The World's Most Evil Gangs (5 page)

In the Thirties, Siegel had survived a number of attempts on his life. His car was once raked with machine-gun fire and on another occasion a bomb went off in the function room in which he was hosting a meeting with senior mobsters. He survived both attempts and extracted revenge on his would-be assassins. In hospital being treated for minor injuries from the
bomb plot, he slipped out of his bed overnight to kill the bomber before creeping back in unnoticed – and with the perfect alibi.

‘Bugsy’ felt himself safe from his many enemies when, in 1936, his friend Lansky sent him on a mission far away from the mean streets of New York. Prohibition had come to an end and the Mafia and their associates needed to replace their lost income. They decided to expand westwards, into California and Nevada, and on Lansky’s advice the Syndicate appointed Siegel as their emissary. This suited Siegel, who in 1935 had been indicted in New York for shooting a rival gang member, one of ‘Dutch’ Schultz’s men, and had therefore been advised by Lansky that he should leave town for a while. So his friend set him up with a $500,000 investment pot and sent him to Los Angeles to team up with local mobster Jack Dragna.

For the sharp-suited, high-living, celebrity-chasing ‘Bugsy’, California was a dream world. After two decades as Lansky’s second-in-command, he was king of his own sun-blessed domain. Siegel settled in Beverly Hills, renting a mansion and joining all the right clubs. In Hollywood, he was on first-name terms with stars like Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, but his greatest friend was actor George Raft, famous for his film gangster roles. He and Raft went on a gambling spree on the French Riviera – until Siegel got a cable from Lansky ordering him to ‘stop acting like a movie star’ and get back to work.

During this exotic period, ‘Bugsy’ seduced a string of starlets but his closest female companion was a millionairess divorcée, Countess Dorothy Di Frasso, who took the handsome newcomer under her wing. They travelled to Italy, where they met Mussolini, and launched an expedition to seek Spanish
treasure on an island off Costa Rica – but after blasting the island with dynamite they returned empty-handed.

Siegel still had business interests back in New York and Lansky regularly remitted money to him. He was a heavy spender and a wild gambler, however, and he also had a very expensive new girlfriend, a spendthrift beauty named Virginia Hill, labelled by
Time
magazine as ‘Queen of the Gangster Molls’. Lansky had constantly to remind Siegel that his mission to the West Coast was, after all, to develop new revenue streams for the Syndicate, and he was ordered to start pulling his weight in the partnership with Dragna.

Jack Ignazio Dragna was an old-style Sicilian Mafioso who bootlegged in California through the Prohibition years and became boss of the Los Angeles crime family after the unexplained death of the incumbent, Joseph Ardizzone, in 1931. He was to remain the ‘Capone of LA’, as the media labelled him, until his own death from a heart attack in 1956. Between them, Siegel and Dragna operated a string of illegal gambling houses and offshore casino ships, as well as drug smuggling operations and even a wire service. The money rolled in throughout World War Two, and in 1945 Lansky helped organise for Siegel a $3 million loan to build a casino hotel in Las Vegas – forerunner of the many monolithic emporia that were to make the desert town into a mobsters’ Mecca.

Siegel matched $3 million of his own money with the crime Syndicate’s stake and started building The Flamingo, a name chosen by his girlfriend, Virginia Hill. During construction, large sums were salted away into Swiss banks, some of them said to be in the name of Miss Hill. The gaping hole in the accounts did not go unnoticed.

At their Cuba summit in December 1946, when Siegel’s East
Coast associates Lansky, Luciano and Genovese met with other leading gangsters to discuss Mob matters, the problem of the errant ‘Bugsy’ was raised. Lansky, who had once considered Siegel a blood brother, put the case for his friend and won him a reprieve. It was decided that Siegel be asked to repay with interest all of the Syndicate investment as soon as the hotel was open. If he failed to do so, then ‘Bugsy’ would be ‘retired’.

Siegel’s luck was out. He opened the Flamingo Hotel on 26 December 1946, with Virginia Hill at his side. The event was a disaster. Bad weather grounded planes in Los Angeles and few of the invited famous faces turned up. The grand opening fell flat, publicity was scant, interest dimmed and the punters stayed away. For two weeks Siegel struggled on. The casino alone lost more than $100,000 before he ordered it to be closed.

The demands for repayment of the Mob’s loan became more and more insistent. But Siegel’s money was largely tied up in the hotel, and the sums siphoned off to Switzerland did not add up to what the Syndicate demanded. He stung everyone he knew for cash; George Raft lending him $100,000 that he never saw again. Siegel was given one last chance, with a
reopening
night the following March, but that too was a damp squib. Worse, the few punters who turned up had a lucky streak and won more than the casino took in profits.

Siegel still thought he could bluff his way out of the crisis, under the protection of Lansky, but his old friend now washed his hands of him. Luciano accepted the task of arranging Siegel’s execution. On the night of 20 June 1947, Siegel was sitting on the sofa in the living room of Virginia Hill’s rented house in North Linden Drive, Los Angeles, when an unknown killer or killers fired eight or nine bullets at him through a window. The result was not a pretty sight, which would not
have pleased the man who had the reputation for being the ‘Casanova of the Mafia’. His body was riddled. And one bullet had blown out his left eye – the coup de grâce that was the Mafia’s ‘calling card’. ‘Bugsy’ would have preferred a more dignified death. So too would his former Hollywood crowd. Those rich and famous friends steered well clear now that his fame had turned to notoriety. There were only five mourners at his funeral; Meyer Lansky was not one of them.

W
hen Bugsy Siegel was bumped off in June 1947 for skimming Mafia money, an associate of the flashy fiend was waiting in the wings ready to take advantage. As one might expect, in this world of supposed family ‘honour’ but in reality back-stabbing duplicity, Siegel’s successor was a former faithful friend who owed his success and wealth to the mobster he helped murder.

Meyer Harris Cohen, later known as ‘Mickey’, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, immigrants from the Ukraine who settled in a poverty-stricken part of New York in 1913. He was first arrested for selling prohibition booze at the age of nine. In his young teens, though only 5ft 5in tall, he became an illegal prize fighter before training as a professional boxer. His career foundered when the world featherweight champion Tommy Paul knocked him out two minutes into the first round.

While America was in the grip of the Great Depression, Cohen rode the railways, criss-crossing the country with hobos and making a living where he could. On arrival in Chicago, his mobster career began in earnest and he helped run a gambling operation for Al Capone’s younger brother, Mattie. When he bought his first pistol, he said: ‘I felt like king of the world. When I whipped out that big .38 it made me as big as a guy six-foot-ten.’

Cohen carried out armed robberies for Mob bosses from the Mid-West to California. He got away with more than 100 before being arrested for the first time as an adult in Los Angeles in July 1933. His mugshot, carrying the number 30732, showed a defiant and lippy 19-year-old glaring at the camera with a crescent-shaped scar two inches long under his left eye.

Just over a year later Cohen was held for murdering a man who tried to rob a casino he had been ordered to guard. But a lawyer on the Capone payroll had him released before a court date was even fixed. Over the next few years he worked as an enforcer for the Mob before his reputation was rewarded with a move to the West Coast.

An FBI report at the time recorded: ‘Cohen’s prestige in underworld circles had been rapidly mounting even while he was in Cleveland, Ohio. He carried out muscle jobs with dispatch and showed no qualms or compunctions against killing. His debut in California was in the capacity of a pimp. However, he had ambitions to be a major hoodlum and by 1938 an informant advised he was running a bookmaking establishment in fashionable Westwood. By 1938 Cohen was also baiting bigshots from the East by making guns and transportation available when they arrived for visits or enforced ‘vacations’.

In Los Angeles, Mickey Cohen was again taken under the wing of fellow New Yorker Bugsy Siegel, for whom he had worked as a hired thug on-and-off for years, and it was under his influence that the newcomer came into his own as a leading gangster alongside the big-time playboy. Years later, Cohen recalled:

‘Siegel would throw me ten grand, 25 grand, the biggest was 40 grand. There were no books kept or explanations. All he would say is, “Here, this is for you.” Ben Siegel gave me to understand that I was not going to be a fly-by-night hoodlum but that I had ability, stature and personality to do things in a much more respectable manner and that I should start to pay my taxes so I didn’t get in any trouble with the revenue.’

It was advice that Cohen would have been wise to have taken. For it was tax-dodging that would be his undoing, just as it had been with Al Capone. But during the late Thirties and Forties Mickey Cohen seemed untouchable.

In 1945 he killed a bookmaker named Maxie Shaman but police efforts to pin the crime on him failed miserably. When ‘undercover’ cops staked out his home, the mobster had his housemaid take beer and cake out to them. When his gardener discovered the cable to a bugging device, he simply turned up the radio whenever he was discussing his protection rackets. ‘I gave them fine music,’ he boasted. ‘Nothing but the best Bach and Beethoven.’

Cohen revelled in his new-found wealth and notoriety, as author Paul Lieberman revealed in a 2011 book,
Gangster Squad,
covering the crook’s crime spree – one of the more fascinating details being how Cohen became addicted not only to fame but, strangely, to water. Suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder that made him terrified of dirt, he took
scalding showers lasting 90 minutes and washed his hands five times during every meal. He was convinced waiters gave him change using the dirtiest bills they could find, thinking that he’d leave them as a tip rather than put them in his pocket!

A more predictable trait of the mobster was disloyalty, as confirmed by another author, his biographer Tere Tereba. In
Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster,
she describes how he turned on his mentor, Bugsy Siegel. With Cohen as an ‘enforcer’, Siegel was developing casino businesses in Las Vegas but secretly siphoning off cash, so in June 1947 Bugsy, who was staying at the LA home of girlfriend Virginia Hill, was ‘retired’ by the Mob by having a hitman shoot him through the window. Tereba wrote: ‘Mickey Cohen was complicit in the plot, beyond a doubt.’

Cohen instantly assumed Siegel’s mantle as
gangster-playboy
. He spent his nights in the clubs surrounded by girls who had flocked to LA trying to break into movies. In time he also got to meet established stars, including Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Junior, and they began to rely on him for favours. Lana Turner entrusted him with her secrets, including her affair with Cohen’s fellow gangster Johnny Stompanato, but Mickey repaid her by selling their love letters to the press.

According to authoress Tereba, Frank Sinatra got help from Cohen to keep his ‘torrid affair with gorgeous new star Ava Gardner hidden from the public and allegations of a sexual assault in Las Vegas remained secret’. She added: ‘Whenever Judy Garland had problems with her husbands she went to Mickey Cohen.’

The mobster was moving up in the world. He still ran his criminal enterprises, principally drugs and protection rackets,
from various ‘front’ businesses, including a haberdashery shop and an ice-cream parlour, but his public image was that of a debonair businessman and friend of the stars. He tried to lose his rough Brooklyn accent, hiring an elocution tutor to improve his vocabulary, learning a new word or phrase each day.
Life
magazine ran picture-spreads on his home in upmarket Brentwood, including bad-taste features such as his bull terrier’s doggy duplicate of his master’s bed, complete with ‘MC’ monogrammed red-velvet bedspread.

But Cohen had enemies in the Mob and survived many attempts on his life, including the bombing of the house where he lived with his wife Lavonne. Bombs and machine-gun bullets failed to kill him. Instead, his notoriety made him a Hollywood celebrity. People asked for his autograph and he was snapped with girlfriends such as Barbara Darnell and Liz Reznay. In 1950 he posed for a remarkable picture surrounded by newspaper cuttings of his criminal exploits.

His flamboyant persona helped portrayals of him in the 1991 movie
Bugsy
, in which he was played by Harvey Keitel as a sidekick to Warren Beatty in the title role. And in 2013 double Oscar-winner Sean Penn played the lead role as Cohen in the film
Gangster Squad.
Which brings us to the reason why this coarse, brutal ex-prize fighter is so significant in the history of organised crime. For the members of the elite police unit formed to smash Cohen and his cohorts were as rough and tough and sometimes as shady and unscrupulous as the criminals they were trying to nail.

The so-called ‘Gangster Squad’ was made up of eight Los Angeles police officers who employed methods that were dubious even in those politically incorrect days. Their unconventional approach to crime-fighting meant that they carried machine guns
in violin cases, took hoodlums into the desert for violent ‘chats’ and dangled thugs over bridges until they ‘squealed’.

The squad was formed in late 1946 when Los Angeles Police Department chiefs realised that corruption in the ranks was so rife that the LAPD was powerless to combat organised crime in the city. In those post-war years, 1,800 bookmakers, 600 brothels and 200 gambling parlours flourished, with raids thwarted by bent cops. One senior officer would warn racketeers of impending swoops by calling them and whistling down the phone.

A former US Marine named Willie Burns was the tough guy chosen to lead the unit that would target this endemic corruption. He recruited like-minded ‘heavies’ who continued to be officially posted on duty rosters at their old stations but instead ‘disappeared’ on ‘special duties’.

First recruit was a quiet undercover cop called Con Keeler, a World War Two veteran who walked with a leg iron because of a serious injury. A former radio mechanic, he was the team’s technical expert, designing bugging devices and planting them along with some of his trademark ‘souvenirs’. He once bugged a motel room, leaving a playing card on the pillow of a crooked guest. Since it was the ace of spades, the death symbol, the calling card had the desired effect and the villain fled town.

If Con Keeler was the brains, then ‘Jumbo’ Kennard was the brawn. A Texan giant, his first Gangster Squad call was to a barber who had tried to bribe a police officer to ignore his sideline, an illegal betting operation. Kennard trapped the barber in a corner while his colleagues trashed his salon – then lathered his head with soap and shaved the quaking shop owner with cut-throat razors. Against other targets, Kennard used to
employ his favourite scare tactic: dangling suspects from road bridges until they agreed to talk.

The third main member of the eight-man squad was a
clean-cut
, church-going detective named Jack O’Mara, who would lift suspects off the streets at gunpoint and drive them into the countryside, where he would interrogate them with a pistol to their ear.

To disguise their mission, the men of the Gangster Squad were based not in an office but in two dilapidated Ford cars. Armed to the teeth, they cruised the city. They carried violin cases with hidden tommy guns. They had spare cash to pay informers. They would smash up illicit businesses by acting as if they were members of rival criminal gangs, but they would never make arrests. Since they were ‘invisible’, their modus operandi was to set up a victim and then call in uniformed cops to make the arrest.

By these means, the squad forced many lesser criminals to flee Los Angeles. They then turned their attention to the bigger fish – targeting the Bugsy Siegel gang and, after he was shot dead in 1947, his successor, Mickey Cohen.

The squad’s principal task was to pin on Cohen the 1945 murder of a bookmaker named Maxie Shaman. In the hope of overhearing a rash admission, the squad dressed as workmen and drove a van onto vacant land near the gangster’s home. When Mickey and wife Lavonne went out for dinner, the cops began drilling noisily to divert the attention of his guards. Meanwhile, Con Keeler sprayed ammonia on himself to keep the guard dog at bay and crept into the house to place a microphone and transmitter in a wardrobe. Dissatisfied with the reception, he went back later and put another bug inside a television set.

The bug yielded no useful evidence, however, so the squad reverted to more intimidating tactics. They put false licence
plates on a car – indicating that it came from Illinois, home of the Chicago mobsters – and cruised slowly past Cohen’s haberdashery shop, raking his most treasured possession, his armoured Cadillac, with bullets. Mickey believed that he had been the target of an assassination bid by out-of-state rivals but merely stepped up his security and became more cautious.

While waiting for evidence to emerge against Cohen, the Gangster Squad turned to one of his rivals, Sicilian-born Jack Dragna, a former member of the Chicago Cosa Nostra and in the post-war years the boss of Los Angeles city’s largest Mafia family. His empire was based on gambling and prostitution and he worked in uneasy alliance with the new arrivals in town, Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. When Siegel was killed, Dragna vied with Cohen to take over Bugsy’s rackets. Dragna ordered several attempts on his rival’s life but Cohen managed to survive them all. When some of Dragna’s ‘soldiers’ were arrested for the bombing of Cohen’s home, Dragna briefly fled the state to avoid questioning but returned to brazen out the crisis and re-establish his leadership.

This blatant inter-gang warfare embarrassed the city authorities and the Gangster Squad was sent in to find any evidence that might stick against the Italian villain. They decided to entrap him on the grounds of his own ‘immorality’. The plan was to catch him engaged in any kind of behaviour which contravened California’s strict morality laws. To this end, Con Keeler broke into the apartment belonging to Dragna’s mistress, a 23-year-old secretary, and hid a bug in the headboard of her bed. They then switched off the power to the block, forcing the couple to have an early night.

This saucy subterfuge had the desired effect. The couple engaged in an offence against California’s then puritan morality
laws – performing oral sex, or ‘French love’ as it was termed. Dragna was brought to court and jailed for 30 days for a ‘lewd act’ of ‘moral turpitude’. LA district attorneys argued that this was sufficient grounds for having him sent back to Italy but he successfully fought deportation until his death of a heart attack in 1956.

Six years earlier, in 1950, the California Commission on Organized Crime had singled out Dragna as the head of a Syndicate that controlled major racketeering in the LA area. He was questioned in US Senate hearings but denied all accusations. His rival Mickey Cohen was also questioned but, unlike the low-profile Dragna, this flamboyant mobster’s more publicised business dealings opened him up to charges of tax evasion, for which he was jailed for four years and his armoured Cadillac confiscated. The conviction was a credit to the Gangster Squad, who had gleaned much of the evidence from his former bodyguard, Neal Hawkins, who, unbeknown to Cohen, had long been their paid informant.

It was unfortunate for Mickey Cohen that he had not heeded his old friend Bugsy Siegel’s advice – for the tax rap was the same offence that had led to the imprisonment of his former Chicago boss Al Capone two decades earlier. Further charges for tax evasion were brought against Cohen and in 1961 he was again locked up, this time for 14 years. While in Alcatraz he survived a murder attempt by a fellow inmate wielding an iron bar. He was freed in 1972 and soon diagnosed with stomach cancer. Mickey Cohen was 62 when he died in his sleep in 1976.