Though it was conceivable that Hoover simply was misguided in denying the scope of the mob, the squad’s Billy Dick Unland was convinced the Mafia had to have some dirt on the head of the FBI. Why else would he take such a see-no-evil stance and leave local law enforcement on its own to penetrate the underworld’s formidable wall of silence, omerta? Hoover had been openly disdainful of Senator Kefauver’s televised 1950–51 hearings spotlighting organized crime, refusing even to protect its witnesses, all while the Tennessee senator touted the help he got from the LAPD and a couple of other police departments. The same dynamic was evident in 1957 when another Southern senator, John McClellan of Arkansas, launched hearings into labor racketeering with the assistance of an aggressive young staff attorney, Robert F. Kennedy. That committee’s most explosive material focused on the Chicago-based Teamsters union but Kennedy also spent time on the West Coast, where Captain Hamilton made available his squad’s voluminous files, including records of one case that left Kennedy’s mouth agape, involving an organizer from the union that represented juke box repairmen.
The unfortunate Hal Sherry had traveled from Los Angeles down to San Diego and checked into the US Grant Hotel, where he was visited by three Italians who announced that they would be fifty-fifty partners in any labor deal in the area. Sherry said his union never made such agreements and promptly received a working over, nothing jaw-dropping about that. But one memorable detail left some wondering whether the episode might be a fable, like Jumbo Kennard’s sending a pimp tumbling down the Hollywood Hills. This one, too, was 100 percent real, however, as Hamilton laid it out for a government panel in California.
There were certain things done to him in that beating. He went to his own doctor in Pasadena for a medical treatment and the more or less unusual things done to his body were verified …
Q: Didn’t the doctor, on that occasion, remove a cucumber from this man’s body?
A: He did. He removed a cucumber from the rectum.
Q: How big was the cucumber?
A: It was my recollection that it was a medium-sized cucumber.
That particular hearing in San Diego underscored that J. Edgar Hoover was not alone in finding denial convenient. Representatives of that city’s police department and the county sheriff both testified that they knew of no large-scale bookmaking, prostitution, or any organized crime in the area, a viewpoint that won the enthusiastic endorsement of Jack Dragna’s pal down there, Anthony “Papa Tony” Mirabile. Papa Tony seemed to have a piece of half the bars and clubs in San Diego, one of which employed the son of L.A.’s Nick Licata. But he was perturbed when not everyone listening bought his testimony that he had never heard of that M-word—it was like they wouldn’t believe him if they said someone was dead or alive. “God almighty, what a man have to do to make you believe it?” he asked. “Bring you the dead people and they are dead?”
Papa Tony did recall hearing vaguely about a Black Hand as a kid (“All I know was dirty hands”) but not this Mafia. He knew of the Ku Klux Klan. He knew of the Knights of Columbus. He knew of the American Legion and the VFW, too, Papa Tony Mirabile said. “Whenever they have a convention, I see they wear that red cap with the long thing.”
* * *
SUCH BULL WAS harder to serve up after November 14, 1957, when local state troopers interrupted a barbecue at the ranch home of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara in the upstate New York town of Apalachin, population 277. For a distributor of Canada Dry soft drinks, Barbara had a lot of friends with nice cars—Lincolns, Imperials, and Cadillacs—and with far-flung addresses, from Brooklyn to Cleveland and Havana to Los Angeles. The ragtag outfit on the coast accounted for two of the approximately sixty Sicilians who tried to flee when the local cops stumbled upon the gathering. Fifty had criminal records. Nine had been in the coin machine business.
One of the attendees from Los Angeles was lawyer Frank DeSimone, who had taken over the mantle of the late banana importer Jack Dragna. Ten days before the gathering at the remote New York town he had paid a courtesy call on Jimmy The Weasel, still serving his extortion sentence up at the Soledad prison. The other L.A. representative was Simone Scozzari, Dragna’s old late-night canasta buddy who still was, on paper, merely the proprietor of a candy and tobacco counter at the Venetian Athletic Club on North Broadway, “a very important sounding title for a very small operation,” in the words of Captain Hamilton, who was amused to hear that Scozzari had $10,000 cash on him when stopped at a roadblock outside Apalachin. “Well, $10,000 certainly never came out of that cigar stand. It would take a long, long time of accumulation and living on nothing but air to accumulate $10,000 from that business.”
The coals in the barbecue pit at Apalachin were barely cool when the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover had an angry visitor at its Washington headquarters. Robert Kennedy, still with the Senate’s McClellan Committee, wanted to see the bureau’s records on the dozens of men detained up there in the middle of nowhere, a list including Paul Castellano, Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, and Vito Genovese. The FBI had nothing, or little more—mostly newspaper clips—on forty of them. A chastened J. Edgar Hoover promptly announced a new Top Hoodlums Program.
The next day, two of his agents from Los Angeles made their way to the offices of the LAPD’s Intelligence Division asking for a look at the files. They entered the sanctum of the Gangster Squad with their fedoras in hand.
For the men who toiled there every day, some for more than a decade, this was not just another small victory. It was a big one. The victory was not in humbling the FBI, it was in the validation of one part of their mission. Chief Parker had almost disbanded the squad because he didn’t understand why they were sitting on their asses writing reports about who was seen drinking whiskey with whom at 2 A.M. Now it was clear that it was important to know who was playing canasta with whom too—that was one more piece of evidence pointing to a problem that suddenly seemed bigger than anyone imagined. They were going to start working right away to help the feds deport the canasta-playing cigar-stand operator Simone Scozzari—he was history. But there was plenty more unfinished business at home, and others to take care of.
* * *
WHEN ROBERT KENNEDY came back to Los Angeles on another fact-finding mission, Captain Hamilton called in one of his investigators for a confidential offering of evidence. Con Keeler was past his fortieth birthday and a veteran of more black-bag jobs than he could count. He was excited about the evidence he had—a shoebox full of checks—sure it would interest the Senate team, which included three young lawyers working under Kennedy. Kennedy asked,
Sergeant, where did you get these?
Err, sir, can’t you just say we found them in the street?
We can’t say we found them in the street.
Then, sir, I don’t know where we found them.
Who are they from?
Who do you want?
Kennedy graciously omitted the shoe-box episode when he wrote up his experiences for the Senate investigation. But his account, “The Enemy Within,” a variation on Parker’s “Invasion from Within” speech of a few years earlier, did include another tidbit from his time on the coast, in addition to the cucumber episode. Kennedy reported: “A major vending machine company paid Mickey Cohen $10,000 simply to remain ‘neutral’ in a battle over locations for machines in Los Angeles.”
“I wanted to keep Cohen and his crowd from in any way infiltrating our industry,” explained George Seedman, who made the payment to Mickey and his dog walker, Fred Sica. The only detail in dispute was whether Mickey had been offered far more, $50,000, to “put out the lights” of a cigarette vendor.
To that Mickey said, “I got nuthin’ to do with electricity.”
CHAPTER 29
A Ring for the Stripper
Sergeant Jerry Wooters developed a theory about Mickey and all those women—nothing was going on there. Mickey’s friends laughed at that, swearing that Mickey scored high on the carnality scale and there was a certain thing he liked done to him
, like any man. But Jerry decided that Mickey’s germ phobia had to get in the way. “I think he was a real closet case, always washing his hands. I spoke to these gals he was with, they said he was always looking out the window, never did lay ’em.”
The bigger issue, of course, was whether Mickey was for real—as a womanizer or a gangster—or a fake; whether he was all an act, especially now, in his second go-around.
* * *
LIZ RENAY WAS the first of the three strippers who became fixtures beside him during those last years of the ’50s and she was a good match, a certified exhibitionist. She also had a lot to show off—she had a thirty-nine-inch rack by age thirteen, when she already was entertaining the servicemen around Phoenix, doing her part for the war effort as a V-girl. She was twenty-four, with two marriages behind her, and two kids, when a film company came to the Arizona city and put out a call for extras to be in a crowd at a lynching. A photographer for Life was doing a feature on what happens when a city far from Hollywood gets a taste of the traveling circus and his eye became fixated on a particular $25 red-haired extra, birth name Pearl Dobbins. She gained a five-page spread in the magazine, Pearl’s Big Moment, which did mention that she had been anointed Miss Stardust of Arizona by a bra manufacturer but left out the 39D specifics of why a bra maker might have embraced her. When Pearl’s Big Moment turned out to be a crowd scene in which she appeared on screen for less than a second, Life celebrated it as her “first and only chance to appear in a movie.” Little did they know.
Liz Renay’s next stop was New York, where she put her attributes more overtly on display as an exotic dancer and was noticed by Tony “Cappy” Coppola, the pudgy driver/bodyguard to Murder, Inc.’s Albert Anastasia. She became the classic gun moll, complete with mink and diamonds and a sugar daddy who wanted her dreams to come true. After she mentioned her ambitions, her mob boyfriend said, “Let’s call The Mick.”
Years later, when Liz got around to recounting her flamboyant career, seven marriages, and many more dalliances in her memoir My First 2,000 Men, she recalled coming to Los Angeles and strategically meeting Mickey in her hotel room, fresh from the shower and in a black sheath that needed zipping. He had never been matinee-idol material and by now was, in essence, bald and dumpy. But she noticed the perfect manicure on his soft hands and, of course, his clothes. Then he drove her somewhere in his Eldorado and she spotted a woman’s high-heeled shoe perched atop the backseat. She wondered if it was a prop placed there for her benefit, to make an impression.
The ground rules were known to all—thou shall not trespass on another gangster’s gal—but he asked, “What would your friends in New York think if you and I decided to play sweethearts?” That meant he’d call her “hon,” but they’d say we’re just friends until later in life, when she insisted that he didn’t really keep off the grass.
The best part was, he did have connections—he could get her in to see people in the industry and, unlike most aspiring bombshells, she had the goods: copper-haired beauty and personality too. She quickly had a Screen Actors Guild card, a Warner Bros. contract, and a guest spot on Groucho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet Your Life. She spoke with Cecil B. DeMille about appearing in one of his biblical epics as Esther, the harem virgin who becomes a queen. She also was up to play the girlfriend in red in a picture on Dillinger, the bank robber, that part less of a stretch.
It probably would have happened for Liz Renay if not for the barber-shop assassination of Albert Anastasia back in New York. When authorities called her in for questioning about the fallen Murder, Inc. boss and his crowd, they found $5,500 in cancelled checks in her purse … written to Mickey Cohen. Liz said she’d simply done him a favor—someone would put money in her account and she’d make out the checks marked for personal loan. “I simply allowed him to use my bank,” she explained. It took a while for her role in the funneling of money, and her flailing attempts to explain it, to land her in federal prison. Before then it landed both her and Mickey back in Life magazine, posed at 4 A.M. in his Carousel ice cream parlor enjoying enormous sundaes with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
* * *
CANDY BARR CAME next. Singer Gary Crosby called Mickey about that stripper, real name Juanita Dale Slusher. The native Texan was the highest paid dancer at Chuck Landis’s Largo club, with dimensions nearly equal to Renay’s. Mickey had seen Candy’s act but had never met her or heard of her crisis: Police back in Dallas had found a small amount of marijuana in an Alka-Seltzer bottle stashed in her bra and on Valentine’s Day, 1958, a judge had sentenced her to fifteen years. Crosby wondered if Mickey might help the stripper and urged him to call Candy’s manager, Joe DeCarlo. Mickey was outraged, DeCarlo recalled.
He couldn’t believe it was true that she was gonna get fifteen years for having less than an ounce of marijuana. So I told him the story and he wound up getting lawyers for her, getting Walter Winchell on it and everything else. Then I said, “You’re doing all this stuff—aren’t you going to meet her?” So I told Candy, “You ought to meet this guy.” So from that day on they were a pair. He had never seen her at all.
Before they met the first time, Candy received an orchid in a champagne glass with a note, “Don’t worry, little girl, you’ve got a friend.” Mickey guaranteed her $15,000 bond in Texas, paid a private detective $75 a day to work her case, and hired three attorneys to pursue her appeal, including flamboyant Melvin Belli. The manager, DeCarlo, swore the relationship was real—he could tell by their childish spat when Mickey began talking to one of the other dancers at the club to make Candy jealous, and she threw a fit in the (un)dressing room. “It was stupid, the games they played. I don’t know about love. He said he loved her. Who knows?”
The day the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Juanita Dale Slusher, a.k.a. Candy Barr, Mickey announced their engagement. He shared the happy news at a party promoting his new association with a marvelous Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. That was in the San Fernando Valley, the dense grid of bedroom communities over the hills from the epicenter of nightlife on the Westside. The thinking was that if Mickey moved his nightly feast, others would follow, in this case to his new haunt, Rondelli’s.
He never wed the lovely Candy, however. The dancer got married in Las Vegas before leaving to serve her pot sentence in Texas, but not to him—her Beverly Hills hairdresser got the honor of her hand and everything attached. “When you follow your heart instead of your head,” Mickey said, “you fall into a trap.”
* * *
NOW THE BUSINESS about him marrying “Miss Beverly Hills,” that was pure farce, a total fake. “That was bullshit,” said Joe DeCarlo, who managed that burlesque star too. She was another of the performers at the Largo and a legit beauty queen, gaining “Miss Marines” and other titles, though they made up the “Miss Beverly Hills” when she started exotic dancing at seventeen. Mickey called her a nice piece of real estate and liked how she was statuesque. But she also was married, and happily, to her childhood beau, Bill Powers, another hairdresser. That detail was not advertised when Mickey announced their engagement and slipped a 12-carat diamond on the finger of Miss Beverly Hills. “She’s a real lady, her morals and concepts of life are real high,” Mickey said, and all that was true of the real-life Beverly Powers, who stripped down only to a bathing suit and would go on to become a minister.
He had been engaged to be married to Candy Barr, who was a dancer too. However, when she went to prison it must have been Joe who approached me. “How would you like to be seen around town with Mickey Cohen? You know, nothing will happen.” And we came up with this publicity stunt and it was just that. Candy Barr disappeared and I was asked to take her place, which was hysterical. I don’t know where Mickey got this engagement ring but it was a massive ring, massive diamond ring. And that was the whole publicity thing with me wearing this humongous diamond, you know.
No less than Meyer Lansky once warned about the danger of glamour broads—they drew attention
to you, like getting your name in the papers. Well, screw that. The cops were watching Mickey’s every move anyway, now with Stripper No. 3 at his side during the nightly spectacle on the town.
I would meet him and his protégés, and a lot of starlets and all, all the people he hung out with around Beverly Hills and Hollywood. Generally there were fifteen, twenty at a table. Very rarely was there anything less, eight to ten people on each side of the table. He would always sit at the head, of course, because that was his party, and he generally had me sitting on his left. We never went out ever that people didn’t approach us. People would come up and would be really in awe of meeting him and I didn’t understand that. They wouldn’t wait for dessert—they would come up while he was about to take a bite and you couldn’t get a glimpse or a glimmer of annoyance on his face. He was always the gentleman. He stood up. He was gracious to the people. He had the disease where you wash your hands anytime you touch anything—during a meal he might leave four or five times to go to the restroom. But he would never not shake the person’s hand. He would sit down graciously and wait till they left and then he would get up, and that touched me.
They even did it to me sometime. They’d ask, “Are you somebody?” And I’d say, “Not really.”
Beverly Powers did not get to wear the humongous diamond long before Joe DeCarlo said the time had come, Mickey needed it back. But she kept it on her finger until then, even when she went to the supermarket and carried the groceries home to the apartment she and her husband rented in Sherman Oaks. She never saw the men watching from the unmarked sedan across the street or hiding in the bushes. She never heard the clicking of their camera with the telephoto lens as it kept taking shots of her finger sporting the glistening 12-carat diamond bought by someone who had claimed to have made his living from a plant nursery and ice cream parlor since his release from prison.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 28
