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

      AS KEFAUVER ATTEMPTED to untangle the Los Angeles underworld, the county grand jury was digging into the Guarantee Finance case. Connections to Mickey Cohen were everywhere. Sam Rummel was Guarantee Finance’s attorney. Harry Sackman, Mickey’s accountant, was its accountant. The company’s books included one item in particular that caught the grand jury’s attention: $108,000 for “juice”—payoff money. The fact that the LAPD had repeatedly (albeit extralegally) raided Guarantee Finance (which was located in unincorporated county territory), only to draw a written rebuke from the sheriff’s department, made it fairly clear who was on the take. So did the astonishing testimony of Undersheriff Arthur C. Jewell before the Kefauver Committee. When pressed, Undersheriff Jewell insisted that neither he nor Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz had heard the name “Guarantee Finance” until state authorities had brought it to their attention. More astonishing still was Jewell’s response to another question. The committee asked him to outline areas of illegal activities that he suspected—suspected—Mickey Cohen might be involved in. By the fall of 1950, every newspaper reader in Los Angeles could have answered this question at length. Not Undersheriff Jewell.

“Personally, I cannot, sir; that is honest and sincere,” he told committee members.

Afterward, the county grand jury decided to look more closely at the evidence tying the sheriff’s department to Guarantee Finance. The top leadership of the sheriff’s department promised to cooperate. A secret meeting was convened to discuss investigation plans. The group of attendees was a small one: the foreman of the county grand jury, a representative of the district attorney’s office, three county law enforcement officials, and two “servers” who would deliver affidavits to witnesses the grand jury planned to call. A list of targets—most of whom were represented by Rummel—was drawn up.

The very next day, the targets scattered. Someone had leaked the list.

The secret strategy meeting had been held on a Wednesday. The witnesses the county grand jury had intended to subpoena scattered the following day, on Thursday. On Sunday, an extraordinary rendezvous occurred. Sheriff’s department captain Al Guasti, vice squad commander Carl Pearson, and vice squad sergeant Lawrence Schaffer met clandestinely with Rummel. The apparent purpose of the meeting was to coordinate a strategy whereby Rummel would cooperate with the investigation in a way that protected both himself and the sheriff’s department.

Later that evening, at about 1:30 a.m., Rummel arrived back at his house in Laurel Canyon, high above what is today West Hollywood. As he walked from his floodlit garage up the steps to his Spanish colonial, a twelve-gauge shotgun roared out from behind a hedge on the property some twenty-nine feet away. The blast hit Rummel in the neck. Blood sprayed across the walk. As the getaway car screeched away—most likely up to Mulholland or over the Santa Monica Mountains into the Valley—Rummel lay on the steps, dying but not dead.

The police got there first. By the time Parker himself arrived, with Jack Donahoe, Rummel had breathed his last breath. Surprisingly, police quickly found the murder weapon—a 1910 double-barreled Remington shotgun propped in the crook of a tree. A few minutes later, Mickey Cohen arrived, wearing a pair of slacks over his pajamas. Brushing past the police cordon, he rushed in to console Rummel’s widow. Upstairs came the commotion of police setting up a command post in Rummel’s den. A police lieutenant soon appeared.

“Cohen, the chief wants you upstairs.”

“All right, I’ll be up there,” Cohen responded. But he made no move to leave the sobbing widow.

“No, he wants you up there right now,” the lieutenant persisted.

Bill Parker was the last person Mickey Cohen wanted to see. By his own accounting, he was “still hot about Parker becoming chief of police.” Now there he was, surrounded by obsequious aides rushing to and fro, sitting behind Rummel’s desk, with Jack Donahoe standing at his side. So when Parker “starts off with this bullshit,” Cohen lost it.

“Lookit, ya punk son of a bitch. As far as I’m concerned, ya should no more be chief of police than a fucking two-dollar pimp,” screamed Cohen.

Suddenly, like a vet handling an angry cat, big Jack Donahoe was holding Mickey up by his neck.

“He’s crazy!” Parker exclaimed. “Get him out of here. I don’t want to talk to him anymore.”

Mickey was hustled off. “[I]’m a son of a bitch if I didn’t have his fingermarks on my throat for six days after,” he said later.