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

      A FRESHMAN SENATOR from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver was a man of great ambition and considerable guile. In 1948, after an unremarkable decade in the House as a pro-Roosevelt, pro-Tennessee Valley Authority Democrat, Kefauver took advantage of a feud between incumbent U.S. senator Tom Stewart and Tennessee party boss Ed “The Red Snapper” Crump and slipped into the Senate. There the Yale Law School-educated senator with the vaguely Lincoln-esque looks impressed his peers with his intelligence (he had authored an academic book on monopolies)—and his womanizing (“the worst in the Senate,” according to William “Fishbait” Miller, the House doorkeeper).

At some point in 1949, Kefauver hit upon the idea of investigating organized gambling. This was not a popular notion among his Senate colleagues. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois relied on Cook County to offset Republican voters downstate. He was not eager to start an investigation that might expose the inner workings of Chicago politics. But Kefauver had picked his topic wisely. By 1950, organized crime had become a subject of great interest to the public. Books such as Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s Chicago Confidential had city residents talking about the underworld. The American Municipal Association held a conference devoted to the subject, and both Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles and Mayor DeLesseps Morrison of New Orleans spoke passionately and frequently about the issue. As a result, in January 1950, Kefauver was able to win passage of a measure authorizing “a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities.” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat McCarran—of Nevada—responded by arranging a series of delays. But in April 1950, McCarran and Senate Majority Leader Lucas’s strategy of delay collapsed when the body of a Kansas City gambling kingpin was found in a Democratic clubhouse, slumped beneath a large portrait of President Harry Truman.

The killing itself was hardly unusual: Kansas City had long been controlled by one of the country’s most notorious “machines,” one that did not shy away from occasional acts of violence. What made this particular slaying noteworthy was the fact that President Truman himself was a product of that same machine. (He owed both his first victory in politics—his election as a county judge in 1922—and his 1934 election to the U.S. Senate to “Boss Tom” Pendergast’s Kansas City machine.) Even though “Boss Tom” had died five years earlier, the slaying in Kansas City stoked public concerns about underworld connections to government officials. Amid the ensuing controversy, the Special Senate Committee on the Investigation of Syndicated Crime in Interstate Commerce—soon known simply as the Kefauver Committee—was finally impaneled. Faced with fallout from the Kansas City slaying, President Truman also gave the Kefauver Committee a potent new tool: access to the income tax records of suspected gambling bosses. Thus armed, Kefauver revealed the investigative strategy that would catapult him to national fame. Instead of summoning witnesses to Washington, the press-savvy senator announced that his committee and its investigators would hold a series of hearings in fourteen cities across the country on “how the national crime syndicate could be smashed.” In November, Senator Kefauver arrived in Los Angeles. Atop his list of witnesses was Mickey Cohen.

When Mickey received a subpoena to appear before the Kefauver Committee at the federal building downtown, all of Los Angeles expected fireworks. But when the committee convened at 9 a.m., there was no Mickey Cohen. Indignant, the commission sent investigators out to his house in Brentwood to search for the witness. They found Mickey asleep in bed. While the committee waited, Mickey got dressed with excruciating slowness. (“Being the fine dressed man I try to be, it takes time for me to get ready for an appearance.”) The hearings had “been blown up so big … like a Hollywood premiere,” and Cohen wanted to look the part of a Hollywood star. He did.

From the minute he entered a crowded courtroom in Los Angeles’s federal building, “Mickey was the star of the show,” reported Time magazine. Wearing “a natty brown suit, brown tie and deep black scowl,” Cohen faced “a whole battery of newsmen, photographers, movie cameras and tape recorders.”

Surveying them in much the same spirit that a feudal lord might survey his vassals, Cohen was overheard commenting, “I could spit on the sidewalk and it would make headlines.”

A reporter asked the question on everyone’s mind: Wasn’t Mickey disrespecting the U.S. Senate by arriving late?

“Lookit, nobody notified me about the time,” Mickey responded testily. “All I got was a call to come down here, and I came down, and I’m here.”