Mickey Cohen

Mickey Cohen

Meyer Harris "Mickey" Cohen (born September 4, 1913 in Brownsville in the Brooklyn borough of New York City , † July 29, 1976 in Los Angeles ) was an American mobster and professional boxer .

Cohen is included in the Kosher Nostra . He was mainly active in Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1970s; He became known for his collaboration with Bugsy Siegel in the construction of the Flamingo hotel-casino in Las Vegas . With this project began the investment of Mafia funds in the gambling business, which was not banned in Nevada unlike in other states of the USA.

Life

Early years

Meyer Harris Cohen in 1913 - on his grave stone but the year is engraved in 1914 - as a child sixth Ukrainian - Jewish emigrants born in Brooklyn. His mother, Fanny Cohen, had emigrated to New York City from Kiev ; his father was a factory worker and died two months after he was born. The family moved with Mickey and his sister Lillie sometime between 1916 and 1919 to Los Angeles, where they opened a small grocery and drug store in the then Jewish community in "Boyle Heights" ; the rest of the family followed later. At the age of six, Mickey was selling newspapers on the street, but his brother Harry (nicknamed Louie) soon pulled him out of that position. Both brothers then engaged in illegal activities; her brother Sam Cohen later developed into a devout, Orthodox Jew.

As early as 1923, during the time of Prohibition , nine-year-old Mickey was selling alcohol that his older brother had made in his mother's shop. Mickey was arrested that same year but did not reveal his brother.

Boxing

When his mother remarried, the teenager Cohen ran away and settled - 19 years old - in Cleveland , Ohio , where he tried his hand at boxing and took part in illegal prize fights in Los Angeles.

His first professional fight took place on April 8, 1930 against Patsy Farr in Cleveland. It was a preliminary fight in the scheduled main fight between Paul Pirrone and Jimmy Goodrich .

Possibly he even took part in fights on the east coast of the USA as a professional boxer ; d. H. on the way east he fought fights along the railway line. On June 12, 1931, a fight between him and featherweight Tommy Paul took place in New York City, which he lost after only 2:20 minutes of the first round by knockout .

On April 8, 1933, he boxed against Chalky Wright in Los Angeles and lost; thereafter he was incorrectly referred to in the Los Angeles Times as Mickey Cohen of Denver . He fought his last fight on May 14, 1933 against Baby Arizmendi in Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California .

Then he ended his boxing career. His official record is 76 wins, 26 defeats and 16 draws. Even after his sports career, Cohen remained a non-smoker and did not drink alcohol.

Criminal career

Shot-damaged side window on Cohen's Cadillac

In Cleveland he had met Lou Rothkopf , who was related to the mobster Moe Dalitz . Cohen then moved to New York and worked for Tommy Dioguardi , Johnny Dio's brother , and Owney Madden . Eventually Cohen went to Chicago , where he got into the legal and illegal gambling controlled by the Chicago Outfit under Al Capone .

During the alcohol prohibition , Cohen worked as an "enforcer" for the outfit and was arrested for his role in the deaths of numerous gangsters after a card game that had apparently got out of control. Cohen continued to play cards and gambling and later worked with Mattie Capone , Al Capone's youngest brother. Because he was also linked in this way with Jake Guzik , he eventually had to leave Chicago when it came to a conflict with rival players. Mickey Cohen himself had been targeted on the street.

He returned to Cleveland and resumed his contact with Lou Rothkopf, who was also on good terms with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel . Rothkopf arranged to work with Bugsy Siegel in California after Siegel left New York. Both developed the secondary location west into a lucrative, multi-million dollar business of drug, gambling and trade union crime for the gangsters of the east coast.

Continental Press

With the help of his friends Mickey Cohen, Bugsy Siegel and Jack Dragna , Gus Greenbaum gained control of the "Trans-America Wire Service" in the southwest in 1928, which in particular transmitted the results of sports betting. Carlos Marcello wanted to complete this monopoly by taking over Continental Press . James M. Ragen , who had bought it from Moe Annenberg on November 15, 1939 , refused.

Ragen was murdered on August 15, 1946. This was not a completely risky approach, because Ragen was one of the Ragen's Colts and his brother Frank Ragen had even made it to the police chief of Chicago . One witness was murdered and another disappeared without a trace. In the murder are Dave Yara , Leonard Patrick , Willie block , Gus Alex and Strongy Ferraro have been involved.

The trick of the news monopoly was to give the mobsters an information advantage, because today's mass media, which published sports results immediately, did not exist back then.

Las Vegas

Mickey Cohen's task in particular was to observe and support Bugsy Siegel in setting up the Flamingo casino in Las Vegas , and to organize sports betting .

In 1947 Siegel's death was decided by the National Crime Syndicate , because Siegel had exceeded the construction costs and at the same time it was suspected that he had moved $ 2 million to a numbered account in Switzerland with the help of his friend Virginia Hill . Cohen was believed to be the prime suspect in this murder; in any case, he became the successor to all of Siegel's gambling activities.

Cohen met with numerous public figures and politicians from Hollywood. Until the end of his life, Cohen was z. As with Sammy Davis Jr. friends.

War with the Dragna family

In later years, the "family" of the Cosa Nostra in Los Angeles was taken over by Frank Carbo , which initially had no impact on Cohen's business. However, Jack Dragna was a local boss of the Cosa Nostra in the west, who had subordinated himself to Siegel, but was not prepared to accept similar dominance by Cohen.

Dragna also acted violently against other Kosher Nostras such as Moe Sedway and Doc Stacher . Numerous assassinations have been committed on Cohen. 1949 two were bomb attacks on his house in Moreno Avenue in Brentwood committed. Sitting in the car, Cohen was shot at and attacked in front of a restaurant in August 1949, with his companions - his then bodyguard and a film actress - seriously injured. Cohen himself was hit in the shoulder. Cohen then turned his house into a fortress with floodlights and alarms . As a bodyguard , he hired Johnny Stompanato .

In the course of the investigation against the Dragna family, to which Carbo belonged, Cohen's brutal methods came into the sights of the investigators; There is also the thesis that it was precisely this intensity of the FBI's investigations - the files there now comprise more than 1,755 pages - that triggered the assassinations.

In 1950, Cohen, like many other mobsters, was summoned to appear before the Kefauver Commission . In 1952 he was imprisoned for four years for tax evasion. After his imprisonment, he became an international celebrity because he was the subject of numerous newspaper articles. B. on the television show by journalist Mike Wallace .

Lana Turner

Cohen's bodyguard Johnny Stompanato was one of the most popular playboys in Hollywood of his day . So one day Frank Sinatra went to Cohen so that he would stop seeing his ex-wife Ava Gardner , with whom he had remained friends. However, Gardner himself is said to have been one of Cohen's numerous conquests.

When Cohen was on McNeil Island , Stompanato used the free time to meet with actress Lana Turner , with whom he began an affair. When he threatened to kill her and her daughter Cheryl Crane in an argument, he was stabbed to death by the underage Cheryl in 1958. A process came about in which the mother's possible complicity should be clarified. When Lana Turner was acquitted, Mickey Cohen was so angry that he passed Turner's love letters to the press out of revenge in order to spark a slanderous campaign.

"This is the first time I've ever heard of a guy being convicted of his own murder."

"This is the first time I've ever heard of a guy convicted of his own murder."

- Mickey Cohen to the press after Cheryl Crane was found not guilty of Stompanato's death.

The end

His business activities extended to flower shops, gas stations, night clubs, casinos, etc. In 1961 he was again charged with tax evasion, in 1962 sentenced to 15 years and initially imprisoned in Alcatraz .

When Alcatraz closed, it came to Atlanta . In 1963 fellow inmate Estes McDonald attacked him from behind with a lead or iron pipe and hit him in the head; since then Cohen was paralyzed on one side. He was transferred to Springfield, Missouri Prison Hospital and released in 1972.

Mickey Cohen spent his final years impoverished in a rented apartment in western Los Angeles. "Mickey" Cohen died in his sleep in 1976 and was buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City , California .

estate

Cohen's armored Cadillac

When Cohen was arrested and convicted in 1962, the Los Angeles Police Department confiscated his heavily armored Cadillac . This car is now in the Southward Car Museum in New Zealand .

Cohen in popular culture

In the 1990 film The Two Jakes , Cohen was portrayed in the form of the fictional character Mickey Weisskopf, embodied by Rubén Blades . A year later, Cohen was portrayed by Harvey Keitel in the film Bugsy , which deals with the building of the casino hotel Flamingo by Bugsy Siegel . In LA Confidential from 1997, the arrest of Mickey Cohen triggers a bloody follow-up fight, which the film dramatizes from the perspective of the (corrupt) police, whose chief of police is ultimately exposed as a wire-pulling mobster . In 2006 Cohen was mentioned twice in The Black Dahlia . On the one hand, the boxing bet, in which the policeman "Bucky" bets against himself, is placed with "a man from Mickey Cohen"; on the other hand, "a friend of Mickey Cohen" is said to be an occasional tipster of the police officer "Lee".

In 2011, Cohen was portrayed in the computer game LA Noire by actor Patrick Fischler using performance capture .

In the 2013 film Gangster Squad , Cohen is played by Sean Penn .

In the TV series Mob City , since December 2013, Cohen is played by Jeremy Luc.

literature

• Robert A. Rockaway: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel & Co. Life stories of Jewish gangsters in the USA. Konkret Literaturverlag, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-89458-170-0 .
• Brad Lewis: Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster: The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen. Enigma Books, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-929631-65-0 .

Web links

• Benny's Shadow: All about Mickey Cohen ( Memento from February 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) by Mark Gribben on www.crimelibrary.com (English)
• Mickey Cohen at www.j-grit.com (English)
• Biography on www.biography.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Mickey" Cohen on www.findagrave.com (English)
2. ↑ Mickey Cohen's boxing matches on boxrec.com (English)
3. ↑ ^{a b} Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato - Hollywood Homicide by Mark Gribben on www.trutv.com (English)
4. ↑ Cadillac Gangster 1950 . Southward Car Museum. Archived from the original on May 24, 2010. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved September 4, 2009. 
5. ↑ LA Noire Has A Star Studded Cast Of Whatstheirnames. at hmsfriday.com, accessed November 18, 2011
6. ↑ Gangster Squad in the Internet Movie Database (English)