The Gangster Squad sets a trap for Mickey Cohen

Nicola “Nick” Licata, a former Detroit bootlegger reputed to be second in command in the L.A. Mafia, August 1951.Licata set up alibi for Fratianno








Detectives and reporters surround the car containing the bodies of the Two Tonys: Tony Trombino, 31, and Tony Brancato, 36, slain on Ogden Drive, half a block from Hollywood Boulevard. Both were shot through the back of the head, August 1951.


After the Two Tonys were shot dead and left slumped in their car in Hollywood, the LAPD prepared an internal report titled "GANGLAND KILLINGS, Los Angeles Area, 1900-1951."

The survey went back to when fruit peddlers fought over turf and the Black Hand shook them down for a cut of the action. Police were certain who committed the first gangland killing, in 1906, but "strong man" Joe Ardizzone was acquitted when "no witnesses . . . would talk." Ardizzone later made the list in a different capacity -- as a victim -- when he vanished in 1931 after leaving his Sunland vineyard to meet a cousin from Italy. No one was convicted in that case, either.

Even as the causes of underworld squabbles evolved over the decades -- from fruit carts to Prohibition liquor sales to control of illegal gambling -- there was one constant: how easy it was to get away with murder.

The "GANGLAND KILLINGS" report listed 57 over the first half of the 20th century. And one conviction. One. For the 1937 rub-out of Redondo Beach "gambling czar" Les Bruneman. And that case eventually unraveled.

What that left was half a century of gangland killings whose case summaries ended with "No prosecution" or the more optimistic "No prosecution to date." Time and again, there was no overcoming the underworld's code of silence, "omertà."

So it was with the Aug. 6, 1951, slaughter of the Two Tonys, a pair of losers from Kansas City who had raised the ire of the mob hierarchy by robbing the cash room at Las Vegas' Flamingo Hotel. "Wild-haired young bloods," Mickey Cohen called them.
Anthony Brancato and Anthony Trombino had been spotted meeting in L.A. with another Kansas City import, Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno. Hours later, Trombino was about to light a cigar in the front seat of his Oldsmobile, with Brancato beside him, when someone in the back blew their brains out, just off Hollywood Boulevard.

Jimmy the Weasel had an alibi, of course -- he'd spent the evening in Burbank, at a fish fry at the Five O'Clock Club owned by Nicola "Nick" Licata. After Licata and 12 others dutifully backed Fratianno's story, the cops tried to get a clerk at Schwab's drugstore to say that a stogie found at the murder scene was a brand that Jimmy the Weasel favored, but she said no, that was too cheap. He was a 70-cent-cigar man.

Thus did the double killing become another "No prosecution to date."

What you had to do, in Jack O'Mara's job, was settle for whatever small victories you could manufacture

That's why the Gangster Squad sergeant volunteered to bring in Licata after the Two Tonys hit.

O'Mara didn't expect a miracle -- there was no way a mob higher-up would turn on a loyal triggerman. But he gave a polite nod to Licata's wife, allowed the man time to get his things and arranged for Licata's son to visit him in the police lockup.
You had to wait for your opening, and for O'Mara it came the next time he showed up at the Licata home, part of yet another roust for a crime that would never be solved. By then, he was like family, the kindly cop, and Licata felt comfortable asking a favor: "Look, Mr. O'Mara, my wife she's a-fixin' me a nice chicken dinner. Before I go downtown. . . ."

'Hey Nick,' I say, 'Go ahead and eat. I'm in no hurry. Do you mind if I use your phone?'


The phone had a long cord so Licata could carry it into his private office. O'Mara carted it instead to the kitchen. Then he began to rummage, "looking," he said, "for anything I could steal."

That's how he stumbled upon paperwork from a wedding. The couple were Licata's son and the daughter of Black Bill Tocco, a Detroit Mafia boss who had a mansion with an 80-foot pool and knew how to stage a gala mob marriage. Many of the RSVPs had come back to the Licata home on Overland Drive.

I got the phone and I'm watching him from the kitchen and I'm pulling out drawers, you know, taking the wedding invitations, and I shove them in my trench coat, you know. I'm bulging with all these RSVPs . . . all the goddamn Mafia in the country, see."

You could call it petty theft -- O'Mara wouldn't argue. But other law enforcement agencies had to settle for camping outside that Detroit wedding with cameras and binoculars, trying to figure out who was emerging from the limos. In L.A., the Gangster Squad didn't have to rely on fuzzy photos to add names to files that now filled a wall of cabinets in City Hall


Small victories, that was their reality. Like when Mickey Cohen finally went on trial in 1951.

For years, Los Angeles officials had lobbied the federal government, all the way to President Truman, to use the legal strategy that nailed Al Capone -- a tax case -- against the showboating L.A. mobster. A grand jury eventually collected evidence of how Mickey had paid a decorator $49,329 for work on his Brentwood home, spent $800 on shoes and handed out $600 in tips at one lavish affair. They'd let him try to explain how he lived like that thanks to $300,000 in "loans," not income, from bookies and others. "If it's against the law to borrow dough," Mickey joked, "I'm guilty."

Thus did they get the guilty verdict they wanted -- and Mickey got a five-year sentence for tax evasion. Before they led him off, Mickey handed his wife a roll of bills and his jewelry, gave her a kiss and pledged to appeal. "Right now, though," he quipped, "I'm hungry."

Five years had passed since the Gangster Squad was formed with the streets as its office. Two of the original eight had retired, including the first field leader, Willie Burns. Soon after, two more originals were gone, dead, in fact -- one in a car accident, the other a suicide.

There were no guarantees in police work, or life, but O'Mara hoped he'd still be around, and on the squad, when Mickey got out of prison. He wanted to see if another of his small victories paid off.

This too involved his mole Hawkins. Well before Mickey went off on his federally sponsored vacation, the guard had smuggled seven handguns out of his Brentwood house. Not exactly smuggled -- at O'Mara's direction, the munitions expert had suggested to Mickey that his guns could use a checkup. Hawkins volunteered to take them into the wilderness to fire 'em, clean 'em and oil 'em. Mickey loved the idea.

But Hawkins did not take the guns to the desert. He took them to the police range in West L.A., where O'Mara was waiting with an LAPD lab technician. Not surprisingly, none of the weapons was registered to Mickey. They recorded the serial numbers and fired test bullets from each.

O'Mara screwed off the butt plates and scratched initials into each gun, putting his own, "JOM," in the first. Then he reattached the plates and Hawkins returned the cleaned guns to an appreciative Mickey.

At police headquarters, the list of hidden initials was locked in a safe in the office of the squad's boss, Capt. James Hamilton. Only Chief William H. Parker and a few others were let in on the trap they'd set for Mickey.

While he was in prison, one of his henchmen would keep his arsenal. When he got out, he'd no doubt retrieve the guns that now could be traced to him. "I figured they might be recovered from a body someday," O'Mara said.

If that happened, the LAPD might actually solve a gangland killing. It was a long shot, but some long shots pay off. O'Mara merely had to wait a decade, to the last days of the 1950s, to the night when Mickey and his crew sat waiting in Rondelli's restaurant for Jack "the Enforcer" Whalen, the homegrown hoodlum who'd found a special friend on the Gangster Squad.

Hollywood Mafia Mobsters Hollywood Gangster Squad

If they joined the Gangster Squad, their targets would be the likes of Bugsy Siegel, the playboy refugee from New York's Murder Inc., and Jack Dragna, the Sicilian banana importer who quietly lorded over the city's rackets.

Then there was Mickey Cohen, the dapper former prizefighter who had come to town as Bugsy's muscle but soon had his own cafe on North La Brea and a "paint store" nearby with three phones to take bets. That's where he'd shot a produce broker whose family ran competing bookie joints. Mickey said the man came at him with a .45, the one found beside the body, and there were no witnesses to contradict his story. "It was me or him," Mickey said. "I let him have it."

There had been three more mob rub-outs around L.A. since then, including the shotgunning of two Chicago men outside a Hollywood apartment. That one generated a "Gangsters in Gambling War" headline that was a prime reason Police Chief C.B. Horrall wanted those 18 cops to see what a Thompson submachine gun looked like.


"You'll be working with these," Burns told them.


The deal was: If they signed on, they'd continue to belisted on the rosters of their old stations. They'd have no office, only two unmarked cars. They'd almost never make arrests. They'd simply gather "intelligence" and be available for other chores. In effect, they would not exist.

Burns gave them a week to ponder advice from an old lieutenant at the 77th, who said an assignment like that could get you in good with the chief. "Or you could end up down in San Pedro, walking a beat in a fog."

After the week, only seven came back, making a squad of eight, counting Burns.

"We did a lot of things that we'd get indicted for today," said Sgt. Jack O'Mara.





* * *


On the job a decade before J. Edgar Hoover's FBI acknowledged the existence of the Mafia, they took an anything-goes approach to making life hell for Mickey Cohen and driving other such characters from the Southern California sunshine.

They used a look-alike Pac Bell truck to plant bugs, to hell with warrants. They did secret favors for Jack Webb, who glorified the LAPD with his "Dragnet" TV show. They stole evidence from mobsters and neutralized a pesky newspaper columnist. And Jack O'Mara personally set a trap for the showboating Mickey, to prove he was a killer.

There were close calls -- grand jury investigations, lawsuits and a skeptical chief or two -- but they endured through the 1950s. That's when one of their cases changed the ground rules for policing in California and when one of their own -- Jerry Wooters, the most reckless of them all -- grew far too friendly with L.A.'s homegrown hoodlum, Jack "the Enforcer" Whalen.

But when "the Enforcer" made the mistake of confronting Mickey and his crew at a hangout in the Valley, a bullet between the eyes signaled that the Gangster Squad's time was over, and so was a defining era in the city's history.

Noir L.A. was a time and place where truth was not found in the sunlight, and justice not found in marble courthouses, and where not a single gangland killing was solved, not one, for half a century. Not on paper, anyway.


* * *
Their first assignment: the visitors shaking down Hollywood restaurants and nightclubs. "Hoodlum types from Rhode Island," in O'Mara's words, "what we called 'dandruff.' "

The fear of evil outsiders had been a refrain in L.A. before any of these cops were born. You could go back to 1891, when this was a community of 70,000 with a police force of 75, and hear Chief John Glass warn of "Eastern crooks" seeking warm weather and easy pickings. After the turn of the century, the invaders were upgraded to "Eastern gangsters," and in 1927 Det. Ed "Roughhouse" Brown became a local legend by escorting Al Capone to the train when the notorious mobster was discovered in a downtown hotel. "I thought you folks liked tourists," Capone said before returning to Chicago.

Now a new group of "tourists" was demanding 25% of the take at landmarks such as the Mocambo and Brown Derby, and the club owners did not want to go to court, worried what might happen to their families. A state crime report would warn anew of an "Invasion of Undesirables." "What are you gonna do?" O'Mara asked.


The view was great from the hills off Mulholland Drive. So why not escort these hoodlums up there and, as O'Mara put it, "have a little heart-to-heart talk with 'em, emphasize the fact that this wasn't New York, this wasn't Chicago, this wasn't Cleveland. And we leaned on 'em a little, you know what I mean? Up in the Hollywood Hills, off Coldwater Canyon, anywhere up there. And it's dark at night."

Amid that darkness, he would "put a kind of a gun to their ear and say, 'You want to sneeze?' "
That was O'Mara's signature, the gun in the ear and a few suggestive words: "Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A real loud sneeze?"


* * *



The squad members met on street corners or in parking lots. Their 1940 Fords had 200,000 miles on them and holes in the floorboard so they could pour fluid into the master cylinders. At times five men rode in one, and if several smoked cigars, their suits would stink so bad they'd hang them outdoors at night.


Their three Tommy guns came with 50-round drums and beautiful violin cases, but were a pain -- they couldn't leave them in the trunk and risk having them stolen. O'Mara slept with his under his bed.

When they did get an office, it was a cubbyhole in the decaying Central station, which had horse stalls from the 1880s.

It was tempting to see them as a wrecking crew, with several resembling another new team in town, the football Rams. Doug "Jumbo" Kennard stood 6-foot-4, Archie Case weighed 250 and Benny Williams was construction-strong -- one of the cops who built the Police Academy in their spare time.

But a team needed a quarterback or two, men tough and clever, like Burns, who'd been a gunnery officer during the war. Or Jack O'Mara.

Born in 1917, he spent his toddler years in Portland, Ore., until ice storms inspired his father to pile the family into a Model T and drive south. Jack landed at Manual Arts High, where he wasn't the speediest guy on the track team but never understood how anyone beat him. For fun, he boxed.

Not quite 135 pounds, he had to stuff himself with bananas and ice cream to make the weight for the LAPD, which needed men in the wake of its scandals of the 1930s, when a mayor and chief were caught selling promotions and a rogue squad planted a bomb under the car of a civic reformer. "It was a lousy, crooked department," said Max Solomon, Bugsy Siegel's attorney.

O'Mara became part of a generation that was supposed to change all that. At the academy, he foolishly kept racing the fastest man in the Class of 1940, Tom Bradley, the former UCLA track star and future mayor, though he had no chance of winning.

He worked patrol and traffic until Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. Coast Guard gave him an aptitude test and sent him to a cryptography unit in the Aleutian Islands, part of the effort to intercept Japanese communications and break their code. Who knew he had brains? When he returned, he was a pipe-smoking, 165-pound Spencer Tracy look-alike, and just the sort Burns wanted for his hush-hush unit.

Other cops suspected they were internal spies, headhunters, a rumor that started when a beat officer confided to the chief's office that a bookmaking barber was inviting cops to "get on the take." The squad caravaned to the barbershop, "ripped everything, kicked all the walls out," O'Mara said, and shaved the guy's head with his own razors.

Pleased, the brass gave them more muscle: 6-foot-5 Jerry Greeley and Lindo "Jaco" Giacopuzzi, a 230-pound former all-Valley football lineman who had built himself up carting milk cans at his family's dairy. When that pair got a Tommy gun, they showed they understood the rules of this gig -- that there were none in dealing with Mickey Cohen and his ilk. Asked to stake out the clothing store Mickey had opened, they decided to leave his crew guessing whether they were cops or out-of-town hoods.

They took the plates off their unmarked car and found others -- from Illinois -- in the trash at the DMV, then parked up the block from Mickey's place. One of Mickey's men went out to investigate and "every time he'd pass by us, we'd put our coat up and pull our hat down," Giacopuzzi recalled. "So when we left, I was driving, and all the men in Mickey's establishment there came out on the sidewalk . . . and I took the car and I swerved it . . . and Greeley leaned way out of the window with the Tommy gun. And you should have seen them hit the deck."

It was a great prank to share with the squad, the fake drive-by, and maybe they wouldn't have done it later, after someone -- not faking -- came by Mickey's haberdashery on the Sunset Strip with a shotgun. That was no laughing matter, the dead body that marked the start of the Sunset Wars





* * *


The squad made news for the first time on Nov. 15, 1947, with a report that Willie Burns and O'Mara had led a "flying detachment" that rousted six Midwesterners on Wilshire in a limo with New York plates. The six were booked on suspicion of robbery, though there was no evidence they had yet committed any crime in Los Angeles. Photographers were invited into the Wilshire station to snap them seated on a bench, several with bowed heads. Then four were escorted to the county border.

Of course, no one knew then what would become of the two men who were allowed to stay on promises of good behavior. Who could have guessed that James Fratianno, an ex-con "used-car salesman" from Cleveland, would become infamous as Jimmy the Weasel, the L.A. mob's most prolific hit man? Who could have guessed that James Regace would rise to head that mob three decades later, under his real name, Dominic Brooklier?


What mattered at the time was that the squad had sent some suspicious characters packing and thus sent a signal to the civilian populace and to Mickey et al. That second audience did get the message -- the bug in Mickey's Brentwood home made that clear.

His right-hand man, Neddie Herbert, was overheard the day after the roust, saying: "I can't meet you at the Mocambo, I'm afraid they'll pick me up." At 3:30 a.m., he updated Mickey: "Somebody else got picked up. Jesus Christ. I'm getting out of this. I want to live to be a grandfather


"They can't make anybody leave town," Mickey said. "It's against the Constitution."

The Gangster Squad could not take credit for that eavesdropping, or be blamed when it turned into a fiasco. The squad was still getting organized when vice detectives leaped at an opening provided by Mickey's renovation of a ranch house on Moreno Drive. Five posed as construction workers, when the real ones took off, and hid a microphone between the wood bin and the fireplace.

The bug was set by the time Mickey and Lavonne Cohen moved in, and soon was picking up barking by Tuffy, their bulldog. The vice team's mistake was hiring a private bugging expert, because he secretly ran a second line to his own listening post. For a year it gave him -- along with the LAPD -- a window into what Mickey was up to: talking about fixing charity boxing matches, telling someone back East that "we need a shotgun in the outfit," grumbling about greedy cops who "grab it and tear your arm off" when you offer them "a gift."


But the bug picked up nothing of note on June 20, 1947, when Bugsy Siegel was shot through the eye while reading the Los Angeles Times in his living room a few miles east. Mickey kept mum about Bugsy's demise, which left him and Jack Dragna to fight for control of local gambling.

Mickey's crew did complain about the leader of the Gangster Squad, Willie Burns, and how some cops were harassing customers at his haberdashery. "It's ridiculous," Mickey said. "Anybody who they see leave the store they take right downtown." Not long after, Burns' wife received flowers at home, a funeral arrangement.


* * *

* * *
Some hoodlums understand the wisdom of anonymity, but the 5-foot-5 Mickey was the opposite breed, like Capone, or later John Gotti. Mickey cultivated his image as a "dese, dem and dose" sort who worked his way up to monogrammed silk pajamas.

He could claim to be a local boy too, for while he was Brooklyn-born, as Meyer Harris Cohen, his mother moved west to Boyle Heights, where he got a paperboy's education in the streets and began boxing with a Star of David on his trunks. He moved East to compete as a top featherweight and settled in Cleveland and Chicago, where he met the Capones and segued into "rooting," his term for "sticking up joints."

Now Mickey sped between nightspots in an entourage of Cadillacs and boasted that he wore suits just twice, then sold them at his store. He made no secret of his hand-washing mania, either, cleaning them constantly for fear that germs, not bullets, would get him.

But he was no joke -- a commission appointed by Gov. Earl Warren estimated that "the Cohen gang" had 500 bookies under its wing, with Mickey demanding $40 a week for each telephone in return for his protection. And although the LAPD once was the place to secure that protection, by 1947 he found it easier to do business in some of the county's other 46 law enforcement jurisdictions, especially Burbank, whose police chief soon was able to buy a 56-foot yacht, largely with cash.

Yet it wasn't easy to get the goods on Mickey, for he'd say one instant that a gambling joint was worth "over half a million," then lament that he still owed $45,000 on his house and, oh yeah, "I haven't booked a horse in four years."

Later, Mickey insisted he knew all along the cops had "a bug in my rug" and that's why he dished them so much nonsense. But he seems to have learned of the bug by chance, when his gardener plunged a shovel through an underground wire. Mickey had his property swept and found the mike by the wood box.

Soon after, he obtained partial transcripts of his conversations, 126 pages of notes that the private bug man apparently had taken and now was selling along the Sunset Strip. The San Francisco Chronicle and the L.A. Times got them too, generating "Cohen's Secrets" and "Cohen's Big Deals" headlines . . . and questions about why the man still walked free if authorities had all that dirt on him.

That's why the Gangster Squad had its own bug man.


* * *
From an Iowa farm family that came west in a covered wagon, Con Keeler had grown up tinkering with radios and could cobble together crude bugs using telephone and hearing aid parts. He also knew Navy intelligence officers who were developing eavesdropping systems that did not require long, telltale wires -- a welcome innovation given that Mickey would be looking for wires.

In this system, the mike was connected to a transmitter that sent signals you could pick up blocks away. The downside was that you had to hide a six-pack of batteries with the transmitter and replace them every week. But the first challenge was planting the equipment.

That was especially daunting at Mickey's house because someone -- probably Dragna -- had exploded dynamite under it. Mickey now had round-the-clock guards, swinging searchlights and an armored front door with a porthole window

The answer? A diversion. As soon as Mickey and Lavonne went out one night, two squad members began digging noisily in a nearby lot. When Mickey's guards went to have a look, Keeler climbed a fence and crept though an orange grove behind the house. He had burlap over his shoes to silence his footsteps and ammonia on his clothes to drive off dogs.

The bombing had left splintered openings under the house, and Keeler was able to slide one bug inside a closet where Mickey stacked dozens of pairs of shoes. Then he crept out through the orchard and past the home of an English physician who had worked for British intelligence in the war and was letting them use his garage as a listening post.

But they hadn't counted on what their bugging would do to Mickey's TV. At a time when only 10 million Americans had sets, he had the fanciest sold by W&J Sloane department store, with a "distinguished mahogany" cabinet and 45 tubes to guarantee clear reception. Now they overheard him ranting about the screwy lines on Channel 2.

Listening from the doctor's garage, the squad knew what was up -- their transmission was too close to the lowest frequency picked up by a TV. Mickey was likely to figure it out also.

"We could hear him call up and raise hell with W&J Sloane company. 'Take this goddamn thing out of here or come out and have somebody fix it!' " O'Mara recalled. "Sure enough, they sent a technician out."

O'Mara had an idea -- intercept the repair truck. "Pulled him over, talked to him. He was scared, but he agreed. 'I'd like you to take a man,' I said."

Mickey wanted service? He'd get two men fiddling with the back of his set. "While we're in, we put in another bug. Right in his TV. And the batteries to run the damn bug."

This one used a slightly different frequency that would not put annoying oscillations on Channel 2.

Mickey said, 'Fine, well, fine, thank you, guys' and gave 'em 25 bucks apiece for a tip, you know. Well, my guy takes Mickey aside and says, 'Lookit, I'll be back in here once a week and take care of it. You know, there's a lot of bugs in televisions and stuff you have to work out

Mickey had to think his lavish tips were why the repairman was so eager to get into his TV every week.

OK, so the bug couldn't hear much when Mickey's TV was on, and it was on all the time. But O'Mara sensed that their mission might be measured by small victories, and it was a small victory , for sure, to be able to say, a half-century later . . . and that's how Mickey Cohen wound up paying for his own bugging.


I spent the whole day with Mobster, Jimmy Fratianno in 1990
and Jimmy told me how he paid these coppers off to lose
the tail they had on him. Anthony Fiato





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Los Angeles crime 'Dragnet' LAPD

'Dragnet' tales drawn from LAPD files burnished the department's image
Jack Webb mirrored Chief William H. Parker's militaristic style and contempt for suspects' rights.
By Paul Lieberman
October 30, 2008

Jack Webb was not yet 30 when he came up with the radio show "Dragnet" in 1949. Two years later, he brought it to the fledgling medium of TV, with its memorable dum-da-dum-dum music and opening: "The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent." The stories weretrue, too, for Chief William H. Parker readily shared files with a booster whose portrayal of "Just the facts, ma'am" cops was one of two ways the country was sold a new image of the LAPD.

The other was Parker's own militaristic style that emphasized crackdowns on "vice and corruption" both on the streets and within the ranks, all to promote "a moral and spiritual rebirth" of the nation.


Webb's TV series drew on all corners of the Los Angeles Police Department, but when he made a movie version in 1954, he set it in the Intelligence Division, a.k.a. the Gangster Squad. In fact, he re-created its offices down to the spittoon.

The plot had Sgt. Joe Friday trying to solve the killing of a mob figure with the help of an informant or two, a bug or two and lectures about the unfair justice system. "Why does the law always work for the guilty?" Friday asks when the hoods come before a grand jury with their rights -- "I refuse to testify . . ." -- written on slips of paper. What's more, a female grand juror gives him a hard time on whether officers should be allowed to tap phones. "How do we know that all you policemen wouldn't be running around listening to all our conversations?" she asks.

"We would if you talked murder," Friday shoots back.


A film critic might say the big-screen "Dragnet" suffered from stylistic schizophrenia, mixing Webb's poker-faced earnestness with traces of film noir, with its rainy streets, dark interiors and elusive reality. Friday and his partner are even denied the privilege of arresting the hit man -- he dies on them, of gastric cancer, a touch inspired by the L.A. mob's Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno, who complained of a "hot gut."

But you had to be an insider to know that -- or how some names in the film were not invented. The real-life Capt. James Hamilton was a major character, played by craggy-faced Richard Boone, and the minor ones included a Sgt. Keeler, after Con Keeler, the squad's original bug man.

A newer bug man also got a plug: "Can Phelps meet us out there with playback equipment?" That was for electronics whiz Bert Phelps, who once turned alarm equipment from a firehouse into a device to monitor a bookie's phones. Phelps also got termite training to provide a cover for crawling under buildings. No wonder the CIA kept trying to hire him.

Phelps got a charge out of being in Webb's movie, naturally, but it also left him uneasy. For he knew the back story -- what the Santa Monica-born actor was rewarding them for.

Webb's marriage to singer Julie London had gone the way of many in Hollywood, leaving him worried how she would pursue his riches. Webb asked Capt. Hamilton if one of his bugging experts could meet him and a private investigator at their home while she was away. The P.I. "was gonna put the wire in, and they wanted my advice," Phelps recalled. "I said: 'Whatever the captain wants me to do, OK.' So thereafter, it did happen. He got evidence he wanted."

The lines were fuzzy in their world, but to Phelps this was a leap away from eavesdropping on Mickey Cohen. It amazed him how his LAPD bosses were so "sanctimonious" in public while secretly helping a Hollywood big shot bug his wife.

Then again, maybe they knew what they were doing by aiding Webb, for he came through for them again after the California Supreme Court, in a Gangster Squad case, issued its landmark ruling that illegally obtained evidence could no longer be used in court.

Parker went berserk over the decision, calling it "a situation long sought by the masters in the Kremlin." Both he and Webb went to Sacramento to plead with legislators to untie the hands of police. Webb's tool of persuasion? His film pointing out the idiocy of giving criminals all those rights.


paul.lieberman@latimes.com

Bottom line, Webb used the coppers to spy on his wife






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Brady gets jailed with pal hop head

Scott Brady (real name Gerald Kenneth Tierney), and his pal Slattery were arrested at 8929 Hollywood Hills Road in a major LAPD raid in which four officers, acting on a tip that drug parties were being held at the home, recovered: the butt of a marijuana cigarette and, yes, a single joint.
Aside from the humorous situation of Sgt. Marty Brennan from the movie "He Walked by Night" being busted for drugs, there's a serious point here and not just the relatively minuscule amount of drugs, compared to today's arrests.

The district attorney's office dropped the case because it would reveal the identify of one of the narcotics details' "most reliable informants," "All I can say is a woman is the cause of it all," Slattery mourned, according to The Times. "You can't shake down every woman who comes into your place."

OK, here's how it went down. Promise not to laugh:

Brady "invited two girls up to blast some tea and get high," Sgt. John E. O'Grady said. (Right daddy-O. Let's throw on some hip platters and groove to Kerouac. He is a real gone cat).

Slattery said neither he nor Brady knew the women, but that one of them called and arranged for Brady to meet them in Hollywood.

Brady came home with a blonde and a Eurasian. When Slattery went into the kitchen, he found the blonde jiggling the shutters as if she were signaling police.

"They came in like the Russian army," Slattery said despite Brady's warning against "talking too much," The Times said.

Police rejected the men's allegations implicating the women. "The girls had nothing to do with the narcotics charge," O'Grady said. "They were brought there by Scott Brady from someplace in Hollywood. We released them after we were perfectly satisfied that they had nothing to do with the narcotics charge."

In December, however, an officer told prosecutors that to "disclose the identity of the two women would be to unmask one of his most reliable informants." The officer said he could not do that "in good conscience," The Times reported.

In other words, police got complaints that Brady and Slattery were throwing drug parties at the house. They had an informant contact the men, go to the home, get the men to smoke some dope and signal the police. The cops release the women and bust the men.

The rub is, my friend Mobster, Johnny Roselli had produced the movie "HE Walked By Night" and he had hand picked Scott Brady for the part . Johnny gave Brady the " brush off "
Another True Hollywood Story Anthony Fiato .

Whitey Bulger

Infamous Mobster, Whitey Bulger of the Winter Hill Mob had a gay one night stand with Hollywood actor Sal Mineo. Mineo was known for his Academy Award nominated performace opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Bulger killed plenty of people with guns, but he shot Sal with cupids arrow right in the ass..



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Louie "The Couch" Gelfuso

Louie "the Couch" Gelfuso was a Capo in the Milano Crime Family. He was nicknamed "Louie The Couch" by FBI agent's who were listening to the planted bug in his broken-down-dump he called an apartment.


Gelfuso was always laying down on his couch while he was watching soap opera's like an old scrub woman. He would talk to the soap show characters, and he would even cry at some of the sentimental scenes.

"Louie The Couch" damn near had the Feds pissing in their pants with laughter, when he said to a soap character -- who was claiming she was a virgin, " you fucki'n douche bag , your cherry is so far up your ass, you can use it for a tailgate".

Another True Hollywood Story Anthony "The Animal" Fiato

Feds throw connolly under the bus

Joe Pistone aka Donnie Brasco, was an FBI agent who worked undercover for six years as an associate of the Bonanno Crime Family. He also helped FBI agent.Zip Connoly with -Mob-informants, Whitey Bulger, and Stevie Flemmi.. Pistone had met and talked to Flemmi and Bulger at a social dinner with Connolly at another FBI agents home in a Boston suburb .

After Connolly was convicted of federal racketeering charges in 2002, Pistone wrote a glowing letter to the sentencing judge urging leniency for .John Connolly,saying, ” he should never have been singled out to take the hit for the admitted flawed policies of a government that benefited from his skills, courage and dedication . I thought that was a cool thing to do.

Pistone must have caught some flack from the feds because now Pistone came up with some lame excuse for not testifying for the defense at Zip’s Conspiracy to Murder trial.. Pistone claims he can’t, and won’t testify without wearing a disguise, which the judge won”t allow. This guy has had his puss shown on TV almost as much as Barack Obama. In my opinion, Pistone is keeping his big trap shut to stay golden with Uncle.Sam. I met Pistone doing a show in the late eighties We compared war stories about what it was like wearing a wire According to Pistone. his wire had malfunctioned many times, which made me wonder if he ever really put it on in dangerous situations, or did he just claim to his superiors that it didn’t work when the going got hairy and scary. I busted his balls about it for a few laughs.

I had flipped to informant and wore a wire on many of the Boston mob . . Something Flemmi and Bulger never really had to do, or they were to scared to do. Connolly’s goose is going to be cooked because of the raw deal he is getting from the deaf, dumb. and blind agents who have thown him under the bus. Pistone should believe his own glowing letter, and have the balls to testify for Zip Connolly . Man up Joe !!! .
Anthony “The Animal” Fiato

Los Angeles Crime Family Hoods get clock cleaned

Frank "Puggy" Sica was the hoodlum brother of big time Los Angeles racketeer, Joe "JS" Sica . Frank was a pint sized punk,with a big chip on his shoulder. He was nothing like his older brother, JS, who was well connected and respected by Mafia figures all over the country. Puggy Sica and Sal Di Giovanni were burglars in the Sica gang. They both got their clock cleaned by a bartender who first shot at them, and then beat the fuck out them both for punching and kicking a woman to the floor in a Hollywood gin mill.. The woman was Sal the Creep's girlfriend... Sal got beat so bad he looked like a racoon because he got two black eyes.. .Frank Sica had been arrested plenty of times, but my old lawyer Eddie "the Fixer" Gritz kept him out of the pokey.. .When I was an enforcer for JS, I hated seeing this little drunken fuck.... Anthony Fiato

..Another true Hollywood story

Anthony Fiato, aka "The Animal", made Murry "the K" DJ

Murray the K, was a famous and influential rock and roll impresario and disc jockey of the 1950's, '60's and '70's. During the early days of Beatle mania, he frequently referred to himself as "the Fifth Beatle, Murray loved to gamble on sports.

He lost a ton of bucks gambling... One weekend he lost over thirty grand betting on football to a bookie named John Di Mattia. Di Mattia was my partner, or with me, as we say in the Mob.. when Murray The "K" came up lame for the dough I took a ride with Di Mattia to Murray's Hollywood Hills home to make him pay, and to meet a guy who was a living legend.

.The "K" looked as skinny as a rail.. I guess it was from doing cocaine.. I had to slap him around. a bit to make myself very clear about how I was going to hurt him bad if we didn't get our money.. The poor prick was shaking like deputy Barney Fife. In the midst of all this ,the crazy fuck asks me if I want a line a coke. Then and there, I knew how we were going to get paid.. I came up with a plan to get the money.. The "K" was heavy into cocaine, so I made him set up a dealer friend of his to be ripped off .by two members of my crew, my brother Larry, and Stevie Munichello..

.I gave the K the money to buy the first ounce ,and a week later this dealer named Tony comes with a key and they stick this fuck up.. This mutt accuses the" K" , but he isn't sure. The K calls me and I tell him to make a meet with this dealer. . I meet this Tony guy, and he has a couple of friends with him, one was someone who knew me,a mug named Mike Lizst, who was a dealer friend of actor Jimmy Caan's Mike's eyes bugged out of his head when he saw me, and he tells this guy Tony I was a Mafia.heavyweigh.t The Tony guy wants to be my friend now, and he wound up working for me, and he set up his supplier for half of the score A few years later the "K" died of cancer.. I did like the skinny prick, and he was a great DJ, but a lousy gambler. .
Anthony "The Animal" Fiato. . ..Another True Hollywood Story.





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MAFIA KILLER LIVED LIKE A KING IN JAIL

Ronnie "The Pig" Casesso.

When I first met Ronnie Casesso he was in Walpole prison courtesy of the snitch Joe Barboza..... Casesso was a made guy in the Patriarca Crime Family who had gotten the death penalty for being one of the shooters in the murder of a minor hood named Teddy Deegan.. Ronnie "The Pig" caught a big break when his sentence was reduced to life in prison because the death penalty was repealed.

Casesso had the run of Walpole in those days. Here's how strong Casesso was. My friend Ronnie Rome was related to Casesso through marriage. He was also in the vending business with mob boss, Jerry Angiulo. Rome gets a call from Casesso.who tells him to bring a pin ball machine to Walpole for the warden as a gift. I decided to take a ride with Ronnie Rome. When we get there I expect to be frisked by the guards, but its not that way. Then I see Casesso really has the run of the place. He's in for murder, and not only is he not behind bars, he's not even inside the prison. He's lying on the grass working on his tan outside of the front gate. "The Pig" is acting more like the warden's brother-in-law, than a prisoner.
. . ..

We greet and I see how informed "The Pig" is. He is really happy to see Ronnie Rome. Rome tells him I was with Nicky Giso.( Nicky was a Patriarca made guy),but Casesso had already heard. He had better news sources than the Boston Globe. He offered us a drink. For a guy in prison,he was a gracious host.

We asked him how some of the guys from our neighborhood were doing. Casesso said," you just missed "The Bear", (Jimmy Flemmi, the brother of Stevie Flemmi)' he was just here getting a tan,''we are going to eat good tonight,'Chinese food, 'in a swell joint down the street".I couldn't believe it. "The Pig"
was living better than most guys on the outside. He laid woman in a motel down the road, and he even stayed overnight. He dropped in on the warden anytime he wanted anything. He was more free than the guards.

Everybody was afraid of "The Pig". They all knew he was Raymond Patriarca's buttonman.and he had killed plenty of times. When we were leaving he told us to watch out for "those people", meaning The Patriarca Crime Family, " they will use you". I laughed, and told Casseso to get my cell ready. Ronnie "The Pig" Casesso died in prison, but he lived like he was as free as a bird.

By Anthony Fiato,"The Animal"
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Barboza Hit

My mentor's in the Mafia always told me,” when it came to payback, no matter how long it takes,

Just like the “turtle”, we always get there”. Nothing illustrates this boast better than the

execution of Joe "The Animal" Barboza, courtesy of my good friend, and Mafia Cohort,. JR Russo--Anthony Fiato





In 1954 with the backing of New York crime lord Vito Genovese, Raymond Patriarca took control of

the New England mafia.. It became known as the Patriarca crime family. Possessing the same traits as his pal Vito; cunning and violence, Patriarca dominated the rackets in his territory with a vengeance from his headquarters in Providence R I . In a world where tough guys only listen to tougher guys, Patriarca was the undisputed boss. The most lucrative rackets were in Boston where Patriarca skipper, Gennaro “Jerry“. Angiulo, and his” North End” gang, locked down all the rackets in the Boston underworld. Anybody operating in numbers,. bookmaking,, loan sharking ,,and any other criminal racket that turned a buck had to go through Angiulo and pay for “permission” to operate. . Without “permission” you needed protection from Angiulo’s enforcers…All the men that kicked into Angiulo were referred to as "connected" guys, meaning they had the protection of the Patriarca family.. If you bothered a “connected” guy you were defying Raymond Patriarca and that was lethal.



For Joe Barboza killing came as easy as breathing. In the early sixties Dodge City atmosphere of the Boston underworld, when it came to murder, the thirty year old Portuguese hit man was the top slugger in the city.. Barboza and his pals Chico Amico and Nicky Femmia operated a leg breaking and gun- for-hire business out of East Boston. Always the thinker, Jerry Angiulo used Barboza to go into certain nightclubs throughout the Boston area and bust them up. The owners of these places were terrified, and immediately reached out to Angiulo to get rid of their Barboza problem. And, Angiulo did, for part ownership in the clubs.. .In the mob we call this create and alleviate.. Barboza so impressed Angiulo’s bosses Patriarca, and Henry Tomeleo, that they started using Barboza and his crew for all the hardcore enforcing that was bringing “heat” to Angiulo’s men.. In exchange Patriarca let Barboza operate in the rackets without paying tribute



The head of the “Winter hill” mob, Buddy McLean, was well liked by Patriarca..The baby faced Irish mobster's gang dominated all the Irish mobs. McLean brought big money deals from race fixing; to high jacking , to his pal Patriarca.. Patriarca made so much money from brokering these deals that he let McLean operate without the standard tribute .



McLean’s Winter Hill gang was the most powerful of all the Irish mobs . In the “South End,” the Harlem section of Boston, you had the Bennet brothers, a faction of the winter hill mob whose enforcers included Frank Salemme and the Flemmi brothers Stevie, and Vinny "The Bear" , who were all friendly with Joe Barboza-- and they were jockeying for a position with Patriarca ‘s most murderous Capo, Larry Bione. George McLaughlin broke away from Mclean and started a renegade faction of his own, and started a war in the Boston Underworld that included holding up the Italian mob’s card games, and shaking down their bookies..



This threw a monkey wrench into the Patriarca money machine so he gave Barboza and his crew marching orders to wipe out the McLaughlin gang under the tutelage of Bione. True to his rep, Barboza and company whacked out over twenty men to restore order for the Patriarca family.. Raymond avoided the heat but Barboza was hotter than a firecracker and he was being tailed by tons of law wherever he went. The cops busted an armed Barboza, and he was held on fifty grand bail.. Joe sent his crew of killers to shake down the Patriarca mob for bail money figuring he had it coming for all the” work” he had done for them. Raymond didn't take kindly to a hothead threatening him, so he had all of Barboza’s crew whacked out...

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Joe then turned rat, and with his treacherous testimony. he put Raymond and some of his capo’s in jail, some of them for life.. In spite of the hundred thousand dollar bounty Patriarca had put on his head, Barboza managed to elude Raymond’s vengeance for almost eight years, until his luck ran out on the streets of San Francisco. Acting on a tip, and some help from the L.A.Mob, my friend, and Patriarca soldier, JR Russo,.blasted Barboza to bits with a shotgun from the back of a white van, hitting him with five bullets while he was leaving an apartment.. Some say Barboza barked, “YOU FUCKERS”, then he died like a dog... JR was upped to the rank of Capo for the hit..... By Anthony Fiato .. .