Wallace: you have made book, you have bootlegged. Most important of all, you’ve broken one of the commandments—you’ve killed, Mickey. How can you be proud of not dealing in prostitution and narcotics when you’ve killed at least one man, or how many more? How many more, Mickey?
Cohen: I have killed no man that in the first place didn’t deserve killing.
Wallace: By whose standards?
Cohen: By the standards of our way of life. And I actually, in all of these killings—in all of what you would call killings—I had no alternative. It was either my life or their life.
Had they left it at that, both parties would have gone home happy. Wallace had a guest talking about killing (!) and Mickey had come up with a signature quote worthy of his obituary: “I have killed no man that … didn’t deserve killing.” Though there was but one fatal shooting conclusively tied to him, he had been able to upgrade himself into a (possible) mass killer, while revealing nothing specific. A win-win, as they’d say later. But Wallace had to push him in another direction. “Now, Mick, without naming names, how far up in the brass do you have to bribe the cops to carry on a big-time bookmaking operation?”
Without naming names? Mickey had been handed a coast-to-coast megaphone to settle old scores. He said, “I have a police chief in Los Angeles who happens to be a sadistic degenerate.” When Wallace linked the words “apparently respectable” to Chief Parker, Mickey could hold back no longer:
I’m going to give him much to bring a libel suit against me. He’s nothing but a thief that has been—a reformed thief … This man here is as dishonest politically as the worst thief that accepts money for payoffs … He is a known alcoholic. He’s been disgusting. He’s an old degenerate. In other words, he’s a sadistic degenerate of the worst type.
Parker was not the only target. After Mickey said, “He has a man underneath him that is on an equal basis,” Wallace pressed him three times to say explicitly who that was, so Mickey obliged. “His name is Captain James Hamilton, and he’s probably a lower degenerate than Parker.” On a roll, he brought up two enemies from the past, the long-retired Chief Horrall and ex-Mayor Bowron, out of office since ’53. It was the same strategy he had employed in 1949, dragging everyone down into the muck with him.
Mike Wallace was years away from being the grand old man of the interview game as the face of 60 Minutes, but he knew the basics of slander. It was one thing to call the Intelligence Division “the Stupidity Squad”—that was a clever dig—and another to call people crooks and degenerates. Wallace’s scrambling only got him in deeper when he returned to Chief Parker and said, “Well, Mickey, you’re a reformed thief just as he’s a reformed thief. Isn’t it the pot calling the kettle black?” By the interview’s end, Wallace had to remind his audience that the views expressed by Mickey were Mickey’s alone. After the crisis conferences following the show, Wallace and his producer hurried over to their guest’s suite on Central Park South, where they found him coming out of the shower, wearing only a towel and with not a care in the world. Mickey reassured them not to fret about Bill Parker—he knew too much about the chief. “He’ll never sue.”
But they had invited “Mr. Dunn” to be their guest and they’d been dumb, dumb, dumb. While the show was broadcast live, that didn’t cover the West Coast, where it was scheduled in the same time slot, meaning three hours later. They let the venomous dialogue be aired there anyway, while offering Parker and Hamilton time to respond. That wasn’t what the two men wanted.
ABC issued a formal apology the next day and the following Sunday the network’s boss went on the show to again retract Mickey’s slams, all too late. The LAPD officials filed suit against Wallace and his guest, the network, and the show’s sponsors. By the time the legal dust settled, they had too, with Chief Parker collecting $45,975.09, enough to have bought Mickey’s Brentwood home, and Captain Hamilton getting $22,978.55 from the deep-pocket defendants. Mickey had no assets in his name to collect and was not a party to the deal. “Any retraction made by those spineless persons in regard to the television show,” he said, “does not go for me.”
The broadcast was costly in more ways than one for Wallace and his creative team—they lost some of the quality that had got them to the national stage, their swagger. It took several years to get that back, along with their reputations, according to the lowest man on the totem pole, the researcher-writer Al Ramrus.
For someone like myself, who grew up on James Cagney movies, Cohen was a big disappointment—aging, out of shape, drab, unattractive, colorless except when talking about crime. An unsavory specimen, nothing like Cagney. Of course, Hollywood doesn’t make movies about “real” gangsters because there’d be no audience. When Cagney went to the chair in Angels with Dirty Faces, you felt empathy, even sympathy and admiration. Had Mickey Cohen gone to the chair, you’d have felt good riddance.
While Cohen was good show business, you still felt somewhat soiled and tainted about giving network television time to such an unsavory creature. He was kind of Damon Runyonesque in a way. He was an aging Jewish guy from New York—perhaps he was doing his best to be Cagney-like. Once the camera went on, he turned it on more. He was acting like Mickey Cohen the gangster, yeah, absolutely. “I didn’t kill nobody who didn’t deserve killing.” It was colorful. It sounded like a good line from a movie, didn’t it?
I think he was trying to be Mickey Cohen as best he could. Just to be a small-time petty gangster, that’s no big deal. Whose gonna pay attention to that kind of guy? Why would Billy Graham, for instance, want him to convert to Christianity and appear at a rally, just a petty thug?
* * *
TWO DAYS AFTER he wreaked havoc on Mike Wallace’s show, Mickey was one of 17,500 people who filled New York’s Madison Square Garden for the crusade of America’s rising voice of evangelism. Billy Graham and his people had hoped that Mickey would do the full bit of coming down the aisle and accepting Jesus into his heart but they had to settle for him standing there for all to see, or take his picture, immaculate in his dark suit, white shirt, and light tie. Hands clasped in front of him, Mickey gave every appearance of listening intently as the charismatic Graham preached, “If you’ll say you will, tomorrow morning when you wake up and face the same old life you’ll find that you have the new power to say ‘no’ to the tempter. And you’ll have a new power to live a new life in Christ.” Billy Graham also warned that New York would be one of the first places wiped out in an atomic war.
Mickey had been playing the North Carolina–based preacher and his crowd for years. His entrée to Graham and his devotees had come through his 304-pound former bugging expert Jim Vaus, who had seen the light at a tent crusade and gone to prison after admitting his perjury on Mickey’s behalf. Vaus came out offering his salvation as a testimonial at Graham’s crusades and intent on saving Mickey’s soul too, recognizing what a coup that would be for the cause. The Jewish gangster would be the ultimate celebrity convert, eclipsing the hillbilly radio star Stuart Hamblen, who gave up his life of sin and racehorses to join them on the sawdust trail.
As early as 1949, Vaus brought the then thirty-year-old Graham by Mickey’s home for hot chocolate and cookies. In 1951, as Mickey was awaiting his tax trial, he was invited to join more than one hundred local luminaries for a Graham-led revival at a manufacturer’s Los Angeles mansion, an event that was supposed to remain private but inevitably wasn’t. “Can’t the poor man find God without the newspapers hounding him?” asked actress Jane Russell, who had become famous after Howard Hughes suggested she wear a steel bra in The Outlaw. Another sexpot actress was there too, Virginia Mayo, along with the wholesome Dennis Morgan, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evans, to hear Dr. Graham talk about how to become a Christian. “Mickey Cohen just happened to be at the meeting,” the evangelist said.
The two men seemed to have a perfect understanding, for mutual benefit. Mickey would say in public, “Billy wasn’t trying to convert me.” Or, “How can he convert me? I’m a good Jew.” Or, “
If I want any spiritual help, I’ll go to my rabbi.” Then Billy would say in public, “Thousands of people are praying all the time for Mickey Cohen to get religion.” Or, “I am hoping—no, change that to praying—for Mr. Cohen’s conversion to Christianity. My only concern is to get this man to turn to God. After all, Jesus visited Zacchaeus of Jericho, who was a tax gatherer of shady reputation.”
Mickey was fine with all that—Billy Graham could say anything he wanted about him. It really started paying off after he got out of prison and needed the cash. The now Reverend Vaus personally gave Mickey a little on-your-feet money and introduced him to a Downey, California, businessman who wanted the former haberdasher to hear his testimony. The man had been orphaned when his father killed his mother, then himself. “When I took Christ into my heart, it took away my tears,” he told Mickey. “If you take these words, your troubles will cease.”
Mickey cried at the sad story and said he would consider converting but that was difficult with all the financial pressure on him. When the businessman offered a $1,500 loan, Mickey said that wasn’t enough. He eventually got $6,000 from the guy.
Mickey went a step further in working the printing company executive and evangelist W. C. “Bill” Jones, who spent $4,500 on him. Once a drinker and gambler who placed bets with the likes of Mickey, Jones said they met at a Sunset Boulevard restaurant, then went to Mickey’s apartment where, “We prayed together for twenty minutes and we knelt together and he turned his life over to Christ in my presence.”
After witnessing the conversion in private, Jones urged Mickey to announce it at Madison Square Garden—winning over a sinner like him would give sizzle to Graham’s crusade in the nation’s media center. Weeks before the New York extravaganza he paid Mickey’s way out there to talk it over face-to-face with Graham and do some Bible readings together. Mickey this time stayed in a suite at the Waldorf, charging the $507 bill to his benefactor. Mickey later said he had them eager to pay $10,000 or more if he proclaimed his allegiance to the Lord at the Garden.
So his time in New York may have been costly to the ABC television network and to Mike Wallace, but it was a profit-maker to Mickey Cohen, and helped get him more firmly on his feet. But that was all he did the night of the crusade at the Garden, stand on his feet. If that angered the suckers who expected more for their money—a conversion of the Little Jew—well, fuck ’em. He wore a gold mezuzah on the watch chain dangling about his waist.
* * *
LOS ANGELES POLICE gave Mickey their own welcome back when he returned from doing the TV show in which he called their chief a degenerate: a patrol picked him up for an offense a few notches below murder. Mickey had stopped his Cadillac in the street through two green lights while he ran to a newsstand and got a paper, no doubt to read about himself. His crime? Blocking traffic.
CHAPTER 26
Jack Whalen Tries “The Scamus”
No one pretended to understand Jerry Wooters, but his partners got some perspective when they met his older brother. Jim Wooters was crazier—bat-shit crazy, in fact, literally crazy about bat shit. His brother was the studio technician rumored to have taken a few bets in his day. Jerry told one squad member that was nonsense, Jim absolutely was not a bookie, though “he might have been at one time, before the war.” In later years his brother settled on a get-rich-quick scheme he insisted wasn’t a gamble, to the amusement of Bert Phelps, the genius bug man.
His claim to fame was that he had the bat guano market locked up. He had tons and tons of bat guano stored in some warehouse. He was always going to sell it and make a million dollars. Yeah, fertilizer. That went on for years and years. Last time I saw Jim, “You still got the bat guano?” “Yeah, man, we’re gonna make a lot of money.”
A few colleagues thought Jerry Wooters had no business being in police work—what was the LAPD thinking?—much less in one of the most sensitive assignments on the force. It’s only fair to note, however, that both of his partners from the 1950s called him the best street cop they ever saw. Even on an elite squad you could be paired with an old-timer whose idea of field work was stopping by a store with a TV in the window to watch professional wrestling. That’s what happened to Billy Dick Unland when he joined the squad and was put in a car with Archie Case, the rabbit-punching onetime beat cop from Watts. Archie was a fan of Gorgeous George and the other wrestlers and would go cruising to find an electronics shop to catch their matches. Finally Unland went for advice to Jack O’Mara, his supervising sergeant, who said, “You’ve got to take the leadership.”
That was the nature of police partnerships. One guy usually was a damper—if not an anchor—while the other was a pusher, the leader who occasionally needed pulling back. Jerry Wooters was the pusher, no matter his partner. He’d have you out all night on the Strip, shadowing Mickey club to club—OK, and enjoying a few drinks on the house. But getting Mickey’s goat wasn’t all he did. More than any squad member he set up arrests of bookies who gave any hint of aligning again with that phony. It was as if Jerry still had a pipeline directly into L.A.’s underworld—and he did, thanks to one particular source. “God, for a few years, you know, they thought I was the best detective in town,” he said. “As long as you had Jack, you had the world.”
As Wooters saw it, there were three gangs in the city: the Italians, of course, including a couple of Dragnas, the Licatas, and Jimmy The Weasel, when he was out of prison; the Jews, meaning Mickey and a lot of bookies and whatever new group of flunkies he assembled; and the homegrown one-man Irish gang who took bets himself, collected debts, and shook down anyone he could, whether a racetrack scammer, abortion doctor, or fellow bookie. If they didn’t pay off Jack Whalen, they might see the law on their tail. “What he didn’t get a piece of, I got word of,” was how Wooters described their delicate arrangement. “I never discussed the Whalen thing with too many people.”
He certainly did not tell his bosses about him and Whalen, nor how he was working surreptitiously with a Vice cop—Captain Hamilton and the others would never understand the age-old ways of Vice. Jerry’s partner on the sly was veteran detective Pete Stafford, who lived within walking distance of him in Arcadia, just north of Jack O’Mara’s town. Jerry and Jean Wooters had moved there after their marriage, when his bachelor duplex by the Police Academy did not seem like the right place to raise a family. Their neighbor Stafford was a no-smoking, no-drinking bruiser who in his off time helped the downtown YMCA weed out perverts in exchange for use of its gym, where he worked out at 4 A.M., bench-pressing 400 pounds. Stafford had become an expert in the increasingly popular gambling on football and other sports, as opposed to horses, but his MO was not what they taught at the Academy. He was known to tell a bookie, “I want to learn about this a little better—let me work your phones.” Then he would sit in as a betting clerk while praying that his Vice colleagues wouldn’t burst in and discover his means of research.
Stafford also said straight-out of certain bookies, “When you get to know ’em well, you kind of do ’em favors.” If their daughter got picked up for drunk driving, he steered the family to an attorney who could get the case knocked down to a straight drunk rather than a 502, driving under the influence. That was their understanding—you do him a good turn, he does one for you, and sometimes it was a tip leading you up the ladder. So when Jerry Wooters got a lead from Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen, he often called Pete Stafford, the weight lifter who played things fast and loose on the job.
He’d get me on the phone and say, “Meet me at Intelligence but go in the back door and I’ll be there and take you to a room, because I don’t want those guys to see you up there.” I’ll tell you, policemen have this little jealousy. And some people were jealous of Jerry because he got more information. Anyhow, we all kind of knew the bookmakers. Jerry Wooters and I knew them better than the rest of the guys. You know what I mean.
He was very good at getting information from people and that’s who he got it from, bookmakers. See, he’d give me infor
mation and sometimes he’d say, “Find out what kind of a deal, if it’s takin’ horses or sports,” you know, so I could find that out. Sometimes he’d say, “Hey, make an arrest on this one.” So I’d make the arrest. And then he would call me and he would say, “OK, Pete, where’s the weakness on the case?” I’d say, “It’s on the search and seizure, that’s where it’s weak…”
From there, Jerry could put the bookie away for a while, squeeze him for cooperation, or offer him a friendly way out. There were lots of ways it could go after Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen turned him on to bookies remaining too tight with the dagos or with Mickey, or simply refusing to do business with him. The Enforcer wasn’t afraid to muscle in on any of them. As Stafford explained:
You see, Jerry used to tell me about Whalen. “That Irishman’s got too much guts, Pete.” I said, “That’s the way we are.” He said, “But you can’t tone him down. You can’t tell him not to be so cocky and tough.” I didn’t want to know him because he was too hot. I always tried to stay in the background. You never know who’s following him.
* * *
WHALEN WAS ALWAYS pleading poverty when he got hauled to court. He’d claim that his wife and children would starve if he couldn’t keep selling aluminum cookware or bartending in his sister’s tavern or pumping gas at a service station. It was true that he had gotten rid of the private charter plane he once flew on a dare under the Oakland Bay Bridge, but he still lived mighty well for a self-described $277-a-month gas pump jockey. By the mid-’50s he had given up the ranch where he used to train horses in favor of an Encino home with a pool out back. There was a pool house, too, with enough room to show films at family gatherings. Sometimes they had sleepovers for the young kids in the extended Whalen-Wunderlich clan and Jack The Enforcer would pretend to be a monster, contorting his face and making grunting noises and threatening to lock the youngsters in a dungeon … before tucking them into bed. He arranged the ponies for their Sunday picnics in Griffith Park and treated everyone to trail rides into the hills from the rental stable below the Hollywood sign.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 25
