L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

5 “Jewboy”

“I wasn’t the worse. Neither was I the tops.”

—Mickey Cohen

BY 1927, the Parrot-Cryer Combination seemed to have Los Angeles sewn up tight. Notwithstanding the presence of a few immigrants such as pimp-turned-bootlegger Albert Marco, the criminal underworld of Los Angeles was now a decidedly WASPy affair, one that left little room for an ambitious Jewish hoodlum like Mickey Cohen. The situation was undoubtedly a frustrating one. Mickey realized early on that “putting money together” was what gave him the most pleasure in life. He also realized that bootlegging, muscle jobs, and armed robbery offered excellent opportunities for enrichment. However, without a “fix,” criminal activities could have most unpleasant ramifications, as Mickey learned after his botched box office holdup. But in Los Angeles, the only outfit with a reliable “fix” was the Combination, and the Combination didn’t recruit talent from the east side of the Los Angeles River. Fortunately, that very year Mickey stumbled across a way out of this dead end. His talent for fighting led him to the one group that could challenge the likes of Kent Parrot, Charlie Crawford, and Guy McAfee: the Mob.

As a condition for his release from reform school, Mickey was required to meet on a weekly basis with a “Big Brother.” Mickey’s was Abe Roth, a well-known fight referee. Where others saw a thuggish street scrapper, Roth saw a talented flyweight boxer. That prizefights were illegal at the time and that Mickey was on probation was no obstacle to Roth’s plan. Roth soon had Mickey fighting four-round bouts in bootleg clubs and “smokers” around the city.

Mickey was not a disciplined boxer. He rarely trained in a gym, preferring instead to hire his fists out to the newsboys who controlled the most lucrative intersections in the city—the blocks downtown that could bring in $2,000, even $3,000 a year—and who consequently needed help keeping rivals off their turf. In time, Mickey and his little crew (two Jewish kids and one Latino) became those rivals, taking control of corners themselves. By 1925, he had staked out a prime corner downtown at Seventh and Spring Streets. Mickey prospered. He began to carry a roll. (“Even if I only made a couple of hundred dollars, I’d always keep it in fives and tens so it’d look big.”) He developed an intense aversion to old clothes (particularly old socks). He bought a car, a patched up Model T.

Yet despite this youthful marauding, Mickey also stayed in the ring, fighting four or five nights a week around the city. He even managed to win the newsboy flyweight championship, a victory that made Mickey a minor celebrity and finally brought his boxing career to his mother’s attention. When she found out what her youngest son was up to, Fanny Cohen was not pleased. Mickey’s three older brothers had gone to college (at least for a while) and found good jobs. Mickey’s violent hustling had to end. She ordered him to stop boxing. His friends urged the opposite: They thought he should go pro. So at age fifteen, Mickey hopped a freight train going east.

At some point in 1928, Mickey showed up at the doorstep of brother Harry the pharmacist, who had moved to Cleveland. When Mickey told him of his plans to turn professional, Harry took one look at his five-foot, three-inch, ninety-six-pound sibling and laughed. Once he saw Mickey in the ring, however, the laughing stopped. His little brother was good. Harry began to nurse a new plan: Mickey would go pro, and he (Harry) would manage his career. A confrere told Harry that if he was serious, Mickey needed professional instruction—the best professional instruction. He needed to go to New York. And so, at the age of sixteen, Mickey Cohen was signed over to two boxing managers and sent to New York City to start training at the most famous boxing gym in the world. He was supposed to learn how to fight. Instead, he would discover a new world—the world of organized crime.

LOU STILLMAN’S GYM—Mickey’s destination—was a dump. “The atmosphere,” George Plimpton would later write, “was of a fetid jungle.” The windows were never opened. The floors went years between cleanings. Members of the public, who could watch the action for a quarter, were encouraged to smoke; Stillman, a moody and acidulous former private eye, thought it toughened fighters up. Perhaps it did, for by 1929 the dungeonlike space on West 57th Street was the most revered gym in the world, a favorite training spot for boxers such as Jack Dempsey and, later, Joe Louis. Mickey was one of the roughly 150 fighters who rented lockers and trained there, a group whose quality ranged, in Stillman’s words, from “jerk squirts to top-of-the-heaps.” In his interactions with the men he was training, Stillman didn’t bother to distinguish between the two.

“Big or small, champ or bum, I treat ’em all the same—bad,” he once said, in what Budd Schulberg described as his “garbage disposal voice.” “If you treat them like humans, they’ll eat you alive.”

The men surrounding Mickey were indeed a tough lot. The gym had been founded by philanthropists whose goal was not to rescue the city’s toughest youth from a life of violence—there seemed to be little hope of that—but rather to encourage them to use their fists instead of knives or guns. The donors were reportedly happy with the gym’s results: Stillman later calculated that only a dozen of his fighters went to the electric chair. He wasn’t counting those who made their way into the rackets.

“A card of membership in Stillman’s is an Open Sesame to low society in any part of the world,” wrote New Yorker correspondent Alva Johnston in 1933. “The place is one of the centralizing institutions of the underworld; rival low-life factions meet here casually under a flag of truce, as the rival financial and social mobs fraternize at the opera.”

This was sixteen-year-old Mickey Cohen’s new world.

He gave it a go.

Every day Cohen did his roadwork in Central Park and then reported faithfully to Stillman’s (whose motto was “Open Sundays, Mondays, & always”). He appeared on the cards on several occasions at the old Madison Square Garden. He got to know Tony Canzoneri, the featherweight champion of the world. He struck up an acquaintance with Damon Runyon, bard of the New York underworld. As a fighter, Mickey gained a reputation for scrappiness and versatility, if not talent. A natural flyweight, Mickey also routinely fought bantam and featherweight bouts. In 1933, he went up against featherweight champion Alberto “Baby” Arizmendi (like Mickey, a sometime-resident of Boyle Heights) in Tijuana, losing by a knockout in the third round. All in all, Cohen was a good, journeyman fighter. As he said later, “I wasn’t the worse. Neither was I the tops.”

Still, his heart wasn’t in it. Boxing increasingly disgusted him. Every year in the ring brought another disfigurement—a broken nose, inch-long scars under both eyes, a two-inch scar on the left wrist. But it wasn’t the pain of these injuries that upset Mickey most; rather, it was the physicality of the sport—the sweat, the blood, the blows, the tie-ups, the embraces. Mickey became compulsive about his personal hygiene. After every fight, he’d spend hours in the bathtub or shower.

Moreover, he wasn’t making any money. Life as a boxer-in-training had its upsides. His managers paid his expenses, bought his clothes, and gave him pocket money. But the fact of the matter was, Mickey now never had more than $15 or $20 in his pocket. Who did? The watchful Irish and Italian men in the bleachers who periodically came in to check on their fighters’ progress—men like Owney “The Killer” Madden, fresh out of Sing Sing, and Joe “the Boss” Masseria, the king of New York’s Italian underworld (until his assassination in 1931). To Mickey, they were simply “the people.” Even then, he knew that these were the men he wanted to associate with. He just didn’t know how. So he decided to return to Cleveland and try his hand as a full-time gangster. He was not welcomed into the fold.

Unlike New York City, where the smartest Jewish and Italian gangsters had learned to cooperate, Cleveland was still primarily Italian territory. Mickey tried to fit in by becoming a kind of honorary Italian himself, making Italian friends, picking up bits and pieces of various Italian dialects, and perfecting such forms of assault as “the Sicilian backhander.” Cleveland’s top Italian gangsters, brothers Frank and Tony Milano, just laughed at the “Jewboy,” as they called him, who so wanted to be Sicilian. That changed when establishments across Cleveland started seeing Mickey behind the barrel of a gun. Mickey had decided that if the Cleveland outfit wouldn’t take him in, he would hang out his own shingle as a “rooter,” a holdup man.

Mickey’s first target was a “half-ass gambling joint… way out the west end of Cleveland in the produce area.” An informer had tipped them off to a high-stakes grocers’ craps game. That night, Mickey and a few associates stormed the joint and grabbed $5,000. They struck again the following week, then two or three times a week. Mickey soon had a troupe of seven and was routinely hitting gambling joints, cafes, and whorehouses across Cleveland. It seemed a highly satisfactory life. Days were spent sleeping and playing cards. Nights were exciting and frequently rewarding, both financially and psychologically. Armed robbery, Mickey found, did wonders for his self-esteem.

“It made me equal to everybody,” Mickey later recalled. “Even as small as I was, when I whipped out that big .38 it made me as big as a guy six foot ten.”

Great Depression or no Great Depression, business was good. At the end of a successful heist, Mickey’s little crew worked around his inability to add or subtract by stacking all the bills up separately—Lincolns here, Hamiltons there, Jacksons here (Grants were rare; Franklins, alas, were virtually unknown)—and then dividing each pile among the participants (“one for you, one for me …”).

The Cleveland mob was remarkably calm about Mickey’s behavior—until he hit a bookie parlor under its protection. Fortunately for Mickey, one member of his crew had an uncle in Buffalo who was in “the highest echelons of ‘the people.’” This uncle made some phone calls to “the people” in Cleveland, and Cleveland reacted magnanimously. Instead of punishing the upstart heister, the Cleveland mob made Mickey an offer. Mickey could operate as before (as long as he stayed clear of mob-protected operations). In addition, the Cleveland outfit (as it was sometimes called) would offer him a $125-a-week retainer. In exchange, Mickey would perform certain tasks for the local mob and, on occasion, for friends elsewhere.

Cohen was delighted. He accepted at once. And, almost as quickly, he fucked up.

Among the tasks that Mickey was occasionally called on to perform was killing people. Hits followed a strict protocol. There was a pointer—someone who knew the victim and could make the target—and a triggerman. Mickey was the triggerman. One day Mickey was sent out with a pointer to take out a man who was trying to set himself up without permission from “the people” (much as Mickey himself had done). The pointer identified the victim, who was out walking with a young woman. Mickey stepped out, pulled out his revolver, and fired. The gun roared, the man went down, and the woman—clearly a lady with remarkable self-possession—started screaming,

“You shot the wrong guy! You shot the wrong guy!”

That night Mickey found out the woman was right. Pissed, he turned on his pointer.

“What’s the matter with you, you rotten son of a bitch?” he shouted. He then proceeded to pistol-whip the man, breaking his jaw. Unfortunately, the man Mickey beat up was the brother of one of Cleveland’s top mob leaders. Cohen, unfailingly lucky, received only a serious talking to. Unfortunately, Mickey then decided to heist a popular cafeteria that happened to be directly across the street from the 105th Street police precinct station. Cohen and an accomplice were apprehended. Although they managed to avoid conviction—the cashier obligingly agreed to confess that the robbery had been staged and was thus not really armed robbery—Cohen’s criminal career in Cleveland was over. Mickey left town—for Al Capone’s Chicago.

IN 1931, A1 Capone was at the height of his power. Two years earlier, on Valentine’s Day, members of the Capone gang dressed as police officers had lured members of the rival Bugs Moran gang to an isolated warehouse—supposedly to receive a shipment of premium whiskey at a bargain price. Moran’s men thought they’d been pinched and expected nothing worse than a quick trip to the lockup. Instead, they were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned. The so-called St. Valentine’s Day Massacre sealed Capone’s standing as Chicago’s top gangster and scandalized the nation, making Capone an international celebrity. It did not, however, make him safer. The primary target of the massacre—Bugs Moran himself—ran late to the meeting, thus missing his own execution. He was now intent on revenge. Rumors that Moran had dispatched two, four, ten gunmen followed Capone everywhere. Al Capone might be the King of Chicago, but he was a monarch who lived under the constant threat of a violent death. As a result, Capone took an interest in newly arrived gunmen, even ones as junior as Mickey Cohen.

Cohen’s job in Chicago was simple: lay low at a large, Jewish-controlled gambling joint on the North Shore and scare off some neighborhood toughs who were trying to squeeze its owners. After years of associating almost entirely with Italians, Mickey “sort of had to relearn Jewish ways.” He rediscovered “real good food on a Jewish style.” He tried not to react violently to perceived slights (“not like [I did] with the Italians”). Then one day three “notorious tough guys”—the people Mickey was supposed to protect the casino against—came calling. Mickey opened fire before they even got through the plate-glass door. By the time the police arrived, two of the men were dead. Despite his insistence that he didn’t start shooting until he saw the man pull his “rod,” Cohen was arrested for murder. Fortunately for Mickey, Chicago was most definitely a city where “the fix” was “in.” To his delight and astonishment, he was released the next morning after a mob representative stopped by the jail and ordered the turnkey to open up. When the jailer protested that he couldn’t let a murder suspect out “just like that,” Mickey’s visitor called for the captain—who let Cohen out “just like that.” The case never went to trial.

Soon thereafter, Mickey was summoned downtown to the Lexington Hotel to meet Al Capone himself. When Mickey walked into Capone’s office, the most powerful man in Chicago (known to his friends as “Big-Hearted Al”) quietly gripped the pint-sized brawler’s head in his hands and kissed him on both cheeks.

“After that meeting, it was kind of like a whole new world for me,” Mickey would later claim. “I wasn’t just a punk kid anymore. I was someone who had done something to justify the favor of Al Capone.”

In truth, Mickey probably amused Capone as much as he impressed him. Mickey had already befriended Al’s little brother Mattie, an avid boxing fan. Cohen had also attracted a measure of attention because, with his broken nose and a nasty, twisting scar under his left eye, he actually looked a lot like a miniature Al Capone. He also dressed like Capone (“admiring the guy as much as I did, I may have tried to copy his ways,” Mickey admitted later), heightening the “Mini-Me” effect. Court jester or respected junior gunman, it hardly mattered. Mickey had Capone’s blessing and that was enough to open the doors of the Chicago underworld. He began to learn how professional criminals really worked.

“I soon found there were lots of older guys willing to teach me about how to grow up and be good at a particular piece of work I wanted to get to know about,” Mickey would say later, with discreet imprecision.

Chicago was also a revelation in another way. As his friend the writer Ben Hecht would later put it, “Before coming to Chicago, Mickey knew there were numerous crooks like himself on the outskirts of society. He did not know, however, that there were ten times as many crooks in the respectable seats of government.” Chicago, a city where everything seemed part of the fix, would be Mickey Cohen’s model—and dream—for L.A.

6 Comrade Bill

“With few exceptions, no protection is afforded to the police chiefs in this country. And to this neglect, more than to any other cause, may be attributed the alliance of politics, police and crime.”

—Berkeley police chief August Vollmer, 1931

WHILE MICKEY COHEN was befriending members of the Capone family, patrolman Bill Parker was struggling to advance in the Los Angeles Police Department in his own unyielding fashion. He would not pay a bribe for a cheat sheet to the civil service exam; he would not curry favor with the politicians; he would not turn a blind eye to infractions that many other officers in the department saw as routine. It was a hard way to get ahead. But Parker was also surprisingly hard to get rid of.

After his early heroics, Parker was transferred into a dead-end job at the property division. It didn’t work. Parker was too nosy.

“There were some irregularities in the handling of confiscated autos,” Parker later recalled (adding, with characteristic self-confidence, “I was too intelligent to conceal things from”).

He was soon transferred to Hollenbeck Division, which was responsible for patrolling Mickey Cohen’s old neighborhood of Boyle Heights, perhaps the “wettest” part of Los Angeles. By 1931, many police officers had lost their enthusiasm for enforcing Prohibition, which was clearly on the way out. (Its formal repeal would come two years later, in 1933.) Not Bill Parker. He immediately set out to make as many arrests as possible. Puzzled, local bootleggers were soon approaching him to ask what he wanted.

“I don’t want anything,” Parker angrily replied. “You’re on one side of the fence, and I’m on the other.” Soon thereafter, Parker was summoned to the office of the division inspector.

“Parker,” he said, “what division would you like to work in?”

“What do you mean?” he replied, even though he knew full well what was happening. The liquor mob was moving him out.

“I mean,” the inspector continued, “if you happened to want a transfer, where would you like to go?”

“Hollywood Division,” Parker replied. Soon thereafter, he was transferred there.

Hollywood was Los Angeles’s fast growing vice hot spot. But vice arrests were not exactly encouraged in his new division. Parker soon chafed at other patrolmen’s “do nothing” attitude. So one night he decided to protest the policy of nonenforcement by parking directly across the street from a Hollywood house of ill repute in an effort to scare the johns away. The madam was irate, as well she might be. By one estimate, some 500 brothels were employing an estimated 2,200 prostitutes—and paying for police protection on a regular basis. Why should she, a dues-paying madam, be singled out by law enforcement? So out she stormed.

“Listen, you stupid fuck,” the madam yelled at Parker. “You’re ruining my business by hanging around here.”

“That’s the general idea,” he replied.

“What’s the next move?” she asked.

“The next move is to put you in jail,” he said.

By the end of the week, Parker had been transferred again.

Despite such obstinacy, in the summer of 1931, Parker was made acting sergeant. His grades on the civil service exam were simply too good to ignore. Of the 505 officers who’d taken the civil service exam for sergeant, Parker received the fourth highest score. And so on July 1, he was made a sergeant and returned to Hollenbeck Division. For the first time, Parker was in a position to force other officers to adhere to a standard of conduct close to his own. Word quickly got around that when Bill Parker was at the booking desk, there would be no rough stuff.

“Take him someplace and book him if you want to start that stuff,” Parker told his fellow officers; “you’re not going to hit him here.”

Such attitudes did not go over well with all of his fellow officers. One night in 1932, matters came to a head when a drunken member of the vice squad announced that he was going to kill Parker—and started fumbling for his gun.

“I could have killed him, but I knew I could make the doorway,” Parker later recounted. So he ran. His fellow officers laughingly dismissed the entire affair as a joke and “tried to convince me the man’s gun was unloaded,” but Parker would have none of it.

“I got out,” he said simply. He would later describe it as a night when he almost got killed.

For Mickey Cohen, boxing and armed robbery had been the path to “the people.” Bill Parker found a very different—but equally unorthodox—path to prominence in the LAPD: He became a union man.

BY 1929, Los Angeles mayor George Cryer’s claims to be a reformer had worn thin. One year earlier a grand jury investigation had forced the resignation of Kent Parrot’s chosen district attorney and made a hero of the jury foreman, John Porter. With ties to both the Ku Klux Klan and to powerful Protestant clergymen like the Rev. Bob Shuler, Porter was an attractive figure to many Angelenos fed up with the underworld. A thriving used-auto-parts and wrecking business also gave him ample means to fund a political campaign. When Cryer announced that he would not run for a fourth term, Porter threw his hat into the race.

To block the Klansman auto wrecker, Kent Parrot turned to an auto dealer whose only other high-profile supporter was, oddly, New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth. Reformers backed the “absolutely incorruptible” city council president William Bonelli (who would later flee to Mexico to avoid an indictment on corruption charges). After a period of uncharacteristic indecision, Harry Chandler and the Times hit upon the local American Legion commander, who frankly (if unhelpfully) acknowledged that he was unprepared to govern the city. With the dominant factions badly divided and the Times, by choosing such an oddball candidate, effectively on the sidelines, Porter won the election. Boss Parrot was no more.

With Parrot gone, the Combination began to crumble. In the summer of 1930, Charlie Crawford was gunned down in his office by a deranged young assistant district attorney. The Combination was no longer able to keep competitors out, and the price of bootleg booze plummeted. Scotch, which had once commanded $50 a case, now cost only $15, virtually wholesale prices. Gunmen robbed slot machine king Robert Gans; bookmaker Zeke Caress was kidnapped and ransomed for $50,000. Along with Gans, Guy McAfee, the vice squad officer turned vice lord, gradually consolidated his authority over the city’s organized prostitution rings and downtown slot machines. But he was never able to regain the clout that Crawford had wielded.

For reformers, the weakening of the Combination should have been welcome news—and it was. But Cryer’s demise and Porter’s election presented Parker with a new problem. The new mayor and his most prominent supporters were viciously anti-Catholic, blaming Rome for everything from the assassinations (or attempted assassinations) of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Roosevelt to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. It is not surprising that Parker soon took an interest in strengthening rank-and-file officers’ job protection. By doing so, Parker would catch the attention of the most colorful police chief in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, Chief James “Two Gun” Davis.

THAT THE LAPD, the scourge of union organizers in America’s most vociferously open-shop city, should have had a union movement is ironic. It must be said that officially it did not. Technically, Los Angeles had only the Fire and Police Protective League, officially a fraternal organization. But by the early 1930s it was well along the path to becoming a union.^[2]

The issue that drew in Parker was job security. Simply put, officers didn’t have it. There was no safe way to make a career in the LAPD. Officers like Parker who insisted on following the letter of the law risked their careers (if not their lives) during periods of corruption. Corrupt cops risked their careers during the brief but regular periods of reform that followed revelations of scandal. While policemen were theoretically under civil service protection, in practice the chief of police was still able to dismiss officers virtually at will, and officers who were dismissed lost everything—their pensions, benefits, everything—no matter how close to retirement they might be.

In 1934, Parker got himself elected as a sergeant representative to the Fire and Police Protective League. He quickly became a forceful advocate for patrolmen’s interests, arguing effectively for a reversal of the pay cuts that had been forced on the department during the early years of the Depression. He also came to the attention of another lawyer-policeman in the department, Earle Cooke. Together, the two men began to lay the groundwork for a change to the city charter that would offer fire and police officers greater protection from political pressure.

In the summer of 1934, the Fire and Police Protective League petitioned the city council to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would “clarify procedure in disciplinary and removal actions” for firemen and police officers. This modest description was highly misleading. Parker and Cooke weren’t seeking to clarify some minority ambiguity; rather, they were proposing to radically expand the protections police (and fire) officers enjoyed. Under their amendment, charges against policemen would be constrained by a one-year statute of limitations. Policemen would be entitled to counsel, and all hearings would take place before a three-person board of rights whose members consisted of officers of the rank of captain or higher. Six names would be drawn out of a box; the accused policeman would then select the three officers who would sit on the panel. Moreover, the board’s recommendations would be binding. The chief of police would only be able to reduce penalties, not increase them.

The city council seems to have taken this request calmly. On August 14, 1934, its members agreed to present the Fire and Police Protective League proposal to voters as Amendment No. 12-A.

The public was not highly attuned to the issue of police discipline. Surveys conducted during the mid-1930s show that the public wanted the police to be disciplined, effective, and nonpolitical. They should be “neat and military” in their appearance; they should take “a professional interest” in their work and be of at least average intelligence; and they should treat “normal” citizens with courtesy. When it came to less “normal” citizens, it was no holds barred. A majority of voters consistently endorsed harsher treatment for “ex-convicts, Negroes, aliens, radicals, and gangsters.”

Some observers did pick up on what Parker and Cooke were trying to do. The liberal Los Angeles Daily News was one, correctly noting that in claiming the right to police itself the LAPD was effectively removing that right from the city’s politicians. Notwithstanding the record of corruption that Los Angeles politicians had compiled, a significant number of Angelenos were hesitant to grant the department such sweeping protections. When Amendment No. 12-A went before voters on September 27, 1934, it passed by a mere 676 votes, with 84,143 in favor and 83,467 opposed. However, a narrow victory is still a victory. It was the beginning of Bill Parker’s wider reputation in the department. Years later, an article in the newsletter of the LAPD’s American Legion chapter would describe the (amended) Section 202 of the city charter as “our most priceless possession,” and credit “Comrade Bill” as the measure’s “co-author.”

UNION ACTIVISM is not always the swiftest path to a police executive’s affection, but Parker’s legal work seems to have impressed Chief James Davis. Two more different personalities are hard to imagine. Parker was cerebral and wry. Davis was a peacock. Handsome (in a slightly puffy, heavily pomaded way), the chief loved uniforms, hats (particularly sombreros), braiding, and decorations. The Rev. Bob Shuler, a frequent critic, described him as “a man with pink complexion who looks like he had a massage every morning and his fingernails manicured.” However, few voiced such criticisms directly. Manicured or not, the 240-pound Texan looked as if he could snap most of his critics in half. A close observer of the Los Angeles political scene would later describe him as “a burly, dictatorial, somewhat sadistic, bitterly anti-labor man who saw communist influence behind every telephone poll.” He was also, arguably, insane. One of Davis’s favorite ways to entertain dignitaries visiting the department was to have a member of his beloved pistol-shooting team shoot a cigarette out of his mouth, a la William Tell.

Davis’s tactics were rough. One of his favorites was “rousting,” described thusly in an admiring 1926 Los Angeles Times profile by police reporter (and Chandler hatchet man) Albert Nathan:

First the word goes out of the chief’s office that the “rousting” is to begin and is to be kept up for a week.

Then all of the liquor squads take to the street, armed with pictures of the best known rum runners and the various members of their “mobs,” and begin looking for them.

As fast as any of the wanted men are located they are seized, handcuffed, loaded into a patrol wagon and escorted to jail. They are then locked up on charges of vagrancy or any other charge which may come to the mind of the arresting officer. In a few hours attorneys appear, writs are secured through the local courts and the prisoners are released…. One by one they are released and then arrested again and again. During a “rousting” a man may be arrested as many as six times, and each time has to stay in jail for one hour to two days before he gets out. After awhile the wanted men learn that every time they saunter up Spring Street they will be arrested and that they are not even safe in their homes.

Even at the time, this struck many as unlawful. “The rousting system may, as many contend, be unlawful,” the Times conceded, but no matter: “[T]his is known and records provide it: The system works.”

Nor were regular citizens exempt from his scrutiny. In 1936, Chief Davis dispatched 126 officers to sixteen highway and rail entry points on the California border to prevent “Okies” fleeing the dustbowl—he called them “the refuse of other states”—from entering California. The Los Angeles papers dubbed it (approvingly) the Bum Blockade. Inspectors from the State Relief Administration reported that officers were “exercising extra-constitutional powers of exclusion, detention, and preemptive arrest” that “seemed more like the border checkpoints of fascist Europe than those of an American state.” Davis responded that 48 percent of the people turned back had criminal records.

“It is an axiom with Davis that constitutional rights are of benefit to nobody but crooks and criminals, and that no perfectly law-abiding citizen ever has any cause to insist on ‘constitutional rights,’” reported the Los Angeles Record sarcastically. “Chief Davis honestly and sincerely believes that the whole country would be better off if the whole question of constitutional rights was forgotten and left to the discretion of the police.”

But as implausible as it may seem, Chief Davis was also something of a reformer.^[3] One of Davis’s first steps was to reinstitute rules against accepting gratuities and soliciting rewards that had lapsed under his predecessor. During his first forty-five months in office, Davis discharged 245 officers for misconduct. However, the strongest evidence for the proposition that Chief Davis was a reformer comes from his treatment of Bill Parker.

In 1934, Chief Davis turned to Parker to draft the bylaws for his beloved training facility in the hills of Elysian Park, today’s Los Angeles Police Academy. Yet despite this interaction with Chief Davis, Parker’s promotional path continued to be a rocky one. On June 5, 1935, Parker took the examination for lieutenant. He scored sixth on the written test, lower on the more subjective oral test, and ended up in the number ten position on the promotional eligibility list. Not until January 18, 1937, was he promoted to the position of lieutenant—and then only after two officers with lower scores had been promoted before him.

Then, suddenly, his career took off. In early 1937, Parker became Chief Davis’s executive officer. In this position, he served as Chief Davis’s scheduler, advisor, and gatekeeper, granting and withholding access to the chief and maintaining relationships with politicians from the mayor to city council members. He also headed the small bureau of public affairs. Work relations between the two men were formal: Parker was always “Lieutenant,” never “Bill.” Davis was simply “Chief.” In private, however, the two men became friends. Parker (and sometimes Helen) frequently joined Davis for hunting and fishing trips with Davis’s sons. Observers of departmental politics soon noted young Bill Parker’s all-too-obvious ambitions. The reluctant police officer, the young man who had barely bothered with his entrance exam, now clearly aspired to one day become chief.

Soon after Parker joined the chief’s staff, Davis made him an acting captain—a move that no doubt raised hackles in the department. Davis probably didn’t care. He needed Parker for something big.

IN 1933, voters had replaced Mayor Porter with county supervisor Frank Shaw. Shaw was not Harry Chandler’s kind of candidate. For one thing, although he was ostensibly a Republican, Shaw embraced the agenda of the newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For another, Shaw had gotten his start in politics as a city council member backed by Kent Parrot, with whom he maintained close (if vague) ties. Chandler’s suspicions proved to be well founded. After taking office, Frank Shaw turned to his brother Joe, recently discharged from the U.S. Navy, to help him oversee municipal affairs. Joe’s title was personal secretary; however, he soon took control of every potential patronage and profit center in the city. Not surprisingly, “The Sailor” (as Joe was known) took a particular interest in the LAPD and in the Los Angeles underworld.

During the 1920s, Kent Parrot and Charlie Crawford had controlled Los Angeles. Joe was determined to revive the old police-underworld arrangements, but this time with himself on top. Where Parrot and Crawford had sought to impose a monopoly, Shaw was willing to tolerate a variety of players—as long as they all paid up and their operations didn’t attract too much attention. Remnants of the Combination soon resurfaced. So did new players such as Jack Dragna, a Sicilian crime boss who focused primarily on traditional activities like extortion, prostitution, and bootlegging. (He also had a legitimate sideline as a banana importer and often referred to himself as a banana merchant.) There was plenty of money to go around. The Hollywood Citizen-News estimated that the L.A. underworld was generating roughly $2 million a month (20 percent of which went to selected policemen, politicians, and journalists). Daily News columnist Matt Weinstock put the figure even higher. His sources figured the Combination at its height was grossing about $50 million a year.

The key to it all was control of the police department. Joe Shaw was determined to make sure he had it. In principle, Chief Davis answered to the Police Commission. In practice, Shaw placed the police department’s most important operations under his close supervision by insisting on making Shaw campaign manager James “Sunny Jimmy” Bolger Chief Davis’s secretary. The fact that the chief’s office was located in City Hall, just around the corner from the mayor’s office (an arrangement instituted by Mayor Porter), further shortened Davis’s leash. Bill Parker’s job was to help him escape it.

IN EARLY 1937, working once more through the Fire and Police Protective League, Parker launched an effort to amend section 1999 of the city charter—this time, to extend civil service protections to the chief of police. The ballot initiative Parker drafted consisted of a single sentence: “Shall proposed charter amendment No. 14-A, amending section 1999 of the Charter clarifying the civil service status of the Chief of Police, providing that he shall not be removed except for cause and after hearing before the Board of Civil Service Commissioners, be ratified?” It seemed a modest change, but its potential consequences were immense. If it passed, the position of chief of police would no longer serve at the pleasure of the Police Commission (and the mayor who appointed its members). Instead, once sworn in, the chief of police would have a “substantial property right” in his position. The chief of police could be suspended or fired only if found guilty of a specific set of publicly aired charges after a “full, fair and impartial hearing” before the city’s Board of Civil Service Commissioners. Needless to say, in a city as corrupt as Los Angeles, a full hearing was something that Mayor Shaw would never be prepared to risk. In short, Proposition 14-A would dramatically strengthen Chief Davis’s position vis-a-vis the Shaws. On Tuesday, April 6, 1937, the electorate of Los Angeles approved it by a vote of 79,336 to 69,380.

It was an amendment that would change the history of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Police Department, long subordinate to some combination of the mayor, the underworld, or the business community (or sometimes all three), now had the legal protection it needed to emerge as a power in its own right.

It also had a potent new adversary. The same year Bill Parker was attempting to erect a ring of legal protections around the chief’s office that neither corrupt politicians nor the remnants of the Combination could breach, one of the most formidable figures in the history of American organized crime arrived in Los Angeles. His name was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Mickey Cohen was his muscle.

7 Bugsy

“Booze Barons of other climes are just bootleggers in Los Angeles. Gangsters can never build another Chicago here.”

—LAPD statement, 1931

BY 1937, Bugsy Siegel was one of the most important men in organized crime. During the 1920s, Siegel and his partner, Meyer Lansky, had made names for themselves in the New York City underworld as fearless stickup men, bootleggers, and muscle-for-hire. In 1927, Siegel participated in one of the earliest efforts to coordinate bootlegging on the Atlantic seaboard. Two years later, Lansky helped organize a national crime “syndicate” at a meeting of the nation’s top crime bosses in Atlantic City. In 1931, Siegel reputedly took part in the successful hit on Joe “the Boss” Masseria—the man young Mickey Cohen had seen in the bleachers at Stillman’s—at a restaurant on Coney Island. The assassination made Charles “Lucky” Luciano (a longtime Lansky friend) the boss of New York and made the loose group organized by Lansky, which would soon come to be known as the Syndicate, the underworld’s preeminent institution.^[4] In short, Siegel was a figure the likes of which the L.A. underworld had never seen before. Yet Siegel did not originally move west to play the heavy. Instead, like generations of migrants before and since, he came west with dreams of health, wealth, and leisure.

Siegel first visited Los Angeles in 1933 to check in on his childhood friend George Raft. Raft, a nightclub dancer in New York, had become a Hollywood star by playing gangsters like Bugsy in the movies. (His breakthrough role came in the 1932 movie Scarface as the coin-flipping sidekick to the Al Capone-esque Paul Muni.) It was not the most auspicious year for a first visit to Los Angeles. That spring, a massive earthquake had leveled a wide swath of Long Beach, killing more than fifty people and badly shaking the confidence of the region. A quarter of the working-age population was unemployed. A vast hobo encampment (nicknamed “The Jungle”) had spread along the Los Angeles River. Siegel was entranced.

He was receptive to Los Angeles for another reason as well. The same year that Siegel made his first visit to the city, Congress repealed the Twentieth Amendment, ending national Prohibition. This was something the Syndicate had long feared. What happened next, though, caught Siegel and his associates off guard. Almost overnight they became wealthy—and quasi-legitimate businessmen. Underground distribution networks could become legal liquor distributorships. The Syndicate steamers loaded with booze suddenly had a future as legal importers. Speakeasies like the 21 Club and the Stork that had once operated behind barred doors with lookout holes now hung out Welcome signs. Siegel and Lansky’s car and truck rental company on Cannon Street, originally a front for bootlegging, was now a successful business in its own right. Siegel quickly became a partner in one of the biggest liquor distributorships in New York City.

Siegel’s lifestyle reflected his success. In the midst of the Depression, Siegel had an apartment at Broadway and 85th and a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, as well as a house in Scarsdale for his wife and kids. Wealth and the possibility of legitimacy had a profound psychological effect on Siegel and his associates. “Viewed from their luxurious apartments and ducal estates, jail houses became utterly repugnant,” wrote newspaper columnist Florabel Muir, who’d observed Siegel’s career as a hoodlum since the early 1920s.

“Caution, fathered by the urge to preserve and enjoy their vast fortunes, overtook them,” she continued, adding, “There is nothing like a million dollars to bring about a conservative point of view.”

Los Angeles offered the chance for a new start. If a Lower East Side tough-turned-speakeasy-“hoofer” like George Raft could transform himself into a movie star there, then perhaps a former gangster could transform himself into a gentleman of leisure. And so in 1934 Siegel moved his wife, his two daughters, and the family German shepherd to Beverly Hills and promptly set out to join the movie colony elite. He rented a luxurious house on McCarthy Drive in Beverly Hills that had once been the home of opera star Lawrence Tibbett. He enrolled his two daughters in an elite private school and an exclusive riding academy. He became a member of the Hill-crest Country Club, the social center of the film colony. He shed his New York City gangster attire (hard-shelled derby hat, fur-trimmed coats, rakish lapels) in favor of two-hundred-dollar sports coats and cashmere slacks. He took as his mistress the most flamboyant hostess in Hollywood, Dorothy di Frasso, a New York leather goods heiress married to an Italian count. Unfortunately, Siegel then ran into a problem—an embarrassing one. He got taken—for a million dollars.

At the end of Prohibition, Siegel had about $2 million in cash. Unfortunately, he then invested much of it in the stock market. In short order, Siegel had cut his fortune in half.

“If I had kept that million,” Siegel later mused to a friend, “I’d have been out of the rackets right then. But I took a big licking, and I couldn’t go legitimate.” Instead, he went back to what he knew best: organized crime. Los Angeles, which Siegel had once viewed as a playground, was now an opportunity.

BUGSY’S PALS back East were delighted by his decision to organize the West Coast. From Lansky and Luciano’s perspective, California was a backwater—an embarrassment, really. The Combination’s power had dwindled. McAfee and Gans controlled little more than prostitution and slots in the downtown core. Yet L.A.’s top Italian crime boss, Jack Dragna, had failed to step up, particularly when it came to asserting authority over fast-growing areas like the Sunset Strip. Located in unincorporated territory outside of the city of Los Angeles (and the reach of the LAPD), the Strip was the perfect vice center. But Dragna hadn’t established even a proper casino. “Jack wasn’t pulling the counties or the political picture together,” Cohen would say later. “There was no combination; everyone was acting independently.” Siegel would change that. Top New York mob boss “Lucky” Luciano contacted Dragna personally with the news that Siegel was taking change “for the good of us all.”

Dragna took the news poorly. It hardly mattered. Dragna had important connections back East himself (according to Cohen, he was related to Tommy “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese), but Siegel was a peer of the realm, an equal to anyone in the Syndicate. Mickey Cohen would later describe him as “one of the six tops … right up with Capone.” Dragna stepped aside. Others were not so deferential.

One who declined to defer to an interloper from back East was Eddy Neales, the thirty-three-year-old owner of the Clover Club, a high-rolling Hollywood nightclub and casino just west of the Chateau Marmont above the Sunset Strip. The handsome half-Mexican, half-Caucasian Neales cut a dashing figure; the Clover Club was the gambling spot in a city that loved to test fortune at the tables. Neales also had a booming bookmaking business, thanks to California’s decision to legalize pari-mutuel betting at racetracks in 1933.^[5] By 1937, Neales was reputedly handling about $10 million a year in bets.

Neales didn’t rely on his personal popularity to protect his operations. Milton “Farmer” Page, a major figure in the Combination, was a silent partner. Neales and partner Curly Robinson were also paying a small fortune in protection money to the Los Angeles sheriff’s department, which had jurisdiction over the Sunset Strip. So it was perhaps understandable that when Siegel approached Neales and Robinson and informed them that he was looking to make a major investment in their club, they demurred. A confrontation appeared to be inevitable. Siegel recognized that he needed more muscle. So Siegel put out a call for talent. Cleveland and Chicago had just the person for the job, Mickey Cohen.

COHEN had outstayed his welcome in Chicago. At one point, he and his associates got permission from the Capone gang to open a blackjack game in the Loop. When that wasn’t lucrative enough, he decided to open a craps game, despite the fact that dice games were strictly off limits in downtown Chicago. Capone accountant Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik personally flew in from Miami to tell Cohen to wind up his craps game. Mickey declined. Several nights later, as Mickey was standing in front of his favorite haberdashery shop, a large black car turned the corner … and opened fire. Mickey hesitated. He was wearing a beautiful new camelhair coat, and he hated the thought of ruining it by “flattening out” in the gutter. If the Capone gang had been serious, he figured he’d probably already be dead. Still, he didn’t want to take any chances—or seem disrespectful. Into the slush he went.

Mickey was living like a man who didn’t value life. Whenever he needed a buck, he’d heist a store—sometimes two or three in a day. He developed a mania for cream-colored Stetson hats, which he’d purchase for $50, wear for a few days, and then discard. When he wanted a new hat, out came the gun. When holdups alone failed to keep Mickey in new hats and flossy suits, he reopened his craps game in the Loop. He made enemies casually. In early 1937, Mickey got into a beef with a former slugger for Chicago’s Yellow Cab company. One day Mickey ran into the man in a restaurant and pistol-whipped him. After getting drunk, the man tracked down Mickey and stuck a gun in his back. Cohen spun around, got his hand on the rod, but wasn’t able to wrest the firearm away from his would-be assailant. So the two men decided to go to a coffee shop to talk matters over, each with a hand firmly on the gun. They sat down at the counter. An instant later, Mickey smashed a sugar dispenser over the man’s head.

“His head split open like a melon and blood flew all over the joint,” Mickey noted later, with evident satisfaction. As the coffee shop erupted in screams, Cohen dashed down to the cellar to dispose of the gun. But the cops found the weapon and arrested him for attempted murder.

There was, of course, an easy way out: Mickey could tell the police that the gun wasn’t his and that he’d acted in self-defense. Fingering someone for the cops, however, was something Mickey just wouldn’t do. He clammed up. But for the last-minute intervention of Pop Palazzi, the Capone gang’s Chicago counselor, Cohen might well have gone to prison. Instead, he was told to leave town. He went to Detroit. There he learned that Bugsy Siegel was looking for muscle in Los Angeles. Detroit wanted Mickey to go there to help out—and to keep an eye on Bugsy. So did Cleveland. And so in 1937, Mickey returned to his old hometown.

MICKEY was supposed to get in touch with Siegel as soon as he arrived in Los Angeles. Instead, he decided that he’d first make a few scores and put a little money in his pocket. If Siegel wanted to get in touch with him, well, then Siegel could come and find him. Mickey quickly hooked up with two Italian brothers, Fred and Joe Sica, who were freelance holdup men. Together, the three men went “on the heavy.” They found a city that was easy pickings. Tipsters were easy to recruit. Mickey and his crew were soon heisting two or three joints a week. Brothels, shops, drugstores—any place with cash on hand was a possible target. Soon Mickey was summoning old colleagues from Cleveland, Chicago, and New York to come join him in L.A. As their confidence increased, so did the size of their targets. Were these establishments perhaps under someone else’s protection? Mickey didn’t know, and truth be told, he “didn’t even give a shit.”

“I was out with ten different broads every night,” he later boasted, “and I was in every cabaret that they could possibly have in town.” Bugsy Siegel was forgotten—until, that is, Mickey and his crew made a spectacularly foolish heist.

Their target was a commission bookmaking office on Franklin that handled high-roller bets and was owned by Morris Orloff, one of the biggest bookmakers in town. Mickey got in using one of his favorite ruses. At nine in the morning, he started banging on the door. The peephole opened and an ex-deputy sheriff eyed Mickey suspiciously. Mickey played it cool:

I says to the doorman, “Is Morey in?”

“Don’t get here till ten o’clock or later,” he says.

“I got to give him this here,” I says, “and pick something up.”

“Put it through the peephole,” the ex-cop says.

“I can’t,” I says, “it’s a package.”

The ex-cop opened the door—and found himself staring into the barrel of Mickey’s .38. Two of Mickey’s associates forced their way in.

The baby-faced kid messenger tone was gone. “Lookit you cocksucker,” Mickey told the lookout, “you just move and you’re gone.”

The man didn’t move. Nor did the four other men in the room who were looking at Mickey. Mickey herded them into a corner and then announced that he was going to wait for Morey Orloff himself to arrive with the big money.

“Look kid, you got alla the money,” said a big Italian man in the corner. “Whatta ya wanna stay around here. A copper could come in.”

Mickey walked over to the man. He was wearing a large diamond stickpin. Mickey ripped it off.

“Listen you dago bastard,” Mickey yelled at the man, “mind your own business or I’ll put a phone through your head. I’m staying for Morey Orloff if I gotta stay till tomorrow.”

Another man spoke up. “I’m Morey Orloff.” To prove it, he showed Mickey his signet ring. That Orloff was joined at the hip with Jack Dragna, Los Angeles’s top Italian crime boss, troubled Cohen not one bit. He took the signet ring too. Then, just as Mickey had hoped, an Orloff flunky arrived—with $22,000 in cash. Mickey and his crew took the money from the messenger and left.

Now Siegel was looking for Cohen. That afternoon, Mickey got a call from Champ Segal, who ran a popular barbershop next to the Brown Derby on Vine—and managed the featherweight boxing champion of the world. Segal was one of Bugsy’s closest associates. He was also one of the few people in Los Angeles who knew Mickey well enough to have a phone number where he could be reached.

“Ben Siegel wants to see you.” (No one called Siegel “Bugsy” to his face.)

“Ben who?” Mickey responded, vainly attempting to project innocence.

“Ben Siegel, a name you got to stand attention to,” Champ replied sharply. Then, no doubt aware of how touchy Mickey was, he shifted tone. “Look, do me a favor and come on up” (to the Hollywood YMCA). Bugsy routinely spent his afternoons there, working the bag and enjoying the sauna, and he wanted to talk to Cohen. Mickey agreed.

When Mickey arrived at the Hollywood Y, he was greeted at the door by Champ and by one of Bugsy’s men.

“Mr. Siegel is expectin’ you,” the man said curtly. He led Mickey and Champ down to the sweat room. Siegel emerged, clad in a towel and with a big smile on his face.

“Take a walk, Champ,” Siegel said. Champ left. Siegel turned to Mickey.

“You were supposed to contact me when you got here,” he said.

“I didn’t get around to you yet,” Mickey responded sullenly. “I wanted to see my family. I been busy.”

“Pretty big score you got this morning,” said Siegel.

Mickey said nothing.

“I want you to kick back the money,” said Siegel.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mickey replied.

Siegel smiled. “You’re a good boy, but you’re a little crazy. I want you to kick back that money.”

“I wouldn’t kick back no money for my mother,” snarled Mickey. “I don’t give a fuck who or what it is. When I go on a score and I put up my life and my liberty on the score, I wouldn’t kick back to nobody.”

“You heard what I said,” Siegel said coldly.

“Go take a fuck for yourself,” said Mickey. And with that, he stalked out.

Champ was waiting just outside the door. Incredulous, he ran after Cohen. “A remark like that means the death penalty,” he told his charge. But Mickey was defiant.

The next day Mickey Cohen was picked up by the cops and thrown into a jail cell. Whether county or city police made the pinch is unclear. Mickey was not arraigned before a judge; there was no pretense of bringing charges. He was simply held incommunicado without bail. On day nine, Champ got him released. Again, Siegel summoned Mickey—this time to a meeting at the offices of Siegel’s attorney, Jerry Giesler. Dragna associate Johnny Roselli was there as well, representing both the local Italian mob and the Chicago “Outfit” (the new name for the old Capone gang). Even to the craziest SOB in the world, it must have been clear that Mickey was now dealing directly with New York and Chicago. Not surprisingly, there was—as Mickey liked to say—“a meeting of the minds.” Cohen was now fully under Siegel’s arm. It was time to organize L.A., “eastern style.”

MICKEY knew Eddy Neales and liked him—“a real nice sort of fellow,” he’d say later, but someone “with California ways,” meaning, someone who couldn’t understand or accept what the Syndicate was. Neales just wanted to do his own thing. When Cohen pressed Neales’s partner Curly Robinson about accepting Siegel as a partner, Robinson stalled. Siegel soon grew impatient with the act. He decided to send a message, meaning, he decided to send Mickey.

Mickey hit Neales’s bookmaking operation first, targeting his commission office. Neales was in the office at the time. Cohen roughed him up, whacking him “across the mouth a few times.” Instead of taking the hint, Neales went into hiding. Through his partner, Neales tried to send Mickey a conciliatory message, explaining “that he meant nothing but the best for me, but that I was too hot-tempered and had too much heat on me to join forces.” Neales also warned Mickey (presciently) that his attempt “to establish things as they are in the East could never fit into the program in this part of the United States.”

Mickey would have none of it. Next he hit the Clover Club itself. After raiding the cage and relieving the off tables of their cash, Mickey turned his attention to the customers, relieving one leggy young blonde of a diamond necklace. She was Betty Grable, who during the 1940s would become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

(Years later, columnist Florabel Muir would introduce the two at a Hollywood party. Embarrassed, Cohen stammered out an apology, “if it was me.” Grable just smiled. “We were insured anyway,” she graciously replied.)

Neales was upset. He switched gears, threatening Siegel with police retaliation. Siegel wasn’t frightened.

“That Mexican son of a bitch thinks he’s comin’ in with me,” Siegel told Cohen. “Keep on him.”

Cohen hit Neales’s joints across the city five more times, wrecking each in the process. As a reward for doing Siegel’s bidding, Mickey kept the proceeds from the heists for himself. When Neales turned to the sheriff’s department for help, Cohen refused to back off. (Mickey’s late-night visit to Deputy Sheriff Contreras’s men wasn’t the only factor in the sheriff department’s decision to stop protecting Neales. Siegel also seems to have made a $125,000 payment to purchase some leeway from the department.) So Neales turned next to Jimmy Fox, a tough old Irishman known for his proficiency with handguns and for his excellent connections. (Fox had once shot three men in a downtown hotel room and been acquitted, implausibly, on grounds of self-defense.) As soon as Siegel heard that Neales had engaged Fox, he offered Mickey five grand to rub him out.

Soon after receiving this contract, Mickey was approached by two pharmacists, who also ran a profitable bookmaking operation out of their drugstore at the corner of Wilshire and San Vicente. They were having some problems with Fox. The pharmacists told Mickey that Fox was demanding a meeting the following evening—presumably, to put the squeeze on them—and asked if he could come too. Mickey told them he’d be glad to come and settle their problems. The pharmacist-bookmakers, dismayed by the notion that the baby-faced little fellow before them was supposed to stand between themselves and Fox, suggested that Cohen bring a few extra hands. Mickey was noncommittal.

The meeting was at the house of one of the bookmakers. Mickey arrived early, alone. When Fox arrived, he was not happy to see Mickey there, waiting for him in the kitchen. The bookmakers and one of their wives were there too. Fox got personal.

“Ya know, I’m going to tell ya something, Mickey,” Fox began. “I had trouble with your brother Harry years before, and ya know, your brother ran out on me. So my feelings towards you ain’t so goddamn good anyway—”

He got no further. Mickey whipped out his .38 and shot Fox on the spot. (By way of justification, Cohen later explained that Harry “was particularly close to me.”) The bookmakers were stunned, then hysterical. The host’s wife lost her voice for several months. Mickey calmly left—and headed downtown to the Olympic Auditorium to catch a prizefight. He didn’t know if Fox was alive or dead and he didn’t care. As he was leaving the auditorium, he was grabbed by Det. Jack Donahoe, one of the LAPD’s toughest (and most upright) officers.

“You dirty son of a bitch,” said the six-foot-one, 225-pound detective to Mickey, as he placed him under arrest. “You kill a man, and you go see a prizefight?”

For three days, Mickey languished in jail—until it became clear that Fox was going to live. Mickey claimed that Fox had drawn on him and that he had fired in self-defense. The tough Irishman declined to contradict him or comment in any way on the shooting. Cohen was released.

Imprisonment hadn’t improved his mood. He blamed Eddy Neales for his three days in jail. One night while he was out with a hooker, Cohen decided that he was going to take care of Neales once and for all. Somehow he managed to acquire a key to Neales’s apartment. Telling his “date” to wait in the car, Mickey slipped in and waited for the rival underworld figure to come home.

“I’m in the joint waiting to put his lights out, I hear him start opening the door. I’m ready to hit him” but then “some sixth sense told him something,” Mickey later recounted. Neales “shut the door real quick and ran”—back to his business partner Curly Robinson. Eddy Neales was done with organized crime in Los Angeles. Robinson called Mickey to capitulate.

Unfortunately, Mickey’s men didn’t get the message fast enough. Around midnight, one of Neales’s men left his Sheridan Road apartment house—alone—to get some cigarettes. Rounding the corner, he ran into Mickey’s right-hand man, Hooky Rothman. This is something that no rational person ever wanted to do. A hundred and ninety pounds and built like a bull, Hooky inspired trepidation in even the toughest toughs. He was an idiot savant of assassination, brilliant at plotting a complex killing but either unable or unwilling to engage in conversation with another person. (His standard courtship line, Mickey’s crew joked, was “Hello goil,” followed by silence.)

“If there was a piece of work to be done, Hooky stopped eating, drinking and sleeping till it was done,” Mickey commented later, approvingly.

When Neales’s man saw Hooky, he was greatly relieved that the feud was over. “Hi ya, Hooky,” he greeted Mickey’s man. Hooky gunned him down on the spot.

“It was a bad tragedy,” Mickey later reflected, “but it ended okay.” Hooky was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. Eddy Neales moved to Mexico City, just to be safe. Siegel and Cohen had run their leading bookmaking rival out of town. But the Los Angeles underworld was still not entirely under their control. The problem was the LAPD.

During his first year or so back in Los Angeles, Cohen focused on avoiding the police. Not until he met the legendary gambler Nick “the Greek” Dandolos did he realize he’d also have to deal with it.

Over dinner one night at the Brown Derby, Dandolos had a heart-to-heart with Mickey.

“You’re doing it all the hard way,” Nick the Greek told the uncharacteristically attentive young heister. “A smart kid doesn’t have to go on the heavy to make a living.” There was a better way—bookmaking.

Mickey liked “going on the heavy.” As he would later tell the screenwriter Ben Hecht, “winning a street fight, knockin’ over a score, havin’ enough money to buy the best hats—I lived for them moments.” However, Cohen had conducted so many heists during his short time in Los Angeles that he risked becoming recognizable. So at Dandolos’s suggestion, he decided to go visit the Santa Anita racetrack, fifteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, to see this business that Siegel was so interested in. He was stunned by what he saw there.

“Fifty thousand people are shovin’ their money across a betting counter in open sight,” he exclaimed with astonishment. Within three days, Mickey was a racetrack bookie, taking bets at his spot along the track rail. When the Pinkertons shut him down, Mickey decided to open a bookie joint of his own. Of course, to do so, Mickey would need police protection.

Fight manager Eddie Meade offered to make some introductions. Over dinner at Ruby Foo’s, Meade introduced Mickey to the head of the LAPD’s Hollywood vice squad, who agreed to let Mickey open a joint at Santa Monica and Western—“door open like a candy store, three-ticket windows,” Mickey recalled fondly. When the day’s horse racing was done, Mickey and his crew took the sheets off the walls and opened up for blackjack and poker. All the games were on the square, and the action was excellent—until, less than four months after Mickey had opened his joint, the LAPD gangster and robbery detail moved in and arrested Cohen and his top associates on suspicion of robbery. Mickey was upset. Didn’t he have a deal with the police? Not exactly, his police contacts informed him. Cohen had a deal with Hollywood vice, but not with the gangster and robbery detail. And that squad had no intention of letting Mickey build up operations within city limits.

This attitude angered Mickey. Los Angeles, he fumed, was the exact opposite of eastern cities. “[I]t was a syndicate—a combination like the syndicate in Chicago or the syndicate in New York. But here, gambling and everything like they did in Jersey, Chicago, and New York was completely run by cops and stool pigeons.”

Then, on the morning of January 14, 1938, an explosion ripped apart a modest house at 955 Orme Street and changed everything.

8 Dynamite

“We’ve got to get somebody to spill his guts.”

—Jim Richardson, city editor, Los Angeles Examiner

IT WASN’T BUGSY SIEGEL or Mickey Cohen who toppled the Combination. Nor, despite Bill Parker’s efforts, was it an honest cop. Los Angeles’s ruling clique was brought down by a thirty-seven-year-old cafeteria owner named Clifford Clinton.

In a city awash in sin and suffering, Clifford Clinton was a righteous man. Stranger still, he was also a rich one, thanks to one of Southern California’s hottest trends, the cafeteria. Cafeterias were to 1930s Los Angeles what coffee shops were to 1990s Seattle—ubiquitous, wildly popular, and very profitable. (In 1923, one writer punned that “Southern California” could with equal accuracy be called Sunny Cafeteria.) In 1931, Clinton took the basic idea and gave it a fantastical twist by opening Clifton’s Pacific Seas, which featured a giant waterfall, jungle murals, and a Polynesian grass hut inspired by his explorations in the South Pacific, as well as a meditation garden inspired by the Garden of Gethsemane. In 1935, Clinton began work on a second establishment, the Brookdale cafeteria, which evoked Clinton’s Northern California childhood with an interior that included redwood trees and a stream that fell over a waterfall before meandering through the cafeteria (past a tiny toy chapel perched upon a rocky escarpment). However, it was Clinton’s response to the Great Depression that made his name.

Clinton had always been proud of his food. His cafeteria’s motto was “Dine Free unless Delighted,” and he meant it. The teetotaler son of Salvation Army officers, Clinton also had strong moral principles. As the Depression deepened, he went out of his way to help Angelenos in distress, offering customers a full meal (soup, salad, bread, Jell-O, and coffee) for a nickel. When it became clear that a nickel was too much for many, he opened a basement cafeteria in his South Hill Street establishment where the less fortunate could get vegetable soup over brown rice for a mere penny. (Clinton would later estimate that he served roughly a million penny meals over the course of the decade.) Demand was so great for the so-called caveteria that patrons lined up three hours before the restaurant opened for a meal.

Clinton’s introduction to politics was accidental. In 1935, county supervisor John Anson Ford asked the thirty-five-year-old restaurant owner to inspect food operations at the County General Hospital. Clinton uncovered instances of waste and favoritism that were costing the county $120,000 a year. Retaliation was not long in coming. Soon thereafter, Clinton was visited by city health inspectors and cited for numerous violations. But Shaw’s minions had messed with the wrong man. Outraged, Clinton persuaded Ford to suggest him for the 1937 county grand jury. Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron agreed to put forward his name, and when the 1937 grand jury convened that February, Clinton was among its members.

The county grand jury was the wildcard in Los Angeles politics. Every year, the county’s fifty superior court judges appointed nineteen people to the jury, which had broad leeway to investigate wrongdoing. At least seventeen of those judges were in the pocket of the Combination; these friendly judges typically ensured that eight to twelve of the grand jury’s members had close ties either to Mayor Frank Shaw’s administration or to the underworld. As a result, grand juries generally managed to avoid uncovering any serious wrongdoing. A clear majority of the 1937 grand jury fit this pattern. When Clinton and three other jurors pressed for an investigation into vice conditions, the grand jury foreman refused. But Clinton was undeterred. Instead, he went directly to Mayor Shaw and asked him to bless an investigation.

Clinton’s proposal put Shaw in a tough position. If the mayor refused, he risked creating the impression that he had something to hide. So over the objections of Chief Davis, Shaw endorsed Clinton’s investigation. When the group unveiled its name—the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC)—and announced that it would also be investigating municipal malfeasance, Shaw realized he had made a mistake. Clinton’s public statements made it clear that he was targeting more than the city’s brothels and gambling parlors; he was targeting the Combination as a whole. The mayor withdrew his support. CIVIC pressed ahead. Its volunteer investigators soon came up with a tally of vice in Los Angeles: 600 brothels, 300 gambling houses, 1,800 bookie joints, and 23,000 slot machines. The rest of the grand jury wasn’t interested. It refused to accept much less publish CIVIC’s report.

Clinton turned to Judge Bowron for advice. The fifty-year-old Bowron knew the underworld well. During the teens, he’d put himself through law school by working as a city reporter. Then, after serving in the Army during the First World War, he’d gotten a job as the executive secretary to California governor Friend Richardson, who appointed him to superior court. There Bowron turned his attention to the issue of corruption. Three years earlier, in 1934, Bowron had presided over a crusading county grand jury that nearly toppled District Attorney Buron Fitts. (Fitts’s office had dropped a case against a millionaire real estate developer who’d allegedly raped an underage prostitute after the developer entered into a shady business deal with a member of the DA’s family.) Now Bowron suggested that Clinton produce a minority grand jury report. When Clinton did so, the judge with responsibility for presiding over the grand jury ruled that it couldn’t be released. Bowron issued a counterruling, and CIVIC hastily printed and distributed thousands of copies.

The report was scathing. It found that “underworld profits” were being used to finance the campaigns of “city and county officials in vital positions.” In exchange, local officials were turning a blind eye to a vast network of brothels, “clip joints,” gambling houses, and bookmakers. The report charged that officials from all three of the principal law enforcement agencies in the county, the district attorney’s office, the sheriff’s department, and the LAPD, “work in complete harmony and never interfere with the activities of important figures in the underworld.”

The counterreaction was swift. Grand jury foreman John Bauer labeled Clinton an “out of control” egomaniac and charged that the cafeteriateur, rather than the underworld, was “Public Enemy #1.” The Los Angeles Times, which was closely allied with District Attorney Fitts, echoed Bauer’s allegations. When a notary appeared before the county grand jury to testify that foreman Bauer was actually a Shaw crony holding lucrative city paint contracts, Fitts, Bauer, and a squad of detectives from the DA’s office arrived, uninvited, at the notary’s house. The detectives then beat the hapless notary so badly that he had to be hospitalized.

Clinton came under pressure too. His real estate taxes were increased by nearly $7,000, a significant sum during the Depression. Complaints of food poisoning became commonplace. Clinton’s newest cafeteria was denied a permit. But the man the newspapers had dubbed “the Cafeteria Kid” was undeterred. So Clinton’s enemies upped the ante. That October, a bomb exploded in the basement of Clinton’s home in Los Feliz. Fortunately Clinton, his wife, and their three children slept on the other side of the house and were unharmed. The LAPD responded by suggesting the attack was probably just a publicity ruse engineered by Clinton himself—despite the fact that a car seen speeding from the scene had license plates that tied it to the LAPD’s intelligence division.

The Shaws weren’t the only people playing hardball. So was former LAPD officer Harry Raymond. Raymond was an unsavory character, a twice-fired former vice squad officer with close connections to the old Combination. As the historian Gerald Woods noted dryly, “Few were better qualified to investigate vice than Raymond.” Raymond had gotten involved in a picayune dispute between a friend who’d done work for Mayor Shaw’s 1933 reelection campaign—and felt he was owed $2,900—and Harry Munson, a former Police Commission member who was widely considered to be the liaison between the underworld and the Shaw administration. Despite the fact that Munson’s associates were clearing somewhere between $2 and $4 million a month, Munson refused to pay up. Raymond’s friend decided to sue. Raymond recommended an attorney, who just happened to be Clifford Clinton’s attorney as well.

Then Raymond himself got busy. His investigation soon uncovered damaging connections between the police department, the underworld, and the Shaw administration. But Raymond didn’t turn this evidence over to Clinton or to prosecutors. Instead, he approached his former colleagues in the police department with a blackmail demand. In response, the decision was made to take Raymond out.

On the morning of January 14, 1938, Harry Raymond walked into the garage of his modest house at 955 Orme Street in Boyle Heights, got into his car, pressed the starter pedal, and triggered a thunderous explosion that shook the neighborhood. The car and the garage were destroyed—investigators would later determine that a heavy iron water pipe packed with dynamite had been attached to his car’s undercarriage—but Raymond somehow survived, despite suffering 186 shrapnel wounds. The badly wounded Raymond summoned Los Angeles Examiner city editor Jim Richardson to his hospital bedside—and fingered Davis muscleman Earl Kynette.

“They told me they would get me,” he whispered to the newspaperman. “They put Kynette on me. I’ve known for weeks he and his boys were shadowing me. They had my phone tapped. Somewhere in the neighborhood you’ll find where they had their listening devices. Kynette takes his orders from City Hall and they wanted me out of the way. He’s the one who rigged the bomb.”

The next morning, Raymond’s allegations were splashed across the front page of the Examiner. Raymond’s attorney quickly reached out to Clifford Clinton and arranged for the wounded blackmailer to claim a more flattering connection to CIVIC. Clinton was happy to portray Raymond as a crusading investigator who had been targeted for termination because he had information that would “blow the lid off Los Angeles.” A wiretapping setup was soon found, just as Raymond had alleged. Neighbors confirmed that Capt. Earl Kynette of the LAPD had indeed been surveilling Raymond in the days leading up to the explosion. Nonetheless, upon returning from a pistol shooting competition in Mexico City, Chief Davis assigned Kynette to investigate the bombing. Kynette in turn suggested that Raymond had blown himself up as part of yet another publicity stunt. This was too much for DA Fitts, who reluctantly opened an investigation into police wrongdoing. To those in the know, the situation was farcical. In a letter to U.S. senator Hiram Johnson, chamber of commerce director Frank Doherty described Fitts’s investigation of the LAPD thusly: “a near psychopathic district attorney is investigating a crooked police department” that is “trying to dispense of or frighten a former crooked member of their crooked force who was spying into their crooked activities.”

Chief Davis’s career—and Bill Parker’s—hung in the balance. Thanks to the changes in the city charter Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had pushed through, Kynette’s intelligence squad now enjoyed significant legal protections. Those advantages were on full display in the wake of the Raymond bombing. Seven members of Kynette’s intelligence squad refused to testify before the grand jury about the unit’s activities, citing fears of self-incrimination. Although the officers were initially suspended from duty, a review board made up of their fellow officers soon returned the men to work. But the question of Chief Davis’s future—and Bill Parker’s—remained.

In April 1938, the trial of Earl Kynette and his two associates got under way. The evidence against Kynette was damning. He had personally purchased the steel pipe used in the bombing. The trial also revealed that Kynette had been running a secret spy squad—one that routinely used wiretaps and dictographs to gather information on opponents of the Shaws’ political machine. Among its targets were county supervisor John Anson Ford (who had run for mayor, unsuccessfully, against Frank Shaw in 1937), Judge Bowron, Hollywood Citizen-News publisher Harlan Palmer, and fifty other prominent Angelenos. Chief Davis clearly had some questions to answer. But when he took the stand on April 26, Davis was a disaster. Prosecutors had subpoenaed the files of the intelligence division two weeks earlier. They now confronted the chief with evidence that the LAPD intelligence squad had been monitoring county supervisors, judges, newspaper publishers, even a federal agent charged with investigating vice conditions in San Francisco who had considered launching a similar investigation into vice conditions in Los Angeles.

“Are these men criminals?” demanded one of the prosecutors.

Davis parried that everyone under observation had a criminal record—a claim that was true only if you counted parking citations. He further alleged that figures such as county supervisor John Anson Ford, Clifford Clinton, and Hollywood Citizen-News publisher Harlan Palmer had been in contact “with subversive elements.” When pressed, Davis acknowledged that one of the intelligence squad’s functions had been to investigate people “attempting to destroy confidence in the police department”—as if criticism of the police were itself a crime. Mostly, though, Davis seemed confused. His testimony at times was so incoherent that the presiding judge dismissed Davis’s testimony as “a debris of words.” Kynette was convicted of attempted murder, assault with intent to commit murder, and the malicious use of explosives and sentenced to ten years in prison, along with one other officer.

In an effort to salvage his position, Chief Davis disbanded the intelligence squad, reassigned more than four dozen officers, and launched sweeping vice raids throughout the city.^[6] But it was too late.

One year earlier, Mayor Shaw had been easily reelected to a second term in office, entrenching the Chandler-Shaw-Combination triumvirate that effectively ruled Los Angeles. Clinton and the reformers now demanded that Mayor Shaw dismiss Davis as chief of police. Shaw refused. Davis was the linchpin of the arrangement by which the business establishment, the underworld, and his administration shared power. If he gave up control over the police department, the entire arrangement would come tumbling down, as the reformers well knew. Faced with this refusal, Clinton and his allies targeted the mayor himself, launching a recall effort. No big-city mayor had ever been recalled before, but by early July, Clinton had the signatures he needed to put a motion to recall Shaw on the September ballot. Now the reformers needed a candidate. That August, just one month before the election, Judge Bowron agreed to step down from the bench and run as the reform candidate. That September, voters swept Frank Shaw out of office and made Bowron mayor. Bowron immediately turned his attention to purging the LAPD—and getting rid of Chief Davis.

In theory, thanks to the charter amendments drafted by Bill Parker, Chief Davis enjoyed a bulwark of legal protections. Bowron was determined to override them. Under pressure from the new mayor, the Police Commission resigned en masse. Bowron promptly appointed a new board that was prepared to follow his instructions. Chief Davis wanted to stay and fight. However, Parker warned him that if he fought and lost, he risked losing his $330 monthly pension. Reluctantly, Davis accepted his protege’s advice. In November 1938, he resigned as chief. Parker’s efforts to insulate the chief of police from political pressures had failed.

Despite his closeness to the former chief, Parker did not initially suffer from Davis’s fall. The new acting chief, Insp. David Davidson, quickly reshuffled the top leadership of the force, but he affirmed Parker’s position as acting captain. He also named Parker “Administrative Officer” for the department—essentially, the assistant chief of police in everything but name. Parker even moved into the previous assistant chief of police’s office. Basically, Davidson was keeping Parker in the same job he’d performed before. Parker seemed to be advancing toward his dream: the chief’s chair. But Mayor Bowron wasn’t done yet with the LAPD.

MAYOR BOWRON was determined to eradicate the Combination. Shaw’s defeat and Chief Davis’s resignation had clearly dealt the underworld a major blow, but Bowron knew that its tentacles still extended deep into municipal government and into the LAPD. Soon after his election, Bowron invited Jim Richardson, city editor of the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner, the feisty morning paper that was the Times’s fiercest competitor, to join him for lunch at the Jonathan Club downtown to talk strategy. The topic of their discussion was uprooting the Combination once and for all.

“We’ve got to find out the facts,” Bowron told the newsman over lunch. “We’ve got to get the evidence of how it was operated, who put out the bribe money and who took it. Who are the crooks in the police department and how did the whole setup operate? We can’t do much, hardly anything, until we get that information; and how are we going to get it?”

“There’s only one way,” Richardson responded. “We’ve got to get somebody to spill his guts.”

A few days later, Richardson realized someone might be willing to talk: Tony Cornero. During his bootlegging days in the 1920s, Cornero had conducted a guns-blazing feud with Combination leader Milton “Farmer” Page. That feud had ended with Cornero’s arrest, followed by an amazing escape to Canada. In 1929, Cornero had voluntarily returned to the United States and served two years in a federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, in the Puget Sound. He returned to Los Angeles in 1931 and hit upon a characteristically wily scheme. Rather than going up against underworld rivals and the LAPD, Cornero decided to commission gambling ships that would operate in international waters off Santa Monica Bay. Offshore gambling proved a smashing success; Cornero had reveled in one-upping his old land based rivals. But Richardson knew Cornero still held a grudge against his old rivals in what remained of the Combination. The newspaperman thought the old bootlegger-turned-nautical casino operator might well be willing to do them one last bad turn. So he called Cornero and asked if he’d meet secretly with him—and with Mayor Bowron—to help the mayor finish off his old enemies. Cornero readily agreed. A midnight summit was arranged at Bowron’s house, on a hill high above the Hollywood Bowl.

The night of the meeting, only six people were present—the mayor, his driver, the head of the Police Commission, Richardson and a colleague, and Cornero. Cornero began by explaining how the underworld operated, but what Bowron really wanted were names—names of police officers on the take.

Cornero handed Bowron a piece of paper. On it was a list of twenty-six compromised police officers. Bowron was thrilled—and puzzled.

“Thank you, Tony,” the mayor told the gangster. “You have done us a big service. In fact, you’ve done the city of Los Angeles a big service.” He paused and then continued. “But there’s only one thing I can’t understand. I can’t understand why you’re doing this. I mean, I can’t see what’s in it for you?”

Cornero smiled and then replied. “Well, Your Honor,” he began, “you are not always going to be mayor of Los Angeles. Someday you’ll be out. It may be the next election or ten years from now. I’ve given you the stuff to put the Syndicate out of business. Out it goes! Then comes the day when you’re out too. Then the field is open again. And it will be mine. It will be open for someone else to take over. Do I make myself clear?”

“You make it clear all right,” Bowron replied. The meeting was over. It was time to clean house at the LAPD.

There was just one problem. The testimony of a convicted felon like Tony Cornero was not exactly something that would hold up in court or even in an administrative hearing, given the protections that Bill Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had so painstakingly enacted. So Mayor Bowron and his Police Commission decided to take an extraordinary step. They hired an ex-FBI man to investigate the officers in question and tap their phones. By the end of the investigation, Bowron was confident that the men were indeed corrupt. Over the course of two days, each was summoned to the mayor’s office individually and asked for his resignation. When an officer hesitated—or refused—the mayor reached over to the sound recorder and played an incriminating section of the wiretap. Most of the officers agreed to resign on the spot. In two days, much of the top echelon of the department was gone. Within six months, a dozen more had followed.

The Combination had finally been smashed. In a world with Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel on the loose, it was simply too dangerous for men like Guy McAfee to operate in Los Angeles without police protection. Moreover, it seemed evident that the new mayor was determined to “close” Los Angeles. And so the organized crime figures who had held sway over the L.A. underworld since the 1920s left Los Angeles. Most relocated to a dusty little town in the Nevada desert where gambling was legal and supervision was lax—Las Vegas.

Mayor Bowron was exultant. “We’ve broken the most powerful ring that ever had an American city in its grip,” he exulted to Richardson. “We’ve swept the police department clean for the first time in many years.”

The sphere of police autonomy that Bill Parker had so laboriously constructed also seemed to have been swept away.

For four years, Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had worked to restrict politicians’ authority over the LAPD. On paper, chief and officers alike now enjoyed substantial legal protections. Yet when the stakes were high, those protections proved to be worthless. In a matter of months, Bowron had forced out the entire senior leadership of the police department, without a prosecutor indicting a single officer, without the Police Commission acting on a single complaint, without a single review board convening. The prospect of a powerful, independent police chief must have seemed impossibly remote.

Yet the triumph of the politicians was not complete. When Bowron’s new Police Commission attempted to rescind the city charter amendments that Cooke and Parker had written—returning disciplinary authority to the chief of police (and thus to the mayor and Police Commission who appointed and oversaw him)—the city council objected. Nor did the council embrace reformers’ proposals for a new city charter, one that would have greatly strengthened the mayor’s rather limited powers over the executive branch of government. In short, the legal protections Parker’s charters had created remained, even as Mayor Bowron drained them of their significance. They simply lay fallow, waiting for a chief who would have the skill and knowledge to breathe life into them.

IN MAY 1939, Parker got his first clear shot at becoming that chief.

In theory, promotion in the LAPD was strictly meritocratic. Under ordinary circumstances, officers sat for promotional exams roughly every two years. A written exam typically accounted for 95 percent of their scores; the remaining 5 percent was determined by an oral exam and by seniority. Officers were then ranked by their results and placed on a promotional list, from which all new appointments had to be made. But the onset of the Great Depression—and the appearance of Joe Shaw—had disrupted this process. Between 1929 and 1936, hiring in the department had essentially been frozen. In 1936, Joe Shaw had overseen a new round of civil service examinations—and, rumor had it, helpfully sold answers to the questions for all fifty positions waiting to be filled. The department’s promotion lists were so suspect that Mayor Bowron’s new Police Commission decided to start from scratch. It threw out the previous lists and announced a new round of competitive examinations. Among the positions up for grabs was that of chief of police.

The acting chief of police, David Davidson, disclaimed any interest in the job, saying he preferred “not to be pushed around every time a new administration took office.” Capt. R. R. McDonald was known to be the mayor’s favorite, yet Bowron’s handpicked Police Commission nonetheless announced that it would make a purely meritocratic choice. The candidate who placed highest on the civil service exam would be the Police Commission’s choice.

One hundred seventy-one officers sat for the written examination for chief, including acting captain Bill Parker. Thirty-one were called back to complete the oral portion of the test. Once again, Parker was among the top group. On June 15, 1939, Parker received his score from the Board of Civil Service Commissioners: He had received a final grade of 78.1, which placed his name eighth on the tentative eligible list. The name at the top came as a surprise to everyone: Lt. Arthur Hohmann. After several weeks of hemming and hawing, the Police Commission decided to recognize Hohmann’s ranking and appointed him chief.

From the first, Bill Parker was in his sights. The services rendered to Chief Davis now stood Parker in bad stead. “Parker’s loyalty and zealous attention to his office was now misinterpreted as blind loyalty to organizations and individuals and his past performance as an efficient, courageous and honest officer was discounted,” wrote a friendly superior officer, B. R. Caldwell, four years after the event. Hohmann immediately created a new headquarters division—and announced that he would command it himself. R. R. McDonald was made administrative officer. Acting captain Bill Parker—now Lieutenant Parker—was out.

Demoralized by his de facto demotion and worried that he would never shake the Davis stigma, Parker seriously considered leaving the force and becoming a full-time attorney. He even lined up a few legal cases he could work on as a private attorney and drafted a letter of resignation, but at the last minute, Parker’s old boss from his time at Hollywood Division, Capt. B. R. Caldwell, stepped in. Caldwell was a Parker admirer. He intervened to secure a position for Parker in the traffic accident investigation division, which he headed. This was not an inconsequential position. Managing traffic was a major problem in the world’s most car-oriented big city. Traffic accidents were also a major cause of death, killing 533 people in 1941, more than ten times the number of people murdered that year. Despite feeling bruised by his treatment, Parker agreed to stay on.

Parker now had something to prove. In February 1940, he took the examination for captain and placed second on the promotion list. That May, Chief Hohmann recognized his achievement by appointing him captain. In September, Parker took the examination for Inspector of Police and again placed second. Soon thereafter, Parker won a fellowship award to Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute. In the fall of 1940, he left for Chicago to study the fine points of traffic control for nine months.

The Combination got in one final dig at the new order. That fall, the generally reliable Hollywood Citizen-News broke the story of Bowron and Jim Richardson’s secret meeting with Tony Cornero, in a highly misleading fashion: NEW VICE SETUP IN LOS ANGELES, proclaimed the banner headline. TONY CORNERO, MAYOR BOWRON AND EXAMINER CITY EDITOR IN SECRET

MIDNIGHT MEETING AT MAYOR’S HOUSE. It turned out that Bowron’s driver was on the Combination’s payroll. Although the charge that the mayor had met with Cornero to divvy up Los Angeles was completely untrue, Bowron felt he had to respond, and so, with no little ruthlessness, he turned against the man who had decapitated the Combination, Tony Cornero.

The gambling fleet Cornero operated just offshore had long been an embarrassment. Mayor Bowron now decided that it was intolerable, so he turned up the pressure on California attorney general Earl Warren and Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz by publicly calling on them to shut down the gaming fleet. With the attention of the public upon them, Sheriff Biscailuz and Santa Monica police chief Charles Dice set out in a fleet of water taxis to arrest the offshore crime lord, who they insisted had strayed into California waters. In court, however, Cornero sprung a surprise. Santa Monica Bay, he argued, was not actually a bay at all but rather a bight, a large coastal indentation. That put his ships in international waters, out of the reach of the California courts. An appeals court agreed, and Tony “the Hat” (now “the Commodore”) returned to action.

After much head-scratching, Attorney General Warren decided to try another tack: He announced that Cornero’s gambling fleet was a “nuisance,” which the state of California had the power to abate. A cease-and-desist warning was issued. When Cornero refused to comply, a raiding party was sent out to capture his flagship, the SS Rex. Cornero insisted the raiding party’s members were pirates. For nine days, “the Commodore” held the raiders off with a fire hose before succumbing to hunger and surrendering the ship. The courts rejected Cornero’s claims that he was a victim of piracy, and the California Supreme Court ruled that the appeals court had erred in its analysis of coastal geography. Santa Monica Bight returned to being Santa Monica Bay. Tony Cornero was out of luck for a second time.

Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, on the other hand, couldn’t have been luckier. Mayor Bowron had shut down first the Combination and then Tony Cornero. Los Angeles’s homegrown criminal underworld had scurried off to Las Vegas. The Los Angeles underworld was now Siegel’s to command. What made the situation even sweeter was that as his influence was growing, his identity as a notorious eastern gangster remained virtually unknown. It wasn’t until a wiseacre NYPD detective decided to give the Los Angeles DA’s chief investigator a scare that the LAPD awoke to the fact that its nightmare of “eastern gangsters” moving into the city had already come true. The struggle for control of Los Angeles was about to move into a new phase, one that would put Bugsy Siegel and his top lieutenant, Mickey Cohen, in direct conflict with the LAPD.

9 Getting Away with Murder (inc.)

“Men who have lived by the gun do not throw off the habit overnight.”

—Florabel Muir

DISTRICT ATTORNEY Buron Fitts was in a tricky position. Angelenos were in a reforming mood—and Buron Fitts was the antithesis of reform. In 1936, Fitts had won reelection after essentially purchasing 12,000 votes along Central Avenue. (The Hollywood Citizen-News later reported that the underworld had spent $2 million—more than $30 million in today’s dollars—to fund Fitts’s campaign.) Knowing of his vulnerability on issues of corruption, when the Raymond bombing scandal broke, Fitts had acted with uncharacteristic vigor, ultimately convicting Joe Shaw on sixty-three counts of selling city jobs and promotions. Still, with a tough reelection campaign approaching, Fitts needed to do more. So in 1939, Fitts sent his chief investigator, Johnny Klein, to Manhattan. New York City district attorney Tom Dewey had made a name for himself by prosecuting gangsters. Klein’s brief was to learn what he could about eastern gangsters who might be trying to infiltrate the City of Angels.

A former Hollywood fur salesman, Klein was not known as the savviest of investigators. When he arrived at NYPD headquarters on Centre Street to examine the department’s gangster files, one of the detectives decided to have a little fun with him. He pulled forth a mug shot of Benjamin Siegel—taken in Dade County, Florida, where Siegel had been arrested for speeding.

“Now there’s an outstanding citizen named Bugsy Siegel,” the detective told the DA’s investigator.

“Never heard of him,” Klein replied.

“You never heard of him? Why, Johnny, this guy is one of the worst killers in America, and he’s living right in your backyard.” The detective continued, “Dewey wants this guy and would give anything to lay hands on him.”

Bugsy Siegel was one of the worst killers in America—the FBI would later credit him with carrying out or participating in some thirty murders—but his whereabouts were hardly a secret. Every crime reporter in New York knew that Siegel was actually in New York at that very moment, staying at the Waldorf-Astoria (where he had lived for much of the 1920s, two floors below “Lucky” Luciano). And it had been a long time since Bugsy Siegel was running around indiscriminately knocking people off. Nonetheless, Klein promptly telegrammed the news of this discovery back to Los Angeles. The DA’s office immediately sent a raiding party to Siegel’s Beverly Hills residence—along with a reporter from the Los Angeles Examiner, which was delighted to have another gangster to crusade against.

The next day the Examiner broke the story in typical Hearst style, portraying Siegel as a Dillinger-esque outlaw on the run. To those familiar with the Syndicate’s operations, the Examiner’s portrayal was laughable. Still, Siegel’s cover was blown. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Siegel had just launched an effort to sign up L.A.’s bookies for a new racing wire, the Trans-American news service. His unmasking threatened to complicate these efforts, as well as the broader effort to organize Los Angeles along eastern lines. Furious, Siegel called the Los Angeles papers. If he was really an outlaw wanted by DA Dewey, then why was he visiting New York City, unmolested, at that very moment? Siegel’s consort, the Countess di Frasso, was also upset, so much so that she drove to San Simeon to make a personal appeal to William Randolph Hearst to stop the Examiner from further besmirching Siegel’s name. These efforts floundered, for Siegel was, of course, a notorious gangster. With uncharacteristic delicacy of feeling, a despairing Siegel decided to resign from his beloved Hillcrest Country Club (though no one dared ask him to). He also decided to leave town for a bit. So he set off for Rome with the Countess di Frasso, leaving Mickey Cohen as his surrogate.

MICKEY AND BUGSY had grown close. Cohen was still raw—not to mention sullen, closemouthed, temperamental, and dangerous—but Siegel thought he had potential. As a result, he began to try, in Mickey’s words, “to put some class into me… trying to evolve me.” It wasn’t easy. As a stickup-man, Mickey steered clear of flashy dressing (too memorable). White shirt, dark sunglasses, that was it. Off the job, however, Mickey continued to pay his sartorial respects to Al Capone. Siegel tried to spiff him up. He introduced Mickey to cashmere. (Mickey thought it tickled.) He also introduced Mickey to a higher class of people. For the first time in his life, Cohen “got invited to different dinner parties and… met people with much elegance and manners.” It slowly dawned on Mickey that he’d been “living like an animal.” He grew ashamed. Earnestly, he set out to improve himself. He hired a tutor to help him learn to speak grammatically. He purchased a leather-bound set of the world’s great literature, which he proudly showed off to visitors (who noted the spines were never cracked).

When a source at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Internal Revenue (precursor agency to the Internal Revenue Service) informed Siegel that the government was starting to get interested in his young sidekick, Siegel told Mickey he had to start paying taxes. It was a tough sell. (“I had a firm belief that if the government, or anybody else, wanted any part of my money they should at least be on hand to help me steal it,” he said later, only half-jokingly.) The fact that Siegel prevailed on Cohen to get an accountant shows the authority that Bugsy exercised over his young protege. Although he would later (much later) boast of thumbing his nose at Bugsy during his early days in L.A., Mickey was actually quite awed by the suave older gangster.

“I found Benny a person with brilliant intelligence,” Cohen told the writer Ben Hecht in the mid-1950s. “He commanded a 1,000 percent respect and got it. Also he was tough. He come out the hard way—been through it all—muscle work, heists, killings.” For someone who had dreamed of an association with “the people,” working with Siegel must have seemed like a dream come true. They were not formally superior and subordinate—Mickey continued to run his own rackets and related to Bugsy more like a subcontractor on retainer than an employee—but when Siegel gave an order, Cohen jumped to. In return, Bugsy took care of Mickey, kicking him anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 on a regular (albeit unpredictable) basis.

It was an arrangement Mickey liked. “I didn’t have no wish to be a ruler,” said Cohen in describing his mind-set upon first arriving in Los Angeles. “In fact that was actually contrary to my nature at the time. I just wanted to be myself—Mickey.” But fate—in the form of Bugsy Siegel’s itchy trigger finger—had other plans.

BUGSY AND THE COUNTESS di Frasso’s trip to Rome wasn’t intended just to get away from the press. Both Siegel and the multimillionaire countess had a weakness for get-rich schemes. One year earlier, they had chartered a boat to look for buried treasure off the coast of Ecuador.^[7] Now the gangster and the countess had another idea. Siegel had recently come across two chemists who claimed to have invented a new type of explosive—Atomite. Bugsy was convinced this new substance would replace dynamite and make him fabulously wealthy. With the countess’s help, he hoped to sell it to the Italian military. The countess, always ready for adventure, talked to her husband, who arranged a demonstration.

For purposes of a trip to fascist Italy, di Frasso decided to recast Bugsy as “Bart”—Sir Bart, an English baronet. This was a good idea, for when the countess arrived at her husband’s villa outside of Rome, she found that they had houseguests—Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister, and Hermann Goring, Luftwaffe commander and Hitler’s second in command. Although Siegel evidently had no qualms about doing business with Mussolini’s military, the Nazi houseguests rubbed him the wrong way. One night he confronted the countess.

“Look, Dottie,” he said, “I saw you talking to that fat bastard Goring. Why do you let him come into our building?”

The countess murmured something about social niceties, to which Siegel responded, “I’m going to kill him, and that dirty Goebbels, too…. It’s an easy setup the way they’re walking around here.”

Only after the countess elaborated on the problems posed by the carabiniere—and the likely consequences for her husband—did Siegel give up on the idea. The Atomite demonstration fizzled, and “Sir Bart” and Countess di Frasso left for the French Riviera. There Siegel bumped into his old friend the actor George Raft, who was pursuing the actress Norma Shearer. Despite Atomite’s inexplicable failure, Siegel seemed to be in good spirits. Raft said he was looking forward to lingering on the Riviera. Then Siegel received a cablegram from New York and his mood suddenly changed. The next day Raft noticed he was gone. The Syndicate had a problem that required Bugsy’s unique talents.

The problem was Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg. Greenberg was a former associate of Siegel and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the Brooklyn-based crime lord and labor racketeer. Greenberg had been arrested and deported to his native Poland, but “Big Greenie” had no intention of going back to the old country. He jumped ship in France and made it back to Montreal. From there he sent a letter to a friend in New York, implying that if his old friends in Brooklyn didn’t send him a big bundle of cash, he might go talk to the authorities. Instead of sending cash, Buchalter associate Mendy Weiss sent two hitmen. “Big Greenie” checked out of his hotel just hours before the two assassins checked in. For a time, the trail went cold. Then, in the fall of 1939, “Big Greenie” was spotted in Hollywood. He had a new name (George Schachter), a new wife, and, given his lack of further communications, he’d evidently learned that blackmailing the Syndicate was a foolish thing to do. Nonetheless, at a meeting in New York, Siegel, Buchalter, New Jersey rackets boss Longy Zwillman, and Brooklyn crime overlord Albert Anastasia decided that “Big Greenie” had to go. Zwillman once again sent two gunmen to California. But the gunmen didn’t like the setup and returned to New York. Bugsy being Bugsy, he decided to take care of the problem himself.

The evening before Thanksgiving, on November 22, 1939, “Big Greenie” got a call to run down to the corner drugstore to pick up a package. As he eased his old Ford convertible into a parking space outside his modest house in Hollywood, triggerman Frank Carbo walked quickly out of the shadows toward the vehicle. Bugsy Siegel was waiting in a black Mercury sedan parked down the street. Al Tannenbaum was behind him, in a stolen “crash car,” ready to stop any car that pursued them. Champ Segal was parked five blocks away, ready to drive Carbo north to San Francisco where he would take a flight back to New York. From inside the Green-berg house, Ida Greenberg heard a rapid series of shots—a backfiring car, she thought, then the sound of two cars speeding down the street. When “Big Greenie” didn’t reappear, she went outside to look for him. She found him in his blood-spattered car, dead from five bullets fired at point-blank range into his head.

So much for “Big Greenie”—or so it seemed. Unfortunately for Bugsy, one of his old associates back in Brooklyn was about to start talking to the DA.

Abe “Kid Twist” Reles had a reputation as one of East Brooklyn’s nastiest thugs. “He had a round face, thick lips, a flat nose and small ears,” noted Brooklyn assistant DA Burton Turkus. “His arms had not waited for the rest of him. They dangled to his knees, completing a generally gorilla-like figure.” He also had the nasty habit of killing victims with an ice pick, which made him one of Louis Buchalter’s most feared executioners.

In January 1940, two months after Greenberg’s assassination, “Kid Twist” was picked up by the police on charges of robbery, assault, possession of narcotics, burglary, disorderly contact, and six charges related to various murders. For a guy like Reles, this should have been no big deal. After all, he’d been arrested forty-two times over the preceding sixteen years and had never done serious jail time. But as he languished in prison, Reles grew worried that several associates who’d also been picked up were ratting him out. So Reles informed his wife that he was willing to talk. One day, Mrs. Reles walked into the Brooklyn DA’s office and announced, “My husband wants an interview with the Law.”

It took twelve days and twenty-five stenographer notebooks to complete and record his confession. Reles’s testimony was stunning. In two weeks’ time, he clarified forty-nine unsolved murders. That wasn’t even the most startling part of his story. Previously, most police officials had assumed that Reles and his associates were basically just a nasty crew of criminals who operated in and around Brownsville and East New York. Not so, Reles told the prosecutors. He revealed that Buchalter had actually assembled a group that functioned as a killing squad for a nationwide crime syndicate. For the first time, authorities realized, in Turkus’s words, “that there actually existed in America an organized underworld, and that it controlled lawlessness across the United States,” from Brooklyn to California. Turkus would later dub it “Murder, Inc.” According to Reles, hundreds of people nationwide had been killed at its bequest. “Big Greenie” was one of them.

There was more. Reles told prosecutors that Bugsy Siegel and Buchalter lieutenant Mendy Weiss had organized the hit on “Big Greenie”—and that New York fight promoter Frank Carbo had pulled the trigger. Mickey Cohen pal Champ Segal had also been involved in the hit, Reles told authorities. He’d heard so firsthand. Reles testified that after the hit, he had overheard Siegel, Weiss, Louis Capone, and one of the original gunmen sent west to do the hit, Sholom Bernstein, discussing the rub-out. According to Reles, Bernstein had criticized the execution of the hit as something more befitting “a Wild West cowboy” than a professional assassin. In response, Siegel had allegedly replied, “I was there myself on that job. Do I look like a cowboy? I did that job myself.” After Bernstein left, Reles added, Siegel had proposed whacking him—for fouling up (“dogging”) the first hit.

Reles wasn’t prosecutors’ only important witness. They’d also flipped Al Tannenbaum, the other gunman Murder, Inc. had originally sent to Montreal to kill “Big Greenie.” Tannenbaum was now prepared to testify that New Jersey mob boss Longy Zwillman had sent him to California with pistols for the Greenberg hit and that on the night of the murder he’d been the driver of the crash car.

A stronger case against Siegel would have been hard to imagine. With two witnesses who could link Siegel to the murder, prosecutors on both coasts went to work. Brooklyn assistant DA Burton Turkus flew to Los Angeles to brief Los Angeles district attorney Buron Fitts on the evidence. Fitts immediately assembled a raiding party. His plan was to nab Bugsy at his newly built dream mansion in Holmby Hills, one of L.A.’s most prestigious neighborhoods.

The raiding party—three cars strong, its members specially chosen for their marksmanship skills—set out for the Siegel mansion at 250 Delfern Street on the morning of August 17, 1940. They were greeted at the front door by Siegel’s butler. The men informed him that they were there to see Benjamin Siegel. The butler nodded and asked them to wait. Several minutes later, he returned and opened the door of the mansion onto a lifestyle they could scarcely conceive of. At a time when the country was mired in the seemingly unending misery of the Depression, Bugsy Siegel was living like… a baronet. In the bar and lounge room, eighteen-foot carved divans flanked a deeply recessed fireplace, and a choice selection of whiskeys, cognacs, and cordials was available for guests. There were six “vanity rooms” for the ladies. The dining room table was made of exotic inlaid woods and sat thirty—without extensions.

Bugsy’s bed was still warm, but there was no sign of him. A member of the raiding party noticed a linen closet door ajar. Atop a pile of fresh sheets, investigators found footprints. The ceiling of the closet had a secret trapdoor that opened into the attic. There the raiding party found Bugsy Siegel in his pajamas, giggling. The gangster coolly informed his captors that he had fled because “I thought it was someone else.” The police were not amused. They hauled Siegel downtown and placed him under arrest for murder. Reles and Tannenbaum were flown to Los Angeles, and on the basis of their testimony, Siegel was indicted. His request for bail was denied. Siegel would await trial at the L.A. County Jail.

MAYOR BOWRON and DA Fitts had run the remnants of the Combination out of town. Siegel’s trial gave them a chance to sweep out the Syndicate as well. But almost immediately the prosecution began to experience problems—strange problems. Reporters discovered that Siegel had access to a telephone, slept in the county jail doctor’s quarters, and employed another prisoner as his valet. Worst of all, he was leaving the jail virtually at will—more than eighteen times in a month and a half. The Examiner even spotted Siegel having lunch with the actress Wendy Barrie. In truth, he was not completely unattended. A deputy sheriff was on hand—as Siegel’s driver.

Then dissension broke out between prosecutors in New York and Los Angeles. Brooklyn district attorney William O’Dwyer abruptly declined to allow Reles to return to Los Angeles to testify, saying that his prized witness, who was being guarded by a crew of eighteen policemen at an undisclosed location, had come down with a serious illness. Suspicions immediately arose that O’Dwyer, who was eyeing a run for mayor of New York, had struck a deal with the Syndicate. Prosecutors in L.A. had problems too. In 1940, Angelenos finally voted Buron Fitts out of office. His successor, former congressman John Dockweiler, was promptly embarrassed when Siegel wrote to him to request that the prosecutor-elect refund him the $30,000 he had contributed to his campaign. The DA complied. (Mickey Cohen would later claim that Siegel had actually given Dock-weiler $100,000.) Siegel then used the funds to hire attorney Jerry Giesler to defend him.

Dockweiler was in a bind. Reles’s testimony was essential to establishing Siegel as the mastermind of the murder plot. Without it, the new DA saw no way to secure a conviction. But O’Dwyer wouldn’t give up his prized witness. As a result, on December 11, 1940, Deputy DA Vernon Ferguson, who was prosecuting the case for Dockweiler’s office, went to court and requested that the murder charges against Bugsy Siegel be dismissed. That afternoon Siegel walked out of jail, a free man.

Back in New York, though, Bugsy’s release proved such an embarrassment for O’Dwyer that he reversed course and agreed to let his witnesses go to Los Angeles. Dockweiler convened another jury; Al Tannenbaum flew west to testify (“under heavy guard”); and Siegel was reindicted and again arrested. The key witness, however, was Reles. Although Tannenbaum had taken part in the actual assassination itself, it was Reles who had the power to send Bugsy Siegel to the gas chamber. And it was Reles who, just before breakfast on the morning of November 12, 1941, was found dead on the roof of the building next door to the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island, where the NYPD had him in protective custody.

What had happened to “Kid Twist”? No one knows for certain. A torn rope made from a bedsheet suggested that Reles had plunged to his death four stories below while trying to escape, though why someone facing a death sentence from the Syndicate would want to escape into Brooklyn was unclear. Perhaps Reles had simply intended to play a joke on his police protectors by demonstrating how easily he could flee. But the physical evidence suggested another explanation. Reles’s body was found more than twenty feet from the wall, suggesting that Reles had been hurled out the window—defenestrated—by a policeman on the take.

Without Reles, the case against Siegel was weak. On January 19, 1942, the trial against Siegel began. While Tannenbaum was there as a witness, California law required that charges against Siegel be corroborated by independent evidence that tied the defendant to the crime—evidence the prosecution no longer had. As a result, on February 5, 1942, Judge A. A. Scott granted Siegel attorney Jerry Giesler’s request to dismiss the case on grounds that no case had been made against his client. Bugsy Siegel was once again a free man.

Siegel’s lengthy entanglements with the court system meant that Mickey Cohen had to take on a large organizational task. He proved to be a surprisingly talented understudy. Mickey soon took over as Siegel’s liaison to the county sheriff’s office. He also took responsibility for cultivating the LAPD.

“For weeks before each Thanksgiving and Christmas, I would receive calls from captains in different precincts and would be told about and given the names and addresses of some persons in their respective districts that they considered in dire straits,” Mickey later related. “I would then have individual baskets made up by a good friend of mine who was in the chain market business (and who would make them up for me at wholesale prices), each basket always including a large turkey, a ham and chicken, and most other necessities for a decent Thanksgiving and Christmas.” At his peak, he was sending out about three hundred baskets a year. Mickey was learning the craft of organized crime. It wasn’t always turkeys and chicken.

One of Mickey’s businesses was pinball and slot machines. His partner was Curly Robinson, former Clover Club owner Eddy Neales’s onetime associate. Mayor Bowron had more or less succeeded in expelling slots from the city of Los Angeles, but they were still a thriving business in the county. Cohen and Robinson were determined to profit from them. Their racket was an association that every distributor in the region had to join.

But Robinson was having problems. Some of its members had gotten a bit independent minded. Expecting trouble at the next meeting, Robinson asked Cohen to come to the association’s next gathering. Mickey arrived early with three of his toughest henchmen, Hooky Rothman (Cohen’s right-hand man, a killing savant), “Little Jimmy” (“quiet—perfectionist—carried out instructions—tough with pistol—two time loser on heists and attempted murder”), and “Big Jimmy” (“six-foot, three-inch—ex-heavyweight pug—easygoing horse bettor—done some time in Maine for a killing”). By the time the meeting got under way, there were roughly six hundred people present.

A speaker took the stage and began to talk about the need for independence. Mickey leapt onto the platform and “busted his head open.”

“Nobody come near me,” he later noted. The meeting hall was silent. With Mickey and his men glowering on stage, the slot machine association fell in line. There was no more talk of autonomy. Still, on the way out, Mickey and his goons pistol-whipped “two or three other dissenters.”

Slots were just a minor sideline. Cohen’s real focus was on gambling.

While Siegel concentrated on signing up bookies for the Trans-American news service (an enterprise that by 1945 would be paying Benny an estimated $25,000 a month), Cohen worked on opening his own gambling joints. Initially, he steered clear of the city proper, preferring more hospitable county terrain. His first major base of operations was in Bur bank, just a few blocks away from the Warner Bros. lot. Thanks to a pliable local police chief, Mickey was able to open a basic $2-a-bet bookie joint. It thrived. Back in Los Angeles, Mickey soon added a commission office that handled the kinds of big “lay-off” bets—typically anything over $5,000—that were often spread out to bookies across the country.

Commission offices thrived on a peculiarity of horse betting. Because sanctioned tracks used a pari-mutuel betting system (whereby the odds were set by the bets placed), a big bet (say $50,000) could significantly reduce the payout. Commission offices offered high rollers an alternative, where they could place big bets without lowering their payoff. Because the people placing these bets often had inside information, they also presented bookies with information that could be highly lucrative.

With this information came new friends, including a number of local politicians. One judge was so horse-crazed that he insisted that Mickey come down to his chambers and run operations from there, so that he would have access to all of Mickey’s tips.

“The poor bookmakers,” Mickey reflected, “were really in a quandary, as they couldn’t figure out where he was getting his information and were in no position to turn down his wagers for fear of invoking the wrath of the Judge.”

One afternoon as Mickey was waiting in the judge’s office, he learned that the case of a small-time bookmaker was about to be heard. Mickey knew the man well; in fact, he’d robbed his establishment before. Mickey decided to peek into the courtroom and watch the proceedings. He could scarcely believe his ears when the judge handed down the sentence—thirty days in the county jail. Furious, Mickey caught the eye of the bailiff and told him that he needed to talk to the judge at once.

“The judge, thinking that I must have received word on a horse, couldn’t get off the bench quick enough,” Mickey later recalled. Back in his chambers, Mickey exploded, speaking “without my usual respect for him, although I did manage to keep myself somewhat under control.”

“What kind of man are you, to sentence a man to jail for thirty days when you yourself are a freak for betting on the horses?”

The answer, of course, was a politician.

For a gangster, Mickey Cohen had an inadequate understanding of treachery. Not only did this make it hard to deal with politicians, it blinded him to what was happening before his very eyes with Jack Dragna.

Dragna, a short, heavyset man who favored horn-rimmed glasses, was an old-school Sicilian who liked to surround himself with Sicilians (or, barring that, at least other Italians). He had the air of someone used to dealing with money. His demeanor was more banker than muscle. Mickey didn’t think much of him. Nor did he seem aware of the fact that Dragna might hold a grudge about Cohen’s earlier heist. Instead, Mickey interpreted the order imposed by Siegel as the natural order of things. He saw Dragna and himself “on an even status as his two lieutenants”—with himself rising and Dragna on the way out.

“Dragna was inactive at the time, and for years had no organization at all,” Mickey later recalled. “[A]nything he wanted done he came to me for.” As far as Mickey was concerned, organized crime in Los Angeles was “a happy family.” As for the possibility that robbing Morris Orloff and being an all-around punk might have rubbed Dragna and the Italian gangsters surrounding him the wrong way, Cohen dismissed it out of hand: “I was the guest of honor at his daughter’s wedding!”

Mickey was mistaken—dangerously so. Bugsy represented New York. But Dragna had closer ties to Chicago. Although the twin capitals of the underworld generally cooperated on matters of importance, there were areas of friction. Siegel’s 1942 decision to force Los Angeles bookmakers to subscribe to his wire service was one of them. At the time, most big bookies in Los Angeles were using James Ragan’s Chicago-based Continental wire services—and paying a cut to Jack Dragna and Johnny Roselli, the Chicago Outfit’s man in Los Angeles, for protection. Siegel didn’t care. Instead, he sent Mickey Cohen to wreak havoc on the office of the Chicago wire’s L.A. manager, Ragan son-in-law Russell Brophy. Even Mickey felt a little leery about this assignment. When he arrived at Brophy’s main office downtown and was told Johnny Roselli was on the phone—and that he wanted to speak to Mickey—Cohen was less enthusiastic still. He knew firsthand what kind of tactics the Chicago Outfit employed. So he ducked the request. Instead, he gave the phone to his partner Joe Sica. (“I figured Italian to Italian, you know.”)

“Lookit, Johnny says that whatever we’ve done is done, but he don’t want this office busted up,” Sica reported.

Which, of course, was precisely what Cohen and Sica had been sent to do.

“Tell him that I’m sorry, but this office is going up for grabs completely,” Mickey replied. “Just tell him that, and hang the phone up.”

Sica did. Then he and Mickey “tore that fucking office apart.” Mickey beat up Brophy, hurting him so badly that Mickey decided to go on the lam. He fled to Phoenix. There he was greeted like a conquering hero by Siegel.

“You little son of a bitch,” Siegel said. “You remind me of my younger days.”

Mickey hid out in Phoenix for six months. Somehow (Mickey was never clear exactly how) Siegel managed to square the Brophy assault with the authorities, clearing the way for Cohen’s eventual return to Los Angeles. Smoothing matters over with Jack Dragna and Johnny Roselli was a more difficult matter. After a period of dormancy, Dragna was gearing up his operations. Worse, he had opted to do so by partnering with a Los Angeles underworld figure, Jimmy Utley, whom Cohen viewed as “an out-and-out stool pigeon for the DA and attorney general’s office.” It aggravated Mickey, and an aggravated Mickey Cohen was a dangerous man, as Utley was about to discover.

One day soon after his return from Phoenix, Mickey sauntered out of Champ Segal’s barbershop on Vine and saw Utley talking with one of the LAPD’s toughest police officers, E. D. “Roughhouse” Brown, in front of Lucey’s Restaurant. Mickey had long suspected that Utley was a “stool pigeon” for Brown—an informer. But if Utley was concerned about this, he didn’t show it. After “Roughhouse” left, Utley waved to Mickey and Joe Sica. So Cohen and Sica walked over—and laid into Utley, pistol-whipping him “pretty badly”—in front of an estimated one hundred people.

Utley took it bravely. Despite being badly hurt, when police arrived on the scene, he insisted that he wasn’t able to identify his assailants.

Jack Dragna was less understanding. He immediately got hold of Siegel and demanded a meeting with Cohen. Siegel summoned his protege to a meeting that very night, and this time, Mickey came.

“I didn’t break his ass, just with my hands,” Mickey claimed, by way of self-defense. “He was talking to a fucking copper!”

Even Siegel was exasperated by this.

“What the fuck’s wrong with ya?” Siegel exploded. “Don’t ya know ya got to do business with these coppers? Ya wanna be a goddamn gunman all your life?”

10 L.A. Noir

“If you’re going to gamble that kind of money own the casa.”

—20th Century Fox chairman Joseph Schenck to Hollywood Reporter owner Billy Wilkerson

BUGSY SIEGEL wasn’t the only person flexing his muscles. So was Mayor Bowron. Bowron disliked the fact that he had such limited formal control over the police department. The 1934 and 1937 charter amendments, which broadened police officers’ job protections and extended them to the chief of police, were a particular sore point, which Bowron repeatedly sought to circumvent. He continued to secretly wiretap the telephone lines of senior police department officials—an activity that arguably constituted a federal felony offense—in order to ensure that the underworld did not reestablish ties with the department. Soon, the mayor was routinely demanding that Chief Hohmann fire officers caught in the wiretaps’ surveillance dragnet. But Bowron, not wanting to acknowledge his illegal wiretapping, refused to explain the basis of these demands, and Hohmann refused to act without evidence. The result was a standoff—and growing tension between the city’s top elected official and its top law enforcement officer.

Hohmann had been an exemplary police chief—honest and intelligent, enlightened on racial issues, and uninterested in currying favor with others. He curtailed special privileges (such as police cars and drivers for city councilmen) and ended the department’s tradition of strikebreaking. Committed to professionalism, he urged his subordinates to do their duty without fear or favor because, he told them, “the days of ‘Big Shot’ political influence in the police department are over.” He was wrong. After winning reelection in 1941, Bowron turned up the pressure on the chief. An embarrassing corruption trial involving the head of the robbery squad finally persuaded Hohmann to step aside and accept a demotion to deputy chief, clearing the way for a new, more deferential chief, C. B. Horrall.

As chief, Hohmann had appointed Horrall to a plum position, giving him responsibility for the Central, Hollenbeck, and Newton Street divisions as well as command of the elite Metropolitan Division. Now that he was chief, however, Horrall demoted Hohmann to lieutenant. Under assault from the new chief and distraught about the sudden, tragic death of his son, Hohmann agreed to accept this second, more humiliating position—only to then turn around and sue the department to have his rank restored. Their feud further demoralized the department.

Bill Parker was demoralized too. In June 1941, he graduated from Northwestern’s Traffic Institute and returned to Los Angeles. As the number two person on the inspector list, Parker had every reason to expect that he would soon receive a promotion. Instead, he found himself trapped in his position as director of the traffic bureau’s accident investigation unit. Chief Horrall routinely passed him over for promotion, blandly noting that “scholastic achievements do not necessarily make the best policemen.” In 1930, Parker had been trapped in the police department by the Great Depression. Now he seemed stuck again, until December 7, 1941, when history provided a way out.

The news hit official Los Angeles like a thunderclap, as the Associated Press blared

JAPS OPEN WAR ON U.S. WITH BOMBING OF HAWAII

Fleet Speeds Out to Battle Invader

Tokyo Claims Battleship Sunk and Another Set Afire with Hundreds Killed on Island; Singapore Attacked and Thailand Force Landed

The situation was actually worse than that. The U.S. Pacific fleet was not “speeding out to battle the invader.” The five battleships and three destroyers that made up the backbone of the U.S. Pacific fleet were in fact sinking to the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The California coast was virtually defenseless. No one knew where the Japanese attack fleet would strike next. The situation was so dire that the War Department deliberately withheld information about the strike, lest the news trigger panic. Meanwhile, law enforcement prepared to move against what many saw as a potential “fifth column”—the city’s Japanese American population.

Los Angeles was home to roughly 38,000 residents born in Japan. Another 70,000 second-generation Japanese Americans, the so-called Nisei, lived in other parts of California. The FBI had already compiled lists of politically “suspect” Japanese Americans. It turned to the LAPD to help round up the subversives.

Around noon that Sunday, police officer Harold Sullivan, who worked under Parker in the traffic division, was driving down Western Avenue on his way to work, when an acquaintance pulled up beside him at Santa Barbara Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard).

“Did you hear the news?” the man asked.

“What news?” Sullivan replied.

“Why, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” the man replied. Sullivan was shocked. Nothing about the attack had been broadcast over the radio. He hurried into work. At about three o’clock, he was summoned into Parker’s office. Parker told him to “get three or four other guys” and report to the local FBI offices. The roundup of Los Angeles’s Japanese American residents was about to begin. That night, federal agents and local officers raided Nisei homes across the region, from San Pedro to Pomona. By morning, some three hundred “subversives” were in police custody; officers and soldiers from Fort MacArthur also secured the largely Japanese fishing fleet at Terminal Island off San Pedro and put the roughly two thousand Nisei who lived on the island under guard. None were permitted to leave without police permission. Ominous reports of weapons found filled the local press. Prominent local officials appealed to the citizenry for loyalty, which Japanese American groups rushed to give. It didn’t help. By Monday, Little Tokyo was shut down. Japanese-language papers were shuttered; banks were padlocked; stores, closed. By midweek, the county jail and an immigration station at Terminal Island were filled with Nisei (as well as a handful of Germans and a smattering of Italians). In February 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which sent all of Los Angeles’s Japanese and Japanese American residents to concentration camps in the interior. In the meantime, the War Department rushed soldiers west, fortifying the beaches, placing anti-aircraft guns throughout the city, and anchoring huge balloons with steel cables over downtown, to entangle low-flying aircraft.

For once, Bill Parker was too busy to reflect on his grievances. There was a sense that Los Angeles might be attacked at any moment. On Christmas Eve 1941, a Japanese submarine torpedoed an American ship in the Catalina Channel, just south of Los Angeles. On February 23, 1942, another sub shelled an oil storage facility in Ellwood, near Santa Barbara. Two nights later, at 2:25 a.m., the spotlights of L.A.’s civil defense forces roared to life, and anti-aircraft guns from Long Beach to Santa Monica opened fire. “The Battle of Los Angeles” had begun. It raged for two hours—until local authorities realized that jittery nerves, not Japanese bombers, had triggered the fusillade.

Parker’s job at the traffic division was central to the region’s preparations during this panicky period. Logistics was key to the war in the Pacific, and in Los Angeles, traffic was the key to logistics. Parker was responsible for selecting a network of roads that could function as military highways, developing plans to isolate approaches to the military targets “in the event of military action,” and—should things go really wrong—for developing a master evacuation plan. He oversaw roughly two hundred other officers. Yet no matter how hard or efficiently he worked, as long as Chief Horrall was in command, there seemed to be no real prospect of advancement.

Parker’s thoughts turned to the military. Perhaps the Army would recognize his skills. When he sounded out military recruitment officers, the feedback he got was encouraging. Officials at the Army’s Los Angeles procurement office assured him that if he applied, he would undoubtedly receive a commission as a captain—perhaps even as a major. In February, he approached his superiors in the department about taking an unpaid leave to join the Army. At first, they resisted, but Parker was persistent, and eventually he prevailed. On April 13, 1942, he applied for a commission. Remarkably, one of his letters of recommendation was provided by former chief Arthur Hohmann, the man who had sent Parker to the traffic department. The letter represented an interesting turnaround in Hohmann’s attitude toward Parker and provides rare insight into Parker’s character from a close contemporary.

“Gentlemen,” the letter began. “I have known Capt. William H. Parker of this department for the past thirteen years, and I am glad to commend him … for the following reasons:

1.I have such a high regard for his knowledge of right and wrong and his sense of public justice that, if I were innocent of an accusation but was thought to be guilty by an entire community of people, I would choose Capt. Parker as my counsel knowing all the while that he would rather see justice done than continue to remain popular with his contemporaries.

2. If I were in command of an organization of which Capt. Parker was a member (and I have been) and I assigned Capt. Parker to perform some minor and mediocre detail of non-essential work, I would be doing so with the full knowledge that insofar as Capt. Parker was concerned that task would be the most important in the world to him for the time being, and he would do it better than anyone else I know….

Hohmann concluded by obliquely alluding to Parker’s prickly personality:

This unusual admixture of fine service quality when found in one personality is very likely to be misunderstood; and, I have observed that sometimes the expression of these qualities by Capt. Parker on occasion of public address, in staff meetings, and in private conversations, has in the past oftentimes caused his motives and objectives to be misinterpreted, misconstrued, and misquoted.

However, Hohmann continued, these faults have “improved to a marked degree, and I now feel that it would be greatly in the interest of the United States if Capt. Parker were a part of its military establishment in some governmental administrative capacity.”

While waiting for a response from the Army, Parker made one last effort to advance by taking the examination for deputy chief. He placed first on the eligibility list but was not granted an interview before the Police Commission. Irate, Parker wrote to the Board of the Civil Service Commissioners to protest what he saw as a blatant violation of civil service principles. His protest was ignored. The following spring, almost one year after he had put in his application, Parker received his commission as an Army officer. The thrill he and Helen experienced as they opened the letter from the adjutant general quickly turned to disappointment. Despite assurances that he would be commissioned as a high-ranking officer, Parker was offered a commission as a mere first lieutenant. After consulting with Helen and receiving assurances that promotion would be prompt, Parker decided to accept the commission anyway. After sixteen years of service in the department, Parker was eager to be free.

His mood improved considerably when he learned that, after a month of basic training at Fort Custer, Michigan, he would be transferred to either Yale University or Harvard for three months of coursework in the Army’s civil affairs training school. Parker moved east in late June, first to Michigan, and then to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Helen came west from California to be with him. Parker’s time at Harvard was blissful, but in early August, classes were cut short. Lieutenant Parker was assigned to the 2675th Regiment, Allied Control Commission, North African Theater of Operations. On August 27, 1943, he shipped off to Algiers. Helen returned to Los Angeles. Parker’s old patron, former chief James Davis, now the head of security at Douglas Aircraft, had arranged a job for her as an auxiliary policewoman at a Douglas aircraft assembly plant in Santa Monica.

Bill Parker wasn’t the only person who saw an “out” in the war. So did Mickey Cohen.

It didn’t take a middle school education to recognize that Bugsy Siegel’s efforts to monopolize the wire business were damned dangerous. According to the LAPD, nearly a dozen people had died in the first few years of what it dubbed “the wire wars.” At some point after the onset of the war, it appears to have dawned on Mickey that he might too. So Cohen decided to enlist.

Mickey wasn’t exactly a model candidate (though there was no denying his efficiency as a killer). So he decided to grease the skids. It just so happened that his old “Big Brother,” fight referee Abe Roth, was a former Army officer with considerable pull in high places. Cohen asked the silver-tongued Siegel (who, somewhat surprisingly, supported Mickey’s decision to enlist) to give Roth, as Mickey put it, “all that anti-Nazi shit and stuff.” Roth was amenable to Mickey’s request. Even better, he had a connection who could ensure that Mickey’s criminal background didn’t raise any alarms. Mickey was delighted. Assured that “the fix was in,” he headed to Boyle Heights to report to the neighborhood draft board.

“Lookit,” he told the ladies manning the draft desk. “I want to get into the Army.”

“What’s your draft status?” he was asked in reply.

“I ain’t been home for some time,” Mickey replied evasively. (In fact, he had recently been on the lam.) “What’s the big fuss about?” he continued, still confident in his fix. “I want to get in the Army. I’m ready to get in right now. What do I gotta do?”

The woman behind the desk asked for his name and then vanished into a back office. She emerged with a file—“kind of laughing and smiling.”

“You can’t get into the Army.” The woman was holding his file. She showed it to him and then explained what it contained. The draft board had designated him a 4-F—not qualified for service in the armed forces—on grounds of mental instability.^[8] This was embarrassing, to say the least. Rather than confess, he called his wife and informed her that he’d been made a general. Then he rushed out and purchased a $150 raincoat (“beautiful … tailored real good”)—with epaulettes. He arrived home to find his spouse on the phone, calling everyone she knew and telling everyone, “He’s in the Army! He’s going away again.”

It was, Mickey thought, a helluva good joke.

IN ALGERIA, Parker was assigned to the Allied Commission for Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy that had been evacuated by the Germans in October in the face of the Anglo-American assault on Italy that had commenced earlier that year. Notwithstanding his continuing frustration about his lowly rank, Parker seemed to enjoy his experiences as a single military man. (In Sardinia, his commanding officer would comment favorably on his “wide experience, great energy and …”—surprisingly—his “pleasing and happy personality.”) In February 1943, Parker was transferred to England to prepare for Operation OVERLORD—the invasion of Europe. His job was to help draft a police and prison plan for France. Parker would then follow the first wave of the D-day landings as a member of the Army’s civilian affairs division to help organize police operations in areas the Allies recaptured.

There was, however, one point on which Parker felt lingering unease: Helen. Relations with his wife had been strained. Despite letters that suggest a passionate reunion in Cambridge, in the months leading up to his departure from L.A., Parker’s relationship with Helen had been rocky. It is not entirely clear what the problem was; Helen had rebuffed Bill’s efforts to talk openly about the state of their marriage, assuring him that things were fine and that she remained committed to their marriage. Bill soon heard otherwise from friends back home. Helen, he was told, had an unusually close male friend.

FOR MICKEY COHEN, the desire to indulge—and bend the rules—meant more business. The first and most important part of it was gambling. Bookies were typically forced to pay $250 a week for the wire that provided racing results and a measure of protection. That added up. By one estimate, Bugsy Siegel’s bookie take during this period amounted to roughly $500,000 a year. (He also reputedly had a multimillion-dollar salvage business that trafficked in rationed goods as well as a rumored heroin supply route.) Mickey got only a sliver of this cash. However, other Siegel-Cohen enterprises were more than enough to make Mickey a wealthy man. Cohen would later boast that the two men’s loan-sharking operations “reached the proportions of a bank.” They also exercised considerable sway over the city’s cafes and nightclubs, lining up performers, arranging financing, and providing “dispute resolution services.”

Mickey had his own operations as well, independent of Siegel. By far the most significant was the betting commission office he operated out of the back of a paint store on Beverly Boulevard. There Cohen handled big bets—$20,000, $30,000, even $40,000—from horse owners, agents, trainers, and jockeys who didn’t want to diminish their payouts by betting at the racetracks. Cohen also routinely “laid off” large bets to five or six commission offices around the country. On a busy day, this amounted to anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000, of which Mickey took a 2V2 to 5 percent commission. He also routinely used his insider knowledge to place bets himself.

That was the serious money side of his business. Then there was the fun stuff, like the La Brea Club, at the corner of La Brea and West Third. Mickey’s personal dinner club featured fancy meals (including rationed wartime delicacies) and a high-stakes craps game. Security was tight: Some evenings, there was as much as $200,000 in cash on the table. He also opened a private club in a mansion in the posh Coldwater Canyon neighborhood, which stretches north from Beverly Hills to Mulholland Drive. There his guests—mainly denizens of the movie colony—could enjoy a good steak, listen to an attractive chanteuse (“who, when the occasion called for it, could also sing a song with a few naughty verses”), and enjoy games of chance at all hours of the night. He likewise dabbled in boxing, managing the leading contender for the title of the lightweight boxing champion of the world, William “Willie” Joyce.

Things were going so well that Cohen took a step that only the most well organized criminals could pull off: He turned his Burbank bookie joint into a casino. At first, it was a dingy place, with “an old broken-down” craps table in a room so small “that when someone wanted to go to the bathroom, the dealer had to leave the end of the table.” However, it did have the advantage of a friendly police chief and a prime location—just a block or two from the Warner Bros. lot. In short order, cowboys, Indians, grass-skirted Polynesian maidens, and other extras were cramming into the former stockyard, which soon began a process of rapid expansion. Occasionally, Burbank police chief Elmer Adams (a sometime dinner guest at the Cohen household and the happy owner of a suspiciously large yacht) would bestir himself to shut down Cohen’s operations, but never for long. Mickey also began to dream of opening a high-end haberdashery shop.

For Cohen, it was a golden period. But Bugsy Siegel was discontented. Despite his considerable successes, Bugsy found Los Angeles to be a frustrating place to do business. To the low-or midlevel hoodlum, the pell-mell of government jurisdictions and municipalities in the Los Angeles basin—forty-six in Los Angeles County alone—was a godsend. But for Siegel, who wanted to organize the entire area, it was a frustrating inconvenience. Even organizing the city of Los Angeles presented nearly insurmountable hurdles. According to Cohen, Siegel never succeeded in establishing a numbers game in Los Angeles not because the police force was honest but rather because he had to negotiate deals on a division-by-division basis. Siegel wanted to find a better way. So did his old partner Meyer Lansky.

Meyer and Bugsy had grown up together on the streets of New York, but after Prohibition ended, the two men had gone in different directions. Siegel had tried to set himself up as a wealthy sportsman in the movie colony; Lansky had tried to establish himself as a businessman in the molasses business. Both failed in these endeavors—Siegel due to bad luck in the stock market, Lansky after federal agents connected his molasses business to illicit distilleries in Ohio and New Jersey that were trying to dodge excise taxes. As a result, both returned to the underworld. But where Siegel delighted in strongarm stuff (leaning on bookies, union extortion, etc.), Lansky concentrated on casinos. Still, the two men stayed in touch. In the early 1940s, Siegel and Lansky invested together in the Colonial Inn, a lavish casino in Hallandale, Florida. Although the Colonial Inn was a remarkable success, it still ran the risks that came with all illegal activities. As a result, both Lansky and Siegel began to explore alternatives. Lansky looked across the Florida Straits to Cuba. Siegel looked across the Nevada desert to Las Vegas.

In 1931, the state of Nevada, desperate to raise revenues, had legalized gambling. The most immediate beneficiary of this move was Reno, which was situated on the busy Union Pacific Line between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. However, gambling entrepreneurs also noticed the sleepy town of Las Vegas, some 250 miles east of Los Angeles. By the late 1930s, former Los Angeles crime bosses such as Tony Cornero and former Combination boss Guy McAfee had opened operations there in an attempt to capitalize on a minor boom brought about by the construction of the Hoover Dam southeast of the city. Siegel noticed it too after he started persuading Las Vegas bookmakers to sign up for a Syndicate-controlled racing wire. Siegel and his Phoenix-based associate Moe Sedway could hardly miss the fact that Las Vegas users of the wire alone were soon providing Siegel with about $25,000 a month in revenue. No wonder he and Sedway dubbed their Vegas service “the Golden Nugget Wire service.”

Still, Las Vegas was slow to establish itself as a gambling destination. It was hot. It was inaccessible. Compared to the classy “carpet joints” of, say, Saratoga Springs, the casinos of downtown Las Vegas, with their sawdust floors and hokey western themes, weren’t much to look at. That began to change in 1941, when hotelier Tommy Hull opened El Rancho Vegas. Instead of being located downtown, El Rancho Vegas was outside the city, on the highway to Los Angeles. With its flamboyant Mission styling, manicured sixty-acre spread, steakhouse, night-club-style entertainment, and comfortable accommodations, El Rancho Vegas wasn’t just a casino, it was a destination. (Today, this once forlorn part of Clark County is the Las Vegas Strip.)

Siegel saw the potential to do something even larger. Las Vegas was within driving distance of Los Angeles. As air-conditioning in automobiles improved, it would be an increasingly easy drive. And of course, gambling in Nevada was legal. But when Siegel made an offer on El Rancho Vegas, Hull turned him down. Instead, he decided to sell the property to an associate of Conrad Hilton. So two years later Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and other Syndicate figures purchased another, more traditional property downtown, the El Cortez. It was an excellent investment, but Siegel wanted something more. By 1945, he was looking for another investment opportunity. It was Billy Wilkerson who would provide it.

Wilkerson was the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, the first movie-biz trade daily, and the man behind the Sunset Strip’s choicest nightclubs. Wilkerson was also one of Hollywood’s most ardent gamblers. His first nightclub, the Club Trocadero (“the Troc”) was known for its backroom card game. Industry giants including Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck, and Sam Goldwyn routinely played poker there with $20,000 chips. Wilkerson followed with Ciro’s in 1939 and LaRue’s in 1944. In the process, he shifted the locus of Los Angeles nightlife to an empty stretch of Sunset Boulevard just outside of the city limits that would soon become known as the Sunset Strip.

Wilkerson was a gambling addict. Often, he’d leave for a week or more for the nearest destination where gambling was legal—Las Vegas. During the first half of 1944, Wilkerson hit a particularly bad streak, losing almost a million dollars, a loss so large that it may have forced him to unload Ciro’s. Finally, Joseph Schenck, then chairman of 20th Century Fox and a personal friend of Wilkerson’s, gave him some advice.

“If you are going to gamble that kind of money,” Schenck told Wilkerson, “own the casa.”

So Wilkerson decided to build a casino—a grand one, as stylish as Ciro’s, as swank as Monte Carlo, an air-conditioned luxury resort surrounded by beautiful grounds and a golf course. He would call it the Flamingo Club. Las Vegas might well have come into existence as Billy Wilkerson’s town, if not for a raid one evening on the swank Sunset Towers apartment of Siegel pal Allen Smiley. Siegel and his friend the actor George Raft were visiting. The police burst in to find Siegel placing a few bets on horse races. Siegel and Smiley (but not Raft) were promptly arrested on bookmaking charges. Bugsy was indignant. All he’d been doing, he claimed, was dialing in a $1,000 bet on a race at Churchill Downs. The notion that he, personally, would be making book on some two-bit horse race was insulting. The idea that some dumb cop could just burst in and arrest him on some trumped up charge was intolerable. It was time, he resolved, to turn his full attention to Las Vegas. In the interim, Mickey Cohen could run Los Angeles.

AS THE BEVERLY HILLS police were harassing Bugsy Siegel, Bill Parker was preparing for D-day.

The invasion of Normandy began on June 6. Parker landed five days later—and was promptly wounded in a German strafing attack, for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. The news was slow to reach Los Angeles. It is a measure of Parker’s standing in Los Angeles that when it did, the Los Angeles Times carried the following item on page two of the paper:

Lt. Parker Wins Purple Heart

Lt. William H. Parker, on miltary leave from his duties as a captain in charge of the accident prevention bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department, has been awarded the Purple Heart for injuries received in action in France, it was learned here yesterday.

He was wounded over the right eyebrow by a machine-gun bullet fired from one of two Nazi planes strafing a column of American vehicles in Normandy, according to reports.

He is serving with Army military government in France. Parker resides here at 2214 India St.

Mayor Bowron was among those who wrote Parker to wish him a speedy recovery. Chief Horrall was not.

For Parker, one brush with death seems to have been more than enough. On August 18, he wrote Helen to tell her that he’d drafted a letter “requesting that I be released from the army.” Parker had what appeared to be a good case. The LAPD desperately needed experienced policemen. Throughout the war years, it had operated with only about two thousand officers, five hundred less than its authorized level. Felonies had increased by 50 percent from 1942 to 1943 alone. Juvenile delinquency was also rising quickly. But in his memo to the adjutant general, Parker chose not to emphasize Los Angeles’s needs. Instead, he presented his own grievances.

“At the time I was interviewed for the commission by the Procurement Officer it was represented to me that I would receive a grade no lower than Captain as the requisition called for commissions in the grades of Captain and Major,” Parker wrote, with obvious bitterness. “The Procurement Officer further stated that I would be recommended for the higher grade.” He concluded with this legalistic (and hubristic) flourish:

I respectfully submit that by reason of my grade there is no position in prospect in the U.S. Army commensurate with my qualifications and thereby I request relief from active duty under the provisions of Paragraph 3, War Department Letter A.G. 210.85 (30 December 1943) PO-A-A 12 January 1944, at the expiration of my accumulated leave.

The Army was not persuaded. Parker’s request was denied.

In a letter to Helen, Parker reacted by comparing himself to Christ on the road to Golgotha. He was clearly lonely and afraid of losing Helen. Parker’s other correspondents continued to speak of a particularly close relationship she had with a certain male “friend.” It seems clear that the relationship was a romantic one (although it is not clear whether it was merely an extended flirtation or an adulterous fling). For Parker, it must have seemed like a nightmare. It was his first marriage all over again. Distressed, Parker wrote to his bank in September asking it to cut off Helen’s access to his bank account.

This was hardly an action that would go unnoticed. In early October, Helen discovered that her financial lifeline had been sundered. Far from showing chagrin at being found out, Helen went on the offensive, penning her husband a furious letter. Addressed to “First Lt. Wm. H. Parker” from “Policewoman A. Parker” (Amelia being Helen’s Christian name), subject line “Being a Good Soldier,” the letter boldly castigated Parker for his two-faced behavior:

Last nite at about four-thirty I arrived at 2214 India Street, after a day at the plant and the usual long trek home, to find a letter written by you on the 28th of September. The salutation was “My Darling” and the closing line was “Goodnite my dear and may thy dreams be untroubled.”

A very strange missive to receive from you in view of the activity you have taken against me in the past couple of weeks.

At this point, her tone switched from sarcasm to anger. She castigated Parker for cutting off access to the family bank account—without notice—while he was continuing to whisper sweet nothings in his letters. She informed him that the week’s vacation she’d taken off from work had been for purposes of locating a new residence after a dispute with her unreasonable landlord, not, as Parker presumably implied in some missing letter, for some tryst. She also made passing references to her loneliness—a tacit justification for her “friendship” with the mysterious “H.J.”

“So now I come to the end of a story about ‘a good soldier,’” she concluded, “and the end of sixteen years … sixteen long years when I had hoped you had built some faith in me as your wife plus being a pal thru those horrible ‘political battles’ and those many happy occasions when we hunted and fished together, not alone at Topaz but up north and also in the Black Hills.” Her final line was pointed: “True, everything has an ending.”

That Helen’s initial response had been to march down to her local bank to open her own bank account she did not reveal. (The manager, a friend of Bill’s, refused, prompting Helen to fume, “Were Bill’s friends everywhere?”)

Parker’s retreat was swift, his capitulation total—or nearly so. He was desperate to shore up relations with Helen; he simply couldn’t stand the prospect of another marriage disintegrating. In his subsequent letters to her, Parker was both apologetic and a bit defensive about the “the direct and harsh tactics” he had used in an effort “to learn the truth.” (At one point, he would later even go so far as to suggest that “when you pause in retrospection you will realize the justice involved.”) Now Helen had the upper hand, and she used it. It was she who would decide whether the marriage would endure or end.

On February 24, 1945, she wrote the decisive letter. She had spoken with “a man of religion” who had persuaded her to persevere in the marriage. Bill responded by reiterating his unwavering love for her—and warning that “the element of INDECISION must never be allowed to reenter our relationship”:

If other circumstances should arise in the future that should again throw you into a sea of doubt as to whether or not you should continue in our marriage relationship,… while you make up your mind as to what you desire to do you cannot expect me to stand by knowing that my entire happiness hangs in the balance and compel me to accept such a situation with the only compensation that you might possibly decide in my favor. I never want to go through that mental agony again and I do not believe that you should expect me to.

Helen accepted these conditions. Never again would she risk breaking with Bill. Henceforth, his life—and his career—would be her central concern.

ALTHOUGH PARKER HAD NOT SUCCEEDED in winning early discharge, his complaints did result in a promising new assignment—as executive officer for the G-5 section, HQ Seine Division. There he participated in the liberation of Paris (accompanying one of the first food convoys into the city). He also achieved the long-sought goal of being promoted to the rank of captain. In the spring of 1945, Parker was assigned to the U.S. Group Control Council for Germany where he renewed his acquaintance with one of the most influential figures in American policing, Col. O. W. Wilson. A star student of the pioneering police chief and criminologist August Vollmer at Berkeley in the 1920s, Wilson had gone on to be a trailblazing police chief in Wichita, Kansas. Among his innovations was the use of marked patrol cars for routine patrol duties. (Previously, departments including the LAPD had relied on officers walking the beat.) In time, the two men would radically reshape American policing, Parker by his work in Los Angeles and Wilson through his writings and, later, by his work as superintendent of the Chicago Police Department in the 1960s.

Parker’s first assignment in liberated Germany was to reorganize the Munich police force—in two months. At first, it seemed a daunting task. Organizationally, the German bureaucracy was unfamiliar. Moreover, the city was swarming with suspicious characters with opaque agendas who were trying to ingratiate themselves with the city’s new occupying power. A conspiratorial milieu, tangled alliances, pervasive corruption, and extensive vice—it was all very Los Angeles.

“All my life I have been accused of being too suspicious of my fellow man,” he confessed to Helen in one letter from Frankfurt. But in his efforts to reorganize the Munich and Frankfurt police departments, Parker found his skeptical approach to human nature fully borne out. “If I were permitted to relate the details of the situation that faces me,” Parker boasted in another letter, “it would rival the wildest fiction.”

Parker was clearly relieved to move away from the topic of his marriage to safer subjects, such as his grievances against his superiors at the LAPD. He was particularly concerned that Chief Horrall and his allies would attempt to thwart his return to the department.

“The present system of oral grading permits the superior officers to grade the candidates, as you know,” he wrote in another letter to his spouse. “My position would not be too good if I had to be graded by the men who were appointed to their positions from behind me on the list. Furthermore I don’t believe the Chief feels kindly toward me…. My present attitude is ‘to hell with them.’ I do not desire to be submitted to the ignominy of being passed up again.”

In fact, the LAPD seems to have been eager to get Parker back. That summer, Chief Horrall contacted the Army to request that Parker be discharged from the service so that he could return to duty with the LAPD. Horrall also wrote Parker directly, claiming “the Department never did recover from the losses sustained when you left” and stating “the sooner you get back, the better and more secure everyone will feel.” This was enough to prompt Parker to renew his efforts to win his release from the Army. Though reluctant to lose such an efficient officer (and worried that Parker’s superiors in the Los Angeles Police Department were less enthusiastic than they let on), Colonel Wilson reluctantly agreed, and in September 1945, Parker was discharged from the Public Safety Division. The following month he came home to California.

He returned to a city transformed. The bucolic Los Angeles of blue skies, sunshine, and orange groves had disappeared (or at least withdrawn to wealthy Westside enclaves like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood). In its place was a new Manchester, a dark, industrial city.

Los Angeles’s transformation had occurred suddenly—so suddenly that it could almost be traced to a single day: July 26, 1943. The next morning, the Los Angeles Times published a bewildered article on the transformation:

CITY HUNTING FOR SOURCE OF “GAS ATTACK”

Thousands Left with Sore Eyes and Throats by Irritating Fumes

With the entire downtown area engulfed by a low-hanging cloud of acrid smoke yesterday morning, city health and police authorities began investigations to determine the source of the latest “gas attack” that left thousands of Angelenos with irritated eyes, noses and throats.

Yesterday’s annoyance was at least the fourth such “attack” of recent date, and by far the worst.

Visibility was cut to less than three blocks in some sections of the business district. Office workers found the noxious fumes almost unbearable. One municipal judge threatened to adjourn court this morning if the condition persists.

Warning that Los Angeles would soon become a “Deserted Village” unless the nuisance were abated, Councilman Carl Rasmussen demanded that the Health Commission make a report on what could be done about it….

The culprit was smog. By late 1943, it had settled permanently over downtown Los Angeles. The noir atmosphere that the director Billy Wilder captured so brilliantly with Double Indemnity in 1944 was not just a symbolically fraught artifact of black-and-white film technology, it was real. Not until 1946 would denizens of downtown Los Angeles see sunshine and blue skies again. Los Angeles had become a noir city.

The Los Angeles power structure had changed as well. In the 1920s, Harry Chandler and his fellow growth barons had dreamed of transforming Los Angeles into an industrial powerhouse along the lines of Chicago. It was clear now that they had achieved their goal. By 1945, Southern California was responsible for 15 percent of the country’s total industrial output. But in transforming Los Angeles into an industrial center, the business barons also brought about a change they had long feared. Aircraft companies Douglas, Northrop, and Grumman and outside companies RCA Victor, Firestone Tire, Dow Chemical, and Ford Motor Company simply didn’t share the native Los Angeles business establishment’s antiunion fervor. Widespread unionization, long resisted, was now a fact. The LAPD’s “red squad” became a thing of the past, and with it, the business establishment’s need to dominate the LAPD.

The Los Angeles business community had experienced another dramatic change as well. In 1944, Harry Chandler died. Leadership of the Los Angeles Times passed to his son Norman (who had become publisher in 1941). Norman was a far more genial figure than his father. However, his father’s trusted associates continued to run the newspaper. Political editor Kyle Palmer was a major force in Sacramento and nationally. In Los Angeles proper, the gnomic Carlton Williams regularly attended city council meetings, routinely flashing a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to conservative members to tell them how they should vote. Under their guidance, the Los Angeles Times would continue to wield great power, as Fletcher Bowron would soon learn to his great sorrow.

The war had changed William Parker, too. Parker had left Los Angeles as a disgruntled midranking police officer with a stalled career. Despite his obvious talents, his prickly personality (and his association with former chief Davis) impeded his efforts to advance. He returned to Los Angeles as a decorated war hero, the highest-ranked LAPD officer to have served in the military. In a city to which veterans were relocating by the thousands every month, that put Parker in a politically powerful position. The city council took note, going so far as to pass a resolution thanking Parker for his wartime service and welcoming him back to the city. Even Chief Horrall penned a note of gratitude. Parker was determined to use that power. His first goal was to become a deputy chief.

Almost immediately, Parker ran into an obstacle—a departmental policy that required two years of service before returning officers were eligible to take promotional exams. As written, it would have prevented him from taking civil service examinations until 1947. Appeals to Chief Horrall to change the policy fell on deaf ears. So Parker went public.

One of Parker’s power bases in the department was American Legion Post 381, which served LAPD veterans. At a post meeting in February 1946, Parker laid into the department for having a policy “that is out of line with the whole nation.” The following day the Los Angeles Times played his comments on page two, in a sympathetic article titled “Policy on Police Veterans Flayed.” The city attorney weighed in by issuing an opinion that the department’s policy on promotions violated the state constitution, clearing the way for veterans to participate in the next round of civil service examinations. For the first time, Parker prevailed over the brass on a major policy dispute.

Parker also tended to other power bases, one of the most important of which was the Fire and Police Protective League. When Parker returned to the force, his former subordinate, the gregarious Harold Sullivan, was serving as the captain’s representative to the Fire and Police Protective League. Parker wanted that position and made it clear that he expected Sullivan to step aside. Sullivan did. In early 1949, Parker became the head of the league’s executive committee.

Popularity and a measure of power seemed to have boosted Parker’s confidence—if not his cockiness. Soon after taking over, Parker took Sullivan and John Dick, a fire department captain, along on a lobbying trip to Sacramento. When the state legislature adjourned for the weekend without taking action on the item they had come to lobby legislators about, Parker proposed that they stay on. The men readily agreed, and the group set off for the Fairmont Hotel. There Parker demanded—and received—a suite. The men then went down to the bar, where Parker boldly struck up a conversation with “two very attractive young ladies” and a fellow who seemed to be their chaperone. The bar closed down at midnight, but Parker wasn’t ready to end the evening.

“So what are you doing next?” Parker asked.

The ladies’ group mentioned that they were going to an after-hours joint in another part of town. Parker asked if his group could join them. The women and their male companion readily agreed to this, so off everyone went. At the end of the evening, Parker went home with one of the women, perhaps, said Sullivan dryly, “to give her a lecture on prostitution.”

This was the new Bill Parker, assertive, entitled, and worldly. And still only partially reconciled with his wife, Helen.

IN THE SPRING of 1947, Parker’s newfound confidence was on display for all to see when he served as the toastmaster for the Protective League’s annual civic dinner. It was the largest dinner in the league’s history. Mayor Bowron was the guest of honor. By all accounts, Parker delivered a sparkling performance. That summer, Parker again garnered headlines when the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star for his service during the war. At the end of the month, when the LAPD released its promotions-eligibility list, Parker topped the list of those eligible for promotion to inspector. He moved up in the legion, becoming, first, vice commander of Post 381 and then commander. Under Parker’s direction, membership exploded, growing to 1,400 in 1947 (the largest annual increase of any post in the state). The next year, it topped the 2,000-person mark. In recognition, he was made membership chairman of the statewide legion.

There was just one thing that hadn’t changed—the underworld. If anything, its tentacles were as tightly entwined around the city as they had been in the mid-1930s. And Parker was surprised to discover it had a new leader: Mickey Cohen.

11 The Sporting Life

“[T]o be honest with you, his getting knocked in was not a bad break for me….”

—Mickey Cohen

MICKEY’S RISE wasn’t always easy. There always seemed to be someone around who wanted to crash the party.

First, there were the uninvited guests, guys like Benny “the Meatball” Gamson from Chicago. Moody and arrogant, “the Meatball” inspired little personal affection among those who came to know him. But he had fast hands and a substantial reputation as a “mechanic,” a crooked card dealer, which meant that he was much sought after by flat shops and juice joints across town. He’d frequently worked with Mickey during the days when Cohen had run wildcat casinos and card games in the Loop and on the North Shore. “The Meatball” added so much to the house advantage that Mickey had even given Gamson “a piece of the operation.” In Gamson’s mind, that made Mickey and him partners. So when Gamson suddenly appeared in Southern California as the war was winding down, he naturally looked Mickey up and proposed reestablishing their old relationship.

But Mickey had changed. Back in Chicago, Mickey had been little more than a punk kid with only a dim awareness of who “the people” were. Since returning to Los Angeles, he had become one of “the people” himself. In Mickey’s mind, “the Meatball” simply didn’t have “the get-up … the class, would be the only word that I could possibly find” to associate with the likes of, well, himself. So when Gamson asked Cohen to “move him in closer” with Siegel, Dragna, and Roselli, Cohen had to tell him that he couldn’t do it. None of those worthies would meet with a pisher like Gamson.

Mickey tried to be nice about it, but the nicer he acted, the angrier Gamson got. Finally, Gamson told his former partner that if Siegel and Dragna wouldn’t deal with him, he, Gamson, would just bring in his own crew, starting with Georgie Levinson, a noted Chicago tough. Cohen “tried to reason with him and make him understand” that that wasn’t a very good idea.

“I told him, ‘Lookit Ben, if we can help in [some other] way—’,” but such offers only made “the Meatball” madder. To put an exclamation point on his pique, Gamson roughed up one of Mickey’s old friends from Boyle Heights. Then Gamson linked up with a rival bookie named Pauley Gibbons. This would not do. It was time to hit back.

First to go was Pauley Gibbons. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning of May 2, 1946, Gibbons was accosted outside his Gale Avenue apartment by two unidentified men. According to neighbors, as soon as he saw them, Gibbons fell down on the sidewalk, screaming, “Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!” Of course they did, with seven quick shots. Gibbons’s diamond and sapphire ring and a gold watch were left behind, to make it clear that this was not some robbery gone awry. To underscore the killers’ opinion of Gibbons, someone paid a drunken homeless man $2 to deliver a box of horse shit (disguised as a box of flowers) to the funeral home during viewing hours. Five months later, on October 3, Gamson and Levinson met a similar fate outside Gamson’s Beverly Boulevard apartment.

So much for “the Meatball.”

Then there were the locals, foremost among them a family of thugs called the Shamans.

Maxie, Izzie, and Joey Shaman had enjoyed a reputation for toughness as kids growing up in Boyle Heights. They fancied they had this reputation still. Cohen henchman Hooky Rothman wasn’t aware of it. When Joe Shaman started acting up one night at the La Brea Club, Hooky told little Joey, bluntly, to “behave yourself in here or get the fuck out.” When Joey didn’t, Hooky broke a chair over his head, worked him over a bit, and then threw him out.

When Mickey swung by that night around 4 a.m., he found out about the incident. It was a shame, he told Hooky; he’d always liked the family. Mickey later claimed that he’d thought no more about it. That seems doubtful. Word raced through Boyle Heights that six-foot, 230-pound Maxie Shaman intended to administer a beating Mickey would not soon forget. The next morning Maxie arrived at Cohen’s commission office behind the paint store on Beverly Boulevard. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Mickey later claimed that Maxie and Izzie burst into his office, armed, and that he gunned down Maxie in self-defense. According to Izzie, his brother walked into Mickey’s office, and Cohen blasted him, killing him in cold blood. The police preferred Izzie’s story; they arrested Cohen for homicide on the spot. However, a young deputy district attorney named Frederick Napoleon Howser (who, as California attorney general, would later provide Cohen with a bodyguard) accepted Mickey’s claim of self-defense, and the diminutive gangster walked.

Still, it was a setback for Mickey. The La Brea Club had become too high profile for its own good. At some point in 1945, Mickey decided to close it (though not before setting up a smaller, more intimate version of the club across the street for his closest friends). The craps game moved to a three-room suite at the Ambassador Hotel. For “seven or eight months,” Cohen organized high-rolling dice games that earned him another $15,000 to $70,000 a month.

In the summer of 1947, Mickey demonstrated his growing power in an impressive and unusual (for him) manner: He decided to hold a charity dinner. The beneficiary was the Jewish paramilitary organization the Irgun.

Mickey came late to ethnic pride, but by early 1947, the outbreak of the Israeli war for independence had touched even him. He particularly admired the spunk of the Irgun, which had earned international notoriety after an attack that previous summer on Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, headquarters of the British administration for Palestine, that killed ninety-three people (most of them innocent civilians). Cohen had heard that the celebrated Chicago newspaperman-turned-Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht was raising money for the Irgun. The Hechts had a villa in Ocean-side. One day in early 1947, Mickey and associate Mike Howard decided to pay Hecht a visit. They arrived unannounced. Hecht, a man of the world, recognized his visitors at once. Howard did the talking.

“Mr. Cohen would be obliged if you told him what’s what with the Jews who are fighting in Palestine,” Howard announced.

According to Hecht, who later described the encounter in his memoirs, A Child of the Century, “Mickey looked coldly at the ocean outside my room and nodded.” So Hecht told his visitors “what was what in Palestine.” Cohen listened calmly as Hecht explained how David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organizat ion that would later form the core of the Israeli Defense Forces, were betraying Irgun agents to the British. The resistance needed guns and money, Hecht explained. Howard pressed him on how he could be having fund-raising problems in a city where “the movie studios are run by the richest Jews in the whole world.”

With sarcastic indignation, Hecht explained that “all the rich Jews of Hollywood were indignantly opposed to Jews fighting.”

“Knockin’ their own proposition, huh?” said Cohen, speaking for the first time. Then Howard quietly asked Hecht, “What city were you born in?”

“New York City,” Hecht replied.

“What school did you go to?” persisted Howard.

“Broome Street Number Two”—on the Lower East Side, Hecht replied. That did the trick.

“I’d like to see you some more,” Cohen said, gently this time. “Maybe we can fix something up.” What he fixed up was a gala benefit dinner at his nightclub, Slapsie Maxie’s Cafe. Hecht was the keynote speaker. When he arrived, he was stunned to find nearly a thousand people in attendance, including almost every player in the Los Angeles underworld.

“You don’t have to worry,” Howard whispered to Hecht. “Each and everybody here has been told exactly how much to give to the cause of the Jewish heroes. And you can rest assured there’ll be no welchers.” Hecht delivered an impassioned speech. Then “the bookies, toughies, and ‘fancy Dans’” stood up and announced their pledges. Mickey wasn’t satisfied. He turned to Howard.

“Tell ‘em they’re a lot o’ cheap crumbs and they gotta give double.” Howard obliged and then Mickey walked up on the stage and stood in the floodlights. According to Hecht, “he said nothing.” He just stood and glowered.

“Man by man,” continued Hecht, “the ‘underworld’ stood up and doubled the ante for Irgun.” At the end of evening, Cohen had raised $200,000.

Cohen’s clout was growing. Just a few days later, on June 20, 1947, Mickey got the break of a lifetime. It came at the expense of the man who’d made him what he was, Bugsy Siegel.

LAS VEGAS had sucked Bugsy Siegel in—and then spat him out. When Billy Wilkerson’s Flamingo Casino broke ground in late 1945, he estimated that he’d need about $1.2 million to build the casino he envisioned. Lansky and Siegel had recently sold the El Cortez for a tidy profit, and in March 1946 the two men made a million-dollar investment in Wilkerson’s project.

Wilkerson saw Bugsy Siegel as an investor, not a managing partner. After all, Bugsy Siegel didn’t know anything about building a grand casino. He’d never even run a nightclub before. But Siegel had other ideas. By early 1947, Wilkerson had fled to Paris to escape from his former business partner.

Wilkerson was right. Siegel had never built a large establishment before, and it showed. The original budget for the new casino was $1.2 million. Siegel spent a million on plumbing alone. By the time the Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, Siegel and his investors—who included the top leadership of the Syndicate—had plowed more than $5 million into the project. Rumors of outrageously expensive design changes started to spread. Some Syndicate chieftains became concerned that Bugsy’s new girlfriend, Mob moll Virginia Hill (whom Outfit figures in Chicago had long used as a “mule” for transporting large amounts of cash) was stashing their money in Swiss bank accounts. Worse, when the Flamingo finally did open, it lost money. Siegel was forced to suspend operations to finish construction and figure out what had gone wrong. When it reopened in the spring, the Flamingo moved into the black, netting $250,000 in the three months that followed. But the hard feelings remained. There was also the matter of Siegel’s attitude. Was their old friend Bugsy contrite about all the Syndicate money he’d spent? Not at all. On the contrary, he wanted even more.

At issue was the business of supplying bookies with racing information. For more than a decade, Moses Annenberg’s Nationwide News Service had dominated this lucrative business.^[9] But in 1939, Annenberg disbanded his wire operations, and leadership passed to James Ragan, who reconstituted the old monopoly as the Continental Press Service. Faced with pressure from the Outfit, Ragan went to the FBI for protection. But they weren’t interested in his stories about how the old Capone mob had reemerged under new leadership. In Chicago on June 24, 1946, two shooters opened fire on Ragan while his car was stopped at the corner of State Street and Pershing Drive. Ragan was rushed to Michael Reese Hospital, where after ten blood transfusions he managed to swear out an affidavit identifying the gunman. In the weeks that followed, Ragan made a remarkable recovery—only to die suddenly on August 15. An autopsy suggested mercury poisoning. As for the gunman Ragan had identified, the affidavit identifying him was lost.

Ragan’s successors got the message. They immediately sold the wire service to front men controlled by the Outfit. Bugsy Siegel did not. With Continental now in Mob hands, Chicago informed Siegel that he could go ahead and shut down the Trans-American wire. Siegel refused. He’d built a viable and highly profitable business. He wanted something in exchange for giving it up—specifically, $2 million. This demand went over poorly.

Bugsy knew the boys could get tough. When he flew into Los Angeles early on the morning of June 20, 1947, violence was on his mind. After catching a few hours of sleep at the Beverly Hills mansion that Virginia Hill was renting (from Rudolph Valentino’s former manager), Bugsy headed over to associate Al Smiley’s apartment, where he met with Mickey Cohen.^[10] Siegel got right to the point.

“What kind of equipment you got?” Siegel asked him. Mickey ran down the list of weapons, hideouts, and gunmen available. Bugsy asked Mickey to send Hooky Rothman over the next day, presumably to provide extra protection. It was clear to Cohen that Bugsy “felt that there was some kind of come-off going to take place.” But Bugsy hadn’t seemed too worried about it. The two men had spoken out by the pool at Al Smiley’s apartment. Siegel prided himself on his tan, and though Cohen noticed that he did look more tired and pallid than normal, he certainly hadn’t gone into hiding.

After talking to Cohen, Siegel dropped by George Raft’s Coldwater Canyon house and invited Raft to join him for dinner that night. Raft had other plans. Siegel spent the afternoon with his attorney and then went out for dinner with Al Smiley and Chick Hill, Virginia’s little brother, at a new restaurant in Ocean Park. By 10:15 p.m., they were back home in Beverly Hills. Siegel and Smiley settled in on the sofa to read the early edition of the next morning’s Los Angeles Times. At 10:45 p.m., the first of nine bullets crashed through the living room window, hitting Siegel directly in the right eye. A second bullet slammed into Bugsy’s neck as Smiley dove to the floor. Seven more bullets followed as Smiley screamed “kill the lights” at Chick Hill, who had run downstairs. Then silence. When Chick turned the lights on again, Al Smiley was hiding in the fireplace and Siegel was sprawled grotesquely across the sofa, tie red with blood, head barely attached. One of his striking blue eyes was on the dining room floor. His eyelashes were found plastered on a doorjamb. The police later concluded that the gunman had rested his high-caliber rifle on a latticed pergola just twenty feet away from where Siegel and Smiley were sitting.

It was, concluded Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson, “a perfectly executed hit.”

“Somebody knew that Siegel would be in Beverly Hills on this one day, and that he would be at Virginia Hill’s home, and when, somehow, the heavy draperies over the living-room window had been left open to give the killer a view of the room,” Anderson later wrote. “The shooting was timed exactly to occur when no police patrol car was near, and had to be done quickly since police cars were in the vicinity every 30 minutes.” The only evidence the police were able to produce was a sketchy report of a black car “headed north on North Linden toward Sunset.” But Chief Anderson had an idea about who might be responsible. His chief suspect was the person who would benefit most from Siegel’s death—Mickey Cohen. The LAPD shared this suspicion.

MICKEY disliked Las Vegas and steered clear of Siegel’s doings there. It wasn’t the toll Las Vegas was taking on his mentor in crime that bothered him, it was the dust. “You have on a beautiful white-on-white shirt and a beautiful suit, and you’d come out and a goddamn sandstorm would blow up,” he later groused. Still, while he tried to avoid going out to the Nevada desert, Cohen knew all about Siegel’s Las Vegas troubles. He also knew that it might very well lead to violence.

“In things like this, you know, sometimes an order is given and you don’t have any choice,” Mickey said later. “There was no other way it could go for Benny.”

Within the hour, the police were pounding at the door of Mickey’s house.

“What do you want?” said Cohen when he opened the door.

But when the Beverly Hills police pinched him on suspicion of being involved, Mickey was indignant. Everyone knew that he and Bugsy had been “real close.” “Naturally, I missed [him],” Cohen would say later. But be that as it may, Siegel’s death also presented Cohen with the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to take over the rackets in L.A.

“The people in the East called on me on all propositions,” Cohen later said, “some of which I wish they had not found me home for.”

The LAPD had already been watching Cohen for some time. Mickey had caught the eye of Det. John (Jack) Donahoe, a legendary figure in both the homicide and robbery squads years earlier. Donahoe figured Mickey—correctly—for a string of armed robberies in the Wilshire corridor between 1937 and 1939. He was soon picking up Mickey for questioning on a regular basis—more than once a month, by Mickey’s later calculations. As the spree continued and reports of unpleasant encounters with a five-foot, five-inch gunman came in, Donahoe grew increasingly confident that Mickey was his man. Yet despite repeatedly pinching Cohen, Donahoe never seemed able to come up with charges that would stick.

In those days, Cohen was far from a charmer. The tough, tight-lipped little hoodlum whom Donahoe first encountered bore little resemblance to the talkative, press-loving gangster whom a later generation of Angelenos would come to know. Yet when you arrest someone enough, it’s hard not to form a relationship. Mickey soon found that he admired the big cop. During the 1930s, robbery/homicide had been the bagman squad—the unit that handled payoffs—for the LAPD. Even after the purge of Davis-era officers, in the late thirties, a whiff of corruption still clung to the unit. Donahoe, though, was different.

“One of the finest gentleman I ever met” was Cohen’s verdict: “He would never take [a] dime—never let me go—[a] strictly on the level guy.”

Donahoe didn’t reciprocate these sentiments. When Donahoe learned that Mickey had started dating a cute Irish dance instructor/model, LaVonne Norma Weaver, he was concerned. Donahoe seems to have had something of a soft spot for a damsel in distress, and based on what he knew about Mickey Cohen, the petite redhead was definitely in danger. Mickey had presented himself to LaVonne as a prizefighter. Donahoe took it upon himself to enlighten her as to Cohen’s true identity as a stickup man.

That would have done the trick for most girls. If it didn’t, Donahoe might have expected that Mickey’s bizarre dating behavior would. The couple’s first date was typical. First, Mickey arrived late—really late. He told LaVonne he’d pick her up at seven. He arrived at eleven. Then he swung back by his apartment so that she could meet his associates, before finally taking her to dinner at midnight.

But LaVonne was clearly a forgiving and adventuresome young woman. (In addition to dating Mickey, she was also a pilot.) Mickey’s chronic tardiness and late hours didn’t seem to bother her. Nor did bizarre habits such as cycling through two or three suits a day and eating ice cream and French pastries at virtually every meal. If she had any qualms about his habit of disappearing for an hour or two mid-date (while he went off to heist a joint or conduct business), she never showed it. Clearly, she did not bring burdensome conversational expectations to their relationship either. In fact, she was almost as taciturn as Mickey himself: “Actually, we never had too much conversation together,” he later allowed. “She was the type of girl who didn’t ask questions,” said Mickey with evident satisfaction.

In the fall of 1940, the two were married, somewhat impulsively, in a wedding chapel on Western Avenue. Mickey’s Boston terrier, Tuffy, was one of the witnesses. When the war ended in 1945, LaVonne wanted what every woman wanted: a new house. Moreover, she wanted it in Los Angeles’s sportiest new neighborhood: Brentwood. So Mickey bought a lot near the Riviera Golf Club and started to build. But unbeknownst to Mickey, one of his general contractors was the LAPD. The Cohens’ new house was wired like a recording studio. In the spring of 1947, the Cohens moved in, and the LAPD started listening.

What they heard was surprising. Cohen, so taciturn in public, was a huge talker on the telephone. Every day, he spent hours talking to bondsmen, newspapermen (and-women), bankers, and bookies—and not just in Los Angeles. Mickey’s acquaintances on the East Coast reached from Miami to Boston. Topics of conversation included paying off the sheriff’s office and the Los Angeles County DA’s office. He also talked about doing business with California’s new attorney general, Fred Howser. Large sums were discussed—a mysterious $4 million “proposition,” an $8 million venture in Las Vegas. Mickey mentioned that in one three-month period alone, his operations in Burbank had netted half a million dollars. He discussed spending $30,000 during a single trip to New York. He talked about his $120,000 house. He spoke (bitterly) of spending $50,000 on LaVonne’s interior decorator and on home furnishings. Evincing little understanding for the necessities of criminal conspiracy, LaVonne, in turn, was frequently overheard castigating her husband for his large phone bills.

In short, the LAPD seemed to have Cohen in its sights. But unbeknownst to the men who had tapped Mickey’s manse, they also had a problem. The police had a mole.