Among the tasks that Mickey was occasionally called on to perform was killing people. Hits followed a strict protocol. There was a pointer—someone who knew the victim and could make the target—and a triggerman. Mickey was the triggerman. One day Mickey was sent out with a pointer to take out a man who was trying to set himself up without permission from “the people” (much as Mickey himself had done). The pointer identified the victim, who was out walking with a young woman. Mickey stepped out, pulled out his revolver, and fired. The gun roared, the man went down, and the woman—clearly a lady with remarkable self-possession—started screaming,
“You shot the wrong guy! You shot the wrong guy!”
That night Mickey found out the woman was right. Pissed, he turned on his pointer.
“What’s the matter with you, you rotten son of a bitch?” he shouted. He then proceeded to pistol-whip the man, breaking his jaw. Unfortunately, the man Mickey beat up was the brother of one of Cleveland’s top mob leaders. Cohen, unfailingly lucky, received only a serious talking to. Unfortunately, Mickey then decided to heist a popular cafeteria that happened to be directly across the street from the 105th Street police precinct station. Cohen and an accomplice were apprehended. Although they managed to avoid conviction—the cashier obligingly agreed to confess that the robbery had been staged and was thus not really armed robbery—Cohen’s criminal career in Cleveland was over. Mickey left town—for Al Capone’s Chicago.
IN 1931, A1 Capone was at the height of his power. Two years earlier, on Valentine’s Day, members of the Capone gang dressed as police officers had lured members of the rival Bugs Moran gang to an isolated warehouse—supposedly to receive a shipment of premium whiskey at a bargain price. Moran’s men thought they’d been pinched and expected nothing worse than a quick trip to the lockup. Instead, they were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned. The so-called St. Valentine’s Day Massacre sealed Capone’s standing as Chicago’s top gangster and scandalized the nation, making Capone an international celebrity. It did not, however, make him safer. The primary target of the massacre—Bugs Moran himself—ran late to the meeting, thus missing his own execution. He was now intent on revenge. Rumors that Moran had dispatched two, four, ten gunmen followed Capone everywhere. Al Capone might be the King of Chicago, but he was a monarch who lived under the constant threat of a violent death. As a result, Capone took an interest in newly arrived gunmen, even ones as junior as Mickey Cohen.
Cohen’s job in Chicago was simple: lay low at a large, Jewish-controlled gambling joint on the North Shore and scare off some neighborhood toughs who were trying to squeeze its owners. After years of associating almost entirely with Italians, Mickey “sort of had to relearn Jewish ways.” He rediscovered “real good food on a Jewish style.” He tried not to react violently to perceived slights (“not like [I did] with the Italians”). Then one day three “notorious tough guys”—the people Mickey was supposed to protect the casino against—came calling. Mickey opened fire before they even got through the plate-glass door. By the time the police arrived, two of the men were dead. Despite his insistence that he didn’t start shooting until he saw the man pull his “rod,” Cohen was arrested for murder. Fortunately for Mickey, Chicago was most definitely a city where “the fix” was “in.” To his delight and astonishment, he was released the next morning after a mob representative stopped by the jail and ordered the turnkey to open up. When the jailer protested that he couldn’t let a murder suspect out “just like that,” Mickey’s visitor called for the captain—who let Cohen out “just like that.” The case never went to trial.
Soon thereafter, Mickey was summoned downtown to the Lexington Hotel to meet Al Capone himself. When Mickey walked into Capone’s office, the most powerful man in Chicago (known to his friends as “Big-Hearted Al”) quietly gripped the pint-sized brawler’s head in his hands and kissed him on both cheeks.
“After that meeting, it was kind of like a whole new world for me,” Mickey would later claim. “I wasn’t just a punk kid anymore. I was someone who had done something to justify the favor of Al Capone.”
In truth, Mickey probably amused Capone as much as he impressed him. Mickey had already befriended Al’s little brother Mattie, an avid boxing fan. Cohen had also attracted a measure of attention because, with his broken nose and a nasty, twisting scar under his left eye, he actually looked a lot like a miniature Al Capone. He also dressed like Capone (“admiring the guy as much as I did, I may have tried to copy his ways,” Mickey admitted later), heightening the “Mini-Me” effect. Court jester or respected junior gunman, it hardly mattered. Mickey had Capone’s blessing and that was enough to open the doors of the Chicago underworld. He began to learn how professional criminals really worked.
“I soon found there were lots of older guys willing to teach me about how to grow up and be good at a particular piece of work I wanted to get to know about,” Mickey would say later, with discreet imprecision.
Chicago was also a revelation in another way. As his friend the writer Ben Hecht would later put it, “Before coming to Chicago, Mickey knew there were numerous crooks like himself on the outskirts of society. He did not know, however, that there were ten times as many crooks in the respectable seats of government.” Chicago, a city where everything seemed part of the fix, would be Mickey Cohen’s model—and dream—for L.A.
6
Comrade Bill
“With few exceptions, no protection is afforded to the police chiefs in this country. And to this neglect, more than to any other cause, may be attributed the alliance of politics, police and crime.”
—Berkeley police chief August Vollmer, 1931
WHILE MICKEY COHEN was befriending members of the Capone family, patrolman Bill Parker was struggling to advance in the Los Angeles Police Department in his own unyielding fashion. He would not pay a bribe for a cheat sheet to the civil service exam; he would not curry favor with the politicians; he would not turn a blind eye to infractions that many other officers in the department saw as routine. It was a hard way to get ahead. But Parker was also surprisingly hard to get rid of.
After his early heroics, Parker was transferred into a dead-end job at the property division. It didn’t work. Parker was too nosy.
“There were some irregularities in the handling of confiscated autos,” Parker later recalled (adding, with characteristic self-confidence, “I was too intelligent to conceal things from”).
He was soon transferred to Hollenbeck Division, which was responsible for patrolling Mickey Cohen’s old neighborhood of Boyle Heights, perhaps the “wettest” part of Los Angeles. By 1931, many police officers had lost their enthusiasm for enforcing Prohibition, which was clearly on the way out. (Its formal repeal would come two years later, in 1933.) Not Bill Parker. He immediately set out to make as many arrests as possible. Puzzled, local bootleggers were soon approaching him to ask what he wanted.
“I don’t want anything,” Parker angrily replied. “You’re on one side of the fence, and I’m on the other.” Soon thereafter, Parker was summoned to the office of the division inspector.
“Parker,” he said, “what division would you like to work in?”
“What do you mean?” he replied, even though he knew full well what was happening. The liquor mob was moving him out.
“I mean,” the inspector continued, “if you happened to want a transfer, where would you like to go?”
“Hollywood Division,” Parker replied. Soon thereafter, he was transferred there.