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

Cohen’s indictment arose from statements LoCigno had made in prison. Mickey’s junior henchman had confessed to a priest that he had not, in fact, shot Whalen but had agreed to be the fall guy after Mickey Cohen promised him a large cash payoff and a short prison term. He’d gotten neither. The priest in turn tipped off prosecutors in L.A. to the fact that LoCigno might be willing to talk. An agent then came up to pay LoCigno a visit. “I didn’t do the shooting,” he told the agent in their first meeting. “I can’t tell you who did but I can get someone to lead you to the gun.” A friend of LoCigno’s took investigators to a popular make-out spot on Mulholland Drive. There police found a rusty revolver that matched the type of gun fired in the Whalen killing. They quickly traced the gun’s ownership to another member of Mickey’s party, Roger Leonard.

Although he was willing to talk with authorities, LoCigno wasn’t willing to finger Leonard or anyone else as the actual gunman. Instead, at the second trial, LoCigno largely repeated the account he had given the jury in his first trial. The prosecution tried to offset this problem with a new witness—a USC student/model who had been dating Candy Barr’s manager at the time. The fearless coed testified that Barr’s manager had warned her that “there’s going to be trouble at Rondelli’s” and later said, “it was stupid to put all the guns in the trashcan.” However, she didn’t identify Mickey as the gunman either, and much of her testimony came perilously close to hearsay. The gun police had recovered following LoCigno’s suggestions was too rusty to be positively identified as the murder weapon. In short, prosecutors had very little in the way of new evidence that could tie Mickey to the shooting.

Cohen’s attorneys did not hesitate to make this point. “If you convict Mickey Cohen in this case,” declared his attorney during his closing statement on April 4, “you’ll be convicting him only because he’s Mickey Cohen, not because he’s guilty.” The following day, after a four-hour closing argument accusing Cohen and his attorneys of weaving “a web of deceit” around what prosecutors claimed was a premeditated conspiracy to kill Jack Whalen, the prosecution rested its case. On Thursday, the jury—eleven women and one man—retired to deliberate. By the end of the day Friday, they still had not reached a verdict. The presiding judge ordered them sequestered over the weekend.

On day four of the jury’s deliberations, newspaper columnist Paul Coates tracked down Cohen and found him “half-dozing in a Beverly Hills barber’s chair.” A manicurist was buffing his nails. A shoeshine boy was hard at work polishing his brand-new Florsheims. As Coates pondered the question of how a man who at any moment could be condemned to death could be so relaxed, the radio crackled to life.

“Here’s another bulletin,” the newscaster announced excitedly. “The Mickey Cohen murder trial jury, failing for the fourth day to reach a verdict, has been locked up again for the night.”

“Mickey’s barber gasped,” wrote Coates.

“The pressure—the suspense. It must be terrible,” the barber suggested. Mickey just grunted.

“This is a crazy town,” he finally answered. “They accuse me of bumping a guy off. So what do they do? They turn me loose and lock up my jury!”

The next day, the jury in Cohen’s case informed the judge that it was hopelessly deadlocked. Nine members of the jury were ready to acquit. Three insisted on holding out for a conviction. Reluctantly, Judge Lewis Drucker declared a mistrial.

“Although much testimony of the defendants was discredited and there was some admitted perjury, I consider the totality of the evidence against them shows no conspiracy exists,” declared the judge. With that, the murder charges were dismissed. Mickey Cohen had once again beaten the rap.

Cohen had dodged the gas chamber. But he couldn’t avoid a return trip to Alcatraz. Later that spring, the Supreme Court rejected his appeals request in his tax-evasion case. In early May, he bid Sandy Hagen and an estimated two hundred fans and autograph seekers farewell as he surrendered to authorities at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles. His mandatory release date was early 1972. Kissing Hagen good-bye, Mickey declared to the assembled crowd, “I followed the concept of life man should—except for that gambling operation.”

      THE FOLLOWING FEBRUARY, Mickey Cohen was moved from Alcatraz to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. There he took over Vito Genovese’s old job in the electric shop, along with Genovese’s hot plate and shower. Mickey typically got off work a bit early, so he could make it to the showers first, for an extra-long rinse. But that particular day, when Cohen headed to the showers, wrapped in a towel, he found himself face to face with an unexpected visitor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.