L.A. Noir (5 page)

Any attempt to heist a box office in downtown Los Angeles, in the middle of the day, in the presence of hundreds of witnesses would have been noteworthy. But what made this band of bandits so singularly striking was their frightening, baseball bat-wielding leader. He was only nine years old. His name was Meyer Harris Cohen, but all of Los Angeles would soon come to know him simply as “Mickey.”

MICKEY COHEN wasn’t supposed to exist in Los Angeles.

“The conditions which exist here should make for the finest character building in the land,” opined the
Los Angeles Times
in 1923. “The hazards of the environment are at their minimum. We should have more than the ordinary proportion of patriotism because our citizens are mainly the descendants of American pioneers. As a city we have no vast foreign districts in which strange tongues are ever heard. The community is American”—meaning, in
Times
-speak, white, native-born, and Protestant—“clear to its back-bone.”

Tell that to the residents of Boyle Heights.

In a city that prided itself on homogeneity, Boyle Heights—a neighborhood across the Los Angeles River due east of downtown—was an anomaly, a mixing pot of Jews, Italians, Mexicans, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Finns, and Frenchmen. It was a neighborhood of both desperate poverty and earnest striving. The flats along the Los Angeles River were home to one of the worst slums in America—a neighborhood whose horrors, according to the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis, exceeded the tenements of the Lower East Side. However, farther east along Brooklyn Avenue (today’s Cesar Chavez Avenue) a vibrant, working-class, polyglot community had taken shape. At a time when Los Angeles was older, wealthier, and sicker than America as a whole (Southern California’s supposed salubrity lured wealthy convalescents from across the country to the region), Boyle Heights was vigorous, young, and exotic. It was here that Mickey Cohen would spend his childhood—and begin his criminal career.

Boyle Heights’s multiculturalism would serve that career well. Mickey grew up with close Mexican and Italian friends. (He would later boast of speaking a little “Mexican.”) The experience paved the way for Mickey’s
later moves into the largely Italian world of organized crime. It would later lead Mickey to assemble an unusual crew, one that was half-Jewish (from New York) and half-Italian (from Cleveland). The easy mingling of Jews and Italians in Cohen’s circle would frustrate Mickey’s rivals and ultimately give him the clout he would need to take on one of Los Angeles’s most shadowy institutions, the group of men who controlled the Los Angeles underworld who were known simply as “the Combination.”

      HE WAS BORN Meyer Harris Cohen on September 4, 1913, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, but he was always known simply as “Mickey.” Just two months after his birth, Mickey’s father, who (his youngest son would later recall) had been involved with “some kind of import business with Jewish fishes,” died. His Russian-born wife was left to take care of the five kids. Three years later, Fanny Cohen decided to move to Los Angeles to start life anew.

Fanny, Mickey, and his sister Lillian settled into a modest apartment on Breed Street, just a block south of the newly built wooden shul that was the center of Boyle Heights’s fast-growing Jewish community. Fanny opened a small grocery store around the corner on Brooklyn Avenue. The business did well enough for her to send for the rest of her family—sons Sam, Louis, Harry, and daughter Pauline. Everyone worked hard—albeit at a range of endeavors whose legality varied. By age four, Mickey was spending most of his time with his older brothers on the street, selling newspapers. Mickey’s job was simple: sit on the stack of newspapers to keep them from blowing away and give passersby pleading looks. But even then, the first sprouts of criminality were taking root in little Mickey’s mind: His brothers found that he was constantly giving away papers for candy and hot dogs.

Mickey soon became a full-fledged newspaper boy in his own right. At a time when newsboys typically had to scrape for a good corner, Mickey secured a prime spot at the elbow of Soto and Brooklyn Streets hawking the
Los Angeles Record
(ironically, the scourge of vice and police corruption in that era). Although his mother attempted to enroll him in kindergarten when he was four, Mickey was a reluctant student. He was always sneaking off to sell papers, particularly when a breaking story meant there were “extras” to be hawked. Indeed, Mickey so preferred making a buck to going to school that he once skipped six weeks of the first grade entirely. It took him a year and a half to graduate to second grade.

Little Mickey was a natural street urchin. He was out on the avenue so much that numbers runners were soon leaving slips with him. Local bootleggers left “packages” with him for important clients. He learned the fine
points of craps and pool sharking. He even got into extortion, frightening a neighborhood barber into paying him to stay away. Naturally, Mickey soon moved into bootlegging as well.

Mickey’s entree came from his brothers Harry and Louie, who had opened a pharmacy at the corner of Pico and Bond. At first they employed Mickey afternoons as a soda jerk, but talent will out: Mickey was soon operating the still behind the store. One morning in 1920, police raided the Cohen family pharmacy and caught Mickey red-handed. That’s when another defining feature of Cohen’s personality came out—his dangerous temper. Instead of being taken into custody quietly, Mickey assaulted one of the arresting officers with a hot plate. He was seven.

What followed was a lesson Mickey would never forget. One of his brothers called a well-connected relative who made the charges go away. For Mickey, it was a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. As he would later write in his memoirs, “It was all a fix. My brother had the connection.” Much of his subsequent life would be devoted to the search for “the fix.”

The fact that Mickey’s brothers had entrusted their still to a seven-year-old might seem like conclusive proof that the brothers Cohen were not concerned with young Mickey’s moral development, but in fact, such a conclusion would be unfair. Oldest brother Sam did care. Sam was a religious man. He decided to enroll Mickey in Hebrew school. Unfortunately, while waiting to meet the rabbi, Mickey “got into a beef” with another kid and slapped him in the mouth. He was promptly sent home with instructions to never appear at synagogue again.

Clearly, Mickey had a calling—a criminal one. But he was hardly a criminal mastermind, as his midday holdup of a movie theater box office demonstrated. A successful heist requires forethought and planning—a “tipster” to provide intelligence, a stolen getaway car (ideally one with “cold” plates), perhaps even a “tail” car to throw anyone who pursued you off the chase. Cohen seems not to have considered what would happen after he got his hands on the money. As a result, the police nabbed him before he could escape from the scene. This time, “the fix” wasn’t “in.” He was sent off to a Dickensian reform school on Fort Hill, overlooking downtown. Mickey would later describe being beaten almost every day of his seven-month stay with a shredded old bicycle tire for “any old thing.” Even for a hardened street kid, it was a nightmare. When Mickey got out of this prison, he resolved never to go to school again. He had almost finished the second grade. He would not learn to read (or to add or subtract) until he was in his thirties, a shortcoming that would complicate his later life as a stick-up artist.

While Mickey started his criminal career at a precocious age, he was
hardly unusual in choosing a life of crime. By late 1922, Los Angeles was experiencing an unprecedented crime wave. Statistics from the period are sketchy, but the best estimates suggest that “virtuous” Anglo-Saxon L.A. had a homicide rate that was nearly twice that of the racially mixed, immigrant metropolis New York City. In fact, with a population of only half a million people, Los Angeles was closing in fast on the total homicide tally of Great Britain, whose population was 44 million.

The cause of this surge in homicides was mysterious, but to Harry Chandler and the business establishment, its potential consequences were profoundly worrisome.

“The white spot of America,” bemoaned one contributor to the
Times
, was becoming a “black spot” of crime—“so black in fact as to make it the subject of invidious comparisons whenever statistics of crime in America and Europe are cited.”

Overt vice and rampant crime threatened the image that fueled Los Angeles’s growth—and undergirded the fortunes of men like Harry Chandler. “Look-the-other-way” boosterism would no longer do. The image that Harry Chandler and the growth barons had so carefully cultivated was in danger. Chandler resolved to act.

      BY 1922, Harry Chandler was accustomed to having his way. A member of more than thirty corporate boards; the hidden hand behind innumerable syndicates, secret trusts, and dummy corporations; a land baron who owned or controlled roughly 300,000 acres in Southern California and, across the border in Mexico, an 860,000-acre ranching and farming operation that included the largest cotton plantation in the world, Chandler was the most powerful businessman in Los Angeles. By 1922, estimates of his fortune ranged from $200 million to half a billion dollars—immense sums for the 1920s. The
Los Angeles Times
was by far the most influential and profitable paper in Southern California, with nearly double the ad linage of its nearest rival, William Randolph Hearst’s
Los Angeles Examiner
. Local businessmen spoke with a mixture of awe and dread of Chandler’s “thousand dollar lunches”—the occasions on which the business community was summoned to rally behind one of Chandler’s civic improvement initiatives. Chandler’s power was not absolute, but when he and the business community resolved to act, they generally prevailed.

Now was just such a time. Chandler quickly recruited George Cryer, a former assistant city attorney (who bore a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson), to run for mayor. To manage his campaign, Cryer chose a former University of Southern California football star-turned-attorney, Kent Kane
Parrot (pronounced “Perot”), a protege of one of Chandler’s closest allies in local politics, Superior Court Judge Gavin Craig.

At first, everything went well. Cryer ran an extremely well-funded campaign, and voters, at the
Los Angeles Times
‘s urging, obligingly elected him mayor. Kent Parrot became his chief of staff. Mayor Cryer then set out to find a chief of police who could crack down on vice.

The mayor’s first choice, a determined reformer, quit within a matter of months, frustrated at resistance within the department. Cryer’s second choice, a war hero with no experience in police work, launched a vigorous crackdown on prostitution in the downtown hotels. But that was the wrong kind of crackdown. The
image
of lawlessness was bad, but certain types of lawlessness (notably prostitution and gambling) were widely seen as being good for business, as long as they were done discreetly. Outraged hoteliers soon forced his resignation. Clearly, cleaning up Los Angeles would require a delicate touch.

If Mayor Cryer was disheartened, he didn’t show it. He turned next to detective Louis Oaks, who’d won acclaim for rescuing a society matron from kidnappers. But, alas, he too stumbled. First the chief was observed frequenting one of the very hotels his predecessor had attempted to close down, in the company of not one but two ladies of the night. Then he was arrested in San Bernardino in the backseat of a car with a half-dressed woman and a half-empty bottle of whiskey.

This was embarrassing, to be sure, but it was not what ended his policing career. Chief Oaks was fired only after he crossed Mayor Cryer’s right-hand man, Kent Parrot. Parrot had his own man in the police department, Capt. Lee Heath. Captain Heath acted as Parrot’s proxy, transferring personnel without the chief’s permission and shaking down tour operators to raise funds for the Parrot-Cryer machine. Such behavior from a subordinate was problematic, to say the least. So Chief Oaks decided to dismiss Captain Heath. Parrot responded by having Oaks fired instead. He then made Heath chief.

By firing Oaks and replacing him with Heath, Kent Parrot was sending a clear message: The LAPD was now under his personal control. Harry Chandler was shocked—and furious. The LAPD was supposed to be under
his
control. For more than a decade, Chandler and his fiercely antiunion father-in-law, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, had relied on the LAPD to do battle with radicals and union organizers.
^*
Parrot was supposed to be a business
community loyalist, Harry Chandler’s man on the mayor’s staff. Instead, Parrot was building a rival power, one underwritten by L.A.’s booze-fueled underworld, not Harry Chandler.

Bootlegging had been a profitable pastime in Southern California since 1916, when California passed a dry law during the First World War that sought to conserve alcohol for military industrial purposes. The passage of the Volstead Act in 1920 implemented Prohibition nationwide in a far more draconian form, by outlawing beer and wine as well as spirits. It was the Volstead Act that made bootlegging a big business. Within months, high-speed motorboats were unloading Mexican and Canadian booze onto beaches from San Diego to Santa Barbara, primarily from Canadian ships that plied the route from Vancouver to Mexico. Meanwhile, convoys of trucks, many with hidden compartments, made their way up the so-called Bootleg Highway from Tecate to Tijuana to San Diego and thence to L.A. By the most conservative estimate, some 3,700,000 gallons of liquor were being illegally imported every year. Most of that was cheap hooch. However, authorities estimated that the most sophisticated bootleggers were also bringing about 150,000 cases of Scotch a year into Los Angeles. The markup on the Scotch was $35 a case, meaning that the bootleggers were grossing more than $5 million a year—about $50 million in today’s dollars—on Scotch alone.