Paul Lieberman is a feature writer who spent 24 years covering a
variety of beats at the Los Angeles Times. He has won a
fistful of awards plus a Nieman Fellowship and was on two reporting
teams that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Back in 1992 the paper had just run a story about how the
Intelligence unit of the Los Angeles Police Department was digging
up dirt on various celebrities and politicians around town while
monitoring organized crime. The piece said the practice started
back in the 1950s. A few days later, Lieberman received a call from
a dissenting reader. “A quavering old man’s voice on the other end
said to me, ‘You’ve got it wrong. That goes back to right after
World War II and the Gangster Squad.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked
him. ‘Because I was there.’”
So began a 15-year reportorial odyssey in which Lieberman
reconstructed the saga of the LAPD’s “Gangster Squad,” which
started as an eight-man unit in 1946 and eventually expanded to
more than 50 members before being folded into the tamer
Intelligence Division after the U.S. Supreme Court placed
restrictions on searches and seizures. The Squad’s mission was to
investigate, harass, and otherwise make life difficult for the
mobsters who were starting to filter into Los Angeles from other
parts of the country. Chief among them was Mickey Cohen, a
5-foot-5-inch former flyweight boxer who wore a Star of David on
his trunks and was threatening to bring Chicago-style crime to the
West Coast’s “Garden of Eden.”
Gangster
Squad, which just opened with Sean Penn as Mickey, is
supposedly based on Lieberman’s fifteen-year labor. “Inspired by a
True Story” is what it says in the opening titles, but at the end
of the final crawl there’s another notice saying, “The characters
depicted in this film are fictional and any resemblance to any real
persons… etc.” The latter comes much closer to the truth.
The fellow on the other end of the line that day was John
O’Mara, a World War II code-breaker who had reclaimed his job with
the LAPD in 1946. One day O’Mara and 18 other officers were called
into a room and told they were candidates for an elite squad that
would pursue and harass gangsters, working pretty much on their
own, in secret and without badges. After some sorting out, eight
took the assignment. “They were given two old unmarked police cars
with rusted-out floorboards,” says Lieberman, whose
seven-part series finally ran in 2008, followed by a book,
Gangster Squad, just published by St. Martin’s
Press. “Whenever they drove through a puddle, they had to hold
their feet up to avoid getting splashed.”
O’Mara was one of two quarterbacks. The other was Willie Burns,
a gunnery officer from World War I who had participated in the “Bum
Blockade,” when Los Angeles tried to prevent hoboes from migrating
to California during the Depression. Jerry Thomas had a
photographic memory and could come out of a bar after a two-hour
undercover operation and recite the entire conversation. Con Keeler
was an electronics genius who could manufacture bugs out of
hearing-aid parts and telephone diaphragms and relay the signal to
a garage listening post. “For ten years he refused to talk to me,”
says Lieberman. “Then one day he opened up and never stopped after
that.”
Finally, there was Jumbo Kennard who, the son of a Texas
constable, had worked as a roughneck in the Oklahoma oil fields. At
six-foot-four, he could pick people up by placing his giant hands
over their heads. “It was basically a few smart guys plus a lot of
muscle,” says Lieberman. Later came Sgt. Jerry Wooters, a roguish
vice cop and ladies’ man, portrayed in the movie by Ryan Gosling.
Seeing the war coming, Wooters had signed up to shoot instructional
films for a reserve unit at a movie studio, confident he would
spend the war on a Hollywood lot. But he made the mistake of
arresting a judge’s nephew and, in the manner of that era, was
immediately reassigned to taking reconnaissance photos out the door
of a bomber over the Pacific. Twice he was shot down but rescued by
American ships before meeting the Japanese and certain death.
If they were a colorful crew, so was their main adversary,
Cohen. A poor boy from Brooklyn, he had started fighting at age 6
to defend his newsboy’s turf. At 19 he made his way across the
country, fighting professionally, until finally meeting the Capone
crowd in Chicago. They signed him on as a foot soldier but his big
break came when Meyer Lansky sent him to L.A. to help Bugsy Siegel
set up gambling operations. But Lansky soon became suspicious that
Siegel was squandering his money on the lavish Flamingo Hotel in
Las Vegas and had Siegel rubbed out. One story has it that Cohen
was so enraged he charged into the Roosevelt Hotel where he thought
the assassins were hiding and fired a few shots into the ceiling,
demanding their appearance. Nobody responded and when the cops
arrived a few minutes later he fled. That was his most flagrant act
of public violence.
Not that Cohen shrunk from confrontation. When fellow bookie
Maxie Shaman stormed into the paint store that fronted for a horse
betting operation, Cohen put a bullet in him. He told the cops it
was self-defense and was never prosecuted. In Los Angeles and other
cities of that era, the rule was, “It’s alright as long as they
only kill each other.” The gangsters could shoot it out among
themselves but if the bodies started turning up on the street, the
law cracked down.
Through the late 1940s and 1950s, the Gangster Squad harassed
and intimidated various hoods, trying to keep things at a minimum.
One favorite tactic was to take a newcomer from Chicago or Rhode
Island into the hills overlooking LA, put him on his knees and
stick a gun in his ear. “Do you feel a sneeze coming on?” O’Mara
would ask his charge. “A… real… loud… sneeze.” Then he would tell
him to get out of town. “It was the most colorful piece of genuine
dialogue that survived into the final script,” says Lieberman. But
Josh Brolin, playing O’Mara, didn’t like the line and so it was
dropped. So much for being inspired by true stories.
By the mid-1950s, Cohen was aspiring to a respectable notoriety.
He allowed Life magazine to do a feature on his home and
pet dogs and Mike Wallace had Cohen as one of the first guests on
his new TV show. But the squad had laid a trap. O’Mara had gotten
one of Mickey’s guards to sneak seven guns out of the house on the
pretense that they needed cleaning and test firing. Then he etched
initials underneath the butt plates so they could be tied to
Mickey. Almost ten years later, two of those guns turned up when
Jack “Enforcer” Whalen was gunned down in a public restaurant.
Everyone at the table exonerated Mickey and one of his henchman
confessed to the shooting, but the etched guns were found nearby
and Cohen was tried for conspiracy. Sitting in a barber’s chair
awaiting the sequestered jury’s verdict, he famously remarked,
“What a great country. They lock up the jury and let me go free.”
The jury hung.
Over the years, the Squad became so familiar with the mobsters
that they liked to play pranks on them. “One of their favorites was
to find an Illinois license plate, stick it on an old unmarked car
and have a pair of Squad members drive into the neighborhood of
Cohen’s storefront,” says Lieberman. “They would park a block away
with their hats pulled down over their faces and wait for Cohen’s
foot soldiers to start checking them out. Then they would pull out
and roar past the store, waving their Tommy guns. It was just to
mess with Cohen’s head.”
The spying and harassing continued until the 1950s, when one of
Wooters’ warrantless buggings was challenged in the California
Supreme Court. Anticipating the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1961 Mapp
vs. Ohio, the California judges threw out the evidence as
illegally tainted. It was the beginning of the end. “They knew
their days were over,” says Lieberman. “O’Mara said that dogging
criminals wasn’t fun anymore.”
An interesting piece of American noir from another era, right?
Now let’s see what happens in the movie,
On the big screen, the tight-knit group that roughed up suspects
and conducted illegal searches has been transformed into
another gang that rampages across Los
Angeles busting into gambling parlors with Tommy guns and shooting
indiscriminately at patrons. In one scene they burst from behind
the stage at a nightclub where a Carmen Miranda look-alike is
singing a Latin number. Another scene had the bad guys luring the
cops into Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where they fired at them
through the movie screen. That scene got yanked after James Eagan
Holmes did almost the same thing in Aurora six weeks before the
film’s first scheduled opening in September. The premier was
postponed until last week.
Meanwhile, Cohen, who undoubtedly killed at least one fellow
hood but liked to claim more, has been turned into a contemporary
Vlad the Impaler. In the opening scene he has a Chicago gangster
torn in half by two opposing cars the way people used to be
quartered by horses during the Middle Ages. Director Ruben
Fleischer collected a teenager audience with Zombieland
and apparently didn’t want lose them to The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre. During the remainder of the film, Penn: 1)
incinerates a clumsy lackey in an elevator shaft, 2) orders his
boys to put an electric drill through the head of a rival gangster
(“You know the drill,” he tells them), and 3) mows down street
crowds, including an innocent newsboy whose death finally persuades
Gosling/Sgt. Wooters to join the squad. All this is carried out
amid the predictable car chases, fiery smash-ups, and the explosion
of a truck carrying a (fictional) heroin shipment that levels half
a block of Chinatown. (Cohen was not known to deal in drugs.)
Instead of just a crime boss trying to muscle other mobsters out of
the bookmaking and extortion rackets, Cohen becomes a Batman-style
overlord trying to bring the whole city to its knees.
In the final scene — perhaps inspired by Cohen’s putting two
bullets in the ceiling of the Roosevelt — the Gangster Squad
launches a full-scale attack on Cohen’s hideout in the historic
Park Plaza Hotel. Blessedly, the hotel staff and guests have gone
home for the weekend, leaving the rival gangs to shoot it out.
Their Tommy guns bring down chandeliers and shred the Christmas
decorations, killing at least a dozen, until — inevitably — O’Mara
and Cohen finally duke it out with fists. All this to serve Cohen
with an arrest warrant.
I came out of the movie theater with the same feeling I used to
get reading the old horror comics of the 1950s. Until the industry
voluntarily regulated itself in 1954 with the Comics Code
Authority, it had turned out “comics” where bug-eyed victims would
have their flesh picked clean by piranhas or their heads bashed in
with baseballs. My elderly piano teacher had a stash in his parlor
and every week while my sister was taking her lesson I would be
hypnotically drawn into the pile where I pored over sickening
scenes of blood and mayhem until I was nauseous. I always left
saying, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”
So where in the annals of American history has there ever been a
scene where rogue cops and gangsters shot it out for twenty minutes
in the lobby of a major hotel without the regular police even
bothering to show up? The answer is simple: 1) in the movies, and
2) in the minds of teenage boys, the sickest of whom will one day
decide to act out such a scene himself. O’Mara’s granddaughter
has written a long protest on Reddit complaining of the
misrepresentations, but who cares? Hollywood does what Hollywood
does. Asked if the industry could have made a more realistic film
out of his 15 years of research, Lieberman says, “If a studio
spends $75 million, they’ve got the right to make the film they
want.”
“Think Global, Kill Local” was the poster for one movie showing
the day Adam Lanza shot up Sandy Beach Elementary. In Hollywood,
even Hansel and Gretel are now vengeful superheroes. Recently about
25 movie stars made a TV commercial in which they appeared in quick
succession pleading for gun control to “end the violence” and
“protect the children.” On the Internet, some clever wag has
interspersed the ad with movie scenes in which the same actors
and actresses spout their love of guns and plaster the landscape
with bullets. It’s good entertainment. It also suggests that if you
want to stop the next lunatic from killing a dozen or more
innocents, the best place to start might be in that moral sewer on
the west side of Los Angeles.
