The district attorney subpoenaed everyone involved to come downtown and appear before a grand jury nine days later. The panel was being asked to consider an indictment for felonious assault in the Schwab’s incident and also conspiracy charges in another matter involving Mickey—an attempt to fix a prizefight. On the same day as the Schwab’s encounter, welterweight Dick Goldstein had been scheduled to fight L.A.’s reigning Mexican-American boxing hero, Art “Golden Boy” Aragon, in San Antonio, Texas. The planned bout was upended, however, when Goldstein told authorities of a bizarre attempt to get him to take a dive.
According to the welterweight’s account, Aragon had approached him directly with an orchestrated scenario for their fight that seemed more suited to professional wrestling: The Golden Boy (gold trunks, gold robe) proposed that Goldstein go down in the second round but rise heroically after an eight count, then stage a furious comeback in the next round, and finally drop his hands in the fourth so he could be tagged for good, lights out. Plus, “Aragon asked me to hit him only around the body because it was almost Christmas and he didn’t want to wear eye patches.” Goldstein said he was offered $500 to take the dive at first, then a more generous $800, plus his hotel expenses. Police and prosecutors in Los Angeles suspected the plot to fix the fight was hatched in L.A. because Mickey and Aragon were buddies there. The Golden Boy was a charismatic figure in and out of the ring, regularly filling Grand Olympic Auditorium for his bouts while providing fodder for the gossip columns by squiring the most va-va-voom of actresses, including Mamie Van Doren and Jayne Mansfield.
Two days after Christmas, the lot of them were gathering to tell their stories to the grand jury. Aragon had already scoffed at how absurd it was to suggest that he would have to pay Dick Goldstein to tank a fight. “Any good boy can beat him any night of the week,” the Golden Boy said. Sitting outside the D.A.’s office, Mick echoed the sentiment, “Nobody would risk a nickel on Goldstein’s chances.” As for his encounter with the manager of Schwab’s, Mickey played the innocent. “I just went in and asked the man for my money, that’s all.” But his wisecracking ceased the instant he saw Sergeant Jerry Wooters come into the waiting room. Mickey’s face tensed.
“You’re the son of a bitch that’s trying to kill me!” he called out. “I’ll come down to the Intelligence squad’s office and you can shoot me there.”
“Aw, you fight like a woman,” Wooters said. “With your mouth.”
Mickey threw him a few more expletives and readjusted his pants as if to tuck in his shirt, or maybe drop his trousers. A tiny fellow with him, Ellis “Itchy” Mandel, no taller than Mick, but his current bodyguard and constant companion (“I’m just around alla time”), started toward Wooters’s partner, Bert Phelps, who suggested that someone might soon go flying out the window. It was one more pleasant afternoon among friends.
The positive note for Mickey was that the Schwab’s manager still would not tattle. Without the victim’s damning testimony the grand jury declined to indict him for the beating. The downside was that the encounter in the courthouse gave Wooters a brainstorm: If they couldn’t yet get Mickey for assault, or for extortion with his plant rentals, or for returning to bookmaking—they suspected that, too—why not for cursing? Cursing before women, to be specific, the district attorney’s secretaries who were seated within earshot of the waiting room. And why not throw in a second count for cursing earlier before the nice ladies working in Schwab’s? The LAPD actually had tried a similar tactic on Mickey years before when he cursed out a couple of cops at his Brentwood home. But the bystanders then had been several reporters, a lower breed known to spout dirty words with their morning coffee. This time Mickey had exposed respectable womenfolk to his tirades. The cases were entirely different, right?
On December 28, the day after the grand jury session, Captain Hamilton announced that Mickey had been arrested at his nursery on two counts of disturbing the peace based on a complaint signed by Sergeant Wooters. But when Mickey returned to the courthouse in February 1957, to stand trial for cursing, his lawyer promptly turned it into the trial of someone else. “This is not a case of the People v. Cohen,” he said, “but of Wooters v. Cohen.”
A jury heard three days of testimony about a few epithets, mostly the phrase suggesting that someone has canine ancestry. One of the D.A.’s secretaries insisted that she lost sleep after being exposed to the foul words, but Mickey’s lawyer, Rexford Eagan, established that all had heard (or used) such language before. Then he went on the offensive, spotlighting the LAPD’s “crusade” against Mickey since his release from prison. The defense’s main witness in that regard was Jerry Wooters. Called to the stand on the trial’s last day, he acknowledged drawing his .38 on Mickey behind the Ambassador.
If Mickey was doing something suspicious that day, why hadn’t he searched Mickey’s car? “I had on a new sport coat and I didn’t want to get it messed up.”
Was he aware that the chief federal probation officer had implored police to lay off Mickey? “He seems to think that Mr. Cohen is a wonderful man.”
In closing statements, Mickey’s lawyer told the jury that the cop pushing the case had a very thin skin and a very thick head. “If Mr. Cohen is found guilty,” Rexford Eagan said, “it will give Wooters a license to hunt, to harass.”
The jurors took only two hours to decide that this was not the case to send the city’s celebrity hoodlum back behind bars. Not guilty on both counts.
Mickey pumped the hand of the jury’s foreman and said, “I’ll try to live up to your verdict.”
Then he went on television to rub it in.
CHAPTER 25
Expensive %$#@ Words
Mickey periodically insisted that he didn’t like all the attention. “I feel happier when I’m anonymous,” he told Florabel Muir during the tumultuous year of 1949. “Where does a guy like me get off sharing headlines with the mayor of this great city? It doesn’t make sense, does it?” Mickey made a similar case to the Kefauver Committee, explaining to the senators that others thrust the perverse celebrity on him, especially a police department eager to divert attention from its own dirty laundry.
Halley: What are they trying to cover up?
Cohen: I don’t know what they are trying to cover up. Every time that something comes up where they want to get it in the papers, I am the best medium for them. All they have to do is throw something at me.
Halley: I don’t think you should be vague. I think as a citizen, if you think something is being covered up, you should say so.
Cohen: I am the greatest newspaper copy in this city and they have used me for any kind of a purpose. Ninety percent of the people in the city will tell you that.
Senator Tobey: In a Senate committee hearing on interstate commerce, we had another gentleman of the same profession come before us. His name was Frank Costello. I began to question him and in all pomposity he beat his breast and said, “I am front-page stuff. Every time I speak, the papers carry it on the front page.” That is called egotism.
Cohen: That happens to be my case and not egotism. I can spit on the sidewalk and it will be in the headlines.
Tobey: I won’t say any more at this time.
Cohen: These are actual facts.
Some smart people agreed with Mickey that he was not wholly to blame, given that he did not exactly issue press releases when he began his climb up the ranks of organized crime, such as it was, in Los Angeles. Enterprising city editors (and Florabels) sought him out, recognizing that the novelty of real gangsters in L.A. made for great copy that fed the paranoid fears of the City of Angels. That was the Frankenstein theory—that Mickey was a creation, a monster brought to life from semi-nothingness who then became nearly impossible to kill once he escaped the castle. It was a provocative theory, up there with Mickey-as-Gatsby, well worth pondering.
But it’s likely that the exponents of the Frankenstein theory never saw a blurb that ran in Ring magazine back in 1931. In addition to covering the major news o
f prizefighting, the Bible of Boxing ran monthly columns from the hotbeds of the sport. The “Cleveland Chatter” column was put together by “Parson” Tom McGinty, who in January of that year included this tidbit several items down on his page:
Mickey Cohen, local flyweight, called me on the telephone, thanking me for writing him up in the RING. This youngster looks like a real find. He is ready for any of the high-class flyweights.… He is certainly a classy little fighter.
Mickey Cohen, at seventeen, was on the phone pushing the ink! A quarter century later, he couldn’t help himself—he was as addicted to the attention as he was to his scalding ninety-minute showers. Maybe the explanation wasn’t in literature or horror films but child development, him being the youngest of six kids, waving to be noticed. What difference did it make? Chicago’s Tony Accardo could come and go from L.A. with a smile and a shrug and resist any temptation to taunt the cops who harried him. A prudent commitment to avoiding the limelight worked well for The Big Tuna—later in life he returned to California with little resistance, wintering during his twilight years in a golf community in Palm Springs, having spent one night in jail his entire career as a mobster. But that wasn’t Mickey—not back when he was holding court on the Strip as he was being shot at, and not in 1957, when he signed on to be the fourth guest on a national talk show launched that April 28 by the ABC television network.
The host was Mike Wallace, a cigarette-puffing former quiz show front man who had made a splash doing blunt interviews for a local New York TV station. His new The Mike Wallace Interview was live, meaning viewers heard whatever came out of Mickey’s mouth unfiltered, a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.
* * *
MIKE WALLACE’S RESONANT voice made him a natural as an announcer in any medium and he took whatever paying work he could get to start. After serving in the Navy in World War II, he lent his voice to a series of radio dramas before making his leap to TV, where he did commercials and hosted quiz shows, the rage of the day. His included The Big Surprise, in which contestants could win up to $100,000 by answering questions in their area of expertise. That was NBC’s attempt to one-up CBS’s The $64,000 Question, on which the pretty psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers had become a national celebrity by showing off her knowledge of boxing. On The Big Surprise, a twelve-year-old hit the jackpot by answering questions about the stock market. Take that, Dr. Joyce.
Wallace fortunately escaped the quiz show carnival before it was exposed as being (sometimes) as fixed as the Golden Boy’s fight. He found his niche when he began hosting newscasts in New York and then Night Beat, for which he conducted interviews from 11 P.M. to midnight four nights a week. Wallace had done some acting over the years (playing a lieutenant in an early TV series Stand By for Crime) and he brought that skill to the interview show, even using his cigarette as an effective prop, holding it between his middle and index fingers and puffing and exhaling for dramatic effect. But his genius was his avoidance of smiley-faced politeness—he was willing to ask his guests about more than their pets or their latest motion picture. He was like a coiled snake, poised to lunge forward and strike. Six months after he began the New York talk show he was invited to do the same thing on a national stage. The Mike Wallace Interview would have just him and one guest for a full half hour each Sunday night.
Given that the show was based in New York, Wallace’s staff didn’t have to look far for a gangster if they wanted to book one. The Kefauver committee had identified New York and Chicago as America’s two centers of organized crime, both cities having large, concentrated Italian immigrant neighborhoods that served as early breeding grounds for the criminal networks that eventually controlled whole building trades, trucking, and the docks. One gambling overlord in the New York area might have sixty enforcers under him. He in turn answered to Frank Costello, whose influence was underscored by a wartime episode involving the Brooklyn prosecutor who had helped cripple Murder, Inc., Bugsy’s old gang, and send Louis “Lepke” Buchalter to the Sing Sing chair—in New York, there had been convictions in mob murders.
But Kefauver’s report described how William O’Dwyer, soon to be elected mayor, had to go hat-in-hand for help during the war when asked to combat the racketeering inflating the cost of aircraft parts purchased by the military. “According to Ambassador O’Dwyer, when he was an Army officer attached to the Air Force in 1942 with orders ‘to keep Wright Field clean,’ he found it necessary to obtain some information from Frank Costello. Despite the obvious disinclination which the former prosecutor of Murder, Inc., must have had to go into the home of Costello, O’Dwyer did not even think of calling Costello to the offices of the Army Air Corps; he went to Costello’s home.”
They called Costello the “prime minister of the U.S. underworld” and he would have been a marquee guest for a TV show, and one who it would cost nothing to get to the ABC studios—his apartment was blocks away, on Central Park West. Of course, absent a subpoena, a mob boss like him would have laughed off any invitation to sit down for half an hour with a camera in his face. Costello had other things on his mind, anyway, as ABC’s new show was launched. On May 2, rival Vinny “The Chin” Gigante ambushed him in the lobby of his fancy apartment building and fired a .38 slug at his head, saying, “This is for you, Frank.” The bullet bounced off, but the likes of Frank Costello was not about to face a TV host eager to ambush him in other ways.
Fresh off his triumph in his court case for cursing before women, the Los Angeles plant pruner Mickey Cohen asked ABC to send a limo out to meet him at the airport when he flew in for the May 19, 1957 show. Mike Wallace’s young researcher-writer Al Ramrus got the job of meeting their guest and taking him to the Hampshire House hotel, understanding that it wasn’t Frank Costello who’d be walking off the plane from the other coast, but expecting at least a facsimile of James Cagney.
I was twenty-seven and it was less than a year after I had been a crime reporter in Hamilton, Ontario. A big story for me there would be a stickup of a gas station. Here I am in New York and I’m told by Mike Wallace and our producer, Ted Yates, we’re doing Mickey Cohen. He was colorful, sensational, controversial, an ideal guest for Mike Wallace. I was told that I was to meet Mickey Cohen at Idlewild Airport in a limousine because he wanted a limousine to take him into the city. And I was sitting in the back and sort of fantasizing what this would be all about. Was he in danger of getting rubbed out? Was I in danger of getting rubbed out? I also had been given word that he was traveling incognito and therefore I had to have a secret password to go up to him and identify myself. The password was “Mr. Dunn.” So I rehearsed that, “Mr. Dunn, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Dunn,” all the way down to the airport. And I recognized Mickey from some news photos. I said “Mr. Dunn, I’m Al Ramrus.” He said “What Dunn? I’m Cohen.” He was not in on the secret password gimmick.
Mickey was short, sort of stocky, overweight, sallow-faced, and you got the feeling he was badly out of shape. In a street fight, unless he could kick a guy’s balls or chew his nose off in the first minute, he’d be a limp noodle in a fight, despite his reputation. Mickey Cohen did not radiate the charisma of a Cagney or a Bogart. He was a rather nondescript, colorless-looking guy. It reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil.” He was a banal guy from everything I could see. He was accompanied by another guy, maybe an associate or a gofer. On the drive back to New York, I talked about the weather, I talked about New York. It was rather awkward. We reached the hotel on Central Park South and went up to the rooms we had reserved for him and his associate. It was two bedrooms and an adjoining bathroom. Mickey took one look at that adjoining bathroom and said, “No, I ain’t gonna stay here.” He wanted a private bathroom. I had to go down to the desk and find some other arrangements.
Mickey didn’t want to talk then. He invited me to a party he was holding that night at his place, which I guess was a getting-together party with the mob from New York and New Jersey, maybe fifteen guys and a handful of hot-looking girls. But str
angely enough the atmosphere was not very romantic or very sexual. It reminds me of something the writer Ben Hecht told me, that mobsters generally are not overly interested in sexual intercourse. They’re obsessed with money, power, scheming, and survival.
I tried to do the preinterview, prepare the show, in the middle of this loud noisy party. And it was very, very difficult. How do you sit and talk about this man’s life and his crimes and his conscience and whatever while he’s surrounded by his pals from the mob? I didn’t see any drugs and I didn’t see very much drinking, either. Mostly it was a lot of pineapple cheesecake, cherry cheesecake from Lindy’s. I was very happy with the cheesecake. Mickey made it very clear to me, however, that he wanted to publicly attack Chief Parker and Hamilton. There was no doubt in my mind that was what he wanted to do on the show. Mainly his motivation was to attack the cops. That should have set alarm bells off in my head. Maybe it was the excitement of being with a mobster or the controversy and the headlines we would get, but it sounded OK to me. And when I went back it sounded OK to Ted and Mike. We were somewhat out of our minds. I can’t give you a better explanation of why we didn’t say, “We can’t do this. We gotta stop him.”
* * *
AS SOON AS the studio lights went on, their guest turned on too. The banal schlub of the airport and hotel suite became Mickey Cohen, gangster—or ex-gangster, for he reiterated for the nation that he had gone straight with the greenhouse, even if Wallace hadn’t invited him to give the lowdown on floral arrangements. “What we wanted from him were stories about the Bad Old Days,” the host said. Mickey obliged by asserting that he once took up to $600,000 in bets daily, but never made a penny from prostitution or narcotics, providing an opening for his host to uncoil. Wallace said:
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 24
