Authors: John Buntin
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 Atwater Village. Coming from downtown, the chief would typically pass 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 passed. 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 embarrassed. Warren Olney’s Special Crime Study Commission had documented 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. Embarrassed 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 associates 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 Asst. 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.
Mickey was now hard-pressed for cash. The government had frozen access to the various safety deposit boxes he’d opened (under various aliases) across town. Worse, Mickey had to demonstrate to the court that the money for his defense was coming from legitimate sources. So Cohen sought out Marvin Newman, auctioneer to the stars, who in turn placed an
ad in the
Los Angeles Times
trumpeting, “The Year’s Most Interesting Auction… furnishings from the home of Mr. and Mrs. Mickey Cohen, Nationally Prominent Personality …” More than ten thousand people showed up for the preview. The auction itself was something of a dud. Tuffy’s mahogany bed sold for just $35.
In truth, Cohen was in desperate shape. Sam Rummel, Cohen’s longtime attorney who had delivered him from every previous legal scrape, was dead. Rummel’s partner, Vernon Ferguson, was dying of brain cancer. Harry Sackman, Mickey’s longtime accountant, had turned state’s witness (though he did die suddenly of a [natural] heart attack before the trial began). In short, Cohen was going to trial utterly unprepared.
The trial began on June 4, with the prosecution asserting that it would show that Cohen had spent some $340,000 between 1946 and 1948. To the press, Mickey displayed the old bravado, confidently predicting at the end of the trial’s first day that he would “beat the rap.” Perhaps he really was confident. But this time, Mickey misunderstood the odds. In previous cases, such as the one recently brought against Cohen and his minions in connection with the beating of the widow-robbing radio repairman Al Pearson, Cohen had been able to present himself as something of a Robin Hood (or plead self-defense). This time, his lavish lifestyle was on trial. To secure a conviction, all the U.S. Attorney’s Office had to do was persuade jurors that Cohen had “willfully” avoided paying his taxes.
The prosecution’s strategy for doing this was simple: parading witnesses before the grand jury to testify about Cohen’s profligate spending in the late 1940s. All told, more than a hundred people were called. Furrier A. Lispey recounted delivering a $3,000 mink and a $2,400 marten cape to LaVonne. A maitre d’ was brought in to recount a $600 tip. An Italian shoemaker was brought in to tell the jury about how he custom-made “two or three” pairs of shoes a week for Mr. Cohen at a cost of $65 a pair (and up). Bail bondsman Louis Glasser testified that Cohen’s house and lot in Brentwood was worth a quarter of a million dollars. John O’Rourke, whose testimony in Miami before the Kefauver Committee had done so much to put Mickey in the feds’ crosshairs, was also brought in to testify. He now claimed that Mickey had won between $60,000 and $70,000 from him in the past three years.
Perhaps the hardest to bear of all, though, was the prosecution’s final witness—LaVonne’s interior decorator. “This woman,” Cohen would later rant, “who many claim robbed me of $40,000 or $50,000, got on the stand and finished me off exactly as the prosecution wanted the job done.”
At the end of each witness’s testimony, prosecutors added to a running chart of Cohen’s spending. As the numbers climbed higher—Cohen’s
spending for 1947 added up to $180,000, a figure considerably higher than the $27,000 declared on his taxes—Mickey could feel the jury turning against him. His new attorneys seemed unable to stop the bleeding. Mickey tried to say that he’d lost large sums to O’Rourke in Miami as well, but O’Rourke denied it. He insisted that he never won more than a thousand dollars or so from Cohen. Attempts to assert that other expenditures had been reimbursed (and thus should not count as expenses that pointed to a large undeclared income) were likewise unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the prosecution produced evidence that Cohen had safety deposit boxes registered under fake names and stuffed with cash all over the city, Prosecutors portrayed them as further evidence of willful tax avoidance. Things were going so poorly for the defense that one day a reporter pulled Cohen aside and asked him if he knew what he was doing. The impression from the gallery, the reporter said, was that Mickey “was being thrown to the lions.”
Cohen’s mood darkened. His behavior became more erratic. The following day, a bailiff had to restrain Cohen when he lunged toward a Bureau of Internal Revenue agent. At other times, such as when he lingered to autograph copies of his old friend Jimmy Vaus’s new book,
Why I Quit… Syndicated Crime
(which Mickey had written the preface to), he was the preening Hollywood celebrity.
The smoking gun, however, came in the form of a net worth statement, signed by Mickey himself, that stated he had earned $244,163.15 in taxable income over a three-year period. Cohen felt blindsided. He’d never understood or paid attention to such things. Keeping him clean was Sackman’s job. Instead, by getting Mickey to sign this statement, Sackman had virtually ensured a conviction. On June 20, the court reached their verdict. Cohen was found guilty of three charges of income tax evasion and on one charge of falsifying a Bureau of Internal Revenue net worth statement. A sentencing date was set for early July. Cohen’s fate was now in Judge Ben Harrison’s hands.
Three weeks later, Cohen returned to court. Judge Harrison began his remarks on a remarkably mild note. “Los Angeles must take part of the responsibility for what has happened to [Cohen],” the judge began. “He was permitted to operate here as a betting commissioner with what I think was the virtual acquiescence of law enforcement officials.”
The judge then expounded on the “questionable environment” in which the “personable” gambler had been raised. He also noted the many letters he had received testifying to Mickey’s good side, prompting the exasperated assistant U.S. attorney to interject that the proceedings risked becoming “a society for the admiration of the good qualities of Mickey Cohen.” While
acknowledging that Mickey had “been a good son to his mother,” the prosecutor reminded the judge that “he is here for the bad things he did.”
Judge Harrison shifted course, saying that he saw no prospect of Cohen resisting the temptation of easy money.
Mickey interjected. “Right now, I could go into the drugstore business in Arizona if the authorities hadn’t stopped me,” he said pleadingly. But Judge Harrison brushed this aside. Instead, he sentenced Cohen to a five-year prison term, to be served at the McNeil Island federal penitentiary off the coast of Washington State in the Puget Sound. He also fined Mickey $40,000 and ordered him to pay the government the $156,000 he owed in back taxes for the years 1946-1948, plus the cost of the trial itself, another $100,000.
Cohen was stunned. It was, he would later claim, “the only crime in my whole life of which I can say I am absolutely innocent.”
A request for bail was denied. Instead, Cohen was sent immediately to the county jail. A game of cat and mouse began. Cohen’s attorneys filed a series of motions requesting that their client be allowed to post bail pending a decision on his appeals request. In November, a federal judge ordered Cohen released on bail. But before he could be released, prosecutors succeeded in winning an injunction and then in overturning the order. If Cohen wanted to persist in appealing his conviction, he would do so from jail. In an effort to dissuade him from doing so, law enforcement authorities set out to make Cohen’s life behind bars as miserable as possible. Federal authorities insisted that Cohen be held in isolation and denied access to any visitors other than LaVonne and his attorneys. Only one exception was made to the no-visitors rule and that was for the Rev. Billy Graham, who stood by the little gangster.
“I am praying that after Mickey Cohen has paid his debt to society, he will give his heart and life to Christ,” Graham told
Time
magazine that summer. “He has the making of one of the greatest gospel preachers of all time.”
The feds’ unsavory strategy to convince Mickey to drop his appeal request should have worked. To someone like Mickey, whose normal routine involved rising around noon, showering for an hour or so, and then changing into fresh (if not
new)
clothes and shoes, imprisonment wasn’t just an ordeal; it was torture. At least, it should have been. But the feds had a problem: head jailer Charles Fitzgerald, whom Mickey would later describe as “a very good friend.” Fitzgerald was a humanitarian. Under his supervision, Mickey had a way of gaining access to certain indulgences—multiple baths a day instead of just one a week, ready access to a good barber, fresh clothes, and food from outside. Cohen also found ways to exercise his innate
talents: Rumor had it that he was running a variety of gambling rackets from the inside.
Eventually, the newspapers got wind of these indulgences and started reporting on Cohen’s behind-bars shenanigans. In response, the federal government dispatched an investigator to Los Angeles to tighten controls. Care packages from LaVonne and the multiple baths a day were ended. Greatly stressed, Fitzgerald retired, and a new jailer was appointed. He immediately summoned Cohen to his office and “in a very excited manner that also carried an apologetic tone” informed Mickey that measures would have to be taken to knock down the rumors in the papers. Mickey replied calmly that there was no satisfying the press: If he was put into solitary confinement on the roof, he told his new jailer, some newspaper would surely report it was penthouse living. Little did Mickey know that his life was about to take a turn for the worse.
One day in early 1952, soon after Mickey’s awkward interview with the new warden, Cohen was rudely awakened at five in the morning and, without even being given a chance to put on his socks or shoes, brought into the chief jailer’s office. There he found the Justice Department representative and two U.S. marshals waiting for him, along with an order to transfer him immediately to the city-run Lincoln Heights Jail. Mickey Cohen was about to enter the domain of Chief William H. Parker.
Cohen was placed in solitary confinement. His cell had no windows or furniture, only a toilet and a concrete slab. No toilet paper was provided. Mickey’s request to take a shower was denied. No outside food was permitted. He was not allowed to shave or to see a barber. In order to ensure that no friends on the force did him any favors, Parker and Hamilton instituted rules that barred any officer from interacting with Cohen in any way without having a lieutenant and a third officer present. When his wife, LaVonne, arrived for a visit, she was allowed four minutes—and forced to speak to Cohen through a speaking tube. Even newspapers were restricted, lest someone try to communicate with Mickey through code.