United States Attorney Ernest A. Tolin paraded a line of accountants, gamblers, bookies, and other witnesses who traced Cohen’s numerous and devious financial operations. Cohen protested that he was just a businessmen who had failed in his business. The jury didn’t believe him. They found him guilty on all four counts. On July 9, he was sentenced to five years in federal prison and fined $10,000. That was the beginning of the end for Mickey Cohen.
He was released on October 9, 1955. LaVonne had divorced him. Jack Dragna died in 1956, one of the few mobsters to die a natural death. Cohen was destined to run into more trouble because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
Mike Wallace, famed TV reporter, decided to have Mickey Cohen on his show. Cohen appeared on the Wallace show in June 1957. Wallace, an expert and brilliant interrogator, asked Cohen about the many killings attributed to him. Cohen’s answer was a classic.
“I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it!”
Cohen presented himself to Mike Wallace as a man who at least had seen the light and who realized that he had trod the wrong paths, was now penitent and was seeking a way to redeem himself by conversion to Catholicism. He had sought out Evangelist Billy Graham and placed himself in the hands of “this man who is showing me the way to God.” It was all pretty talk and made good copy. It wasn’t, however, Mickey Cohen.
Before the interview was over, Cohen returned to himself. He attacked Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker, Captain James Hamilton of the department’s intelligence squad, former Mayor Fletcher Bowron and former Police Chief C. B. Horrall.
Cohen called Parker some rather nasty names, some of them considered unprintable by every newspaperman in the country, even drunken ones. The performance was certainly a new high in weird interviews.
Cohen had an axe to grind with Chief William H. Parker and Mayor Bowron. It went back almost ten years from the date when he appeared on the Mike Wallace interview. He had made the same kind of remarks to those he made on the Wallace show to his henchmen. The words were stronger, however. The remarks referred to deals and payoffs involving Brenda Allen, infamous madame and vice queen of Los Angeles.
In April, 1949, there appeared a piece in the Hollywood Nite Life signed by Jimmie Tarantino which ignited the fuse that ultimately blew the lid off the vice racket in Los Angeles. The article stated:
“The Los Angeles Grand Jury can ask Mayor Fletcher T. Bowron many embarrassing questions regarding many shady deals with His Honor’s Administrative Vice Department.
“We have about twenty-five questions we would like answered. And so would the public. The puzzle involves Lieutenant Rudy Wellpott and Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson.
“Last week we told you of the alleged shakedown between Lieutenant Wellpott and Mickey Cohen. We also pointed out that Lieutenant Wellpott and Mickey Cohen had been chummy at various public places.
“Now, we would like to ask Mayor Bowron to answer the following questions, of which we are certain he is capable of doing.
“What does Jim Vauss, the wire-tapper, know about the intimate conversations which often took place between Sergeant Jackson and Brenda Allen, well known prostitute now serving sentences of 180 days?
“What does Mayor Bowron know about Sergeant Stokes’ connections with wire-tapper Jim Vauss? And what happened to the wire-recordings?”
Jim Vauss had done some work for Mickey Cohen, had wired his home and put in about $4,000 worth of radar and electronics stuff. He had also done other work for him, made recordings of conversations between Brenda Allen arid Sergeant E. V. Jackson.
In Florable Muir’s column in the Los Angeles Mirror on May 6, the noted columnist wrote:
“I hear that those wire recordings to be offered in the trial of Harold (Happy) Meltzer were sold to Mickey Cohen by the gent who made them for the Hollywood police vice squad.
“They’re supposed to be a conversation picked up between Brenda Allen and a cop.
“Brenda, who was recently convicted on a charge of purveying illicit love, was hotter than a depot stove because the protection she said she had been paying for wasn’t forthcoming.
“If the wire recordings get into the testimony a lot of other people are going to be hotter than Brenda was.”
The Syndicate now took a firm look at Mickey Cohen and was highly displeased. Internecine warfare was bad enough but fighting the cops as Cohen was doing, openly, in defiance of all the rules, was certain to bring the wrath of the press and public down on all the underworld. Cohen was ordered to quiet down but he was too big, in his own mind, to take orders. The determination to silence him, once and for all, one way or another, was then made by the mob.
A month after Florabel Muir’s column of May 6, appeared she wrote another column, this one on June 8, in which she declared:
“United States District Attorney James Carter says he’s investigating the possibility that Federal telephones have been tapped and if he learns they have he’ll take the matter up with the Federal Grand Jury today.
“Why does he have to wait for government phones to be tapped? It’s just as much against the law to tap anybody’s phone.
“I’ve heard lots of citizens discussing the wire-tapping goings on recently and their reactions are interesting.
“Some of them think it is okay for the police to tap wires to get evidence on suspected criminals.
“But if you ask them how they’d like to have anyone listening in on their own private phone chats, that’s an equine of a different shade.
“The story of Sergeant Charles Stoker of LAPD is very interesting to me because it reveals the way of thinking that seems to be predominant among some young cops today. They have lots of zeal, but not much know-how. Stoker says he heard that Brenda Allen was operating as a madam and the only way he knew how to get her was by listening in on her telephone calls. So he asked agent named Jimmy Vauss who just happened to be riding around in his car with him to put a bug on her phone. He doesn’t explain how he happened to be riding around with Jimmy (Sleight-of-hand) Vauss.
“Jimmy, who always seems to have been ready for any exigency, whips out his electronic tools and presto they’re getting an earful of Brenda’s talk with a Mr. Doe in the police department.”
When Harry “Happy” Meltzer went on trial, Sam Rummel, Meltzer’s lawyer, made an opening statement to the jury in which he declared that Lieutenant Wellpott and Sergeant Jackson had attempted to obtain $5,000 from Mickey Cohen to be used in the campaign of Mayor Bowron.
Rummel said, “We will prove through testimony that the two men first sought $20,000, then $10,000, and finally $5,000 from Cohen in return for their promise to quit harrassing him.”
This was the first direct accusation against police officers made by an attorney representing a henchman of Cohen’s, and it had to stand that it was an accusation made by Cohen himself.
Rummel said further, and this portion of his opening statement to the jury had to be taken with a grain of salt, that:
“We will further show that Cohen told him, Lieutenant Rudy Wellpott, and Sergeant E. V. Jackson, he was a legitimate businessman and refused to be rousted further and charged that even if he gave the $5,000 he was sure none of it would ever reach Mayor Bowron. We will prove that Wellpott and Jackson took their lady friends on tours of such places as the House of Murphy; Slapsy Maxie’s, and other Hollywood night spots and told the management to ‘send the check to Mickey Cohen.’ We will have witnesses from each of these spots to so testify.”
Mayor Bowron issued a statement after the newspapers hit the street. He was indignant over the charges made by Sam Rummel.