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

by Paul Lieberman

  Once Villanueva began running with the “Halifax Gang,” he was struck by how two-bit they were for bad-asses—they’d steal ice cream cones if they could. Another thing he noticed: “They were always kowtowing to Mickey. If they stole something that was really nice they wanted to give it to Mickey.” Mickey had come out of prison playing the harmless ex-hood swooning over the floozies, but this crew treated him as the big man out here, worthy of paying tribute.

  By those last months of 1959, Mickey was being treated very differently by another character on The Strip, someone who acted as if Mickey owed him money. Villanueva’s best guess was that a bookie had laid off bets with Mickey and Mickey had not bothered to place them, he just kept the cash. When the accounting turned in the bookie’s favor, Mickey told him to bug off. So the bookie enlisted a third party who was experienced in resolving such disputes without an excess of conversation, whether dealing with a nobody $15 horse bettor or the somebody spotlighted in a four-week spread in the Saturday Evening Post, and posed in an ice cream parlor in Life, sharing a table with a stripper while eating a vanilla-and-chocolate-sauce sundae, topped by a cherry.

  The word on the street was that Mickey was into Whalen for quite a few bucks. Whalen confronted Mickey at the Crescendo one night and in front of Mickey’s cohorts literally went through Mickey’s pockets searching for money.

  Villanueva’s main cover sergeant from the squad, Gene James, added one detail about the encounter whispered about in certain circles along The Strip. Jack Whalen had lifted Mickey up by the lapels of his suit jacket and plopped him on the bar before going through his pockets, setting up a short repartee.

  This time you’ve gone too far.

  You’re still into me …

  Too far, too far.

  * * *

  THE WHALEN FAMILY had a specific date for that confrontation, but provided a different setting and back story: October 18, 1959, the Formosa Café, right by Sam Goldwyn’s studio. Jack was at the bar with a friend named Hickman who wanted to place a bet in the back room. It was a Sunday, with six NFL games in the schedule including the local Rams playing the Green Bay Packers. Hickman had $30 of his own and borrowed $20 from Jack so he could bet $50. Hickman went to the back room, where Mickey and two other men were taking the action. Another family acquaintance completed the account:

  Hickman returned to the bar and told Jack Whalen about the bet and his choice of teams and said he had received six points. Whalen said, “Go get your money back, you have been robbed, you can get more points than that.” Hickman was scared and hesitated. Whalen went to the back room, made Cohen take his money out of his pocket and place it on the table. Whalen took $50 from Cohen’s money and told Cohen to put the balance back in his pocket and slapped Cohen, calling him a THIEF. Cohen said, “YOU HADN’T OUGHT TO HAVE DONE THAT.” Whalen returned to the bar and gave the $50 to Hickman.

  * * *

  MICKEY DISMISSED ALL those tales as utter nonsense, street gibberish—how would anyone believe he’d let that nobody lay a hand on him, or on his money? It was his buddy Fred Sica, Mickey said later, who was abused by that “great big enforcing bullshit cocksucker.” To elaborate, “He enforced himself around here with everybody in my outfit. He had no respect for nobody. Everyone knew what a vicious, bullying, rotten bastard Jack-this-so-called Enforcer Whalen was.”

  Hadn’t that cocksucker Whalen gotten the word?

  “Don’t fuck with that little Jew.”

  CHAPTER 32

  A Phone Call at the Jail

  Jerry Wooters’s two little sons were taking rides atop Thor the Great Dane in the family’s backyard in Arcadia when Captain Hamilton summoned him into the office and told him he was out of the squad. He was being transferred to the 4 P.M. to midnight shift at the city jail in Lincoln Heights, back in uniform in an assignment a notch below working traffic.

  Well, you know, I put in a lot of years. What the hell is going on?

  The transfer’s effective tomorrow.

  I feel I deserve—

  Tomorrow.

  Wooters said he pumped everyone he knew for an explanation but never got one, not a word about his relationship with Whalen or anything. “I was kind of on the shady list, I guess.”

  But another squad member knew what had been the clincher after the years of whispers. Sergeant “Down the Line” knew. Con Keeler knew. An officer relatively new to the unit suddenly had asked for another assignment after working on a bookie. He wouldn’t say why he wanted to transfer out, following the code that applied to cops and as well as crooks. But his partner confided to Keeler that Jerry Wooters had unnerved the new squad member with a proposal—suggesting that they arrest the bookie then offer him a way out. It sure smelled like a shakedown to Keeler.

  Well, it was a bookmaker out on Wilshire Boulevard, he had a store out there, a haberdashery, something to do with clothing. And one of our officers got next to him and he was an informant and a good one and we didn’t bust him for bookmaking. Jerry Wooters had worked Vice so he had good knowledge of bookmakers and stuff and that was the reason he was in the division. And so he went to the officer who had this informant and tried to work a deal with him—if they could set him up for something, Wooters could make a bust on him then set him loose. In other words, get something on him, arrest him and shake him down. I really don’t know what the plan was. But the officer tells his partner about it and I don’t know why—I was always father confessor or something—anyway, the partner comes to me and tells me. So I found the officer and took him back in my laboratory, and he wanted to transfer out. I said, “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I don’t want any part of it.”

  So we talked for a little while. I told him he owed it to the rest of the guys to blow the whistle. “Hey, your buddies here you’ve been working with, you going to leave them hanging?” Well, finally I convinced him to talk to the skipper.

  So I went in to Hamilton. I told him, “Captain we’ve got a problem.”

  “Oh?”

  So I told him that one of our men had propositioned another man. Well, my cap went right up in the air. He said, “Who’s the guy?”

  “Wooters.”

  Cap looked at me just kind of shook his head. He wasn’t surprised when I told him. He just sat there and thought—nodded his head kind of. So Hamilton brought the officer in, the skipper talked to him. Wooters the next morning was working the jail and Bert the next morning …

  That was the hard part for everyone in the know, how they also transferred Bert Phelps, the son of the LAPD’s first pilot who had proven to be a genius at bugging and could have been using his technical wizardry for the CIA at three times the pay. Bert had given his body for the cause, literally breaking his back, and had returned to work rather than take disability. But none of that could save him in Chief Parker’s no-excuses LAPD, which held one partner responsible for the other, no matter what. “Bert should have known some of the things Wooters had done,” Con Keeler reasoned. “I said, ‘Bert, you’re not stupid.’”

  Phelps could argue all day that he didn’t know and that Jerry might merely have wanted to squeeze the bookie to snare a bigger fish, like Mickey. They didn’t understand the crazy way old Vice guys worked. They didn’t understand the whole, “That’s Jerry.” When Captain Hamilton called him in, Phelps said, “Captain, shit, I’ve been here for years, I’ve given it my all.” No use. He, too, found himself working as a jailer—in his case in the lockup at LAPD headquarters, midnight to eight A.M., the graveyard shift. It all was done quietly without the formality of a disciplinary hearing, and both men kept their ranks as sergeants. There wouldn’t be any blot on their records. The world outside didn’t have to know a thing. Keeler even told Phelps the new assignment could be a blessing, with its regular hours. “Why don’t you finish law school and get your degree?”

  A blessing? The midnight-to-eight shift at the jail? Phelps would come home in the morning, have “dinner,” take a brief nap, and then study befo
re his law classes, which ran from 6:00 to 9:30 P.M. Then he’d drive over to the police station and try to nap two hours in his car before the next graveyard shift in purgatory. A blessing? It would take him a long time to get over his anger at the “sanctimonious assholes” who had never hesitated to tap his talents for special assignments. “Tonight, you’re going to Yuma.” “Yes, sir.” “Tonight you’re going to San Diego and bug this place.” “Yes, sir.” “Tonight go debug the chief’s office.” “Yes, sir.” Tonight go help a cheating Hollywood bigwig eavesdrop on his wronged wife. “Yes, sir.”

  Now it was “Tonight sit in the fucking jail” and count your blessings. At least it was conceivable they might someday forgive and forget with Bert, whose only crime had been to be someone’s partner. It was not the same with Jerry Wooters. Barely a year before, he’d been the only foot soldier pictured with the bosses in a national spread about Mickey Cohen in the Saturday Evening Post, described there as the little hoodlum’s Javert. Now it was hard to imagine him ever escaping the Lincoln Heights jail, right back where he’d once been hauled as a kid for hawking dollar bags of oranges. Jerry Wooters had gone nowhere and gotten there fast.

  * * *

  WOOTERS WAS JUST a month or two into his exile at the jail when he got a call from the familiar voice of Jack Whalen. The big man was still free on bail while appealing his grand theft conviction for scamming $500 from the Giovanni guy trying to be a bookie. It was Wednesday, December 2, 1959. Whalen did not sound overly agitated.

  Ah, I got a real rough beef, can you give me a hand?’

  What?

  Well, I got a showdown with that goddamned Mickey.

  Where?

  Rondelli’s, in the Valley.

  Jack, I’m in uniform. I’m active duty. I can’t just walk out and wind up in the Valley. You know I can do a lot of things, but I can’t do that. But I’ll see if I can get you some help.

  Wooters phoned the old squad, where a couple of the guys still might listen if he had a tip.

  I called a guy who I thought was a friend of mine—not a friend, an acquaintance, a guy down there who was a lieutenant. I called him and said, “Listen, if you guys go by Rondelli’s tonight around eleven o’clock, I think you’re gonna find Whalen and Mickey and some other bigs. And I’m pretty sure you’ll find some firearms.”

  He said, “Oh, yeah, thanks a lot.”

  Then I called Whalen. I said—he never had a reputation for carrying a piece, with Whalen, it was always hands, he beat the shit out of them—so I called him and said, “Don’t take any firearms down there.”

  The caution was something of an insult given Jack Whalen’s pride at needing nothing more than his fists. But Jerry Wooters drove home the point, anyway—don’t be packing. And Jack the Enforcer did not carry a gun on the last night of his life.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Deadly Night in the Valley

  Jack Whalen’s beef was not directly with Mickey, but with a couple of his crew and it revolved around familiar issues in their realm: Who was scamming whom? And who would back down first?

  The dispute had its roots in November 21, 1959, raids by Vice Squads on five locations that took bets for Al Levitt, a Valley-based sports bookie suspected of handling $50,000 in wagers on a good day. Periodic raids were an expected cost of business in that trade and your clerks rarely got much jail time, if any. The real hassle came if the cops penetrated the back office and seized your betting slips. If word leaked out to the clientele, a few bold gamblers might call in to gush about how brilliant they’d been with their picks and, hey, where’s our money. How could you prove otherwise?

  So it was that a pair of bettors began clamoring for $390 they claimed they were due on their wagers on college football games after the LAPD raids on Levitt’s bookmaking operation. The pair bet under the code name “George for Ram.”

  When asked in an official setting, like a courtroom, George Piscitelle, a.k.a. George Perry, and Sam LoCigno, a.k.a. Sam Lombardo, listed themselves as unemployed—as a laid-off drug store manager in Perry’s case and as an unemployed bartender and asphalt salesman in LoCigno’s. Both lived well, though, for people without paychecks, driving new Cadillacs. “I don’t believe anyone can win on horses,” LoCigno said, “but I was just lucky.”

  Sammy LoCigno had grown up in Cleveland while Mickey was still there making the leap from boxing to rooting, then come West himself in 1944 after being discharged from the Army because of a nervous condition he blamed on bad water from a well. He was picked up from time to time for running games of chance but after fifteen years in town had only one jail term on his sheet, five days for speeding. At thirty-nine, he seemed to be little more than “a smalltime bookie who was a flunky and errand boy for Mickey Cohen,” as a probation officer described him.

  Now the errand boy Sam LoCigno and his friend George Piscitelle were looking to finagle $390 from the just raided Al Levitt. The pair collected $140 of their supposed winnings before the bookie had second thoughts and—unfortunately for them—found evidence to back his suspicions.

  Normally their gambit would have worked without a blink, but they hadn’t counted on the ways of LAPD Vice. One of the sergeants leading the raids on Levitt’s operation did not immediately take the seized betting slips downstairs to book into evidence. He stuck them in his locker—he said he wanted to study ’em before he wrote his report. Then who should call him but a veteran lawyer who represented lots of bookies. The lawyer said, “Listen, we’re having trouble with some of these guys claiming they won big and Al doesn’t think they did…” Most times, you tell a bookie’s lawyer to screw himself, but this counselor was always cooperative, a go-along, get-along sort. What was the harm?

  The sheets listed two college football wagers by the pair who called themselves “George for Ram” and both were losers. The two fools had put $220 on the school for smart boys, Northwestern, which had dreams of making the Rose Bowl if it beat Illinois, then lost 28–0. Al Levitt, out on bail and not in the best of moods, did his own calculations and decided that he didn’t owe those scammers anything—they owed him $910. Levitt’s chief clerk suggested that he forget the matter, given the players. But their way of life was all about thinning out the weakest of the herd and Al Levitt could not afford to look like the weakest of the herd. On the morning of December 2 he got the scamming bettor George Piscitelle on the phone and endured a frustrating barrage of indignant denials and demands for the phantom winnings. Levitt finally said, “Well, look, I am through with the thing. I am having J.O. call you.”

  George Piscitelle did not have to be told who “J.O.” was. The man was turning the matter over to Jack O’Hara, a.k.a. Jack Whalen, a.k.a. The Enforcer.

  Five minutes later the phone rang again in Piscitelle’s apartment.

  * * *

  WHEN JACK WHALEN took over a marker it meant the debt was his and the fight was his and he didn’t intend to waste time listening to waffling. George Piscitelle said the message from the “head-buster” was to the point: “You dago bastards better pay up.”

  This was an intimate society, this slice of Los Angeles in the waning days of the 1950s, and Piscitelle was familiar with The Enforcer’s modus operandi. When Piscitelle worked at Turner’s drug store on The Strip he had seen Whalen pound three men in the street, sending one eight feet back into a row of garbage cans. And sharing Piscitelle’s North Hollywood apartment at the moment was someone who knew Whalen more personally, the young lounge singer Anthony Amereno, a.k.a. Tony Reno. Another fellow described Tony as “five-foot-nuthin’” and “120 pounds soaking wet with a hard-on,” but he had found a niche in Los Angeles after using a $26 Greyhound bus ticket to flee New York and its shylocks. The crooner had become a mainstay at the joint next to Turner’s drug store, the Melody Room, and had a gig upcoming in Glendale, which made the call from Whalen fortuitous. The big man was one of his biggest fans. “Every place I worked, singing that is, I called Jack and he used to come down, you know, spend money like
—it’s always good for a nightclub to have a little following, you know. Bosses like you to spend money and he used to come down and buy drinks, for anybody I was with.”

  What’s more, when Tony was broke The Enforcer had given him a job for five months handling the phone in the back office of his horse book. The singer knew of Whalen’s con man father too, enough to refer to him as Doc, as in Dr. Whalen. So when Tony Reno realized who was ringing up George Piscitelle about a gambling matter, he said, “Give me the phone, because I know Jack.”

  “Just stay out of it, you little punk,” Whalen told his crooning former bookmaking clerk. “I want my $900 and I don’t want no from nothing.”