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

One of Mickey’s businesses was pinball and slot machines. His partner was Curly Robinson, former Clover Club owner Eddy Neales’s onetime associate. Mayor Bowron had more or less succeeded in expelling slots from the city of Los Angeles, but they were still a thriving business in the county. Cohen and Robinson were determined to profit from them. Their racket was an association that every distributor in the region had to join.

But Robinson was having problems. Some of its members had gotten a bit independent minded. Expecting trouble at the next meeting, Robinson asked Cohen to come to the association’s next gathering. Mickey arrived early with three of his toughest henchmen, Hooky Rothman (Cohen’s right-hand man, a killing savant), “Little Jimmy” (“quiet—perfectionist—carried out instructions—tough with pistol—two time loser on heists and attempted murder”), and “Big Jimmy” (“six-foot, three-inch—ex-heavyweight pug—easygoing horse bettor—done some time in Maine for a killing”). By the time the meeting got under way, there were roughly six hundred people present.

A speaker took the stage and began to talk about the need for independence. Mickey leapt onto the platform and “busted his head open.”

“Nobody come near me,” he later noted. The meeting hall was silent. With Mickey and his men glowering on stage, the slot machine association fell in line. There was no more talk of autonomy. Still, on the way out, Mickey and his goons pistol-whipped “two or three other dissenters.”

Slots were just a minor sideline. Cohen’s real focus was on gambling.

While Siegel concentrated on signing up bookies for the Trans-American news service (an enterprise that by 1945 would be paying Benny an estimated $25,000 a month), Cohen worked on opening his own gambling joints. Initially, he steered clear of the city proper, preferring more hospitable county terrain. His first major base of operations was in Bur bank, just a few blocks away from the Warner Bros. lot. Thanks to a pliable local police chief, Mickey was able to open a basic $2-a-bet bookie joint. It thrived. Back in Los Angeles, Mickey soon added a commission office that handled the kinds of big “lay-off” bets—typically anything over $5,000—that were often spread out to bookies across the country.

Commission offices thrived on a peculiarity of horse betting. Because sanctioned tracks used a pari-mutuel betting system (whereby the odds were set by the bets placed), a big bet (say $50,000) could significantly reduce the payout. Commission offices offered high rollers an alternative, where they could place big bets without lowering their payoff. Because the people placing these bets often had inside information, they also presented bookies with information that could be highly lucrative.

With this information came new friends, including a number of local politicians. One judge was so horse-crazed that he insisted that Mickey come down to his chambers and run operations from there, so that he would have access to all of Mickey’s tips.

“The poor bookmakers,” Mickey reflected, “were really in a quandary, as they couldn’t figure out where he was getting his information and were in no position to turn down his wagers for fear of invoking the wrath of the Judge.”

One afternoon as Mickey was waiting in the judge’s office, he learned that the case of a small-time bookmaker was about to be heard. Mickey knew the man well; in fact, he’d robbed his establishment before. Mickey decided to peek into the courtroom and watch the proceedings. He could scarcely believe his ears when the judge handed down the sentence—thirty days in the county jail. Furious, Mickey caught the eye of the bailiff and told him that he needed to talk to the judge at once.

“The judge, thinking that I must have received word on a horse, couldn’t get off the bench quick enough,” Mickey later recalled. Back in his chambers, Mickey exploded, speaking “without my usual respect for him, although I did manage to keep myself somewhat under control.”

“What kind of man are you, to sentence a man to jail for thirty days when you yourself are a freak for betting on the horses?”

The answer, of course, was a politician.

For a gangster, Mickey Cohen had an inadequate understanding of treachery. Not only did this make it hard to deal with politicians, it blinded him to what was happening before his very eyes with Jack Dragna.

Dragna, a short, heavyset man who favored horn-rimmed glasses, was an old-school Sicilian who liked to surround himself with Sicilians (or, barring that, at least other Italians). He had the air of someone used to dealing with money. His demeanor was more banker than muscle. Mickey didn’t think much of him. Nor did he seem aware of the fact that Dragna might hold a grudge about Cohen’s earlier heist. Instead, Mickey interpreted the order imposed by Siegel as the natural order of things. He saw Dragna and himself “on an even status as his two lieutenants”—with himself rising and Dragna on the way out.