L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Ethel was a prankster. The card may have been a joke. But the joke was a pointed one because the sentiments it expressed (the desire to be done with Hoover) were obviously true. To his closest aides, Kennedy frequently criticized the director and mocked his intimate associate, Clyde Tolson. Once his brother Jack was reelected, he told friends, Hoover was out. No wonder Hoover feared that Kennedy and Parker were conspiring to dethrone him. But Hoover held a trump card—information. Eleven days after John F. Kennedy was sworn into office, Hoover forwarded a memo to RFK alerting him to a woman who was claiming to have had a sexual liaison with Jack. It was the first in a very long line of memos.

      TO MICKEY COHEN, the selection of Robert Kennedy to be the attorney general was the latest development in a nightmarish autumn. On September 16, the LAPD intelligence division’s painstaking efforts to document Cohen’s extravagant lifestyle (along with a massive investigation by the Treasury Department and several months of intensive surveillance by the FBI) paid dividends when prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office indicted Cohen on thirteen counts of tax evasion and fraud. The sums named were startling. Prosecutors alleged that between 1945 and 1950 and between 1956 and 1958, Cohen had evaded $400,000 in income tax. Federal authorities also filed liens against Cohen in Los Angeles, El Paso, St. Louis, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an effort to recover some of the $135,000 he still owed in back taxes following his first tax evasion conviction.

To Cohen, the case was nothing more than a personal vendetta.

“There’s no question about Bobby Kennedy and Chief William Parker having everything to do with my being indicted,” he would later fume. “[H]is squads were following me around here at the Mocambo, Ciro’s, Chasen’s. They had little cameras, they would snap pictures, they would take data.”

That data was now put to damning use. The strategy pursued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office was basically the same as that used in Cohen’s first trial: prove that Cohen’s expenses vastly exceeded his income. With information provided by the intelligence division and others, Treasury Department investigators were able to reconstruct in vivid detail Cohen’s free-spending ways. A string of witnesses further bolstered their case. The landlord of Cohen’s apartment at 705 S. Barrington in Brentwood testified that after moving in, Cohen had spent between $5,000 and $8,000 redecorating his apartment, a sum he described as “a nominal figure” for the retired gangster. He also noted that Mickey had paid $9,000 up front for rent and other expenses. The owner of the Sportsman Lodge remembered paying Michael’s Greenhouses $9,500 for landscaping work but was rather vague on what, if anything, had been done. A psychiatrist recalled a $10,000 gift to Cohen—in exchange for the right to study the gangster’s aberrant behavior.

Then there were the people who had invested in the Mickey Cohen life story.

The first investor appeared as early as 1951, when Beverly Hills decorator Henry Guttman gave Cohen $10,000 for all story and screen rights to the Cohen life story. That didn’t stop Mickey from seeking other investors. Several years later, a nightclub owner paid $15,000 for a 10 percent cut in Cohen’s book. When he tried to back out, he’d gotten a frightening phone call from someone in New York telling him that if he didn’t “straighten things out” with Mickey, he’d “be taken care of.” Other investors had followed. Comedians Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton testified to being approached by Cohen about producing and starring in his movie. (Cohen had originally wanted Robert Mitchum to play himself.) Lewis demurred, saying that “any productions bearing his name should involve levity.” (He did make a small investment in the project though; Mickey had been the person who first brought him to the West Coast to do a show at Slapsie Maxie’s.) Skelton had also turned down Cohen’s offer, pointing out that a “tall red-headed fellow” would hardly make a credible Mickey Cohen.

Then there were the “loans.” By his own account, Cohen had borrowed more than $140,000 since his release from prison. Acquaintance after acquaintance appeared before the jury to relate loans in the range of $1,000 to $25,000, none of which had ever been repaid. Almost everyone said they’d happily lend Cohen more.

The most damaging testimony, though, came from Cohen’s stripper paramours.