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

Mickey’s men got similar treatment, judging by a story told by former LAPD officer-turned-private-eye Fred Otash. One night, soon after the shooting at Sherry’s, Otash spotted Johnny Stompanato cruising down the Sunset Strip. Otash told his partner to pull up beside him. Then he pulled their shotgun out of the gutter between the seat and the door and, when they were parallel to Stompanato, stuck the gun out the window and shouted, “Now you’ve had it, you motherfucker!”

“When Johnny saw the shotgun, he ducked, losing control of his new Cadillac,” Otash recalled later, with obvious delight. “It went over the curb and down the hill of Sunset. He could have been killed.”

Otash wasn’t on the intelligence unit. He was far too unreliable and unruly for such a sensitive post. But this episode drew only a mild rebuke from downtown. Clearly, tough-guy tactics were part of the job.

“Our main purpose is to keep anyone from getting ‘too big,’” Hamilton told a San Francisco newspaper years later, in discussing the exploits of his intelligence squad. “When we get word that someone has ‘juice,’ that he’s trying to ‘fix things,’ and thinks he can, then we’re after him.

“We’re selfish about it—damned selfish. Because we know that that’s the kind of a guy who’s going to wreck your police department if he can. And we’re going to stop him—one way or the other.”

It would not be long before the unit got a dramatic test of its abilities.

      AS KEFAUVER ATTEMPTED to untangle the Los Angeles underworld, the county grand jury was digging into the Guarantee Finance case. Connections to Mickey Cohen were everywhere. Sam Rummel was Guarantee Finance’s attorney. Harry Sackman, Mickey’s accountant, was its accountant. The company’s books included one item in particular that caught the grand jury’s attention: $108,000 for “juice”—payoff money. The fact that the LAPD had repeatedly (albeit extralegally) raided Guarantee Finance (which was located in unincorporated county territory), only to draw a written rebuke from the sheriff’s department, made it fairly clear who was on the take. So did the astonishing testimony of Undersheriff Arthur C. Jewell before the Kefauver Committee. When pressed, Undersheriff Jewell insisted that neither he nor Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz had heard the name “Guarantee Finance” until state authorities had brought it to their attention. More astonishing still was Jewell’s response to another question. The committee asked him to outline areas of illegal activities that he suspected—suspected—Mickey Cohen might be involved in. By the fall of 1950, every newspaper reader in Los Angeles could have answered this question at length. Not Undersheriff Jewell.

“Personally, I cannot, sir; that is honest and sincere,” he told committee members.

Afterward, the county grand jury decided to look more closely at the evidence tying the sheriff’s department to Guarantee Finance. The top leadership of the sheriff’s department promised to cooperate. A secret meeting was convened to discuss investigation plans. The group of attendees was a small one: the foreman of the county grand jury, a representative of the district attorney’s office, three county law enforcement officials, and two “servers” who would deliver affidavits to witnesses the grand jury planned to call. A list of targets—most of whom were represented by Rummel—was drawn up.

The very next day, the targets scattered. Someone had leaked the list.

The secret strategy meeting had been held on a Wednesday. The witnesses the county grand jury had intended to subpoena scattered the following day, on Thursday. On Sunday, an extraordinary rendezvous occurred. Sheriff’s department captain Al Guasti, vice squad commander Carl Pearson, and vice squad sergeant Lawrence Schaffer met clandestinely with Rummel. The apparent purpose of the meeting was to coordinate a strategy whereby Rummel would cooperate with the investigation in a way that protected both himself and the sheriff’s department.

Later that evening, at about 1:30 a.m., Rummel arrived back at his house in Laurel Canyon, high above what is today West Hollywood. As he walked from his floodlit garage up the steps to his Spanish colonial, a twelve-gauge shotgun roared out from behind a hedge on the property some twenty-nine feet away. The blast hit Rummel in the neck. Blood sprayed across the walk. As the getaway car screeched away—most likely up to Mulholland or over the Santa Monica Mountains into the Valley—Rummel lay on the steps, dying but not dead.