Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles

by Paul Lieberman

  The nightclub managers did not even report the squeeze themselves, they didn’t dare to—a couple of bookies had witnessed an episode and quietly passed the word. All the squad had to do was disperse in pairs to the various Hollywood hotspots and wait. Jumbo and his partner came up with one hit, sitting at a bar, sipping a few drinks to blend in. Right in front of them, like out of an underworld comic book—they swore it was this brazen—two guys come in, one says:

  “We’re here for the protection money.”

  “Protection from what?” asks the bartender.

  “Protection from this,” says the second Detroit guy, and punches the barkeep. Then he reaches into the till to take the cash, with the walk-away line, “See ya next week.”

  The owners of the joints still would not testify. As O’Mara said, “What are you gonna do? Are you gonna leave it or are you gonna take action?” He had an action in mind.

  * * *

  JOHN J. O’MARA was not a native, either. Who was? He wasn’t sure how his family got from Ireland to Portland, Oregon, but that’s where he was born in 1917 and spent his toddler years. Then the record winter of 1919–20 dumped 40 inches of snow in one day above the Hood River, followed by 1922’s “silver thaws,” where the rain fell through a layer of frigid air and came down as ice ready to kill, each drop like a bullet from the sky. “My dad said, ‘California here we come, where the streets are paved with gold.’” His father piled the seven children into the Model T and off they went to join the great migration, reaching Los Angeles the same year as the Whalens, except the O’Maras came from the north.

  Jack’s dad found work with the power company, believing a weekly paycheck to be the foundation for survival. It also was enough to buy a small two-bedroom house in working class South Los Angeles then build another bedroom for the three boys in the back. The kids all started in the parish school at Nativity Church, which crammed eight grades into four classrooms and taught that heaven and hell were real, not abstractions. There was good and evil and not much between. Perhaps fighting fell in the middle, though—the boys sure did a lot of it, that’s how Jack’s nose got broken. He was a scrawny boy with jet black hair and piercing turquoise eyes that the family saw as a badge of the true-blooded Irish—he could easily be mistaken for an innocent fresh off the boat. But those same wide blue eyes had a way of looking through people, and intimidating them, long before he realized it.

  When it was time for high school, the O’Mara girls were sent to parochial Saint Agnes while the boys were unleashed on public Manual Arts, known for its shop classes in printing, auto mechanics, and blacksmithing, and its football and track teams. Though Jack gave hints of his strength in his sturdy neck and gnarled hands, he was five foot nine and chicken-chested and relegated to running cross-country and middle distances, like the half-mile, where sheer determination could carry the day—he basically went as fast as he could until he conked out. His social life revolved around an unapproved fraternity spearheaded by Frank Bruce, a Memphis, Tennessee, boy destined to become an aerospace millionaire. Calling themselves Delta Tau Sigma, they rented the bottom of a house in Hermosa Beach with just enough room for eight of them to put on suits, run down to the water and later crash on the floor, or have boxing matches. That’s when Jack discovered he could knock down bigger guys, “I surprised ’em,” is what he’d say. They entered a team in the semi-pro Municipal Football Association, which staged games at a field where up to 10,000 spectators were invited to drop a token of appreciation into a hat, usually 25 cents. The “two-bit football” drew one team of rugged San Pedro Longshoremen and another that was all black, the Ross Snyder Bulldogs. Filled out to 135 pounds, O’Mara told his teammates, “Give me the ball, I’ll run right through them,” and Delta Tau Sigma won the league title in ’39, you could look it up.

  But the fraternity’s most popular activity was girl-hunting on Catalina Island. The boys saved up to buy $3.95 tickets that included a round trip on the big white steamer and a night in “villas” that were little more than tents. During the day, they spear-fished out of a makeshift diving bell built from an old water heater, the air hand-pumped into it through a sixty-foot garden hose. Their prime destination, however, was the island’s famous Casino, not the gambling type, the dancing one. The massive art deco ballroom in Avalon Harbor drew the big bands of Glenn Miller and Harry James and hordes of young ladies eager to let off steam doing the jitterbug.

  Connie Paegel was sixteen when he noticed her calves across the room. She was a Saint Agnes girl like his sisters, dark-haired with pale hazel cat eyes, a golden under-glow to her skin, and curves all over. She was a lively dancer too, an early bobby-soxer, yet clearly sheltered—she would never drive a car in her life. What she noticed about him was equally profound, “He was the skinniest guy, the smallest and the toughest. He had muscles.” More than seventy years later, one of their daughters sized up another era’s boy-meets-girl this way:

  You married a woman because she had great legs and big tits and she was pretty and fun and you wanted to get her into the sack. And you married a man because he was handsome and he’ll be a good provider and you wanted to get out of the house. It wasn’t like a huge amount of thought or existential angst went into selecting these mates, right?

  Before the wedding, Connie went with her mom and sister to check out dresses at I. Magnin and tried on one that the elegant actress Myrna Loy might have worn, with layers of silk and lace. Then they went home and got on the old foot-pedal black Singer and sewed up a perfect replica. Connie kept a little photo-diary book chronicling “Our Wedding Journey” and “Our Honeymoon” in which she duly noted how she and Jack took the winding road up into the San Bernardino Mountains, a drive that was spooky but fun.

  Got to Big Bear about 7 in the evening—found a nice cabin & then went for dinner & what a dinner … we bought rums, cokes & lime and went back to the cabin. Had a few drinks and retired—!

  When they awoke the next morning, it was snowing. A day later, they had to shovel themselves out.

  * * *

  HE TOLD HER he wanted to be a cop the night they met. He already was out of high school, scrounging jobs at the gas company and joining some of the frat crowd in unloading freight trains that came down overnight from San Francisco. In the Depression, you took whatever work you could get. He was considering applying to the FBI, but Los Angeles needed bodies more in the wake of its scandals. With so many men fired or retired, the new Bowron administration was ready for an influx of fresh blood. The future Connie O’Mara said that sounded great—maybe he’d rise to chief someday—and she stuffed him with bananas and ice cream to make sure he met the minimum weight. John J. O’Mara entered the Police Academy on September 3, 1940 and became part of the generation that was supposed to forge a new LAPD. Of course, he foolishly kept challenging the fastest recruit at the Academy to race, never understanding why he couldn’t beat Tom Bradley, a former UCLA track star poised to become one of just 100 black officers on the force and eventually the first black mayor of Los Angeles.

  He worked traffic and patrol before the war, with only one complaint against him, from a drunk he pulled out of a car. He once got a call that his kid brother had been picked up for causing a ruckus in a bar, so he took off his gun and asked to be left alone in a cell with Paul—Jack’s knuckles ached for days after that. He fired his gun one time, when he caught a burglar breaking into an apartment of two old ladies. The man took a slash at him with a knife then ran off and started climbing a fence—Jack got him in the ass, like Archie with the guy in Watts. In those days they didn’t question why you shot someone running away, they congratulated you on your aim.

  After Pearl Harbor the Coast Guard sought out policemen, thinking they might be valuable in helping to protect ports and other critical installations. But they gave them all aptitude tests first and ordered O’Mara to an Aleutian Islands cryptography unit working to intercept Japanese communications, part of the effort to break the Japanese code. Who knew he
had brains? The hush-hush work at times had him on desolate Adak Island, but he twice snuck Connie up there and rented a small room in someone’s house on the mainland, all against regulations—even then he was willing to break the rules for a good cause.

  When he got out of the service, he was a pipe-smoking 165-pound Spencer Tracy look-alike, and just the sort Willie Burns wanted for his secretive squad that was going to protect Los Angeles from evil invaders.

  * * *

  O’MARA AND JERRY Thomas, “The Professor,” were staking out a nearby nightspot when Jumbo and his partner seized the two strong-arm assholes from Detroit. Thomas was great on such assignments because he could reproduce every word your suspects said without using a notebook—they thought you were shooting the breeze but he was getting it all down in his head.

  “Where should we take ’em?” Jumbo asked when the two Gangster Squad teams met to decide the fate of their evening’s catch.

  “Why not the desert?” Thomas said. “Strip ’em down, leave ’em there.”

  “City Hall no good?” Jumbo said—there were empty rooms in the basement they could use at night with no one around to see or hear what they did.

  “No, let’s take ’em up,” O’Mara said, and that was it.

  The view was great from Mulholland Drive, the winding road atop the hills that divide Los Angeles, so why not show it to the hoods muscling in on the Hollywood hotspots? It was a five minute drive up from the Sunset Strip, no one saying a word, all squeezed together, the cops and the hoods.

  Los Angeles policemen had taken suspects up into those hills before. O’Mara was hardly the first to suggest it. But the new assignment called for a new approach.

  I’d emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago this wasn’t Cleveland. This is L.A. and we’re not going to put up with this crap and get the word out to your people back East. And we leaned on ’em a little, you know what I mean, up in the Hollywood Hills, off Coldwater Canyon, anywhere up there. And it’s dark at night, and we’d talk to them man to man.

  O’Mara liked the darkness of the hills, with the city twinkling in the distance, to make his point. Amid the darkness, to drive it home, he put a gun to one guy’s ear. He didn’t plan what he said. It just popped out.

  You wanna sneeze?

  And that became the O’Mara signature, the gun in the ear and a few suggestive words.

  Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A … real … loud … sneeze?

  CHAPTER 6

  Mickey Moves Up, Bugsy Moves (Six Feet) Down

  The columns called Benny Siegel a “Hollywood sportsman” or some such nonsense when he was seen with another B-starlet or his old friend George Raft, the smooth cabaret dancer turned movie tough guy. Los Angeles was a playground for Bugsy, who had come of age on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as part of an alliance of real-life Italian and Jewish tough guys including Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the latter eventually giving him the Mafia version of the old pep talk, “Go West, young man.”

  No one was sure exactly when he arrived for good—’34, ’35, ’36, or ’37—but he didn’t come out to hide out. He could be found along the Sunset Strip or holding court in a box at Santa Anita racetrack, waving to other bettors while jotting down his Ws and Ls in a little black book. You also might find him taking meetings at the steam room at the Hollywood Athletic Club or yukking it up at Hillcrest, the Jewish golf club whose members included the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, and many of the studio moguls—that may explain why they were willing to deal with him when he moved in for a time on the union that represented screen extras, trusting him to deliver labor peace for a price.

  Mickey Cohen laid out the qualities he admired in the man quite succinctly, “money, clothes, and class.” When it came to capturing the look, Bugsy was up there with the aptly named Joe Adonis and with Frank Costello, the New York mob boss who mixed comfortably with the powerful squares of the world. In Mickey’s eyes, Bugsy’s cashmere-suit style was the opposite of the old Moustache Petes, who often dressed like rag pickers. He wasn’t necessarily referring to Jack Dragna, who dressed OK. But Dragna was “lackadaisical,” Mickey said, and that was a prime reason the organization sent Bugsy out, and him later on. Dragna may have been working L.A. since 1914 but “he wasn’t able to put a lot of things together to the satisfaction of the eastern people.” So there was some tension, you know? Bugsy’s main ties were to New York, Dragna’s to Chicago. Plus the Italian-Jew thing—such an alliance may have made sense on the Lower East Side but not every Sicilian bought into being upstaged by those people. “Fuck Dragna,” Bugsy basically said to that.

  Fortunately, there was money to be made for all in the new enterprise of choice. As if to hand the racketeers a timely gift, Santa Anita Park opened on Christmas Day almost exactly a year after the end of Prohibition cut off their main revenue stream. The races fueled a demand to place bets legally on the track and illegally off of it, and also provided a simpler way for Bugsy and his friends to get legions of bookies to cut them in on their take, through a racing wire. The wires provided the essential information—track conditions, jockeys, etc., along with results—directly to customers over telegraph-like tickers or through regional distributors, who printed up the data on the daily scratch sheets neither bettors nor bookies could do without. One local distributor boasted that he was a leg of a loop that “circumvents the United States.” He was asked if he really meant circumvents as in circumvents the laws? “Circumcises, I don’t give a shit what you call it,” he said. “It goes coast to coast.”

  Bugsy’s top priority on the West Coast was pushing the mob’s Trans-America wire, and he worked wonders in Nevada, where gambling was legal—he gained a monopoly at many of the gambling houses, sending an estimated $25,000 a month his way. While not the most faithful husband, he was able to build a 12,000-square-foot home for his wife and two daughters in Los Angeles’ exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood and enrolled the girls in a private school and riding academy. The mansion had a recessed bar flanked by slot machines, a large pool, and more powder rooms than most houses have rooms. Bugsy wasn’t just flash, he had the cash.

  * * *

  HE WAS LISTED as “Siegel, Benjamin” in the notebook Con Keeler began keeping on the Gangster Squad’s targets: height, weight, address, aliases, hangouts, car type, plate number, and so on. Keeler used a fine-tip pen and precise, compressed handwriting because the book was so slender, able to slide into his breast pocket. Regular files were not an option if you had no office, if you didn’t exist. “Damn fine print,” Lieutenant Willie Burns told him. “I can’t see it.”

  There quickly were dozens of names in the little book, but Bugsy was of special interest because he validated the darkest visions of city officials. The squad got the lecture from Assistant Chief Joe Reed, who with his paunch and balding head fancied himself resembling the British leader Winston Churchill. Reed gathered them after hours at City Hall to talk about … New York. He warned that underworld figures in that state were feeling the heat because their governor was Tom Dewey, who had made his mark as a prosecutor and mob fighter, up there with Eliot Ness, the Treasury agent. “Trust me, they’ll be looking for fertile ground,” Reed said. “They’re comin’ out.”

  It may have sounded like paranoia, but one other Murder, Inc. figure already had done that, with fatal consequences. George Harry Schachter, aka “Big Greenie,” had snuck out west for his safety after foolishly hinting to mob associates in New York that he might cooperate with authorities if they didn’t pay him more. How dumb was Big Greenie? They pumped five shots into his head and neck after he eased his Ford convertible to the curb in front of a Hollywood rooming house. When the LAPD pulled Bugsy in on suspicion of murder, he asked to borrow a comb and necktie from the detectives who escorted him to the jail. “I’m Ben Siegel and I’m not gonna look like a bum,” he said.

  The case went nowhere when a key witness in New York plunged to his death from a hotel window, but at least Bug
sy was described with a little less naivete in L.A. after that. He now was in the columns as a “onetime New York police character” or even as “a man who lived by the bluff of his good connections.” The hardest part for Bugsy was having to resign, with a boot at his rear, from Hillcrest Country Club. “I missed the golfing,” he said.

  * * *

  MICKEY CRINGED WHEN anyone suggested that he was brought out to be Bugsy’s gofer and mindless muscle. In his first years in L.A. he fancied himself still the wild young buck who didn’t need anyone’s permission to stick up bookie joints, nightclubs, even one of Dragna’s gambling places. At the same time, “Benny was trying to put some class in me and trying to evolve me,” Mickey said, and he did study the New Yorker’s dress and lifestyle. For one thing, he followed Bugsy’s lead in avoiding alcohol—it paid to keep a clear head in their line of work, as when the operator of a competing racing wire needed to be sent a message. Mickey did a characteristic verbal dance when asked later about the visit he and Joe Sica paid to Bugsy’s uncooperative rival.

  Q: Were you convicted of administering a beating to Russell Brophy?

  Cohen: No, sir.

  Q: Let’s start at the beginning. Russell Brophy managed the wire service in Los Angeles, is that right?

  Cohen: That is right.

  Q: Giving racing wire service to bookies?

  Cohen: That is right.

  Q: You and Joe Sica entered the place and beat him up, isn’t that correct?