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

First to go was Pauley Gibbons. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning of May 2, 1946, Gibbons was accosted outside his Gale Avenue apartment by two unidentified men. According to neighbors, as soon as he saw them, Gibbons fell down on the sidewalk, screaming, “Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!” Of course they did, with seven quick shots. Gibbons’s diamond and sapphire ring and a gold watch were left behind, to make it clear that this was not some robbery gone awry. To underscore the killers’ opinion of Gibbons, someone paid a drunken homeless man $2 to deliver a box of horse shit (disguised as a box of flowers) to the funeral home during viewing hours. Five months later, on October 3, Gamson and Levinson met a similar fate outside Gamson’s Beverly Boulevard apartment.

So much for “the Meatball.”

Then there were the locals, foremost among them a family of thugs called the Shamans.

Maxie, Izzie, and Joey Shaman had enjoyed a reputation for toughness as kids growing up in Boyle Heights. They fancied they had this reputation still. Cohen henchman Hooky Rothman wasn’t aware of it. When Joe Shaman started acting up one night at the La Brea Club, Hooky told little Joey, bluntly, to “behave yourself in here or get the fuck out.” When Joey didn’t, Hooky broke a chair over his head, worked him over a bit, and then threw him out.

When Mickey swung by that night around 4 a.m., he found out about the incident. It was a shame, he told Hooky; he’d always liked the family. Mickey later claimed that he’d thought no more about it. That seems doubtful. Word raced through Boyle Heights that six-foot, 230-pound Maxie Shaman intended to administer a beating Mickey would not soon forget. The next morning Maxie arrived at Cohen’s commission office behind the paint store on Beverly Boulevard. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Mickey later claimed that Maxie and Izzie burst into his office, armed, and that he gunned down Maxie in self-defense. According to Izzie, his brother walked into Mickey’s office, and Cohen blasted him, killing him in cold blood. The police preferred Izzie’s story; they arrested Cohen for homicide on the spot. However, a young deputy district attorney named Frederick Napoleon Howser (who, as California attorney general, would later provide Cohen with a bodyguard) accepted Mickey’s claim of self-defense, and the diminutive gangster walked.

Still, it was a setback for Mickey. The La Brea Club had become too high profile for its own good. At some point in 1945, Mickey decided to close it (though not before setting up a smaller, more intimate version of the club across the street for his closest friends). The craps game moved to a three-room suite at the Ambassador Hotel. For “seven or eight months,” Cohen organized high-rolling dice games that earned him another $15,000 to $70,000 a month.

In the summer of 1947, Mickey demonstrated his growing power in an impressive and unusual (for him) manner: He decided to hold a charity dinner. The beneficiary was the Jewish paramilitary organization the Irgun.

Mickey came late to ethnic pride, but by early 1947, the outbreak of the Israeli war for independence had touched even him. He particularly admired the spunk of the Irgun, which had earned international notoriety after an attack that previous summer on Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, headquarters of the British administration for Palestine, that killed ninety-three people (most of them innocent civilians). Cohen had heard that the celebrated Chicago newspaperman-turned-Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht was raising money for the Irgun. The Hechts had a villa in Ocean-side. One day in early 1947, Mickey and associate Mike Howard decided to pay Hecht a visit. They arrived unannounced. Hecht, a man of the world, recognized his visitors at once. Howard did the talking.

“Mr. Cohen would be obliged if you told him what’s what with the Jews who are fighting in Palestine,” Howard announced.

According to Hecht, who later described the encounter in his memoirs, A Child of the Century, “Mickey looked coldly at the ocean outside my room and nodded.” So Hecht told his visitors “what was what in Palestine.” Cohen listened calmly as Hecht explained how David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organizat ion that would later form the core of the Israeli Defense Forces, were betraying Irgun agents to the British. The resistance needed guns and money, Hecht explained. Howard pressed him on how he could be having fund-raising problems in a city where “the movie studios are run by the richest Jews in the whole world.”

With sarcastic indignation, Hecht explained that “all the rich Jews of Hollywood were indignantly opposed to Jews fighting.”

“Knockin’ their own proposition, huh?” said Cohen, speaking for the first time. Then Howard quietly asked Hecht, “What city were you born in?”

“New York City,” Hecht replied.

“What school did you go to?” persisted Howard.