L.A. Noir (38 page)

More startling, even, than this was what happened next: After being treated at the infirmary, the man “got a black mark for destroying government property.”

Cohen was determined never to return to prison again. His aversion to further incarceration was so great that Mickey was prepared to take a desperate step: He would go straight. He decided to start by doing something that for an unlettered gangster was remarkable: He would write a book. Of course, as someone who was basically illiterate, Mickey couldn’t really do this on his own. Fortunately for Cohen, Hollywood’s most famous screenwriter was about to come calling.

      SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER Mickey’s return to Los Angeles, the screenwriter Ben Hecht was talking with the director Otto Preminger. Hecht was Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, the person responsible for such films as
Scarface
(the first gangster movie),
The Front Page
(based on his days as a newspaperman in Chicago),
Gone with the Wind
(an uncredited rewrite),
His Girl Friday, Spellbound
, and
Notorious
. Preminger was an Austrian Jewish emigre with a deep interest in abnormal psychology and crime. (His father had been the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) His breakout hit was the 1944 noir thriller
Laura
, which told the story of a detective investigating the slaying of a beautiful young woman who had been murdered despite—or because of—her ability to make men love her. As the investigation progressed, the detective himself fell under her spell.
Laura
’s success made Preminger one of the top directors in Hollywood. In 1955, he had begun work on another noir drama,
The Man with the Golden Arm
. Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, the film told the story of a heroin addict (Frank Sinatra) with dreams of big band greatness. The aspiring drummer gets clean in prison, but after his release, he encounters two old temptations, heroin and Kim Novak. (He succumbs to one.) Hecht was helping Preminger with the screenplay. Although Preminger was not unfamiliar
with the American underworld—he was, among other things, the lover of the world-famous striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee—it still wasn’t his native idiom. One day, Hecht realized that he knew someone who could provide Preminger with just the right sort of color—Mickey Cohen.

It took a while to find Cohen. The haberdashery was long since closed. The Moreno manse in Brentwood had been sold. The papers had reported LaVonne’s new address in West Los Angeles—a nice apartment just off Santa Monica Boulevard near the Fox back lot (today’s Century City)—but Cohen wasn’t living there. Eventually, Hecht tracked him down at the Westwood Motor Inn, Mickey’s temporary work address. Cohen suggested that Hecht stop by his apartment for a visit.

On the appointed day, Hecht arrived at a small, nondescript apartment building. The only outward sign of Cohen’s residency within was a gleaming new Cadillac (“as luxurious and roomy as a hearse,” thought Hecht). When Hecht arrived, Mickey was in the shower. It was his third of the day.
^*
Hecht knew this could take a while, so he looked around. The apartment was tiny—“so small it was almost impossible to walk swiftly in it without bumping into the walls”—but tastefully (indeed, professionally) decorated (albeit in a “bourgeois” fashion). It was also crammed with luxury items.

“There are thirty pressed and spotless suits crowded in the closet, all in tan shades,” jotted Hecht in his notebooks. “Twenty-five Chinese, Japanese, and Persian robes of silk hang there and thirty-five pairs of glistening shoes stand on the floor, neatly.”

Finally, Mickey himself appeared—“nude, dressed only in green socks held up by maroon garters.” He seemed lost in thought, scarcely bothering to acknowledge Hecht. Instead, he put on a new Panama hat and wandered about the small room, powdering himself with talcum, washing his hands, and looking for the perfect suit. Every twenty minutes or so, Mickey would dash over to the phone, place a call, and proceed to have a lengthy cryptic conversation “devoid of proper names.” (Cohen was convinced—no doubt correctly—that his phones were tapped.) Two hours later, the two men left for dinner at Fred Sica’s place.

Hecht was fascinated by Cohen’s odd behavior. But Mickey soon did something that was even more surprising. He started talking. When Hecht had first met Cohen in 1947 at Hecht’s home in Oceanside, Cohen had been “a calm, staring man in a dapper pastel suit.” He had conveyed an
unmistakable air of menace (only slightly offset by his ice-cream-and-French-pastry-fueled pudginess). In those days, Mickey sometimes went for days without saying a word.

Not anymore. The postprison Cohen was a conversationalist, at least when the mood came over him. When Hecht brought Preminger over to meet the notorious gangster, Cohen freely recounted stories of his underworld days, explaining the intricacies of the bookie business. In the process, Mickey greatly confused the director, who mistook one of Mickey’s bookmaking phrases, “laying a horse” (which simply means wagering that a certain horse will lose), for a sexual act. (After the meeting, Preminger reportedly turned to Hecht and declared, “My God! Why would you take me to meet a man who lays horses?!”) Mickey had even begun work on a book about his life. When he showed it to Hecht, the Oscar-winning screenwriter was astonished. Cohen’s work in progress was actually pretty good. Never before had Hecht seen the criminal mind bared so openly and artlessly. But Cohen wasn’t just interested in reliving his glory days. His goal, he told Hecht, was nothing less than redemption.

“I’m a different man than the wild hot Jew kid who started stickin’ up joints in Cleveland, who lived from heist to heist in Chicago and Los Angeles,” he told Hecht.

“What changed you?” Hecht asked.

“First, common sense,” Cohen replied. “Then I wanted the respect of people—not just people in the underworld.” However, the deepest change was more visceral: “I lost the crazy heat in my head,” he told Hecht, “even though I seen enough dirty crooked double-crosses to keep me mad for a hundred years.”

Mickey assured Hecht that he was now determined to go straight. Indeed, he had already picked a new profession. He had become a florist.

Mickey insisted that he had returned to Los Angeles “stone broke.” But soon after his homecoming, Cohen somehow became the proprietor of a chain of greenhouses, with headquarters at 1402 Exposition Avenue near Normandie. Exposition Avenue was a long way from Mickey’s old haunts on Sunset, but Cohen did his best to display the old razzle-dazzle, renaming the chain Michael’s Greenhouses and telling the papers that he was “chucking the rackets for tropical foliage.” Among his first visitors were the officers of the LAPD intelligence squad. To its officers, Mickey confided the “real” reason he had gone into the business. Exotic flowers, he told the officers, was “a tremendous racket… out of this world.”

LaVonne thought Mickey had finally gone crazy. One month after Michael’s Greenhouses came into existence, she filed for divorce. Cohen was understanding. “LaVonne had married a dashing, colorful rough-tough
hoodlum and when I came home she found me quite a bit different,” he piously informed the press. Cohen’s parole officers seemed to believe in Cohen’s reformation. There was just one problem: No one had much use for a gangster who had been scared straight.

“When I was a gangster like those characters in the movies, I tell you everybody admired me, including even the press,” Mickey told Hecht one night. “Now look at the situation…. [S]ince I came home”—Cohen’s preferred euphemism for getting out of jail—“the general public including the newspapers have been actin’ sour at me, as if they were sore at my having reformed and bein’ now a law abiding citizen.

“So help me, it’s unusual. I ask myself, ‘Can it be that the public prefers the type of person I was to the type of citizen I am now?’”

Mickey already knew the answer to that question. Of course they did.

One night after midnight, as Hecht sat at Cohen’s table at one of the nightclubs he frequented nearly every evening, Hecht realized what Cohen had become. “It is a
gilgul
I’m sitting with”—a soul suspended between the stages of reincarnation. “Life won’t let him in. A desperate Mickey is at the cafe table—not Mickey, the gun-flourishing heister, but a lonely knocker at the door.”

Chief Parker would have none of it. Cohen was a hoodlum through and through. If Mickey thought tropical plants were a “tremendous racket,” they probably were. Parker wanted every angle covered. Make sure Cohen’s not strong-arming people into buying exotic tropical plants, Parker told the intelligence division. The chief’s suspicions proved well founded: Several restaurateurs and bar owners confidentially informed the squad that Mickey had demanded that they pay $1,000 a month to rent a plastic fern—or else. Parker made it clear that he wanted Hamilton’s men to watch every move Mickey made.

The LAPD wasn’t the only law enforcement outfit tracking Cohen. So were agents from the Treasury Department. Mickey had resolutely refused to pay the federal government any of the back taxes he owed. He justified his inaction by claiming to be broke. When questioned about his new Cadillac and his lavish wardrobe, Cohen replied blandly that he enjoyed only what his friends gave (or loaned) him. Given Cohen’s history of extortion, this seemed more than a little suspicious. So FBI headquarters instructed the Los Angeles office to put Cohen under surveillance. In short order, Cohen had a discreet complement of G-men with him on his nocturnal nightclub outings. What they witnessed confirmed the bureau’s suspicions. Cohen, they reported, was routinely dropping $200 or $300 a night and generally spending money at a rate that only the most lucrative greenhouse in the world could provide.

The LAPD intelligence division was likewise uncovering evidence that Cohen was less reformed than he was letting on to his friend Ben Hecht. One source informed the division that Mickey was attempting to strong-arm a local linen business. The LAPD also heard rumors that Cohen, along with his old pal the great lightweight boxer Art “Golden Boy” Aragon, was fixing fights. LaVonne even called off the divorce and got back together with Mickey. Everything pointed to a full-fledged return to the life of crime.

      IN THE FALL OF 1956, the LAPD gained another ally in its fight against organized crime: the thirty-year-old chief counsel of the Senate subcommittee on investigations, Robert Kennedy.

By 1956, the Kennedys were one of America’s best-known families. Bobby’s maternal grandfather, John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, had been mayor of Boston, as well as a congressman. Father Joseph was one of the country’s most powerful businessmen, a prominent Wall Street investment banker, ex-ambassador to the Court of St. James, a former movie magnate (and Gloria Swanson’s lover), and a high-end bootlegger. The oldest son, Joe Jr., whom Joe Sr. had been grooming for the presidency, had been killed during the Second World War; in 1946, the Navy had recognized his sacrifice by naming a destroyer after him. His brother Jack had stepped in and commenced on a remarkable rise to prominence. His Harvard College thesis,
While England Slept
, was published and became a best-selling book. During the war, he served on a PT boat. When it was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, Lieutenant Kennedy kept his head and saved most of his men, a feat of bravery that won him a Navy and Marine Corps Medal (and a front-page story in the the
New York Times)
. In 1946, he was elected to the House of Representatives from his grandfather’s old district (after Joe Sr. bought out the incumbent). In 1952, Jack was elected to the U.S. Senate. Earlier that year, in 1956, Jack wrote another best-selling book,
Profiles in Courage
.

In comparison, Bobby had struggled. An indifferent student, he bounced from school to school before landing at Milton Academy. He got into Harvard, but his grades there weren’t good enough to continue on to the business or law school, so he went to the University of Virginia law school instead. Upon graduating (in the middle of his class), he went to work on his brother’s successful Senate campaign, where he distinguished himself with his dogged hard work. Kennedy then worked briefly for perhaps the most notorious committee in the history of the U.S. Senate—Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—before joining Arkansas senator John McClellan’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations
as its chief counsel and staff director. There Kennedy and his boss, Senator McClellan, hit upon another subject—governmental corruption. This was an issue that provoked distinct unease in urban Democrats, many of whom were indebted to municipal machines. But Bobby brushed away such reservations. His first target would be New York City. There he discovered the world of the Irish NYPD—and the underworld.

      KENNEDY’S FIRST STEP as staff director of the investigations subcommittee was to approach the Federal Bureau of Investigation for assistance. He was startled to learn that the FBI knew virtually nothing about corruption or organized crime at the city level. It simply wasn’t within the bureau’s jurisdiction, he was told. So he turned instead to the federal Bureau of Narcotics, the precursor to today’s Drug Enforcement Administration. Two agents, Angelo Zurelo and Joseph Amato, took Bobby under their wing. They explained to Kennedy that much of the crime in New York (including, contrary to popular myth, the narcotics trade) was organized and controlled by the Sicilian mafia. They also introduced Kennedy to their partners in the New York Police Department’s intelligence division, an outfit whose personnel consisted of largely Irish detectives straight out of a Damon Runyon story.