So we got the guns and we went up to the West L.A. firing range and we had Ray Pinker, a famous ballistics man on the police department, and Russell Camp of the police lab. So we were up test firing and took test bullets out of each gun. Then I took the butt plates off and I scratched initials under them, inconspicuous that nobody would notice even if they took the plates off again. Then I wrote a special report for Hamilton and the Cap locked it up in the so-called safe—we used to have a safe there for all our top secret stuff and the Cap put it there with the bullets.
See, I figured they might be recovered from a body someday. I said, “He’s got those guns. Somebody’s gonna use ’em.”
At the LAPD, only Chief Parker, Captain Hamilton, and a couple of others were let in on the trap that Jack O’Mara had set for Mickey Cohen. While Mickey was in prison, one of his flunkies would keep his weapons. But when he got out, he’d no doubt get back all those guns that now could be traced to him. Perhaps the judge was right and Mickey was merely a hard-luck problem child of the Los Angeles melting pot, a personable salesman whose main misfortune was that he’d sold himself too well as the city’s signature gangster. “You’re not as bad as you have been pictured,” the judge said.
Or maybe he was a killer. It was true he’d mostly been shot at of late. But before that he’d gunned down one rival bookie in L.A. and perhaps been behind the deaths of three others, and who knew how he’d earned his stripes in his younger days, in Cleveland and Chicago. It was yet another mind game and O’Mara’s trap was a long shot. But if Mickey got out, and got those guns back, and one was used to kill, Los Angeles police might actually solve a gangland murder after a century of failure—and put Mickey away for good. It was a long shot indeed, depending on many what-ifs. But some long shots pay off.
Sergeant Jack O’Mara merely had to wait a decade.
PART III
Sergeant Jerry Wooters and the Deadly Night at Rondelli’s
CHAPTER 17
Jerry Meets Jack
Sergeant Jerry Wooters first encountered Jack Whalen at the Mark Twain Hotel in Hollywood, where the big man was demanding that two members of the Gangster Squad show him their badges.
Sizing Jack Whalen up was a lot like family lore or explaining a shooting—the tales tended to wander. Depending on who you spoke to, he went from six-foot-one to six-foot-four and from 225 to 250 pounds. But everyone who shook his hands agreed they were the thickest they’d ever seen, or felt. An off-duty LAPD sergeant, not long before, had made the mistake of taunting him at a bar and Whalen did what he did to a lot of men in bars and elsewhere, knocked ’em cold. It was not like later on, where if you laid a finger on a cop they hauled you off—no questions asked or answered. A policeman back then was expected to handle himself—if he couldn’t, shame on him. This was an older sergeant on uniformed patrol who was having drinks at a bar on 7th Street, where he got to jawing with Whalen and they took it out into the parking lot. The sergeant could not remember much when questioned at the hospital, and he retired soon after. There was little his colleagues could do, but word of the incident spread through the department and on April 14, 1952, nine months after Mickey Cohen was sentenced to prison, the Intelligence Division put Jack Whalen on its watch list for “muscle activities.”
A few months later, a slender dance instructor named Jon Anton was leaving the Hollywood Post Office when three men confronted him to collect all of $15 he owed a bookie. Anton apparently had placed three $5 bets on a horse to win, place, and show. The horse had done none of those but Anton still hadn’t paid Roger Matthews. The bookie was among the trio who approached him to collect and he brought along Jack Whalen to do the negotiating, such as it was. First thing, the big man pushed Anton up against the windows of the post office and reached into his pocket to see what cash he had. Anton tried to get to a pay phone to call police but Whalen gently advised him not to. “I will kill you,” he said. “I will catch you in an alley with no witnesses.” Anton was advised, equally gently, to deliver the money to the lobby of the nearby Mark Twain Hotel, which served as Whalen’s office of sorts, the switchboard dutifully taking his calls. There Anton made the mistake of arguing that he didn’t owe that much—he’d only bet $2—and that ended the conversation. The first fist struck him between the eyes, a police report said, and after ten more rights and lefts he had enough internal injuries to keep him spitting blood for a month, plus “a chipped front tooth, a bruise on the left shin, lumps on the right side of the head, a swollen nose and his face was ‘badly beaten up.’” It seemed like overkill to collect $15 but in some businesses, the report noted, you need to “send a message to a larger clientele.”
Now Sergeant Jerry Wooters and his partner got a radio call to come to the Mark Twain Hotel, someone there was messing with two other members of the squad, making them prove they were cops.
Let me tell you how I first met Jack. Met these officers in this hotel, two guys from Intelligence, two guys from our office. They’re sittin’ there in the lobby and he’s in the corner. Good lookin’, well-dressed. Didn’t look like a hoodlum, an asshole.
So Whalen’s sitting in the corner of the lobby and these two policemen are there, both of them pretty good size. I got a little partner with me. So I said, “What the hell’s the problem?” They said “Jack Whalen—we tried to place him under arrest and he wouldn’t come.” These were policeman, and I was a sergeant. That’s why they called me. But I couldn’t believe these fuckers let him sit there. I woulda got my nightstick and beat the shit out of him or something.
So I said, “Why wouldn’t he come?”
“We didn’t have the badge with us.”
Well, we didn’t carry a badge, just an ID card. It was too heavy. I guess we were copying the FBI or something. These badges wore out your pockets. So Whalen had stopped there to pick up a collection or pay somebody or something and they grabbed him. And they said “We’re police officers, come with us.” And he says “Get fucked, where’s your badge?” They didn’t have a badge.
They didn’t know what to do. So I didn’t care who the fuck Whalen was. He was just another bookie. I said, “Oh shit,” so I went over to him, all my 163 pounds, and I said, “Whalen I understand you’re a tough guy, really good fighter. Really good shape. Husky and big.”
He said, “Where’s your badge?”
I said, “I have a badge. I’m not going to show it to you, asshole.” Of course, I didn’t have one. So I said, “I heard about your reputation and I’ll tell you one thing: you’re going to go out of this lobby. You might take two of us out, but you ain’t gonna take four because we’re all comin’ after you at one time. Now do you want to go easy or want to go hard?”
He says, “Dick, what’s your name?”
So I tell him my name.
“Oh, hiya, Jerry, I heard about you.”
Jerry Wooters figured that was pure bull, Jack Whalen shining him on with a grin more befitting a movie star than a hoodlum. But that’s how the renegade cop met the renegade gangster and how they became friends for life, or however long life could last, in Los Angeles of the ’50s, for someone named Jack “The Enforcer.”
CHAPTER 18
How Jack Whalen Became “The Enforcer”
The temptation is to say he saw an opening when Mickey Cohen was sent to prison and went for it. But Jack Whalen had been moving toward a life of crime well before then, spoiling the plan of his father, the notorious “Freddie the Thief,” that he rise above the family trade. The Whalen patriarch held himself partly to blame, for he was why Jack didn’t last as a cadet at Black-Foxe Military Institute, the elite private academy that was going to mold him into a pillar of respectable Los Angeles.
Fred Whalen, no surprise, had never been a conventional father. From the earliest age, the pool hustler-turned-bootlegger tutored his children in how to survive in this world—the Whalen way. At suppertime, many parents lecture their kids, “Eat your vegetables.” Not in that household. Fred made a game of hovering
over his children’s plates with his fork and snatching their favorite foods—their potatoes, pie, and the like. That was his way of teaching them that the other guy wanted your goodies and you’d better protect ’em, or go after his first. If the kids refused to drink their milk, he’d drop a quarter in the bottom of the glass, a lesson in how the lure of money can get people to do what they wouldn’t otherwise. He also played card games with the children … and cheated. He tried to make it obvious when he dealt himself extra aces from the bottom of the deck. He wanted them to squeal, “I saw that!” His daughter, at least, usually did.
Bobie was blonde in her early years, Jack dark-haired. The Whalen daughter was a daddy’s girl—she’d jump into Fred’s arms to be carried about, while Momma hoisted little Jack. His bond was with one of the Wunderlichs, the stocky ones without the same guile. “Each took a child and that was it,” their daughter said in old age.
When Jack turned eleven, his father sent him off to Black-Foxe, a school founded by a wealthy developer and two former World War I majors, Earle Foxe and Harry Black. Tall and blond, looking every bit the officer, Major Earle Foxe had been a successful actor in silent movies before the war and continued appearing in the talkies. He was one reason show biz luminaries felt comfortable turning their children over to the military academy, and the cadets included the sons of the silent film giants Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and later of Edward G. Robinson, who’d just made a splash as the rags-to-riches hoodlum in Warner Bros.’ Little Caesar, dying with the last words, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” The singing-dancing child star Shirley Temple also came to visit while Jack Whalen was at the school—her brother was a cadet too. So was the grandson of the fellow who owned Seabiscuit, the horse.
Black-Foxe was designed to be an island of moral rectitude amid a city that remained outrageously crooked through the ’30s. That was the era of Mayor Frank Shaw and the 2,600 bookies, brothels, and gambling parlors—some of that sin and graft flourishing blocks from where the sons of the fortunate learned to march in uniform with straight backs and practiced their public speaking, a skill Major Earl Foxe believed essential for society’s future leaders, like the Whalen boy. The school’s main campus was in the shadows of the Hollywood studios, but it had a second in the Valley for its sports and stables. Coached by a former captain in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the polo team took on college squads from Berkeley, Stanford, and the like. Though hardly raised in horse country, Jack Whalen scored a goal his first season, remarkable for a baby-faced cadet not yet a teen-ager. The son of Freddie the Thief was a natural at polo. He was a physical marvel in every sense, becoming captain of the junior gymnastics team and a standout in the pentathlon, which included the high jump, shot put, and 50-yard dash.
On the academic front, Black-Foxe offered a full college-prep curriculum plus military training in everything from cavalry tactics to aviation, using a leftover World War II plane. The Whalen boy had a head start on the flying front, for few of the cadets, even there, had daddies with a biplane. Jack did get homesick, like other new cadets, so he kept handwritten letters from his mom under his pillow—he liked the familiar scent of her perfume sprinkled on them. He wrote letters back in beautiful slanted penmanship, drawing little circles over every “i” instead of dotting them.
Veterans of the school said it was unheard of for a cadet to become commander of his class his rookie year. A photo commemorating the 1933 appointment showed Jack posed in white dress uniform with a leather belt and chest sash, three medals over his heart, and a ceremonial sword on his left hip. A stickler might quibble at how his officer’s cap was askew, tilted to the right, and how his hands were not exactly in the classic position for standing at attention. Or maybe it’s only after we know what he would become that our eye is drawn to young Jack Whalen’s hands, and how they were balled into fists.
* * *
BLACK-FOXE OLD-TIMERS SAY it would have been grounds to force the boy to leave once the school discovered how his father really could afford the tuition—it wasn’t through dry cleaning. Fred Whalen’s role as a rum-runner came into public view only after the lifting of Prohibition, in a Los Angeles Times feature on the daredevil smugglers who had brought whiskey to a supposed dry California. There he was, dubbed the “Wild Irishman,” alongside the likes of Tony “The Hat” Cornero. Fred was one of the few never to land in prison for that, but when authorities did get him—well, that was one more reason Black-Foxe couldn’t let his boy stay.
In later life, Freddie boasted that authorities never really caught on to his scams, at least not after the early misunderstanding over the swiped lingerie in the store, which he dismissed as ancient history. But the truth is they nailed him after Prohibition, too, when he began reselling the cheap drugstore liquor in Johnny Walker bottles. The concept was inspired: You bought up gallons of the least expensive stuff you could find—Brunswick Drug Scotch, say, or the Sontag Drug Company’s Royal Clan—and poured it into glassware available from C&O Bottle and Cork Supply. By the time Freddie was done, it looked exactly like premium Black Label and he could sell it by the case to doctors down in Long Beach, the film crowd in Hollywood, or even to priests. But to make the enterprise really pay he needed a network—why not cover Watts? So he enlisted six others to operate franchises, in effect, out of rented garages, the helpers including Leo Chapman, James Woods … and George Wunderlich.
The Whalen clan was convinced that the youngest of the brothers-in-law was the one who eventually rolled over and tattled to authorities, under pressure when he faced unrelated legal troubles, something to do with a young lady. Whatever the reason, the feds got wind of the whiskey scheme that Freddie the Thief had milked brilliantly for two years. Freddie made the best of it by copping to one count of “buying, selling and transporting intoxicating liquor in unstamped paid tax containers.” The plea bargain called for him to spend less than six months in the nearby Terminal Island prison where his wife and kids could visit for picnics on the grounds while he enjoyed the first real vacation of his life. “He had a ball,” his daughter said. “He played pool, you know?” When Freddie completed his sentence, he convinced the relevant officials to waive any probation given how he had totally reformed and entered a promising new field, selling imported china. Chief Probation Officer Thaddeus Davis was either a true believer, or a little richer. He wrote of Freddie, “due to the fact that his present employment will probably carry him into the countries of South America, and the fact that his family ties are extremely strong, we feel that further supervision in this case would serve no useful purpose.”
Freddie could shrug off the conviction, but his son landed in public schools, among the common kids. The football part, at least, came easy. Jack had filled out quickly as a teen-ager, to a point where he couldn’t wear regular pajamas. “He would just bend his arm and they would split right open,” his sister said. “Bend his leg, same thing, split right open.” But when Jack was sixteen he and several friends took a ’36 Chevy from a used car lot and didn’t bring it back for five days, “driven nearly 1,000 miles and returned in deplorable condition,” a police file reported.
Fred Whalen gave his son a hard slap when they released him after the long joyride. That could have been a show for the cops but Jack’s sister said the friction between the father and son was real—Freddie was furious that his boy had screwed up like that. Or perhaps he was disappointed that his son had been caught so easily. Another time Jack was riding in a convertible with his sister, who kept her hair platinum and did some modeling—she looked OK. When a man in a passing car called out his appreciation, Jack swerved in front of the other car to block it. “Well, see, my brother just yanked him out of the car and just worked him over. He said, ‘Nobody should talk to women that way.’”
When Freddie saw that his son enjoyed fighting, he decided to cure the habit (“it’s a dirty business”) with the help of a locally based boxer who in 1939 was training for the biggest shot in that game, a titl
e bout with Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion. Jack Roper was old for a pro, at thirty-six, and worked a regular job as an electrician at the studios, where he also picked up bit parts acting in character, playing the “club bouncer,” “restaurant gangster,” “barfly” and the like. Roper later would be cast as the boxer whom John Wayne kills with his fists in The Quiet Man, sending a despairing Wayne fleeing to Ireland, vowing never to fight again. But in real life Roper had survived more than 100 bouts, and while he lost quite a few, thirty-nine, he had a solid left hook that had enabled him to score nine first-round knockouts, enough to earn a supporting role in L.A.’s first heavyweight championship fight in three decades. After Roper set up a training camp at a ranch north of the city to prepare, Fred Whalen volunteered his son as an impromptu sparring partner, meaning cannon fodder. Using his persuasive talents, Fred told the heavyweight’s trainer, “just have your guy go three rounds with him and have him cold-cock my son. I don’t want him doing this.”
For one round, the real-life contender and the muscular teen did the usual in sparring, they danced and pawed. But in the second round the 194-pound Roper performed as requested and unloaded, knocking down the youngster. Jack Whalen got up, shook off the daze and got angry, as they say, with his right hand. “One punch,” his sister recalled, “one punch,” and the professional heavyweight title contender didn’t get up—so went the Whalen family legend.
That April 17 a crowd of 30,000 including a “Who’s Who” of the film colony crowded into Wrigley Field, L.A.’s minor league ballpark. Some spectators tried to watch for free by climbing high up on a wall at the back of the stadium so security guards sprayed them with fire hoses. But the night did not provide much of a show in the canopy-covered ring—Jack Roper landed one good left on Joe Louis before the champ unleashed a combination in a corner and put him away at 2 minutes, 20 seconds of the first round, the sixth successful title defense for “The Brown Bomber” and his third straight opening-round knockout. Other than his paycheck, the only consolation for the local fighter was that he had lasted longer than Germany’s Max Schmeling, who the year before had been felled by Louis in 2 minutes and 4 seconds in the bout cheered as a triumph for America against Hitler’s surging menace.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 17