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

Back in Washington, Robert Kennedy had a simple question: Who were these men? Seven years earlier, the Kefauver Committee had introduced Americans to gangsters Joe Adonis and Frank Costello (whose nervous hands were famously televised during the Kefauver Committee’s hearings in New York). But names such as Vito Genovese were unfamiliar. Kennedy’s first reaction, naturally enough, was to turn to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When the bureau failed to produce dossiers on these figures, Kennedy personally paid the director a visit, barging in (without an appointment) and demanding that the bureau provide the McClellan Committee with everything it had on this collection of hoods. Hoover was forced to reveal the humiliating truth. The bureau (in Kennedy’s words) “didn’t know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States.” Disgusted, Kennedy and his aides turned instead to the FBI’s minnow-sized rival, the Bureau of Narcotics, which was able to offer investigators a wealth of information on the activities of the men arrested in Apalachin. There was also one police department whose knowledge stood out—the LAPD.

One year earlier, the LAPD intelligence division had bugged a room of Conrad Hilton’s Town House hotel, where up-and-coming Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa was meeting with three residents of Chicago. At the time, Hoffa was in the middle of a heated campaign for the presidency of the Teamsters Union. According to an LAPD memo on the meeting (which later turned up in the files of the Chicago Crime Commission), the men in question included Marshall Caifano, who oversaw Chicago Outfit activities in Los Angeles, and Outfit boss Murray Humphreys. The memo stated in no uncertain terms that “a member of the Executive Board is being taken before these men singly, and they are advising members of the Executive Board in no uncertain terms that Hoffa is to be the next President of the Teamsters Union.” Sure enough, that fall Hoffa was elected president of the Teamsters.

The news from Apalachin—and the LAPD intelligence division’s ability to tie Hoffa and the Teamsters to the Chicago Outfit—caused Kennedy to reconsider the depths of the corruption he had uncovered. The McClellan Committee had begun its work in 1956 by focusing on dishonesty and corruption in the clothing procurement program of the military services. That, in turn, had led to the discovery that gangsters such as Albert Anastasia and Johnny Dio had become deeply involved in both the textiles unions and the textiles business. Apalachin had revealed an even broader horizon of organized crime, one in which the underworld preyed upon entire industries and whole communities.

“The results of the underworld infiltration into labor-management affairs form a shocking pattern across the country,” Kennedy wrote one year later in his best-selling book The Enemy Within. “[T]he gangsters of today work in a highly organized fashion and are far more powerful now than at any time in the history of the country. They control political figures and threaten whole communities. They have stretched their tentacles of corruption and fear into industries both large and small. They grow stronger every day.”

Parker himself couldn’t have put it better. As Kennedy realized what a profound danger organized crime posed to the American way of life, he grew even more appreciative of the work the LAPD was doing. He also began to seriously consider Chief Parker’s idea of creating a national clearinghouse for intelligence information. Naturally, in the course of their work together Parker and Hamilton told Robert Kennedy all about the activities of Mickey Cohen. Not surprisingly, Robert Kennedy decided that he wanted to meet this Mickey Cohen in person—and nail him.

21 The Electrician

“[W]hat’s the meaning in the underworld or the racket world when somebody’s ‘lights are to be put out?’”

—Robert Kennedy to Mickey Cohen, 1959

BY LATE 1958, Mickey Cohen was back in the rackets. His target was Los Angeles’s lucrative vending machine market. His modus operandi was pure muscle—threatening vending machine owners with bodily harm if they didn’t pay him for protection. As word spread that Cohen was back in business, old friends resurfaced, asking favors of the sort that Cohen had once dispensed so freely. Among them was Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn.

Cohn had the temperament of a first-class gangster. “Bullying and contemptuous” (other common descriptions include “profane,” “vulgar,” “cruel,” “rapacious,” and “philandering”), an ardent admirer of Benito Mussolini (whose office he re-created for himself on the Columbia lot and whose picture he proudly displayed even after the Second World War), Cohn delighted in the fear his presence could create.