L.A. Noir Part 8

The more time General Worton spent in office, the more convinced he became that the entire system was flawed. The notion that the department answered to a board of civilians was nothing more than a polite fiction-and was exposed as such whenever the police department had something sensitive to handle, such as a brutality complaint. These were dealt with internally, by department personnel alone. This rubbed Worton the wrong way. So too did the fact that while the mayor was held to account, politically, for the conduct of the police department, he exercised only indirect influence over the department, through his appointees to the Police Commission.

A better model was needed, Worton concluded, and it wasn't hard to find one. Police departments in New York, Chicago, and Detroit all operated under a different management structure. In those cities, the mayor appointed a single civilian commissioner or superintendent to supervise the department. This commissioner or superintendent answered to the mayor. Day-to-day police department operations were run by a top-uniformed officer-in the NYPD, the chief of department. The Marine Corps had a similar structure. There the top-uniformed officer-the commandant-ran operations but answered to a civilian, the secretary of the Navy. Worton believed that the LAPD would benefit from a similar structure.

During the fall of 1949, he fleshed out his plan for reorganizing the department. It called for a non-civil-service commissioner who would be appointed by the mayor (subject to city council approval) to a three-year term. This commissioner would be responsible for setting goals for the department and would directly run important bureaus such as internal affairs, planning and accounting, records and identification, and communications. A uniformed police chief would serve under him and direct actual law enforcement activities. Worton believed such a reorganization could be accomplished without amending the city charter. As to who this new commissioner would be, most observers a.s.sumed that the candidate Worton had in mind was himself.

Mayor Bowron liked the idea. But Worton's plan quickly encountered opposition from powerful forces-and from at least one member of his inner circle, Bill Parker. The disciplinary system that struck Worton as ill conceived was among Parker's proudest accomplishments. With the department's top job once again in reach, Parker had no intention of standing aside while an outsider gutted the system he had created. He boldly criticized General Worton's proposed reforms. He insisted that a five-member civilian Police Commission whose members were each appointed to five-year terms would be more independent and responsive to the public than a single commissioner who answered only to the mayor would be.

"You'll get a bad city administration someday," Parker warned.

For months, the police department had stood by meekly while Mayor Bowron extended General Worton's emergency term of office in legally dubious ways and considered plans to unilaterally reorganize the department. Now the forces of the status quo ante counterattacked. General Worton had suggested that the department could be reorganized without a charter amendment. A chorus of voices arose to question this sweeping claim. Reluctantly, Mayor Bowron agreed that his acting police chief's plan would have to be submitted to the voters for their approval. As the weeks pa.s.sed, it became increasingly clear that the only person who was really enthusiastic about this idea was Worton himself. Finally Mayor Bowron gave in and announced that he'd be scheduling an examination to select a new chief in the spring of 1950. Some two dozen LAPD officers promptly announced that they would sit for the examination, among them Bill Parker.

On July 10, partic.i.p.ants' scores were announced. Parker placed first. Thad Brown and Roger Murdock placed a distant second and third. That same day, General Worton notified the Police Commission that he wished to step down from his position at the end of the month. Legally, Mayor Bowron could select any of the top three candidates, but everyone knew that the choice was really between the two heavyweights, Brown or Parker. Both men now attempted to rally their allies. In Parker's case, that meant the American Legion and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, including its new archbishop (soon to be cardinal), James Francis McIntyre. By 1948, there were 650,000 Roman Catholics in Los Angeles, and another 55,000 were arriving from across the country every year. Msgr. Thomas O'Dwyer, the top aide to Archbishop McIntyre, sent a pointed letter to Mayor Bowron, noting Parker's many qualifications.

These were powerful backers, but Thad Brown, arguably, had even stronger allies. The LAPD had long been a strikingly Protestant organization: All but one of its previous chiefs had been Protestants. Almost all of them had also been Freemasons, as were many of the officers on the force. Brown was both. He also enjoyed the quiet support of the underworld. Thad Brown was in no way corrupt, but neither was he seen as a zealot who would attempt to eradicate the underworld altogether. The Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times also supported Brown. In early August, it reported that three of the five Police Commissioners-clubwoman Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman-had settled on Brown. The Police Commission's sole African American member, J. Alexander Somerville, and Irving Snyder, the commission's Jewish member, supported Parker. Brown had the votes to become police chief-if he could keep them. For at that very moment, Agnes Albro was dying of breast cancer. Already, she was confined to bed. Brown's supporters knew they needed to move quickly. Duque and Newman proposed to convene a meeting at Albro's house to select Brown as chief. Parker vehemently objected. A meeting in a private residence would be illegal, he warned the commissioners, a clear violation of California's open meeting requirements. Brown's supporters paused. As they were debating the issue, Agnes Albro pa.s.sed away. also supported Brown. In early August, it reported that three of the five Police Commissioners-clubwoman Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman-had settled on Brown. The Police Commission's sole African American member, J. Alexander Somerville, and Irving Snyder, the commission's Jewish member, supported Parker. Brown had the votes to become police chief-if he could keep them. For at that very moment, Agnes Albro was dying of breast cancer. Already, she was confined to bed. Brown's supporters knew they needed to move quickly. Duque and Newman proposed to convene a meeting at Albro's house to select Brown as chief. Parker vehemently objected. A meeting in a private residence would be illegal, he warned the commissioners, a clear violation of California's open meeting requirements. Brown's supporters paused. As they were debating the issue, Agnes Albro pa.s.sed away.

The race was now a toss-up. "In the newspapers, it was a bigger story than baseball or the heat wave," wrote one contemporary observer. "[T]he reporters smoked out secret meetings all through City Hall. Meetings between the Mayor and his Police Commissioners; between the Mayor and the candidates; between the commissioners and the candidates."

On August 2, Mayor Bowron, General Worton, and the four members of the Police Commission sat down together. Exactly what was said was unclear, but after the meeting one of Thad Brown's supporters decided to switch his support to Parker. (Many years later, Thad Brown would claim that he had withdrawn his name from consideration because he didn't want "Bill Parker behind me, with his knife out.") To send a message of strong support for the new chief, the sole remaining Brown holdout agreed to join the pro-Parker majority in order to make the vote unanimous. And so, later that very day, the Police Commission voted unanimously to make William H. Parker Los Angeles's fortieth chief of police.

Mayor Bowron was notably lukewarm about their choice. When asked by a reporter if the appointment "met with his approval," Bowron declined to answer, suggesting instead that "all statements should come from the Police Commission."

Chief Parker waved off the mayor's lack of support. "The action of the Police Commission this afternoon was gratifying and confirms my belief that the Chief of Police must be selected without political influence," he told the press later that day.

The reality was otherwise. Parker had politicked-and prevailed. But many doubted that he would retain the position for very long.

"I know I'm supposedly coming in with a life expectancy of two weeks," he told the press after being sworn in. "We'll see."

15.

"Whiskey Bill"

"There is a sinister criminal organization known as the Mafia operating throughout the country."-Sen. Estes Kefauver, 1950.

IT HAD BEEN a rotten vacation. Mickey had left Los Angeles a month earlier with a leisurely agenda of business and pleasure in mind. In Phoenix, he wanted to visit brother Harry and check out some drugstores he was considering purchasing. But the Phoenix police department had quickly run him out of town. The same thing had happened in Texas, where he owned an oil well. Then, when Mickey Cohen arrived at the Amba.s.sador Hotel in Chicago on August 3, 1950, he learned that Bill Parker had been appointed chief of police. It was upsetting. "I had joints all over town, and I needed the police for coordination," Cohen would later say. Instead, the Police Commission had selected "the one cop who really gave me trouble." Just when it seemed like things could not get worse, Chicago detectives picked him up for an evening of questioning. He was released the next day and told to get out of town.

Mickey Cohen was getting too famous for his own good. Not only had he gained a dangerous new enemy in the person of Los Angeles's new police chief, he had also attracted the attention of a curious outsider, U.S. senator Estes Kefauver.

A FRESHMAN SENATOR from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver was a man of great ambition and considerable guile. In 1948, after an unremarkable decade in the House as a pro-Roosevelt, pro-Tennessee Valley Authority Democrat, Kefauver took advantage of a feud between inc.u.mbent U.S. senator Tom Stewart and Tennessee party boss Ed "The Red Snapper" Crump and slipped into the Senate. There the Yale Law School-educated senator with the vaguely Lincoln-esque looks impressed his peers with his intelligence (he had auth.o.r.ed an academic book on monopolies)-and his womanizing ("the worst in the Senate," according to William "Fishbait" Miller, the House doorkeeper).

At some point in 1949, Kefauver hit upon the idea of investigating organized gambling. This was not a popular notion among his Senate colleagues. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois relied on Cook County to offset Republican voters downstate. He was not eager to start an investigation that might expose the inner workings of Chicago politics. But Kefauver had picked his topic wisely. By 1950, organized crime had become a subject of great interest to the public. Books such as Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer's Chicago Confidential Chicago Confidential had city residents talking about the underworld. The American Munic.i.p.al a.s.sociation held a conference devoted to the subject, and both Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles and Mayor DeLesseps Morrison of New Orleans spoke pa.s.sionately and frequently about the issue. As a result, in January 1950, Kefauver was able to win pa.s.sage of a measure authorizing "a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities." Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat McCarran-of Nevada-responded by arranging a series of delays. But in April 1950, McCarran and Senate Majority Leader Lucas's strategy of delay collapsed when the body of a Kansas City gambling kingpin was found in a Democratic clubhouse, slumped beneath a large portrait of President Harry Truman. had city residents talking about the underworld. The American Munic.i.p.al a.s.sociation held a conference devoted to the subject, and both Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles and Mayor DeLesseps Morrison of New Orleans spoke pa.s.sionately and frequently about the issue. As a result, in January 1950, Kefauver was able to win pa.s.sage of a measure authorizing "a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities." Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat McCarran-of Nevada-responded by arranging a series of delays. But in April 1950, McCarran and Senate Majority Leader Lucas's strategy of delay collapsed when the body of a Kansas City gambling kingpin was found in a Democratic clubhouse, slumped beneath a large portrait of President Harry Truman.

The killing itself was hardly unusual: Kansas City had long been controlled by one of the country's most notorious "machines," one that did not shy away from occasional acts of violence. What made this particular slaying noteworthy was the fact that President Truman himself was a product of that same machine. (He owed both his first victory in politics-his election as a county judge in 1922-and his 1934 election to the U.S. Senate to "Boss Tom" Pendergast's Kansas City machine.) Even though "Boss Tom" had died five years earlier, the slaying in Kansas City stoked public concerns about underworld connections to government officials. Amid the ensuing controversy, the Special Senate Committee on the Investigation of Syndicated Crime in Interstate Commerce-soon known simply as the Kefauver Committee-was finally impaneled. Faced with fallout from the Kansas City slaying, President Truman also gave the Kefauver Committee a potent new tool: access to the income tax records of suspected gambling bosses. Thus armed, Kefauver revealed the investigative strategy that would catapult him to national fame. Instead of summoning witnesses to Washington, the press-savvy senator announced that his committee and its investigators would hold a series of hearings in fourteen cities across the country on "how the national crime syndicate could be smashed." In November, Senator Kefauver arrived in Los Angeles. Atop his list of witnesses was Mickey Cohen.

When Mickey received a subpoena to appear before the Kefauver Committee at the federal building downtown, all of Los Angeles expected fireworks. But when the committee convened at 9 a.m., there was no Mickey Cohen. Indignant, the commission sent investigators out to his house in Brentwood to search for the witness. They found Mickey asleep in bed. While the committee waited, Mickey got dressed with excruciating slowness. ("Being the fine dressed man I try to be, it takes time for me to get ready for an appearance.") The hearings had "been blown up so big ... like a Hollywood premiere," and Cohen wanted to look the part of a Hollywood star. He did.

From the minute he entered a crowded courtroom in Los Angeles's federal building, "Mickey was the star of the show," reported Time Time magazine. Wearing "a natty brown suit, brown tie and deep black scowl," Cohen faced "a whole battery of newsmen, photographers, movie cameras and tape recorders." magazine. Wearing "a natty brown suit, brown tie and deep black scowl," Cohen faced "a whole battery of newsmen, photographers, movie cameras and tape recorders."

Surveying them in much the same spirit that a feudal lord might survey his va.s.sals, Cohen was overheard commenting, "I could spit on the sidewalk and it would make headlines."

A reporter asked the question on everyone's mind: Wasn't Mickey disrespecting the U.S. Senate by arriving late?

"Lookit, n.o.body notified me about the time," Mickey responded testily. "All I got was a call to come down here, and I came down, and I'm here."

For the next five hours, Mickey put on a remarkable show. One month earlier in Chicago, Harry "The Muscle" Russell, the Chicago Outfit's Florida representative, had fl.u.s.tered the Kefauver Committee by citing the Fifth Amendment (which protects against self-incrimination) as a justification for refusing to answer any any questions from the committee. Mickey had no such hesitation. Speaking easily, almost casually, without notes and rarely pausing to consult attorneys Sam Rummel and Vernon Ferguson, Cohen denied every allegation thrown at him: questions from the committee. Mickey had no such hesitation. Speaking easily, almost casually, without notes and rarely pausing to consult attorneys Sam Rummel and Vernon Ferguson, Cohen denied every allegation thrown at him: "I ain't never muscled no one in my life.""I ain't never offered no policeman a bribe.""I never pistol-whipped anyone.""I ain't never been with no prost.i.tute.""I never had no part of a fix.""I never strong-armed n.o.body in my life."

It was a bravura recitation of lies. But there was one issue Mickey couldn't wish away-his income.

Other Mob bosses had carefully constructed front companies or bought in to legitimate businesses in order to account for their large incomes. Frank Costello, the so-called prime minister of the underworld, insisted that he was merely a semiretired real estate investor. Jack Dragna claimed that he was a vineyard owner and banana importer. Aside from a few desultory investments (in grocery stores and a women's shoulder-pad manufacturer), Mickey had not. Even Michael's Haberdashery had never made much pretense of being a going concern. Instead, Mickey maintained that he was just a former bookmaker who now earned a modest living from gambling. But he lived like a pasha in a $120,000 house in Brentwood and purchased new Cadillacs every year for himself and his wife (to say nothing of his $15,000 armored car).

Anyone who bothered to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation could see that there was something suspicious about such lavish expenditures. The problem was squaring such spending with the era's high income tax rates. In 1950, a taxpayer who earned $100,000 could expect to hand nearly $60,000 of that to the federal government and another $5,000 to the state of California, leaving about $35,000 for himself. Double that hypothetical income to $200,000, and the taxpayer was left with a mere $50,000 in after-tax income. Yet by his own acknowledgment, Mickey had spent more than $200,000 on his house and about $30,000 on Cadillacs. Investigators also estimated that Cohen kept roughly eighteen men on his payroll; at his declared pay rate of "$75 to $100 a week," that added another $85,000 or so to his expenses. In order to generate, say, $125,000 in legitimate after-tax income, Mickey would had to have paid taxes on a declared yearly income of nearly a million dollars. He wasn't even close. Instead, the tax returns he had filed with the Bureau of Internal Revenue in the late 1940s reported annual incomes as low as $6,000 a year-just twice the national average income.

This should have led the Bureau of Internal Revenue to take a closer look at Mickey's finances, as it had done nearly two decades earlier in the case of Al Capone. Yet remarkably, as Warren Olney noted in the final report of the Special Crime Study Commission-a report that came out the same month that Senator Kefauver was interrogating Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles-"there has never been a racketeer, hoodlum, or gangster of first rank importance convicted of income tax fraud in California." Nor, according to comments made by Treasury Department officials at a conference on organized crime in the spring of 1949, were any such cases in the works. Local Bureau of Internal Revenue agents had actually tried to start an investigation several years earlier. But after their superiors discovered the probe, they'd been detailed to other a.s.signments.

The Kefauver Committee had no intention of letting Mickey off so lightly. During their questioning, committee members homed in on Mickey's ma.s.sive expenditures and minimal income. Grudgingly, Cohen admitted to a $40,000 home (far less than its actual value) with $48,000 worth of home furnishings. That still left a gap of $210,000 in unaccounted-for income. When pressed about the discrepancy by chief counsel Rudolph Halley, Cohen replied that over the past four years, he had borrowed about $300,000, most of which, he added, had been spent on lawyers' fees as a result of the constant "hara.s.sment from the LAPD."

Halley asked if there were any notes or collateral that could doc.u.ment these loans.

Mickey said there were not. People had lent him money, Cohen continued, because "they just happen to like me."

"How do you maintain that kind of credit?" Sen. Charles Tobey of New Hampshire asked.

Mickey cracked his first smile. "It's getting very weak, Senator."

The audience chuckled. By the end of the week, the investigators were gone. When a reporter asked Cohen what he thought of the experience, Mickey cracked, "All them congressional committees are a joke, a gimmick for the furtherance of a politician." Bill Parker worried him much more.

DURING PARKER'S first month on the job, four different emissaries approached him with variations on a single proposal: appointing a gambling "czar." Ostensibly, this person's job would be to curb gambling, but Parker felt his interlocutors were actually more interested in organizing it. Fearing a frame-up, Parker spoke openly about these overtures at a countywide meeting of law enforcement officers later that month. He was convinced that the various attempts to snuff out Mickey Cohen suggested that the Syndicate was preparing to move into Los Angeles in force. Los Angeles, which Parker described, in language harkening back to the 1920s, as "the last white spot among the great cities of America," risked becoming Chicago. The LAPD was determined to resist this, he told his audiences. But he warned, "I do not know how long this can be continued. There are men here ready to get their tentacles into the city and drain off large sums of money through gambling activities of various kinds."

Parker argued that if the forces of law and order were to prevail, a counteroffensive was needed. For too long, gangsters had taken advantage of the fact that when things got "hot" in one of Los Angeles County's forty-five-odd munic.i.p.alities, they could just move to another. At a meeting of regional law enforcement officials, Parker proposed a new approach-a central intelligence bureau that pooled resources from all of the region's law enforcement agencies and pursued gangsters wherever they attempted to hide. Representatives from the three dozen law enforcement agencies present readily agreed to partic.i.p.ate in such an effort. But Parker's ambitions were larger still.

"This plan goes deeper than a means of saving Los Angeles from the stigma of vice," Parker continued. "We are protecting the American philosophy of life. It is now clear that Russia is hoping we will destroy ourselves as a nation through our own avarice, greed, and corruption in government. Hence, this program has a wider application than in the Los Angeles area alone." Parker envisioned a national consortium of departments committed to information-sharing.

The a.s.sembled group was, according to one account of the meeting, "startled," both by the scope of Parker's ambitions and by his tone. In his first speeches as chief-of-police-elect, Parker had struck a hopeful-even humble-note, committing himself and his officers to the "reasonable enforcement of the law and respect for the rights and dignity of the individual-to work for the community, not rule it." But already another side of Chief Parker was appearing-the profoundly pessimistic observer of American decline, the Spengler of City Hall.

Parker was a powerful speaker in thrall to a potent theme: the corruption of American society and the perils this posed. "We have become a great nation in a material sense," Parker warned the Holy Name Society in a speech soon after becoming chief. "But this unparalleled success in the acquisition of worldly goods has been accompanied by a materialistic philosophy that threatens to destroy every vestige of human liberty.

"Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome rose, then fell as strength gave way to weakness," continued Parker ominously. "It is possible that our failure to recognize the indispensability of Religion and Morality to our national welfare is leading us to the same fate that beset these brave civilizations of the past."

Whether 1950s Los Angeles was Babylon or not, Bill Parker was right about one thing, though. The underworld was moving in.

Soon after Parker was appointed chief, five of the top criminals in Los Angeles County got together in a Hollywood hotel suite to "cut up the town." The men present included Sam Rummel, Mickey Cohen's attorney and sometime business partner; Jimmy Utley, a former Cohen rival who now concentrated on bingo and abortion; Max Kleiger, bookmaker and gambler; Robert Gans, slot machine king during the heyday of the Combination in the 1930s; and Curly Robinson, his successor in the coin machine field, another Cohen partner. For hours, they discussed how to divvy up the most lucrative rackets, as well as bookmaking, gambling, bingo, and prost.i.tution. They also discussed tactics. Since Parker wouldn't bend, the underworld decided to target Mayor Bowron. They decided to mount a recall initiative (the same measure that had brought Bowron to office in the first place in 1938). In a delightfully cynical twist, the grounds for the recall were none other than the supposed influence exercised by the underworld over Mayor Bowron, as exposed by the vicecapades of 1949.*

The LAPD heard it all. The hotel suite was bugged, courtesy the LAPD intelligence division.

The idea of an intelligence division wasn't new: Chief James E. Davis had one in the 1930s; Chief Horrall had one in the 1940s. Other units such as administrative vice and the gangster squad routinely did intelligence work too, as the bugging of Mickey Cohen's house demonstrated. But most previous intelligence work had relied heavily on wiretaps and a style of interrogation that could be summarized as "pinch-'em-and-sweat-'em." When General Worton took over the department, he wanted something different-a.n.a.lysis, predictions, and actionable information of the sort that military commanders received from their intelligence outfits. In short, he wanted a policing version of the Army's G-2 intelligence system.

Parker shared Worton's enthusiasm for operational intelligence. During the war, one of the new chief's most important jobs had been reorganizing and de-n.a.z.ifying the Munich police department. At the time, he had been struck by the parallels between de-n.a.z.ification and clearing the LAPD of corrupt police officers with ties to the underworld. Now that Parker was chief, he set out to realize General Worton's vision. He expanded the unit to roughly three dozen officers and appointed his most trusted a.s.sociate in the department, James Hamilton, to head its operations. Both men agreed that traditional policing techniques simply did not work against the Syndicate. In the early 1940s, Bugsy Siegel had killed with impunity-and then been killed with equal impunity by a professional gunman who escaped without leaving a trace. More recently, even the most basic questions about Mickey Cohen were not fully resolved. Consider the case of Sam Rummel. Why was he, rather than Mickey, meeting to "cut up" Los Angeles? Was he Mickey's mouthpiece and junior partner, as most people a.s.sumed? Or was he playing a more subtle game? In Chicago, for instance, many astute observers of the Outfit believed that the real power rested not with so-called leaders such as Frank Nitti and Sam Giancana but rather with the men who stayed in the background, Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, and Murray Humphreys. Might Rummel likewise be calling the shots in Los Angeles? These were the kinds of questions the intelligence division was tasked with answering.

The intelligence division didn't just watch and a.n.a.lyze. According to former gangster squad member Jack O'Mara, a favorite tactic was to drive new arrivals up into Coldwater Canyon or the Hollywood Hills to "have a little heart-to-heart talk with 'em, emphasize the fact that this wasn't New York, this wasn't Chicago, this wasn't Cleveland." O'Mara had his own way of driving the lesson home: He'd "put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, 'You want to sneeze?' Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?"

Mickey's men got similar treatment, judging by a story told by former LAPD officer-turned-private-eye Fred Otash. One night, soon after the shooting at Sherry's, Otash spotted Johnny Stompanato cruising down the Sunset Strip. Otash told his partner to pull up beside him. Then he pulled their shotgun out of the gutter between the seat and the door and, when they were parallel to Stompanato, stuck the gun out the window and shouted, "Now you've had it, you motherf.u.c.ker!"

"When Johnny saw the shotgun, he ducked, losing control of his new Cadillac," Otash recalled later, with obvious delight. "It went over the curb and down the hill of Sunset. He could have been killed."

Otash wasn't on the intelligence unit. He was far too unreliable and unruly for such a sensitive post. But this episode drew only a mild rebuke from downtown. Clearly, tough-guy tactics were part of the job.

"Our main purpose is to keep anyone from getting 'too big,'" Hamilton told a San Francisco newspaper years later, in discussing the exploits of his intelligence squad. "When we get word that someone has 'juice,' that he's trying to 'fix things,' and thinks he can, then we're after him.

"We're selfish about it-d.a.m.ned selfish. Because we know that that's the kind of a guy who's going to wreck your police department if he can. And we're going to stop him-one way or the other."

It would not be long before the unit got a dramatic test of its abilities.

AS KEFAUVER ATTEMPTED to untangle the Los Angeles underworld, the county grand jury was digging into the Guarantee Finance case. Connections to Mickey Cohen were everywhere. Sam Rummel was Guarantee Finance's attorney. Harry Sackman, Mickey's accountant, was its accountant. The company's books included one item in particular that caught the grand jury's attention: $108,000 for "juice"-payoff money. The fact that the LAPD had repeatedly (albeit extralegally) raided Guarantee Finance (which was located in unincorporated county territory), only to draw a written rebuke from the sheriff's department, made it fairly clear who was on the take. So did the astonishing testimony of Undersheriff Arthur C. Jewell before the Kefauver Committee. When pressed, Undersheriff Jewell insisted that neither he nor Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz had heard the name "Guarantee Finance" until state authorities had brought it to their attention. More astonishing still was Jewell's response to another question. The committee asked him to outline areas of illegal activities that he suspected-suspected-Mickey Cohen might be involved in. By the fall of 1950, every newspaper reader in Los Angeles could have answered this question at length. Not Undersheriff Jewell.

"Personally, I cannot, sir; that is honest and sincere," he told committee members.

Afterward, the county grand jury decided to look more closely at the evidence tying the sheriff's department to Guarantee Finance. The top leadership of the sheriff's department promised to cooperate. A secret meeting was convened to discuss investigation plans. The group of attendees was a small one: the foreman of the county grand jury, a representative of the district attorney's office, three county law enforcement officials, and two "servers" who would deliver affidavits to witnesses the grand jury planned to call. A list of targets-most of whom were represented by Rummel-was drawn up.

The very next day, the targets scattered. Someone had leaked the list.

The secret strategy meeting had been held on a Wednesday. The witnesses the county grand jury had intended to subpoena scattered the following day, on Thursday. On Sunday, an extraordinary rendezvous occurred. Sheriff's department captain Al Guasti, vice squad commander Carl Pearson, and vice squad sergeant Lawrence Schaffer met clandestinely with Rummel. The apparent purpose of the meeting was to coordinate a strategy whereby Rummel would cooperate with the investigation in a way that protected both himself and the sheriff's department.

Later that evening, at about 1:30 a.m., Rummel arrived back at his house in Laurel Canyon, high above what is today West Hollywood. As he walked from his floodlit garage up the steps to his Spanish colonial, a twelve-gauge shotgun roared out from behind a hedge on the property some twenty-nine feet away. The blast hit Rummel in the neck. Blood sprayed across the walk. As the getaway car screeched away-most likely up to Mulholland or over the Santa Monica Mountains into the Valley-Rummel lay on the steps, dying but not dead.

The police got there first. By the time Parker himself arrived, with Jack Donahoe, Rummel had breathed his last breath. Surprisingly, police quickly found the murder weapon-a 1910 double-barreled Remington shotgun propped in the crook of a tree. A few minutes later, Mickey Cohen arrived, wearing a pair of slacks over his pajamas. Brushing past the police cordon, he rushed in to console Rummel's widow. Upstairs came the commotion of police setting up a command post in Rummel's den. A police lieutenant soon appeared.

"Cohen, the chief wants you upstairs."

"All right, I'll be up there," Cohen responded. But he made no move to leave the sobbing widow.

"No, he wants you up there right now," the lieutenant persisted.

Bill Parker was the last person Mickey Cohen wanted to see. By his own accounting, he was "still hot about Parker becoming chief of police." Now there he was, surrounded by obsequious aides rushing to and fro, sitting behind Rummel's desk, with Jack Donahoe standing at his side. So when Parker "starts off with this bulls.h.i.t," Cohen lost it.

"Lookit, ya punk son of a b.i.t.c.h. As far as I'm concerned, ya should no more be chief of police than a f.u.c.king two-dollar pimp," screamed Cohen.

Suddenly, like a vet handling an angry cat, big Jack Donahoe was holding Mickey up by his neck.

"He's crazy!" Parker exclaimed. "Get him out of here. I don't want to talk to him anymore."

Mickey was hustled off. "[I]'m a son of a b.i.t.c.h if I didn't have his fingermarks on my throat for six days after," he said later.

THE NEXT DAY Chief Parker vowed he would find the killer. The new chief needed a win. The Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times had supported his opponent; the mayor was cool to him; even the person who had done more than any other to smooth his ascent to the top-William Worton-was turning into an impediment. On the same day that Parker himself had been sworn in as chief, Bowron had named Worton to the Police Commission. Instead of the usual group of civilians who provided oversight in name only (and who in reality met once a week to hear license applications), Parker would have to answer to a board that included his former boss. This, undoubtedly, was Mayor Bowron's point. had supported his opponent; the mayor was cool to him; even the person who had done more than any other to smooth his ascent to the top-William Worton-was turning into an impediment. On the same day that Parker himself had been sworn in as chief, Bowron had named Worton to the Police Commission. Instead of the usual group of civilians who provided oversight in name only (and who in reality met once a week to hear license applications), Parker would have to answer to a board that included his former boss. This, undoubtedly, was Mayor Bowron's point.

But solving the case wouldn't be easy. The LAPD really had only one concrete piece of evidence-the murder weapon itself. It was extremely unusual to find a weapon at the scene of a professional hit. By leaving it, the killer was basically giving law enforcement the middle finger. But in this case, the killer's confidence was misplaced. In an astonishing feat of police work, the LAPD managed to trace the weapon back to Riley, Kansas, to a p.a.w.nshop frequented by a tough hood who'd recently relocated to the Los Angeles area, Tony Broncato. Broncato and his partner, Tony Trombino, were a pair of freelance gunmen who'd been questioned in connection with every major shooting in Los Angeles since Bugsy Siegel's rub-out. Unfortunately, the two Tonys had also recently turned up dead, both shot in the back of the head in a parked car just north of Sunset.

Parker suspected the Dragna crew. He and Hamilton immediately grabbed seven top suspects, including most of Dragna's muscle, and brought them into a suite of rooms they'd reserved at the Amba.s.sador Hotel. (Reporters had staked out police headquarters, which were then located in City Hall, and Parker didn't want news of the interrogation to leak to the press.) For three days and nights, police officers interrogated the suspects, turning over alibis, looking for inconsistencies, bluffing, and threatening the suspects (who were denied sleep and access to their lawyers). As the interrogation progressed, Parker became increasingly confident that Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno had been the triggerman. The police even had a witness-an elderly woman who lived across the street from the crime scene. She had seen someone who fit Fratianno's physical description step out of the backseat of the doomed men's car immediately after the shooting. Parker was elated. There was just one problem-district attorney Ernest Roll. He felt the case against Fratianno was weak.

"The Weasel" had an alibi. A waitress at a cafe owned by another Dragna a.s.sociate, Nick Licata, said he'd been in her company the entire night of the killing. Parker thought she was lying.* But when the waitress told the grand jury Roll had reluctantly convened that two detectives had paid her a visit and attempted to persuade her to retract her statement by burning her with cigarettes, Roll declined to proceed with the case. The chief was furious, but Roll was unyielding. There would be no indictment. Parker's effort to bring Rummel's killers to justice had failed. Worse, Parker was beginning to suspect that DA Roll did not share the new police chief's interest in bringing the underworld to heel. But when the waitress told the grand jury Roll had reluctantly convened that two detectives had paid her a visit and attempted to persuade her to retract her statement by burning her with cigarettes, Roll declined to proceed with the case. The chief was furious, but Roll was unyielding. There would be no indictment. Parker's effort to bring Rummel's killers to justice had failed. Worse, Parker was beginning to suspect that DA Roll did not share the new police chief's interest in bringing the underworld to heel.

The LAPD proved more pliable.

Parker inherited a department with pressing problems. Los Angeles had added more than 400,000 residents during and after the Second World War, yet the police department numbered just under 4,200 officers. For a city fast approaching a population of two million people, this was a grossly inadequate number. If the department was to maintain order, it would have to do so through the most focused deployment of resources possible.

Parker moved quickly to make the department more efficient. His first act was to simplify the bureaucracy. Divisions such as business, public information, internal affairs, intelligence, and administrative vice were swept into a new bureau of administration. Under the organizational chart he inherited from General Worton, fourteen department and division heads reported directly to the chief. In the new structure, that number was reduced to eight. Parker also created a new division of planning and research, which turned its attention to everything from record-keeping procedures for chronic drunkards to training manuals to deployment patterns. The 1950 annual report epitomized the new spirit. Where previous annual reports had been dull, monochromatic, and light on statistics, Parker's first report was full of color and photographs, clear in its explanation of the department's structure, and full of relevant tables of statistics about the department's activities and about the problems it faced.

Parker's reorganization gave him more time to focus on his top priority-staying in office. There were three threats that particularly worried him. The first was a recall movement aimed at Mayor Bowron and financed by the underworld. The second was an effort at the state level to legalize gambling in California, which Parker feared would corrupt the citizenry and tempt politicians with irresistible pots of money. The third, more amorphous, threat came from political attacks on the department.

Parker realized what many of his predecessors had not-namely, that a police chief's authority ultimately depended on the level of public support he enjoyed. In ousting chiefs Davis, Hohmann, and Horrall, Mayor Bowron had repeatedly demonstrated that when the mayor wanted something, civil service protections counted for very little. Parker was also keenly aware of the fact that the average tenure of the typical LAPD chief was just two years. He was determined to avoid that fate by transforming himself into a politician to be reckoned with.

It was not an easy task. Parker did not have the backslapping personality of the typical politician. His wit was dry; his manner, reserved. He was impatient with fools. The slight Boston accent he acquired during his time in the military added a further touch of hauteur. He often spoke with an angry intensity born of resentment and conviction. But he could also be charming. People respected him-and not just in the police department. Since returning to Los Angeles after the war, Parker had risen steadily in the Fire and Police Protective League and in the American Legion. This bespoke political skills of the first order. As the head of Chief Davis's small public affairs bureau, Parker had worked closely with Davis to build support for the department, hosting lunches at the police academy, providing shooting demonstrations, and courting friends in the business community and the movie colony. He now set about using these skills to protect his new position.

From day one, Parker acted like a politician who would soon be up for reelection. The new chief maintained a frantic public schedule. He accepted almost every invitation to speak and was soon making two speeches a day, followed by another round of speeches in the evening. It was an exhausting pace, one that necessitated many hours in the car. Parker needed a driver. He asked Internal Affairs to choose a suitable candidate from among the Police Academy's recent graduates. The person selected was Daryl Gates.

Gates was the perfect physical specimen of what an LAPD officer should be: five foot, eleven inches tall and two hundred pounds of muscle. (His fellow cadets at the police academy had called him "The Bear.") He'd grown up in Highland Park, a working-cla.s.s neighborhood northeast of downtown, served in the Navy during the war, returned to L.A., gotten married, and gone to the University of Southern California on the GI Bill. Like young Bill Parker, Gates wanted to be an attorney. But when his wife unexpectedly got pregnant during his senior year at USC, Gates needed a job that would support his family. He saw a job with the LAPD as a sinecure where he could finish his college degree and save some money for law school. Like Bill Parker, he was very sharp. Of the five thousand applicants who took the police entrance test, Gates placed ninth.

On Gates's first day of duty, he reported early to the office of the chief of police. When Parker arrived, Gates failed to recognize him and attempted to block him from entering the chief's office. When it came time to drive Parker back to his home in Silver Lake at the end of the day, Gates scrambled to open the back door for the chief, just as General Worton's driver had done. Parker stepped around him and got into the front seat instead. Now Gates was really nervous. He scrambled back to the driver's seat and settled in behind the wheel of the new Buick Dynaflow that was the chief's official vehicle. But he couldn't find the clutch.

Finally, in an even voice, Parker said, "You've never driven an automatic shift."

"No, sir," Gates conceded, miserably. "I don't have the slightest idea how to drive this car."

"Well, get out," Parker said. The two men switched places, and Parker drove home, with Gates in the pa.s.senger seat. He then instructed his new driver to wait there. Parker climbed up the steps and exchanged a few words with Helen. Then he came back down and taught his new driver how to operate an automatic transmission.

No word of reproach was ever uttered.

Fortunately, Daryl Gates was a fast learner, for he soon discovered that there were many evenings when Bill Parker was unable to drive himself home. Parker was a drinker-a heavy one. During the day, he was brilliant and disciplined-"a real iron a.s.s," says Gates. Liquor never pa.s.sed his lips. But nighttime was different. Out having dinner, after giving his speech, Parker sometimes loosened up and started drinking-and kept drinking. According to Gates, he drank "until his words slurred and stairs became a hazard." Disciplinarian by day, drunkard by night-it was a difficult balancing act. It was also a dangerous one.

In the fall of 1950, the day before Chief Parker was due to testify before the Kefauver Committee in Los Angeles, Captain Hamilton got a tip that the underworld was planning to take out the chief. The rub-out was supposed to happen that very night. That evening, Chief Parker was scheduled to address the Breakfast Club, a prominent business and social group, at its clubhouse in At.w.a.ter Village. Coming from downtown, the chief would typically pa.s.s through Griffith Park. The hit was supposed to occur on one of its secluded roads.

Parker reacted to the news of the planned hit calmly. Instead of canceling his appearance, he simply instructed Gates to choose a different route. He didn't even leave his wife at home. Instead, Helen sat in the backseat, holding a loaded shotgun. Gates and Parker arrived safely, but even though Hamilton had arranged for extra security at the event, Gates remained antsy. After arriving, scanning the crowd, and seeing no unfamiliar faces, Gates went outside and waited in the car. A few hours later, as things were winding down, Helen Parker came out to the car-without her husband. The minutes pa.s.sed. Finally, a concerned Gates got out of the car and went to look for the chief. There was no sign of him in the hall. Worry turned to panic. Gates ran outside to alert the extra officers Hamilton had positioned outside the venue. The frantic officers searched the hall-no Parker. Finally, they found him, in a hidden barroom nursing a bourbon.

AS THE KEFAUVER HEARINGS PROGRESSED, the Treasury Department's Bureau of Internal Revenue found itself increasingly embarra.s.sed. Warren Olney's Special Crime Study Commission had doc.u.mented a striking indifference on the part of the bureau's San Francisco office to the activities of well-known crime figures. Meanwhile, the Kefauver Committee's chief investigator (himself a veteran of Olney's working group) was closing in on Mickey Cohen.

The most incriminating information came from the committee's hearings in Miami, where senators had heard testimony from a West Palm Beach bookmaker/real estate mogul named John O'Rourke. Like other big bookmakers, O'Rourke routinely "laid off" particularly big bets on other bookmakers around the country. He was also a big gambler in his own right. Mickey was a favorite partner. When quizzed about how much business he had done with Cohen, O'Rourke came up with an eye-popping $3 million figure. O'Rourke also told the astonished committee members that he'd lost roughly $80,000 to Cohen, without ever meeting Mickey in person.

When Cohen himself appeared before the committee, he was asked about this $3 million sum. Mickey insisted that the figure was misleading: $3 million was the total sum wagered, not his profit. But that still left $80,000 undeclared gambling profits. Embarra.s.sed by such revelations, in early 1951, the Bureau of Internal Revenue commenced a vigorous investigation into Cohen's finances. A federal grand jury was soon summoning Cohen a.s.sociates for closed-door hearings.

From the start, Mickey sensed trouble.

Cohen had long maintained that he was a gambler, not a gangster. Now, he told his reporter-acquaintances that he was done with even that. "Every-thing is going to be legitimate.... I'm tired.... I want to keep things peaceful," Mickey told the press. Brother Harry reemerged too, informing the press that he'd purchased a drugstore in Tucson and that Mickey was going to manage it. Wife LaVonne was reportedly supportive; the Arizona state pharmacy board was not. There were other signs of divestment too. The Los Angeles newspapers were buzzing with rumors that Mickey was in negotiations to sell his armored Cadillac, first to President Juan Peron of Argentina, then to Mexican President Miguel Aleman Valdes. Mickey was also sighted dining at a Sunset Strip nightclub with the Reverend Billy Graham.

It was no use. On April 6, 1951, Cohen and LaVonne were indicted on charges of allegedly evading $156,000 in income taxes between 1946 and 1948. The maximum penalty faced by the couple was twenty years in the federal penitentiary system. Still, Cohen seemed remarkably confident. On the day of the bail hearing, Mickey showed up without an attorney and, to the chagrin of a.s.st. U.S. Attorney Ray Kennison, convinced U.S. District Judge William Mathes to set bail at a mere $5,000. A trial date was set for early June. But there was one more spectacle scheduled before then.