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

by Paul Lieberman

  Hecht—who won the very first Academy Award for Original Screenplay, for the appropriately titled Underworld, and also wrote Scarface, the movie in which Paul Muni, a Jew, played a fictionalized Al Capone—had met Mickey a decade before, in his prime strutting days. The co-author of The Front Page was roped in back then to give a short speech at a fund-raiser Mickey was staging at Slapsy Maxie’s for the Irgun, the underground Jewish group fighting to establish a state of Israel. In his memoir, A Child of the Century, Hecht recounted showing up and seeing all these battered faces, “some in society rig,” and asking Mickey’s man, Mike Howard, who they were.

  Mr. Howard, tempestuously in charge of everything, answered. “You don’t have to worry. Each and everybody here has been told exactly how much to give to the cause of the Jewish heroes. And you can rest assured there won’t be no welshers.” … I addressed a thousand bookies, ex-prize fighters, gamblers, jockeys, touts, and all sorts of lawless and semi-lawless characters …

  Now Hecht found the post-prison Mickey in his small apartment, fresh from the hot shower, dusting himself with talcum powder. He was nude except for green socks, held up by maroon garters. Mickey assured him, “I’m a different man than the wild hot Jew kid who started sticking up joints in Cleveland, who lived from heist to heist in Chicago and Los Angeles.”

  “What changed you?” Hecht asked.

  “I lost the crazy heat in my head.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST JERRY Wooters–Mickey Cohen confrontation came behind the giant Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire. Jerry had followed a strong-arm character to that spot and was giving him the usual roust when the guy suddenly peered up. Everything escalated up the ladder from there, or into the sewer.

  I was behind the Ambassador and talking to a collector from Vegas, just shakin’ him, but he didn’t have anything. I was standing on the fender and I noticed him look behind me. And it was Mickey and a little guy, Ruffy Goldberg, they were together, naturally in a Cadillac. Mickey had just gotten out of the joint. When I turned around, he stopped and backed up.

  He said, “Come over and shake my hand.”

  I said, “I don’t shake hands with no fucking pimps.”

  He said, “You fuckin’ whore, I saw your picture in the paper when I was in the joint. That gal, she used to suck my dick.”

  I said, “I understand you got the sweetest ass in the joint, everybody got a piece of you.”

  So he comes charging out of the car. I came out with a .38. Unfortunately, he didn’t try anything.

  I got pissed, I just hated him. I hated him. He’s a guy that’s always pulling a gun on somebody and always belting somebody. You know, all you have to do is catch him once and kill him and your problems are solved.

  They were not strangers, those two, hardly. As a sergeant of Administrative Vice during the postwar years, Jerry had orchestrated the busts of bookies backed by Mickey during his rise to power. Mickey in turn had fueled the scandal that broke up the Vice unit and got Jerry busted back into uniform. So there was blood between them, plenty of fuck-yous held in reserve. And, yes, it was possible that Mickey had seen Jerry Wooters’s picture in the paper with a gal while he was in the joint, assuming Mickey was keeping up with the news from back home. When the bachelor Wooters finally got married, it did make the papers, with a colorful account of how he’d met his TWA stewardess bride on a flight while escorting a prisoner from the east. His colleagues at headquarters laughed at that tale and at how Jerry trimmed a couple of years off his age so he was only a decade older than sweet, beaming twenty-four-year-old Jean Jettie, bless her soul.

  But if anyone thought Jerry was puffing up the encounter with Mickey behind the Ambassador, forget it—Mickey filed a complaint with federal authorities, asking them to investigate the cop who pulled a .38 on him and seemed poised to blow him away. Jerry Wooters found himself having to explain why he was accused of violating the civil rights of Los Angeles’s best-known hoodlum.

  I got the perfect wife. Absolutely never offered any advice. Never. But sometimes you get involved in that shit, my wife got a little edgy. I came home one day from work and we had her relatives for dinner. Jesus Christ, two of the nephews are ministers. And on the back porch is some goddamned newspaper. It’s got an article, “Killer Cop Stalks Mickey Cohen.” That was me, the killer cop.

  CHAPTER 23

  “It’s Hard”

  Sergeant Jack O’Mara had kept busy while Mickey was in prison. One of the first of the state crime commission reports had used the term “Invasion of Undesirables” and the big-time undesirables had not stopped trying to gain a foothold in Southern California. Or maybe they were just tourists with $12,000 in tip money.

  Colleagues decided that O’Mara had a sixth sense for spotting them but it mostly was luck, he said, and good (paid) informants. He gained his reputation, oddly, in the wake of the ill-fated Dahlia investigation, when he posed as the shrink’s chauffeur. During his days undercover on that case he had almost been arrested himself one night at a motel up north off Interstate 5. Local police were searching for three hoods who had robbed an unemployment office in San Francisco and they thought O’Mara was acting suspiciously. He sure was—he was sneaking off to call Connie.

  A couple of weeks later, safely back in L.A., he was smoking his pipe, studying the teletype, when he got a call from a hotel detective downtown, a guy he greased for information, reporting three suspicious men. O’Mara drove there with Keeler and Archie Case and shouted “That’s one!” when he spotted a man leaving the hotel. O’Mara slammed on the brakes and ran after the fellow, who quickly disappeared into a bar. Inside, the cops found a row of men having drinks, but only one with a full glass, freshly poured. Keeler held up three fingers and big Archie cuffed the third man down the bar—yes, one of the robbers of the unemployment office. They got the other two in the hotel. Amazing. It almost made up for botching the Dahlia thing.

  * * *

  A YEAR AND a half after Mickey was locked up, O’Mara got lucky (or good) again, when one of his old high school fraternity mates virtually handed him Leo “Lips” Moceri, the fugitive hit man sought for two decades by authorities in Toledo, Ohio. A member of Detroit’s old Purple Gang, Moceri was on the FBI’s most wanted list as well when he was discovered in Los Angeles putting slugs into a pay phone. Two phone company investigators were watching a booth at a farmers market off Vine a week before Thanksgiving when they spotted a middle-aged man plunking in four quarter-sized washers and two fake dimes to make a long distance call.

  The caller saving himself $1.20 had an I.D. giving his name as “John Baker” and listing an address that was an abandoned chicken ranch. He also had $1,800 in his wallet along with a $10,000 bank deposit slip. When the phone company investigators confronted him he waved a couple of hundred-dollar bills and asked, “If I give each of you a single can you forget about this?” They refused the bribe, so he ran—and was tackled by Robert Skibel, who said, “If you make another move, I’ll tear your head off.”

  Skibel years before had been the fleet end on the semi-pro football team formed by working class boys from Manual Arts High School. O’Mara was the pledge master when he joined, the one who swatted his fanny with the paddle. “Tremendous coincidence,” said Skibel, who made two calls that night: the first to the LAPD’s nearest station, the Hollywood Division, to get a squad car right over; and the second to his old fraternity brother, who then followed “John Baker” after Hollywood detectives released him with a citation for petty theft. The man didn’t look like a “John Baker” to Jack O’Mara.

  I said, “That guy’s a god-damned Sicilian. He’s giving us bullshit. We’re gonna print him, let’s check that SOB.” This buddy of mine comes in, “Bingo, O’Mara.” He comes up a Mafia hit man wanted for seven murders. So I call Hamilton’s home. I said, “Hey, Cap, I got an old friend in your office waiting to see you. Guy named Leo Moceri.”

  You know, guys like this, they’re petty thieves at heart. We had another, t
his big boxing promoter, stealing magazines out at the international airport, taking magazines without paying for them. They work their way up and wear $200, $300 suits but they’re still just thieves.

  * * *

  HOW O’MARA GOT on the trail of the mob boss of Gary, Indiana, was more of a fluke. When Connie’s father became ill they moved for several months in with her folks in Sierra Madre, a quaint town right against the foothills of the San Gabriels. Across the street was a big property where the shrubbery had been cleared within five feet of the house and a wall erected around the front, with an iron-gate entrance. Large cars with out-of-state plates came and went and the men who got out wore dark suits and ties, not the usual dress in the foothills. Neighbors said the owner had paid cash for the house. “Oh, he’s a great guy, you know.”

  O’Mara began peering through binoculars out his in-laws’ window to get the license numbers of visiting cars—what else did he have to do? It turned out the visitors were coming to see Anthony Pinelli, who ran the gambling and other rackets in Gary for the old Capone crew—he just did it at a distance now, having invested his profits in eight properties around Southern California, including a motel near the Hollywood Bowl, which his son managed. The motel served as a temporary home for the elder Pinelli’s associates coming in from the Midwest. But one day he went to the airport to personally greet a distinguished trio led by Tony Accardo, one of the figures on the first page of the slender notebook Con Keeler began keeping in the first days of the Gangster Squad.

  Mob lore had it that “Accardo, Anthony a.k.a. Batters, Joe” may have been one of the machine gunners in Chicago’s infamous 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which solidified Al Capone’s rule over the underworld there. After Capone’s jailing and death, Accardo rose up the ranks with the opposite style—he diligently avoided scandal and publicity while becoming the nation’s second most powerful mobster, after Frank Costello. On this occasion, Accardo had flown into Los Angeles with his personal physician, Dr. E. J. Chesrow, said to be an administrator of Cook County General Hospital, and with a bodyguard traveling under the name Michael Mancuso. That man listed himself as a car dealer but he looked remarkably like Sam Giancana, who within a decade would take over the outfit upon Accardo’s retirement and, like Capone, display an affinity for both scandal and publicity until the day he was shot down in his Chicago home.

  Accardo’s arrival was not quite the equivalent of Capone’s coming to Los Angeles a quarter century before, but it was close enough—O’Mara helped form a large LAPD task force to watch the Chicagoan and his entourage to see where they went. The answer: Perino’s, the same fancy Italian restaurant on Wilshire where Jack Dragna had taken his mistress. Police officials higher up the ladder later gave the impression that the cops promptly treated the Chicago trio to the bum’s rush onto the first plane out. In reality, Accardo and his buddies took the flight on which they already had tickets, leaving at 1:30 A.M. for Las Vegas. But Chief Parker’s LAPD again got the sort of publicity it craved (EX-CAPONE CHIEF GETS COLD SHOULDER IN L.A.) and O’Mara got another of his small victories, along with the opportunity to demonstrate the squad’s standard operating procedure for the amiable Tony Accardo before his plane took off. The boss had $7,000 on him, Sam Giancana $5,000, and the good doctor $250.

  That’s when I shook him down and found all that money in his pocket. Accardo, I’ll never forget, “Hey, kid, help yourself. That’s just tip money.” And it was hundred-dollar bills. He had no other bills in there, about 12 grand or something, just a tremendous amount of money. He says, “Hey, that’s tip money.”

  Well, we found out they were going to Vegas. We let them go, we turned ’em loose and of course the press came in, they got all their pictures and knocked off Pinelli’s hat. He was very irate, he thought that he had blown the deal for Tony Accardo and the mob would be unhappy with him. We had nothing on them—hell, all we wanted to do was heat ’em up so bad and give ’em publicity. It made good copy, you know, the hoods coming in.

  Sam Giancana, oh yeah, he looked at me when I was shaking down Tony, you know, giving him kind of a heavy frisk, I wasn’t being too gentle with him. And Sam, he stared at me. Those snake eyes glittered. Boy, I’m telling you he had blue eyes. They were icy blue. I’ll never forget that. I never had a guy look at me like that. If anybody could kill, that was him.

  When O’Mara’s wife, Connie, heard him go on about Sam Giancana’s killer blue eyes, she shook her head and said, “Like your eyes.”

  * * *

  AFTER CONNIE O’MARA’S niece announced that she was engaged to a policeman, Connie didn’t try to talk her out of it, but she said, “They’re gone and you never know what they’re doing. It’s hard.”

  The last few years had been hard for her not only because Jack spent his nights rousting the likes of Tony Accardo and his days either moonlighting at Santa Anita or going to school, still using the G.I. Bill in pursuit of his degree at USC. Connie’s nighttime tears again had been over a series of miscarriages. She had waited seven years for their first child and assumed a second would come quickly. But after the birth of Maureen another seven years came and went and she and Jack still didn’t have a second child. At Christmas she gave her daughter baby dolls and baby cribs and baby high chairs—being a mommy meant everything. She still baked cookies for the priests and nuns. Jack was head usher at the church. They cared for her ailing parents. Jack battled evil in Los Angeles. It just wasn’t fair.

  Connie played the bouncy homebody most of the time and family members called her “Lucy,” after TV’s antic comedienne, but she never fully adjusted to the strains of being a cop’s wife. When they had parties or barbecues with couples from the squad she sometimes drank as much as the men, which was a lot. Jack had grown closest to Jerry Greeley, the burly Navy vet who divorced his first wife and married an LAPD secretary. Greeley wasn’t a good drinker—he became loud and belligerent. His new wife put up with it until she became pregnant, then stormed out of one of their parties after another alcohol-fueled scene. “I can’t do it,” she said, “if this is how it’s gonna be.” Greeley stopped drinking after the ultimatum and stayed sober for years. But Connie O’Mara liked her martinis and vodkas on the rocks and she could get loud too. Jack once prodded her, “Let’s go, boss,” and put his hand on her elbow. She brushed his hand off.

  A specialist who examined her said that corrective surgery might help her get pregnant, but it was a long shot.

  * * *

  JACK O’MARA CAUGHT himself wondering whether it made sense for the squad to be devoting all these resources to getting Mickey now. He’d seen a picture of the man posing with his pruning shears and telling jokes like a comedian. He didn’t buy the buffoonery, but still … All these other characters continued to come knocking on the city’s door—the Moceris, Pinellis, Accardos. Real hit men and old-school hoods with organizations…

  Captain Hamilton had asked if he wanted to go to the airport and meet Mickey returning from prison and O’Mara said, “I’d love to, Cap.” Then something came up and he had to be at home. O’Mara called the captain back and said, “I’m sure you can get one of the other guys.”

  * * *

  CONNIE GOT PREGNANT almost immediately after the corrective surgery that was supposed to have little chance of success. They hoped for a boy, to balance the family, and had a name ready, Michael. But when God blessed them with another girl they named her after the niece who carried the flower basket at their wedding, Martha Ann—“Marti,” for short. Connie wrote in her Baby Book:

  Our littlest angel made her debut on February 23, 1955, approximately 8:20 P.M., weighing 6 pounds, 10 ounces.” Her first day at home was quite an education for us. After six hours had passed and she hadn’t awakened to eat I was sure something was wrong. I called the hospital and they assured me everything was all right and let her sleep.… She awoke and was hungry about ten hours later.

  The O’Maras had moved by then to El Monte, a bit farther out in the San Gabri
el Valley. Their new home had only two bedrooms—the girls had to share the pink one—but there was a cottage out back for Connie’s parents, who were getting on. They had a large yard with plenty of fruit trees, peach, apricot, lemon, tangerine, kumquat, and Santa Rosa plum. Connie could go wild making jam. She also planted lilac bushes like the ones she remembered from her childhood in Minnesota, though their gardener warned her that Southern California was too hot for those. Their gardener had been interned during the war for being Japanese and tended the fruit trees wearing a pith helmet, a comic counterpoint to Jack’s gray fedora. Life was good again. Peggy Lee had even come out with a new version of one of Connie’s favorite songs, so she started singing it once more, now with two little girls in tow.

  But my heart belongs to Daddy,

  Yes, my heart belongs to Daddy.

  CHAPTER 24

  Bad %$#@ Words

  The second Wooters–Cohen confrontation was in a waiting room outside the D.A.’s office but it stemmed from an incident at Schwab’s, the drug store where starlets were said to be discovered. On December 18, 1956, Mickey strode into the pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard and worked over one of the managers to collect a $500 debt—onlookers said he spit at Harry Maltin, punched him about the face, and kicked him in the groin. Mickey started to walk out but returned to tell the manager to go screw himself. It did not sound like a discussion about renting fake tropical plants.

  Jerry Wooters and his partner were in their unmarked car around the corner when they got the radio call but arrived too late to catch Mickey at the scene. They did line up several witnesses, including the woman who sat up in the cashier’s perch and a waitress at the drug store’s famous soda fountain. But the witness who counted—the battered Harry Maltin—wanted nothing to do with them. Even after Wooters pleaded with him to sign a complaint, he refused. Then Maltin went home to recover and his phone rang with a mystery call, from an angry, anonymous voice claiming to be speaking for Mickey. Within an hour, guess who showed up at his house? Sergeant Wooters and his baby-faced partner, Officer Phelps, asking if he had gotten a threatening call from Mickey that might have changed his mind about pressing charges. “What call?” the guy responded. Hey, you win some and you lose some in any game.