L.A. Noir

by John Buntin

  But under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been the end of the story. For many years, the LAPD had secretly protected (and monitored) the activities of visiting VIPs by ensuring that local livery companies used undercover policemen as drivers. Most VIPs never knew, but Kennedy’s people did. They arranged for their own driver. As a result, there was no chance that a plainclothes LAPD officer would be at Kennedy’s side when, shortly after midnight, the candidate slipped out of the fifth-floor ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, where he’d just delivered a rousing victory speech and, exiting through its kitchen, encountered Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian angry about Kennedy’s support of Israel during the Six-Day War. As Kennedy was shaking hands with a busboy, Sirhan stepped out from beside a refrigerator and opened fire with a .22 caliber pistol. Two bullets entered the senator’s upper torso. One, fired from a distance of one inch away, entered the back of his head.

  Four LAPD patrol cars were circling the Ambassador. The police arrived within minutes, after Kennedy’s entourage, which included Kennedy’s bodyguard and the writer George Plimpton, had wrestled Sirhan to the ground. Kennedy was rushed to the Central Receiving Hospital, and then taken across the street to Good Samaritan Hospital for surgery. It was no use. Twenty-six hours later, at 1:44 a.m., June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy was pronounced dead.

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, the warden at the federal penitentiary in Springfield called Mickey Cohen into his office.

  “There’s a call from Washington, and he’s going to call back, like, say, one o’clock, so get showered and prepared,” he said, brusquely.

  When Cohen returned, he found his old pal the columnist Drew Pearson on the line. Needless to say, it was highly unusual for the warden of a federal prison to put a newspaper columnist through to an inmate.

  “We’re going for [Vice President Hubert] Humphrey for president,” Pearson informed him, “and I’ll assure you that if he becomes our president, you’re going to be given a medical parole.”

  This sounded good. Naturally, though, Mickey wanted to know why Pearson was willing to do such a tremendous favor.

  “I’m gonna use you again in the campaign against Nixon,” Pearson informed him. When Nixon first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1950, his campaign manager and attorney, Murray Chotiner, had asked Mickey Cohen to raise $75,000 for the campaign, a considerable sum in those days. Cohen responded by throwing a fund-raiser at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Said Cohen later: “It was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money, there wasn’t a legitimate person in the room.” Cohen had told Pearson about it. Now the columnist wanted to go public with the information.

  Cohen was amenable. He’d long since soured on Nixon, whom he considered to be a “rough hustler, like a goddamn small-town ward politician” who dressed like “maybe… a three-card Monte dealer” and was an anti-Semite to boot. “Go ahead if that’s the way to go,” Cohen replied.

  A series of accusatory columns by Pearson duly appeared. Mickey was ecstatic. Pearson assured him that a medical parole was simply a matter of time.

  “I got a definite promise from LBJ that one way or another, if Humphrey wins or loses, you’re going to get a parole or a medical parole at least,” Pearson assured him. News of the payoff spread throughout Washington. Rival columnist Jack Anderson ran a story saying that President Lyndon Johnson was considering a Cohen pardon as a reward for “dirt” Cohen had provided to Drew Pearson on Richard Nixon.

  Cohen wrote brother Harry to let him know that “the fix was in.” It wasn’t. Humphrey lost, and LBJ left office without granting Mickey a medical parole. Mickey didn’t even bother to ask his old acquaintance Richard Nixon. There was nothing for Cohen to do but serve out the remainder of his sentence.

  ON JANUARY 6, 1972, Mickey was released from the Springfield federal penitentiary. Despite extensive physical therapy for nearly a decade, Mickey still needed help with the most basic tasks, such as getting dressed and standing up. Age, ice cream, and, of course, his nearly fatal braining with the lead pipe had made Mickey an old man. But life beckoned still. The night before his release, Cohen bade good-bye to such dear friends as Johnny Dio. “Before you leave a prison after eleven years of being incarcerated,” he said later, “the most exciting day is the day before.”

  Once again, a crowd of reporters gathered for Cohen’s release. The frumpy little man who emerged wearing a white T-shirt, windbreaker, and rolled-up chinos bore little resemblance to the suave prisoner who had entered prison a decade earlier. “To hell with this rotten joint,” Cohen muttered, as he was helped to brother Harry, who’d come to pick him up—in a brand-new white Cadillac. Their first stop was Hamby’s restaurant in downtown Springfield, where Mickey gorged himself—two orders of ham and eggs, three glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a Danish pastry. Then he got a shave, a haircut, a massage, and a manicure. As always, he left a tip that was “extraordinary … particularly for a small town.” Then he went to a hotel and showered “for a couple of hours, I guess.”

  From Springfield, Mickey and Harry, along with a young man named Jim Smith, who suddenly appeared in the capacity of caretaker, drove to Hot Springs, to visit bootlegger Owney “The Killer” Madden’s widow and soak in the waters. (Owney had passed away during Mickey’s time in the joint.) Cohen hoped that the hot springs would help him “correct my walking at least forty to fifty percent, anyway.” Instead, several weeks of hydrotherapy weakened him badly. The food, however, was marvelous. The manager of the Arlington Hotel “still remembered me from my heydays” and made sure Mickey got plenty of Italian cuisine.

  “They brought out big silver things full of food, and the chef himself was out there dishing it out—every kind of pasta, every kind of chicken, veal, everything you could imagine,” Cohen recalled.

  Then it was on to New Orleans, to see Carlos Marcello. (“We talked about the old times, among other things.”) Only then did Mickey Cohen return to Los Angeles.

  What he found there stunned him. The Sunset Strip he had once known was gone. Its elegant nightclubs were shuttered. Teenage punks and rock ‘n’ roll had taken over what had once been Hollywood’s grandest boulevard. Elegance was no more. Broads now walked around “with skirts up to their neck.” Harry and Cohen caretaker Jim Smith tried to explain the fashion for miniskirts and, well, the sixties, but it was hard to understand. Even crime was bewildering and different.

  “Today, it’s a whole new setup, because you got punks running around. Kids go in, and people give them their money, and they still kill them afterwards,” Mickey lamented. In fact, Mickey Cohen was about to discover just how strange the new criminal underworld was.

  In February 1974, Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley by one of the decade’s most bizarre criminal terrorist groups, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Founded by an escaped African American convict who had adopted the nom de guerre “Cinque” (after the leader of the 1839 slave ship rebellion on the Amistad), the SLA espoused a strange blend of Maoist terrorism and Black Power ideology. In the early 1970s, the group assassinated a popular African American Berkeley school superintendent. Several members were convicted and incarcerated for the killing. Hearst was originally seized in order to facilitate a hostage exchange. But two months after her kidnapping, the story took a bizarre twist: Hearst took part in a bank robbery—as an SLA member. The video footage of Patty Hearst—who had adopted the name Tania—was a news sensation. The Bay Area was now too hot for the SLA. So Cinque decided to go south to his hometown of Los Angeles. That’s when Patty’s father Randolph called Mickey Cohen.

  Mickey Cohen had always revered William Randolph Hearst.

  “He was a benefactor for me throughout my career and when I needed him,” Mickey would later explain, perhaps in reference to the Hearst papers’ favorable coverage of Mickey during the Al Pearson beating trial. “There was nothing the Hearst people could call on me for that I would refuse or not attempt to do.”

  So w
hen Randolph Hearst called Mickey (at the recommendation of the San Francisco Chronicle’s crime reporter) and asked if he’d be willing to use his contacts in the underworld to locate Patty, Cohen was happy to oblige. Calling on certain acquaintances in the African American “sporting world,” Cohen soon made contact with some figures who might—or might not—have been SLA members or associates. A half dozen meetings ensued, all of them preceded by elaborate, multicar evasive maneuvers intended to throw off any cops who were trailing Cohen. Mickey was frankly jittery at the early meetings. Although he respected SLA members for their skill as lamsters, Cohen didn’t get the underground anti-Vietnam War movement. The SLA guys, in turn, viewed Cohen as a “square” because he didn’t drink and had never tried drugs. After a while, though, things got chummy. So chummy that Cohen felt a deal was within reach. Through his reporter-contact at the Chronicle, Cohen summoned Patty’s parents down from San Francisco to L.A.

  They met over dinner at Gatsby’s. Patty’s mother was nervous, probably because the maitre d’ came over early to inform them that they were being monitored by men from the LAPD intelligence division. She told Mickey that she was worried that her daughter might now be so committed to the SLA that she would not return to her parents’ custody willingly. That didn’t seem to concern Mickey. But what Catherine Hearst said next did.

  “We may be making a mistake bringing Patty back,” Mrs. Hearst continued quietly. “We may be bringing her back to do thirty, forty years in prison.”

  That was it for Mickey.

  “Lookit,” he told them, “if the situation is such that you folks don’t know whether she’s going to go to prison or not, I don’t want no part of it.” It was against Cohen’s code of ethics to send a lamster to prison. Cohen was done with the Hearsts.

  “I don’t want to be rude,” he told them, “but I got to beg off this thing.”

  Mickey’s muscle days were over. But as the threat of violence that had long been associated with him dissipated, he now became what, arguably, he’d long wanted to be—a celebrity. When he went to the fights, real celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Redd Foxx would come over to say hello. (Mickey appreciated the fact that Sinatra always greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and the more formal “Michael.”) Although Cohen’s tips were sadly reduced (“I maybe used to tip a barber twenty dollars, I maybe tip five dollars now”), he still wore tailor-made clothes and luxurious robes. He still dined at restaurants such as Chasen’s, Perino’s, and Mateo’s, even though it now took him four or five hours to get dressed to his standards. At theaters such as the Shubert, Cohen was a fixture on opening night. His sources of income remained mysterious. (His attorneys had won a settlement from the government for failing to protect Cohen in prison; however, the government had reclaimed most of the money as payment owed it for overdue taxes.) Friends like Frank Sinatra once more kicked in “gifts” to tide him over. Rumor had it that Cohen had resumed bookmaking.

  In September 1975, Mickey checked into UCLA Medical Center, complaining of pain from an ulcer. It turned out he had stomach cancer. His doctors informed him that he had only months to live. Mickey used the time to relate his life story to the writer John Peer Nugent. The highly idiosyncratic result was In My Own Words. The following summer, Mickey Cohen died at home in his sleep, leaving $3,000 in cash, which the IRS promptly took. With back taxes, penalties, and interest, he still owed the U.S. government $496,535.23.

  Epilogue

  “This city is plagued by hostility, rage and resentment. It could happen again.”

  —former FBI director William Webster, October 1992

  IN 1969, LAPD officer-turned-councilman Tom Bradley decided to challenge incumbent mayor Sam Yorty for the city’s top elected office. Bradley presented himself as a statesman who would address the city’s biggest issues—rapid transit, business growth, racial harmony. His base of support came primarily from the city’s African American community, which made up nearly 20 percent of the population, and from the liberal, heavily Jewish Westside, but it also included some surprising members of the city’s downtown business community, most notably the Los Angeles Times. To this formidable challenge, Yorty responded with a simple and devastating rejoinder: If Bradley was elected, Yorty charged, the police force would resign en masse, leaving (white) Angelenos defenseless before the (black and brown) criminal hordes.

  Just before the vote, chief of police Tom Reddin resigned to take a job as a news commentator (at a salary of $100,000 a year). Rumors immediately arose that Reddin had left rather than face the possibility of serving under Mayor Bradley. Despite Reddin’s denials that politics played a role in his decision, Bradley lost the general election.

  Reddin’s decision to step down gave Gates another shot at the chief’s position. This time, however, the recently divorced inspector scored poorly on the oral portion of the civil service exam and placed third on the list. At the top was Deputy Chief Ed Davis, whom the historian Gerald Woods would later describe as “a Protestant version of Bill Parker.” Like Parker, Davis was an innovator. His concept of “team policing” (which Davis referred to as “the basic car plan”) called for assigning officers to small geographic areas where they could work with residents to identify and solve crime problems. It prefigured what is today called community policing. Davis also eliminated the practice of awarding black officers low scores on the oral component of civil service exams, which had long limited the promotion of African Americans. But if Davis’s reforms were in some ways progressive, his personal style was not. Like Parker, he was also an outspoken cultural conservative. No one was safe from his derision. White liberals were derided as “swimming-pool Communists.” Homosexuals were “fruits.” In general, Davis encouraged his officers to treat “the counterculture” as an enemy.

  Few dared to complain. In 1973, Bradley once again challenged Yorty, along with California state assembly speaker Jesse Unruh and former police chief Tom Reddin. This time, Bradley was the front-runner. He carefully crafted a “law and order” platform that promised unyielding support for the police. This time, he won, beating Yorty soundly in another runoff to become Los Angeles’s first African American mayor.

  It took Bradley two more years to take control of the Police Commission. Only then, in 1975, did the commission order the department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division and Organized Crime Intelligence Division (the successors to Parker and Reddin’s intelligence division) to destroy the intelligence files the department had amassed over the course of the preceding four-odd decades. Some two million dossiers were shredded.* But both intelligence divisions were retained. Together, they continued to employ nearly two hundred officers.

  IN JANUARY 1978, after eight years as chief of police, Ed Davis resigned in order to pursue a career in politics. He was not interested in running for mayor. (“That position has no power. I have more power than the mayor.”) Only one position in California state government seemed like a clear step up—being governor. By making a run for statewide office, Davis gave Daryl Gates the opportunity he had been dreaming of since his very first days in the department, when Chief Parker first began to school him as his successor.

  Mayor Bradley didn’t want him. The mayor was fed up with what his associates referred to as “the LAPD mentality”—an attitude that even Daryl Gates would later describe as “independence bordering on arrogance.” Standing in his way was the system Bill Parker had created.

  Los Angeles’s civil service code still required the Police Commission to select a new chief from one of the top three scorers on the combined written/oral promotional exam, although it had been amended to provide for the possibility of an outside candidate. Rumor had it that Santa Monica police chief George Tielsch (who’d previously headed the Seattle Police Department) was Bradley’s top choice. But at the end of the examination process, Daryl Gates was number one on the eligibility list.

  The Police Commission hesitated. Selecting someone other than the top-ranked candidate
would be a big Political risk. As it considered its choice, police commissioner Jim Fisk asked for a private meeting with Gates.

  Fisk had been one of the LAPD’s most talented new officers. Like Bradley, he had joined the department in 1940. He quickly established himself as one of the department’s bravest policemen and routinely topped the civil service examinations. However, Fisk also had a reputation as a liberal. He was passed over by Parker for a position as deputy chief in the mid-1950s. Tapped to lead the department’s community relations effort after Watts, he was passed over for the position of chief after Parker died, despite having the highest civil service score. When Reddin retired, the Police Commission again ignored Fisk’s top score to select Ed Davis as police chief. Fisk left to teach at UCLA until he was summoned back by Mayor Bradley. As a member of the Police Commission, he was supposedly one of the department’s five bosses. As a result, Fisk might well have expected that when he asked Gates to be more “flexible”—to show some willingness to take direction from the Police Commission—the assistant chief would have responded positively.

  “Okay. What issue do you want me to compromise on?” Gates replied.

  The Police Commission was under pressure to contain the department’s rising costs (which were increasing, in no small measure, as a result of a pay increase Gates himself had championed as assistant chief). Fisk explained that he and his fellow commissioners felt that one way to mitigate the problem would be to prune the number of upper-level positions in the department. Gates listened noncommittally. He knew that one of his rivals for the top position, deputy chief Bob Vernon, had presented the commission with a detailed plan for trimming top management. Yet when Gates appeared before the full Police Commission and was asked if he’d be willing to eliminate upper-management positions, his reply was a simple “No.”