But the bug man’s repentance came too late for Chief C. B. Horrall. In Florabel Muir’s words, “The county grand jury handed out spades and shovels and went to digging up dirt on a lot of badge wearers from the chief on down.” Largely a figurehead now, the chief said screw it and on June 28, 1949, retired to the pigs and cows on his five acres in the Valley. Mickey Cohen could gloat that he’d taken down the city’s top cop and gloat he did, when he wasn’t dodging bullets again. The year was only half done.
* * *
THE SHOOTING UP of Mickey’s car likely would have become public knowledge eventually, but O’Mara credited the Secret Service Fund with bringing the incident to light almost right away. From the squad’s first days, the fund was among its most important tools, up there with the Tommies. They had $25,000 at their disposal to pay informants—it often took more than Irish charm to get people to tell you things. Soon after the farcical Happy Meltzer trial, Jack O’Mara got a tip from one of the characters on his dole.
One of those funny deals, a guy was playing baseball out in the Valley and he knew somebody who knew somebody, a guy who worked in a body shop, who said a Cadillac had come in with a windshield blown out. So I got checking into it and found out it was Mickey’s. At that time his guy Neddie Herbert was living in an apartment out there and Mickey parked his car and took Neddie Herbert’s Cadillac. Then they switched the plates. But Mickey’s Caddy was in the garage, all shot up, his windshield and side window. He’d never reported it and when we got to him he denied the whole deal, you know?
Later in life, Mickey didn’t deny it—he was rightly proud of his coolness under fire when his car was blasted. Just as he pulled it into his Brentwood driveway, gunmen started shooting from across the street. He ducked below window-level and floored the accelerator, going backwards out the driveway, and sped off virtually blind up the street. “The minute I sensed what was happening I fell to the floor and drove that goddamned car … all the way down to Wilshire with one hand. That’s about a mile … With all the shooting, I only got hit with the flying glass.” When Mickey finally returned home, bleeding and disheveled, he greeted his evening’s startled guests, including actor George Raft, Bugsy’s childhood friend. Mickey said he told ’em, “Don’t worry what happened. Let’s sit down and have dinner,” so they did, including an apple pie made special for the movie tough guy Mr. Raft.
But guns fired continually in your direction are not likely to miss forever. Any doubt that Mickey was a target evaporated that July 20, when he was shot in the shoulder outside Sherry’s cafe on Sunset. The 3:45 A.M. shotgun blasts from across the street fatally wounded Neddie Herbert, the crew member who had been overheard by the wood pile bug worrying about living to be a grandpa—he wouldn’t. Neddie fell under the front awning of the Sunset Strip hotspot, just feet from his Caddy waiting at the curb. The shooting also sent two women to the hospital. Dalonne “Dee” David was described in one of the papers merely as “a blonde,” but was amplified in others as a “screen extra.” She also could have been billed as “clothespin heiress,” for her daddy had a factory that made them in Burbank. Someone commented that it was tragic when a girl aimed to get into the movies and wound up in the newsreels instead. The other woman shot was Florabel Muir, who took a pellet in her hindquarter. The intrepid columnist said she had been hanging by Mickey merely to get a story, “waiting for someone to try to kill him.”
The final entry on the list of wounded was the oddest, an enormous special agent from the state Attorney General’s Office named Harry Cooper who called out “I’m hit” when shot twice in the abdomen. He was an ex-wrestler and looked the part, towering a foot over Mickey. The state’s agent was wearing a light double-breasted suit and two-tone shoes just like The Mick—they’d made for a comical sight earlier in the evening when they walked side-by-side out of the Continental Café, a pair matched in clothing and nothing else. California Attorney General Fred Howser scrambled to explain that he had assigned the giant agent to shadow Mickey because any citizen deserved protection when endangered—and also to encourage local police to stop harassing Mickey. Nonetheless, sheriff’s deputies were all around the Strip, as usual, and the crowd at Sherry’s included an LAPD sergeant as well, from the Detective Bureau headed by Thad Brown. He was still furious that the Gangster Squad had been brought in to work his Homicide crew’s Black Dahlia case and he retaliated by anointing a few of his men as his personal gangster squad, a little up-yours to Willie Burns. There was a lot of competition to get in on the Mickey Cohen business.
Mickey had started the deadly night by having dinner with Artie Samish, a bald, cigar-chomping lobbyist with a seventh-grade education who had become the prime fixer for the state’s railroad, racetrack, and liquor interests. Boasting that he could sense whether a legislator needed a baked potato, a girl, or money, the 300-pound Samish controlled a $153,000 slush fund provided by the California Brewers Institute, prompting the state’s governor to concede, “On matters that concern his clients, Artie unquestionably has more power.” After their dinner with the well-funded power broker, Mickey led his entourage to the Continental, of which he owned a piece, and then to Sherry’s. That place was run by a former New York City policeman, Barney Ruditsky, who personally cased the parking lot and street whenever Mickey was coming, which meant nearly every night. On this night Mickey bantered with several reporters about the scent of the gardenias in his yard and about Annie Get Your Gun, which had just opened in a new location, the outdoor Greek Theater. Asked by the Los Angeles Times’ Ed Meagher if he was reluctant to be out in public, Mickey said, “Not as long as you people are around.” But the Times’ man left with his photographer before the 3:30 A.M. closing time, leaving Florabel as Mickey’s only media shield as the party walked out the door.
The club owner, Ruditsky, heard seven shotgun blasts from across the street, from next to a building owned by singer Bing Crosby. “I think it was a 12-gauge shotgun,” Ruditsky said, “and they plugged them pretty good.”
Jack O’Mara was among the swarm of investigators soon looking for discarded weapons and other evidence. He concluded that the gunmen indeed had waited across Sunset, by Bing’s building, at cement steps leading down to a vacant lot. Coffee and pastries were left at the spot from which the gunmen had a perfect view of anyone exiting from Sherry’s into its floodlit entrance area. The shotgun blast got Mickey solidly in the right shoulder, but he never went down. “I didn’t want to get my suit dirty,” he said.
For O’Mara and the others, it was not a fun moment to be a cop. They had botched the Dahlia thing and now shotguns were blasting up Sunset. They were pretty sure who was behind this shooting, the low-profile Mr. Dragna, but what were the odds of the Sicilian’s crew, like the man they called “The Weasel,” ever cracking? Meanwhile the disgraced former Hollywood Vice sergeant was running around calling them crooks—and worse. Sergeant Charles Stoker had his own theory of who carried out the ambush at Sherry’s, “members of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose motive was to seal Cohen’s lips.”
Mickey knew better. “It’s local punks,” he said when he was able to hold court in his blue pajamas and slippers at Queen of Angels Hospital. “I talked to New York, Chicago, and Cleveland regular and I got no rumble of trouble there. I am a pretty well informed guy.”
There was no doubting it then, he was L.A.’S GANGSTER. He posed at home for the national magazines showing off his closet full of suits and his miniature bed for Tuffy, so what if one piece in Life was headlined TROUBLE IN LOS ANGELES. He had begun his hustling by selling newspapers as a six-year-old and he was selling them still. One of California’s leading intellectuals, Carey McWilliams, did Mickey the honor of an analysis, albeit comparing him to Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. “He has tried to acquire the airs and manners of a gentleman in an effort to erase the memory of those sordid days before he had acquired his present eminence,” McWilliams wrote. “In fact if there were any evidence Cohen could read, one might suspect that he had
consciously modeled his career after Gatsby’s.”
One paper’s approach was not as high-brow or wry, though it did enlist a Ph.D. to interpret Mickey’s handprint. Dr. Josef Ranald pointed to Mickey’s short stubby fingers and said, “the type of hand is predominantly elementary and belongs to the simplest and least cultivated persons.”
* * *
ON JULY 29, 1949, Mayor Bowron again went on the radio to address the city. The day before, the grand jury had indicted the Ad Vice pair, Jackson and Wellpott, and three of the top figures in the LAPD, including the already retired Chief Horrall and Assistant Chief Reed, accusing the administrators of perjury—the grand jurors simply did not believe their accounts of what they knew about the Hollywood madam and their Vice Squad. Almost as soon as the indictments were handed up, Mickey rubbed it in, “I bet the police are sorry they ever stepped out of city territory.”
“That has the familiar ring of the underworld, one who thinks of retaliation,” Mayor Bowron replied in his address to the city. “Well, Mickey, I have never met you. You have never picked up a check for me and I have never received a suit or other present from your so-called haberdashery. And you never will—and I never will.”
Bowron could argue that the indictments covered five men out of thousands on the LAPD, and he could (correctly) predict that the cases against them would collapse, depending as they did on the testimony of a madam, a raving ex-Vice cop and a bug man who’d just found the Lord. But that sounded like weaseling to a public that could not be blamed if it now viewed L.A.’s cops as no better that the Sheriff’s brazen grafters or than the LAPD of the tainted ’30s. A decade of image building had been for naught.
Look magazine told its national audience,
Cohen’s escapades provide overwhelming evidence that all too many of California’s sworn law-enforcement officers have crossed the line and become partners in the lush profits of bookmaking, the shake-down racket, the narcotics trade, the slot-machine business, and that of the madams, the muggers and the murders who follow … The ugly glaring fact remains that California’s law-enforcement agencies, from top to bottom, have proved worse than helpless in protecting the state against its great post-war wave of hoodlumism. By their internal squabbles, by peddling protection, by playing footsie with open and acknowledged criminals, they have encouraged and participated in the growth of the greatest little racket empire west of the Mississippi.
Dragna and his men may have been firing the weapons, but Mickey Cohen was doing far more damage to the city. Mayor Bowron allowed himself to use a little Wild West rhetoric in addressing the man directly over the radio.
“I give you full warning,” the mayor said. “You have not intimidated me or the Los Angeles Police Department. We are coming after you.”
CHAPTER 11
The Funeral Wreath
Five hundred people attended Neddie Herbert’s funeral in New York that had a casket adorned with a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of gardenias from someone in Los Angeles.
Lieutenant Willie Burns lived in Gardena, a small city in southern Los Angeles County built atop what once were strawberry fields. When his wife received a funeral wreath at home, the squad knew that the same someone had sent them, Mickey Cohen.
After two decades on the police force, Burns had been proud to be able to buy the small house (963-square-feet) on little more than a tenth of an acre. It had three bedrooms and one bath for him and his wife, their son, Richard, who dreamed of becoming a fireman, and their daughter, Patty, the teenager with polio and rheumatoid arthritis. The diseases cost her the use of one hand and most of a leg, but she liked to draw and paint and showed talent at both. Her parents had resolved to raise her as a normal child and they were.
Willie’s wife saw the delivery truck and they were able to track down the florist. He said a kid had come in off the street with cash and asked that the funeral flowers be sent to the Gardena address. They guessed the kid had been paid $10 to place the order by someone he’d never met.
Burns phoned Mickey and told him to get his ass, pronto, to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, near Hollywood and Vine. Burns grabbed O’Mara, Keeler, Jumbo, and another of the bruisers and said, “I’m gonna knock his balls through his fucking nose.” They took their Tommy guns and left in one car, packed together like the early days.
* * *
THE SQUAD HAD carried the Tommies from day one but never fired them at anybody. Keeler had come the closest, the time Al Capone’s youngest brother Matty showed up at the Biltmore, the same hotel where Al was given the heave-ho two decades earlier by Roughhouse Brown. While O’Mara and another sergeant monitored the lobby, Keeler picked the lock on the 11th floor suite with Archie Case at his side. Keeler recalled their close call:
Anyway, I went up there to the room to check for weapons and everything else. We searched the whole place and then Arch and I stayed upstairs, waiting for them to come back. I had my Tommy gun, so I stood in this little kitchenette facing the doorway, there was semi-darkness. One of us heard a key, Archie’s standing in the living room with his .38 and this guy walks in and Arch says, “Come in brother, come in boys, we’re police officers.” The first guy, his hands are clear. The second guy walks in, and he’s got his hand in his coat pocket. Well, shoot. So I tell him to get his hands out of his pocket and he jerks his hand out and boy, for a minute there that looked like a .38, believe me. I squeezed down that Tommy gun and it was a full automatic and I never did figure out why it didn’t go off. I just stopped it before it went, I guess. Man alive, I tell ya. I never did figure out how I didn’t kill that guy. Boy, he steps back and says, “I was just reaching for a cigar!” Archie tells him to go ahead. He points at me, but when you have a Tommy gun you don’t say anything. He reaches in his fingertips and pulls out a cigar, holds it up to show it to me, and backs off. They really respect those Tommy guns, believe me.
* * *
JACK O’MARA HAD to move his Tommy when he and Connie finally had their daughter. When he first got back from the service, they had rented the garden apartment in Leimert Park, near Connie’s sister and across from the church. But that was a trying time for reasons beyond the job, Connie’s miscarriages. The fun-loving bobby-soxer bride often cried herself to sleep while suffering through one lost pregnancy after another. She was a good Catholic girl—why was God punishing her? It took seven wrenching years before a pregnancy did not end in miscarriage, and when God blessed them with little Maureen they followed the trodden path toward the American Dream. They could have been one of the hordes of start-up families shown in Life magazine heading outward from the urban centers to brand new cookie-cutter homes with postage-stamp lawns in suburbia—their three-bedroom ranch model on Pedley Drive in Alhambra was among 500 built atop a onetime country club and polo field. Streets nearby were named Pine Valley and Siwanoy after posh golf clubs back east that no one moving in had heard of. As soon as the houses went up, a Catholic church did too, and Jack again was anointed head usher, being a natural to entrust with the collections every Sunday.
Connie was in bliss as a housewife and mother, delighted to iron the boxer shorts of her policeman husband while the black cat, Spooky, kept her company. She made homemade jam from peaches, apricots, and plums grown there in the San Gabriel Valley where you could see snow atop the mountains when it was 80 degrees on the flats. When Christmas approached, she made candied kumquats and German-style fruitcakes and cookies, too, tons of gumdrop ones, fig bars, and sugar Santas. She gave boxes of those to the priests and nuns and set aside others for members of Jack’s old high school fraternity, who each year came to visit. She did fret the holiday season when Jack had to go undercover on the Dahlia case, unable to call for days. But that homecoming was gloriously tearful as Connie hoisted their baby girl into the air and cooed “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” the Cole Porter song that was finally hers to sing.
The problem was the big gun in the violin case. Once little Maureen was old enough to crawl they could turn around for a mo
ment and she’d be gone, scurrying to their room—a couple of times she made her way under their bed and began playing with the case. “Get it out of there,” Connie said, and Jack said, “Yes, boss,” and up it went onto a shelf in the closet.
Like the others, O’Mara sometimes practiced shooting the Tommy at the Police Academy range in Elysian Park. The public assumed the sprawling Academy complex was run by the LAPD administration but it wasn’t. It had been built by the rank-and-file’s Los Angeles Police and Athletic Revolver Club after the shooting events of the 1932 Olympics were held in the hilly 575-acre park on the edge of downtown. Volunteer officers moved and reassembled part of the Olympic Village to serve as a clubhouse and added an ornate rock garden and waterfall and eventually a swimming pool, so you could drop your kids off and meet your buddies at the café or the pistol range. Even experts with other weapons found the Thompson submachine gun hard to master. One newer squad member, John Olsen, was an avid hunter who boasted, “I could hit a rabbit on the run with a shotgun and take the head off so I wouldn’t ruin the meat.” But he gripped the Tommy too tightly and it jerked up on him. “We learned that if you left ’em lying loose you could fire ’em more accurately. If you tightened up on the suckers, they’d ride right up over your head.”
It was a coup when the squad got another new member who could really teach them how to use those things, Dick Williams. He was the son of Benny Williams, their leather helmet footballer who in the ’30s had helped build the Academy on his days off. Benny was getting up in years and he lost it one shift when he heard through a callbox that his boy, then new to the force, was being shot at during a foot pursuit. Benny rushed to the scene and helped handcuff the gunman on the ground. Then he yelled “LET’S KILL THIS SON OF A BITCH!” and he might have if commanders had not driven up. The good news was that they had a ready-made replacement when Benny retired. His son had joined the LAPD fresh from service as an elite Army Ranger in the Pacific—Dick Williams and his fellow Rangers snuck ashore behind enemy lines in the Philippines before the mass landings by General MacArthur’s troops. The six-foot-three Williams later provided jungle warfare training to Marine snipers, including a lanky actor-to-be, Lee Marvin. So Benny Williams’ son was an expert with a Tommy gun and more. “He didn’t talk about it much but he was in a part of the service where he had to go around killing people,” big Lindo Giacopuzzi said. “Oh, yeah, he knew how to take care of himself. He could break your neck in a minute, Williams could.”
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 11