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

It was with great relief that Vaus denied this allegation. “I don’t even know where you live!” he responded.

“If there were a microphone in my home, do you think you could locate it and take it out for me?” Mickey asked, sounding slightly less severe.

“Mr. Cohen, you’ve got me all wrong,” Vaus responded. “I’m in the business of putting them in, not of taking them out.”

Mickey again fixed a cold gaze on him. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a “reel-sized roll” of hundred-dollar bills—the biggest wad Jimmy Vaus had ever seen. In a slow, deliberate motion, Cohen peeled off one C-note, then a second, then a third. Visions of hand-painted ties, tailored suits, and “chromium accessories for my car” floated through Vaus’s mind. Before he knew it, he was on his way to the Cohen abode, accompanied by Cohen lieutenant Neddie Herbert.

When he entered the house, Vaus had to pause to catch his breath. The contrast between the lifestyles of the gangster and the policeman left him dumbstruck:

No cop had a home this luxurious. It had obviously been decorated by a professional—only they would be this bold in their color combinations. Lemon-yellow, shades of mauve and bold tones of blue harmonized with the gleaming woodwork and indirect lighting.

Confronted with such opulence, Vaus’s moral faculties, which were clearly weak to begin with, failed him entirely. “It would have been very hard to persuade a man that it was wrong to have the money sufficient to buy these creature comforts,” Vaus concluded. He rushed back to his workshop and spent the night feverishly tinkering with an ultrasensitive pickup coil and a high-gain amplifier that he hoped would be capable of detecting the tiny electromagnetic current of a small bug. The following day Vaus returned to the Cohen abode on Moreno Avenue. After carefully sweeping the house, he detected a small electrical current. A carpenter was called in to cut a hole in the floor. Vaus lowered himself into the space under the house and soon found a microphone and amplifier connected to a wire. He disconnected it with a sickening feeling, for he knew that as he did so someone at the listening end was hearing their bug go dead—and that that person was a cop. Instead, he thought about what he’d buy with Mickey’s money.

Neddie Herbert was delighted with Vaus’s work. He asked him to stay so he could show Mickey the bug. Two hours later, when Cohen appeared, Vaus explained where and how he’d found the listening device. Mickey pulled out the roll again and peeled off a few more C-notes—a bonus for his good work. Then he offered Vaus a job.

It was a delicate moment.

Even the covetous wiretapper understood that working for both the LAPD and the city’s top organized-crime boss would be a dicey proposition. But when Cohen explained what he had in mind—no lawbreaking, just consulting work—Vaus decided that working for the police and for the city’s leading gangster need not be mutually exclusive. After all, was removing a bug placed illegally in Mickey Cohen’s house really worse than nabbing some poor john by helping the vice squad mike his hotel room? Or breaking into a basement to plant an illegal bug? So he took the job—and took on a double life.

For eight months, Vaus pulled it off. Indeed, he thrived. With Mickey’s backing, Vaus opened an electronics shop in the same Sunset Strip complex that housed Cohen’s haberdashery and Cohen henchman “Happy” Meltzer’s jewelry shop. Of course, it didn’t last. By early 1949, Mickey had become fed up with what he saw as efforts by the vice squad to extort money from him. When police arrested “Happy” Meltzer, Cohen decided to hit back. His tool was Jimmy Vaus.

Vaus had told Cohen about the wiretaps he had done for Sergeant Stoker and about the conversations he’d overheard between Sergeant Jackson and Brenda Allen. Now he offered to help Mickey secure recordings he could use against the police. Vaus’s idea was that Cohen should arrange a meeting with Lieutenant Wellpot and Sergeant Jackson at which he, Vaus, would record their extortion attempt. Mickey agreed at once. Soon after Meltzer’s arrest, he contacted Jackson and Wellpott and asked to meet the two officers in his car, just off the 9000 block of Sunset. Jackson and Wellpot arrived in good spirits, presumably because they expected Mickey to agree to a payoff. They left angry when he didn’t. Mickey, however, was delighted. Thanks to Vaus’s efforts, Cohen now had clear evidence that the LAPD was trying to blackmail him—or so he believed. Now Mickey decided to put this evidence before the public—by bringing Vaus and his incriminating tapes to light at Meltzer’s trial, which was set to commence on May 5, 1949.

Chief Horrall’s boys had pushed Mickey Cohen too far, and now they would pay.

      MICKEY COHEN wasn’t the only person stalking Chief Horrall and the corrupt clique around him. So was Bill Parker.