It was a great prank to share with the squad afterward, the fake drive-by, at least until the double-barreled shotguns started firing for real. But before those blasts echoed across the Sunset Strip, Jack O’Mara would meet the man whose future would intertwine with Mickey’s, and his, in ways he could not imagine.
CHAPTER 8
O’Mara Meets the Whalens
O’Mara got the word when he arrived for the night shift April 16, 1948: “Freddie the Thief” Whalen had been kidnapped by three Fresno men who said he had conned $2,900 from them and a bookie friend. Fred Whalen was taking a stroll near his Hollywood home with his twenty-month-old grandson—the son of his daughter Bobie—when the trio descended and handcuffed him, then shoved him in the back of a car and drove off, leaving the toddler on the sidewalk. Family members saw the abduction and ran after the fleeing car, then called the Hollywood station, setting in motion an all-points bulletin that helped police seize the culprits in Burbank. They had been threatening to take Freddie up in a plane and drop him from the skies if he didn’t return the money he’d suckered from them as “Dr. Harry Moore.”
The general public still had no idea who Fred Whalen was unless they were hard-core pool players who knew of his trick shot exhibitions or his challenge match with the great Ralph Greenleaf a decade earlier. But Freddie the Thief was a legend among Bunco and gambling detectives, who considered him the cleverest con man Los Angeles had seen in years, or perhaps ever, if you discounted the fellow who’d stung half the city with an oil stock swindle in the ’20s. Then again, C. C. Julian fled the country and killed himself—Freddie Whalen was still around, topping himself with one new scam after another. When many bootleggers foundered after Prohibition, he had simply started buying cheap drug store whiskey and reselling it as expensive Johnny Walker, in look-alike bottles. But this current scam—the reason three Fresno guys wanted to drop him from an airplane—was something else, pure genius.
Freddie would go to a hospital posing as a visiting doctor, wearing the white coat and stethoscope around his neck. First thing, he’d carry a break-the-ice bouquet of roses to the receptionist and switchboard operator and introduce himself as doctor-so-and-so, Dr. Harry Moore up in Fresno. He would explain that he’d be around a week checking on a couple of patients as a favor to one of the hospital’s regular physicians who was away on vacation, then give the phone operator that oversized smile and say, “I’m expecting a call, dear, and if you’d page me I’d appreciate it.” Next Freddie would spread the word around the hospital that he had a passion for the ponies and did anyone know where he could place a bet? He would be connected to the local bookie in no time and place a few small wagers to start, sure losers. After that, he’d make the bookie a proposition—how about if he, Dr. Moore, collected bets from people at the hospital? What an offer—an amiable doctor volunteering to solicit wagers for you! And from fellow physicians, nurses and patients! What bookie could resist? Few could, though they might do their due diligence and call the hospital to check if he was legit. “Oh, Dr. Moore, certainly,” the hospital operator would say. “Let me page him.”
At midmorning, the horse-happy Dr. Moore would arrange for the bookie or his runner to meet him at a nearby motel so he could hand over the bets from the hospital—written on index cards—just as the day’s races were to begin on the East Coast. Freddie would offer the guy a drink and tell a few jokes, filling a little time. His mark had no way of knowing that an associate or two—sometimes his brothers-in-law, the Wunderlichs—were in the adjoining room, getting the results over the phone as the races were run. They used a thin curved wire to slide additional index cards under the door with new bets, except these were winning wagers, often on long shots. The furniture in Freddie’s motel room had been rearranged so that the desk was in front of the door between the rooms, blocking the mark’s view of the cards being slid underneath on the wire, then up to him, seated at the desk. Being a pro with his (pool shark’s) hands, Freddie effortlessly slipped the new cards into the stack he was handing the bookie, one at a time. The dupe had no reason to suspect a con—the doc had been alone with him since before the tracks opened. It was classic past-posting that took one bookie after another to the cleaners in communities around California and beyond. “Daddy didn’t get above the fifth grade,” his daughter said, “but he didn’t need it.”
This time, Freddie had outdone himself by convincing a bookie in Merced that he could gather bets from three hospitals in nearby Fresno. The bookie rounded up several associates to back the venture, only to quickly lose $2,900 because of a series of seemingly lucky winning wagers. That’s when the stung trio got suspicious and followed the good doctor, then decided to help him skydive without a parachute from a private plane out of Burbank airport. But after they snatched Freddie off the street in Hollywood and roughed him up a bit, he volunteered a way to pay them back—with his wife’s two diamond rings, 10 carats and 5 carats, worth $12,000 at least. The trio bit and called Lillian from a pay phone to tell her to bring the jewelry, fast, to a Burbank drug store. The police showed up instead.
* * *
O’MARA HOPED TO learn, for starters, who stood behind the stung bookmaker. The trio who snatched Freddie appeared to be low on the gambling food chain, one describing himself as a former plumber, another as a stud poker dealer and sheet rock finisher. But many bookies were paying someone like Mickey up the ladder, if not for the racing wire then for protection, whether from his own goons or from (bribable) authorities … or from past-posting scammers. It made sense to have muscle behind you that could administer painful punishment to people who dared to cheat you. One state report estimated that Mickey had 500 bookies in his network, charging them by the phone. Dragna no doubt had a slew paying him. So O’Mara headed over to Fred Whalen’s place in Hollywood, playing a long shot himself.
Freddie lived now in a garden apartment in the flats, on Lodi Street, across from the Hollywood Studio Club, the sorority-like rooming house for young women in the entertainment industry, or trying to crack it. A twenty-one-year-old wannabe named Joan Cory was coming out of the club just as Freddie was walking his grandson and witnessed his abduction—“It looked like a scene from a movie,” the dark-haired actress said. Another young aspirant living at the rooming house that year was the former munitions plant worker Norma Jeane Baker, who posed nude for the first time to earn $50. “I was behind in my rent,” explained the roomer who would become better known as Marilyn Monroe.
Freddie Whalen let Jack O’Mara in, no problem, like he had nothing to hide. They talked turkey, too, the two Irishmen—Whalen and O’Mara. Only one other person was present, Fred’s son, Jack, though O’Mara never would have guessed they were related. The elder Whalen was of average build and dressed in a short-sleeve white shirt and looking incredibly relaxed for someone who’d nearly been dropped from a plane—he had ultimate confidence in his wits. His son, in contrast, was pure physicality. O’Mara’s hand disappeared when he shook Jack Whalen’s massive mitt. Photos around the living room showed the younger Whalen in uniform—Freddie proudly reported that his boy had been a pilot in the war. The kid looked the part, too—dashing, as they say, with thick, wavy, jet-black hair. He resembled the darkly brooding bad-boy actor Robert Mitchum, only he was much broader and thicker than Mitchum. Shaking his hand was enough to unsettle you.
But the son, Jack Whalen, said little. He mostly paced about, grim-faced, as his dad finally said, no—he didn’t know much about the trio who had come down to kill him and certainly wouldn’t testify against them.
O’Mara didn’t argue. He understood the code among thieves. Plus, Freddie could hardly get on the witness stand and explain what he was doing in a Fresno hospital in a white coat and stethoscope. They parted with an agreement, then. If unsavory visitors tried that again, Freddie would let his new friend on the Gangster Squad know. Freddie wouldn’t have to worry about going to court. Sergeant J. J. O’Mara would take ’em up into the hills for a chat.
; CHAPTER 9
A Bug in Mickey’s TV
The Gangster Squad finally was given an office, albeit a cubbyhole in the ancient Central Station, which still had horse stalls from the 1800s and a circular turnaround where the old horse-drawn Paddy wagons had been pivoted about. When they got the go-ahead to get a secretary, she was picked carefully—Sally Scott had top security clearance during the war, when she worked for the Navy in Washington. She helped Keeler transfer data from their breast-pocket notebooks to five-by-seven cards. She took out mail subscriptions to newspapers from around the country so she could clip any articles about the hoodlums and file them in a small cabinet next to their spittoon. They still received their paychecks as if they were in their old jobs, but they had a place now, complete with a hat rack by the door.
Their greater reward was the knowledge they were getting to Mickey—the bug in his home made that clear. The day after their limo roust on Wilshire, his henchman Neddie Herbert was overheard saying, “I can’t meet you at the Mocambo, I’m afraid they’ll pick me up.” At 3:30 A.M., Neddie rushed into Mickey’s bedroom to update him, “Somebody else got picked up. Jesus Christ. I’m getting out of this. I want to live to be a grandfather.”
“They can’t make anybody leave town,” Mickey insisted. “It’s against the Constitution.”
Later he was overheard grumbling that some LAPD officers were harassing customers at his haberdashery, sometimes smearing their new clothes with red chalk. “For god’s sake, some of these guys got on $200 suits,” Mickey said. “It’s ridiculous—anybody they see leave the store they take right downtown.”
Another of his crew was overheard wondering whether Willie Burns was campaigning to be “the next Mayor of Hollywood.”
So the Gangster Squad could take pleasure in getting Mickey’s goat. But it couldn’t take credit for the eavesdropping that proved it—or be blamed when that turned into a fiasco. The bug in question had been planted by a Vice crew back when the squad was getting organized, right at the time Mickey’s rising fortunes enabled him to buy and renovate a ranch home in Brentwood, an upscale suburb he assumed was outside Los Angeles’ borders. It wasn’t—Brentwood was part of the city—and the Vice detectives posed as construction workers on a rainy day, when the real ones took off, putting on hardhats and work boots and nonchalantly going in and out of the torn-apart house. They hid their microphone between the fireplace and wood box in Mickey’s living room then ran a thin wire under the lawn to a telephone pole and from there to a listening station. The bug was set to go by the time Mickey and Lavonne Cohen moved to 513 Moreno Avenue with their dog Tuffy, a Boston bull terrier.
It was a wonderful coup, but for one mistake, the Vice team’s use of a private electronics expert. Russ Mason was paid for helping them get the bug going, and he expected to be hired to monitor the wire, also. When he wasn’t given that job, he secretly ran a second line to his own listening post, setting the stage for the eventual public disclosure of 126 pages of notes chronicling conversations overheard in Mickey’s home.
But that scandal came later. For a year, from April 13, 1947 to April 28, 1948, the bug by the wood box gave a group of LAPD officers a pretty good idea of what Mickey was up to.
He was up to a lot, whether plotting to fix a prizefight being staged for charity, lamenting that “We need a shotgun in this outfit” or gossiping with the boys about an old friend back in Cleveland who bought an estate for $120,000 and had “gone for society—maids, butlers, cooks, chauffeurs.” The year’s worth of conversations also made it clear where Mickey was doing most of his business, namely in the nearby city of Burbank and in unincorporated portions of the county, the Sheriff’s turf. Perhaps the LAPD once was the logical place for racketeers to secure protection for gambling, but not now. In Burbank, Mickey built a full casino on the Dincara Stock Farm, out past Warner Bros. studios. He and his boys occasionally rode horses out there in full western regalia, and put their first craps table in a shed used by stable hands. Before long they had four craps tables, five for blackjack, three for chemin de fer, and slot machines, as well. The gamblers were offered free drinks and grub—turkeys and ham—served by Filipino house boys. Mickey thought it was a scream, the film crowd they drew, “there’d be guys in Indian suits or dressed up like cowboys, or girls dressed up like doing a dance. They’d just come over from the set.”
One of Mickey’s pals laid out the potential take from the casino, “if that joint can go for 90 days, it’ll be worth over half a million.” They did have to worry about occasional raids by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, but not by Burbank police—the chief there, Elmer Adams, earned $8,500 a year yet was able to buy a 56-foot yacht largely with cash. Adams once received $100 from a bookie in the mail while attending an FBI training program outside Washington, D.C. He enjoyed his suits from Mickey’s store and dinners at Mickey’s house.
But Los Angeles police could not gloat too easily about the comical level of corruption in Burbank and on the county’s turf—a retired LAPD captain, Jack Dineen, was running Mickey’s ranch casino. And Mickey griped about how L.A. cops kept hitting him up to buy tickets to their annual show, a fundraiser featuring professional talent like the young song-and-dancer Sammy Davis Jr. Mickey calculated that he had forked over $1,600 for all those damn tickets.
* * *
LOS ANGELES HAD a bona fide gangster on its hands. The Mickey Cohen overheard by that bug was more than a pint-sized peacock putting on his own show by leading a procession of Cadillacs about town. Yet it wasn’t easy to get the goods on him, for he’d be puffing one day about having books at five racetracks doing $8,000 to $15,000 in business, then remark, “I haven’t booked a horse in four years … Hooky is leaving Cleveland tonight. He is bringing me $45,000 so I can finish this house.” One reassuring visitor was Allen Smiley, the man on the other end of the sofa the night Bugsy was killed. Smiley marveled at how Mickey stood up to all the setbacks, the headache moments. “Some men are born to have ulcers,” Smiley told him, “and some men are born to give ulcers.” Everyone in the room knew which one Mickey was born to be.
Thank goodness for Lavonne Cohen. She would be up waiting when Mickey got home at 3:00 A.M., put out coffee and pie for the fellas and entertain them by showing all the tricks Tuffy could do. She was training their birds to talk, too. The Cohens’ marble-topped coffee table always had a vase full of flowers and she kept two dozen crystal containers of scents and potions on the mirrored vanity in her boudoir. So what if she chided Mickey about the phone bills that ran to $300 on a month when he was laying off bets for that guy in Florida? She could cook “in t’ree languages,” Mickey boasted, “Jewish, Italian, and Irish.”
They met in 1940 at a party at Billy Gray’s Band Box, a club that drew a lot of comedians in the Fairfax District, an area populated with Jews moving up from Boyle Heights. But Lavonne was not of the tribe—she was a twenty-three-year-old Irish Catholic who wore her red hair primly up, worked as a dance instructor at the studios, had an aviator’s license, and golfed. She was anything but a gun moll, another way Mickey was evolving himself. She was “a lady from her toes to her head,” Mickey noted. “You could take her anywhere.” That didn’t mean he always took her out on the town, of course, for the trade-off was the usual one in such marriages—she could help herself to the cash he kept in the dresser but she wouldn’t ask about other women who might have been at his table on any particular night.
* * *
THE GANGSTER SQUAD often had a car outside the Cohen house in those days. Mickey was understandably suspicious of any cops—“Who’s behind you?” he’d ask—but he generally was a good sport about their surveillance. Lavonne once sent out chocolate cake to two of the guys in the unmarked car. On one hot day the Cohens’ faithful maid, Willa, came out and asked if they wanted a beer. Hell yeah, they did.
But Willie Burns, Jack O’Mara, and the rest only learned of the Vice bug with the rest of the public, when the scandal broke—such were the
turf wars and secrets and tensions within a police department. Mickey himself apparently had sensed what was up because he could be heard warning callers, “these phones are no good, so take it easy.” Or sometimes he turned the radio way up when he was having a conversation. Later on Mickey said, “I knew all the time the cops had a bug in my rug. I gave them fine music, nothing but the best Bach and Beethoven.”
His gardener discovered the wire outside while digging up fence posts. Mickey then had his property swept by his own electronics expert, 304-pound J. Arthur Vaus, who used a metal detector and current sensor to find the bug by the wood box. Still, Mickey kept quiet about it until the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle published pages of purported transcripts under headlines that blared, COHEN’S BIG DEALS or more stingingly, COPS HAVE BEEN SITTING ON THE DATA.
While Mickey’s own words drew much of the focus, so did the fact that the LAPD had overheard them and done nothing, or so it seemed. An angry county prosecutor said he had never been informed of the bugging and given a chance to determine if a criminal case could be made from the overheard nuggets—that outburst became, D.A. BLASTS/COP COVERUP/ON COHEN. To City Councilman Ernest Debs, it smacked of a return to the crooked old days in L.A. when the Vice Squads might get the goods on criminals merely to extort payoffs. “They must have gotten the information to shake down Mickey Cohen,” the councilman said. A grand jury called in every Vice officer who had monitored the bug amid reports that their transcripts were for sale along the Sunset Strip—you could enter Mickey Cohen’s inner sanctum for $2,500! It was one giant nightmare for the LAPD.
Luckily it was not hard to determine how the bugged conversations had gotten out to the world. The “transcripts” really weren’t, they were notes the private investigator had taken on the sly after being stiffed by the Vice boys. When Russ Mason was confronted, he tried the equivalent of a first grader’s “the-dog-ate-my-homework”—he said a mysterious fire had destroyed his backyard shed with all his records. The private eye clung to that story for about fifteen minutes before he confessed. The lesson was: Never trust an outsider to do your dirty work.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 8