(1975: by Mickey Cohen as told to John Peer Nugent- One of...)
1975: by Mickey Cohen as told to John Peer Nugent- One of the most flamboyant mobsters of the 1940's and 1950's.
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Meyer Harris "Mickey" Cohen was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the sixth child of Sam and Fanny Cohen, Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father died when Mickey was two months old. His mother left his siblings with relatives and, with Cohen, resettled in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles. Cohen left home to become a boxer in Cleveland, Ohio, where he fell in with bootleggers and gangsters.
Cohen dropped out of school in the sixth grade.
Cohen worked in Los Angeles as a sparring partner to prepare boxers for upcoming fights. In his teens, Cohen embraced the gangster life-style rather than return to the drudgery of the small grocery store his mother operated. Eventually he came to the attention of the Chicago syndicate that was impressed with his nerve and cunning; Cohen's involvements with Al Capone and other mob bosses inflated his reputation as a strong-arm man with brains and opened up opportunities for him in gambling enterprises. Cohen moved back to the West Coast after a gunplay episode in Chicago and joined Benjamin ("Bugsy") Siegel of the New York syndicate in loan-sharking, gambling, and movie industry rackets. With Siegel's assassination in 1947, Cohen emerged as the undisputed boss representing Chicago underworld interests. He lived sumptuously in a large mansion on Lake Michigan fully equipped with sophisticated security devices. Cohen identified with the Hollywood mystique, moved in fashionable circles, and lavishly entertained many of the movie industry's biggest stars. Cohen was noted for his expensive clothes and fastidious taste in food and for his obsessive personal hygiene: he showered many times a day and washed his hands constantly. Apart from his chief preoccupations with vice and movie racketeering in which he played a role in manipulating the labor unions, he bought a haberdashery, invested in a supermarket chain, and dabbled in the promotion of prizefighters. Having achieved notoriety with his open connections with movie stars, law enforcement officials, politicians, and hoodlums in a community that thrived on publicity and flamboyance, in 1947 Cohen agreed to raise money and material support for the Jewish struggle in Palestine. He met with Menachem Begin, at the time one of the leaders of the Irgun, a radical underground group believed to be a terrorist organization. Cohen's contacts with teamsters and stevedores persuaded Begin and other Jewish activists that he could assemble war surplus and ordnance for shipment to the Irgun and the more moderate Haganah statehood movement. Nearly $1 million was collected for the Israeli cause at Hollywood benefits and functions that Cohen arranged. But according to Mafia informants, the entire scheme was nothing more than an elaborate and callous scam. Three months after the funds had been collected, Cohen claimed that the ship he had contracted for the transportation of the weapons and supplies to the Jews fighting in Palestine was mysteriously sunk. Cohen also claimed that the funds donated were used to buy weapons and bribe government officials. In November 1950, Cohen testified before the Kefauver Committee of the United States Senate investigating racketeering and illegal gambling activities in the United States. Asked to explain his many arrests in Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as his scale of living, he denied he was a racketeer, said that his principal business was a tailor shop, and that his affluence was attributable to his knowledge of sports and his sheer luck in betting. Even less convincingly, he claimed that he was the beneficiary of gifts in the amount of $300, 000 from friends and Hollywood associates. Within two years of his appearance before the Senate committee, he was convicted of tax evasion and served two years at the McNeil Island federal prison in Washington. Again in 1959, Cohen was subpoenaed to testify before the McClellan Subcommittee investigating labor racketeering. His sardonic remarks in answering questions led to still another tax investigation and conviction. While serving a fifteen-year sentence in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Cohen was assaulted by an inmate in 1963 and was partially paralyzed from a head injury. He was released in 1972, moved to a modest abode in southern California, and faded from public view until 1974, when he campaigned for prison reform and attracted attention when he met with the Hearsts about the sensational events surrounding the 1974 kidnapping of their daughter, Patricia, by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Cohen intimated that he could locate Patty Hearst and arrange for her safe return. The Hearst family confirmed that they knew Cohen and had met with him about their daughter but denied that they had accepted his offer to help find her. In a turbulent underworld career spanning more than three decades, Mickey Cohen was indeed lucky. He managed to evade a murder charge that was declared a justifiable homicide; to survive two bombings of his home; a gunshot wound; and a prison assault that partially paralyzed him for the rest of his life. A succession of showgirls and Hollywood starlets filled Cohen's life thereafter. Cohen wrote a book in 1975 about his colorful life and made television appearances in which he described the underworld as full of misfits and freaks. His rejection of his former way of life may have been an effort to change his image as a thug and to vindicate himself. He urged the government to vigorously prosecute organized criminals and to root out corrupt government officials without which, he said, racketeers could not flourish. He died of stomach cancer at the University of California Medical Center.
(1975: by Mickey Cohen as told to John Peer Nugent- One of...)
Cohen's only marriage did not survive, however. It collapsed because of his wife's incapacitating emotional problems induced by the mayhem of her husband's stormy life-style. The marriage was childless.
