On a warm Los Angeles night in 1949, a man walked out of Sherry’s restaurant on Sunset Strip and into a hail of gunfire. He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a politician. He was a 5’5 former boxer from Boil Heights who had clawed his way from the slums of East Los Angeles to the absolute summit of American organized crime.
His name was Mickey Cohen. The bullets missed him that night. They almost always did. But the world he had built, the empire of bookmaking, extortion, and glamour he had stitched together beneath the glittering surface of post-war Hollywood, was already beginning to unravel. This is the story of how a Jewish kid from the streets became the most feared and most photographed gangster in American history, and what it cost him.
Mayor Harris Cohen was born on September 4, 1913 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. He was the sixth child of Max and Fanny Cohen, immigrants from Ukraine who had arrived in America carrying nothing but the conviction that the new world owed them something. It didn’t take long for that conviction to be tested.
Max Cohen died when Mickey was just 6 years old, leaving Fanny alone with six children and no income in one of the most punishing neighborhoods in the United States. Brownsville in 1919 was not a place that rewarded patience. It was a neighborhood of pushcart vendors and sweat shop workers, of men who came home smelling of fish and women who stretched a dollar until it screamed.
Crime was not a temptation in Brownsville. It was infrastructure. The streets operated according to their own economic logic, and young Mickey Cohen absorbed that logic before he could read. Fanny moved the family to Los Angeles when Mickey was around three, settling in the Boil Heights neighborhood on the east side of the city.
If Brownsville was hard, Boil Heights was its West Coast cousin, dense, immigrant, and alive with the kind of low-level hustle that kept families fed when legitimate work ran dry. Mickey would later say that he could not remember a time when he wasn’t running some kind of angle. He sold newspapers as a small child, not because his mother asked him to, but because the money felt good in his hand.
By the time he was 8 years old, Mickey Cohen was already operating outside the rules. He ran bootleg whiskey for local dealers during prohibition, navigating the streets of East Los Angeles with a confidence that unnerved adults twice his age. He was small. He would never grow past 5′ 5 in. But he carried himself like someone who had decided at a very early age that size was irrelevant.
What mattered was nerve, and Mickey Cohen had nerve to spare. His first real brush with boxing came around age nine when he started fighting in amateur bouts around Los Angeles. The ring made sense to him in a way that school never had. It was direct. You hurt someone or they hurt you. There were no ambiguities, no teachers asking questions he couldn’t answer, no social codes he had to pretend to understand.
Inside the ropes, everything was honest. He was good at it, too. Quick-handed, aggressive, with a punching power that surprised opponents who underestimated his frame. School ended for Mickey Cohen somewhere around the fourth grade. He was not expelled so much as he simply stopped going, and no one in his world had the authority or the inclination to force him back.
The streets of Boil Heights became his classroom, and the curriculum was brutally practical. how to read people, how to collect money, how to make yourself respected when the normal tools of respectability were unavailable to you. By the time he was a teenager, Mickey Cohen was not heading toward organized crime.
He was already inside it. Boxing took Mickey Cohen out of Los Angeles for the first time in his life. And what he found beyond the city limits changed everything about his ambitions. He turned professional as a boxer in the early 1930s, fighting in the lightweight division with a style that reflected his personality entirely, aggressive, relentless, and not particularly interested in defense.
He was willing to take two punches to land one, which made him exciting to watch and difficult to develop into a champion. Trainers liked his heart. They were less enthusiastic about his chin. Mickey Cohen lost fights he should have won because he walked into shots that a more disciplined fighter would have slipped.
And he won fights he should have lost because he simply refused to go down. He fought in Cleveland in Chicago and eventually in New York, working his way through the lower and middle ranks of professional boxing with a record that was respectable but never spectacular. What he gained from those years, however, had nothing to do with boxing.
Every city he entered was a graduate school in organized crime. Cleveland in the early 1930 was controlled by the Mayfield Road mob, a sophisticated criminal organization with deep political connections and a strangle hold on the city’s gambling operations. Chicago belonged to the remnants of the Capone organization, restructuring itself after federal pressure had put its most famous member in a federal cell. New York was its own universe.
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Five families, complex hierarchies, and a street level economy of extraordinary scale and violence. Mickey Cohen watched all of it with the attention of a student who understood that what he was seeing was the future. He was not a romantic about crime. He did not read glamour into the men who ran these organizations. What he read was power.
The ability to move through the world without asking permission to accumulate resources. To command respect that had nothing to do with education or family name or the kind of patient incremental advancement that legitimate society required. For a kid from Boille Heights with a fourth grade education, that kind of power was not just appealing.
It was the only kind that made sense. He began making connections. In Cleveland, he attached himself to the edges of the Mayfield Road operation, running errands and making himself useful to men who noticed his combination of physical fearlessness and street intelligence. In Chicago, he encountered figures connected to the national syndicate that was then consolidating control over organized crime across the country.
The network of relationships and territories that Lucky Luchano, Mayor Lansky, and Bugsy Sieel had spent the early 1930s assembling with methodical precision. The boxing career began to wind down not because Mickey Cohen chose to end it, but because the ceiling became apparent. He was not going to be a champion.
He was too reckless, too undisiplined in his technique, and the division he fought in was thick with talent. What boxing had given him though was a physical confidence and a reputation for toughness that would serve him for the rest of his life. Men who had seen Mickey Cohen fight. Men who had watched him absorb punishment and keep moving forward did not dismiss him easily.
He returned to Los Angeles in the mid 1930s with no money, no prospects in the ring, and a very clear sense of what he wanted. The city had changed during his years away. Los Angeles in the mid 1930 was a boom town wearing a respectable face. A city of movie studios and orange groves and real estate fortunes precided over by a civic elite that projected optimism and progress while conducting its actual business in back rooms and private arrangements.
The Los Angeles Police Department was among the most corrupt in the country. The city’s political class was available to the highest bidder. Gambling was technically illegal and practically ubiquitous. For someone with Mickey Cohen’s education and ambitions, this was not an obstacle. It was an opportunity.
He started small, running a bookmaking operation out of a barber shop in the Fairfax district, taking bets on horse races, and managing the money with a precision that surprised people who assumed a boxer couldn’t keep books. He was disciplined about the business in a way he had never been disciplined in the ring.
He paid his debts. He honored his arrangements. And he protected his territory with a directness that left no room for misunderstanding. Word spread quickly in the insular world of Los Angeles gambling that Mickey Cohen was someone worth knowing and someone who should not be crossed.
He was 23 years old and running a criminal operation and he had not yet met the man who would transform his ambitions from local to national. That meeting was coming. Benjamin Sil arrived in Los Angeles in 1937. Like a comet, brilliant, destructive, and impossible to ignore. Sieel was everything the organized crime world both admired and feared.
He was handsome in a way that movie stars noticed. comfortable in rooms that most gangsters could never access, and possessed of a violence so sudden and complete that even men who had known him for decades never entirely relaxed in his presence. He had been sent west by the national syndicate, by Mayor Lansky and Lucky Luchano and the network of relationships they had spent a decade constructing to bring the West Coast operations into alignment with the national organization.
California was producing money in ways that the East Coast leadership found both impressive and disorganized. Sieel was supposed to fix that. Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Seagel found each other quickly. The introduction came through the overlapping world of Los Angeles bookmaking where Cohen had established himself as a reliable and aggressive operator.
Sieel, who was assembling a team of local talent to consolidate control over the city’s gambling operations, recognized immediately what he had in Mickey Cohen. Here was a man who combined physical fearlessness with genuine organizational ability, who could run a book, manage a crew, collect a debt, and handle himself in a street confrontation with equal competence.
In the economy of organized crime, that combination of skills was rare and valuable. For Cohen, sieel represented something he had been working toward since his days watching the Cleveland and Chicago operations from the margins. Here was direct access to the national syndicate, to the men who actually controlled the infrastructure of American organized crime.
Sieel was not just a powerful figure in Los Angeles. He was connected to Lansky, to Luchano, to the Genoves and Gambino organizations in New York, to the Chicago outfit. To be Bugsy Seel’s man in Los Angeles was to be connected to the most powerful criminal network in the country. Cohen threw himself into the relationship with characteristic intensity.
He became Sieel’s enforcer, his troubleshooter, and his most trusted lieutenant for the day-to-day violence that any criminal consolidation required. When bookmakers refused to come under syndicate control, it was often Cohen who delivered the message that refusal was not an option. When rival operations needed to be dismantled, Cohen organized the dismantling.
He was not squeamish about the work. He was by multiple accounts from that period, genuinely enthusiastic about it. The Los Angeles bookmaking consolidation that Sieel and Cohen conducted between 1937 and 1940 was one of the most aggressive territorial expansions in the history of West Coast organized crime. They moved against independent operators systematically, offering a choice between cooperation and consequences.
Most chose cooperation, those who didn’t experience consequences that served as useful object lessons for anyone still undecided. By 1940, the bookmaking operation that Sieel controlled and that Cohen managed at the street level was generating revenues that the syndicate in New York found gratifying.
But the relationship between Sil and Cohen was never simply transactional. There was genuine affection between the two men, the kind that sometimes develops between people who recognize in each other qualities they admire in themselves. Sieel appreciated Cohen’s toughness and his loyalty.
Cohen admired Sil’s ambition and his social fluency, the ease with which Sieel moved through Hollywood society, dining with actors and directors and studio executives who found the glamorous gangster irresistible. Cohen watched Siegel operate in those rooms and understood something important. In Los Angeles, the line between the entertainment industry and organized crime was not just porous.
In certain circles, it barely existed. The years with Sieel also taught Cohen something about scale. Bugsy Sieel was not interested in running a bookmaking operation in the Fairfax district. He was interested in controlling the flow of criminal money across the entire western United States and eventually in the dream that would consume and ultimately destroy him in building a gambling empire in the Nevada desert that would redirect that flow through a single magnificent operation.
The Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas was Sieel’s obsession in the mid 1940, and Cohen watched its development with the mixture of admiration and unease that most of Seel’s associates felt toward the project. The Flamingo was over budget, plagued by construction problems, and launched in December 1946 in a disaster of an opening night that sent its Hollywood guests home early and confirmed the worst fears of the syndicate partners who had invested in it.
Sieel had spent approximately $6 million, roughly twice the original budget, and the early return suggested the hotel was going to lose money. The men in New York who had been watching the budget overruns with increasing alarm were running out of patience. Mickey Cohen was in Los Angeles on the night of June 20, 1947 when Bugsy Sil was shot dead at the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill.
Seel was sitting on the couch reading the Los Angeles Times when multiple rifle shots came through the living room window. Two bullets struck him in the head. He was 41 years old. The murder was never officially solved. The identity of the shooter was never established in court. The consensus among organized crime historians is that the order came from the national syndicate from the New York families who had decided that Sil’s mismanagement of the flamingo money combined with his increasingly erratic behavior made him a liability that outweighed his value. The execution was clean, professional, and sent precisely the message it was intended to send. For Mickey Cohen, the death of Bugsy Sieel was the pivot point of his life. The man who had connected him to the national syndicate, who had given his local ambitions a national context, was gone. Cohen was now alone at the top of the Los Angeles operation.
Not by appointment from the syndicate and not without competition, but by the simple fact that he was the most capable and most feared figure in Los Angeles organized crime at the moment when the power vacuum opened. He had been Bugsy’s shadow. Now the spotlight was his. What the syndicate in New York thought of that arrangement was something Cohen would spend the next decade discovering, mostly through violence and federal indictment.
But in the summer of 1947, with Sieel barely cold and the Los Angeles operation leaderless, Mickey Cohen moved with the speed and decisiveness that had always been his defining characteristic. He was 33 years old. He was connected to the most powerful criminal network in the country and he was for the first time in his life the most important man in the room.
He intended to make the most of it. The Los Angeles that Mickey Cohen inherited in the summer of 1947 was a city in the middle of a transformation that would have been difficult to predict even 5 years earlier. The war had ended. The men had come home. The defense industry that had turned Los Angeles into a manufacturing powerhouse during the conflict was converting itself into the aerospace and technology economy that would define the region for decades.
The population was exploding 2 million people in 1940, nearly 2.5 million by 1950. With the suburbs spreading east and south in tracks of identical houses that accommodated the returning veterans and their rapidly expanding families, the movie industry, which had continued producing throughout the war, was entering what its executives hoped would be a golden age of prosperity and influence.
The city felt in the late 1940s like a place where anything was possible. Mickey Cohen understood this feeling and exploited it with precision. His primary business was bookmaking, the taking of bets on horse races, on sports, on any competitive event where money could be wagered, and a house percentage extracted.
Bookmaking in postwar Los Angeles was not a marginal operation. It was a mass industry serving hundreds of thousands of workingclass and middle class customers who regarded a bet on the afternoon races as a legitimate form of entertainment. The wire services that transmitted race results, the information infrastructure that made largecale bookmaking possible were controlled nationally by the Continental Press Service, which was itself controlled by the Chicago outfit.
Cohen’s relationship with Continental Press gave him a structural advantage over independent operators that was difficult to overcome. He ran his bookmaking empire through a network of handbooks, small storefront operations, often disguised as tobacco shops or news stands that served as retail outlets for the bedding business.
At its peak, Cohen’s organization controlled somewhere between 60 and 100 handbook operations across Los Angeles County, each generating daily revenues that flowed upward through the organization to Cohen himself. The total annual revenue from this network has been estimated by historians and law enforcement analysts at anywhere from several million to tens of millions of dollars.
Precise figures are difficult because the operation was by design invisible to legitimate accounting. But bookmaking was only one dimension of Cohen’s empire. He also controlled significant portions of the lone shark operations in Los Angeles. Advancing money to gamblers and small businessmen at interest rates that were usurious by any standard and enforced by methods that left no room for negotiation.
He had interests in several legitimate businesses, a habeddasherie, a flower shop that served simultaneously as fronts for money laundering, and as expressions of his genuine interest in personal style. Mickey Cohen dressed extraordinarily well. He had suits made by the best tailor in Los Angeles, wore silk shirts, kept his shoes polished to a shine that could serve as a mirror.
His personal grooming was obsessive. He was known to wash his hands dozens of times a day, a habit that would later be recognized as symptomatic of obsessive compulsive disorder, but that at the time simply added to his reputation for fastidiousness. He moved freely through Los Angeles society in a way that reflected both his confidence and the peculiar social arrangements of postwar Southern California.
He was a regular at restaurants on the Sunset Strip, where his presence was noted by gossip columnists and tolerated by owners who understood that having Mickey Cohen at your table meant your establishment would not be troubled. He was photographed with actors, with athletes, with the kind of peripheral Hollywood figures who found gangsters romantically interesting.
He cultivated relationships with journalists, particularly with Florable Mure of the Los Angeles Mirror, who became something like his in-house chronicler with an understanding that press coverage, even unflattering press coverage, was a form of protection. Famous criminals are harder to kill quietly than obscure ones. His relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department during this period was a masterwork of managed corruption.
The LAPD under Chief William Warton and later Chief William Parker was undergoing a transformation from the openly corrupt department of the pre-war years towards something more professional and more hostile to organized crime. But the transformation was uneven and slow. Significant elements of the department remained available to criminal payment and Cohen navigated those arrangements with the same precision he applied to his business operations.
He knew which captains were on his payroll, which detectives could be trusted to lose evidence, which officers would provide advanced warning of raids. He managed those relationships like investments, paying regularly, not asking for more than was reasonable, ensuring that the arrangement remained mutually beneficial.
The violence that accompanied his consolidation of power was substantial and largely unscentimentalized. Cohen’s organization killed when it needed to kill, intimidated when intimidation was sufficient, and accepted the costs of doing business in an industry where contract disputes were resolved with guns rather than lawyers.
Cohen himself participated in this violence directly. He was not a figure who ordered deaths from a distance while maintaining personal cleanliness. He was known to take part in beatings personally, to be present at confrontations that turned lethal, to project the physical threat that his boxing background made credible in a way that many crime bosses could not.
The assassination attempts began almost immediately after he assumed control. In 1948, a bomb was discovered beneath his Brentwood home. The following year came the most dramatic attempt, the Sher’s restaurant shooting on Sunset Strip. that would later become one of the defining images of his story.
On the night of July 20, 1949, Cohen and several associates were leaving Sherry’s when gunmen opened fire from across the street. Three people were wounded. Cohen himself, by what seemed to be extraordinary luck or extraordinary instinct, was not hit. One of his bodyguards, Netty Herbert, was shot and later died.
A gossip columnist named Florable Mure, who happened to be present, was grazed by a bullet. The shooter or shooters were never identified or prosecuted. The Sherry’s shooting was the most public expression of a conflict that had been building since Cohen assumed control of the Los Angeles operation.
The challenge came primarily from Jack Dragna, the longtime boss of the Los Angeles Italian-American crime family, who regarded Cohen’s dominance of Los Angeles gambling as an intrusion on territory that historically belonged to his organization. Dragna had tolerated Sieel because Sieel came with the full endorsement of the National Syndicate and the implicit threat of national syndicate violence.
Cohen came with Sieel’s connections, but not Sieel’s mandate, and Dragna spent several years attempting to resolve the situation through assassination. He failed repeatedly. The attempts on Cohen’s life during this period, the Sherry’s shooting, the earlier bombing, several other incidents were numerous enough to be remarkable.
Cohen survived them through a combination of luck, caution, and the physical alertness that years of boxing had built into his nervous system. He never went anywhere without armed bodyguards. He varied his routes and his routines. He trusted very few people with his actual schedule. He was by the late 1940 a man who had made so many enemies that survival itself had become a full-time occupation.
The conflict with Dragna was never formally resolved through the kind of sit-down negotiation that the national syndicate preferred. What ended it eventually was not diplomacy, but federal prosecution. As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the United States government was bringing to bear on organized crime a level of attention and resources that made the internal conflicts of the Los Angeles underworld secondary to the shared problem of staying out of federal prison.
Mickey Cohen, at the height of his power in 1949 and 1950, was the undisputed king of Los Angeles organized crime. He was also, though he did not fully appreciate this yet, already in the crosshairs of a federal investigation that would spend the next several years constructing the case that would bring him down. The crown he had seized was magnificent.
It was also like all crowns in his world, measured for its wearer’s head from the moment it was placed there. There has never been a city quite like Los Angeles in the late 1940s for the interpenetration of crime and culture. And Mickey Cohen was its most visible symbol. Hollywood in the years immediately following World War II was the most powerful cultural machine the world had ever produced.
The studios were at the peak of their institutional dominance. MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Colombia, and RKO controlled not just production, but distribution and exhibition, operating a vertically integrated entertainment monopoly that generated revenues comparable to major industrial corporations.
The men who ran these studios, Louis B, Mayor Jack Warner, Harry Conn, Daryl Xanuk, were among the most powerful figures in American business life, preciding over empires of fantasy that shaped the dreams and desires of hundreds of millions of people across the globe. They were also, many of them, deeply connected to the world that Mickey Cohen inhabited.
The connection was not always direct or deliberate. It grew from the structural reality of Los Angeles in the 1940, a city where gambling was the primary recreational industry for the working class and a significant entertainment option for the wealthy. where labor unions with organized crime connections controlled the physical production of movies and where the social geography placed studio executives, actors, directors, and gangsters in the same restaurants, the same clubs, and the same circles of mutual acquaintance. In Los Angeles, the distance between legitimate and illegitimate was measured in blocks, not miles. Cohen understood the value of Hollywood connections better than almost any other figure in organized crime. He was not starruck. He was too fundamentally practical for that, too cleareyed about what actors and directors actually were beneath the
mythology. What he understood was that celebrity was a form of protection and a form of currency. A gangster whose name appeared regularly in the entertainment columns was harder to prosecute quietly. A gangster whose associates included recognizable faces from the movie screen had access to a kind of social legitimacy that normal criminal operations could never purchase.
He cultivated these connections deliberately and maintained them with the same organizational attention he brought to his bookmaking network. His habeddasherie on the Sunset Strip became a social hub where the worlds of entertainment and organized crime met on neutral ground. Actors came to buy shirts and stayed to talk.
Producers stopped in for a fitting and left having made arrangements that had nothing to do with fabric. The shop was a stage set, an expression of Cohen’s understanding that in Los Angeles, image was not separate from substance. Image was substance. His relationship with the entertainment industry operated on multiple levels simultaneously.
At the most basic level, many studios and production companies had gambling debts, individual debts of producers, directors, and stars who had borrowed money from Cohen’s lone shark operations and were paying it back with interest. This created leverage that Cohen did not need to exercise overtly.
The existence of the debt was itself a relationship, a form of mutual obligation that shaped how these individuals behaved in his presence and what they were willing to do for him. At a more complex level, Cohen had relationships with the labor unions that controlled significant portions of the Hollywood workforce.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees had been infiltrated by organized crime since the 1930 when Chicago mob figures Willie Beoff and George Brown had extorted the major studios for hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for labor peace. That particular arrangement had ended badly.
BAF and Brown were convicted of extortion in 1941 and sent to federal prison. But the underlying structural relationship between organized crime and Hollywood labor continued through different channels and different personnel. Cohen’s organization maintained connections to union officials who provided both income and political intelligence.
But the most visible and in many ways most significant dimension of Cohen’s Hollywood presence was purely social. He was by the late 1940 a celebrity in his own right. one of the most photographed private citizens in Los Angeles. His image appearing regularly in newspaper columns alongside performers and producers who found his combination of menace and charm irresistible. He was good copy.
He was quotable. He understood instinctively what journalists needed. A memorable line, a dramatic image, a narrative that satisfied the public appetite for stories about the dangerous glamour of organized crime. He played this role with conscious artistry. Cohen gave interviews. He commented on public affairs.
He positioned himself as a kind of civic character. A rough but honest businessman. A patriot who had served his country’s interests during the war by keeping the gambling money flowing through American rather than foreign hands. A man whose only crime was providing services that hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Angelinos willingly purchased.
This narrative was, of course, a construction, a careful piece of image management designed to complicate the moral picture that prosecutors needed to paint in order to convict him. But it was also, in the peculiar moral geography of post-war Los Angeles, not entirely false. Cohen did provide services that people wanted.
He did employ significant numbers of people. He did, in his way, participate in the civic life of the city. The entertainers who orbited around him during this period ranged from the genuinely famous to the merely aspirational. Frank Sinatra, whose own connections to organized crime were a subject of intense interest to federal investigators, was an acquaintance.
Various actors and comedians appeared at the social events that Cohen’s organization staged at nightclubs and restaurants on the strip. George Raft, the actor who had built an entire career playing characters modeled on the real gangsters he had known as a child in New York, was a personal friend and associate.
Raft was one of the most explicit examples of the Hollywood organized crime connection. A man whose screen persona and whose actual social world were essentially identical. The corruption that Cohen represented was not simply financial. It was cultural. a corruption of the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate that Hollywood both reflected and accelerated.
The movies of the late 1940 were full of glamorous criminals, charming hoods, and morally ambiguous protagonists who operated outside the law with a style that the audience found appealing rather than threatening. Film noir, the great American cinema movement of that decade, was built on precisely this moral ambiguity.
and the most famous real life gangster in Los Angeles was serving consciously or not as a kind of living proof of concept for that aesthetic. Cohen’s visibility also served a specific tactical function. As federal pressure on organized crime increased through the late 1940, celebrity became a defensive weapon.
The Keover Committee, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, launched in 1950 under Senator S. Keover of Tennessee, was the most significant federal investigation of organized crime since the prohibition era. Its hearings were televised, the first time that a major congressional investigation had been broadcast to a national audience, and the effect was enormous.
Millions of Americans who had known organized crime existed but regarded it as an abstraction suddenly watched real gangsters sitting before senators taking the fifth amendment or providing testimony that revealed the depth and sophistication of criminal organization in postwar America. Mickey Cohen was called before the Keover Committee and testified in a performance that was part theater, part legal strategy and entirely characteristic.
He was cooperative in manner, evasive in substance, and frequently funny in a way that undermined the committee’s attempt to present him as a sinister figure. He acknowledged running a gambling operation. He denied violence. He presented himself as a man whose personal income, which he acknowledged was substantial, came from legitimate sources that he was happy to document.
The committee did not find his documentation convincing, but they were not able at that stage to prove otherwise. What the Keover hearings did accomplish was to make Mickey Cohen’s name known across the entire country. He had been famous in Los Angeles. He was now famous in America. And with that national fame came a level of federal attention that would prove in the end to be the instrument of his destruction.
The Hollywood that Cohen had infected with his presence did not mourn when the federal authorities closed in. The studio executives quietly distanced themselves. The actors who had found him amusing stopped taking his calls. The journalists who had fed on his quotability began writing the narrative of his downfall with the same relish they had brought to the narrative of his rise.
In Hollywood, loyalty is a seasonal commodity, available in abundance during success and suddenly scarce when the weather turns. Mickey Cohen had spent years poisoning Hollywood with his presence. Not because he corrupted individuals who would otherwise have been pure, but because he revealed and exploited corruption that was already there, built into the structure of an industry that had always operated at the intersection of fantasy and money, glamour and power.
The poison was not something he introduced. It was something he made visible. And in making it visible, he made himself a target that the federal government could not ignore. The Internal Revenue Service destroyed Mickey Cohen, and it did so with a patience and thoroughess that his enemies with guns had never managed to achieve.
The federal government’s approach to organized crime in the early 1950 had been shaped decisively by the lessons of the Capone prosecution. Al Capone had been untouchable through conventional law enforcement. No witness would testify against him. No physical evidence connected him to specific crimes, and the network of political corruption that surrounded his operation in Chicago made direct prosecution effectively impossible.
What had worked against Capone was the tax code. He had made millions and paid no taxes on any of it. And when the IRS built its case methodically over several years, the result was a conviction that sent the most powerful figure in American organized crime to federal prison for 11 years.
The Cohen investigation followed the same logic. Whatever else was true about Mickey Cohen, however many assaults, how much extortion, how many people intimidated or hurt or killed at his direction, the case that could be built against him with available evidence was not easy to construct. Witnesses who had seen things were reluctant to say so in court.
Physical evidence was scarce. The corruption of the LAPD, though diminishing under Chief Parker’s reform program, still meant that some investigative threads went nowhere for reasons that investigators could sense but not prove. The tax code, however, operated indifferently to all of these complications.
If Cohen had income and didn’t pay taxes on it, the IRS would find the gap. They began building their case in earnest around 1950, pulling together bank records, wire service transactions, gambling receipts, and the financial records of the businesses that Cohen used as fronts for his operation.
The picture they assembled was of a man who had spent lavishly and ostentatiously for years. the suits, the cars, the restaurant meals, the bodyguards, the Brentwood home, while reporting income that would not have supported a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle. The gap between Cohen’s visible spending and his reported income was enormous, obvious, and legally actionable.
The investigation was complicated by Cohen’s genuine financial sophistication in certain areas. He was not, despite his fourth grade education, a man who was careless about money. He understood the value of cash transactions that left no paper trail. He used nominees, fronts whose names appeared on leases and accounts while Cohen controlled the actual assets.
He moved money through layers of transactions designed to obscure its origin. These were standard mob accounting practices developed over decades of experience with federal investigations, and they made the IRS’s job difficult, but not impossible. The investigators were patient, and they had resources.
They interviewed hundreds of people, bookmakers who had paid Cohen a percentage, employees who had handled cash, vendors who had supplied his businesses. They analyzed utility records, telephone logs, and the financial records of Cohen’s known associates. They traced the Continental Press service payments that had flowed to Cohen’s bookmaking network.
They constructed piece by piece a picture of an organization that generated millions of dollars annually. While its principal reported almost nothing, Cohen, for his part, was not unaware that this was happening. The federal investigation was not a secret. It was the subject of newspaper coverage and street gossip and Cohen had enough connections in the federal system to understand that serious resources were being directed at him. His response was characteristic.
He hired excellent lawyers. He talked to journalists and he continued operating with the confidence of a man who had survived assassination attempts and congressional committees and did not intend to be destroyed by accountants. The lawyers he retained were among the best criminal defense attorneys in California.
Men who understood how to delay proceedings, challenge evidence, and exploit the procedural complexities of federal tax law to maximum effect. Cohen’s legal defense was wellunded and aggressively conducted. It bought him time and created complications for the prosecution, but it could not ultimately change the fundamental arithmetic of the case.
In June 1951, Mickey Cohen was indicted on federal tax evasion charges. The indictment covered the years 1946 through 1950 and alleged that he had failed to report income of approximately dollar300 000, a figure that investigators considered conservative, but that they could prove with available evidence.
Cohen pleaded not guilty and prepared for trial with the legal team that had cost him a significant portion of whatever assets he had left after years of maintaining his operation and his lifestyle simultaneously. The trial, which began in the spring of 1951, was a civic event in Los Angeles. The courthouse was packed with journalists and observers.
Cohen arrived each day dressed immaculately, projecting the calm of a man who was confident in his defense. His attorneys challenged the government’s evidence on multiple fronts, questioning the reliability of witnesses, attacking the methodology of the financial analysis, arguing that legitimate income sources had been overlooked or mischaracterized by the prosecution. The jury was not convinced.
On June 20, 1951, 4 years to the day after Bugsy Seel had been shot dead in Beverly Hills, Mickey Cohen was convicted of federal tax evasion. He was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison and fined $100,000. The sentence was substantial, but not unprecedented for a tax conviction of this scale.
His lawyers immediately filed for appeal. The appeal process dragged through the courts for months. Cohen remained free on bail during this period, continuing to operate his reduced organization and maintaining his public presence with a defiance that his supporters found admirable and his prosecutors found infuriating.
He gave interviews. He appeared at restaurants. He dressed as well as ever. He projected with practiced consistency the image of a man who regarded the federal conviction as a temporary inconvenience rather than an existential threat. The courts disagreed with this assessment. His appeals were denied and in 1952 Mickey Cohen entered the federal penitentiary at McNeel Island in Washington State to begin serving his sentence.
McNeel Island was a serious federal penitentiary. Not the minimum security arrangements that were sometimes made for white collar criminals, but a genuine hard prison where Cohen served alongside men convicted of violent federal crimes. His time there was by his own later account genuinely difficult. He was not a man who adapted easily to confinement.
The obsessive need for control that had driven his success as a criminal made the loss of autonomy that prison represented particularly painful. He could not choose his food, his clothing, his company, or his schedule. The man who had built an empire of precisely managed relationships was now managed entirely by an institution that had no interest in his preferences.
He was released in 1955, having served approximately 3 years of his 5-year sentence. He returned to Los Angeles with a public profile that had not diminished during his absence. If anything, the prison term had added a dimension of authentic toughness to the image that had previously been built partly on projection.
He had been to prison. He had come back. He was, in the eyes of the world that still found him interesting, a survivor. What he returned to, however, was an organization that had been substantially dismantled during his absence. The federal prosecution and his imprisonment had scattered the bookmaking network that had been the financial foundation of his operation.
The wire service connections that had given his operation its structural advantage had been disrupted by the Kefover investigation’s pressure on Continental Press. The LAPD under the reform program that Chief Parker had accelerated during Cohen’s imprisonment was a meaningfully different institution than the department he had managed through selective corruption in the late 1940s.
The men who had worked for him had during his years away made accommodations to the new reality. Some had gone to work for other organizations. Some had retired from the business entirely. Some had cooperated with federal investigators in ways that they would not have contemplated when Cohen’s organization was at full strength.
And his capacity for retaliation was credible. The landscape of Los Angeles organized crime that Cohen returned to in 1955 was not the landscape he had left in 1952. He set about rebuilding with the energy of a man who did not know how to do anything else. He reestablished connections, reassembled pieces of the bookmaking operation, and attempted to reconstruct the relationships with journalists and entertainers and corrupt officials that had defined his power at its peak.
Some of these efforts were successful. Others ran into the reality that the world had moved on during his imprisonment and that certain doors that had been open in 1952 were now closed. The federal government, meanwhile, had not concluded its interest in Mickey Cohen. The conviction and imprisonment had been satisfying, but investigators who had spent years studying Cohen’s finances believed that the 1951 case had only scratched the surface of his actual income and his actual tax liability.
As Cohen attempted to rebuild his operation in the late 1950, the IRS and federal investigators were watching with the patient attention of people who had won once and were confident they could win again. They were right. The Mickey Cohen who emerged from McNeel Island in 1955 was physically the same man, compact, impeccably dressed, and radiating the kind of coiled energy that had always been his most immediate impression on the people he met.
But the empire he had built was cracked in ways that even his considerable resilience could not fully repair. Los Angeles had changed around him. The city of 1955 was not the city of 1947. The population had continued its explosive growth, spreading across the San Fernando Valley and into the distant suburbs in patterns that dispersed the dense neighborhood gambling culture that had been the economic foundation of his bookmaking operation.
Television had arrived as a mass entertainment medium, competing with the barberhop handbooks and the neighborhood betting parlors for the leisure hours and the disposable income of the workingclass men who had been Cohen’s primary customers. The social geography of gambling was shifting in ways that favored the large organized casino operations that were taking shape in Las Vegas.
operations that were removing from the street level economy, precisely the customers that bookmakers depended upon. Chief William Parker’s reform of the LAPD had also created a genuinely different law enforcement environment. The corruption that had been so systematically exploitable in the late 1940 had not been eliminated.
Corruption is never eliminated from institutions, only managed. But it had been reorganized, reduced, and made significantly more expensive. The arrangement by which Cohen had maintained a network of cooperative officers at predictable cost was no longer available in its previous form. The officers who remained available were fewer, more cautious, and more expensive.
The institutional protection that corruption had provided was now partial rather than comprehensive. The national syndicate’s relationship with Cohen had also changed in his absence. The men in New York and Chicago, who had tolerated his independence during his years of dominance, had used the period of his imprisonment to arrange Los Angeles affairs to their own satisfaction.
The Dragnas, who had never accepted Cohen’s primacy, had not been destroyed. The family remained a presence in Los Angeles organized crime, but neither had they consolidated the control they had sought. What had happened instead was a kind of fragmented accommodation. Multiple organizations sharing the Los Angeles market in an arrangement that was stable primarily because none of them was strong enough to dominate the others.
Cohen’s return disrupted this arrangement without replacing it with anything more coherent. He was too big a figure to be ignored, too well-connected to be dismissed, and too driven to simply accept a reduced role in a market he had once controlled entirely. He pressed hard against the boundaries that the new landscape imposed, rebuilding his bookmaking operation, reestablishing his lone shark connections and attempting to reassert the dominance he had exercised before his imprisonment.
The press remained interested. If anything, Cohen’s celebrity had intensified during his imprisonment. The prison term had completed a narrative arc that the public found satisfying, and his return provided the sequel. He continued his relationship with journalists, feeding them stories and commentary that kept his name in the newspapers and maintained the public image that he had always understood as a form of protection.
He gave interviews about prison conditions, about the federal government’s treatment of him, about his plans for the future. He was photographed regularly. He remained, despite everything, one of the most visible private citizens in Los Angeles. It was during this period of attempted reconstruction that Cohen became involved in one of the strangest episodes of his career, his relationship with evangelical Christianity, specifically with Billy Graham and his crusade movement.
The connection came through Jim Vos, a wiretapper who had worked for Cohen in the late 1940 and had then undergone a religious conversion at a Billy Graham crusade in 1949. Vos had subsequently become a public figure in evangelical circles, testifying to audiences across the country about his conversion from a life of crime.
His story, which prominently featured his former employer, Mickey Cohen, gave him a platform and gave Graham’s organization an authentic connection to the world of organized crime that the crusades publicity team found useful. Graham himself met with Cohen several times in the mid 1950 in conversations that the evangelist described as sincere and that Cohen described with characteristic ambivalence.
He was genuinely moved by Graham personally, he said, and genuinely unconvinced by the theology. Cohen told reporters that he was interested in becoming a Christian, but a Christian the way I see it. The phrase captured perfectly the fundamental impossibility of the enterprise. Mickey Cohen’s relationship to any belief system or institution was always going to be on his own terms, which meant that the submission required by religious conversion.
The acceptance of a framework larger than yourself, was not something he could actually perform. The Billy Graham connection brought Cohen a kind of positive press coverage that was entirely new to his experience. The possibility that the most dangerous gangster in Los Angeles was finding God was irresistible to the newspapers that had been covering his criminal career for a decade.
The coverage was mostly sympathetic, occasionally mocking, and generally irrelevant to the actual business of his life. Cohen never converted. He never changed his operations. He used the publicity generated by his association with Graham with the same instrumental intelligence. he brought to all his meteor relationships.
The violence that had attended his rise did not disappear during these years. If anything, it became less organized and more desperate, an expression of an operation that was fighting to maintain relevance rather than one that was expanding from a position of strength. The assassination attempts continued. There was another shooting incident in 1959 that left Cohen physically unharmed but killed a bystander and wounded several others, generating the kind of publicity that was now damaging rather than protective. The criminal case that eventually brought him down for a second time began taking shape in the late 1950 as federal investigators continued assembling financial evidence. Cohen’s rebuilt operation, while smaller than its predecessor, was still generating significant income that was not being reported to the IRS. The same gap that
had produced the 1951 conviction, visible wealth grossly disproportionate to reported income, was reappearing in the records that investigators were accumulating. Cohen’s personal finances during this period were genuinely chaotic. He had spent money throughout his career with a freedom that reflected his assumption that the supply was essentially unlimited, that the operation would always generate more.
The costs of his legal defense in the early 1950 had been enormous. His lifestyle expenses were continuous and not subject to downward revision. The fines and civil judgments that had accumulated against him were a persistent drain. And the rebuilt operation, while productive, was not generating the revenues that the peak organization had produced.
He borrowed money. He deferred payments. He made arrangements that created complicated financial obligations that he then had difficulty meeting. The man who had once been one of the wealthiest criminals in America was by the late 1950 facing genuine financial pressure. Not poverty, not by any normal measure, but the particular stress of a man who had lived at a certain level for so long that the prospect of living at any other level was genuinely disturbing.
In the midst of these financial pressures, Cohen made a decision that reflected either extraordinary confidence or a fundamental misunderstanding of his situation. He went on living exactly as he always had. The suits were as good as ever. The restaurant meals were as frequent. The entourage was maintained.
The social life continued. The public image, which he had spent decades constructing, and which he genuinely seemed to believe was both deserved and impregnable, was not subjected to any revision. This combination, reduced income, continued high expenditure, ongoing federal scrutiny, was not sustainable.
Anyone watching from outside could see where it was heading. Whether Cohen could see it himself is harder to determine. His confidence was genuine, not performed. He had survived so much. the assassination attempts, the first federal conviction, the imprisonment that each new threat may have seemed like another manageable challenge rather than the final act of a declining story.
There were people around him who understood some of his older associates, men who had built careers managing risk in the criminal economy, looked at the trajectory of his situation and made quiet arrangements to distance themselves before the next collapse arrived. They had been in the business long enough to recognize the pattern.
The federal government was not going to stop. The financial position was deteriorating and the political environment was becoming less tolerant of high-profile organized crime figures who operated openly in major American cities. The Senate hearings that had begun with Keover had continued in various forms through the 1950s. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who had served as counsel to the Keover Committee and had developed an intense personal interest in organized crime prosecution, was directing Justice Department resources toward the organized crime problem with an energy and focus that had no precedent. The FBI under Jay Edgar Hoover was finally beginning to take organized crime seriously after decades of public denial that it existed as a national phenomenon. The full weight of the federal government was turning toward organized crime and men like Mickey
Cohen were the most visible targets. The empire he had built over 20 years was not collapsing all at once. It was cracking slowly, unevenly, with occasional moments of apparent stability that created the illusion that the damage might be arrested. But the cracks were real, and they were multiplying, and the foundation beneath them was eroding with every federal subpoena, every informant interview, every financial analysis that the IRS added to the file that bore his name.
He was approaching 60 years old. He had spent his adult life in organized crime. He had been the most powerful criminal figure in one of the largest cities in the United States. He had been shot at, bombed, imprisoned, and investigated by the most powerful government on Earth. And he was still standing, still dressed well, still talking to journalists, still projecting the certainty of a man who intended to survive whatever came next.
What came next was going to require more than certainty. The second federal tax conviction of Mickey Cohen arrived in 1961 with a severity that made the first conviction look like a warning. The case that federal prosecutors had been building through the late 1950 was substantially more comprehensive than the 1951 indictment.
The investigators had more experience, more resources, and the advantage of having watched Cohen’s rebuilt operation function for several years after his release from McNeel Island. They had assembled evidence covering the period 1956 through 1958. The years of Cohen’s attempted reconstruction, and the financial picture they had constructed was damning in its specificity.
The indictment alleged that Cohen had failed to report income of approximately $1400 over the 3-year period. The actual income generated by his operations during those years was estimated by investigators to be substantially higher. The provable gap was dollar400 0, but investigators believed the true figure was several times that amount.
The evidence they had accumulated included testimony from former associates, financial records subpoenaed from multiple businesses and individuals, wire service transaction records, and the kind of painstaking forensic accounting that the IRS had refined over decades of pursuing tax cheats at every level of American society.
Cohen’s defense was vigorous and expensive. He retained Melvin Belly, one of the most famous trial lawyers in California, who brought to the case the theatrical skill and procedural sophistication that had made him a legendary figure in American courtrooms. Belly challenged the government’s evidence, attacked the credibility of its witnesses, and constructed an alternative narrative of Cohen’s finances that attempted to explain the gap between visible spending and reported income through legitimate sources that had been overlooked or mischaracterized. The jury, after deliberating for several days, convicted Mickey Cohen on all counts. The judge who had preided over the trial with evident awareness that he was delivering a verdict on one of the most significant organized crime prosecutions in California history sentenced Cohen to 15 years in federal
prison and a fine of $30,000. The 15-year sentence was not the maximum available under the tax statutes, but it was a number that made clear that the court regarded Mickey Cohen not as a man who had made accounting errors, but as the leader of a criminal organization that had operated openly and contemptuously outside the law for two decades.
Cohen’s lawyers immediately appealed. The appeal was denied. He was remanded to federal custody and transported to the United States Penitentiary at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the most famous, most feared, and most severe federal penitentiary in the country. Alcatraz, the name alone carried a weight that was different from McNeel Islands.
McNeel had been a serious prison. Alcatraz was a deliberate statement, a piece of rock in the middle of a cold bay, engineered specifically to contain the most dangerous and the most escapone inmates in the federal system. Its residents over the years had included Al Capone, George Machine Gun Kelly, and Robert Straoud, the Birdman of Alcatraz.
Being sent, there was not just a sentence. It was a designation, a declaration by the federal government that the person being sent was not ordinary and that the ordinary federal prison system was not sufficient. For Mickey Cohen, who had spent his adult life managing his image with extraordinary care, the Alcatraz designation was in some ways the most painful aspect of the second sentence.
It was a statement about what he was made by an institution whose opinion of him he could not control through press releases or journalist relationships. The federal government was saying in the most public way available to it that Mickey Cohen belonged among the worst and most dangerous criminals in America.
He arrived at Alcatraz in 1962 and began serving a sentence that given his age, he was approaching 50, might effectively be a life sentence. The island prison was operating in the final years of its existence as a federal penitentiary. It would be closed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963. Its inmates transferred to other institutions, but Cohen experienced Alcatraz in its last phase, and the experience marked him physically and psychologically in ways that his first imprisonment had not. The isolation was the defining feature. Alcatraz was designed to prevent the kind of social networking that made prison bearable for men who had spent their lives in environments organized around personal relationships and mutual obligation. The rules were strict, the guards were professional, and the daily routine was structured to minimize the possibility
of any inmate establishing the kind of influence over other inmates that powerful criminals naturally sought to establish. Mickey Cohen, who had built his entire career on personal relationships and the management of complex social networks, was placed in an environment specifically engineered to prevent exactly that.
He also experienced physical violence at Alcatraz that was distinct from the violence that had characterized his life outside. In 1963, Cohen was attacked in the prison laundry room by another inmate, Burl E. Macdonald, who struck him in the head with a lead pipe. The attack was unprovoked by any immediate interaction.
It was, investigators concluded, an assassination attempt ordered from outside the prison, either by criminal associates who viewed Cohen as a potential informant or by personal enemies who had waited for him to be in a position where he couldn’t protect himself. The attack nearly killed him. Cohen suffered severe head trauma that left him with permanent neurological damage.
He was hospitalized for an extended period during which the full extent of his injuries became apparent. The damage to his brain and spinal cord affected his mobility and his cognitive function in ways that varied in severity but never fully resolved. Mickey Cohen, who had survived multiple gunshot attempts and bombings throughout his career, who had walked out of Sherry’s restaurant unscathed when men with rifles were trying to kill him, was nearly murdered in a federal prison laundry room by a man with a pipe.
The irony was not lost on the journalists who covered his story. The most shot at gangster in American history, had been brought low, not by bullets, but by blunt force trauma in a place where he was supposed to be protected by the federal government. The image of Cohen as an almost supernaturally fortunate survivor, a man who bent the laws of probability through some combination of instinct and luck was not destroyed by the Alcatraz attack, but it was severely complicated. He survived, but he did not recover fully. The neurological damage was permanent, and it manifested in physical limitations that the formerly athletic, constantly kinetic Cohen found humiliating. He had been his entire life a man defined by physical confidence, by the boxer’s certainty that his body would do what he asked of it, that the physical dimension of any situation was something he could handle. The aftermath of the Alcatraz attack removed that
certainty. He walked with difficulty. He experienced chronic pain. The condition of his body became a daily reminder of vulnerability. Alcatraz was closed in 1963 and Cohen was transferred to the federal penitentiary at Atlanta where he continued serving his sentence in conditions that were physically less severe but no less isolating.
The world outside the prison continued without him. The Los Angeles that he had dominated was moving on. The criminal organization he had built was not waiting for his return. It had been absorbed, dismantled, and redistributed among the figures who had moved into the space his absence created. In Atlanta, Cohen had time, more time than he had ever had in his adult life.
To reflect on what his career had been and what it had cost him, he began during these years, the process of constructing the memoir that would eventually be published as Mickey Cohen. In my own words, the project gave him something to organize his thoughts around a narrative purpose in an environment that was organized entirely around containment rather than purpose.
He worked with a journalist to assemble his recollections, his justifications, and his perspective on a life that was in the most literal sense running out of road. The memoir that emerged from this process was a characteristic document, selfserving, entertaining, occasionally candid, and structured to present its subject in the best possible light while acknowledging enough unflattering material to seem honest.
Cohen admitted to running gambling operations. He was vague about violence. He was generous in his accounts of his own courage and resilience. He was ungenerous toward the federal government, which he consistently portrayed as having pursued him with a disproportionate ferocity motivated by something beyond legitimate law enforcement interest.
He was released from federal prison in January 1972, having served approximately 10 years of his 15-year sentence. He was 58 years old. He had spent the better part of his adult life either building an empire, defending it, imprisoned for having built it, or trying to rebuild it after the federal government had destroyed it.
He was physically diminished by the Alcatraz attack and its aftermath. He was financially depleted by decades of legal expenses and the systematic destruction of his revenue generating operations. He was returning to a city that had moved past him while he was gone, to a criminal landscape that had reorganized itself without reference to his existence.
The crown that he had seized in 1947 had not merely been removed. It had been melted down and recast for other heads during the decade of his imprisonment. The king was coming home to a kingdom that no longer existed. What awaited him on the outside was not the rebuilt empire he had constructed after his first imprisonment.
He was too old, too damaged, and too thoroughly documented by federal investigators to resume anything resembling his former operations. He would spend his remaining years in the strange limbo of the famous former criminal. recognized everywhere, relevant nowhere, living on the residue of a reputation that still generated interview requests and documentary interest while providing neither income nor protection from the ordinary difficulties of aging in poverty.
The solitary fall that had begun with the second indictment was complete. The man who had been the most dangerous criminal in Hollywood’s golden age was now simply old. Mickey Cohen lived for 10 years after his release from federal prison and those years constitute one of the stranger kodas in the history of American organized crime.
A decadel long performance of relevance by a man whose actual power had evaporated entirely but whose public image refused to follow it into irrelevance. He returned to Los Angeles in 1972 to the particular kind of attention that American culture reserves for the rehabilitated transgressor. Journalists who had written about his empire at its peak were now writing about its ruins and they found the ruins nearly as interesting as the edifice had been.
Television producers who had been children during his years of dominance were now making documentaries about him. Publishers were interested in the memoir he had assembled during his imprisonment. He was in the vocabulary of a media culture that was then developing its addiction to the retrospective celebrity profile, a story that had not yet been fully told.
He cooperated with all of it. He gave interviews with the same openness he had always brought to his media relationships, though the tone had necessarily changed. He was no longer a man with power to project and a reputation to manage in ways that might affect his safety and his operations. He was now a man with a story to tell in diminishing time in which to tell it.
The interviews he gave in the 1970 are among the most revealing documents of his career. Not because he was more honest in them than he had been in earlier years, though he was somewhat more candid about certain things, but because the absence of operational stakes removed the filter that had always shaped his public statements during his years of active crime.
He talked about Bugsy Sieel with genuine emotion. Whatever the complexities of that relationship, whatever the calculations that had been involved on both sides, the affection was real. He described watching Sil move through Hollywood society with an admiration that had not diminished over 30 years. He talked about the day he learned of Cel’s murder with a directness that suggested the shock had genuinely never left him.
He talked about the federal government with unddeinished resentment. the conviction that he had been pursued with a disproportionate intensity, that the government’s interest in him exceeded anything that his actual criminal activities warranted, was a constant of his public statements from the first tax conviction until his death.
This conviction was not entirely without foundation, the Keover Committee hearings, the sustained IRS investigation, the Alcatraz sentence. There is a reasonable argument that Cohen received treatment calibrated to his public prominence as much as to the specific evidence against him. The federal government needed visible prosecutions to demonstrate that organized crime was being addressed and visible organized crime figures were the most useful prosecal targets regardless of whether they were individually more culpable than less visible alternatives. This argument, while not entirely wrong, was also precisely the argument that every major organized crime figure made about his own prosecution. The federal government pursued Cohen because he was powerful and prominent and because defeating him would send a message to the criminal economy as a whole. That logic does not make the prosecution
unjust. Cohen ran a gambling empire that extorted, intimidated, and occasionally killed. But it does complicate the simple narrative of law enforcement triumphant that the prosecution supporters preferred. His physical condition continued to deteriorate after his release. The damage from the Alcatraz attack was permanent, and the aging process compounded it in ways that became more apparent with each passing year. He walked with a cane.
He experienced chronic pain that he managed with medication. The man who had once been defined by his physical vitality, by the boxer’s energy and the street fighter alertness, was now a visibly diminished figure who moved carefully and tired easily. He lived modestly in West Los Angeles in circumstances that were a vivid contrast to the Brentwood home and the Cadillacs and the bespoke suits of his years of power.
He had essentially no money. The empire had been destroyed and the assets dispersed. The legal expenses had consumed whatever reserves he had accumulated, and the federal government had extracted fines and judgments that had followed him through and beyond his imprisonment. He was not destitute in the literal sense, but he was dependent on the generosity of old associates and the income from the memoir and the interview appearances in a way that would have been unimaginable to the Mickey Cohen of 1948. The memoir published in 1975 under the title Mickey Cohen, in my own words, was received with the mixture of critical skepticism and genuine public interest that such documents typically attract. Reviewers pointed out correctly that the book presented its subject in a light that was consistently more favorable than the available evidence warranted. Cohen’s account of his own violence was
carefully minimized. His account of his relationships with corrupt officials was artfully vague. His account of the specific mechanisms by which his bookmaking empire operated was sufficiently general to avoid creating legal problems while being specific enough to seem authentic. What the book did capture and what gave it an enduring value beyond its considerable limitations as a reliable historical document was the texture of a life lived at the intersection of ambition and violence in post-war American cities. Cohen had a genuine gift for observed detail, for the specific physical and behavioral characteristics of the people he had known, for the social dynamics of the criminal world he had inhabited, for the particular rhythms of a life organized around the maintenance of power. The memoir was not the whole truth, but it was a kind of truth, and the glimpses it provided of the world it
described were irreplaceable. In the late 1970, Cohen became involved in the affairs of an unlikely figure, Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign and administration. He had met the Georgia politician through intermediaries and characteristically attempted to parlay the relationship into something useful.
The connection came to nothing of practical significance, but it illustrated a quality that had characterized Cohen throughout his life. his genuine belief that his social skills and his reputation for reliability would always allow him to find a place in any room he walked into. Even at the end of his life, diminished and impoverished, he was networking.
His health collapsed progressively through the late 1970s. The neurological damage from Alcatraz was compounded by stomach cancer diagnosed in the final years of his life. He underwent treatment and continued making public appearances as long as his physical condition permitted, maintaining to the end the public presence that had always been his most reliable tool of self-preservation.
Mickey Cohen died on July 29, 1976. He was 62 years old. The cause of death was stomach cancer. He was buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, California, in a cemetery that also contains the graves of several Hollywood figures, an appropriately ambiguous final resting place for a man who had spent his life occupying the border between the entertainment world and the criminal one.
The orbituaries were substantial and for the most part surprisingly admiring the qualities that the press chose to emphasize. His toughness, his style, his survival against extraordinary odds, his genuine charisma reflected the way in which the American cultural memory of organized crime tends to romanticize its subjects once they are safely dead and operationally inert.
The murders, the extortions, the corruptions of public institutions, the violence directed at people who had no power to resist it. These things were present in the obituaries but peripheral to the main narrative which was the story of a remarkable personality. That romanticization is worth examining because it reveals something important about what Mickey Cohen’s story actually meant and means.
Cohen was not a sympathetic figure in any straightforward sense. He was a man who built a criminal empire through violence and corruption, who made a great deal of money by exploiting the weaknesses and desperation of the people. His lone shark and gambling operations served and who maintained that empire through a systematic willingness to intimidate and hurt anyone who challenged it.
The people who died in proximity to his career, the bodyguards shot in assassination attempts targeting him. The rivals whose organizations he dismantled, the individuals who made the mistake of crossing him in ways that required demonstration were not abstractions. They were people with families and histories and futures that ended or were damaged because of the world he built and maintained.
And yet the romanticization persists. And it persists not because people are foolish, but because Cohen’s story touches something real in the American cultural imagination. He was a man who started with nothing, literally nothing. A fatherless immigrant child in the most desperate neighborhood of a city that had no particular reason to give him anything, and who refused with a stubbornness that never left him, to accept the limitations that his birth circumstances implied.
The methods he used to overcome those limitations were criminal and harmful. But the refusal itself, the fundamental unwillingness to accept a subordinate position in a society that offered nothing better than subordination to men of his background, resonates with something that the American tradition is supposed to honor.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the American gangster story. And Mickey Cohen embodied it more completely than almost any other figure in that tradition. He was a product of the promise that America made to the immigrants it attracted. and then frequently failed. The promise of mobility, of the possibility that effort and intelligence and will could overcome the accidents of birth.
He pursued that promise through illegal means. But the pursuit itself was recognizably American, and the society that prosecuted him was also the society that had created the conditions in which men like him were made. His influence on the criminal world he left behind was substantial but indirect. He did not create an organization that survived him in the way that the New York family survived their founders.
The Los Angeles criminal landscape he had dominated was absorbed after his final imprisonment into arrangements that reflected the national syndicates preferences rather than any local tradition he had established. His particular combination of Jewish immigrant street culture and organized crime sophistication, the same combination that had produced Mayor Lansky and Bugsy Sieel and several other significant figures in mid-century American organized crime, did not produce a school or a succession.
It produced individual figures who burned brightly and were consumed. What he left instead was the image, and the image has proven remarkably durable. Mickey Cohen appears in film, in television, in fiction, in historical accounts of mid-century Los Angeles with a frequency that reflects both his genuine historical importance and the particular quality of his public presence.
The combination of menace and style and accessibility that made him irresistible to the media of his own time and has made him irresistible to the cultural industries that have processed and reprocessed the material of that era ever since. He is a character in the fullest sense of that word, a human being whose particular combination of qualities created a figure that the culture found more interesting than most of the people who surrounded him.
The Los Angeles he inhabited and shaped no longer exists. The bookmaking culture that was his economic foundation was displaced by legal gambling in Nevada, then in Atlantic City, then across the country. The LAPD he corrupted and fought has been through multiple reform cycles and multiple scandals since his era.
The Hollywood he penetrated and exploited has been through transformations that would make it unrecognizable to the studio executives and actors who found his company entertaining in 1948. The city itself has grown to nearly 4 million people and spread across a geography that makes the Los Angeles of his era seem almost quaint. But the story persists.
It persists because the questions it raises, about what ambition looks like when it has no legitimate outlet, about what the glamour of power conceals and enables, about the relationship between the criminal economy and the legitimate one in American cities, about the cost of building a life on the consistent application of force are questions that do not resolve with the death of their most visible illustration.
Mickey Cohen was born hungry in a Brooklyn tenement, raised hard in the streets of East Los Angeles, educated by the criminal economies of Cleveland and Chicago and New York, made powerful by a combination of physical fearlessness and organizational intelligence that was genuinely rare. Brought down by the patient application of the tax code, nearly killed in a federal prison and spent his final years as a living museum exhibit.
A man whose time had passed but whose story had not. He was in the end exactly what America makes when it takes a boy with nothing and gives him a city full of opportunity and no particular direction about how to pursue it. He pursued it the only way he knew.
