by John Buntin
Wilkerson saw Bugsy Siegel as an investor, not a managing partner. After all, Bugsy Siegel didn’t know anything about building a grand casino. He’d never even run a nightclub before. But Siegel had other ideas. By early 1947, Wilkerson had fled to Paris to escape from his former business partner.
Wilkerson was right. Siegel had never built a large establishment before, and it showed. The original budget for the new casino was $1.2 million. Siegel spent a million on plumbing alone. By the time the Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, Siegel and his investors—who included the top leadership of the Syndicate—had plowed more than $5 million into the project. Rumors of outrageously expensive design changes started to spread. Some Syndicate chieftains became concerned that Bugsy’s new girlfriend, Mob moll Virginia Hill (whom Outfit figures in Chicago had long used as a “mule” for transporting large amounts of cash) was stashing their money in Swiss bank accounts. Worse, when the Flamingo finally did open, it lost money. Siegel was forced to suspend operations to finish construction and figure out what had gone wrong. When it reopened in the spring, the Flamingo moved into the black, netting $250,000 in the three months that followed. But the hard feelings remained. There was also the matter of Siegel’s attitude. Was their old friend Bugsy contrite about all the Syndicate money he’d spent? Not at all. On the contrary, he wanted even more.
At issue was the business of supplying bookies with racing information. For more than a decade, Moses Annenberg’s Nationwide News Service had dominated this lucrative business.* But in 1939, Annenberg disbanded his wire operations, and leadership passed to James Ragan, who reconstituted the old monopoly as the Continental Press Service. Faced with pressure from the Outfit, Ragan went to the FBI for protection. But they weren’t interested in his stories about how the old Capone mob had reemerged under new leadership. In Chicago on June 24, 1946, two shooters opened fire on Ragan while his car was stopped at the corner of State Street and Pershing Drive. Ragan was rushed to Michael Reese Hospital, where after ten blood transfusions he managed to swear out an affidavit identifying the gunman. In the weeks that followed, Ragan made a remarkable recovery—only to die suddenly on August 15. An autopsy suggested mercury poisoning. As for the gunman Ragan had identified, the affidavit identifying him was lost.
Ragan’s successors got the message. They immediately sold the wire service to front men controlled by the Outfit. Bugsy Siegel did not. With Continental now in Mob hands, Chicago informed Siegel that he could go ahead and shut down the Trans-American wire. Siegel refused. He’d built a viable and highly profitable business. He wanted something in exchange for giving it up—specifically, $2 million. This demand went over poorly.
Bugsy knew the boys could get tough. When he flew into Los Angeles early on the morning of June 20, 1947, violence was on his mind. After catching a few hours of sleep at the Beverly Hills mansion that Virginia Hill was renting (from Rudolph Valentino’s former manager), Bugsy headed over to associate Al Smiley’s apartment, where he met with Mickey Cohen.* Siegel got right to the point.
“What kind of equipment you got?” Siegel asked him. Mickey ran down the list of weapons, hideouts, and gunmen available. Bugsy asked Mickey to send Hooky Rothman over the next day, presumably to provide extra protection. It was clear to Cohen that Bugsy “felt that there was some kind of come-off going to take place.” But Bugsy hadn’t seemed too worried about it. The two men had spoken out by the pool at Al Smiley’s apartment. Siegel prided himself on his tan, and though Cohen noticed that he did look more tired and pallid than normal, he certainly hadn’t gone into hiding.
After talking to Cohen, Siegel dropped by George Raft’s Coldwater Canyon house and invited Raft to join him for dinner that night. Raft had other plans. Siegel spent the afternoon with his attorney and then went out for dinner with Al Smiley and Chick Hill, Virginia’s little brother, at a new restaurant in Ocean Park. By 10:15 p.m., they were back home in Beverly Hills. Siegel and Smiley settled in on the sofa to read the early edition of the next morning’s Los Angeles Times. At 10:45 p.m., the first of nine bullets crashed through the living room window, hitting Siegel directly in the right eye. A second bullet slammed into Bugsy’s neck as Smiley dove to the floor. Seven more bullets followed as Smiley screamed “kill the lights” at Chick Hill, who had run downstairs. Then silence. When Chick turned the lights on again, Al Smiley was hiding in the fireplace and Siegel was sprawled grotesquely across the sofa, tie red with blood, head barely attached. One of his striking blue eyes was on the dining room floor. His eyelashes were found plastered on a doorjamb. The police later concluded that the gunman had rested his high-caliber rifle on a latticed pergola just twenty feet away from where Siegel and Smiley were sitting.
It was, concluded Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson, “a perfectly executed hit.”
“Somebody knew that Siegel would be in Beverly Hills on this one day, and that he would be at Virginia Hill’s home, and when, somehow, the heavy draperies over the living-room window had been left open to give the killer a view of the room,” Anderson later wrote. “The shooting was timed exactly to occur when no police patrol car was near, and had to be done quickly since police cars were in the vicinity every 30 minutes.” The only evidence the police were able to produce was a sketchy report of a black car “headed north on North Linden toward Sunset.” But Chief Anderson had an idea about who might be responsible. His chief suspect was the person who would benefit most from Siegel’s death—Mickey Cohen. The LAPD shared this suspicion.
MICKEY disliked Las Vegas and steered clear of Siegel’s doings there. It wasn’t the toll Las Vegas was taking on his mentor in crime that bothered him, it was the dust. “You have on a beautiful white-on-white shirt and a beautiful suit, and you’d come out and a goddamn sandstorm would blow up,” he later groused. Still, while he tried to avoid going out to the Nevada desert, Cohen knew all about Siegel’s Las Vegas troubles. He also knew that it might very well lead to violence.
“In things like this, you know, sometimes an order is given and you don’t have any choice,” Mickey said later. “There was no other way it could go for Benny.”
Within the hour, the police were pounding at the door of Mickey’s house.
“What do you want?” said Cohen when he opened the door.
But when the Beverly Hills police pinched him on suspicion of being involved, Mickey was indignant. Everyone knew that he and Bugsy had been “real close.” “Naturally, I missed [him],” Cohen would say later. But be that as it may, Siegel’s death also presented Cohen with the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to take over the rackets in L.A.
“The people in the East called on me on all propositions,” Cohen later said, “some of which I wish they had not found me home for.”
The LAPD had already been watching Cohen for some time. Mickey had caught the eye of Det. John (Jack) Donahoe, a legendary figure in both the homicide and robbery squads years earlier. Donahoe figured Mickey—correctly—for a string of armed robberies in the Wilshire corridor between 1937 and 1939. He was soon picking up Mickey for questioning on a regular basis—more than once a month, by Mickey’s later calculations. As the spree continued and reports of unpleasant encounters with a five-foot, five-inch gunman came in, Donahoe grew increasingly confident that Mickey was his man. Yet despite repeatedly pinching Cohen, Donahoe never seemed able to come up with charges that would stick.
In those days, Cohen was far from a charmer. The tough, tight-lipped little hoodlum whom Donahoe first encountered bore little resemblance to the talkative, press-loving gangster whom a later generation of Angelenos would come to know. Yet when you arrest someone enough, it’s hard not to form a relationship. Mickey soon found that he admired the big cop. During the 1930s, robbery/homicide had been the bagman squad—the unit that handled payoffs—for the LAPD. Even after the purge of Davis-era officers, in the late thirties, a whiff of corruption still clung to the unit. Donahoe, though, was different.
“One of the finest ge
ntleman I ever met” was Cohen’s verdict: “He would never take [a] dime—never let me go—[a] strictly on the level guy.”
Donahoe didn’t reciprocate these sentiments. When Donahoe learned that Mickey had started dating a cute Irish dance instructor/model, LaVonne Norma Weaver, he was concerned. Donahoe seems to have had something of a soft spot for a damsel in distress, and based on what he knew about Mickey Cohen, the petite redhead was definitely in danger. Mickey had presented himself to LaVonne as a prizefighter. Donahoe took it upon himself to enlighten her as to Cohen’s true identity as a stickup man.
That would have done the trick for most girls. If it didn’t, Donahoe might have expected that Mickey’s bizarre dating behavior would. The couple’s first date was typical. First, Mickey arrived late—really late. He told LaVonne he’d pick her up at seven. He arrived at eleven. Then he swung back by his apartment so that she could meet his associates, before finally taking her to dinner at midnight.
But LaVonne was clearly a forgiving and adventuresome young woman. (In addition to dating Mickey, she was also a pilot.) Mickey’s chronic tardiness and late hours didn’t seem to bother her. Nor did bizarre habits such as cycling through two or three suits a day and eating ice cream and French pastries at virtually every meal. If she had any qualms about his habit of disappearing for an hour or two mid-date (while he went off to heist a joint or conduct business), she never showed it. Clearly, she did not bring burdensome conversational expectations to their relationship either. In fact, she was almost as taciturn as Mickey himself: “Actually, we never had too much conversation together,” he later allowed. “She was the type of girl who didn’t ask questions,” said Mickey with evident satisfaction.
In the fall of 1940, the two were married, somewhat impulsively, in a wedding chapel on Western Avenue. Mickey’s Boston terrier, Tuffy, was one of the witnesses. When the war ended in 1945, LaVonne wanted what every woman wanted: a new house. Moreover, she wanted it in Los Angeles’s sportiest new neighborhood: Brentwood. So Mickey bought a lot near the Riviera Golf Club and started to build. But unbeknownst to Mickey, one of his general contractors was the LAPD. The Cohens’ new house was wired like a recording studio. In the spring of 1947, the Cohens moved in, and the LAPD started listening.
What they heard was surprising. Cohen, so taciturn in public, was a huge talker on the telephone. Every day, he spent hours talking to bondsmen, newspapermen (and-women), bankers, and bookies—and not just in Los Angeles. Mickey’s acquaintances on the East Coast reached from Miami to Boston. Topics of conversation included paying off the sheriff’s office and the Los Angeles County DA’s office. He also talked about doing business with California’s new attorney general, Fred Howser. Large sums were discussed—a mysterious $4 million “proposition,” an $8 million venture in Las Vegas. Mickey mentioned that in one three-month period alone, his operations in Burbank had netted half a million dollars. He discussed spending $30,000 during a single trip to New York. He talked about his $120,000 house. He spoke (bitterly) of spending $50,000 on LaVonne’s interior decorator and on home furnishings. Evincing little understanding for the necessities of criminal conspiracy, LaVonne, in turn, was frequently overheard castigating her husband for his large phone bills.
In short, the LAPD seemed to have Cohen in its sights. But unbeknownst to the men who had tapped Mickey’s manse, they also had a problem. The police had a mole.
* Annenberg purchased the General News Bureau from Chicago gambler Mont Tennes in 1927, just a few years before states such as California began to legalize horse racing and permit pari-mutuel on-track betting to bolster state revenues. The result was a huge boom in horse betting—and a vast new business for Annenberg (who also owned the Daily Racing Form). Just how big became evident after federal prosecutors indicted Annenberg for income tax evasion and began to dig into his businesses. Prosecutors were startled to discover that the General News Service (later renamed the Nationwide News Services, after another wire service Annenberg purchased) was AT&T’s fifth largest customer. (Moore, The Kefauver Committee, 18.)
* Hill herself was not there; she had left town several days earlier after a spat with Siegel and gone to Paris. (Jennings, We Only Kill Each Other, 189-90.)
12
The Double Agent
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”
—Jeremiah
WIRETAPPER JIMMY VAUS couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a cop or a crook—so he tried to be both. In doing so, he set off on a path that led directly to Mickey Cohen.
Vaus first started working for the LAPD almost by accident. In 1946, Vaus was managing a “quiet, high-class” apartment building in Hollywood for a friend while pursuing his true passion: tinkering with electronics. Tenants at the building had started complaining about a dark-haired, well-dressed girl named Marge, whose apartment was frequented by an unusually large number of “men-friends.” Marge was a B-girl downtown who made her living by tricking customers into buying her (watered-down) drinks. It seemed she was now also turning tricks on the side. So Vaus called the LAPD’s Hollywood station, which promptly sent over a young vice squad officer, Charles Stoker.
Vaus explained the problem of Marge and her many “friends” to Stoker and his partner. Stoker knew the type. “Anyone visiting her now?” he asked.
Indeed there was. Vaus gave the officers her apartment number and retreated to his office. A half hour later, Stoker reappeared.
“There’s someone in there with her, all right,” he reported. “We could hear them talking but we couldn’t hear what they were saying. We think we might hear better from outside. Do you have a ladder we could use?”
He did. Ladder supplied, Vaus returned to his office. A few minutes later, the officers were back again.
“I’m afraid we’re stymied, Mr. Vaus,” Stoker informed him. “There doesn’t seem to be any way we can either see or hear what’s going on, and in absence of evidence, we can’t act.”
Vaus was incredulous. “You mean, the vice squad doesn’t have equipment that will enable you, in a case like this, to hear what is going on behind closed doors?” he asked.
“Nope, there’s nothing like that in the Department,” Stoker replied, “in a tone of voice,” Vaus would later recall, “that implied I’d asked him if he’d bought the license plates for his transplanet rocket ship.”
Vaus explained that it would be a simple matter to get officers the proof they needed. All he had to do was plant a concealed microphone in the room and connect it by wire to a recording device outside. Indeed, Vaus modestly continued, he’d be happy to put together such a system himself to help the officers obtain the evidence they needed against Marge.
“Come back tomorrow night, I’ll have it set up and you can listen in,” Vaus said.
Wiring Marge’s room was a snap. When Stoker returned the following night, he was able to overhear Marge discussing prices with a customer. He promptly arrested her. Word of Sergeant Stoker’s new friend soon spread to other vice squad units.* About a week after the arrest of Marge, one of the senior officers from the administrative vice unit downtown approached Vaus with a question. Could he develop a variant on a wiretap that would allow the police to listen in on conversations and also determine what telephone number had been dialed? In other words, the officer explained, “Joe Doaks walks into a drugstore, uses a particular telephone to dial a number and says, ‘Joe, I’ll take two dollars on horse number four in the fifth race today at Rockingham.’ Could the officer working on such a case hear the conversation and know the number that had been dialed?”
The implications of the request were obvious. If the police could tap phone lines and determine whom calls were being made to, they could then pinpoint the locations of bookmakers across Los Angeles. That would give the police a big edge on the underworld.
“I think it can be done,” Vaus replied. In fact, he’d already been working on just such a device, which Vaus dubbed “the im
pulse indicator.” But it was Officer Stoker who got to it first. His target was not the bookmaking racket but rather the so-called Queen Bee of Hollywood, Hollywood madam Brenda Allen.
PROSTITUTION IN HOLLYWOOD has always been a dynastic affair. Brenda Allen had started out as a streetwalker on West Sixth Street between Union and Alvarado Streets. At some point, Allen caught the eye of Anne Forrester, the Combination’s favorite madam. Allen was a quick understudy, and when Forrester went to jail, Allen took over the high-end prostitution racket. Her particular field of innovation was the call girl. Rather than risk running a “bawdy house,” Allen used a telephone exchange service to manage her 114 girls. It was a lucrative business. Allen’s meticulous ledgers would later reveal takes of as much as $2,400 a day, of which half, the traditional split between madam and girl, went to her.
Charles Stoker had first heard of Brenda Allen when she was a plain streetwalker named Marie Mitchell plying her business downtown. He’d been startled when he returned from the war and learned that she’d become the town’s top madam. The brazenness—and cleverness—of her current arrangements aggravated him, and caused him no end of trouble. Whenever he’d arrest another prostitute, she’d complain bitterly, “Why are you arresting me while Brenda is running full-blast?”
Stoker decided he would try to take down Allen. But even finding her was a challenge. The number of the telephone exchange Brenda used was well known. Obviously, the exchange had Allen’s private number. If he could get it, he could go to the phone company and get an address. But when Stoker approached the telephone exchange service and asked for Allen’s number, it told him to produce a court order. So he went to the DA’s office, where he was “politely but firmly given the brush off.”
