PART ONE
The Fallen City
1
The Mickey Mouse Mafia
“[A] dead-rotten law enforcement setup rules in this county and city with an iron hand.”
—LAPD Sgt. Charlie Stoker, 1950
MICKEY COHEN was not a man used to being shaken down. Threatened with handguns, blasted with shotguns, strafed on occasion by a machine gun, yes. Firebombed and dynamited, sure. But threatened, extorted—hit up for $20,000—no. Anyone who read the tabloids in post-World War II Los Angeles knew that extortion was Mickey’s racket, along with book-making, gambling, loan-sharking, slot machines, narcotics, union agitation, and a substantial portion of the city’s other illicit pastimes. In the years following Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s ill-fated move to Las Vegas, Mickey Cohen had become the top mobster on the West Coast. And the tart-tongued, sharp-dressed, pint-sized gangster, whom the more circumspect newspapers described tactfully as “a prominent figure in the sporting life world,” hadn’t gotten there by being easily intimidated—certainly not by midlevel police functionaries. Yet in October 1948 that is precisely what the head of the Los Angeles Police Department vice squad set out to do.
Cohen was no stranger to the heat. During his first days in Los Angeles as Bugsy Siegel’s enforcer, he had been instructed to squeeze Eddy Neales, the proprietor of the Clover Club. Located on the Sunset Strip, an unincorporated county area just outside of Los Angeles city limits, the Clover Club was Southern California’s poshest gaming joint. It reputedly paid the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department a small fortune for protection. The squad that provided it, led by Det. George “Iron Man” Contreras, had a formidable reputation. People who crossed it died. According to Cohen, one member of the unit had been the triggerman on eleven killings. So when Neales sicced Contreras’s men on Cohen, he undoubtedly expected that the sheriff’s men would scare Mickey stiff.
Contreras tried. Cohen was picked up and brought in to receive a warning: If he didn’t lay off Neales, the next warning would come in the form of a bullet to the head.
Mickey wasn’t impressed. A few nights later, he sought out Contreras’s top gunman.
“I looked him up and said to him, ‘Let me tell you something: to me you’re no cop. Being no cop I gotta right to kill you—so come prepared. The next time I see you coming to me I’m going to hit you between the eyes.’”
It was an effective warning. “He felt I was sincere,” Mickey later reported. The cops backed down. Until now.
THE FACT OF THE MATTER was, Mickey Cohen was in an uncharacteristically vulnerable position that fall. Two months earlier, on Wednesday, August 18, as Cohen was putting the final touches on his newest venture, a swank men’s clothing shop on Sunset Boulevard named Michael’s Haberdashery, three gunmen had charged into the store and opened fire, wounding two Cohen henchmen and killing his top gunman, Hooky Rothman. Mickey himself was in the back bathroom washing his hands, something the obsessive-compulsive gangster did fifty or sixty times a day. Trapped, he hid in a stall, atop a toilet, awaiting his death. But instead of checking to see that they’d gotten their man—item number one on the professional hitman’s checklist—the gunmen fled. A few minutes later the incredulous driver of the gunmen’s crash car saw Mickey scurry to safety out the front door.
Cohen had survived, but great damage had been done. As Siegel shifted his attention to Las Vegas, Mickey had taken over his old boss’s Los Angeles operations—as well as Siegel’s organized crime connections back East. The attempted hit on Cohen not only showed that Mickey was vulnerable, it suggested that Bugsy’s powerful friends had no particular commitment to his protégé’s survival. In short, Mickey looked weak, and in the underworld, weakness attracts predators. So when the head of the LAPD administrative vice squad called just weeks after the attempted rub-out to inform Cohen that they “had him down for a ten to twenty thousand dollar contribution” for the upcoming reelection campaign of incumbent mayor Fletcher Bowron, Mickey knew what was happening. This was not an opportunity for good, old-fashioned graft: Bowron had devoted his career to eradicating the underworld. Rather, this was a sign that the vice squad now viewed him as prey rather than predator.
“Power’s a funny thing,” Cohen would later muse. “Somebody calls your hole card, and [if you can’t show you aren’t bluffing] it’s like a dike—one little hole can blow the whole thing.”
Paying would only confirm his weakness. Cohen refused.
Administrative vice’s response was not long in coming. Just after midnight on the evening of January 15, 1949, five officers watched two Cadillacs depart from Michael’s Haberdashery. They set off in pursuit. At the corner of Santa Monica and Ogden Drive, two miles west of Los Angeles city limits, the police pulled over the Cadillac containing Cohen, his driver, and Harold “Happy” Meltzer, a sometime Cohen gunman who also had a jewelry shop in the same building as Cohen’s haberdashery. A firearm was conveniently found on Meltzer, who was arrested. (It later disappeared, making it impossible to determine whether or not the gun had been planted.) Several days later, Mickey received a phone call offering to settle matters for $5,000. The vice squad was sending Cohen one last message: Hand over the cash or the gloves come off.
Mickey was furious. For years he had helped cops who got injured on the job and dispensed Thanksgiving turkeys to families in need at division captains’ request. He’d given municipal judges valuable horse tips. He’d wined and dined the administrative vice squad’s commanding officers, Lt. Rudy Wellpot and Sgt. Elmer Jackson, at the Brown Derby and Dave’s Blue Room, presented their girlfriends with expensive gifts, and treated them as VIPs at his nightclub-hangout on Beverly Boulevard, Slapsie Maxie’s. The police had responded by breaking into his new house in Brentwood, stealing his address books, and swaggering around town with almost unbearable arrogance, routinely telling waiters who arrived with the check at the end of evening to “send it to Mickey Cohen.” It was time to teach the LAPD a lesson it would never forget about who was running this town. The vice squad had called his hole card; now Mickey would show them he was holding the equivalent of a pair of bullets (two aces)—in the form of a recording that tied the vice squad to a thirty-six-year-old redheaded ex-prostitute named Brenda Allen.
BRENDA ALLEN was Hollywood’s most prosperous madam, in part because she was so cautious. Rather than take on the risks that came with running a “bawdy house,” Allen relied on a telephone exchange service to communicate with her clients, clients who were vetted with the utmost care. While Allen would occasionally insert chaste ads in actors’ directories or distribute her phone number to select cabbies, bartenders, and bellhops, she prided herself on serving the creme de la creme of Los Angeles. It was rumored that she even ran a Dun & Bradstreet check on prospective customers to ensure their suitability. Those who were accepted were rewarded with Allen’s full and carefully considered attention. All of her girls were analyzed as to their more intimate characteristics, which were then carefully noted on file cards for cross-tabulation with her clients’ preferences. The selection Allen offered was considerable. By 1948, she had 114 “pleasure girls” in her harem. She also had a most unusual partner and lover: Sergeant Jackson of the LAPD administrative vice squad, the same policeman who was trying to shake down Mickey Cohen.