While The Weasel dutifully attended Mickey’s Sunday bagel brunches, he had a different sort of bond with Johnny Rosselli, for ages the main emissary between Chicago and Jack Dragna. Within weeks of the Gangster Squad’s limo roust on Wilshire Boulevard, which rounded him up and five others, Fratianno had been beckoned by Rosselli to a winery south of downtown where a revolver and dagger were waiting on a long wooden table. Amid the pungent smell of fermented grapes, Jack Dragna personally presided over the ceremony where they pricked his finger to draw blood, said a few words in Sicilian, and everyone kissed his cheek. It was an induction they did not announce to the society pages … and of which the public still had not a clue, just as Mickey and his men had not a clue that Fratianno had given his other friends a signal as he left the haberdashery. If Mickey’s crew recognized the man in the cream-colored Panama who blew Hooky’s face off, they weren’t saying. “He had a hat and a gun, that’s all I know,” one testified at the inquest.
But Mickey had a strong suspicion that the shooting stemmed from how he had stepped up after Bugsy got knocked in. “People like Jack Dragna kept feeling that their prestige was badly shaken,” he figured later. To him, that’s what it was about, recognition, even if the old-school Dragna had no interest in the public variety. They couldn’t have been more opposite in that regard. Two decades had passed since the émigré from Corleone to Los Angeles had lent his name to the city’s Italian-American banquet and he had learned the wisdom of staying as far in the background as possible. Dragna’s office was a concrete-walled room behind a small grocery, not a haberdashery that sold gift suspenders and smoking jackets on the famous Sunset Strip, a place where the nightclubs and restaurants shot searchlight beams towards the heavens each evening. Mickey flew toward those lights.
That was not the sole appeal of the Strip to someone in the rackets. That stretch of the affluent Westside was like an island in the middle of Los Angeles, for it was in the heart of the city yet unincorporated county land, making it the domain of sheriff’s officials more tolerant (for a cut) of gambling and other pleasures-for-a-price. On paper, the Strip was not subject to the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles police. On paper, not in practice.
A month after the shooting at the haberdashery, a Gangster Squad car just happened to be driving by a club on Sunset as the manager of Mickey’s store, Mike Howard, was walking out. The usual roust was from a car—get out, empty your pockets, hands on the hood, spread ’em—but you could do it on a sidewalk too. When the squad’s imposing Giacopuzzi-Greeley duo patted down the store manager they found a snub-nosed .38 he had no license to carry. The former Meyer Horowitz was the oldest of Mickey’s crew, at fifty-four, and a veteran of the actual clothing business, a real rag man. Mickey didn’t want him rotting in a cell for thirty days.
“They should be looking for Hooky’s killers instead of harassing us,” Mickey griped. “They’re setting us up as clay pigeons. We got no way to protect ourselves. And he’s no ex-convict—he went through bankruptcy just like any other high-class citizen.”
The next month, Lieutenant Willie Burns showed up at the haberdashery and gave Mickey himself the treatment, the grounds being his role in the beating of a card player. Mickey had $3,011.20 in his pockets when Burns made him empty them, holding true to a childhood resolution to keep an impressive roll. Mickey said his mother beat the crap out of him when he was twelve after he hung his pants on a chair and $300 to $400 fell out—she figured he’d robbed a bank. He still favored a roll with the largest dominations on the outside but now insisted on crisp, clean ones. He swore that waiters deliberately gave him change using the dirtiest bills they could find, knowing he’d leave them all as a tip rather than put that filth back in his pocket. Such were the mind games played on the famous Sunset Strip.
* * *
THE BEST WAY to avoid blackmail is to not give ammunition to those who would blackmail you. The columnist Florabel Muir saw it as the most dangerous growth industry around town now that new methods of tapping phones and bugging rooms were available to private eyes of dubious ethics. They would feed dirt about the rich and celebrated to the scandal sheets, which then would offer to withhold the titillating expose for a fee. “Should a man of importance make the mistake of talking too freely to his light o’ love over the phone,” Florabel noted, “he’s liable to find a gent at the back door with a recording and demands for a payoff.” But the blackmail game could be played at a high level too, with a whole police department or a city, if they foolishly handed the ammunition to the wrong enemy. In Los Angeles, that appeared to be the personal mission of some of the Vice detectives who accounted for 150 of the LAPD’s 4,300 sworn officers.
Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson had been lauded for bravery when a young man with a machine gun approached the driver-side window of his parked car and said, “This is a holdup, give it to me.” Jackson pretended to reach for his wallet but got his revolver instead and shot dead Roy “Peewee” Lewis, twenty-three, whose machine gun turned out to have been stolen from the San Francisco armory. It was classic heroism, except for the minor wrinkle of the redhead seated beside Sergeant Jackson in the parked car. She was not an Administrative Vice clerical worker, as he listed her on the incident report. She was Hollywood’s leading madam. A scarlet lie like that might be kept secret for months, or a year but not forever—the relationship between the Vice sergeant and madam Brenda Allen would have one of those Sunset Strip spotlights shined on it when Mickey went on his crusade against the Los Angeles Police Department in 1949.
What set him off first was an incident not much different than the Gangster Squad’s rousts. That January 15, a group of LAPD Vice cops including the heroic Sergeant Jackson followed a pair of Cadillacs leaving Mickey’s store and stopped them on the sheriff’s turf, then arrested one of the drivers, charging Harold “Happy” Meltzer with having an unlicensed gun by the car’s front seat. A New Jersey native with 26 entries on his rap sheet, Happy ran the jewelry shop adjoining Mickey’s haberdashery, he was part of the crew. From his cell at the police lockup, he complained that the gun was a plant but didn’t make a fuss, joking that in addition to peddling watches he was “sort of a professional gambler, but not a very successful one.” Mickey was in no joking mood, however, not with one man dead, gun charges against two of his earners and the city coming down on him even when he tried to do good, for once, by helping a poor widow.
* * *
THAT WAS IN the case of Alfred Pearson, operator of the Sky Pilot Radio Shop. Person had become a reviled figure about town due to his attempt to foreclose on the home of sixty-three-year-old Elsie Phillips over an unpaid bill for $8.95. An enraged LAPD captain assigned to the city’s Police Commission got into a running feud with the greedy (and litigious) repairman and lined up a lawyer to plead the widow’s case. The next day, Mickey’s heavyweight henchman Jimmy Rist and several others paid the radio shop a visit posing as magazine reporters eager to hear the repairman’s side of the story. “When Pearson invited the four men behind a partition … without any warning, they beat him about the head and body with a gun, clubs, iron rods, and other heavy objects,” a subsequent court ruling summarized the action, failing to mention only the riding crop the crew used. “Pearson’s arm was broken and his head cut in five places. They tore telephones from the wall and … made their escape in an automobile, which was double-parked in front of the store.”
The vigilante justice might have worked had the escapees not made an illegal U-turn. A patrol car with two rookie officers witnessed the traffic violation and gave chase, then called for backup as a pair of vehicles sped away while the passengers tossed tire irons and other incriminating weapons out the windows. Though a police captain may have initiated the campaign on behalf of the widow Phillips, the ferocity of the beating forced authorities to bring assault and conspiracy charges against Mickey and his men, quickly dubbed “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Mickey being the symbol of purity. It cost him serious dough, though—$50,000 bond for
some of his crew, $25,000 for others, $100,000 for himself. Mickey may not have finished grade school but he asked a very smart question after that, “Why didn’t somebody just pay the goddamn radio bill?”
He was boiling angry by the time his jewelry man “Happy” Meltzer came to trial on May 5, 1949, for violating the state’s deadly weapons act in the Cadillac. Mickey arrived at the Hall of Justice with a secret weapon, J. Arthur Vaus, the 304-pound electronics expert who had helped him find the Vice bug in his wood box. On this day, Vaus carried a machine to play back wire recordings and ceremoniously placed it on the defense table before taking a seat next to Mickey in the front row of the courtroom.
Their attack was launched right in opening statements by the defense lawyer Mickey had lined up for Happy, Sam Rummel. He alleged that the gun-in-the-Caddy case was part of an eighteen-month effort by the LAPD’s central Administrative Vice unit to shake down the esteemed Mr. Cohen. Why did its leaders arrest his flunky, not Mickey? Rummel answered, “They did not want to kill the goose they hoped was going to lay the golden egg.”
In the days following, the lawyer and Mickey himself accused Sergeant E. V. Jackson and his boss Lieutenant Rudy Wellpott of trying to squeeze up to $20,000 in bribes from Mickey in return for a halt to the constant harassment. But why stop with them? Mickey said some of the payments they solicited were touted to him as political contributions—to Mayor Fletcher Bowron! It was quite a leap to accuse the gray-suited former jurist who used his radio speeches to promote the image of a booming and clean Los Angeles. Bowron at the moment was running for reelection, still warning about the insidious influence of “Eastern gangsters, big-time racketeers.” But the sixty-one-year-old reform mayor was just another phony by Mickey’s account, a crook like all the rest. He was going to bring everyone down to his level. They were freeloaders too, those cops—Mickey recounted how he often picked up their checks at places like the Brown Derby and Slapsy Maxie’s, the Wilshire Boulevard nightspot fronted by Maxie Rosenbloom, the hulking former prizefighter who often played punch-drunk types in the movies.
That still was merely an appetizer for Mickey’s main course, the explosive ammunition he had kept warming in the oven—details of how the red-haired madam had been paying off the same crooked cops. Mickey claimed to have recordings to prove it, made at her hilltop house of joy above the Sunset Strip, where else? That’s why his man had brought the playback machine. “When the jury hears these,” Mickey said, “it will blow this case right out of court.”
The judge finally said, stop, no more. “Happy” Meltzer was on trial for having a gun he claimed was planted. That was the issue for the jury, not whether bribes (or mayor contributions) were solicited or whether the madam and the sergeant engaged in afterhours hanky-panky. But so much mud had been thrown some had to stick. Indeed, some deserved to stick—when the Vice sergeant was questioned on the stand, he admitted allowing Mickey to pay for eats and drinks for him and his lieutenant.
Did you ever dine with Mickey Cohen?
Oh no, I have never eaten at the same table with him.
When you and Wellpott ate at Dave’s Blue Room with your friends, did you pay the check?
I didn’t pay the check. I don’t know who did.
Ever eat at the Piccadilly?
Yes, I have eaten there with others.
Did you pick up the check?
No, I don’t know who did.
Now how about the House of Murphy?
Well, uh—yes. I was there with another officer and a lady friend. Cohen and a party were at another table … When I asked for the bill, I was told Cohen had paid it.
After all that, the hung jury was inevitable. In the spirit of the times, the twelve men and women couldn’t decide who was telling the truth, if anyone, in the city going down, down, down.
* * *
THE GRAND JURY investigation was a natural, particularly into whether the Vice cops’ relationship with the madam had been adequately investigated by police higher-ups after she was in the sergeant’s car the night he’d shot the robber named Peewee. It hadn’t been. Chief Horrall could offer only a lame excuse for not getting to the bottom of the matter—he was too busy with his ceremonial duties, meeting with civic organizations. It was true that the bulbous-nosed chief napped more than ever on the cot in his office while his assistant, Joe Reed, largely ran the LAPD. But it was a sad scene when a haggard Chief Horrall came out of the grand jury room and pulled back the lapel on his coat to show his badge, trying to signal that he was still in charge. Mayor Bowron looked more chipper when he was called before the grand jury, fresh off re-election to another term—voters for some reason were not swayed by Mickey Cohen’s assertion that he was a crook.
One star witness, predictably, was the madam Brenda Allen, born Marie Mitchell. Wearing heavy makeup on her face, the thirty-six-year-old redhead spoke in a slight Southern accent as she told the grand jurors that, yes, she was paying off Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson, $50 per week, per girl—but she began paying more to a Hollywood Vice cop after she discovered him parked outside her place in his car, wearing headphones. Then there was her complaint about other cops she let in free to the parties in her parlor where her real customers cavorted with her girls. Her gripe with them? Those freeloading cops ate the nuts off the top of her pecan pie.
She instantly became another Los Angeles celebrity, the Hollywood Madam. Convicted on morals charges twenty-one times over the years, she said any talk of her having 114 girls was wildly inflated. But when Municipal Judge Joseph Call got a look at the black box with cards listing her clients he didn’t buy that she was small-time. “In this box are the names of dignitaries of the stage and screen and executives of responsible positions in many great industries,” the judge said while putting the box under lock and seal. Of course, that provided great fodder for the madam’s lawyer, Max Solomon, who from then on would playfully threaten prosecutors, judges, and fellow attorneys that he had kept a copy of her version of the little black book. “I see you’re in there,” he would tell them, “as a ‘bad lay.’”
Not that many years had passed since Mayor Bowron had gone on the radio to speechify, “There is no widespread commercialized gambling or vice in Los Angeles, no payoff. It is the cleanest large city in America.”
* * *
THE GANGSTER SQUAD was not immune from the mud throwing that sordid year. Their accuser was the second Vice cop the Madam herself had accused of taking bribes. At that time based in Hollywood but now drummed off the force, Sergeant Charles Stoker went wild unleashing his own allegations before the grand jury, to the Los Angeles Daily News (BIG EXPOSÉ TELLS VICE, POLICE LINK) and finally in a book filled with astonishing accounts of mobster coppers within the LAPD, a breathless tale of conspiracies around every corner. Did the public know the real reason Mayor Bowron tried to put the lid on gambling in L.A.? Not honest reform—the mayor was being bribed $250,000 by Nevada interests so Los Angeles gamblers would have to travel there! And Mickey? Los Angeles police needed a whipping boy. “Mickey Cohen is it,” Stoker said.
As for the Gangster Squad, “I defy anyone to go back over the record and show me a single instance in which Lt. Willie Burns arrested one important gangster in which the gangster in question was convicted,” he said. “It is well known that police officers under Lt. Burns were frequenters of Mickey Cohen’s cocktail bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, where they sat hour after hour in a room drinking Mickey Cohen’s whiskey … Why does Mayor Fletcher E. Bowron continuously bleat about the threatened invasion of eastern gangsters?… If the eastern gangsters came here, there wouldn’t be room for the crooked cops—they’d have to go east!!”
The Gangster Squad knew this Stoker all too well. Once when a couple of the men were seeking out Hollywood bookies to determine if they might become informants, Stoker got wind of what they were doing and fed them a hot tip about dangerous hoodlums holed up in the Valley. Willie Burns instructed Con Keeler and his partner to go out there with their Tommy gun, to
Keeler’s eventual frustration:
Winter, real cold, supposed to be a big gambling deal going on. And we got to this address and watched the place and finally a lady came on the back porch and hung out some diapers. No cars, no activity. So we finally go back to the Hollywood station and Burns is there too. So Burns says to Stoker, “What was the address?” Stoker couldn’t remember the address he’d given. He was trying to keep us busy and keep us out of Hollywood. Burns wanted to punch him out but I said, “Listen fella, if you ever send us out on a wild goose chase like that again I’m gonna go up on Hollywood Boulevard and book the ass of several of your bookmakers and tell ’em you sent me. Get it?”
By the standards by which Con Keeler measured his world, Sergeant Charles Stoker was not a down-the-line cop. But by the chaotic standards of 1949 Los Angeles, his ranting, like Mickey’s, was the stuff of headlines.
* * *
AMID THE SNOWBALLING scandals, Keeler got the job of visiting Big Jim Vaus, the private bug man now living on Mickey’s dime. Vaus never did play his recordings for the grand jury, either—just as he was scheduled to bring them in he announced that six spools of wire recordings had been stolen from the trunk of his car. Then he said they were buried in his yard. If 1949 was the year a gigantic circus tent enveloped the city, the blubbery bug man was poised for his moment in center ring. The son of a minister, Vaus was having second thoughts about selling his soul to … well, one person’s whipping boy was another’s devil. The epiphany came to Vaus during a visit to a real tent, part of the canvas cathedral crusade of the sensational young evangelist Billy Graham. Big Jim Vaus found his way back to Jesus there and dedicated his life to repent—and perhaps someday save the soul of the man the Chicago mob boys called “the Little Jew.” First, Mickey’s private bug man admitted he had lied about what was on his recordings and went to jail for perjury.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 10