Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles

by Paul Lieberman

  There was inevitable speculation over one floral piece that had a card signed by “Nell, Fred and Mick,” but it was from the actor Mickey Rooney, his mother, and stepfather. His mom, Nell, a former vaudevillian, had become good friends with the dead man’s mother, Lillian Whalen. Lillian had to be helped from the chapel herself, her left arm supported by husband Freddie and her right arm held by her brother, Gus Wunderlich. The onetime gambling ship pirate looked like a patrician now, gray-haired in a light gray suit.

  Sergeant Jack O’Mara was one of several plainclothes officers from Intelligence assigned to keep an eye on the services, just to see who might attend. There was not much to report other than that the bookie Al Levitt was one of the pallbearers and the backup from the fatal night, Rocky Lombardi, was among the mourners.

  O’Mara saw their recently banished squadmate Jerry Wooters sitting there, as well. Jerry was never one to hide so he came up to say hello to his former colleagues. O’Mara might have thought of asking, “Which side are you on?” But he didn’t. Jerry was the one to speak as they shook hands.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll get ’em.”

  * * *

  FREDDIE THE THIEF had been out of town the night of the killing. The elder Whalen was back East with his suitcase with the white coat and stethoscope in it. After he rushed home to L.A. the salesman’s smile was gone from his face. He started drinking too.

  He made every official event—any grand jury hearing, every court session—and was remarkably candid about his son, except for embellishing his background a bit, elevating Jack to a graduate of Black-Foxe and a law student in Idaho, where he’d merely done his preflight training in the war. Freddie’s audience of reporters and assorted onlookers had little idea who he was. Other than that he played pool—that everyone knew—he was any distraught dad rambling on, sometimes repeating himself and sometimes contradicting what he’d said the time before.

  I tried to talk Jack into giving up the rackets many times. Maybe he wasn’t the best apple in the world. He may have pushed some people around. But when he went into a place he went in with nothing but his fists. No guns, knives, or clubs. That’s what burns me, to think those assholes would shoot him down.

  Jack was a tough boy. He loved a fight. He would fight eight men if he had to, but he never carried a gun or a knife. He may have been a bookie, I don’t know. But he wasn’t a killer.

  His main ambition in life was to be an actor.

  If I knew who actually killed my son I would run barefooted to the nearest police station.

  If I did know, I’d put a gun on and go after them.

  I’m a lot older than I was and I’m not going to strap on a gun and go looking for the guy who killed Jack. But I am going to see him in the gas chamber.

  And I don’t care whose toes I have to step on.

  One newsman called him up and in conspiratorial tones asked for a meeting at Larry Potter’s Supper Club. The newsman claimed to have the inside scoop. “We have proof he was killed by the police”—that nonsense again. Fred Whalen was hardly naive about cops, but he did not blame them. The very suggestion made him spell it out.

  Mickey Cohen as good as pulled the trigger and everybody knows it.

  The mob murdered my son.

  Parker and Hamilton are fine honorable men. Chief of Police Parker knows who the murderer is.

  I know these boys. I have ways of finding things out.

  I know the Mickey Cohen mob. Mickey is surrounded by big guns—the Sicas, Dragna, and that type. But they will get theirs eventually.

  The evening of December 14, 1959, Freddie went club-to-club in a rage along the Sunset Strip. One stop was at the Melody Room, where he found Tony Reno, the singer who was supposed to have been a friend of his boy’s but had failed to stop Jack from entering the dining area of Rondelli’s, as if that was possible. A couple of plainclothes cops were at the Melody Room, too, on that night. One was Roger Otis, who had been recruited to the Gangster Squad because he could scamper up a telephone pole like a pro. Perhaps he did tell Freddie where to find the crooner who had been part of Mickey’s dinner crew on the fatal evening—that’s what Tony Reno believed. A few minutes after midnight Freddie walked up to him and asked “Are you Reno?” Then he sent a right to his left ear, the second time in two weeks a Whalen had manhandled Tony Reno.

  That was nothing. He come up on The Strip with two coppers. I remember it like it was yesterday. He come in the club on The Strip, I didn’t see him, then he hit me on the side, it was all bullshit. He was drunk, he come in with the two coppers, the two working on The Strip. They all worked for Chief Hamilton, was that his name? Another asshole. On The Strip, the Melody Room, everybody hung out there. I sang like Sinatra. It was just bullshit. You know, just to keep my nose clean. It was a nice piano bar. A lot of high-class whores would come in there. In those days $200, $300 is a lot of money for whores, and the maître d’, he had the book. You know it was a hangout, a good place to hang out.

  Never met the old man, knew he was a hustler, though. He just took a shot at me—it was like a faggot shot, hit me in the side and then they broke it up. He was with the two faggot coppers. They knew who I was—they pointed me out to him, those two assholes, because they knew I hung out in the Melody Room. Then he called and apologized.

  When word reached Mickey Cohen that old man Whalen had gone trolling along Sunset and clocked Tony Reno, he was ready with a response. “Fifteen or twenty people told me Freddie was going around The Strip bragging he had an OK from the police department to kill me. He has my invitation to come out and see me,” Mickey said. “Any time.”

  A day later, Freddie Whalen was in Municipal Court, all contrite as the judge fined him $25 for battery and placed him on six months’ probation. Thirty-five years had passed since his visit to an L.A. courtroom with his wife for shoplifting, when he tried to sweet-talk his way out of trouble with an absurd story about a birthday shower. This time he said only, “I’m deeply sorry.”

  * * *

  JACK O’MARA DROVE to the Big White House atop the hill in Los Feliz, the place Freddie let everyone believe was his but really was his daughter’s. O’Mara had been there before, for one of Freddie holiday parties, the early portion, for the squares. He’d brought his daughter Maureen along that time. This time he came alone.

  Freddie didn’t seem drunk to him. He was in the basement, at his full-sized Brunswick table. He was dressed casually in a cardigan sweater but still had on his tie from court. He had grown a little mustache, one of those pencil-thin jobs like on the old silent movie actors. Either no one told him he looked like a relic, or he didn’t care.

  O’Mara had never seen what Freddie could do with a cue stick and didn’t know what to expect. So much of what you saw and heard as a cop was bullshit and the old man served it up, too, without blinking. But the way he wielded the cue was no bull—Fred Whalen sent ball after ball into the pockets, working his way around the table as he made his position clear.

  The last thing I do O’Mara, I’m gonna get that son of a bitch.

  CHAPTER 36

  Mickey Takes the Stand

  A week after the shooting in Rondelli’s, the Los Angeles Mirror-News ran an editorial lamenting that the city had been transported back to the dismal days when Mickey was the cocky boss of The Strip. He had come out of prison offering comic relief as the harmless ex-hood but here he was making threats and tweaking the cops while, once again, “death was his handmaiden.”

  Mickey Cohen, assured and openly contemptuous, dominated the investigation of the Whalen gunning … From the standpoint of the mobsters, the boss was really living it up, giving the fuzz the brush-off, making them look silly … arrested on suspicion of murder, he walked out the next day, his prestige enhanced, strutting grandly.

  Since his imprisonment for income tax evasion, Cohen has deliberately projected an image of himself as a half-comic pixie, a martyr to police prosecution, a lover swooning over a succession of str
ipteasers, a harmless eccentric ex-mobster.

  That myth has now been exploded. The 1949 Mickey Cohen is back again, thumbing his nose at the LAPD gleefully, and murder walks in his wake, as it did 10 years ago when the Sunset Strip was a shooting gallery.

  In sum: 1959 suddenly looked like 1949 all over.

  * * *

  AT LEAST THE wheels of justice turned quickly. They were ready for trial in three months, by March 1960, and a bizarre trial it was given that Sam LoCigno was the only one charged. Prosecutors thought the whole night had been a plot by Mickey’s lynch mob of human sewage to lure the bothersome Enforcer to his doom. But they couldn’t be certain who pulled the trigger and had no witness to contradict LoCigno’s confession that he did it, “I’m the man that shot Jack O’Hara in self-defense.”

  Typical was the testimony of Sandy Hagen, who was sitting next to Mickey but unfortunately reaching into her purse for a cigarette just as someone pulled out the .38 Special she never saw. Tony Reno kept to his story that he unfortunately was back in the bar, “Somebody says to me, ‘Well they killed Jack,’ so I went and I looked and I ran.” About the only diner who now decided he had witnessed the action was the visiting (and squabbling) café owner Joe Friedman, a.k.a. Joe Mars, who had been tracked down by O’Mara the night of the killing and said his view had been blocked by Mickey’s back. Now he declared, “I seen the shooting,” and gave the exact account outlined by Mickey and his men.

  One after another, the tablemates told of a menacing Jack Whalen barging in and going dago-this and dago-that, then punching out poor George Piscitelle who was sitting there eating his pasta, then lifting a chair and shouting “You’re next!” to poor Sammy. The man was all but begging for a bullet, though none saw the gun that did it, or any gun. It often was a contest to see who could lie with the straightest face as the boys got up to testify that they had no inkling that the Mick would be at Rondelli’s, even though they’d stopped to pick up his date. Then there was LoCigno saying he did it, yeah, but couldn’t recall where he tossed his .38 Special afterward. “It’s one of those foggy things.”

  Oh, he’d bought the gun for thirty-five bucks, loaded, from the boxing trainer Willie Ginsburg, who unfortunately had died since then of a heart attack, meaning Willie couldn’t come in to confirm it …

  … Oh, and he’d gone out with the .38 special packed in his right-side pocket because he was petrified by the threats from The Enforcer, but that didn’t deter him from schmoozing the girls at the bar and arranging a rendezvous at the comedy show later. “I don’t stop living because I’m scared,” Sammy said …

  … Oh, and he couldn’t recall who hid him up north for most of a week …

  On it went.

  Yet if the defense had its whoppers, the government had its innuendo, as when prosecutors harped on the nature of the crowd in Rondelli’s, how so many there had two names and knew each other, so many belonging to this mysterious society of unemployed Cadillac owners. Sammy LoCigno was Exhibit A, eating at that joint three or four times a week while griping he couldn’t get work as a bartender, but thank God his suit had a pocket just the right size for the .38 he got from a dead man.

  Then there was how the two prosecutors asked witness after witness who had seen nothing if they at least had heard something—Mickey calling out, “Now, Sam, now!’” right before the fatal shot. “Now, Sam, now!” It was like the plot of one of those boxing movies where the fighter is being clobbered for fourteen rounds until his corner gives him a secret signal to unleash an uppercut, then KABOOM! “Now, Sam, now!” The government’s lawyers asked about those three words enough times that the jury must have thought that someone had heard them. But when pressed for the basis of the “Now, Sam, now!” the prosecutors finally revealed that an investigator had been told that by a prostitute, who’d heard it from the maître d’, who wouldn’t admit it now.

  “You know it’s false,” Mickey said when given his turn to speak. “Listen, am I on trial here?”

  Sure he was.

  * * *

  HE WAS CALLED as a defense witness, but that was only the preview. He did better with his name this time, not attempting the full Meyer Harris Cohen that had tripped him up at his tax trial. Sam LoCigno’s chief lawyer, Norman Sugarman, led Mickey gently through the innocent events of the night, how he’d come early to meet the colored talent agent and his singing duo, and to see the former exterminator about the book and motion picture based on his life, and how the talk at his table was the usual trivia—none of the guys mentioned their spat with The Enforcer, or how he promised to break their skulls. Indeed, Mickey told the jury that while he had heard talk of the head-buster he’d never once met him. They might have been in the same club at some point but that was his only exposure to, “O’Hara or Whalen, whatever they call him.” Mickey’s testimony for the defense was done in a snap, filling merely twenty pages of trial transcript.

  The cross-examination by Deputy District Attorney James C. Ford went nearly six times as long, filling 114 pages over two days in the Los Angeles Superior Court of Judge Clement D. Nye. It took that long to get through all the insults from Mickey and to ease Los Angeles’ headline-happy hoodlum into the trap they had waiting.

  Prosecutor Ford: You had an appointment to go there that night?

  Mickey: I want to know with who you mean.

  Judge Nye: That’s an easy question to answer, isn’t it?

  Cohen: Yes, but I don’t trust this man and I have a right to find out what he’s doing to me.

  Ford: The feeling is mutual … Did you use Rondelli’s restaurant as a business headquarters?

  Cohen: I did not.

  Ford: Were you accustomed to making phone calls from the office…?

  Cohen: Not any more than any other customer.

  Ford: You came to Rondelli’s restaurant in your own automobile, didn’t you?

  Cohen: Yes.

  Ford: What kind of car is that?

  Cohen: Cadillac.

  Ford: Were you driving…?

  Cohen: How else could I get there? The dog couldn’t drive.

  Ford: May the jury be instructed to disregard that?

  Judge Nye: The jury is instructed to disregard the voluntary statement of the witness.

  Cohen: What are these catchy questions? I don’t understand, “How did I get there?” I drove myself … The man is trying to trip me up.

  Judge Nye: Nobody is trying to trip you up …

  Ford: Now about what time of the evening was it that you first saw Jack O’Hara … do you call him Jack O’Hara or Jack Whalen?

  Cohen: I don’t call him anything.

  Ford: All right, we will call him Jack O’Hara.

  Cohen: The only time I seen him was when he came over to the table.

  Ford: Had you ever seen him before in your life?

  Cohen: Not to my recollection.

  Ford: Isn’t it a fact that you had conversations with him prior to that night?

  Cohen: That’s absolutely untrue … I am positive of it. Not sure of it, but positive of it …

  Ford: Did you ever have a conversation with Mr. O’Hara at the Formosa Café?

  Cohen: Absolutely not.

  Ford: … the Garden of Allah Hotel?

  Cohen: Absolutely not.

  Ford: Have you ever threatened Jack O’Hara?

  Cohen: How could I threaten him, I never had no conversation with him.

  Ford: You were looking at Mr. O’Hara at the time the shots were fired?

  Cohen: When the shot was fired I didn’t look at anybody, I ducked … the first BANG! I heard I ducked … I thought I heard three or four …

  Ford: Well, were they bang, bang, bang, bang?

  Cohen: I don’t take no notes at a thing like that.

  Ford: How long did you stay under the table?

  Cohen: When I heard the stampeding and the running and all that and it sounded like there was nothing there, I got up.

  Ford: You didn’t see anything?
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  Cohen: I don’t remember what I seen. It is dark, the restaurant is dark and I am under the table. I am trying to figure out if I got shot … I didn’t see anybody except Sandra Hagen …

  Ford: Did she come back to the table?

  Cohen: She grabbed her purse or whatever was laying there … I walked her towards the front entrance … just told her to go on home so she shouldn’t get mixed up with this thing.

  Ford: Now after she went outside what was the next thing you did?

  Cohen: The next thing, I went and washed my hands.

  Ford: You did not call the operator or the police department or the fire department?

  Cohen: I don’t call the police department at no time.

  Ford: Did you notice anyone cleaning off table 15?

  Cohen: I did not.

  Ford: How many years have you known Mr. LoCigno?

  Cohen: I know him many, many years. I knew him when I was boxing around Cleveland.

  Ford: Do you know what his occupation was as of December 2, 1959?

  Cohen: No. I knew that he made a bet here or there but I wouldn’t consider it his occupation … I never discussed those things with Sammy …

  Ford: Was he working for you?

  Cohen: No. He has never worked for me.

  Ford: What business are you in, Mr. Cohen?

  Defense lawyer Sugarman: I object to that as being immaterial to the issues in this case …

  Ford: After the police arrived there, Mr. Cohen, didn’t you have a conversation with Deputy Chief of Police Thad Brown?

  Cohen: The only conversation I had with deputy chief Thad Brown was in generalities.

  Ford: And did he ask you in substance at that time whether you had shot O’Hara and you said, “No”?

  Cohen: I was asked that question forty times … I didn’t give any answers, your honor.