by John Buntin
Cohen was unfazed. Soon after the interview with Wallace, Cohen went on the WINS radio station. There he repeated his charges and dared Parker to file suit. Executives at ABC were more worried. Unlike Mickey Cohen, ABC possessed legitimate income and assets, and Cohen’s vituperative comments looked rather shaky in the light of day. The next day ABC offered its “sincere apologies for any personal distress resulting from this telecast.” It also decided to withhold the show from the handful of stations that had not yet aired it. Parker was not mollified. He, Hamilton, and ex-mayor Fletcher Bowron responded that they would continue to explore their legal options.
A week later, ABC vice president Oliver Treyz went on the air. With a chastened Wallace standing by his side, Treyz allowed as to how something “profoundly regrettable occurred while Mr. Wallace was questioning Mickey Cohen.” ABC, he continued, “retracts and withdraws in full all statements made on last Sunday’s program concerning the Los Angeles city government, and specifically, Chief William H. Parker.”
ABC’s apology did little to assuage the anger of Parker’s supporters. From Washington, D.C., Senate investigations subcommittee staff director Robert Kennedy delivered a stinging rebuke to ABC.
“Gentlemen,” the letter began.
A week ago Sunday, I watched the Mike Wallace show and his guest, Mickey Cohen. I was deeply disturbed.
In the investigation that this Committee has been conducting, we have to work closely with police departments throughout the country. I want to say that no department has been more cooperative or has impressed us more with its efficiency, thoroughness and honesty than Mr. Parker’s in Los Angeles.
Although I do not have a transcript here in Washington, it was my impression that Mike Wallace urged Mickey Cohen to name Captain Hamilton as a degenerate. In my estimation, I would consider Captain Hamilton as the best police officer we have worked with since our investigation began….
To allow such serious and unsubstantiated charges to be made on nationwide television is grossly unfair and unjust.
Very truly yours,
Robert Kennedy
Chief Counsel
Cohen was enraged by ABC’s backtracking. From Los Angeles, he issued a statement of his own: “Any retraction made by those spineless persons in regard to the television show I appeared on with Mike Wallace on A.B.C. network does not go for me.” Implicit in this response was a challenge—sue if you dare.
Parker dared. On July 8, he sued ABC, Mike Wallace, and The Mike Wallace Interview’s sponsors for $2 million. (Captain Hamilton and former mayor Fletcher Bowron also filed million-dollar libel lawsuits.) He did not file suit against Cohen, on the grounds that Mickey claimed to have no assets and was already deeply indebted to the federal government. ABC’s attorneys sought out Mickey, hoping to discover some substance that would support his allegations. But now that ABC was calling on Cohen to show his hand, Mickey abruptly folded. Later, he would mutter only that he’d had incriminating information about Parker pinching a prostitute’s ass on a yacht during a policing convention in Miami. Even if this were true, it hardly established that Parker was a bagman for the Shaws in the 1930s. ABC’s attorneys realized that it was time to seek a settlement.
COHEN, meanwhile, was dealing with another problem: the wrath of his coreligionists. Ever since the idea had surfaced in the press that Cohen would convert to Christianity, Jews from across the country had been calling Michael’s Greenhouses to urge Mickey against betraying his people. On the evening of Wednesday, May 22, Cohen attended the Graham campaign. But he did not come forward to be harvested for Christ, meeting privately instead with W. C. Jones and Jimmy Vaus after the rally. The meeting reportedly was stormy. Jones berated Mickey for continuing to associate with his gangster friends. Cohen responded by angrily declaring, “If I have to give up my friends to be a Christian, I’m pulling out. I renounce it right now.” Then he stormed out. With that, Mickey’s Manhattan adventure came to an end.
Just days after his anticlimactic appearance at Madison Square Garden, Cohen was served with a subpoena by the FBI and flown to Chicago, where he was forced to testify at the trial of Outfit leader Paul Ricca, whom federal authorities were attempting to deport to Italy. Cohen had nothing to say. While he was more than ready to talk about himself, the old taciturnity reasserted itself when the topic turned to other gangsters. Everywhere he went, Cohen was shadowed by officers of the LAPD intelligence division. But Cohen professed to have nothing but scorn for Chief Parker’s efforts to shadow and intimidate him. When, at some point the evening before his flight back to Los Angeles, Mickey slipped his LAPD security detail, he personally telegrammed Chief Parker to inform him of his flight number and arrival time in L.A. It was Cohen’s personal little “fuck you.”
MICKEY arrived back in Los Angeles in late May. In an attempt to stem the tide of bad news, he immediately announced that Ben Hecht had begun work on his life story, now titled The Soul of a Gunman. It was clear that Mickey intended to do everything he could to continue his PR blitz (despite a report from Walter Winchell that Cohen’s compatriots in the underworld were getting fed up with Mickey “The Louse” Cohen’s clamoring for public attention). But back in L.A., Cohen found that an unpleasant new reality awaited him. Where previously Mickey had been shadowed, he was now actively harassed. His first weekend back, two alert patrolmen saw Cohen stop his car at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western and walk over to a newsstand to buy a paper. A line of cars behind him started honking as the light changed. So the two officers went over and gave him a ticket. Cohen protested that he’d simply stopped behind a stalled car and stepped out to get a paper while the lady in the car in front of him tried to restart her engine. He refused to sign the citation. So the two officers hauled him in and booked him, on charges of causing a traffic jam. Cohen vowed to fight the charges.
“They can’t get away with stuff like this,” he fumed to the reporters who had rushed over when they heard that Cohen had been arrested (in riding breeches and full equestrian attire). “This is some more of Bill Parker’s stuff.”
Los Angeles-area law enforcement was just getting started. Prosecutors decided to throw the book at Cohen on the traffic jam charges. That summer he was convicted—and fined $11. He vowed to appeal the decision. The following month, Beverly Hills police arrested Cohen as he was tucking into a ham-and-eggs breakfast (at 2:30 p.m.) at one of his favorite restaurants. The charge was failing to register as an ex-felon. (The Beverly Hills municipal code limited convicted felons to five visits to Beverly Hills every thirty days.) Police hauled Cohen, “screaming epithets,” into Chief Anderson’s office for questioning. A scuffle ensued, and Anderson ordered that Cohen be charged with disorderly conduct as well. A. L. Wirin and the ACLU stepped forward to defend him, arguing that the registration requirement was unconstitutional. A Beverly Hills municipal court judge agreed and threw out the charges against Cohen. A jury later acquitted Cohen on the remaining charge.
Mickey’s courtroom successes didn’t extend to his business ventures. Exotic plants apparently were not, in fact, “a tremendous racket”—at least, not to someone who had never managed (or bothered) to figure out which plant was which. That summer, Cohen announced that he was leaving the green house business.
“I didn’t know a plant from a boxing glove,” he confessed to the press, “but I would have made a go of it if those cops had left me alone. We couldn’t go into the greenhouse without their hot breath wilting the plants.”
Henceforth, Mickey would focus his business endeavors in an area where he was an acknowledged expert—ice cream. Together with his sister and brother-in-law (and investors from Las Vegas), Cohen was preparing to open the Carousel ice cream parlor in Brentwood. He also announced that he would be focusing on his book with Hecht and on a movie spin-off, The Mickey Cohen Story. Whispers of a huge movie deal soon filled the press. Cohen attorney George Bieber claimed that Cohen had been offered $200,000 in cash and 80 percent of profits but that Cohen was
holding out for 20 percent of gross box office receipts. Beiber also predicted that Hecht’s book would bring in $500,000 to $700,000.
Back in New York City, Mike Wallace wasn’t entertaining visions of the silver screen. Instead, he was trying to save his job. ABC’s promises to back Wallace through controversies were now forgotten. Instead, John Daly, the head of the network news division, stepped forward to deal with the man he saw as a loose cannon. A minder was assigned to vet the script before every show and to monitor Wallace’s performances on the set—“a balding, humpty-dumpty kind of guy,” as Ramrus recalled him. He was also humorless. Typical of the petty obstacles the show now faced was the minder’s reaction to a proposed question for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright:
Wallace: Mr. Wright, I understand you designed a dream home for Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. As an architect, what do you think of Marilyn Monroe’s architecture?
“Objection,” came the response from the minder. “Indecent question.”
“What’s indecent?” replied Wallace and Yates, innocently. The answer, of course, was the thought that had arisen in the mind of the minder.
For the most part, Wallace just brushed aside objections of this sort and did what he wanted to do. Still, the new regime was demoralizing. Although ABC eventually settled Parker’s suit for $45,000, ABC’s insurer, Lloyd’s of London, took a dim view of the controversy. It insisted that henceforth a lawyer monitor every show, complete with cue cards. When Wallace approached a controversial subject, the attorney (who sat just outside the range of the camera) would hold up a “BE CAREFUL” cue card. The most dangerous conversational forays resulted in “STOP” or “RETREAT” cards. This was no way to run a TV show whose entire point was to be daring and provocative, and it took its toll. That December, ABC had another brush with a libel lawsuit after Wallace guest Drew Pearson charged that Senator John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage had been ghostwritten. In the spring of 1958, Philip Morris announced that it would not be renewing its sponsorship of The Mike Wallace Interview. Wallace’s days as a national TV personality seemed numbered. The following fall, Wallace left ABC and returned to local television on Channel 13, a station even smaller than his old employer, Channel 5. Not until 1963, when Wallace managed to convince CBS News president Dick Salant to take a chance on him, did Wallace get another job at a network, this time as the host of a radio interview program and the anchor of the new CBS Morning News. In 1968, Wallace finally got another shot at a show that offered to make him a national media star. That program was 60 Minutes.
MEANWHILE, back in Washington, D.C., Robert Kennedy was puzzling over a question. In keeping with Hamilton’s suggestions, the investigations subcommittee had taken a close look at the behavior of Teamsters Union officials in the Pacific Northwest. They had uncovered disturbing evidence of stolen funds, including evidence that implicated Teamsters president David Beck. They had also discovered that Kennedy’s friends in the New York press had been right: Certain unions—the Operating Engineers, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, and, again, the Teamsters—did have long histories of involvement with organized crime. There was also evidence that tied emerging Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa to organized crime figures in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Chicago. As he considered these connections, Kennedy found himself mulling over a larger question: Was the Mafia a national, coordinated criminal enterprise, or did the phrase simply refer to the hierarchy of Italian organized crime in any given area? On November 13, 1957, Kennedy put that very question to his old acquaintance Joseph Amato, a Mob specialist with the Bureau of Narcotics.
“That is a big question to answer,” Amato replied. “But we believe that there does exist today in the United Sates a society, loosely organized, for the specific purpose of smuggling narcotics and committing other crimes…. It has its core in Italy and it is nationwide. In fact, international.”
The very next day, Kennedy and the world received definitive proof that Amato was right when New York state police decided to investigate an unusually large gathering of luxury cars and limousines at the home of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara outside the little town of Apalachin (pronounced “Apple-aykin”) in western New York. When the state police officers arrived, Barbara’s guests leapt into their cars and fled—running straight into a state police roadblock. Other gangsters ran into the woods, including (most likely) James Lanza from San Francisco, Sam Giancana of Chicago, Tommy Lucchese of New York City, and Joseph Zerilli of Detroit. Fifty-eight men were arrested. Only nineteen of the men (all of whom were Italian) were from upstate New York. The rest of the guests appeared to have come from cities all across the country and even from as far away as Cuba. John Scalisi had come from Cleveland. Santos Traficante had come from Havana. James Lanza had come from San Francisco. Frank DeSimone (the Dragnas’ longtime attorney, now the family boss in his own right) had come from Los Angeles. Twenty-three of the men came from New York City and northern New Jersey, including Joseph Profaci, Joseph Bonanno, and Vito Genovese. All told, the group’s members had been arrested 257 times, with more than a hundred convictions for serious offenses such as homicide, armed robbery, trafficking in narcotics, and extortion. In their pockets the police found $300,000 in cash.
It was clear that New York state police had stumbled across what appeared to be a board meeting of the Mafia. Newspapers across the country trumpeted the arrests. As astonishing as the fact that a massive international crime organization existed (and was meeting at some wiseguy’s house in upstate New York) was the list of legitimate businesses these men controlled. They included “dress companies, labor organizations, trucking companies, soft drink firms, dairy products, coat manufacturers, undertaking parlors, oil companies, ladies’ coat factories, real estate projects, curtain, slip cover and interior decorating, ships, restaurants, night clubs, grills, meat markets. Also vending machine sales, taxi companies, tobacco distributors, awning and siding firms, automotive conveying and hauling firms, importers of food and liquor, grocery stores and food chains, labor relations consulting firms, cement firms, waste paper removal, strap manufacture, liquor and beer distributors, textiles, shipping, ambulances, baseball clubs, news stands, motels, hotels, and juke boxes,” to name just a few. In short, the underworld had burrowed deeply into the fabric of American business.
Back in Washington, Robert Kennedy had a simple question: Who were these men? Seven years earlier, the Kefauver Committee had introduced Americans to gangsters Joe Adonis and Frank Costello (whose nervous hands were famously televised during the Kefauver Committee’s hearings in New York). But names such as Vito Genovese were unfamiliar. Kennedy’s first reaction, naturally enough, was to turn to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When the bureau failed to produce dossiers on these figures, Kennedy personally paid the director a visit, barging in (without an appointment) and demanding that the bureau provide the McClellan Committee with everything it had on this collection of hoods. Hoover was forced to reveal the humiliating truth. The bureau (in Kennedy’s words) “didn’t know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States.” Disgusted, Kennedy and his aides turned instead to the FBI’s minnow-sized rival, the Bureau of Narcotics, which was able to offer investigators a wealth of information on the activities of the men arrested in Apalachin. There was also one police department whose knowledge stood out—the LAPD.
One year earlier, the LAPD intelligence division had bugged a room of Conrad Hilton’s Town House hotel, where up-and-coming Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa was meeting with three residents of Chicago. At the time, Hoffa was in the middle of a heated campaign for the presidency of the Teamsters Union. According to an LAPD memo on the meeting (which later turned up in the files of the Chicago Crime Commission), the men in question included Marshall Caifano, who oversaw Chicago Outfit activities in Los Angeles, and Outfit boss Murray Humphreys. The memo stated in no uncertain terms that “a member of the Executive Board is being taken before
these men singly, and they are advising members of the Executive Board in no uncertain terms that Hoffa is to be the next President of the Teamsters Union.” Sure enough, that fall Hoffa was elected president of the Teamsters.
The news from Apalachin—and the LAPD intelligence division’s ability to tie Hoffa and the Teamsters to the Chicago Outfit—caused Kennedy to reconsider the depths of the corruption he had uncovered. The McClellan Committee had begun its work in 1956 by focusing on dishonesty and corruption in the clothing procurement program of the military services. That, in turn, had led to the discovery that gangsters such as Albert Anastasia and Johnny Dio had become deeply involved in both the textiles unions and the textiles business. Apalachin had revealed an even broader horizon of organized crime, one in which the underworld preyed upon entire industries and whole communities.
“The results of the underworld infiltration into labor-management affairs form a shocking pattern across the country,” Kennedy wrote one year later in his best-selling book The Enemy Within. “[T]he gangsters of today work in a highly organized fashion and are far more powerful now than at any time in the history of the country. They control political figures and threaten whole communities. They have stretched their tentacles of corruption and fear into industries both large and small. They grow stronger every day.”
Parker himself couldn’t have put it better. As Kennedy realized what a profound danger organized crime posed to the American way of life, he grew even more appreciative of the work the LAPD was doing. He also began to seriously consider Chief Parker’s idea of creating a national clearinghouse for intelligence information. Naturally, in the course of their work together Parker and Hamilton told Robert Kennedy all about the activities of Mickey Cohen. Not surprisingly, Robert Kennedy decided that he wanted to meet this Mickey Cohen in person—and nail him.
