by John Buntin
That Bill Parker was almost certainly thinking precisely that bothered General Worton not at all. On July 15, Angelenos woke up to the news that General Worton had moved Inspector Parker to a newly created position in his office. His duties, General Worton told the Los Angeles Times (“in cryptic Marine general style”) would be “anything I want him to do.” In fact, the meaning of Worton’s move was obvious: Asst. Chief Joe Reed was being eased out. Worton’s bland denials—when pressed by reporters, he simply observed that Reed had a civil service position and that the only way to vacate it was for him to resign or be removed on charges (of the sort that the county grand jury was then preparing)—only confirmed his intent. The smart money had Parker pegged as Worton’s new number two. But roughly a week after Worton announced that he was bringing Parker into his office, the interim chief announced that he wanted Parker to head an entirely new bureau, Internal Affairs.
FOR DECADES, vice and its attendant, corruption, had been ineradicable parasites on the body of the LAPD. The cycle of scandal, reform, and then scandal again had driven city politics for decades. Reform-minded police chiefs had tried everything to eradicate it, putting administrative vice under the chief’s tight control; disbanding administrative vice; ignoring vice; suppressing it. Internal Affairs represented something new: an entire bureau focused solely on investigating misconduct and corruption within the LAPD. Worton emphasized its importance by moving Deputy Chief Richard Simon, who headed the patrol bureau, out of City Hall and moving Parker and Internal Affairs in.
It was the perfect position for Bill Parker, for a number of reasons. First, it gave him more authority to pursue and root out corruption than he’d ever had before (vastly more authority than he had enjoyed as lead prosecutor for the department trial board). Second, it allowed him to pursue his long-cherished goal of shoring up police autonomy. By demonstrating that the department was capable of policing itself, Parker hoped to defang the small but vocal group of activists and critics who had begun to call for a board of civilians to review complaints against the department. Finally, the position gave Parker access to information—to the department’s deepest secrets, both real and imagined. A new element mingled with feelings of respect—fear. Fear about what Parker was learning—and about how he might use it.
General Worton and his new team moved quickly. Under his predecessor, Chief Horrall, lines of command had grown murky. Worton clarified them, creating an organizational chart where authority and responsibility for every major function were clearly assigned. He doubled the training period for cadets at the police academy to ninety days, established a new corrections division, and ended the practice of automatically assigning all rookie officers to either the Lincoln Heights jail or traffic duty downtown, both of which tended to sour new officers on police work. The two gangster squads he inherited (each with roughly a dozen men) were combined into a single intelligence squad and instructed to work closely with the FBI and the San Francisco Police Department on antimob activities. Worton also divided the detective bureau between two inspectors, diminishing the power of that fiefdom, and placed the vice, robbery, and homicide squads under Deputy Chief Hohmann. Vice squad officers across the city were dispersed to other units. (Leaving officers in vice for years on end was, Worton thought, an invitation to corruption.) So were hundreds of other officers. The practice of accepting gifts of any sort was banned, at least in theory. The position of assistant chief was abolished too. The chief of police would no longer be able to pass responsibility for running the department to someone else.
General Worton was also keenly interested in departmental morale. Closer acquaintance with the LAPD had convinced Worton that, contrary to public perception, LAPD officers were generally dedicated and honest. But the Brenda Allen scandal had badly dented the department’s self-confidence. “They didn’t have the esprit of a good combat unit,” Worton would later tell a reporter. So he set out to instill it, using the Corps’s tried-and-true methods. The police academy became even more like Quantico. “Military bearing” became a prime objective for all LAPD officers. Worton also instituted aggressive inspections, with an emphasis on spit and polish. He often conducted them himself. Where his predecessor, Chief Horrall, had seemed content to leave departmental matters to others, General Worton was everywhere.
“He would be out prowling at night, and some guy would stop somebody to write a ticket, and this big, black car would pull up behind him, and when the officer was finished this little guy would come walking over and say, ‘Hi. I’m the chief,’” recalls Bob Rock (a future acting chief). He quickly became a popular figure with his men. “He made a really diligent effort to relate to the people, to the department,” says Rock.
Worton’s personal style—and his efforts to instill military pride in the department—proved popular, particularly with the department’s new officers, most of whom had served in the military during the war. Initially, Worton had worried about moving too quickly in this direction. However, in short order, average patrolmen were snapping to attention and saluting sharply when he appeared (even though he never formally instituted salutes).
PARKER MOVED decisively too, quickly forcing the resignation of an officer who’d been involved in a controversial shooting earlier in the year. It was an accomplishment that attracted considerable good publicity—and not the only one. One of Parker’s duties for former chief James Davis had been to handle the press, and he knew how to keep his name in the headlines. On August 28, Parker presided over a huge Fire and Police dinner, lavishing praise on guest-of-honor Mayor Bowron (for seven years of regular pay raises). The following month, at a meeting of the California American Legion’s three hundred top officials, Parker received a well-publicized assignment to promote “Americanism” after the convention listened to an up-and-coming Republican congressman from Whittier—Richard Nixon—warn of the dangers of a Communist insurrection. Integral to the success of this campaign, from Parker’s perspective, was the removal of the cancer of organized crime, which cultivated base appetites and weakened the country when it needed to be preparing for the coming struggle with Soviet Russia. That meant dealing with the likes of Mickey Cohen.
The problems posed by Mickey were manifold. First, there was the criminal activity he was involved in. In the fall of 1949, as the county grand jury was attempting to sort out the welter of charges and countercharges between Mickey and the LAPD, another embarrassing case was headed to court, this one involving a bookmaking front company called the Guarantee Finance Corporation.
Located in unincorporated county territory, Guarantee Finance was perhaps the most audacious bookmaking operation in 1940s Los Angeles. With 74 telephones in its central gambling room, Guarantee Finance employed more than 170 runners and handled gambling in excess of $7,000,000 a year. (It was also happy to arrange high-interest loans for clients with gambling debts.) The LAPD administrative vice squad identified the operation almost immediately but found that the sheriff’s vice squad was strangely uninterested in shutting it down. Frustrated, Sgt. James Fisk took matters into his own hands and raided the establishment, destroying equipment and removing betting markers. A few months later, with the operation still running, Fisk carried out a second raid. This prompted sheriff department captain Al Guasti (“Iron Man” Contreras’s successor as the supervisor of the Sunset Strip) to write then-Assistant Chief of Police Joe Reed a stern letter, warning the LAPD to keep its nose out of county business. Finally, in early 1949, the state corporation commission raided the bookmaking operation and shut its operations down. The wholesale gambling operation the state raid revealed was yet another embarrassing testament to the reach of the underworld into Los Angeles.
The second thing that made Mickey seriously inconvenient was the fact that someone kept trying to kill him—in a sloppy and inept fashion. On August 2, a pipe bomb intended for Mickey exploded across the street from Cohen’s Brentwood house, upsetting the neighbors and, by extension, their elected representatives. It would not do t
o have a resident of Brentwood die in the cross fire of a gang war. Worton decided to go after Mickey with everything he had. His first step was to sic the new intelligence squad on Cohen.
On August 3, officers searched the apartment of Cohen associate Mike Howard (Meyer Horowitz) after getting a tip that he might be dealing drugs. They didn’t find any narcotics, but they did discover two unlicensed pistols. So they hauled in Howard and sent two LAPD detectives and a federal Bureau of Narcotics agent over to Cohen’s house to question him about the incident.
Mickey was not happy to find police officers at his door.
“What the hell do you want?” he snarled. When he found out what they’d come to ask him about—some gun charge involving an associate—he lost it. Didn’t they realize that he had guests (among them Earl Brown, Life’s crack crime writer, and Al Ostro of the San Francisco Daily News) and that it was dinnertime? He asked if the police had a warrant. They didn’t.
“Well then go fuck yourself,” Mickey told them. “And tell the chief to go fuck himself.” Then, for good measure, he added, “Get the hell off my property, you sons of bitches.”
The officers retreated. But two weeks later, in a clear indication that the police were playing by new rules, they returned and arrested him for using obscene and insulting language against a police officer. Mickey got out on bail, and a trial date was set for September 15, 1949.
The press was delighted. Mickey’s journalist guests testified that Mickey had indeed questioned the legitimacy of the law officers’ births. Cohen’s situation looked dire, but his attorneys had a trick up their sleeves. To back his assertion that calling someone a “son of a bitch” wasn’t obscene, Rummel pointed to none other than President Harry Truman, who had recently called columnist Drew Pearson the exact same thing. The courtroom laughed, the jurors retired to deliberate, and four hours later Mickey Cohen once again walked out a free man.
Within weeks, his name was back in the papers, this time in connection with one of the biggest trials in recent Hollywood history, the trial of actor Robert Mitchum. Mitchum had been busted by the sheriff’s department vice squad with a joint of marijuana at a party in the Hollywood Hills, in a raid whose timing was so fortuitous as to be suspicious. Nonetheless, he was convicted and shipped off to prison for a brief stint behind bars (accompanied by a photographer from Life magazine). Now Paul Behrmann, a former business manager and actors’ agent who had once represented Mitchum (but who had since gotten into troubles of his own with the law) came forward with a startling tale. Behrmann told DA William Simpson that Cohen was running a sex-and-extortion ring that specialized in capturing big-time businessmen and actors in compromising situations. Cohen’s stable of accomplices supposedly included a party girl named “Bootsie” and the twenty-four-year-old redheaded assistant to “French lover teacher” Claude Marsan. The suggestion was made that Mitchum, too, had been set up by Cohen.
With Mickey on the loose, every day seemed to bring a new humiliation for Los Angeles area law enforcement. But the LAPD was also squeezing Cohen. Mickey had demonstrated his clout by sparking the scandal that led to Chief Horrall’s ouster, but in General Worton, Cohen had arguably found a cure that was worse than the disease. It wasn’t that Cohen felt fundamentally threatened by Worton; Mickey was convinced that the general “knew little or nothing of the workings of this office.” However, since Chief Horrall’s forced retirement, the LAPD had gone all out to make Mickey’s life miserable. Constant surveillance made it difficult for Mickey to do business. A grand jury had begun to investigate Cohen’s (protected) gambling operations in Glendale. There were reports that the FBI had also begun an investigation. But the worst blow of all had come from a small outfit convened at Gov. Earl Warren’s behest the previous summer, the Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime. Although the state legislature had been careful to make the commission as toothless as possible (for example, denying its four investigators subpoena power), the commission had an asset whose tenacity could not be easily blunted—chief counsel Warren Olney III.
OLNEY CAME from one of California’s most distinguished families. His grandfather was one of the founders of the Sierra Club; his father had been a justice on the California Supreme Court. Olney himself was one of Governor Warren’s closest and most valued associates. He was also something of an authority on interstate gambling and the racing wire. As the head of the California attorney general’s criminal division in the late 1930s (when Warren had been the state attorney general), Olney had begun to investigate bookmaking in California, with a particular focus on Moses Annenberg’s Nationwide News Service. At first, Olney had struggled to figure out what was so important about the wire service. But after three days at Reno’s Bank Club, it came to him. The tout sheets, the hot tips, the fluctuating pari-mutuel prices, the odds at the gate, the conditions of the track—all of that was really just a distraction. Bookies needed the wire so that they could quickly roll $2 bets from one race into $2 bets on the next race. Most gamblers weren’t reading the Daily Racing Form, looking for an inside edge. They were betting on race after race just like gambling junkies played slots.
“Bookmaking has nothing to do with horse races,” Olney concluded. “It’s a strict lottery—nothing more than that.” The wire delivered the information that made it possible to place bet after bet, hour after hour.
This system was generating immense amounts of money for Mickey Cohen. According to LAPD estimates, in mid-1949, Mickey had about five hundred bookmakers paying for protection (typically, $40 per week for every telephone in their operation plus $5 a week per agent). Even if the average bookie had only two telephones, this would have generated more than $160,000 a month. In exchange for such princely sums, Mickey provided attorneys and bail money for bookmakers unfortunate enough to be arrested. This service was famously speedy. In one notorious case, vice squad officers arrested a bookmaker at 3:05 p.m. only to be presented twenty-six minutes later with a bail bond and a writ of habeas corpus, signed by a judge and duly executed, ordering them to release the arrested bookie. Cohen also provided insurance against clients who engaged in “past posting”—placing bets after the race was over—in the form of a menacing visit to bettors who tried to cheat. After these visits, bettors rarely persisted in their claims.
Olney realized that there was a simple way to end it all: cut the wire. An investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission revealed that all the bookmakers in California were supplied over a single telegraphic wire leased from Western Union by the Continental Press service.* Continental then telegraphed information on odds, post times, track conditions, and results to “drops” across the nation. The Special Crime Study Commission identified eight in Southern California—front companies with unclear ownership structures and bland names such as Consolidated Publish Inc. and Southwest News. The system was fast but also vulnerable. Olney’s investigators discovered that Western Union’s contract with Continental gave state law enforcement authorities the power to request that the wire be terminated if they suspected it was being used, directly or indirectly, in violation of California law. Clearly, Continental’s services were being used to violate California law, but when Olney directed the state attorney general’s office to that provision, it did nothing. Finally, after months of pressure from Olney and his commission, Attorney General Howser ended his foot-dragging and presented Western Union with such a request. Western Union disconnected the wire, throwing bookmaking in California into chaos.
The halt was temporary. A mysterious new entity, the Illinois News Association, soon appeared with a request to provide a new telegraphic wire service. When the public utilities commission declined to authorize it, the “news association” sued in federal court—and lost. Undeterred, the news association appealed and sought a temporary resumption of wire service, pending the outcome of its appeal request. Attorney General Howser, ever solicitous of the underworld, declined to provide attorneys to defend the public utilities commission’s actio
n. Despite lacking counsel, the state utilities commission again prevailed.
The interruption of the wire service had a dramatic impact on gambling in Los Angeles. Without the wire, the ability to roll money quickly from one race into the next was greatly diminished. The most profitable gambling establishments, the so-called horse parlors, where bettors came into a room and placed cash bets directly, one race after the other, disappeared almost overnight. Instead, bettors were directed to call “runners,” who took bets over the phone (customers were given an unlisted number and a code word) and then relayed them back to a central office, where bookies collected information via long-distance telephone calls. Volume diminished, and, as the time required to receive results increased from a few minutes to half an hour or longer, the risk of “past posting” increased. The single most lucrative source of Syndicate revenues in the Southland was being squeezed.
Mickey Cohen felt the pinch. But the impact of the wire shutoff wasn’t limited to his pocketbook. The wire service was not just a source of vast profits for the Syndicate: Because every serious bookie needed it, the wire was also a tool for licensing and organizing gambling in every big city across the country. “[T]he inevitable result [of its termination],” predicted Olney, “will be the disorganization of bookmaking and the eradication of the organization upon which the Capone Syndicate could and would have based its organizat ion of the California underworld.” Cohen understood the threat. But he was preoccupied with a more pressing problem: the people who kept trying to kill him.
Mickey accepted the fact that his chosen profession entailed risks. That local crazies like Maxie Shaman would occasionally come at him was no surprise. What was a surprise was that professional hit men would repeatedly try to kill him. Bugsy Siegel had died because he’d angered virtually every other top figure in the Syndicate. Mickey hadn’t. On the contrary, he’d gotten the nod to take over Bugsy’s book. Manhattan mobster Frank Costello, the most influential Mob boss in the country, backed him. So did the Cleveland outfit, a far larger presence in Los Angeles than is commonly realized. A rogue hit of the sort attempted at Sherry’s—one that endangered civilians and nearly killed a policeman—seemed like something no professional criminal would do.
