by John Buntin
“The present system of oral grading permits the superior officers to grade the candidates, as you know,” he wrote in another letter to his spouse. “My position would not be too good if I had to be graded by the men who were appointed to their positions from behind me on the list. Furthermore I don’t believe the Chief feels kindly toward me…. My present attitude is ‘to hell with them.’ I do not desire to be submitted to the ignominy of being passed up again.”
In fact, the LAPD seems to have been eager to get Parker back. That summer, Chief Horrall contacted the Army to request that Parker be discharged from the service so that he could return to duty with the LAPD. Horrall also wrote Parker directly, claiming “the Department never did recover from the losses sustained when you left” and stating “the sooner you get back, the better and more secure everyone will feel.” This was enough to prompt Parker to renew his efforts to win his release from the Army. Though reluctant to lose such an efficient officer (and worried that Parker’s superiors in the Los Angeles Police Department were less enthusiastic than they let on), Colonel Wilson reluctantly agreed, and in September 1945, Parker was discharged from the Public Safety Division. The following month he came home to California.
He returned to a city transformed. The bucolic Los Angeles of blue skies, sunshine, and orange groves had disappeared (or at least withdrawn to wealthy Westside enclaves like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood). In its place was a new Manchester, a dark, industrial city.
Los Angeles’s transformation had occurred suddenly—so suddenly that it could almost be traced to a single day: July 26, 1943. The next morning, the Los Angeles Times published a bewildered article on the transformation:
CITY HUNTING FOR SOURCE OF “GAS ATTACK”
Thousands Left with Sore Eyes and Throats by Irritating Fumes
With the entire downtown area engulfed by a low-hanging cloud of acrid smoke yesterday morning, city health and police authorities began investigations to determine the source of the latest “gas attack” that left thousands of Angelenos with irritated eyes, noses and throats.
Yesterday’s annoyance was at least the fourth such “attack” of recent date, and by far the worst.
Visibility was cut to less than three blocks in some sections of the business district. Office workers found the noxious fumes almost unbearable. One municipal judge threatened to adjourn court this morning if the condition persists.
Warning that Los Angeles would soon become a “Deserted Village” unless the nuisance were abated, Councilman Carl Rasmussen demanded that the Health Commission make a report on what could be done about it….
The culprit was smog. By late 1943, it had settled permanently over downtown Los Angeles. The noir atmosphere that the director Billy Wilder captured so brilliantly with Double Indemnity in 1944 was not just a symbolically fraught artifact of black-and-white film technology, it was real. Not until 1946 would denizens of downtown Los Angeles see sunshine and blue skies again. Los Angeles had become a noir city.
The Los Angeles power structure had changed as well. In the 1920s, Harry Chandler and his fellow growth barons had dreamed of transforming Los Angeles into an industrial powerhouse along the lines of Chicago. It was clear now that they had achieved their goal. By 1945, Southern California was responsible for 15 percent of the country’s total industrial output. But in transforming Los Angeles into an industrial center, the business barons also brought about a change they had long feared. Aircraft companies Douglas, Northrop, and Grumman and outside companies RCA Victor, Firestone Tire, Dow Chemical, and Ford Motor Company simply didn’t share the native Los Angeles business establishment’s antiunion fervor. Widespread unionization, long resisted, was now a fact. The LAPD’s “red squad” became a thing of the past, and with it, the business establishment’s need to dominate the LAPD.
The Los Angeles business community had experienced another dramatic change as well. In 1944, Harry Chandler died. Leadership of the Los Angeles Times passed to his son Norman (who had become publisher in 1941). Norman was a far more genial figure than his father. However, his father’s trusted associates continued to run the newspaper. Political editor Kyle Palmer was a major force in Sacramento and nationally. In Los Angeles proper, the gnomic Carlton Williams regularly attended city council meetings, routinely flashing a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to conservative members to tell them how they should vote. Under their guidance, the Los Angeles Times would continue to wield great power, as Fletcher Bowron would soon learn to his great sorrow.
The war had changed William Parker, too. Parker had left Los Angeles as a disgruntled midranking police officer with a stalled career. Despite his obvious talents, his prickly personality (and his association with former chief Davis) impeded his efforts to advance. He returned to Los Angeles as a decorated war hero, the highest-ranked LAPD officer to have served in the military. In a city to which veterans were relocating by the thousands every month, that put Parker in a politically powerful position. The city council took note, going so far as to pass a resolution thanking Parker for his wartime service and welcoming him back to the city. Even Chief Horrall penned a note of gratitude. Parker was determined to use that power. His first goal was to become a deputy chief.
Almost immediately, Parker ran into an obstacle—a departmental policy that required two years of service before returning officers were eligible to take promotional exams. As written, it would have prevented him from taking civil service examinations until 1947. Appeals to Chief Horrall to change the policy fell on deaf ears. So Parker went public.
One of Parker’s power bases in the department was American Legion Post 381, which served LAPD veterans. At a post meeting in February 1946, Parker laid into the department for having a policy “that is out of line with the whole nation.” The following day the Los Angeles Times played his comments on page two, in a sympathetic article titled “Policy on Police Veterans Flayed.” The city attorney weighed in by issuing an opinion that the department’s policy on promotions violated the state constitution, clearing the way for veterans to participate in the next round of civil service examinations. For the first time, Parker prevailed over the brass on a major policy dispute.
Parker also tended to other power bases, one of the most important of which was the Fire and Police Protective League. When Parker returned to the force, his former subordinate, the gregarious Harold Sullivan, was serving as the captain’s representative to the Fire and Police Protective League. Parker wanted that position and made it clear that he expected Sullivan to step aside. Sullivan did. In early 1949, Parker became the head of the league’s executive committee.
Popularity and a measure of power seemed to have boosted Parker’s confidence—if not his cockiness. Soon after taking over, Parker took Sullivan and John Dick, a fire department captain, along on a lobbying trip to Sacramento. When the state legislature adjourned for the weekend without taking action on the item they had come to lobby legislators about, Parker proposed that they stay on. The men readily agreed, and the group set off for the Fairmont Hotel. There Parker demanded—and received—a suite. The men then went down to the bar, where Parker boldly struck up a conversation with “two very attractive young ladies” and a fellow who seemed to be their chaperone. The bar closed down at midnight, but Parker wasn’t ready to end the evening.
“So what are you doing next?” Parker asked.
The ladies’ group mentioned that they were going to an after-hours joint in another part of town. Parker asked if his group could join them. The women and their male companion readily agreed to this, so off everyone went. At the end of the evening, Parker went home with one of the women, perhaps, said Sullivan dryly, “to give her a lecture on prostitution.”
This was the new Bill Parker, assertive, entitled, and worldly. And still only partially reconciled with his wife, Helen.
IN THE SPRING of 1947, Parker’s newfound confidence was on display for all to see when he served as the toastmaster for the Protective League’s annual
civic dinner. It was the largest dinner in the league’s history. Mayor Bowron was the guest of honor. By all accounts, Parker delivered a sparkling performance. That summer, Parker again garnered headlines when the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star for his service during the war. At the end of the month, when the LAPD released its promotions-eligibility list, Parker topped the list of those eligible for promotion to inspector. He moved up in the legion, becoming, first, vice commander of Post 381 and then commander. Under Parker’s direction, membership exploded, growing to 1,400 in 1947 (the largest annual increase of any post in the state). The next year, it topped the 2,000-person mark. In recognition, he was made membership chairman of the statewide legion.
There was just one thing that hadn’t changed—the underworld. If anything, its tentacles were as tightly entwined around the city as they had been in the mid-1930s. And Parker was surprised to discover it had a new leader: Mickey Cohen.
* Mickey would later insist that this classification reflected a simple misunderstanding. During an earlier court appearance, his attorney had gotten into “a beef” with a judge. The “beef” had escalated into “a big hurrah,” which ended with Mickey being forced to submit to a psychological examination. Evidently, he failed. (Cohen, In My Own Words, 64-65.)
11
The Sporting Life
“[T]o be honest with you, his getting knocked in was not a bad break for me….”
—Mickey Cohen
MICKEY’S RISE wasn’t always easy. There always seemed to be someone around who wanted to crash the party.
First, there were the uninvited guests, guys like Benny “the Meatball” Gamson from Chicago. Moody and arrogant, “the Meatball” inspired little personal affection among those who came to know him. But he had fast hands and a substantial reputation as a “mechanic,” a crooked card dealer, which meant that he was much sought after by flat shops and juice joints across town. He’d frequently worked with Mickey during the days when Cohen had run wildcat casinos and card games in the Loop and on the North Shore. “The Meatball” added so much to the house advantage that Mickey had even given Gamson “a piece of the operation.” In Gamson’s mind, that made Mickey and him partners. So when Gamson suddenly appeared in Southern California as the war was winding down, he naturally looked Mickey up and proposed reestablishing their old relationship.
But Mickey had changed. Back in Chicago, Mickey had been little more than a punk kid with only a dim awareness of who “the people” were. Since returning to Los Angeles, he had become one of “the people” himself. In Mickey’s mind, “the Meatball” simply didn’t have “the get-up … the class, would be the only word that I could possibly find” to associate with the likes of, well, himself. So when Gamson asked Cohen to “move him in closer” with Siegel, Dragna, and Roselli, Cohen had to tell him that he couldn’t do it. None of those worthies would meet with a pisher like Gamson.
Mickey tried to be nice about it, but the nicer he acted, the angrier Gamson got. Finally, Gamson told his former partner that if Siegel and Dragna wouldn’t deal with him, he, Gamson, would just bring in his own crew, starting with Georgie Levinson, a noted Chicago tough. Cohen “tried to reason with him and make him understand” that that wasn’t a very good idea.
“I told him, ‘Lookit Ben, if we can help in [some other] way—’,” but such offers only made “the Meatball” madder. To put an exclamation point on his pique, Gamson roughed up one of Mickey’s old friends from Boyle Heights. Then Gamson linked up with a rival bookie named Pauley Gibbons. This would not do. It was time to hit back.
First to go was Pauley Gibbons. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning of May 2, 1946, Gibbons was accosted outside his Gale Avenue apartment by two unidentified men. According to neighbors, as soon as he saw them, Gibbons fell down on the sidewalk, screaming, “Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!” Of course they did, with seven quick shots. Gibbons’s diamond and sapphire ring and a gold watch were left behind, to make it clear that this was not some robbery gone awry. To underscore the killers’ opinion of Gibbons, someone paid a drunken homeless man $2 to deliver a box of horse shit (disguised as a box of flowers) to the funeral home during viewing hours. Five months later, on October 3, Gamson and Levinson met a similar fate outside Gamson’s Beverly Boulevard apartment.
So much for “the Meatball.”
Then there were the locals, foremost among them a family of thugs called the Shamans.
Maxie, Izzie, and Joey Shaman had enjoyed a reputation for toughness as kids growing up in Boyle Heights. They fancied they had this reputation still. Cohen henchman Hooky Rothman wasn’t aware of it. When Joe Shaman started acting up one night at the La Brea Club, Hooky told little Joey, bluntly, to “behave yourself in here or get the fuck out.” When Joey didn’t, Hooky broke a chair over his head, worked him over a bit, and then threw him out.
When Mickey swung by that night around 4 a.m., he found out about the incident. It was a shame, he told Hooky; he’d always liked the family. Mickey later claimed that he’d thought no more about it. That seems doubtful. Word raced through Boyle Heights that six-foot, 230-pound Maxie Shaman intended to administer a beating Mickey would not soon forget. The next morning Maxie arrived at Cohen’s commission office behind the paint store on Beverly Boulevard. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Mickey later claimed that Maxie and Izzie burst into his office, armed, and that he gunned down Maxie in self-defense. According to Izzie, his brother walked into Mickey’s office, and Cohen blasted him, killing him in cold blood. The police preferred Izzie’s story; they arrested Cohen for homicide on the spot. However, a young deputy district attorney named Frederick Napoleon Howser (who, as California attorney general, would later provide Cohen with a bodyguard) accepted Mickey’s claim of self-defense, and the diminutive gangster walked.
Still, it was a setback for Mickey. The La Brea Club had become too high profile for its own good. At some point in 1945, Mickey decided to close it (though not before setting up a smaller, more intimate version of the club across the street for his closest friends). The craps game moved to a three-room suite at the Ambassador Hotel. For “seven or eight months,” Cohen organized high-rolling dice games that earned him another $15,000 to $70,000 a month.
In the summer of 1947, Mickey demonstrated his growing power in an impressive and unusual (for him) manner: He decided to hold a charity dinner. The beneficiary was the Jewish paramilitary organization the Irgun.
Mickey came late to ethnic pride, but by early 1947, the outbreak of the Israeli war for independence had touched even him. He particularly admired the spunk of the Irgun, which had earned international notoriety after an attack that previous summer on Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, headquarters of the British administration for Palestine, that killed ninety-three people (most of them innocent civilians). Cohen had heard that the celebrated Chicago newspaperman-turned-Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht was raising money for the Irgun. The Hechts had a villa in Ocean-side. One day in early 1947, Mickey and associate Mike Howard decided to pay Hecht a visit. They arrived unannounced. Hecht, a man of the world, recognized his visitors at once. Howard did the talking.
“Mr. Cohen would be obliged if you told him what’s what with the Jews who are fighting in Palestine,” Howard announced.
According to Hecht, who later described the encounter in his memoirs, A Child of the Century, “Mickey looked coldly at the ocean outside my room and nodded.” So Hecht told his visitors “what was what in Palestine.” Cohen listened calmly as Hecht explained how David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organizat ion that would later form the core of the Israeli Defense Forces, were betraying Irgun agents to the British. The resistance needed guns and money, Hecht explained. Howard pressed him on how he could be having fund-raising problems in a city where “the movie studios are run by the richest Jews in the whole world.”
With sarcastic indignation, Hecht explained that “all the rich Jews of Hollywood were indign
antly opposed to Jews fighting.”
“Knockin’ their own proposition, huh?” said Cohen, speaking for the first time. Then Howard quietly asked Hecht, “What city were you born in?”
“New York City,” Hecht replied.
“What school did you go to?” persisted Howard.
“Broome Street Number Two”—on the Lower East Side, Hecht replied. That did the trick.
“I’d like to see you some more,” Cohen said, gently this time. “Maybe we can fix something up.” What he fixed up was a gala benefit dinner at his nightclub, Slapsie Maxie’s Cafe. Hecht was the keynote speaker. When he arrived, he was stunned to find nearly a thousand people in attendance, including almost every player in the Los Angeles underworld.
“You don’t have to worry,” Howard whispered to Hecht. “Each and everybody here has been told exactly how much to give to the cause of the Jewish heroes. And you can rest assured there’ll be no welchers.” Hecht delivered an impassioned speech. Then “the bookies, toughies, and ‘fancy Dans’” stood up and announced their pledges. Mickey wasn’t satisfied. He turned to Howard.
“Tell ‘em they’re a lot o’ cheap crumbs and they gotta give double.” Howard obliged and then Mickey walked up on the stage and stood in the floodlights. According to Hecht, “he said nothing.” He just stood and glowered.
“Man by man,” continued Hecht, “the ‘underworld’ stood up and doubled the ante for Irgun.” At the end of evening, Cohen had raised $200,000.
Cohen’s clout was growing. Just a few days later, on June 20, 1947, Mickey got the break of a lifetime. It came at the expense of the man who’d made him what he was, Bugsy Siegel.
LAS VEGAS had sucked Bugsy Siegel in—and then spat him out. When Billy Wilkerson’s Flamingo Casino broke ground in late 1945, he estimated that he’d need about $1.2 million to build the casino he envisioned. Lansky and Siegel had recently sold the El Cortez for a tidy profit, and in March 1946 the two men made a million-dollar investment in Wilkerson’s project.
