What mattered at the time was that the squad had sent some suspicious characters packing and thus sent a signal to the civilian populace and to Mickey et al. That second audience did get the message -- the bug in Mickey's Brentwood home made that clear.
His right-hand man, Neddie Herbert, was overheard the day after the roust, saying: "I can't meet you at the Mocambo, I'm afraid they'll pick me up." At 3:30 a.m., he updated Mickey: "Somebody else got picked up. Jesus Christ. I'm getting out of this. I want to live to be a grandfather."
"They can't make anybody leave town," Mickey said. "It's against the Constitution."
The Gangster Squad could not take credit for that eavesdropping, or be blamed when it turned into a fiasco. The squad was still getting organized when vice detectives leaped at an opening provided by Mickey's renovation of a ranch house on Moreno Drive. Five posed as construction workers, when the real ones took off, and hid a microphone between the wood bin and the fireplace.
The bug was set by the time Mickey and Lavonne Cohen moved in, and soon was picking up barking by Tuffy, their bulldog. The vice team's mistake was hiring a private bugging expert, because he secretly ran a second line to his own listening post. For a year it gave him -- along with the LAPD -- a window into what Mickey was up to: talking about fixing charity boxing matches, telling someone back East that "we need a shotgun in the outfit," grumbling about greedy cops who "grab it and tear your arm off" when you offer them "a gift."
But the bug picked up nothing of note on June 20, 1947, when Bugsy Siegel was shot through the eye while reading the Los Angeles Times in his living room a few miles east. Mickey kept mum about Bugsy's demise, which left him and Jack Dragna to fight for control of local gambling.
Mickey's crew did complain about the leader of the Gangster Squad, Willie Burns, and how some cops were harassing customers at his haberdashery. "It's ridiculous," Mickey said. "Anybody who they see leave the store they take right downtown." Not long after, Burns' wife received flowers at home, a funeral arrangement.
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Some hoodlums understand the wisdom of anonymity, but the 5-foot-5 Mickey was the opposite breed, like Capone, or later John Gotti. Mickey cultivated his image as a "dese, dem and dose" sort who worked his way up to monogrammed silk pajamas.
