L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

by John Buntin

  Their target was a commission bookmaking office on Franklin that handled high-roller bets and was owned by Morris Orloff, one of the biggest bookmakers in town. Mickey got in using one of his favorite ruses. At nine in the morning, he started banging on the door. The peephole opened and an ex-deputy sheriff eyed Mickey suspiciously. Mickey played it cool:

  I says to the doorman, “Is Morey in?”

  “Don’t get here till ten o’clock or later,” he says.

  “I got to give him this here,” I says, “and pick something up.”

  “Put it through the peephole,” the ex-cop says.

  “I can’t,” I says, “it’s a package.”

  The ex-cop opened the door—and found himself staring into the barrel of Mickey’s .38. Two of Mickey’s associates forced their way in.

  The baby-faced kid messenger tone was gone. “Lookit you cocksucker,” Mickey told the lookout, “you just move and you’re gone.”

  The man didn’t move. Nor did the four other men in the room who were looking at Mickey. Mickey herded them into a corner and then announced that he was going to wait for Morey Orloff himself to arrive with the big money.

  “Look kid, you got alla the money,” said a big Italian man in the corner. “Whatta ya wanna stay around here. A copper could come in.”

  Mickey walked over to the man. He was wearing a large diamond stickpin. Mickey ripped it off.

  “Listen you dago bastard,” Mickey yelled at the man, “mind your own business or I’ll put a phone through your head. I’m staying for Morey Orloff if I gotta stay till tomorrow.”

  Another man spoke up. “I’m Morey Orloff.” To prove it, he showed Mickey his signet ring. That Orloff was joined at the hip with Jack Dragna, Los Angeles’s top Italian crime boss, troubled Cohen not one bit. He took the signet ring too. Then, just as Mickey had hoped, an Orloff flunky arrived—with $22,000 in cash. Mickey and his crew took the money from the messenger and left.

  Now Siegel was looking for Cohen. That afternoon, Mickey got a call from Champ Segal, who ran a popular barbershop next to the Brown Derby on Vine—and managed the featherweight boxing champion of the world. Segal was one of Bugsy’s closest associates. He was also one of the few people in Los Angeles who knew Mickey well enough to have a phone number where he could be reached.

  “Ben Siegel wants to see you.” (No one called Siegel “Bugsy” to his face.)

  “Ben who?” Mickey responded, vainly attempting to project innocence.

  “Ben Siegel, a name you got to stand attention to,” Champ replied sharply. Then, no doubt aware of how touchy Mickey was, he shifted tone. “Look, do me a favor and come on up” (to the Hollywood YMCA). Bugsy routinely spent his afternoons there, working the bag and enjoying the sauna, and he wanted to talk to Cohen. Mickey agreed.

  When Mickey arrived at the Hollywood Y, he was greeted at the door by Champ and by one of Bugsy’s men.

  “Mr. Siegel is expectin’ you,” the man said curtly. He led Mickey and Champ down to the sweat room. Siegel emerged, clad in a towel and with a big smile on his face.

  “Take a walk, Champ,” Siegel said. Champ left. Siegel turned to Mickey.

  “You were supposed to contact me when you got here,” he said.

  “I didn’t get around to you yet,” Mickey responded sullenly. “I wanted to see my family. I been busy.”

  “Pretty big score you got this morning,” said Siegel.

  Mickey said nothing.

  “I want you to kick back the money,” said Siegel.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mickey replied.

  Siegel smiled. “You’re a good boy, but you’re a little crazy. I want you to kick back that money.”

  “I wouldn’t kick back no money for my mother,” snarled Mickey. “I don’t give a fuck who or what it is. When I go on a score and I put up my life and my liberty on the score, I wouldn’t kick back to nobody.”

  “You heard what I said,” Siegel said coldly.

  “Go take a fuck for yourself,” said Mickey. And with that, he stalked out.

  Champ was waiting just outside the door. Incredulous, he ran after Cohen. “A remark like that means the death penalty,” he told his charge. But Mickey was defiant.

  The next day Mickey Cohen was picked up by the cops and thrown into a jail cell. Whether county or city police made the pinch is unclear. Mickey was not arraigned before a judge; there was no pretense of bringing charges. He was simply held incommunicado without bail. On day nine, Champ got him released. Again, Siegel summoned Mickey—this time to a meeting at the offices of Siegel’s attorney, Jerry Giesler. Dragna associate Johnny Roselli was there as well, representing both the local Italian mob and the Chicago “Outfit” (the new name for the old Capone gang). Even to the craziest SOB in the world, it must have been clear that Mickey was now dealing directly with New York and Chicago. Not surprisingly, there was—as Mickey liked to say—“a meeting of the minds.” Cohen was now fully under Siegel’s arm. It was time to organize L.A., “eastern style.”

  MICKEY knew Eddy Neales and liked him—“a real nice sort of fellow,” he’d say later, but someone “with California ways,” meaning, someone who couldn’t understand or accept what the Syndicate was. Neales just wanted to do his own thing. When Cohen pressed Neales’s partner Curly Robinson about accepting Siegel as a partner, Robinson stalled. Siegel soon grew impatient with the act. He decided to send a message, meaning, he decided to send Mickey.

  Mickey hit Neales’s bookmaking operation first, targeting his commission office. Neales was in the office at the time. Cohen roughed him up, whacking him “across the mouth a few times.” Instead of taking the hint, Neales went into hiding. Through his partner, Neales tried to send Mickey a conciliatory message, explaining “that he meant nothing but the best for me, but that I was too hot-tempered and had too much heat on me to join forces.” Neales also warned Mickey (presciently) that his attempt “to establish things as they are in the East could never fit into the program in this part of the United States.”

  Mickey would have none of it. Next he hit the Clover Club itself. After raiding the cage and relieving the off tables of their cash, Mickey turned his attention to the customers, relieving one leggy young blonde of a diamond necklace. She was Betty Grable, who during the 1940s would become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

  (Years later, columnist Florabel Muir would introduce the two at a Hollywood party. Embarrassed, Cohen stammered out an apology, “if it was me.” Grable just smiled. “We were insured anyway,” she graciously replied.)

  Neales was upset. He switched gears, threatening Siegel with police retaliation. Siegel wasn’t frightened.

  “That Mexican son of a bitch thinks he’s comin’ in with me,” Siegel told Cohen. “Keep on him.”

  Cohen hit Neales’s joints across the city five more times, wrecking each in the process. As a reward for doing Siegel’s bidding, Mickey kept the proceeds from the heists for himself. When Neales turned to the sheriff’s department for help, Cohen refused to back off. (Mickey’s late-night visit to Deputy Sheriff Contreras’s men wasn’t the only factor in the sheriff department’s decision to stop protecting Neales. Siegel also seems to have made a $125,000 payment to purchase some leeway from the department.) So Neales turned next to Jimmy Fox, a tough old Irishman known for his proficiency with handguns and for his excellent connections. (Fox had once shot three men in a downtown hotel room and been acquitted, implausibly, on grounds of self-defense.) As soon as Siegel heard that Neales had engaged Fox, he offered Mickey five grand to rub him out.

  Soon after receiving this contract, Mickey was approached by two pharmacists, who also ran a profitable bookmaking operation out of their drugstore at the corner of Wilshire and San Vicente. They were having some problems with Fox. The pharmacists told Mickey that Fox was demanding a meeting the following evening—presumably, to put the squeeze on them—and asked if he could come too. Mickey told them he’d be glad to come and settle their
problems. The pharmacist-bookmakers, dismayed by the notion that the baby-faced little fellow before them was supposed to stand between themselves and Fox, suggested that Cohen bring a few extra hands. Mickey was noncommittal.

  The meeting was at the house of one of the bookmakers. Mickey arrived early, alone. When Fox arrived, he was not happy to see Mickey there, waiting for him in the kitchen. The bookmakers and one of their wives were there too. Fox got personal.

  “Ya know, I’m going to tell ya something, Mickey,” Fox began. “I had trouble with your brother Harry years before, and ya know, your brother ran out on me. So my feelings towards you ain’t so goddamn good anyway—”

  He got no further. Mickey whipped out his .38 and shot Fox on the spot. (By way of justification, Cohen later explained that Harry “was particularly close to me.”) The bookmakers were stunned, then hysterical. The host’s wife lost her voice for several months. Mickey calmly left—and headed downtown to the Olympic Auditorium to catch a prizefight. He didn’t know if Fox was alive or dead and he didn’t care. As he was leaving the auditorium, he was grabbed by Det. Jack Donahoe, one of the LAPD’s toughest (and most upright) officers.

  “You dirty son of a bitch,” said the six-foot-one, 225-pound detective to Mickey, as he placed him under arrest. “You kill a man, and you go see a prizefight?”

  For three days, Mickey languished in jail—until it became clear that Fox was going to live. Mickey claimed that Fox had drawn on him and that he had fired in self-defense. The tough Irishman declined to contradict him or comment in any way on the shooting. Cohen was released.

  Imprisonment hadn’t improved his mood. He blamed Eddy Neales for his three days in jail. One night while he was out with a hooker, Cohen decided that he was going to take care of Neales once and for all. Somehow he managed to acquire a key to Neales’s apartment. Telling his “date” to wait in the car, Mickey slipped in and waited for the rival underworld figure to come home.

  “I’m in the joint waiting to put his lights out, I hear him start opening the door. I’m ready to hit him” but then “some sixth sense told him something,” Mickey later recounted. Neales “shut the door real quick and ran”—back to his business partner Curly Robinson. Eddy Neales was done with organized crime in Los Angeles. Robinson called Mickey to capitulate.

  Unfortunately, Mickey’s men didn’t get the message fast enough. Around midnight, one of Neales’s men left his Sheridan Road apartment house—alone—to get some cigarettes. Rounding the corner, he ran into Mickey’s right-hand man, Hooky Rothman. This is something that no rational person ever wanted to do. A hundred and ninety pounds and built like a bull, Hooky inspired trepidation in even the toughest toughs. He was an idiot savant of assassination, brilliant at plotting a complex killing but either unable or unwilling to engage in conversation with another person. (His standard courtship line, Mickey’s crew joked, was “Hello goil,” followed by silence.)

  “If there was a piece of work to be done, Hooky stopped eating, drinking and sleeping till it was done,” Mickey commented later, approvingly.

  When Neales’s man saw Hooky, he was greatly relieved that the feud was over. “Hi ya, Hooky,” he greeted Mickey’s man. Hooky gunned him down on the spot.

  “It was a bad tragedy,” Mickey later reflected, “but it ended okay.” Hooky was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. Eddy Neales moved to Mexico City, just to be safe. Siegel and Cohen had run their leading bookmaking rival out of town. But the Los Angeles underworld was still not entirely under their control. The problem was the LAPD.

  During his first year or so back in Los Angeles, Cohen focused on avoiding the police. Not until he met the legendary gambler Nick “the Greek” Dandolos did he realize he’d also have to deal with it.

  Over dinner one night at the Brown Derby, Dandolos had a heart-to-heart with Mickey.

  “You’re doing it all the hard way,” Nick the Greek told the uncharacteristically attentive young heister. “A smart kid doesn’t have to go on the heavy to make a living.” There was a better way—bookmaking.

  Mickey liked “going on the heavy.” As he would later tell the screenwriter Ben Hecht, “winning a street fight, knockin’ over a score, havin’ enough money to buy the best hats—I lived for them moments.” However, Cohen had conducted so many heists during his short time in Los Angeles that he risked becoming recognizable. So at Dandolos’s suggestion, he decided to go visit the Santa Anita racetrack, fifteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, to see this business that Siegel was so interested in. He was stunned by what he saw there.

  “Fifty thousand people are shovin’ their money across a betting counter in open sight,” he exclaimed with astonishment. Within three days, Mickey was a racetrack bookie, taking bets at his spot along the track rail. When the Pinkertons shut him down, Mickey decided to open a bookie joint of his own. Of course, to do so, Mickey would need police protection.

  Fight manager Eddie Meade offered to make some introductions. Over dinner at Ruby Foo’s, Meade introduced Mickey to the head of the LAPD’s Hollywood vice squad, who agreed to let Mickey open a joint at Santa Monica and Western—“door open like a candy store, three-ticket windows,” Mickey recalled fondly. When the day’s horse racing was done, Mickey and his crew took the sheets off the walls and opened up for blackjack and poker. All the games were on the square, and the action was excellent—until, less than four months after Mickey had opened his joint, the LAPD gangster and robbery detail moved in and arrested Cohen and his top associates on suspicion of robbery. Mickey was upset. Didn’t he have a deal with the police? Not exactly, his police contacts informed him. Cohen had a deal with Hollywood vice, but not with the gangster and robbery detail. And that squad had no intention of letting Mickey build up operations within city limits.

  This attitude angered Mickey. Los Angeles, he fumed, was the exact opposite of eastern cities. “[I]t was a syndicate—a combination like the syndicate in Chicago or the syndicate in New York. But here, gambling and everything like they did in Jersey, Chicago, and New York was completely run by cops and stool pigeons.”

  Then, on the morning of January 14, 1938, an explosion ripped apart a modest house at 955 Orme Street and changed everything.

  8

  Dynamite

  “We’ve got to get somebody to spill his guts.”

  —Jim Richardson, city editor, Los Angeles Examiner

  IT WASN’T BUGSY SIEGEL or Mickey Cohen who toppled the Combination. Nor, despite Bill Parker’s efforts, was it an honest cop. Los Angeles’s ruling clique was brought down by a thirty-seven-year-old cafeteria owner named Clifford Clinton.

  In a city awash in sin and suffering, Clifford Clinton was a righteous man. Stranger still, he was also a rich one, thanks to one of Southern California’s hottest trends, the cafeteria. Cafeterias were to 1930s Los Angeles what coffee shops were to 1990s Seattle—ubiquitous, wildly popular, and very profitable. (In 1923, one writer punned that “Southern California” could with equal accuracy be called Sunny Cafeteria.) In 1931, Clinton took the basic idea and gave it a fantastical twist by opening Clifton’s Pacific Seas, which featured a giant waterfall, jungle murals, and a Polynesian grass hut inspired by his explorations in the South Pacific, as well as a meditation garden inspired by the Garden of Gethsemane. In 1935, Clinton began work on a second establishment, the Brookdale cafeteria, which evoked Clinton’s Northern California childhood with an interior that included redwood trees and a stream that fell over a waterfall before meandering through the cafeteria (past a tiny toy chapel perched upon a rocky escarpment). However, it was Clinton’s response to the Great Depression that made his name.

  Clinton had always been proud of his food. His cafeteria’s motto was “Dine Free unless Delighted,” and he meant it. The teetotaler son of Salvation Army officers, Clinton also had strong moral principles. As the Depression deepened, he went out of his way to help Angelenos in distress, offering customers a full meal (soup, salad, bread, Jell-O, and coffee) for a nick
el. When it became clear that a nickel was too much for many, he opened a basement cafeteria in his South Hill Street establishment where the less fortunate could get vegetable soup over brown rice for a mere penny. (Clinton would later estimate that he served roughly a million penny meals over the course of the decade.) Demand was so great for the so-called caveteria that patrons lined up three hours before the restaurant opened for a meal.

  Clinton’s introduction to politics was accidental. In 1935, county supervisor John Anson Ford asked the thirty-five-year-old restaurant owner to inspect food operations at the County General Hospital. Clinton uncovered instances of waste and favoritism that were costing the county $120,000 a year. Retaliation was not long in coming. Soon thereafter, Clinton was visited by city health inspectors and cited for numerous violations. But Shaw’s minions had messed with the wrong man. Outraged, Clinton persuaded Ford to suggest him for the 1937 county grand jury. Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron agreed to put forward his name, and when the 1937 grand jury convened that February, Clinton was among its members.

  The county grand jury was the wildcard in Los Angeles politics. Every year, the county’s fifty superior court judges appointed nineteen people to the jury, which had broad leeway to investigate wrongdoing. At least seventeen of those judges were in the pocket of the Combination; these friendly judges typically ensured that eight to twelve of the grand jury’s members had close ties either to Mayor Frank Shaw’s administration or to the underworld. As a result, grand juries generally managed to avoid uncovering any serious wrongdoing. A clear majority of the 1937 grand jury fit this pattern. When Clinton and three other jurors pressed for an investigation into vice conditions, the grand jury foreman refused. But Clinton was undeterred. Instead, he went directly to Mayor Shaw and asked him to bless an investigation.

  Clinton’s proposal put Shaw in a tough position. If the mayor refused, he risked creating the impression that he had something to hide. So over the objections of Chief Davis, Shaw endorsed Clinton’s investigation. When the group unveiled its name—the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC)—and announced that it would also be investigating municipal malfeasance, Shaw realized he had made a mistake. Clinton’s public statements made it clear that he was targeting more than the city’s brothels and gambling parlors; he was targeting the Combination as a whole. The mayor withdrew his support. CIVIC pressed ahead. Its volunteer investigators soon came up with a tally of vice in Los Angeles: 600 brothels, 300 gambling houses, 1,800 bookie joints, and 23,000 slot machines. The rest of the grand jury wasn’t interested. It refused to accept much less publish CIVIC’s report.