L.A. Noir (9 page)

“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.

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.

Hollywood was Los Angeles’s fast growing vice hot spot. But vice arrests were not exactly encouraged in his new division. Parker soon chafed at other patrolmen’s “do nothing” attitude. So one night he decided to protest the policy of nonenforcement by parking directly across the street from a Hollywood house of ill repute in an effort to scare the johns away. The madam was irate, as well she might be. By one estimate, some 500 brothels were employing an estimated 2,200 prostitutes—and paying for police protection on a regular basis. Why should she, a dues-paying madam, be singled out by law enforcement? So out she stormed.

“Listen, you stupid fuck,” the madam yelled at Parker. “You’re ruining my business by hanging around here.”

“That’s the general idea,” he replied.

“What’s the next move?” she asked.

“The next move is to put you in jail,” he said.

By the end of the week, Parker had been transferred again.

Despite such obstinacy, in the summer of 1931, Parker was made acting sergeant. His grades on the civil service exam were simply too good to ignore. Of the 505 officers who’d taken the civil service exam for sergeant, Parker received the fourth highest score. And so on July 1, he was made a sergeant and returned to Hollenbeck Division. For the first time, Parker was in a position to force other officers to adhere to a standard of conduct close to his own. Word quickly got around that when Bill Parker was at the booking desk, there would be no rough stuff.

“Take him someplace and book him if you want to start that stuff,” Parker told his fellow officers; “you’re not going to hit him here.”

Such attitudes did not go over well with all of his fellow officers. One night in 1932, matters came to a head when a drunken member of the vice squad announced that he was going to kill Parker—and started fumbling for his gun.

“I could have killed him, but I knew I could make the doorway,” Parker later recounted. So he ran. His fellow officers laughingly dismissed the entire affair as a joke and “tried to convince me the man’s gun was unloaded,” but Parker would have none of it.

“I got out,” he said simply. He would later describe it as a night when he almost got killed.

For Mickey Cohen, boxing and armed robbery had been the path to “the
people.” Bill Parker found a very different—but equally unorthodox—path to prominence in the LAPD: He became a union man.

      BY 1929, Los Angeles mayor George Cryer’s claims to be a reformer had worn thin. One year earlier a grand jury investigation had forced the resignation of Kent Parrot’s chosen district attorney and made a hero of the jury foreman, John Porter. With ties to both the Ku Klux Klan and to powerful Protestant clergymen like the Rev. Bob Shuler, Porter was an attractive figure to many Angelenos fed up with the underworld. A thriving used-auto-parts and wrecking business also gave him ample means to fund a political campaign. When Cryer announced that he would not run for a fourth term, Porter threw his hat into the race.

To block the Klansman auto wrecker, Kent Parrot turned to an auto dealer whose only other high-profile supporter was, oddly, New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth. Reformers backed the “absolutely incorruptible” city council president William Bonelli (who would later flee to Mexico to avoid an indictment on corruption charges). After a period of uncharacteristic indecision, Harry Chandler and the
Times
hit upon the local American Legion commander, who frankly (if unhelpfully) acknowledged that he was unprepared to govern the city. With the dominant factions badly divided and the
Times
, by choosing such an oddball candidate, effectively on the sidelines, Porter won the election. Boss Parrot was no more.

With Parrot gone, the Combination began to crumble. In the summer of 1930, Charlie Crawford was gunned down in his office by a deranged young assistant district attorney. The Combination was no longer able to keep competitors out, and the price of bootleg booze plummeted. Scotch, which had once commanded $50 a case, now cost only $15, virtually wholesale prices. Gunmen robbed slot machine king Robert Gans; bookmaker Zeke Caress was kidnapped and ransomed for $50,000. Along with Gans, Guy McAfee, the vice squad officer turned vice lord, gradually consolidated his authority over the city’s organized prostitution rings and downtown slot machines. But he was never able to regain the clout that Crawford had wielded.

For reformers, the weakening of the Combination should have been welcome news—and it was. But Cryer’s demise and Porter’s election presented Parker with a new problem. The new mayor and his most prominent supporters were viciously anti-Catholic, blaming Rome for everything from the assassinations (or attempted assassinations) of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Roosevelt to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. It is not surprising that Parker soon took an interest in strengthening rank-and-file officers’ job protection. By doing so, Parker would catch the attention of the most
colorful police chief in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, Chief James “Two Gun” Davis.

      THAT THE LAPD, the scourge of union organizers in America’s most vociferously open-shop city, should have had a union movement is ironic. It must be said that officially it did not. Technically, Los Angeles had only the Fire and Police Protective League, officially a fraternal organization. But by the early 1930s it was well along the path to becoming a union.
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The issue that drew in Parker was job security. Simply put, officers didn’t have it. There was no safe way to make a career in the LAPD. Officers like Parker who insisted on following the letter of the law risked their careers (if not their lives) during periods of corruption. Corrupt cops risked their careers during the brief but regular periods of reform that followed revelations of scandal. While policemen were theoretically under civil service protection, in practice the chief of police was still able to dismiss officers virtually at will, and officers who were dismissed lost
everything
—their pensions, benefits, everything—no matter how close to retirement they might be.

In 1934, Parker got himself elected as a sergeant representative to the Fire and Police Protective League. He quickly became a forceful advocate for patrolmen’s interests, arguing effectively for a reversal of the pay cuts that had been forced on the department during the early years of the Depression. He also came to the attention of another lawyer-policeman in the department, Earle Cooke. Together, the two men began to lay the groundwork for a change to the city charter that would offer fire and police officers greater protection from political pressure.

In the summer of 1934, the Fire and Police Protective League petitioned the city council to place a charter amendment on the ballot that would “clarify procedure in disciplinary and removal actions” for firemen and police officers. This modest description was highly misleading. Parker and Cooke weren’t seeking to clarify some minority ambiguity; rather, they were proposing to radically expand the protections police (and fire) officers enjoyed. Under their amendment, charges against policemen would be constrained by a one-year statute of limitations. Policemen would be entitled to counsel, and all hearings would take place before a three-person board
of rights whose members consisted of officers of the rank of captain or higher. Six names would be drawn out of a box; the accused policeman would then select the three officers who would sit on the panel. Moreover, the board’s recommendations would be binding. The chief of police would only be able to reduce penalties, not increase them.