Dick Williams was the fourth man Willie Burns asked to drive with him to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel to talk with Mickey Cohen about those flowers. You did not mess with a policeman’s family.
* * *
USUALLY THEY KEPT the Tommies in their trunks when they drove. This time O’Mara carried his under his gray overcoat as they headed to Hollywood. Mickey was waiting on the sidewalk, giving a “Who me?” look, his blue Cadillac with whitewall tires at the curb, his men watching by the other Caddies.
Burns stepped up to Mickey, face-to-face and said, “Have I ever lied to you?”
“No, lieutenant.”
“Well, I am going to tell you something. I know what all of you look like. I know what your cars look like. If I ever see or hear of one of them driving by any of our officers’ homes, I’m gonna come pick you up…”
“Jeez, I don’t know where my boys go.”
“… and we’re gonna have the damndest accident.”
With that, O’Mara and Keeler pushed up the bottom of their overcoats using the Tommy guns underneath, so the tips poked out. The two towering squad members, Jumbo Kennard and Dick William, flanked them.
“That’d be murder,” Mickey said.
“No, no. Just like you, self-defense.”
Mickey got the message. The public would never understand how different he was when alone with them, out of the spotlight.
After they got back to their office, O’Mara rushed home and pretended he’d left something there. He wanted to see if Connie had gotten flowers, or seen any Cadillacs on their street. O’Mara didn’t know about the others, but that was the moment the job changed for him, the moment Mickey became his obsession. It was like his old boxing matches behind the frat house or his footraces at the Academy—it was you and the other guy finding out who was the better man. There was just a bit more at stake now. He resolved to prove that Mickey Cohen, that strutting little showboat, was a killer.
* * *
WILLIE BURNS WOULD not be by his side. To start the recovery from the Vice scandal and the resignation of Chief Horrall, the mayor persuaded a spit-and-polish former Marine Corps general, William A. Worton, to come up from his retirement home down the California coast and serve as interim chief. General Worton’s mandate was to make changes in the LAPD, and quickly.
A decade earlier it was notable when the city got a police chief who had graduated from any college. This new guy, Worton, had diplomas from both Harvard and Boston University Law School, and those were his least impressive credentials. He had joined the Marines a week before America’s entry into World War I and fought on the Western Front in France, where he was wounded and gassed. In the mid-’30s, while Los Angeles authorities were masterminding their embarrassing Bum Blockade of California’s borders, Worton was risking his life again, going undercover in Shanghai and pretending to be a disgruntled former Marine looking to start a new life as a businessman. In reality, he was trying to recruit spies against Japan, his secret mission for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Worton carried three passports and met many of his contacts in bars. In an oral history of the Shanghai operation, he was not idealistic about why people helped him—it often was money. “He was a man looking for a dollar,” Worton said of one prime espionage recruit. He laughed at Hollywood’s image of spying, offering an assessment that could apply as easily to certain law enforcement assignments, “This type of duty is not glorious. It is a lonesome, frustrating, and hazardous occupation.”
During World War II, as a Marine Corps general, Worton merely helped command the III Amphibious Corps in the Battle of Okinawa, then assisted with the occupation of northern China. The case could be made that he was slumming by taking the interim chief’s job in Los Angeles. After a little time in town he said, “I can’t trust a soul in the whole department.”
But there was one crew he wanted close by. Perhaps it was because Worton had worked in a thankless covert operation himself, or perhaps he thought that any group considered enemy by Mickey Cohen must be OK—he decided that the Gangster Squad should be at his side. The catch was that he wanted someone more like himself, more executive, to lead them. Captain Lynn White had been a lieutenant commander in the Navy and was a prodigy in the LAPD, already directing narcotics units on his way to becoming a deputy chief before he was forty. Worton reasoned that the squad, like a military operation, needed to get more serious about the intelligence portion of its mission—it was time for an administrator who was not so eager to be the front man of a flying squadron that left troublemakers strewn on a hillside. Effective October 7, 1949, Lieutenant Willie Burns was reassigned to uniform duty as a watch commander in the University Division.
General Worton put Captain Lynn White and the men in the office right next to his, in his suite on the first floor of City Hall. The Marine general did insist on a new name, one not so crude. The original members could still call themselves the Gangster Squad, sure, and they would. But on paper, for the moment, they would be Administrative Intelligence.
They had begun three years earlier working out of two rusted cars and then out of a cubbyhole in a station house with a turnaround for horse wagons. Now they were at the seat of power with windows over a patio. It was perfect. At night they could step out the windows and across a stretch of concrete right down to Spring Street—they could come and go from City Hall without anyone seeing them, as if they were invisible. O’Mara said:
We loved ole Lynn White, he was a helluva of a policeman, you know, so we behaved ourselves. But about our third meeting with him and the new chief we figure “What the hell?” What we do, someone gets ole Lynn’s overcoat and the secretary does a little sewing, takes about two minutes. Then at the meeting someone picks up the coat and shows the General the label under the collar and he says, “What’s this?” Lynn White, he takes back his coat and he says, “What the…?” You see, we put a little label in there that said, MICHAEL’S, from Mickey Cohen’s store, you know?
Someone had to spoil it by laughing after about ten seconds, but we sure had ’em going there awhile.
CHAPTER 12
Florabel to the Rescue
Now they had to do something about the troublemaking woman who dared to ask, “What does a Gangster Squad do?”
Florabel Muir was a child of the Wild West, born in 1889 in a Wyoming mining town, Rock Springs, where she witnessed a shootout while clinging to her mother’s skirt. “I had gunpowder with my porridge,” was how she put it. After she conned her way into her first newspaper job in Salt Lake City she petitioned to attend an execution despite a law that counted only male witnesses. “She’s no lady, she’s a reporter” the Utah attorney general ruled. As a crime reporter in New York her claim to fame was speeding from Sing Sing to the Daily News in 1928 with the film that a colleague had used in a camera strapped to his leg to snap a shot of murderess Ruth Snyder in the electric chair. The “Spider Woman” housewife had enlisted a weak-willed lover to kill her husband for the insurance money, a scenario that inspired the 1944 movie Double Indemnity, in which Barbara Stanwyck seduces Fred MacMurray into doing the deed. The real-life Ruth Snyder became the first woman sent to any prison’s hot seat, lending instant fame to the photograph Florabel helped sneak from Sing Sing.
By the time she switched coasts, she was the epitome of the hard-boiled newspaper dame, serving up a mixture of Hollywood scandal and gangster gossip while mocking, all too often, the LAPD. When her daily columns weren’t calling them Cops à la Keystone, a favorite topic of ridicule was their pursuit of the undersized hoodlum who spawned oversized headlines.
If Mickey Cohen is breaking the laws, why not arrest him and charge him with such violations instead of handing out all this hot air?
Los Angeles is the third largest city in the country and it’s high time the police department was growing up with it. The public loses confidence in the boys with badges when arrest after arrest flivvers.
Seems to me they’re casting Mickey as a red herring to drag across t
he scene. He could pull a dirty trick by just disappearing. That would leave them with nobody to blame anything on.
Blah, blah, blah. Florabel Muir, at sixty-one, wasn’t about to commit a crime or help Mickey heist anyone, they knew that. And a little ribbing was fair play, they dished out plenty themselves. But Los Angeles was embroiled in more than a war fought with shotgun pellets. Mickey attacked with words and Florabel, in their eyes, was his ally. That was far outside the concerns of a street cop like O’Mara, who just wanted to get his man. But image mattered to city fathers. Someone above their heads was always saying, “This doesn’t look good.”
So it was after their ill-fated attempt to prove that the sex-obsessed nobody from Miami had killed the Black Dahlia.
One guy came out of the recent Black Dahlia debacle with a reward of some kind. Willie Burns of the L.A. Police Gangster Squad took a trip to Florida to interview the wife of Leslie Dillon who was sprung as a suspect before Burns arrived in Miami. Probably Willie’s trip to the Atlantic coast won’t be entirely a waste of money for the taxpayers. He might turn up some gangsters who are contemplating a trip to California.
In posing that question, “What does a Gangster Squad do?” Florabel answered on her daily soapbox:
Looks like they devote part of their time to trailing Mickey around. But they don’t seem to be stopping Mickey from doing whatever it is he is doing that they don’t like. He keeps on doing it and they keep on rousting him …
Gangster Squads running around playing cops and robbers is not the way to cope with organized crime.
The capper for the brass came after the ambush at Sherry’s, when the Mirror columnist saw fit to repeat the theory that even Mickey had discredited, that Los Angeles cops might be behind it. The LAPD. Them.
The most unfortunate aspect of this whole thing is the fixed idea that a lot of people have that it was police who were shooting at Mickey. Many people have remarked that to me.
It should be inconceivable to any right-minded person that police officers could bring themselves to shoot into a crowd of people just to get a man they didn’t like.
That was Florabel. Blah, blah, blah. She’d never let up.
No one could have guessed that she would help save the squad when the LAPD got its permanent new chief in the summer of 1950, yet another child of the Wild West and the man who would help revolutionize police work in the United States.
* * *
NO POLICE CHIEF ever had a more appropriately named birthplace than William H. Parker. He was born in Lead City, South Dakota, and raised in Deadwood in a family rooted in frontier law enforcement and a stern moral code. His grandfather was a Civil War colonel (on the Union side) who moved out to the Black Hills where he headed a mining camp militia, battled to close brothels, and became a district attorney and U.S. Congressman before dying of cirrhosis of the liver, the drinking man’s disease. The grandson Bill Parker won a public speaking award in high school but started his working life humbly as a teenage bellhop and part-time detective at a Deadwood hotel before his mother announced that they were moving, without his father, to Los Angeles. The Parkers arrived in 1922—the same year the Whalens came west from St. Louis and the O’Maras south from Portland—and settled near Westlake Park. While Fred and Lillian Whalen were stocking their store in that neighborhood with lingerie pilfered from rivals, young Bill Parker took jobs as a movie usher and taxi driver and enrolled in a local law school, at a time they didn’t require a college degree. He still needed a paycheck, so before graduating he applied to the LAPD and entered in 1927, a timing that let him witness the department’s worst years up close. He learned the need for policemen of good moral fiber to resist the temptations they faced—and for structures that punished those who didn’t, at least until God passed final judgment. “Police history is not a pretty thing,” he acknowledged. “It does not inspire confidence.”
Parker’s career was interrupted only by twenty-six months overseas in World War II, during which he was wounded at Normandy and developed the plan for prisons to handle Germans captured in the Allies’ invasion. He also helped establish post-war police departments in Munich and Frankfort and was awarded a Croix de Guerre by the French government for his work in the liberation of Paris. An organization man in every sense, Parker held leadership posts back home in the Fire and Police Protective League, the American Legion and later the Boy Scouts. If he seemed too perfect, he wasn’t—he inherited his granddad’s propensity for drinking and with it a nickname, “Whiskey Bill.” He was in his second marriage by the time he became chief at forty-five, and childless. Like Mickey Cohen and his wife, the Parkers made do with the company of dogs.
With his elevation to chief, Parker went on the radio on August 9, 1950 and spoke bluntly about the moral challenge in the community and within his own department: “There are wicked men with evil hearts who sustain themselves by preying upon society. There are men who lack control over their strong passions … to control and repress these evil forces, police forces have been established … Sometimes wicked men elude the detection devices of the selection process and find their way into police service. Their evil acts, when discovered, cast disrepute upon the entire force.”
Chief William H. Parker thus was the great exponent of Internal Affairs, of policing your own tougher than you policed the city. No more beat officers helping themselves to apples from the local grocery, no more free dinners on Sunset, no more Vice cops helping themselves to the local madam. And perhaps no more Gangster Squad.
Jack O’Mara was smoking his pipe, perusing the teletype, when the new boss stopped by. A few others were writing up reports noting which hoodlums they had seen having drinks where, and with whom, the night before. It looked to an outsider like they collected paychecks for sitting on their rears. Con Keeler had worked under Parker before the war and he warned the crew, “He’s a very abrupt man. Believe me, you get out of line, you’ll get clobbered.” Now O’Mara saw Parker looking at them like: What are these idiots doing in my suite? What are they doing with Tommy guns? O’Mara heard the new chief mutter, “What the hell?” and soon after a commander warned him, “He doesn’t know what the hell you do. He’s going to derail you guys.”
Just like that, Parker put the unit under the command of his most trusted aide, tall, stolid Captain James Hamilton, and had him prepare transfer orders for the men, pegging several for traffic duty, AI, Accident Investigation. The prospect was crushing to O’Mara, who had joined the LAPD as a scrappy kid with dreams of rising to chief himself. He’d taken hoods up into the hills, abandoned his wife at Christmas to pose as a crazy shrink’s chauffeur and done other dirty work of the Gangster Squad. Now they were going to reward him by having him investigate fender benders. At least he had a little time before his career went in the toilet. He figured he might as well use it to make one last run at Mickey.
* * *
O’MARA HAD SENSED an opening when he learned that a guard at Mickey’s home had a warrant hanging over him. O’Mara encouraged the guard to quit and to suggest that Mickey hire “a buddy” as his replacement. The “buddy” was Neal Hawkins, who had a profile likely to appeal to Brentwood’s most notorious citizen. Hawkins was a wiry Brooklyn boy who had come to Los Angeles when the Army assigned him to searchlight duty at the UCLA campus, defending against a Japanese air attack on the U.S. mainland. After that he was trained in munitions and demolition and sent to North Africa and Italy with a platoon assigned to disrupt the enemy by blowing up things like bridges. After the war, Hawkins came back to California as a civilian and went to work as a clerk and gun-toting protector of a liquor store in Santa Monica that did other business on the side—a lot about Hawkins would appeal to Mickey. But he also was a certain cop’s paid informant. The Secret Service Fund won you a lot of friends.
Mickey’s new guard earned part of his keep the summer of 1950 by patrolling Mickey’s property every hour, investigating any noises, and answering the front door so a visitor with bad intentions woul
d get him, not Mickey. Hawkins earned his other pay by alerting Sergeant Jack O’Mara to comings and goings at the house. So he dutifully reported in when he overheard Mickey planning a trip to Texas with, of all people, Florabel Muir’s husband, Denny Morrison, a former newspaper copy editor and film publicist. Mickey later insisted that he had hired Morrison merely as a tutor to polish up his dese-dems-dose vocabulary, to evolve him some more by teaching him a new word a day, or a new phrase. Mickey once showed off his new knowledge by letting his bodyguard Johnny Stompanato win a game of gin and proudly calling it, “Noblesse oblige.” When Johnny offered the straight line, “What’s that?” Mickey said, “Something a peasant like you wouldn’t understand.”
To Jack O’Mara, the fact that Mickey had hired Florabel’s husband was confirmation that she was more than his ally. She was his paid mouthpiece. Yet while the LAPD often felt Florabel’s bite, Mickey was not immune from a nip, either. The day after both of them were shot outside Sherry’s, she wrote, “I would like to say to Mickey, ‘Give it all up, my boy. Let those who want your unrealistic little kingdom have it. Pick up your marbles and get lost along the common and ordinary byways.’” But the fact that Florabel might occasionally question Mickey’s wisdom hardly explained why her hubby was going to Texas with him, much less another detail about the trip—when O’Mara tailed them to the airport he discovered that they had registered for their flight as “Denny Morrison” and “Denny Morrison Jr.”
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 12
