Before there was East Coast West Coast rap battles, there was East Coast West Coast mob wars. You think about the MAFI, you think about New York, you think about Chicago, you think about al Capone. But Los Angeles had its own batch of mobsters. It's where we kick off True Crime Tuesday. The story is.
True, sounds true?
No, it sounds made up.
I don't know, Garry and Shannon present true.
You raised a son, I did. When your son was five? Did he know how to make gin?
No? He barely knew how to make peepee. Mickey Cohen is a kid who, at the age of five, was taught how to make gin by his older brother, Harry. Mickey Cohen is the name of an LA gangster that kind of pails. I don't want to discount his impact, but he's not as well known, perhaps as some of the bigger ones, the Lucky Luciano's, the Bugsy Seagulls and things like that. And part of it is because he was an LA guy at least when he rose to when he rose to prominence.
Yeah, Mickey Cohen was born in Brooklyn, but his dad died in when he was weeks old. Mom took off to Los Angeles a couple of years later, and they made their life in Boyle Heights. And as you mentioned, he took to the life very quickly. He had an older brother who was a teenager at the time when when little Mickey was learning how to make gin at five, he grew up around pool halls, racking balls, slipping players,
bootlegged booze. It was a life of crime, or shall we say, a life on the take from go and Mickey Cohen is known. I think the picture that comes to mind for me of Mickey Cohen is when he's standing among what is left of his house in February nineteen fifty and he's wearing a bathrobe and he's just kind of casually looking at his house that had just been essentially blown up by a rival mobster. And it's such a cool picture because Mickey Cohen's in a bathrobe. Now,
what does that exude to you? To me, that exudes I don't give an f you just tried to blow my house up. I am not bothered enough to get out of my bathrobe. I am not bothered enough to change out of my slippers. I'm going to stand here in my bathrobe and look at the damage, because I don't fear you. I am Mickey f and Cohen.
Yeah, this is the craziest of This rival tries to sneak a bomb underneath the crawl space of Cohen's house and the crawl space or the bomb itself is made of thirty sticks of dynamite, and they said it was a weird quirk of the house that resulted in the bomb not killing anybody. It was placed underneath the house, but a cement covered vault that this guy installed ended up diverting the blast.
The guy's name was Tom Dragna, the rival who tried to blow up Mickey Cohen and his house, and the two were involved in the Sunset Wars, which was basically a turf war in Los Angeles trying to get mob dominance in the late forties. And this was supposed to be a sign, but like you said, it was a gross miscalculation because there was that cement covered vault that basically took the impact of the bomb.
And that was one of eleven known assassination attempts against this guy. He was known as LA's al Capone, and you mentioned that he was born in Brooklyn. As he grew up. He just all ways was hustling, started selling La examiners downtown. The paper he would he struck up a deal with the editor the paper because he was giving the editor bathtub gin at a time during prohibition, and the editor would end up giving him papers that he could then sell and keep the proceeds from.
It's funny that he started selling newspapers because he ended up buying the newspaper people, buying the politicians, buying the cops, buying attorney general. In fact, got an attorney How is that? How great is that that you're a mobster running dirty money left and right and you're able to put an age of your picking in that spot.
Pretty nice? He as a kid, learns to box, actually tries to make a go of it, ends up in the Midwest in Cleveland, but catches on with some of the less than savory people who are around the boxing clubs that he was in, and gets picked up as an enforcer for the mob. Gets pushed over towards Chicago because they need some they need a tough guy in Chicago. Now, this Mickey Cohen told stories all the time, and I mean tall tales that kind of story all the time.
He talks about when he was in Chicago that was the first time he met al Capone. Well, the math doesn't work out because al Capone was already in Alcatraz for tax evation at the time, so there's no way he could have met him. But after things get out of hand in Chicago and he's a little bit too big for his breeches, they send him back to Chicago in the thirties and they say, hey, listen, we need
you to team up with Bugsy Seagull. So he's in cahoots with Bugsy Seagull and basically everything from prostitution to gambling on the strip, the gambling ships off the coast, all of that made Mickey Cohen into one of the biggest gangsters in la.
If you're interested in this storyline, I will direct you to the nineteen ninety one major motion picture movie Bugsy. It's a great movie from what I remember when I was eleven and I went to go see it in the theater. It's about Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Warren Batty is Bugsy. Harvey Kaitel plays Mickey Cohen. Yeah, and it's fantastic. It's all about Los Angeles and Vegas and like the West Coast Mafia.
Mickey Cohen, a former boxer turned local mobster here in la is detailed in a new book out. It's called Mickey Cohen, The Life and Crimes of LA's Notorious Mobster and Terry Tariba. The author basically argues that Mickey Cohen kind of didn't get as fair shake in terms of being as high profile as some of the other mobsters that we know about. For example, Mickey Cohen, he didn't really he didn't really drink, wasn't a big smoker. I guess ice cream was his was his vice, and in
fact he was. He was oddly respectful and nice in many cases to the police that were tracking him and trailing him all day. He also supposedly brokeered some sort of a truce. One of his tough guys named Johnny Stampanado was caught with Ava Gardner, who was also having an affair with Frank Sinatra at the time, and Mickey Cohen mediated the whole thing, not by insisting that Johnny Stampanado give up the relationship, but by insisting that Frank Sinatra make amends with his wife Nancy.
At the time, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. What a love story. Yeah, what a great story that is. I think there's a Kitty Kelly book about that. It's pretty good.
He controlled and I mentioned that, you know, all of the things, the gambling, ships, the back room gambling on the Sunset Strip, prostitution, all of that stuff that was running through LA at the time, but none of that is what really got him in trouble. It's what falls, sorry, it's what fells. All of the big ones. Tax evasion. In nineteen fifty one.
Sam tax evasion.
He's indicted for failing to pay adequate taxes on his income one owing what would be about two point seven million when adjusted for inflation. There were some other legal issues that were hanging over him. Of course. To shore up his legal defense, he took out a storefront on the Sunset Strip in which he wrote the words Mickey Cohen quits, and then auctioned off a bunch of his furniture, a bunch of his electronics, his vintage weapons at the time.
So he does just under four years in prison for tax evasion, and he gets out and he's a new man. But i'll put that in quotes new man. He dresses differently. He talks to young people. A stay out of crime begins hanging out with Billy Graham.
How old was he when he got out?
Uh? And died in fifty one, got out in fifty five and born in thirteen, So he's in his forties.
Yeah, well back then the forties were your sixties essentially.
I guess. And then he goes back to prison in nineteen sixty two. Guess what for tax evasionax evasion? And he's released a short time later. I mentioned that there is another movie about this guy. You mentioned Buggsy Siegel. Obviously that concentrates on Bugsy Bugsy, but there was a There was another movie called Gangster Squad in twenty thirteen where Sean Penn plays.
Making That's a good movie. That's a good movie.
I'm a Stone. Josh Brol and Ryan Gosling in that as well.
When Cohen was interviewed by Mike Wallace in New York in nineteen fifty seven, he said, I never killed a guy who, in my way of life didn't deserve it. I mean, in my way of life, is quite the umbrella. Right.
By the time he gets out, he says, the world has changed. Touring for his autobiography that he wrote he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. A little less energetic, they said. He did still did the did the rounds. He did what he could