Jewel and Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno. "Once Jimmy entered Witness Protection, my opinion is that he needed to magnify his knowledge of certain things."

Some hard guys came to town after the war. A big ex-con with the cold eyes of a killer drove in from Kansas City. He parked in front of a white stucco house in Kensington. Three bedrooms, two baths, tile roof, little porch the wife would like. Back yard for the kids.

Willie (the Rat) Cammisano. Willie’s detractors said his sobriquet had its source in Willie’s unique body-disposal method: he stuffed victims in sewers for rats to chew.

He stands on Lymer Drive, between the two palm trees. The palms cast meager shadows. Maybe a wind comes up and the fronds rattle. Whatever.

The Mister and Missus, here they come, right on time, out the door. He watches them walk down the steps toward him. He wants to get it over with. Give them the money, sign the papers. Get the wife and kids settled. Get to work.

Willie the Rat's Kensington house. One of the original tough men. Willie always stayed in the background and didn’t get publicity.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

He nods. Says, “Howdy.” They seem like howdy people. Missouri is full of howdy people. He and the Mister shake hands. He tells the Mister he’s ready. He pops his trunk. He opens a cardboard suitcase. He counts out $25,000. Perhaps he thinks to himself that the Mister and Missus have never seen this much in bills. Maybe he laughs. He was known to laugh.

Mickey Cohen. February, 6, 1950, the Dragnas tucked dynamite under Cohen’s house on San Vincente Boulevard.

I wish I knew what he drove that day. I don’t. I wish I knew who gave him the $25,000. I don’t. I wish I knew the bills’ denominations. I don’t. I wish I knew who told him to come here. I think I know that, but I’m not sure.

Here is what I do know. I know that 42 years later, a buyer paid $190,000 for this same house. I know that most houses on Lymer Drive were built between 1927 and 1929. I know this house was built in 1929. I know that in this house somebody nicknamed Momo stuck a .32-caliber pistol behind his right ear, pulled the trigger, and died.

Joe Adamo lived at 4010 S. Hempstead Circle, not far from the Kensington house Cammisano purchased.

<em>Kensinton-Talmadge, 1910-1985,</em> by Thomas Baumann

I know the bullet lodged in the ceiling, that Momo fell backward, that the gun dropped at his feet. I know that before Momo shot himself, he shot his wife. Momo believed he killed her. He didn’t. Her name was Marie. She died, in Pacific Beach, 34 years later. I know that Momo and the guy who counted out the $25,000 were friends. I know that he named his son Girolamo, Momo’s given name, that Momo was the boy’s godfather. Or, as Sicilians might say, “Momo baptized his son.”

Fratianno described John Rosselli as the brains behind the operation of the L.A. Mafia family.

Nineteen fifty-three this was when the hard guy with the cold eyes — Momo’s friend — bought the house. Lymer Drive was a lovely little street back then. One block long. Still is. One block long, and pretty. Mr. Noble lived at 4149; he was retired vice president of San Diego Gas. Then there were some insurance people, Navy people. There was a schoolteacher, Mrs. Emma K. Speck, she lived with her mother at 4143. Mrs. Daisy L. Staunton was at 4165. They were all nice people. But it’s never been a street, said a resident who’s lived there since 1940, where “people fraternize. They’ve always stayed somewhat to themselves. It isn’t a street where people bring casseroles.”

Bugsy Siegel. One bullet smashed the teeth of which Siegel was so proud. Another blew his right eyeball out of its socket; the impact sent the eyeball clear across the room.

Perhaps it was just as well that no one wandered over with a Pyrex baker heaped with noodles, tuna fish, and mushroom soup. Because back in Kansas City they called this new Lymer Drive resident “Willie the Rat.” Willie’s detractors said his sobriquet had its source in Willie’s unique body-disposal method: he stuffed victims in sewers for rats to chew. Willie, however, contended that his enemies were in error, on two counts. One, his true nickname was “Willie Rats.” Two, he acquired the name as a child when he rented out his rat terrier Trixie to neighbors with rodent problems. Try to imagine Mrs. Daisy L. Staunton saying a chipper “Good morning!” to Willie the Rat.

Momo and Marie Adamo. Before Momo shot himself, he shot his wife. Momo believed he killed her. He didn’t.

William “Willie the Rat” Cammisano first saw the light in 1915 in Williamsburg, Iowa. Two years later, his family moved to Kansas City and settled in the North End’s Italian/Sicilian ghetto. This was not the peaceful fishing village of San Diego’s Little Italy: the year before Willie’s parents arrived, 40 murders occurred in the area. Cammisano was 14 when police arrested him as incorrigible. Cammisano’s name first shows up in association with organized crime when he went to work for Johnny Lazia, ruler of Kansas City’s Little Italy.

Momo Adamo, fourth from left (holding hat). Momo became second in command, or underboss, to Dragna.

Jay Robert Nash in World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime writes, about Lazia: “He made every Midwestern crook and killer welcome in Kansas City, which was part of what later came to be known as the Crime Corridor of the 1930s.... Every wide-open saloon paid tribute to Lazia and his goons.”

When Lazia was assassinated in July 1934, Cammisano was in El Reno, serving two years on a felony conviction for interstate shipment of stolen goods. After El Reno, Cammisano returned to Kansas City and married Antoinette Cipolla, born in 1917, to whom he remained married until his death in 1995. Cammisano aligned himself with Lazia’s successor (and the man who, apparently, ordered his death), Charles Binaggio, who himself was assassinated in 1950. According to reports in the Kansas City Star, Cammisano and his brother Joe, during the Binaggio regime, “muscled their way into ownership of two lucrative policy wheel gambling operations.”

After several arrests for making whiskey, Cammisano spent a year at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. Three months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Cammisano went to Wilmington, Delaware, and tried to join the army, specifically the Corps of Engineers. They didn’t want him, but, back in Kansas City, he managed to enlist in the regular army. Quite what happened with Cammisano and the army remains unclear, but at least twice he is on record as AWOL. He was back in Kansas City by 1944. In the next two years, until August 2, 1946, Cammisano was arrested and detained in Kansas City for offenses ranging from carrying a concealed weapon, stealing rings off a woman’s fingers, pistol-whipping a robbery victim, gambling, fighting, and disturbing the peace. After August 1946, no entries appear again on Cammisano’s Kansas City rap sheet until May 17,1956, when he was arrested on suspicion of burglary and liquor violations.

I talked with a retired lawman with Kansas City connections. He said that it was difficult to know what Cammisano did in his early years, in part because at the behest of the Pendergast political machine, many Kansas City police records were removed. He said, too, that until 1958, when the 1957 meeting in Apalachin, New York, of 65 men, many associated with America’s crime syndicate, forced J. Edgar Hoover to turn his G-men to studying organized crime, little intelligence was developed about men like Cammisano. “There were many years when no intelligence was developed, because no one was looking at these people closely, so there are many gaps in these people’s histories. In the old days a lot of people traveled and hung together more than they did once they were scrutinized, so there’s a great deal we never heard about. There’s an amazing amount buried in police files that was never understood for what it was.”

Nash writes that “when the Mafia-syndicate expanded westward after World War II, Binaggio resisted demands that he share with the national crime cartel the profits from his many lucrative rackets.” April 6,1950, Binaggio and his bodyguard were murdered. Their killers were never identified. (Men with an interest in Binaggio’s death, prior to the hit, were reputed to have settled in at Caesar’s in Tijuana so as to provide themselves with alibis.)

After Binaggio’s murder, Nicholas Civella came to the fore in Kansas City. Born in 1912, Civella was given up to the Kansas City authorities as incorrigible at even a tenderer age than was Cammisano. Civella was 10. By the time he turned 20, Civella had been arrested for car theft, gambling, robbery, and vagrancy. My retired lawman with K.C. connections said, about Civella in his later years, “He was a very astute leader. He didn’t just kill willy-nilly like Chicago people did. He was a moderate, as bosses go. He did what he had to do. He understood that politics and the labor union were the power base of the mob, not killing people. He wasn’t the type who would pull the trigger for any infraction, he was very moderate in that regard, a very bright guy. He was a very tough competitor.”

Civella’s rise was still in the future in the late 1940s. Civella’s ascendancy likely would not have affected Cammisano. The retired K.C.-connected lawman said, about Cammisano, that consensus among K.C. lawmen is that “Willie always was a member in good standing of the K.C. mob. Willie basically was a loyal worker. He was reliable, a guy they could call on when they needed things done. A hands-on kind of guy. He never seemed to have any great leadership role in the family, he wasn’t a capo. But he went way back. He was a member before Nick Civella was. But Civella and Cammisano were never close.”

During this decade-long lacuna in Cammisano’s Kansas City police record, K.C. authorities believe Cammisano was “formally transferred from the K.C. to the L.A. family. Sent out there.” My informant warned that this was only supposition, noting that in the 1950s, with the exception of LAPD Intelligence Unit’s Captain James E. Hamilton and Chicago Crime Commission’s Virgil Peterson, few people regularly conducted intelligence on organized crime personnel. “So,” my informant said, “descriptions of activities of these people are not definitive. You can’t say this is what was happening at this time and that’s why. But we do know, for sure, that Willie went to California.” My informant met Cammisano. I asked for a description. He said, “You look at Willie and he smiles, but his eyes were never smiling. He was a very cold, hard, brutal type of guy, a real throwback. He was a medium-height, stocky fellow with a roundish face, looked like a longshoreman. He was the scariest guy in Kansas City. One of the original tough men. Willie always stayed in the background and didn’t get publicity, always looked like a bum. He wasn’t a guy who went around in the pinstripe suits, he was more a blue-jeans-and-old-pickup-truck kind of guy. In later years, after he came back from San Diego, his headquarters was this old garage, and we believe they killed a few people over there.”

I asked how Willie made his money.

The gentleman replied, “That’s a good question. How do any of these guys make their money? He never had any outward employment of his own. He was a mob guy, a member of La Cosa Nostra, so he got a piece of all the action that was going on and had deals in stolen property. He had that garage on the east side and he had a lot of junk, J guess he dealt with that. That’s always a mystery, though, how these guys make their money. The lion’s share comes from the rackets, and how the various guys are all cut in is not always evident.” To try to figure out where Cammisano went next and what he did, it is necessary to take a look at what happened in Southern California when World War II ended.

In the immediate postwar period, mob families in Kansas City and New York, in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Boston, and New Orleans were generally well organized. Each family had its leader, and that leader exerted draconian power over his area. Not in Southern California.

The Los Angeles Times describes L.A.’s Mafia family as “one of 24 recognized families in the American wing of the Sicilian Mafia.” Recognized, it was. Powerful, it wasn’t. Crime writers refer to Jack Dragna’s L.A. family as the “Mickey Mouse Mafia.”

In a recent telephone interview, Jay Robert Nash speculated on the mob’s inability to maintain a strong organization in California — north, south, or central. The state itself, he said, is “unwieldy, it’s too big. And California doesn’t have the kind of social enclaves, and never has, that are controllable. A city like New York was a compressed polyglot fiefdom of many nationalities, of which Italian at the turn of the century was a very large portion. And this population was controllable. It’s not that way in California. California is like a vast country, and its people don’t stay put. They move. Organized crime has to operate from a headquarters, a base. If you can’t control an element of the population, organized crime has a problem finding roots.

“Also, in California, lots of independent guys would go out there with their own organizations, especially with gambling. Gambling was very big out there. So, in addition to land mass and unstable population base, the syndicate also had a difficult time in California in controlling the various rackets because of the presence of independent people.”

William F. Roemer Jr., a 30-year FBI veteran who spent the majority of his career as a special agent in Chicago, after his retirement moved to Arizona. He began to write and publish. In the Hoover years, the FBI discouraged even retired agents from talking to the press. Roemer disagreed with bureau secrecy. “Ninety percent of former FBI agents don’t want to discuss what they did in the past They were ordered through all their working years not to talk to the press, and they carry that into retirement. I don’t know why that should be, that retired agents shouldn’t talk, or write, because the public should know what the agency does.”

To date, Roemer has written a half-dozen books, including his two latest —Accardo: The Genuine Godfather and The Enforcer: Spilotro — The Chicago Mob's Man over Las Vegas. In a recent telephone interview, I asked Mr. Roemer about the L.A. crime family. He laughed. “They were so screwed up. Everybody that’s ever been in Los Angeles was screwed up. The L.A. family never had someone who’s really been adept at doing organized crime.”

Asked about mob control of San Diego, Roemer, whose book The Enforcer contains references to San Diego and San Diegans, said, “Chicago controlled San Diego. Chicago controls everything west of Chicago to the Pacific Ocean. This control began in the days of Capone when Johnny Rosselli was sent out there in 1924 by Capone to be the representato of the Chicago mob in Hollywood. So that happened from almost time immemorial.

“In California, San Diego has always been more important to the Chicago mob than any other city other than Los Angeles and certainly more important to them than San Francisco or San Jose. San Diego was always a big moneymaker, not as big as cities like Kansas City, and New Orleans and even Denver or Los Angeles, but big.”

For all that L.A. family power was weakened by incursions from New York and Chicago, Jack Dragna himself was no weakling. Described by the Los Angeles Times as perhaps “the only classic ‘godfather’ that the city has ever known,” Dragna was calculating and fierce. In his later years, no evidence exists that he participated in killings. Indeed, it was a standing joke among the guys that when time came for shotguns to go off, Dragna alibied himself by checking into a hospital for a physical. Evidence does indicate, however, that he didn’t flinch when he ordered hits on associates who got out of line. He may have feared mob bigwigs in Chicago and New York and Cleveland, but he didn’t fear his fellow Southern Californian Sicilians. Jack was nobody to mess with.

In 1946, the Los Angeles Police Department organized a gang squad. The squad kept an eye on bookmakers, pimps, and high-ranking crooks. In 1950 the Gang Squad expanded and became the Intelligence Unit. William R. (“Billy Dick”) Unland went on the Los Angeles police force in 1947, after he got out of the navy. In October 1949, Unland transferred into the Gang Squad and then in 1950 into Intelligence, where he stayed until he retired in 1972. “Watching Italians and Sicilians,” he said in a recent interview, “that was sort of my specialty.” Unland tailed them all — the Dragnas, Frank Desimone (a frequent San Diego visitor, who in 1956, after Jack Dragna’s death, became L.A. family chief), Simone Scozzari, Charley Battaglia, Joseph “Joe Dip” Dippolito, Sam Bruno, Nick Licata and his son Carlo (who during the 1950s lived in San Diego), Angelo Polizzi, San Diego’s Frank Bompensiero and Girolamo “Momo” Adamo.

I asked Mr. Unland if he ever came to San Diego. “Only,” he said, “if we were tailing somebody down there, like Mickey Cohen. Everybody thought Mickey was going to go across the border and scoot to Mexico, but he didn’t. The only other time I remember, there was a meeting of some Mafia people at one of those bar-restaurants out at Shelter Island. At that time, this would have been the 1950s, San Diego needed some help identifying people, so we helped them out. We worked more with the sheriff s department than we did with the P.D. We worked with Newsom, Big Bob Newsom.

“This Mafia in California,” Unland said, “never was like it was in New York, Chicago, Detroit, or Cleveland.” Unland suspects that, in part, the Intelligence Unit made life difficult for mobsters. “We treated them pretty rough when they came here. Tony Accardo came out, and the squad met him at the train station and took him to a plane and told him to get his ass out of here and not come back. We treated ’em pretty rough.

“Also, they were so mixed up. Sometimes the same ones that worked for Mickey Cohen worked for Dragna too. Mickey had his gambling places around Hollywood, every bookmaker in L.A. had to pay Mickey so much for every phone he had. If they didn’t pay, Mickey’s Seven Dwarfs would get out and work them over, so of course they all paid up. But they were a mixed-up bunch.”

Jack O’Mara signed up for the LAPD Gang Squad in 1946, moved into the Intelligence Unit in 1950, and stayed there until 1960. In a recent interview O’Mara said, “I worked mostly all OC [organized crime] and Mafia — Mickey Cohen and the Sicas, Fred and Joe; Nick Licata and his son Carlo.” O’Mara agreed with Unland’s assessment of the LAPD’s roughness. “In 1946, when Tom Dewey, governor then of New York, ran the crooks out of New York, a bunch of the bums come out here and they were shaking down a lot of the top eateries, like Brown Derby, and putting the muscle on them and declaring themselves part owners of the place.”

To identify hoods migrating from back East to L.A., the Gang Squad formed an airplane squad, said O’Mara. “At first we just had one guy out there at the airport. He developed a rapport with all the officials and flight attendants and kept us apprised of who was flying in. Later, that squad expanded.

“We had carte blanche to do what we had to do to get rid of them, which we did.” O’Mara laughed. “I’m talking now the statute of limitations has run out. We used kind’ve rough tactics on them, we gave them curfews and we had a few kidnappings and we taught them a few things about hospitality in L.A. and the word got back East, which we wanted, that you weren’t welcome out here. You get bums and you got to treat them like bums. Of course, you can’t do that today. That’s why the town’s gone to hell, the police can’t do anything.”

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (1906-47) arrived in L.A. in 1936. New York sent Siegel out to manage bookmaking and get things going in Vegas. Meyer Lansky, the bookmaking mastermind, expected that Siegel’s presence in California would extend syndicate control of gambling all through the West. Lansky spoke to Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who spoke to Jack Dragna. Charlie Lucky told Dragna to make Siegel welcome in L.A. Dragna acceded, not happily, to Lansky and Luciano’s demands.

Mickey Cohen, in Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words (as told to John Peer Nugent), explained, “Dragna was really from the old mustache days. The worst thing you can do to an old-time Italian Mahoff is to harm his prestige in any way, and that’s what took place when Benny came out here.

“I met with Dragna after this thing that took place. In fact, I met with him and Johnny Rosselli. Jack Dragna didn’t like to be connected with Siegel. See, Three-Finger Brown — Thomas Lucchese — in New York was Jack Dragna’s goombah and a real nice guy. Benny’s was Meyer Lansky. Jack Dragna was actually the complete boss out here before Siegel or I come out here. Now when Benny and I come out here, two Jews, then Meyer made trips out here. So it was really an encroachment on Dragna’s Italian territory. He didn’t realize it at first, but I started to get wind of it when I had more meetings with Jack Dragna. He would get in a little zing all the time to Benny and Jews, and I kind of woke up to it. You gotta remember the old-time Italian outlook on things, pride is a tremendous thing with them. Dragna and Johnny Rosselli were on a pedestal by themselves. But Benny, with his takeover way, was knocking down that pedestal pretty good, and with my help.”

Siegel has been much written about. In what has been written, details vary. The several versions of the Siegel tale give a reader an idea of how difficult it is to know in true crime literature what’s fact and what’s fiction. Take the stories of how Siegel’s Vegas casino, the Flamingo, got its name. One version has it that Siegel’s boyhood friend Meyer Lansky, the East Coast mob’s financier, and Siegel chose the name. Lansky is supposed to have said, “We decided...to call it the Flamingo one day when we were at Hialeah Race Track.... There’s a pretty little lake there...you can watch... pink flamingos rise in the sky. There’s a local legend that flamingos are a sign of good luck and anyone who shoots birds will have seven years of misfortune. So because of the good luck connection, Bugsy had the idea of naming our Las Vegas project the Flamingo.” Jay Robert Nash reports that “Flamingo” was Siegel’s pet name for his tempestuous redheaded mistress, Virginia Hill.

Whatever the name’s origin, by late 1946 Siegel was in big trouble at the Flamingo. After the casino’s opening in a rainstorm on the day after Christmas, with business so bad that even gaming tables lost money, Siegel’s losses continued. Already in hock to the East Coast mob, Siegel demanded more money from mob bosses to keep the Flamingo going. The story goes that Charles “Lucky” Luciano not only refused to float another loan for Siegel but had the gall to demand Siegel repay loans already out The temperamental Siegel then called Luciano a “dirty wop,” a racial slur that little amused Charlie Lucky.

Already suspected of funneling mob money out of the Flamingo and into the pocketbook of Virginia Hill, Siegel, by early 1947 was in big trouble. Luciano put out a death warrant. Lansky, so one account goes, begged Siegel to make peace with Luciano and pay back the mob. Siegel refused. Other versions have it that Lansky bit his lip and told Siegel’s would-be killers, “Do it.” In Martin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer’s Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Luciano recalled his and Lansky’s discussion: “There was no doubt in Meyer’s mind that Bugsy had skimmed this dough from his buildin’ budget, and he was sure that Siegel was preparin’ to skip as well as skim, in case the roof was gonna fall in on him. Everybody listened very close while Lansky explained it. When he got through, somebody asked, ‘What do you think we ought to do, Meyer?’ Lansky said, ‘There’s only one thing to do with a thief who steals from his friends. Benny’s got to be hit.’ ”

Virginia Hill and Siegel were notorious for turbulent lovers’ quarrels. Moe Sedway’s widow, in a PBS interview, said about the duo: “They had a lot of matinees.” Pete Hamill’s account in Playboy notes that in June 1947, in Vegas, the lovers’ battles heated up. In their suite at the Flamingo, the two got into a drunken fight; Virginia smashed Siegel in the head with a high-heeled slipper, Siegel countered by punching her in the belly. Virginia flew home to L.A. and on June 10, 1947, enplaned for Paris.

Ten days later Siegel returned to California, to Virginia’s rented Beverly Hills mansion at 810 North Linden Drive. “In the morning,” Hamill wrote in Playboy, “he went to Drucker’s barber shop. He visited with [George] Raft. He confabbed with an attorney and a Flamingo publicist. Virginia’s brother, 21-year-old Chick Hill, was staying at the house with his girlfriend, Jerri Mason. He remembered a telephone call during which an angry Siegel said, ‘You son of a bitch. Over my dead body, you will. You haven’t got the guts.’ ”

Siegel went out for dinner to Jack’s Restaurant in Ocean Park with his friend, gambler Allen Smiley, Chick Hill, and Jerri Mason. After Siegel paid the tab, the cashier handed him a complimentary copy of the Los Angeles Times's early edition. According to Hamill’s account, a sticker applied to the paper’s front page read: “GOOD NIGHT SLEEP WELL, WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF JACK’S.”

After dinner, the four returned to North Linden Drive. Siegel, opening the front door, said to Chick, “I smell flowers.” Chick said he didn’t smell anything.

Chick and Jerri walked upstairs. Chick reportedly said to Jerri, “My grandmother always said that when someone smells flowers and there aren’t any, it means they’re going to die.” Jerri kissed his ear, whispered: “Don’t be superstitious.”

Siegel and Smiley wandered into the drawing room and sat down on the couch, Siegel at one end, Smiley at the other. Siegel switched on the table lamp and began to read his newspaper. The evening was warm, the drapes that normally covered the French windows were pulled back, leaving an unobstructed view from the dark garden into the well-lit room.

We all know what happened next. At about 10:30, from the gloom of the next-door driveway, someone with a .30/30 carbine fired nine rounds through the drawing room windows. One bullet smashed the teeth of which Siegel was so proud. Another blew his right eyeball out of its socket; the impact sent the eyeball clear across the room.

Shortly before midnight, Pacific time, four Lansky associates strode into the Flamingo and announced they were taking over.

Walter Winchell, the next morning, began his radio report with “Flash! Beverly Hills, California.” After noting Siegel’s death, Winchell concluded: “As Confucius always say, ‘Gangland gold always pay off in lead.’ ”

Some stories have it that Dragna’s family made the hit; others have it that out-of-town boys got the job. The murder has never been solved.

Retired LAPD Intelligence Unit member Jack O’Mara said, “There was speculation about that shooting in Beverly Hills of Siegel. I didn’t have too much faith in the investigation of the Beverly Hills Police Department at that time. But it wasn’t our case, we didn’t have jurisdiction.

“I still think Virginia Hill’s brother did it. He was an old marine, and the type of gun — the .30/30 — that was used was used in the marines. We had word that Siegel beat Virginia around quite a bit and that the brother vowed the next time he beat her up, he’d kill him.

“I was at the coroner’s inquest and my suspicions were verified because of the interplay between Virginia and her brother, nuances that you can’t quite put a finger on. I had my speculation, but it was something I couldn’t prove. It was something that always stuck in my craw. I could never prove it.”

Siegel’s murder altered Southern California’s crime syndicate’s balance of power. In All-American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story, Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker postulate, “Eliminating Bugsy Siegel may have bolstered Dragna’s ego, but it left the Los Angeles underworld in a state of chaos. Siegel’s mercurial lieutenant Mickey Cohen was assigned control of bookmaking in 1942 with Dragna and Rosselli’s consent, but with Siegel gone, Cohen renounced any ties to the Italians.”

With Siegel dead, Meyer Lansky’s protective hand no longer extended over the “Jew boys.” Dragna had nothing to fear from back East when he declared war on Cohen. But before Dragna set out to break Cohen’s bookmaking franchise and break Cohen too, if he could, he had to get in some workers. Speculation is that one of the workers Dragna brought in was Willie Cam-misano. If Dragna did bring in Willie, he brought him in for muscle. Willie, in those days, was strictly muscle.

What happened in Los Angeles, of course, reverberated in San Diego. This battle for power in Los Angeles caught up at least two other San Diegans — Frank Bompensiero and Biaggio Bonventre, the latter an old short-of-breath guy with varicose veins who’d done federal time for Prohibition violations at San Quentin with Bompensiero. A third person who became entangled—Girolamo “Momo” Adamo, brother to San Diego bar owner Joe Adamo — in 1956 moved from Los Angeles to San Diego.

If indeed, as my Kansas City informant suggests as likely, Willie Cammisano was “formally transferred from the Kansas City to the L.A. family. Sent out there,” it also is likely that the person who suggested Cammisano to L.A. was Momo Adamo. Given that Momo’s brother Joe owned the Panama, a bar at 827 Fourth in downtown San Diego, and lived at 4010 S. Hempstead Circle, not far from the Kensington house Cammisano purchased, it seems likely the Adamos helped Cammisano house hunt.

Momo Adamo (1895-1956), born in Sicily, came to the U.S. in the early 1900s. He went first to Chicago. According to my Kansas City informant, intelligence information sets out that Adamo “was brought to Kansas City from Chicago by Johnny Lazia, leader of the Kansas City Italian organized crime syndicate.” In Kansas City during Prohibition, Momo ran a speakeasy called the Garden of Naples. He was seen around town during the great Kansas City Massacre, when on a summer Saturday morning in 1933, gangsters opened fire in front of Kansas City’s Union Station, leaving four policemen and their prisoner dead. Lazia ruled Kansas City’s North Side until 1934, when he was shot down as he entered the Park Central Hotel. Lazia lieutenants, men like Cammisano and Momo Adamo, believed a Kansas City upstart — Michael James LaCapra—determined to take over the Lazia domain, ordered Lazia’s killing. But criminologists continue to argue over the identity of Lazia’s murderer.

Momo had settled in L.A. by 1936. He brought, from Kansas City, his wife, Marie, and her son, Paul. Marie, nee Caldarello, was born in Kansas City in 1907. She married Frank Guererra in Kansas City in 1934. She divorced Guererra and married Adamo a short time after her son by Guererra was born. Marie, one of whose brothers married into a “connected” K.C. family — the Lococos — may have met Adamo through her sister-in-law. Marie was an exceptionally gorgeous and fine-figured woman, a red-haired Sicilian who some people thought looked a bit like Rita Hayworth. She was high-spirited and tempestuous, noted into her old age as a party girl. So it is also possible that Marie met the equally tempestuous Adamo — a dark, saturnine, and handsome playboy who did a mean tango — while on a night on the town.

Momo joined Jack Dragna in L.A. In the early 1930s, Dragna operated what the Los Angeles Times described as “the former barkentine Montfalcone, a gambling and cafe barge...at anchorage six and one half miles off the harbor...on the high seas and beyond legal jurisdiction. The big windjammer, with gaudily painted top sides and interior transformed into a cafe and casino that equals the best of Mexican resorts, has been converted for her new career at a cost of $58,000.” Dragna and his partners had endless troubles with the Montfalcone, from police and from other mobsters. The former tried to shut it down, the latter tried to hijack it. When Momo arrived in Los Angeles, Dragna’s interest in the Montfalcone had evaporated. Siegel was in town. Mickey too. The nation was deep in the Depression. This must have been a low point for Dragna.

Momo became second in command, or underboss, to Dragna. During the 1940s Momo lived in Los Angeles, at 3911 Westside Avenue, not far from Jack Dragna’s house at 3027 Hulbert. Billy Dick Unland, who spent many hours in the neighborhood during the late 1940s and 1950s surveilling Jack Dragna and Momo Adamo, said that the west side L.A. neighborhood then was a well-kept upper-middle-class enclave of prewar Spanish-style houses. “It was,” he said, “a very nice neighborhood.”

Had Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno during the late 1970s not spoken into Ovid Demaris’s tape recorder, San Diego’s mob connections might have remained largely unrecorded. Two early 1950s books alluded to these connections — Lait and Mortimer’s 1952 U.S.A. Confidential and Ed Reid’s 1952 The Mafia. The latter, in a chapter entitled “Phi Beta Mafia,” lists 83 names that Reid alleged were Mafia members; number 26 was Frank Bompensiero. In 1969 came Reid and Ed Becker’s Grim Reapers, with its chapter on Frank Bompensiero and Jimmy Fratianno’s association in an Imperial County trucking business. In 1970 came Demaris’s Poso del Mundo: Inside the Mexican-American Border, from Tijuana to Matamoros, with its shocking chapter on John Alessio and the late C. Arnholt Smith. But what these earlier books only hint at emerges in great detail in The Last Mafioso.

A veteran local bookseller said, about Ovid Demaris, that once Demaris wrote about a town, he dare not return. After The Green Felt Jungle, a Las Vegas tell-all coauthored with the late Ed Reid, was published, the bookseller said, “Demaris didn’t dare go to Vegas again.” After Captive City, an expose of Chicago mob alliances, Demaris was no longer safe in the Windy City. After Poso del Mundo — with its mentions of Tony Mirabile and several Matrangas, of Lew Lipton, of William Lipin’s friendship with L.A. Mafioso Frank Desimone, with its interviews with John Alessio and Lipton — “Demar-is,” the bookseller said, “wasn’t safe in San Diego or Tijuana.”

Demaris was almost 60 when Fratianno’s Hayward lawyer, Dennis McDonald, approached him about writing Fratianno’s biography. Previous to meeting Fratianno, Demaris studied FBI and police surveillance reports, Fratianno’s prison records, parole reports, and psychological evaluations. They met first in a San Francisco motel in summer 1978. Demaris came with 200 questions and proceeded, wrote Michael Zuckerman in Vengeance Is Mine: Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno Tells How He Brought the Kiss of Death to the Mafia, “to put Fratianno through a grilling session that made the FBI interviews pale by comparison.

“Demaris was a tough-minded, unyielding interviewer who wasn’t going to allow Fratianno the luxury of rambling through his usual warm-up stories. He wasn’t going to coax and cajole; either Fratianno was going to be an entirely willing subject or he didn’t want any part of him.”

In a recent telephone interview, I asked Demaris if he believed Fratianno told him the truth. He said, yes, he did. “The government,” he noted, “warned Jimmy that if he were caught in even one lie, they’d send him back to prison. I told him that if I caught him lying to me, he could forget my doing the book.” Demaris conducted 150 hours of interviews with Fratianno, following him from California to New York, as Fratianno testified in one trial after another against his former Cosa Nostra affiliates.

Other writers are not so sure Fratianno was truthful. Ed Becker, coauthor with Charles Rappleye of All-American Mafioso, said that in his and Rappleye’s research on Johnny Rosselli, they talked with Fratianno, for whom Rosselli was something of a mentor. The duo visited Fratianno, who by this time, under the Witness Protection Program, was living in Bellingham, in Washington state; under an assumed name. They met in the Red Roof Inn in Seattle. Becker, who worked with Ed Reid on the 1969 book The Grim Reapers, is an old Vegas hand. Rappleye, far younger than Becker, is now a Los Angeles Weekly editor. “Charlie,” laughed Mr. Becker, “was scared to death. I wasn’t. Because I knew Jimmy was a fraud. I challenged him at everything. Yelled at him. Charlie was just a young kid, then, and he was terrified. Jimmy took us up on the 20th floor roof to look at the city. One hiccup and I could have pushed him over the side.

“When we left the next morning, he was asleep, next door. We had to go in and say good-bye. I had to lean over while Jimmy kissed me. Charlie’s eyes got big as saucers.”

Aladena Fratianno, born near Naples, Italy, in 1913, came to the United States with his mother when he was four months old. They joined Jimmy’s father, a landscape contractor, in Cleveland’s Little Italy. “Jimmy,” as Fratianno soon asked to be called, because “Aladena” sounded too much like a girl’s name, started as a paperboy when he was six; the summer he turned 11, he began spending summer vacations working for his father. Fratianno was dubbed “The Weasel” as a young teenager. He’d gotten into the habit of stealing fruit from neighborhood fruit stands. A beat cop was wont to chase him. One day Jimmy hit the policeman with a tomato. The policeman ran after Jimmy. A man watching the chase said, about Jimmy, “Look at that weasel run!” The policeman collared Jimmy and when filling in his arrest report wrote down “The Weasel” as Jimmy’s nom de crime. The name stuck. When Jimmy turned 12 he waited tables in a Cleveland speakeasy; he worked there two years. Jimmy was 14 when a neighborhood gambler took him under his wing and taught him all the tricks he knew for cheating at card and dice games. Several bouts with pneumonia and pleurisy, which left his lungs weakened, and Jimmy, after ninth grade, quit school. He was 17 when he became the neighborhood gambler’s partner and 18 when he went into business for himself, hosting gambling evenings that netted him three or four hundred dollars a night. Gradually, Jimmy got to know local racketeers — Frank and Tony Milano (Tony’s son Peter later would join the Los Angeles crime family and Frank would become involved in management of the Desert Inn); Leo “Lips” Moceri, who would later help out the California family by assisting in several hits; Anthony “Tony Dope” Delsanter, James Licavoli, whose cousin Peter Licavoli would become a Detroit crime family leader, a resident of Arizona and visitor to San Diego; Frank Niccoli, whom Jimmy on Labor Day weekend, 1949, would help kill in his, Jimmy’s, suburban Westchester, California, home. Jimmy and his friends, members of Jack Dragna’s Los Angeles crime family — Joseph “Joe Dip” Dippolito, Sam Bruno, Nick Licata, Carmen Carpinelli — looped a rope around Niccoli’s neck and pulled, hard. Demariswrites, “They squeezed the life out of him.” Fratianno complained, after his old buddy drew his last breath, “The sonov-abitch pissed on my new carpet.” To which Sam Bruno, an old bootlegger and bookie, 20 years Jimmy’s senior, replied, “They always piss. Sometimes they shit Count yourself lucky.” (The Last Mafioso, page 27)

But that was all in the future. When Jimmy in 1936 married a shapely blond hat-check girl — Jewel — whom he met in a Miami nightclub, he didn’t yet have blood on his hands, hands everyone who met him described as unusually large. J immy and Jewel had a daughter in 1937, and shortly after her birth Jimmy was convicted of robbery. Jimmy spent the next seven years in prison in Ohio.

Jimmy walked out of prison on Washington’s Birthday in 1945, the day before marines planted the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima. He took a job managing factory canteens and, on the side, with help from buddies involved with the Teamsters, he engaged in hijacking and the black market. A year later, Jimmy set out for Los Angeles with Jewel. Jimmy told Demaris that he left Ohio with $90,000 in cash in the trunk of his new Buick.

Jimmy set up as a bookmaker at the Chase Hotel in Santa Monica. The posh hostelry, built in the 1920s, overlooked the Pacific. Its suites were home to visiting stars, including Charlie Chaplin. Jimmy used some of his $90,000 to rent a third-floor suite and open a lobby cigar stand. (The Chase, turned into an apartment complex in 1978 and renamed the Sea Castle Apartments, gradually fell into disrepair and was declared unsafe after the January 1994 North-ridge earthquake.)

When Jimmy Fratianno decamped in L.A. in 1946, he rapidly connected with the locals. He met Salvatore “Dago Louie” Piscopo (a.k.a. Louie Merli). A successful bookmaker who’d been in L.A. since the 1930s, Dago Louie also served as driver and bagman for Johnny Rosselli. Dago Louie introduced Jimmy to the Dragnas.

Dago Louie, described by someone with present-day OC connections as “nothing but a piece of shit,” must have functioned as something of a Welcome Wagon lady to hoods new to L.A. In September 1995, Anthony “The Animal” Fiato, an ex-mobster who came to national attention during the O.J. Simpson trial, mentioned Dago Louie on Larry King Live. Fiato had been testifying against former associates in the Los Angeles trial for the murder of an actor, Frank Christi, who appeared in The Godfather, when he met Denise Brown, Nicole Simpson’s louche sister, in a courthouse smoking room. It was the day a tearful Denise testified that O.J. had grabbed her and thrown her out of his house and had done the same to Nicole. “Denise had just come off the stand, and I was joking around with her,” said Fiato. “I said that if anybody bothered her like that again, that Jimmy Hoffa would have a roommate.” Denise and Fiato became friendly and engaged in a short romance.

Fiato told Larry King’s audience: “I was bom in Boston, my family moved here [Los Angeles] for a while. I met a soldier in the Dragna family, this guy called Dago Louie. I mean, ha, ha, give me a break. And I went around with him for a while, and I started collecting for him and that’s where I got my start, on the streets here....I became a lieutenant to a top capo in Los Angeles. We ran California from Fresno to San Diego.”

Dago Louie was also one of the first persons Mickey Cohen met in L.A.: “I was in town a month, tops,” Cohen recalled, and at this point “didn’t know Dago Louie from a coat hanger.” Cohen and Joe Sica and Joe Gentile, needing cash, “took off a score.”

“In a commission book I nailed this guy called Dago Louie, who was connected with Jack Dragna. There was 30, 35 phones in the joint because different bookmakers took off their action there. They booked the stables, the jockeys, the owners, and only bettors that would bet from $500 on up.”

Cohen explained, “There was about 25 guys in the joint, and it was tough to get into because they had two sheriffs on the door.” But the diminutive Cohen had his trigger finger ready on a .38 and under his arm, a sawed-off shotgun. He and his partner backed off the sheriffs.

“Now,” Cohen continued, “we suddenly got the god-damnedest break that we ever could have got in this joint. A guy by the name of Little Dave comes walking in, his real name was Davy Schneiderman, and he’s also connected with Johnny Rosselli and Jack Dragna and Dago Louie. This little guy had just picked up $32,000. But figuring nobody’s ever going to knock off this joint — this is the mahoffs joint, the top people’s joint — he comes in to get a result with all the money on him. So, of course, we nail the guy.”

Cohen, fond of swank, made off with more than cash. He also pocketed Dago Louie’s stickpin. Louie protested, in broken English. Cohen, given to commenting on ethnic differences, noted about Louie that “he had a real Italian accent and way of expressing himself.”

The upshot was that Dragna complained to Siegel about Cohen’s busting up his place and “taking off [his] goombah, Little Davy Schneiderman, Johnny Rosselli’s partner.” Siegel insisted Cohen meet him and Rosselli downtown in attorney Jerry Giesler’s office. Siegel said to Cohen, “Ya made a good score...but kick back Dago Louie’s stickpin. It was his family whoreloom; it’s a thing that the guy can’t replace.” Cohen returned the stickpin.

Billy Dick Unland remembered Dago Louie. “He was also known as 'Louie Merli.’ He lived out on Hayward Street in the Fairfax area. He was short, maybe five seven, and heavyset, stocky in the way of Bompensiero down in San Diego, roughly that size of a man. He was quite a dapper-looking guy, not as dapper as Momo Adamo, but he always dressed well. His daughter was sort of wild, and I remember one time the neighbors called the police because he was out there in front of the house calling her every name in the book.

“He used to go to the racetrack. One day at Santa Anita he and Joe Dippolito got in a fight right on the mezzanine floor. Never did know what it was about.” Unland added that he also was never quite sure whether Dago Louie’s real name was “Salvatore Piscopo” or “Louie Merli.”

Unland also recalled seeing Fratianno around during the late 1940s. “When he first came to L.A., he was just a smalltown bookie type. We watched him, but he didn’t appear to be much of anything. He was just a punk from Cleveland. He worked for the Dragnas, and he worked for Mickey.”

Unland remembered that he followed Frank Bompensiero and Momo Adamo in Los Angeles during the late 1940s and early 1950s. “We’d see Momo up in Hollywood. I remember him up around the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. He was an older man, generally always wore a snap-brim felt hat or a Homburg, always dressed in a suit, had a scar against I don’t remember which cheek. He’d been cut somehow. He was relatively short, five seven, eight, nine, at the most. He always smoked a big cigar. Just like Bompensiero. We’d see Bompensiero. If you were around the Dragnas and that bunch, you saw Bompensiero. He wasn’t as dapper as Momo, but he always wore a suit. But Momo wore that Homburg and carried a cane. Yes, sir, he was very dapper, Momo was.” Unland sighed, said, “We never knew from where he’d come.”

Unland recalled that Momo spoke a thickly accented English. “We had to chase him one night, we were following him, he was loading a bunch of wine into an apartment over on the Westside, for a wedding reception. One of the guys in Intelligence with me said to him, ‘Oh, what is that, Momo, Dago red wine?’ Momo got pretty heated at that and said to us, ‘Why you call that Dago red wine? You don’t call Manischewitz ‘Sheeny red wine.’ ”

While Fratianno was still in prison in Ohio, he met Yon-nie Licavoli, in since 1934 on a murder rap. Licavoli suggested to Jimmy that when he got to Los Angeles, he should look up Johnny Rosselli (born Filippo Sacco in Italy and known among his confreres as “Don Giovanni”). Licavoli further suggested to Jimmy that Rosselli could help him get straightened out with “the right people.” When Rosselli got out of federal prison in August 1947, he returned to L.A. Dago Louie set up a meeting between Jimmy and Rosselli. The meeting took place in September 1947, in what Jimmy described to Demaris as Dago Louie’s “parlor.” Jimmy relayed Licavoli’s message as to Rosselli’s ability to get Jimmy with “the right people.” In L.A. at the time, that of course meant the Dragna family. In The Last Mafioso, Jimmy recalled the conversation: “Johnny, I’ve been wanting this since I was a kid. I knew the Italians on the Hill had something special going for them, but it’s so fucking hard to crack.”

To which Jimmy remembered Rosselli replying, “That’s right, Jimmy, and that’s the way it should be. When you get the wrong guy in there, you’ve got to clip him. There’s no pink slip in this thing.”

Fratianno, in interviews with federal agents and discussions with biographers Demaris and Zuckerman, made much of his relationship with Rosselli and Rosselli’s prominence in mob councils. In All-American Mafioso, the authors note: “During an interview in November 1987, Fratianno described Rosselli as the brains behind the operation of the L.A. Mafia family. ‘See, Jack [Dragna] respected Johnny. He was in on everything. Johnny, you know, he gave the orders because he was smarter than all them guys.’ ”

Ex-G-man and author William Roemer disagrees with Fratianno’s assessment of Rosselli’s importance. “I knew Jimmy,” Roemer said in a recent interview, “and I evaluate most of what he had to say as very accurate. But he goes overboard on the subject of Rosselli.”

Early in his career in Chicago, Roemer supervised installation of a wire into a Chicago mob hangout. Chicago agents nicknamed the microphone that picked up top mobsters’ talk “Little Al,” the “Al,” of course, a reference to Al Capone. Roemer said, “From what we heard from Little Al, I know that the Chicago mob held Rosselli in low esteem. They didn’t think he was effective. When they first sent him out there to Los Angeles, he was effective, but later, he got screwed up in so many different things that he lost his effectiveness. So his importance is not nearly what the Weasel made it out to be.”

Roemer talked, then, about Fratianno’s admiration for Rosselli. Rosselli began life as a near-illiterate immigrant. By the time Fratianno and Rosselli met, in 1947, Rosselli had acquired enormous polish — good tailoring, exquisite manners, ease with menus and wine lists. Roemer feels, as Demaris suggests in The Last Mafioso, that Jimmy's near hero-worship for Rosselli was based in part on Rosselli’s having accrued to himself the exterior marks of “class.” “The Weasel,” said Roemer, “looked up to Rosselli. But once Jimmy entered Witness Protection, my opinion is that he needed to magnify his knowledge of certain things, and if he magnified the importance of Rosselli, and then, in talking with the government and biographers, he posited Rosselli as the conduit for his information, then that made Jimmy more important and credible. If Jimmy had described Rosselli as just a bum, then the information Jimmy was spouting to agents and in his books would have been less important and less credible.”

The scene of Jimmy’s becoming a “made man” opens The Last Mafioso. Jimmy's “making” took place in the basement of a winery on South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. “Made” with him, according to Demaris’s book, were Jimmy Regace (who in a fit of Anglophilia later would call himself Dominic Brooklier), Charley Dippolito, Salvatore “Dago Louie” Piscopo, and Tom Dragna’s son, Louis Tom. Jack Dragna initiated the new men, “incanting in Sicilian with a dagger and a revolver lying crossed on the table before him. John Rosselli greeted the initiates at the door and led them to Dragna.” (All-American Mafioso, page 124)

Zuckerman uses in Vengeance Is Mine Jimmy’s testimony in a deposition to tell the story of Jimmy’s “making.” Jimmy was asked, “Who decides if a person can become a member of La Cosa Nostra?”

His answer: “Well, number one, you’ve got to be proposed [by a member]. The boss decides if you’re to become a member, the bosses of the Family.... Sometimes you have to do something significant, like kill somebody.”

Then, Jimmy describes his initiation: “There were 5 of us.... I think at the time we had 50 to 60 members, and maybe 40 to 45 were present. They had a long table. The boss and underboss would sit on one side; the capos on the end. There was a gun and a sword in the middle of the table crossing each other.

“The boss would...we would all stand up. We would hold our hands together, and the boss would rattle something off in Sicilian.... After that they would prick your finger with a sword or with a pin to draw blood. And they take you around to each member, introduce you and you kiss them on the cheek. That’s the initiation.”

After the ceremony, Jimmy and Rosselli celebrated in Dago Louie’s parlor. “For a while there,” Jimmy told Rosselli, “I felt like I was in church.” (The Last Mafioso)

Fratianno at some point in the late 1940s began to visit San Diego. The SDPD vice squad observed him on downtown streets. Sheriff s deputies noticed him at Del Mar.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, a race aficionado, first came to Del Mar in 1938. Hoover continued to visit Del Mar yearly with his long-time companion and coworker Clyde Tolson. Hoover scheduled his annual physical at Scripps Clinic to coincide with the Del Mar meet. Del Mar’s 1948 meet opened on July 27 and closed on September 11. According to Fratianno’s testimony, as recorded in Anthony Summers’s Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy and Frank Bompensiero were at the Del Mar track on an afternoon in 1948 when Hoover was in attendance. “I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front,” Fratianno recalled, “and said, ‘Hey, lookit there, it’s J. Edgar Hoover.’ And Frank says right out loud, so everyone can hear, ‘Ah, that J. Edgar’s a punk, he’s a fuckin’ degenerate queer.’ ”

Later, according to Fratianno’s account to Summers, when Bompensiero ran into Hoover in the track’s men’s room, “the FBI director was astonishingly meek. ‘Frank,’ he told the mobster, ‘that’s not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me.’ It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and had absolutely no fear of him.”

Bill Roemer talked recently about Anthony Summers’s Hoover book. “Tony’s a good friend and I helped him with the book. I spent 15 or 20 hours talking to him. But he didn’t use my stuff. I don’t like the book and he knows it. I don’t believe any of the stuff about Hoover being a homosexual. I don’t believe most of the stuff in Tony’s book.”

Jay Robert Nash said about Summers’s book’s allegations of Hoover’s homosexuality, “I was the first person to write a biography of J. Edgar Hoover — Citizen Hoover—while he was still alive. In 1972. All the rest of those cowards waited until he died. And he knew I was doing it, and when he died the galleys of that book were sitting on his nightstand. That’s a fact.

“Hoover’s sex life,” Nash concluded, “was the power he wielded. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, I doubt whether the man from 1924 to the day of his death ever ejaculated except over a dossier he put together on somebody he hated.”

After Siegel’s death, Jack Dragna set out to kill Cohen. In his autobiography, in chapter 13, “The Battle of Sunset Strip,” Cohen writes, “It was really a battle of recognition more than anything else. After Benny Siegel got knocked in, people like Jack Dragna kept feeling that their prestige was badly shaken.... When a war starts, it is just an understanding who fires the first shots. I wouldn’t want to say that the responsibility in this war was completely on one side or the other. People just declared themselves, and that was it.”

The first attempt took place on a Wednesday evening, August 18,1948, at Michael’s, Cohen’s haberdashery at 8800 Sunset Boulevard. If, indeed, Fratianno and Bompensiero were at Del Mar on an afternoon during the 1948 meet, that some of their conversation might have centered around the plans to kill Cohen seems likely.

Fratianno’s account in The Last Mafioso and All-American Mafioso has him serve as point man for this first hit against Cohen. Five men were assigned to the hit team — Frank Bompensiero, Simone Scozzari, Biag-gio Bonventre, Sam Bruno, and Frank Desimone. The plan was that Jimmy, on Wednesday evening, August 18,1948, would

go by the haberdashery to visit Cohen. If everything looked right, he’d walk out onto Sunset Boulevard toward his Buick and give the okay sign to the team.

Looking back in old copies of the San Diego Union, a reader can learn that the weather had been chilly for August, with the low for August 18 dropping to 63 degrees and the high 74. I like to imagine Bompensiero backing his blue Hudson out of his driveway at 5878 Estelle and heading for Los Angeles. The drive, then, on old 101, took two hours. Would he have left that morning or waited until afternoon?

Would Bompensiero have taken his shotgun with him? Or would the shotgun have been provided for him in L.A.? Would Bonventre, who lived in San Diego and was an old friend, have driven up from San Diego with him? Would Bompensiero and Bonventre have reminisced about 1931, the year they served in the chilly federal prison in Washington state’s McNeil Island?

Meanwhile, in L.A., Fratianno had decided he’d take along Jewel and their nine-year-old daughter Joanne. The family sat in the haberdashery office, chatting with Cohen about the hit musical Annie Get Your Gun. Also in the office were Hooky Rothman, Al Snyder, and Jimmy Rist, who variously served Cohen as collectors for his bookie shops, as muscle and “entourage.” Cohen was praising Annie Get Your Gun as the best musical to come to a Los Angeles stage in years. Cohen offered the Fratiannos tickets. Jimmy stood from Cohen’s couch, took the ticket envelope from Cohen, and then put out his hand and shook Cohen’s hand.

Cohen had a hand-washing fetish. He sometimes scrubbed his small, compact hands every five minutes. His office, of course, was fitted out with a bathroom.

The Fratiannos walked out. “Jimmy,” Demaris writes, “spotted Frank Desimone standing on the far corner of Holloway Drive and Palm Avenue and he gave him the signal. They had taken less than a dozen steps...when he heard a door open behind him and he turned to see Hooky Rothman coming out.

“At that exact moment Scozzari had pulled up and three men were jumping out of the car. Bompensiero, wearing dark glasses and a white Panama hat pulled low over his forehead, swung the sawed-off shotgun in front of Hooky’s face and ordered, ‘Get back in there.’ Bruno and Biaggio ran around Hooky and into the office just as Hooky tried to hit the shotgun out of Bompensiero’s hands. The explosion was deafening.

“Jewel and Joanne screamed and began running in opposite directions. Jimmy, who had just seen Hooky’s face blown away, stood there for a split second, not knowing whom to chase. From the corner of his eye, he saw Bompensiero step over Hooky’s body and charge into the office, his body hunched over.

“When they got back to the car, Jimmy saw Cohen run out the front door of his haberdashery and head toward an apartment building as swiftly as his short legs would take him. With wife and daughter screaming at his side, Jimmy stood there not wanting to believe his eyes. He felt ill. All that planning, Hooky dead, and there was Mickey running like a deer for cover.” (The Last Mafioso, page 34)

When Jimmy read the newspaper account of the hit, he discovered that Cohen had escaped death because he’d rushed into the bathroom to wash the hand Jimmy had shaken. Hooky Rothman was dead, Jimmy Rist had a bullet nick on his ear, and Al Snyder took a slug in the arm.

Back home on Estelle Street, on Thursday morning, August 19, if Bompensiero picked up the San Diego Union off his front lawn and turned to the front-page account of the failed hit, this is what he read:

MICKEY COHEN ASSOCIATE SLAIN; GANG WARFARE REVIVAL SEEN

SHOTGUN BLASTS WOUND ANOTHER IN SUNSET STRIP HABERDASHERY

SHOTGUN BLASTS LAST NIGHT LEFT ONE MAN DEAD; ANOTHER WOUNDED CRITICALLY

The shooting, he would have read, “was conducted in typical gangland style with the killers escaping in a fast automobile.” He would have seen a photograph of an LAPD investigator pointing his flashlight at the holes made in the wall of Cohen’s office.

According to Jack O’Mara, the L.A. police never solved the Rothman killing. “It was kind’ve a funny deal there, we never identified anybody who was on the hit. All we had was a lot of speculation.”

Cohen noted in his autobiography, “Nobody could identify anybody in the shoot-out for the cops. That isn’t the way of the racket world.”

Cohen regretted his old pal Hooky’s loss. “He was a solid Jew. If you take a Jew that is completely solid, it makes no difference if he gets hit with a thousand-year sentence or if he’s facing the loss of his life a second later. He won’t be a stool pigeon. I believe a rotten cock-sucker is either born a rotten cocksucker or he’s not.”

The Dragna-Cohen battle continued. June 1949, Tom Dragna built a bomb designed to tear apart barbed wire barricades. Dragna packed a pipe with sticks of dynamite and tucked the pipe beneath Cohen’s house. The bomb never went off.

July 20,1949, at 3:45 a.m., as Cohen, actress Dee David, columnist Florabel Muir, Cohen’s bodyguard Neddie Herbert, and their party left Sherry’s Cafe, 9030 Sunset Boulevard, two gunmen from across the street fired at the group with shotguns, then fled the scene. Herbert was killed by a shotgun blast and Dee David, wrote Cohen, “got hit in the ass.” Cammisano was one of the suspects picked up and then released after this shooting.

Then, in the fall of 1949, two of Cohen’s “Seven Dwarfs,” Frank Niccoli and Davey Ogul, disappeared, forever. Jimmy Fratianno described above his version of Frank Niccoli’s demise — the guys “squeezed the life out of him.” Cohen tells a slightly different story as to how Niccoli died. Cohen writes that both Niccoli and Ogul “were done away with by Dragna’s outfit, strictly as a professional job. Niccoli and Ogul were shot in an automobile. Then they drove them to a lime pit and buried them. The lime pits ate them all up.” What we know for sure is that no one, after autumn 1949, ever saw the two men again.

Billy Dick Unland, in 1949, began his watch over the Dragnas. “At that time,” Unland recalled, “the Dragnas and Momo Adamo were importing bananas. They bought a couple of LCIs [landing craft infantry] and converted them and put in refrigeration, bringing in bananas up from Costa Rica. They had an outfit they called Latin American Import down on Linden Street in the commercial district of L.A., down by the Farmers Market.”

The Los Angeles Times reported about the banana business that Dragna “owns the Santa Maria, a vessel registered in Panama. It plies in the banana trade between Long Beach and Central and South America. [Momo] Adamo reputedly is a partner in this venture.”

“That building,” said Unland, “was my very first assignment when I went into Intelligence. They put me in an old apartment hotel room up there that faced back onto Linden, myself, and an Italian kid, taking pictures of everyone who came and went from that place—the Dragnas, the whole bunch.

“The Dragnas and Momo also had the Trans-America Wire service that provided the odds on different things. On horses, or whatever, and the usual extortion and shake-down. The wire service came on wires across Hoover Dam. It was a real wire. They would print out the information and deliver it to bookmakers. That was the information that the bookmakers needed because back then there weren’t any scratch sheets. I know that Louis Dragna, Jack’s nephew, back then, was also working down at the banana warehouse, running the wire service to bookmakers, delivering it. An Irishman named Ragen was killed over some of that. [James M. Ragen, whose brother-in-law Leonard Brophy was a long-time San Diego resident, was wounded June 24, 1946, in a Chicago mob gun battle. Ragen was hospitalized, under police guard, and considered improving. On August 24 he unexpectedly died. The coroner’s report found “enough mercury in Ragen’s body to kill three men. Mercury was administered in rubbing alcohol, injected, or given by enema.” The Chicago mob somehow got past the guards and poisoned Ragen with mercury.]

“Louis’s father, Tom,” Unland said, “had a market— Victory Market [5026 S. Huntington Drive]. The guy — Jimmy Regace — who became head of the L.A. Mafia here in the 1980s and called himself Dominic Brooklier, in the old days he worked in the Victory Market as a clerk.”

Jack O’Mara also watched the Dragnas. “We had to have the manager move a party out of the room in that old hotel so I could set up a surveillance camera. We took motion pictures of them. I can still see Jack coming out and talking. He wouldn’t talk inside the building. He would stand outside and converse. Unfortunately, we had no way to hear him. We never did bug the place.

“We never could get anything out of the surveillance outside a lot of people who’d be outside on the street with Dragna. We didn’t have the cooperation of the FBI or the federales like they do now. There were a couple of FBI guys who knew the hoods, but it wasn’t extensive. So we had a lot of these people coming and going whom we didn’t even know. We’d tail them and try to identify them. Sometimes we’d pick ’em up and shake ’em.

“My main deal for a while,” said O’Mara, “was Mickey Cohen and surveillance of him. To me he was a bum.” O’Mara’s team put bugs in Cohen’s house. “We had two bugs in his house. My partner and I crawled under the house to get the first one in. We were under that house for seven hours. Mickey’s dog started sniffing the floor above us. But back then, this was the only way you could do a bug. You actually had to have a direct connection with a 110-volt outlet for a power supply, either that or you could have a battery supply that lasted about seven days. With that, you had to constantly go back in and replace the batteries, so it was a lot better to go under someplace to get a direct electrical outlet.

“When everybody was gone we crawled under Mickey’s house. We had to crawl through a small opening to the secondary foundation — it took you about five minutes to squeeze through it. We got under the house, and he had cable to this big insulated water heater. It was a commercial-type water heater, but it was run by a motor that had an electrical line. So we were able to directly hook up a transmitter on there for power supply. He had this special water heater installed, because he was a nut for hot water for washing his hands.

“Back at that time they came out with a little radio transmitter that could pick up conversations, but the range was limited. Down the street, I had a doctor who let us have his garage for a listening post and we also had another guy across from Mickey on the next street who was a former major in the British intelligence and he let us use his shed for a listening post.

“Those transmitters in those days were very sensitive and when television was on, the stations on television were almost on the same cycle and you would pick up some conversation and you would also pick up some damned television programs. We’d tape the conversations onto reel-to-reel tape recorders onto the oxide tape.

“Mickey had bought a new television with a big screen. He was real proud of it, he would show his friends. He bought it from W.J. Sloane. He had it delivered and it went into a living room. But he was having trouble with it. So the television guy from Sloane’s came in and got it going.

“When the Sloane’s guy was through, I tailed him and I pulled him over and had a long conversation with him. I asked him what the problem was with Mickey’s television. He said that Mickey wasn’t satisfied with it, he was not getting the picture in well. And that’s because our bugs were working, they were causing a little disturbance in the set.

“So Mickey told the Sloane’s guy he wanted them to come back and check it out, he wanted regular service. I talked the kid into meeting with one of our technicians and he did. And the next time the Sloane’s guy went to Mickey’s, our guy went in with him, posing as a real good technician who could get the bugs out of his television. So we sent in the battery pack and had it put into Mickey’s television.

“Mickey came out front in his bathrobe when they were all done, shaking hands. The technician from Sloane’s was there and my man was there. Mickey was saying to them how very appreciative he was of all the attention they were giving him and he tipped them 20 bucks apiece. My man took Mickey aside and said, ‘Look, I’ll come back, I can get away and I’ll service your machine and make sure it’s running good.’ Mickey said, ‘That’s great’ and gave him another 20. So he went back every week and changed the batteries. We used to have some times, I tell you.”

Cohen notes, however, in his autobiography that even back in the 1940s, they worried about wiretaps. “Important messages never came by phone. Anything to do with a hit, a gambling operation, to go somewhere or to see somebody, was by courier. Even money was only transacted person to person. If anybody had money coming or going, you put a man on a plane.”

February, 6, 1950, the Dragnas tucked dynamite under Cohen’s house. Unland recalled, “Cohen’s house was on San Vincente Boulevard, not too far from where O.J. lives. After that bombing, we had orders to go pick up all the Dragnas and Momo Adamo. The guys who picked up Momo discovered he had a gun and a permit from the chief of police in Hawthorne. The chief at that time, he was one of those guys you could buy.”

In this 1950 bombing, Willie the Rat Cammisano momentarily surfaces again. The LAPD picked him up in Los Angeles, together with Momo Adamo and Tom Dragna and Tom Dragna’s sons on suspicion of conspiracy with intent to commit murder. He was soon released.

At Adamo’s house, the police picked up Adamo’s address book and a miscellany of paper ephemera. The list of what the LAPD took includes a nightclub photo of Adamo from Ciro’s in Hollywood and a “snap of Mr. and Mrs. G. Adamo and small son taken in what appears to be a living room of a residence.” In Adamo’s address book were telephone numbers and addresses for men all across the country; the majority had criminal records. Included were Joseph Bonanno, next to whose name Adamo had written, “Joe Bananas”; Joe Batters, whose given name was Joseph Accardo, a onetime bodyguard to AL Capone, considered a top man among Chicago mobsters; John Priziola in Detroit, whose daughter San Diego’s Joseph E. Matranga married; Santo Trafficante Sr., head of Tampa’s mob; Frank Desimone, the L.A. attorney who became L.A. family head and who in college, at USC, founded his friendship with San Diego’s William Lipin; Jasper Matranga in Upland. Adamo also had the San Diego telephone number for Bompensiero’s home and for Bompensiero and Dragna’s San Diego bar, the Gold Rail; for Tony and Paul Mirabile and for Tony’s bar, the Rainbow Gardens; for Momo’s brother Joe’s house in Kensington. Momo also had Dago Louie, listed as Louie Merli. Also in Momo’s book were Jimmy Durante, 1218 Cold-water, Apt. 263; Paramount Studios; George Raft; Fay Wilson — showgirl; and a Phil Maita, next to whose name Adamo printed, in parentheses, “dope peddler.”

The absence of any Kansas City Mafia names and addresses did not surprise authorities. That none were listed was credited to Adamo’s continuing friendship with K.C. kingpins James Balestrere, Joseph DiGio-. vanni, Tony Gizzo, and others, including Tano Lococo, his wife Marie’s brother’s father-in-law.

Ed Reid in his 1952 The Mafia noted, about Adamo’s address book: “Adamo was so up to date on his information that a couple of names on his list were crossed out. One of these was Paul Buffa, St. Louis Mafioso, who had been killed in a disagreement with a fellow member of the secret society.”

That same night, Unland and his partner were sent to Jack Dragna’s house. “We went in the early evening and sat there with his wife. Frances was her name. Jack didn’t come home that night. She seemed like a nice lady. I don’t recall that she said much of anything. They didn’t tell their wives much and their wives knew better than to ask. We just sat. I remember searching the house and finding a one hundred dollar bill between some sheets in the linen cabinet. Jack never came home that night. He was picked up later.”

Additional LAPD Intelligence Unit operatives went to the home of Jack Dragna’s brother Tom at 3943 Gillis Street in L.A. Among items confiscated was Mrs. Tom Dragna’s address book. Mrs. Dragna’s lady friends’ addresses and telephone numbers were listed: Mrs. Momo Adamo, Mrs. F. Bompensiero (5878 Estelle, San Diego, RAndolf 5539) and Mrs. Sam Corrao (2306 Union St., San Diego, FRanklin 2495). All the names, excepting one, are Italian, and most of the addresses are in Southern California.

“Nothin’ ever happened on the Cohen bombing case,” Unland recalled. “They couldn’t prove anything. They were the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight, that Dragna bunch. As many times as they tried to shoot Mickey Cohen, they couldn’t hit him.”

But they kept trying. December 11, 1950, Angelo Polizzi and Carlo Licata, armed with a Remington 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun, shot Cohen’s lawyer, Sam Rum-mel. The shotgun, left in the crotch of a tree, was traced to Riley, Kansas, where it had been stolen in 1913. I have often wondered if the shotgun came to Los Angeles in the hands of Willie Cammisano. Again, in this incident, he was picked up by police and then released.

I asked Ed Becker, coauthor of All-American Mafioso, why the Dragna family was never able to kill Cohen. “Poor timing,” he said. “And, if you go into it as I did at the time I was doing research with L.A. Intelligence for the Rosselli book, you find that the police blanketed Mickey. He was always under surveillance, so it would be tough to whack him.”

The February 6, 1950, Cohen bombing did lead to deportation orders being filed against Jack Dragna and Simone Scozzari. After Dragna was picked up and appeared for his arraignment and bailed out, Unland and his partner, on orders of their lieutenant, went back to Dragna’s house on Hulbert. “Dragna told us to get the hell out of his property,” said Unland. “Our lieutenant said, ‘If you guys take that, it’s up to you, do whatever you can.’ So my partner and I, we decided to make a lifetime job out of Jack. We found he was going out on his wife with a girl and we found out he had her in an apartment and bugged her and bugged him. They had some rather risque events. Simone Scozzari and his girlfriend — Simone wasn’t married — they’d get together in the apartment and play canasta. So we had ’em bugged and we knew if we could get them in some kind of sex thing, they could be deported.

“We caught them doing some 288a.’s, it was French love; and it was against the law then. Because of that we were able to get the order to get Jack deported, but he died in 1956 before he got deported. But Scozzari, he did finally get deported. That would have been sometime after 1957, because he went back with Frank Desimone to the Apalachin meeting.”

In 1951 Dragna was convicted of vagrancy and lewd conduct and sentenced to six months in jail. The sentence was reduced to 30 days in the county jail. In 1952, federal immigration authorities arrested Dragna on a charge of illegally entering the United States; specifically, he was accused of coming into the United States in 1932 with “insufficient documentation.” The warrant stated that when Dragna returned that year from a trip into Mexico, he fraudulently claimed American citizenship.

Dragna fought the deportation order without success. His wife, Frances, suffering from cancer, died July 23,1953, while Dragna was in the Terminal Island detention center. Soon after Frances’s death Dragna won release on a $15,000 bond, pending another appeal of his deportation order.

Uriland remembered that during this time Dragna “drove a maroon Cadillac, two or three years old. We had all kind of cars, two-tones, Chevys, Fords, jazzed up to make them seem they weren’t police cars, different kinds of plates. Sometimes we worked around the clock. You always had to do at least eight hours and sometimes all night.

“Generally we didn’t follow them in, but if it was Jack Dragna, we went in. If he went in to get his hair cut and his fingernails polished, we followed him in. He was livid. One day we were tailing him and he picked up on us and he had apoplexy, his head was waggling. He stopped the car and we knew he’d made us and we pulled up behind him and he got out. He said, ‘Why don’t you just pull out your gun and shoot me? You killed my wife.’ She died of cancer, of course. But he went on, ‘You killed my wife, you got my son thrown out of law school, and you might as well shoot me right here.’

“Frank Paul Dragna, who lost an eye in the war, he was going to USC to law school and we were tailing him around with his girlfriend and they claimed that because of that roust, when Mickey’s place was bombed, that Frank Paul dropped out of law school and the girl he was going with, she left him.”

Mickey Cohen, to the end, remained philosophical about Dragna’s bloody assaults. As to his childhood friend Niccoli, Cohen wrote, “Naturally it hit me, Niccoli was as close to me as the chair I’m sitting on. It was a real bad loss to me — a fellow that I loved dearly. But what can you do?”

Cohen concluded, “I think it all came about with a lot of people prodding Jack and steaming him up about him losing face in the whole community, in our way of life. Different guys wanted to make themselves look good to him in every way they could. And actually they was nothing but a bunch that kiss other people’s asses, and the result was a lot of guys getting knocked off.

“Sometimes people do things and then they wake up and say, ‘Well, I’m a son of a bitch, the guy actually didn’t have this coming to him.’ See, actually, I had a very strong respect for Jack Dragna and his family. In fact I was at his son’s wedding. I sat at the head table with Three-Finger Brown. It was a mutual good feeling with everybody, but it was just one of those things.”

By 1952 Cohen was fighting a federal tax evasion charge. His attorney, Morris Lavine, offered as Cohen’s defense that Cohen was too uneducated to be capable of fraud. The judge laughed. Cohen spent the next three years plus several months in a cell on McNeil Island.