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

Bugsy knew the boys could get tough. When he flew into Los Angeles early on the morning of June 20, 1947, violence was on his mind. After catching a few hours of sleep at the Beverly Hills mansion that Virginia Hill was renting (from Rudolph Valentino’s former manager), Bugsy headed over to associate Al Smiley’s apartment, where he met with Mickey Cohen.^* Siegel got right to the point.

“What kind of equipment you got?” Siegel asked him. Mickey ran down the list of weapons, hideouts, and gunmen available. Bugsy asked Mickey to send Hooky Rothman over the next day, presumably to provide extra protection. It was clear to Cohen that Bugsy “felt that there was some kind of come-off going to take place.” But Bugsy hadn’t seemed too worried about it. The two men had spoken out by the pool at Al Smiley’s apartment. Siegel prided himself on his tan, and though Cohen noticed that he did look more tired and pallid than normal, he certainly hadn’t gone into hiding.

After talking to Cohen, Siegel dropped by George Raft’s Coldwater Canyon house and invited Raft to join him for dinner that night. Raft had other plans. Siegel spent the afternoon with his attorney and then went out for dinner with Al Smiley and Chick Hill, Virginia’s little brother, at a new restaurant in Ocean Park. By 10:15 p.m., they were back home in Beverly Hills. Siegel and Smiley settled in on the sofa to read the early edition of the next morning’s Los Angeles Times. At 10:45 p.m., the first of nine bullets crashed through the living room window, hitting Siegel directly in the right eye. A second bullet slammed into Bugsy’s neck as Smiley dove to the floor. Seven more bullets followed as Smiley screamed “kill the lights” at Chick Hill, who had run downstairs. Then silence. When Chick turned the lights on again, Al Smiley was hiding in the fireplace and Siegel was sprawled grotesquely across the sofa, tie red with blood, head barely attached. One of his striking blue eyes was on the dining room floor. His eyelashes were found plastered on a doorjamb. The police later concluded that the gunman had rested his high-caliber rifle on a latticed pergola just twenty feet away from where Siegel and Smiley were sitting.

It was, concluded Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson, “a perfectly executed hit.”

“Somebody knew that Siegel would be in Beverly Hills on this one day, and that he would be at Virginia Hill’s home, and when, somehow, the heavy draperies over the living-room window had been left open to give the killer a view of the room,” Anderson later wrote. “The shooting was timed exactly to occur when no police patrol car was near, and had to be done quickly since police cars were in the vicinity every 30 minutes.” The only evidence the police were able to produce was a sketchy report of a black car “headed north on North Linden toward Sunset.” But Chief Anderson had an idea about who might be responsible. His chief suspect was the person who would benefit most from Siegel’s death—Mickey Cohen. The LAPD shared this suspicion.

      MICKEY disliked Las Vegas and steered clear of Siegel’s doings there. It wasn’t the toll Las Vegas was taking on his mentor in crime that bothered him, it was the dust. “You have on a beautiful white-on-white shirt and a beautiful suit, and you’d come out and a goddamn sandstorm would blow up,” he later groused. Still, while he tried to avoid going out to the Nevada desert, Cohen knew all about Siegel’s Las Vegas troubles. He also knew that it might very well lead to violence.

“In things like this, you know, sometimes an order is given and you don’t have any choice,” Mickey said later. “There was no other way it could go for Benny.”

Within the hour, the police were pounding at the door of Mickey’s house.

“What do you want?” said Cohen when he opened the door.

But when the Beverly Hills police pinched him on suspicion of being involved, Mickey was indignant. Everyone knew that he and Bugsy had been “real close.” “Naturally, I missed [him],” Cohen would say later. But be that as it may, Siegel’s death also presented Cohen with the opportunity of a lifetime—the chance to take over the rackets in L.A.

“The people in the East called on me on all propositions,” Cohen later said, “some of which I wish they had not found me home for.”

The LAPD had already been watching Cohen for some time. Mickey had caught the eye of Det. John (Jack) Donahoe, a legendary figure in both the homicide and robbery squads years earlier. Donahoe figured Mickey—correctly—for a string of armed robberies in the Wilshire corridor between 1937 and 1939. He was soon picking up Mickey for questioning on a regular basis—more than once a month, by Mickey’s later calculations. As the spree continued and reports of unpleasant encounters with a five-foot, five-inch gunman came in, Donahoe grew increasingly confident that Mickey was his man. Yet despite repeatedly pinching Cohen, Donahoe never seemed able to come up with charges that would stick.