Mickey Cohen was a “dangerous man, full of bluster, violence, charm, greed, grandiosity, obsession, deception, chutzpah, and occasionally self-realization…”
You would think this nutshell appraisal would aptly sum up the notorious and colorful mob boss, but Tere Tereba enhances her painstakingly researched and vividly rendered Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A’s Notorious Mobster, with another observation: “…he understood his time and place. Mickey Cohen was about Los Angeles.”
Indeed, as much as Chicago had Al Capone and New York Lucky Luciano, “the pudgy, squat-legged former prizefighter” Mickey Cohen was, Tereba also notes, “as much a part of the local color as movie stars, palm trees, and smog." The judiciously infused sense of place plays out well, so that Los Angeles comprises more than just the setting—it is virtually another character. Granted, it is of the dark and gritty, hardboiled and corruption-plagued variety we’ve come to know from detective stories, crime hearings, tawdry Hollywood exposes, and sensationalistic tabloid headlines and photos. But as a warts-and-all study of a figure who is mostly all warts, Mickey Cohen chronicles the Brooklyn-born gangster—he had moved to California while a teenager—in a criminal career from hardscrabble Boyle Heights to higher-rung Brentwood, between the late 1940s and '76.
From early stints as a racketeering newsboy, gambler, stick-up artist, and boxer, Mickey made his way to Los Angeles for good in 1937 and had quickly jockeyed for—and attained with the endorsement of Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello—the position held by his mentor, Hollywood hood Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, before Siegel's 1947 murder in which, according to Tereba, Mickey was complicit. But taking over gambling, prostitution, and drugs in Los Angeles as the “King of the Sunset Strip”—the title of the book’s Act II--also meant that Mickey had his own experiences at the wrong end of a gun or two, dodging many bullets and sure death in at least a dozen assassination attempts. But though Mickey seemed to uncannily pop up from murder scene to murder scene, crime site to crime site, all he was ever imprisoned for was tax evasion. It no doubt helps to have corrupt cronies in the police department, though he and LAPD Chief William H. Parker would become bitter enemies after Mickey defamed the city’s top cop as a "known alcoholic … a sadistic degenerate of the worst type” on Mike Wallace's Nightbeat TV show in 1957.
Not without his chummy--if sometimes lethal--charms, Mickey could never resist the spotlight. The flashy publicity-seeker was always poised for power grabs, but also ready for his close-ups and above-the-fold press coverage: "When it came to money and ink," says the author, "Mickey Cohen was insatiable." He made the social-swirl and talk show rounds, hobnobbing with Hefner or Sinatra or such, usually in the company of his starlet or stripper girlfriend du jour such as Candy Barr ("What she lacked in proper education, she made up for in carnal knowledge," Tereba writes). The "celebrity mobster" also hammed it up on Merv Griffin and occasionally provided color commentary for boxing matches. In addition, he seemed to relish his time engaging in words of ill will and wit with his tireless foe Senator Robert Kennedy in televised hearings investigating labor racketeering corruption and mob infiltration of businesses.
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