Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles
Page 32
Like most everyone else, the actor Michael Ross had rushed from the dining room, leading his wife though the kitchen. But the couple paused there a few minutes, as if paralyzed. Then they realized that Toni had left behind her purse, cigarettes, and lighter. The actor hurried back to their table to retrieve them and that’s when he saw young Jo Wyatt over the body on the floor. It looked to him like she was kneeling in prayer over Jack Whalen.
Wyatt pleaded with Mickey Cohen, “Please call a doctor,” and he did—he phoned his own physician, Dr. Max Igloe.
“Next thing,” Mickey said, “I went and washed my hands.”
* * *
AUTHORITIES WEREN’T CALLED until 12:04 A.M. and then not by anyone still in the restaurant. Rocky Lombardi made the call. After the second shot, and hands-up gesture from Tony Reno, he did briefly look into the dining room and saw his friend Jack sprawled there. “He didn’t look too healthy. He wasn’t moving none. I left. I went out the door with the rest of the people.” But Rocky alone stopped at a pay phone and dialed the operator to ask her to send an ambulance to Rondelli’s on Ventura Boulevard. “A man got hurt.”
Patrol Officer James C. Newell got the man down radio call at 12:10 A.M. He worked out of the Van Nuys Division, in the heart of the Valley. He and his partner arrived at the restaurant just as the ambulance was pulling up.
Whalen was dead by then. The first bullet had missed him, whizzing through two leaves of the fake philodendrons before blasting through the ceiling toward the attic. The second bullet got him just over his right eyebrow, almost between the eyes, and lodged at the back of his skull.
Mickey Cohen was coming from the bathroom when the first policemen walked into the restaurant, the only diner still there. His table had been cleared. Everything on it was gone, the dishes, the napkins, and the glassware that might have fingerprints. Only the white tablecloth remained, still with the checkerboard pattern of creases from how it was folded overnight. The waiter said he’d cleared the table by habit, nobody told him to. He also cleared the drinks from the bar on the other side of the planter—he polished off the booze in every glass himself. He had started in on the cooking wine in the kitchen too. He was feeling no pain, that waiter.
Chief Parker and Captain Hamilton were there within an hour, part of the largest concentration of police brass at a crime scene since 1950, when Mickey’s lawyer Sam Rummel was ambushed outside his Laurel Canyon home. Back then, the chief had said, “This case can, and will, be solved, if it takes every member of the police department.” But that rubout had never been solved, like so many others in L.A. Now it seemed like the entire force was mobilized again—everyone available from Homicide and Intelligence was called in to round up anyone who had been in the restaurant that night. The owners of record, James and Hazel Rondelli, had hung around, along with the waiter and a couple of other employees, and they helped by naming some of their regulars. A few were just up the street, in a coffee shop. Others were surprised with knocks on their doors at home.
While those cops were fanning out around the city, the honor of questioning Mickey fell to Thad Brown, the cigar-chomping deputy chief and supervisor of detectives. Brown had clashed with the Gangster Squad when it was called in on the Black Dahlia investigation, an insult to his Homicide boys, but it was hard not to admire his old-school guts. Despite his rank, Brown was the furthest thing from a desk bureaucrat—he personally arrested two of the three women sent to the gas chamber at San Quentin, including Barbara Graham, whose case had been made into a film (I Want to Live) that won the best actress Oscar for Susan Hayward. In real life, when it came time to storm the converted store where the murderess was hiding out with two men, Brown snatched a shotgun and insisted on going through the back door first. The deputy chief knew about tough and he knew about the fellow on the floor of Rondelli’s.
“He’d been flirting with the undertaker for a long time,” Thad Brown said of Jack Whalen. “He was big, rough, and as mean as they come.”
Brown asked a uniformed officer to clear out of the back room at Rondelli’s so he could question Mickey alone. The only witness was the dog, Mickey Jr.
“So help me God, Chief, I didn’t shoot him,” Mickey said.
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who else was seated with you at the table?”
“No one.”
As others were rounded up that night, they slowly filled in the details. One salesman from the swimming pool company next door, Gerald Sumption, said he had told his companions, “Let’s leave” only to be blocked by Mickey, who apparently had not remained under the table all that long.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
Then Mickey cuffed the salesman on the right cheek, hard.
Sumption weighed 245 pounds and was fit—he knew judo—and Mickey apparently mistook him for one of Whalen’s backups, for he said, “You were with them, you dirty…” and slapped him again. The burly salesman could have manhandled the pint-sized Mickey but thought better of it—two other men were standing behind him, not so small. The moment Mickey turned his attention to someone else with him, a girl with cascading blond hair, Sumption scrammed out the door.
The cops found Sandy Hagen at her apartment across the freeway from the Hollywood Bowl, along with her older sister and another young woman, a dancer visiting from Vegas. Mickey’s Caddy was parked outside—he’d flipped Sandy the keys when he told her to get lost from Rondelli’s. At the apartment, her older sister fought with the officers who came to take her away, but teenage Sandy displayed aplomb worthy of her ten days at the side of the infamous Mickey Cohen. She said of the night, “I heard shots. It ruined my dinner—I dropped my fork.”
Other witnesses were little more help. The wobbly scotch drinker Harry Diamond couldn’t see much with his one good eye. The actor’s wife, Toni Ross, had seen a flash from Mickey’s table, not much else. “I didn’t see any faces.”
Tony Reno had fled in the spiffy Thunderbird with George Piscitelle over the hill to another of their haunts, the Carolina Pines, for cups of coffee. The cops later found him in the Melody Room—where else?—but he swore he hadn’t seen the shooting, he’d been in the bar.
Only Sam LoCigno, of the nervous stomach, and Joe DeCarlo, the man with the strippers, were nowhere to be found. One of Joe’s dancers, Miss Beverly Hills, had planned to meet the crew after her show at the Largo but arrived at Rondelli’s at midnight, amid the mass exodus.
“Joe DeCarlo greeted me, ‘Get outta here, get outta here, get outta here!” And she did. So did he.
The police did not know much that night. Chief Parker nonetheless reassured the swarm of press at the scene that his department had not been entirely in the dark about the goings-on at the restaurant. He disclosed that Captain Hamilton’s squad had been tipped earlier that Whalen might be heading there “for a showdown with the top gambling man in Los Angeles, to settle a beef.”
Parker did not say where the tip came from.
* * *
JERRY WOOTERS WAS awakened by the phone ringing in his Arcadia home a couple of hours after his shift at the jail had ended. It was not a friendly call or conversation.
So now I’m home in bed, about two o’clock in the morning, and I get a call from Hamilton. And he says, “Where can we pick up—” See, now suddenly he knows I’m close to Whalen, he didn’t know it before. He says, “Where can I pick up Mrs. Whalen, Whalen’s wife?”
I said, “Captain, you’re talking to a uniformed sergeant. I got thousands of prisoners. I don’t know any of that shit. You got all those high-powered detectives down there. Let them find out where she is.”
So he says, “Listen, I’m gonna tell you something. God damn, you think you’re so fucking smart.” And Jesus he went on with stuff I never heard about.
And I said, “Listen, I assume you’re recording this. And I have no desire to talk any further. I’m on overtime if you pull me down.”
He sai
d, “God damn it.” Blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I didn’t tell him anything.
Jerry Wooters was not told much in return, either. Only later did he learn that the unmarked car had been sent to Rondelli’s following his earlier call but that the two cops in it had simply parked off Ventura Boulevard and never gone in. He learned that detail from a day-shift lieutenant. “You know, in that Rondelli’s killing there was an Intelligence car sitting out in front of that goddamned place and they drove off?”
That’s what his years as the secret buddy of Jack Whalen had come to, then—him stuck in the jail, Whalen sprawled dead on the floor with a bullet in his brain, and his own Los Angeles Police Department on the outside without a clue.
* * *
WHEN THE SUN came up in the morning, one of the swarm of officers still at the scene searched through a trash can down the alley and found a plastic bag with three .38s in it. That was the moment an original member of the Gangster Squad had been anticipating for a decade.
Sergeant John J. O’Mara had gotten to Rondelli’s while the body still lay there. After that, he was sent out to track down Joe Friedman, a.k.a. Joe Mars, the restaurateur who had been squabbling with the near-blind horse bettor Harry Diamond. The man was sitting five feet from Mickey’s table but looking into Mickey’s back, blocking his view of everything except the big body falling, or so he insisted that night. “I didn’t want to get involved,” Joe Friedman explained later. “I had a place of business.” So that part of O’Mara’s night had been frustrating.
All that changed in the morning’s light, at 6:30 A.M., when the uniformed patrolman who had been the first one at the restaurant made his discovery. Officer James C. Newell used the first daylight to scour the roof of the pool business next to Rondelli’s and the parking lot and a fifty-gallon drum sitting there in the open. Voila. Amid the trash was the plastic bag with the trio of .38s: a Colt, a Smith & Wesson, and a pearl-handled snub-nose, just a two-inch. All were loaded. Officer Newell ran inside the restaurant to tell the bosses.
When the word reached Jack O’Mara he ran off, too, to find Captain Hamilton.
“Cap, they could be the guns I took.”
It seemed like a lifetime ago, but Hamilton remembered well. He was one of the few on the force who knew of O’Mara’s great coup those many years ago—how O’Mara had convinced a snitch to sneak seven guns out from Mickey Cohen’s house in Brentwood and then etched his initials under the butt plates in hopes of one day proving the man was a killer. The Gangster Squad had been trying to make that case, but failing, since 1946.
CHAPTER 34
“I’m the Man…”
December 3, 1959, the same day the guns were discovered, one Los Angeles paper ran a short article under Mickey Cohen’s byline. Front pages naturally were filled with WAR BREAKS OUT headlines reporting the slaying at Rondelli’s. Some monkey was being shot up in a rocket as part of the nation’s fledgling space program, but it was hard to match MICKEY COHEN SEES L.A. CAFÉ GANG MURDER. So the Herald-Express carried a second page piece titled COHEN’S OWN STORY OF CAFÉ SHOOTING complete with BY MICKEY COHEN.
Mickey didn’t actually write anything, needless to say; the piece was based on his blabbing that night. But whether written or spoken it was a comedy of lies, start to finish, with emphasis on the comedy. Near the top he said, “I’d sure like to know where my car is now,” when he surely knew he’d given the keys to the Caddy to the gal whose bedroom looked like a valentine. Near the end he said, “I wasn’t with anyone,” when he never went out in public without his personal audience. But such quibbling was pointless, for that string of paragraphs was all about the tone, the absolute embrace of the goof. All that had happened was one giant goof.
I walked into the place with my dog, Mickey Jr. I think I’m going to have to get him an attorney too …
I was seated at a table with my dog beside me eating linguini (That’s a type of Italian spaghetti with clam sauce).
Suddenly I heard shots … you can bet I ducked … I turned around to someone behind me and I asked, “Look to see if I’m bleeding.”
When I ducked the first thing I did was take off his [the dog’s] bib—you gotta wear one when you eat linguini …
It doesn’t do any good to duck under the table. I ought to know. I’ve been in too many of these before …
I only got one complaint. I didn’t get to finish my linguini.
* * *
ON DECEMBER 8, 1959, six days after Mickey didn’t get to finish his linguini, he announced to the world that the killer of Jack Whalen—a.k.a. Jack O’Hara, a.k.a. The Enforcer—would turn himself in. Mickey said he had convinced the gunman to come in and end the manhunt, “to save the taxpayers’ money.”
Thus did Sam LoCigno finally come out of hiding. Since the deadly night at Rondelli’s he had holed up in the Tropicana Motel off the Sunset Strip, stopped by the Miramar by the beach in Santa Monica, and made his way 155 miles north to Santa Maria, where a friend of Mickey’s, the operator of a card club, put him up. LoCigno’s attorney arranged for him to return and surrender at LAPD headquarters, but only after they went on television to have their say. Then Sammy was ready to turn himself in to none other than William H. Parker. Los Angeles’ chief of police had a tape recorder by him to take down the confession. It flicked on as Sammy said:
“I’m the man that shot Jack O’Hara in self-defense.”
PART IV
Justice
CHAPTER 35
Freddie Loses It
When the coroner put Jack Whalen’s body on a slab it measured 72 inches, exactly six feet tall. He was smaller in death than in life. But he did weigh 230 pounds. He was thirty-eight years old.
For his death certificate, his family gave his occupation as “Actor” and his industry as “Motion Pictures.” The death certificate listed his last employer as Revue Productions, which had been the force behind one of the prime weekly series embracing an idealized image of the American family, Leave It To Beaver, and a series of Westerns including The Restless Gun, which starred John Payne, the wholesome-looking actor best known for playing the lawyer who saves Santa from the loony bin in Miracle on 34th Street. In The Restless Gun he was a weary gunslinger who roams the West but survives all challengers. Each episode required a slew of cowboy actors and four times in the show’s last year they included a muscular former schoolboy polo player. They were bit parts, but no one could call Jack Whalen a wannabe any longer—he died with a Screen Actors Guild card in his wallet thanks to writer-producer David Dortort, who had just launched yet another TV Western, the first ever filmed in color. Everyone said that was crazy, given that most televisions sets still presented the world in black and white. But it was conceivable that Jack Whalen might have gotten a bit part in that risky series done in brilliant colors, the one Dortort called Bonanza.
“We hired him through Revue Productions with a bunch of other cowboy actors,” the writer-producer said. “I sure didn’t know he was a mobster.”
* * *
THE LAST DAYS of 1959 were filled with wild conjecture over the killing, including innuendo that police may have been behind it. A spokeswoman for the California Attorney General’s Office disclosed that someone claiming to be speaking for Jack Whalen had sent feelers to the office months before indicating that the big man, facing up to ten years in prison for grand theft, wanted to meet. “He said Whalen had been pushed around and wanted to tell a story that would blow the lid off the Los Angeles Police Department.”
The attorney general’s spokeswoman, Connie Crawford, said the emissary later told them to forget the whole thing, it was a no-go. But state prosecutors hadn’t forgotten the events of a decade earlier, when the LAPD had been among the cynics when the attorney general assigned a giant investigator to serve as Mickey’s personal bodyguard along The Strip. The chief deputy in the office now sent Chief Parker a note suggesting that his cops may have been taking “juice” to protect Whalen’s gambling interests.
Even Sergeant Con Keeler, Mr. Down the Line, was taken aback by the last tidbit. There had been no allegation of an actual payoff, much less any admission—it was just Jerry Wooters being Jerry Wooters, playing some game outside the lines and perhaps hoping to collect juice in the end but nobody knew that.
Jerry himself was not fazed by the gossip. They didn’t name him, thankfully, and he refused to believe that Whalen had been ready to roll over on him—maybe the old man, Freddie the Thief, had gone to the AG in hopes of saving his boy from prison. But all that was irrelevant now. He still was stuck in the fucking jail and Jack was planted in the fucking ground. Jerry went to the funeral, of course.
They had it at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the burial ground started by a fellow from Missouri who decided that Los Angeles should have a cemetery of sunshine and not darkness. It was on a hillside near where Jack Whalen had taken his cousins’ kids on pony rides and overlooked the backlot where they filmed several Westerns. The Episcopal preacher who presided admitted he didn’t know the deceased but told the three hundred mourners, “There is no cause for bitterness. No place for hopelessness. We should ask God in his eternal power for forgiveness. We cannot ask why things are…” Someone thought they heard the dead man’s society widow sob, “He didn’t believe in God.” But who knew? The former Kay Sabichi was not the only woman crying for the dead man. His body had been indentified at the morgue by a twenty-three-year-old blonde, said to be a good friend. A mysterious nineteen-year-old wearing all black and a veil was at the cemetery, too, near collapse, and had to be helped away.