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

MICKEY COHEN was not a man used to being shaken down. Threatened with handguns, blasted with shotguns, strafed on occasion by a machine gun, yes. Firebombed and dynamited, sure. But threatened, extorted—hit up for $20,000—no. Anyone who read the tabloids in post-World War II Los Angeles knew that extortion was Mickey’s racket, along with book-making, gambling, loan-sharking, slot machines, narcotics, union agitation, and a substantial portion of the city’s other illicit pastimes. In the years following Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s ill-fated move to Las Vegas, Mickey Cohen had become the top mobster on the West Coast. And the tart-tongued, sharp-dressed, pint-sized gangster, whom the more circumspect newspapers described tactfully as “a prominent figure in the sporting life world,” hadn’t gotten there by being easily intimidated—certainly not by midlevel police functionaries. Yet in October 1948 that is precisely what the head of the Los Angeles Police Department vice squad set out to do.

Cohen was no stranger to the heat. During his first days in Los Angeles as Bugsy Siegel’s enforcer, he had been instructed to squeeze Eddy Neales, the proprietor of the Clover Club. Located on the Sunset Strip, an unincorporated county area just outside of Los Angeles city limits, the Clover Club was Southern California’s poshest gaming joint. It reputedly paid the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department a small fortune for protection. The squad that provided it, led by Det. George “Iron Man” Contreras, had a formidable reputation. People who crossed it died. According to Cohen, one member of the unit had been the triggerman on eleven killings. So when Neales sicced Contreras’s men on Cohen, he undoubtedly expected that the sheriff’s men would scare Mickey stiff.

Contreras tried. Cohen was picked up and brought in to receive a warning: If he didn’t lay off Neales, the next warning would come in the form of a bullet to the head.

Mickey wasn’t impressed. A few nights later, he sought out Contreras’s top gunman.

“I looked him up and said to him, ‘Let me tell you something: to me you’re no cop. Being no cop I gotta right to kill you—so come prepared. The next time I see you coming to me I’m going to hit you between the eyes.’”

It was an effective warning. “He felt I was sincere,” Mickey later reported. The cops backed down. Until now.

      THE FACT OF THE MATTER was, Mickey Cohen was in an uncharacteristically vulnerable position that fall. Two months earlier, on Wednesday, August 18, as Cohen was putting the final touches on his newest venture, a swank men’s clothing shop on Sunset Boulevard named Michael’s Haberdashery, three gunmen had charged into the store and opened fire, wounding two Cohen henchmen and killing his top gunman, Hooky Rothman. Mickey himself was in the back bathroom washing his hands, something the obsessive-compulsive gangster did fifty or sixty times a day. Trapped, he hid in a stall, atop a toilet, awaiting his death. But instead of checking to see that they’d gotten their man—item number one on the professional hitman’s checklist—the gunmen fled. A few minutes later the incredulous driver of the gunmen’s crash car saw Mickey scurry to safety out the front door.

Cohen had survived, but great damage had been done. As Siegel shifted his attention to Las Vegas, Mickey had taken over his old boss’s Los Angeles operations—as well as Siegel’s organized crime connections back East. The attempted hit on Cohen not only showed that Mickey was vulnerable, it suggested that Bugsy’s powerful friends had no particular commitment to his protégé’s survival. In short, Mickey looked weak, and in the underworld, weakness attracts predators. So when the head of the LAPD administrative vice squad called just weeks after the attempted rub-out to inform Cohen that they “had him down for a ten to twenty thousand dollar contribution” for the upcoming reelection campaign of incumbent mayor Fletcher Bowron, Mickey knew what was happening. This was not an opportunity for good, old-fashioned graft: Bowron had devoted his career to eradicating the underworld. Rather, this was a sign that the vice squad now viewed him as prey rather than predator.

“Power’s a funny thing,” Cohen would later muse. “Somebody calls your hole card, and [if you can’t show you aren’t bluffing] it’s like a dike—one little hole can blow the whole thing.”

Paying would only confirm his weakness. Cohen refused.