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

by Paul Lieberman

  But before Jerry Wooters was set loose on such bastions of sin, they gave him a trial run at a plain old massage parlor, with a catch—this one was owned by a policeman who had been tipped that a rookie undercover officer would be coming in to ask for extra service. “I went in there with the masseuse and she slapped the hell out of me. I later heard this policeman had six to eight massage parlors.” Jerry did not fare any better in the “Faithful Fido…” raid on a house where twenty people were gambling on the French card game Piquet at a party in honor of one Ruth Beyer, according to the newspaper account: “The fidelity of Fido, a white fox terrier, gave Detective Jerry Wooters an embarrassing moment early yesterday and also enabled several persons to escape a Vice-Squad raid … as Wooters started toward Miss Beyer, her dog Fido went into action and took a healthy mouthful of material out of the seat of the officer’s trousers. During the excitement, most of the people escaped.”

  Jerry could take the inevitable ribbing, for he quickly realized how to handle the Vice gig. All you had to do was make a few meaningless arrests of hookers or bookies’ phone clerks, or preferably a lot of arrests, each evening shift. “You go to work at four and hit the street and you’d have everybody booked and your work done in four hours,” he said. “It was a great job.”

  For half a century, colleagues would cap stories about him by saying “That’s Jerry,” usually after an account of some finagling gone wrong. So it was when he plotted how to avoid getting his butt singed if America got drawn into the war ongoing in Europe and the Far East. On September 4, 1941, five months after he’d joined the LAPD, he listed his occupation as photographer on an application to enlist in a Naval Reserve photo unit based at the Fox studio. If the country did go to war, he’d be making training films, at worst, on the green, green grass of home. That was the scenario Jerry Wooters envisioned in joining the Reserves.

  Then Vice sent him undercover to a hotel above a gay bar on Hill Street, where he would sit having a drink until a man made a pass at him. Jerry and the suspect would go upstairs to a room where backup officers had drilled a peephole so they could rush in as soon as the fellow made a move—between pinches they’d plug the hole with chewing gum. As luck had it, one of the first suspects Jerry nabbed was the great-nephew of an appellate judge.

  After the arrest, suddenly a couple of detectives are wanting to speak to me in the parking lot, “Hey you think we can do anything for the kid?” I was approached two times by two teams of detectives. “Can you do anything?” I said, “I don’t think so.” Then suddenly I get called to active duty. God-damned war hadn’t even started but suddenly—bang—I got orders to report, “Report Monday!”

  He was long gone by the time the peephole case came to trial but he heard how the jury found all sorts of deficiencies in his arrest report. The hotel room wallpaper he described as rose-colored now was green and the door was solid as could be, there was no hole of any sort in it. “It was my first exposure to clout,” said Navy P.3c Jerry Wooters, who would not be spending the war making training films on the green grass of home.

  * * *

  “GEE SIS I feel like a lost soul up here.… Sitting out on this bay front is a bit lonesome,” he wrote in November, 1941 from the U.S. Naval Air Station in Alameda, outside San Francisco. “There are a few books on photography here. Maybe I had better look a few of them over.” The head of his small section quickly saw that he had lied about having experience as a photographer—the first pictures he took came out overexposed and he forgot to put film in the camera another time. Jerry wrote his older sister, Margaret, that his stomach ached like hell after every meal. “I think it’s from being nervous. The strain of trying to pretend you know something you don’t.… The Navy has a beautiful lab here, everything a person could want as far as photographic equipment goes. What a boon this would be if a person were interested in the damn stuff.”

  He spoke differently with his sister than with anyone else—he idolized her. With the war brewing, Margaret Wooters took a job in Washington, D.C., where she met and married a brilliant Macedonian émigré, Stoyan Christowe, who was working in U.S. military intelligence but already had written a book chronicling his experience as an immigrant, “This is My Country,” which had become a favorite of President Roosevelt. His sister was entering a whole different strata and it left Jerry concerned, but also more aware of what he didn’t have. “How is it for you … with money and health? Are you happy?” he asked. “Are things easy for you, I mean more so than they were before you were married?” As for himself, he confided that even going out with the guys for a drunken good time couldn’t lift his mood since he’d been yanked into active duty, at a third of is police pay. “I realize that I’ve never in all my life been satisfied so why it should be any different now I don’t know,” he wrote. “If in eighteen months I’m still here I’m going to feel pretty bad.… God, I’d love to see you.”

  The good news was that the ladies liked how he looked in uniform. Jerry took pictures with a slew of women through his time in the service, one showing five crowded around him as a brunette slung an arm around his neck. Another was taken through a window, framing him and a dirty blonde, his head tilted down to gaze into her eyes. Another showed a full blonde with her head back, seemingly laughing at something he’d said as they sat along a long table crammed with uniformed sailors, a hundred empty beer bottles lined up behind them. Another shot was on the dance floor, cheek-to-cheek. He was just under six feet and lanky—everything about him was lean, including his hawk-like face, which narrowed sharply to his chin. He was not particularly handsome but his rubbery mouth formed a wry, casual smile, as if he didn’t care much about anything, he was just kicking back. Maybe that attitude is what got to them.

  They wrote him letters too, one drawing a caricature of him exaggerating the cute little moustache he’d grown. One woman called herself “Your sweet faithful thing” and spoke of “All my wasted love.” One letter suggested they train pigeons or doves to carry messages back and forth, and worried what he was up to, “Put down that nurse! I’ll have you know she’s a nice girl!” “Do you still smoke stinking cigars?” “Do you still have baggy pants? Do you still have freckles on your back?” That woman also asked, “Who reminds you of your sister these days? (If my memory’s still clicking, you once told me I did—a stinking line but some guys WILL use it.)”

  His own letters to his sister changed after Pearl Harbor instantly brought the nation into combat. He reassured her, “As far as armed forces go, my work is as safe as any I can think of. I want to get out of this war in one piece and feel as though I will. My desire is certainly to do all I can for America but … there are a few old-timers here who say damn few of us will come through.” The scary part to him was how war was so different from police work, which pitted one man against another. In war, it might be you against a 1,000-pound bomb. “Take it easy,” he told his sister.

  * * *

  IN LATER LIFE he exaggerated a bit the time he spent floating in the raft after his plane was shot down over Guadalcanal—he sometimes stretched it to five days. In reality, according to his military records, the crew of the B-17 was left adrift in the ocean for two days, or thirty-eight hours, to be precise. Speedy Japanese fighter planes had caught up to them while Jerry was taking reconnaissance shots of the enemy’s positions below, pointing his big Brownie-like box camera out the bomber’s open side bay. Then again, he never mentioned that his planes were “knocked down” twice, as the records indicate, during his 270 hours of combat flying for the first Navy combat photographic unit. In the ditching episode that left them in the raft, one of the crew had a broken back and kept moaning while they waited to see if a Japanese ship would find them first and finish them off. Jerry had the only pistol and when the pilot asked for it, he said, “Over my dead body.” He was uninjured, though—his Purple Heart stemmed from a flight a month earlier during which an enemy shell killed the side-gunner next to him in the plane and slashed him under the chin. �
�I got the shit beat out of me,” he summarized his time overseas. His Air Medal citation said “in numerous flights over enemy held territory, Wooters was successful in obtaining aerial reconnaissance photographs, many times carrying out his task while under fire from enemy planes and antiaircraft guns.”

  After the close calls he began vomiting at the end of each flight and reporting pain again in his stomach. He was told that might be an outgrowth of the yellow jaundice and malaria he caught on the islands. It didn’t help that he’d be sleeping in a tent and feel sudden pressure on his chest—from the land crabs that crawled in and jumped on him. The damn crabs scared him almost as much as the Japanese Zero fighter planes. When he kept complaining about his stomach, the medics worried he might be a psycho case until further tests produced a simpler diagnosis, ulcers.

  He turned it all into a joke when he got sick leave to come home and stopped by the LAPD’s Central Station. The visit generated the headline WOUNDED MEDAL WINNER BACK FROM PACIFIC WAR with an account of Jerry having given another member of the crew of the downed plane 2:1 odds that they would be picked up by friendly forces. “A few hours after I made the bet one of our destroyers pulled up to our life raft. They uncovered their guns thinking we might be Japanese but we shouted at them and identified ourselves and were taken aboard,” he said. “I won $30.”

  * * *

  WHEN HE RETURNED to the department for real, he asked, “What’s open?” and was told, “Anything you want.” He picked the Vice unit with citywide scope, sixteen-member Administrative Vice, run by the man who had recruited him out of the Academy, now Lieutenant Rudy Wellpott. Promoted to sergeant himself, Wooters was assigned to a largely black area of the Newton Division, to work the big-time bookies there. But he also led occasional raids on gambling clubs where he’d bring the largest backup officers he could find and his largest overcoat. He once jumped up onto a card table with all the cash on it and asked the gamblers, “Does anyone want to claim this money?” No one did, naturally—that would admit their guilt—so he scooped it all up, using his coat like a sack. He left the impression that he treated all the Vice boys to several long nights of drinking that way. On another raid, he kicked in what he thought was a wooden door but it was glass, painted black, and he severed his Achilles tendon. While in a cast, he was assigned to man the listening post set up in a motel for the bug that Ad Vice had planted in Mickey Cohen’s house in Brentwood, by the wood box. Jerry had the headphones on the night Bugsy Siegel was hit across town. No matter what others thought, “Mickey had nothing to do with that,” he said. “There was no turmoil in his house, nothing that wasn’t routine.”

  Jerry’s two mentors in Ad Vice here the ones at the heart of the scandal that enveloped the city in 1949, accused of being cozy with the Hollywood madam. But as in the war, he was a survivor. “They indicted the commander and they indicted the day watch sergeant. And I was the night watch sergeant,” he summed it up. “I didn’t get indicted. I got transferred.”

  Effective July 11, 1949, he was busted back to uniform duty, on foot patrol along Wilshire. That’s what he was doing, pounding a fucking beat, when he crashed the Christmas party of the Gangster Squad.

  * * *

  THE MAIN PURPOSE of the Christmas party was to thank the civilians who secretly helped the squad during the year. One guest was the chief investigator for the phone company, who helped them get a phone truck so it wouldn’t look so suspicious if they were messing around telephone poles. They also invited the people who helped them set up a fake music company as a front for leasing phone lines to carry signals from their bugs planted about town. But no one had invited Sergeant Jerry Wooters, a busted-down refugee from the infamous Ad Vice unit about whom there were all sorts of rumors. Sergeant Con Keeler, the squad’s stern Mr. “Down the Line,” heard that his older brother was a bookie and that’s why he was so plugged into the betting scene. Keeler was the one who discovered Jerry in a backroom at their affair, separating some of their guests from their money.

  We had the party over on Figueroa Street, in a hotel, all invitational, and I went back into one of the rooms in this big suite and there was a craps game going. Well that’s illegal. So I just looked in, OK? Well, OK, so some of our guests are playing craps on the floor. But also playing with them was a uniformed sergeant, in uniform, with his cap on and everything, down on the floor playing craps. Well, I just closed the door, walked off. It was Jerry Wooters.

  We had guests there, like from Water and Power, from various places that were cooperating. Our Christmas party, it wasn’t for us. It was for our contacts, not our hoodlum contacts. And goddamn, here’s Wooters in full uniform, sergeant’s bars, playing craps with the guys. Well, you know, god dang, to have a man in uniform, especially a supervisor, a sergeant playin’ craps, which was illegal …

  Imagine his surprise when Jerry joined their ranks.

  That was the doing of their boss, Captain Hamilton. He sat on an LAPD disciplinary board that decided cases against wayward cops, including—sometime after their party—a Vice officer accused of enjoying the company of prostitutes he met on the beat. The accused officer brought Wooters with him as his defense lawyer of sorts, and Jerry spun an elaborate argument on his behalf, all pure bullshit, with a straight face. The panel didn’t buy it, but afterward Jerry approached Hamilton. “I asked if he needed a good sergeant.”

  In fact, the squad did. With Mickey Cohen in prison and Jack Dragna then on the ropes, the brass saw an opening to finally crush bookmaking in Los Angeles. Hamilton needed a man who knew the ins-and-outs of gambling and could think on his feet—dealing with informants required a touch of bull. Hamilton said he’d see what he could do. Then Jerry waited and heard nothing so he went to see Richard Simon, the LAPD’s deputy chief in charge of administration.

  I was trying to get out of that god-damned uniform. He said, “What’s your problem, sergeant?”

  “I have an offer to work Intelligence, requested by the captain, but somebody up here is putting the kybosh on it.”

  He said, “I don’t know that word.”

  I said, “Redline. I’m being redlined.”

  He said, “That’s true. That’s me. It’s my understanding that you’ve been playing footsie with the bookies.”

  “Have you investigated it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What have you found?”

  “Nothing.”

  He got on the phone to Hamilton. He said. “You still want this Wooters?”

  That’s how the squad took on the cop who headed the investigation that changed the ground rules for policing in California.

  CHAPTER 20

  A Lecture from the Court

  As a newcomer Jerry Wooters felt the wariness of the veteran squad members. They would cluster in a corner talking in low voices and cover their papers when he walked by their desks. They hardly socialized with him, either, given that they were married and raising children while he was a bachelor, known for inviting flight attendants to parties in his Elysian Park duplex—police wives would not always cotton to their husbands mingling with young stewardesses. Those other guys were godfathers to each others’ kids, passed down their baby clothes and went on fishing trips together. Jerry had spent enough time atop the water.

  From where he sat, it was hard to understand the mystique that surrounded the men who launched the Gangster Squad. He heard talk of what Jack O’Mara used to do with hoods up in the hills but found it difficult to believe—with his tweed coats and pipe the guy looked more like a scholar than a head-knocker. In fact, O’Mara was one of several squad members using the G.I. Bill to go to college in their spare time. The University of Southern California had a program tailor-made for cops and other civil servants, offering classes in downtown offices after the day shift and before night duty. Many of the family men also hustled outside jobs in their off-hours to help pay for their suburban ranch houses. O’Mara and a couple of colleagues who lived in the San Gabriel Valley had started doing part-t
ime security work at Santa Anita Park, the horse track that helped keep all the bookies in business. Wooters wondered whether O’Mara and those others were more interested in getting their degrees and padding their savings accounts, with an eye to the future, than getting all the wannabe gangsters looking for a piece of Mickey Cohen’s old action.

  But if older squad members such as O’Mara seemed cool and incommunicative, the younger breed, the ones who joined the department after the war, couldn’t resist Jerry. It was as if he said, “Hop in and come along for the ride,” and they did. He’d invite them to see films late at night at the Academy—leftover evidence from Vice, not for children. Then the next day he’d offer to take warm and fuzzy photos of their families. He was a pro with the camera, right? One taker was his first partner on the squad, Jack Horrall, the son of the old chief, C. B. Horrall. Jack had grown up witnessing hush-hush meetings in his house when his father gathered his right-hand man, Joe Reed, and others he trusted safely away from office eyes. The younger Horrall entered the force in 1947 after serving as a Navy gunner’s mate at Okinawa, then became eager to join the mob-fighting squad when Mickey Cohen revved up the scandal that forced his father to retire. The old man was all for it—“he handed me two black loose-leaf notebooks with nothing but pictures of organized crime figures in them.” Now the younger Horrall was paired with a fellow Navy vet offering him baby pictures.

  Jerry was good at that—he came out to my house in the Valley and took some pictures of my first boy, and my wife cooked a meatloaf dinner. And if you know Jerry he’d say, “Gee, I don’t want to eat this,” or he’d say to me, “Do you eat this garbage?” My wife was in the kitchen but she heard. She said, “Just don’t eat it, then.” He backed off and ate it. I loved Jerry. Jerry was one of a kind.

  Of course, when Jerry got serious about a sweet young TWA flight attendant, Jean Louise Jettie, and they spoke of marriage, Horrall did pull her aside. “I said, ‘Jeanie, are you sure you know what you’re doing?’”