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

by Paul Lieberman

  So we go in and they had a padded headboard and Con put the mike in there and wired it over and down to the basement where we set up our listening post where we could tape it and listen to it. In these days we didn’t have tape recorders, we had wire recorders. Anyway we sat down there in the basement. And we used to spit polish our shoes while we were listening, really shine ’em up, the Marine and Navy way, like we were getting ready for inspection. My partner and I were listening one night to Dragna and Simone Scozzari and they used to sit in there with these girls and play canasta all night. All night. Drove us crazy. The card game was, oh, hell—we’re sitting down listening on the bug and we finally just turned off the power from the basement, turned off the god-damned lights so they’d stop playing and go to bed. Sexual stuff. That’s why we wanted them to stop playing canasta.

  There was some sex play with a Coke bottle but what they mostly wanted to document was the sex beyond the missionary position, what they called “French love.” In later years, the public would see it simulated routinely on movie screens, but it was a 288a under the California Penal Code, oral copulation, and enough to make a jury blush in 1951, as Keeler recalled it.

  She says, “The farther down my throat it goes the better it feels.” Then a few minutes later, he’s calling out from somewhere in the bathroom and he says, “Where’s the mouthwash, honey?” And she says, “Oh, there isn’t any.” Then she comes back, “It’s alright, it won’t hurt you.”

  Dragna was arrested that April 10 on his return from a trip to Vegas. His lawyers could argue all they wanted that the cops didn’t have a warrant for their break-in and bugging—when did they ever? That June 2, Dragna was found guilty of three misdemeanor morals charges, a conviction that earned him all of thirty days in the county jail at sentencing by Municipal Judge Vernon Hunt. But that wasn’t the point. How and where he was bugged stood to cost him respect in the mob—the case might diminish L.A.’s most powerful gangster, if not its best known. More significantly, a crime of moral turpitude could help get him sent back to Italy.

  Dragna still was fighting a bid to deport him when he died of a heart attack a few years later. A maid discovered his body in a Sunset Boulevard motel where he had been registered under an assumed name. They found him in pink pajamas, with $986.71 and two sets of false teeth nearby and, in his luggage, a small statue of Jesus. There also was a news clip on how his son’s lawsuit had finally been dismissed, one more small victory for the cops amid fifty-eight killings that went unsolved.

  CHAPTER 15

  Mickey’s Turn

  For years, Los Angeles’ Mayor Fletcher Bowron had been lobbying the federal authorities up to President Harry Truman to use the same legal strategy that put away Al Capone on the L.A. hoodlum who similarly flaunted his high living while reporting meager income. Everyone on both sides of the law knew what had sent Capone to federal prison in 1932. One of the memorable moments of the yearlong organized crime hearings spearheaded by Tennessee’s Senator Kefauver came when the nation’s most powerful Mafia figure, Frank Costello, was asked, “What have you done for your country?” With a raspy voice from the streets of New York, Costello spit back, “Paid my tax!”

  Mickey Cohen was well aware that the IRS had a microscope over his finances by the time the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce brought its fourteen-city road show to Los Angeles in November of 1950. He had the right to take the Fifth and refuse to answer questions, or could have followed the lead of some of the committee’s targets in Las Vegas and skipped town. But the ground rules of the subpoenaed testimony provided limited immunity—what he said there could not be used against him later—so Mickey went ahead and faced the committee’s questions, and the television cameras, and pleaded poverty. He explained how he depended on the kindness of friends, and their generous loans, to survive. He even emptied his pockets to prove it to the committee’s chief counsel, Rudolph Halley.

  Cohen: For the last four years I have been constantly in courts and under harassment by the Los Angeles Police Department that is making it their business to see that I get broke.…

  Halley: Now, you borrowed at least $60,000 this year?… You say you spent $25,000 for the bond on the man who disappeared?… How did you spend the other $35,000?

  On my living, and I had a colored maid.

  How else?

  Lawyers’ expenses, troubles.

  Is it all gone by now?

  All excepting what I have in my pocket.

  You have nothing in the world except what you have in your pocket?

  That is right.

  What do you have in your pocket?

  $200 or $300, $285 or so. Yes. $285.

  That is all the money you have left in the world?

  $286, I mean.

  How do you expect to live from now on?

  I can get money.

  You borrow it?

  Yes.

  Mickey indeed had taken a hit when his two men vanished while out on a combined $75,000 bail for the beating of the greedy radio shop operator. Though Mickey was certain they were in lime-pit graves, not skipping bail, he was responsible—that was the explanation he gave for shutting his haberdashery on Sunset, he needed quick cash. His auctioneer-liquidator, J. W. Fetterman, announced the going-out-of-business sale in fitting style, “Mickey Cohen erstwhile entrepreneur herewith notifies the citizens of Los Angeles and environs of his intention of assuming the role of the good Saint Nicholas—alias Santa Claus.”

  Then they put up signs that blared MICKEY COHEN QUITS and SELLING OUT TO THE BARE WALLS, and trucked in a searchlight for the big event. Mickey personally greeted the mix of lookiloos and genuine customers checking out the promised 50- to 75-percent discounts on $200 men’s robes, $15 belts, and $50 cuff links. One man of limited intelligence ran off with a $50 hat during the closing sale but was nabbed by a clerk when he came back to shoplift again.

  The store was shut by the time the state crime commission issued its report spotlighting the Dragna-Cohen gang war and estimating that 500 bookmakers paid Mickey a cut at one time. Mickey had helped bring down the leadership of the LAPD and had goaded the mayor into going on the radio to deliver a “We are coming after you” speech. Just a year later, Senator Kefauver offered a very different appraisal than the state panel, which had made Mickey out to be this monster racketeer. While the Tennessee senator expressed shock at what he discovered in the state (“Crime and corruption in California had a special flavor, exotic, overripe, and a little sickening”) he sided with those who termed Mickey “a pipsqueak” or “a horsefly on the rump of human decency,” as if the unkindest cut you could deliver to him was to his image.

  Kefauver’s Mickey was a “contemptible little punk” who inhabited a “dim and dirty world” and looked comical, as well. He wrote, “Cohen, a simian-like figure with thinning hair and spreading paunch, appeared before us in a suit coat of exaggerated length, excessively shoulder-padded and a hat with a ludicrously broad brim.” The knock at the hat may have been unfair, though, coming from a politician who often hit the campaign trail in a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Mickey did not testify with his hat on, anyway—he wore a dark suit, white shirt, and an elegant “MC” tie clip while seated before the microphone in the Los Angeles federal building. And Kefauver at least should have given Mickey credit for his own self-deprecation on one point, his boxing career.

  Like much with him, it was hard to determine the truth about his performance in the ring. His record got mixed up with that of another Mickey Cohen fighting at the same time in the lighter weight classes, but out of Denver. Mickey may have hyped a tad when he suggested that his Cleveland-based pugilism often put him in the limelight, “That’s right,” he told the committee, “32 main events.” The Bible of the sport, The Ring magazine, listed him as having only eighteen professional fights: six wins, eleven losses, and one draw. But the magazine did not tally nonsanctioned bouts, so the government could not get Mickey for perjury on that
count. And when asked before the TV cameras, “Were you pretty good?” he told the absolute truth.

  “Not too good,” he said.

  * * *

  HE WAS INDICTED for tax evasion within days of Jack Dragna’s arrest was on the morals charges. A federal grand jury had assembled evidence that Mickey paid $49,329 for renovations and furnishing at his Brentwood house, spent $800 a year on shoes (at $50 a pair), and handed out $600 in tips at one lavish affair alone. They’d let him try to explain how he lived like he did thanks to $300,000 in “loans,” not income, from bookies and others. “If it’s against the law to borrow dough,” Mickey jived, “I’m guilty.”

  The prosecution was based on what the IRS called the expenditure method, which calculates a taxpayer’s net worth at the beginning of a time period and his spending during it. If his reported income doesn’t cover the total, he’d better have a good explanation. Mickey had listed his net worth at only $3,110.82 shortly before January 1, 1946 and reported $72,777.52 in income over the next three years. But the government was able to document $345,933.53 in expenses through the end of 1948, leaving quite a gap. While some of the tallying of expenses came from obvious paperwork—for his home purchase, for instance—the Gangster Squad helped out by recording Mickey’s cash on hand every time it rousted him and by going into restaurants after he left to find out what his habitual check-grabbing cost him each night.

  Between them, the IRS investigators and the snooping of the Ad Vice Squad that Mickey had attacked (and fed for free), the government could show that he paid $150 to a dog training school and $111 to his pets’ vet, $549 in one year for laundry service and $85 each month to the gardener Sam Miyotta, not counting the plants. Lavonne Cohen had been right to complain about the phone bills—one year alone Mickey placed 411 long distance calls to Boston and 318 to West Palm Beach to lay off (and take) bets. Prosecutors could show he paid $3,964 for a new Cadillac five days before Christmas in 1947 and $5,220 for another, a convertible, two days after the holiday. Mickey and his wife spent $280 on pedicures, $3,551 on bedding and table linens, $7,472 on a Beverly Hills tailor, $4,300 on monogrammed shirts and pajamas, and $7,076 one year on ties and socks. Mickey was addicted to wearing new socks—he was a man who never let his bare feet touch the ground and his buffer between his flesh and the dirty world had to be pristine.

  Mickey never learned how the government got some of the evidence against him. He was careful not to receive sensitive mail at home—if his contacts didn’t send their messages by a trusted courier, such as Neddie Herbert, they would address their letters and packages to him under assumed names at scattered restaurants and bars, where he could pick them up. At his house, Mickey had a backyard furnace to burn sensitive documents and letters after he looked at them, going outside to feed the paperwork into the fire himself. But when he went back inside, one of his security guards would stamp out the flames … and salvage what he could … and sneak the charred remnants to the other man paying him … who passed the charred paperwork to his bosses … who passed it along to the feds. That security guard was worth scores more than the $25 a week Jack O’Mara paid him. “My boy, Neal Hawkins,” O’Mara said.

  Yet even as they tricked him, O’Mara never underestimated Mickey, as he saw others do—Mickey invited that, of course, all those times he played the buffoon. But one day O’Mara followed him on a whim after spending a boring hour on surveillance outside his lawyer’s office. After a meeting there, Mickey didn’t head home for his normal 90-minute hot shower before a night out. He headed south toward the airport, driving himself in his blue Caddy but stopping short of LAX, at the Athens oil field.

  OK now, I’m figuring what the hell’s this son of a bitch going out there for? He pulls into the oil field, parks. Pretty soon another car comes in and joins him. I’ve got a pair of field glasses and I’m watching from a distance and I see an exchange, a banter, maybe it lasted 10, 15 minutes. What the hell’s going on? So I tailed the other car and he broke loose and went down Figueroa and I pulled alongside and got his license number and I look at him. I don’t recognize him, he’s a stranger, you know. So I go in and run a DMV on him. And it comes back as so-and-so. OK, it still doesn’t ring a bell because I knew most of the hoods and all his business acquaintances. So I go down to the register of voters. I look up Joe Dokes. “Internal Revenue.” It lists your occupation. I said “Jesus Christ, what the hell’s going on?” Mickey’s surreptitiously meeting an Internal Revenue guy out on the oil field like that. So I go into Hamilton and I say, “Hey, I don’t know, here’s what happened, Cap.” He says, “Jesus Christ!” so he called the chief over there, Internal Revenue, and he said this guy’s the chief investigator on fraud cases and he’s due to retire in about a week.

  Well, I wanted no part of it ’cause I didn’t want to get on any IRS shit list. The guy was ready to retire and he was doin’ business, you know, he was doin’ business with Mickey. I didn’t want any part of it, you know. It’s none of my business, let the Cap take it from there with the IRS, let them handle it. They know what the hell they’re doing. I don’t want to stick my nose any further into it. Just another lead, another piece of police work.

  Captain Hamilton never told him what happened and O’Mara guessed nothing, they let the agent disappear with his pension. But when Senator Estes Kefauver brought his hearings to Los Angeles, one of the subpoenaed witnesses was an IRS man who had worked on investigations of Bugsy Siegel and Tony Cornero, the king of the gambling ships, and had recently retired to enter a brief partnership with … Mickey’s accountant. Former IRS agent Donald O. Bircher testified that he was acting as a private tax consultant when “Mr. Cohen” requested a meeting at the oil field to see about buying vacant property nearby. “So we walked down there, walked around for about five minutes … and then he said, ‘Do you know if anything is available in this area?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ And that was the end of it,” a perfectly innocuous conversation on a pleasant afternoon, you know?

  * * *

  O’MARA WAS NOT present to hear that Kefauver Committee testimony but he was not going to miss another session in the federal building seven months later. On June 18, 1951, he joined several other squad members for the one-minute walk up Spring Street from City Hall to the seventeen-story courthouse where Mickey Cohen would be testifying in his own defense, trying to talk his way out of going to prison for underpaying his taxes by $156,123. Mickey wore a dark blue gabardine suit, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie fixed in place by his initialed gold MC clasp. His shoes were two-toned black-and-white, the footwear style favored by gangsters and golfers. He carried a brown paper bag with life’s essentials. “The restroom here ain’t got soap and towels, I brought my own,” he explained. Then he botched the first question out of the gate, when his own lawyer, Leo Silverstein, asked him his name.

  Meyer Michael Cohen.

  Isn’t it Meyer Harris Cohen?

  Oh, yes, Meyer Harris Cohen.

  The record corrected, Mickey briefed the jury on how he’d been born in Brooklyn but grew up fatherless right here, with chronic truancy and scrapes precipitating his departure from school in the third grade before he devoted himself to hustling papers at 7th and Spring, blocks from the courthouse. The important part was explaining that while he once had been “engaged in the gambling business,” in his lawyer’s words, he was not a bookie but maintained a betting office, at the executive level. “My last gambling transactions were about three years ago,” he added, with one winking semi-confession thrown in. “Oh, I made a couple of bets since then.”

  Mickey also entertained the jurors with an inside anecdote about his stint in the rag trade, describing a side deal he worked with his own $250 suits. “I had an arrangement with some people who liked them but couldn’t afford them. They paid $100 for a suit after I wore it four, five, or six times,” Mickey said, “but I wear them longer now,” the laugh line buying him a little more time before the daunting task of detailing where he got $300,000
in loans, without paperwork, that he never paid back.

  One loan appeared to be real, a no-interest $35,000 advance from the president of Hollywood State Bank, a man who ceased being the bank’s president once the transaction was disclosed. “I guess he liked me,” Mickey said. After that, Mickey cited a couple of dead men who couldn’t testify to the contrary—the late Bugsy Siegel and Hooky Rothman loaned him $25,000 and $15,000, he said. But he was doomed by another supposed source of $25,000, Arthur Seltzer, a New York manufacturer of leather handbags who happened to be the son-in-law of his bookkeeper, Mike Howard. Seltzer evidently saw no harm in helping his father-in-law’s boss until prosecutors reminded him of the consequences of perjury. U.S. Attorney Ernest Tolin instructed the New Yorker to share for the jury a conversation he’d had with Mickey.

  He asked me if I could enter in my records the fact that I had loaned him $25,000 … I thought nothing of it and I said, “Yes.”

  Well, had you loaned him $25,000?

  I had not.

  Had you loaned him any money at all?

  I hadn’t loaned him any money at all.

  During closing statements, Mickey’s lawyer suggested that Mickey’s earlier life might explain his confusion about his finances, “Those fights may have affected him in later life, who knows?” They called that the “Punch Drunk Defense.”

  * * *

  SHORTLY BEFORE THE verdict one of the Hollywood trade papers carried a for-sale advertisement for Mickey’s house. The Brentwood home with the doggie bed and mirrored boudoir had been showcased in both Life and Look magazines and described in the state crime commission report as worth $200,000. The real-world asking price was $47,500. The contents, meanwhile, were the featured attraction of THE YEAR’S MOST INTERESTING AUCTION EVENT, so termed by the flyer from Marvin H. Newman Auctioneers. Ten thousand people showed up at its Wilshire Boulevard showrooms for the preview viewing of “the complete and luxurious furnishings from the Brentwood home [of] Mr. and Mrs. Mickey Cohen—nationally prominent personality.” The offered items ranged from Mickey’s collection of antique firearms to Tuffy’s bed that matched his own. One remnant of the Sunset Strip haberdashery also was up for bid, the bulletproof doors reinforced with 300 pounds of steel. Mickey’s similarly armored Cadillac, which the state of California never let him use, already had been sold for $12,000 to the Texas Stock Car Racing Association, which planned to put it on display.