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Authors: Nigel Blundell
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immigrants from the Ukraine who settled in a poverty-stricken part of New York in 1913. He was first arrested for selling prohibition booze at the age of nine. In his young teens, though only 5ft 5in tall, he became an illegal prize fighter before training as a professional boxer. His career foundered when the world featherweight champion Tommy Paul knocked him out two minutes into the first round.
While America was in the grip of the Great Depression, Cohen rode the railways, criss-crossing the country with hobos and making a living where he could. On arrival in Chicago, his mobster career began in earnest and he helped run a gambling operation for Al Capone’s younger brother, Mattie. When he bought his first pistol, he said: ‘I felt like king of the world. When I whipped out that big .38 it made me as big as a guy six-foot-ten.’
Cohen carried out armed robberies for Mob bosses from the Mid-West to California. He got away with more than 100 before being arrested for the first time as an adult in Los Angeles in July 1933. His mugshot, carrying the number 30732, showed a defiant and lippy 19-year-old glaring at the camera with a crescent-shaped scar two inches long under his left eye.
Just over a year later Cohen was held for murdering a man who tried to rob a casino he had been ordered to guard. But a lawyer on the Capone payroll had him released before a court date was even fixed. Over the next few years he worked as an enforcer for the Mob before his reputation was rewarded with a move to the West Coast.
An FBI report at the time recorded: ‘Cohen’s prestige in underworld circles had been rapidly mounting even while he was in Cleveland, Ohio. He carried out muscle jobs with dispatch and showed no qualms or compunctions against killing. His debut in California was in the capacity of a pimp. However, he had ambitions to be a major hoodlum and by 1938 an informant advised he was running a bookmaking establishment in fashionable Westwood. By 1938 Cohen was also baiting bigshots from the East by making guns and transportation available when they arrived for visits or enforced ‘vacations’.
In Los Angeles, Mickey Cohen was again taken under the wing of fellow New Yorker Bugsy Siegel, for whom he had worked as a hired thug on-and-off for years, and it was under his influence that the newcomer came into his own as a leading gangster alongside the big-time playboy. Years later, Cohen recalled:
‘Siegel would throw me ten grand, 25 grand, the biggest was 40 grand. There were no books kept or explanations. All he would say is, “Here, this is for you.” Ben Siegel gave me to understand that I was not going to be a fly-by-night hoodlum but that I had ability, stature and personality to do things in a much more respectable manner and that I should start to pay my taxes so I didn’t get in any trouble with the revenue.’
It was advice that Cohen would have been wise to have taken. For it was tax-dodging that would be his undoing, just as it had been with Al Capone. But during the late Thirties and Forties Mickey Cohen seemed untouchable.
In 1945 he killed a bookmaker named Maxie Shaman but police efforts to pin the crime on him failed miserably. When ‘undercover’ cops staked out his home, the mobster had his housemaid take beer and cake out to them. When his gardener discovered the cable to a bugging device, he simply turned up the radio whenever he was discussing his protection rackets. ‘I gave them fine music,’ he boasted. ‘Nothing but the best Bach and Beethoven.’
Cohen revelled in his new-found wealth and notoriety, as author Paul Lieberman revealed in a 2011 book,
Gangster Squad,
covering the crook’s crime spree – one of the more fascinating details being how Cohen became addicted not only to fame but, strangely, to water. Suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder that made him terrified of dirt, he tookscalding showers lasting 90 minutes and washed his hands five times during every
While America was in the grip of the Great Depression, Cohen rode the railways, criss-crossing the country with hobos and making a living where he could. On arrival in Chicago, his mobster career began in earnest and he helped run a gambling operation for Al Capone’s younger brother, Mattie. When he bought his first pistol, he said: ‘I felt like king of the world. When I whipped out that big .38 it made me as big as a guy six-foot-ten.’
Cohen carried out armed robberies for Mob bosses from the Mid-West to California. He got away with more than 100 before being arrested for the first time as an adult in Los Angeles in July 1933. His mugshot, carrying the number 30732, showed a defiant and lippy 19-year-old glaring at the camera with a crescent-shaped scar two inches long under his left eye.
Just over a year later Cohen was held for murdering a man who tried to rob a casino he had been ordered to guard. But a lawyer on the Capone payroll had him released before a court date was even fixed. Over the next few years he worked as an enforcer for the Mob before his reputation was rewarded with a move to the West Coast.
An FBI report at the time recorded: ‘Cohen’s prestige in underworld circles had been rapidly mounting even while he was in Cleveland, Ohio. He carried out muscle jobs with dispatch and showed no qualms or compunctions against killing. His debut in California was in the capacity of a pimp. However, he had ambitions to be a major hoodlum and by 1938 an informant advised he was running a bookmaking establishment in fashionable Westwood. By 1938 Cohen was also baiting bigshots from the East by making guns and transportation available when they arrived for visits or enforced ‘vacations’.
In Los Angeles, Mickey Cohen was again taken under the wing of fellow New Yorker Bugsy Siegel, for whom he had worked as a hired thug on-and-off for years, and it was under his influence that the newcomer came into his own as a leading gangster alongside the big-time playboy. Years later, Cohen recalled:
‘Siegel would throw me ten grand, 25 grand, the biggest was 40 grand. There were no books kept or explanations. All he would say is, “Here, this is for you.” Ben Siegel gave me to understand that I was not going to be a fly-by-night hoodlum but that I had ability, stature and personality to do things in a much more respectable manner and that I should start to pay my taxes so I didn’t get in any trouble with the revenue.’
It was advice that Cohen would have been wise to have taken. For it was tax-dodging that would be his undoing, just as it had been with Al Capone. But during the late Thirties and Forties Mickey Cohen seemed untouchable.
In 1945 he killed a bookmaker named Maxie Shaman but police efforts to pin the crime on him failed miserably. When ‘undercover’ cops staked out his home, the mobster had his housemaid take beer and cake out to them. When his gardener discovered the cable to a bugging device, he simply turned up the radio whenever he was discussing his protection rackets. ‘I gave them fine music,’ he boasted. ‘Nothing but the best Bach and Beethoven.’
Cohen revelled in his new-found wealth and notoriety, as author Paul Lieberman revealed in a 2011 book,
Gangster Squad,
covering the crook’s crime spree – one of the more fascinating details being how Cohen became addicted not only to fame but, strangely, to water. Suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder that made him terrified of dirt, he tookscalding showers lasting 90 minutes and washed his hands five times during every
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