They’d stop at a dusty roadside camp on the outskirts of Anywhere U.S.A., where everyone got out but Fred and his young wife and the iron-muscled Gus. An aunt would take charge of baby Jack, who traveled in a makeshift cradle they suspended on a rope inside one car, hanging down behind the front seat. While other Wunderlichs wandered off to find a nearby farm, searching for a stray chicken to poach, Fred put on his three-piece suit and Lillian her frilliest dress, with a hat to match. Gus got ready in a white shirt and vest … and a chauffeur’s cap. Then they rode in toward Main Street in the imposing Marmon, the couple in back, Gus up at the wheel. Fred called him “kid” and “palie,” but Gus was an ideal chauffeur, having driven farm vehicles, and rebuilt their motors, from the day he quit the sixth grade.
In each town, Gus would look for the busiest tavern and stall the Marmon in front of it. By the time he got out and lifted the hood, a crowd would be gathering to gawk at the car that sure wasn’t a Ford and at the regal-looking couple inside, dressed to the nines. Gus would examine the engine and shake his head and ask if anyone knew where he could find tools. Then he’d walk back to tell Fred, “Excuse me sir, it’s going to take a while to fix. Why don’t you go inside where it’s cool and have some refreshment?”
Fred would take Lillian’s hand and stride into the tavern and as soon as they disappeared a local would ask, “Who’s that?” Gus-the-chauffeur then would tell of the finance company Fred ran, consolidated or associated something-or-other, and then he’d asked the locals, “Do you have any pool tables in there?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, my boss fancies himself a pool player. He thinks he can play.”
Gus would glance side to side to make sure his boss was gone then confide that if anyone knew what they were doing, and stayed sober, they could beat him easy. All Gus asked was that they share some of their take with the kindly servant who had tipped them off, slip him a token of appreciation after they took his boss to the cleaners. The news spread quickly that there was a rich, easy mark in town.
That’s how the Whalens and Wunderlichs financed their trek west, with Fred’s winnings from all the suckers in America’s heartland.
CHAPTER 2
The City Where Evil Comes from Without
The fear of invading evildoers had been a refrain in Los Angeles since before the turn of the century. The nation’s burgeoning railroad system did not reach the young city until 1876, when the Southern Pacific linked up to it from the North, and that same year a new position of Chief of Police was established to supervise six officers. By 1891 Los Angeles was a scattered community of 65,000 with a police force of seventy-five, counting the matron, clerk, bailiff, and secretary. If you discounted the two men who drove the horse-drawn Paddy wagons, Chief John Glass had 48 patrolmen to watch over thirty-six square miles and combat the nagging problems of the day. “There are some (too many) poker games kept running in the back of cigar stores and saloons, and they do great damage to the young men of this city and furnish a living for a lot of wretches who are too lazy to work,” Chief Glass told residents in his annual report. “Lottery gambling is not easily eradicated … The number of pawnbrokers and other dealers in second-hand goods has increased.” The good news for Los Angeles was that the tally of houses of prostitution had held steady and “war has been made on the pimps,” the chief said. “I believe that there now are less of those vile human beings in this city than in any time in years past.” Other good news was the $1,867.10 in savings achieved by having inmates cook their own food, rather than pay a restaurant to furnish prison meals. But Chief Glass had an ominous warning for the sun-drenched outpost that fancied itself America’s Garden of Eden: “One very serious cause of annoyance and danger to the residents of this city is yearly growing: Each winter brings us an increased number of burglars, safe-blowers and other skilled thieves from the large cities of the East.” While there had been some important arrests of “Eastern crooks,” Glass said it was time to furnish his officers with more than a rosewood club and leather belt and not count on them to buy their own handcuffs and revolvers. The chief called upon the city to provide each officer with all that plus a “police whistle, fire key … and a first-class repeating rifle.”
With the onset of the twentieth century, shootouts erupted among L.A.’s immigrant fruit cart vendors—first hints that the notorious Black Hand might be in town—and the unwelcomed outsiders were upgraded to “Eastern gangsters.” After George Maisano was shot three times in the back on June 2, 1906, he lived long enough to tell police that the gunman was a fellow immigrant fruit peddler, Joe Ardizzone, the “Iron Man” of the city’s small Italian quarter. But Ardizzone quickly “disappeared in the darkness,” noted one account at the time. “The case is a difficult one, because other Italians in the colony here are doing all they can to aid the criminal in escaping and refuse absolutely to talk about the case, saying they never heard of it.”
A few months later, a man on a bicycle shot Joseph Cuccia, a father of three, as he drove his wagon along North Main Street, his horses then spooking and the cart careening for two blocks. When a witness tried to run after the fleeing cyclist, the man turned with his gun and said, “Let no one try to follow me.” Next to go was a barber, Giovannino Bentivegna, who was shot through the window of his shop. Authorities said a letter found in his pocket was written in Sicilian and had “a crude drawing of a clown and a policeman,” the Black Hand’s warning to a stool pigeon. Those were the sort of incidents that had plagued New York’s Little Italy following the 1890s’ wave of immigration across the Atlantic. But Los Angeles? A new name was suggested for one street in its Italian quarter, “Shotgun Alley.”
In 1913, the LAPD announced that it was hiring twenty-five new officers to repel what were now described as “Eastern hoodlums,” spurred in part by a jewelry store heist on South Broadway. Unknown parties cut a two-foot hole in the roof, lowered themselves down a rope, avoided several alarms, and made off with a tray containing dozens of diamond rings worth $6,000, the most lucrative criminal haul in the city in a year. The culprits were pros, clearly, but Los Angeles officials were sure it was more, evidence of an influx of Bunco men, porch climbers (“ding-bats”), pickpockets (“dips”) and safe crackers (“pete blowers). “A thousand thieves are headed for Los Angeles,” police told the Los Angeles Times, adding that the grim news had come directly from law enforcement agencies in the know. “The eastern departments recently sent word that nearly every thief caught said he would leave for Los Angeles if released and, further, that every man that was wanted was reported to be in Los Angeles or headed for the city.”
As if to punctuate the warning—and quiet any skeptics—one of the twenty-five rookie police officers hired to repel the invasion almost immediately got into a shootout with two gunmen. Days on the job, Frank “Lefty” James became an overnight hero by taking a slug in his left shoulder while killing one of his assailants and wounding the second, who promptly told officers he had shuffled into town only the day before … from Buffalo.
Then two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were caught in a nighttime car chase and shootout on a lonely stretch of West Temple Street and one of the gunmen left behind a hat with a .45 bullet hole in it and a label from a store in … Chicago.
It was all leading to the nightmare scenario, the arrival of Al Capone. Word spread quickly that the nation’s most feared hoodlum had slipped into L.A. under an alias and checked into the Biltmore, the ornate new hotel with an aquamarine tile swimming pool in the basement. Detective Ed “Roughhouse” Brown led a delegation of cops over there to ceremoniously escort Capone and his bodyguards onto the first train back to Chicago. Just twenty-eight, yet rumored to be worth $2 million from the beer and booze trade, Capone took the bum’s rush in good humor, noting that his crew had at least gotten to tour a film studio. “I came here with my boyfriends to see a little of the country,” he quipped. “Why should everybody in this town pick on me?… we are tourists and I thought
you folks liked tourists. Whoever heard of anyone being run out of Los Angeles that had money?” But the city evidently was a dangerous place, even for a Capone—someone stole his jug of wine en route to the train station. “Now I won’t have a drink,” he said, “between here and home.”
So L.A. had an early glimpse of a hoodlum who turned everything into a goof—there would be another to come. The city also had a second celebrity cop guarding its borders. First “Lefty” James and now “Roughhouse” Brown. What a glorious headline Roughhouse earned. Glorious! Glorious!
“Scarface Al”—Came to Play
Now Look—He’s Gone Away!
* * *
BY THEN THE Whalens had settled in a small apartment above a dry goods store they opened with the last of Fred’s earnings from the trip out. They’d come in through the desert along the Old Santa Fe Trail, fixing the inevitable flat tires on the Dorris during the day and camping nights in tents as coyotes howled outside. There were few other Marmon Touring Cars on the roadway soon to be anointed Route 66, but it was crammed throughout 1922 with fellow Midwesterners in their Model Ts and jalopies, on their way to swelling Los Angeles’ population past San Francisco’s, making it the largest city in California. One hundred thousand people a year were migrating to the area, primarily from the heartland states and no longer drawn west by the last century’s fantasy of riches from gold. Though some were entranced by the fantasy that replaced it—of fame in the movies—for most it was enough to dream of a fresh start in “the city where there is everlasting sunshine,” in the words of Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., not to mention the free lunches that real estate developers served up to anyone visiting their new housing tracts. With no less than 631 subdivisions in the works the year the Whalens arrived, one builder was preparing to erect an enormous sign in the hills touting HOLLYWOODLAND, his housing tract below. Another adorned his lots with images of houses-to-come on false fronts supported by wooden braces, the real estate version of Hollywood sets. Another offered a free rooster for your backyard—you could still feel like a farmer, just like back in Iowa. A fellow Midwesterner-émigré to L.A. meanwhile was redefining the cemetery as a memorial park with none of those morbid monuments sticking up, just stones laid flat along peaceful sweeping lawns, so the bereaved might find hope and solace. Missouri native Herbert L. Eaton vowed that his Forest Lawn would be “as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness, as Eternal Life is unlike death.” In Los Angeles, the cemetery would become “God’s Garden!”
The Whalens set up shop a mile west of downtown, well beyond its commercial clutter and the intersection already touted as the busiest for traffic in the nation, though development was edging their way. The castle-like Ambassador Hotel had just gone up on Wilshire Boulevard, with 500 guest rooms and a nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove, where dancers waltzed “under the spell of the (artificial) palms.” But Wilshire remained unpaved in the other direction, away from the city, passing dairy farms and fields of lima beans as it headed toward the ocean. The Whalens also were within walking distance of Westlake Park, a favorite setting for the colorized postcards that were all the rage, with pastel-enhanced scenes of gents and ladies strolling in their Sunday finery by cypress and palm trees to a boathouse by the lake, an American-flag topped gazebo looking down on young couples paddling their canoes. You’d find such idealized images for sale next to the Whalens’ cash register, amid all the merchandise they stole.
Fred and Lillian were arrested after Christmas, 1924, charged with swiping three sweaters from another store across town. With Fred waiting in the getaway car, Lillian had reprised her Jesse James heritage by carrying off the sweaters while a clerk was helping other customers. Then Los Angeles police put more of the Whalens’ merchandise on display at the Central Station—stockings, dresses, women’s silk unmentionables—and merchants from around the city came by to examine the items and announced, “That’s mine!” or “That’s ours!” By the time of the Whalens’ trial, prosecutors had a dozen witnesses to their far-flung petty larceny.
When Fred had his turn on the witness stand he flashed his salesman’s smile and swore all the bras and nighties were gifts, given to them at a “birthday shower.” But jurors took all of twenty minutes to find the couple guilty. Lillian fainted when the verdict was announced and Fred had to endure a night in jail, plus the indignity of the local newspaper calling him a “self-professed champion billiard player.”
It was an unpleasant start to life in L.A., but at least no one pegged them as outsiders. In a city of refugees and wannabes, being ma-and-pa shopkeepers with two toddlers was enough to qualify the Whalens as bona fide Angelenos. There even was an upside to having the idiots doubt Fred’s ability with a cue.
He preferred straight pool, where you had to sink 125 balls, the no-nonsense tournament test. But the money still was at bars and parlors where the rubes liked quicker games such as Eight-Ball. A player of Fred’s caliber often could sink all the solids or stripes in one turn, but he’d never earn a buck if he did—even drunk, most pea-brains would take their money off the table after seeing how easily he ran out the rack. What he’d do instead, then, is barely miss his opening shots, lagging his balls—whether the stripes or solids—to the edge of the pockets. More importantly, he’d leave the white cue ball in a spot that gave the other guy no good shot, no opening at all. After the fellow’s futile turn, all Fred had to do was knock in his balls sitting on the edge of the pockets, duck shots anyone could execute. The other guys thought he was lucky, that’s it. They might start out playing for quarters, but a frustrated loser soon could be betting dollars, or more, to get even.
That was Fred Whalen’s MO as he made the rounds of upscale pool parlors favored by the beneficiaries of the area’s two booming industries. The oil people had cash in their pockets from the newly gushing Signal Hill field down by Long Beach, where one well alone spewed 1,000 gallons a day. The Hollywood folks were flush too, by 1927 spending $100 million a year making movies.
But Fred didn’t ignore the lowlier neighborhoods where pool was a staple of life, and a test of manhood. One such community was Boyle Heights, a slum on the east side of the Los Angeles River made undesirable by its proximity to factories and the rail yards. That neighborhood got groups proper L.A. didn’t want—or banned by real estate covenants—the Mexicans, Italians, and especially poor Russian Jews, often ones who had sampled New York first and now were refugees a second time. Boyle Heights was a classic survival-of-the-fittest slum, typified by the action each night at Art Weiner’s pool hall. It attracted guys with names like Matzie and Dago Frank who could roll any number they wanted with the right pair of dice and fancied themselves primo pool hustlers too. The tough local kids competed for their favor, including a pint-sized newsboy, proper name Meyer Harris Cohen, whose mother Fanny, an immigrant from Kiev, had brought her six children west after the death of her husband Max. They helped in the small grocery she opened, stacking cans, though her youngest preferred the streets or the pool hall, where he often racked balls and kept score for the local hustlers Matzie and Dago Frank. “Gimme the chalk!” they’d say and he’d do it, the little kid they called Mickey for short. But there’s no way of knowing if young Mickey Cohen ever saw Fred Whalen wander in to play his idols for fools, or whether their eyes locked across one of the green felt tables at Art Weiner’s pool hall, as they would in a Los Angeles courtroom, decades later.
* * *
SOMETIMES FRED WANTED to show off—he got tired of holding back—so the family would road trip out of L.A. to smaller communities reminiscent of the ones they’d victimized on their cross-country trip. Lillian sewed him a bright blue satin costume with a Russian Cossack–style top and a mask and they would post flyers advertising an exhibition by “The Masked Marvel.” Fred performed the tricks he’d learned as a kid, including hitting balls off Coke bottles, plus new ones using pairs of cue sticks as ramps—the cue ball went up one ramp and down another, then knocked three or four balls into pockets. Or
he’d hide balls under a handkerchief and sink them, or make them disappear. There was an exhilarating honesty to the shows, and not only because his skill was unleashed. It was one time he could announce who he was. “I’m going to cheat you,” he could say, “but even after I tell you, you still can’t see me cheat you.” Then he’d make the red ball vanish, steal it right from under their eyes.
Understand, he hadn’t given up on cons like the chauffeur bit, not at all. He loved that sting, loved it. In fact he’d do it again, just not with Gus putting on the cap to play a fake chauffeur in the St. Louis version of a rich man’s car. Fred Whalen soon would be able to afford a genuine chauffeur, and a genuine Stearns-Knight Touring Car, and how he got those had nothing to do with pool.
CHAPTER 3
Young Jack Whalen Takes a Plane Ride
The cops who’d run off Al Capone sounded no such alarm when a large group of locals—by L.A. standards—held a banquet ten days before Christmas, 1929 to celebrate the city’s Italo-American Welfare League. Much of it no doubt was old-fashioned politics, playing to the ethnics. But the mayor, district attorney, and county sheriff were among the guests at the Flower Auditorium who applauded tributes to Italian opera and the courage of Italian-Americans in the Great War, undaunted by the program listing the evening’s chairman as “J. Ardizzone” and its vice chairman as “J. I. Dragna.”
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 2
