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

by Paul Lieberman

  The prosecutors did not try to sanitize the victim in their closing statements to the jury. “The fact that Jack Whalen was killed that night doesn’t affect us directly in any way. We lost nothing by it,” Deputy District Attorney James C. Ford said, kicking off the government’s pitch. “We do not grieve.” The prosecutor said:

  Jack Whalen, Jack O’Hara, was a violent man. There is no denying that fact. He was a big man. He was a muscular man and … we may flatly state that Jack O’Hara was a tough, violent man … He could take somebody on, take almost anybody on, and lick him. That’s the truth … one of the toughest guys in town. A real man and a half, and he stood tall and he weighed heavy … He could have been a contender for the heavyweight championship of the world …

  But he was not a gun carrier, not a knifer, but a man who … was at least manly enough to stand up with his own two fists and … he never killed anybody or ever used any weapon, including a chair …

  In fact, the prosecutors had a theory of the fatal night built around Whalen’s prowess: If he packed the wallop of a mule, how come George Piscitelle’s face wasn’t caved in or his teeth knocked out? Their answer: He wasn’t knocked to the ground, he ducked, to clear the line of fire. And was Whalen really lifting the empty chair to bash poor Sammy? Or was he pulling it back, to take a seat? Why had Tony Reno rushed back to the bar after he was prodded into the dining area by the big man? He knew what was coming, that’s why.

  The prosecutors counted 310 lies by the defense witnesses, about 100 by Mickey Cohen, who never had a gun or saw a gun, including the three he’d had his boys rush out the back door. Joe Busch got to cap the prosecution’s appeal for a guilty verdict by saying:

  If you had crimes committed in Hell, you wouldn’t expect angels for witnesses, would you?

  It is pretty hard to get at the truth in this case with these liars that have testified here. It is like a bunch of human sewage passing through.

  As that man entered that restaurant that night, he went to his execution.

  * * *

  THE DEFENSE OFFERED a touch of philosophy in response. LoCigno’s lawyer William Strong said, “You will find that there isn’t any such thing as ‘right is right and wrong is wrong.’ Everything is relative in this world, of course. And under certain circumstances…” Translation: you can kill a guy and it not be a crime. Strong said of the chief prosecutor, Busch:

  He isn’t trying Mr. LoCigno here at all. He is trying Mickey Cohen. I think he would be much happier, frankly, if the case were the people against Mickey Cohen. Then he could really stick his teeth into it. But he hasn’t got a case like that … so he is doing the next best thing. He is making Sam LoCigno the whipping boy. He will beat him to death if he can because he can’t establish a case against Mickey Cohen.

  If Mr. Cohen hadn’t been present I can tell you that there wouldn’t have been any case here.

  But I will say this, it makes a much more interesting case if you have three guns in a trash can on the outside … six hours later, ladies and gentlemen, they find them … that place, swarming with policemen … do you believe, really believe, they didn’t bother going outside in the back and looking in the trash can?

  * * *

  O’MARA WAS SITTING a couple of rows behind the prosecution table and you’d better believe he took it personally. The man had said, “I am not suggesting…” Really? There was no mistaking what he was suggesting—that Jack O’Mara, the young cop always looking to race, the code breaker in the war, the head church usher, the original member of the LAPD’s Gangster Squad … that he must have planted those guns in the trash outside Rondelli’s. Well, fuck you.

  CHAPTER 38

  Jethro Gives Chase

  The jury began deliberating Thursday, March 24, and the next night Mickey led his entourage to the Cloister, where his reservation to hear comedian Joey Bishop had gone unused on the fateful evening. This time he made the show but the damnedest thing happened—someone stole his dog. Actually, a drunk stole his Cadillac. Mickey Jr. was in the back. When the human Mickey and his hangers-on left the club at 2:45 A.M., they saw the car racing along Sunset. Luckily another Junior was around.

  Max Baer Jr., son of the former heavyweight boxing champion, was a strapping lad who had not yet been discovered by Hollywood and become the Beverly Hillbillies’ Jethro. He had just moved to town and almost instantly became part of Mickey’s floating party, getting to know all the boys (and broads).

  I was by myself, I was just a kid, just out of the service. I hadn’t had a job yet. Oh, shit, he always got the good tables, he always had good-looking girls around, he always picked up the tab, so what’s not to like if you’re a young kid and don’t have any money? In other words, I hate to say it, but I was a mooch.

  Mickey had a whole bunch of people there and when we came out of the place early in the morning Mickey’s car was gone and we were standing there wondering what the hell happened. It was a black ’60 Cadillac Eldorado with a stainless steel floor. I had a Pontiac Chieftain, a blue one, two door, and so we were standing out there in front of the place and Mickey was not as upset about the car as he was about his dog, and all of a sudden the car comes driving right by the club. And I’m in my car and he yells at me, “Max! Hey, get that guy!” So I step on the gas, pull out of the thing, and go down following him. We must’ve been going a hundred miles an hour down The Strip and the guy for some reason, I can never figure it out, we turn on Wilcox, which dead-ends into the Hollywood police station. They got him there. I couldn’t believe it. I’m looking right at the police station.

  The drunken car thief and dog-napper had delivered himself right to the Hollywood lockup—a sign, if ever there was one, that the LAPD could get its man.

  Three days later the Los Angeles Superior Court jury returned its verdict and declared Sam LoCigno guilty of first-degree murder. The jurors deliberated only eleven more minutes before recommending life in prison. The government had not pushed the death penalty for the killing of Jack Whalen. “He’d been flirting with the undertaker for a long time,” the deputy police chief had noted.

  Hours after the Tuesday, March 29, 1960, verdict, the Mirror-News was on the street with a banner headline that used the name of someone other than the man on trial.

  COHEN PAL CONVICTED

  OF 1ST-DEGREE MURDER

  The public had to wait a day to learn the full significance of the moment. The follow-up head was a small one, inside the Los Angeles Times, and easy to miss. But it was on the record.

  FIRST GANG

  CONVICTION

  IN 19 YEARS

  In praising his deputies, Acting District Attorney Manley Bowler had pointed out that this was Los Angeles’ first successful prosecution in a gangland killing in two decades. There was double reason to pop the champagne.

  But it was more than that. The last conviction had stemmed from another killing of a gambling figure in an eatery, on October 25, 1937, when the pair of gunmen entered The Roost café and fired a barrage of shots at George “Les” Bruneman, who controlled the bookmaking by the beach but neglected to share with Bugsy Siegel or Jack Dragna. That was the case where it took two years for authorities to arrest the former jailbird Pete Pianezzi, based on an informant’s tip and shaky but emotional eyewitness testimony by the café owner’s wife. “His cold, steely eyes—I’ll never forget them.”

  The Dragna crowd laughed for years about that poor sap rotting up in Folsom Prison for a shooting actually carried out by a real pro, Leo “Lips” Moceri, the hit man later caught putting slugs in a pay phone. It would take decades for Pianezzi to be exonerated, officially declared the wrong man. Had the District Attorney known that in 1960 he might have given his two prosecutors the complete credit they deserved—if you discounted the botched Pianezzi case, their conviction of Sam LoCigno stood as the twentieth century’s first, and only, in a Los Angeles mob killing.

  It was the perfect moment to toast the end of a long losing streak and of an era. A new decad
e, the ’60s, had arrived. All they had to do was declare victory and go home before their own case, for the killing of Jack Whalen, went the way of noir.

  CHAPTER 39

  Mickey’s Boast

  Appeals moved slowly, so it took a year for a higher court to lambaste their guilt-by-association prosecution as “extremely prejudicial,” “utter unfairness,” and “billingsgate,” and to overturn the conviction of Sam LoCigno. He had been the defendant of record but you would never have known it from what transpired in Judge Nye’s courtroom.

  “The case we are reviewing could truly be called ‘The trial of Mickey Cohen,’” the panel of three California appellate judges declared in a decision released June 26, 1961. Their unanimous sixty-page ruling made the tongue-lashing delivered in the Cahan case look like a mild tsk-tsk. The panel reviewing LoCigno’s conviction couldn’t get over the government’s obsession with someone not on trial.

  We may assume that the jurors in the course of the trial had learned enough about Mickey Cohen to be able to classify him as a notorious ex-mobster and racketeer. His unsavory reputation was harped upon by the People as the most potent evidence that the killing of O’Hara was premeditated. In the brief of the attorney general it is said: “Mickey Cohen is a notorious figure … If we accept appellant’s theory [the bad reputation of Cohen] then it becomes the thing for the ‘bad man’ to do, when he is planning a murder, to associate himself with a notorious gangster and carry out the killing when he is beside him…”

  It is fair to say that throughout the trial the People treated Mickey Cohen as the central figure in the murder and the others, including LoCigno, as merely his henchmen, subject to his directions and control …

  That was exactly what the cops and prosecutors believed. They thought it so obvious they put it in their sentencing memo: “This murder was committed pursuant to the purposes of organized crime.” But the rules of the game were that you couldn’t lock someone away based on what you believed, only what you could prove. The appellate judges did not appreciate the prosecutors’ description of the crowd at Rondelli’s as “a bunch of human sewage” or how they asked LoCigno, “Now, did you receive any money from anybody for shooting O’Hara?” The appellate panel also zeroed in on two trial tactics for extended condemnation. The first was the prosecution’s insistence on asking witnesses whether Mickey had explicitly ordered the shooting by saying “Now, Sam, now!”—the damning statement based on a second-hand account from an unidentified prostitute.

  The second fatal defect in the trial, the judges said, was the use of the three guns retrieved from the trash. The judges were not entirely naive—they acknowledged that the loaded .38s may well have been dumped by Mickey or his companions. But none had been used to kill the head-buster Jack Whalen, a.k.a. O’Hara, and what evidence tied them to the man on trial?

  The evidence, both direct and circumstantial, indicated that defendant was on the defensive, that he was not only not looking for O’Hara, but that he had an intense desire to avoid an encounter with him … Mere evidence that defendant had friends who carried guns did not tend to prove any material or relevant fact and should not have been admitted … Although it warranted a strong suspicion that the several persons at the table were armed, it was not evidence of a conspiracy to shoot O’Hara … the shooting of O’Hara was being pictured as a “gangland” crime, the rubbing out of one gangster by another in the course of underworld warfare …

  The three guns were not admissible in evidence for any purpose.

  Thus did Sergeant Jack O’Mara’s prized accomplishment—the secret marking of Mickey’s guns a decade before—help overturn their landmark guilty verdict and set the convicted man free.

  * * *

  LOS ANGELES AUTHORITIES did not give up in the wake of the legal rebuke. If the judges complained that the trial of Sam LoCigno had seemed like a disguised prosecution of Mickey Cohen, why not lift the disguise and make it that for real? Four months after the conviction was tossed out they brought a new murder indictment that added a conspiracy count against Mickey, LoCigno, and three of their dinner companions: George Piscitelle from the drug store; Roger Leonard, the exterminator-turned-producer; and Joe DeCarlo, the man with the strippers.

  The government did have one more piece of evidence to use this go-around. Sobered up by having started to serve a life sentence, LoCigno overcame his amnesia about the murder weapon and told prison authorities of a buddy who could lead them to it—the .38 Smith & Wesson had been tossed in the thick brush off Mulholland Drive, the winding road atop the hills where you got a perfect view of the city’s lights, the jewels on the breast of the harlot.

  By the time investigators for the D.A.’s office found the discarded weapon it was too rusted to be linked conclusively to the bullet in Whalen’s brain. But on this point, they believed the imprisoned Sammy—it was the murder weapon, except it was not bought from a dead boxing trainer, as he had conveniently testified before. The .38 Special had been purchased in Arizona by another of the dinner crew, Leonard, who supposedly was at the restaurant to talk about making The Mickey Cohen Story. He apparently had sold or loaned the gun to LoCigno, except that Sammy had decided to change a second part of his story, as well. Now he wasn’t the killer, after all—someone else pulled the trigger. He just wouldn’t say who. He was only going semi-rat.

  So the government finally had a key piece of the puzzle, the (presumed) murder weapon, but the entire case remained, more than ever, “one of those foggy things,” to quote LoCigno’s original accounting of his gun. The second trial thus proved to be a costly circus and waste of time—a hung jury—whose main highlight was a quip from Mickey as they waited for the verdict that would never come. He was at the barber shop getting the full treatment—a trim, manicure, and shine—while the radio offered updates on the Mickey Cohen murder jury, which had been sequestered for four days, arguing over the murky evidence.

  “This is a crazy town,” Mickey said. “They accuse me of bumping a guy off, so what do they do? They turn me loose and lock up the jury.”

  It still was one giant goof to him.

  * * *

  ONLY AFTER THAT second exercise in courtroom futility did prosecutors settle for a face-saving deal under which LoCigno alone was tried before a new judge, without a jury and without additional testimony—Judge Lewis Drucker would base his verdict on the transcripts already in hand and on closing arguments by the lawyers. LoCigno was back to saying, yeah, he did it, but had no choice, and now all he wanted was to marry the girl from Rondelli’s, Ona Rae, and whisk her back to Cleveland to operate a deli or candy store with his father. “I have,” he told the judge, “gained something that I never possessed before, love … Her faith and love have kept me in good spirits and has given me at long last a way and desire to be a worthier citizen.”

  The lovebird looking for a worthier life came to court this time with a new attorney arguing his case for self-defense, the flamboyant Marvin Mitchelson, who would become famous (and infamous) as the Rolls-Royce–driving pioneer of “palimony” suits on behalf of spurned live-in lovers. But back then he was a young lawyer eager to take on a case that might get him some attention after being introduced to LoCigno by his friend at the drug store. Alas, Mitchelson did not encounter a client who seemed all that eager for a square’s life behind a counter selling confections:

  I lived up around Sunset and knew the guys at Turner’s drug store. They were all threatening one another. I mean, this was a rough group and everyone carried a gun in those days. He came to my house once in a big, big hurry and very furtively looking around, you know. Then he left and he stashed a gun in the couch he was sitting on. In my house! Because he was trying to ditch it from the cops or something. I never got over it.

  The defense was that he did it but he did it out of fear—big, burly tough guy just comes storming in. Sam knew that Whalen was going to come after him. Well, he was after both, actually. I also think that he was trying to protect Mickey. I think th
at was part of it, as well. They all tried to cover each other, that’s what they do. I thought we got a good deal.

  They got a very good deal. Under the new ground rules, the judge found LoCigno guilty merely of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced him to one to ten years in prison, the same term Jack Whalen had gotten for suckering $500 from a wannabe bookie.

  Mickey Cohen had to wait until his end-of-life memoirs to boast how they’d worked the system.

  * * *

  “THE FIRST THING you got to understand is this: Sam LoCigno, who was accused of the hit, couldn’t hit the wall of an auditorium,” Mickey said in his last account of the night at Rondelli’s. “The person that hit Whalen was an expert shot. This expert shot never missed before in whatever it was, you understand?” This account had Sam taking the rap for “$25,000 plus,” though Mickey declined to say which expert shot really had done in Jack Whalen, that great big bullshit enforcer. Mickey did suggest who it was, however. He wanted the world to know. “I could shoot a gun pretty goddamned well … there’s never a statute of limitations on murder, so I don’t want to go no further.”

  How could the great Mickey Cohen not take credit for killing the fearsome Enforcer? That was Mickey’s story, to be believed or not, as with anything he said.

  To be fair, another of the dinner party eventually would back his account, albeit half a century after the shooting. Tony Reno, king of the Melody Room piano bar, swore in old age that he had lingered in the dining room at Rondelli’s after Whalen pulled him out of the phone booth and prodded him around the fake philodendron—he lied, he said, when he told police and a jury that he rushed back into the lounge and saw nothing. A half century later, he insisted that he kept his eyes on big Jack walking toward his doom.