L.A. Noir Read Free

Ruditsky if he could recommend someone to sweep his house in Brentwood for eavesdropping devices. Ruditsky could: an electronics whiz named Jimmy Vaus. Vaus found the bug, and Mickey hired him on the spot. Soon thereafter, Vaus let Mickey in on a little secret: He was also a wiretapper for a sergeant on the Hollywood vice squad. Vaus told Cohen he had recordings linking Sergeant Jackson to Brenda Allen. That information was Cohen’s ace in the hole. He decided to play it at henchman “Happy” Meltzer’s trial.
    The trial began on May 5, 1949. In his opening statement, attorney Sam Rummel laid out Meltzer’s defense. “We will prove through testimony that the two men first sought $20,000, then $10,000, then $5,000 from Cohen in return for their promise to quit harassing him,” Rummel declared. As a defense, this was ho-hum stuff: Gangsters were always insisting they’d been framed. But when Cohen appeared with “sound expert” Jimmy Vaus and a mysterious sound-recording machine, the press took notice, especially after Cohen confidentially informed them that he had recordings that would “blow this case right out of court.”
    The timing of Cohen’s accusation was potentially explosive. Incumbent mayor Fletcher Bowron was up for reelection on June 1. The mayor had based his entire reelection campaign on his record of keeping Los Angeles’s underworld “closed” and the city government clean. Now Mickey was claiming that he had evidence that would show that senior police officials were on the take. Fortunately for Mayor Bowron, most of the city’s newspapers strongly supported his reelection. So did the county grand jury impaneled every year to investigate municipal wrongdoing. A mistrial was hastily declared. Cohen’s allegations received only light coverage. MayorBowron was handily reelected. Only then did the
Los Angeles Daily News
break the story: BIG EXPOSE TELLS VICE, POLICE LINK: INSIDE STORY TELLS BRENDA’S CLOSE RELATIONS WITH THE POLICE, BY SGT. CHARLES STOKER!
    It turned out that Vaus’s contact on the Hollywood vice squad, Sgt. Charles Stoker, had gone before the criminal complaints committee of the county grand jury the day before Cohen and Vaus showed up in court with the wire recordings. There Stoker had told the committee about overhearing Brenda Allen’s conversations with Sergeant Jackson. It then emerged that Sgt. Guy Rudolph, confidential investigator for the chief of police, had gotten wind of Jackson’s connection to Allen fourteen months earlier and had asked police department technician Ray Pinker to set up another wiretap. But that investigation had mysteriously stalled, and the recordings had then disappeared.
    Spurred by these revelations and by Cohen’s charges, the county grand jury opened an investigation. In mid-June it began subpoenaing police officers. Chief Clarence B. Horrall insisted that he had never been informed of the allegations swirling around the vice squad; high-ranking officers stepped forward to insist that he had been. Brenda Allen volunteered that Sergeants Stoker and Jackson had both been on the take. The head of the LAPD gangster squad abruptly retired. Every day brought a new revelation. The
Daily News
revealed that the LAPD had broken into Mickey’s house in Brentwood and installed wiretaps. Columnist Florabel Muir accused Mayor Bowron of personally authorizing the operation and implied that the transcriptions were being used for purposes of blackmail. Shamefaced, Mayor Bowron and Chief Horrall were forced to concede that they had OK’d a break-in. What was worse was that no charges against Cohen had come of it. On June 28, Chief Horrall announced his retirement. One month later, the grand jury indicted Lieutenant Wellpot, Sergeant Jackson, Asst. Chief Joseph Reed, and Chief of Police C. B. Horrall for perjury. Cohen had won his bet—if he could survive to collect.
          JUST A FEW WEEKS LATER, Mickey was driving home to his house in Brentwood for