Recently, I watched the movie Gangster Squad while
riding on a plane from London to Washington, D. C. As far as I could see, like
most movies based upon historical characters, the film contained a blend of
fact and fiction. How do I know? My father, Jim Vaus, worked for Mickey Cohen,
the lead character in the movie and one-time boss of organized crime in
Southern California.
Was Mickey a
violent gangster who ruthlessly killed people? Yes. Even Cohen himself admitted
as much. Did Cohen run a widespread gambling and prostitution ring in Los
Angeles in the late 1940s? Yes again. Was Cohen a womanizer and drug dealer? So
far as my father was aware, the answer was “no” on both counts. My father told
me more than once that Cohen refused to deal in drugs and Cohen was faithful to
his wife, Lavonne. Apparently, even gangsters have a conscience.
So what did my
father do for Cohen? Though my father was not portrayed by name in the movie,
some of his activities for Mickey were depicted. My father was the man who
found the listening device that the Los Angeles Police Department planted in
Cohen’s house. Dad was able to do that with a fair amount of expertise because
he often did wiretapping for the LAPD. Thus, in a sense, my father was part of
“the gangster squad,” but he subsequently switched allegiance. Though Dad did
not plant the bug in Cohen’s house, taking it out was the first job he
performed for Mickey. After that, my father used his knowledge of electronics
to provide surveillance and protection for Cohen. Among other things, he
surrounded the mobster’s Brentwood home (which was not as elaborate as the one
depicted in the film) with a system of infrared light in order to detect the
presence of any intruders. It was this system that alerted my father to the
presence of an explosive device on Cohen’s property that he was subsequently
able to diffuse.
Another one of my
father’s inventions was alluded to in Gangster
Squad. It was a system of electronic components that allowed the mob to
intercept the Continental Wire Service for ninety seconds, long enough to flash
the names of winning horses from races in the eastern part of the United States
to mob operatives in the west, allowing the mob my father was associated with
to clean up the cash every time. My father designed this system for past-post
betting, not for Cohen directly, but for a man Dad knew only as St. Louis Andy.
Dad was scheduled
to meet Andy’s mob in St. Louis on November 10, 1949 to set up his electronic
gizmo to intercept the Continental Wire and beat all the bookies west of there.
However, my father never made that meeting. For on the sixth of November, he happened
to attend a tent meeting at the corner of Washington and Hill in LA, where six
thousand people every night for weeks sat spellbound by the preaching of a
young man named Billy Graham.
My father, like
many others, was also captivated by Graham’s message. It was one he was
familiar with, because he had grown up as the son of a preacher. However, he
had never felt obligated to follow the morality of his father, thus his
involvement in crime, and with Mickey Cohen in particular.
But all that
changed for my dad on that November night in Los Angeles, probably for two
reasons. One was that he had seen people killed right in front of him and he
was beginning to question the value and direction of his own life. The other
thing that impacted my father in the tent meeting was when Graham, at the end
of his message, said: “There is a man in this audience tonight who has heard
this message many times before, but he has never given his life to Jesus
Christ, and this may be his last opportunity.” Somehow, my father sensed God
speaking to him through the words of Billy Graham. He walked the sawdust trail
in the tent that night, then knelt and prayed, “God, if you’ll mean business
with me, I’ll mean business with you.”
And those were not
empty words. From that moment on, my father set about repaying everyone from
whom he had ever cheated or stolen. In the end, he was flat broke. But,
seemingly miraculously, just when my father was in need of a new house, or a
new car, or money to put food on the table, it was provided by members of his
new gang: fellow Christians.
Dad also changed
his testimony in a Grand Jury trial in which he had committed perjury. That
trial involved Sergeant E. V. Jackson, another real-life character depicted in Gangster Squad. However, unlike the movie,
Cohen was not put away for murder. Rather, he was convicted in 1951 for income
tax evasion, partly due to my father’s testimony against him. After giving his
testimony in Mickey’s trial, my father’s life insurance company quickly
canceled his policy.
Mickey, on the
other hand, was not so quick to end his friendship with my father. Despite my
dad quitting organized crime and later testifying against Cohen, the two
remained friends for the rest of Cohen’s life, until Mickey’s death from cancer
in 1976. From 1972 when Cohen got out of jail, until ’76, our family spent a
great deal of time with him. I met Mickey on many occasions and he often called
me his “little buddy Billy”. I still have one of his famed fedoras, inscribed
with my name and given to me as a present. Though Cohen could be a ruthless
killer when double-crossed by others in his “line of work”, he was the perfect
gentleman in the presence of women and children. Though he could be rather
foul-mouthed, I never heard a swear-word cross his lips.
You may be
wondering how it was that my father the convert and Cohen the convict remained
friends. Part of the reason lies in the fact that Cohen respected my father for
the guts that it took to quit the mob. In addition, Mickey once said that he
never counted on my father to stand up in court and perjure himself again on
Mickey’s behalf. Cohen’s expectations of my father were different than those
that he held for men in his true, inner circle.
For my father’s
part, I think he always held out hope that Mickey might make the same decision
he had, to follow Jesus Christ. It was for that reason that my father
introduced Cohen to Billy Graham in ’49. Sadly, so far as our family knew,
Cohen never did change his ways. He seemingly died without remorse for the many
people he had hurt and even murdered in his lifetime, but not before he
revealed to my father and to me a little known mob secret.
During Cohen’s
treatment for cancer at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, we visited him
at least once at his bedside. It was on that occasion that Mickey divulged, in
his husky “godfather-like” voice, to my father and to me: “I know what they did
with the body of Jimmy Hoffa.”
My father asked
the obvious counter question: “What?” Then Mickey proceeded to tell my dad that
the mob did to Hoffa what Mickey’s own gang had done to some other person they
had killed back in the 40s…they put the body in lye, which caused it to quickly
disintegrate.
No doubt, many of
the things that Cohen did in his life were truly “awful”, in the worst sense of
that word. That is why I am so glad my father got out of the mob. For he found
out subsequent to his conversion at the Billy Graham tent meeting, that if he
had gone to St. Louis on November 10, 1949, he would not have lived more than
thirty minutes beyond his arrival. A rival gang was waiting there to kill him.
If it had not been
for Billy Graham, and my father’s decision in the tent, Dad never would have
lived past the age of thirty, and I never would have been born. Truly, there
are some choices in life that are too important to put off to some unknown
future.
If you are interested in learning more about this story it is told in rather complete detail in my book, My Father Was a Gangster: The Jim Vaus Story, available from Amazon and my web site. Click here to learn more:
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Anthony