Between You and Me (21 page)

In his heyday, Mickey Cohen had been a crook of some repute, especially on the West Coast, where he worked closely with his longtime partner in crime, Bugsy Siegel. Although Cohen’s principal activities were gambling and bootlegging, he was well acquainted with other, rougher games. He was known to have killed some people who had crossed him in one way or another. But when we contacted him in the spring of ’57, Cohen insisted that his criminal pursuits were all in the past. He had gone legit and was now making a modest living as a florist, an improbable line of work for someone who had long been accustomed to the high-roller action of bookmaking and peddling illegal booze.

We made it clear to Cohen that we weren’t interested in talking to him about floral arrangements or tropical plants. What we wanted from him were stories about the Bad Old Days. We were hoping that recollections of his life in the underworld would give our audience some understanding of what a mobster did and what organized crime was like on the inside. After hearing what we had in mind, Cohen said he would be happy to give us “the lowdown.”

Cohen flew into New York from Los Angeles, and our writer and

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researcher Al Ramrus was dispatched to the airport to meet him.

There Al discovered that our guest had not traveled alone; arriving with him were two companions whom he introduced only as Arlene and Itchy. In keeping with our agreement, Al checked them into a suite at the Hampshire House on Central Park South, not far from our studio, but Cohen did not find the accommodations acceptable. It was then that we learned the former gangster had an obsession about hygiene and was so fastidious that he refused to share a bathroom with anyone else. We approved their move into a larger suite, one that offered more plumbing facilities, thereby assuring his pristine privacy.

All the trouble and expense seemed to be worth it, or at least that was my first impression once we began the interview. For the most part, Cohendid talk freely about his life onthe wrong side of the law, eventhough some of his remarks were more thana little self-serving.

At one point, for example, he piously boasted that he had never been involved in narcotics or prostitution, as if that abstention were enough to make him a model citizen. I wasn’t about to let him get away with it.

W A L L A C E : Well, wait just a second. You say you’ve never mixed with prostitution, never mixed with narcotics.

C O H E N : That’s right.

W A L L A C E : Yet you’ve made book, you have bootlegged. Most important of all, you’ve broken one of the commandments—

you’ve killed, Mickey. How can you be proud of not dealing in prostitution and narcotics when you’ve killed at least one man, or how many more? How many more, Mickey?

C O H E N : I have killed no men that in the first place didn’t deserve killing.

W A L L A C E : By whose standards?

C O H E N : By the standards of our way of life. And I actually, in

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all of these killings—in all of these what you would call killings—I had no alternative. It was either my life or their life.

As he rambled oninthis veinabout how he had killed certain people because he had no choice, I couldn’t have been more pleased.

These were exactly the kinds of unsavory comments I’d hoped to draw out of him. Thenthe conversationturned to his highly lucrative but illegal gambling empire, and that was when we got into trouble—

serious trouble. Cohenclaimed that inorder to keep that racket running smoothly over the years, he had to shell out vast sums of money in bribes to politicians and law-enforcement officials. That led me to ask him: “Now, Mick, without naming names, how far up in the brass do you have to bribe the cops to carry ona big-time bookmaking operation?”

Cohen neglected to answer the question, but unfortunately, he did name names, and one in particular: William Parker, the chief of police in Los Angeles. I never did find out what set Cohen off on such a tirade, but he suddenly filled the air with an outburst of vicious slander. Parker, he said, was “nothing but a thief. This man is as dishonest politically as the worst thief that accepts money for payoffs. . . . He’s a known alcoholic. He’s been disgusting and he’s a known degenerate. In other words, he’s a sadistic degenerate of the worst type.”

If this torrent of invective had been unleashed in a story I was doing for 60 Minutes, there would have been no problem. By then the standard practice in TV journalism was to film or tape an interview in advance, and such loose-cannon comments would have been checked for accuracy and weighed for discretion before being put on the air. In this case, once it became clear that Cohen had no evidence to back up his abusive remarks, they would not have been in-

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cluded in the broadcast. But The Mike Wallace Interview was broadcast live, and therein lay the peril. Cohen’s libelous charges were heard by our viewers in real time, at the precise moment they were uttered. Still, that was no excuse for my lapse in judgment, for I had been doing live interviews long enough to recognize the danger signs.

As soon as Cohen finished his diatribe, I should have said something like: “Now, wait a minute, you’re calling the police chief of Los Angeles a sadistic degenerate, and that’s undoubtedly actionable. I want to disassociate myself from all such accusations unless you can prove to me right now, at this instant, that what you’re saying is true. Give me book, chapter, and verse. Otherwise, let’s move on to something else.”

Instead, I was so caught up in the heat of the moment that I proceeded to talk my way more deeply into hot water. Referring to his target as “the apparently respectable Chief William Parker,” I urged Cohen to elaborate on his charges, and he was only too happy to oblige. In fact, he extended his allegations to other law-enforcement officials in Los Angeles.

As soonas we were off the air and I saw the expressiononYates’s face, I knew we had a problem. Yet even after we had reviewed the broadcast and discussed it at some length, I still clung to the belief that even an ex-mobster would not have made such accusations unless he had the goods to nail the man he was talking about. To get re-assurance on that point, Yates and I hustled over to Cohen’s suite at the Hampshire House. Mr. Cleanhad just takena shower, anablu-tionary rite he apparently performed several times a day, and he greeted us wearing nothing more than a towel draped around his ample midriff. We moved directly to the point and told him how concerned we were.

“Mike, Ted, forget it,” Cohen replied in a tone of serene confi-

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dence. “Parker knows that I know so much about him, he wouldn’t dare sue.”

Unfortunately, Police Chief Parker did not agree. At a news conference the next day, he threatened legal action and severely took us to task. “I am not concerned about the specific comments of such a person,” he said, dismissing Cohen. “However, I am concerned about the authority of a television station to use that type of slander. A slanderous magazine story must be picked up at a newsstand, but TV enables slander to be brought into the living room.”

That was enough to set off alarm bells at ABC. Prior to my next interview, our viewers were addressed by Oliver Treyz, the president of ABC Television. This was the same Oliver Treyz who, six months later, issued a formal on-air apology for the statement Drew Pearson made on The Mike Wallace Interview about the authorship of Profiles in Courage. I vigorously objected to that mea culpa, but in the aftermath of the Cohen interview, I fully agreed with the network’s attempt to make amends. I was standing next to Treyz when we went on the air and he solemnly intoned:

“Last Sunday night something most unfortunate, unexpected, and profoundly regrettable occurred while Mr. Wallace was questioning Mickey Cohen. Leonard Goldenson, our president, joins me most earnestly in stating that the American Broadcasting Company retracts and withdraws in full all statements made on last Sunday’s program concerning the Los Angeles city government, and specifically, Police Chief William H. Parker. . . .”

Treyz added a few more lines of remorse and ended by saying that ABC “deeply regrets the matter and offers its sincere apologies.”

He then turned to me. I said, “I join sincerely and earnestly in the statement of retraction and apology.”

The humble pie we gulped down on national television was not

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enough to mollify Parker. He proceeded to sue ABC for two million dollars. Although the suit never came to trial (Parker eventually settled out of court for forty-five thousand dollars), the legal squabble and the adverse publicity it engendered took a heavy toll on us.

Among other things, the unfortunate encounter with Mickey Co-henundermined our self-assurance. We had come to ABC with a confidence that bordered on hubris. We were convinced that we had the moxie to turnour local hit show into a big winner onthe national stage. Moreover, we had the trust and support of our new bosses, who encouraged us to pursue the probing interviews and controversial subjects that had beenour stock-in-trade onNight Beat. Shortly before we had closed the deal with the network that spring, I was invited to break bread with Leonard Goldenson in his private dining room.

He said to me, “Mike, you will not be doing your job properly unless you make this building shake every couple of weeks.” With more than a little help from the loquacious Mr. Cohen, we had set off a tremor of earthquake force and intensity, but for some reason, Goldenson neglected to compliment us on the terrific job we had done. I didn’t hear from him at all for several months after the Cohen interview.

However, our chief nemesis at ABC was neither Goldenson nor his second in command, Treyz, but the head of the network’s news department, John Daly—or John Charles Daly, as he preferred to be called. Daly had been opposed to the whole idea of The Mike Wallace Interview. He made it clear that he did not consider me to be a “real”

journalist but merely an interviewer, and an irresponsible one at that.

I learned from some people who were close to Daly that when our Night Beat team was hired, he had told Goldenson and Treyz that bringing us into ABC was a serious mistake because we were bound to cause trouble for the network. In the wake of the Cohen broadcast, he was able to crow “I told you so”—and he did.

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In other words, we were put squarely on the defensive, and once we lost our swagger, we also lost a lot of the driving force that had fueled the success of Night Beat. I even had to endure the indignity of a legal watchdog during our broadcasts. Not long after the Cohen interview, ABC’s insurer, Lloyd’s of London, insisted on the following new policy: Each night we went on the air, a lawyer would sit in the studio just outside of camera range, and there, facing me, he would hold up cue cards at sensitive moments warning me to BE CAREFUL or STOP or RETREAT. It was so demeaning that I routinely referred to the lawyer as “my nanny,” but under the circumstances, I was in no position to object to his presence.

Still, we didn’t exactly fold up our tent and slink off into oblivion.

We continued to soldier on through the rest of 1957 and deep into 1958, during which time I did a number of interviews that were very well received, like the ones with Orval Faubus and Frank Lloyd Wright and Margaret Sanger, as well as several others I have not cited in this narrative. But we were never able to escape entirely from the shadow cast by the Cohen episode, and the subsequent flap over the Drew Pearson interview didn’t help matters. Hence, when our contract with Philip Morris expired in the spring of ’58, we were hardly surprised by the tobacco company’s decision not to renew it.

That naturally made our situation at ABC even more precarious, and though we managed to keep the show afloat for a few more months, it was obvious that our days there were numbered. So, rather than wait for the ax to fall, we arranged for safe passage back to the more congenial sphere of local television.

It still took a while to recover from the damage. The lingering fallout from the Cohen and Pearson broadcasts continued to dog me.

Even some reviewers who had previously praised my candid style of interviewing now turned on me. I had come to be regarded in many

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circles as a reckless hip-shooter whose lust for sensationalism had plunged my network into legal jeopardy. It was during this period that I learned a vital and valuable lesson: If you choose to court controversy, then you better understand that it’s a two-edged sword and you’re likely to get cut up a bit in the process.

I don’t want to overstate the difficulty of the post-ABC years. I had no trouble finding work, and I made a very nice living in a variety of jobs during the late 1950s and early ’60s. But I couldn’t help noticing that no offers came my way from any of the three networks. In their eyes, I apparently had become a pariah, and I pretty much remained one until early 1963, when I launched a vigorous effort to get hired by one of the networks, and the president of CBS News, Dick Salant, decided to take a chance on me. That marked my return to network journalism, and this time it was for keeps.

J i m m y “ T h e W e a s e l ” F r at i a n n o J o e B o n a n n o

I W O N ’ T G O S O F A R as to say that my distressing experience with Mickey Cohen made me gun-shy (as it were), but twenty-four years passed before I interviewed another bona fide mobster. And I do mean bona fide, because they didn’t come any more authentic than Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, who for years had been one of the Mafia’s most ruthless hit men. Fratianno agreed to appear on 60