O’Mara rushed back to their City Hall office and left a note asking the squad’s morning lieutenant to cable the Texas Rangers that Mickey was headed their way under that alias. Then O’Mara headed home to bed, not knowing whether the Rangers would do what he’d hoped. They did—the Texas lawmen treated Mickey’s arrival as akin to Bonnie and Clyde coming back from the dead. Rangers led by Captain Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas just missed Mickey in Odessa, where he was hosted by a prominent Texas gambler. But they caught up with Mickey after the gambler’s chauffeur took him to Wichita Falls, near the Red River border with Oklahoma. When the Rangers rousted him at 3 A.M. in a suite at the Kemp Hotel, Mickey protested that he was there on legitimate business, meeting with an oilman about leases on three wells. The Rangers told him to forget it. He needed to pack his bags—and his traveling companion was ordered to do the same. Mickey said the man was his publicity agent.
In Los Angeles, the publisher of the Mirror, Virgil Pinkley, was awakened by phone calls asking him why the spouse of his star columnist was consorting out-of-state with Mickey Cohen. But when the publisher called Florabel she denied that her hubby was in Texas. She said, “He’s asleep right here—you want me to get him?” That’s when Jack O’Mara had his own sleep interrupted by a ringing phone, along with a warning from a lieutenant, “Your ass is in a sling.”
They were ready to hang me out to dry. All this is going on deep in the heart of Texas and the publisher Pinkley asks Florabel Muir, “Well, where is your husband?”
He’s here.
I guess Pinkley said, “I’ll take your word for it,” you know? In the meantime, Pinkley got a hold of Chief Parker, “What the hell are you doing to my people?” So they call me up and get me out of bed.
I said, “What the hell you talking about?”
The lieutenant said, “Don’t you know? The shit’s hitting the fan. Pinkley’s on Parker’s ass.”
I said, “Listen, I know those bastards and I watched ’em get on the plane. You tell Parker that’s exactly what happened.”
No one could doubt O’Mara’s account after the Texas Rangers escorted Mickey and his small entourage onto a flight home and then invited the newshounds in during a stopover in El Paso, where Mickey was fingerprinted, photographed, and all but posed in a corral. The state’s governor got into the act, saying, “If you’re thinking of coming to Texas, stay out. If you are in Texas, get out.”
Florabel tried to be nonchalant about why her husband had gone to Texas with Mickey—she said it was a secret mission to look for one of Mickey’s henchmen who had vanished amid the violence on Sunset. The five-foot-four David Ogul and another of the “Seven Dwarfs” had disappeared a month apart and there had been not a trace of them since, other than car keys found in a storm drain. The disappearances were expensive to Mickey—he faced forfeiture of the $50,000 bond he had posted for one and $25,000 for the other—but he didn’t pretend that he was searching for either man in the North Texas oil fields. “Dey is dead,” Mickey said.
* * *
A THRONG WAS waiting at the airport in Los Angeles when the American Airlines flight from El Paso touched down on August 31, 1950. Mickey was the last one off the plane, in a gray suit and snap-brim hat but tieless and in need of a shave. “Why all the reception?” he quipped before offering one observation about life in Texas, “Well, the food was good.” But the Los Angeles Times noticed someone else coming off the plane. He was one of the first passengers out the hatch and disappeared quickly into the crowd. “Denny Morrison, Mickey’s traveling companion on the gambler’s latest flight into the limelight, gave no evidence of being in the same party.”
All that counted to Sergeant Jack O’Mara was the experience of Chief Bill Parker, who was less than one month on the job: First the chief received an effusive call offering thanks from the head of the Texas Rangers. Then came the apology from the publisher of the newspaper that had been clobbering the LAPD for sport. Parker had to attend a policeman’s funeral the next morning, but another squad member saw him pull aside his favored aide, Captain Hamilton, for a conference right at the cemetery, in the chief’s car.
They would not be disbanding the squad, after all, the one begun in 1946 with eight men who met on street corners. Chief William Parker and Captain James Hamilton did give it yet another name, the Intelligence Division. They ordered those Tommy guns locked in a closet. They moved the crew again—just across the hall.
But under their watch the squad would grow to have 50 investigators determined, like Jack O’Mara, to take down Mickey Cohen.
CHAPTER 13
Fifty-eight Rubouts and a Wedding
Headline writers found an easy nickname for the lowlifes from Kansas City slaughtered the evening of August 6, 1951, “The Two Tonys.” Anthony Brancato and Anthony Trombino were shot in the back of their heads and left slumped in their car on a Hollywood street. It made for a grim photo worthy of Chicago of the ’20s, the two dead men in the front seat of the sedan with their heads leaning back, blood dripping down their faces, and bullet holes in the windshield.
In the wake of the double hit, the LAPD higher-ups decided to create a list of every local mob rubout of the twentieth century. Titled “Gangland Killings, Los Angeles Area, 1900–1951,” the subsequent report went back to when the fruit peddlers fought over downtown turf and the Black Hand shook them down for a cut of the action. Joe Ardizzone predictably was the star of the early years as the gunman identified in the first murder, in 1906, only to be acquitted (“insufficient evidence, no witnesses that would talk”) so he could make the list in a different capacity, as a victim, when he vanished after leaving his Sunland vineyard in 1931. No one knew how many people The Iron Man had killed during his quarter-century run.
The LAPD survey concluded that the first murders were tied to “the Italian element … Either for intimidation, extortion, revenge or jealousy,” while the second phase, during Prohibition, was more purely profit oriented. “The opportunity to ‘bootleg’ liquor illegally gave this type of person a chance to make fast money in large amounts.” The third phase of killings had an obvious theme, the end of Prohibition and rise of illegal gambling. But the study identified another trend at that point—the bid by a certain group to seize a large piece of the action from the established racketeers such as Guy McAfee, the former Vice captain. The report couldn’t resist a little hyperventilated narrative in describing the new force muscling in on L.A.’s old guard: “McAfee refused and was reported to ask, ‘Who the hell is Jack Dragna?’ He found out! Stickup men raided the books; runners were roughed up … Soon the Italians were cut in!” More significantly, the report spoke openly of these new powers as “Mafia leaders.”
Decades later, thanks to a few key turncoats and scores of movies, the American public would think nothing of such a reference. But the Mafia was a controversial concept in 1951. As far back as 1928 two dozen Sicilian crime figures had been discovered meeting in Cleveland—New York’s Joe Profaci insisted he was there in connection with the olive oil business, never mind that Cleveland did not have an olive oil business. Yet the nation’s most prominent law enforcement official remained skeptical of any talk of a Mafia or of organized crime in general. There were plenty of desperadoes and local criminal rings, of course, and his agents helped fight those Public Enemies. But the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover dismissed the notion of a national crime syndicate as baloney.
The Los Angeles Police Department did not agree and when U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver decided to investigate organized crime in America he relied heavily on its files—Con Keeler’s small notebook by then had grown into elaborate flow charts with tangles of lines connecting each suspected organized crime figure to a dozen or more others. The Tennessee senator’s committee did identify one group of witnesses who embraced Hoover’s skepticism about the Mafia. The suspected leaders and soldiers of the shadowy crime organization were 100 percent behind the FBI’s director. “They were virtually unanimous in their complete ignorance o
f such a group.”
The LAPD’s internal “Gangland Killings” study had its own olive oil connection—the body of one bootlegger was found resting on six large cans of it in 1927. “Shot on public street” was the most common circumstance over the five decades of underworld bloodshed, with only one corpse having been “found in reservoir.” As for weapons, handguns were favored over “shotgun,” “blunt instrument,” and garrotes (“strangled”). Among motives, revenge was more common than “strong-arm (‘muscle’).” One victim drove a Willys-Knight touring car and another a purple Cadillac—that fellow was presumed dead after he vanished and his distinctive Caddy turned up with traces of dirt from the Riverside County oil field. The oil field was being called the “Ganglands Cemetery” to complement “Shotgun Alley” downtown.
But there was one disturbing constant over the first half of the twentieth century—how easy it was to get away with murder in Los Angeles. The study listed 58 gangland slayings over that time. And one conviction. One.
There were a few instances of street justice in which suspects in the killings were felled themselves in the shootouts. But the only conviction in court was for the 1937 murder of George “Les” Bruneman, who fancied himself the rightful czar of Southern California gambling, not Bugsy Siegel or Jack Dragna. Bruneman had been wounded earlier in a botched ambush and was recovering at Queen of Angels Hospital when he invited his nurse to lunch at The Roost café. Two gunmen came in and finished the job, firing fourteen times at him and also killing a waiter who ran out after them. Two years later, an informant told authorities that one of the killers was Pete Pianezzi, who had done time for bank robbery. Pianezzi expressed astonishment at his arrest and nine of the eleven witnesses to the killing could not identify him. But the wife of the café’s owner said she had a perfect view of the two assassins. “They had big guns in each hand. One of them held me hypnotized with his cold, steely eyes—I’ll never forget them.” The prosecutor asked, “Do you see those eyes in court here today?” She said, “Yes, that’s the man,” and that was enough for authorities to obtain their lone conviction in fifty-one years.
So what if Pianezzi was the wrong man, bound to be exonerated, a classic victim of unreliable eyewitness identification? That wrinkle would take years to unfold. He was still behind bars when the LAPD surveyed the half-century of killings, enabling it to list that one success among the pages of case studies that reported “no clues” or “two unknown men” or “arrested but later released.” It went on that way for pages, one gangland killing after another ending in “No prosecution” or the more optimistic “No prosecution to date.” The 1907 New Year’s Eve barbershop murder of Giovannino Bentivegna, whose body was found with a crude drawing of a clown and a policeman—the Black Hand’s mark of a stool pigeon—was still listed, forty-four years later, as “No prosecution to date.”
From the Black Hand days on, there was no overcoming the underworld’s intimidating code of silence or the frequent lack of any witnesses at all. That was the case in the survey’s first entry of Chief Parker’s tenure, the rubout of Mickey Cohen’s lawyer Sam Rummel, who had helped rev up the scandals of 1949. He was ambushed while walking from his car to his Laurel Canyon home at 1:00 A.M. on December 11, 1950. The only clue was the sawed-off Remington shotgun left in the “V” of a tree, a weapon that been reported stolen in 1913, making for one more no prosecution to date.
* * *
IT WAS NOT hard to identify a motive or a suspect in the 1951 massacre of the Two Tonys. The veteran gunmen from Kansas City had recently raised the ire of the underworld chiefs by robbing the cash room at Bugsy’s old Las Vegas palace, the Flamingo. They also sometimes pretended to be collectors for Mickey or Dragna—when they weren’t—a practice that placed them “in disfavor of certain persons,” a police report noted. They had it coming, in other words.
Hours before they took their last breaths they had been seen meeting with Jimmy Fratianno at the apartment of an actor who made book, on the side, at the studios. That night, Trombino was about to light a cigar in the front of their Oldsmobile, with Brancato beside him, when two gunmen in the backseat fired seven or eight shots, blowing their brains out. A phone book found in the car had a Biblical message written on the cover, “Jesus is coming so are you ready to meet him…?” The murder scene again was all-too-public, on North Ogden Drive, just off Hollywood Boulevard.
No one had to tell Los Angeles police whom to pick up first. Death followed closely behind Jimmy the Weasel. It wasn’t only how he’d left Mickey’s haberdashery moments before Hooky Rothman was shot-gunned. Fratianno also had been scheduled to have dinner with one of Mickey’s henchman the evening he vanished. That was Frank Niccoli. When Jimmy the Weasel began talking about such matters much, much later in life, he said they’d used the old rope trick on Frankie—one rope twisted about the neck, with two men pulling it tight from the sides—and that the scene was not pretty, “The son-of-a-bitch pissed on my new carpet.” But it was hard to make your living only as a killer, so Fratianno traveled down to San Diego and got into the business of selling orange juice to bars—you know, pay me for a lot of juice, or else. The odd thing was, he did act like a weasel whenever the squad rousted him. The squad’s Texas shit-kicker, Jumbo Kennard, often got the Fratianno duty and he’d do his bit where he clamped his giant hand atop someone’s head to lift them up. Fratianno would go, “Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me! I got ping-pong balls in my lungs!” That was true, too—doctors had put these little balls in there to keep his lung inflated after a dangerous infection.
Fratianno naturally had an alibi for the night the Two Tonys were blasted—he’d had dinner at the Smoke House in Burbank with Nicola “Nick” Licata then spent the rest of the evening at a party at Nick’s own joint in that city, the Five O’Clock Club. Licata was a grandfatherly looking former Detroit bootlegger who answered only to Jack Dragna in the L.A. mob. He dutifully backed Fratianno’s account, as did eleven others rounded up in the wake of the killings. Everyone backed The Weasel’s alibi. The cops tried to get a clerk at Schwab’s drugstore to say that a stogie found at the murder scene was a brand Fratianno favored, but she said, no, that was too cheap, a three-for-a-dollar smoke. Jimmy the Weasel was an 80-cent cigar man. A waitress at the Five O’Clock Club complained that two LAPD detectives burned her with a cigarette to get her to admit that Fratianno had snuck out of the festivities there. But she didn’t budge and backed his alibi too. The double murder of the Two Tonys was destined to become yet another “No prosecution to date.”
* * *
WHAT YOU HAD to do, in Jack O’Mara’s job, was settle for whatever victories you could manufacture. That’s why he volunteered to help with the Licata end of the Two Tonys investigation. He didn’t expect a miracle—a mob boss would never finger a loyal triggerman. But you tried anyway, you moved your feet. “I said, ‘I know Nick. I’ll go out.’”
O’Mara had gotten to know the local Mafia’s number two man by schmoozing at his club, even once accepting a fifth a whiskey from the proper Sicilian who kept a handkerchief carefully folded in his breast pocket. Accepting the booze was against O’Mara nature, but he felt he couldn’t refuse the gift. The whole idea that night was to make like they were pals and keep Licata hanging around—long enough for Keeler to plant a couple of bugs at his home on Overland Avenue in the Palms neighborhood, towards the airport.
When O’Mara showed up at the house after the Two Tonys bought it, Nick Licata offered a “How are ya?” in his heavily accented English before their pro forma Q&A.
You have any guns?
Yeah, O’Mara, I got guns.
You have any shotguns?
Yeah I got shotguns?
You keep ’em for your protection, huh?
Yeah, I keep ’em for my protection …
O’Mara and his partner loaded the weapons into their trunk and waited for Licata to get his coat, keeping it nice and friendly.
After the Two Tonys hit, all the suspects and alibi
witnesses were taken to a secret interrogation center the LAPD set up on the third floor of the Ambassador Hotel, away from police stations where the press would be swarming. The questioning was handled above O’Mara’s rank, with Captain Hamilton earning the privilege of interrogating Jimmy the Weasel. But the next day O’Mara got a call from Licata’s twenty-year-old son, Carlo, complaining that the family had been unable to find his father. “Can I go see my papa?” he asked, and O’Mara arranged it, still being their best buddy, because down the line …
Down the line came the next time he showed up at the Licata home as part of another roundup of suspects for a crime that would never be solved. By then he was like family, the kindly cop, so the elder Licata asked one more favor in his heavily accented English, “Look, Mr. O’Mara, my wife she’s a-fixin’ me a nice chicken dinner. Before I go downtown…”
O’Mara said, “Hey, Nick, go ahead and eat. I’m in no hurry. You mind if I use your phone?”
The phone had a long cord, 50 feet or more, so Licata could carry it into his private office. O’Mara carted it instead into the kitchen. Then he began to rummage, “looking for anything I could steal.” That’s how he stumbled upon paperwork from the wedding. Licata’s son had married the daughter of Black Bill Tocco, a Detroit Mafia boss who lived among the swells in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in a mansion with an eighty-foot pool. The year earlier, Tocco’s son had wed the daughter of New York’s Joe Profaci—he was going coast-to-coast with these family unions. Under normal etiquette, the bride’s side sent out the invites, but the Licatas had sent out a batch too, personally alerting their circle of friends to the glorious occasion. All the RSVPs and congratulations and flower cards had come back to the home on Overland Avenue where Jack O’Mara gave Nick Licata plenty of time to enjoy his wife’s chicken dinner.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 13