L.A. noir.
The struggle for the soul of America"s most seductive city.
by John Buntin.
Prologue
OTHER CITIES have histories. Los Angeles has legends. Advertised to the world as the Eden at the end of the western frontier, the settlement the Spaniards named El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles turned out to be something very different-not the beatific Our Lady the Queen of the Angels advertised by its name but rather a dark, dangerous blonde.She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn"t reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn"t often seen in bookstores. She was an ash blonde...Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.-Raymond Chandler, The Big SleepFor more than sixty years, writers and directors from Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder to Roman Polanski and James Ellroy have explored L.A."s origins, its underbelly, and (yes) its blondes in fiction and films like The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential L.A. Confidential. In the process, they created the distinctive worldview known as noir, where honor is in short supply and where Los Angeles invariably proves to be a femme fatale. Yet this preoccupation with a mythic past has obscured something important-the true history of noir Los Angeles.For more than forty years, from Prohibition through the Watts riots, politicians, gangsters, businessmen, and policemen engaged in an often-violent contest for control of the city. Their struggle shaped the history of Los Angeles, the future of policing, and the course of American politics. In time, two primary antagonists emerged. The first was William H. Parker, Los Angeles"s greatest and most controversial chief of police. His nemesis was Los Angeles"s most colorful criminal, featherweight boxer-turned-gangster Mickey Cohen.IN 1920 Los Angeles surpa.s.sed San Francisco as California"s largest city. It was a moment of triumph for Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, who had arrived four decades earlier when the city of angels was a dusty, water-starved pueblo of ten thousand souls. Chandler and his a.s.sociates worked tirelessly to build a metropolis, relentlessly promoting the fledgling city and ruthlessly securing the water needed to support it (a campaign made famous by the film publisher Harry Chandler, who had arrived four decades earlier when the city of angels was a dusty, water-starved pueblo of ten thousand souls. Chandler and his a.s.sociates worked tirelessly to build a metropolis, relentlessly promoting the fledgling city and ruthlessly securing the water needed to support it (a campaign made famous by the film Chinatown) Chinatown). Yet 1920 was also the year that witnessed the emergence of a major threat to their authority. The threat came from Prohibition. For years, Harry Chandler and the so-called business barons had supplied local politicians with the advertising, the publicity, and the money they needed to reach the city"s new residents. In exchange, they gained power over the city government. But with the imposition of Prohibition, a new force appeared with the money and the desire to purchase L.A."s politicians: the criminal underworld. To suppress it, the business community turned to the Los Angeles Police Department. The underworld also looked to the LAPD-for protection.In 1922, Bill Parker and Mickey Cohen entered this drama as bit players in the struggle for control of Los Angeles. In 1937, Parker emerged as a protege of Los Angeles"s top policeman while Mickey became the enforcer for L.A."s top gangster. In 1950, they became direct rivals, each dedicated to the other"s destruction. Two characters more different from each other would be hard to imagine. Parker arrived in Los Angeles in 1922 from Deadwood, South Dakota, a proud, ambitious seventeen-year-old, one of the tens of thousands of migrants who were moving west to Southern California in what the journalist Carey McWilliams described as "the largest internal migration in the history of the American people." He hoped to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a pioneering prosecutor on the western frontier, and make a career for himself in the law. But instead of opportunity, Parker found in Los Angeles temptation. Instead of becoming a prominent attorney, he became a cop, a patrolman in the Los Angeles Police Department. Coldly cerebral (Star Trek (Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, a onetime LAPD officer and Parker speechwriter, reputedly based the character Mr. Spock on his former boss), intolerant of fools, and famously incorruptible (in a department that was famously corrupt), Parker persevered. Gradually he rose. Between 1934 and 1937, he masterminded a campaign to free the police department from the control of gangsters and politicians, only to see his efforts undone by a blast of dynamite and a sensational scandal. Then, in 1950, another scandal (this one involving 114 Hollywood "pleasure girls") made Parker chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, a position he would hold for sixteen controversial years. creator Gene Roddenberry, a onetime LAPD officer and Parker speechwriter, reputedly based the character Mr. Spock on his former boss), intolerant of fools, and famously incorruptible (in a department that was famously corrupt), Parker persevered. Gradually he rose. Between 1934 and 1937, he masterminded a campaign to free the police department from the control of gangsters and politicians, only to see his efforts undone by a blast of dynamite and a sensational scandal. Then, in 1950, another scandal (this one involving 114 Hollywood "pleasure girls") made Parker chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, a position he would hold for sixteen controversial years.In contrast, Mickey Cohen wasn"t troubled by self-examination until much later in life (when he would grapple with the question of going "straight"). Born Meyer Harris Cohen in 1913 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Mickey arrived in Los Angeles with his mother and sister at the age of three. By the age of six, he was hustling newspapers on the streets of Boyle Heights. At the age of nine, he began his career in armed robbery with an attempt to "heist" a movie theater in downtown L.A. using a baseball bat. His talent with his fists took the diminutive brawler to New York City to train as a featherweight boxer. His skill with a .38 took him into the rackets, first in Cleveland, then in Al Capone"s Chicago. In 1937, Mickey returned to Los Angeles to serve as gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel"s right-hand man. It was a job that put him on a collision course with Bill Parker.For three decades, from the Great Depression to the Watts riots, Parker and Cohen-the policeman and the gangster-would engage in a struggle for power, first as lieutenants to older, more powerful men, then directly with each other, and finally with their own instincts and desires. In 1956, Chief Parker"s war against Mickey Cohen and organized crime in L.A. attracted the attention of a young Senate investigator with political ambitions named Robert Kennedy. It also antagonized FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and created an extralegal, wiretap-driven style of policing that eerily prefigures the tactics being used in today"s war on terror. In the 1960s, it would incite the Watts riots and help propel Ronald Reagan into the governor"s mansion in Sacramento. Their contest would involve some of the most powerful-and colorful-figures of the twentieth century: press magnates Harry Chandler and his nemesis, William Randolph Hearst; studio head Harry Cohn of Columbia; entertainers Jack Webb, Frank Sinatra, Lana Turner, and Sammy Davis Jr.; and civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. The outcome of their struggle would change the history of Los Angeles, set race relations in America on a dangerous new path, and chart a problematic course for American policing.Parker and Cohen"s struggle for control of the city also changed them. Ultimately, like any good noir tale, the story of the rivalry between the young hoodlum with a second-grade education who became the king of the L.A. underworld and the obstinate young patrolman from Deadwood who created the modern LAPD brings us back to the question that Los Angeles always seems to pose: Is Our Lady the Queen of the Angels the dark angel, or do we simply bring our own darkness to her?
1.
The Mickey Mouse Mafia.
"[A] dead-rotten law enforcement setup rules in this county and city with an iron hand."-LAPD Sgt. Charlie Stoker, 1950 MICKEY COHEN was not a man used to being shaken down. Threatened with handguns, blasted with shotguns, strafed on occasion by a machine gun, yes. Firebombed and dynamited, sure. But threatened, extorted-hit up for $20,000-no. Anyone who read the tabloids in post-World War II Los Angeles knew that extortion was Mickey"s racket, along with book-making, gambling, loan-sharking, slot machines, narcotics, union agitation, and a substantial portion of the city"s other illicit pastimes. In the years following Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel"s ill-fated move to Las Vegas, Mickey Cohen had become the top mobster on the West Coast. And the tart-tongued, sharp-dressed, pint-sized gangster, whom the more circ.u.mspect newspapers described tactfully as "a prominent figure in the sporting life world," hadn"t gotten there by being easily intimidated-certainly not by midlevel police functionaries. Yet in October 1948 that is precisely what the head of the Los Angeles Police Department vice squad set out to do.
Cohen was no stranger to the heat. During his first days in Los Angeles as Bugsy Siegel"s enforcer, he had been instructed to squeeze Eddy Neales, the proprietor of the Clover Club. Located on the Sunset Strip, an unincorporated county area just outside of Los Angeles city limits, the Clover Club was Southern California"s poshest gaming joint. It reputedly paid the L.A. County Sheriff"s Department a small fortune for protection. The squad that provided it, led by Det. George "Iron Man" Contreras, had a formidable reputation. People who crossed it died. According to Cohen, one member of the unit had been the triggerman on eleven killings. So when Neales sicced Contreras"s men on Cohen, he undoubtedly expected that the sheriff"s men would scare Mickey stiff.
Contreras tried. Cohen was picked up and brought in to receive a warning: If he didn"t lay off Neales, the next warning would come in the form of a bullet to the head.
Mickey wasn"t impressed. A few nights later, he sought out Contreras"s top gunman.
"I looked him up and said to him, "Let me tell you something: to me you"re no cop. Being no cop I gotta right to kill you-so come prepared. The next time I see you coming to me I"m going to hit you between the eyes.""
It was an effective warning. "He felt I was sincere," Mickey later reported. The cops backed down. Until now.
THE FACT OF THE MATTER was, Mickey Cohen was in an uncharacteristically vulnerable position that fall. Two months earlier, on Wednesday, August 18, as Cohen was putting the final touches on his newest venture, a sw.a.n.k men"s clothing shop on Sunset Boulevard named Michael"s Haberdashery, three gunmen had charged into the store and opened fire, wounding two Cohen henchmen and killing his top gunman, Hooky Rothman. Mickey himself was in the back bathroom washing his hands, something the obsessive-compulsive gangster did fifty or sixty times a day. Trapped, he hid in a stall, atop a toilet, awaiting his death. But instead of checking to see that they"d gotten their man-item number one on the professional hitman"s checklist-the gunmen fled. A few minutes later the incredulous driver of the gunmen"s crash car saw Mickey scurry to safety out the front door.
Cohen had survived, but great damage had been done. As Siegel shifted his attention to Las Vegas, Mickey had taken over his old boss"s Los Angeles operations-as well as Siegel"s organized crime connections back East. The attempted hit on Cohen not only showed that Mickey was vulnerable, it suggested that Bugsy"s powerful friends had no particular commitment to his protege"s survival. In short, Mickey looked weak, and in the underworld, weakness attracts predators. So when the head of the LAPD administrative vice squad called just weeks after the attempted rub-out to inform Cohen that they "had him down for a ten to twenty thousand dollar contribution" for the upcoming reelection campaign of inc.u.mbent mayor Fletcher Bowron, Mickey knew what was happening. This was not an opportunity for good, old-fashioned graft: Bowron had devoted his career to eradicating the underworld. Rather, this was a sign that the vice squad now viewed him as prey rather than predator.
"Power"s a funny thing," Cohen would later muse. "Somebody calls your hole card, and [if you can"t show you aren"t bluffing] it"s like a dike-one little hole can blow the whole thing."
Paying would only confirm his weakness. Cohen refused.
Administrative vice"s response was not long in coming. Just after midnight on the evening of January 15, 1949, five officers watched two Cadillacs depart from Michael"s Haberdashery. They set off in pursuit. At the corner of Santa Monica and Ogden Drive, two miles west of Los Angeles city limits, the police pulled over the Cadillac containing Cohen, his driver, and Harold "Happy" Meltzer, a sometime Cohen gunman who also had a jewelry shop in the same building as Cohen"s haberdashery. A firearm was conveniently found on Meltzer, who was arrested. (It later disappeared, making it impossible to determine whether or not the gun had been planted.) Several days later, Mickey received a phone call offering to settle matters for $5,000. The vice squad was sending Cohen one last message: Hand over the cash or the gloves come off.
Mickey was furious. For years he had helped cops who got injured on the job and dispensed Thanksgiving turkeys to families in need at division captains" request. He"d given munic.i.p.al judges valuable horse tips. He"d wined and dined the administrative vice squad"s commanding officers, Lt. Rudy Wellpot and Sgt. Elmer Jackson, at the Brown Derby and Dave"s Blue Room, presented their girlfriends with expensive gifts, and treated them as VIPs at his nightclub-hangout on Beverly Boulevard, Slapsie Maxie"s. The police had responded by breaking into his new house in Brentwood, stealing his address books, and swaggering around town with almost unbearable arrogance, routinely telling waiters who arrived with the check at the end of evening to "send it to Mickey Cohen." It was time to teach the LAPD a lesson it would never forget about who was running this town. The vice squad had called his hole card; now Mickey would show them he was holding the equivalent of a pair of bullets (two aces)-in the form of a recording that tied the vice squad to a thirty-six-year-old redheaded ex-prost.i.tute named Brenda Allen.
BRENDA ALLEN was Hollywood"s most prosperous madam, in part because she was so cautious. Rather than take on the risks that came with running a "bawdy house," Allen relied on a telephone exchange service to communicate with her clients, clients who were vetted with the utmost care. While Allen would occasionally insert chaste ads in actors" directories or distribute her phone number to select cabbies, bartenders, and bellhops, she prided herself on serving the creme de la creme of Los Angeles. It was rumored that she even ran a Dun & Bradstreet check on prospective customers to ensure their suitability. Those who were accepted were rewarded with Allen"s full and carefully considered attention. All of her girls were a.n.a.lyzed as to their more intimate characteristics, which were then carefully noted on file cards for cross-tabulation with her clients" preferences. The selection Allen offered was considerable. By 1948, she had 114 "pleasure girls" in her harem. She also had a most unusual partner and lover: Sergeant Jackson of the LAPD administrative vice squad, the same policeman who was trying to shake down Mickey Cohen.
Needless to say, Sergeant Jackson"s connection to Brenda Allen was not common knowledge. Even someone as well informed as Mickey Cohen might never have learned of it-but for the fact that another member of the police department had recently blackmailed Mickey with a transcription of certain sensitive conversations that Mickey had conducted at home. The shakedown tipped Mickey off to the fact that the LAPD had gotten a bug into his house. So he asked his friend Barney Ruditsky for help. Ruditsky, a former NYPD officer, was now Hollywood"s foremost private eye. He specialized in doc.u.menting the infidelities of the stars (then as now, a business that relied heavily on illegal electronic surveillance). Cohen asked Ruditsky if he could recommend someone to sweep his house in Brentwood for eavesdropping devices. Ruditsky could: an electronics whiz named Jimmy Vaus. Vaus found the bug, and Mickey hired him on the spot. Soon thereafter, Vaus let Mickey in on a little secret: He was also a wiretapper for a sergeant on the Hollywood vice squad. Vaus told Cohen he had recordings linking Sergeant Jackson to Brenda Allen. That information was Cohen"s ace in the hole. He decided to play it at henchman "Happy" Meltzer"s trial.
The trial began on May 5, 1949. In his opening statement, attorney Sam Rummel laid out Meltzer"s defense. "We will prove through testimony that the two men first sought $20,000, then $10,000, then $5,000 from Cohen in return for their promise to quit hara.s.sing him," Rummel declared. As a defense, this was ho-hum stuff: Gangsters were always insisting they"d been framed. But when Cohen appeared with "sound expert" Jimmy Vaus and a mysterious sound-recording machine, the press took notice, especially after Cohen confidentially informed them that he had recordings that would "blow this case right out of court."
The timing of Cohen"s accusation was potentially explosive. Inc.u.mbent mayor Fletcher Bowron was up for reelection on June 1. The mayor had based his entire reelection campaign on his record of keeping Los Angeles"s underworld "closed" and the city government clean. Now Mickey was claiming that he had evidence that would show that senior police officials were on the take. Fortunately for Mayor Bowron, most of the city"s newspapers strongly supported his reelection. So did the county grand jury impaneled every year to investigate munic.i.p.al wrongdoing. A mistrial was hastily declared. Cohen"s allegations received only light coverage. Mayor Bowron was handily reelected. Only then did the Los Angeles Daily News Los Angeles Daily News break the story: break the story: BIG EXPOSE TELLS VICE, POLICE LINK: INSIDE STORY TELLS BIG EXPOSE TELLS VICE, POLICE LINK: INSIDE STORY TELLS BRENDA"S CLOSE RELATIONS WITH THE POLICE, BY SGT. CHARLES STOKER! BRENDA"S CLOSE RELATIONS WITH THE POLICE, BY SGT. CHARLES STOKER!
It turned out that Vaus"s contact on the Hollywood vice squad, Sgt. Charles Stoker, had gone before the criminal complaints committee of the county grand jury the day before Cohen and Vaus showed up in court with the wire recordings. There Stoker had told the committee about overhearing Brenda Allen"s conversations with Sergeant Jackson. It then emerged that Sgt. Guy Rudolph, confidential investigator for the chief of police, had gotten wind of Jackson"s connection to Allen fourteen months earlier and had asked police department technician Ray Pinker to set up another wiretap. But that investigation had mysteriously stalled, and the recordings had then disappeared.
Spurred by these revelations and by Cohen"s charges, the county grand jury opened an investigation. In mid-June it began subpoenaing police officers. Chief Clarence B. Horrall insisted that he had never been informed of the allegations swirling around the vice squad; high-ranking officers stepped forward to insist that he had been. Brenda Allen volunteered that Sergeants Stoker and Jackson had both been on the take. The head of the LAPD gangster squad abruptly retired. Every day brought a new revelation. The Daily News Daily News revealed that the LAPD had broken into Mickey"s house in Brentwood and installed wiretaps. Columnist Florabel Muir accused Mayor Bowron of personally authorizing the operation and implied that the transcriptions were being used for purposes of blackmail. Shamefaced, Mayor Bowron and Chief Horrall were forced to concede that they had OK"d a break-in. What was worse was that no charges against Cohen had come of it. On June 28, Chief Horrall announced his retirement. One month later, the grand jury indicted Lieutenant Wellpot, Sergeant Jackson, a.s.st. Chief Joseph Reed, and Chief of Police C. B. Horrall for perjury. Cohen had won his bet-if he could survive to collect. revealed that the LAPD had broken into Mickey"s house in Brentwood and installed wiretaps. Columnist Florabel Muir accused Mayor Bowron of personally authorizing the operation and implied that the transcriptions were being used for purposes of blackmail. Shamefaced, Mayor Bowron and Chief Horrall were forced to concede that they had OK"d a break-in. What was worse was that no charges against Cohen had come of it. On June 28, Chief Horrall announced his retirement. One month later, the grand jury indicted Lieutenant Wellpot, Sergeant Jackson, a.s.st. Chief Joseph Reed, and Chief of Police C. B. Horrall for perjury. Cohen had won his bet-if he could survive to collect.
JUST A FEW WEEKS LATER, Mickey was driving home to his house in Brentwood for dinner with his wife, LaVonne, and the actor George Raft. Mickey had outfitted his $150,000 home at 513 Moreno Avenue with the most advanced security gear of the time, including an "electronic eye" that could detect intruders and trigger floodlights. The goal was to illuminate anyone who approached the house. But of course the security system also illuminated him him when he got home in the evening. This was a serious problem when there was a hitman hiding in the empty lot next door, as there was that night. when he got home in the evening. This was a serious problem when there was a hitman hiding in the empty lot next door, as there was that night.
As Mickey started to swing into his driveway and the lights came on, the gunman opened fire, pumping slugs into Mickey"s car. Mickey dropped to the floorboard. Without looking over the dashboard, he wrenched his blue Caddy back onto the road and floored it. He made it about two blocks before beaching the car on a curb. Fortunately, the gunman was gone. So Mickey went home. Despite bleeding from cuts inflicted by the shattered gla.s.s, Mickey waved off the questions about what had happened and insisted on proceeding with dinner-New York strip and apple pie, Raft"s favorite. The actor would later say that Mickey had looked "a little mussed up."
Cohen didn"t report the matter to the police. (Why advertise his vulnerability further?) The attack might never have come to light but for a tip from Cohen"s auto-body shop to the police... and Mickey"s decision to commission a $25,000 armored Cadillac and test it at the police academy firing range. When the press broke the story, Cohen replied nonchalantly, "Well, where else? You can"t test it [by opening fire]... on the street for Christ"s sake!" Posed before his ma.s.sive new armored car, the sad-eyed, five-foot-three-inch gangster (five-foot-five in lifts) looked like nothing so much as Mickey Mouse. Gangsters in other cities marveled about Mickey"s good luck-and sn.i.g.g.e.red about L.A."s "Mickey Mouse Mafia."
Still, someone clearly was trying to kill him, albeit rather ineptly. It might have seemed like a good time to lie low. But that was a feat Cohen seemed const.i.tutionally incapable of. Thanks to the tabloids, Mickey was a celebrity, one of the biggest in town, and he acted the part, courting the press, squiring "budding starlets" around town (although in private his tastes inclined more to exotic dancers), and frequenting hot nightclubs like Ciro"s, the Trocadero, and the Mocambo.
The evening of Tuesday, July 19, 1949, was a typical one for Mickey. After dining with Artie Samish, chief lobbyist for the state"s liquor interests and one of the most powerful men in Sacramento, Mickey and his party of henchmen, starlets, and reporters repaired to one of his favorite hangouts, Sherry"s, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip that was owned by his friend Barney Ruditsky. Standing watch outside was a curious addition to Mickey"s crew: Special Agent Harry Cooper, from the state attorney general"s office. After the attempted hit at Michael"s Haberdashery, the L.A. County Sheriff"s Department had insisted-somewhat counterintuitively-on disarming Cohen"s men and checking them frequently for weapons, to make sure they stayed unarmed. As a result, Mickey was essentially unprotected. Samish had arranged to provide a little extra protection in the form of Special Agent Cooper.
By 3:30 a.m., Mickey was ready to call it a night. Ruditsky went outside and did a quick sweep of the parking lot. Everything looked clear. Two of Cohen"s men went to bring around his Cadillac (one of the regular ones, Mickey being embroiled in a dispute with the California Highway Patrol about the excessive weight of his armored car). A valet went to get Cohen pal Frankie Niccoli"s Chrysler, and at 3:50 a.m., Mickey and his party stepped outside. Almost immediately a shotgun and a high-powered .30-06 rifle opened up from an empty lot across the street, and members of Mickey"s party started to drop.
One of them was newspaper columnist Florabel Muir, who had been lingering inside over the morning paper as Mickey"s party exited. Muir (who frankly admitted to hanging around Mickey in hopes that some shooting would start) now charged outside, into the gunfire. One of Cohen"s top thugs, Neddie Herbert, had been hit and was lying wounded on the ground. Special Agent Cooper was staggering about, clutching his stomach with one hand and waving his pistol with the other. Then Muir saw Mickey, "right arm hung limp, and blood spreading on his coat near the shoulder" running toward Cooper. With his one good arm Cohen grabbed the sagging six-foot-tall lawman and stuffed him into Niccoli"s Chrysler. Cohen piled in as well, and the Chrysler zoomed off-to the Hollywood Receiving Hospital. Thanks to Mickey"s quick reaction, Cooper lived. The more seriously wounded Herbert wasn"t so fortunate; he died four days later. Mickey himself escaped with only a shoulder wound. Florabel Muir got her exclusive, along with a sprinkling of buckshot in her bottom.
Later that night, policemen found automatic Savage and Remington shotguns in the empty lot across the street from Sherry"s. A ballistics test determined that the buckshot slugs used were standard-issue police riot-control sh.e.l.ls. Muir also noted with interest that the deputy sheriffs who seemed so diligent in ensuring that Cohen"s crew was firearms-free had vanished a few minutes before the shooting.
The papers, of course, were thrilled. "The Battle of the Sunset Strip!" the press dubbed it. But who was behind the hit? Mayor Bowron blamed Manhattan crime boss Frank Costello. Others pointed to Jack Dragna, a local Italian crime boss who"d reluctantly accepted direction from Bugsy Siegel but who was known to dislike Mickey. Sergeant Stoker, the former vice officer turned county grand-jury witness, claimed the triggerman was LAPD. Cohen himself was confused by the attack. But Mickey did know one thing: He could deal with an underworld rival like Dragna. But in order to thrive as a crime lord in Los Angeles, Mickey needed a friendly-or at least tolerant-chief of police in office.
For the moment, that was impossible. In the wake of Chief Horrall"s ouster, Mayor Bowron had appointed, on an emergency basis, a no-nonsense former Marine general named William Worton to run the department. One of Worton"s first acts was to reconst.i.tute the LAPD"s intelligence division. Its top target: Mickey Cohen. Fortunately for Cohen, Worton was only a temporary appointment; civil service rules required the Police Commission to hire from within the department. That meant Cohen would have a chance to put a more friendly man in the position, and the diminutive gangster already knew exactly who he wanted: Thaddeus Brown, a former detective who"d headed the homicide department before winning promotion to deputy chief of patrol in 1946.
Brown was a big teddy bear of a man, enormously popular with the department"s detectives and well regarded by the underworld, too. As chief of detectives, Brown insisted on knowing every detective"s confidential sources. As a result, he had a wide range of acquaintances. He saw the underworld"s denizens as human beings, not evil incarnate. As a result, Cohen had something of a soft spot for the man the papers called "the master detective." Brown had another, even more influential backer in Norman Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times. The support Norman could offer was not purely rhetorical. The Chandler family had long maintained a special-almost proprietary-interest in the LAPD. Indeed, for more than two decades the city"s dominant newspaper had made it clear that a voice in police affairs was the sine qua non of the paper"s political support. It was widely known that Norman Chandler controlled three of the Police Commission"s five votes-and that Chandler expected them to vote for Thad Brown as chief.
In short, Brown"s ascension seemed inevitable. However, it was not automatic. The Police Commission could not simply vote to promote the "master detective." Since 1923, the chief of the LAPD had been chosen under the civil service system. As a result, applicants for the top position had to take an elaborate civil service exam, composed of a written test and an oral examination. The results of the written test typically accounted for 95 percent of the total score; the oral exam plus a small adjustment for seniority contributed the other 5 percent. Candidates then received a total score and were ranked accordingly. The Police Commission was allowed to choose from among the top three candidates.
To no one"s surprise, Thad Brown got the top score. What was surprising was who came in second: Deputy Chief William H. Parker, the head of the Bureau of Internal Affairs. A decorated veteran of the Second World War, wounded in Normandy during the D-day invasion, Parker had helped to den.a.z.ify munic.i.p.al police forces in Italy and Germany as the Allies advanced. He now wanted to purge the LAPD of corruption-and Los Angeles of organized crime-in much the same way. Mickey Cohen was determined to make sure that Parker never got that chance.
"I had gambling joints all over the city," Mickey later explained, "and I needed the police just to make sure they ran efficiently." Bill Parker would not make things go smoothly.
One of the things that any crime lord needs is a line on the Police Commission, and Cohen had it. His contacts there a.s.sured him that three of the five commissioners-Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman-favored Brown. That left only Irving Snyder and Dr. J. Alexander Somerville, the sole African American police commissioner, in favor of Parker. Mickey was convinced that "the fix" was in and that Brown would be the next chief of police. The only obstacle Brown faced, Cohen"s connections informed him, was that Brown"s selection might be seen as a personal triumph for the little gangster. On their advice, Cohen decided to leave town for the actual decision-making period-"just to blow off any stink that could possibly come up." Along with his sometime bodyguard Johnny Stompanato (who was also known as one of Hollywood"s most notorious gigolos) and his Boston terrier, Tuffy, L.A."s underworld boss set off on a leisurely road trip to Chicago.
Cohen arrived in Chicago to shocking news. The day before the Police Commission vote, Brown-supporter Agnes Albro had unexpectedly died. The following day, the commission had voted to name Bill Parker the next chief of police. The battle for control of Los Angeles was about to begin in earnest. Though Mickey didn"t know it, it was a fight Bill Parker had been preparing for his entire life.
2.
The "White Spot"
"Wherein lies the fascination of the Angel City! Why has it become the Mecca of tourists the world over? Is it because it is the best advertised city in the United States? Is it that it offers illimitable opportunities for making money and eating fruit? Hardly that. After all the pamphlets of the real estate agents, the boosters" clubs, the Board of Trade and the Chamber of Commerce have been read, something remains unspoken-something that uncannily grips the stranger"-Willard Huntington Wright, 1913 BEFORE IT WAS A CITY, Los Angeles was an idea.
Other cities were based on geographical virtues-a splendid port (San Francisco, say, or New York), an important river (St. Louis), a magnificent lake (Chicago). But nothing about the arid basin of Los Angeles (other than its mild weather) suggested the site of a great metropolis. So the men who built Los Angeles decided to advertise a different kind of virtue: moral and racial purity. Los Angeles, a settlement founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, was reenvisioned as "the white spot of America," a place where native-born, white Protestants could enjoy "the magic of outdoors inviting always... trees in blossom throughout the year, flowers in bloom all the time" as well as "mystery, romance, charm, splendor," all safe among others of their kind. It was an image relentlessly promoted by men like Harry Chandler, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times and one of Southern California"s most important real estate developers, and it worked. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpa.s.sed San Francisco to become the largest city in the west. There was just one problem with this picture of Anglo-Saxon virtue. It wasn"t true. Far from being a paragon of virtue, by the early 1920s, Los Angeles had become a Shangri-la of vice. and one of Southern California"s most important real estate developers, and it worked. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpa.s.sed San Francisco to become the largest city in the west. There was just one problem with this picture of Anglo-Saxon virtue. It wasn"t true. Far from being a paragon of virtue, by the early 1920s, Los Angeles had become a Shangri-la of vice.
The historic center of the city"s underworld was Chinatown, "narrow, dirty, vile-smelling, [and] thoroughly picturesque," an area just east of the historic plaza that had been the center of town back in Los Angeles"s pueblo days. Its opium dens introduced Angelenos to the seductions of the poppy flower; its fan tan and mah-jongg parlors catered to the area"s still-sizable Chinese population; its fourteen-odd lotteries attracted gamblers of every color and nationality from across the city. Just north of Chinatown was the predominantly Mexican part of the city known as Sonoratown. There women in negligees lolled casually in the open windows of "disorderly houses," advertising their availability. According to the Los Angeles Record Los Angeles Record, a hundred known disorderly houses operated in the general vicinity of downtown. The citywide brothel count was 355-and growing fast. (By the mid-1920s, reformers would count 615 brothels.) That was just the high-end prost.i.tution. Streetwalkers offered themselves on Main Street, a thriving but seedy neighborhood of taxi dance halls (so named because a dancing partner could be hired like a taxi for a short period of time), burlesque shows, and "blind pigs" (where a shot of whiskey went for ten cents a gulp). Farther south, down on Central Avenue in the thirty-block area between Fourth Street and Slauson Avenue, an even more tempting scene was taking shape, one offering narcotics, c.r.a.ps, color-blind s.e.x for sale, and a strange new syncopated sound called jazz.
The city also boasted a steamy s.e.x circuit. Upscale "ninety-six clubs"-some just blocks away from City Hall-offered "queers," "fairies," or otherwise straight men a place for a discreet "flutter" or "twentieth century" (read: oral) s.e.x in a luxurious setting. The less well-to-do worked a circuit of downtown speakeasies, bars, public baths, and parks along Main and Hill Streets-Maxwell"s, Harold"s, the Crown Jewel, the Waldorf. For those who could not afford "to spend a quarter or fifty cents for a dime"s worth of beer," there were the parks. The poet Hart Crane, visiting Los Angeles in 1927, would marvel at what he saw in the lush groves of bamboo and banana trees in downtown"s Pershing Square. "The number of f.a.ggots cruising around here is legion," he wrote friends back East. "Here are little fairies who can quote Rimbaud before they are eighteen." The city itself was horrid, Crane wrote, but the s.e.x was divine.
Then there was gambling. Amid the banks and stock brokerages of Spring Street, bootlegger Milton "Farmer" Page presided over a string of gambling clubs, the most imposing of which, the El Dorado, occupied the entire top floor of a downtown office building. There on a typical evening five to six hundred people would gather to play c.r.a.ps, poker, blackjack, roulette, and other games of skill and chance. At the corner of Spring and W. Third Streets, bookies waited to take the public"s wagers on the Mexican racing tracks or on Pacific Coast League baseball games. Nearby saloons provided upstairs rooms for poker and faro, sometimes even roulette, while younger and less prosperous customers stayed in the alleys to try their luck with the dice in one of the ubiquitous games of c.r.a.ps. Bingo games sucked away the earnings of bored housewives; card rooms distracted their husbands. "Bunco" men (as con men were then known) preyed on the unwitting, selling naive newcomers nonexistent stocks, gold mines, oil fields, and real estate. "Boulevard sheiks" prowled for and preyed on the growing number of working girls making their homes in Los Angeles. Among this teeming underworld"s victims was a seventeen-year-old emigrant from Deadwood, South Dakota, William H. Parker III.
IT"S HARD to imagine better preparation for 1920s Los Angeles than turn-of-the-century Deadwood, a town devoted, as one wag put it, "to gold, guns, and women." Parker was born into a family that had played a large part in cleaning it up. His grandfather-the first William H. Parker-had arrived in the spring of 1877, less than a year after General Custer and the 210 men under his direct command were killed by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors at Little Big Horn, a hundred miles south of the mining camp. College educated, a former colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War who was later appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to be the first federal collector for tax revenue and the a.s.sistant U.S. attorney in the Colorado territory, Parker cut an imposing figure. Within days of arriving in the frontier settlement, he was made captain of a hastily a.s.sembled town militia, formed to protect the booming mining camp. In 1902, he became the district attorney, a position he occupied until 1906, when he was elected to Congress. His willingness to enforce closing hours on casinos and brothels earned him a reputation as a reformer. Prosperous, fierce ("a good hater," said one acquaintance), aloof ("to many he may have appeared unapproachably chilly," noted one friend in a memorial address to the Deadwood bar), Congressman Parker was one of Deadwood"s most imposing citizens-"dauntless, proud, imperious."
Congressman Parker"s position should have ensured that his grandson would grow up as a member of one of Deadwood"s most respected families. Instead, as he was returning home by train from his first year in Washington, the new congressman was suddenly afflicted with terrible abdominal pain. He stopped in Chicago. There a surgeon cut into the freshman representative and discovered that Parker suffered from advanced cirrhosis of the liver-a condition often a.s.sociated with heavy drinking. He died two months later at the age of sixty-one, leaving behind a family of five sons and two daughters. Bill Parker would not grow up with his grand father"s wealth or prestige. Instead, he would inherit his temperament and, in time, his fondness for whiskey.
As a child, Bill grew up in a house divided. His mother, Mary Kathryn Moore, was a spirited, independent woman who was both deeply religious and good humored. By all accounts, she was intensely proud of Bill, her oldest son, who was born on June 21, 1905. Bill"s father, William Henry Parker Jr., had a personality that can only be called dour. He also had a violent temper. At school, one of Parker"s sisters was once asked what her father did. She answered, "Oh, my father gets up in the morning to fix breakfast and throws pots and pans around in the kitchen."
These troubles were not debilitating, at least not at first. As a young boy, Parker was diligent and bright, a dogged athlete and a gifted orator. (The Deadwood High School yearbook reported that Parker won the senior year first prize in rhetoric for his stirring recitation of William Jennings Bryan"s "Cross of Gold" speech-an interesting selection for a gold-mining town.) His final report card in 1922 reveals an excellent student, with an apt.i.tude for math and rhetoric, who enjoyed the high opinion of his teachers.
"I consider William Parker to be an unusually bright young man, endowed with mental energy and capabilities which, if properly directed, will enable him to carve out for himself a name of which all concerned may be justly proud," the princ.i.p.al of Deadwood High School wrote on Parker"s final report card.
As an obviously intelligent young man born into a distinguished family, Bill might have been expected to follow in his father"s and grandfather"s footsteps and continue on to college. Instead, he stayed in Deadwood, working a series of odd jobs, delivering newspapers and selling frocks and undergarments knit by his mother to various ladies in town-and not just the ladies. By one account, Parker blushingly sold garments to the town"s madams as well. The teenager"s first real job, however, was at Deadwood"s most prestigious hotel-the Franklin-where he got a job as a bellhop and the house detective.
In later years, Parker would occasionally allude to his work in Deadwood, suggesting that his job involved rousting guests who misbehaved and patrolling the premises for ladies of the night. In truth, he was probably more occupied with his work as a bellboy than with acts of sleuthing. The Franklin was known for its ongoing high-stakes poker game; it is unlikely that a teenage employee would have interfered much with it. Nonetheless, it"s clear that the idea of being a lawman spoke to Parker"s imagination. Imagination was all he had. Bill Parker seemed stuck in Deadwood.
Then, suddenly, he wasn"t.
In 1922, his mother announced that she was separating from Bill"s father and moving to Los Angeles and that she was taking Bill"s three younger siblings with her. Bill went with her to help with the move-and to see the City of Angels for himself.
LOS ANGELES was Deadwood writ large-a boomtown on a scale never seen before or since in this country. The city was growing so quickly that residents and visitors couldn"t even agree on how to p.r.o.nounce its name. To some it was "Loss An-jy-lese;" to others, "Loss An-jy-lus" or even "Lows An-y-klyese"-a p.r.o.nunciation the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times suspected was a deliberate eastern slur. (The paper of record insisted that the proper p.r.o.nunciation was the distinctly Spanish "Loce Ahng-hail-ais," a p.r.o.nunciation it printed under its masthead for several years.) Not until the 1930s did today"s "Los An-ju-less" gain the clear upper hand. suspected was a deliberate eastern slur. (The paper of record insisted that the proper p.r.o.nunciation was the distinctly Spanish "Loce Ahng-hail-ais," a p.r.o.nunciation it printed under its masthead for several years.) Not until the 1930s did today"s "Los An-ju-less" gain the clear upper hand.
Whatever its p.r.o.nunciation, it was clear that people couldn"t wait to get there. Model Ts crammed the old Santa Fe Trail-today"s Route 66-full of Midwesterners who were California-bound. By 1922, the city"s population had risen to more than 600,000. Fifteen-story skysc.r.a.pers (heights had been capped after the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906) lined Spring Street, the so-called Wall Street of the West. Dazzling electric signs proclaimed its next goal-2,000,000 POPULATION BY 1930! POPULATION BY 1930!(It made it to 1,200,000.) At the corner of Wilshire and La Brea, newcomers were transfixed by something they had never seen before, neon signs, the first in the United States. Everywhere there were automobiles. On a typical workday, some 260,000 cars jammed downtown Los Angeles, making the intersection of Adams and Figueroa on the edge of downtown the busiest in the world, with more than double the traffic of its nearest rival, Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Los Angeles also had one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the country. Together, the intraurban Yellow and interurban Red lines provided service over more than a thousand miles of rail and transported an average of 520,000 people into the downtown area every day. Total number of pa.s.senger trips in 1924: 110,000,000.
"All of the talk was "boom," "dollars," "greatest in the world," "sure to double in price,"" marveled the author Hamlin Garland, who visited L.A. in 1923.
"I have never seen so many buildings going up all at one time.... There are thousands in process in every direction I looked." The mingling of architectural styles was-to use a word coined in that same period-surreal. The city"s neighborhoods, reported Garland, consist of "hundreds of the gay little stucco bungalows in the Spanish-Mexican, Italian-Swiss, and many other styles, a conglomeration that cannot be equaled anywhere else on earth I am quite sure." If others noticed this, they didn"t seem to mind.
"The whole Middle West," Garland concluded, "wants to come here."
And no wonder. The city (to say nothing of its underworld) was a carnival. In downtown Los Angeles, the theaters and movie palaces that lined Broadway attracted thronging crowds to motley performances that mixed vaudeville performers, singers, dancers, chorus girls, acrobats, even elephants with silent films by stars like Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. Then as now, starstruck tourists could sign up for "star tours" that took them past the homes of their favorite celebrities on the beach in Santa Monica and in Beverly Hills. Streetcars packed with bands and draped with advertis.e.m.e.nts crisscrossed the city, announcing new towns every month. Elephants, lions, and circus freaks lured people out to the newest developments (or, more commonly, to a free lunch under a tent on an empty lot followed by a pitch for a "marvelous investment opportunity").
"If every conceivable trick in advertising was not resorted to, it was probably due to an oversight," wrote one early philanthropist. Along Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevards, the city"s first apartment buildings were starting to rise. South of downtown was the beginning of a vast manufacturing district, home to tire fabrication and automotive a.s.sembly plants that would eventually transform bucolic Los Angeles into the country"s preeminent manufacturing center. High in the Hollywood Hills, a giant sign, each letter fifty feet tall and covered with four thousand lightbulbs, promoted one of Harry Chandler"s new developments, "Hollywoodland!" The "-land" later fell over, and the sign became the new city"s most distinctive symbol.
Then there was the oil. Beginning in 1920, a series of spectacular discoveries just south of the city suddenly made Los Angeles into one of the world"s great oil-production centers. At its acme, Southern California produced 5 percent of the world"s total oil supply. Shipping out of the port of San Pedro exploded. Ordinary Angelenos became obsessive investors in local oil syndicates such as the ones organized by oilman C. C. Julian from his office suite above the palatial Loews"s State Theater on Broadway. It wasn"t Sacramento in 1848; it wasn"t Deadwood in 1876 or the Klondike in 1897; it was bigger. For a child of Deadwood, it should have been familiar terrain. Instead, Los Angeles would prove to be a cruel instructor.
THE PARKERS settled first in Westlake (today"s MacArthur Park), west of downtown, then one of the most fashionable parts of Los Angeles. Despite having moved to a nice neighborhood, the family"s position was a tenuous one. Support from Deadwood was uncertain. (Mary Parker and Bill"s youngest brother, Joseph, would later move to the immigrant neighborhood of Pico Heights.) In Deadwood, the Parkers had been one of the most prominent families in town. In Los Angeles, Mary Parker was basically a single mother. Moreover, she and her family were Catholics in America"s most belligerently Protestant big city, a place where the Ku Klux Klan"s members at one point included the chief of the LAPD, the Los Angeles County sheriff, and the U.S. attorney for Southern California. Bill Parker did not look like one of the swarthy Mediterranean immigrants that caused Protestant Angelenos such concern. Yet at a time when anti-Catholic views circulated freely, he was in a very real sense a minority.
Parker probably didn"t dwell much on these difficulties. He didn"t have time. At the age of seventeen, Bill Parker was now the man in the family. Although Bill"s father continued to support his family from afar, finances were tight. Bill had to find a job. And so Parker turned to Los Angeles"s-and America"s-fastest growing industry: the movies.
Los Angeles became the home of the movie industry almost by accident. In 1909, Col. William Selig (a minstrel show owner who filched a t.i.tle from the military and the design of the Kinescope movie projector from Thomas Edison) had sent director Francis Boggs west from Chicago to shoot a western in Arizona. Arizona was hot and dull, so Boggs pressed on to the city he had visited two years earlier, Los Angeles. There he and other itinerant filmmakers found the perfect outdoor shooting environment-a mixture of cityscape and countryside, deserts and mountains, ocean and forest. Its three-thousand-mile distance from New York and the Motion Pictures Patent Company "trust," which technically (i.e., legally) held the license on the technology used by the industry, was a plus too.
By 1910, the year Los Angeles annexed Hollywood, some ten-odd motion picture companies had set up operations in the area. That same year the director D.W Griffith completed the movie In Old California In Old California, the first film shot completely in Hollywood. The following year, the Nestor Film Company moved from New Jersey to the corner of Sunset and Gower Street, becoming the first Los Angeles-based motion-picture studio. Universal, Triangle, Luce, Lasky"s Famous Players (later Paramount), Vita-graph (later Columbia), Metro (later part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM), Fox, and others soon followed. By 1915, Hollywood was synonymous with the film industry, and Los Angeles was producing between 60 and 75 percent of the country"s motion pictures-a little more than a quarter of the world"s total films. The First World War destroyed the foreign compet.i.tion and made Hollywood the cinematic capital of the world. By 1921, its seventy-plus studios had 80 percent of the world market. In the process, Hollywood became fantastically rich. By 1919, an estimated fifteen thousand theaters in the United States alone were generating roughly $800 million a year in revenues-roughly $10 billion in today"s dollars.
Parker was plankton in the Hollywood food chain. His first job was as an usher at the California Theater, an imposing Beaux Arts theater at the corner of Main and Eighth Streets. He soon switched jobs, moving two blocks north to Loews"s State Theater, a glorious 2,600-seat theater, reportedly Los Angeles"s most profitable movie palace, in the heart of the Broadway movie district. There (for ten to fifty cents a ticket) the public could enjoy entertainment of the most wonderful variety. It wasn"t just the movies. Pit orchestras performed Gilbert and Sullivan-or Beethoven. Opera singers trilling arias shared the stage with acrobats; ballets followed circus animals; elaborate "moving tableaux" gave way to daring stunts. What tantalized audiences most, though, was something new-the femme fatale.
The first was Theodosia Goodman, a tailor"s daughter from Ohio, who, in the hands of her press agents, became Theda Bara, "foreign, voluptuous, and fatal"-a woman "possessed of such combustible Circe charms," panted Time Time magazine, "that her contract forbade her to ride public conveyances or go out without a veil." Others soon followed: Pola Negri, Nita Naldi, Louise Brooks. Women weren"t the only ones steaming up the screen. In 1921, Rudolph Valentino rode off with the hearts of women around the world as the Sheik, the mesmerizing Arab who kidnapped, wooed, lost, saved, and ultimately won an English lady-socialite as his bride (Agnes Ayres). magazine, "that her contract forbade her to ride public conveyances or go out without a veil." Others soon followed: Pola Negri, Nita Naldi, Louise Brooks. Women weren"t the only ones steaming up the screen. In 1921, Rudolph Valentino rode off with the hearts of women around the world as the Sheik, the mesmerizing Arab who kidnapped, wooed, lost, saved, and ultimately won an English lady-socialite as his bride (Agnes Ayres).
As the movies heated up, so did the imaginations of the public. No one was more vulnerable than the people most exposed-theater employees. "Love is like the measles," explained one girl usher to the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times. "You can"t be around it all the time without catching the fever."
Bill Parker caught the fever.
As chief of police, Parker would become a tribune of social conservatism. As a young man, however, he was ensnared. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles while he was working as an usher, Parker met Francette Pomeroy, a beautiful, high-spirited young woman, age nineteen-almost two years older than himself. The exact circ.u.mstances of their courtship are unknown. However, it"s easy to understand how Francette (who went by "Francis") might have fallen for Bill. He was an unusually handsome young man-slender, of medium height, with a high forehead, prominent nose, and large, intelligent eyes. He was smart and attentive; even then, he had a sense of presence. On August 13, 1923, the two essentially eloped and were married in a civil ceremony.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the failure of his own parents" marriage, young Bill Parker had very conventional ideas about his relationship with Francis. She did not share these ideas. On the contrary, she saw no reason why marriage should interfere with the life she previously enjoyed, which involved music, dancing, and active socializing, including a continuing a.s.sociation with other young men. This came as a shock to Bill. In time, Parker"s family would come to view Francis as a s.e.x addict.
Perhaps she was. More likely, Francis was an adventuresome, somewhat risque young woman who reveled in the freedom of life in Los Angeles and who was caught off guard by Bill"s traditional expectations. Whatever her activities, they were unacceptable to her husband. In February 1924, when Francis prepared to leave the house, Parker confronted her with a torrent of abuse and, according to Francis, threatened "bodily harm." Two months later, on April 15, he allegedly delivered on that threat. Francis had announced that she was going out, and Parker exploded. He followed her down the staircase, arguing furiously. When she refused to come back inside, he struck her in the face, grabbed her by the throat, and dragged her upstairs and back into the apartment.
Something horrifying was happening-to Parker and to his marriage. The handsome, ambitious young man whom Francis Pomeroy had married was vanishing, replaced by a man she would later describe in her divorce pet.i.tion as "cross, cranky, peevish, irritable, aggravating, and of a generally-nagging and fault-finding att.i.tude." He, in turn, was soon describing his wife as a "d.a.m.ned fool," an "idiot," a "G.o.d-d.a.m.ned b.i.t.c.h"-and worse. What Bill was like before his marriage we do not know; however, these adjectives, this intolerance of fools, would be all too familiar to the men who later worked with (and for) him. In less than two years, Los Angeles had frustrated Parker"s hopes and brought out the ugliest features of his personality. Bill Parker was discovering that in Los Angeles, violence, dreams, and desire kept close company.
Bill Parker was not the only young man spurred to violence by life in "the white spot" in those days. One afternoon in the summer of 1922, just a few blocks away from where Parker was working as a movie usher, idling motorists witnessed an outburst of violence that was far more remarkable than Bill Parker"s (alleged) wife-beating-a holdup of the box office of the Columbia Theater.
Any attempt to heist a box office in downtown Los Angeles, in the middle of the day, in the presence of hundreds of witnesses would have been noteworthy. But what made this band of bandits so singularly striking was their frightening, baseball bat-wielding leader. He was only nine years old. His name was Meyer Harris Cohen, but all of Los Angeles would soon come to know him simply as "Mickey."
3.
The Combination.
"The purpose of any political organization is to get the money from the gamblers ..."-Wilbur LeGette MICKEY COHEN wasn"t supposed to exist in Los Angeles.
"The conditions which exist here should make for the finest character building in the land," opined the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times in 1923. "The hazards of the environment are at their minimum. We should have more than the ordinary proportion of patriotism because our citizens are mainly the descendants of American pioneers. As a city we have no vast foreign districts in which strange tongues are ever heard. The community is American"-meaning, in in 1923. "The hazards of the environment are at their minimum. We should have more than the ordinary proportion of patriotism because our citizens are mainly the descendants of American pioneers. As a city we have no vast foreign districts in which strange tongues are ever heard. The community is American"-meaning, in Times Times-speak, white, native-born, and Protestant-"clear to its back-bone."
Tell that to the residents of Boyle Heights.
In a city that prided itself on h.o.m.ogeneity, Boyle Heights-a neighborhood across the Los Angeles River due east of downtown-was an anomaly, a mixing pot of Jews, Italians, Mexicans, j.a.panese, Russians, Germans, Finns, and Frenchmen. It was a neighborhood of both desperate poverty and earnest striving. The flats along the Los Angeles River were home to one of the worst slums in America-a neighborhood whose horrors, according to the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis, exceeded the tenements of the Lower East Side. However, farther east along Brooklyn Avenue (today"s Cesar Chavez Avenue) a vibrant, working-cla.s.s, polyglot community had taken shape. At a time when Los Angeles was older, wealthier, and sicker than America as a whole (Southern California"s supposed salubrity lured wealthy convalescents from across the country to the region), Boyle Heights was vigorous, young, and exotic. It was here that Mickey Cohen would spend his childhood-and begin his criminal career.
Boyle Heights"s multiculturalism would serve that career well. Mickey grew up with close Mexican and Italian friends. (He would later boast of speaking a little "Mexican.") The experience paved the way for Mickey"s later moves into the largely Italian world of organized crime. It would later lead Mickey to a.s.semble an unusual crew, one that was half-Jewish (from New York) and half-Italian (from Cleveland). The easy mingling of Jews and Italians in Cohen"s circle would frustrate Mickey"s rivals and ultimately give him the clout he would need to take on one of Los Angeles"s most shadowy inst.i.tutions, the group of men who controlled the Los Angeles underworld who were known simply as "the Combination."
HE WAS BORN Meyer Harris Cohen on September 4, 1913, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, but he was always known simply as "Mickey." Just two months after his birth, Mickey"s father, who (his youngest son would later recall) had been involved with "some kind of import business with Jewish fishes," died. His Russian-born wife was left to take care of the five kids. Three years later, f.a.n.n.y Cohen decided to move to Los Angeles to start life anew.
f.a.n.n.y, Mickey, and his sister Lillian settled into a modest apartment on Breed Street, just a block south of the newly built wooden shul that was the center of Boyle Heights"s fast-growing Jewish community. f.a.n.n.y opened a small grocery store around the corner on Brooklyn Avenue. The business did well enough for her to send for the rest of her family-sons Sam, Louis, Harry, and daughter Pauline. Everyone worked hard-albeit at a range of endeavors whose legality varied. By age four, Mickey was spending most of his time with his older brothers on the street, selling newspapers. Mickey"s job was simple: sit on the stack of newspapers to keep them from blowing away and give pa.s.sersby pleading looks. But even then, the first sprouts of criminality were taking root in little Mickey"s mind: His brothers found that he was constantly giving away papers for candy and hot dogs.