The Real Mickey Cohen Was The Most Feared Mobster Behind 'Gangster Squad' Movie

[00:00:00]Gunman walked into his shop carrying shotguns. They came to erase the king of Los Angeles. He survived because he was washing his hands. August 18th, 1948.

[00:00:12]A gleaming men's wear shop at 8804 Sunset Boulevard, the storefront for the biggest rackets in Los Angeles. The boss had stepped into the washroom seconds earlier to scrub his hands, a compulsion he could not control. In 2013, Hollywood turned this world into a film called Gangster Squad with Josh Brolan and Ryan Gosling hunting a snarling crime lord through a neon Los Angeles. Hollywood gave you a comic book. Here's what actually happened. The man in the washroom was Mickey Cohen, 5' 5 in of failed boxer with 200 tailor-made suits and hands he scrubbed raw dozens of times a day. By the end, the attempts on his life would reportedly number 11.

[00:00:57]Shotguns, bombs, vanishing bodyguards.

[00:01:01]Every single one failed. And in half a century of rackets, no jury ever convicted him of a single violent crime.

[00:01:09]This is the story of the news boy who inherited Los Angeles the night Bugsy Seagull died. Of a war fought against the mafia and the police at the same time. And of the one enemy Mickey Cohen never saw coming because it carried a briefcase instead of a gun. Because here is the question hanging over all of it.

[00:01:29]Everybody in this story wanted Mickey Cohen dead. The mafia, his rivals, half the police department. So, how did the most shot at man in America die peacefully in his own bed? To answer that, start with a fatherless kid selling newspapers. Meer Harris Cohen was born on September 4th, 1913 in New York City, the youngest of six children of Jewish immigrants from Kiev. His father died in 1915 when Mickey was a toddler. His mother, Fanny, packed the family west and settled in Boille Heights, the immigrant heart of East Los Angeles. By 8 years old, he was a news boy, hustling papers at the corner of Sto and Brooklyn and keeping the coins.

[00:02:13]By nine, he had already been sent to reform school for petty theft. And by some accounts, he was soon running Prohibition gin out of the back of a family drugstore. School never took. For most of his life, he could barely read, a secret he guarded like money. What he could do was fight. At 15, he moved to Cleveland to train boxing as a featherweight under the alias Irish Mickey Cohen into the early 1930s.

[00:02:39]On June 12th, 1931, he climbed into the ring with Tommy Paul, a future world featherweight champion, and Paul knocked him out cold inside the first round. The record shows a fighter with heart and a ceiling. So, he took the skill set somewhere it paid better. In Cleveland and then Chicago, Cohen worked the rackets in Prohibition's dying days, running card games and dice for men connected to Al Capone's outfit and sticking up gambling joints on the side.

[00:03:11]Understand how reckless that was.

[00:03:13]Robbing protected games is how ambitious men end up in rivers. Instead, it got him a reputation. Fearless, crazy, useful. Cohen claimed for the rest of his life that he met the great Capone himself. The timeline says probably not because by then the government had already taken Capone off the board. Not with bullets, with a tax ledger. Hold on to that detail. It is the ending of this story. Hiding in the beginning. In 1937, the syndicate sent him west to Los Angeles to work under the man building the mob's empire on the coast. Benjamin Seagull, movie star, handsome, syndicate royalty out of New York, charming over dinner, homicidal by dessert, and so allergic to his nickname that men were afraid to say Bugsy in the same room.

[00:04:06]Seagull needed muscle with brains for his bookmaking wars. And the little boxer from Boille Heights became his strong arm, leaning on bookies, knocking over rival operations, learning the anatomy of the Los Angeles rackets from the inside. In 1940, Mickey married Leavonne, a striking, patient woman who would spend 18 years pretending her husband sold suits. He babyed his dogs like children. He tipped waiters like a man burning evidence. and he watched Seagull run an empire the way an apprentice watches a master right up until the night of June 20th, 1947 when the apprenticeship ended with rifle fire through a Beverly Hills window. Seagull was on the sofa at 810 North Lynen Drive reading the Los Angeles Times when a 30 caliber military carbine opened up through the window.

[00:05:00]The rounds tore into his head and chest.

[00:05:03]One of them blew his left eye clean across the room. The Flamingo casino he had built in the desert had swallowed some $6 million of syndicate money, and the syndicate had stopped believing his receipts. 20 minutes after the shooting, mob representatives walked into the Flamingo in Las Vegas and calmly announced new management. Nobody was ever charged. Mickey Cohen stepped over his mentor's memory and took control of Seagull's gambling interests across Southern California. The kid who once hawkked newspapers now ran the richest rackets in the fastest growing city in America. But Los Angeles already had a mafia boss and nobody had consulted him.

[00:05:45]Jack Dragna, Sicilianborn, head of the Los Angeles crime family, a man of the old ways in a city that ignored him. For years, the Eastern Syndicate had treated him like a doorman in his own territory.

[00:05:58]And now a loud cameraloving Jewish exboxer had inherited the crown jewels over his head. Dragna decided to settle at the old country. What followed became known as the Battle of the Sunset Strip.

[00:06:12]The first serious try was the habeddasherie. The scene that opened this story. August 18th, 1948. Shotguns through the front door of 8804. Sunset.

[00:06:24]Hookie Rothman dead among the ties. Two more Cohen men bleeding on the floor and the target himself alive because of soap and water. The police booked Cohen and his crew for questioning as if being shot at were his crime. Then let them go. Nobody talked. Nobody was ever convicted. Dragnaw kept trying. That June, gunfire found Netty Herbert, the loyal hand who had stepped into dead Hookie Rothman's job outside Herbert's own home. He survived it. Then came July 20th, 1949. Outside Sherry's restaurant on the strip, Cohen walked out with his entourage into a wall of shotgun fire from across the street. Herbert went down and died. 6 days later, a state agent named Harry Cooper, assigned by the attorney general of California to protect Cohen, took a bullet in the stomach. Sit with that sentence. The state of California was officially guarding a gangster and the guard got shot. A young woman named D. David was wounded. The columnist Florel Mure, Cohen's pet journalist, was grazed.

[00:07:34]Mickey himself took a slug in the shoulder and lived. That August, two of his men, Frank Nicoli and Dave Ogul, simply vanished, and their disappearance reportedly cost Cohen $75,000 in forfeited bail bonds. The war was eating his crew and his cash. Then Dragna went to explosives. February 6th, 1950, a bomb went off at Cohen's house at 513 Moreno Avenue in Brentwood in the middle of the night with Mickey and Leavonne inside. The blast wrecked part of the house and shattered windows down the block. The Coins crawled out of the wreckage essentially unheard. Reports at the time credited blind luck and the layout of the house for deflecting the force. Count it however you want. By 1950, the attempts on Mickey Cohen's life were stacking toward their reported total of 11, and every one of them had failed. The film compresses this entire war into a few loud months of 1949. The real one burned for years, and the mafia lost it. Now, here's what the movie war can't show you. how the money actually worked. Cohen's kingdom ran on the Racewire. Every bookie in America needed race results within seconds because a customer with faster information could bet a race that was already over, control the wire, and every bookmaker in the city either subscribes or goes blind. The syndicate had muscled its way into the western wire business for exactly this reason. And after Seagull, the bookmaking world of Los Angeles answered to Cohen. His people collected from bookmaking operations across the city. Week after week, a private tax on an industry that could not call the police. On top of it sat his own bedding commission office, moving money with some of the biggest layoff men in the country. And the whole thing wore a suit. That storefront at 8804 Sunset held a habernasherie, a jewelry store, and a tailor shop at street level with the real business upstairs. Federal files later described the place with a straight face, a bulletproof steel door, a bulletproof sedan, and a nominal amount of actual sales. Cohen played shopkeeper in tailor-made suits that reportedly ran $300 a piece, 200 of them in his closets, hung next to what he liked to call a welle equipped arsenal.

[00:10:02]He put flood lights and alarms on the Brentwood house. He showered for an hour at a time and washed his hands until they cracked. He fed columnists, posed for photographers, and tipped like royalty.

[00:10:15]Mickey Cohen chose to be famous. Rich on camera, poor on paper. Somewhere downtown, quiet men with adding machines were watching the news reels and doing arithmetic. The bullets had all missed.

[00:10:29]The arithmetic would not. Because Dragna was only one of the armies hunting him, the other one carried badges. In 1946, the Los Angeles Police Department quietly created a unit that appeared on no organizational chart. Eight men, two battered Fords, no office. The gangster squad. Their mandate, delivered with a wink, was to keep the eastern mobs from owning Los Angeles the way they owned other cities. And nobody asked how.

[00:11:01]Sergeant Jack Omera was one of them. A church-going family man with a salesman's hat and a habit of driving hoods up into the hills above the city for conversations nobody ever filed a report about. Sergeant Jerry Wutters was another, a war veteran, charming, cynical, allergic to rules. You have met both men if you watched the film because it kept their real names. What had changed was their weapons. The real squad's deadliest tool was not a Tommy gun. It was a microphone. Here is how the counter operation worked. The opportunity was Cohen's own fortress of a house, wired for comfort and full of appliances. The execution came from the squad's electronics man, who got a listening device inside by the men's own accounts hidden within Cohen's television set. For years, the talk inside the king's castle traveled out to cops in headphones. And what the listeners learned about how Mickey lived, spent, and lied did not stay in a drawer. It drifted toward the same breed of men who had taken down Capone, the taxmen. The squeeze turned national in November 1950 when Senator Kayover's crime committee put the rackets under a national spotlight and hauled Cohen in front of it. Under oath, the king of the Los Angeles underworld explained his lifestyle with a straight face. He lived, he said in effect, on borrowed money, some $300,000 in loans from generous friends whose names escaped him. The country laughed.

[00:12:35]The revenue man did not. In June 1951, a federal jury convicted him of evading taxes on roughly $156,000 of income worth close to 2 million today. The man 11 hit squads could not touch was carried off by accountants and the newspapers barely knew how to write it. He walked out in October 1955 and came home a celebrity. This is the strangest stretch of the whole story. He ran floral shops and paint stores. He drove an ice cream van down San Vicenti Boulevard in Brentwood. One of the most feared men in California handing cones to children. He went on live national television with Mike Wallace in 1957 and insulted the chief of the LAPD so recklessly that the network reportedly paid the chief tens of thousands to settle. He struck up a public friendship with the evangelist Billy Graham, told the press he was very high on the Christian way of life and let the country wonder whether the gangster had found God. The preacher got headlines.

[00:13:40]Mickey got cover. Nobody got a conversion. The women and the wreckage piled up around him. Leavonne finally divorced him in 1958.

[00:13:50]His girlfriend Liz Renee chose three years in jail over informing on him. and his bodyguard, Johnny Stampinato, a handsome hustler romancing the actress Lana Turner, was stabbed to death on April 4th, 1958.

[00:14:07]By Turner's 14-year-old daughter during a violent argument, the courts called it justifiable. Cohen paid for the funeral, then leaked Lana Turner's love letters to the newspapers. Even grief was leverage, but the trap was closing from two directions at once. Sergeant Wutters, the rule-breaking half of the gangster squad, had cultivated a source deep inside the bookmaking world. Jack Whan, a mountain of a man they called the enforcer, a debt collector so feared he reportedly worked with nothing but his fists. The cop and the muscle became something close to friends. That alliance is straight out of the record.

[00:14:46]And it gives the film its best subplot.

[00:14:49]Remember Whan's name? He has one scene left in this story and he does not survive it. On December 2nd, 1959, Whan walked into Randelli's restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks to collect a gambling debt from Cohen's table. One 38 caliber bullet met him. He died on the dining room floor. A Cohen man named Sam Losno swore the gun and the shot were his alone. A jury convicted Loso. An appeals court threw it out. Prosecutors eventually put Cohen himself on trial for the killing and could not make it stick. No conviction ever for anything violent. But while the murder cases sputtered, federal agents were finishing a different kind of file.

[00:15:34]And this one had receipts, all of them.

[00:15:37]The second tax case landed in 1961, and it was built like a fortress. The government had traced the borrowed money that never got repaid, the front businesses that never sold anything, the old unpaid assessments running past $135,000, and a lifestyle no ice cream van could explain. A parade of witnesses walked the jury through years of spending, guilty again. This time, the judge handed down 15 years, reported at the time as the heaviest federal tax sentence in American history. And they did not send him somewhere gentle. They sent him to the rock Alcatres.

[00:16:16]Inmate number 15, 18. Doing his time on an island built for men exactly like him. Then he pulled off one last piece of magic. In 1962, his lawyers sprang him on an appeal bond, making Mickey Cohen, by most accounts, the only prisoner ever bailed off Alcatres. The magic did not hold. The conviction stood. The island prison shut down in 1963 and the system shipped him to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. August 14th, 1963.

[00:16:51]Cohen is watching television in the prison day room. He does not see the inmate named Burl Estus Macdonald coming up behind him. He does not see the length of iron pipe. The first blow caves in the back of his skull. The room becomes noise and blood and then guards.

[00:17:06]Surgeons work on him for hours and save his life, but they cannot save the rest.

[00:17:11]Partial paralysis.

[00:17:13]Years of relearning how to stand, how to walk, how to hold a fork. The beating took seconds. The damage lasted the rest of his life. And then Mickey Cohen did the most Mickey Cohen thing imaginable.

[00:17:26]He sued the United States government for failing to protect him inside its own prison. And he won $110,000.

[00:17:36]The IRS seized nearly all of it before he could spend a dime. Even his victories paid his enemies. In January 1972, they finally let him go. A slow, careful man on damaged legs. Two decades after his first fall and a lifetime after Boil Heights. Jack Dragna, the man behind the bombs and the shotguns, never got his city back and died of a heart attack in a Hollywood motel room in February 1956. Bugsy Seagull got a closed casket and a legend. Jack Whan got a restaurant floor. Hookie Rothman and Netty Herbert got the graves meant for their boss. The men of the gangster squad grew old in silence. Their war officially non-existent until a journalist coaxed the story out of the survivors half a century later. And Mickey Cohen, hunted by all of them, toured the talk shows of the 1970s as an elder statesman of a vanished underworld, then died in his sleep on July 29th, 1976.

[00:18:40]Stomach cancer. 62 years old in his own bed. The most shot at man in America was never once killed by anybody. So, what is the verdict on the film? Here is what it got right. The Gangster Squad existed, formed in 1946 as a small off-the-books LAPD unit. Omera and Wutters were real sergeants, and the film kept their names. The bugging of Cohen's world was real, down to a microphone hidden inside a television set. And the alliance between Wutters and Whan came straight from the record.

[00:19:14]Now, here is what it changed. The love story at the center of the film is an invention. The blazing hotel shootouts never happened and a decade of war is crushed into 1949.

[00:19:28]But the biggest distortion is the ending. The film finishes with Cohen beaten in a fist fight and put away for life for murdering one of his own men.

[00:19:37]The real Mickey Cohen was never convicted of a violent crime in his entire life. Paperwork took him down twice. The same weapon that took the Capone he woripped. and he walked out of prison in 1972 and died free. Hollywood needed justice to look like a punch.

[00:19:55]History delivered it as an audit, which leaves the only epitap that fits. Los Angeles never figured out how to kill Mickey Cohen. It could only build him.

[00:20:07]If this one changed how you see the rackets, subscribe because the vault of real stories behind famous crime films runs deep. and drop a comment naming the figure you want covered next. The loud ones and the quiet ones all left records.