by John Buntin
It turned out that Vaus’s contact on the Hollywood vice squad, Sgt. Charles Stoker, had gone before the criminal complaints committee of the county grand jury the day before Cohen and Vaus showed up in court with the wire recordings. There Stoker had told the committee about overhearing Brenda Allen’s conversations with Sergeant Jackson. It then emerged that Sgt. Guy Rudolph, confidential investigator for the chief of police, had gotten wind of Jackson’s connection to Allen fourteen months earlier and had asked police department technician Ray Pinker to set up another wiretap. But that investigation had mysteriously stalled, and the recordings had then disappeared.
Spurred by these revelations and by Cohen’s charges, the county grand jury opened an investigation. In mid-June it began subpoenaing police officers. Chief Clarence B. Horrall insisted that he had never been informed of the allegations swirling around the vice squad; high-ranking officers stepped forward to insist that he had been. Brenda Allen volunteered that Sergeants Stoker and Jackson had both been on the take. The head of the LAPD gangster squad abruptly retired. Every day brought a new revelation. The Daily News revealed that the LAPD had broken into Mickey’s house in Brentwood and installed wiretaps. Columnist Florabel Muir accused Mayor Bowron of personally authorizing the operation and implied that the transcriptions were being used for purposes of blackmail. Shamefaced, Mayor Bowron and Chief Horrall were forced to concede that they had OK’d a break-in. What was worse was that no charges against Cohen had come of it. On June 28, Chief Horrall announced his retirement. One month later, the grand jury indicted Lieutenant Wellpot, Sergeant Jackson, Asst. Chief Joseph Reed, and Chief of Police C. B. Horrall for perjury. Cohen had won his bet—if he could survive to collect.
JUST A FEW WEEKS LATER, Mickey was driving home to his house in Brentwood for dinner with his wife, LaVonne, and the actor George Raft. Mickey had outfitted his $150,000 home at 513 Moreno Avenue with the most advanced security gear of the time, including an “electronic eye” that could detect intruders and trigger floodlights. The goal was to illuminate anyone who approached the house. But of course the security system also illuminated him when he got home in the evening. This was a serious problem when there was a hitman hiding in the empty lot next door, as there was that night.
As Mickey started to swing into his driveway and the lights came on, the gunman opened fire, pumping slugs into Mickey’s car. Mickey dropped to the floorboard. Without looking over the dashboard, he wrenched his blue Caddy back onto the road and floored it. He made it about two blocks before beaching the car on a curb. Fortunately, the gunman was gone. So Mickey went home. Despite bleeding from cuts inflicted by the shattered glass, Mickey waved off the questions about what had happened and insisted on proceeding with dinner—New York strip and apple pie, Raft’s favorite. The actor would later say that Mickey had looked “a little mussed up.”
Cohen didn’t report the matter to the police. (Why advertise his vulnerability further?) The attack might never have come to light but for a tip from Cohen’s auto-body shop to the police… and Mickey’s decision to commission a $25,000 armored Cadillac and test it at the police academy firing range. When the press broke the story, Cohen replied nonchalantly, “Well, where else? You can’t test it [by opening fire]… on the street for Christ’s sake!” Posed before his massive new armored car, the sad-eyed, five-foot-three-inch gangster (five-foot-five in lifts) looked like nothing so much as Mickey Mouse. Gangsters in other cities marveled about Mickey’s good luck—and sniggered about L.A.’s “Mickey Mouse Mafia.”
Still, someone clearly was trying to kill him, albeit rather ineptly. It might have seemed like a good time to lie low. But that was a feat Cohen seemed constitutionally incapable of. Thanks to the tabloids, Mickey was a celebrity, one of the biggest in town, and he acted the part, courting the press, squiring “budding starlets” around town (although in private his tastes inclined more to exotic dancers), and frequenting hot nightclubs like Ciro’s, the Trocadero, and the Mocambo.
The evening of Tuesday, July 19, 1949, was a typical one for Mickey. After dining with Artie Samish, chief lobbyist for the state’s liquor interests and one of the most powerful men in Sacramento, Mickey and his party of henchmen, starlets, and reporters repaired to one of his favorite hangouts, Sherry’s, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip that was owned by his friend Barney Ruditsky. Standing watch outside was a curious addition to Mickey’s crew: Special Agent Harry Cooper, from the state attorney general’s office. After the attempted hit at Michael’s Haberdashery, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department had insisted—somewhat counterintuitively—on disarming Cohen’s men and checking them frequently for weapons, to make sure they stayed unarmed. As a result, Mickey was essentially unprotected. Samish had arranged to provide a little extra protection in the form of Special Agent Cooper.
By 3:30 a.m., Mickey was ready to call it a night. Ruditsky went outside and did a quick sweep of the parking lot. Everything looked clear. Two of Cohen’s men went to bring around his Cadillac (one of the regular ones, Mickey being embroiled in a dispute with the California Highway Patrol about the excessive weight of his armored car). A valet went to get Cohen pal Frankie Niccoli’s Chrysler, and at 3:50 a.m., Mickey and his party stepped outside. Almost immediately a shotgun and a high-powered .30-06 rifle opened up from an empty lot across the street, and members of Mickey’s party started to drop.
One of them was newspaper columnist Florabel Muir, who had been lingering inside over the morning paper as Mickey’s party exited. Muir (who frankly admitted to hanging around Mickey in hopes that some shooting would start) now charged outside, into the gunfire. One of Cohen’s top thugs, Neddie Herbert, had been hit and was lying wounded on the ground. Special Agent Cooper was staggering about, clutching his stomach with one hand and waving his pistol with the other. Then Muir saw Mickey, “right arm hung limp, and blood spreading on his coat near the shoulder” running toward Cooper. With his one good arm Cohen grabbed the sagging six-foot-tall lawman and stuffed him into Niccoli’s Chrysler. Cohen piled in as well, and the Chrysler zoomed off—to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital. Thanks to Mickey’s quick reaction, Cooper lived. The more seriously wounded Herbert wasn’t so fortunate; he died four days later. Mickey himself escaped with only a shoulder wound. Florabel Muir got her exclusive, along with a sprinkling of buckshot in her bottom.
Later that night, policemen found automatic Savage and Remington shotguns in the empty lot across the street from Sherry’s. A ballistics test determined that the buckshot slugs used were standard-issue police riot-control shells. Muir also noted with interest that the deputy sheriffs who seemed so diligent in ensuring that Cohen’s crew was firearms-free had vanished a few minutes before the shooting.
The papers, of course, were thrilled. “The Battle of the Sunset Strip!” the press dubbed it. But who was behind the hit? Mayor Bowron blamed Manhattan crime boss Frank Costello. Others pointed to Jack Dragna, a local Italian crime boss who’d reluctantly accepted direction from Bugsy Siegel but who was known to dislike Mickey. Sergeant Stoker, the former vice officer turned county grand-jury witness, claimed the triggerman was LAPD. Cohen himself was confused by the attack. But Mickey did know one thing: He could deal with an underworld rival like Dragna. But in order to thrive as a crime lord in Los Angeles, Mickey needed a friendly—or at least tolerant—chief of police in office.
For the moment, that was impossible. In the wake of Chief Horrall’s ouster, Mayor Bowron had appointed, on an emergency basis, a no-nonsense former Marine general named William Worton to run the department. One of Worton’s first acts was to reconstitute the LAPD’s intelligence division. Its top target: Mickey Cohen. Fortunately for Cohen, Worton was only a temporary appointment; civil service rules required the Police Commission to hire from within the department. That meant Cohen would have a chance to put a more friendly man in the position, and the diminutive gangster already knew exactly who he wanted: Thaddeus Brown, a former detective who’d headed the homicide department before
winning promotion to deputy chief of patrol in 1946.
Brown was a big teddy bear of a man, enormously popular with the department’s detectives and well regarded by the underworld, too. As chief of detectives, Brown insisted on knowing every detective’s confidential sources. As a result, he had a wide range of acquaintances. He saw the underworld’s denizens as human beings, not evil incarnate. As a result, Cohen had something of a soft spot for the man the papers called “the master detective.” Brown had another, even more influential backer in Norman Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. The support Norman could offer was not purely rhetorical. The Chandler family had long maintained a special—almost proprietary—interest in the LAPD. Indeed, for more than two decades the city’s dominant newspaper had made it clear that a voice in police affairs was the sine qua non of the paper’s political support. It was widely known that Norman Chandler controlled three of the Police Commission’s five votes—and that Chandler expected them to vote for Thad Brown as chief.
In short, Brown’s ascension seemed inevitable. However, it was not automatic. The Police Commission could not simply vote to promote the “master detective.” Since 1923, the chief of the LAPD had been chosen under the civil service system. As a result, applicants for the top position had to take an elaborate civil service exam, composed of a written test and an oral examination. The results of the written test typically accounted for 95 percent of the total score; the oral exam plus a small adjustment for seniority contributed the other 5 percent. Candidates then received a total score and were ranked accordingly. The Police Commission was allowed to choose from among the top three candidates.
To no one’s surprise, Thad Brown got the top score. What was surprising was who came in second: Deputy Chief William H. Parker, the head of the Bureau of Internal Affairs. A decorated veteran of the Second World War, wounded in Normandy during the D-day invasion, Parker had helped to denazify municipal police forces in Italy and Germany as the Allies advanced. He now wanted to purge the LAPD of corruption—and Los Angeles of organized crime—in much the same way. Mickey Cohen was determined to make sure that Parker never got that chance.
“I had gambling joints all over the city,” Mickey later explained, “and I needed the police just to make sure they ran efficiently.” Bill Parker would not make things go smoothly.
One of the things that any crime lord needs is a line on the Police Commission, and Cohen had it. His contacts there assured him that three of the five commissioners—Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman—favored Brown. That left only Irving Snyder and Dr. J. Alexander Somerville, the sole African American police commissioner, in favor of Parker. Mickey was convinced that “the fix” was in and that Brown would be the next chief of police. The only obstacle Brown faced, Cohen’s connections informed him, was that Brown’s selection might be seen as a personal triumph for the little gangster. On their advice, Cohen decided to leave town for the actual decision-making period—“just to blow off any stink that could possibly come up.” Along with his sometime bodyguard Johnny Stompanato (who was also known as one of Hollywood’s most notorious gigolos) and his Boston terrier, Tuffy, L.A.’s underworld boss set off on a leisurely road trip to Chicago.
Cohen arrived in Chicago to shocking news. The day before the Police Commission vote, Brown-supporter Agnes Albro had unexpectedly died. The following day, the commission had voted to name Bill Parker the next chief of police. The battle for control of Los Angeles was about to begin in earnest. Though Mickey didn’t know it, it was a fight Bill Parker had been preparing for his entire life.
2
The “White Spot”
“Wherein lies the fascination of the Angel City! Why has it become the Mecca of tourists the world over? Is it because it is the best advertised city in the United States? Is it that it offers illimitable opportunities for making money and eating fruit? Hardly that. After all the pamphlets of the real estate agents, the boosters’ clubs, the Board of Trade and the Chamber of Commerce have been read, something remains unspoken—something that uncannily grips the stranger”
—Willard Huntington Wright, 1913
BEFORE IT WAS A CITY, Los Angeles was an idea.
Other cities were based on geographical virtues—a splendid port (San Francisco, say, or New York), an important river (St. Louis), a magnificent lake (Chicago). But nothing about the arid basin of Los Angeles (other than its mild weather) suggested the site of a great metropolis. So the men who built Los Angeles decided to advertise a different kind of virtue: moral and racial purity. Los Angeles, a settlement founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, was reenvisioned as “the white spot of America,” a place where native-born, white Protestants could enjoy “the magic of outdoors inviting always… trees in blossom throughout the year, flowers in bloom all the time” as well as “mystery, romance, charm, splendor,” all safe among others of their kind. It was an image relentlessly promoted by men like Harry Chandler, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times and one of Southern California’s most important real estate developers, and it worked. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco to become the largest city in the west. There was just one problem with this picture of Anglo-Saxon virtue. It wasn’t true. Far from being a paragon of virtue, by the early 1920s, Los Angeles had become a Shangri-la of vice.
The historic center of the city’s underworld was Chinatown, “narrow, dirty, vile-smelling, [and] thoroughly picturesque,” an area just east of the historic plaza that had been the center of town back in Los Angeles’s pueblo days. Its opium dens introduced Angelenos to the seductions of the poppy flower; its fan tan and mah-jongg parlors catered to the area’s still-sizable Chinese population; its fourteen-odd lotteries attracted gamblers of every color and nationality from across the city. Just north of Chinatown was the predominantly Mexican part of the city known as Sonoratown. There women in negligees lolled casually in the open windows of “disorderly houses,” advertising their availability. According to the Los Angeles Record, a hundred known disorderly houses operated in the general vicinity of downtown. The citywide brothel count was 355—and growing fast. (By the mid-1920s, reformers would count 615 brothels.) That was just the high-end prostitution. Streetwalkers offered themselves on Main Street, a thriving but seedy neighborhood of taxi dance halls (so named because a dancing partner could be hired like a taxi for a short period of time), burlesque shows, and “blind pigs” (where a shot of whiskey went for ten cents a gulp). Farther south, down on Central Avenue in the thirty-block area between Fourth Street and Slauson Avenue, an even more tempting scene was taking shape, one offering narcotics, craps, color-blind sex for sale, and a strange new syncopated sound called jazz.
The city also boasted a steamy sex circuit. Upscale “ninety-six clubs”—some just blocks away from City Hall—offered “queers,” “fairies,” or otherwise straight men a place for a discreet “flutter” or “twentieth century” (read: oral) sex in a luxurious setting. The less well-to-do worked a circuit of downtown speakeasies, bars, public baths, and parks along Main and Hill Streets—Maxwell’s, Harold’s, the Crown Jewel, the Waldorf. For those who could not afford “to spend a quarter or fifty cents for a dime’s worth of beer,” there were the parks. The poet Hart Crane, visiting Los Angeles in 1927, would marvel at what he saw in the lush groves of bamboo and banana trees in downtown’s Pershing Square. “The number of faggots cruising around here is legion,” he wrote friends back East. “Here are little fairies who can quote Rimbaud before they are eighteen.” The city itself was horrid, Crane wrote, but the sex was divine.
Then there was gambling. Amid the banks and stock brokerages of Spring Street, bootlegger Milton “Farmer” Page presided over a string of gambling clubs, the most imposing of which, the El Dorado, occupied the entire top floor of a downtown office building. There on a typical evening five to six hundred people would gather to play craps, poker, blackjack, roulette, and other games of skill and chance. At the corner of Spring and W. Third Streets, bookie
s waited to take the public’s wagers on the Mexican racing tracks or on Pacific Coast League baseball games. Nearby saloons provided upstairs rooms for poker and faro, sometimes even roulette, while younger and less prosperous customers stayed in the alleys to try their luck with the dice in one of the ubiquitous games of craps. Bingo games sucked away the earnings of bored housewives; card rooms distracted their husbands. “Bunco” men (as con men were then known) preyed on the unwitting, selling naive newcomers nonexistent stocks, gold mines, oil fields, and real estate. “Boulevard sheiks” prowled for and preyed on the growing number of working girls making their homes in Los Angeles. Among this teeming underworld’s victims was a seventeen-year-old emigrant from Deadwood, South Dakota, William H. Parker III.
IT’S HARD to imagine better preparation for 1920s Los Angeles than turn-of-the-century Deadwood, a town devoted, as one wag put it, “to gold, guns, and women.” Parker was born into a family that had played a large part in cleaning it up. His grandfather—the first William H. Parker—had arrived in the spring of 1877, less than a year after General Custer and the 210 men under his direct command were killed by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors at Little Big Horn, a hundred miles south of the mining camp. College educated, a former colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War who was later appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to be the first federal collector for tax revenue and the assistant U.S. attorney in the Colorado territory, Parker cut an imposing figure. Within days of arriving in the frontier settlement, he was made captain of a hastily assembled town militia, formed to protect the booming mining camp. In 1902, he became the district attorney, a position he occupied until 1906, when he was elected to Congress. His willingness to enforce closing hours on casinos and brothels earned him a reputation as a reformer. Prosperous, fierce (“a good hater,” said one acquaintance), aloof (“to many he may have appeared unapproachably chilly,” noted one friend in a memorial address to the Deadwood bar), Congressman Parker was one of Deadwood’s most imposing citizens—“dauntless, proud, imperious.”