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

by Paul Lieberman

  He finally showed up at police headquarters with his lawyer and told how the big fat bookie, Maxie Shaman, had come at him with a .45, the one found by the body. Detectives knew it might be a drop gun, planted next to the corpse, but there were no witnesses to contradict Mickey’s tale of self-defense.

  “It was me or him,” Mickey said. “I let him have it.”

  The captain of Homicide, Thad Brown, tried to reassure the public that the shooting at the paint store had nothing to do with bookmaking. It was just a personal dispute among lowlifes, better forgotten.

  * * *

  MAXIE SHAMAN AT least had been shot behind closed doors. Paulie Gibbons got it May 2, 1946 on an all-too-public street, as he returned home from a card club at 2:40 A.M. Paulie had just $1.92 in his pocket—he had not had a good night at the card tables—but his gold watch and gold ring with his initials, in diamonds and sapphires, were still on his body, indicating that the gunman had something other than robbery in mind. The killer had been sitting in an Oldsmobile in an alley, waiting for Paulie to return to his apartment just off Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Neighbors heard him cry “Don’t! Don’t!” before the first shots, and one looked out the window as Paulie called out again, “Please don’t kill me!” before the final two shots to his head. The gunman got back in the Olds and drove off.

  The forty-five-year-old Gibbons had a rap sheet with thirty arrests going back to 1919 and was known for being slow to pay off on bets while casing gambling joints looking for lucky winners to rob—he was, in the lingo of his peers, a “gabby guy with plenty of front but few buckeroos in the kick.” A police report was more clinical, listing him as a “known gambler, bookmaker, pimp, muscle-man, etc.” and speculated that he had been killed “for welching or pulling a shady deal with associates.” In other words, the cops didn’t know nothing. They pulled in for questioning: A liquor store owner to whom Gibbons owed money; a dog track operator; the proprietor of a Central Avenue café; a wrestling promoter from Long Beach; a nightclub hat check concessionaire; and Mickey Cohen, operator of the La Brea Social Club. Mickey said he’d never heard of the man, which was odd because Paulie once was caught in a raid at his place and still carried a membership card from the La Brea Social Club.

  The final suspects questioned and released were a pair of gambling figures originally from Chicago, Georgie Levinson and Benny “The Meatball” Gamson, who supposedly had gotten into a black market nylon deal with Paulie. Before long they were dead, too.

  * * *

  THE ROUND-FACED MEATBALL, a bookie and a card cheat, had been shot at already, weeks before Paulie. His car was struck five times, though he denied that the holes in the side or the smashed back window were from gunplay. He also refused police protection—vandals must have drilled the holes, he said. But Gamson might have had an inkling he was a target because he was living away from his family in an apartment with Levinson, who was newer to town and described in police ledgers as “a Chicago trigger-man.” Authorities believed the pair had made enemies while trying to squeeze some unaffiliated bookies around Los Angeles into working with them. Meatball’s wife and three-year-old daughter were staying across town, while Levinson had his wife and two children, a boy and a girl, in the same building as the late Paulie Gibbons. The men themselves were holed up in an apartment house on Beverly Boulevard where another unit facing the front was set up for a phone clerk or lookout, adorned only with a portable radio, empty whiskey bottles and highball glasses. Neighbors this time heard no warning shouts or scuffle, suggesting that The Meatball and Georgie willingly opened the door for someone they knew at 1:30 A.M. on October 3. The killer must have come in blasting, though, for Georgie was dropped on the spot, hit in the shoulder, back and head. He had no time to get the Mauser automatic under the sheets of their pull-down bed, the .38 Colt under a blanket in the closet, or the two sawed-off shotguns in a brown suitcase. Meatball was shot five times in the stomach but managed to stumble away as the gunman fired twice at him in the hallway. Clutching his midsection, he made it out the front door and down a grassy slope just as a police cruiser was driving by, carrying a drunk to the station. The patrol officers got to him right as he died.

  A few years later, when authorities knew much more, a state crime report would link the killings of Paulie, Georgie, and The Meatball, saying “Their deaths automatically removed three potential obstacles in the path of Cohen’s plans for building his gambling empire.” But at the time about all they had were the headlines, OUTBREAK OF UNDERWORLD WAR FEARED, UNDERWORLD GRILLED, GANGSTERS IN GAMBLING WAR.

  Mayor Bowron said, “We must rid ourselves of gangsters.”

  * * *

  THE MAYOR’S FIRST instinct was to import cops from New York who were experienced in crimes like this. Someone else mentioned bringing back old “Lefty” James, reincarnating the past. But the city’s police chief had another idea. Clemence B. Horrall was a rarity on the force by having both a college degree and a Wild West pedigree. After studying animal husbandry at Washington State University, he moved to Montana to work for the cattle country version of a Savings & Loan, riding the range on horseback to investigate whether ranchers had all the stock they claimed as collateral. Monitoring that rugged crowd was almost a law enforcement job, which is how C. B. Horrall described it after frostbitten toes sent him south to warmer Los Angeles, where he joined the LAPD in 1923. Even then, he kept true to his roots by buying five acres in the Valley to keep pigs, chickens, horses, and cows, which his wife milked each morning. Horrall became chief in 1941, not long before Pearl Harbor, and put a cot in his office so he’d never have to leave if the city was attacked—that did not seem far-fetched after a Japanese submarine snuck into Santa Barbara Channel and fired shells onto the mainland up the coast. But Horrall was no longer a young man. He had served as a lieutenant back in the First World War and his heart gave him problems. Word was he used the cot to nap during the day, with a trusty sergeant stationed outside to buzz him awake if anyone important came by. Horrall even toyed with rewarding his gatekeeper by making him the head of his new special detail until his chief deputy, Joe Reed, talked him out of that foolishness. They didn’t need an office guy. They needed a street cop, like that tough little sergeant at the 77th Street Station, Willie Burns.

  Burns had been another traveler in the great Midwestern migration, coming from Minnesota, where he worked as a tree-topper as a teenager. Figuring that any profession had to be safer than timbering, he came west, joined the police force and got himself shot … by evil outsiders. The Starr brothers from Detroit had pulled a dozen grocery store and gas station robberies in their first month in L.A. before Burns confronted them outside the Western States Grocery on San Pedro Street and took a slug in his shoulder. Four years later, he was one of the LAPD officers dispersed to guard California’s borders against Okies and other Depression refugees looking for fruit picking work that usually wasn’t there, “thieves and thugs,” the police chief called the itinerant job seekers. The hobos responded with a song,

  I’d rather drink muddy water

  Sleep out in a hollow log

  Than be in California

  Treated like a dirty dog.

  Burns did not necessarily buy into the Bum Blockade—he basically was a good soldier who did what he was told. But he was a good soldier with skills that belied his small (five-foot-seven) stature. He had been a gunnery officer in the Marines—that’s how he knew about machine guns, learning on the Browning Automatic—and he had won a welterweight boxing title in Pacific Fleet competitions. In a department of sometimes undisciplined brawlers, he earned a reputation for being the opposite. He was light on his feet and quick and accurate with his fists, as he demonstrated as a watch sergeant when his officers brought in a struggling suspect. Without a word, he clocked the guy on the jaw, sending him sliding across the polished wood floor, all the way to the far end of the booking room. Only then did he ask, “OK, what’d the asshole do?” That was Willie Burns at work. Off the
job, he lived in a small house near the station, 900-square-feet, where he and his wife poured their heart into caring for a daughter crippled by polio. He was in line for a promotion from sergeant to lieutenant when Chief Horrall and Joe Reed called him in and asked if he’d head their new special detail.

  Another team had just been assembled in Los Angeles, the pro football Rams, and that was Burns’ model. A good football team started with the line, with the giants. So atop the list of cops Burns invited to his mysterious after-hours meeting was James Douglas “Jumbo” Kennard, a native of Grand View, Texas. Jumbo went six foot four, 245 pounds, and was the son of a small-town constable who kept the peace while sporting a tin badge atop full Western regalia. Jumbo left Texas at sixteen to find work as an oilfield roughneck in neighboring Oklahoma, where someone snapped a picture of him in his coveralls, looking as towering as the wells. Oilfield labor took him most of the way through the Depression before he moved to Los Angeles and briefly wasted his time as a parts man in an auto plant, fetching carburetors and batteries, before he discovered the LAPD. His fingers were so long, and strong, he could clamp them atop the heads of misbehaving suspects and lift them up out of a chair. He carried an intimidating 6-inch revolver, too—anything smaller would look puny in those hands. Willie Burns rejoiced when Jumbo Kennard was one of the seven cops who came back after their first meeting and said, “I’m in.”

  Benny Williams was in too. He was an old-timer born at the turn of the century, with a gimpy leg and crow’s-feet eyes. But he might have been a pro football player for real if the sport paid more than pennies back in its leather helmet era. After growing up in Indiana, Benny had joined one of the early traveling teams on which you played offense, defense, everything, while scrounging for a few bucks. He proved to be so skilled at dropkicking, in particular, that he got a letter from George Halas in 1921 inviting him to come out for the Chicago Bears, Halas’ team about to join a new circuit called the National Football League. But Benny had already become fascinated by Southern California after the Army sent him there to learn balloon reconnaissance during World War I. So he became a policeman rather than a Chicago Bear, and the brass placed him on a Prohibition liquor-fighting squad. He promptly was shot, like Burns—that happened a lot to cops in those days. In Benny’s case, he and his partner were struggling with a pimp who snatched the partner’s gun. Benny was wounded in the knee but Officer Vern Brindley was killed. The only time Benny’s wife saw him cry was at the hospital when he got the news. “He’s got two boys just like us,” Benny said. As if he wasn’t born strong enough, Benny built himself up doing construction work, volunteering as one of the officers who in their spare time built the Los Angeles Police Revolver and Athletic Club, better known as the Police Academy. In tussles with suspects, Benny’s trademark was a closing kick to the fanny that sent them flying. Once a drop-kicker, always a drop-kicker.

  Archie Case’s specialty was the rabbit punch to the back of the head. Archie carried 250 pounds on a six-foot frame and earned his rep in the black community once known as Mud Town and now called Watts, an area annexed into Los Angeles in 1926. For a beat officer on foot, it was not simple to transport a suspect—to get a patrol car you had to find a street-corner Gamewell call box, a fire-alarm–sized container that flipped open to reveal a phone connected right to the station house. Going to the box one time, Archie sensed that a young fellow he’d collared was antsy, itching to flee. Archie warned him, “You take off, I’m gonna shoot you in the ass.” The guy ran, naturally, and Archie shot him in the ass. When he got back on the Gamewell phone, he told the watch commander back at the station, “Never mind sending a pickup—send an ambulance,” and from then on Archie was known as “The Mayor of Watts.”

  That was the start of Willie Burns’ squad, the muscle. Jerry Thomas and Con Keeler were big enough too, both a shade over six feet, but they were not around for head-knocking. Others dubbed Thomas “The Professor” for his photographic memory—he could mingle in a bar for hours, then come out and recite every name and every address anyone mentioned, letter perfect. Keeler was a redhead from Iowa farm stock who’d come out of the war with an iron brace on his leg, making him useless for most police work. Except if you needed to pick locks. Or plant bugs.

  But the muscle guys and specialists were worthless without tough, wily quarterbacks, and Burns himself was one. The other was square-jawed Jack O’Mara, the Sunday church usher who’d knock you on your ass if you crossed him. As a condition of joining, Jack insisted that Burns invite his partner from the 77th, Dick Hedrick. That completed the squad to start, the original eight. Others would join them down the line, including the roguish Sgt. Jerry Wooters, but these were the pioneers.

  The challenge was getting them to work together, the bruisers and the brains. Enter the theater pickpockets.

  * * *

  CHIEF C. B. HORRALL agreed it might be good training, tackling the young thieves who targeted the servicemen still returning from overseas by the shipload. That was an unfinished chapter amid L.A.’s post-war celebration and it enraged military and civilian officials alike. The weary veterans spent just one night in the city before boarding trains to their hometowns, often passing the night in the dime movie houses downtown. The theaters had begun staying open twenty-four hours to coincide with the round-the-clock schedule of the defense plants during the war—workers could go from their shift, whenever it ended, and see a film. Now America’s returning heroes could do the same. The enormous movie palaces along Broadway showed the new releases, but the smaller theaters along Main were cheaper, in a district that included a few tattoo parlors and burlesque houses. So what if those theaters ran second-run films? Many of the vets just wanted to snooze. The problem was, they were used to being jostled in trucks or boats, making it easy to lift wallets or pouches, flush with their separation pay, even from sailors’ thirteen-button trousers. The pickpocket would plunk down next to anyone he saw sitting alone and give ’em a nudge, making sure they were asleep. Then he’d lift their wallet, pouch or roll, or slice it out, if necessary, with a knife. In the time-tested modus operandi of the trade, the thief often had a partner walking up the aisle for a handoff no one could see. The evidence was gone.

  The plan, then: Keeler and Thomas, or O’Mara and Hedrick, would sit up in the projection booths with binoculars, watching for any suspicious civilians sidling up to a vet. When they suspected a theft, they’d give a hand signal to big Archie or Benny, waiting by the exits. No culprit would get by those two, no way. But nabbing them was the easy part. The reality was that none of the servicemen wanted to hang around to testify against the pickpockets, none. A court hearing could be set in two or three days, but after years away at war the servicemen wanted to get home, right away.

  That’s how the squad came to use Winston Alley and James Douglas “Jumbo” Kennard. Understand, off the job Jumbo was a normal, quiet man. At home, he mostly wanted to plunk down on his easy chair and eat his bowl of chocolate ice cream. After his father died, Jumbo and his wife took in his kid sister and he watched over the teen-age Betty in the extreme, even inspecting her ears before she went out to make sure they were clean. Jumbo always kept his own hair brushed and the wide-lapel jacket on his suit neatly buttoned. He was totally civilized off the job—but on it he could go berserk. It didn’t take much acting for the son of a Texas constable to start waving his six-inch and ranting about what they should do to those punks when the guys delivered them in the middle of the night to the L-shaped alley by the railroad tracks. O’Mara would plead with Jumbo not to shoot, “they’re still investigating the body from last week,” and Jumbo would turn away from the young thief to argue the issue, still waving his giant gun while shouting, “I’m gonna kill the motherfucker!” At that moment O’Mara would whisper to the panicked kid, “Get out of here—now!” and the kid would flee down the alley in the dark and turn left and the cops would not bother to chase him. They’d just wait for the crash, for there was a chain around the corner, stret
ched across the alley, knee-high. One after another, the Main Street pickpockets plunged head-first to the pavement, until the guys got tired of that routine and moved to a bridge over the railroad tracks, where Jumbo held them by their feet, upside down … and finally Chief C. B. Horrall said, “Enough!”—maybe a body wouldn’t get up.

  Two nights later they were down at the bars by the harbor, where the ships came in. At a few places girls were slipping Mickey Finns to the returning soldiers and sailors and leading them outside, toward dark alleys, where their boyfriends would roll the drugged vets. It was the same routine down there, except that Jumbo held them over the edge of a dock.

  At one joint where they thought the bar owner was in on it, they took the cash register’s money tray, just lifted it out and announced, “The business is closed! Everyone leave!” and the guy said, “You can’t do that.” Willie Burns was along for that one and he said back, “Yeah, good luck—have your attorney call us.” But he didn’t leave a card.

  Chief C. B. Horrall again said “Enough,” and this time it was. There wasn’t much pickpocketing in those theaters and bars anymore.

  L.A.’s new Gangster Squad was ready for the gangsters.

  CHAPTER 5

  O’Mara’s Mulholland Drive Sneeze

  Their first real assignment: the visitors shaking down Hollywood restaurants and nightclubs, “hoodlum types from Rhode Island,” in O’Mara’s words, “what we called ‘dandruff.’” The hoods—from Detroit actually, an echo of the old Purple Gang—were demanding a percentage of the take at such places as the Brown Derby, where the gossip columnists hung out, and the Mocambo, where the rail-thin band singer Frank Sinatra had begun his solo career a few years earlier. The law enforcement problem was the same as with the servicemen victimized by pickpockets—the club owners did not want to go to court, in their case fearing what might happen to their families. “What are you gonna do?” asked Sergeant Jack O’Mara.