Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles
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She doesn’t think my father was very violent but, you know, I’m sorry, I saw all those guns under my dad’s bed and in the closet, because I was very fascinated with them and they had to keep moving them. I know they don’t look like Mom and Dad. Yes, he’s wearing a wedding ring and Dad didn’t. But it’s a movie.”
That said, the elder sister was disappointed herself at one tweaking of reality: when Jack and Connie O’Mara have a child in the film, the baby’s room in their post-war American Dream house is blue. “That’s me being born, except it’s a boy,” she told the actors playing Mickey’s henchman.
Then came the miracle. She was watching that scene being shot and one take brought chills to her body. Brolin was playing her dad, actress Mireille Enos her mom. Enos said, “Oh, Jack,” and the (fictional) couple exchanged a look and suddenly it was them, her real parents.
From then on the filming became an opportunity for her to make peace, finally, with her father’s death. Maureen O’Mara Stevens started visiting all the places of their lives, and her own, then went to the cemetery for the first time since her father’s burial.
I made a little map of all these places I wanted to go visit. I wanted to see the houses where we lived. I just wanted to see everything again. The house on Pedley, the house in El Monte. Then we went to their grave and I realized why my parents bought a grave there—the cemetery is not even five minutes away from where they bought their first house. It’s the same beautiful view of the foothills. They bought their burial plot when they bought their first house. Dad was looking ahead, I guess, to what might happen.
I went by my dad’s grave and my mom’s grave and told them about it, the film. My dad, I think, he’s not going to care that anybody made him look tougher than he was. But you hear about him taking those guys up into the hills, you know, I think he was pretty tough.
The capper for Maureen came at Halloween when her grandson was given his choice of costumes. He got himself one of those hats and trick-or-treated as Jack O’Mara of the Gangster Squad.
* * *
THE EXPECTED E-MAIL from the son-in-law arrived January 31, 2012. A massive stroke did it. Don Irvine sent a notice to the police department, “Sorry to report that retired Sergeant Con Keeler, one of the last men standing…”
The last of the original eight was gone. Only their stories remained.
Fred Whalen and family, including son, Jack, circa 1927, on the road with their prized Sterns-Knight Touring Car. (Courtesy of John F. von Hurst)
Jack Whalen, left, commander of his class at the elite Black-Foxe Military Institute, where he played polo and was groomed to be a leader of men. (The Black-Foxe Adjutant)
Fred Whalen hoped his growing boy, Jack, would avoid his own criminal path. (Courtesy of John F. von Hurst)
Mickey Cohen’s mug shot, 1933, after his first adult arrest in Los Angeles, before his style of dress was “evolved” by his mentor, Bugsy Siegel. (Los Angeles Times)
Jerry Wooters bet his Navy raft mates that they would be rescued after their plane had to ditch at sea while flying over Japanese positions in the Pacific. (Courtesy of the Wooters family)
Jerry Wooters at 23, about the time he joined the LAPD as a Vice officer sent undercover to massage parlors and other houses of sin. (Courtesy of the Wooters family)
Jack and Connie O’Mara at their 1940 wedding for which Connie made her own dress by copying one she saw at the I. Magnin and Company department store. (Courtesy of Felix Paegel and the O’Mara family)
Jack O’Mara had to stuff himself with ice cream and bananas to make the minimum weight for the Los Angeles Police Department in 1940. (Courtesy of the O’Mara family)
Sergeant Jack O’Mara, center, after a big burglary bust in 1946, shortly before he was recruited onto the Gangster Squad. (Courtesy of the O’Mara family)
Sergeant Conwell Keeler preached the need to be “down the line” but he walked a fine line as the Gangster Squad’s bug man. (Courtesy of Kathleen Irvine and Mary Jean Hardin)
A page from one of Sergeant Con Keeler’s early notebooks, listing Gangster Squad colleagues (top) and addresses for Mickey Cohen and others (bottom)—the notebooks were their files until they got an office. (Courtesy of Kathleen Irvine and Mary Jean Hardin)
Mickey and wife, Lavonne Cohen, in their Brentwood home with Mike, one of their two dogs overheard barking when the Gangster Squad hid a bug in their TV. (Los Angeles Times)
Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen wanted to be an actor in Westerns. (Courtesy of John F. von Hurst)
Mickey Cohen feared that germs, and not bullets, would do him in. (Los Angeles Times)
Jack Whalen, shortly before the fatal night at Rondelli’s. (Courtesy of John F. von Hurst)
The Gangster Squad, circa 1948, with Sergeant Jack O’Mara sitting on the far left in the bottom row, holding his pipe. Doug “Jumbo” Kennard stands directly behind O’Mara; Lieutenant Willie Burns stands in the center, hat down over his eyes; broad-shouldered Lindo “Jaco” Giacopuzzi stands just to the right of Burns; Big Archie Case, the “Mayor of Watts,” sits below Giacopuzzi; Jerry “The Professor” Thomas, stands above Burns’ right shoulder. Bug man Conwell Keeler is not in the photo because he took it. (Courtesy of Kathleen Irvine and Mary Jane Hardin)
Mickey Cohen was not pleased after being rousted by the Gangster Squad’s Lieutenant Willie Burns in 1949. (Los Angeles Times)
The gunmen fired from across Sunset Boulevard as Mickey and his crew left Sherry’s restaurant in July 1949, at the peak of the Sunset Wars. (Los Angeles Times)
Columnist Florabel Muir mocked the LAPD as “Cops a la Keystone” and dared to ask, “What does a Gangster Squad do?” (Los Angeles Times)
The first person Chief William H. Parker met with each morning was Captain James Hamilton (standing), head of the Intelligence Division, aka the Gangster Squad. (Los Angeles Times)
Sergeant Jerry Wooters, in 1950, after being busted back to uniformed duty amid Vice Squad scandals. Shortly afterward he talked his way onto the secret Gangster Squad. (Courtesy of the Wooters family)
Mickey Cohen, flanked by U.S. Marshals, after authorities finally used the same tactic that had gotten Al Capone—a tax case—to land Cohen in federal court in July 1951. (Los Angeles Times)
Detectives and newsmen surround the car of the Two Tonys, after the August 1951 double murder that became another “no prosecution to date.” (Los Angeles Times)
Mickey Cohen signs autographs for high school students on his way to court in April 1958. “I can spit on the sidewalk and it will be in the headlines,” he said. (Los Angeles Times)
Mickey Cohen had survived three shootings before the dynamiting of his Brentwood home in February 1959, all orchestrated by his rival Jack Dragna. (Los Angeles Times)
The watchdog Thor, a gift from Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen, with Jerry Wooters’ son Gerard Jr. in the LAPD sergeant’s backyard. (Courtesy of the Wooters family)
Rondelli’s restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, where “The Enforcer” confronted Mickey Cohen and his armed crew on December 2, 1959. (Los Angeles Times)
The body of Jack Whalen, shot at Rondelli’s, as the huge Los Angeles police investigation began. (Los Angeles Times)
Frank LoCigno (center) turned himself in to Chief William Parker and announced, “Well, I’m the man that shot Jack O’Hara in self-defense.” (Los Angeles Times)
Fred Whalen, demonstrating his trick shots for servicemen at the USO in Hollywood, perfected his hustling along the Mississippi near his hometown of Alton, Illinois. (Courtesy of John F. von Hurst)
“Freddie the Thief” was a born salesman and never stopped selling, a product or himself, until the day he died. (Courtesy of John F. von Hurst)
Mickey Cohen with aspiring model Sandy Hagen and talent manager Joe DeCarlo attending the March 1960, murder trial of Sam LoCigno. (Los Angeles Times)
Mickey Cohen gets a kiss from girlfriend Sandy Hagen in February 1962, after being released on bail from Alcatraz, pen
ding an appeal of his second tax conviction. (Los Angeles Times)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks must start with Jack O’Mara, for making a phone call in 1992, then to Connie O’Mara, for graciously putting up with so many hours of war stories; to the O’Mara daughters, Maureen and Marti, for offering loving yet honest perspective on their parents; and to other members of their extended family for filling in details back to the 1920s. The Wooters’s sons, Gerard and David, deserve similar thanks for their candid guidance in advancing the research on “the old man” after Jerry Wooters was no longer around to tell stories himself.
I wish Con Keeler had lived to be one hundred, when he finally might have revealed why he decided to talk after a decade of silence, but I’m indebted to him for remembering the trivia of 1946 a full sixty-five years later. The two LAPD veterans who may yet break the century mark, Lindo Giacopuzzi and Judge Phelps, kept their good humor while being prodded to go over the same ground time and again. Other Gangster Squad members shared their stories with equal fervor—thanks especially to Jack Horrall, William Unland, and John Olsen—even if they are secondary figures in the final narrative. Many family members helped bring back to life other of the old cops no longer with us. Thanks to the three Greeley kids, Jumbo Kennard’s sister, Willie Burns’s grandson, and Buzz Williams, a policeman himself who had both a grandfather (Benny) and father (Dick) on the Gangster Squad.
Many in the extended Whalen-Wunderlich clan helped as well, but the thanks there must start with Bobie von Hurst, who as a child was part of the family’s trek West in 1922 and lived until the fall of 2011. She set the tone with her willingness to discuss the extraordinary (and often extralegal) antics of her father, Fred Whalen. Her son, John von Hurst, may have been the square of the clan, but thank goodness he was willing to endure endless questions in his role as the unofficial Whalen family historian.
Thanks also to those readers who shared their own experiences with the Gangster Squad, or with Mickey Cohen and the other hoodlums, following publication of the seven-part “Tales from the Gangster Squad” in the Los Angeles Times. Musician Bill Peterson volunteered a telling Sunset Strip encounter from his own memoir, “Show Biz from the Back Row,” while the Grahm family shared the inner workings of the Hollywood warehouse that supplied Fred Whalen and other of L.A.’s colorful con men. Thanks, too, to Chicago’s Newberry Library for access to the Ben Hecht Papers.
On the sausage-making side, two editors at the Los Angeles Times, Marc Duvoisin and Rick Meyer, helped shape the first telling of this story. But the most valuable players at the newspaper were researchers Tracy Thomas and Maloy Moore, who dug up thousands of pages of documents that made it possible to check and amplify the oral histories. Nona Yates then carried on that same high calling with professionalism and zeal while helping to track down more witnesses and documents essential to the writing of this book.
In Los Angeles, Peter Nelson helped figure out how to give this material additional life, and Jim Ehrich made it happen, while Dan Lin and Jon Silk turned the words into moving pictures, albeit with a lot more rat-a-tat-tat. In New York, Jake Elwell helped make this book happen while Peter Wolverton and Anne Bensson labored under extraordinary deadlines to get it ready for the presses at Thomas Dunne Books.
Finally, thanks for moral support to the usual suspects, Joan, M.T., and Dr. C., and to the saintly Heidi, of course, for putting up with the obsessed soul laboring on the computer down in the Man Cave.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL LIEBERMAN spent twenty-four years as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times and before that was projects editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He has won dozens of journalism honors, including the Robert F. Kennedy Awards Grand Prize, the George Polk Award, the Gerald Loeb Award, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award. He also shared in two team Pulitzer Prizes at the Los Angeles Times, as a writer on its coverage of the Los Angeles riots and an editor of its reporting on the Northridge earthquake. A native New Yorker, Lieberman is a graduate of Williams College and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where he studied law and social history. He lives in Westchester County with his wife, Heidi, a school administrator.
Thomas Dunne Books.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
GANGSTER SQUAD. Copyright © 2012 by Paul Lieberman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Motion picture artwork © 2012 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.
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ISBN 978-1-250-02011-6 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-02015-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02785-6 (mass market paperback)
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First Edition: August 2012