The fictional Max Troy does not think much of cops. “I pay your salary,” he reminds Sergeant Friday when they try to question him. “What do they pay you to carry that badge around, 40 cents an hour?”
“That badge pays $464 a month … worth $1.82 an hour,” Friday says. “So Mister, better settle back in that chair because I’m gonna blow about twenty bucks of it right now.”
But the tough-talking hero is frustrated when four gangsters show up before a grand jury with their Fifth Amendment rights (“I refuse to testify…”) written on slips of paper. Webb’s sergeant has phone records showing a suspicious pattern of calls among them, but admits he can’t be sure what was said because the law (unfortunately) won’t let police wiretap.
“You mean cut in on private telephone conversations?” asks a shocked female grand juror, obviously an ACLU liberal. “Why, that’s an invasion of privacy. How do we know that all you policemen wouldn’t be running around listening to all our conversations?”
“We would if you talked murder,” Friday deadpans.
The prosecutor has to tell him they don’t have enough evidence against the hoods. “Release ’em.”
“Why does the law always work for the guilty?” Friday asks.
“Because the innocent don’t need it,” the D.A. says.
Red-meat preaching aside, the film did provide audiences with realistic glimpses of rousts (“put your hands up on the car…”) and of bumper-to-bumper tailing after Captain Hamilton instructs his men, “Put ’em to bed at night and get ’em up in the morning.” But the big-screen Dragnet suffered from stylistic schizophrenia, mixing the dark look of film noir and its sardonic asides with Webb’s poker-faced earnestness and his insistence that this mob rubout be solved in the end by the good guys paid, however little, to solve crimes. After one of their bugs overhears top mobsters plotting to kill their own triggerman, Sergeant Friday uses the recording to persuade the killer’s wife to lead them to a piece of smoking-gun evidence: the barrel of the sawed-off his shotgun he used in the murder. When Friday presents the new evidence to the D.A., he says, “You got ’em!” and a miraculous clap of thunder punctuates the point. But when they head out in their raincoats to arrest the main mobster, Max Troy, they have to go to the hospital (“All Saints”) because his illness was real—he’s just died of gastric cancer.
“I’m sorry, was Mr. Troy a friend of yours?” a young intern asks.
“No sir, we hardly knew him.”
Standing in the rain, on the street, Friday drops a slip of paper onto the wet pavement—the crib sheet from the grand jury room on which the mobster had written his rights. As the cops walk off, buttoning their overcoats, the rain washes over the paper, obliterating the hood’s name.
* * *
THE ENTIRE SQUAD was invited to the Warner Bros. premiere and most attended. Con Keeler, Mr. Down the Line, drew a few glances by bringing one of his informants who looked suspiciously like a lady of the night—he was merely rewarding her for some good leads, he explained later, that’s all. Like a number of the cops in the audience, Keeler was a minor character in Webb’s film. “Keeler, you and Stevens want to cover the back?” Sergeant Joe Friday asks in one scene. “Right, Joe,” says the actor playing Keeler. Big Jerry Greeley got a mention too, as did Billy Dick Unland.
Their newest bug man also got a plug, in the critical scene where Sergeant Friday wants to play a wire recording for the killer’s wife. He asks, “Can Phelps meet us out there with playback equipment?” The real Bert Phelps got a charge out of that, as anyone would. But it also left him uneasy, for he knew the backstory, why Jack Webb was rewarding him.
* * *
TO WEBB’S CREDIT, he married gorgeous Julie London before he was a TV star. They were wed in Las Vegas in 1947, when he was still making his mark in radio and she was a twenty-one-year-old pinup girl and start-up actress, not yet discovered as a sultry singing talent who would score a million-selling hit with “Cry Me a River.” That was her future, but in 1953 she was mostly a glamorous mommy, taking care of their two children at their Encino home. The marriage was on shaky ground, though, according to London’s subsequent testimony in divorce court, where her lawyer actually said, “Give us the facts, ma’am.” She then described how Webb would turn on the TV at the house and tune her out. She also complained that he talked down to her as if she were a three-year-old. “He’d tell me something ten times when I’d already understood it,” she said. The star of Dragnet finally just split.
“Last April, my husband left for work and said he’d be home for dinner. Then he called later in the day and said he would not … then I did not see him for six weeks,” London testified, wearing a pink chiffon scarf at the court hearing in November 1953. Webb did return home after the weeks away but “said he wasn’t sure about continuing our marriage, and he wanted to think it over,” she continued. “He stayed two months then asked me for a divorce.… He said his career gave him no time for marriage.” Webb’s career did give him time for actress Dorothy Towne, however, who had played a bit part on one Dragnet episode—he forgot to mention that detail to his wife.
So Jack Webb was caught like many in Hollywood, facing a nasty divorce and worried how his estranged spouse might go after his wealth. He thus called his friend and technical advisor, Captain James Hamilton, and asked if he could get a different sort of technical advice. Julie London and the kids still were living in the Encino house and Webb wanted a private eye to wire it up—he wondered whether Hamilton could come over with one of his bugging experts to lend some expertise. Bert Phelps got the nod.
I was asked by the captain to go with him out to Jack Webb’s place, his home. It was just off of Ventura Boulevard in Encino. He and his wife, they were having all kinds of battles, they were going through a bitter divorce and when we got out there a private detective was out there and he wanted to bug the rooms for Jack Webb. Now, why the captain brought me out there for a civil situation, I felt very uncomfortable out there. Anyway, they asked me for my opinion and what should be done and so on and I told them. I said, “Whatever the captain wants me to do, OK,” so thereafter it did happen, he got evidence he wanted to get. Jack Webb and the captain were very close. I think it was, “Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
Amid the scope of all they did, the help they gave Jack Webb was minimal—and apparently not of much benefit. The sultry Julie London was awarded $150,000 cash, $150,000 in Dragnet Productions securities, and $21,000 a year in support payments, guaranteed by a $150,000 insurance policy on Webb’s life. But the episode still left Phelps feeling uncomfortable. Though the lines were always fuzzy in their world, this was a leap away from eavesdropping on a major bookmaking ring, the LAPD’s public voices of morality secretly helping a Hollywood big shot bug his wife. Then again, maybe they knew what they were doing.
Webb came through for them again after the top court used the Cahan case to proclaim that law enforcement could no longer use illegally obtained evidence. First, he produced an episode of Dragnet titled “The Big Ruling,” in which Sergeant Friday and his partner get a tip that a heroin shipment is coming and search a pusher in the area. They find the damning drugs—and stolen sweaters—but have no warrant and can’t use the evidence, so they have to set the pusher free. Jack Webb’s character gives America a lecture in answer to the question “Who’s better off?” It’s not society.
Webb also joined Chief Parker in appearing before the State Assembly’s Judiciary Subcommittee to plead that legislators untie the hands of police. The actor’s tool of persuasion? His film pointing out the foolishness of giving criminals all those rights.
CHAPTER 22
Mickey Gets Out
Sergeant Jerry Wooters was in one of the three LAPD cars waiting at the airport on October 10, 1955 when Mickey Cohen flew home from prison. Thanks to 480 days off for good behavior, Mickey had completed his tax term in far less than the maximum time at McNeil Island federal penitentiary in Washington. He was met in Los
Angeles by his wife, Lavonne, and by Mike, their boxer. The other dog, Tuffy, the trick-performing terrier heard barking on the Vice bug, had died. But Mike was still wagging his little tail to greet his master. There was lots of speculation over what Mickey might do with his new start in life, but no one anticipated that he’d pick the nursery business. He would sell and rent out plants, real and fake—plastic greenery—and later manage an ice cream parlor. A state commission once estimated that he had five hundred bookies under him. But beauty and sweets, that was the new Mickey, so he swore.
* * *
MICKEY COHEN TOLD of the bleakness and sick violence of life in prison, where a guard might beat a Mexican inmate with his flashlight through the bars for failing to understand his English. Another time, Mickey said, he found a con in agony on the blood-covered floor of a cell—the guy had stuck a lightbulb up his ass and it broke. Most of Mickey’s prison stories emphasized how he had played the system: scoring a job in the clothing commissary that enabled him to win guards’ favor by giving them new uniforms every month, rather than every year; growing fat from the steak sandwiches made for him by the Chinese chef in the officers’ dining room because of favors he’d done, years before, in L.A.’s Chinatown; getting the choice assignment of examining crates shipped in from the Pacific with war surplus items, from playing cards to cologne, waiting to be plucked; wrangling up to a dozen towels for his cell, along with a large hope chest he stored under his bed; and, most important, gaining access to a shower near the clothing dispensary so he wouldn’t be limited to the normal two cleansings a week. “Otherwise I probably would have flipped out,” Mickey said. He might have had Gus Wunderlich to thank, too, for the hot water that saved his psyche at McNeil Island—that’s where Gus had been sent years earlier for pirating the gambling ship, and used his mechanical wizardry to fix the ancient boilers.
Mickey had hoped to slip out of the Washington prison unnoticed. Fat chance. The plan was for prison officials to escort him onto the boat off the island at 4 A.M. so he would reach the mainland town of Steilacoom well before sunup. There he would be met by his brother, Harry, who would come in from Chicago for the big day while Lavonne waited in L.A. But the first hitch stemmed from Lavonne’s method of getting him suitable new clothes. The city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, Jim Richardson, talked her into letting a reporter haul the clothing up there, so more than kin were waiting for Mickey to step off the prison launch amid a pouring rain. When Mickey did walk up the gangplank, his expected welcoming committee was nowhere to be seen—his brother, Harry Cohen, and two men with him were off staying dry in a coffee shop. With only reporters to greet him in the downpour, Mickey took off running, in a raincoat but hatless, toward his brother’s blue ’54 Cadillac. Realizing that he had missed the boat, literally, Harry finally came scampering after him and the mob of newsmen. “Where in hell have you guys been?” Mickey asked.
They had arranged for him to get a haircut and manicure at a Seattle hotel, to blow off the prison stink, but authorities discouraged any local stop. Mickey suggested they go to Portland instead—he knew a slot machine guy there. On the way, the drenched quartet stopped for breakfast at a restaurant where he celebrated his freedom by ordering double portions of orange juice and pancakes and three eggs, then left a $20 tip. He still owed half a million in back taxes and penalties, but some habits were hard to break, and not only for him. Portland police rousted Mickey and his entourage shortly after they checked into a hotel there. It was off to the airport and a Western Air Lines flight that landed at 11:07 P.M. in Los Angeles, where another media throng waited along with the three police cars, Lavonne, and Mike the boxer.
Mickey had floated the idea that he might open a restaurant along Wilshire’s Miracle Mile or in Beverly Hills, forgetting that his federal parole prohibited him from being any where liquor was served. The eatery thus was a nonstarter, but Los Angeles city councilman Gordon Hahn was taking no chances—he introduced a motion to ask the state to deny Mickey a liquor license if he applied for one. “If he wants to sell ice cream cones, that’s ducky,” Hahn said. With the restaurant nixed, rumors had Mickey getting back into the haberdashery business, but in Vegas, going to Texas to give oil another try, or heading to Alaska to prospect for gold.
The chief federal probation officer in Los Angeles, Cal Meador, appealed to the LAPD to leave Mickey alone, to give him a chance—he thought Mickey might be an ideal person to speak to delinquent boys and other down-and-outers. But Chief Parker was not about to share his strategy for dealing with the newly released Mickey, noting “the German army didn’t come over and tell their plans to the allies.” It’s a fair guess that he didn’t buy into the positive role model theory, though, especially after Mickey was picked up in Palm Springs on February 11, 1956, for failure to register as an ex-con. That was a minor infraction that cost Mickey only $75 to resolve but authorities were curious as to why he was in the desert resort with veteran Chicago lawyer George Bieber, who had once represented Bugs Moran. Four days later, Mickey opened Michael’s Tropical Plants in L.A., out of a greenhouse on South Vermont Avenue, just north of downtown. Mickey revealed that a brother-and-sister pair had written him in prison suggesting he join them in the business. He was good for publicity, at minimum—the Associated Press took his picture posing in a green smock and holding clippers as he explained how he was a 9-to-6 working stiff now, turning over a new leaf, so to speak, from his profligate past.
It used to cost me two, three hundred bucks to walk out on the street with all the bites put on me. Dinner, every night a couple of hundred bucks.
Show you how crazy I was. I was going over my clothes after I got back and I found 600 pairs of socks, five bucks and seven-fifty a pair, all with the labels still on.…
Just the other day I get a call from a fella high up in gambling circles, “How’s the flower business?” he asks.
I tell him it’s not flowers, it’s plants, but he don’t know the difference.
“Look,” he says. “What you fooling around with that stuff for?”
Then he lays his proposition in front of me, but I’m not interested.
“Look,” he says. “What’s the score? You just doing this ’til your parole is up?”
That’s what everybody thinks.
That wasn’t what Sergeant Jerry Wooters thought.
* * *
BY 1956, WOOTERS no longer was partnered with Jack Horrall, the old chief’s son. They gave him Bert Phelps, the electronics whiz whose cop father had four notches in his gun. Bert was a blessing from on high. Assigned to watch one bookie they suspected might realign with Mickey, they rented an apartment above a pizza parlor across the street. The book opened for business at 6 A.M. and worked eight or more phones, providing a lot of chatter to overhear. Bert said one Friday, “I got an idea,” and over the weekend he invented a device to capture every number dialed to and from each phone—and perhaps what was said—“so we didn’t have to do much work for the next six months,” Jerry boasted. He may have puffed up the time-saving a touch, but there was a reason the CIA was constantly trying to hire away Bert Phelps.
After the opening of Michael’s Tropical Plants, Jerry and his brainy partner planted themselves in their car across the street from the greenhouse that instantly became Mickey’s office, playing the same role as his paint store and haberdashery in years past. Jerry quickly figured out Mickey’s scam—he and his men were “renting out” plastic philodendrons in about the same manner as Jimmy The Weasel peddled orange juice to bars.
It was a phony nursery—he’d come in and tell you you needed artificial plants, cost you 1,000 bucks a month, or else, you know? So you could almost walk in and tell every place that’s paying Mickey Cohen. The joint would have all the plants around it. Some guys did it with linen, some guys had soft drinks. He had plants. But he had one soft spot at the nursery, the half an hour between when the office help left and his bodyguards arrived. Well, anytime he turned around and farted we’d be there.
I hadn’t said a word to him. I just was there. The captain, Hamilton, he says, “The chief says, stay away from Cohen. Anything happens to the son of a bitch, you’re going to get the beef.”
Sometimes the bosses knew what they were talking about.
* * *
LAVONNE COHEN FILED for divorce a month after the plant business opened. She said, “We’ve both changed since he’s been gone.… I’m sure there can’t be a woman in a million who has had a marriage like mine. I’ve lived in a dream house furnished with every luxury a woman could desire. I’ve had mink coats and racks of wonderful clothes. I’ve been smothered in jewels and bought a new Cadillac every year.… Now they are all gone—the money, the jewels, the clothes, the cars…”
Mickey said, “Lavonne married a dashing, colorful rough-tough hoodlum and when I came out she found me quite a bit different.” He also said, “Who’d want to marry a guy like me? Always washing his hands and stinking up the place with cologne? Nobody would ever put up with it, except Lavonne.”
So that’s why they split—that, and the actress he was seeing.
The bullshit amused the cops who for years had watched Mickey flit about with one wannabe glamour girl or another. But they also had noticed how Lavonne had started leaving their old home twenty minutes after one of his men, Sam Farkas. When she eventually remarried after the divorce, Sam became husband number two. For the moment, though, Lavonne was living in an apartment in West L.A.—their old house had long ago been sold for the taxes and their possessions put up at auction.
As for Mickey, screenwriter Ben Hecht tracked him down to an apartment that was tiny but with enough room for his essentials. A new Caddy was parked outside, and inside “thirty pressed and spotless suits crowded in the closet, all in tan shades. Twenty-five Chinese, Japanese, and Persian robes of silk hang there and thirty-five pairs of glistening shoes stand on the floor neatly.” The essentials.
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