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

Mickey was not a disciplined boxer. He rarely trained in a gym, preferring instead to hire his fists out to the newsboys who controlled the most lucrative intersections in the city—the blocks downtown that could bring in $2,000, even $3,000 a year—and who consequently needed help keeping rivals off their turf. In time, Mickey and his little crew (two Jewish kids and one Latino) became those rivals, taking control of corners themselves. By 1925, he had staked out a prime corner downtown at Seventh and Spring Streets. Mickey prospered. He began to carry a roll. (“Even if I only made a couple of hundred dollars, I’d always keep it in fives and tens so it’d look big.”) He developed an intense aversion to old clothes (particularly old socks). He bought a car, a patched up Model T.

Yet despite this youthful marauding, Mickey also stayed in the ring, fighting four or five nights a week around the city. He even managed to win the newsboy flyweight championship, a victory that made Mickey a minor celebrity and finally brought his boxing career to his mother’s attention. When she found out what her youngest son was up to, Fanny Cohen was not pleased. Mickey’s three older brothers had gone to college (at least for a while) and found good jobs. Mickey’s violent hustling had to end. She ordered him to stop boxing. His friends urged the opposite: They thought he should go pro. So at age fifteen, Mickey hopped a freight train going east.

At some point in 1928, Mickey showed up at the doorstep of brother Harry the pharmacist, who had moved to Cleveland. When Mickey told him of his plans to turn professional, Harry took one look at his five-foot, three-inch, ninety-six-pound sibling and laughed. Once he saw Mickey in the ring, however, the laughing stopped. His little brother was good. Harry began to nurse a new plan: Mickey would go pro, and he (Harry) would manage his career. A confrere told Harry that if he was serious, Mickey needed professional instruction—the best professional instruction. He needed to go to New York. And so, at the age of sixteen, Mickey Cohen was signed over to two boxing managers and sent to New York City to start training at the most famous boxing gym in the world. He was supposed to learn how to fight. Instead, he would discover a new world—the world of organized crime.

      LOU STILLMAN’S GYM—Mickey’s destination—was a dump. “The atmosphere,” George Plimpton would later write, “was of a fetid jungle.” The windows were never opened. The floors went years between cleanings. Members of the public, who could watch the action for a quarter, were encouraged to smoke; Stillman, a moody and acidulous former private eye, thought it toughened fighters up. Perhaps it did, for by 1929 the dungeonlike space on West 57th Street was the most revered gym in the world, a favorite training spot for boxers such as Jack Dempsey and, later, Joe Louis. Mickey was one of the roughly 150 fighters who rented lockers and trained there, a group whose quality ranged, in Stillman’s words, from “jerk squirts to top-of-the-heaps.” In his interactions with the men he was training, Stillman didn’t bother to distinguish between the two.

“Big or small, champ or bum, I treat ’em all the same—bad,” he once said, in what Budd Schulberg described as his “garbage disposal voice.” “If you treat them like humans, they’ll eat you alive.”

The men surrounding Mickey were indeed a tough lot. The gym had been founded by philanthropists whose goal was not to rescue the city’s toughest youth from a life of violence—there seemed to be little hope of that—but rather to encourage them to use their fists instead of knives or guns. The donors were reportedly happy with the gym’s results: Stillman later calculated that only a dozen of his fighters went to the electric chair. He wasn’t counting those who made their way into the rackets.

“A card of membership in Stillman’s is an Open Sesame to low society in any part of the world,” wrote New Yorker correspondent Alva Johnston in 1933. “The place is one of the centralizing institutions of the underworld; rival low-life factions meet here casually under a flag of truce, as the rival financial and social mobs fraternize at the opera.”

This was sixteen-year-old Mickey Cohen’s new world.

He gave it a go.