Not reassuring words from a man who was almost certainly an alcoholic.
Parker’s second arrest was more successful. Gazing out the window as he was riding home on one of the yellow Los Angeles Railway streetcars that crisscrossed the city, Parker noticed a man running toward his streetcar, carrying a woman’s fur coat. Panting heavily, the man stepped onto the streetcar. He was a big guy—over six feet tall, probably weighing at least two hundred pounds—with long arms; small, deep-set eyes; and a broad chest. Something about him looked familiar. Then Parker realized that he matched the description of a man wanted by the San Francisco police who had terrorized the city for weeks by attacking people with a long knife.
Parker edged over to the man and asked, in what he hoped was a casual voice, “Say, where’d you get that coat?”
“What’s it to you?” the man snarled, turning away.
Parker told the man he was a policeman and patted him down. He found—and confiscated—a long-bladed knife. Convinced that he had happened across the wanted man, Parker signaled for the motorman to stop—and informed the suspect that he was under arrest. Then he pulled the man off the streetcar and dragged him, “protesting and resisting,” to a police call box, where he called for a patrol wagon. At police headquarters, the department confirmed that Parker had nabbed the man San Franciscan papers had taken to calling Jack the Ripper.
It was a major coup for a rookie officer. His superiors, doubtless, were not pleased. A rookie had no right to make such an arrest: A savvier officer would have allowed a more senior officer to take the credit. But then no one thought Bill Parker was savvy; on the contrary, he was either one of the dumbest men on the force or one of the most obstinate. Either way, he needed to be taught a lesson. So when Central Division got word one day that a shopkeeper had taken two employees hostage, the lieutenant on duty knew just who to send.
“He’s got a repeating shotgun,” the lieutenant said. “Take it away from him and bring him in.”
“Yes, sir,” Parker responded, and hurried to the shop.
When Parker arrived at the store, he saw the shopkeeper through the glass of the locked door, pacing and waving his gun. The owner saw Parker, too, and yelled at him to get back. Instead of waiting for backup, Parker went up to the store and calmly knocked on the door.
“Keep out,” the owner yelled. Parker knocked again. The man with the shotgun approached the door—and started lamenting his troubles. Parker indicated that he just couldn’t hear him clearly.
“Open the door so I can hear you,” Parker called out to the man. As he did so, Parker rushed the gunman, grabbing the shotgun before the man could fire it. The gun was later found to contain five shells. Bill Parker had gotten lucky.
Later that year, he got lucky in another way. At some point in 1927, Parker met Helen Schultz, an eighteen-year-old telephone exchange girl, the daughter of an Austrian immigrant furniture maker in Philadelphia. In Helen, the twenty-two-year-old Parker (who by then was claiming to be twenty-five) found a kindred spirit. Helen was a devout Catholic, and she loved to hunt and fish. She was also smart, sassy, and, personality-wise, something of a pistol. (It would seem that Bill Parker had no brief for sedate women.) This time there would be no elopement. On May 1, 1928, an announcement of Parker and Helen’s engagement appeared in the Los Angeles Times. They were married later that year.
Happy, at least in his personal life, Parker bore down on his studies. He was now plowing through night school at the Los Angeles College of Law. In 1930, he would finally receive his law degree. Then he could leave the force and follow in his grandfather’s footsteps.
The Great Depression intervened. By 1930, Los Angeles had the highest personal bankruptcy rate in the country. Ruined investors were hurling themselves to their deaths from the Arroyo Seco Bridge in Pasadena with such frequency that the city was forced to erect elaborate antisuicide barriers. Nevertheless, Parker’s wife, Helen, assumed that he would leave the force and go to work for a law firm as soon as he completed his degree. As the date drew nearer, however, it dawned on her that her husband might actually enjoy policing more than the practice of law.
“Statements from Bill kept cropping up about ‘liking the work’ [and] ’every day there is something new,” Helen would later write. So one day she asked him point-blank: Would a law degree help you in a career with the police? He assured her that it would. And so the decision was made. Parker would remain a policeman.
PART TWO
The Struggle for Authority
5
“Jewboy”
“I wasn’t the worse. Neither was I the tops.”
—Mickey Cohen
BY 1927, the Parrot-Cryer Combination seemed to have Los Angeles sewn up tight. Notwithstanding the presence of a few immigrants such as pimp-turned-bootlegger Albert Marco, the criminal underworld of Los Angeles was now a decidedly WASPy affair, one that left little room for an ambitious Jewish hoodlum like Mickey Cohen. The situation was undoubtedly a frustrating one. Mickey realized early on that “putting money together” was what gave him the most pleasure in life. He also realized that bootlegging, muscle jobs, and armed robbery offered excellent opportunities for enrichment. However, without a “fix,” criminal activities could have most unpleasant ramifications, as Mickey learned after his botched box office holdup. But in Los Angeles, the only outfit with a reliable “fix” was the Combination, and the Combination didn’t recruit talent from the east side of the Los Angeles River. Fortunately, that very year Mickey stumbled across a way out of this dead end. His talent for fighting led him to the one group that could challenge the likes of Kent Parrot, Charlie Crawford, and Guy McAfee: the Mob.
As a condition for his release from reform school, Mickey was required to meet on a weekly basis with a “Big Brother.” Mickey’s was Abe Roth, a well-known fight referee. Where others saw a thuggish street scrapper, Roth saw a talented flyweight boxer. That prizefights were illegal at the time and that Mickey was on probation was no obstacle to Roth’s plan. Roth soon had Mickey fighting four-round bouts in bootleg clubs and “smokers” around the city.
Mickey was not a disciplined boxer. He rarely trained in a gym, preferring instead to hire his fists out to the newsboys who controlled the most lucrative intersections in the city—the blocks downtown that could bring in $2,000, even $3,000 a year—and who consequently needed help keeping rivals off their turf. In time, Mickey and his little crew (two Jewish kids and one Latino) became those rivals, taking control of corners themselves. By 1925, he had staked out a prime corner downtown at Seventh and Spring Streets. Mickey prospered. He began to carry a roll. (“Even if I only made a couple of hundred dollars, I’d always keep it in fives and tens so it’d look big.”) He developed an intense aversion to old clothes (particularly old socks). He bought a car, a patched up Model T.
Yet despite this youthful marauding, Mickey also stayed in the ring, fighting four or five nights a week around the city. He even managed to win the newsboy flyweight championship, a victory that made Mickey a minor celebrity and finally brought his boxing career to his mother’s attention. When she found out what her youngest son was up to, Fanny Cohen was not pleased. Mickey’s three older brothers had gone to college (at least for a while) and found good jobs. Mickey’s violent hustling had to end. She ordered him to stop boxing. His friends urged the opposite: They thought he should go pro. So at age fifteen, Mickey hopped a freight train going east.