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

The next day the Examiner broke the story in typical Hearst style, portraying Siegel as a Dillinger-esque outlaw on the run. To those familiar with the Syndicate’s operations, the Examiner’s portrayal was laughable. Still, Siegel’s cover was blown. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Siegel had just launched an effort to sign up L.A.’s bookies for a new racing wire, the Trans-American news service. His unmasking threatened to complicate these efforts, as well as the broader effort to organize Los Angeles along eastern lines. Furious, Siegel called the Los Angeles papers. If he was really an outlaw wanted by DA Dewey, then why was he visiting New York City, unmolested, at that very moment? Siegel’s consort, the Countess di Frasso, was also upset, so much so that she drove to San Simeon to make a personal appeal to William Randolph Hearst to stop the Examiner from further besmirching Siegel’s name. These efforts floundered, for Siegel was, of course, a notorious gangster. With uncharacteristic delicacy of feeling, a despairing Siegel decided to resign from his beloved Hillcrest Country Club (though no one dared ask him to). He also decided to leave town for a bit. So he set off for Rome with the Countess di Frasso, leaving Mickey Cohen as his surrogate.

      MICKEY AND BUGSY had grown close. Cohen was still raw—not to mention sullen, closemouthed, temperamental, and dangerous—but Siegel thought he had potential. As a result, he began to try, in Mickey’s words, “to put some class into me… trying to evolve me.” It wasn’t easy. As a stickup-man, Mickey steered clear of flashy dressing (too memorable). White shirt, dark sunglasses, that was it. Off the job, however, Mickey continued to pay his sartorial respects to Al Capone. Siegel tried to spiff him up. He introduced Mickey to cashmere. (Mickey thought it tickled.) He also introduced Mickey to a higher class of people. For the first time in his life, Cohen “got invited to different dinner parties and… met people with much elegance and manners.” It slowly dawned on Mickey that he’d been “living like an animal.” He grew ashamed. Earnestly, he set out to improve himself. He hired a tutor to help him learn to speak grammatically. He purchased a leather-bound set of the world’s great literature, which he proudly showed off to visitors (who noted the spines were never cracked).

When a source at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Internal Revenue (precursor agency to the Internal Revenue Service) informed Siegel that the government was starting to get interested in his young sidekick, Siegel told Mickey he had to start paying taxes. It was a tough sell. (“I had a firm belief that if the government, or anybody else, wanted any part of my money they should at least be on hand to help me steal it,” he said later, only half-jokingly.) The fact that Siegel prevailed on Cohen to get an accountant shows the authority that Bugsy exercised over his young protege. Although he would later (much later) boast of thumbing his nose at Bugsy during his early days in L.A., Mickey was actually quite awed by the suave older gangster.

“I found Benny a person with brilliant intelligence,” Cohen told the writer Ben Hecht in the mid-1950s. “He commanded a 1,000 percent respect and got it. Also he was tough. He come out the hard way—been through it all—muscle work, heists, killings.” For someone who had dreamed of an association with “the people,” working with Siegel must have seemed like a dream come true. They were not formally superior and subordinate—Mickey continued to run his own rackets and related to Bugsy more like a subcontractor on retainer than an employee—but when Siegel gave an order, Cohen jumped to. In return, Bugsy took care of Mickey, kicking him anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 on a regular (albeit unpredictable) basis.

It was an arrangement Mickey liked. “I didn’t have no wish to be a ruler,” said Cohen in describing his mind-set upon first arriving in Los Angeles. “In fact that was actually contrary to my nature at the time. I just wanted to be myself—Mickey.” But fate—in the form of Bugsy Siegel’s itchy trigger finger—had other plans.

      BUGSY AND THE COUNTESS di Frasso’s trip to Rome wasn’t intended just to get away from the press. Both Siegel and the multimillionaire countess had a weakness for get-rich schemes. One year earlier, they had chartered a boat to look for buried treasure off the coast of Ecuador.^* Now the gangster and the countess had another idea. Siegel had recently come across two chemists who claimed to have invented a new type of explosive—Atomite. Bugsy was convinced this new substance would replace dynamite and make him fabulously wealthy. With the countess’s help, he hoped to sell it to the Italian military. The countess, always ready for adventure, talked to her husband, who arranged a demonstration.