L.A. Noir (25 page)

The problems posed by Mickey were manifold. First, there was the criminal activity he was involved in. In the fall of 1949, as the county grand jury was attempting to sort out the welter of charges and countercharges between Mickey and the LAPD, another embarrassing case was headed to court, this one involving a bookmaking front company called the Guarantee Finance Corporation.

Located in unincorporated county territory, Guarantee Finance was perhaps the most audacious bookmaking operation in 1940s Los Angeles. With 74 telephones in its central gambling room, Guarantee Finance employed more than 170 runners and handled gambling in excess of $7,000,000 a year. (It was also happy to arrange high-interest loans for clients with gambling debts.) The LAPD administrative vice squad identified the operation almost immediately but found that the sheriff’s vice squad was strangely uninterested in shutting it down. Frustrated, Sgt. James Fisk took matters into his own hands and raided the establishment, destroying equipment and removing betting markers. A few months later, with the operation still running, Fisk carried out a second raid. This prompted sheriff department captain Al Guasti (“Iron Man” Contreras’s successor as the supervisor of the Sunset Strip) to write then-Assistant Chief of Police Joe Reed a stern letter, warning the LAPD to keep its nose out of county business. Finally, in early 1949, the state corporation commission raided the bookmaking operation and shut its operations down. The wholesale gambling operation the state raid revealed was yet another embarrassing testament to the reach of the underworld into Los Angeles.

The second thing that made Mickey seriously inconvenient was the fact that someone kept trying to kill him—in a sloppy and inept fashion. On August 2, a pipe bomb intended for Mickey exploded across the street from Cohen’s Brentwood house, upsetting the neighbors and, by extension, their elected representatives. It would not do to have a resident of Brentwood die in the cross fire of a gang war. Worton decided to go after Mickey with everything he had. His first step was to sic the new intelligence squad on Cohen.

On August 3, officers searched the apartment of Cohen associate Mike Howard (Meyer Horowitz) after getting a tip that he might be dealing drugs. They didn’t find any narcotics, but they did discover two unlicensed pistols. So they hauled in Howard and sent two LAPD detectives and a federal Bureau of Narcotics agent over to Cohen’s house to question him about the incident.

Mickey was not happy to find police officers at his door.

“What the hell do you want?” he snarled. When he found out what they’d come to ask him about—some gun charge involving an associate—he lost it. Didn’t they realize that he had guests (among them Earl Brown,
Life’s
crack crime writer, and Al Ostro of the
San Francisco Daily News)
and that it was dinnertime? He asked if the police had a warrant. They didn’t.

“Well then go fuck yourself,” Mickey told them. “And tell the chief to go fuck himself.” Then, for good measure, he added, “Get the hell off my property, you sons of bitches.”

The officers retreated. But two weeks later, in a clear indication that the police were playing by new rules, they returned and arrested him for using obscene and insulting language against a police officer. Mickey got out on bail, and a trial date was set for September 15, 1949.

The press was delighted. Mickey’s journalist guests testified that Mickey had indeed questioned the legitimacy of the law officers’ births. Cohen’s situation looked dire, but his attorneys had a trick up their sleeves. To back his assertion that calling someone a “son of a bitch” wasn’t obscene, Rummel pointed to none other than President Harry Truman, who had recently called columnist Drew Pearson the exact same thing. The courtroom laughed, the jurors retired to deliberate, and four hours later Mickey Cohen once again walked out a free man.

Within weeks, his name was back in the papers, this time in connection with one of the biggest trials in recent Hollywood history, the trial of actor Robert Mitchum. Mitchum had been busted by the sheriff’s department vice squad with a joint of marijuana at a party in the Hollywood Hills, in a raid whose timing was so fortuitous as to be suspicious. Nonetheless, he was convicted and shipped off to prison for a brief stint behind bars (accompanied by a photographer from
Life
magazine). Now Paul Behrmann, a former business manager and actors’ agent who had once represented Mitchum (but who had since gotten into troubles of his own with the law) came forward with a startling tale. Behrmann told DA William Simpson that Cohen was running a sex-and-extortion ring that specialized in capturing big-time businessmen and actors in compromising situations. Cohen’s stable of accomplices supposedly included a party girl named “Bootsie” and
the twenty-four-year-old redheaded assistant to “French lover teacher” Claude Marsan. The suggestion was made that Mitchum, too, had been set up by Cohen.

With Mickey on the loose, every day seemed to bring a new humiliation for Los Angeles area law enforcement. But the LAPD was also squeezing Cohen. Mickey had demonstrated his clout by sparking the scandal that led to Chief Horrall’s ouster, but in General Worton, Cohen had arguably found a cure that was worse than the disease. It wasn’t that Cohen felt fundamentally threatened by Worton; Mickey was convinced that the general “knew little or nothing of the workings of this office.” However, since Chief Horrall’s forced retirement, the LAPD had gone all out to make Mickey’s life miserable. Constant surveillance made it difficult for Mickey to do business. A grand jury had begun to investigate Cohen’s (protected) gambling operations in Glendale. There were reports that the FBI had also begun an investigation. But the worst blow of all had come from a small outfit convened at Gov. Earl Warren’s behest the previous summer, the Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime. Although the state legislature had been careful to make the commission as toothless as possible (for example, denying its four investigators subpoena power), the commission had an asset whose tenacity could not be easily blunted—chief counsel Warren Olney III.

      OLNEY CAME from one of California’s most distinguished families. His grandfather was one of the founders of the Sierra Club; his father had been a justice on the California Supreme Court. Olney himself was one of Governor Warren’s closest and most valued associates. He was also something of an authority on interstate gambling and the racing wire. As the head of the California attorney general’s criminal division in the late 1930s (when Warren had been the state attorney general), Olney had begun to investigate bookmaking in California, with a particular focus on Moses Annenberg’s Nationwide News Service. At first, Olney had struggled to figure out what was so important about the wire service. But after three days at Reno’s Bank Club, it came to him. The tout sheets, the hot tips, the fluctuating pari-mutuel prices, the odds at the gate, the conditions of the track—all of that was really just a distraction. Bookies needed the wire so that they could quickly roll $2 bets from one race into $2 bets on the next race. Most gamblers weren’t reading the
Daily Racing Form
, looking for an inside edge. They were betting on race after race just like gambling junkies played slots.

“Bookmaking has nothing to do with horse races,” Olney concluded. “It’s
a strict lottery—nothing more than that.” The wire delivered the information that made it possible to place bet after bet, hour after hour.

This system was generating immense amounts of money for Mickey Cohen. According to LAPD estimates, in mid-1949, Mickey had about five hundred bookmakers paying for protection (typically, $40 per week for every telephone in their operation plus $5 a week per agent). Even if the average bookie had only two telephones, this would have generated more than $160,000 a month. In exchange for such princely sums, Mickey provided attorneys and bail money for bookmakers unfortunate enough to be arrested. This service was famously speedy. In one notorious case, vice squad officers arrested a bookmaker at 3:05 p.m. only to be presented twenty-six minutes later with a bail bond and a writ of habeas corpus, signed by a judge and duly executed, ordering them to release the arrested bookie. Cohen also provided insurance against clients who engaged in “past posting”—placing bets after the race was over—in the form of a menacing visit to bettors who tried to cheat. After these visits, bettors rarely persisted in their claims.

Olney realized that there was a simple way to end it all: cut the wire. An investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission revealed that all the bookmakers in California were supplied over a single telegraphic wire leased from Western Union by the Continental Press service.
^*
Continental then telegraphed information on odds, post times, track conditions, and results to “drops” across the nation. The Special Crime Study Commission identified eight in Southern California—front companies with unclear ownership structures and bland names such as Consolidated Publish Inc. and Southwest News. The system was fast but also vulnerable. Olney’s investigators discovered that Western Union’s contract with Continental
gave state law enforcement authorities the power to request that the wire be terminated if they suspected it was being used, directly or indirectly, in violation of California law. Clearly, Continental’s services were being used to violate California law, but when Olney directed the state attorney general’s office to that provision, it did nothing. Finally, after months of pressure from Olney and his commission, Attorney General Howser ended his foot-dragging and presented Western Union with such a request. Western Union disconnected the wire, throwing bookmaking in California into chaos.

The halt was temporary. A mysterious new entity, the Illinois News Association, soon appeared with a request to provide a new telegraphic wire service. When the public utilities commission declined to authorize it, the “news association” sued in federal court—and lost. Undeterred, the news association appealed and sought a temporary resumption of wire service, pending the outcome of its appeal request. Attorney General Howser, ever solicitous of the underworld, declined to provide attorneys to defend the public utilities commission’s action. Despite lacking counsel, the state utilities commission again prevailed.

The interruption of the wire service had a dramatic impact on gambling in Los Angeles. Without the wire, the ability to roll money quickly from one race into the next was greatly diminished. The most profitable gambling establishments, the so-called horse parlors, where bettors came into a room and placed cash bets directly, one race after the other, disappeared almost overnight. Instead, bettors were directed to call “runners,” who took bets over the phone (customers were given an unlisted number and a code word) and then relayed them back to a central office, where bookies collected information via long-distance telephone calls. Volume diminished, and, as the time required to receive results increased from a few minutes to half an hour or longer, the risk of “past posting” increased. The single most lucrative source of Syndicate revenues in the Southland was being squeezed.

Mickey Cohen felt the pinch. But the impact of the wire shutoff wasn’t limited to his pocketbook. The wire service was not just a source of vast profits for the Syndicate: Because every serious bookie needed it, the wire was also a tool for licensing and organizing gambling in every big city across the country. “[T]he inevitable result [of its termination],” predicted Olney, “will be the disorganization of bookmaking and the eradication of the organization upon which the Capone Syndicate could and would have based its organizat ion of the California underworld.” Cohen understood the threat. But he was preoccupied with a more pressing problem: the people who kept trying to kill him.

Mickey accepted the fact that his chosen profession entailed risks. That local crazies like Maxie Shaman would occasionally come at him was no surprise. What was a surprise was that professional hit men would repeatedly try to kill him. Bugsy Siegel had died because he’d angered virtually every other top figure in the Syndicate. Mickey hadn’t. On the contrary, he’d gotten the nod to take over Bugsy’s book. Manhattan mobster Frank Costello, the most influential Mob boss in the country, backed him. So did the Cleveland outfit, a far larger presence in Los Angeles than is commonly realized. A rogue hit of the sort attempted at Sherry’s—one that endangered civilians and nearly killed a policeman—seemed like something no professional criminal would do.

But not only had someone made the attempt, they were continuing to do so. And if they couldn’t touch Mickey directly, they were prepared to do the next best thing. They would target the members of his gang. Ironically, it was Cohen’s sense of street justice (and his instinct for good PR) that made him vulnerable.

      THE TROUBLE STARTED when William Randolph Hearst’s
Examiner
splashed across its front page the sad story of a widow who had refused to pay a $9 radio repair bill she regarded as excessive. The radio repairman in question, Al Pearson, responded by initiating a lawsuit that led to the eventual fire sale of the widow’s home, which he then purchased for $26.50. He allowed her to stay on as a tenant paying $10 a week in rent. Outraged policemen at nearby Wilshire station took up a collection.

Pearson’s business practices had long attracted unfavorable attention: Police Commission chief investigator Harry Lorenson would later describe him as “the most dishonest businessman in the entire city.” When Cohen heard about the incident, he saw an opportunity to burnish his image. He and seven of his boys went over to West Adams to talk with Pearson about returning the widow’s house. When Pearson refused to yield to reason, Mickey’s cohorts gave the recalcitrant radio repairman a severe beating, cracking his skull and fracturing his right arm—before a large crowd of cheering neighbors.

As Cohen was leaving the scene to get into his car, one of his henchmen, a three-hundred-pound former prizefighter named Jimmy Rist, rushed up.

“Hey, the guy’s got a thing back there that listens to things!” he informed Mickey. “He’s got everything on it that went on.”