Download or read book Mickey Cohen written by Tere Tereba and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sensational tell-all biography of Hollywood’s most infamous mob boss who dominated Los Angeles’s underworld—and headlines—from the 1940s to the 1970s. When Bugsy Siegel was murdered in 1947, his henchman Mickey Cohen took over his criminal enterprise in Los Angeles. As charismatic as he was ruthless, Cohen attained so much power up until his death in 1976 that he was a regular above-the-fold newspaper name, with more than one thousand front-pages in LA papers alone. His story is inextricably intertwined with the history of the city of angels. Mickey Cohen is a seductive tale of Hollywood true crime history with a wildly eccentric mob boss at its center. Biographer Tere Tereba delivers tales of high life, high drama, and highly placed politicians—among them Robert F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon—as well as revelations about countless icons, including Shirley Temple, Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, and even Rev. Billy Graham. Meticulously researched, this rich tapestry presents a complete look at the mid-twentieth century Los Angeles underworld. “The author does a superb job of tracing the ins and outs of Hollywood’s gang world in the 1940s and ’50s.” —The Wall Street Journal

Download or read book King of the Sunset Strip written by Steve Stevens and published by Cumberland House Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who would have thought that an acting career that began as a teenage star on "The Mickey Mouse Club" would lead to the role of assistant to Southern California crime-boss Mickey Cohen? King of the Sunset Strip takes readers through the author's dramatic Hollywood story to the curtain call that eventually led him out of the life of crime.

Download or read book Mickey Cohen in My Own Words written by Michael Mickey Cohen and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gangster Squad written by Paul Lieberman and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Read this man's book." --James Ellroy Gangster Squad presents a harrowing, edge-of-your-seat narrative of murder and secrets, revenge and heroism in the City of Angels—the real events behind the blockbuster Warner Brothers film starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. GANGSTER SQUAD chronicles the true story of the secretive police unit that waged an anything-goes war to drive Mickey Cohen and other hoodlums from Los Angeles after WWII. In 1946, the LAPD launched the Gangster Squad with eight men who met covertly on street corners and slept with Tommy guns under their beds. But for two cops, all that mattered was nailing the strutting gangster Mickey Cohen. Sgt. Jack O'Mara was a square-jawed church usher, Sgt. Jerry Wooters a cynical maverick. About all they had in common was their obsession. So O'Mara set a trap to prove Mickey was a killer. And Wooters formed an alliance with Mickey's budding rival, Jack "The Enforcer" Whalen. Two cops -- two hoodlums. Their fates collided in the closing days of the 1950s, when late one night "The Enforcer" confronted Mickey and his crew. The aftermath would shake both LA's mob and police department, and signal the end of a defining era in the city's history. Warner Brothers developed the film Gangster Squad based on the research award-winning journalist Paul Lieberman conducted for this book, which reveals the unbelievable true stories behind the film. He spent more than a decade tracking down and interviewing surviving members of the real police unit as well as families and associates of the mobsters they pursued. Gangster Squad is a tour-de-force narrative reminiscent of LA Confidential.

Download or read book Gangster Mickey Cohen written by Bradley Lewis and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mickey Cohen, who died in 1976, was a colorful, feared West Coast gangster-gambler who knew the biggest names in Hollywood, was a confidant of Bugsy Siegel, and on first names with the biggest guys in the Mafia, plus everyone from Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe. Bradley Lewis' novel about Cohen draws from thousands of resources - a virtual treasure trove of Mafia-related books, articles and interviews. Lewis tells the early Mickey Cohen story during the period when he was growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, until the beginning of his foray with Bugsy Siegel into Las Vegas. From Bugsy Siegel to Lucky Luciano and Jack Dragna to Meyer Lansky. Mickey knew them well and worked closely with them for many years. This lively, somewhat fictional take is based on the first modern biography of Cohen, "Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster, The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen".

Download or read book The Mafia s President written by Don Fulsom and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever full account of Nixon's extensive ties to the American Mafia, from a veteran White House reporter. Unbeknownst to most people even now, the election of 1968 placed the patron saint of the Mafia in the White House. In other words, Richard Nixon would go on to not only lead a criminal presidency; he would be totally indebted to our nation’s top mobsters. By 1969, thanks in large part to his long-time campaign manager and political advisor Murray Chotiner, a lawyer who specialized in representing mobsters, Nixon had participated in secret criminal dealings for more than 20 years with sketchy figures such as Mickey Cohen, Mob financial guru Meyer Lansky, Teamsters union chief Jimmy Hoffa, and New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. And with Chotiner as one of his key behind-the-scenes advisors in the White House, Nixon's ties to the Mafia didn't end there. The Mafia’s President reveals a mind-blowing litany of favors Nixon exchanged with these sinister characters over decades, ranging from springing Jimmy Hoffa from prison to banning the federal government from using the terms “Mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra.” Drawing on newly released government tapes, documents, and other fresh information, The Mafia’s President by Don Fulsom offers a carefully reported, deeply researched account of Richard Nixon’s secret connections to America’s top crime lords.

Download or read book L A Noir written by John Buntin and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now the TNT Original Series MOB CITY Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men—one L.A.’ s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief—each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.

Download or read book The Notorious Ben Hecht written by Julien Gorbach and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Biography. Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe. In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.

Download or read book Gangsters vs Nazis written by Michael Benson and published by Citadel. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback! The stunning true story of the rise of Nazism in America in the years leading to WWII—and the fearless Jewish gangsters and crime families who joined forces to fight back. With an intense cinematic style, acclaimed nonfiction crime author Michael Benson reveals the thrilling role of Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel in stomping out the terrifying tide of Nazi sympathizers during the 1930s and 1940s. As Adolph Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany, a growing wave of fascism began to take root on American soil. Nazi activists started to gather in major American cities, and by 1933, there were more than one-hundred anti-Semitic groups operating openly in the United States. Few Americans dared to speak out or fight back—until an organized resistance of notorious Jewish mobsters (Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Red Levine, and others) waged their own personal war against the Nazis in their midst, gangland-style . . . Packed with surprising, little-known facts, graphic details, and unforgettable personalities, Gangsters vs. Nazis chronicles the mob’s most ruthless tactics in taking down fascism—inspiring ordinary Americans to join them in their fight. The book culminates in one of the most infamous events of the pre-war era—the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden—in which law-abiding citizens stood alongside hardened criminals to fight against the Nazis for the soul of America. This is the story of the mob that’s rarely told—one of the most fascinating chapters in American history and American organized crime.

Download or read book Mobsters and Gangsters written by Life Books (Firm) and published by Life Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of organized crime, from the Wild West and the early gangs of New York City to the mob's rise to prominence, and also discusses gangsters on television and movies.

Download or read book Mr Mob written by Michael Newton and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morris "Moe" Dalitz was America's most secretive and most successful mobster. As a major architect of the United States' national crime syndicate, Dalitz was active in various fields of organized crime from 1918 until his death, all while spinning a web of myth and mock-respectability around himself so dense that decades after his demise, most mistake the legend for reality. From Prohibition-era bootlegging to the Reagan years, no other individual was present at so many pivotal events in gangland history. It's impossible to fully understand the modern Mob without knowing about Dalitz, his career, and the cunning publicity campaign that transformed his image from thug to that of a revered philanthropist. This exhaustive biography tells the story of Dalitz's life and the syndicate that he and like-minded individuals built from scratch.

Download or read book Mickey Cohen written by Brad Lewis and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2012-12-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mickey Cohen, who died in 1976, was a colorful, feared West Coast gangster-gambler who knew the biggest names in Hollywood including the Rat Pack, was a confidant of Bugsy Siegel, a friend of Las Vegas' late Liz Renay and on first names with the biggest guys in the Mafia, plus Frank Sinatra, Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. Brad Lewis' book about Cohen draws from thousands of resources -- a virtual treasure trove of Mafia-related books, articles and interviews. Written by a tough and knowledgeable insider, Lewis tells the whole Mickey Cohen story with this biography. All the whispered anecdotes, the news items and the underside of the crime rackets where Mickey operated are in this book, open to scrutiny. From Bugsy Siegel to Lucky Luciano and Albert Anastasia to Meyer Lansky and Carlos Marcello, Mickey knew them well and worked closely with them for many years. This is Mickey Cohen! Inside and Out! This book is an abridged version of Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster

Download or read book The Big Nowhere written by James Ellroy and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The D. A.'s brass, a sheriff's deputy, and a rough-and-tumble bagman are unknowingly chasing a nightmare in this thrilling novel from the author of "some of the most powerful crime novels ever written" (New York Times). Los Angeles, 1950 Red crosscurrents: the Commie Scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Gangland intrigue and Hollywood sleaze. Three cops caught in a hellish web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. Danny Upshaw is a Sheriff's deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they're his chance to make his name as a cop...and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is D.A.'s Bureau brass. He's climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain custody of his adopted son, a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe. Buzz Meeks-bagman, ex-Narco goon, and pimp for Howard Hughes-is fighting communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare.

Download or read book Lanza s Mob written by Christina Ann-Marie DiEdoardo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-06-27 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting sociological as well as historical perspectives, this book supplies readers with a fascinating, unprecedented look at the most successful organized-crime family they've probably never heard of. From the 1920s until the early 21st century, one Sicilian mob family defied everyone from the California attorney general to J. Edgar Hoover to chart their own American Dream. Unlike their flashier rivals in New York and Chicago who met their end by the knife, the bullet, or a judge's gavel, this crime family prospered and grew alongside their adopted home of San Francisco. This book tells how they did it. Readers will learn how the Lanzas managed to retain control of their patch from the end of Prohibition through the Summer of Love and into the beginnings of the dot-com era, gaining insight into not only what the west-coast branch of the Mob did, but also why they did it. The documentation of how this mostly unknown crime syndicate formed, evolved, and eventually folded is set against the backdrop of the city of San Francisco transforming itself from a gritty port and manufacturing hub dominated by Italian- and Irish-Americans into the multicultural intellectual and services capital it is today.

Download or read book Detroit s Infamous Purple Gang written by Paul R. Kavieff and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang is a photographic history of one of the most notorious organized crime groups of the 20th century. The photographs chronologically follow the evolution of the Purples from their days as a juvenile street gang through their rise to power and eventual self-destruction. Using rare police department mug shots and group photographs, the book transports readers through the dark side of Prohibition-era Detroit history. Detroit had a gold rush atmosphere and a thriving black market during the 1920s that attracted gangsters and unsavory characters from all over the country.

Download or read book The L A Quartet written by James Ellroy and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 1415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here in one volume is James Ellroy's first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles--etched in red and black and film-noir grays. The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop's rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950--and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It's a reverential shuck--and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad. L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He's a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He's a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he's being had. He's just met a woman. Thus, he's determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he's created--and he's determined to tell us everything. The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.

Download or read book The Last Mafioso written by Ovid Demaris and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The night Jimmy Fratianno became a government witness, not a single Mafia boss slept. As a "made guy" in La Cosa Nostra, Jimmy Fratianno knew their best-kept secrets. A soldier, capo, and ex-boss of the Los Angeles family, involved at the highest levels with bookmaking, gambling, union racketeering, extortion, pornography, and virtually every criminal activity to which organized crime is linked, Fratianno also earned the reputation as the Mafla's top killer in California.Fratianno became the highest-ranking Mafloso ever to "turn," and in the past two years his testimony, in courtrooms across the nation, has been making sensational headlines. A veteran investigative reporter and bestselling author, Ovid Demaris had the unprecedented opportunity to debrief Fratianno in order to write this book. Demaris also had access to wiretaps, surveillance reports, prison and court records, The result is the most important work to date on organized crime in America---a disturbing, yet extraordinary and vivid life story that makes the other "insider" stories of the Mafia look like tales of innocence.The Last Mafioso details eleven murders Fratianno was personally involved in, and relates Fratianno's inside knowledge of some two dozen others, including the slayings of Bugsy Siegel, Nick DeJohn, Albert Anastasia, Jimmy Hoffa, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Tamara Rand. Fratianno was a confidant of Johnny Roselli, so Demaris tells the real story of Operation Mongoose, the CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro. Here also are the behind-the-scenes deals and machinations of the Mafia in Las Vegas. Fratianno's life was not spent entirely with his criminal friends, although The Last Mafioso records the secret lives of virtually all the important Mafiosi of the last thirty years. Fratianno moved perpetually in exotic circles, a man of inexhaustible energy, an ingenious schemer and scammer, an insatiable womanizer and socializer who was quick to ingratiate him-self with Mafia royalty, Hollywood celebrities, politicians, prominent lawyers, successful businessmen, and Teamster officials. In The Last Mafioso there are countless episodes with the likes of Frank Sinatra and ex-San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto.