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

Far from responding gratefully to Mickey’s gestures, Fratianno drifted into the sphere of Jack Dragna and his ambitious nephew Louis Tom, both of whom chafed at the notion of a Jew running the rackets. The Dragna circle soon felt comfortable enough with Fratianno to enlist him as a conspirator in an effort to regain control of the Los Angeles underworld—by rubbing out Mickey. “The Weasel” was happy to help. Their first target was Cohen henchman Frank Niccoli, who also happened to be one of Fratianno’s old stickup buddies from Cleveland. At Dragna’s behest, Jimmy called up Niccoli and asked him to come over for a drink. He let Niccoli finish it before having him strangled. The killers then stripped off Niccoli’s clothes, stuffed the body in a mail sack, and threw it in the back of their car. A few hours later, Niccoli was interred with a sack of lime in a vineyard in Cucamonga. Niccoli’s car was then abandoned at LAX.

It took Mickey several days to realize that Niccoli was missing. But Superior Court Judge Thomas Ambrose was not impressed by Cohen’s claim that something awful had happened. The judge suspected that Niccoli had simply flown the coop. Reports that Niccoli had been sighted in Mexico filtered in. Police officers were dispatched to search for him in Texas. When Niccoli didn’t appear in court on October 3, the first day of the trial, the $50,000 Mickey had put down as bail was forfeited.

Then, on October 10, another Cohen henchman, Davey Ogul, vanished. His car turned up two days later. Again the judge rejected Mickey’s claims that foul play was involved and, when the dead man failed to present himself in court, Mickey was out another $25,000. With the police breathing down his neck, it was practically impossible to do business anyway. So on October 13 Mickey took the humiliating step of instructing his remaining henchmen to return to jail, where their safety would be guaranteed.

But where is true safety in this world? Surely not in jail. The constant attempts on his life, his miraculous escapes from death—it was enough to make a man think of Providence, for as the Psalmist said, “It is thou, Lord, only that makest me dwell in safety.”

Mickey Cohen wasn’t a religious man. But in the autumn of 1949, God came calling at 513 South Moreno in the form of an unlikely duo: Cohen wiretapper Jimmy Vaus and a charismatic young evangelist named Billy Graham.

^* Legalized pari-mutuel betting (where the odds reflect at-track wagers calculated by a pari-mutuel machine) was legal in California, but off-track bookmaking was banned, as it was in every state save Nevada. That made it impossible for Continental to collect information openly. So instead it employed undercover “signalers” or “wigglers” who transmitted odds and race results through a complicated set of signals to outside observers who typically monitored the track with high-powered binoculars and quickly relayed information to the Continental Press “drops.” Drops were typically little more than a large room with fifteen to twenty telephones (each carefully registered to a false name), placed on a rack before a loudspeaker. At the beginning of the racing day, calls were placed to subscribing bookmakers and left open all day. When information came in from Chicago, an operator at the drop read it into a microphone that broadcast it out through the loudspeaker and into the battery of phones, which bookmakers on the other end heard instantly and simultaneously. The system was remarkably fast (for the pre-Internet era). Bookmakers in L.A. (who, incidentally, placed the vast majority of bets on out-of-state races) could get results from the New Orleans race tracks in as little as a minute and a half. (California Special Crime Study Commission report, March 17, 1949, 72, 79-80.)

14

The Evangelist

“He has the making of one of the greatest gospel preachers of all time.”

—the Rev. Billy Graham, commenting on Mickey Cohen

THE YEAR 1949 had been a disastrous one for Jimmy Vaus. “Happy” Meltzer’s trial and the revelations that followed had exposed him as a double agent and placed him in considerable legal peril. And so it was that driving home late one Saturday night in November, filled with mournful thoughts, listening to the original singing cowboy, radio host Stuart Hamblen, Jimmy Vaus heard something that would change his life.

“A few nights ago,” began Hamblen, “I went to the Big Tent at Washington and Hill, and after I heard Billy Graham preach, I accepted Christ as my personal Savior.” Hamblen was so committed to Jesus, he continued, that he was selling his racehorses—save for his sentimental favorite, the champion Thoroughbred El Lobo.