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

by John Buntin

  The Gas Chamber

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  —Mickey Cohen

  IN JANUARY 1962, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Cohen’s tax conviction. Mickey returned to Alcatraz. But two weeks later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas stepped in again, allowing Mickey to leave on bail once more while the U.S. Supreme Court considered his final appeal. Soon thereafter, a reporter for the Valley News found him living quietly in a rented house in Van Nuys. He complained about the lack of closet space and the small hot water heater. He explained that he and Hagen were engaged and hoped to be married as soon as he won his income tax appeal. He was even working on a new version of his life story, tentatively titled The Poison Has Left Me. Meanwhile, on March 5, 1962, Mickey Cohen’s trial for the murder of Jack Whalen got under way. If convicted, Cohen faced the possibility of the gas chamber.

  Cohen’s indictment arose from statements LoCigno had made in prison. Mickey’s junior henchman had confessed to a priest that he had not, in fact, shot Whalen but had agreed to be the fall guy after Mickey Cohen promised him a large cash payoff and a short prison term. He’d gotten neither. The priest in turn tipped off prosecutors in L.A. to the fact that LoCigno might be willing to talk. An agent then came up to pay LoCigno a visit. “I didn’t do the shooting,” he told the agent in their first meeting. “I can’t tell you who did but I can get someone to lead you to the gun.” A friend of LoCigno’s took investigators to a popular make-out spot on Mulholland Drive. There police found a rusty revolver that matched the type of gun fired in the Whalen killing. They quickly traced the gun’s ownership to another member of Mickey’s party, Roger Leonard.

  Although he was willing to talk with authorities, LoCigno wasn’t willing to finger Leonard or anyone else as the actual gunman. Instead, at the second trial, LoCigno largely repeated the account he had given the jury in his first trial. The prosecution tried to offset this problem with a new witness—a USC student/model who had been dating Candy Barr’s manager at the time. The fearless coed testified that Barr’s manager had warned her that “there’s going to be trouble at Rondelli’s” and later said, “it was stupid to put all the guns in the trashcan.” However, she didn’t identify Mickey as the gunman either, and much of her testimony came perilously close to hearsay. The gun police had recovered following LoCigno’s suggestions was too rusty to be positively identified as the murder weapon. In short, prosecutors had very little in the way of new evidence that could tie Mickey to the shooting.

  Cohen’s attorneys did not hesitate to make this point. “If you convict Mickey Cohen in this case,” declared his attorney during his closing statement on April 4, “you’ll be convicting him only because he’s Mickey Cohen, not because he’s guilty.” The following day, after a four-hour closing argument accusing Cohen and his attorneys of weaving “a web of deceit” around what prosecutors claimed was a premeditated conspiracy to kill Jack Whalen, the prosecution rested its case. On Thursday, the jury—eleven women and one man—retired to deliberate. By the end of the day Friday, they still had not reached a verdict. The presiding judge ordered them sequestered over the weekend.

  On day four of the jury’s deliberations, newspaper columnist Paul Coates tracked down Cohen and found him “half-dozing in a Beverly Hills barber’s chair.” A manicurist was buffing his nails. A shoeshine boy was hard at work polishing his brand-new Florsheims. As Coates pondered the question of how a man who at any moment could be condemned to death could be so relaxed, the radio crackled to life.

  “Here’s another bulletin,” the newscaster announced excitedly. “The Mickey Cohen murder trial jury, failing for the fourth day to reach a verdict, has been locked up again for the night.”

  “Mickey’s barber gasped,” wrote Coates.

  “The pressure—the suspense. It must be terrible,” the barber suggested. Mickey just grunted.

  “This is a crazy town,” he finally answered. “They accuse me of bumping a guy off. So what do they do? They turn me loose and lock up my jury!”

  The next day, the jury in Cohen’s case informed the judge that it was hopelessly deadlocked. Nine members of the jury were ready to acquit. Three insisted on holding out for a conviction. Reluctantly, Judge Lewis Drucker declared a mistrial.

  “Although much testimony of the defendants was discredited and there was some admitted perjury, I consider the totality of the evidence against them shows no conspiracy exists,” declared the judge. With that, the murder charges were dismissed. Mickey Cohen had once again beaten the rap.

  Cohen had dodged the gas chamber. But he couldn’t avoid a return trip to Alcatraz. Later that spring, the Supreme Court rejected his appeals request in his tax-evasion case. In early May, he bid Sandy Hagen and an estimated two hundred fans and autograph seekers farewell as he surrendered to authorities at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles. His mandatory release date was early 1972. Kissing Hagen good-bye, Mickey declared to the assembled crowd, “I followed the concept of life man should—except for that gambling operation.”

  THE FOLLOWING FEBRUARY, Mickey Cohen was moved from Alcatraz to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. There he took over Vito Genovese’s old job in the electric shop, along with Genovese’s hot plate and shower. Mickey typically got off work a bit early, so he could make it to the showers first, for an extra-long rinse. But that particular day, when Cohen headed to the showers, wrapped in a towel, he found himself face to face with an unexpected visitor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

  Kennedy had come to offer the hoodlum one last opportunity to turn state’s witness for the government. “How the hell are you going to live fifteen years in this goddamn chicken coop?” he asked Cohen.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Cohen replied. Then he proceeded to the shower.

  Compared to Alcatraz, Atlanta was “paradise.” Cohen could listen to the radio and read the newspaper—even watch television from time to time. He slowly adjusted to prison hours—waking up at five thirty or six, going to sleep early, when lights went out. To stay in shape, “I did a lot of shadow boxing and knee bends.” He thought about appeals strategies and wrote letters to his attorneys. He engaged in “shop talk” with “certain guys from Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.” He also made nice with other inmates.

  “[Y]ou say hello to everybody, particularly if you’re somebody with a name. See, if you don’t, they’ll say, ‘Who the hell does that son of a bitch think he is? He thinks he’s a big shot?’” From such small slights, shocking violence could sometimes erupt.

  Cohen was playing it smart. But sometimes, even the smartest card player gets dealt a bad hand. That’s what happened to Mickey on August 14, 1963, when a deranged inmate, Estes McDonald, escaped from medical supervision. After scaling a chain-link fence and crossing the prison yard, he found Mickey Cohen inside watching TV—and viciously brained him with a three-foot-long lead pipe. By the time prison authorities restrained McDonald, Cohen was a bloody heap, his skull visibly indented. It took him six hours to regain consciousness. It was another two days before prison doctors were confident that Cohen would survive. Prison authorities tried to put a happy face on the situation for Sandy Hagen and Cohen family members, but the damage done was severe. Mickey’s legs were partially paralyzed. His arms were essentially useless. His voice was slurred. Cohen had to beg the prison bull for a special allotment of six rolls of toilet paper a day, simply to dry the tears that now rolled down his cheeks spontaneously, uncontrollably.

  In October, Cohen was transferred to a special medical facility in Springfield, Missouri, for brain surgery. It was only partially successful. Cohen was still unable to walk following the operation and could use only one arm. Cohen was sent to Los Angeles for therapy—under armed guard. As a result of intensive physical therapy there, considerable progress was made. By the end of his time in Los Angeles, Cohen was able to move with the assistance of a walker. Progress was rewarded with a transfer back to Springfield. There, for
most of the next eleven months, he was kept in solitary confinement, ostensibly for his protection. Cohen responded by filing a $10 million lawsuit against the government for negligence in allowing the convict who had attacked him to escape.

  In March 1964, Cohen’s old friend Ben Hecht wrote the gangster a sympathetic letter. “Dear Mickey,” it began.

  You are not in the only jail there is. There is another jail called “old age” in which I am beginning to serve time. Like you, I am not allowed to complain or protest—Rose won’t stand for it.

  I hope they let you look at television so that you can keep up on the shenanigans that the “holier than thous” continue to commit and perform. I was going to write a letter to Attorney General Kennedy about you—I inquired of a friend of his how he might react to such a letter. I was told he would react loudly and angrily rant against it

  If there is such a thing as “Good luck” in the place where you are, I hope you find it.

  Sincerely, Ben Hecht

  Hecht died one month later. Cohen seemed trapped in a living death. Disconsolate, he wrote the faithful Sandy Hagen, telling her that she should wait for him no more.

  “I may never come out of here alive, and the best I’m going to come out is terribly crippled,” he wrote. “I won’t be in no position to be any good to you or anyone else.”

  Ever obedient, Hagen complied with Mickey’s instructions. She married and disappeared from the newspapers, never to be found again. Cohen was now truly alone.

  BILL PARKER was also struggling against a failing body. In May 1964, Parker left Los Angeles for the Mayo Clinic. The papers reported he would be gone for a week of “skin and arthritic treatment.” In fact, it appears that he was undergoing serious gastrointestinal surgery. Associates were shocked at his appearance upon his return. Parker was gaunt and appeared to have aged several years. However, surgery didn’t seem to have diminished his zest for rhetorical combat. When later that summer rioting broke out in four eastern cities after clashes between police officers and African Americans, Parker was adamant that Los Angeles would see no similar large-scale disturbances. At appearances throughout the city, the chief returned to his theory of outside agitators, noting that most of the protesters who turned out for civil rights demonstrations in Los Angeles weren’t even black.

  Yet signs of racial strife were everywhere. That April, black youths had clashed with police on multiple occasions, first at a track meet at Jefferson High School, then, two weeks later, at the scene of a traffic accident. (Parker blamed “social unrest and resentment against all forms of governmental authority” for the disturbances.) In May, California assistant attorney general Howard Jewell warned, in a report to the state AG, that the bitter conflict between Parker and civil rights leaders risked sparking rioting unless the tensions were addressed. Judge Loren Miller, a member of the Jewell Commission, was even more pessimistic.

  “Violence in Los Angeles is inevitable,” wrote Miller. “Nothing can or will be done about it until after the fact. Then there will be the appointment of a commission which will damn the civil rights leaders and the Chief alike.”

  Parker vehemently disagreed.

  “I doubt that Los Angeles will become part of the battleground of the racial conflict that is raging in the United States today,” Parker told the Sigma Delta Chi journalism fraternity that fall. “This city is ten years ahead of other major metropolitan areas in assimilating the Negro minority.” Real unrest would only become a danger, Parker told the Sherman Oaks Rotary Club in the spring of 1964, if “the current soft attitude on the part of the republic to crime and Civil Rights demonstrations” continued.

  Even with three African Americans on the city council, no one could check Chief Parker’s course. Councilman Bradley became so frustrated with the situation that in the spring of 1965, he even introduced legislation that would have made the chief of police more powerful. Bradley’s rationale was that it was time to end the charade that the Police Commission directed the department and hold accountable the man who really did. But like most of Bradley’s other attempts to restrain Parker, it failed. Bill Parker would chart his own destiny.

  27

  Watts

  “This community has done a magnificent job [with race relations]. We’re afraid to tell the truth, because it would prove this is the Garden of Eden.”

  —Chief William Parker, June 25, 1963

  ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, August 11, 1965, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, Lee Minikus, was waved down by a passing African American motorist. The motorist told Minikus that he’d just seen a white Buick headed up Avalon Boulevard, driving recklessly—“like he might be drunk or something.” Minikus, who was white, set off in pursuit and soon caught up with the speeding car. He pulled it over at 116th and Avalon. Its driver was twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye. His stepbrother Ronald, twenty-two, was also in the car. Office Minikus asked Marquette for his license. He didn’t have one. Smelling alcohol, Officer Minikus asked Marquette to get out of the car to perform the standard field sobriety test. Frye failed the test. Minikus went back to his motorcycle and radioed for his partner, who was patrolling the nearby Harbor Freeway. He also called for a patrol car to take Marquette in to be booked and a tow truck for the car. It was a minute or two after seven o’clock in the evening.

  Minikus told Marquette that he was under arrest. Still good-natured, Marquette asked Minikus if his brother or some other family member could take the car home. They were only a block away. Officer Minikus said that he could not. Department procedure called for towing away and impounding the car. At that very moment, an ex-girlfriend of Marquette’s walked by. Seeing that Marquette was about to be arrested, she hurried over to the apartment where he lived to fetch Marquette and Ronald’s mother. When she arrived at the scene to find a second motorcycle patrolman (Minikus’s partner), a transportation car, and the tow truck, Mrs. Frye got upset—at Marquette. She started to scold him for drinking. Up until this point in the arrest, Marquette had been subdued but cooperative. Now, his mood changed. He pushed away his mother and allegedly started shouting, “You motherfucking white cops, you’re not taking me anywhere!” yelling that they would have to kill him before he would go to jail.

  It was a sweltering day. Since Monday, temperatures had been in the mid-nineties—fifteen degrees hotter than it had been all summer. A yellow-gray blanket of smog lay heavy across the city. In 1965, air conditioners were still a rarity in this part of Watts, a working-class neighborhood of newly built two-story apartment buildings and bungalows. As a result, residents tried to spend as much time outside as they could. The neighborhood was full of people that evening—people who were naturally curious to know what all the ruckus was about. By the time Marquette got angry, a crowd of roughly a hundred bystanders had gathered. Some of them started to murmur, angrily. Minikus’s partner slipped off and radioed a code 1199—officer needs help. He returned with a baton used for riot control. The officer in the patrol car grabbed his shotgun.

  The crowd, now numbering perhaps 150 people, was starting to turn hostile. “Hit those blue-eyed bastards!” a voice yelled. While one highway patrol officer waved his shotgun at the crowd, the two motorcycle patrol officers attempted to grab Marquette. A scuffle broke out as California Highway Patrol reinforcements arrived at the scene. Marquette was struck by a baton and collapsed on the ground. Mrs. Frye jumped onto the back of one of the arresting officers, screaming, “You white Southern bastard!” Little brother Ronald got into the mix too. By 7:23 p.m., all the Fryes were under arrest. The crowd was now screaming.

  “Leave the old lady alone!” someone cried.

  “Those white motherfuckers got no cause to do that,” yelled someone else.

  “We’ve got no rights at all—it’s just like Selma,” shouted someone else.

  The number of onlookers swelled to between 250 and 300 persons. The crowd was getting more and more agitated. Who didn’t know about the shootout three years earlier with the Nati
on of Islam? Who didn’t know that just one year earlier white Californians had voted to maintain housing segregation, to keep black Angelenos confined to the ghetto? Picking up on the mood, one of the highway patrol officers slipped off to radio for more backup. Soon three more highway patrol officers appeared. Minikus and his partner were now struggling with Marquette and his stepbrother—and with Mrs. Frye. Another officer swung his nightstick at Marquette, hitting him on the forehead and opening a nasty cut. As this was going on, the first LAPD units arrived at the scene.

  The arresting officers caught the crowd’s mood. They knew things could get violent. The patrol cars and the tow truck pulled away fast. But as the motorcycle patrolmen revved their engines, one of the officers felt a wad of spit hit the back of his neck. He and his partner stopped and plunged back into the crowd, grabbing the woman they thought was responsible, who started screaming that she hadn’t done anything. The patrol cars returned to the scene, where the crowd, enraged by police mistreatment of a pregnant black woman (as the rumor now had it) was screaming for blood.

  “Motherfuckers! Blue-eyed devils! Motherfuckers!”

  Another man started urging the crowd to respond; the highway patrol arrested him as well. Then they left to take the Fryes to be booked at a local sheriff’s substation. By 7:40 p.m., the police were again pulling away. A youth hurled a bottle at one of the retreating patrol cars, hitting its rear fender with a crash. This time the police did not return, but instead of dispersing, the assembled crowd headed out into the neighborhood, intent on venting their anger. White motorists passing through the area soon found themselves pelted with stones and, in some cases, beaten. One of the people driving through the area was Chief Parker’s protege, Daryl Gates.

  Gates had enjoyed a rapid ascent in Parker’s police department. In 1963, Parker confidant James Hamilton, the longtime head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s intelligence division, had left the department to go to the National Football League. (The NFL was having problems with gambling and organized crime, and Robert Kennedy had recommended his old friend as the perfect person to clean it up.) No position in the department was more sensitive; Parker tapped Gates to fill it. After two years of exemplary service in that position and another outstanding performance on the civil service exam, in June 1965 Gates became (at the age of thirty-eight) one of the youngest inspectors in the history of the LAPD. A Herald-Examiner story on the appointment noted that Gates was “rumored to be Parker’s choice as a successor.” He was assigned to command Patrol Area 3—Highland Park, Hollywood, Hollenbeck, and Central Division. But in early August, the inspector who was normally in charge of Patrol Area 2—South-Central and southwest L.A.—went on vacation. As a result, those areas were added to Gates’s command.