L.A. Noir (18 page)

      FOR MICKEY COHEN, the desire to indulge—and bend the rules—meant more business. The first and most important part of it was gambling. Bookies were typically forced to pay $250 a week for the wire that provided racing results and a measure of protection. That added up. By one estimate, Bugsy Siegel’s bookie take during this period amounted to roughly $500,000 a year. (He also reputedly had a multimillion-dollar salvage business that trafficked in rationed goods as well as a rumored heroin supply route.) Mickey got only a sliver of this cash. However, other Siegel-Cohen enterprises were more than enough to make Mickey a wealthy man. Cohen would later boast that the two men’s loan-sharking operations “reached the proportions of a bank.” They also exercised considerable sway over the city’s cafes and nightclubs, lining up performers, arranging financing, and providing “dispute resolution services.”

Mickey had his own operations as well, independent of Siegel. By far the most significant was the betting commission office he operated out of the back of a paint store on Beverly Boulevard. There Cohen handled big bets—$20,000, $30,000, even $40,000—from horse owners, agents, trainers, and jockeys who didn’t want to diminish their payouts by betting at the racetracks. Cohen also routinely “laid off” large bets to five or six commission offices around the country. On a busy day, this amounted to anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000, of which Mickey took a 2V2 to 5 percent commission. He also routinely used his insider knowledge to place bets himself.

That was the serious money side of his business. Then there was the fun stuff, like the La Brea Club, at the corner of La Brea and West Third. Mickey’s personal dinner club featured fancy meals (including rationed wartime delicacies) and a high-stakes craps game. Security was tight: Some evenings, there was as much as $200,000 in cash on the table. He also opened a private club in a mansion in the posh Coldwater Canyon neighborhood, which stretches north from Beverly Hills to Mulholland Drive. There his guests—mainly denizens of the movie colony—could enjoy a good steak, listen to an attractive chanteuse (“who, when the occasion called for it, could also sing a song with a few naughty verses”), and enjoy games of chance at all hours of the night. He likewise dabbled in boxing, managing the leading contender for the title of the lightweight boxing champion of the world, William “Willie” Joyce.

Things were going so well that Cohen took a step that only the most well organized criminals could pull off: He turned his Burbank bookie joint into a casino. At first, it was a dingy place, with “an old broken-down” craps table in a room so small “that when someone wanted to go to the bathroom, the dealer had to leave the end of the table.” However, it did have the advantage of a friendly police chief and a prime location—just a block or two from the Warner Bros. lot. In short order, cowboys, Indians, grass-skirted Polynesian maidens, and other extras were cramming into the former stockyard, which soon began a process of rapid expansion. Occasionally, Burbank police chief Elmer Adams (a sometime dinner guest at the Cohen household and the happy owner of a suspiciously large yacht) would bestir himself to shut down Cohen’s operations, but never for long. Mickey also began to dream of opening a high-end haberdashery shop.

For Cohen, it was a golden period. But Bugsy Siegel was discontented. Despite his considerable successes, Bugsy found Los Angeles to be a frustrating place to do business. To the low-or midlevel hoodlum, the pell-mell of government jurisdictions and municipalities in the Los Angeles basin—forty-six in Los Angeles County alone—was a godsend. But for Siegel, who wanted to organize the entire area, it was a frustrating inconvenience. Even organizing the city of Los Angeles presented nearly insurmountable hurdles. According to Cohen, Siegel never succeeded in establishing a numbers game in Los Angeles not because the police force was honest but rather because he had to negotiate deals on a division-by-division basis. Siegel wanted to find a better way. So did his old partner Meyer Lansky.

Meyer and Bugsy had grown up together on the streets of New York, but after Prohibition ended, the two men had gone in different directions. Siegel had tried to set himself up as a wealthy sportsman in the movie
colony; Lansky had tried to establish himself as a businessman in the molasses business. Both failed in these endeavors—Siegel due to bad luck in the stock market, Lansky after federal agents connected his molasses business to illicit distilleries in Ohio and New Jersey that were trying to dodge excise taxes. As a result, both returned to the underworld. But where Siegel delighted in strongarm stuff (leaning on bookies, union extortion, etc.), Lansky concentrated on casinos. Still, the two men stayed in touch. In the early 1940s, Siegel and Lansky invested together in the Colonial Inn, a lavish casino in Hallandale, Florida. Although the Colonial Inn was a remarkable success, it still ran the risks that came with all illegal activities. As a result, both Lansky and Siegel began to explore alternatives. Lansky looked across the Florida Straits to Cuba. Siegel looked across the Nevada desert to Las Vegas.

In 1931, the state of Nevada, desperate to raise revenues, had legalized gambling. The most immediate beneficiary of this move was Reno, which was situated on the busy Union Pacific Line between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. However, gambling entrepreneurs also noticed the sleepy town of Las Vegas, some 250 miles east of Los Angeles. By the late 1930s, former Los Angeles crime bosses such as Tony Cornero and former Combination boss Guy McAfee had opened operations there in an attempt to capitalize on a minor boom brought about by the construction of the Hoover Dam southeast of the city. Siegel noticed it too after he started persuading Las Vegas bookmakers to sign up for a Syndicate-controlled racing wire. Siegel and his Phoenix-based associate Moe Sedway could hardly miss the fact that Las Vegas users of the wire alone were soon providing Siegel with about $25,000 a month in revenue. No wonder he and Sedway dubbed their Vegas service “the Golden Nugget Wire service.”

Still, Las Vegas was slow to establish itself as a gambling destination. It was hot. It was inaccessible. Compared to the classy “carpet joints” of, say, Saratoga Springs, the casinos of downtown Las Vegas, with their sawdust floors and hokey western themes, weren’t much to look at. That began to change in 1941, when hotelier Tommy Hull opened El Rancho Vegas. Instead of being located downtown, El Rancho Vegas was outside the city, on the highway to Los Angeles. With its flamboyant Mission styling, manicured sixty-acre spread, steakhouse, night-club-style entertainment, and comfortable accommodations, El Rancho Vegas wasn’t just a casino, it was a destination. (Today, this once forlorn part of Clark County is the Las Vegas Strip.)

Siegel saw the potential to do something even larger. Las Vegas was within driving distance of Los Angeles. As air-conditioning in automobiles improved, it would be an increasingly easy drive. And of course, gambling
in Nevada was legal. But when Siegel made an offer on El Rancho Vegas, Hull turned him down. Instead, he decided to sell the property to an associate of Conrad Hilton. So two years later Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and other Syndicate figures purchased another, more traditional property downtown, the El Cortez. It was an excellent investment, but Siegel wanted something more. By 1945, he was looking for another investment opportunity. It was Billy Wilkerson who would provide it.

Wilkerson was the publisher of the
Hollywood Reporter
, the first movie-biz trade daily, and the man behind the Sunset Strip’s choicest nightclubs. Wilkerson was also one of Hollywood’s most ardent gamblers. His first nightclub, the Club Trocadero (“the Troc”) was known for its backroom card game. Industry giants including Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck, and Sam Goldwyn routinely played poker there with $20,000 chips. Wilkerson followed with Ciro’s in 1939 and LaRue’s in 1944. In the process, he shifted the locus of Los Angeles nightlife to an empty stretch of Sunset Boulevard just outside of the city limits that would soon become known as the Sunset Strip.

Wilkerson was a gambling addict. Often, he’d leave for a week or more for the nearest destination where gambling was legal—Las Vegas. During the first half of 1944, Wilkerson hit a particularly bad streak, losing almost a million dollars, a loss so large that it may have forced him to unload Ciro’s. Finally, Joseph Schenck, then chairman of 20th Century Fox and a personal friend of Wilkerson’s, gave him some advice.

“If you are going to gamble that kind of money,” Schenck told Wilkerson, “own the
casa.”

So Wilkerson decided to build a casino—a grand one, as stylish as Ciro’s, as swank as Monte Carlo, an air-conditioned luxury resort surrounded by beautiful grounds and a golf course. He would call it the Flamingo Club. Las Vegas might well have come into existence as Billy Wilkerson’s town, if not for a raid one evening on the swank Sunset Towers apartment of Siegel pal Allen Smiley. Siegel and his friend the actor George Raft were visiting. The police burst in to find Siegel placing a few bets on horse races. Siegel and Smiley (but not Raft) were promptly arrested on bookmaking charges. Bugsy was indignant. All he’d been doing, he claimed, was dialing in a $1,000 bet on a race at Churchill Downs. The notion that he, personally, would be making book on some two-bit horse race was insulting. The idea that some dumb cop could just burst in and arrest him on some trumped up charge was intolerable. It was time, he resolved, to turn his full attention to Las Vegas. In the interim, Mickey Cohen could run Los Angeles.

      
AS THE BEVERLY HILLS police were harassing Bugsy Siegel, Bill Parker was preparing for D-day.

The invasion of Normandy began on June 6. Parker landed five days later—and was promptly wounded in a German strafing attack, for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. The news was slow to reach Los Angeles. It is a measure of Parker’s standing in Los Angeles that when it did, the
Los Angeles Times
carried the following item on page two of the paper:

Mayor Bowron was among those who wrote Parker to wish him a speedy recovery. Chief Horrall was not.

For Parker, one brush with death seems to have been more than enough. On August 18, he wrote Helen to tell her that he’d drafted a letter “requesting that I be released from the army.” Parker had what appeared to be a good case. The LAPD desperately needed experienced policemen. Throughout the war years, it had operated with only about two thousand officers, five hundred less than its authorized level. Felonies had increased by 50 percent from 1942 to 1943 alone. Juvenile delinquency was also rising quickly. But in his memo to the adjutant general, Parker chose not to emphasize Los Angeles’s needs. Instead, he presented his own grievances.

“At the time I was interviewed for the commission by the Procurement Officer it was represented to me that I would receive a grade no lower than Captain as the requisition called for commissions in the grades of Captain and Major,” Parker wrote, with obvious bitterness. “The Procurement Officer further stated that I would be recommended for the higher grade.” He concluded with this legalistic (and hubristic) flourish:

The Army was not persuaded. Parker’s request was denied.

In a letter to Helen, Parker reacted by comparing himself to Christ on the road to Golgotha. He was clearly lonely and afraid of losing Helen. Parker’s other correspondents continued to speak of a particularly close relationship she had with a certain male “friend.” It seems clear that the relationship was a romantic one (although it is not clear whether it was merely an extended flirtation or an adulterous fling). For Parker, it must have seemed like a nightmare. It was his first marriage all over again. Distressed, Parker wrote to his bank in September asking it to cut off Helen’s access to his bank account.

This was hardly an action that would go unnoticed. In early October, Helen discovered that her financial lifeline had been sundered. Far from showing chagrin at being found out, Helen went on the offensive, penning her husband a furious letter. Addressed to “First Lt. Wm. H. Parker” from “Policewoman A. Parker” (Amelia being Helen’s Christian name), subject line “Being a Good Soldier,” the letter boldly castigated Parker for
his
two-faced behavior: