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

Renay was a sometime stripper (44DD-26-36) as well as an aspiring painter and occasional poet who had left New York after boyfriend Tony Coppola’s longtime boss, Albert Anastasia, was rubbed out in 1957. Friends such as “Champ” Segal in New York told Renay to look up Mickey. When she did, Renay was pleasantly surprised: “His hands were soft, his nails fastidiously clean and polished. His touch was more like a caress. He wasn’t at all what I expected him to be.” The two hit it off and soon became a couple (though Renay would later claim that in private Mickey always “stopped short”—out of respect for Renay’s boyfriend in New York). In March 1958, Life magazine featured a photo spread of the two of them eating ice cream sundaes at the Carousel. This was too much for LaVonne. Escorting starlets to nightclubs was one thing—that was practically part of a Hollywood gangster’s job description. Flirting around town and eating ice cream with a rather notorious young woman was quite another. That June, LaVonne and Mickey returned to divorce court. This time the split was final. As alimony, Cohen agreed to pay LaVonne a dollar a year.

Meanwhile, Cohen and Hecht were making progress with his life story. On July 7, Walter Winchell reported that The Soul of a Gunman was finished and that Mickey Cohen had already begun selling shares in a future feature film based on his memoirs. According to Winchell, a Los Angeles psychiatrist had already invested $30,000 in the project. It soon emerged that a number of other people had made significant investments as well. Now that his client had the prospect of legitimate income at hand, Cohen attorney George Bieber approached the Internal Revenue Service with a proposal to settle Cohen’s tax problems for $200,000. Under Bieber’s proposal, the government would get the first $50,000 in revenues from Cohen’s life story; Cohen would get the second $50,000; and the IRS would collect the rest of the royalties until Mickey’s debt was paid. Treasury agent Guy Mc-Cown expressed an interest in the deal.

Then Mickey made a misstep. On September 20, 1959, writer Dean Jennings published the first installment in what proved to be a withering four-part series about Cohen in the Saturday Evening Post. Entitled “The Private Life of a Hood,” the article detailed Cohen’s luxurious lifestyle—a lifestyle the author estimated required about $120,000 a year—at precisely the moment Cohen was denying that he had any earned income. Jennings’s article also infuriated the writer Ben Hecht, who felt that by talking to Jennings, Cohen had cannibalized their proposed book. Angrily, Hecht informed Cohen that the collaboration was off. Mickey was upset (though he still harbored hopes for a lucrative movie deal).

On the whole, though, Chief Parker’s problems were more acute. Cohen was reconstituting his power and hiding large sources of income from the IRS, even as he prepared to negotiate a deal that would remove the threat of federal monitoring and prosecution. Recent court decisions made it harder than ever to catch Cohen in the act. In October 1958, the state supreme court came out with yet another ruling, People v. McShann, that required the police to produce confidential informers in narcotics cases for cross-examination by the defense. The LAPD, warned Parker in reply, was being disarmed just as “the criminal cartels of the world” were preparing another “invasion.”

“It won’t be long,” Parker warned, “until the Costello mob moves in here and turns this city into another Chicago.”

But Cohen was not home free yet. While his attorney was seeking a deal, the Treasury Department was opening a new investigation into Cohen’s finances. Investigators quickly homed in on Liz Renay. In early 1958, prosecutors in New York interrogated her about her ties to Anastasia—and her relationship with Mickey. Cohen was nonchalant about the prospect of prosecutors questioning the statuesque actress about their relationship.

“Anything she says is good enough for me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. He even invited Chief Parker and Captain Hamilton to join them for dinner when Renay got back. “But I don’t think they’d pick up the tab,” he quipped. “That’s a thousand-to-one shot.”

The questioning of Renay continued. The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles convened a grand jury to investigate Mickey’s lavish lifestyle. That fall, the federal grand jury summoned Renay to appear before them. She arrived at the federal courthouse resplendent in an outfit the Los Angeles Times described as “a tight-fitting royal blue jersey dress.”