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

by Paul Lieberman

  So anyhow, I got the phone and I’m watching him from the kitchen and I’m pulling out drawers, you know, taking the wedding invitations, and I shove them in my trench coat, you know. I’m bulging with all these RSVPs, all the goddamn Mafia in the country, see. Actually, I committed a burglary, right, technically? After all, I’m not allowed to steal a guy’s property out of his house. But I figured I was housekeeping …

  Call it theft, call it housekeeping. O’Mara wouldn’t argue. Other law enforcement agencies had to settle for camping outside the big wedding in Detroit with cameras and binoculars, trying to identify the hundreds of guests coming and going from limos. In Los Angeles, the Gangster Squad didn’t have to rely on fuzzy photos to add names to files that now filled ten cabinets along a wall in City Hall.

  Small victories, that was their reality. Like how they finally got to Dragna, by bugging his mistress’s bed.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Bedbug

  Dealing with Jack Ignatius Dragna from the start was the flip side of dealing with Mickey. Dragna once complained to Jimmy the Weasel that it was so hard to kill Mickey because of all the cops and reporters around him. Dragna desired the company of neither. Icy distance was the rule when the Gangster Squad camped outside his banana warehouse or the Victory Market, where he held meetings in a concrete-walled back room.

  There was a shabby boarding house across from his warehouse on the south edge of downtown, just off Central Avenue, so the squad rented a second floor room there and pointed an 8mm movie camera out the window. It showed who was coming and going from Dragna’s Latin Import & Export Co., and that was worth something—they spotted the Sica brothers and some other Italians who long had been with Mickey but now had “gone over to the other side,” they concluded. But the pictures were of little use without sound and they couldn’t hear much, even after Keeler bugged a telephone pole outside the warehouse. He put a microphone in a hole gouged in the pole, near where Dragna and his crew emerged for walk-and-talks. Any conversations were drowned out, however, by the noise of passing traffic. About the only incriminating evidence they got from their silent movies were shots of policemen arriving empty-handed and then leaving with arms full of the bananas Dragna hauled to Los Angeles. The cops helping themselves to free fruit were surprised with stern lectures only after the surreptitious moviemaking ended.

  They fared little better at the market where Dragna had his fortified office. A security guard patrolled there all night, providing little opportunity to break in and plant a bug, much less to conceal it. But why not try? Con Keeler was the man to go in, as usual, while Dick Williams headed a backup team that watched for the guard from their darkened cars. Whenever Keeler was on a black-bag job he wanted the six-foot-three former Army Ranger around, the one who could break someone’s neck if he had to.

  Dick Williams, he was always my right-hand man when I went on something like that. I had the stakeout crew out front, as much coverage as I could get. Jack Dragna’s place, we had to go through Victory Market, through two locks there, and they had a night watchman that came by every twenty minutes and checked the place. We had to put a tail on him and go in between the times he checked the front door—we had to get in and open the lock on this concrete room back there, that’s where they had a meeting place. They had a great big safe back there but I wasn’t a safe man, there was nothing I could do about that. If I’d known what was in that safe, I’d of figured out some way to steal it.

  Nothing’s ever perfect, but we got in there and I did get the microphone in, hidden, best I could. Had it there a couple of weeks until they found it. Joe Sica, he comes outside holding the microphone hanging from a wire and he looks up and down the street, he takes that microphone and he bangs it against the curb. I don’t know—he kept looking up at me, we had a stakeout on, and he’s banging that thing against the curb.

  They got us on that one. But after that we tried a little psychology. We had a team following Dragna around—Unland and Roberson, they were a good follow team—and he was going crazy, because he’d meet somebody on the corner or the sidewalk and our car would be across the street, those two officers sitting in it. So to add to his misery, I gave them a set of earphones. We had no bug working, but I said, “Next time you see him in the street talking to somebody, put these on. And when he looks over toward you duck down like you’re trying to hide.” They did it one day and, damn, Dragna came over shouting and screaming—whoever he was meeting was sure we were listening to them if these cops are wired with headphones.

  * * *

  THE TWO SQUAD members following Dragna had never heard of him when they recruited themselves into the unit from the Central Division. William R. “Billy Dick” Unland and H. E. “Robbie” Roberson were the hottest radio car team in a territory that included Pershing Square and its Biltmore Hotel when their lieutenant was transferred to the squad. “Take us with you,” Unland said, and he did. But when told their assignment was the Dragnas, all they could think of was Dragnet, the radio show that had come on the air in 1949 with little known actor Jack Webb playing a by-the-book LAPD detective named Joe Friday who spoke clipped lines with a deadpan delivery and lived with his mother. Then Unland realized their assignment had nothing to do with the radio show. “We’re working the dagos.”

  Unland had served with the Navy in the Pacific, set ashore on the Philippines from one of the Landing Craft Tanks, or LCTs, vessels like the one Dragna converted to haul his bananas. When Bill Parker became chief in 1949, he calculated that 3,000 of the LAPD’s 4,493 sworn officers had joined since the war, and Unland was among them. He lived in the same suburban housing development as Jack O’Mara and when he joined the Intelligence Division he was asked to drive the sergeant to the office. “Well, I went over and picked him up. I was young at the time and Jack came out, he had a topcoat on and a hat and I think he was sucking on a pipe. I remember he looked so old to me.” O’Mara was thirty-two.

  The newcomer had a lot to learn. Early on, he and his partner were sent to question Dragna at his home in Leimert Park, near where the Black Dahlia’s body was found. The local Mafia boss shooed them away, saying “Get off my porch.” When they returned to the office and reported what had happened to Lieutenant Grover “Army” Armstrong, he said “If you guys want to take that shit from that wop, OK,” and they got the message. After that, they rousted Dragna like other guys did Mickey, making him empty his pockets five times a day. They also followed him into his favorite barber shop in the Beverly Wilshire hotel and sat waiting while he had his hair trimmed and his nails manicured. When the barber said, “You’re next,” they replied, “We’re not here for a haircut. We’re following that asshole.”

  A few times the squad had its first-generation Italian, Lindo “Jaco” Giacopuzzi, go to Dragna’s home in hopes that he or his men might say something revealing in their native language, unaware that Jaco spoke it too. The ploy never worked and Jaco’s most vivid memory of the visits was seeing Dragna’s wife in the bedroom, patiently ironing his beautiful shirts and arranging them, perfectly folded, on the bed. Frances Dragna was a nice, quiet lady and Jaco wondered, “If she knew he had that girlfriend would she still be ironing his shirts?”

  * * *

  LIFE MAGAZINE WOULD never be invited into Jack Dragna’s house to take pictures of his shirts or of his doggie bed, if he had one. Other than with women, Dragna remained cautious to a fault, reflected in his innocuous rap sheet since his short stint in prison thirty-five years earlier—seven arrests, no convictions. He was winning both wars, against Mickey and the squad, until the explosive first weeks of 1950.

  Luckily for Mickey, he was on his wife’s side of their Brentwood house in the early morning of February 6 when his outside alarm was triggered. He got out of bed and went to a front window, where he detected an acrid odor of something burning, then returned to Lavonne’s bedroom near her mirrored boudoir and the walk-in vault that held her fur coats. The bomb went off about 4:15 A.M., blasting a ten-foot
hole in the front bedroom where Mickey normally slept, destroying forty of his suits and catapulting one of his bedroom slippers into the yard. The damage would have been far worse but for a thick concrete floor safe, which deflected much of the blast, likely saving the Cohens and their live-in maid. Mickey soon was holding court amid the wreckage in his monogrammed silk pajamas, telling Florabel Muir and others who rushed to the scene how relieved he was to see Tuffy prance out from his little bed. Mickey quipped, “You know, I don’t think I’m going to be able to rent this room now.”

  Yet the bombing could not have been a total surprise to him. Months earlier Mickey had discovered wrapped sticks of dynamite under his home, with a fuse that had been lighted but fizzled. He tried to erect a fence in front of the exposed house, but was told zoning codes limited its height to a puny three-and-a-half feet. He ordered a Cadillac with bulletproof fiberglass panels inside the doors, and windshields three inches thick, but authorities questioned the legality of that too, his custom-made $16,000 armor-plated car. Now the headline read, MICKEY COHEN’S/HOME BLASTED, one more episode helping to explain his classic exchange when Senator Estes Kefauver’s organized crime committee subpoenaed him to testify.

  Question: And you have been surrounded by violence, is that right?

  Cohen: What do you mean that I am surrounded by violence? What do you mean that I am surrounded by violence? I have not murdered anybody. All the shooting has been done at me. What do you mean, I am surrounded by violence, because people are shooting at me, that is the way it is? What do you want me to do about it?

  The Chairman: Just a minute, Mr. Cohen. Let me put it another way.…

  Cohen: People are shooting at me, and he is asking me if I am surrounded by violence.

  His neighbors didn’t really care who was shooting at whom, or who was doing the bombing. The throat of a girl sleeping across the street had nearly been slashed by flying glass. One nearby parent said, “Our children can’t ride their bicycles or skate in the streets. Bombs today—it might be machine guns tomorrow.” When Mickey heard that some Brentwood residents were petitioning for him to move, he wrote them an open letter, composed with the help of (or entirely by) a writer friend. It said:

  On Monday morning, my home was bombed. Though this outrage constituted a great threat to my wife and my neighbors and has deprived me of the sense of security and sanctuary that every man feels when he steps across his home doorstep, it didn’t make me nearly as unhappy as the action, today, of some of my neighbors … trying to push me out of the community.… I took it for granted that if I could expect no breaks from the mad beast who bombed me I would certainly have no reason to fear hurt from my neighbors, whom I have never molested in any way.… In the words of some of the wide-eyed characters who have written about me for the public, you have been “bum-steered” and I have been “bum-rapped.” Let’s both stop being victimized. I am a gambler and a betting commissioner; no more, no less. I am not a mobster, a gunman, or a thug. I leave such antics to Mr. George Raft and Mr. Humphrey Bogart, who make money at it, or to certain other local actors—bad actors—who make the penitentiary at it.…

  Very sincerely,

  Your neighbor,

  Mickey Cohen.

  A week after the fireworks on Moreno Avenue, members of the squad fanned out to pick up Jack Dragna’s inner circle. The family patriarch was nowhere to be found, but they corralled six others, including his son, brother, and two nephews, and held them on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder, for allegedly arranging the bombing. It wasn’t the roust, however, that exploded Dragna’s decades-long effort to keep out of view—that same day, February 13, a commission appointed by Governor Earl Warren issued its long-awaited report on organized crime in California. That headline read, COHEN-DRAGNA GANG WAR/CHARGED BY CRIME BOARD, and the Sunset Strip showboat, Mickey Cohen, was not the one branded “The Capone of Los Angeles.” The commission, headed by a retired admiral, William H. Standley, said that description of Dragna had come from the late James Ragan, who headed the dominant Continental horse racing wire until he was gunned down in Chicago—then poisoned in the hospital—by the real Capone mob. Punctuating the point, authorities in Los Angeles revealed that a search of Dragna’s home had uncovered checks showing he was receiving $500 a week from a racing news service in Chicago. Until this most Angelenos had never heard of Dragna. Now they were told he had an address book that “reads like a Who’s Who in the Mafia.”

  One person did come quickly to his defense—the man who was bombed. “He’s one of my best friends,” Mickey said. “He might have mixed up in gambling once but he’s fifty-five or sixty, an old man, and he’s retired. He’s in the produce business now and he don’t bother nobody.”

  But when Dragna finally surfaced, he was furious. Though he did not fear prosecution for the bombing—the code of silence again could be counted on—he’d had enough of the LAPD’s harassment. Dragna even spoke publicly, that’s how mad he was. He had a simple explanation for his weekly checks from the racing wire—he wrote articles for it. “What do the cops want from me? They follow me everywhere I go.… I’m just minding my own business. Why don’t they mind theirs?”

  Then he had his son sue the squad. Frank Paul Dragna was twenty-six and a decorated veteran of World War II, in which he lost an eye serving his country. He was a college boy too, having attended the University of Southern California. He was the farthest thing from a Moustache Pete and thus the perfect plaintiff in the suit stemming from detention of six Dragnas for almost three days while under investigation for the bombing of Mickey’s home. The younger Dragna’s suit complained of unlawful arrest and of an attempt to “humiliate and embarrass the plaintiff” by holding him in a tank cell until 3:00 A.M. while reporters and photographers were ferried in to portray him nationwide as a mobster tied to an arsenal of shotguns, rifles, and pistols. Frank Dragna also complained that the cops did not let him communicate with his attorney—or his mother. His suit sought $350,000 damages each from Captain Lynn White and ten John Doe officers, two of whom were quickly identified as Unland and Roberson, the pair hounding his father.

  It was a perfectly understandable counteroffensive against the cops and the Dragnas could be excused if they did not anticipate how the squad would respond by going after their patriarch, the Al Capone of Los Angeles, for how he enjoyed himself with a woman.

  * * *

  THEY NORMALLY IGNORED sexual peccadilloes, leaving those to the scandal sheets. Surveillance teams at Mickey’s Brentwood house sometimes noticed his prim wife leaving twenty minutes after one of his men, Sam Farkas. They said nothing about that to Mickey, just as they said nothing to Lavonne about the women he dined with. It was the same with Jack Dragna. O’Mara once got a tip that he had an assignation with an employee of the Los Angeles Times and it was true—Dragna picked the woman up outside the newspaper and they drove to a motel. Some colleagues said O’Mara should have called Vice and had the pair arrested, but why, “just to embarrass them?” Men will be men, they played a little grab-ass. But Dragna had another girlfriend who did clerical work for the dry cleaners union, in which the mob had its hooks. If a cleaning shop didn’t sign up, Dragna’s men would send over suits with dye sewn inside so all the clothes in its vats turned purple or red. Extortion like that was the cops’ normal concern, not hanky-panky with a red-haired secretary. But the man was trying to ding them for $350,000, and not total, each. Screw ’em.

  The twenty-three-year-old clerical worker had an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard, near the Ambassador Hotel and Perino’s, Dragna’s favorite restaurant. That’s where he took her for dinner the night the squad planted the bug. The elegant eatery had a marble entry leading to an oval dining room where waiters wore white gloves and the napkins were of Irish linen so the guests wouldn’t get lint on their clothing. It figured to be a long dinner, giving Keeler enough time at the young mistress’ apartment. Billy Dick Unland came with him—Dragna was his assignment—but an operation like this req
uired a crowd of men. Two more watched the restaurant, including Jerry “The Professor” Thomas, and two sat in an unmarked car outside the apartment. If Dragna and the woman came back early, giant Jumbo Kennard would clumsily get out of the car, making sure the crime boss saw him—Dragna was sure to drive off then, buying more time for the cops upstairs.

  Even before Keeler finished picking the lock to the apartment he could see sweat seeping through the new felt hat of the younger Officer Unland. It reminded Keeler why he preferred to do such jobs alone. He had trained himself to sniff for any scent of a person before he stepped into a dark room. He didn’t wear cologne or anything that might give the resident a clue that he’d been there. He looked for drawers or doors intentionally left open a crack so he could put them back the same way, exactly, when he was done. Keeler was a pro at this, but other guys poured sweat if you took them under a house where dogs might come barking or into an apartment where a Sicilian might come home with a gun.

  The secretary’s bed had a large padded headboard with a sunburst pattern. Keeler drilled a hole in the back so he could put his tiny microphone directly in the center of the sun. He ran its thin wire into the wall behind the bed, and fed that down with the phone lines into the basement. That’s where they maintained their listening station for two months, in a little room that became home for Unland and others, crouched over a log book while listening through headphones.

  They did overhear occasional talk of mob activity, including plans for a new casino in Vegas. But that wasn’t what they used against the sixty-year-old Dragna. Their ammunition came from other goings-on in the bedroom. If they couldn’t get him for ordering hits on Mickey and his men, why not for “lewd/vag,” lewd conduct and vagrancy? Proving that wasn’t a snap, however, because Dragna’s close associate Simone Scozzari often visited with his own young girlfriend, having fun that was far too clean. Billy Dick Unland finally had to do something to end their wholesome activity of choice.