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

by Paul Lieberman

  Only two of the Gangster Squad’s original eight remained on the job: rabbit-punching Archie Case, who was near retirement; and the bug man Con Keeler, Mr. Down the Line, who figured to stay till he dropped. “Get the hell out,” was O’Mara’s advice. Their time was as past as Mickey’s.

  He followed Mickey’s second tax trial as a civilian and took pleasure in the absurdity of the man getting fifteen years for fudging on his taxes. But O’Mara did not confuse that with justice. Real justice was what happened to Mickey behind bars.

  * * *

  ALCATRAZ HAD HOUSED only one other tax cheat before: Capone. “It was a crumbling dungeon,” Mickey later said of America’s version of Devil’s Island, where water dripped from the ceilings above cellblocks that lacked the usual prison amenities. No TVs, no playing cards, no commissary. “You never seen a bar of candy there, only on Christmas.” About his only daily diversions were games of dominoes in the tiny prison yard but there he had to watch for inmates ready to slice him with a shiv for whatever offense, real or imagined. The whole place stank, literally and figuratively. One consolation was his job dispensing clothing—there still were advantages to having been a haberdasher—near where he could take hot showers for his sanity.

  He also got one reprieve unique in Alcatraz’s history, when the warden called him in and said, “Well, I guess you got the good news.” Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had approved his release on bond, pending his appeal. Mickey wrote the famous judge a thank-you—“I assured him that his faith in me wouldn’t be abused”—and returned to Los Angeles to again enjoy the pleasures of freedom and the company of Sandy Hagen. But they were awoken at 6:55 A.M. on April 30, 1962, by a call with news from the East that was not good—the full Supreme Court would not overturn his conviction. Sandy cooked him scrambled eggs and bacon but he could manage only juice and coffee. “I gotta take care of some things,” he said. He spent half an hour brushing his teeth with two brands of toothpaste and five brushes. He called his sister to calm her. He took off for a meeting at the Ambassador, where he once had one of his floating casinos. He saw his old Russian mother, still alive. He stopped by the ice cream parlor. He bought new T-shirts and socks. He went to the barber shop and said, “Manicure me extra short, so it will last me a few weeks.” At 7 P.M. he did a TV interview, in which he made a virtue of his not running away. “I’m no lamster,” he said. Then he and Sandy had dinner out, Italian, spaghetti, before the crowd gathered at their apartment one last time, into the morning, when his cruel taste of freedom had to end.

  He had the honor of being one of the last inmates on The Rock, another institution whose time had passed—Alcatraz closed as a prison March 21, 1963, destined to become a tourist attraction and curiosity. Mickey was transferred to the federal pen in Atlanta, where he was assigned to work in the electronics shop and given the job that had been held by the New York mob boss Vito Genovese, dispensing tools to the inmate workers. Mickey was proud that “Don Vito” had left him his hot plate and heater in the small office there. Those things counted, you know?

  The warden later said it was there in the shop that the crazed inmate Berl Estes McDonald bashed Mickey over the head with a lead pipe the morning of August 14, 1963. Mickey said that was wrong. “I know exactly where this ding-a-ling Estes McDonald got me. I was in the television room watching the noon news program with my back towards the corridor. I don’t know if the fucking building fell on me or what happened, and the next thing I know, I came outa the coma I had been in for two weeks.” Warden David Heritage said Mickey actually was out for six hours, but his injuries were real. His skull had been caved in, his brain damaged, and his left side largely paralyzed. He had been struck three times by the pipe, BAM, BAM, BAM. Inmate Berl McDonald “got in several good ones,” the warden said.

  Most every account had it as a random act by a deranged convict, with no good reason. The thirty-three-year-old McDonald was a forger by profession, from rural South Carolina, but had a history of psychiatric problems and had knifed another prisoner at the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas—indeed, he’d been given ten more years for that assault and was supposed to have been in maximum security segregation in Atlanta. He was allowed into an exercise yard unsupervised, however, then climbed an eleven-foot brick wall and walked to the Radio-TV building, where Mickey was talking with an instructor. A prison guard who found McDonald holding the bloody pipe reported that he boasted “he had got one, and named Mickey Cohen.”

  Though McDonald was diagnosed to be in a “constitutional psycopathic state,” federal authorities had to ponder the possibility that someone might have been after Mickey due to unfinished underworld business. The year before, the Atlanta pen had experienced a similar pipe bashing that was having continuing repercussions in that realm. A foot soldier from New York named Joe Valachi became convinced that another inmate in the yard was a hit man sent by mob higher-ups, and clobbered the guy to death. Facing a murder rap for the prison slaying, the fifty-eight-year-old Valachi was said now to be singing to the FBI, sharing hitherto unknown secrets of a national “La Cosa Nostra” and offering seemingly outlandish tidbits about blood oath initiations and kisses-of-death on the cheek …

  Mickey himself pooh-poohed the notion that the attack might be tied to anything. The man who got him was a demented ding-a-ling, he said, “someone nobody in my walk of life knows about.” Or as his stripper friend Liz Renay put it, while praying for Mickey’s recovery, “They put a lot of kookie people in prison.”

  Back in Los Angeles, Jack O’Mara wasn’t buying it. He was certain that Fred Whalen was behind the bashing of Mickey Cohen in prison.

  * * *

  O’MARA HAD BEEN off on his August vacation, fishing for trout in the Sierra. He was far from the normal cares of life or the banner headline, MICKEY COHEN BEATEN IN PRISON, MAY DIE and the next day’s smaller, MICKEY COHEN WILL LIVE. Only when he got back to civilization, and his job at the track, did he get a call from one of his old buddies from the squad, Jerry Greeley, now on Homicide, asking, “Did you hear?”

  “Goddamn,” O’Mara said.

  He understood that it was another mind game, thinking Freddie the Thief had it done. It was like with Bugsy’s murder ages before, or the Dahlia case, when O’Mara was sure, absolutely sure, he knew who did it. You could know things with dead certainty yet be wrong, or so people told you.

  Yet didn’t Freddie have connections all over from his life of scamming? Hadn’t he spelled out what he’d do? “The last thing I do, O’Mara, I’m gonna get that son of a bitch. You won’t nail me, but I’ll have that done.”

  That was their world in a nutshell. The church usher Jack O’Mara may not have bought into their reality on paper, but he lived it: Truth was found not in the sunlight, but in the shadows, justice not in a courthouse but off Mulholland Drive, or in a prison radio shop. Jack O’Mara tied up his years on the Gangster Squad in a neat bow with this belief that the aging grifter Freddie the Thief Whalen had been able to reach across the continent into an Atlanta prison to have some dippy-do bash Mickey Cohen in the head for what he’d done to his boy—a pure noir fantasy if ever there was one. Except maybe it wasn’t a fantasy.

  CHAPTER 42

  The Visit

  If you were part of the Whalen clan you got an education in the rackets. John von Hurst just began his earlier than most, as the toddler taken on the walk by Grandpa Fred in 1948 when the kidnappers from Fresno threatened to drop Freddie from a plane. Years later, when the boy grew into a strapping football tight end, Grandpa Fred continued the tutorial by using him as a straight man when he would go to pool halls and pretend to be tipsy. Freddie would slur his words and stumble off the stool to slap his money on the table while taunting the young studs with their cue sticks, “Oh, you can’t play,” and one would snipe back, “Show me what you can do, old man.” The grandkid’s job was to keep nudging the wobbly Freddie, “C’mon, Grandpa, you’ve had enough!” thereby enticing more suckers into games of 8-b
all they had no chance of winning.

  So even if John von Hurst was destined to become a square in life—an architect and then a rancher up in Oregon—Freddie the Thief did not hide who he was from the boy. Grandpa Fred thus allowed him to hang around the time the two men came calling at their mansion atop the hill in Los Feliz soon after Mickey Cohen went to prison for taxes, not for what he’d done at Rondelli’s. Young Johnny heard the bell and answered the door. Two visitors stood beneath the white-columned portico of the Big White House.

  Yeah, I was there when the guys came to the house, yeah. I didn’t know who those guys were. I’d never seen them before.

  They came to the front door and I answered the door and they asked if Fred Whalen was at home and I said, “Yeah, just a second,” and he came downstairs and sat in the living room, went from the entry to the living room and sat on the couch. They sat on two chairs near him and I stood on the other side of the room, I just stood there watching ’em. My grandfather was comfortable with them so I wasn’t worried. I just listened.

  They started out, “We haven’t seen you for a long time. How you doing?”

  My grandfather said “I’m doing fine.”

  They said, “You know Fred, we’ve never really gotten right about what happened with Jack. We would like to, you know, kind of even the score.”

  Then they asked my grandfather if he had a problem with it, with them doing something to Mickey Cohen. They probably figured my grandfather might have thought, “Why don’t we just let him rot in jail?” I don’t know.

  I think the language they used was, “Do you mind if we have him taken care of?”

  You knew what “take care of” meant. The idea was they were gonna kill him. Yeah, whack ’im. So they said, “Do you have a problem with this?” They felt it was my grandfather’s business because it was his son. “Do you have a problem with this?”

  My grandfather said, “Hell no, I don’t care what you do to the son of a bitch.” He said basically, “Let ’em kill the fat little fuck.”

  John von Hurst said his grandfather did not mention the visit again until they heard over the radio that Mickey Cohen had been bashed over the head in prison on August 14, 1963.

  Freddie Whalen said then, “I guess those guys meant what they said.”

  CHAPTER 43

  A Song by Sinatra

  Sergeant Jerry Wooters, who had played the long odds all his life, ended his police career working the night shift at the Lincoln Heights Jail. “Couldn’t get out,” he said.

  He couldn’t get out even after the man who bounced him there, Captain James Hamilton, retired from the LAPD to take a plum job heading security for the National Football League, which had experienced a betting scandal and needed protection against its own Invasion of Undesirables. “He helped hook Mickey Cohen twice,” one sports columnist wrote in touting Hamilton’s qualifications. Chief Parker then appointed his former driver Daryl F. Gates to take over Intelligence, giving him a taste of the secretive unit before he, too, rose to chief. Sometimes it seemed like everyone else was getting ahead while you were going nowhere.

  At least Jerry had a little clout as a watch commander at the jail. Once in a while he’d take his oldest son along so a trustee could give the boy a haircut. He’d march the kid by holding cells where inmates shouted catcalls and raked stuff across the bars, BAM, BAM, BAM, an experience Gerard Jr. would never forget.

  So we’d go around the corner and there was a little barber shop and the guy in there was crazy-eyed and pasty-faced and slamming a razor on one of those belts. He’d throw me in a barber chair and wrap one of those capes around me and my dad would say, “OK, give him a good cut there, Joe!”

  Hey, the free buzz cut saved Jerry a few bucks.

  He tried to find some respite by being a good suburban dad, enrolling one of his boys in an Indian Guides program that had fathers and sons rough it in the wilds. “The rest of us would be trying to sleep on the hard ground in the tepees with our feet hanging out,” recalled Dr. Norm von Herzen, another of the parents, “and invariably Jerry would fudge a little bit. He would sneak out of the tepee after his kid was asleep and he’d go in the back of his station wagon on this soft mattress that he had. That’s Jerry.”

  It was during those camping trips that Jerry confided to his doctor friend how apprehensive he was about life after police work. He recalled how the gangsters would mock cops like him as being suited to be security guards at best, minimum wage hacks. “You’ll never make it, kid,” they’d say. This was coming from pieces of shit like Mickey, but it got to him.

  Then a Navy buddy pitched him on selling built-in vacuum systems for houses. Jerry and his wife had a vacation coming up in Hawaii, so he took a sample door-to-door there—he’d find the housewife and pretend he was back wooing nurses during the war. Why hadn’t he realized he could sell anything? “Gosh, I made like $4,000 in a week. Came back, hocked the house, hocked the car, and got into the business.” He started selling garage doors, also, and hooked up with a guy who made a “food center” gizmo with a spinner you built into the kitchen counter; a fancy blender, really. He began telling the developers of huge subdivisions, “Look, I’ll take care of your intercom, garage door opener, build your alarm system.” Before long, he was able to move his family into a house on the water in Newport Beach. He bought duplexes as investments and built an office park. You had to be an idiot not to get rich in the 1960s in booming Orange County, California.

  * * *

  HE THANKFULLY WAS out of police work and starting to make his fortune when the riots broke out in Watts in the summer of ’65. Their generation of cops had come of age during the White Men Rule era when you could come back to the station house and joke about shooting a black man in the ass. Those people were not in the club, not close—they got the club. But O’Mara was right, their time had passed, and the changing realities caught up even with Chief William H. Parker. He had become a pioneer of professional policing by being a hard-ass but that didn’t go over as well when the minority communities erupted and he said things like, “One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.”

  However bitter Jerry Wooters remained about his last years in purgatory, he never held it against the chief. “An amazing man,” Jerry called him, so it pained him to see Parker come under attack when he railed about some of the city’s Latinos as being “not far removed from the wild tribes of Mexico” and how most of the blacks weren’t from Los Angeles, either—they were from the South. “They came in and flooded a community that wasn’t prepared to meet them,” Parker declared. “We didn’t ask these people to come here…” The riots, too, it seems, were an Invasion of Undesirables.

  After that, the chief spent too much time defending himself when he needed to be nursing his health. He finally took a leave after undergoing surgery at the Mayo Clinic to remove an aortic aneurysm, but returned in time for the Second Marine Division Association to honor him at a banquet on July 16, 1966. After 1,000-plus vets gave him a standing ovation at the Statler Hilton, Parker returned to his table, sat down and collapsed. He was sixty-four.

  His trusted right hand, Captain Hamilton, died four months later, a stroke cutting short his plum job keeping pro football honest. He was just fifty-seven.

  Neither lived long enough to see the mob in Los Angeles come to be widely derided as a “Mickey Mouse Mafia” as the public gained an appreciation for how the city had never gone the way of Chicago or New York or Philly, where organized crime controlled whole ports and unions and construction trades. There were all sorts of reasons, but the Gangster Squad, for all its excesses—perhaps because of its excesses—was one. They had made life hell for Mickey Cohen and his ilk.

  When they started out, eight men in two rusted cars, trying to remain invisible, it was nothing like later years when every third mob guy was wired up, getting the goods on the others. In their time, omerta was chillingly enforced. Joe Valachi did not break the mob’s cod
e of silence until 1963 and there wasn’t a second great mob turncoat until 1978, when L.A.’s own Jimmy the Weasel ’fessed up to eleven killings. That was another thing—after Fratianno’s confession you could rethink their long losing streak. You could go back over the city’s half century of unsolved murders and declare many solved, after all.

  “People today wouldn’t understand what it was like,” Jerry Wooters said one day. “You’d take ’em out to the desert, take their shoes away, take their clothes, and give ’em a paper sack. And the next day they’d be back.”

  * * *

  IN HIS LATER years he joked that he put his LAPD pension to good use, all $332 a week of it. “Pays my liquor bill,” he said. He grew a wispy white beard like other multimillionaire beach bums who whiled away their days sipping drinks on the back patio and watching the California girls pass in their bikinis.

  One afternoon in the fall of 1998 he showed up at the Newport offices where his son Gerard now ran the business. His son needed more time to talk with a pal so he said, “Hey, Dad, how about getting us a six-pack?”

  He said, “Yeah, OK,” so my friend and I just finished up and he rolled in, he has the beer, stood there and watched us crack a beer, and he says, “You know, I drank a fifth of whiskey a day for twenty years.” And my buddy just looks at him and sings, “All my whiskey drinking friends are dead,” and my dad lit up and started laughing, I mean a full belly laugh. Now, I don’t know what was so funny about it, except that he was in hysterics to the point where he didn’t say another word, got in his car, and as he drove out you could see his head bobbing as he laughed. He apparently thought it was so funny that he was still alive.