L.A. Noir (28 page)

When Mickey received a subpoena to appear before the Kefauver Committee at the federal building downtown, all of Los Angeles expected fireworks. But when the committee convened at 9 a.m., there was no Mickey Cohen. Indignant, the commission sent investigators out to his house in Brentwood to search for the witness. They found Mickey asleep in bed. While the committee waited, Mickey got dressed with excruciating slowness. (“Being the fine dressed man I try to be, it takes time for me to get ready for an appearance.”) The hearings had “been blown up so big … like a Hollywood premiere,” and Cohen wanted to look the part of a Hollywood star. He did.

From the minute he entered a crowded courtroom in Los Angeles’s federal building, “Mickey was the star of the show,” reported
Time
magazine. Wearing “a natty brown suit, brown tie and deep black scowl,” Cohen faced “a whole battery of newsmen, photographers, movie cameras and tape recorders.”

Surveying them in much the same spirit that a feudal lord might survey his vassals, Cohen was overheard commenting, “I could spit on the sidewalk and it would make headlines.”

A reporter asked the question on everyone’s mind: Wasn’t Mickey disrespecting the U.S. Senate by arriving late?

“Lookit, nobody notified me about the time,” Mickey responded testily. “All I got was a call to come down here, and I came down, and I’m here.”

For the next five hours, Mickey put on a remarkable show. One month earlier in Chicago, Harry “The Muscle” Russell, the Chicago Outfit’s Florida representative, had flustered the Kefauver Committee by citing the Fifth Amendment (which protects against self-incrimination) as a justification for refusing to answer
any
questions from the committee. Mickey had no such hesitation. Speaking easily, almost casually, without notes and rarely pausing to consult attorneys Sam Rummel and Vernon Ferguson, Cohen denied every allegation thrown at him:

It was a bravura recitation of lies. But there was one issue Mickey couldn’t wish away—his income.

Other Mob bosses had carefully constructed front companies or bought in to legitimate businesses in order to account for their large incomes. Frank Costello, the so-called prime minister of the underworld, insisted that he was merely a semiretired real estate investor. Jack Dragna claimed that he was a vineyard owner and banana importer. Aside from a few desultory investments (in grocery stores and a women’s shoulder-pad manufacturer), Mickey had not. Even Michael’s Haberdashery had never made much pretense of being a going concern. Instead, Mickey maintained that he was just a former bookmaker who now earned a modest living from gambling. But he lived like a pasha in a $120,000 house in Brentwood and purchased new Cadillacs every year for himself and his wife (to say nothing of his $15,000 armored car).

Anyone who bothered to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation could see that there was something suspicious about such lavish expenditures. The problem was squaring such spending with the era’s high income tax rates. In 1950, a taxpayer who earned $100,000 could expect to hand nearly $60,000 of that to the federal government and another $5,000 to the state of California, leaving about $35,000 for himself. Double that hypothetical income to $200,000, and the taxpayer was left with a mere $50,000 in after-tax income. Yet by his own acknowledgment, Mickey had spent more than $200,000 on his house and about $30,000 on Cadillacs. Investigators also estimated that Cohen kept roughly eighteen men on his payroll; at his declared pay rate of “$75 to $100 a week,” that added another $85,000 or so to his expenses. In order to generate, say, $125,000 in legitimate after-tax income, Mickey would had to have paid taxes on a declared yearly income of nearly a million dollars. He wasn’t even close. Instead, the tax returns he had filed with the Bureau of Internal Revenue in the late 1940s reported annual incomes as low as $6,000 a year—just twice the national average income.

This should have led the Bureau of Internal Revenue to take a closer look at Mickey’s finances, as it had done nearly two decades earlier in the case of Al Capone. Yet remarkably, as Warren Olney noted in the final report of the Special Crime Study Commission—a report that came out the same month that Senator Kefauver was interrogating Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles—“there has never been a racketeer, hoodlum, or gangster of first rank importance convicted of income tax fraud in California.” Nor, according to comments made by Treasury Department officials at a conference on organized crime in the spring of 1949, were any such cases in the works. Local Bureau of Internal Revenue agents had actually tried to start
an investigation several years earlier. But after their superiors discovered the probe, they’d been detailed to other assignments.

The Kefauver Committee had no intention of letting Mickey off so lightly. During their questioning, committee members homed in on Mickey’s massive expenditures and minimal income. Grudgingly, Cohen admitted to a $40,000 home (far less than its actual value) with $48,000 worth of home furnishings. That still left a gap of $210,000 in unaccounted-for income. When pressed about the discrepancy by chief counsel Rudolph Halley, Cohen replied that over the past four years, he had borrowed about $300,000, most of which, he added, had been spent on lawyers’ fees as a result of the constant “harassment from the LAPD.”

Halley asked if there were any notes or collateral that could document these loans.

Mickey said there were not. People had lent him money, Cohen continued, because “they just happen to like me.”

“How do you maintain that kind of credit?” Sen. Charles Tobey of New Hampshire asked.

Mickey cracked his first smile. “It’s getting very weak, Senator.”

The audience chuckled. By the end of the week, the investigators were gone. When a reporter asked Cohen what he thought of the experience, Mickey cracked, “All them congressional committees are a joke, a gimmick for the furtherance of a politician.” Bill Parker worried him much more.

      DURING PARKER’S first month on the job, four different emissaries approached him with variations on a single proposal: appointing a gambling “czar.” Ostensibly, this person’s job would be to curb gambling, but Parker felt his interlocutors were actually more interested in organizing it. Fearing a frame-up, Parker spoke openly about these overtures at a countywide meeting of law enforcement officers later that month. He was convinced that the various attempts to snuff out Mickey Cohen suggested that the Syndicate was preparing to move into Los Angeles in force. Los Angeles, which Parker described, in language harkening back to the 1920s, as “the last white spot among the great cities of America,” risked becoming Chicago. The LAPD was determined to resist this, he told his audiences. But he warned, “I do not know how long this can be continued. There are men here ready to get their tentacles into the city and drain off large sums of money through gambling activities of various kinds.”

Parker argued that if the forces of law and order were to prevail, a counteroffensive was needed. For too long, gangsters had taken advantage of the fact that when things got “hot” in one of Los Angeles County’s
forty-five-odd municipalities, they could just move to another. At a meeting of regional law enforcement officials, Parker proposed a new approach—a central intelligence bureau that pooled resources from all of the region’s law enforcement agencies and pursued gangsters wherever they attempted to hide. Representatives from the three dozen law enforcement agencies present readily agreed to participate in such an effort. But Parker’s ambitions were larger still.

“This plan goes deeper than a means of saving Los Angeles from the stigma of vice,” Parker continued. “We are protecting the American philosophy of life. It is now clear that Russia is hoping we will destroy ourselves as a nation through our own avarice, greed, and corruption in government. Hence, this program has a wider application than in the Los Angeles area alone.” Parker envisioned a national consortium of departments committed to information-sharing.

The assembled group was, according to one account of the meeting, “startled,” both by the scope of Parker’s ambitions and by his tone. In his first speeches as chief-of-police-elect, Parker had struck a hopeful—even humble—note, committing himself and his officers to the “reasonable enforcement of the law and respect for the rights and dignity of the individual—to work for the community, not rule it.” But already another side of Chief Parker was appearing—the profoundly pessimistic observer of American decline, the Spengler of City Hall.

Parker was a powerful speaker in thrall to a potent theme: the corruption of American society and the perils this posed. “We have become a great nation in a material sense,” Parker warned the Holy Name Society in a speech soon after becoming chief. “But this unparalleled success in the acquisition of worldly goods has been accompanied by a materialistic philosophy that threatens to destroy every vestige of human liberty.

“Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome rose, then fell as strength gave way to weakness,” continued Parker ominously. “It is possible that our failure to recognize the indispensability of Religion and Morality to our national welfare is leading us to the same fate that beset these brave civilizations of the past.”

Whether 1950s Los Angeles was Babylon or not, Bill Parker was right about one thing, though. The underworld was moving in.

Soon after Parker was appointed chief, five of the top criminals in Los Angeles County got together in a Hollywood hotel suite to “cut up the town.” The men present included Sam Rummel, Mickey Cohen’s attorney and sometime business partner; Jimmy Utley, a former Cohen rival who now concentrated on bingo and abortion; Max Kleiger, bookmaker and gambler; Robert Gans, slot machine king during the heyday of the Combination in the
1930s; and Curly Robinson, his successor in the coin machine field, another Cohen partner. For hours, they discussed how to divvy up the most lucrative rackets, as well as bookmaking, gambling, bingo, and prostitution. They also discussed tactics. Since Parker wouldn’t bend, the underworld decided to target Mayor Bowron. They decided to mount a recall initiative (the same measure that had brought Bowron to office in the first place in 1938). In a delightfully cynical twist, the grounds for the recall were none other than the supposed influence exercised by the underworld over Mayor Bowron, as exposed by the vicecapades of 1949.
^*

The LAPD heard it all. The hotel suite was bugged, courtesy the LAPD intelligence division.

The idea of an intelligence division wasn’t new: Chief James E. Davis had one in the 1930s; Chief Horrall had one in the 1940s. Other units such as administrative vice and the gangster squad routinely did intelligence work too, as the bugging of Mickey Cohen’s house demonstrated. But most previous intelligence work had relied heavily on wiretaps and a style of interrogation that could be summarized as “pinch-’em-and-sweat-’em.” When General Worton took over the department, he wanted something different—analysis, predictions, and actionable information of the sort that military commanders received from their intelligence outfits. In short, he wanted a policing version of the Army’s G-2 intelligence system.

Parker shared Worton’s enthusiasm for operational intelligence. During the war, one of the new chief’s most important jobs had been reorganizing and de-Nazifying the Munich police department. At the time, he had been struck by the parallels between de-Nazification and clearing the LAPD of corrupt police officers with ties to the underworld. Now that Parker was chief, he set out to realize General Worton’s vision. He expanded the unit to roughly three dozen officers and appointed his most trusted associate in the department, James Hamilton, to head its operations. Both men agreed that traditional policing techniques simply did not work against the Syndicate. In the early 1940s, Bugsy Siegel had killed with impunity—and then been killed with equal impunity by a professional gunman who escaped without leaving a trace. More recently, even the most basic questions about Mickey Cohen were not fully resolved. Consider the case of Sam Rummel. Why was he, rather than Mickey, meeting to “cut up” Los Angeles? Was he Mickey’s mouthpiece and junior partner, as most people assumed? Or was he playing a more subtle game? In Chicago, for instance, many astute observers of the Outfit believed that the real power rested not with so-called
leaders such as Frank Nitti and Sam Giancana but rather with the men who stayed in the background, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, and Murray Humphreys. Might Rummel likewise be calling the shots in Los Angeles? These were the kinds of questions the intelligence division was tasked with answering.

The intelligence division didn’t just watch and analyze. According to former gangster squad member Jack O’Mara, a favorite tactic was to drive new arrivals up into Coldwater Canyon or the Hollywood Hills to “have a little heart-to-heart talk with ’em, emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago, this wasn’t Cleveland.” O’Mara had his own way of driving the lesson home: He’d “put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, ‘You want to sneeze?’ Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?”

Mickey’s men got similar treatment, judging by a story told by former LAPD officer-turned-private-eye Fred Otash. One night, soon after the shooting at Sherry’s, Otash spotted Johnny Stompanato cruising down the Sunset Strip. Otash told his partner to pull up beside him. Then he pulled their shotgun out of the gutter between the seat and the door and, when they were parallel to Stompanato, stuck the gun out the window and shouted, “Now you’ve had it, you motherfucker!”

“When Johnny saw the shotgun, he ducked, losing control of his new Cadillac,” Otash recalled later, with obvious delight. “It went over the curb and down the hill of Sunset. He could have been killed.”

Otash wasn’t on the intelligence unit. He was far too unreliable and unruly for such a sensitive post. But this episode drew only a mild rebuke from downtown. Clearly, tough-guy tactics were part of the job.