Cohen closed lip the horse room and took a train back to Los Angeles.
When Cohen arrived in Los Angeles he learned that Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was in control on orders from the National Crime Cartel which rules the nation’s underworld.
Bugsy Siegel, although a guy with a hair-trigger temper and a reputation as a killer for Murder, Inc., was the complete antithesis of Mickey Cohen. The Bug was smooth, polished, quiet, and deadly, He was also shrewd and cunning and bossed things with an iron hand. He did go off the deep end once and wound up a corpse. That’s the way with the Syndicate. Step out of line and you’re dead. It happened to a lot of the big boys — to Albert Anastasia, Willie Moretti, Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, and many others.
At the moment, however, Bugsy Siegel was riding high. He moved in the circle of movie stars, directors, producers, and the king-pins of the industry. He was seen with some of the loveliest stars. One of them was his mistress.
Mickey Cohen looked on and licked his chops. He hungered for everything that Siegel had, especially the big money and the beautiful women. He lacked a few items, physically and mentally. Siegel was as handsome as a movie star. Cohen was short, chunky, with a broken nose, thick lips, and a limited vocabulary that ran to Brooklynese and the vilest kind of profanity.
Morally, there was nothing to choose between them. Siegel and Cohen were both bums, vicious, atavistic, jungle marauders. Siegel could give Cohen cards and spades in viciousness.
Cohen could have risen high in the National Crime Cartel but two things were against him. His mouth was too big, and he was Jewish. The latter wouldn’t have been too large a hurdle to leap because men like Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Meyer Lansky, Jake Guzik, Lepke Buchalter, and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, among others, were big in the Syndicate.
The Italian people as a whole have been seriously maligned because of the notoriety of the Mafia or Cosa Nostra. Only a handful, proportionately, are involved in the rackets. But those few are as evil as they are deadly.
Mickey Cohen, during the years he was free and operating in Los Angeles, took a lot of heat off the Chicago and New York mobs, all Sicilians or Italians with a few exceptions. Cohen didn’t have the kind of police protection that Bugsy Siegel had, and certainly nothing to compare with the Chicago Syndicate. It is generally known that the Windy City mob, leftovers from the days of Capone, is undoubtedly the most politically insulated and police-protected criminal organization in the world. That includes Sicily, the birthplace of the Mafia.
Mickey Cohen could riot, even at the very height of his career as the top hood in Los Angeles, command the kind of protection necessary to operate illegal enterprises with immunity. His police record, as previously noted, became spotted with arrests. A man like Tony Accardo, who ran the Chicago mob for years, never served a single day in jail. Accardo, however, despite the fact that he never went beyond the sixth grade, was shrewd, clever, innately intelligent, and closemouthed. Cohen was the exact opposite.
Cohen was more along the type of Jake “Gurrah” Shapiro or more, perhaps, like Momo Salvatore Giangono, alias Sam Giancana. Cohen has been described as a “snarling, ill-mannered, sarcastic, sadistic psychopath.” It was a justly earned description.
Bugsy Siegel took Cohen under his wing. He saw something in Cohen that reminded him of his own early days when he was a gunman and killer for Murder, Inc., a partner with Meyer Lansky in the notorious Bug and Meyer Mob. Siegel was having trouble with Jack Dragna, who had bossed things in Los Angeles prior to Siegel’s coming. He felt that Cohen could serve him well in the matter of straightening out some of Dragna’s hoods who were a little out of form, muscling bookies, gamblers, narcotics dealers, and whores under Siegel’s protection.
“I want you to lean real heavy on these bums, Mickey,” Siegel said. “Bust ’em up, put them in the hospital, break their arms and legs. Anyway, you want to do it so long as they get the kind of message I want them to get. Understand?”
“Sure, Ben. I know just what you want. Leave it to me.”
Cohen quickly impressed Bugsy Siegel with his efficiency at quieting stubborn rivals. He beat more than a dozen of Dragna’s hoods, roughed them up in a way he knew too well. Most of them became hospital cases. After six months of this, Dragna sought peace with Siegel.
At this time, in 1939, a war for control of the wire-service in Chicago was going on. The Chicago Syndicate wanted to take over the wire-service which supplied thousands of handbooks across the country with information on horse races to be run and those which already had run. A handbook could not operate without this vital service which not only provided the results of each race but also’ furnished the win, place, and show prices.
James Ragen and Arthur B. “Mickey” McBride operated the wire service for Moses Annenberg. Annenberg was at one time circulation manager of all Hearst newspapers. As he gained knowledge of the newspaper business, from end to end, Annenberg quit Hearst and built a vast empire of his own that rivaled Hearst’s newspapers. Among those newspapers and magazines were the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Morning Telegraph and Racing Form. His knowledge of Chicago’s underworld when he rough-housed his way through the many wars for circulation supremacy aided Annenberg in taking over the wire service from Mont Tennes who first thought of it, built it into a multi-million dollar operation, and held it for about ten years. Mont Tennes named it the General News.
Moses Annenberg went to prison for income tax evasion, and that left Ragen in full control. Mickey McBride and Louis Rothkopf were his lieutenants. Both were at one time associated with the notorious Mayfield Mob of Cleveland where Mickey Cohen tried unsuccessfully to gain a foothold. Enter now, Mickey Cohen.
Bugsy Siegel had started Trans-America in Los Angeles. The wily Siegel figured that if the Chicago mob took over the wife service from Ragen the next step would be to take over Trans-America Press, the wire service he controlled in Los Angeles and which was netting him hundreds of thousands dollars a year. He then turned to Cohen.
“You know Ragen?”
“James Ragen?”
“Yes. I knew him in Chicago.”
“Do you know Mickey McBride?”
“Sure. From Cleveland. He’s circulation manager of the News, I think. He’s got a lot of connections.”
“Like who?”
“A lot of good people. Big Al Polizzi, Gameboy Miller, King Angersola, Sammy Haas, and a bunch of others.”
“You know these people?”
“Sure. All of them.”
“Okay. You go to Chicago and get in touch with Ragen. The boys there are trying to take over the wire service there. You work with Ragen.”
Cohen hesitated, “Ben, Jake Guzik is a friend of mine. He gave me some breaks. I can’t do that to him.”
“Can you do it to me?” Siegel demanded. “Whose side are you on now? You make a choice. Me or Guzik.”
“Come on, Ben. You know it’s you. Hell, I couldn’t go against you. You’re giving me breaks too.”
“Bigger ones. Okay. Go to Chicago.”
The whole situation now took on the aspects of a Greek drama where the cross and double-cross was a part of every scene.
Mickey arrived in Chicago to visit his mother, so he said, who was ill with cancer. He contacted Ragen and told him he was there on orders from Siegel to render whatever aid he could in the matter of the wire service.