That Christmas, Jerry stumbled while putting on his pants before a holiday dinner. He told his wife Jean, the onetime stewardess, “I’ve got a headache.” He had been shot down over the Pacific, drawn his gun on Mickey Cohen, and nearly walked into the wrong restaurant with Jack Whalen, but the brain hemorrhage took him out with little suffering for his sins.
The short obituary in The Orange County Register described Gerard “Jerry” Wooters, eighty-one, merely as president of Sea Coast Security and reported that services for the local businessman would not be at any church but at the Riverboat Café. His death certificate got it better: “Sergeant. Law Enforcement. Los Angeles Police Dept.”
Two old cops were on the boat that took his ashes toward Catalina Island. One was Bert Phelps, whose police career had been stymied for being his partner. But Bert never blamed him, nor was he jealous of Jerry’s later-life success, for he had not done badly himself. After law school Bert had become more than another cop-turned-lawyer—the old bug man became a judge, Superior Court Judge Beauford H. Phelps. He studied jurisprudence at Oxford. He tried murder cases.
Also onboard was Robert Peinado, who worked for the LAPD from 1951 to 1963 and also became a lawyer. He lived near the beach, too, and Jerry loved to hear him sing. Peinado performed “Danny Boy” at Wooters’s eightieth birthday and afterward Jerry asked a favor, for when his time came. Jerry had another song in mind, made famous by Sinatra.
The boat was halfway to Catalina when they began struggling with the box of ashes, had to get pliers to rip it open. When they did get the ashes out, a wind gust blew some back into their faces. Jerry was causing trouble to the end. But the wind finally calmed and they sprinkled the remaining ashes on the waves as Peinado sang the man’s last request, “My Way.”
CHAPTER 44
Freddie’s Last Laugh
Fred Whalen drank heavily through the ’60s—he couldn’t much enjoy the years after his son was killed. But he was out of his funk by the time he received a proclamation from Mayor Sam Yorty declaring February 1971, “Billiards Month” in Los Angeles. The embossed certificate acknowledged how Fred had begun promoting a “World Pocket Billiards Championship” in the city, though there actually were three competitions—in straight pool, 9-ball, and one-pocket—offering $40,500 in prizes. Many of the players wore tuxedos, and off-duty LAPD cops provided security. World champ Irving “The Deacon” Crane was entered, as were several contestants from Japan. The program had a “Thank You Los Angeles” note from Freddie and two photos of his face with the salesman’s smile.
The event was held at the Elks Building (Lodge No. 99) an imposing neo-Gothic edifice at the upper end of what used to be Westlake Park, near where Freddie’s clan had settled and opened their small dry goods store in 1922. The park had since been renamed for General Douglas MacArthur, but the Elks tower dated to the time of the mass migration that brought the Whalens and the Wooters and the O’Maras to Los Angeles. The front of the building was engraved with wisdom from Matthew 7:12:
All things Whatsoever Ye
Would That Men Should Do
To You, Do Ye Even So to Them
That was the Bible’s best statement of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others…”) but anyone so inclined might stretch it a bit to sanction “An eye for an eye,” as well.
Freddie the Thief would have loved for his son to be around when Disney cast him a few years later in The Cat from Outer Space, playing a pool shark named Sarasota Slim. The next year, at eighty-one, he returned to his hometown of Alton, Illinois, where the local paper did a local-boy-makes-good feature, quoting him puffing, “I’m a millionaire today.” While it mentioned his pool promotions, the piece reported “Fred credits his success to the cleaning business from which he recently retired.” He was still telling that story, bless him.
Back in L.A., he continued to give exhibitions with his cue stick, making the rounds of taverns and VFW halls and hitting balls off the top of Coke bottles, like he had as a kid. After people gathered ’round to see the show, he would go out to his Cadillac and get merchandise from the trunk, boxes of steak knives for the men and bottles of Chanel No. 5 for their wives. He’d wink at the absurdly low price for the world’s most famous fragrance, $5 a bottle, and they got the gist—it was hot, stolen, had to be.
Freddie told a different story to the professional pool players he recruited to sell the stuff for him. That was a way to get on his good side and guarantee favorable draws in his tournaments—sell for Freddie. He confided to the pool whizzes that the perfume wasn’t stolen at all. “Mixed it in the bathtub,” he whispered. Of course, that wasn’t true either.
* * *
FREDDIE’S FAVORITE PLACE to be toward the end of his life was a warehouse in Hollywood once used by Charlie Chaplin to shoot silent films. It was called Associated Consumers now and run by an old Brooklyn boy, Alan Grahm, who recognized the potential, decades ahead of most, of counterfeit goods. He sold fake watches and lighters and Mont Blanc pens and Majorica pearls, on it went. But the perfume was the favorite of Freddie Whalen. He had never gotten over being nabbed in the ’30s for failing to have tax stamps on the cheap whiskey he poured into fake Johnny Walker bottles. He still loved that scheme, loved it. The warehouse sold the fake Chanel and White Christmas to regulars for $2 a bottle and they’d resell it to the suckers for $5 or $10 or whatever.
Freddie would be the first one at the warehouse in the morning but the regular crew soon joined him for coffee and donuts at a stand run by a Greek guy across the street. It was a convention of grifters. One guy would go to massage parlors and show the girls pearls with a $250 price tag and say, “Look, gimme twenty dollars and take care of me and I’ll give you the necklace.” He got a lot of free massages (and more) for that phony strand that cost him $3. A regular from Detroit had never driven a semi in his life but dressed like a trucker and told people he had this load of unclaimed freight. “Listen, it’s worth a thousand but I’ll give it to you for a couple a hundred, take it off my hands.” An operator from Vegas pretended to be in the Navy and in need of money for a bus ticket back to his base. If you loaned him $25, he’d let you keep his $300 watch, “I’ll pay you back when I get there.” There even were a couple of police detectives who bought the fake goods, then let their marks believe it was real thing they’d confiscated from robbers. These were Freddie’s people indeed, among the first invitees to his annual holiday party in the Big White House.
He got a second proclamation from the mayor when he and Lillian were married for seventy years, but she was sick by then. Freddie appeared at a charity exhibition while she was in the hospital and did his ball-in-the-handkerchief trick where he’d announce “I’m going to cheat you,” but mostly he reminisced about the former Lillian Wunderlich, “such a wonderful girl.” After she passed, he moved to Oregon to be close to his daughter Bobie and her kids, including his grandson Johnny. Freddie started showing up at a bar there that had 8-ball competitions each Sunday until they told him to stay away—no one else had a chance, never mind that he was over ninety. He told his family he was thinking of doing the scamus again, going to hospitals in his white coat and stethoscope. They said, “No, Grandpa.”
The night before he died, he played cards with his daughter, then in her seventies. She had tried the scamus herself in her younger days, posing as a nurse, and pulled it off. She was clever like her dad, a true Whalen. So she saw what he was doing as they played gin for the last time, dealing himself cards from the bottom of the deck. She said nothing, the daughter of Freddie the Thief. His life had spanned the century when Los Angeles came of age. Why not let him end it the way he he’d begun it, by cheating?
CHAPTER 45
The Eulogy
Jack O’Mara did not take a day off between his last shift at the LAPD and his first heading up security at Los Angeles’ two horse tracks. That provided one of two work photos he hung on his wall the rest of his life. The first was of the Gangster Squad at its picnic, circa 1948—fifteen pl
ainclothes bruisers, a few squinting under hats, a couple with cigars in hand. In the second photo O’Mara was the only one in a suit standing amid dozens of uniformed guards in front of the Santa Anita grandstand.
“I think you’re a dummy that you didn’t go for chief,” his wife Connie said one day, speaking of the LAPD.
“I had more fun than the chief.”
But she could get him going by noting how his contemporaries Tom Reddin and Ed Davis had risen that far. Hadn’t he done as well as them at the Academy, or as Tom Bradley, his 1940 classmate who became mayor? “Hell no, higher!” O’Mara said, and she had him.
They all were part of a generation that was supposed to remake the LAPD. But none of the others had been given the chore that had been an obsession in Los Angeles for a century, of protecting this paradise from the evil outsiders of the underworld. Every decade or so, another shadowy unit was formed to take on the job that promised to make you a hero only to leave even the most celebrated foot soldiers tarnished in the end.
“Somebody’s gotta do the dirty work,” O’Mara said, and for him it meant settling for being the chief of two racetracks, where he still had to watch for crooks and scammers but also escorted dignitaries to see the stables’ most famous resident, “Mr. Ed,” television’s talking horse.
Crazy Jerry Wooters came to the track a few times with business associates and Jack set him up in a box and then a table in the Turf Club, good perks for impressing clients. They didn’t say much about the old days, just kept their secrets with a firm handshake. Fred Whalen came by also and O’Mara was pleased to see that Freddie had gotten over his vengeful anger. He even had some pearls to sell at amazing prices. Connie O’Mara was suspicious, for some reason, when Jack gave her that necklace as a present—she had picked up a little horse sense over the decades married to a cop.
O’Mara’s daughters were sharp too. He taught the youngest to drive in Santa Anita’s vast parking lot and she was a whiz, Martha (Marti) O’Mara. Blessed with the looks of her mom, she was invited at sixteen to be a bachelorette contestant on TV’s The Dating Game on a night when the other girl featured was Maureen Reagan, Ronnie’s daughter. Bitten by the quiz-show bug, the whole O’Mara clan got on Family Feud, where Jack gave host Richard Dawson a whip used by Willie Shoemaker, the famous jockey. Then Marti got on Tic-Tac-Dough and won $6,000. Smart? O’Mara’s youngest got a scholarship to study sociology in college and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, where she then taught in its business and design schools while doing consulting around the country. The oldest, Maureen, merely got a master’s in health administration and taught maternal and prenatal nursing at Azusa Pacific University. He had quite some girls there.
Maybe all that was justice, though—what O’Mara and the other Gangster Squad alumni had done with the rest of their lives. It wasn’t merely their bug man who became a judge. Lindo Giacopuzzi, the burly first-generation Italian American whose family ran a dairy? He became about as rich as Wooters by developing a shopping center on their ten acres. Jack Horrall, the chief’s son, became military liaison to the governor. Some of the others headed security for recluse Howard Hughes in Vegas—an oddball, but the man could pay. O’Mara’s big Irish buddy Jerry Greeley hadn’t gotten enough action as a Navy commander and LAPD lieutenant, so he took off for Southeast Asia amid the war there, supposedly working as a civilian advisor to South Vietnamese police. Everyone knew Greeley really was CIA, especially after his helicopter was shot down over Burma. He survived, made it home and became active in a group called The Spies Who Wouldn’t Die.
* * *
THEY ALL LIVED to see a crippled Mickey Cohen die in 1976, at sixty-two, leaving an estate valued at $3,000. Mickey had shuffled out of prison four years earlier, hunched over and needing a three-pronged cane, a moist towel over the handle to protect his hand from germs. But his injuries weren’t why he left the media crowd outside the penitentiary waiting. “He’s taking three hours to get dressed,” his brother Harry explained.
After the brutal beating nearly killed him in Atlanta, Mickey had been moved to the federal prison system’s medical center in Springfield, Missouri, where he went through delicate brain operations and painful therapy to regain partial use of his legs. He won a moral victory when a federal judge in Atlanta ordered the Unites States of America to pay him $110,000 as damages for his prison beating. Of course, all that money went right back to the government to cover some of his unpaid taxes.
After his release, Mickey spent most of his time at home, in his pajamas. But he did earn his way back into the headlines from time to time, most notably when he claimed to have an inside track on finding newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, who had been abducted by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army and brainwashed into helping the group rob banks. Hearst’s parents actually flew to Los Angeles to meet Mickey at one of his new favorite restaurants. “While we were having dinner,” he said later, “the owner came over and told me the police Intelligence squad was in the restaurant. I said I didn’t give a damn—they could sit at the table if they wanted.”
He did finally get to tell his story, though not with the masterful help of a Ben Hecht. It was one of those as-told-to autobiographies, Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words, and never reached the bestseller status of the two confessionals penned by his onetime stripper consort Liz Renay. But Liz did list him in the “Most Exciting Men” section of one memoir and she was one of the old crowd who stuck with him to the end, through his hospitalization for stomach cancer at UCLA Medical Center. “I’m on my way out. Too bad,” he told her. “We could have been so happy.” The flamboyant redhead concluded that Mickey possessed the power to destroy, himself and others, but she also wrote “He lived with a flourish and he died like a man.”
Mickey was buried by his sisters as Meyer H. Cohen (“Our Beloved Brother”) in the Alcove of Love section of Hillside Memorial Park, surrounded by other of Los Angeles’ over-the-top performers: Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and George Jessel.
* * *
AFTER HIS RETIREMENT from his second career, at the track, O’Mara tended the roses in his garden and fished the Sierras. He also decided it was time to tell the tales of the Gangster Squad, though his wife thought that was a mistake.
“I think sometimes you talk too much and you might put your foot in it,” Connie O’Mara said, as if they would haul him off to jail for having taken some hit man into the hills for a chat in 1949. “Oh, Daddy, don’t go into that.”
“Leave it alone a minute, will you, boss? I still got my marbles.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” she said.
When Connie had her stroke he cared for her at home, lifting her in and out of bed and keeping her clean, doing everything, until he got weak, too, with lymphoma. Only then did he allow her to be taken to a nursing home, where he visited every day. He years before had picked out their gravesite in a Catholic cemetery in the San Gabriel Valley, on a hillside with a tree that shaded visitors in the afternoon.
That’s where his daughter read his eulogy after he died in June 2003, at eighty-six.
* * *
MARTI O’MARA WENT into a brief panic when she gazed about the rolling lawns before the graveside ceremony. She knew it probably was her own mind game but she found herself studying the other headstones. Some had disturbingly young faces etched into the marble, a smiling fellow in a T-shirt, dead at seventeen, or an eighteen-year-old with a mustache. “It’s the gangbanger cemetery,” she said, fretting for an instant that her dad would be surrounded for eternity by a newer era’s bad guys. Los Angeles’ street gangs now claimed hundred of victims a year and no one could say this menace came from without. The inner city, that’s what they called it.
Then she realized it didn’t matter if those were gangbangers buried on that bucolic hillside. Her dad could handle those guys.
Marti O’Mara titled her eulogy, “A Good Life.”
“My father loved being a cop,” she said. “He was part of the team that really did keep organized crim
e out of Southern California.”
“For my father, there was good, there was evil. He fought evil.”
AFTERWORD: MACHINE GUN SHOOTOUTS ON THE BIG SCREEN
Gangster Squad, both the book and the film, began with a phone call twenty years ago. An article in the Los Angeles Times on July 26, 1992, reported on a controversy over sensitive information in the police department’s files—dirt, in essence, on politicians, celebrities, and hoodlums. The unit keeping the files was known then as the Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID), but the article said it had its roots in the Intelligence Division formed in the early 1950s by the legendary Chief William H. Parker. Then the phone rang that morning and the voice on the other end—clearly of an older man—said that was wrong. The roots went back further, to just after World War II, and something called the Gangster Squad. When I asked how he knew, the caller paused and said, “Well, I was on it.”
The next day I was in the San Gabriel Valley living room of long-retired Sergeant John J. O’Mara, going through his fitness reports from when he joined the LAPD in 1940. His wife, Connie, lurked a safe distance away by the kitchen, cooking a pot of chili for us, but always listening in. At one point Jack railed against modern political correctness, with all these women charging sexual harassment.
“Sure a bunch of boys will be boys and get out of hand, play a little grab-ass,” the faithful church usher said.
And the voice from the kitchen piped in, “Don’t you feel honored to talk to such an intelligent man?”
Of course, she mostly worried about him getting into other sensitive matters, for as he said, “We’d be indicted today for things we did every day then.”
Another LAPD unit of the era, a robbery trio known as the Hat Squad, had gotten a lot of attention over the years—its members were remarkable too, but also good self-promoters. The Gangster Squad had remained virtually invisible, in contrast, as its founders intended. Some of the men, particularly the original bugging expert Conwell Keeler, embraced almost the same code of silence as the mob, omerta. But O’Mara loved telling the tales, to a point where his family tuned them out, “Oh, that again.” Or else they wondered, reasonably, whether he might have embellished some of the stories, even the mundane ones. After the former LAPD lieutenant Tom Bradley was elected mayor in 1973, the first black to hold the post, O’Mara spoke often of his rookie rivalry with the former UCLA track star. Such I-knew-him-when claims are commonly stretched and some of O’Mara’s relatives thought they might catch Jack on this one years later when they took him to a show at the Ahmanson Theatre and noticed another old man being helped across the plaza, Tom Bradley, then long out of office. A nephew, Jim O’Mara, recalled prodding his gray-haired uncle to say hello, a classic “now we’ll see” moment. But Bradley beat them to it. Spotting the familiar face, he called out “OOOOO MARA!” and the two geezers all but got down into their racing stances right there.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 38