by John Buntin
The evening before Thanksgiving, on November 22, 1939, “Big Greenie” got a call to run down to the corner drugstore to pick up a package. As he eased his old Ford convertible into a parking space outside his modest house in Hollywood, triggerman Frank Carbo walked quickly out of the shadows toward the vehicle. Bugsy Siegel was waiting in a black Mercury sedan parked down the street. Al Tannenbaum was behind him, in a stolen “crash car,” ready to stop any car that pursued them. Champ Segal was parked five blocks away, ready to drive Carbo north to San Francisco where he would take a flight back to New York. From inside the Green-berg house, Ida Greenberg heard a rapid series of shots—a backfiring car, she thought, then the sound of two cars speeding down the street. When “Big Greenie” didn’t reappear, she went outside to look for him. She found him in his blood-spattered car, dead from five bullets fired at point-blank range into his head.
So much for “Big Greenie”—or so it seemed. Unfortunately for Bugsy, one of his old associates back in Brooklyn was about to start talking to the DA.
Abe “Kid Twist” Reles had a reputation as one of East Brooklyn’s nastiest thugs. “He had a round face, thick lips, a flat nose and small ears,” noted Brooklyn assistant DA Burton Turkus. “His arms had not waited for the rest of him. They dangled to his knees, completing a generally gorilla-like figure.” He also had the nasty habit of killing victims with an ice pick, which made him one of Louis Buchalter’s most feared executioners.
In January 1940, two months after Greenberg’s assassination, “Kid Twist” was picked up by the police on charges of robbery, assault, possession of narcotics, burglary, disorderly contact, and six charges related to various murders. For a guy like Reles, this should have been no big deal. After all, he’d been arrested forty-two times over the preceding sixteen years and had never done serious jail time. But as he languished in prison, Reles grew worried that several associates who’d also been picked up were ratting him out. So Reles informed his wife that he was willing to talk. One day, Mrs. Reles walked into the Brooklyn DA’s office and announced, “My husband wants an interview with the Law.”
It took twelve days and twenty-five stenographer notebooks to complete and record his confession. Reles’s testimony was stunning. In two weeks’ time, he clarified forty-nine unsolved murders. That wasn’t even the most startling part of his story. Previously, most police officials had assumed that Reles and his associates were basically just a nasty crew of criminals who operated in and around Brownsville and East New York. Not so, Reles told the prosecutors. He revealed that Buchalter had actually assembled a group that functioned as a killing squad for a nationwide crime syndicate. For the first time, authorities realized, in Turkus’s words, “that there actually existed in America an organized underworld, and that it controlled lawlessness across the United States,” from Brooklyn to California. Turkus would later dub it “Murder, Inc.” According to Reles, hundreds of people nationwide had been killed at its bequest. “Big Greenie” was one of them.
There was more. Reles told prosecutors that Bugsy Siegel and Buchalter lieutenant Mendy Weiss had organized the hit on “Big Greenie”—and that New York fight promoter Frank Carbo had pulled the trigger. Mickey Cohen pal Champ Segal had also been involved in the hit, Reles told authorities. He’d heard so firsthand. Reles testified that after the hit, he had overheard Siegel, Weiss, Louis Capone, and one of the original gunmen sent west to do the hit, Sholom Bernstein, discussing the rub-out. According to Reles, Bernstein had criticized the execution of the hit as something more befitting “a Wild West cowboy” than a professional assassin. In response, Siegel had allegedly replied, “I was there myself on that job. Do I look like a cowboy? I did that job myself.” After Bernstein left, Reles added, Siegel had proposed whacking him—for fouling up (“dogging”) the first hit.
Reles wasn’t prosecutors’ only important witness. They’d also flipped Al Tannenbaum, the other gunman Murder, Inc. had originally sent to Montreal to kill “Big Greenie.” Tannenbaum was now prepared to testify that New Jersey mob boss Longy Zwillman had sent him to California with pistols for the Greenberg hit and that on the night of the murder he’d been the driver of the crash car.
A stronger case against Siegel would have been hard to imagine. With two witnesses who could link Siegel to the murder, prosecutors on both coasts went to work. Brooklyn assistant DA Burton Turkus flew to Los Angeles to brief Los Angeles district attorney Buron Fitts on the evidence. Fitts immediately assembled a raiding party. His plan was to nab Bugsy at his newly built dream mansion in Holmby Hills, one of L.A.’s most prestigious neighborhoods.
The raiding party—three cars strong, its members specially chosen for their marksmanship skills—set out for the Siegel mansion at 250 Delfern Street on the morning of August 17, 1940. They were greeted at the front door by Siegel’s butler. The men informed him that they were there to see Benjamin Siegel. The butler nodded and asked them to wait. Several minutes later, he returned and opened the door of the mansion onto a lifestyle they could scarcely conceive of. At a time when the country was mired in the seemingly unending misery of the Depression, Bugsy Siegel was living like… a baronet. In the bar and lounge room, eighteen-foot carved divans flanked a deeply recessed fireplace, and a choice selection of whiskeys, cognacs, and cordials was available for guests. There were six “vanity rooms” for the ladies. The dining room table was made of exotic inlaid woods and sat thirty—without extensions.
Bugsy’s bed was still warm, but there was no sign of him. A member of the raiding party noticed a linen closet door ajar. Atop a pile of fresh sheets, investigators found footprints. The ceiling of the closet had a secret trapdoor that opened into the attic. There the raiding party found Bugsy Siegel in his pajamas, giggling. The gangster coolly informed his captors that he had fled because “I thought it was someone else.” The police were not amused. They hauled Siegel downtown and placed him under arrest for murder. Reles and Tannenbaum were flown to Los Angeles, and on the basis of their testimony, Siegel was indicted. His request for bail was denied. Siegel would await trial at the L.A. County Jail.
MAYOR BOWRON and DA Fitts had run the remnants of the Combination out of town. Siegel’s trial gave them a chance to sweep out the Syndicate as well. But almost immediately the prosecution began to experience problems—strange problems. Reporters discovered that Siegel had access to a telephone, slept in the county jail doctor’s quarters, and employed another prisoner as his valet. Worst of all, he was leaving the jail virtually at will—more than eighteen times in a month and a half. The Examiner even spotted Siegel having lunch with the actress Wendy Barrie. In truth, he was not completely unattended. A deputy sheriff was on hand—as Siegel’s driver.
Then dissension broke out between prosecutors in New York and Los Angeles. Brooklyn district attorney William O’Dwyer abruptly declined to allow Reles to return to Los Angeles to testify, saying that his prized witness, who was being guarded by a crew of eighteen policemen at an undisclosed location, had come down with a serious illness. Suspicions immediately arose that O’Dwyer, who was eyeing a run for mayor of New York, had struck a deal with the Syndicate. Prosecutors in L.A. had problems too. In 1940, Angelenos finally voted Buron Fitts out of office. His successor, former congressman John Dockweiler, was promptly embarrassed when Siegel wrote to him to request that the prosecutor-elect refund him the $30,000 he had contributed to his campaign. The DA complied. (Mickey Cohen would later claim that Siegel had actually given Dock-weiler $100,000.) Siegel then used the funds to hire attorney Jerry Giesler to defend him.
Dockweiler was in a bind. Reles’s testimony was essential to establishing Siegel as the mastermind of the murder plot. Without it, the new DA saw no way to secure a conviction. But O’Dwyer wouldn’t give up his prized witness. As a result, on December 11, 1940, Deputy DA Vernon Ferguson, who was prosecuting the case for Dockweiler’s office, went to court and requested that the murder charges against Bugsy Siegel be dismissed. That afternoon Siegel walked out of
jail, a free man.
Back in New York, though, Bugsy’s release proved such an embarrassment for O’Dwyer that he reversed course and agreed to let his witnesses go to Los Angeles. Dockweiler convened another jury; Al Tannenbaum flew west to testify (“under heavy guard”); and Siegel was reindicted and again arrested. The key witness, however, was Reles. Although Tannenbaum had taken part in the actual assassination itself, it was Reles who had the power to send Bugsy Siegel to the gas chamber. And it was Reles who, just before breakfast on the morning of November 12, 1941, was found dead on the roof of the building next door to the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island, where the NYPD had him in protective custody.
What had happened to “Kid Twist”? No one knows for certain. A torn rope made from a bedsheet suggested that Reles had plunged to his death four stories below while trying to escape, though why someone facing a death sentence from the Syndicate would want to escape into Brooklyn was unclear. Perhaps Reles had simply intended to play a joke on his police protectors by demonstrating how easily he could flee. But the physical evidence suggested another explanation. Reles’s body was found more than twenty feet from the wall, suggesting that Reles had been hurled out the window—defenestrated—by a policeman on the take.
Without Reles, the case against Siegel was weak. On January 19, 1942, the trial against Siegel began. While Tannenbaum was there as a witness, California law required that charges against Siegel be corroborated by independent evidence that tied the defendant to the crime—evidence the prosecution no longer had. As a result, on February 5, 1942, Judge A. A. Scott granted Siegel attorney Jerry Giesler’s request to dismiss the case on grounds that no case had been made against his client. Bugsy Siegel was once again a free man.
Siegel’s lengthy entanglements with the court system meant that Mickey Cohen had to take on a large organizational task. He proved to be a surprisingly talented understudy. Mickey soon took over as Siegel’s liaison to the county sheriff’s office. He also took responsibility for cultivating the LAPD.
“For weeks before each Thanksgiving and Christmas, I would receive calls from captains in different precincts and would be told about and given the names and addresses of some persons in their respective districts that they considered in dire straits,” Mickey later related. “I would then have individual baskets made up by a good friend of mine who was in the chain market business (and who would make them up for me at wholesale prices), each basket always including a large turkey, a ham and chicken, and most other necessities for a decent Thanksgiving and Christmas.” At his peak, he was sending out about three hundred baskets a year. Mickey was learning the craft of organized crime. It wasn’t always turkeys and chicken.
One of Mickey’s businesses was pinball and slot machines. His partner was Curly Robinson, former Clover Club owner Eddy Neales’s onetime associate. Mayor Bowron had more or less succeeded in expelling slots from the city of Los Angeles, but they were still a thriving business in the county. Cohen and Robinson were determined to profit from them. Their racket was an association that every distributor in the region had to join.
But Robinson was having problems. Some of its members had gotten a bit independent minded. Expecting trouble at the next meeting, Robinson asked Cohen to come to the association’s next gathering. Mickey arrived early with three of his toughest henchmen, Hooky Rothman (Cohen’s right-hand man, a killing savant), “Little Jimmy” (“quiet—perfectionist—carried out instructions—tough with pistol—two time loser on heists and attempted murder”), and “Big Jimmy” (“six-foot, three-inch—ex-heavyweight pug—easygoing horse bettor—done some time in Maine for a killing”). By the time the meeting got under way, there were roughly six hundred people present.
A speaker took the stage and began to talk about the need for independence. Mickey leapt onto the platform and “busted his head open.”
“Nobody come near me,” he later noted. The meeting hall was silent. With Mickey and his men glowering on stage, the slot machine association fell in line. There was no more talk of autonomy. Still, on the way out, Mickey and his goons pistol-whipped “two or three other dissenters.”
Slots were just a minor sideline. Cohen’s real focus was on gambling.
While Siegel concentrated on signing up bookies for the Trans-American news service (an enterprise that by 1945 would be paying Benny an estimated $25,000 a month), Cohen worked on opening his own gambling joints. Initially, he steered clear of the city proper, preferring more hospitable county terrain. His first major base of operations was in Bur bank, just a few blocks away from the Warner Bros. lot. Thanks to a pliable local police chief, Mickey was able to open a basic $2-a-bet bookie joint. It thrived. Back in Los Angeles, Mickey soon added a commission office that handled the kinds of big “lay-off” bets—typically anything over $5,000—that were often spread out to bookies across the country.
Commission offices thrived on a peculiarity of horse betting. Because sanctioned tracks used a pari-mutuel betting system (whereby the odds were set by the bets placed), a big bet (say $50,000) could significantly reduce the payout. Commission offices offered high rollers an alternative, where they could place big bets without lowering their payoff. Because the people placing these bets often had inside information, they also presented bookies with information that could be highly lucrative.
With this information came new friends, including a number of local politicians. One judge was so horse-crazed that he insisted that Mickey come down to his chambers and run operations from there, so that he would have access to all of Mickey’s tips.
“The poor bookmakers,” Mickey reflected, “were really in a quandary, as they couldn’t figure out where he was getting his information and were in no position to turn down his wagers for fear of invoking the wrath of the Judge.”
One afternoon as Mickey was waiting in the judge’s office, he learned that the case of a small-time bookmaker was about to be heard. Mickey knew the man well; in fact, he’d robbed his establishment before. Mickey decided to peek into the courtroom and watch the proceedings. He could scarcely believe his ears when the judge handed down the sentence—thirty days in the county jail. Furious, Mickey caught the eye of the bailiff and told him that he needed to talk to the judge at once.
“The judge, thinking that I must have received word on a horse, couldn’t get off the bench quick enough,” Mickey later recalled. Back in his chambers, Mickey exploded, speaking “without my usual respect for him, although I did manage to keep myself somewhat under control.”
“What kind of man are you, to sentence a man to jail for thirty days when you yourself are a freak for betting on the horses?”
The answer, of course, was a politician.
For a gangster, Mickey Cohen had an inadequate understanding of treachery. Not only did this make it hard to deal with politicians, it blinded him to what was happening before his very eyes with Jack Dragna.
Dragna, a short, heavyset man who favored horn-rimmed glasses, was an old-school Sicilian who liked to surround himself with Sicilians (or, barring that, at least other Italians). He had the air of someone used to dealing with money. His demeanor was more banker than muscle. Mickey didn’t think much of him. Nor did he seem aware of the fact that Dragna might hold a grudge about Cohen’s earlier heist. Instead, Mickey interpreted the order imposed by Siegel as the natural order of things. He saw Dragna and himself “on an even status as his two lieutenants”—with himself rising and Dragna on the way out.
“Dragna was inactive at the time, and for years had no organization at all,” Mickey later recalled. “[A]nything he wanted done he came to me for.” As far as Mickey was concerned, organized crime in Los Angeles was “a happy family.” As for the possibility that robbing Morris Orloff and being an all-around punk might have rubbed Dragna and the Italian gangsters surrounding him the wrong way, Cohen dismissed it out of hand: “I was the guest of honor at his daughter’s wedding!”
Mickey was mistaken—dangerously so. Bugsy represented
New York. But Dragna had closer ties to Chicago. Although the twin capitals of the underworld generally cooperated on matters of importance, there were areas of friction. Siegel’s 1942 decision to force Los Angeles bookmakers to subscribe to his wire service was one of them. At the time, most big bookies in Los Angeles were using James Ragan’s Chicago-based Continental wire services—and paying a cut to Jack Dragna and Johnny Roselli, the Chicago Outfit’s man in Los Angeles, for protection. Siegel didn’t care. Instead, he sent Mickey Cohen to wreak havoc on the office of the Chicago wire’s L.A. manager, Ragan son-in-law Russell Brophy. Even Mickey felt a little leery about this assignment. When he arrived at Brophy’s main office downtown and was told Johnny Roselli was on the phone—and that he wanted to speak to Mickey—Cohen was less enthusiastic still. He knew firsthand what kind of tactics the Chicago Outfit employed. So he ducked the request. Instead, he gave the phone to his partner Joe Sica. (“I figured Italian to Italian, you know.”)
“Lookit, Johnny says that whatever we’ve done is done, but he don’t want this office busted up,” Sica reported.
Which, of course, was precisely what Cohen and Sica had been sent to do.
“Tell him that I’m sorry, but this office is going up for grabs completely,” Mickey replied. “Just tell him that, and hang the phone up.”
Sica did. Then he and Mickey “tore that fucking office apart.” Mickey beat up Brophy, hurting him so badly that Mickey decided to go on the lam. He fled to Phoenix. There he was greeted like a conquering hero by Siegel.
