Florabel Muir had the nerve to ask, "What does a Gangster Squad do?"
She was the epitome of the hard-boiled newspaper dame: born in a Wyoming mining town, a veteran of New York's tabloid battles and now, in 1949, author of a Los Angeles Mirror column that served up Hollywood news while mocking the LAPD as "cops a la Keystone."
To the cops, she was nothing more than a mouthpiece for the boxer-turned-hoodlum who zoomed about town in a caravan of Cadillacs while fighting for control of L.A.'s rackets.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, October 30, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
Gangster Squad: In Monday's California section, the second installment of a series about the Los Angeles Police Department's Gangster Squad gave the address of Sherry's cafe as 9039 N. Sunset Blvd. The address is on West Sunset Boulevard.
Florabel wrote of the secretive police Gangster Squad: "Looks like they devote part of their time to trailing Mickey Cohen around . . . but they don't seem to be stopping Mickey from doing whatever it is he is doing."
What Mickey mostly was doing, though, was dodging bullets.
The Sunset Wars had begun when a man in a Panama hat fired a shotgun into Mickey's clothing store on the Sunset Strip, killing one of his cadre of henchmen dubbed the "Seven Dwarfs." Some suspected that Mickey had set up his own man because he ducked into the bathroom before the shooting -- not everyone understood that the gang boss suffered from an uncontrollable urge to wash his hands.
It became clear that Mickey himself was a target in July 1949, when he was shot in the shoulder outside Sherry's cafe at 9039 N. Sunset Blvd. The blasts killed another in his crew and sent two women to the hospital: a bit actress described in The Times as "Miss Dee David, a blond," and Florabel, who took a pellet in her hindquarter. Florabel said she'd been hanging around Mickey to get a story, "waiting for someone to try to kill him."
She got the cops boiling again by passing on to readers a theory "a lot of people have" -- that the ambush wasn't the work of Mickey's rival, Jack Dragna, but that the LAPD was somehow behind it.
Yet another of Mickey's Dwarfs disappeared Labor Day weekend after he was supposed to dine with Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno. One more vanished a month later.
By fall 1949, Mickey could claim a scalp of his own, that of Police Chief C.B. Horrall.
This episode began when vice officers arrested another of Mickey's men for illegal possession of a weapon. Enraged, Mickey arrived at his underling's trial with his personal bugging expert, 300-pound J. Arthur Vaus, and announced that they were going to blow the lid off the LAPD.
