L.A. Noir

by John Buntin

  So some did. People arrested by the police were often detained for days—sometimes even for weeks—before being brought before a judge. Prisoners were frequently held incommunicado—no contact with family or friends, much less an attorney—until they confessed. When faced with hardened cons, the police routinely shifted prisoners into cold, dark cells without beds or chairs or into “sweat boxes.” They also resorted to “the third degree.” Typically, this involved round-the-clock questioning and sleep deprivation, a form of torture that almost always produced the desired confession. When it didn’t—or if the police were simply pissed—the “third degree” could also involve beating prisoners with clubs, fists, or rubber hoses. Central Division station even had a special cell where such beatings occurred. “Screams have been heard and complaints from prisoners are frequent,” reported one investigation of jail conditions.

  Parker would later describe this period as “the bad old good old days.”

  Remarkably, the LAPD was actually less violent than most big-city police departments. In Chicago, prisoners were routinely beaten with phone books, manacled and hung from pipes, and teargassed. Still, Los Angeles was clearly not a city where people were equal under the law. Parker soon came to the sickening realization that Los Angeles “was in the clutch of hoodlums.” Dumb hoodlums: IQ tests administered in the early twenties found that a significant number of police officers were “low-grade mental defectives.” Drunken, dumb hoodlums. Sometimes, Parker would later recall, “I was the only sober man in the office.”

  Not reassuring words from a man who was almost certainly an alcoholic.

  Parker’s second arrest was more successful. Gazing out the window as he was riding home on one of the yellow Los Angeles Railway streetcars that crisscrossed the city, Parker noticed a man running toward his streetcar, carrying a woman’s fur coat. Panting heavily, the man stepped onto the streetcar. He was a big guy—over six feet tall, probably weighing at least two hundred pounds—with long arms; small, deep-set eyes; and a broad chest. Something about him looked familiar. Then Parker realized that he matched the description of a man wanted by the San Francisco police who had terrorized the city for weeks by attacking people with a long knife.

  Parker edged over to the man and asked, in what he hoped was a casual voice, “Say, where’d you get that coat?”

  “What’s it to you?” the man snarled, turning away.

  Parker told the man he was a policeman and patted him down. He found—and confiscated—a long-bladed knife. Convinced that he had happened across the wanted man, Parker signaled for the motorman to stop—and informed the suspect that he was under arrest. Then he pulled the man off the streetcar and dragged him, “protesting and resisting,” to a police call box, where he called for a patrol wagon. At police headquarters, the department confirmed that Parker had nabbed the man San Franciscan papers had taken to calling Jack the Ripper.

  It was a major coup for a rookie officer. His superiors, doubtless, were not pleased. A rookie had no right to make such an arrest: A savvier officer would have allowed a more senior officer to take the credit. But then no one thought Bill Parker was savvy; on the contrary, he was either one of the dumbest men on the force or one of the most obstinate. Either way, he needed to be taught a lesson. So when Central Division got word one day that a shopkeeper had taken two employees hostage, the lieutenant on duty knew just who to send.

  “He’s got a repeating shotgun,” the lieutenant said. “Take it away from him and bring him in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Parker responded, and hurried to the shop.

  When Parker arrived at the store, he saw the shopkeeper through the glass of the locked door, pacing and waving his gun. The owner saw Parker, too, and yelled at him to get back. Instead of waiting for backup, Parker went up to the store and calmly knocked on the door.

  “Keep out,” the owner yelled. Parker knocked again. The man with the shotgun approached the door—and started lamenting his troubles. Parker indicated that he just couldn’t hear him clearly.

  “Open the door so I can hear you,” Parker called out to the man. As he did so, Parker rushed the gunman, grabbing the shotgun before the man could fire it. The gun was later found to contain five shells. Bill Parker had gotten lucky.

  Later that year, he got lucky in another way. At some point in 1927, Parker met Helen Schultz, an eighteen-year-old telephone exchange girl, the daughter of an Austrian immigrant furniture maker in Philadelphia. In Helen, the twenty-two-year-old Parker (who by then was claiming to be twenty-five) found a kindred spirit. Helen was a devout Catholic, and she loved to hunt and fish. She was also smart, sassy, and, personality-wise, something of a pistol. (It would seem that Bill Parker had no brief for sedate women.) This time there would be no elopement. On May 1, 1928, an announcement of Parker and Helen’s engagement appeared in the Los Angeles Times. They were married later that year.

  Happy, at least in his personal life, Parker bore down on his studies. He was now plowing through night school at the Los Angeles College of Law. In 1930, he would finally receive his law degree. Then he could leave the force and follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.

  The Great Depression intervened. By 1930, Los Angeles had the highest personal bankruptcy rate in the country. Ruined investors were hurling themselves to their deaths from the Arroyo Seco Bridge in Pasadena with such frequency that the city was forced to erect elaborate antisuicide barriers. Nevertheless, Parker’s wife, Helen, assumed that he would leave the force and go to work for a law firm as soon as he completed his degree. As the date drew nearer, however, it dawned on her that her husband might actually enjoy policing more than the practice of law.

  “Statements from Bill kept cropping up about ‘liking the work’ [and] ’every day there is something new,” Helen would later write. So one day she asked him point-blank: Would a law degree help you in a career with the police? He assured her that it would. And so the decision was made. Parker would remain a policeman.

  5

  “Jewboy”

  “I wasn’t the worse. Neither was I the tops.”

  —Mickey Cohen

  BY 1927, the Parrot-Cryer Combination seemed to have Los Angeles sewn up tight. Notwithstanding the presence of a few immigrants such as pimp-turned-bootlegger Albert Marco, the criminal underworld of Los Angeles was now a decidedly WASPy affair, one that left little room for an ambitious Jewish hoodlum like Mickey Cohen. The situation was undoubtedly a frustrating one. Mickey realized early on that “putting money together” was what gave him the most pleasure in life. He also realized that bootlegging, muscle jobs, and armed robbery offered excellent opportunities for enrichment. However, without a “fix,” criminal activities could have most unpleasant ramifications, as Mickey learned after his botched box office holdup. But in Los Angeles, the only outfit with a reliable “fix” was the Combination, and the Combination didn’t recruit talent from the east side of the Los Angeles River. Fortunately, that very year Mickey stumbled across a way out of this dead end. His talent for fighting led him to the one group that could challenge the likes of Kent Parrot, Charlie Crawford, and Guy McAfee: the Mob.

  As a condition for his release from reform school, Mickey was required to meet on a weekly basis with a “Big Brother.” Mickey’s was Abe Roth, a well-known fight referee. Where others saw a thuggish street scrapper, Roth saw a talented flyweight boxer. That prizefights were illegal at the time and that Mickey was on probation was no obstacle to Roth’s plan. Roth soon had Mickey fighting four-round bouts in bootleg clubs and “smokers” around the city.

  Mickey was not a disciplined boxer. He rarely trained in a gym, preferring instead to hire his fists out to the newsboys who controlled the most lucrative intersections in the city—the blocks downtown that could bring in $2,000, even $3,000 a year—and who consequently needed help keeping rivals off their turf. In time, Mickey and his little crew (two Jewish kids and one Latino) became those rivals, taking control of corners themselves. By 1925, he had stake
d out a prime corner downtown at Seventh and Spring Streets. Mickey prospered. He began to carry a roll. (“Even if I only made a couple of hundred dollars, I’d always keep it in fives and tens so it’d look big.”) He developed an intense aversion to old clothes (particularly old socks). He bought a car, a patched up Model T.

  Yet despite this youthful marauding, Mickey also stayed in the ring, fighting four or five nights a week around the city. He even managed to win the newsboy flyweight championship, a victory that made Mickey a minor celebrity and finally brought his boxing career to his mother’s attention. When she found out what her youngest son was up to, Fanny Cohen was not pleased. Mickey’s three older brothers had gone to college (at least for a while) and found good jobs. Mickey’s violent hustling had to end. She ordered him to stop boxing. His friends urged the opposite: They thought he should go pro. So at age fifteen, Mickey hopped a freight train going east.

  At some point in 1928, Mickey showed up at the doorstep of brother Harry the pharmacist, who had moved to Cleveland. When Mickey told him of his plans to turn professional, Harry took one look at his five-foot, three-inch, ninety-six-pound sibling and laughed. Once he saw Mickey in the ring, however, the laughing stopped. His little brother was good. Harry began to nurse a new plan: Mickey would go pro, and he (Harry) would manage his career. A confrere told Harry that if he was serious, Mickey needed professional instruction—the best professional instruction. He needed to go to New York. And so, at the age of sixteen, Mickey Cohen was signed over to two boxing managers and sent to New York City to start training at the most famous boxing gym in the world. He was supposed to learn how to fight. Instead, he would discover a new world—the world of organized crime.

  LOU STILLMAN’S GYM—Mickey’s destination—was a dump. “The atmosphere,” George Plimpton would later write, “was of a fetid jungle.” The windows were never opened. The floors went years between cleanings. Members of the public, who could watch the action for a quarter, were encouraged to smoke; Stillman, a moody and acidulous former private eye, thought it toughened fighters up. Perhaps it did, for by 1929 the dungeonlike space on West 57th Street was the most revered gym in the world, a favorite training spot for boxers such as Jack Dempsey and, later, Joe Louis. Mickey was one of the roughly 150 fighters who rented lockers and trained there, a group whose quality ranged, in Stillman’s words, from “jerk squirts to top-of-the-heaps.” In his interactions with the men he was training, Stillman didn’t bother to distinguish between the two.

  “Big or small, champ or bum, I treat ’em all the same—bad,” he once said, in what Budd Schulberg described as his “garbage disposal voice.” “If you treat them like humans, they’ll eat you alive.”

  The men surrounding Mickey were indeed a tough lot. The gym had been founded by philanthropists whose goal was not to rescue the city’s toughest youth from a life of violence—there seemed to be little hope of that—but rather to encourage them to use their fists instead of knives or guns. The donors were reportedly happy with the gym’s results: Stillman later calculated that only a dozen of his fighters went to the electric chair. He wasn’t counting those who made their way into the rackets.

  “A card of membership in Stillman’s is an Open Sesame to low society in any part of the world,” wrote New Yorker correspondent Alva Johnston in 1933. “The place is one of the centralizing institutions of the underworld; rival low-life factions meet here casually under a flag of truce, as the rival financial and social mobs fraternize at the opera.”

  This was sixteen-year-old Mickey Cohen’s new world.

  He gave it a go.

  Every day Cohen did his roadwork in Central Park and then reported faithfully to Stillman’s (whose motto was “Open Sundays, Mondays, & always”). He appeared on the cards on several occasions at the old Madison Square Garden. He got to know Tony Canzoneri, the featherweight champion of the world. He struck up an acquaintance with Damon Runyon, bard of the New York underworld. As a fighter, Mickey gained a reputation for scrappiness and versatility, if not talent. A natural flyweight, Mickey also routinely fought bantam and featherweight bouts. In 1933, he went up against featherweight champion Alberto “Baby” Arizmendi (like Mickey, a sometime-resident of Boyle Heights) in Tijuana, losing by a knockout in the third round. All in all, Cohen was a good, journeyman fighter. As he said later, “I wasn’t the worse. Neither was I the tops.”

  Still, his heart wasn’t in it. Boxing increasingly disgusted him. Every year in the ring brought another disfigurement—a broken nose, inch-long scars under both eyes, a two-inch scar on the left wrist. But it wasn’t the pain of these injuries that upset Mickey most; rather, it was the physicality of the sport—the sweat, the blood, the blows, the tie-ups, the embraces. Mickey became compulsive about his personal hygiene. After every fight, he’d spend hours in the bathtub or shower.

  Moreover, he wasn’t making any money. Life as a boxer-in-training had its upsides. His managers paid his expenses, bought his clothes, and gave him pocket money. But the fact of the matter was, Mickey now never had more than $15 or $20 in his pocket. Who did? The watchful Irish and Italian men in the bleachers who periodically came in to check on their fighters’ progress—men like Owney “The Killer” Madden, fresh out of Sing Sing, and Joe “the Boss” Masseria, the king of New York’s Italian underworld (until his assassination in 1931). To Mickey, they were simply “the people.” Even then, he knew that these were the men he wanted to associate with. He just didn’t know how. So he decided to return to Cleveland and try his hand as a full-time gangster. He was not welcomed into the fold.

  Unlike New York City, where the smartest Jewish and Italian gangsters had learned to cooperate, Cleveland was still primarily Italian territory. Mickey tried to fit in by becoming a kind of honorary Italian himself, making Italian friends, picking up bits and pieces of various Italian dialects, and perfecting such forms of assault as “the Sicilian backhander.” Cleveland’s top Italian gangsters, brothers Frank and Tony Milano, just laughed at the “Jewboy,” as they called him, who so wanted to be Sicilian. That changed when establishments across Cleveland started seeing Mickey behind the barrel of a gun. Mickey had decided that if the Cleveland outfit wouldn’t take him in, he would hang out his own shingle as a “rooter,” a holdup man.

  Mickey’s first target was a “half-ass gambling joint… way out the west end of Cleveland in the produce area.” An informer had tipped them off to a high-stakes grocers’ craps game. That night, Mickey and a few associates stormed the joint and grabbed $5,000. They struck again the following week, then two or three times a week. Mickey soon had a troupe of seven and was routinely hitting gambling joints, cafes, and whorehouses across Cleveland. It seemed a highly satisfactory life. Days were spent sleeping and playing cards. Nights were exciting and frequently rewarding, both financially and psychologically. Armed robbery, Mickey found, did wonders for his self-esteem.

  “It made me equal to everybody,” Mickey later recalled. “Even as small as I was, when I whipped out that big .38 it made me as big as a guy six foot ten.”

  Great Depression or no Great Depression, business was good. At the end of a successful heist, Mickey’s little crew worked around his inability to add or subtract by stacking all the bills up separately—Lincolns here, Hamiltons there, Jacksons here (Grants were rare; Franklins, alas, were virtually unknown)—and then dividing each pile among the participants (“one for you, one for me …”).

  The Cleveland mob was remarkably calm about Mickey’s behavior—until he hit a bookie parlor under its protection. Fortunately for Mickey, one member of his crew had an uncle in Buffalo who was in “the highest echelons of ‘the people.’” This uncle made some phone calls to “the people” in Cleveland, and Cleveland reacted magnanimously. Instead of punishing the upstart heister, the Cleveland mob made Mickey an offer. Mickey could operate as before (as long as he stayed clear of mob-protected operations). In addition, the Cleveland outfit (as it was sometimes called) would offer him a $125-a-week
retainer. In exchange, Mickey would perform certain tasks for the local mob and, on occasion, for friends elsewhere.

  Cohen was delighted. He accepted at once. And, almost as quickly, he fucked up.

  Among the tasks that Mickey was occasionally called on to perform was killing people. Hits followed a strict protocol. There was a pointer—someone who knew the victim and could make the target—and a triggerman. Mickey was the triggerman. One day Mickey was sent out with a pointer to take out a man who was trying to set himself up without permission from “the people” (much as Mickey himself had done). The pointer identified the victim, who was out walking with a young woman. Mickey stepped out, pulled out his revolver, and fired. The gun roared, the man went down, and the woman—clearly a lady with remarkable self-possession—started screaming,

  “You shot the wrong guy! You shot the wrong guy!”

  That night Mickey found out the woman was right. Pissed, he turned on his pointer.

  “What’s the matter with you, you rotten son of a bitch?” he shouted. He then proceeded to pistol-whip the man, breaking his jaw. Unfortunately, the man Mickey beat up was the brother of one of Cleveland’s top mob leaders. Cohen, unfailingly lucky, received only a serious talking to. Unfortunately, Mickey then decided to heist a popular cafeteria that happened to be directly across the street from the 105th Street police precinct station. Cohen and an accomplice were apprehended. Although they managed to avoid conviction—the cashier obligingly agreed to confess that the robbery had been staged and was thus not really armed robbery—Cohen’s criminal career in Cleveland was over. Mickey left town—for Al Capone’s Chicago.

  IN 1931, A1 Capone was at the height of his power. Two years earlier, on Valentine’s Day, members of the Capone gang dressed as police officers had lured members of the rival Bugs Moran gang to an isolated warehouse—supposedly to receive a shipment of premium whiskey at a bargain price. Moran’s men thought they’d been pinched and expected nothing worse than a quick trip to the lockup. Instead, they were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned. The so-called St. Valentine’s Day Massacre sealed Capone’s standing as Chicago’s top gangster and scandalized the nation, making Capone an international celebrity. It did not, however, make him safer. The primary target of the massacre—Bugs Moran himself—ran late to the meeting, thus missing his own execution. He was now intent on revenge. Rumors that Moran had dispatched two, four, ten gunmen followed Capone everywhere. Al Capone might be the King of Chicago, but he was a monarch who lived under the constant threat of a violent death. As a result, Capone took an interest in newly arrived gunmen, even ones as junior as Mickey Cohen.