“Sir, you are the proud owner of Mickey Cohen’s bedspread!” auctioneer Newman declared on one of the seven nights it took to sell the household items. The entertainment console that Mickey had bought for $2,700 went for $1,150 while his bed and nightstand brought in $600. Someone paid $1,100 for the Steinway piano, while the French Provincial dining set, made of fruitwood, sold for $900. The doggie bed? Thirty-five dollars. “You should have seen Tuffy when they took his bed. He didn’t like it,” Mickey said. “Why, the linen on that bed was changed every day, same as mine.”
* * *
THE SEVEN WOMEN and five men on the jury had to digest the testimony of more than 100 witnesses but deliberated only four hours before returning June 20 to declare Mickey guilty of three counts of tax evasion and one count of filing a false financial statement.
Sentencing was set for July 9 and Jack O’Mara was not going to miss that, either. The way their world worked was that the police chief, captains, and lieutenants got written letters of appreciation from the city while the anonymous foot soldiers got to go out and get drunk to celebrate what finally was more than a minor victory. A bunch of them first went to court to see Mickey be sentenced to five years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine. What they didn’t expect was the lecture by U.S. District Judge Benjamin Harrison, directed at them—they were among the causes, you see, of Mickey’s misfortune.
“This community has to take its share of the responsibility for his present predicament,” the judge said. “There was no serious effort on the part of local law enforcement officers to stop you. If they had performed their duty you wouldn’t be here now—you would be in some other line of business.…”
And Mickey? Where Senator Kefauver saw a contemptible little punk, the federal judge saw a “hard luck problem child” of “the Los Angeles melting pot … a very personable individual, at least a good salesman who has been able to sell himself very well. I think you have a good side. You’re not as bad as you have been pictured. Perhaps more of us would be gamblers if we’d been as lucky at it as you.”
Before they led him off to exchange his suit for prison blues, Mickey handed his wife his pearl gray fedora, his pinky ring, and his meager roll of fresh bills, only $50 not counting the lucky $2 note stashed in his wallet, which he hoped they’d let him keep while incarcerated. With interest and penalties, he was half-a-million dollars in hock to the government, worse off than when he was selling 2-cent newspapers on the corner down the street. He hugged Lavonne and said, “Take it easy”—no worry, they’d get ’em on appeal.
“Right now, though,” Mickey said, “I’m hungry.”
CHAPTER 16
The Trap
In the spring of 1949, as the Vice scandals and violence enveloped the Sunset Strip, the California Congress of Parents and Teachers met in Los Angeles to discuss the social responsibility—or lack of it—of gangster films. On the surface, the concern was nothing new. Gangster stories had been a staple of the screen from the silent era on and grumbling about them was one reason Hollywood in 1930 adopted the Hays Code, which mandated, among other things, that films “shall never … throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice.” The code meant that James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson had to get it at the end of the shoot-’em-ups that continued to proliferate through the ’30s. One critic who adored the genre gushed that “the story of man against society, the villain pursued and punished—the ‘gangster,’ as a generalization—remains basic, A–No. 1 cinema stuff.… When it’s done well you can’t beat it for suspense, vicarious thrills and, at the end, the smug satisfaction (‘There but for the grace of God, go I!’) of watching justice vindicated.”
But the 1945 film Dillinger had set off outraged protests and a boycott by religious and women’s groups even though the title character was done in much like the real Depression-era bank robber—ambushed by federal agents waiting outside a Chicago movie theater where he had just seen Manhattan Melodrama. The protesters worried that impressionable adolescents would to be entranced by such rags-to-riches, authority-defying characters, however brutal their demise. The intense actor playing Dillinger didn’t help—Lawrence Tierney was a real-life Hollywood bad boy known for boozing and brawling along the Strip. Columnist Louella Parsons declared that the country had enough of gangster films. “We have outgrown them,” she wrote, and one of Hollywood’s leading moguls agreed. Samuel Goldwyn’s studio had produced similar movies in the past but he thought such fare perpetuated an unfortunate image of the nation that had just won World War II. “Any returning G.I. will tell you that many of our allies across the seas still believe that the gangster is a familiar figure in any American street,” he said. In 1947, Goldwyn joined with other producers and distributors in voting to cease showing 25 titles including Dillinger; Me, Gangster; They Made Me a Killer; and Ladies of the Mob. As for the PTA, it was forever calling for more stories about decent people and did so again in 1949.
But by the organization’s last statewide meeting of the 1940s something more disturbing was unfolding on the screen. In some new movies it wasn’t a given that virtue would win out, if any virtue could be found. Even some Westerns no longer were simple good guy–bad guy morality plays. They too were going for gangster angles, the PTA lamented. A French critic had named this new genre “Film Noir” in 1946—the year the squad was born—when a backlog of American movies finally reached post-war Paris. Part of it was style, the black-and-white, the dark interiors, the rainy streets with lonely lampposts and characters casting long shadows that seemed to represent a dark, second self. These films had a worldview, too, and it was hardly black and white. Paranoia reigned. And everyone lied, even women. They no longer were soothing innocents but schemers, femmes fatales. What’s more, the official arms of society—police and prosecutors—were as crooked as the crooks, or irrelevant. If the bad guys got it, it wasn’t because of anyone with a badge but through the work of a weary private eye, often a fallen cop. And where the early gangster films had been set in New York or Chicago, the backdrop for these dark tales more often was Los Angeles, the sun-washed city of palm trees and self-invention, the city that pretended that evil came from afar. In this world, truth was found not in the sunshine but in the shadows. Justice was obtained not in a marble courthouse but in the streets and alleys.
Jack O’Mara never bought into the noir worldview. Time and again his work as a cop played out at the edges, in episodes that ended in murk, not clarity. But into old age he thought that good and evil, and right and wrong, were obvious enough. He’d been raised to believe in heaven and hell and he knew where he was headed. He didn’t expect to find Mickey Cohen in the same community.
When it came to movies, O’Mara’s idea of a good one was Oklahoma, the musical with songs that begged to be sung in the shower. Rodgers and Hammerstein had a new musical out, South Pacific, and it had great tunes too, especially “Some Enchanted Evening,” where you meet a stranger across a crowded room, the way he met Connie. You better believe he sang that in the shower. And if your wife and daughter started crooning another hit of the day, “(How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window?” somebody damn well better get them a doggy. The O’Maras’ named their new Scottish terrier “Trouble.”
* * *
A LOT OF what was written about Los Angeles wasn’t much better than the Film Noir bleakness. For decades, writers had competed to show how clever they could be in telling the city how phony and empty it was. “Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city,” Morrow Mayo wrote. “On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity, something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouthwash.” A Kentucky native, Mayo decided after six years in Los Angeles, “Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn … the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat
.”
Others told you that Los Angeles was built on a giant crime, the theft of water from the Owens Valley, and that evil things went on inside the city’s pink stucco houses. “There is a bright side to Los Angeles,” the Slovenian immigrant Louis Adamic wrote, “only to see it, one must have good eyesight … In spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place—full of old, dying people, who were born of old, tired pioneer parents, victims of America.” His buddy Carey McWilliams, who had come out from Colorado during the surge of 1922, had a unique take on the twinkling city you saw at night from Mulholland Drive, where Jack O’Mara took unwelcome visitors—the miles of lights below were “jewels on the breast of the harlot.”
Raymond Chandler created a great detective, Marlowe, but he might be describing the desert winds that blew through the San Gabriel Valley and next thing you knew he was putting evil thoughts in the head of a man’s good woman, “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.…” Then Nathaniel West came out with The Day of the Locust, about the dreamers on the fringe of Hollywood who relieved their boredom with trash newspapers and movies that “fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”
Jack O’Mara understood that men like those were deep thinkers. But he had two questions for them: “What does any of that bleakness have to do with how you live your own life?” And, “Do you ever go fishing?”
Everyone on the squad fished. Sometimes several of the men went together without the wives for the deep sea variety down off Mexico. But more often they traveled up into the Sierra Nevada seeking the smaller fish, usually rainbow trout. Con Keeler went so often they made him a fish and game warden. Archie Case made tackle boxes on the side. O’Mara led his extended family on excursions to June Lake or Lake Sabrina, at 9,000-feet, where they would sleep on cots in tent shelters and he would tease his young nieces and nephews with stories about the monsters lurking in the outhouses. O’Mara fished there in the cold months too, when common wisdom said the only way to catch trout was to go before sun-up and break a hole in the ice. He experimented and found no, you could catch ’em at all hours—he even sent an outdoors magazine an article he wrote called “Nine O’Clock Trout,” to debunk the pre-dawn ice fishing myth. That was something worth racking your brain about, not figuring out the soul of Los Angeles.
The bottom line was that no egghead had to tell him or others on the Gangster Squad that bad shit happened behind pink stucco walls, or that young girls sometimes came to Hollywood with one thing in mind and wound up doing another. But here’s what they did when they stumbled onto a pimp who was preying on underage runaways—they took him up into the hills to see those fucking jewels on the breast of the harlot. O’Mara was going to stick his gun in the guy’s ear and do his usual sneeze routine until Jumbo insisted, “Let me.” No one played the crazed I’m-gonna-kill-you cop better than Jumbo, no one. As with the pickpockets victimizing the World War II servicemen, it didn’t take much to get him worked up about the pimp—the little sister he cared for at home, Betty, was the same age as the girls that scum made work the streets. So Jumbo started waving his six-inch and screaming motherfucker-this and motherfucker-that and finally charged at the pimp atop Runyon Canyon. The only way the terrified man could flee was down. But after a few steps, he fell and slid and tumbled, and it was like that all the way down the slope. He tumbled over rocks and through thorny brush that ripped his ace pimp clothes to shreds and tore at his skin, too. By the time he reached Hollywood Boulevard he was a bloody half-naked mess ready to call one of his buddies and plead, “Get me a couple hundred bucks—I’m getting out of this crazy town.” Talk of that night spread within the LAPD until it became one of those legends no one knew for sure was based on a real episode, but it was. Eventually someone put a version of it in a movie, having no idea that a real cop named Jumbo had driven a real pimp down the mountain just like that.
* * *
JUMBO WAS THE first of them to die. At the end of work on March 1, 1952, the big Texan did what he did most nights, had a few drinks with his partner Dick Williams, the ex-Army Ranger. Jumbo dropped Williams off at home in Westchester and headed in a driving rain toward his own house. A mile from it, on Western Avenue, his unmarked squad car skidded head-on into a bus. They naturally wondered whether another car might have forced his to swerve but Jumbo never was able to speak during the two days he lingered in the hospital as everyone gathered around. James Douglas Kennard was thirty-nine and left a wife, mother, seven-year-old son, and two sisters.
Next of the originals to go was Jerry Thomas, the quiet one with the memory, who had gotten their files started by perfectly recalling all the names and addresses mentioned in barroom conversations. “The Professor” was married to a nurse and both had a hard time handling the pressure of a job that sent you on fifteen-hour stakeouts. “When will you be back?” “I don’t know.” Every marriage felt the strain. The squad’s first secretary, Sally Scott, once had to deliver documents to Con Keeler’s home in the Valley. Con’s wife asked her, “Can you tell me what he does?” and Sally said, “You really don’t want to know.” One squad member, Jerry Greeley, had already gotten divorced in order to marry an LAPD secretary, so the wives weren’t crazy if they worried what the men were up to. Jerry Thomas got ulcers from dealing with the life, then started showing up for work wearing one black shoe and one brown shoe. Finally they had him answering the phone, that’s all, and one day he went home, sat on the Davenport sofa and shot himself in the head with his service revolver.
Tough little Willie Burns, who once took a bullet for the LAPD, did not appreciate being bumped off the squad he had commanded and sent back to uniformed duty. When the tiny city of Maywood had an opening for a police chief he applied and got the job. Burns lasted three weeks presiding over eighteen officers who patrolled barely one square mile. “I just sat around and suddenly I realized I was bored,” he said, so he went back to being a lieutenant and watch commander for the LAPD. Then heaven called—he was offered the chief’s job in one of the glorious old California mission cities up the coast, San Luis Obispo. Never mind the pay, $495 a month, he didn’t know life could be so good. But he barely had time to make his mark there before they diagnosed his inoperable cancer. “Go home,” doctors advised and that’s where he died, at the small house in Gardena where his wife once had received a funeral wreath. Willie Burns was only fifty-four.
* * *
ON FEBRUARY 13, 1952, Mickey Cohen finally was flown to Tacoma, Washington, and taken to the ancient McNeil Island federal penitentiary. He was ready for the pen after growing tired of staying in Los Angeles jails while pursuing his appeal. He had a fine time in the Sheriff’s custody but suddenly was moved to the Lincoln Heights Jail controlled by the LAPD, where he was miserable, he said through his lawyer: “I was afraid for my life. There were cops all around me and police are my deadly enemies. I’m shaggy as a beaver. They didn’t let me shave for four days, gave me no exercise, and cut up the newspapers. My wife, Lavonne, was only allowed a four-minute visit. We had to converse through speaking tubes. They gave me no clean clothes.… The food was terrible. They wouldn’t let me take a bath.” The cops had figured that would be the worst part of confinement for Mickey, denial of his bubble baths.
More than five years had passed since the Gangster Squad was formed with the streets as its office. It had a sanitized new name, digs at the heart of city government, and many more men. One Sunday when they had a squad picnic at Lincoln Park, Con Keel
er had everyone present sit on a bench or stand behind it, by a chain link fence, for the only photo they ever took as a group. That was back in ’48 or ’49 and they had sixteen men even by then, the fifteen in the photo and Keeler, who snapped it. The picture showed O’Mara holding his pipe in his right hand and wearing a light suit and a wide tie that didn’t reach down to his belt—most everyone wore a tie, even at a picnic. They ate franks and beans and afterward O’Mara goaded a bunch of the guys into taking off their jackets for a game of football, touch football, so he could dart by the giants and they couldn’t pound him, at least those were the rules. The next day, Monday, half couldn’t make their shifts. Now some were dead.
There were no guarantees in police work, or in life, but O’Mara hoped he was still around, and on the squad, when Mickey got out of prison. He wanted to see if another of his small victories might pay off. This too involved Neal Hawkins, his well-placed mole at Mickey’s house.
I knew he had guns there and Neal was an Army man, what you might call a gunsmith specialist in the Army. I said, “See if you can get those guns from him, I’d like to check ’em out.” Oh, hell, Neal Hawkins conned Mickey—he said he’d take ’em home and out to the desert, check ’em out on a shooting range, oil ’em up, grease ’em, make sure everything was working. Well, there were seven guns Mickey had, none of ’em registered to him. The numbers on those weren’t worth a shit, they didn’t check to anything, those guns were taken off the street.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 16