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

Located in unincorporated county territory, Guarantee Finance was perhaps the most audacious bookmaking operation in 1940s Los Angeles. With 74 telephones in its central gambling room, Guarantee Finance employed more than 170 runners and handled gambling in excess of $7,000,000 a year. (It was also happy to arrange high-interest loans for clients with gambling debts.) The LAPD administrative vice squad identified the operation almost immediately but found that the sheriff’s vice squad was strangely uninterested in shutting it down. Frustrated, Sgt. James Fisk took matters into his own hands and raided the establishment, destroying equipment and removing betting markers. A few months later, with the operation still running, Fisk carried out a second raid. This prompted sheriff department captain Al Guasti (“Iron Man” Contreras’s successor as the supervisor of the Sunset Strip) to write then-Assistant Chief of Police Joe Reed a stern letter, warning the LAPD to keep its nose out of county business. Finally, in early 1949, the state corporation commission raided the bookmaking operation and shut its operations down. The wholesale gambling operation the state raid revealed was yet another embarrassing testament to the reach of the underworld into Los Angeles.

The second thing that made Mickey seriously inconvenient was the fact that someone kept trying to kill him—in a sloppy and inept fashion. On August 2, a pipe bomb intended for Mickey exploded across the street from Cohen’s Brentwood house, upsetting the neighbors and, by extension, their elected representatives. It would not do to have a resident of Brentwood die in the cross fire of a gang war. Worton decided to go after Mickey with everything he had. His first step was to sic the new intelligence squad on Cohen.

On August 3, officers searched the apartment of Cohen associate Mike Howard (Meyer Horowitz) after getting a tip that he might be dealing drugs. They didn’t find any narcotics, but they did discover two unlicensed pistols. So they hauled in Howard and sent two LAPD detectives and a federal Bureau of Narcotics agent over to Cohen’s house to question him about the incident.

Mickey was not happy to find police officers at his door.

“What the hell do you want?” he snarled. When he found out what they’d come to ask him about—some gun charge involving an associate—he lost it. Didn’t they realize that he had guests (among them Earl Brown, Life’s crack crime writer, and Al Ostro of the San Francisco Daily News) and that it was dinnertime? He asked if the police had a warrant. They didn’t.

“Well then go fuck yourself,” Mickey told them. “And tell the chief to go fuck himself.” Then, for good measure, he added, “Get the hell off my property, you sons of bitches.”

The officers retreated. But two weeks later, in a clear indication that the police were playing by new rules, they returned and arrested him for using obscene and insulting language against a police officer. Mickey got out on bail, and a trial date was set for September 15, 1949.

The press was delighted. Mickey’s journalist guests testified that Mickey had indeed questioned the legitimacy of the law officers’ births. Cohen’s situation looked dire, but his attorneys had a trick up their sleeves. To back his assertion that calling someone a “son of a bitch” wasn’t obscene, Rummel pointed to none other than President Harry Truman, who had recently called columnist Drew Pearson the exact same thing. The courtroom laughed, the jurors retired to deliberate, and four hours later Mickey Cohen once again walked out a free man.

Within weeks, his name was back in the papers, this time in connection with one of the biggest trials in recent Hollywood history, the trial of actor Robert Mitchum. Mitchum had been busted by the sheriff’s department vice squad with a joint of marijuana at a party in the Hollywood Hills, in a raid whose timing was so fortuitous as to be suspicious. Nonetheless, he was convicted and shipped off to prison for a brief stint behind bars (accompanied by a photographer from Life magazine). Now Paul Behrmann, a former business manager and actors’ agent who had once represented Mitchum (but who had since gotten into troubles of his own with the law) came forward with a startling tale. Behrmann told DA William Simpson that Cohen was running a sex-and-extortion ring that specialized in capturing big-time businessmen and actors in compromising situations. Cohen’s stable of accomplices supposedly included a party girl named “Bootsie” and the twenty-four-year-old redheaded assistant to “French lover teacher” Claude Marsan. The suggestion was made that Mitchum, too, had been set up by Cohen.