CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The plot to overthrow Hollywood had been staunched, but in 1938 at the time of Judge Perlman’s war, both the Bund and the Silver Legion remained active in L.A.
To start the ball rolling on the West Coast, Perlman called a gangster he’d known back in New York, a well-known hood by the name of Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen.
Cohen was not a book-smart guy and was known for his tortured grammar and malapropisms. Street smarts he had. No one knew more about the political landscape in L.A. Need a crooked cop? He was your guy. Need an invite to a Hollywood party? He could get you in. Want to run a scam? You better talk to him first, if you know what’s good for you. Need a Nazi stomped? No sweat. He’d been taking orders to beat people up for much of his life, so Perlman had him quickly enlisted in the cause. Mickey later said that whomping Nazis was his “patriotic duty.”
Cohen was another Brooklyn boy, born in 1913, son of Russian immigrants. His dad died when he was an infant, and mom gathered up the baby and moved to L.A. Mickey had six older brothers and sisters, who remained in Brooklyn, living with aunts and uncles.
At age six, Cohen was selling copies of the Los Angeles Record (now long defunct) on the corner of Soto Street and Brooklyn Avenue (now known as East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue), a major intersection on the northern edge of Boyle Heights.
Eventually, he did more on that corner than sell papers. For two bits, he’d hold a package for one man to be picked up by another. The package almost always contained a bottle of whiskey, and Cohen was arrested when he was nine for bootlegging.
According to his legend, Mickey also pulled his first score when he was nine, knocking off the Columbia Theater box office with a baseball bat.
As for competition, he usually settled that with his fists. If another newsboy wanted the hustling and bustling corner of Soto and Brooklyn, there was a fight, which Mickey inevitably won.
Sometime around puberty, someone said, “Hey kid, you should be a fighter.” So he wandered into a boxing gym and was immediately enchanted by the speed bag’s rhythmic beat.
Punches sold quicker than peanuts back then, and it didn’t matter how old the combatants. There was an organized tournament for newsies, and the boys who fought over turf got their first taste of gloving up and getting into the ring, three two-minute rounds while chattering men made bets at ringside.
Mickey didn’t win the tournament, but he fared well enough to get his name in the papers and a job as a sparring partner. He was fighting professionally as a bantamweight by the time he was thirteen.
He bragged about his boxing career in later years. Officially, he only fought in seven prizefights and won none of them—three losses, four draws. But in reality, there were many more. He fought in four-round smokers, unsanctioned and illegal fight cards held in bootleg clubs. They were cockfights, only with kids off the street instead of roosters.
When he was sixteen, Mickey returned to New York to train at Lou Stillman’s Gym on West Fifty-seventh Street, a dank space that had never been cleaned, and smelled like it. Stillman, who doubled as a private investigator, thought the filthiness of his gym toughened up the fighters who trained there.
It was while training at Stillman’s that Mickey picked up the obsessive-compulsive habit of washing his hands sixty times a day. He was a guy who was pleased to meet you but didn’t really want to shake your hand.
As was true of many boxing gyms of the day, you dropped a dime in the bucket and you could watch all day, and Mickey got to meet those guys, a cast of characters straight out of a Damon Runyon story.
Moving from opportunity to opportunity, Cohen moved westward again. He eventually became Ben “Bugsy” Siegel’s bodyguard, which put him on the fast track for success. In addition to guarding Siegel, Cohen also was raking in the dough with his own bookie joint at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue. The place was cop-proof on account of the chief of the Hollywood bunco squad had a piece of the action. The joint was wired for the ponies during the day and operated as a casino at night.
Cohen’s pugilistic skills might’ve been less than top drawer, but there was no questioning his toughness or his courage. The L.A. mob boss Jack Dragna wanted him dead, bad. Mickey escaped every assassination attempt. Bullets were fired into his home. Dynamite once blew a gaping hole in his bedroom wall. Later, he would take a shotgun blast to the shoulder. The attempts just made Cohen’s fame grow.
In 1938, when Perlman called, Cohen was already a star gangster in L.A. with plenty of clout and plenty of enemies.
Perlman mentioned Siegel to Cohen. Mickey said that he knew for a fact that Ben would love to sock a Nazi, too, that he’d openly discussed, pardon the expression, icing Nazis.
“Relay a message for me, Mickey?” Perlman said.
“Anything you want, Judge.”
“Tell Ben I already have Lansky and Zwillman on board back east.”
“You are doing a great thing, Judge.”
“And tell Ben no icing.”
“Takes a little bit of the fun out of it . . .”
“Yes, but it has to be that way. Rabbis will be watching what you do.”
Perlman asked Mickey about the LAPD, whose reputation stunk like the La Brea Tar Pits. Mickey assured him there was no problem. There might’ve been officers who worshipped Hitler on the force, but most only worshipped the greenback dollar bill.
The judge knew the time and place of the next Bund meeting. Cohen jotted that down and said he’d take care of it. He immediately called Siegel to tell him the good news.
Bugsy Siegel was the best looking of the Jewish gangsters, with heavy-lidded eyes, a movie-star jaw, and a cool-breeze demeanor. He was also Meyer Lansky’s childhood co–gang leader and had been sent west from New York to set up rackets in Tinseltown.
Siegel loved L.A. because he loved sunshine and convertibles and starlets. His first westward trek came in 1933, when he visited actor George Raft, himself a Brooklyn neighborhood kid from back in the day.
The weather, the girls, L.A., and Bugsy were meant for each other—but Siegel was overseas trying to sell a patent for a new explosive when he first planned to hurt Nazis.
Siegel had been a bad, bad boy dating back to when he first partnered up with Lansky. By the time he turned twenty-one, he had a rap sheet as long as his inseam: assault, drug dealing, rape, robbery, numbers, rubouts, white slavery.
Siegel also had been a professional killer from the time he was a teenager, sometimes whacking guys for as little as fifty bucks. Ah, but he was a good Jewish boy. He never killed on the Sabbath.
As a killer, Siegel was a gunman. He didn’t go much for hands-on stuff. He saved that for the dolls. But with a gun in his hand, he was about the most dangerous thing known to man. He had a nose like a football player’s—these were the days before face guards—and a rictus grin when he diddled the trigger.
When he was told to break a guy’s leg, he shot the guy in the kneecap instead. On those occasions, Siegel would grin at his victim. The wails of pain were music to his ears.
His cold blood scared everyone, no matter whose side they were on.
One former crewmate recalled, “When the rest of us were trying to decide what to do, Siegel was already shooting. I’ve seen him charge ten men, and all ten ran for cover.”
His reputation took a quantum leap in 1931, when he was part of the four-man crew that whacked Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Coney Island. The others included Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, and Joe Adonis—an all-star crew.
In 1938, Siegel was thirty-two years old and schtupping Dorothy di Frasso, a married Italian countess, in the Villa Madama in Rome, and big-time Nazis were in the hotel, in town to conduct business with Mussolini. Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels were just down the hall.
Because of his international notoriety, Siegel was registered under a pseudonym: Sir Bart, a British baronet. Politics weren’t Siegel’s forte, but he took an immediate dislike to that “fat bastard” Göring because he caught him chatting with his girl.
“Why do you talk to him, Dottie?” Siegel wanted to know.
“He is an important man. I . . .”
“Fuck him. And fuck that other asshole, Goebbels, too,” Siegel said. “I am going to kill the both of them. It’s an easy set-up with the way they’re walking around here.”
“You can’t do it, Ben.”
“Why not?”
“They would execute my husband, my whole family, in retaliation,” Dottie said.
So Siegel backed off, but he didn’t forget.
In the days and weeks after Perlman’s call, Cohen, Siegel, and others undertook a campaign of guerilla warfare—slinking around the hot city in small cynegetic packs, finding Nazis alone or in groups and pounding them into the desert sand.
It’s unknown how they learned where the Nazis were going to be, but given Perlman’s relationship with the Anti-Defamation League and the league’s network of spies inside L.A.’s Nazi community, the information was no doubt easily acquired.
“Hitler’s got one nut, which is one more than you going to have if we see you wearing that fucking shirt again,” Cohen would say to the bloody puddle left squirming on the burning L.A. sidewalk.
Some of the Nazis who were tenderized by gangster fists were also cops, not so brave when caught alone.
“We had to fight cops, too. Back in those days, a lot of L.A. cops were Nazis as well,” Cohen later recalled.
In another city, Siegel and Cohen would have been busted for attacking a police officer. In L.A., that couldn’t happen. Top cops were in business with Siegel and Cohen, and the pair happened to be excellent earners.
The largest Nazi riot in L.A. came on February 22, 1939, months after most of the action had taken place in New York, Philadelphia, Newark, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Syracuse. On that date, Cohen, Siegel, and a hundred of their best friends surrounded the Deutsches Haus, the German House, on West Fifteenth Street in Los Angeles as a Bund meeting took place inside.
The Bund meeting was advertised as a celebration of George Washington’s birthday—the Bund loved birthdays—and the surprise guest speaker was Herman Max Schwinn, a leftover from Hitler’s plan to conquer Hollywood. Schwinn’s presence at the meeting had been kept secret because the US government was in the process of canceling his US citizenship.
Schwinn was a bespectacled chap whose military cap hid the great height and width of his forehead. Sometime during 1938, he’d grown a truncated mustache, an homage no doubt to you-know-who. Also scheduled to speak was a writer and pamphlet publisher named David Hall Jr. from Glendale, California.
But all of that George Washington business was just a smoke screen of patriotism that didn’t deter a bloodthirsty mob from assembling outside. Along with the gangsters, there were demonstrators from the Socialist Workers Party and the Young People’s Socialist League who were carrying signs that read SMASH HITLER, FIGHT AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM, and BUILD WORKERS’ DEFENSE GUARDS. There were a surprising number of women among the protesters, pipingly singing the “Internationale” in clear, untrained voices.
A box truck rolled slowly around the block with a loudspeaker mounted on it. Inside, a man with a microphone broadcasted a relentless mantra, “Down with Hitler! Down with fascism!”
Along with protest signs, it seemed as if every protester had brought a bushel basket full of rotten vegetables, eggs, and rocks. When a Nazi wearing a brown shirt tried to enter the Deutsches Haus, objects both disgusting and harmful rained down on him. The most serious injuries at the riot were Nazis who’d been hit on the head and face by thrown rocks.
Before long, the front steps to the building were slick with rotten-vegetable slime. The protesters kept attendance down as many potential attendees chose safer activities.
The Nazis inside the hall were still not safe, either. Two rocks smashed through front windows and rained glass down onto their delicate pink scalps. For those who did make it inside, slime dripping from their uniforms, there was a second problem: how to get out.
After an hour’s delay, there was an attempt to start the rally, and Hall got off a couple of remarks—“Washington was a leader of a revolution who was like Hitler today”—before more broken glass from hurled rocks interrupted him.
Police were called from a telephone inside the building, but when they arrived, seven radio cars strong, they only made a half-assed attempt to disperse the crowd, which barely budged.
With Hall keeping his head covered, Schwinn took the podium and managed to insult FDR and several members of his cabinet before realizing no one was listening because of the chaos outside.
Eventually, the police decided against direct confrontation with the angry mob. They cleared the area surrounding a side door and led the Nazis to safety one patrol car load at a time.
After the Deutsches Haus riot, there was a feeling among the gangsters that their job was through, that the public had picked up where they had left off. Bund membership in L.A. was shrinking and shrinking fast. Siegel proclaimed it a job well done.
In addition to making Bund and Legion meetings dangerous, Cohen later told a writer that he’d also done favors for the left-leaning Writer’s Guild, which was having its own Nazi trouble.
A few weeks later, there was a separate incident in La Crescenta, California, about twenty miles due north of downtown L.A., at a Bund meeting that made the out-of-town papers, largely because of a gender angle that so titillated editors back in the day. There was a woman involved.
Her name was Mrs. Elizabeth Barber, and we wonder just how much she appreciated getting her name in the papers after she disrupted a Bund meeting. She was lucky in one sense. At least none of the papers published her address, as newspapers used to do all the time, even for witnesses to mob hits.
There were 1,500 people at the outdoor rally in Hindenburg Park (now part of Crescenta Valley Park), and Fritz Kuhn himself was at the podium, gesticulating, when, according to the Associated Press reporter on the scene, Mrs. Barber stood and demanded, “Tell the truth!”
Her voice was loud and clear, and everyone heard what she said. She may have wished she could have crawled under her seat, but she kept her chin up, even as angry Nazis “surrounded her and began to chant in playground bully style, ‘Go back to Moscow! Go back to Moscow!’”
Mrs. Barber began to inch her way toward the aisle, and as she did so, she yelled, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal!”
She picked up her step as she got to the aisle, confident now that these angry fascists were not going to get physical with her.
“We the people!” she cried. “We the people!”
The wire service reporter followed to make sure he got her name spelled correctly in the morning edition. She told the scribe she couldn’t help but speak up because that Kuhn guy was not “advocating true Americanism.”
Not being reporters who worked for circulation-hungry editors, many others thought the headline of the day was not the woman heckler but rather the low-flying airplane that buzzed the meeting a few times before dropping thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets on the angry crowd.
“Wanted for kidnapping, Adolf Hitler,” the leaflet read. “Indicted by world opinion for murder and kidnapping with intent to kill.”
L.A. and its surroundings weren’t the only place where Nazis were active on the West Coast. Northern California, Oregon, and Washington State also had their share of Nazi recruiting and anti-Nazi violence.
When the Bund held large meetings in San Francisco, they were held at that city’s Deutches Haus, which—now known as the California Hall and used as a concert hall—stands at the corner of Polk Street and Turk Street in the then-German section of the city, now known as the Tenderloin. The venue was built in 1912, designed by architect Frederick H. Meyer.
Cohen and Siegel and their crew didn’t make the trip north for these meetings. It wasn’t that the meetings were secret or that they lacked controversy. The American Federation of Musicians Local Six union in San Francisco had just published an open letter in the local newspapers condemning the Bund for its “religious intolerance and racial hatred.”
Best guess is that the gangsters’ hands-off policy had to do with money. Riots bring heat, and perhaps the boys had an ongoing op in the Tenderloin neighborhood, something that was best left without scrutiny by the Law.
One factor supporting that theory is that the instant the Bund tried to have meetings in other parts of the San Francisco Bay area, Jewish gangsters were on hand to dish out some all-American punishment.
The Bund, hopeful now that they had found a section of the country where they could gather unmolested, rented out the Hermann Sons Hall on Western Avenue in the town of Petaluma, California, thirty-seven miles north of San Francisco. The speaker was again Schwinn, who was coming up from L.A. for the gig.
The Hermann Sons Hall building was not named for a couple of siblings who owned the hall. It was the name of a fraternal order of German Americans that had been around since the turn of the century. The Sons’ object was to “preserve the culture, traditions, and language” of their homeland. They named themselves after Arminius Hermann, a ninth-century German chieftain who fought off the Romans.
Also heading north for the event were Siegel, Cohen, and a couple dozen hoodlums looking for trouble. The meeting was not a secret, and they were not the only Jews up in arms about the meeting.
A twenty-seven-year-old Petaluma teacher by the name of Jeremy Koch wrote a letter to the editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier denouncing the Bund and demanding that the Nazi meeting be canceled. The paper published the letter, and a wave of protest followed. The newspaper subsequently printed its own editorial criticizing the Jews, shouting that they were trying to stifle the Nazi’s freedom of speech.
The folks who ran the Hermann Sons Hall said they were innocent, that they knew nothing about terrorism or movements of hate. They had rented out the hall for the showing of a German-language movie. They saw no need to cancel.
Their innocence was feigned, as they knew exactly who was coming to speak and pretty much what was going to be said. There was even a branch of the Bund in Petaluma, said to be one of the most active branches on the West Coast and to which many of the Hermann Sons belonged.
When the meeting finally happened, there were more protesters outside the hall than Nazis inside. The attendance had been held down by talk of trouble. Two movies were shown. One was a cinematic celebration of the Nazi invasion of Austria and the second was The Aryan Bookstore, an infomercial about Pape’s L.A. Nazi center that instructed Petalumans on how to get their hands on that much-in-demand Jew-hating propaganda.
Schwinn took the podium and said, “We have as little ill feeling against the Jews as we have against a flea. But it takes only one mosquito to spread malaria, so when such a mosquito settles on our body, we do not intend to spend much time wondering whether it is a good one or a bad one.”
Unlike the gangster teams working back east, Cohen’s boys did not try to get inside the meeting. If they had, the riot would have started right then and there. As it was, Schwinn finished his speech.
The gangsters waited until it was over and went to work on the Nazis as they came out, some of them fairly sloshing with pilsner. The protesters objected to the gangsters almost as much as to the Nazis, screaming “No violence” as the Brown Shirts were pummeled. About a dozen Nazis were beaten before the L.A. boys cheesed it on account of the cops.
There was action even farther north, a physical confrontation between gangsters and Nazis at the Masonic Temple on Capitol Hill, constructed 1915, seating capacity 750, at the corner of Pine and Harvard in Seattle, Washington. Today, it has landmark status and serves as a single-screen art cinema for Seattle Central College.
One of the speakers that night was Hans Otto Giese, a Seattle German American lawyer, who said, “We frankly admire our reborn and united German fatherland of today and its greatest genius, Adolf Hitler, who has accomplished such wonders over there in restoring national unity and peace.”
The event was a celebration for sailors from a German warship visiting Puget Sound and a lovefest for Hitler in general. The main speaker was Schwinn, although again his presence was not publicized because he was sought by the feds.
The event drew a crowd of naysayers. The Bund PR campaign had been combatted by King County Judge Samuel R. Stern, who publicized reports of mass murder coming out of Germany.
“It is a real hell on earth,” Stern said.
The audience only learned of the protesters outside after the show started. The instant the orchestra began to play, a group of young women ran up and down the aisles throwing anti-German leaflets into the crowd.
Most of the women were out the back door before anyone realized that they weren’t part of the show but were really part of the “communist” protest.
A couple of the leaflet throwers were slow to escape and were nabbed by sailors, who whooped and hollered and “roughed the women up” before tossing them out.
When word of the women’s mistreatment got outside, the protesters threw down their signs and stormed the arena. Cops were called, and thirty policemen joined the fray.
In the end, the protesters backed off, and order was restored. The show went on. There were only three arrests, one of them a high school kid and another a black man who was busted for possession of brass knuckles. He should’ve opted for the roll of nickels.
None of the beaten Nazis was Schwinn, who snuck out a back door when he heard there was trouble in the front. Schwinn may not have gotten a sock on the jaw that night, but he soon thereafter got one—figuratively, at least—from the US government. He was stripped of his US citizenship for having made a false oath of allegiance, and right after Pearl Harbor, he was placed under house arrest in Chicago as a “risk to military security on the Pacific Coast.”