L.A. Noir (16 page)

Then dissension broke out between prosecutors in New York and Los Angeles. Brooklyn district attorney William O’Dwyer abruptly declined to allow Reles to return to Los Angeles to testify, saying that his prized witness, who was being guarded by a crew of eighteen policemen at an undisclosed location, had come down with a serious illness. Suspicions immediately arose that O’Dwyer, who was eyeing a run for mayor of New York, had struck a deal with the Syndicate. Prosecutors in L.A. had problems too. In 1940, Angelenos finally voted Buron Fitts out of office. His successor, former congressman John Dockweiler, was promptly embarrassed when Siegel wrote to him to request that the prosecutor-elect refund him
the $30,000 he had contributed to his campaign. The DA complied. (Mickey Cohen would later claim that Siegel had actually given Dock-weiler $100,000.) Siegel then used the funds to hire attorney Jerry Giesler to defend him.

Dockweiler was in a bind. Reles’s testimony was essential to establishing Siegel as the mastermind of the murder plot. Without it, the new DA saw no way to secure a conviction. But O’Dwyer wouldn’t give up his prized witness. As a result, on December 11, 1940, Deputy DA Vernon Ferguson, who was prosecuting the case for Dockweiler’s office, went to court and requested that the murder charges against Bugsy Siegel be dismissed. That afternoon Siegel walked out of jail, a free man.

Back in New York, though, Bugsy’s release proved such an embarrassment for O’Dwyer that he reversed course and agreed to let his witnesses go to Los Angeles. Dockweiler convened another jury; Al Tannenbaum flew west to testify (“under heavy guard”); and Siegel was reindicted and again arrested. The key witness, however, was Reles. Although Tannenbaum had taken part in the actual assassination itself, it was Reles who had the power to send Bugsy Siegel to the gas chamber. And it was Reles who, just before breakfast on the morning of November 12, 1941, was found dead on the roof of the building next door to the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island, where the NYPD had him in protective custody.

What had happened to “Kid Twist”? No one knows for certain. A torn rope made from a bedsheet suggested that Reles had plunged to his death four stories below while trying to escape, though why someone facing a death sentence from the Syndicate would want to escape into Brooklyn was unclear. Perhaps Reles had simply intended to play a joke on his police protectors by demonstrating how easily he could flee. But the physical evidence suggested another explanation. Reles’s body was found more than twenty feet from the wall, suggesting that Reles had been hurled out the window—defenestrated—by a policeman on the take.

Without Reles, the case against Siegel was weak. On January 19, 1942, the trial against Siegel began. While Tannenbaum was there as a witness, California law required that charges against Siegel be corroborated by independent evidence that tied the defendant to the crime—evidence the prosecution no longer had. As a result, on February 5, 1942, Judge A. A. Scott granted Siegel attorney Jerry Giesler’s request to dismiss the case on grounds that no case had been made against his client. Bugsy Siegel was once again a free man.

Siegel’s lengthy entanglements with the court system meant that Mickey Cohen had to take on a large organizational task. He proved to be a surprisingly talented understudy. Mickey soon took over as Siegel’s liaison to
the county sheriff’s office. He also took responsibility for cultivating the LAPD.

“For weeks before each Thanksgiving and Christmas, I would receive calls from captains in different precincts and would be told about and given the names and addresses of some persons in their respective districts that they considered in dire straits,” Mickey later related. “I would then have individual baskets made up by a good friend of mine who was in the chain market business (and who would make them up for me at wholesale prices), each basket always including a large turkey, a ham and chicken, and most other necessities for a decent Thanksgiving and Christmas.” At his peak, he was sending out about three hundred baskets a year. Mickey was learning the craft of organized crime. It wasn’t always turkeys and chicken.

One of Mickey’s businesses was pinball and slot machines. His partner was Curly Robinson, former Clover Club owner Eddy Neales’s onetime associate. Mayor Bowron had more or less succeeded in expelling slots from the city of Los Angeles, but they were still a thriving business in the county. Cohen and Robinson were determined to profit from them. Their racket was an association that every distributor in the region had to join.

But Robinson was having problems. Some of its members had gotten a bit independent minded. Expecting trouble at the next meeting, Robinson asked Cohen to come to the association’s next gathering. Mickey arrived early with three of his toughest henchmen, Hooky Rothman (Cohen’s right-hand man, a killing savant), “Little Jimmy” (“quiet—perfectionist—carried out instructions—tough with pistol—two time loser on heists and attempted murder”), and “Big Jimmy” (“six-foot, three-inch—ex-heavyweight pug—easygoing horse bettor—done some time in Maine for a killing”). By the time the meeting got under way, there were roughly six hundred people present.

A speaker took the stage and began to talk about the need for independence. Mickey leapt onto the platform and “busted his head open.”

“Nobody come near me,” he later noted. The meeting hall was silent. With Mickey and his men glowering on stage, the slot machine association fell in line. There was no more talk of autonomy. Still, on the way out, Mickey and his goons pistol-whipped “two or three other dissenters.”

Slots were just a minor sideline. Cohen’s real focus was on gambling.

While Siegel concentrated on signing up bookies for the Trans-American news service (an enterprise that by 1945 would be paying Benny an estimated $25,000 a month), Cohen worked on opening his own gambling joints. Initially, he steered clear of the city proper, preferring more hospitable county terrain. His first major base of operations was in Bur
bank, just a few blocks away from the Warner Bros. lot. Thanks to a pliable local police chief, Mickey was able to open a basic $2-a-bet bookie joint. It thrived. Back in Los Angeles, Mickey soon added a commission office that handled the kinds of big “lay-off” bets—typically anything over $5,000—that were often spread out to bookies across the country.

Commission offices thrived on a peculiarity of horse betting. Because sanctioned tracks used a pari-mutuel betting system (whereby the odds were set by the bets placed), a big bet (say $50,000) could significantly reduce the payout. Commission offices offered high rollers an alternative, where they could place big bets without lowering their payoff. Because the people placing these bets often had inside information, they also presented bookies with information that could be highly lucrative.

With this information came new friends, including a number of local politicians. One judge was so horse-crazed that he insisted that Mickey come down to his chambers and run operations from there, so that he would have access to all of Mickey’s tips.

“The poor bookmakers,” Mickey reflected, “were really in a quandary, as they couldn’t figure out where he was getting his information and were in no position to turn down his wagers for fear of invoking the wrath of the Judge.”

One afternoon as Mickey was waiting in the judge’s office, he learned that the case of a small-time bookmaker was about to be heard. Mickey knew the man well; in fact, he’d robbed his establishment before. Mickey decided to peek into the courtroom and watch the proceedings. He could scarcely believe his ears when the judge handed down the sentence—thirty days in the county jail. Furious, Mickey caught the eye of the bailiff and told him that he needed to talk to the judge at once.

“The judge, thinking that I must have received word on a horse, couldn’t get off the bench quick enough,” Mickey later recalled. Back in his chambers, Mickey exploded, speaking “without my usual respect for him, although I did manage to keep myself somewhat under control.”

“What kind of man are you, to sentence a man to jail for thirty days when you yourself are a freak for betting on the horses?”

The answer, of course, was a politician.

For a gangster, Mickey Cohen had an inadequate understanding of treachery. Not only did this make it hard to deal with politicians, it blinded him to what was happening before his very eyes with Jack Dragna.

Dragna, a short, heavyset man who favored horn-rimmed glasses, was an old-school Sicilian who liked to surround himself with Sicilians (or, barring that, at least other Italians). He had the air of someone used to dealing with money. His demeanor was more banker than muscle. Mickey didn’t think
much of him. Nor did he seem aware of the fact that Dragna might hold a grudge about Cohen’s earlier heist. Instead, Mickey interpreted the order imposed by Siegel as the natural order of things. He saw Dragna and himself “on an even status as his two lieutenants”—with himself rising and Dragna on the way out.

“Dragna was inactive at the time, and for years had no organization at all,” Mickey later recalled. “[A]nything he wanted done he came to me for.” As far as Mickey was concerned, organized crime in Los Angeles was “a happy family.” As for the possibility that robbing Morris Orloff and being an all-around punk might have rubbed Dragna and the Italian gangsters surrounding him the wrong way, Cohen dismissed it out of hand: “I was the guest of honor at his daughter’s wedding!”

Mickey was mistaken—dangerously so. Bugsy represented New York. But Dragna had closer ties to Chicago. Although the twin capitals of the underworld generally cooperated on matters of importance, there were areas of friction. Siegel’s 1942 decision to force Los Angeles bookmakers to subscribe to his wire service was one of them. At the time, most big bookies in Los Angeles were using James Ragan’s Chicago-based Continental wire services—and paying a cut to Jack Dragna and Johnny Roselli, the Chicago Outfit’s man in Los Angeles, for protection. Siegel didn’t care. Instead, he sent Mickey Cohen to wreak havoc on the office of the Chicago wire’s L.A. manager, Ragan son-in-law Russell Brophy. Even Mickey felt a little leery about this assignment. When he arrived at Brophy’s main office downtown and was told Johnny Roselli was on the phone—and that he wanted to speak to Mickey—Cohen was less enthusiastic still. He knew firsthand what kind of tactics the Chicago Outfit employed. So he ducked the request. Instead, he gave the phone to his partner Joe Sica. (“I figured Italian to Italian, you know.”)

“Lookit, Johnny says that whatever we’ve done is done, but he don’t want this office busted up,” Sica reported.

Which, of course, was precisely what Cohen and Sica had been sent to do.

“Tell him that I’m sorry, but this office is going up for grabs completely,” Mickey replied. “Just tell him that, and hang the phone up.”

Sica did. Then he and Mickey “tore that fucking office apart.” Mickey beat up Brophy, hurting him so badly that Mickey decided to go on the lam. He fled to Phoenix. There he was greeted like a conquering hero by Siegel.

“You little son of a bitch,” Siegel said. “You remind me of my younger days.”

Mickey hid out in Phoenix for six months. Somehow (Mickey was never clear exactly how) Siegel managed to square the Brophy assault with
the authorities, clearing the way for Cohen’s eventual return to Los Angeles. Smoothing matters over with Jack Dragna and Johnny Roselli was a more difficult matter. After a period of dormancy, Dragna was gearing up his operations. Worse, he had opted to do so by partnering with a Los Angeles underworld figure, Jimmy Utley, whom Cohen viewed as “an out-and-out stool pigeon for the DA and attorney general’s office.” It aggravated Mickey, and an aggravated Mickey Cohen was a dangerous man, as Utley was about to discover.

One day soon after his return from Phoenix, Mickey sauntered out of Champ Segal’s barbershop on Vine and saw Utley talking with one of the LAPD’s toughest police officers, E. D. “Roughhouse” Brown, in front of Lucey’s Restaurant. Mickey had long suspected that Utley was a “stool pigeon” for Brown—an informer. But if Utley was concerned about this, he didn’t show it. After “Roughhouse” left, Utley waved to Mickey and Joe Sica. So Cohen and Sica walked over—and laid into Utley, pistol-whipping him “pretty badly”—in front of an estimated one hundred people.

Utley took it bravely. Despite being badly hurt, when police arrived on the scene, he insisted that he wasn’t able to identify his assailants.

Jack Dragna was less understanding. He immediately got hold of Siegel and demanded a meeting with Cohen. Siegel summoned his protege to a meeting that very night, and this time, Mickey came.

“I didn’t break his ass, just with my hands,” Mickey claimed, by way of self-defense. “He was talking to a fucking copper!”

Even Siegel was exasperated by this.

“What the fuck’s wrong with ya?” Siegel exploded. “Don’t ya know ya got to do business with these coppers? Ya wanna be a goddamn gunman all your life?”

BUGSY SIEGEL wasn’t the only person flexing his muscles. So was Mayor Bowron. Bowron disliked the fact that he had such limited formal control over the police department. The 1934 and 1937 charter amendments, which broadened police officers’ job protections and extended them to the chief of police, were a particular sore point, which Bowron repeatedly sought to circumvent. He continued to secretly wiretap the telephone lines of senior police department officials—an activity that arguably constituted a federal felony offense—in order to ensure that the underworld did not reestablish ties with the department. Soon, the mayor was routinely demanding that Chief Hohmann fire officers caught in the wiretaps’ surveillance dragnet. But Bowron, not wanting to acknowledge his illegal wiretapping, refused to explain the basis of these demands, and Hohmann refused to act without evidence. The result was a standoff—and growing tension between the city’s top elected official and its top law enforcement officer.