Other cops suspected they were internal spies, headhunters, a rumor that started when a beat officer confided to the chief's office that a bookmaking barber was inviting cops to "get on the take." The squad caravaned to the barbershop, "ripped everything, kicked all the walls out," O'Mara said, and shaved the guy's head with his own razors.
Pleased, the brass gave them more muscle: 6-foot-5 Jerry Greeley and Lindo "Jaco" Giacopuzzi, a 230-pound former all-Valley football lineman who had built himself up carting milk cans at his family's dairy. When that pair got a Tommy gun, they showed they understood the rules of this gig -- that there were none in dealing with Mickey Cohen and his ilk. Asked to stake out the clothing store Mickey had opened, they decided to leave his crew guessing whether they were cops or out-of-town hoods.
They took the plates off their unmarked car and found others -- from Illinois -- in the trash at the DMV, then parked up the block from Mickey's place. One of Mickey's men went out to investigate and "every time he'd pass by us, we'd put our coat up and pull our hat down," Giacopuzzi recalled. "So when we left, I was driving, and all the men in Mickey's establishment there came out on the sidewalk . . . and I took the car and I swerved it . . . and Greeley leaned way out of the window with the Tommy gun. And you should have seen them hit the deck."
It was a great prank to share with the squad, the fake drive-by, and maybe they wouldn't have done it later, after someone -- not faking -- came by Mickey's haberdashery on the Sunset Strip with a shotgun. That was no laughing matter, the dead body that marked the start of the Sunset Wars.
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The squad made news for the first time on Nov. 15, 1947, with a report that Willie Burns and O'Mara had led a "flying detachment" that rousted six Midwesterners on Wilshire in a limo with New York plates. The six were booked on suspicion of robbery, though there was no evidence they had yet committed any crime in Los Angeles. Photographers were invited into the Wilshire station to snap them seated on a bench, several with bowed heads. Then four were escorted to the county border.
Of course, no one knew then what would become of the two men who were allowed to stay on promises of good behavior. Who could have guessed that James Fratianno, an ex-con "used-car salesman" from Cleveland, would become infamous as Jimmy the Weasel, the L.A. mob's most prolific hit man? Who could have guessed that James Regace would rise to head that mob three decades later, under his real name, Dominic Brooklier?
