Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles

by Paul Lieberman

  They carried two sacks of loot to their stolen fishing boat and motored away from the Monte Carlo and what looked to be the perfect robbery. “A boat leaves no trail,” noted the highest-ranking local detective soon put on the case, Long Beach Inspector Owen Murphy.

  But their fantasies of an easy life were undermined by an age-old mistake of the foolish criminal, suspicious spending. One of the pirate crew was veteran jailbird Frank Dudley, recently paroled from San Quentin. He believed in living it up during his interludes of freedom so he played the big shot at a downtown bar, giving the waitress a keep-the-change $5 bill and $10 to two women of questionable repute who came to sit by him. “More where this came from,” he boasted, and at that point two undercover detectives at a corner table had heard enough. Dudley asked only that they let him see his girlfriend, a redhead, before he said, “Ever hear of the Monte Carlo?”

  He quickly led officers to the address south of town where the gang had met to divide the cash, a bandbox house wedged between two cypress hedges on E. 116th Street. The raiders found Gus Wunderlich inside with his kid brother George, along with a loaded .38 wrapped in cloth under the dining table, a .38 under a pillow, and a .45 in a dresser. Still, it took a while for the raiders to discover the hidden chamber. They had to connect two wires virtually invisible in the bedroom’s baseboard, setting off a groaning in the closet—its concrete floor shifted, part of a perfect counterweight system, to expose a room below with a bar and several barrels, remnants of the glory days of Prohibition. All that was left was for the cops to stumble onto Gus’ hollowed-out bedpost full of jewelry, including a telltale diamond solitaire ring in a platinum setting.

  It’s not often there’s a federal trial for piracy and plundering. Augustus “Gus” Wunderlich swore at his that he was at the movies the night of the robbery, but he couldn’t describe the film he’d seen—he slept through it, he said. He got eight years for conspiracy and was signed into the federal penitentiary right behind a white slavery suspect and a murderer.

  There was some consolation for the family. The feds on the piracy case never found any evidence to prosecute George Wunderlich, the runt of the old bootlegging clan. And Gus fared better than the man who’d gotten him into that mess. Harry Allen Sherwood also was sentenced to federal prison, but didn’t live long after he got out. He stumbled into a hospital with a bullet by his spinal column, a form of justice for a high-risk life of crime that the courts did not hand out—and a reminder that the streets of the City of Angels could be just as perilous as its seas.

  PART II

  The Gangster Squad’s Sergeant Jack O’Mara Sets His Trap for Mickey

  CHAPTER 4

  Orientation in an Alley

  Los Angeles was supposed to have been transformed and cleansed by World War II, its scandals of the past erased by the time hordes of heroic servicemen returned home and streamed off their ships at the port, ready for a new start in life. The city was supposed to have bottomed out before the war. It wasn’t being a Pollyanna, or a Chamber of Commerce booster, to believe that everything had to be heading up-up-up for Los Angeles after one particularly horrible day, January 14, 1938.

  That was when private investigator Harry Raymond got into his car, turned on the ignition and a black-powder bomb went off under the hood. Raymond miraculously survived the 150 fragments doctors had to remove from him but the force of the blast carried far beyond his body. A former San Diego police chief, he had been helping expose local wrongdoing on behalf of the city’s unlikely civic reformer, Clifford Clinton. Clinton owned two cafeterias that served comfort food at low cost to the masses and often at no cost to the poor—under a policy of “whatever you wish to pay,” he gave away 10,000 free meals one summer during the Depression. The son of two Salvation Army captains, Clinton was a true Good Works soul who had been shocked by his service on a grand jury, which gave him a glimpse of the city’s underbelly. He personally funded CIVIC, the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee, to ferret out the sickening specifics: Los Angeles was home to 1,800 bookies, 600 brothels, 200 gambling parlors, and 23,000 slot machines, all operating under the nose of Mayor Frank Shaw.

  Shaw had won office with the slogan, “Throw the grafters out” but it was an open secret that his own brother was L.A.’s most accomplished of grafters. Joe Shaw had been elected to nothing but used a City Hall office as a perch to collect bribes of up to $1,000 from cops seeking promotions and much more from vice lords seeking protection. The most outrageous of those was a former LAPD Vice captain, Kansas-born Guy McAfee, who during his days on the force supposedly warned racketeers of raids by calling them up and whistling over the phone. Figuring that being a gambling czar paid better than being a cop, McAfee married a madam and then a starlet and ran “The World Famous Clover Club” on the Sunset Strip where the blackjack and roulette tables could flip over to be hidden, just in case.

  When Clifford Clinton’s do-gooder committee began raising a stink about the gambling parlors and brothels, the Shaws and their friends gave the crusader just what he wanted, an investigation—city inspectors swarmed into his cafeterias in the name of public health. When a bomb exploded at Clinton’s home, destroying his kitchen, they accused him of staging the episode himself, for publicity. “I’ll never stop now,” Clinton was said to have responded. Then his private investigator, Harry Raymond, tried to start his car and KABOOM!

  James “Two Gun” Davis, serving his second stint as L.A.’s police chief, was traveling in Mexico when the bomb exploded, so the head of his Special Intelligence Unit phoned him with the news. Captain Earle Kynette offered the chief a theory about who might have wanted to blow up the private eye, “I said that he had such a score of enemies in the underworld that possibly the enemy came from Las Vegas.” Unfortunately for Captain Kynette, evidence pointed closer to home, to his own squad. He and six of his men had been renting a house across from Raymond’s for $50 a month to watch him, eavesdrop on him and finally shut him up. They all took the fifth when called before a grand jury looking into the bombing, but Kynette did offer an alibi—he was at home nursing an eye-ache while his wife and in-laws played cards downstairs. “I made a compress out of boric acid and went to bed,” he said. Harder to explain was the detonating wire found in his garage. Kynette was convicted of attempted murder and sent to San Quentin.

  “It was a lousy, crooked department,” summed up Max Solomon, who knew about crooked L.A. from serving as defense attorney for many of its toughest characters of that era and for decades to come. “You know, in Chicago the gangsters paid off the police but the gangsters did the job. In Los Angeles, the police were the gangsters.”

  At least the city had reached its nadir—that day had to be it—and could start its climb. Captain Earle Kynette shouted “It’s a travesty of justice!” but he was behind bars. Chief “Two Gun” Davis was forced to resign. Mayor Frank Shaw was recalled, the first mayor of a major American city to be ousted that way, and in his place the city elected a more convincing reformer, a judge no less, Judge Fletcher E. Bowron. The new mayor was about sobriety, not sizzle, a man of gray suits, black shoes, rimless glasses, and a fondness for the dusty Los Angeles of his childhood before all the cars (“chug wagons,” he called them) and clutter. The scoundrels were not going to ruin the Los Angeles he remembered—more than 200 police commanders and officers were fired, demoted, retired, or transferred, including the head of another infamous detail, the Red Squad. The past was past, as they say, and the future finally was at hand, under the shadow of war.

  * * *

  WHAT HAD BEEN the nation’s thirty-sixth largest city at the turn of the century boomed into fifth place after the hostilities broke out in Europe and the Far East. Six aircraft factories soon were operating within ten miles of downtown and vast shipbuilding facilities at Los Angeles County’s ports. With much of the male population called away into the Armed Forces, including 983 members of the city police and fire departments, warm and willing bodies had to be found and r
ecruited. A decade after the LAPD spearheaded a Bum Blockade to keep migrants out of California, even the Okies from the Dust Bowl were welcomed with semi-open arms. By October 1943, the county had 569,000 new residents and a year later the aviation industry alone needed 230,000 workers to keep mammoth plants such as Lockheed’s in Burbank and Douglas’ in Santa Monica churning far beyond 9:00 to 5:00. More than 40 percent of the workers were women whose bandanas became almost as iconic to the war effort as the helmets of the GIs abroad. Earning 60 cents an hour at minimum, mothers on the assembly line could park their children in one of 244 nursery and daycare centers established by the National Aircraft War Production Council, while single women could go from their shifts as riveters to shifts as volunteer dance hostesses at the USO’s Hollywood Canteen, dreamed up by film stars John Garfield and Bette Davis to lift the spirits of servicemen on leave. The movie crowd also was waving the banner by selling war bonds on the road, adding to the positive pictures L.A. was sending to the world.

  The inevitable housing boom provided vivid visuals of its own as it echoed the real estate frenzy of the ’20s, when the Midwesterners came to town. Especially at the war’s end, scores of remaining orchards and ranches were sacrificed in the outlying San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys to make room for rows of two- and three-bedroom starter homes, yours for just $150 down in one development. The bottom line was that Los Angeles was overflowing with nearly a million newcomers who had little inkling of the city’s sordid past and with returning vets and their wives eager to start families and pursue the American Dream in a city that promised to deliver just that.

  There were a few glitches, of course, like the Zoot Suit Riots. The newcomers in the latest migration were not all pale-skinned farmers (or pool players) from Illinois or Missouri. This wave of transplants included tens of thousands of blacks from Alabama and Georgia for whom it was harder to blend in, along with Mexicans and other Latinos, some of whom chose to stand out. Teen-age Mexican-American boys began wearing frock jackets with exaggeratedly padded shoulders and pleated pants pulled high up on their waist, a look-at-me style enhanced by swinging key chains, wide-brimmed hats and hair slicked into ducktails. It was unclear how they began clashing with young sailors on leave, or who beat up on whom, but the situation got out of control by the time a throng of servicemen piled into twenty-nine taxis to seek out zoot suiters to pound on. As police swooped in amid the rumbles, they naturally sided with the men in the government’s uniforms, not those of the streets.

  When Mayor Bowron went on the radio to discuss the mess, he said most criticism he heard was that the police were not brutal enough, letting the zoot suiters “run wild and ruthlessly attack servicemen.” As the mayor saw it, his city fell under a spotlight no matter what it did. “What it will be next week or next month, I cannot guess,” he said, “but the Hollywood section of Los Angeles is always good for some spicy domestic scandals, and divorce cases of movie stars rate a headline in any newspaper from Maine to Florida.” Like any politician, he pleaded for more good news, pointing out how the area had produced one-tenth of America’s war goods and most all the oil used by the forces in the Pacific. The most miraculous news, however, was how his city had transformed its law enforcement over those same years it was helping to save the world.

  “It’s high time that Los Angeles should be given the reputation it deserves, that of a modern, progressive great city,” Mayor Bowron told the radio public. “The nation should know this about our Police Department: It has enforced the law. There is no widespread commercialized gambling or vice in Los Angeles, no pay-off. It is the cleanest large city in America.”

  But soon his cleanest large city in America would have to explain the bullet-riddled bodies of guys named Maxie, Paulie, Georgie, and The Meatball.

  * * *

  THE “PAINT STORE” at 8109 Beverly Boulevard wasn’t really a paint store, but neither was 250-pound Maxie Shaman the “produce broker” he claimed to be, or so his family described him after he barged in there on May 15, 1945 and was shot dead by the proprietor, Mickey Cohen. Shaman and his two brothers were well-known bookies and it wasn’t hard to figure out that Mickey’s place took bets on the horses too, regardless of what its sign said. The store was a sorry-looking one-story box set in a patchy, weedy lot, not the best advertising for a product that was supposed to beautify your home. Kon-Kre-Kota, “The Wonder Paint,” was touted on a billboard and on the sides of the store as a cement coating that would not peel, chip, leak, or burn. “Lasts Years Longer,” the signage promised, and Kon-Kre-Kota was “Vermin Proof,” too—the rats wouldn’t get it. There even were a few displays of paint, or whatever the stuff was, inside the narrow screened door. But beyond them was a back office with three phones and a pay window, along with scratch sheets listing the horses withdrawn in races at various tracks and the odds on those still running. There also was a desk with a .38 in the drawer, which is where Mickey sat waiting that afternoon, well aware of who was coming his way.

  The beef of the moment began at another place Mickey ran, a café on North La Brea. It also had two sides, or levels, the downstairs serving food like any restaurant while the upstairs hosted high-stakes craps games, took bets on sports events, and invited bookies to come in, settle accounts, and compare notes with their peers. Mickey ordered 5,000 chips at a time for the marathon poker sessions staged there, games in which the uninitiated might learn what could happen if you played with a (very subtly) shaved deck. A trusted customer calling in might be told, “We’ve got craps, roulette, everything.”

  The gambling area was adorned with photos of Mickey’s boxing idols—the tough little guys who’d done big things. They were fighters such as Bud Taylor, the bantamweight champ known as the “Terror of Terre Haute” who had killed two men with his fists, and Jackie Fields, a Jew from Chicago, born Jacob Finkelstein, who twice won the welterweight crown. Mickey was proud of having won a title himself as a five-foot-three flyweight when he lived in the Russian Town section of Boyle Heights, fighting in the newsboy championships at the American Legion just a few years after he was racking balls at Art Weiner’s pool hall. Soon he was headed east to go pro, first settling in Cleveland, where a brother lived, then spending stretches in New York and Chicago while segueing into other endeavors. Scrawny as he was as a teen-age fighter, he entered the ring like a gladiator with only a towel over his shoulder and no robe, his shorts displaying a Star of David. While he put on a good enough show to be matched with a future champion or two, there wasn’t a great future for him in that racket—his official record had him losing nine of his last ten fights. No matter. These days he strutted about the city’s nightspots as if he once held a belt.

  The spat at his La Brea Social Club the night before involved Max Shaman’s brother, Joe, who had misbehaved among the boxing pictures. Joe’s version was that he was leaving on his own when Mickey and some others in a car tried to run him down. “They caught me in a vacant lot and really gave me a working over,” Joe said. But accounts of events leading to a shooting are like family lore, the details get tweaked by the telling. Mickey at first said it was Joe who kept bothering other patrons and got rough, until “he ripped me over the head with a chair” … only to rethink, later on, who had wielded the furniture. Under Mickey’s subsequent account, his right-hand man Hooky Rothman warned Joe good, “Look it, behave yourself in here or get the fuck out,” but Joe didn’t cooperate. “So Hooky broke a chair over his head and bodily threw him out of the joint, slapped the shit out of him, you know, gave him a deal, gave him a going over.” That telling made more sense because it was Joe who needed the six stitches in his scalp.

  The next morning, the two other Shaman boys, Izzy and big Maxie, set out to get even. They stopped twice at Mickey’s social club on La Brea, then drove to Santa Anita racetrack and asked around for him there. By then it was no secret that they were on the prowl, and why.

  They finally tried the paint store on Beverly, where Izzy kept their car idling while t
wenty-eight-year-old Maxie went in. Izzy heard the first gunshot, rushed to the door and was warned not to enter. “Then I heard two or three or four more shots, so I ran to the car and got a pistol, walked back to the office and found nobody there but my brother, dead.”

  Mickey insisted that big Maxie pulled his gun first, so he grabbed it and, “I blasted him with a piece I had in my desk.” Mickey didn’t see any reason to stick around and see if Maxie, sprawled on the floor, was still breathing. “I didn’t stop to say, ‘Are ya dead?’ when I banged him out.”

  Mickey was thirty-one and no longer a flyweight. Though he had added a couple of inches to his listed height since his newsboy days, that may have been the (elevated) shoes. They already were describing him as pudgy and his face was puffed too, accentuated by a nose flattened from his time in the ring and by an unnaturally small, rounded mouth that was perpetually pursed, or pinched, in the classic “sucked-a-lemon” look—his standard look was displeased. They called Mickey “swarthy” also, but there was nothing he could do about that. His dark, bushy eyebrows grew like weeds, and he could shave in the morning and his face started to shadow by the time he got dressed and out the door. Of course, it took him longer than most to get ready given how he scrubbed himself in the hot shower for an hour at least before powdering his body. Then he washed his hands dozens of times each day. Mickey scoffed at any notion that his obsession was like the crazy lady’s in Shakespeare who kept seeing something on her flesh and pleaded, “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!” and that was supposed to be her guilt from killing. Bullshit. Mickey simply had one of those compulsions. He feared that germs, not bullets, would get him.