Supermob

by Gus Russo

  The 5.69-square-mile subdivision was opened in January 1907, whereupon Wilbur D. Cook, influenced by landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, created a garden city, with wide, curving streets leading to narrow switchbacks that hugged the hills just above. The city's first streets (Rodeo, Canon, Crescent, Carmelita, Elevado, and Lomitas) were constructed, and these winding roads were lined with palm, acacia, eucalyptus, jacaranda, and pepper trees. Developer Burton Green named the new city Beverly Hills on a whim, after noticing a news story on President Taft's recent vacation in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Sales of lots were languid until Green built a world-class resort hotel, The Beverly Hills Hotel, in 1912.

  Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford led the wave of movie stars to Beverly Hills when they built their mansion, Pickfair (1143 Summit Drive), in 1919. Stylish mansions began to spring up overnight, built by a torrent of new celebrity homeowners, among them Gloria Swanson, Will Rogers (the city's honorary mayor), Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, Carl Laemmle, Ronald Colman, King Vidor, John Barrymore, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Marion Davies, Harry Cohn, and Rudolph Valentino. By century's end, there would be 8,269 mostly well-to-do families residing within the city limits, among them Chicago's transplanted Supermob.

  Th e Club

  All that was missing was a place for the Jewish elite to schmooze. As in Chicago and elsewhere, the Jews were confronted with the entrenched WASP clubbism, prohibiting them from joining the established local watering holes/golf courses. The ongoing joke was that Groucho Marx was once invited to visit the "restricted" Los Angeles Country Club, and while his children were splashing in the pool, the president of the club quietly informed him that the club was restricted and his young ones would have to leave the pool.

  "They're only half-Jewish," Groucho replied. "Let them go in up to their waist."

  The club problem was rectified in June of 1920, when "Rabbi to the Stars" Edgar Magnin and a group of German Jews formed the Hillcrest Country Club on a 142-acre plot out in western Los Angeles just south of Beverly Hills on Pico Boulevard. Today the club boasts over six hundred members, who each pay a $40,000 annual membership fee. In addition to the fees and requisite sponsors, new members are said to have to document at least $50,000 given by them to charitable causes. On the occasion of an important new cause being defined, meetings of the membership were held wherein they had to stand up individually and tell the amount of their pledge. Such was the case when they raised $34 million to build CedarsSinai Hospital (where a wing is now named after Jake Factor's brother, Max). Regarding Hillcrest's strictures, Groucho remarked, "I wouldn't want to join a club that would have a person like me for a member." That was only for laughs—Groucho became one of the club's stalwarts.

  The new Ashkenazic Jews were first admitted when the 1929 Depression decimated the membership, making Hillcrest not merely a club for the assimilated downtown Jews, but a place where all Jews, and even a smattering of non-Jews, could congregate. Hollywood chronicler Neal Gabler noted the importance of this distinction: "Hillcrest forged an alliance between these groups that would strengthen the entire Jewish community, especially when it was confronted by the virulent anti-Semitism of the thirties or when it was needed to raise funds for Jewish causes." The new openness paved the way for light moments (such as Harpo Marx playing a round of golf in a gorilla suit) and serious power brokering. Countless movie deals and business transactions were hatched in the club's dining room or on its putting greens. Gabler called it "the klavern from which all power emanated."6

  In addition to the moguls and movie stars like the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, and George Burns, after their arrival in the forties, virtually the entire Supermob were spending their leisure time at Hillcrest.7 And although Sidney Korshak was seen there, he was less than enthusiastic about its true raison d'etre. When Beverly Hills restaurateur Kurt Niklas offended Hillcrest president Arthur Sinton by asking him not to bring his pipe into his eatery, Sinton responded by calling Niklas a Nazi and orchestrated a Hillcrest boycott of his establishment. Niklas's pal Sid Kor­shak gave his apt assessment of the clubbers: "Fuck 'em! . . . Listen, the guys that started that place, George Jessel and L. B. Mayer and Harry Cohn and the Warner brothers, guys like that—they wanted to be plain old rich Americans. They thought a country club would help them assimilate, be like everybody else. But now we've got a second generation that's spoiled to the core and thinks being a Jew is something special. I say, fuck 'em! You don't need Hillcrest!"8

  An offshoot of Hillcrest was soon constructed to quench the one major vice that prevailed among the Jews. Although there was the occasional womanizing and even less alcoholism, the real Jewish weakness was gambling. Not allowed in Santa Anita Race Track, they built Hollywood Park in Inglewood. This "Hillcrest with furlong markers," as it was called, was founded in 1938 by Jack Warner and six hundred shareholders that included Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walt Disney, and stars such as Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, George Jessel, and Wallace Beery. For forty years, the director of the park was Mervyn LeRoy. Here again, the Supermob, especially Sid Korshak, would come to wield power conferred on him by the alliance with the underworld-controlled unions.

  Neal Gabler aptly summed up the Jewish milieu in Los Angeles when he wrote, "Their own lives became a kind of art. They lived in large, palatial homes, became members of the country club Hillcrest, subscribed to a cultural life, centered around the Hollywood Bowl, that simulated the cultural life of eastern aristocracy. They organized a system of estates, a rigid hierarchy."9

  Not only had Southern California proven hospitable to Jews, but it was also no less amenable to gangsters, who seemed virtually exempt from prosecution, just as in Chicago. In Los Angeles, Ben Siegel's successor as the mob's local wire-service boss, Mickey Cohen, was close friends with municipal officers at all levels. Artie Samish, a Cohen childhood friend and California lobbyist, who was called more powerful than the governor by Governor Earl Warren,10 remained a powerful ally of Cohen's. As Cohen explained in his autobiography, "See, if I had any problems with legislators in Sacramento on things like slot machines on premises, he nipped it in the bud. I was his right hand, and he was my godfather, my senior statesman."11 Cohen's friendly influence did not stop at the state capital—it extended into every important agency, including the police force and the mayor's office. "At one point in the 1940s and 1950s, I had the police commission in Los Angles going for me," Cohen recalled. "A lot of the commissioners didn't have any choice. Either they would go along with the program, or they would be pushed out of sight . . . It was all the way up to the box at certain police stations . . . When I was in the mayor's corner, see, a certain amount was put into his campaign each time through my lawyers, Sam Rummel and Vernon Ferguson." Cohen had the private numbers of the mayor's home and office to boot.12 He also knew Richard Nixon, who, before running for Congress, demanded that Cohen come up with a $75,000 "contribution" to assure Nixon's leniency toward the local bookies. Cohen held a dinner with all the local hoods and came up with the money.13

  Mickey Cohen (r.) with his enforcer, Johnny Stompanato (author collection)

  The mobsters bonded not only with the local pols, but also with the moguls and their stars. It was yet another symbiotic relationship: the mob wanted the executives' money and broads, and the Hollywood elite wanted the swagger they thought would rub off by association with hoods, in addition to the muscle they could bring to bear on the nascent labor movement. Much has been written about Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana, George Raft and Bugsy Siegel (and later Sid Korshak), and Johnny Rosselli and moguls like Harry Cohn, who proudly wore the ruby pinkie ring given him by Rosselli, and proudly kept a framed picture of his idol, Benito Mussolini, on his desk. But there was more: Joe Schenk's earliest investors included New York underworld genius Arnold Rothstein; Longy Zwillman provided Harry Cohn with start-up money to take over Columbia; and Louie Mayer's "closest friend" was said to be hood Frank Orsatti.

  One employed
the other, and in return mobsters were favorably portrayed on-screen. The gangster fraternization went beyond the moguls to the actors themselves. Sam and Chuck Giancana alleged that the mob sponsored numerous stars, including the Marx Brothers, George Raft, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Durante, Marie McDonald, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant, and Wendy Barrie. Jimmy Fratianno and Mickey Cohen both claimed that they knew half the movie people on a first-name basis. Robert Mitchum and Sammy Davis Jr. acted as character witnesses for Cohen during his numerous trials. The hoods bedded an endless parade of young actresses, such as Jean Harlow, who enjoyed the affections of Longy Zwillman, and Lana Turner, who lived with Cohen's boy Johnny Stompanato.

  The camaraderie between the moguls and the hoods caught the eye of noir writer Raymond Chandler, who, after seeing a herd of moguls returning from lunch, wrote, "They looked so exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on the beaten competitor. It brought home to me in a flash the strange psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money business and the rackets. Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement."14

  When hedonistic studio chiefs or their stars risked potential vice or gambling scandals, they were happy to call on their new pals like Rosselli to make the problems go away. As Rosselli's biographers observed, "The sudden and enormous success of movies spawned an orgy of vice that threatened to shatter the industry. Drug use was widespread, including cocaine, heroin and illegal alcohol. Sexual favors were demanded by casting directors and became a sort of alternative currency.15"When actresses such as Joan Crawford were blackmailed with porno reels shot in their youth, Rosselli and friends put the hammer to the extortionists. When the celebs or their employers got juiced up at Santa Anita or at Jack Dragna's offshore gambling ship The Rex, the hoods often took care of their markers.

  At least that was on the surface. Behind the scenes, a subtler, criminal incursion was beginning, when into this dynamic mix of prospering Jews and mobster chic was added the post-World War II Supermob arrivals. Indeed, the Jewish population of Los Angeles exploded following the war, doubling by 1948, and doubling again by 1960. Jewish newcomers were so predominant that by 1950 only 8 percent of adult Jews in L.A. had been born here. But without doubt, the most important of the new arrivals hailed from Chicago, and they had names like Korshak, Ziffren, Hart, Factor, Stein, Wasserman, Evans, Pritzker, Annenberg . . . and a non-Jew named Reagan. These men represented a new kind of L.A. mogul, one that had ready access to the clout and lucre of the Chicago underworld. In no time, the new arrivals seized not only the entertainment juggernaut, but also the political clout that accompanied real estate investment on a massive scale.

  The Taking of California, 1-2-3

  The Chicago group took over. We used to sit around and wonder how they all got here.

  CONNIE CARLSON, ORGANIZED CRIME INVESTIGATOR IN THE CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES16

  While the land grab in the Western world is as old as Columbus, its place in California history provides a study of its sophisticated evolution. After the destruction of the native population, questionable legal precedents separating the Mexican population from their property established a sympathetic relationship early on between the territorial courts and the newly arrived white immigrants. Later, rampant land-title abuses, fraudulent mining claims, and water-rights disputes schooled an investing elite whose financial interests would parade under the guise of public welfare concerns aided and abetted by a compliant court system. The history of California is inseparable from its land or what lay beneath.

  In the twentieth century, California land grabs were exemplified by the actions of the privately owned Los Angeles Water Company. Under the leadership of William Mulholland and former L.A. mayor Fred Eaton, the company bought large tracts of land from farmers in Owens Valley, 230 miles north of Los Angeles*" The sellers had been told that the purchases were needed to advance a study on the best ways to irrigate the valley, when the truth was just the opposite: the actual intent of the land grab was to build an aqueduct with which to drain the local Owens River down to the exploding L.A. metropolis. When the spigots were opened in 1913, the Owens Valley farmland quickly turned into a dust bowl, as the water supply evaporated. In addition to the human toll, native wildlife and vegetation were devastated. But the water supply allowed L.A. to modernize, and the San Fernando Valley to exist at all.

  "The Rape of Owens Valley," which inspired the fictionalized 1974 film Chinatown, was yet to experience its most tragic consequence. On March 28, 1928, one of the many dams linked to the aqueduct, the St. Francis, collapsed, sending a forty-foot wall of water into the Santa Clara Valley, claiming over four hundred lives. The subsequent investigation determined that an engineering flaw and "an error in regard to fundamental policy related to public safety" was the cause of the dam's failure. Mulholland was so distraught that he took a pair of pliers and pulled out all his teeth, then withdrew from the public until his death in 1935.17

  Three decades after Owens Valley was denuded, it became the Super­mob's turn to relieve unknowing Californians of their land. The decade from 1943 to 1953 was known as the Suede Shoe era, a time when FHA home-improvement-loan scandals swept the country, and returning GIs, anxious to purchase or improve their homes, were victimized by con artists who funneled mob money into collateral loans with the FHA. The mob too was investing much money in commercial real estate, especially hotels. With seemingly respectable attorneys and accountants as fronts, they channeled monies gained from gambling, vice, narcotics, extortion, etc., into legit properties that earned legit profit. The returning "clean" profits inspired the term comeback money. The gang that set the standard for this money laundering hailed from Chicago, and although much has been written about their self-admitted conquest, Las Vegas, few seem to want to discuss their first major target: the sunny expanses of Southern California.

  What made California such an easy target for the mob-Supermob alliance was a classic example of good intentions gone awry. Lester Velie, one of the great investigative reporters of the century, wrote, "The late Senator Hiram Johnson, seeking to bar political bosses and machines forever, had designed California's open primary. Aspirants could run in Democratic or Republican primaries—or both—without party labels. Boss control of primaries withered, and then died altogether as reform laws barred parties from endorsing primary candidates. But something that Reformer Johnson didn't bargain for took the boss's place: money power."18 Art White, a tireless political reporter with the Tos Angeles Mirror, wrote about how this arrangement played into the hands of outside corrupters in the post-World War II period in California:

  California was to become a state full of strangers, political waifs and mavericks who registered in their party of preference only to find that they had come to a place where political ideology was of no importance. Republicans ran as Democrats and Democrats ran as Republicans. With disconcerting regularity, Republicans, having won both party nominations, were elected in the primaries.

  Since party designations had no meaning to the electorate, elections were won by the candidate with the most money, the greatest number of billboards, direct mail pieces, and the most radio time.

  Any individual who could devise a system to furnish these campaign necessities on a sustained basis was on his way to becoming a political boss, California style. The boss . . . could have a say, perhaps the final word, in the appointment of judges from the municipal courts to the state supreme court. Other appointive jobs included inheritance tax appraisers, deputy attorneys general, state department heads and commissioners of departments. With a handful of such appointments in his pocket, the boss could protect his economic interests.19

  In short, California was, by design, the perfect place to export Chicago-style patronage and political corruption. Fletcher Bowron, L.A.'s mayor throughout the war years, was a Republican reform politic
ian often at odds with diehard business coalitions and organized crime cartels. Among his other powerhouse enemies, Bowron was at war with Tos Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, who controlled the do-nothing police commission. For a time, Bowron and Chandler held an uneasy truce—Bowron promising not to reveal what his intel unit learned of Chandler's marital infidelities, and Chandler agreeing not to publish stories of police transgressions. But the truce broke when Chandler, at odds with Bowron's desire to obtain federally funded housing projects, began financing opposing candidates.20

  Mayor Bowron described the sociopolitical climate in 1940s California thus: "Los Angeles potentially is the most lush field for the activities of those connected with organized crime; with particular reference to commercialized gambling and vice, it is probably more true than for any city in America. We have considerable wealth here. We have a large population. We have free spenders here. We have people that like that sort of thing. It means constant and eternal vigilance to keep the city clean. We can't keep it entirely clean."21

  Adding to the city's woes was an understaffed police department that, according to the Association of National Chiefs of Police, was two thousand police short of the six thousand it needed to monitor the 453-square-mile sprawl.22 Incorporated towns, like Beverly Hills, thus sprung up with their own police departments that redefined the term lax.

  When Bowron's political enemies attempted a recall in 1948, there were rumors of outside instigation. Bowron later testified, "Many of those behind [organized crime] were connected directly or indirectly with the recall movement. I don't merely mean that they had to eliminate me, but they have to eliminate those people that I try to represent, those who want laws enforced and want to see a clean city."23 Soon, rumors were flying that a mysterious group of non-Californians called The Big Five, hoping to open up the state to underworld control, were financing the recall. One associate of that group, a bookie and co-owner of the offshore gambling ship The Rex, James Utley, sent a courier named Polly Gould to Bowron in an effort to cut a deal: Utley said he couldn't pull out of the recall because the other participants were "bigger shots" than he, but he would quietly work for Bowron at the same time in exchange for a promise from Bowron not to raid his nightclub, The Tropics. Bowron replied, "I don't make any deals."24