Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.'s Notorious Mobster

by Tere Tereba

Overview

Go deep into the L.A. underworld with the true story of one obsessive gangster’s unparalleled quest for privilege, power, and paydays

This biography of celebrity gangster Mickey Cohen digs past the sensational headlines to deliver a remarkable story of a man who captivated, corrupted, and terrorized Los Angeles for a generation.

When Bugsy Siegel was murdered, his henchman Mickey Cohen took over the criminal activity in Los Angeles. Mickey Cohen attained such power and dominance from the late 1940s until 1976 that he was a regular above-the-fold newspaper name, accumulating a remarkable count of more than 1,000 front-pages in Los Angeles papers alone, and was featured in hundreds of articles in national and international periodicals. His story and the history of mid-century L.A. are inextricably intertwined.

Mickey Cohen is a seductive, premium-octane blend of true crime and Hollywood that spins around a wildly eccentric mob boss. Author Tere Tereba delivers tales of high life, high drama, and highly placed politicians, among them RFK and Richard Nixon, as well as revelations about countless icons, including Shirley Temple, Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, and the Reverend Billy Graham. Meticulously researched, this rich tapestry presents a complete look at the Los Angeles underworld.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770410008
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	05/01/2012
Edition description:	No Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

TERE TEREBA is an award-winning fashion designer and journalist. She has written extensively for Interview, her work has been featured in Italian Vogue, and her account of Jim Morrison in Paris was selected by The Doors to appear in their book, The Doors: An Illustrated History. Tereba lives in Los Angeles, and you can find her online at TereTereba.com.

Read an Excerpt

Two years earlier, in 1947, Mickey Cohen had become Los Angeles’s most prominent underworld figure. Standing five-foot-five in his custom-made elevator shoes, the pudgy, squat-legged former prizefighter was now as much a part of the local color as movie stars, palm trees, and smog. Having grown into a figure of immense fascination to the public, his exploits were constant headline-makers. L.A.’s Capone – he seemed able to get away with murder. Many assassinations were ascribed to him, and in the past year alone, there had been multiple heavily publicized attempts on his life. Cunning, ruthless, and flamboyant, at thirty-five, Mickey Cohen was at the center of an ongoing underworld war and major political upheaval.

Police, political figures, and members of the underworld had all heard the story: Cohen was again slated for assassination. The local Mafia wanted him dead, while another rival offered an apartment house as compensation for accomplishing the deed. A cadre of rogue cops had vowed to kill him, and members of his own gang were eager to displace him. Threatening to end the careers of an array of LAPD brass and prominent officials, he was scheduled to appear before a grand jury investigating police corruption.

After dining with a lobbyist considered to be California’s political kingmaker, Mickey turned up at Sherry’s. It was common knowledge the no-frills, smoke-filled restaurant was his favorite last-round hangout. Resplendent in an impeccably tailored pigeon gray suit, he settled into his regular spot, booth #12. Back to the wall, he sat surrounded by members of the press. The journalists he entertained were following him, anticipating high drama. While satisfying his addiction to chocolate ice cream, Mickey held court, kibitzing with them in his unique patois of fractured grammar and four-syllable words. Florabel Muir, the veteran newswoman who had become his covert advocate, asked him if it was dangerous to be clubbing.

“Not as long as you people are around,” the mobster told her. “Even a crazy man wouldn’t take a chance shooting where a reporter might get hit.” Knocking wood, he added, “You’re too hot.”

It was nearing 4 a.m. when plans for his exit began. Flanking the exit were plainclothes police, a sergeant from LAPD’s Gangster Squad, and Special Agent Harry Cooper, the high-ranking state officer who, in a stunning move, had recently been assigned – by California’s attorney general – as Cohen’s bodyguard. Seeing the lawmen at the door, journalist Muir jokingly said to them, “What are you standing out here for? Trying to get yourself shot?”

Given an all-clear signal, Cohen and his party, accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards from both sides of the law, moved onto the neon-lit Strip. Muir lagged behind, stopping to buy the morning edition of the Examiner. As she picked up the paper, the journalist heard a volley, then another. Looking out the door, what she saw unfolded like a movie.

A few feet away, a screaming man and young woman lay sprawled on the sidewalk. As the fusillade continued, she watched Cohen, blood darkening the shoulder of his jacket, shout commands. Then the state officer was hit. Clutching his stomach, Special Agent Cooper was still gripping his revolver as Cohen’s men struggled to pull him into a car. The wounded mob boss took charge, hoisting the hulking cop into the back seat as the big sedan roared into the night.

This was the sixth of eleven attempts on the Hollywood mobster’s charmed and violent life. Nearly thirty years later, at the end of nearly sixty years of crime, Mickey Cohen would die peacefully in his sleep, outliving many formidable assassins and all his prominent enemies, as well as his legendary sponsors, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, and Lucky Luciano, as the most brazen and colorful gangster of them all.

Table of Contents

Prologue a Dangerous Place 1

Act I The California Wildcat

1 Boyle Heights Boychik 7

2 School of Hard Knocks 14

3 The Coasters 29

4 Fields of Manna 39

5 Young Blood 51

6 Picked from the Chorus 60

7 Hollywood Byzantine 72

Act II King of The Sunset Strip

8 Puttin'on the Dog 83

9 A Thousand Hinky Plays 100

10 High Jingo 109

11 Smog Alert 122

12 Star-Crossed 137

13 Bum-Steered and Bum-Rapped 141

14 Tsuris 150

15 Death and Taxes 162

16 Judas and Iago 172

Act III The Long Goodbye

17 Shifting Winds 179

18 Brave New World 187

19 Sacrificial Lamb 196

20 Ink Junky 207

21 The Oscar 215

22 Bombshells and Bobby 233

23 End Games 248

24 Relic 263

Cast of Characters 279

Notes on the Text 294

Selected Bibliography 312

Photo Credits 317

Index 318

What People are Saying About This

Rikki Klieman

Mickey Cohen is electric — filled with detail that makes your senses tingle. . . . If you love The Godfather, The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire, run — don't walk — to read this book." —Rikki Klieman, attorney, TV legal analyst, and bestselling author, Fairy Tales Can Come True

Jonathan Eig

Tere Tereba gives the gangster the biography he has long deserved — an intense, straight-shooting, rocket-fast read, full of gossip, gore, and great research. Cohen's life is a fascinating slice of American history, and Tereba captures it poignantly."
--Jonathan Eig, author, Get Capone

From the Publisher

"Tereba brings the bantamweight crook back to vivid life in this biography. . . . This is a remarkable biography, in that Tereba takes a long-gone, mostly forgotten criminal and through her lively re-creation of the '20s and '30s, the decades in which Cohen was formed, and the later years when he ruled, makes you care." —-Booklist

Lee Server

An arresting, high-speed account of Hollywood's homegrown superstar of crime —dangerous, outrageous, bulletproof Mickey Cohen, the man the mob could not kill. Tere Tereba writes a white-hot true crime classic."
--Lee Server, author, Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing

Kevin Starr

This highly factual, rapidly paced biography chronicles not only tough-guy poster boy Mickey, but the City Noir whose appetites and ambitions he serviced, exploited, and, paradoxically, exemplified."
--Kevin Starr, professor of history, University of Southern California

Gus Russo

With great style and boatloads of new information, Tere Tereba has crafted a page-turner about the greatest gangster LA has ever seen. . . . Few lived on the edge as long as Cohen, and fewer still earned a biography this entertaining.
--Gus Russo, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, The Outfit and Supermob

T. J. English

In Mickey Cohen, Tere Tereba brings to life the pugnacious nature of a hoodlum unique in the annals of American gangsterism. . . . Tereba captures the essence of the man and his times with insight and flair."
--T.J. English, New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne and The Westies

Editorial Reviews

Tereba brings the bantamweight crook back to vivid life ... This is a remarkable biography.” — Booklist

“Ms. Tereba brings flair and a tone of appalled fascination to her thorough and lively study of ‘the man who plundered Los Angeles.’” — The Wall Street Journal

“Tereba spent more than 10 years researching and writing her book; she tells Cohen’s story swiftly and assuredly. Her page-turning and entertaining narrative neither glamorizes nor judges its subject.” — Film Noir Blonde

“Rough, florid, lively, and detailed, with plenty of celebrities in supporting roles and lots of Hollywood scandal. Tereba sums Cohen up as ‘a dangerous man, full of bluster, violence, charm, greed, grandiosity, obsession, deception, chutzpah, and occasionally self-realization.’ Unlike many of his brother gangsters, Cohen loved the limelight, so Tereba has had plenty of material to draw upon.” —The Dispatch

“As a study of a man of violence-fittingly illustrated throughout, with a beneficial Cast of Characters, ample end notes, and Selected Bibliography — Mickey Cohen is a meticulously-documented biography and incisive social history of breadth and depth. It is a cohesive, cogent, and well-structured exploration of both an obsessive mobster and his inextricable link with the city in which he made his home and caused some harm.” — Seattle PI

From the Publisher

Kate Reading delivers the story with the unwavering ear of a television reporter. Reading is so good that listeners won’t notice that a woman is playing the roles of hardened gangsters who would as easily kill a man as talk to him.”

AudioFile

"[An] absorbing and gritty account of Cohen’s rise from a tough as nails pugilist from East LA to a seemingly untouchable gangster.”

HollywoodOutbreak.com

Tereba brings the bantamweight crook back to vivid life in this biography, along with the night clubs and race tracks he frequented and the no-holds-barred LA in which he flourished…This is a remarkable biography, in that Tereba takes a long-gone, mostly forgotten criminal and through her lively re-creation of the ‘20s and ‘30s, the decades in which Cohen was formed, and the later years when he ruled, makes you care.”

Booklist

This is a slashing good book—a razor-sharp bio of malevolent macher Mickey the C: the confounding Kingpin of LA crime. Buy this book now—it’ll hang you out to dry!!”

New York Times bestselling author of Perfidia James Ellroy

The author does a superb job of tracing the ins and outs of Hollywood’s gang world in the 1940s and ‘50s.”

Wall Street Journal

Tere Tereba gives up the charismatic LA mobster Mickey Cohen.”

Vanity Fair

Tereba brings the bantamweight crook back to vivid life in this biography, along with the night clubs and race tracks he frequented and the no-holds-barred L.A. in which he flourished. This is a remarkable biography.

Booklist