by John Buntin
But Malcolm X wasn’t there for funeral publicity. He was determined to bring the LAPD to justice. Suspecting that police would seek to prosecute the men it had arrested in order to justify the seven shootings, he set to work lining up the services of one of the city’s most respected African American attorneys, Earl Broady. A former policeman and now a proud resident of Beverly Hills, Broady initially rejected these overtures. He thought of Black Muslims as riffraff and saw Parker as a reformer, albeit an autocratic one. However, Malcolm X’s persistence and his lucid explanations of what was at stake—plus the largest retainer fee Broady had ever been offered—eventually prevailed.*
Malcolm X’s efforts put the NAACP in an awkward situation. Although he was loath to associate his organization with the Nation of Islam, executive director Roy Wilkins suspected there was considerable truth to Malcolm X’s version of what had happened. Eventually, the NAACP decided to join the civil suit. Meanwhile, the LAPD counterattacked. Parker arranged for a group of Negro leaders, many of them ministers hostile to the Black Muslims, to endorse a campaign to eradicate the Nation of Islam. But when the group convened before the county board of supervisors on May 8, protesters shouted them down. Both the ministers and the supervisors were shaken. Not since the days of the Zoot Suit Riots, said one supervisor, had he felt such tension. The ministers decided to amend their request. Now, they proposed to work with the police to eradicate the Nation of Islam and police brutality. Three days later a group of twenty-five ministers met with Chief Parker. But when one of the participants, Rev. H. H. Brookins, broached a recent order to require two officers per car in Negro areas, Chief Parker declared, “I didn’t come here to be lectured,” and stalked out. Horrified, the head of the Police Commission persuaded Parker to return. But at the end of the meeting Parker complained that “the Negro people” seemed unable to conduct a civil exchange with him.
This was too much. Rev. J. Raymond Henderson decided to hold a protest at his Second Baptist Church, one of the largest congregations in the west. On the evening of Sunday, May 13, nearly three thousand people packed the church, among them the exotic Muslim leader from New York, Malcolm X. As a non-Christian, he was not allowed to step into the worship area. But when he rose from his front-row seat and asked to address the audience, Reverand Henderson allowed him to proceed. Malcolm X’s speech was so mesmerizing, an undercover LAPD officer reported, that when Reverend Henderson tried to interrupt his diatribe about police brutality, the reverend’s own congregation booed their minister into silence.
The LAPD was losing the black community.
In early June, a group called the United Clergymen for Central Los Angeles denounced Parker as “anti-Negro” and asked Mayor Yorty to personally investigate complaints of verbal and physical brutality. Parker responded that this was nothing more than an attempt by Communist sympathizers to use the technique of the “Big Lie” against the department. Mayor Yorty rushed to his police chief’s defense.
“I doubt if there is any city in the United States with more Negroes in government than Los Angeles,” Yorty told the press, noting that he himself was a member of the NAACP and that both his civil service and police commissions were dominated by minorities. This was technically true. The Police Commission’s five members did include a black attorney, a Latino doctor, and a Jewish lawyer. But these men hardly served as Parker’s boss. On the contrary, Parker himself had chosen at least one of the minority members, African American attorney Elbert Hudson. As for the constant drumbeat of allegations about police brutality, Yorty dismissed them as “wild and exaggerated” and echoed Parker’s suggestion that they were Communist inspired. That summer Parker flew to Washington, D.C., to brief Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the Black Muslim menace.
Chief Parker ignored—or mocked—those who sought to draw attention to African American grievances. When in early 1963, the Episcopal bishop of California drew attention to “the bad psychological pattern” between police and minority groups, Parker hit back, dismissing the prelate as an uninformed San Franciscan.
“The Negro community here has praised us long and loud,” Parker insisted. “We have the best relationship with Negroes of any big city in America today.”
Chief Parker and Mayor Yorty’s brush-off inspired black Angelenos to take action. The following year, in 1963, three African Americans were elected or appointed to the city council, Billy Mills, Gilbert Lindsay, and Tom Bradley. All had made police accountability a major part of their campaign platforms. All soon discovered that they could make no headway against Chief Parker.
That August, America watched while civil rights demonstrators converged in Washington, D.C., for a march to demand jobs and freedom for all Americans. To many Americans, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was a thrilling paean to the promises of freedom. To Chief Parker, it was an invitation to revolt. Immediately after the March on Washington, law enforcement and National Guard officials met to draft a plan to respond to civil disorder. An emergency plan was developed, numbering nearly a hundred pages in length. Later that fall, LAPD officials wrote a memo on police-guard coordination that included a provision that would permit the use of hand grenades against protesters.
The emergence of a civil rights movement founded on the concept of civil disobedience likewise disturbed Parker greatly—more greatly than the conditions that prompted its emergence. Parker seemed to believe that Los Angeles already was as integrated as it could be, short of embracing “reverse discrimination” (i.e., forcing white people to work with and live next to black people when they would rather not). When asked how he would have responded to civil rights demonstrations had he been the chief of police in Birmingham, Parker ducked the question. “Los Angeles is not Birmingham,” he replied. To Parker, the willingness of Los Angeles-area civil rights organizations to criticize the LAPD—a department that Chief Parker firmly believed had done “a magnificent job” with race relations—afforded the final proof that the civil rights movement was essentially pro-Communist and antipolice.
In Chief Parker’s world, race relations had a “through the looking glass” quality. The LAPD arrested a higher percentage of minorities than other big-city police departments because it enforced the law more equally than other departments. Race relations in Los Angeles seemed bad because race relations were so good that the city had become a target for agitators. Unnamed forces, Parker insisted, had chosen Los Angeles as “a proving ground” for their strategy of damaging the police precisely because it took racial complaints so seriously. Fortunately, the chief asserted, it wasn’t working. “Negroes,” he confidently asserted in the summer of 1963, “aren’t ready to make big demonstrations.” Nor would he permit the threat of disorder to intimidate the department into unilaterally disarming.
“This city can’t be sandbagged by some threat of disorder into destroying itself,” he told Los Angeles Times columnist Paul Coates in the summer of 1963. “We have the most advanced department in the nation in human relations.”
The country’s greatest police department would not allow its youngest great city to go up in flames.
* On May 14, an all-white coroner’s jury acquitted the officer involved in the point-blank shooting of one of the men at the mosque, Ronald X Stokes. Stokes had been shot with his hands raised because the officer who killed him felt endangered. The jury’s deliberations took less than thirty minutes. The Black Muslims were not treated so leniently. Despite Broady’s efforts, on July 14, 1963, eleven members of the Nation of Islam were convicted on a variety of charges and given prison sentences ranging from one to ten years. (“Sentences Reimposed on 11 Black Muslims,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1965.)
26
The Gas Chamber
“Don’t worry about me.”
—Mickey Cohen
IN JANUARY 1962, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Cohen’s tax conviction. Mickey returned to Alcatraz. But two weeks later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William D
ouglas stepped in again, allowing Mickey to leave on bail once more while the U.S. Supreme Court considered his final appeal. Soon thereafter, a reporter for the Valley News found him living quietly in a rented house in Van Nuys. He complained about the lack of closet space and the small hot water heater. He explained that he and Hagen were engaged and hoped to be married as soon as he won his income tax appeal. He was even working on a new version of his life story, tentatively titled The Poison Has Left Me. Meanwhile, on March 5, 1962, Mickey Cohen’s trial for the murder of Jack Whalen got under way. If convicted, Cohen faced the possibility of the gas chamber.
Cohen’s indictment arose from statements LoCigno had made in prison. Mickey’s junior henchman had confessed to a priest that he had not, in fact, shot Whalen but had agreed to be the fall guy after Mickey Cohen promised him a large cash payoff and a short prison term. He’d gotten neither. The priest in turn tipped off prosecutors in L.A. to the fact that LoCigno might be willing to talk. An agent then came up to pay LoCigno a visit. “I didn’t do the shooting,” he told the agent in their first meeting. “I can’t tell you who did but I can get someone to lead you to the gun.” A friend of LoCigno’s took investigators to a popular make-out spot on Mulholland Drive. There police found a rusty revolver that matched the type of gun fired in the Whalen killing. They quickly traced the gun’s ownership to another member of Mickey’s party, Roger Leonard.
Although he was willing to talk with authorities, LoCigno wasn’t willing to finger Leonard or anyone else as the actual gunman. Instead, at the second trial, LoCigno largely repeated the account he had given the jury in his first trial. The prosecution tried to offset this problem with a new witness—a USC student/model who had been dating Candy Barr’s manager at the time. The fearless coed testified that Barr’s manager had warned her that “there’s going to be trouble at Rondelli’s” and later said, “it was stupid to put all the guns in the trashcan.” However, she didn’t identify Mickey as the gunman either, and much of her testimony came perilously close to hearsay. The gun police had recovered following LoCigno’s suggestions was too rusty to be positively identified as the murder weapon. In short, prosecutors had very little in the way of new evidence that could tie Mickey to the shooting.
Cohen’s attorneys did not hesitate to make this point. “If you convict Mickey Cohen in this case,” declared his attorney during his closing statement on April 4, “you’ll be convicting him only because he’s Mickey Cohen, not because he’s guilty.” The following day, after a four-hour closing argument accusing Cohen and his attorneys of weaving “a web of deceit” around what prosecutors claimed was a premeditated conspiracy to kill Jack Whalen, the prosecution rested its case. On Thursday, the jury—eleven women and one man—retired to deliberate. By the end of the day Friday, they still had not reached a verdict. The presiding judge ordered them sequestered over the weekend.
On day four of the jury’s deliberations, newspaper columnist Paul Coates tracked down Cohen and found him “half-dozing in a Beverly Hills barber’s chair.” A manicurist was buffing his nails. A shoeshine boy was hard at work polishing his brand-new Florsheims. As Coates pondered the question of how a man who at any moment could be condemned to death could be so relaxed, the radio crackled to life.
“Here’s another bulletin,” the newscaster announced excitedly. “The Mickey Cohen murder trial jury, failing for the fourth day to reach a verdict, has been locked up again for the night.”
“Mickey’s barber gasped,” wrote Coates.
“The pressure—the suspense. It must be terrible,” the barber suggested. Mickey just grunted.
“This is a crazy town,” he finally answered. “They accuse me of bumping a guy off. So what do they do? They turn me loose and lock up my jury!”
The next day, the jury in Cohen’s case informed the judge that it was hopelessly deadlocked. Nine members of the jury were ready to acquit. Three insisted on holding out for a conviction. Reluctantly, Judge Lewis Drucker declared a mistrial.
“Although much testimony of the defendants was discredited and there was some admitted perjury, I consider the totality of the evidence against them shows no conspiracy exists,” declared the judge. With that, the murder charges were dismissed. Mickey Cohen had once again beaten the rap.
Cohen had dodged the gas chamber. But he couldn’t avoid a return trip to Alcatraz. Later that spring, the Supreme Court rejected his appeals request in his tax-evasion case. In early May, he bid Sandy Hagen and an estimated two hundred fans and autograph seekers farewell as he surrendered to authorities at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles. His mandatory release date was early 1972. Kissing Hagen good-bye, Mickey declared to the assembled crowd, “I followed the concept of life man should—except for that gambling operation.”
THE FOLLOWING FEBRUARY, Mickey Cohen was moved from Alcatraz to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. There he took over Vito Genovese’s old job in the electric shop, along with Genovese’s hot plate and shower. Mickey typically got off work a bit early, so he could make it to the showers first, for an extra-long rinse. But that particular day, when Cohen headed to the showers, wrapped in a towel, he found himself face to face with an unexpected visitor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Kennedy had come to offer the hoodlum one last opportunity to turn state’s witness for the government. “How the hell are you going to live fifteen years in this goddamn chicken coop?” he asked Cohen.
“Don’t worry about me,” Cohen replied. Then he proceeded to the shower.
Compared to Alcatraz, Atlanta was “paradise.” Cohen could listen to the radio and read the newspaper—even watch television from time to time. He slowly adjusted to prison hours—waking up at five thirty or six, going to sleep early, when lights went out. To stay in shape, “I did a lot of shadow boxing and knee bends.” He thought about appeals strategies and wrote letters to his attorneys. He engaged in “shop talk” with “certain guys from Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.” He also made nice with other inmates.
“[Y]ou say hello to everybody, particularly if you’re somebody with a name. See, if you don’t, they’ll say, ‘Who the hell does that son of a bitch think he is? He thinks he’s a big shot?’” From such small slights, shocking violence could sometimes erupt.
Cohen was playing it smart. But sometimes, even the smartest card player gets dealt a bad hand. That’s what happened to Mickey on August 14, 1963, when a deranged inmate, Estes McDonald, escaped from medical supervision. After scaling a chain-link fence and crossing the prison yard, he found Mickey Cohen inside watching TV—and viciously brained him with a three-foot-long lead pipe. By the time prison authorities restrained McDonald, Cohen was a bloody heap, his skull visibly indented. It took him six hours to regain consciousness. It was another two days before prison doctors were confident that Cohen would survive. Prison authorities tried to put a happy face on the situation for Sandy Hagen and Cohen family members, but the damage done was severe. Mickey’s legs were partially paralyzed. His arms were essentially useless. His voice was slurred. Cohen had to beg the prison bull for a special allotment of six rolls of toilet paper a day, simply to dry the tears that now rolled down his cheeks spontaneously, uncontrollably.
In October, Cohen was transferred to a special medical facility in Springfield, Missouri, for brain surgery. It was only partially successful. Cohen was still unable to walk following the operation and could use only one arm. Cohen was sent to Los Angeles for therapy—under armed guard. As a result of intensive physical therapy there, considerable progress was made. By the end of his time in Los Angeles, Cohen was able to move with the assistance of a walker. Progress was rewarded with a transfer back to Springfield. There, for most of the next eleven months, he was kept in solitary confinement, ostensibly for his protection. Cohen responded by filing a $10 million lawsuit against the government for negligence in allowing the convict who had attacked him to escape.
In March 1964, Cohen’s old friend Ben Hecht wrote the gangs
ter a sympathetic letter. “Dear Mickey,” it began.
You are not in the only jail there is. There is another jail called “old age” in which I am beginning to serve time. Like you, I am not allowed to complain or protest—Rose won’t stand for it.
I hope they let you look at television so that you can keep up on the shenanigans that the “holier than thous” continue to commit and perform. I was going to write a letter to Attorney General Kennedy about you—I inquired of a friend of his how he might react to such a letter. I was told he would react loudly and angrily rant against it
If there is such a thing as “Good luck” in the place where you are, I hope you find it.
Sincerely, Ben Hecht
Hecht died one month later. Cohen seemed trapped in a living death. Disconsolate, he wrote the faithful Sandy Hagen, telling her that she should wait for him no more.
“I may never come out of here alive, and the best I’m going to come out is terribly crippled,” he wrote. “I won’t be in no position to be any good to you or anyone else.”
Ever obedient, Hagen complied with Mickey’s instructions. She married and disappeared from the newspapers, never to be found again. Cohen was now truly alone.
BILL PARKER was also struggling against a failing body. In May 1964, Parker left Los Angeles for the Mayo Clinic. The papers reported he would be gone for a week of “skin and arthritic treatment.” In fact, it appears that he was undergoing serious gastrointestinal surgery. Associates were shocked at his appearance upon his return. Parker was gaunt and appeared to have aged several years. However, surgery didn’t seem to have diminished his zest for rhetorical combat. When later that summer rioting broke out in four eastern cities after clashes between police officers and African Americans, Parker was adamant that Los Angeles would see no similar large-scale disturbances. At appearances throughout the city, the chief returned to his theory of outside agitators, noting that most of the protesters who turned out for civil rights demonstrations in Los Angeles weren’t even black.
