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

by Paul Lieberman

  Over the months (then years) after our initial chili lunch, O’Mara helped steer me toward other surviving members of the secretive squad convened by Lieutenant Willie Burns. But even then only one other of the original eight was still alive, bug man Keeler. “I don’t think he’d say shit if he had a mouthful,” warned the subsequent bugging genius (Judge) Bert Phelps, and he was right. A series of visits, notes, and knocks on Keeler’s door produced one curt response. “We had a job to do and we did it. Those are, how do you say, bodies that are buried.” That went on for a decade.

  Judge Phelps was the first to say I had to see Jerry Wooters. As with Bert becoming a judge, the arc of Wooters’s life alone presented a novelty—he was the renegade cop who became a millionaire by the beach, though I did have to pick up the check every time we met. The grizzled Sergeant Wooters would reach for it and get there just a moment late, “That’s Jerry,” as they say. But it was more than his unlikely success. Most all these old cops were children of the Depression and veterans of the War—they’d been through a lot—and their storytelling bore little resemblance to what you encounter in today’s age of puffery and (instant) celebrity, when people don’t hesitate to tout their own (invented) heroism. The Gangster Squad cops, in contrast, were modest and self-deprecating, and Jerry was at the extreme of the latter, portraying himself as a screw-up in virtually every story he told. Forget the medals he’d won in the war, he was a draft-dodger at heart. Forget the descriptions of him as Mickey Cohen’s pursuing “Javert”—they both wound up in some damn jail, didn’t they?

  I naturally wondered about some of Jerry’s stories too, even if he came out on the wrong end in them. I loved his tale of getting a watchdog as a gift from the fearsome Jack Whalen after trying in vain to turn down the animal. “They die on you, then you’re miserable.” With many of the stories told by the cops, thousands of pages of dusty records could be found to check them out—grand jury transcripts on the Gangster Squad’s role in the Black Dahlia case, for instance, or testimony of a former guard at Mickey’s home, confirming how he snuck the guns to O’Mara. But how do you check whether a cop got a gift dog from “The Enforcer,” a man killed a half century before? Well, I recalled Jerry mentioning in passing that Whalen’s sister was the one who raised the Great Danes, so I tracked down the colorful Bobie von Hurst in Oregon. With some trepidation I asked the woman, then nearing ninety, if she remembered the episode and that particular animal. She said, “Yes, sure, Thor,” and that was the start of long sessions with the daughter of “Freddie the Thief,” and then other family members who could help piece together his journey across America, conning all the way.

  Yet even as notebooks and cassette tapes filled with the details of Fred Whalen’s trek and the Gangster Squad’s missions, I still was not sure of what to do with the material—it wasn’t easy to see how it fit into a daily newspaper. But when the fiftieth anniversary of the squad’s founding approached I decided with my editors that the story needed to be told, however outside the box. So I set out to see Jack O’Mara one last time.

  I had kept in touch through Connie’s illness and death, convinced that his caring for her was his finest act as a man—far beyond anything he did with a gun. But with his own lymphoma taking its toll, his family moved him into an upscale senior residence down in the Laguna Beach area. That was a story in itself. The other men there tended to be doctors and lawyers, etc., but the blue-eyed Irish cop quickly became cock of the walk, winning their competitions in pitch-and-putt golf and lawn croquet, everyone dressed in white for that. No doctor or lawyer could match his stories either, that’s a given. The widower Jack O’Mara perked up and had a couple of attractive girlfriends, you better believe it, before his health failed again. At that point I was living in New York, so I flew out, hoping for one final visit that didn’t happen—Jack O’Mara died that week, with three younger generations around him, a great-grandson curled up at his side.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER in June 2003, I decided to make one last call before I flew back East. I wanted to try Con Keeler again, after a decade of rebuffs. I was at a barbecue at an old friend’s house and at sundown called on my cell phone and got a “Hello?” Then I simply asked a question, with no preliminaries, about the squad’s roster in 1946—and Con answered. He talked a while about tough little Willie Burns then went down the list of the originals for three hours, burning out the cell phone’s battery. When I informed him that O’Mara had died, he said, “I guess I’m the only one left.”

  After that, we spoke or met close to one hundred times. Con had the best memory of anyone for dates, addresses, or names—or exactly how Lieutenant Burns showed off his Tommy gun at their first meeting. He never hesitated to question someone else’s memory of a detail, either. “Noooo, I don’t think so,” he’d say. He never said why he had decided to talk after all those years.

  It defied logic that he was the last of the originals alive. During World War II, he had become infected amid routine surgery in an operating room that had sawdust in it and they left him in a “dark room” to die. After the war, during an operation to remove his scar tissue, an anesthesiologist overjuiced him and he went into a coma for two days—other squad members dropped by to say good-bye before he fooled ’em again. He was supposed to die in 1965 also, from a heart attack the last day of the Watts riots. That ended his police career, but on he lived.

  Unlike other squad members, Keeler did not become a millionaire or a judge or a racetrack honcho. He dabbled in private debugging, then decided he could make do on his pension. Having been a policeman was enough for him. He hung a rendering of his sergeant’s badge, #2763, in his living room, across from the 1883 clock his grandparents had carted in a covered wagon from Iowa. “It ticks away,” he said as he neared his ninetieth birthday, miraculously still ticking himself.

  That was about the time he said, “I want to show you something,” and got out the little notebook that started their files, his fine-point pen recording the basics on “Accardo, Anthony,” “Cornero, Tony,” and “Cohen, Mickey,” with his “46 Cad. Sed Blk. Shiny 3T9 364.”

  But Con was taking seven pills in the morning for his thyroid and strokes and to control the timing of his heart. Sometimes he’d collapse and a rescue crew would rush him to the hospital. Back home, he’d go to the garage to get a tool and forget why he was there. It went on that way for several years until his family, like O’Mara’s, moved their old warrior to assisted living.

  That’s where I hoped to see him one last time when I came west this past fall for the filming of Gangster Squad.

  * * *

  I WAS NERVOUS, I must admit, because of my trip out to see O’Mara eight years earlier, when Jack died. I didn’t want to jinx Con, now a month from his ninety-seventh birthday. The producers of the Warner Bros. film hoped to get him to the set, but that was unrealistic. I had been speaking with his daughter Kathleen, retired after working for the LAPD’s crime lab, and her husband, Don Irvine, a retired lieutenant. Empty nesters since their son took off to attend Harvard—I don’t have to tell you how proud they were—they had taken on the wrenching task of moving Con out of the house he built with the help of Benny Williams, another Gangster Squad original, now long gone.

  We met at Con’s group care residence, where an aide helped him from his room. Con, neat in gray slacks and a gray shirt, stood almost erect, if not quite to his six-foot-one of old. We hugged and took seats at a table next to a framed display of shells atop sand.

  “You’re a character in a movie,” the son-in-law, Don, kicked us off.

  “I was in one before,” Keeler replied, “Webb’s.”

  He then recalled how Dragnet’s Jack Webb had given him a shotgun not for the 1954 movie, but for serving as technical adviser on several episodes of the TV series.

  “We still have the shotgun,” Don told him.

  Con was at the stage where not a day was guaranteed, but we were sure to get a couple of the old stories. They would like
ly be ones I had heard several times, because he’d evolved from omerta to thirsting to talk. But you never knew when a new story would pop out and one did that day, November 7, 2011, though it had nothing at all to do with Mickey Cohen. It was about how Chief Parker, like his predecessors, could not resist using the squad for other chores … in this case helping to protect a dignitary, President John F. Kennedy. Con Keeler’s final story, then:

  Parker always was fearful that something might happen in L.A. and embarrass the city, though this attitude was rare in the era before the Kennedy assassination. So Kennedy himself comes to town and they assign a car to watch him. I was like a supervisor then and the guys are reporting in to me. So he goes to his hotel where he checks into a bungalow and then they see him crawl out a window and get a cab. A cab—the president of the United States. Oh, my. So they call me, “What should we do?”

  “Follow him.”

  So they do … to Kim Novak’s house.

  I call the Secret Service, which is supposed to be protecting him. “Do you know where your man is?”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “You’d better check where.”

  * * *

  THE FILM GANGSTER Squad was shot “on location,” as they say, and that week the location was the north end of what used to be fashionable Westlake Park, now MacArthur Park, and in a neighborhood that’s changed. But the building being used was a remnant of the area’s peak, the neo-Gothic tower that originally housed the Elks Lodge, then a hotel (the Park Plaza), which now is used mostly for catered events and film shoots. It was to be the setting for the climactic showdown between Mickey and his men and the Gangster Squad led in the film by Jack O’Mara and Jerry Wooters. There would be bullets flying back and forth all week, both on the street outside the hotel, amid vintage Cadillacs, and inside the enormous lobby, which was decorated for Christmas. In a gangster film, you can’t have the Tommy guns kept under the overcoats at the big confrontation.

  “Boys with toys!” declared Dan Lin, the producer who led the transformation of the real story into a film geared toward multiplexes, meaning a dozen antique Tommies would be rat-a-tat-tatting all week, some old enough to have been under O’Mara’s bed. Actor Ryan Gosling, playing Wooters, was getting ready to charge the hotel where Sean Penn, the film’s Mickey, was holed up.

  “Did any of these guys get killed?” Gosling asked.

  I explained that two of the original eight had been shot, and one had a partner killed, but early in their careers. Jumbo Kennard was killed, but not by a gun.

  Gosling had already been visited on the set by the sons of the real Jerry Wooters, Gerard, and David, along with their dad’s old partner, Judge Phelps, very much still kicking. All had pestered the actor on the small things he had to do—or stop doing—to be true to the real Jerry. “You’ve got to ash your cigarette into your cuff,” one of the boys told him. “That’s how the old man did it.” Then the trio of visitors went nuts when Gosling, in the bar scene, ordered a Nehi, or something as tame.

  “I never saw your dad drink a soda pop in his life!” the judge told the boys. And Jerry in spats?

  Relishing the interplay, Gosling explained that his Wooters is the hard drinker they knew when we first see him in the film. But Gosling saw going on the wagon was a way of signaling the character’s shedding of cynicism as he gets with the mission of getting Mickey Cohen.

  Actors make decisions like that. Sean Penn no doubt considered many ways to play Mickey, who was a different person in different eras, going from the don’t-mess-with-me heist man to the showman of his last years. Were he alive today, he’d have a reality TV series, without question. But the film is set in 1949, when he was causing serious havoc in the city and the bullets were flying, even if mostly in his direction. Penn decided that the key to that Mickey lay earlier in his life, when he had to measure his opponent, strategize, and inflict pain a different way. “It’s all about boxing,” explained the director Ruben Fleischer, watching the action on a bank of monitors as Gosling and Josh Brolin finally stormed the hotel, Tommies blazin’. Brolin was doing O’Mara as a Berserker, one of those Norse fighters who charged forward without much concern for their safety.

  During a break, I jotted a note to myself to calculate how close we were to where the Whalens opened their little store in 1922. I guessed eight blocks. The imposing old Elks lodge being shot up was where Freddie the Thief staged his pool championships in later years, with L.A. cops providing security.

  Another intersection between fiction and reality was delicious: The film crews re-created Slapsy Maxie’s to stage the scene in which Wooters first eyes Mickey and meets the woman who will be caught between them, a fictionalized character played by the young actress Emma Stone, who dyed her hair from its natural blond to red for the role—Caddies and redheads, that too was their world. Anyway, during this part of the shoot, they ran into an old-time fireman who had been around in the restaurant’s glory days, so Gosling started questioning him.

  He said a couple of times he saw the real Mickey Cohen there so I asked what that was like. The man said, “He was right at that table,” and pointed. He said, “He was telling these lame jokes but everybody was laughing.”

  Then Emma Stone came out of a trailer, getting ready for her scene, and Gosling greeted her with a question.

  I asked Emma, “How’s it going at the trailer?” She said, “Oh, Sean’s telling all these lame jokes and everyone’s laughing.”

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, the filming by the park drew more visitors from the real story. One was Lindo Giacopuzzi, the Gangster Squad’s first addition after the original eight, who became the resident Italian. Now ninety-five, the old football lineman had been driven to the shoot by a granddaughter, but looked like he still could knock your block off. He carried a scrapbook with clippings of some of his cases, including the 1947 roust of six Midwesterners in the Caddy owned by one of Mickey’s henchman. With perfect timing, two of the actors playing Mickey’s thugs came over and plopped themselves in directors chairs next to Jaco. He told them then how he had been transferred out of the squad without explanation when Chief Parker took office and put Captain James Hamilton in charge.

  “He thought I’d be clannish,” Jaco told the actors. “I was put on because I was Italian and spoke Italian and I was put off because I was Italian.”

  “How come men were tougher in your day?” asked Holt McCallany, a rugged guy who in the film was trying to kill Jaco’s old buddies.

  “We used to say ‘half-tough.’ We’d say ‘That Jumbo Kennard, he’s half-tough.’”

  On the monitors everywhere, Sean Penn was running through the scene in which he puts on his coat and heads out from his suite for the showdown with O’Mara and company. In another reality-meets-fiction, the script was written by cop-turned-novelist Will Beall, who worked out of the LAPD’s 77th Street Division a half century after the Gangster Squad was formed there. But you hire an actor such as Penn knowing he’s going to make the script his own—he’ll try things a few ways once he inhabits a character. So one time he heads off to the showdown without uttering a line, it’s all in his stride. Another time he says just a single word, “Unbelievable.” A third time he gets ready for the shootout—you know bodies will fall—by muttering, “Gotta fix my tie—I can’t go out in public with my tie like this.” A fourth time he goes for melodrama, “This is it. This is the end.”

  Jack O’Mara’s older daughter also came by that night, but that was no surprise. Maureen O’Mara Stevens had been showing up several times a week, like a groupie. “I know they think I’m nuts, but I don’t care,” she said. “How often do they make a movie with your father in it?”

  The two O’Mara girls represent a classic divide. The youngest, Marti, was the prodigal, picked for those TV quiz shows and then off to Harvard for three advanced degrees. Dr. O’Mara still lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is an expert in corporate real estate, traveling the country as head of her own consulting
company when she isn’t home, as a mother of three. The older daughter, Maureen, stayed closer to the original nest. While teaching nursing and tending her family—she’s a grandma already—Maureen took on the dutiful care of their parents. After her father’s death, she refused to cooperate with my research for several years—the loss of her dad was too much for her—while Marti was eager to see her father’s life shared with the world. Now the two sisters saw the filming entirely differently.

  In Cambridge, Marti was bothered by the violence. She had not known her father to ever use his gun. He had once, but he spared his daughters the details. She was bothered too by the casting of the buffed, ripped Brolin as her smaller dad. Even hearing that he wore a brown suit got to her—her dad went for blue and gray, to go with his eyes. But mostly it was all the shoot-’em-up scenes she heard about, ones her older sister invariably witnessed. “I kept telling her, ‘It’s a movie,’” Maureen said during yet another day of shooting.