That’s why the Gangster Squad had its own bug man.
* * *
“THEY SAY NATIVE Californians all come from Iowa,” observes the doomed main character in 1944’s Double Indemnity, and Con Keeler was the embodiment of that, the closest thing the squad had to a purebred Angeleno. His American Gothic grandparents had come from Iowa in a Conestoga wagon in the 1800s and helped established alfalfa and long-staple cotton farming in California’s Palo Verde Valley until Colorado River flooding washed out the ranches—the Hoover Dam had not yet been built to help control the darn river. The family moved in toward Los Angeles and Con’s father became a cabinet maker and carpenter, being good with his hands. The red-haired Con was too, even as a child, building shortwave radios in his room and tinkering with any piece of machinery he could find.
He was a rawboned six-foot-one-inch by the time he joined the LAPD shortly before the war. When they gave the physical tests at the Academy the instructor couldn’t believe his score on the hand-gripper and made him squeeze a second time. “What have you done for a living?” the instructor asked. “Well, I’ve been a mechanic,” Con said, and the guy nodded, “That explains it.” He paired the strength of the Iowa farm boy with a touch of the Freemason’s moralizing, not hiding his disdain for the old-timers who had been taking gratuities for years. To Keeler, the highest compliment you could pay a man, or a cop, was to say, “He’s down the line,” and those old-timers weren’t. Earning $170 a month as a rookie, he was assigned to traffic investigations to start, even as word spread of his other skills. But his country called and Keeler enlisted in the Army Air Corps with no ambition of being a hotshot pilot—all he wanted was to get his hands on the engines of the B-24 bombers being developed. He was about to head overseas, to Europe, when he got a near fatal lesson in the politics of bureaucracies.
We were shipping out and standing for the train for New York, and I got called out, to report to medics. They told me I had hemorrhoids which I didn’t have. But someone had marked it down in a page when they checked you over. The doctor checks you and a sleepy soldier marks it down and he put the check in the wrong place. So I knew a captain and went to see him. He said, “Don’t you have an infected toe or something they can work on? You know officers don’t make mistakes.” And so anyway they rolled me into this operating room, fiddling around, give me a spinal and everything else. And they had to chase the two carpenters out, they were sanding the floors. It looked like a fog in there and of course it was an operating room so there were all kinds of germs and infection set in—they had to burn me with silver nitrates four or five times—and I became a casualty.
Con Keeler spent months in the hospital and once, after his fever spiked, they wheeled him into the Dark Room, where hopeless cases were left overnight to die. “I fooled ’em,” he said, but the tragedy of medical errors left him hobbled, needing the iron brace on his leg. He didn’t complain—he was a company man to the core—but it was one miracle he made it through the war and a second that the LAPD took him back, on limited duty, once again on the boring TI unit—traffic investigation—until Willie Burns phoned one night.
Keeler couldn’t run like O’Mara and the others but he could cobble together crude bugs using telephone and hearing aid parts. He also knew a select circle of sound and electrical engineers working on new eavesdropping technology, including guys in Naval Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. They were developing systems for overseas spying that did not use long, telltale wires. That was crucial, given that Mickey Cohen and his crew would be looking for suspicious wires.
The Gangster Squad was going to bug him again, whatever the Vice screw-up.
In the new system, a small microphone was connected to a transmitter that sent a signal over the air, which a receiver could pick up a couple of blocks away, like a radio broadcast. The major downside was that you had to hide a six-pack of batteries with the transmitter to power it, and those batteries died out—you had to keep replacing them. But the first challenge was planting the gear.
By the time they tried it, Mickey’s home had become a fortress with round-the-clock guards, swinging searchlights and an armored front door with a porthole window. Their solution? Stage a diversion. The squad waited for a night when both Mickey and Lavonne went out, and then had Jumbo and rotund Archie Case start digging in a vacant lot nearby, as noisily as possible. As expected, Mickey’s guards moved their way to check out the commotion. That was Keeler’s opening to sneak through the lawn of the home behind Mickey’s, climb a chain-link fence and creep through a backyard orange grove. He had burlap over his shoes for silence and ammonia sprinkled on his clothes to drive off the dogs. Mickey had two now, the pampered Tuffy and Mike, a boxer.
There was a crawl space under the house but wood splinters were everywhere. Keeler carefully avoided those, brushed aside the cobwebs and made his way around the huge hot water tank that enabled Mickey to wash his hands a zillion times a day. While Mickey’s guards watched the diggers, shining flashlights at the pair over the shrubbery, Keeler worked on the padlocked vent under Mickey’s personal wing of the house. The lock was surprisingly simple to pick—Keeler was in, near where Mickey could sleep away from his wife or hold meetings not appropriate for Lavonne’s flowery living room. Keeler hid his microphone inside the cedar-lined closet where Mickey kept dozens of pairs of shoes and used a cabinet in it to conceal the two feet of wire leading down to the transmitter and batteries affixed beneath the house. The batteries would last only ten days, at most, when Keeler would have to sneak back under the house to replace them. But that was next week’s problem.
He crept back out amid the cobwebs and splinters and back through the dark orchard, finally reaching the safety of the adjoining block. The squad had discovered that one resident was a doctor who had been a major in British intelligence during the war. After a little vet-to-vet sweet talk, the Englishman agreed to let them use his garage as a listening post, and even put a small antenna on the roof.
Hunched around a headset, Keeler and several others soon were hearing the yapping of Tuffy and Mike, the dogs. Then they heard friendly banter among Mickey’s dinner crowd, back from the night out. A half dozen companions came home with the Cohens, including Florabel Muir, the Mirror columnist who had gotten so quickly to Bugsy’s death scene and since then had been giving his successor a lot of ink. She kept telling Lavonne how nice her house looked. It was meaningless suck-up jibber-jabber, but their primitive radio bug worked perfectly, at least until something new arrived at Mickey’s home, putting the entire operation in peril.
* * *
AT A TIME when barely 10 million Americans owned televisions, Mickey had to have the fanciest, sold by the W & J Sloane department store. Set in a mahogany cabinet, it had forty-five tubes to guarantee clear reception. Only Mickey’s reception wasn’t clear. The bug overheard him ranting about the screwy lines on Channel 2. Listening from the English doctor’s garage, the squad guessed what was up—their transmission was too close to the lowest frequency picked up by a TV: Channel 2. Mickey was sure to figure it out too. The first thing in the morning, he raised hell with W & J. Sloane, “Take this god-damn thing out of here or come out and have somebody fix it!” The store said it would send a repairman over.
O’Mara took it from there. Fortunately, the batteries on their shoe-closet bug were about to run down, deactivating that troublemaker. Why not intercept the TV repairman’s truck on the way to Mickey’s house and try something else?
Followed him five or six blocks, pulled him over, talked to him. And I convinced him he should contribute something. He was scared shitless, but he agreed. “I’d like you to take a man,” I said.
The repairman would take a member of the Gangster Squad, to be exact, but wearing a repairman’s uniform. Mickey wanted service? He’d get two men fiddling in back of his beautiful mahogany TV cabinet. While there, they installed another bug, “right in the damn TV,” using a frequency that
(they prayed) would not put annoying oscillations on Channel 2.
“It’s fine now, thank you guys,” a delighted Mickey said, giving the pair a $50 tip to split.
“Mr. Cohen, you’re so kind,” the pretend repairman said. “Look-it, I’ll be back in here once a week and take care of it, check it personally. There’s a lot of bugs in televisions and stuff you have to work out.”
Mickey had to think his lavish tips were why the repairman was that eager to get back into his TV every week. He couldn’t have known that was the timetable for replacing certain batteries. OK, so the bug couldn’t hear much when the TV was on, and it was on all the time. Mickey and his wife invited all their friends over to see their marvelous set with forty-five tubes.
But O’Mara sensed that their mission might be measured by small victories. And it was a small victory, for sure, to be able to tell a tale, a half century later, that ended, “… and that’s how Mickey Cohen wound up paying for his own bugging.”
CHAPTER 10
L.A.’s Year in the Gutter
The Gangster Squad’s own fiasco involved the Black Dahlia murder and set the stage for the year when Los Angeles and its police department were dragged down, down, down into the muck, all but obliterating the optimism and positive images of the post-war years. Mickey Cohen was in the middle of most everything then, driving the descent even as he began dodging bullets, not always successfully. But first came the disastrous Dahlia sideshow, for which he bore no blame.
* * *
“I’VE GOT TO go,” O’Mara announced to his wife on December 28, 1948, three days after Christmas and two days before her birthday.
“When will you be back?” Connie asked.
“I don’t know.”
O’Mara did not want to tell her the case on which he was going undercover—the slaughter of Elizabeth Short, the twenty-two-year-old whose nude body had been found in a vacant lot, surgically cut in half, drained of blood, and mutilated. Though the body had been discovered on January 15, 1947, nearly two years before, the unsolved crime remained a preoccupation of the city. The Dahlia often was described as a wannabe actress who fell into the party scene in L.A. but she had spent much of her time in California around military bases, looking for a boyfriend or husband. She was a high school dropout from a small city outside Boston who plugged her decayed teeth with wax—another wandering soul denied a happy ending in the City of Angels and denied justice, as well.
Now the Los Angeles Police psychiatrist thought he had a hot lead—he just didn’t want to give it to the Homicide detectives who had been flailing on the case from the start and still were monitoring the crazies it attracted, fifty of whom had confessed to killing the dark-haired woman with the alluring nickname. Dr. J. Paul de River thought his suspect was not a crazy. The doctor had been exchanging letters with a Florida man who had read about the crime in the detective magazines and was fascinated by sexual “psychopathia.” The man knew a lot about the dismemberment, too much, the doctor thought. Plus he had lived in California at the time, working as a motel bellhop. Chief C. B. Horrall was sold. His deputy, Joe Reed, suggested using the squad and one sergeant in particular. O’Mara could forget about Mickey Cohen for a moment.
His mission was to pose as the psychiatrist’s chauffeur after they lured twenty-seven-year-old Leslie Dillon from Miami with promises that he might serve as the doc’s assistant. O’Mara drove the pair to a remote tourist camp then stayed in the next room, listening with the door cracked, his gun at the ready, as they discussed sex with the dead and how you bleed a corpse. Meanwhile other squad members worked up hundreds of pages of background on the man Chief Horrall agreed was “the best suspect we have ever had.” O’Mara welcomed 1949 still at the lodge, the psychiatrist encouraging Leslie Dillon to explain how a painting of the Madonna reminded him of the Dahlia.
The doctor was questioning him on New Year’s Eve and I was in the next adjoining room in the dark. I know this sounds kind of silly, but he had an awful look on his face just like he was going to pounce on the doctor.
But the former bellhop never did pounce. So they drove him to a vacant lot in Leimert Park. “Do you recall now this was where the body was found?” de River asked.
“What body do you mean?”
“You know what body I mean.”
After a week of that, they dropped the ruse and officially seized this Dillon. The law required them to book him right then, but they didn’t—they held him in the Strand Hotel downtown where Lieutenant Willie Burns took over the questioning and threatened to send the man to the gas chamber for what he’d done.
The squad members were never sure how Dillon slipped his HELP ME note out the window while being guarded by two of the bruisers, but he did. He used a picture postcard of their first bucolic tourist camp to scrawl a message pleading for a lawyer to rescue him from the crazed Dahlia investigators. It was discovered in the gutter near the hotel by a deliveryman for the Los Angeles Herald-Express. The bizarre card carrying a one-cent stamp wound up in the hands of Agness Underwood, the paper’s city editor, who promptly called police headquarters to find out what in God’s name this was about before she unleashed the headlines.
O’Mara and the others huddled in a panic when called before a grand jury to explain what had transpired with the sex nut from Florida. “Jeez, we kidnapped him!” exclaimed Giacopuzzi, who helped guard Dillon at the hotel. Now the man was free and heading back east, already plotting his lawsuit seeking $100,000 from each officer responsible for him being “nationally degraded by said incompetent agents of the city.”
“They had me about convinced that I was crazy,” Dillon said before he reunited with his wife and young daughter. “That maybe I did kill the Dahlia and just forgot.”
They could handle his lawsuit, but were they the crazy ones for still thinking he might have done it? O’Mara was in that trance when he told the grand jury,
This man was inhuman … To my observation he’s an individual that I have never seen the likes of before, and probably will never see again, if I may say so. He was—his facial expression would change and his temperaments would change very quickly and suddenly … There was something about the man, what you might call raises a man’s animal instincts that there is something there, in other words makes the hair on the back of your neck bristle up.
One of the grand jurors asked, “Wasn’t the man a frail, weakly, sloop-shouldered man, wearing glasses?”
It was another mind game they would never win. O’Mara said back, “These recollections can play awfully funny tricks with you.”
* * *
SOME CALLED THIS period of bullets and blackmail the “Sunset Strip Wars” but a war normally has bullets going both ways—you don’t have one side doing all the shooting (or garroting) while the other is merely ducking, disappearing, and dying.
The bloodshed was previewed the summer before, on August 18, 1948, when a man in a cream-colored Panama hat fired a shotgun into the new store Mickey was opening right on the Sunset Strip, moving up from the one where the Gangster Squad had staged its fake drive-by. This gunman was not faking. The double-barrel blast killed Hooky Rothman, Mickey’s henchman, who had bashed a chair atop one of the Shaman brothers back in ’45. Many suspected at first that Mickey had set up his man because of how he retreated into the bathroom moments before the shooting—not everyone understood Mickey’s compulsion to wash his hands after taking a call, what with the germs you get from touching a phone. His large curving desk had three phones, a lot for a humble shopkeeper, beneath a portrait of the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Mickey’s new place, “Michael’s Exclusive Haberdashery,” was in a two-story building on a slope at 8804 Sunset. The upper level abutted the busy boulevard so customers could wander in to peruse imported gabardine suits and camel-haired coats displayed in vault-like closets with sliding doors and walnut walls. The lower level was the office where Mickey’s men gathered to conduct their real business late into the n
ight, coming and going through a separate entrance on the side street, Palm Avenue, the route used by the killer and two associates. The carnage would have been worse if not for Jimmy Rist. Many of Mickey’s crew were not much bigger than he was, swaggering little men, but Rist was a heavyweight, 295 pounds. He managed to grab the barrel of one shotgun and wrest it away, despite being wounded in his right ear. The assailants fled before they realized that the corpse on the sidewalk was not Mickey—he was on the bathroom floor with his foot braced against the door. “It sounded like the war broke out,” Mickey said, so to that extent the “Sunset Strip Wars” descriptor made sense. But Mickey himself had it as, “The Battle of Sunset Strip.”
His flight to the lavatory was enough for police to hold him, at least briefly, on suspicion. Little notice was given to the man who left the haberdashery moments before the shooting. Aladena “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno had come by with his wife, Jewel, and their daughter to pick up tickets for the hit show imported from Broadway, Annie Get Your Gun, which was running at Philharmonic Auditorium. Mickey had boasted, “I can get all the free tickets I want,” and Jimmy the Weasel took him up on it. That was his cover story for coming over—he was eager to see the musical that had the great Mary Martin as Annie Oakley singing “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun.”
Jimmy Fratianno had been born in Italy but moved as an infant to Cleveland, where he picked up his nickname by running away from a neighborhood kid after squashing a tomato in his face. He was not long out of prison for armed robbery when he headed west, he later explained, because, “They didn’t have nobody to kill people.”
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