Mickey Cohen: The West Coast “Dapper Don”
© Ron Lombard
Back in the 1930s and '40s, Los Angeles was a town with hardly any rules. Bookmakers operated openly, casino gambling flourished and one-armed bandits could be found just about anywhere. When the FBI started messing with the high rollers, a small operator named Tony Cornero anchored a gambling ship outside the three-mile limit. Brenda Allen was L.A.'s best-known madam. Hundreds of girls worked for her, and most of the vice squad was on her payroll. The city was growing fast and organized crime was seeking new areas to establish control. There was so much corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department that a retired Marine general had to be called in to restore order. It was in this atmosphere that the mob set its sights on organizing Hollywood's motion picture industry. But the Mafia organization on the West Coast was weak and the Families from New York And Chicago saw an opportunity to move into the region. In the early 1930s, Chicago's notorious Al Capone sent his henchmen to L.A. to found one of the film colony's most successful labor unions, the International Alliance of Stage and Theatrical Employees (IATSE). IATSE represents cameramen, soundmen, stagehands and editors. Today, despite its past, from the union headquarters down to the soundstages, the IATSE union is remarkably mob-free, not like it was in the past. The movies were one magnet for the mob. The other was the glittering Sunset Strip and its nightclubs, where mobsters cooked up deals, and at times even shot it out with each other. Hollywood was in its heyday, and the nation's leading mobsters wanted a piece of the action. New York Families saw what Chicago was doing and planned to move in to take their share of the pie. East Coast mob boss Lucky Luciano, sent out what was described as one of the meanest men in America; Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the debonair mobster and cold blooded killer. Along with Siegel came Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno, the executioner whose gunmen patrolled the Strip and who eventually became an FBI snitch and wrote "The Last Mafioso;" and Johnny Roselli, known as the mob's ambassador to Hollywood and a participant in the famous plot to kill Fidel Castro. Siegel was quick to assume control and begin to show the "hometown boys", how things should be done.
The pickings appeared to be so good that other Families followed. Moving operations to the West Coast, Cleveland mob boss Morris "Mo" Dalitz would in time take over the Las Vegas Strip and was subsequently honored as a humanitarian. Later, Dalitz retired to Southern California and founded the L.A. Costa Country Club. These new Family members moved into the "wild west" and began to find new schemes and operations to create profits for the coffers in Chicago and on the East Coast. Mickey Cohen had been operating as an independent against the Dragna Crime Family and saw the influx of the new Families as an opportunity to create an alliance that would aid him in his competition with Dragna. Cohen weighted the options of who he should form an alliance with and reached the conclusion that his best future would lie with a close connection to Siegel.
Go To Page: 1 2
