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

The next day, Cohen appeared as a witness—along with New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello (“a beautiful person, a real gentleman,” according to Mickey). Kennedy began by establishing Cohen’s moral character—namely, that he was an effete clotheshorse who had spent “$275 on his silk lounging pajamas, $25,000 for a specialty built bulletproof car and at one time had 300 different suits, 1,500 pairs of socks and 60 pairs of $60 shoes.” Kennedy then noted that despite such lavish expenditures Cohen had declared only $1,200 in income in 1956 and $1,500 in income in 1957.

Cohen was upset about being questioned “like an out-and-out punk” by this “snotty little guy.” So when Kennedy started to ask him more pointed questions about his finances, Cohen took the Fifth, declining to answer on the grounds that by doing so he might incriminate himself. Cohen’s only laugh came when Kennedy asked if it was true that Cohen had gone zero for three in his professional boxing career (with three knockouts). (It wasn’t. His professional boxing record seems to have been six wins, eleven losses, and one draw.)

Frustrated by Cohen’s stonewalling, Kennedy called Cohen back into the hearings the next day. “I have been given to understand that you are a gentleman,” he told Cohen pointedly before the cameras.

“Well, I consider myself a gentleman yeah,” Cohen replied.

“Well, you sure haven’t been a gentleman before this committee,” Kennedy chided. “I see you’re not going to answer any questions, but at least you could have answered that you respectfully declined to answer the questions because they may tend to incriminate you.”

“That you respectfully?” Cohen replied, incredulous. “I’ll be glad to do that—if I remember.”

Then Kennedy switched gears. “Now off the record—you say you’re a gentleman and all that. Let me ask you a question, and it has nothing to do with what we’re here for concerning coin-operated machines, but what’s the meaning in the underworld or the racket world when somebody’s ‘lights are to be put out’?”

It was a trick question. Cohen himself stood accused of having threatened one cigarette vending machine operator by informing him that he’d gotten a $50,000 contract to “put his lights out.’” His answer was quick in coming.

“Lookit,” Mickey replied innocently, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not an electrician.”

The audience laughed. Flushing bright red, Kennedy jumped up and headed for Mickey. But Senator McClellan grabbed Kennedy by the shoulder, to Cohen’s great disappointment.

“I would have torn him apart [and] kicked his fuckin’ head,” Cohen said later. Instead, he and Fred Sica, highly pleased with themselves, flew up to New Jersey to visit Sica’s eighty-year-old mother, who greeted Cohen by saying, “Mickey, my boy. Jimmy was supposed to get the lamp fixed, but I told him to wait for you. You fix it. You’re an electrician.”

To celebrate the thumb in the eye to Kennedy, the next day Cohen called the Cadillac dealership in Beverly Hills and ordered a new El Dorado Biarritz black convertible. Its list price was approximately $10,000—more than six times Cohen’s declared income that year.

22 Chocolate City

“We are all members of some minority group.”

—Chief William Parker

THE POLITE WORD was “Negro”—long “e,” long “o.” Bill Parker couldn’t pronounce it correctly. Try as he might, Parker kept shortening his vowels, producing (in his odd, pseudo-Bostonian accent) something more like “nigra.” The effect was jarring. When black people first heard Parker speak about race, they sometimes thought he was using the slur “nigger.” When Vivian Strange, one of the few black women in the department in the early 1950s (and a fellow Roman Catholic), pointed out the chief’s pronunciation problem, Parker was embarrassed. He did his best to correct himself, even going so far as to tape himself and play back his words: nigra, nigra, neegro. Parker’s lack of familiarity with the word pointed to a larger challenge: Like many white Angelenos, Parker simply didn’t know much about black people.

Nothing in Parker’s life had prepared him to relate to African Americans. When Parker’s paternal grandfather had first arrived in the Black Hills, Deadwood had been a polyglot mining camp, filled with adventurers from Wales to Nanjing, including a number of African Americans. But by the time Parker was born in 1905, that had changed. Deadwood’s Chinatown, once the largest between San Francisco and the Mississippi River, had vanished; even the Chinese cemetery had been emptied of its bodies. The raucous, polyglot mining camp had given way to George Hearst’s more organized Homestead Mining Company. Deadwood had become white.