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

Cohen had long maintained that he was a gambler, not a gangster. Now, he told his reporter-acquaintances that he was done with even that. “Every-thing is going to be legitimate…. I’m tired…. I want to keep things peaceful,” Mickey told the press. Brother Harry reemerged too, informing the press that he’d purchased a drugstore in Tucson and that Mickey was going to manage it. Wife LaVonne was reportedly supportive; the Arizona state pharmacy board was not. There were other signs of divestment too. The Los Angeles newspapers were buzzing with rumors that Mickey was in negotiations to sell his armored Cadillac, first to President Juan Peron of Argentina, then to Mexican President Miguel Aleman Valdes. Mickey was also sighted dining at a Sunset Strip nightclub with the Reverend Billy Graham.

It was no use. On April 6, 1951, Cohen and LaVonne were indicted on charges of allegedly evading $156,000 in income taxes between 1946 and 1948. The maximum penalty faced by the couple was twenty years in the federal penitentiary system. Still, Cohen seemed remarkably confident. On the day of the bail hearing, Mickey showed up without an attorney and, to the chagrin of Asst. U.S. Attorney Ray Kennison, convinced U.S. District Judge William Mathes to set bail at a mere $5,000. A trial date was set for early June. But there was one more spectacle scheduled before then.

Mickey was now hard-pressed for cash. The government had frozen access to the various safety deposit boxes he’d opened (under various aliases) across town. Worse, Mickey had to demonstrate to the court that the money for his defense was coming from legitimate sources. So Cohen sought out Marvin Newman, auctioneer to the stars, who in turn placed an ad in the Los Angeles Times trumpeting, “The Year’s Most Interesting Auction… furnishings from the home of Mr. and Mrs. Mickey Cohen, Nationally Prominent Personality …” More than ten thousand people showed up for the preview. The auction itself was something of a dud. Tuffy’s mahogany bed sold for just $35.

In truth, Cohen was in desperate shape. Sam Rummel, Cohen’s longtime attorney who had delivered him from every previous legal scrape, was dead. Rummel’s partner, Vernon Ferguson, was dying of brain cancer. Harry Sackman, Mickey’s longtime accountant, had turned state’s witness (though he did die suddenly of a [natural] heart attack before the trial began). In short, Cohen was going to trial utterly unprepared.

The trial began on June 4, with the prosecution asserting that it would show that Cohen had spent some $340,000 between 1946 and 1948. To the press, Mickey displayed the old bravado, confidently predicting at the end of the trial’s first day that he would “beat the rap.” Perhaps he really was confident. But this time, Mickey misunderstood the odds. In previous cases, such as the one recently brought against Cohen and his minions in connection with the beating of the widow-robbing radio repairman Al Pearson, Cohen had been able to present himself as something of a Robin Hood (or plead self-defense). This time, his lavish lifestyle was on trial. To secure a conviction, all the U.S. Attorney’s Office had to do was persuade jurors that Cohen had “willfully” avoided paying his taxes.

The prosecution’s strategy for doing this was simple: parading witnesses before the grand jury to testify about Cohen’s profligate spending in the late 1940s. All told, more than a hundred people were called. Furrier A. Lispey recounted delivering a $3,000 mink and a $2,400 marten cape to LaVonne. A maitre d’ was brought in to recount a $600 tip. An Italian shoemaker was brought in to tell the jury about how he custom-made “two or three” pairs of shoes a week for Mr. Cohen at a cost of $65 a pair (and up). Bail bondsman Louis Glasser testified that Cohen’s house and lot in Brentwood was worth a quarter of a million dollars. John O’Rourke, whose testimony in Miami before the Kefauver Committee had done so much to put Mickey in the feds’ crosshairs, was also brought in to testify. He now claimed that Mickey had won between $60,000 and $70,000 from him in the past three years.

Perhaps the hardest to bear of all, though, was the prosecution’s final witness—LaVonne’s interior decorator. “This woman,” Cohen would later rant, “who many claim robbed me of $40,000 or $50,000, got on the stand and finished me off exactly as the prosecution wanted the job done.”