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

by Paul Lieberman

  We’re going back a lot of years now. The killing in the restaurant, that was 1959. Everybody thinks it was Sammy who killed him. That was all bullshit. Mickey Cohen shot him—who else could have shot him at that fucking table? The other guy, Sammy, he’s a bookmaker, he couldn’t hit the side of a barn. It was Mickey, who the fuck else would it be?

  Sam LoCigno took the blame because we told him to take it for self-defense. He figured what a hero he’d be, he killed Jack the Enforcer. He’ll take over the whole L.A. now, you know what I mean? But it didn’t work out that way.

  Jack was a good guy, he just got fucking goofy. He walked into the wrong restaurant at the wrong time. That’s when all the shit started. Very, very good friend of mine, a nice guy, a stand-up guy, a powerful guy. But things were getting tough on him and he decided to muscle in on Mickey Cohen and you can’t do nothing with that little guy because he’ll fucking shoot you.

  When I was in the pay phone, that’s when he came in. He came in through the back with a guy, Rocky Lombardi, that’s another goof. Jack came in, he saw me in the phone booth, I was talking to my broad, and he says, “Where’s the Jew and the dagos?” So that’s when I tried to calm him down but you couldn’t calm him down because he was drinking. He went in the back, the party was over. He got his brains blown out. Exactly what happened.

  Sure they knew he was coming. Why do you think there were so many fucking guns at the table for?

  One thing I’ll tell you. If they missed that fucking shot between his eyes, that whole table would have went. That’s how powerful he is. The whole table would have went. He was no pussycat. Powerful guy with his hands—are you kidding me? An unbelievable strong son of a bitch. Jack O’Hara, yeah. Good guy.

  Why does he have to carry a gun for? Don’t forget. It was, you know, a scumbag town, that’s what it was. Yeah, bullshit. Mickey ran the whole place all them years. Just shows how bad they were—all the shit he did they could never put him in jail, they had to go back to the taxes.

  Accounts of shootings are like family lore or anything Mickey said, and must be taken as such. By the time Tony Reno offered that version of the night at Rondelli’s he was nearing eighty and looking for one last score before his time ran out. That’s what it was about in their world, the score. Everything else was bullshit. So maybe someone would come up with some green and Anthony Amereno, a.k.a. Tony Reno, would tell all about how Mickey shot the big man between the eyes, and how they disposed of the gun—and while he was at it maybe the true story of who killed Bugsy …

  As for Mickey Cohen, by the time he took half-assed credit for killing Jack Whalen … well, the Mick was a shell of a man by then, in no shape to be prosecuted for much of anything.

  CHAPTER 40

  Déjà Vu

  Part of Tony Reno’s account could not be questioned—the one way they could get Mickey was for taxes. Twice. When he landed back in prison it was not for Whalen or any violent crime, but again for his insistence on living a millionaire’s life on pitifully little (reported) income. Just as Sammy LoCigno’s first murder trial was ending, a federal grand jury began summoning Mickey’s stripper consorts, gambling pals, evangelist dupes, and movie investors to testify to his lifestyle of Cadillacs and nightclubs that was hard to reconcile with the $1,200-a-year income he reported from his nursery and ice cream parlor since his release from prison. A disbelieving Mickey screamed double jeopardy—he’d already done time for telling a few white lies to the IRS. Didn’t everyone do that? But law enforcement was like the criminal element. Once they found an MO that worked, they kept at it.

  A show called This Is Your Life had been running on television for a decade and Mickey had his equivalent in the trial that began May 2, 1961. One hundred eighty witnesses were called, filling 8,000 pages of transcript with testimony mostly about his earnings and spending since he stepped off the launch from McNeil Island. The squad had helped again by documenting his visits to (and bills from) Sunset Strip hotspots these recent years. But part of the thirteen-count indictment went back further than that, accusing him of continuing to avoid paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes and penalties he owed from as early as 1945, when he still was in Bugsy’s shadow, taking bets in the back of his paint store and actually gunning down a rival bookie. The trial revisited his entire tenure as a showboating public nuisance in L.A.

  Jim Vaus, the 304-pound electronics man who had swept Mickey’s house for bugs in 1949 and gone to prison for perjury on his behalf, took the stand to describe his subsequent conversion to the ways of the Lord and the thousands he and other Billy Graham devotees advanced to bring Mickey to “a complete severance from the things of the past and a positive identification with God through Jesus Christ.” Billy Gray, owner of the Band Box, the comedy club where Mickey met his wife Lavonne years before—and where Mickey often got his mail under the name O’Brien—testified to loaning him $69,000, some via checks to his sister, Lillian. The well-endowed Liz Renay told how someone would deposit money in her account so she could forward up to $3,500 at a pop to Mickey, similarly classified as personal loans.

  A Texas private eye described Mickey giving him $800 from an envelope as a retainer for his work helping the stripper Candy Barr fight her marijuana conviction. Candy herself, fully clothed, testified that Mickey had given her $1,700 in cash along with a phony birth certificate and Social Security card so she could briefly go on the lam to Mexico. The Miami showman who hoped to get Candy (“a hot piece of property”) to Florida told of placing bets with Mickey’s recommended source, his flunky Sammy, then wiring his $800 loss to Mickey the night Jack Whalen was shot. A man from Western Union came in to detail eleven such money orders cashed by Mickey around the country.

  The sweetest witness by far was a young singer from Cincinnati, Janet Schneider, who was just twelve when her father became convinced she could become the next Judy Garland with the right connections. A local boxing promoter knew somebody in Los Angeles who knew people, but the insider needed a token of appreciation, call it a loan, so her father dug deep for his little girl and made three quick $500 payments. The boxing promoter wired the first two to Mickey at the Waldorf Astoria in New York while he was there talking with Billy Graham about the future of his soul. That might have been the end of it, just a few more hundreds for Mickey’s roll (and tough luck for the rubes) except for the catch—he sort of came through for the Cincinnati man and his innocent blonde daughter.

  The girl drove to L.A. with her mom and dad and was treated by their gentleman host to meetings with agents and front-row tables with his entourage to hear Bobby Darin sing with Sammy Davis Jr. and Don Rickles do insult comedy and Jerry Lewis open at the Moulin Rouge. The stars all came over to their party to say hello, with an extra touch at the Villa Capri, where Frank Sinatra kissed the little girl’s hand. Janet visited the mansion of Red Skelton and met his parrot who refused to talk (“he has a mind of his own,” the comedian apologized) and she nearly got a deal to appear on Red’s TV show, and Lewis’s, too. The girl really could sing, but in the end she drove back to Cincinnati with only her memories and a photo of a casual Mickey in a golf shirt (no tailored Italian suit) and with a beaming smile (no scowl). The photo was signed, “To my little girl, Janet, and my little friend. I just know that you can’t miss reaching the absolute heights…”

  But the federal prosecutors were less interested in this glimpse of a different Mickey, the kindly uncle, than in the dollars Janet’s daddy had shelled out by the end: $2,350 to Mickey to promote his daughter and a $2,500 advance for the movie-to-be. The Schneider girl’s proud father also volunteered to help Mickey with the book he was writing, The Poison Has Left Me.

  All their payments came out in court along with a slew of accountings that went down to the penny, as in the $3,861.61 in custom carpeting and other improvements Mickey ordered for his post-prison apartment, from the louver windows ($260.03) to an ice bucket ($13). Mickey never did get around to paying that decorator but did have $7,500
to purchase U.S. Savings Bonds, purportedly for Lillian. “My sister is very patriotic,” Mickey said.

  The giant diamond ring figured in a series of witness accounts. It was 12.69 carats, the government disclosed, and served as Mickey’s supposed collateral for a series of his self-described loans when it wasn’t on the finger of one of the women at his side. The ring had finally passed to Sandy Hagen the night after the shooting at Rondelli’s, when she had known Mickey all of eleven days. Their relationship had endured in the seventeen months since and Sandy was at Mickey’s side throughout the forty-two-day tax trial in the spring of 1961. “I still plan to marry him,” she said.

  But how Mickey had sold his life was more pertinent to the proceedings than any of its soap opera details. Another group of witnesses testified to purchasing shares of “The Mickey Cohen Story,” or whatever he called it at the moment, those investors ranging from the vending guy to the psychiatrist eager to get Mickey on his couch. The screenwriter Ben Hecht provided some expert perspective and a reminder of the gap between fiction and its opposite. In his 1932 gangster film Scarface, Hecht had to come up with a fitting ending for the title character based on Al Capone, who was still alive but about to go to Alcatraz, “The Rock,” to serve his own sentence for tax evasion. The real-life Capone eventually would get out but never regain power—he’d waste away from syphilis. In the film, in contrast, his character goes out in a blaze of gunfire, shot down by the coppers under a travel agency’s sign reading THE WORLD IS YOURS. Of course, when Hecht flirted with writing his Mickey Cohen book he’d feared the reform scenario, that Mickey would wind up just another dull Rotarian. Now Hecht was a witness at the trial that threatened to brand the man as just another (two-time) tax cheat, in part for raking in tens of thousands of dollars by selling percentages of his life story. On that point, Hecht told the federal court jury, “I couldn’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to buy into a nonexistent property.”

  When an appeals court later took a look at this case, it, too, would be amazed by the foolishness of Mickey’s benefactors:

  … during the years 1957 and 1958 he received very large sums of money from a remarkable variety of persons, rich and poor, prominent and obscure. It shows a studied attempt on his part to cast most of these transactions in the form of loans, many purportedly secured by “interests” in his life story … The particular brand of magic that he used in obtaining these moneys does not always appear. That there was fraud involved in many instances is plain.

  That was putting it mildly, for the story of Mickey Cohen’s sale of his story had a punch line worthy of one of Hecht’s scripts—in reality, Mickey had nothing to sell. He had signed over all rights to his life story a decade earlier, on June 14, 1951, a week before he was convicted on tax charges the first time. He signed them over to a Henry Guttman, the decorator who did up his Brentwood house with the wonderful mirrored boudoir for Lavonne and the cute doggie bed for Tuffy. Meyer Harris Cohen, the boy from Brooklyn or Boyle Heights—take your pick—had been selling shares of nothing.

  “I’m not too good at business,” was Mickey’s basic defense at the 1961 tax trial that was a joke in many respects but hardly a goof, certainly not on the day he was sentenced.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME around, a kind judge had felt sorry for him as a hard-luck problem child of the urban melting pot. Not so U.S. District Judge George Boldt, who got to lecture Mickey this time after the jury of seven men and five women found him guilty on eight counts. In his own brief remarks on July 1, 1961, Mickey said, “Since my return from prison I have made every effort to live my life rightfully.” Judge Boldt replied:

  Living on the luxury of the land, available to only a fortunate few of our people, Mr. Cohen has no notion of contributing anything to the cost of defending or maintaining the land affording him that luxury.

  In the present struggle for the continuance in the world of a free way of life, best and utmost effort is required. The obstruction and impeding weight of the collective Mickey Cohens in our national community conceivably could tip the balance to our doom.

  At least the menace of his conduct, for what I deem a reasonable season, will be curtailed.

  For Judge Boldt, a reasonable season to put the menace of Mickey Cohen out of circulation was three consecutive terms of five years each, a stunning fifteen years for underpaying his taxes—far longer than the one-to-ten sentence Sam LoCigno had gotten for killing a man, and four years more than Al Capone himself had gotten for failing to report millions in income.

  Perhaps equally startling was Mickey’s age, just forty-seven. It seemed like he had been around forever.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Lead Pipe

  Jack O’Mara was forty-four. He also was no longer a cop. He retired the day he hit twenty years on the LAPD, not long after his ill-fated turn on the witness stand. Captain Hamilton tried to talk him into staying with the force, and on the squad, to no avail. Hamilton then brought him in to see the chief, who was studying his file. Whiskey Bill Parker said, “Two degrees?”

  “That’s right, Chief.”

  O’Mara had just gotten his Masters in Public Service from Cal State L.A., three years after completing his undergraduate studies in Public Administration from USC. The degrees represented a decade’s worth of part-time schooling for a fulltime cop and father of two.

  “Is that your USC ring?” the chief asked.

  It was. When you were a scrappy Depression kid from Manual Arts High, which specialized in shop classes, getting a college diploma meant you bought the ring and wore it—all the time—and attended graduation in a tasseled cap and gown, even at twice the age of most students.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” the chief asked.

  “Yes, sir. It’s a good job.”

  The Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau had invited him to oversee its uniformed security forces at the two L.A.-area tracks, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park. The bureau had been formed in 1946, the same year as the Gangster Squad, to combat the unsavory types and rampant cheating at the Thoroughbred Racing Association’s thirty-seven venues around the country. From the onset it had been headed by a former top aide to J. Edgar Hoover, himself a big racing fan. Hoover may have resisted acknowledging the threat of organized crime to America but he saw the threat to horse racing—his man, Spencer Drayton, initiated the tattooing of IDs inside the animals’ lips so scammers could not easily substitute a faster one for a certain loser. When it came to this security threat, the enmity between the FBI and LAPD was overlooked. Drayton personally solicited O’Mara to supervise almost eighty men in Los Angeles, including retired police captains, lieutenants, and federal agents, a larger force than you’d find in many city police departments. O’Mara would have his own office and secretary, as you’d expect of a chief.

  His alternative was continuing to chase hoodlums such as Mickey Cohen, at all hours, and have their idiot lawyers accuse him of planting guns.

  “I hope you understand,” O’Mara told Los Angeles’ police chief.

  Then they squabbled over a trivial matter. O’Mara wanted to be sprung a couple of weeks early to begin his new job, using his unused leave days. Parker said no—like other veterans, O’Mara already was getting full credit for his time in the military. They couldn’t let him retire a moment before twenty years from his join date.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Chief Parker said.

  * * *

  O’MARA HAD HEARD that before often, “It doesn’t look good,” but he couldn’t remember whether Chief Horrall or his deputy, Joe Reed, said it first. One of them was waving a headline, perhaps GANGSTERS IN GAMBLING WAR from 1946 or the editorial titled NO WINTER RESORT FOR RACKETEERS, which repeated an old fear in the city of sunshine: “This is the time of year when the chill winds and bleak skies of the East and Middle West remind people of the gentle atmosphere of Southern California, and they head this way, with a disproportionate number of crooks among the substantial citizens.�
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  O’Mara never understood the preoccupation in Los Angeles with the notion that evil came from without, and with image. He was a simple man who saw the work as “I’m a cop, you’re a bad guy, let’s do our jobs.” The politicians could worry about how things looked. The complicating factor was how they wanted you to defend the honor of their city. That was echoed in the editorial imagining another winter invasion of Mickeys—it openly evoked the name of one of L.A.’s iconic crime fighters. “Let it not be said that the spirit of Roughhouse Brown has vanished from the department!”

  Ah, yes, Edward Daniel “Roughhouse” Brown, the cop who had become an overnight hero by giving Al Capone the boot in 1927. What they didn’t tell you was that Roughhouse was banished from the police department two years after his famous encounter with Capone, accused of hanging around the speakeasy of a bootlegger. Roughhouse said he was only checking out the criminals there but they didn’t let him back on the LAPD for six years. He was still on the force when O’Mara joined and could be found in the business office, the old guy shuffling papers with failing eyesight and telling tales about the wild old days.

  It had been much the same with another iconic L.A. cop, Frank “Lefty” James, who was shot in 1913 after a week on the job, then headed the Gun Squad during Prohibition. Lefty quit the force a couple of times, only to return, before he finally was put out to pasture in the Valley and then the jail. They still called him a “fabled officer” when he died in 1959.

  How lucky was O’Mara to have made it through two decades without a single complaint against him, unless you counted the drunk he pulled out of a car in ’43?

  I never was reprimanded. I never had anything against me. I just figured, you know, there are times to hold ’em and times to fold ’em. We were living on the sharp edge, you know. I was doing a lot of stuff that was very effective but with all the heat that was coming on—these so-called lawyers were givin’ us a bad time and we were worried a little about undue force cases and tailing. They were trying to send out injunctions against tailing a person because you’re invading their privacy, you’re violating their civil rights, and a lot of the telephone company investigators were on our ass, to see if we were tapping lines. Finally it got to the point I figured, “Hell, I done my work, it’s time to get the hell out.” It just got to be no fun anymore.