CHAPTER 30
“Bend Your Knees and Roll”
To Jerry Wooters’s partner, those years were like being in a movie, and not a Jack Webb clunker. To Bert Phelps, Jerry was Humphrey Bogart incarnate, the defiant hero on the hard-boiled fringe. Phelps relished having a front-row seat as Jerry and Mickey went at it cursing—they once grew so foul trying to out-motherfucker each other that Mickey began laughing, never mind his federal complaint against the killer cop. Phelps got a kick out of being chased by the FBI, too, or whoever that was with the two-way radio in the car following them. He got a charge out of his partner taking him to street corners or bars to meet Jack Whalen, though he was skeptical at first when Jerry assured him the man was no donkey and had piloted bombers during the war. Then they sat down to lunch and Phelps learned that Whalen had been stationed at one of the same airfields as him and indeed knew the workings of the B-25s and B-29s. Whalen really had been a flyboy for his country and now was a strong-arm hood. Amazing.
One day they were in the courthouse as the veteran defense lawyer Max Solomon was pleading out several prostitutes. Old Max was full of stories about representing Bugsy Siegel and the “Syndicate” gambling czars in the days of the crooked Shaw Administration and then the Hollywood Madam with her box of cards telling who in town was a bad screw. Whenever he saw Wooters he dredged up a case from Jerry’s Vice days in which the prosecution’s crucial testimony came from a woman named Gaybreast. Old Max would ask, “How’s your witness ‘Happy Titty?’” Anyhow, on this day the counselor Max Solomon was pleading out hooker clients one after another. Bert Phelps said, “Gee, Max—hell, I could do that.”
Max said, “Well, why don’t you? Go to law school.”
“Really?”
“Sure, you can do it.”
That’s how the genius bug man Bert Phelps got the genius idea of going to law school in his spare time—inspired not by Chief William Parker, who had done the same thing decades earlier, but by a mob lawyer.
Bert Phelps relished every moment of his wild ride with Jerry Wooters—right up to the night he fell off the telephone pole.
* * *
IT WAS NEARLY pitch-black and he was fifty feet up, in an alley outside a bookie’s place off Vermont. Wooters, on the ground, thought he saw a shadowy figure peering at them. “Hey, Bert,” he said, in the tones of a whisper but the urgency of a shout. Phelps turned to look, then reached back to grab the pole. They might have wondered later whether what happened that night was an omen of what was to come, but it was an accident, nothing more—the spikes on Phelps’s climbing shoes slipped, that’s it, and down he plunged. No omen, just an accident, said Bert Phelps.
Once upon a time, in a place far, far away, we had found this Italian, some guy working for Mickey. So I went up there, I had my little small device with me that would transmit the telephone calls, both sides of the conversation, plus give you the telephone numbers they dialed. It was a nice little device. So I went up there and I put it on, it worked great. But something happened to it, we didn’t know what it was, maybe rain. Jerry and I decided we got to go back and take a look at it, bring it down, repair it. About two, three o’clock in the morning, I climbed the pole and went up to the top and was looking at it. Then suddenly I heard Jerry, “Hey, Bert!”
I said, “What is it?” He pointed and you looked down there and you could just see in the background a figure. Some son of a bitch I think is going to shoot me. So I quickly turned around on the pole and I reached, and it wasn’t there. I went, “Whoooa.” Telephone pole height, a long ways down.
I remember going down, I’ll never forget this, going down, my old parachute training in the Air Corps, “Bend your knees and roll. Bend your knees and roll.” You know, so I did. I put my head out and rolled. And I hit the cement. God, it just knocked me unconscious.
Jerry said, “Get up! Let’s go, Bert!”
I couldn’t get up. Jerry says, “Get up, get up, let’s go!” I couldn’t. I finally heard him. I said, “I can’t breathe.”
Jerry says, “Get up.”
I said, “Call the ambulance.”
Jerry told him their car radio wouldn’t work in the alley—he had to drive the unmarked Chevy out to the street. So off he went, leaving Bert sprawled unprotected on the pavement, praying no other vehicle would turn into the dark alley and run him over. But after Jerry drove off, he didn’t use the car radio. He found a landline instead to call the office. Sergeant Jack O’Mara was acting as night watch commander. He had a question.
“Wait a minute. He’s in the alley?”
“Yeah, he’s layin’ here in the alley. I’ll drag him out to the street.”
“Don’t touch him!”
“Well, I don’t want to burn the thing.”
“To hell with burning it—don’t touch him!”
O’Mara called for the ambulance, telling the paramedics to rush down now but “kill the lights, kill the siren.” By the time they got there, Jerry had eased the unmarked Chevy back into the alley and parked it crossways so no one would run over the fallen Phelps. Bert’s arms, feet, and back had been broken. He needed to get to the hospital fast. But before the ambulance pulled away, one of the paramedics asked Jerry, “Why didn’t you radio from your car?”
The Humphrey Bogart of the Intelligence Division just shrugged. He wasn’t going to explain to that moron that he didn’t want to use his police radio least anyone overhear and ponder what they were doing, at that hour, in that alley, on that pole.
* * *
JACK WHALEN WAS in trouble again, for trying another past-posting scam. He had a partner in this one, Lloyd “Sailor Jack” Woods, who was a tough character, too, but did tote a gun—he once fired five shots into the bookie Charles Cahan in a dispute outside a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. They supposedly were squabbling over a girl named Dixie, but who knew?
The target of their scam was a Hollywood gambler named Don Giovanni, like the opera, who wanted to be a bookie. The two tough guys—Jack Whalen and Sailor Jack—told him, sure, there was room for one more bookie in the Valley. They would even send a few bets his way, from employees at the General Motors plant, to get him started. And they did.
What the neophyte bookie did not realize was that some of their bets were on races that had just been completed. It was not quite as clever as Freddie the Thief’s past-posting charade in hospitals, but it nearly worked. At the end of Don Giovanni’s first day as a bookie, he was $4,000 in the hole. When he pleaded that he didn’t have that much, Jack Whalen and Sailor Jack Woods took all he did have, $500.
Unfortunately, Don Giovanni had not been tutored in the etiquette of their realm—like the slender dance instructor years before he turned to authorities for help. The past-posting victim named for an opera swore out another complaint that no detective, however friendly, could derail. On July 31, 1959, Jack Whalen and his buddy Sailor Jack were sentenced to one to ten years in prison for grand theft by past-posting. Though Whalen would remain free while appealing, and probably could drag out the proceedings for a year, the immediate indignity was seeing himself described, at the time of the sentencing, as “a self-styled actor.”
* * *
BERT PHELPS WAS in that hospital room two and a half months, staring at the ceiling, counting the little holes in it. Then they put his body in a metal cage to help it heal. His peers on the squad paraded in to console him and Captain Hamilton did, too, but not Chief Parker, that mean-tempered (and damn intelligent) son of a bitch. “The chief probably thought ‘You dumb shit, you got caught,’ and wanted to give me a pension, pension me off. Bullshit, I wanted to work.”
But Phelps was not ready to get back in the unmarked Chevy when his partner got a call from Jack Whalen asking for a favor. It was the sort of matter The Enforcer normally would have handled himself, and left a body laying there, but the legal heat was on him. So he called Jerry Wooters.
You know, Mickey had a gang. The other guys had a gang. Whalen was Whalen. So he had
a bookmaker in the south end—he had some bookmakers down there paying him protection. So another guy got out of San Quentin, a great big Mexican I guess, this guy stands six-foot-nine and he’s strong from layin’ bricks at Quentin. He was down there saying that he was Jack Whalen and he was gonna be collecting the money from this one bookie. So Jack called me. I said, “Where’s the meeting?” He says, “Some restaurant, eight o’clock in the morning.” Bert was in the hospital and I didn’t want to expose Whalen to any of the other guys at the office. So I went down myself.
It wasn’t complicated. You just go down and flash your police ID. Maybe the fool giant pretending to be Jack Whalen sees your shoulder holster. You leave him guessing whether you’re there on official business or just a friend helping a friend. “Never had any problem,” Jerry said.
He did wonder at times what the bosses knew, or suspected. He had been tempted to think that nothing could get to him after he survived being shot down over the Pacific. But the ulcers that flared up during the war never went away. “My hot gut,” he called it, and it was flaring up again. But that wasn’t an omen, either.
* * *
SERGEANT CON KEELER learned what the bosses knew. The moralizing bug man was the greatest contradiction on the squad. He was always talking about the need to be “down the line” and yet his job so often put him over it. After Anthony Pinelli got his motel, Keeler picked the lock of a room and left a playing card by the pillow of a visiting hood—an ace of spades—just to mess with him. He used a small Minox spy camera to copy movie industry labor contracts he found in the home of Johnny Roselli, Dragna’s consigliere.
He broke into Johnny Stompanato’s place, too, to look for address books or guns, and wound up trapped in the bathroom—the squad’s lookouts down the street hadn’t realized that Johnny Stomp was returning because he was in a woman’s car, not his convertible. When Keeler heard them at the door, he hurried into the bathtub and pulled the curtain … only to have the woman come in to use the pot. He imagined her finding him and screaming, then Johnny rushing in, armed. Keeler had it all played out in his head—he was going to step calmly from the tub and say, “Just passing through, Johnny…” But the woman flushed and left without discovering him and she soon drove off with the mob’s great lothario. Keeler then found a revolver in a dresser, rushed it to the police range for test firing, and broke into the house again to place it back in the same drawer, beneath the same underwear.
One day Keeler went to check out a few lowlifes from San Francisco staying at a Hollywood Boulevard hotel, and followed his usual MO. When they left their suite at night, he went in, no warrant—screw the Cahan case, he was just fishing. But he found dozens of expensive new cameras, clearly the fruit of recent robberies at local shops. The problem was he had no grounds to be there. So the next night he watched from the lobby as the punks came out with bulging laundry bags and tossed them in the back of a white Cadillac. Keeler called the West L.A. station and was connected to a patrol car. The young patrol cops sounded naive when he described the Caddy. One asked, “Well, how are we going to stop it, legally stop it?”
Keeler had to spell it out. “You know, nobody stops at a boulevard stop sign—they roll up and go about one mile an hour through it. That’s your grounds for stopping ’em. And since you’re going up to the driver’s side, turn your flashlight to the backseat and you’ll see these sacks. They’re probably gonna tell you it’s laundry but you’re going to be able to see the outline of what looks like tin cans. You’ve got your probable cause.”
“OK, OK, great.”
The young patrol cops did as told, making the bogus traffic stop and arresting the punks with the hot cameras. Then they called their tipster back. “When are you coming to the station?” They assumed he wanted credit for the collar. They still didn’t get it. Con Keeler didn’t exist.
“I’m not coming. Our officers aren’t coming. You fellas just made a helluva good pinch. Congratulations.”
“OK, great, thanks.”
The next morning, Keeler drove to the office. The squad was gone from City Hall by then—the LAPD had finally gotten its own headquarters a block east, an eight-story, whitish-gray monolith everyone called the Glass House. Keeler pulled into the basement parking area, got on the elevator, and pushed the button for the seventh floor. But before the door closed, two other men stepped in, Chief Parker and Daryl F. Gates, his protégé and frequent driver. Keeler started sweating but managed to say, “Hi, Chief.” The door closed and the elevator started up. Nothing more was said until the door opened on the sixth floor, home of the chief’s office. As he was stepping out of the elevator, the formidable William H. Parker turned and said, “Nice job you did last night, Sergeant.”
Chief Parker knew. He knew everything. Their bosses knew everything.
* * *
OUT OF THE blue, Jack Whalen offered Jerry Wooters a gift. “I got a dog for you,” he announced. That was one thing Whalen had in common with Mickey, dogs. Mickey went for boxers and bulls, the squat, powerful breeds. Whalen favored purebred German shepherds and Great Danes, the big dogs. But Jerry Wooters wanted nothing to do with any pooch, and not only because one took a bite of his hind end back when he was a rookie. He told Whalen:
They die on you, then you’re miserable.
No, no, you’ll like this dog.
No, no, Jack, I don’t want the fucking dog.
I’m telling ya’, Jerry, take the dog—you’re hurting the wrong people.
Who am I…?”
Trust me, the thing’ll let you know if anyone’s sniffing around your bushes or you car …
C’mon…”
No, listen, I’m tellin’ you, you’re gonna open up that garage some night and you’re gonna get your ass blasted off.
Where do I pick up the dog?
The Wooters’ new pet was named Thor, after the Norse god of thunder.
CHAPTER 31
“Don’t Fuck with That Little Jew”
Jack Whalen and Mickey Cohen had something else in common besides dogs. If you saw photographs of each at a packed table at a Sunset Strip club, surrounded by soused frivolity, they might be the only ones scowling. Jack usually could force a smile if he knew a camera was on him, but sometimes he forgot and the edges of his mouth sunk. Mickey almost always looked that way.
Whalen’s older sister came up with a fable to explain the bad blood between the two men by the tail end of 1959, an enmity beyond the natural tension between competitors in the gambling rackets. From her perch in the Big White House, Bobie von Hurst decided that her (big) kid brother had enraged the deranged (little) showboat by coming to the rescue of street-corner newsboys. Mickey, of course, had been one himself in Boyle Heights by age six, having been instructed by his older brothers to sit on a stack of two-cent Los Angeles Records. He was eight, by his own calculation, when he started getting nickels from the local hustlers (including the pool-playing Dago Frank) to hold their betting slips. So it was hardly news that the kids hawking papers on the corners sometimes played a role in the re-creation of gambling. But it seemed a stretch to believe, as Bobie von Hurst did, that the grown-up Mickey was demanding a cut of the newsboy action even as he was raking in money from gullible evangelists and investors in a film based on his life. As Bobie explained:
The thing was, all the little newspaper guys on the corner, you know, on Hollywood Boulevard, they took bets, just small bets. Mickey Cohen came around and told them they had to give the bets to him. And my brother didn’t like that. He didn’t think Mickey Cohen should do it. And that’s when he got into trouble with Mickey Cohen. A lot of things started with Mickey Cohen harassing the little news kids taking bets. He told Mickey that any of his collectors that came around, he’d beat the bejesus out of them. Jack was taking care of the newsboys, that’s all. And Mickey was washing his hands every twenty minutes. I don’t know what he was trying to wash off of them.
Jack Whalen’s sister didn’t much like that Mickey Cohen, either.
* * *
UNDERCOVER COP QUINTIN Villanueva heard a different story and he had a seat closer to the action. What he heard along The Strip was that Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen, in one encounter, had punctured the quality that Mickey had spent two decades building up for himself in Los Angeles. Not fear or wealth—those seemed more East Coast virtues—but his stature, how he looked.
Only six members of the force knew what Villanueva was doing for the Intelligence Division in 1959, or even that he was part of it. He was a Marine tank unit veteran of the Korean War who made the mistake of beginning his police career in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. His reward for finishing atop the recruit class there was an assignment that included visiting twenty-three bars to collect envelopes full of cash to be shared up the line. When Villanueva had the bad manners to balk at being a bag man with a badge, they yanked him off the street and put him on a shelf. A friendly judge told him where he might find an honest big-city police department, so he flew across the country over a weekend, on his own dime, to take the entrance exam for the LAPD. The earnest live-with-momma image projected by Dragnet may have seemed hokey, and it was, even to cops, but the moralizing Chief William Parker really was redefining what professional policing meant in America. Villanueva joined up and was given a trial-run assignment that took advantage of his being a new face in town—they used him in an undercover narcotics sting. After he pulled that off, a supervisor in narcotics said, “You’re going to this house at six o’clock, just be there,” and gave him an address in West Covina. That was the home of Captain James Hamilton.
Hamilton was waiting with two of his sergeants and two lieutenants from Intelligence, an intimidating reception committee for a probationary officer. They laid out Villanueva’s next mission, should he accept it, though in reality he couldn’t refuse: he was to infiltrate a crew of out-of-towners who had moved into the Halifax Apartments in Hollywood and seemed to have a proclivity for staging holdups. They were not averse to taking over a restaurant at gunpoint and lining everyone against the wall, like in the movies, the sort of stickup Mickey had pulled in younger days to prove himself in Cleveland and Chicago. This crew included Michael Rizzitello, a reputed associate of the Gallos back in New York, enough of a profile to warrant a major charade. Officer Villanueva was given an identity as a young Jersey guy with a record and set up in his own apartment in Hollywood, so he could invite any new friends over for poker games (and free liquor) and then excuse himself to run errands (“See you later, guys”) so they could talk freely among themselves … always within earshot of the microphones. The bugs had been hidden in the living room and bedroom by an LAPD veteran the rookie didn’t really know, a man named Keeler. Villanueva would hang out at the gang’s favorite watering holes and at the delis and coffee shops where they migrated after the bars closed to have breakfast and kibitz or play cards. Often Mickey and his own delegation would be at nearby tables at the Gaiety and Carolina Pines, capping off their own long nights on the town.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 29