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

by John Buntin

  “I think there is one other statistic I will bore you with,” Parker continued. “I believe this growth in population, relative growth should be of deep interest to you in attempting to translate what you have been told in terms of problems. The Negro population of Los Angeles has increased 58.8 percent since 1952, while the Caucasian population increased only 10.9 percent, which indicates the general type of growth in this community.” In the face of “the explosive growth of this community and the inherent frictions among men, the most predatory of all animals,” Parker continued, “I would like to say, to me, it is utterly remarkable that we have gone through this growth experience without violence, and to us it is nothing short of a miracle.”

  Parker then shifted to the topic of segregation. His assessment of its prevalence in Los Angeles was startling.

  “There is no segregation or integration problem in this community, in my opinion, and I have been here since 1922,” he asserted. “There may be an assimilation problem, I think that is inherent. But from the standpoint of integration, while there have been dislocations, this doesn’t present any serious problems.” Nor did the LAPD have an integration problem, the chief insisted.

  “[W]e have Negro police officers; we have had them as long as I have been on the department,” Parker told the commissioners. “They have been elected presidents of our classes—I doubt you have been told that—in democratic elections. There has been no integration problem. We have as much respect for them as anyone else in the department because they are individuals, they perform as individuals, and their conduct is graded on the basis of individual contact.”

  Parker insisted that there was no section of the city where Negroes couldn’t work. He explained that he had declined to issue an order requiring black and white officers to work together because that would be “reverse discrimination.” Parker said he favored integrated assignments on a voluntary basis instead.

  Parker was becoming more relaxed—and more expansive. In response to a question about a witness who had recounted a story of police brutality, Parker replied with a meandering answer that concluded with one of his favorite themes: the police as “the greatest dislocated minority in America today.”

  “I have been very much interested in your charts where you break down crime in Los Angeles on a ratio of Caucasian, Latin, and Negro,” interjected commission chairman John Hannah. “Do you have any observations as to the relationship in these groups based on the kind of housing that they have available to them or the amount of education that these young people have?”

  Parker replied that “it is quite obvious” that blacks and Latinos were in the lower economic brackets but said that he hadn’t “attempted to assume the role of sociologist and reach any determination” about the connections between crime and housing. (No one noted that Parker had shown no such hesitancy during the debate over public housing earlier that decade.)

  “There are a few questions I would like to ask you, Mr. Parker,” interrupted another commissioner. “One of them has to do with what I believe you said was a conclusion that you had reached that much of this was the result of a conflict of cultures.”

  “Yes, sir,” Parker replied.

  “Then I take it that that is a conclusion you would reach with respect to the Negro population as distinguished from the Caucasian population, suggesting that the Negro has a different culture.”

  “Not necessarily,” Parker replied,

  No, no. I think a great deal of this has been based on our experience with the Latin population more than with the Negro or the balance of Caucasian…. Just so we keep the record straight, I’m not singling the Negro out. The Latin population that came in here in great strength—were there before us—has presented a great problem because I worked over on the East Side when men had to work in pairs. But that has evolved into assimilation. And it’s because some of these people [Mexican Americans] have been here since before we were, but some of them aren’t far removed from the wild tribes of inner Mexico.

  Sitting in the audience, councilman Ed Roybal could hardly believe his ears. Had Chief Parker actually described his constituents as former members of “the wild tribes of inner Mexico”? The following day, Roybal introduced a motion in the city council requesting a transcript of the previous day’s hearing. By then, Chief Parker’s alleged “wild tribes of inner Mexico” was the talk of the town. The city council demanded a written explanation.

  Never slow to respond to an attack, Chief Parker insisted that he had been set up and misquoted. “Nobody is concerned with the rights of policemen,” he fumed to the press. “I’ve been harassed by these elements ever since I’ve been chief.” The chief insisted that a tape of the meeting would vindicate him.

  It didn’t. Forced to listen to what he said, Parker described the statement as “a slip of the tongue.” He once again refused to apologize (characteristically insisting that Roybal owed him an apology for misinterpreting his words). He didn’t have to. The Los Angeles Times editorial board rushed to Parker’s defense, accusing not the chief of police but rather his critics of “the most offensive kind of demagoguery.” Councilman Roybal reluctantly accepted the chief’s explanation, and the controversy soon blew over.

  That April, Parker and his wife, Helen, left Los Angeles for a fifty-five-day trip to Europe (paid for with a $45,000 settlement from ABC for Mike Wallace’s interview with Mickey Cohen). The couple’s trip took them to many of the places Parker had served in during the war, including Italy. Parker’s visit to Italy made his carabiniere hosts nervous. Parker was, after all, one of the Mafia’s most committed adversaries. What if an intrepid Mafioso decided to knock him off?

  During Parker’s visit to Rome, local authorities got wind of a report that gangsters who congregated at a certain cafe were indeed contemplating just such a hit. They presented this information to Parker and suggested that he cut his visit short. Parker scoffed at this suggestion. He would not be frightened by Mob threats. Instead, the following morning, he went to have breakfast at the cafe in question.

  24

  Showgirls

  “Girls very often like me and seem attracted to me, and I find them also attractive, at times. It’s talkin’ to them that’s the hard part.”

  —Mickey Cohen

  THE RULES were strict and clear. Stripteases were legal in the city of Los Angeles as long as they were not “lewd and lascivious.” In practice, this meant that certain rules had to be followed. The guidance provided by the city attorney’s office was quite, well, explicit. Performers were required to wear G-strings and pasties. A performer was not permitted to “pass her hands over her body in such a manner that the hands touch the body at any point.” The “bump and grind” was permissible—but only in “an upright position.” Under no circumstances was bumping and grinding to occur “adjacent to a curtain or [an] any other object.”

  The biggest no-no of all, though, was touching. That was both legally off-limits and personally unwise. Strippers, then and now, tended to have personal problems and expensive needs. There was a good reason that the most successful professional gangsters, men like Meyer Lansky and Paul Ricca, were known for being faithful to their spouses. Mickey Cohen had been too, for the most part. Sure, he liked to squire starlets around town. Yes, he enjoyed “blue films” and liked a good burlesque show as much as the next man—perhaps more so. Prostitutes? They were hard to avoid in his milieu. According to Jimmy Fratianno, Cohen dropped a C-note for a professional “flutter” from time to time. However, skirt-chasing never interfered with the serious business of being a gangster. But when Bing Crosby’s son introduced Cohen to Juanita Dale Slusher, better known by her stage name, Candy Barr, Mickey had a change of heart.

  Candy Barr was striptease royalty, thanks in large part to her 1951 appearance in the stag film Smart Aleck. (Barr, then a sixteen-year-old runaway who survived by turning tricks, played the role of the teenager lured into a traveling salesman’s motel room—with a friend—after a nude dip in
the pool.) The one-reel, fifteen-minute film circulated widely, making Barr arguably the world’s first porn star. From there, the teenaged Barr (measurements 37-22-33) dyed her hair blond and moved easily into the world of burlesque and, occasionally, the theater. Her angelic, innocent face and her heavenly but far from innocent body made her a popular performer. She was soon alternating between regular gigs in Las Vegas and Dallas (where she struck up a friendship with nightclub owner Jack Ruby). But in 1957, Dallas police arrested Barr on charges of possessing four-fifths of an ounce of marijuana. The green-eyed twenty-two-year-old performer was tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in the state prison. To Bing Crosby’s son, a Candy Barr fan, it seemed a terrible injustice. He soon thought of just the person who might be able to help—Mickey Cohen.

  AS A YOUNG MAN, Cohen had been shy—even prudish—when it came to the female gender. That changed in Cleveland, where he shacked up with a redheaded Irish girl named Georgia (“beautiful face and fine disposition”). Although they were never married, they lived together as man and wife until Georgia moved to Michigan and really did get married. Mickey then moved to Los Angeles.

  In Los Angeles, prostitution was a big business. During his heyday, Bugsy Siegel had routinely taken a significant cut of the action (amounting to about $100,000 a year), as did the Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s vice squad. As Siegel’s lieutenant, responsibility for collecting from the whorehouses fell to Mickey. Cohen insisted that he refused to do it. He claimed that he wanted nothing to do with prostitution as a business.[21]

  Ordinary women were a challenge too. Mickey was not a handsome man. In 1950, Senator Kefauver would describe him as “a simian figure, with pendulous lower lip… and spreading paunch.” The muckraking journalist Ovid Demaris agreed: “Pint-sized and pudgy, with simian eyes, a flattened nose, and a twisting scar under his left eye.” The FBI was more clinical: Cohen, one agent reported, “had a one-inch scar under each eye and one on the inner corner of his left eyebrow. His nose had been broken, and he had a two-inch scar on his left hand.” Nor was he a natural conversationalist.

  “Girls very often like me and seem attracted to me, and I find them also attractive, at times. It’s talkin’ to them that’s the hard part,” he said, plaintively, to Ben Hecht (one of the century’s greatest conversationalists) one day. “You break your back to be a gentleman when you take a girl out. They like the respect you got for them. So the next day she says, ‘You know last night you didn’t talk to me at all.’

  “‘I didn’t have nothing to say to you,’ I try to explain, ‘I can’t make conversation out of nothing!’”

  Given these drawbacks, it’s easy to understand how Cohen would eventually gravitate toward professionals. His first extended fling—with the artist Liz Renay—had been something of a publicity stunt. Barr was more serious. Perhaps the fact that she’d shot her second husband one year earlier (he survived) piqued Mickey’s interest. Perhaps he simply liked her act. Whatever the motivation, at Crosby’s suggestion, Mickey took on Candy Barr, personally guaranteeing a $15,000 bail bond and vowing to appeal her conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  By the spring of 1959, they were dating. Cohen lined up a gig for Barr at the Club Largo on Sunset, where she was soon earning $2,000 a week. Mickey was a nightly visitor. On April 20, readers of the columnist Art Ryan learned that Cohen had squired Candy Barr to the Saints and Sinners testimonial dinner for Milton Berle. The romance blossomed. By early May, Cohen was hinting to the press that he was considering tying the knot with Miss Barr after his divorce with LaVonne went through.

  While Cohen enjoyed Candy Barr, federal authorities were stepping up their efforts to gather incriminating information on Cohen. A parade of witnesses was now passing before the federal grand jury that had been called to investigate Mickey’s lavish lifestyle. Prosecutors cast a wide net, subpoenaing virtually everyone who might have seen Mickey spend money, from telephone company employees to fight promoter Harry “Babe McCoy” Rudolph to LAPD-cop-turned-private-investigator Fred Otash. Prosecutors also tightened the noose around Mickey Cohen’s previous girlfriend, Liz Renay.

  Renay had long been a subject of interest and was repeatedly questioned by the jury. At first, she attempted to make light of these summonses. After being called back to testify in January, she told the press that the jury was “a bunch of old meanies” and complained that the appearance had cost her a movie role. Gradually, though, the gravity of her situation began to dawn on her. Prosecutors had figured out that Cohen had turned to Renay for “loans” when he needed to pay for something with a check instead of cash. In an attempt to support Cohen’s claims that he was broke, Renay initially claimed that he never paid her back. This claim was easily refuted by Western Union records that showed Cohen routinely wiring money to her account in New York. As a result, on March 12, Renay was indicted on five counts of perjury by the federal grand jury investigating Cohen’s income. She was released on $1,500 bail. Two weeks later, on March 31, while Cohen was thumbing his nose at Robert Kennedy and buying a new Cadillac, Renay pleaded innocent to the charges. Evidently, she soon had second thoughts about her situation. In July, she changed her testimony, informing the judge that she’d failed to tell the truth about the $5,500 in “loans” she’d made to Cohen, and on July 18, 1959, a federal judge gave her a three-year suspended sentence—and a clear warning to associate with the likes of Cohen no more. (She later violated the terms of the deal and ended up serving a two-year prison sentence on Terminal Island off San Pedro.)

  Mickey’s romance with Candy Barr was similarly ill fated. Early in the summer of 1959, she broke up with Mickey. She promptly married her hairdresser in Las Vegas. Without Cohen’s high-priced lawyers throwing up delays, the law quickly closed in on Candy Barr. Soon after her nuptials, she was deported to Texas to begin her prison term.

  Inwardly, Mickey grieved. Outwardly, he soldiered on. He soon found a new flame—a twenty-two-year-old stripper at the Largo named Beverly Hills. Reached by an intrepid Los Angeles Times reporter at noon on October 1 (Mickey was still in his pajamas and visibly sleepy), Cohen confirmed that he and Miss Hills would soon be wed. Their honeymoon was to take place in Miami, where the future Mrs. Cohen would be appearing at the Clover Club. That engagement fizzled too. By late fall, Cohen had a new love, a nineteen-year-old former carhop named Sandy Hagen, whom Cohen had “discovered” at a drive-through.

  On December 2, 1959, Cohen and Hagen were having dinner at Rondelli’s, an Italian restaurant in Sherman Oaks that was one of Mickey’s favorite hangouts. (Cohen was widely assumed to be the stealth owner.) With them were Cohen’s new canine companion, bulldog Mickey Jr., and the usual scrum of henchmen (including Candy Barr and Beverly Hills’s manager). At about 11:30 p.m., Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen walked in. Whalen was probably the biggest bookmaker in the Valley at the time. As his nickname suggested, the six-foot, 250-pound Whalen was also one of the toughest. He and Mickey had something of a beef. Whalen had recently beaten up Fred Sica, one of Cohen’s top men. That night “The Enforcer” was out trolling bars for delinquent borrowers, one of whom he spotted in a telephone booth in the cafe. Whalen walked over, grabbed the man, and proceeded to knock him around.

  This was not a respectful way to conduct yourself in a rival gangster’s restaurant, but Whalen didn’t seem worried by Mickey’s presence. In fact, he strolled over to Cohen’s table afterward. What happened next is unclear. Words were exchanged; a punch may (or may not) have been thrown at one of Cohen’s associates. One thing was clear though. Two shots were fired. One slammed into the ceiling. The other hit Whalen right between the eyes. Cohen got up to go wash his hands. Then he called his doctor. Then he called the fire department. Next he called the newspapers. Finally, someone called the police. By the time two patrolmen in a radio car arrived at 12:10 a.m., Whalen was dead. The policemen were disturbed to see that someone had tidied up the area around Cohen’s table, a mere six feet from where the body lay. They pr
omptly locked the doors and began to question everyone in the restaurant. Deputy Chief Thad Brown himself questioned Cohen.

  Cohen’s account of what had happened was vague.

  “A man walked in and punched a little man at the next table,” Cohen told Brown. “I never saw either before. Shots rang out. I thought someone was shooting at me, and I ducked.” That was all Cohen had to say. The following day, he elaborated further—in an exclusive column for the Herald-Express—on the night at Rondelli’s, claiming, with wild implausibility, that he’d never seen “the boys who approached the table next to him” and that he hadn’t seen what happened after the shooting because he was taking off Mickey Jr.’s bib. (“You gotta wear one when you eat linguine.”)

  The police weren’t buying it. For one thing, Cohen’s Cadillac was gone. Mickey said Sandy Hagen had taken it home, but Hagen didn’t have a driver’s license. There was also the fact that Mickey had called quite a few people before contacting the police. Chief Parker himself soon arrived to take personal control of the investigation, but Cohen wouldn’t talk to him. Outside, reporters pressed the chief about whether Cohen was a suspect.

  “Obviously, he is,” Parker replied. “This killing occurred at Cohen’s headquarters. He was less than six feet away. We knew that the victim was going there to square a gambling beef. Then Mickey’s car just happened to vanish, off the lot.” Nonetheless, with no evidence tying Cohen to the shooting, he wasn’t immediately booked. Instead, some thirty policemen were dispatched to round up all known Cohen henchmen for questioning.

  The police then got a lucky break. Three pistols were recovered from the trash behind the restaurant. One was registered to the late Johnny Stompanato. A clearer connection to Cohen would have been hard to imagine. Police booked Cohen and four associates on charges of murder. But try as he might, Parker could find no physical evidence (such as fingerprints on the murder weapon) that tied Cohen to the shooting. None of the guns in the trash can were the murder weapon. After two nights in custody, Mickey was released on bail.