Sgt. Willie Burns had a Tommy gun on the bench in front of him when his 18 handpicked candidates arrived at the 77th Street station on the edge of Watts. It was a cool evening in November 1946, and the men came in topcoats and hats. Burns wore his low, almost over his eyes, like the bad guys.
Years later, he told a grand jury: "My primary duties were to keep down these gangster killings and try to keep some of these rough guys under control." But he hadn't given his fellow LAPD cops any hint of why they'd been summoned that night. Now he laid it out.
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 be listed 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.
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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.
