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

“The conditions which exist here should make for the finest character building in the land,” opined the Los Angeles Times in 1923. “The hazards of the environment are at their minimum. We should have more than the ordinary proportion of patriotism because our citizens are mainly the descendants of American pioneers. As a city we have no vast foreign districts in which strange tongues are ever heard. The community is American”—meaning, in Times-speak, white, native-born, and Protestant—“clear to its back-bone.”

Tell that to the residents of Boyle Heights.

In a city that prided itself on homogeneity, Boyle Heights—a neighborhood across the Los Angeles River due east of downtown—was an anomaly, a mixing pot of Jews, Italians, Mexicans, Japanese, Russians, Germans, Finns, and Frenchmen. It was a neighborhood of both desperate poverty and earnest striving. The flats along the Los Angeles River were home to one of the worst slums in America—a neighborhood whose horrors, according to the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis, exceeded the tenements of the Lower East Side. However, farther east along Brooklyn Avenue (today’s Cesar Chavez Avenue) a vibrant, working-class, polyglot community had taken shape. At a time when Los Angeles was older, wealthier, and sicker than America as a whole (Southern California’s supposed salubrity lured wealthy convalescents from across the country to the region), Boyle Heights was vigorous, young, and exotic. It was here that Mickey Cohen would spend his childhood—and begin his criminal career.

Boyle Heights’s multiculturalism would serve that career well. Mickey grew up with close Mexican and Italian friends. (He would later boast of speaking a little “Mexican.”) The experience paved the way for Mickey’s later moves into the largely Italian world of organized crime. It would later lead Mickey to assemble an unusual crew, one that was half-Jewish (from New York) and half-Italian (from Cleveland). The easy mingling of Jews and Italians in Cohen’s circle would frustrate Mickey’s rivals and ultimately give him the clout he would need to take on one of Los Angeles’s most shadowy institutions, the group of men who controlled the Los Angeles underworld who were known simply as “the Combination.”

      HE WAS BORN Meyer Harris Cohen on September 4, 1913, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, but he was always known simply as “Mickey.” Just two months after his birth, Mickey’s father, who (his youngest son would later recall) had been involved with “some kind of import business with Jewish fishes,” died. His Russian-born wife was left to take care of the five kids. Three years later, Fanny Cohen decided to move to Los Angeles to start life anew.

Fanny, Mickey, and his sister Lillian settled into a modest apartment on Breed Street, just a block south of the newly built wooden shul that was the center of Boyle Heights’s fast-growing Jewish community. Fanny opened a small grocery store around the corner on Brooklyn Avenue. The business did well enough for her to send for the rest of her family—sons Sam, Louis, Harry, and daughter Pauline. Everyone worked hard—albeit at a range of endeavors whose legality varied. By age four, Mickey was spending most of his time with his older brothers on the street, selling newspapers. Mickey’s job was simple: sit on the stack of newspapers to keep them from blowing away and give passersby pleading looks. But even then, the first sprouts of criminality were taking root in little Mickey’s mind: His brothers found that he was constantly giving away papers for candy and hot dogs.

Mickey soon became a full-fledged newspaper boy in his own right. At a time when newsboys typically had to scrape for a good corner, Mickey secured a prime spot at the elbow of Soto and Brooklyn Streets hawking the Los Angeles Record (ironically, the scourge of vice and police corruption in that era). Although his mother attempted to enroll him in kindergarten when he was four, Mickey was a reluctant student. He was always sneaking off to sell papers, particularly when a breaking story meant there were “extras” to be hawked. Indeed, Mickey so preferred making a buck to going to school that he once skipped six weeks of the first grade entirely. It took him a year and a half to graduate to second grade.

Little Mickey was a natural street urchin. He was out on the avenue so much that numbers runners were soon leaving slips with him. Local bootleggers left “packages” with him for important clients. He learned the fine points of craps and pool sharking. He even got into extortion, frightening a neighborhood barber into paying him to stay away. Naturally, Mickey soon moved into bootlegging as well.