In contrast to that the reform of the gangster was a bore, and that’s what Ben Hecht feared he was witnessing in Mickey—the reform epilogue, the toothless tiger talking about his hunts of yore. True, great details about the underworld MO came out when Mickey recounted pieces of muscle work he did back in Cleveland and Chicago, like mentioning how he “raised” people during heists at bookie joints—he’d explain then how that meant lining ’em against the wall, hands raised. But even as he offered up the gangster version of sausage-making, Mickey would point out how he wasn’t the wild, hot Jew kid anymore, having become older and more sensible during his years on McNeil Island. “I didn’t reform that I know of,” he told Hecht, “but I began to think with a head that didn’t belong to me at first.”
Here was Hecht’s problem, then—the new Mickey. Even the gangsters at the top often lost their zip once they escaped the streets for hotel suites. They became little different from any other honorable tycoon or dull factory owner counting his profits. He wrote, “The odds are three to one that Mickey Cohen, if not stopped by a bullet, will wind up a Rotarian.”
None of those worries were shared with Mickey, whose own reasoning was more elemental: How could the thing not be a bestseller? A hundred thousand cops alone would want to know what he was thinking. Mickey also reasoned: Why wait to sell the mother and the real moneymaker too, the movie version of The Mickey Cohen Story? Mickey didn’t bother to tell his Oscar-winning collaborator, Ben Hecht, that he was going to start doing that pronto, peddle shares in a movie that didn’t exist to anyone who would bite—except he’d call them loans for the benefit of the IRS. Pure genius, no?
* * *
A GUY IN THE appliance trade advanced him $25,000 and a retired manufacturer the same. He got $7,500 from a juke box dealer and an equal amount from an L.A. businesswoman. Mickey actually signed a contract with vending machine manufacturer Aubrey Stemler, guaranteed his $15,000 back with 6 percent interest if no book or movie was produced within a year, good luck collecting. Mickey reassured them all that his film would gross $10 million and his smallest investor agreed—agent Lou Irwin thought it could rival movies about Capone and Baby Face Nelson. But Irwin was smart enough to hand Mickey only $1,000 from the pocket money he often doled out to needy actors to tide them over for the weekend. Not so frugal (or bright) was an L.A. psychiatrist who, like Hecht, was eager to get inside Mickey and his past, “the way he behaves, what motivates him.” The shrink advanced him $25,000 and was promised a 10 percent interest in his life story. “I was very impressed with Mr. Cohen. He is a gentle and nice fellow,” the doctor said. “In return for my efforts he said he’d commit himself for psychiatric study—but he is a very busy man, you know.” Alas, Mickey never did have the free time to sit on his couch. But he kept the cash.
The public relations woman Elinor Churchin thought she might write Mickey’s biography herself, or help package his book and movie, and she came up with a novel way of gaining the inside track: she purchased the plant business for $17,000 from the brother and sister who originally brought Mickey into it but found, somehow, that the enterprise lost money. The PR woman never did get to write her bio and six months later signed over the nursery to Mickey’s sister, Lillian Weiner.
Mickey may not have told Ben Hecht what he was up to but he did boldly inform the IRS. In March 1958, he met with agent Guy McGowen and proposed a deal. As the IRS man later detailed it, Uncle Sam would get the first $50,000 in profits from the book and movie based on Mickey’s life, “Cohen would get the next $50,000, minus of course taxes on that, and all future monies would be turned over to the government.” Mickey cautioned the federal agent not to be alarmed if it looked like he was leading a lavish life again—that was a necessary act that would benefit them all.
“I must keep up a front. My only asset is the motion picture,” Mickey explained. “If I lowered my living standards it would take away my reputation. If I was to make myself unknown I’d be out of the picture.
“You can’t expect Mickey Cohen to go around like a three-dollar-a-day-bum.”
* * *
BUT IF YOU are going to sell your life story the one thing you don’t do is give it away. In the summer of 1958, Mickey agreed to let Saturday Evening Post writer Dean Jennings be his new fly on the wall and witness the same shower-and-powder routine as Ben Hecht, along with his nights with the regulars and a new addition to the crew, a bulldog dubbed Mickey Cohen Jr. The dog had his own set of pink-and-white plastic dishes, an extra-wide turquoise lounge chair, and a red leather leash. Fred Sica had dog-walking honors.
Running over four consecutive weeks, “Mickey Cohen: The Private Life of a Hood” was packed with trivia about Mickey’s new apartment in West L.A.: the door with three locks and a peephole; the dozens of pairs of shoes stacked two-deep on a rack below the pants and jackets still tailored by Beverly Hills’ Al Pignola; the red-velvet MC-monogrammed bedspread; the bar with a built-in fountain dispensing root beer, cola, club soda, and water, and on a shelf above, different wines and liquors for the drinking guests, each bottle illuminated by its own blue light at night; the white drapes that opened and closed at the touch of a button thanks to an electric motor; the three TVs, two black and white and one a color model, quite a novelty then; the (unused) fireplace decorated with satin-finished black bricks; the walnut bookcase with decorative hardcover books he never read; the baby blue stationery imprinted FROM THE DESK OF MICKEY COHEN; the Italian-made red leather cigarette case with a silver plate engraved with his name, a gift from Mike Wallace for his slander-filled interview; and no less than six telephones in different shades, quite a communications setup for someone now in the sundae-and-banana-split business. The nursery had been sold to Japanese investors and the back office so essential to Mickey had moved across town to the Carousel ice cream parlor, purportedly owned by his sister.
One day Mickey got a call at the apartment from Helen Phillips, wife of his longtime bail bondsman. She asked, “What are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Well, go out and kill me a couple of people.”
That was the take on Mickey, the harmless ex-gangster who could only joke about the days when his wife, Lavonne, would complain that he wouldn’t eat a Spanish omelet and he’d retort, “Hon, is that any way to talk to the number-one hoodlum in Los Angeles?” Or when he’d tell Examiner city editor Jim Richardson, “The people of Los Angeles ought to get down on their knees and thank God for Mickey Cohen, because if it wasn’t for me the wops would have this town tied up.”
The narrative agreed that Mickey’s only real asset now was his life, and he was stunningly candid about his attempts to peddle it, matter-of-factly detailing the loans he’d lined up for shares of a promised book and movie, the $10,000 here and $25,000 there that kept high-test gas in his Cadillac with the reinforced steel roof, and funded the long nights out when he still wouldn’t let anyone else pick up the check. The author, Jennings, summed it up: “He is doing the best he can to scrape together a few hundred thousand tax-free dollars.”
Thus did Mickey simultaneously thumb his nose at the IRS and guarantee that the great Ben Hecht would write him off, not write an epic about him. Hecht hadn’t a clue that Mickey was giving away the goods (his story) or lining up suckers to invest in a nonexistent property. He called Mickey to confront him. “I told Cohen what I had been told. He didn’t admit it or deny it, but I understood what the silence meant.” Hecht also contacted producers he knew to ask about the potential for a Mickey Cohen film. “None,” he said, “was particularly interested.”
The Saturday Evening Post series concluded that Mickey and Los Angeles now were like the two ends of a dumbbell, stuck to each other. In the magazine, the pieces were filled with photos of Mickey out on the town, dining with a nightclub dancer, in front of his Caddy, visiting entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., scowling under his fedora, washing his hands (of course), and in the barber’s chair being pampered with a shoe shine and a manicure w
hile the dog, Mickey Jr., was hoisted up to say hello. There also was an inevitable shot of his former bodyguard Johnny Stompanato with actress Lana Turner, in whose home Stompanato had been stabbed to death months earlier.
The four weeks of Saturday Evening Post articles used only one photo of policemen, a deadly dull shot showing Chief William Parker posed seated in his office with Captain James Hamilton peering over his shoulder while one of their foot soldiers stood at the far end of the chief’s desk. The third man looked rail thin and angular in his dark suit and had his hair trimmed as short as his bosses’ for the occasion. There were dozens of investigators in the Intelligence Division now and the one posing with the brass was never quoted in the pieces. But Sergeant Jerry Woote was described to America as having ulcers from the role he’d taken on as “Mickey’s relentless Javert.”
* * *
JERRY WAS amused by the effort Mickey was putting into portraying himself as a pitiful and defanged ex-hood and how he had snowed his federal parole officer—that clown who arranged for Mickey to give how-I-turned-my-life-around talks on behalf of Volunteers of America, the service organization dedicated to reaching and uplifting those in need. He must not have seen the Mickey that Jerry saw in his confrontation with the lawyer Paul Caruso. That Mickey was rather like the old one.
Caruso was a newly minted attorney fresh out of the Marines and looking for clients like crazy when Mickey, just out of prison, hired him to handle several civil matters. Mickey would come to Caruso’s home and have dinner and be the perfect gentleman with the wife and kids. When the rabid L.A. cops accused him of cursing, Caruso couldn’t believe it—the Mickey he saw wouldn’t tolerate a word of profanity, “he was a dream guest.” But just as Mickey was about to go on TV with Mike Wallace, Caruso decided it was time to collect his overdue legal fees, up to $7,900 by then. Mickey said sorry, no—Caruso actually owed him $1,000, money left in trust in the lawyer’s office. Caruso said he had a family and needed the fees he had earned.
He was telling people he didn’t owe me money. I was stupid and young and an ex-Marine. I said, “You were born a small-time hoodlum and you’re going to die a small-time hoodlum.”
He said, “If you’re man enough, come down and get it.”
His sister had that greenhouse then, Lillian Weiner. He’d go in and say, “You need plants around here.” So I went down there and two of his men were sitting on each side of his desk and within thirty seconds he had a .38 pointed at me. Fortunately his sister walked in.
Caruso stunned Mickey by grabbing his sister and using her as a shield to back out of the nursery and escape to his car. But after the lawyer made it home, he got a phone call, one of the henchmen announcing, “The little guy’s unhappy with you. He wants $1,000.”
That’s when Caruso called Captain Hamilton’s squad and five of the men came over, right in the middle of the night. Keeler the bug man was among them and so was Dick Williams, the lethal jungle fighter. But the one who settled him down was Jerry Wooters. Jerry had been by his house before, with his partner, Phelps, feeling him out and trying to turn him against his hoodlum client. Caruso had a bar in his home and Jerry would crack a beer and say, “You know, you’re being taken for a ride.”
“They were telling me I was being played for a sucker and they were right. They tried to get me to crack on Mickey. I was too dumb and too impressed with Mickey to know they were really looking out for my welfare.”
After Mickey pulled the .38 on the lawyer, Jerry never lorded it over him how they were right. All Paul Caruso saw that night was a taciturn cop standing erect, like Gary Cooper, ready with his gun if Mickey or his men came by to follow up on heir threats. The cops stayed there for most of a week, just in case, and Caruso decided “Jerry was the one who would have done something if Mickey just gave him an excuse.”
CHAPTER 28
Coins and a Cucumber
Jerry Wooters would argue at times that his dealings with The Enforcer—surreptitiously trading information and favors—were little different from any cop’s with an informant. “There are no freebies in this world,” he said. “You got to give to get.” But that didn’t stop the whispers in the ranks, especially after he and Bert Phelps noticed a car following them.
They had a healthy paranoia—watching one’s back seemed prudent in the job—and they sensed that the sedan was staying a convenient distance behind them. Jerry made a couple of turns to see if it would follow and it did, until they reached a red light. When the light turned green, Jerry didn’t go anywhere, he stayed put, forcing the suspicious sedan to drive ahead. At that point, they turned the tables and began following the other car, finally edging alongside and waving for the driver to pull over.
Instead, the son of a bitch tried to run off. I could drive pretty good and I caught up and swerved in front of him to jam him against the curb. I got out and approached the driver’s side and I see he’s reaching under the dash. So I stuck my .38 in his ear. But he was just turning off his radio.
It was not the sort of radio that plays music.
He took out his ID card. I went to a phone and called the office. “We just grabbed an FBI guy.” Hamilton checked it out and told me, “Hell, they’ve been tailing you for a week.” This is where I came up as the bag man.
The bosses told him not to worry, they’d handle it. They almost laughed it off, in fact. They said the tail only showed how desperate J. Edgar Hoover was to embarrass the LAPD—it would make his year to embarrass the squad at the core of Chief William Parker’s mission.
It was no secret that Hoover and Parker were bitter rivals as they competed to be the nation’s paragon of law enforcement virtue. The enmity surfaced in petty ways. Jack Webb had continued to use the line “I’m a cop” in the introduction to the LAPD’s great image booster, Dragnet, while the show held its own in the ratings against the ’50s Westerns and Lucille Ball’s antic comedy. But the line was axed after Hoover wrote in an FBI bulletin, “I abhor the word ‘cop.’ Especially deplorable is use of this term—a standard derisive invective of the underworld—in a careless or disdainful manner by … law abiding individuals.” Meanwhile deputies from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department routinely were admitted to training programs at the FBI Academy while candidates from the LAPD were told they might have to wait a decade. “I guess we are an unfriendly foreign country,” Chief Parker said.
There also was a substantive difference between the two men and their institutions, over organized crime. While Hoover built the FBI’s reputation chasing down bank-robbing desperados such as Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, he denied for decades that there was any nationwide crime network, much less a Mafia. “Baloney,” he famously said, pooh-poohing any notion of a dominant “coalition of racketeers.” Led by its Gangster Squad, since morphed into Intelligence, the LAPD had been working for a decade to document just such a criminal enterprise. In 1946, back when they wouldn’t know a Mafioso if he rang their doorbell, Willie Burns and Con Keeler had been pioneers merely by creating crude charts on which they listed the undesirables found in the city and drew lines to their suspected associates around the country—just assembling files of news clips on the hoods was novel then. Early in Parker’s tenure atop the force, he delivered a speech in Chicago to the National Automatic Merchandising Association spelling out his philosophy of a three-segment “Invasion from Within” threatening America and listing the Mafia, by name, as “the most ominous of all criminal cartels,” a menace to be taken as seriously as Communism. “It is difficult to believe the Mafia exists,” Parker told the luminaries of the vending machine industry, who were not naive on the topic. “Yet it does exist, and its inner circle of members do control organized crime in America!”
In a thinly veiled swipe at you-know-who, Parker said, “It has repeatedly been stated that law enforcement is primarily a local responsibility and that, even though criminals may be organized on a nationwide basis, the majority of their criminal acts involve the violation of local laws.” Fin
e, then—he’d do the job locally and get the credit. Parker proudly quoted a columnist who wrote, “I have found only one local setup that recognizes the peril of this situation. Los Angeles has the only police agency designed to combat the Mafia and its collateral mobster connections.” Only a few years had passed since Los Angeles and its police department were enmeshed in scandal and made a farce of in the national magazines by a pint-sized tax cheat whose only virtue was his clean hands. Yet Chief Parker was ready to revive a term taken from the early booster days of his city of sunshine, back when the hordes from the Midwest arrived by the carload with dreams of a new life. “Today, Los Angeles is referred to by authorities as the ‘white spot’ amid the black picture of nationally organized crime,” Parker said, and no one was going to tarnish that white spot if he could prevent it—not J. Edgar Hoover, not any blowhard gangster, not any wayward cop.
* * *
FRUSTRATED BY THE FBI’s willful blindness, Parker and his trusted second, Captain Hamilton, in 1956 spearheaded creation of the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU), a coalition of twenty-six local and state agencies committed to sharing confidential data about the underworld, with federal agencies explicitly excluded. Hoover naturally saw the coalition as a slap at the FBI and a challenge to his power, and sought out participants to serve as his spies. A field agent in San Francisco subsequently wrote a memo discussing “tactful and discreet steps to ‘clip the wings’ of Hamilton and this group … his orders come from Chief Bill Parker, who could perhaps be described as the symbol of frustrated ‘kingmakers’ in law enforcement.”
The snooping went the other way too. When veteran FBI agent Julian Blodgett was recruited to head an intelligence unit in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office he received an icy reception from his counterpart in the LAPD and soon after spotted an unmarked car following him. Only when the report came back “he sings loudest in church choir” did Blodgett settle into a working relationship with Captain James Hamilton and his crew.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 27