Whalen said the two scamming bettors had until noon to pay, but he gave them a break, making the deadline 12:30 P.M. He’d send an emissary to the Salem Manor on Sunset to pick up the cash. When the time came, LoCigno and Piscitelle were not there, only their volunteer middleman, Tony Reno, wanting to blab some more. Whalen’s emissary got the big man on the phone with Reno again to explain the obvious. “Those two dago bastards, I am going to bust them all up. Who do they think they are fucking around with, some kid? They don’t have the money down there right now?”
“No, I told them for you.”
“They’ve both got to go.”
Jack Whalen did not have to ask where he could find the two welshing cheats.
* * *
THEY WERE ALL social vampires, that crowd—they lived for the night—and they had a typically full evening ahead. The party was going to start with supper at what quickly had become their usual spot, Rondelli’s, then continue back over the hill at the Cloister, on The Strip, where it was the closing night of comedian Joey Bishop’s successful run at the club. Bishop might have kept going there but needed to get ready to shoot a heist caper film in Las Vegas, a little romp called Ocean’s 11 with pals Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. Mickey Cohen had reserved a full table for Bishop’s final show at the Cloister and the Bronx-born comic was going to meet them for the dinner beforehand—he liked the gnocchi made fresh at Rondelli’s every Wednesday night. So did talent agent Joe DeCarlo, the manager of Mickey’s favorite strippers, who was all set to drive Bishop to the restaurant until the comic decided to play an extra nine holes of golf and begged off. That was fine, though, for when DeCarlo called Mickey with the news the little fellow said, “OK, pick up Sandy for me.”
Mickey’s 12-carat charade of an engagement with Miss Beverly Hills was still ongoing but for the last ten days he had been seeing an eighteen-year-old with cascading blond hair, Claretta Hashagen. Originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, she went by Sandy Hagen in L.A., where she aspired to make it as a model. She kept a French poodle named Brigitte and a parakeet named Blue Boy in an apartment that had a bedroom done up in red and white satin, like a valentine. Police later said she had 290 names in several address books—the pretty young thing had gotten to know a lot of people in town. She’d been introduced to Mickey through a mutual friend at a restaurant on The Strip and then phoned him—she called him—and now they were an item. “He’s a perfect gentleman,” she said. “He never drinks. He never swears. He never smokes.”
Tony Reno got his hair cut that afternoon—all those men had marvelous hair: dark, wavy, and poofed up just a bit, then held in place, perfectly, with goop. Most got in a nap before they rendezvoused at Joe DeCarlo’s apartment in Hollywood to head out for the long evening. Sammy LoCigno wasn’t supposed to drive, his license had been suspended, so Joe took the wheel of his gray-silver ’59 Caddy convertible with George Piscitelle beside him up front and Sammy relegated to the back of his own car. Tony followed, driving a nice car, too, one belonging to Piscitelle’s girlfriend. George was a good looker, up there with the late Johnny Stomp, and the ladies threw themselves at him. This one had a ’58 T-bird. The entourage took off at 9:40 P.M.
As requested by the Mick, they headed first to Sandy Hagen’s place off the 101 Freeway, across from the Hollywood Bowl. But when they tooted the horn outside she came down in a housecoat and said she wasn’t ready, they should go ahead, she’d take a cab to Rondelli’s.
Sammy LoCigno figured he had eaten at Rondelli’s fifteen or sixteen times over the past month alone. He liked the place because the waiters knew he preferred the pasta without any of the spicy tomato sauce that inflamed his nervous stomach—the chef, Nick, cooked it up special for him, as he wanted, bland.
LoCigno wore one of his perfectly tailored suits for their night out, with a side pocket just the right size for his .38. “It hung in there real nice,” he said.
* * *
TOUGH AS HE was, Whalen wasn’t about to go out on the job alone—he’d been smart enough to fly bombers, after all. Following his phone call with his old pal from Intelligence, stuck now in the jail, the big man arranged for a frequent helpmate, Rocky Lombardi, to meet him at 8:30 P.M. on The Strip. Whalen wasn’t worried about anyone in front of him, anyone he could see. “He wanted me to watch his back.” Rocky said. “If anything happened, to watch his back.”
Whalen was in no rush—he downed half a dozen shots at their first meeting place, the Rondelet tavern on Sunset, while Rocky had just a beer. Sailor Jack Woods was there too and normally might have joined their road trip, packing as usual. But Sailor Jack also was appealing their conviction and one-to-ten-year sentence and he didn’t need to give authorities any reason to revoke his bail. So he’d hoist a few beforehand with them, that’s it.
Their next stop was the Melody Room, the place where Tony Reno often sang, and Whalen put away another half dozen shots, still in no rush. He was dressed business casual in gray slacks, an open white shirt, and sports coat. Finally, he said it was time to go. He made no secret of where—the scuttlebutt even reached the young undercover cop from Jersey, Quintin Villanueva, who was out mixing with his Halifax Gang suspects on The Strip. “I was in one of the nightclubs,” he said, “and the word among the rounders was that Whalen was hot and was heading for the Valley.”
Whalen did not go directly to Rondelli’s, though. He and Rocky Lombardi stopped first at a Mexican joint, Casa Vega, to meet a second backup. José Sanchez Herrera was known as Big Joe, with good reason—he was six-foot-three, 320, and sometimes got bit roles playing giant Polynesians in the movies.
The Mexican restaurant was almost within crawling distance of Rondelli’s but they took their cars, anyway. Rocky and Big Joe went in one, The Enforcer in his own. The two backups got there first, at 11:25 P.M., and walked right in the front door, entering under the canopy and the neon sign advertising NEAPOLITAN CUISINE. Inside, they veered right by the phone booth into the narrow, dimly lit bar area, where salesmen from the swimming pool business next door were laughing it up over the piped-in music while two young women chatted up the bartender. Rocky Lombardi and Big Joe Herrera took positions at opposite ends of the bar, ordered drinks themselves, and waited. You might almost think they’d done this before.
Rocky had not yet touched his glass when Jack Whalen burst through the swinging doors of the kitchen at 11:28. He had pulled up a back alley, past the Anthony Pools building, and come in Rondelli’s by the back way. He did not say a word to Rocky as he marched along the bar toward the phone booth at front of the restaurant. The tiny crooner Tony Reno, five-foot-nuthin’ and 120 pounds with a hard-on, was visible inside the glass-sided booth, making a call. The bar itself was packed. All the stools were filled, as were the four small cocktail tables. Several patrons stood with their drinks. Whalen knew the two women chatting up the bartender, Ona Rae Rogers and Jo Wyatt—they both sometimes waitressed along The Strip—but he did not speak to them either. He brushed one aside as he headed toward Tony Reno in the phone booth. “I knew he wasn’t there for pleasure,” Jo Wyatt said later.
You couldn’t see the dining room from the bar. The two areas were separated by a long planter filled with fake greenery, plastic philodendrons rising nearly to the ceiling, the sort of stuff that had been a staple of the nursery Mickey Cohen operated when he got out of prison.
* * *
MICKEY HAD ARRIVED between 8:30 and 9 P.M. in his black and white ’59 Caddy convertible, accompanied by his bulldog, Mickey Jr. The dog had his own checkered bib so he could eat in style, off a plate, at his master’s feet. At a hearing just a week before on Rondelli’s application for a license to offer live entertainment, Mickey had taken the Fifth more than fifty times when asked if he was a hidden owner. “I got no piece of that restaurant,” he said. “I wouldn’t take a piece of it on a silver platter.” This night he came early to the restaurant he didn’t have a piece of to meet with a man named Waders who was managing a black singing du
o and wanted his help—Waders and his singers were waiting in the bar for him. Mickey also had a meeting with his old friend Roger Leonard, who used to be in the pest extermination business and sold ultraviolet equipment. Now Leonard fancied himself a writer-producer, like his brother, who was one of the principals behind the New York cop drama Naked City and was developing another TV series, Route 66, about two young guys who explore the famous highway in a Corvette. The former pest man Roger Leonard hoped, in turn, to become producer of The Mickey Cohen Story.
Table 15 was reserved for them, in the back of the restaurant, by the pastry cart. One of the Sica brothers, Fred, was there for a while but made it an early evening. He excused himself and left Rondelli’s just as Mickey’s main entourage for the night arrived.
Sammy LoCigno of the nervous stomach went first into the kitchen to pay his respects to Nick the cook, then took a seat on Mickey’s left. The ex-drug store manager George Piscitelle sat on the other side of the round table, where he could see anyone entering the dining room. The faux Sinatra crooner Tony Reno was an anomaly—he was wearing an alpaca sweater, not a suit—but he was at table 15, too, as were Joe DeCarlo, the man with the strippers, and Roger Leonard, who wanted to make a movie. The seat on Mickey’s right was kept empty awaiting the girl Sandy.
There was a lot of flitting about—someone always was getting up from the table or coming back. Mickey constantly was off to the restaurant’s office to make calls or to the men’s room for his hand washing. Sammy LoCigno kept going to the bar to schmooze with the women, Jo Wyatt and her roommate, Ona Rae Rogers. He knew Ona Rae especially well—they’d had a couple of dates—so he invited both to come into the dining room and join the party. “We already had dinner,” Ona Rae said, but they accepted his offer to come later, to the Cloister, to catch Joey Bishop’s last show. Meanwhile, Tony Reno kept going to the pay phone, just trying to find his manager, he said—he needed a cash advance to get his clothes out of the cleaners before his gig in Burbank.
Others in the restaurant were regulars too. Harry Diamond was dropped off by his son and planted himself at the bar to inhale shots of straight scotch—fifteen, eighteen, twenty shots. He was blind in one eye already and the second didn’t work too well when he tried to read the fine print on that most important publication, the Racing Form. Diamond weaved from the bar to a table to join Joseph Friedman, a.k.a. Joe Mars, who had his own café on North Highland but came here to eat. They quickly began arguing over who owed what from another night’s check.
Michael and Toni Ross came over after a traffic accident—they’d been hit by a drunk driver and needed sustenance to recover. Michael Ross was an actor who subsisted on small parts, one in the 1950 noir classic DOA, the film that began with Edmond O’Brien showing up at a police station to report a homicide and being asked, “Who was murdered?” “I was,” he replies. Ross and his wife sat down to eat with Al Siegel, Hollywood Al, who was there with his mother. When Mrs. Ross got up to use the washroom, she encountered Mickey coming out and gave him a nodding hello.
The teenage Sandy Hagen had not yet arrived so Mickey asked George Piscitelle to drive him and Mickey Jr. to the nearest Western Union place, up on Van Nuys Boulevard, where $800 was being wired to him. Back when he was squiring the stripper Candy Barr, a Florida club owner had come to Los Angeles and asked about flying her to Miami to perform, and also asked where he might place a bet while in town. Mickey said Sammy LoCigno could help him out with that. Now the fellow was paying off his losses and Mickey, in all his kindness, was picking up the money order for Sammy.
The cab with the young blonde finally pulled up soon after Mickey and the bulldog returned to Rondelli’s. Sandy Hagen ordered an orange juice and the veal scaloppini but was just starting to dig into it at 11:28 P.M. Sam LoCigno had finished his salad and was ready for his pasta with no tomato sauce. Mickey was back in his seat, not off at the soap and water. His dog’s plate of linguini was below the table, licked clean. Tony Reno was gone once more to the glassed-in phone booth up front, on the other side of the fake philodendron. He was on that pay phone again when a familiar (large) figure pushed through the kitchen doors and strode along the bar in his direction, looking like he was not there for pleasure.
* * *
THE UNMARKED POLICE car had been sitting outside Rondelli’s since 8 P.M.—the night lieutenant in Intelligence had asked the two men in it to watch the place. They parked on a side street where they would not be so obvious while keeping an eye on the front entrance, the velvet rope, and ATTENDANT PARKING sign. They could not see the back alley or back entrance at all.
One of the pair on surveillance was Jack Horrall, son of the police chief from the ’40s and Jerry Wooters’s old partner. “There was supposed to be a meeting in there,” was about all he’d admit knowing. They did notice Mickey leave in LoCigno’s Cadillac and dutifully followed him and his dog to the Western Union on Van Nuys Boulevard, recording the excursion in their log. But when Mickey returned to Rondelli’s they merely repositioned their car on the side street to keep an eye again on the front of the restaurant.
The other cop watching was Jean Scherrer, who had been entrusted with sensitive assignments from the day he joined the LAPD. A naive rookie in 1949 when the scandals rocked the force, Scherrer was sent down toward the Coliseum, the huge stadium, for what he thought was routine traffic control. Instead, he was told by a sergeant, “We’re taking over Administrative Vice.” With that, Scherrer became part of the small task force that broke into the tainted unit’s headquarters and found “stuff in lockers—money, stacks of it, things of that nature.” The public quickly learned that everyone in Ad Vice had been fired or transferred but never was told about the cash. Some matters were best kept quiet, then and now. Scherrer also worked the famous Cahan bookmaking case led by Sergeant Jerry Wooters. “The best investigator I ever worked with,” he said.
But on December 2, 1959, Scherrer had not been told whose tip prompted the bosses to send them to Rondelli’s—he did not learn until years later where the lead came from. Had he known at the time, he might well have done more than sit in the car.
We weren’t given that much information. We could only see the front door and there wasn’t much going in and out. We were there quite a few hours and it was very inactive. Somewhere it was decided within the office that nothing was going to happen. We were told, “Forget it. Leave.” We left just before the shooting.
* * *
TONY RENO WAS plunking another dime into the pay phone when a giant hand reached in and grabbed onto his collar, effortlessly lifting him off his feet and out of the booth. Jack Whalen said, “Where’s them friends of yours, them two dagos?” Or maybe it was, “Hang the phone up and show me where those bastards are.” Or maybe it was simply, “What you doing?” Tony Reno had to recount the moment many times later—could he be blamed if the dialogue varied?
“Tony, who you calling?”
“I’m calling my manager.”
“Where’s them two cocksuckers?”
“Jack, take it easy…”
“They’re going to go. Are they in there?”
“Yes, in the back.”
Whalen prodded little Tony ahead of him, around the planter with fake greenery and into the dining area. But the big man loosened his grip as soon as he saw who was in there. Whalen forged ahead and Tony scurried back to the safety of the bar, or so he said in the days following—he was up front by the phone booth, where he couldn’t see what happened, he only heard the shots. One shot, a short pause, then another.
Tony Reno looked toward the other end of the bar, at Rocky Lombardi, the big man’s backup. After the second shot, Tony gave a hands-up gesture, like “What can you do?”
* * *
MICKEY’S STORY THAT night was that the shots came from a nearby booth, along the wall, and he didn’t see nuthin’. He held steady all night, didn’t see nuthin’.
Later he changed it, of course. Then it became OK, the shots came from his
table—but he still didn’t see much. Mickey’s eventual account had that rotten bastard Jack Whalen walking up and saying, “Good evening, Mr. Cohen,” but not giving him time to respond because The Enforcer put his huge left hand on George Piscitelle’s shoulder and asked, ‘“Have you got something for me?’” George said, “I don’t have anything to talk to you about, Jack” and George turned back to his food—“And Bingo! He hit George a shot,” a powerful right, “and George went to the floor.” Whalen grabbed hold of the empty chair at their table and turned toward Sammy LoCigno, the big man starting to lift the chair as he said, “‘You dago bastard, you’re next’ or something of that sort … The next thing, I heard the shooting, and that was it. I never seen any gun.”
Mickey insisted that he had ducked from force of habit after the first shot and stayed under the table, down there with the dog, Mickey Jr., and when he finally looked up, the restaurant was all but empty. That eventually became Mickey Cohen’s official story, to be believed or disbelieved, as with anything he said. But all that first night, it was “I didn’t see nuthin’.”
Of all the patrons in the restaurant that night, only Mickey and the two young women at the bar did not flee. Amid the screams and panic and cries of “Let’s go!” the other regulars and the drunks and the swimming pool salesmen had gotten the hell out, most via the back way, through the kitchen and the alley. But the roommates Jo Wyatt and Ona Rae Rogers stayed. They knew the man sprawled on the floor from their time on The Strip—Jo Wyatt knew him very well. She hurried to the dining area and found Jack Whalen lying on his right side, next to the pastry table. The big man was breathing faintly, bleeding from his head, so she eased him onto his back, got napkins and towels, and asked her friend Ona to get ice. After Whalen was rolled onto his back, his feet pointed outward, unmoving, and his left hand lay on his stomach, as if he had reached there, thinking that’s where he was shot.
Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles Page 31
