by John Buntin
“We would if you talked murder,” Friday snaps back.
Even Parker supporters, such as the in-house publication of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, The Tidings, were somewhat disconcerted by the film’s depiction of harsh police tactics. But Parker insisted that such misgivings were misinformed.
“Far from being a threat to our freedom,” Parker wrote in the pages of the California Law Review the following spring, “the use of modern technological devices by the police may well be their most powerful tool in combating our internal enemies, and a vital necessity in the protection of our nation’s security, harmony, and internal well-being.”
In addition to trying to win public support for less restrictive wiretapping laws, Parker also sought broader legal protections for his officers. In the fall of 1954, Parker kicked off a campaign to persuade allies in the state legislature to pass a law shielding law enforcement officers from the threat of criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits for actions taken in the routine course of their work. But just weeks after Parker floated this proposal, state attorney general Pat Brown made an announcement that preempted Parker’s efforts. Brown suggested that local district attorneys henceforth consider prosecuting police officers who broke into citizens’ homes to install dictographs without a court order. Then, on April 27, 1955, the California Supreme Court suddenly and unexpectedly issued a ruling that threatened to destroy what Parker had so carefully built.
The case of Cahan v. California bore a striking resemblance to Irvine. This time it was the LAPD that had broken into the property of a suspected bookmaker, thirty-one-year-old Charlie Cahan. He was a big-time bookie, with a clearinghouse near the Coliseum, an elaborate call-back system to avoid police detection, and a network of backup “spots” across the city where debtors could place bets in person. The LAPD estimated that he was handling about $6 million a year, and his lifestyle showed it. According to an LAPD intelligence dossier, Cahan had “concubines, liquor by the case, a lavish penthouse, Cadillacs.” Cahan had emerged from nowhere and become an important player virtually overnight. Many assumed he was paying for police protection. He wasn’t. On the contrary, Chief Parker had instructed the intelligence division in no uncertain terms that he wanted “this son of a bitch in jail.”
So the intelligence division sent a man disguised as a termite inspector into the building housing Cahan’s accountants to install a dictograph. The recordings secured a conviction, and Cahan was fined $2,000, sentenced to nine days in prison, and given a five-year-probation. Cahan appealed the decision. An appeals court rejected it, but when Cahan took his case to the California Supreme Court, it was accepted. A narrow 4-3 majority threw out Cahan’s conviction.
“We have been compelled to [void the conviction and impose new evidentiary guidelines] because other remedies have completely failed to secure compliance with constitutional provisions on the part of police officers,” wrote Justice Roger Traynor in the majority opinion. He continued, “The courts under the old rule have been constantly required to participate in, and in effect condone, the lawless activities of law enforcement.”
Traynor served notice that such practices were now coming to an end. The court struck down a California law that allowed courts to accept evidence, regardless of the manner in which it was obtained. Henceforth evidence improperly acquired would be thrown out—period. This was a fairly extreme remedy. Few other states imposed the exclusionary rule in such a blanket fashion. But the court insisted that the stakes justified such a draconian remedy.
“Today one of the foremost concerns is the police state,” declared Justice Traynor bluntly. “Recent history has demonstrated all too clearly how short the step is from lawless although efficient enforcement of the law to the stamping out of human rights.”
Parker’s reaction was apoplectic. He described the ruling as “a terrible blow to efficient law enforcement” and warned that the decision “will probably set law enforcement back fifty years.”
“The positive implication drawn from the Cahan case is that activities of the police are a greater social menace than are the activities of the criminal,” he told the press. “This, even as a suggestion, is terrifying.” State assistant attorney general Clarence Linn agreed, calling the ruling “the Magna Carta of the criminal.” In a meeting with the Mirror, the chief revealed that in the month following the Cahan decision, arrests had plummeted across the board: bookmaking arrests, down 42 percent; narcotics, down 38 percent; weapons, down 20 percent. A headline in the Mirror-News captured the chief’s sentiments perfectly: “Criminals Laugh at L.A. Police, Says Chief. Underworld Rejoices in Ruling.”
Cahan offended Parker on many levels. As an attorney, he believed the ruling was ill considered and flew in the face of the doctrine of stare decisis, which held that courts should generally stand by earlier decisions. As a lawman, he found it insulting. But the new restrictions imposed by the courts on the police also worried Parker for a more immediate reason. For on October 9, 1955, after three years, eight months, and sixteen days in the joint, Mickey Cohen walked out of prison a free man.
19
The Enemy Within
“He is intent on being a respectable member of society as a senatorial nominee on getting elected. The odds are three to one that Mickey Cohen, if not stopped by a bullet, will wind up a Rotarian.”
—Ben Hecht
WHEN MICKEY COHEN stepped off the ferry from McNeil Island at the little town of Steilacoom, near Tacoma, the press was waiting. Mickey didn’t seem surprised. Even after three years in prison, he accepted press attention as his due. In fact, Cohen seemed more relaxed—and more chatty—than ever before. When asked what his next plans were, Mickey indicated that he was leaning toward opening a bar and grill, “maybe in Beverly Hills or the Miracle Mile”—this despite the fact that Cohen still owed Uncle Sam $156,123. In fact, he told the assembled press, he and a few partners had already hired an architect to draw up plans. The news was instantly telegraphed to L.A., where official reaction was not long in coming.
“There is not a chance that anyone with Cohen’s record would be given a liquor license,” declared Phil Davis, the Southern California liquor administrator for the state board of equalization. “I can’t say he would be very welcome in Beverly Hills,” agreed Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson. The Los Angeles City Council voted en masse against a liquor license for Cohen, despite the fact that the city council had no say in such matters. As for Chief Parker, he suspected that Mickey’s restaurant was nothing but a sham. When a reporter asked the chief if Parker had any plans to put Cohen under surveillance, he replied tersely, “The German army didn’t come over and tell their plans to the Allies.”
When talking to the press, Cohen projected a jaunty self-confidence. But to those who knew him well, Mickey seemed changed. Despite his long history of violence, both in the ring and on the street, he appeared to have been badly shaken by his experiences in prison.
“When I was on the Island, I saw things I couldn’t believe myself. And I thought I’d seen everything,” Mickey said later. One night in particular had driven home the brutality and indifference of prison authorities:
The middle of the night, a fella a couple of cells down starts screamin’. I call the guard and we go together to see what’s the matter with the guy. The light in his cell don’t turn on and the guard has to use a flashlight. The screamer is lying in a pool of blood two inches deep. When the guard investigates he discovers that this guy was trying to give himself some fun by sticking an electric light bulb up his behind. In the middle of his enjoyment the glove had busted….
More startling, even, than this was what happened next: After being treated at the infirmary, the man “got a black mark for destroying government property.”
Cohen was determined never to return to prison again. His aversion to further incarceration was so great that Mickey was prepared to take a desperate step: He would go straight. He decided to start by doing something that for an unlettere
d gangster was remarkable: He would write a book. Of course, as someone who was basically illiterate, Mickey couldn’t really do this on his own. Fortunately for Cohen, Hollywood’s most famous screenwriter was about to come calling.
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER Mickey’s return to Los Angeles, the screenwriter Ben Hecht was talking with the director Otto Preminger. Hecht was Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, the person responsible for such films as Scarface (the first gangster movie), The Front Page (based on his days as a newspaperman in Chicago), Gone with the Wind (an uncredited rewrite), His Girl Friday, Spellbound, and Notorious. Preminger was an Austrian Jewish emigre with a deep interest in abnormal psychology and crime. (His father had been the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) His breakout hit was the 1944 noir thriller Laura, which told the story of a detective investigating the slaying of a beautiful young woman who had been murdered despite—or because of—her ability to make men love her. As the investigation progressed, the detective himself fell under her spell. Laura’s success made Preminger one of the top directors in Hollywood. In 1955, he had begun work on another noir drama, The Man with the Golden Arm. Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, the film told the story of a heroin addict (Frank Sinatra) with dreams of big band greatness. The aspiring drummer gets clean in prison, but after his release, he encounters two old temptations, heroin and Kim Novak. (He succumbs to one.) Hecht was helping Preminger with the screenplay. Although Preminger was not unfamiliar with the American underworld—he was, among other things, the lover of the world-famous striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee—it still wasn’t his native idiom. One day, Hecht realized that he knew someone who could provide Preminger with just the right sort of color—Mickey Cohen.
It took a while to find Cohen. The haberdashery was long since closed. The Moreno manse in Brentwood had been sold. The papers had reported LaVonne’s new address in West Los Angeles—a nice apartment just off Santa Monica Boulevard near the Fox back lot (today’s Century City)—but Cohen wasn’t living there. Eventually, Hecht tracked him down at the Westwood Motor Inn, Mickey’s temporary work address. Cohen suggested that Hecht stop by his apartment for a visit.
On the appointed day, Hecht arrived at a small, nondescript apartment building. The only outward sign of Cohen’s residency within was a gleaming new Cadillac (“as luxurious and roomy as a hearse,” thought Hecht). When Hecht arrived, Mickey was in the shower. It was his third of the day.* Hecht knew this could take a while, so he looked around. The apartment was tiny—“so small it was almost impossible to walk swiftly in it without bumping into the walls”—but tastefully (indeed, professionally) decorated (albeit in a “bourgeois” fashion). It was also crammed with luxury items.
“There are thirty pressed and spotless suits crowded in the closet, all in tan shades,” jotted Hecht in his notebooks. “Twenty-five Chinese, Japanese, and Persian robes of silk hang there and thirty-five pairs of glistening shoes stand on the floor, neatly.”
Finally, Mickey himself appeared—“nude, dressed only in green socks held up by maroon garters.” He seemed lost in thought, scarcely bothering to acknowledge Hecht. Instead, he put on a new Panama hat and wandered about the small room, powdering himself with talcum, washing his hands, and looking for the perfect suit. Every twenty minutes or so, Mickey would dash over to the phone, place a call, and proceed to have a lengthy cryptic conversation “devoid of proper names.” (Cohen was convinced—no doubt correctly—that his phones were tapped.) Two hours later, the two men left for dinner at Fred Sica’s place.
Hecht was fascinated by Cohen’s odd behavior. But Mickey soon did something that was even more surprising. He started talking. When Hecht had first met Cohen in 1947 at Hecht’s home in Oceanside, Cohen had been “a calm, staring man in a dapper pastel suit.” He had conveyed an unmistakable air of menace (only slightly offset by his ice-cream-and-French-pastry-fueled pudginess). In those days, Mickey sometimes went for days without saying a word.
Not anymore. The postprison Cohen was a conversationalist, at least when the mood came over him. When Hecht brought Preminger over to meet the notorious gangster, Cohen freely recounted stories of his underworld days, explaining the intricacies of the bookie business. In the process, Mickey greatly confused the director, who mistook one of Mickey’s bookmaking phrases, “laying a horse” (which simply means wagering that a certain horse will lose), for a sexual act. (After the meeting, Preminger reportedly turned to Hecht and declared, “My God! Why would you take me to meet a man who lays horses?!”) Mickey had even begun work on a book about his life. When he showed it to Hecht, the Oscar-winning screenwriter was astonished. Cohen’s work in progress was actually pretty good. Never before had Hecht seen the criminal mind bared so openly and artlessly. But Cohen wasn’t just interested in reliving his glory days. His goal, he told Hecht, was nothing less than redemption.
“I’m a different man than the wild hot Jew kid who started stickin’ up joints in Cleveland, who lived from heist to heist in Chicago and Los Angeles,” he told Hecht.
“What changed you?” Hecht asked.
“First, common sense,” Cohen replied. “Then I wanted the respect of people—not just people in the underworld.” However, the deepest change was more visceral: “I lost the crazy heat in my head,” he told Hecht, “even though I seen enough dirty crooked double-crosses to keep me mad for a hundred years.”
Mickey assured Hecht that he was now determined to go straight. Indeed, he had already picked a new profession. He had become a florist.
Mickey insisted that he had returned to Los Angeles “stone broke.” But soon after his homecoming, Cohen somehow became the proprietor of a chain of greenhouses, with headquarters at 1402 Exposition Avenue near Normandie. Exposition Avenue was a long way from Mickey’s old haunts on Sunset, but Cohen did his best to display the old razzle-dazzle, renaming the chain Michael’s Greenhouses and telling the papers that he was “chucking the rackets for tropical foliage.” Among his first visitors were the officers of the LAPD intelligence squad. To its officers, Mickey confided the “real” reason he had gone into the business. Exotic flowers, he told the officers, was “a tremendous racket… out of this world.”
LaVonne thought Mickey had finally gone crazy. One month after Michael’s Greenhouses came into existence, she filed for divorce. Cohen was understanding. “LaVonne had married a dashing, colorful rough-tough hoodlum and when I came home she found me quite a bit different,” he piously informed the press. Cohen’s parole officers seemed to believe in Cohen’s reformation. There was just one problem: No one had much use for a gangster who had been scared straight.
“When I was a gangster like those characters in the movies, I tell you everybody admired me, including even the press,” Mickey told Hecht one night. “Now look at the situation…. [S]ince I came home”—Cohen’s preferred euphemism for getting out of jail—“the general public including the newspapers have been actin’ sour at me, as if they were sore at my having reformed and bein’ now a law abiding citizen.
“So help me, it’s unusual. I ask myself, ‘Can it be that the public prefers the type of person I was to the type of citizen I am now?’”
Mickey already knew the answer to that question. Of course they did.
One night after midnight, as Hecht sat at Cohen’s table at one of the nightclubs he frequented nearly every evening, Hecht realized what Cohen had become. “It is a gilgul I’m sitting with”—a soul suspended between the stages of reincarnation. “Life won’t let him in. A desperate Mickey is at the cafe table—not Mickey, the gun-flourishing heister, but a lonely knocker at the door.”
Chief Parker would have none of it. Cohen was a hoodlum through and through. If Mickey thought tropical plants were a “tremendous racket,” they probably were. Parker wanted every angle covered. Make sure Cohen’s not strong-arming people into buying exotic tropical plants, Parker told the intelligence division. The chief’s suspicions proved well found
ed: Several restaurateurs and bar owners confidentially informed the squad that Mickey had demanded that they pay $1,000 a month to rent a plastic fern—or else. Parker made it clear that he wanted Hamilton’s men to watch every move Mickey made.
The LAPD wasn’t the only law enforcement outfit tracking Cohen. So were agents from the Treasury Department. Mickey had resolutely refused to pay the federal government any of the back taxes he owed. He justified his inaction by claiming to be broke. When questioned about his new Cadillac and his lavish wardrobe, Cohen replied blandly that he enjoyed only what his friends gave (or loaned) him. Given Cohen’s history of extortion, this seemed more than a little suspicious. So FBI headquarters instructed the Los Angeles office to put Cohen under surveillance. In short order, Cohen had a discreet complement of G-men with him on his nocturnal nightclub outings. What they witnessed confirmed the bureau’s suspicions. Cohen, they reported, was routinely dropping $200 or $300 a night and generally spending money at a rate that only the most lucrative greenhouse in the world could provide.
The LAPD intelligence division was likewise uncovering evidence that Cohen was less reformed than he was letting on to his friend Ben Hecht. One source informed the division that Mickey was attempting to strong-arm a local linen business. The LAPD also heard rumors that Cohen, along with his old pal the great lightweight boxer Art “Golden Boy” Aragon, was fixing fights. LaVonne even called off the divorce and got back together with Mickey. Everything pointed to a full-fledged return to the life of crime.
IN THE FALL OF 1956, the LAPD gained another ally in its fight against organized crime: the thirty-year-old chief counsel of the Senate subcommittee on investigations, Robert Kennedy.
By 1956, the Kennedys were one of America’s best-known families. Bobby’s maternal grandfather, John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, had been mayor of Boston, as well as a congressman. Father Joseph was one of the country’s most powerful businessmen, a prominent Wall Street investment banker, ex-ambassador to the Court of St. James, a former movie magnate (and Gloria Swanson’s lover), and a high-end bootlegger. The oldest son, Joe Jr., whom Joe Sr. had been grooming for the presidency, had been killed during the Second World War; in 1946, the Navy had recognized his sacrifice by naming a destroyer after him. His brother Jack had stepped in and commenced on a remarkable rise to prominence. His Harvard College thesis, While England Slept, was published and became a best-selling book. During the war, he served on a PT boat. When it was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, Lieutenant Kennedy kept his head and saved most of his men, a feat of bravery that won him a Navy and Marine Corps Medal (and a front-page story in the the New York Times). In 1946, he was elected to the House of Representatives from his grandfather’s old district (after Joe Sr. bought out the incumbent). In 1952, Jack was elected to the U.S. Senate. Earlier that year, in 1956, Jack wrote another best-selling book, Profiles in Courage.
