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

“I know I’m supposedly coming in with a life expectancy of two weeks,” he told the press after being sworn in. “We’ll see.”

15 “Whiskey Bill”

“There is a sinister criminal organization known as the Mafia operating throughout the country.”

—Sen. Estes Kefauver, 1950

IT HAD BEEN a rotten vacation. Mickey had left Los Angeles a month earlier with a leisurely agenda of business and pleasure in mind. In Phoenix, he wanted to visit brother Harry and check out some drugstores he was considering purchasing. But the Phoenix police department had quickly run him out of town. The same thing had happened in Texas, where he owned an oil well. Then, when Mickey Cohen arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago on August 3, 1950, he learned that Bill Parker had been appointed chief of police. It was upsetting. “I had joints all over town, and I needed the police for coordination,” Cohen would later say. Instead, the Police Commission had selected “the one cop who really gave me trouble.” Just when it seemed like things could not get worse, Chicago detectives picked him up for an evening of questioning. He was released the next day and told to get out of town.

Mickey Cohen was getting too famous for his own good. Not only had he gained a dangerous new enemy in the person of Los Angeles’s new police chief, he had also attracted the attention of a curious outsider, U.S. senator Estes Kefauver.

      A FRESHMAN SENATOR from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver was a man of great ambition and considerable guile. In 1948, after an unremarkable decade in the House as a pro-Roosevelt, pro-Tennessee Valley Authority Democrat, Kefauver took advantage of a feud between incumbent U.S. senator Tom Stewart and Tennessee party boss Ed “The Red Snapper” Crump and slipped into the Senate. There the Yale Law School-educated senator with the vaguely Lincoln-esque looks impressed his peers with his intelligence (he had authored an academic book on monopolies)—and his womanizing (“the worst in the Senate,” according to William “Fishbait” Miller, the House doorkeeper).

At some point in 1949, Kefauver hit upon the idea of investigating organized gambling. This was not a popular notion among his Senate colleagues. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois relied on Cook County to offset Republican voters downstate. He was not eager to start an investigation that might expose the inner workings of Chicago politics. But Kefauver had picked his topic wisely. By 1950, organized crime had become a subject of great interest to the public. Books such as Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s Chicago Confidential had city residents talking about the underworld. The American Municipal Association held a conference devoted to the subject, and both Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles and Mayor DeLesseps Morrison of New Orleans spoke passionately and frequently about the issue. As a result, in January 1950, Kefauver was able to win passage of a measure authorizing “a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities.” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat McCarran—of Nevada—responded by arranging a series of delays. But in April 1950, McCarran and Senate Majority Leader Lucas’s strategy of delay collapsed when the body of a Kansas City gambling kingpin was found in a Democratic clubhouse, slumped beneath a large portrait of President Harry Truman.

The killing itself was hardly unusual: Kansas City had long been controlled by one of the country’s most notorious “machines,” one that did not shy away from occasional acts of violence. What made this particular slaying noteworthy was the fact that President Truman himself was a product of that same machine. (He owed both his first victory in politics—his election as a county judge in 1922—and his 1934 election to the U.S. Senate to “Boss Tom” Pendergast’s Kansas City machine.) Even though “Boss Tom” had died five years earlier, the slaying in Kansas City stoked public concerns about underworld connections to government officials. Amid the ensuing controversy, the Special Senate Committee on the Investigation of Syndicated Crime in Interstate Commerce—soon known simply as the Kefauver Committee—was finally impaneled. Faced with fallout from the Kansas City slaying, President Truman also gave the Kefauver Committee a potent new tool: access to the income tax records of suspected gambling bosses. Thus armed, Kefauver revealed the investigative strategy that would catapult him to national fame. Instead of summoning witnesses to Washington, the press-savvy senator announced that his committee and its investigators would hold a series of hearings in fourteen cities across the country on “how the national crime syndicate could be smashed.” In November, Senator Kefauver arrived in Los Angeles. Atop his list of witnesses was Mickey Cohen.