CRIME: The Killers

During his 16 years in Los Angeles, short, sharp-eyed Benny the Meatball grew chubby and genial and almost quit carrying a rod. Los Angeles was paradise for a wrong gee with the right connections. The sun was warm, suckers in dark glasses stood under every palm tree, and the cops obligingly kept Eastern hoods out of town.

Once in a while Benny (whose most recent alias was Gamson) had to pay a $5 fine for shooting craps, but nothing ever came of his six arrests for suspicion of robbery. He had a little routine trouble with a tough local competitor named Mickey Cohen. One night he hammered Mickey’s skull with a piece of lead pipe, but the quarrel never got really serious.

Benny branched out into gambling, bookmaking and investments. He went right on prospering even after reform-minded Mayor Fletcher Bowron purged the cooperative cops, thus inviting torpedoes from all points East. There was opportunity for all in Los Angeles—the races, Hollywood, wartime black markets, herds of money-heavy aircraft workers. The newly arrived mobsters sighed happily, bought gabardine slacks and pastel sports shirts, rubbed shoulders peacefully at Vine Street bars, the baseball games and the Friday night fights at Hollywood Legion Stadium.

The Drill. But last year things began to change. Los Angeles heard rumors of a struggle for power, a merging of talent. Some said Mickey Cohen might end up as the city’s No. 1 business man. Benny began to be seen with one George Levinson, a Chicagoan with wide experience who had come West to enter the profitable nylon black market.

One day last May the cops grabbed Benny. They had just found the bullet-punctured body of a minor gangster, and they thought Benny might have done the shooting. Benny assured them that they were wrong. But a few weeks later the cops grabbed him again—they found him out in the street inspecting the door of his 1942 Chrysler sedan. The door was full of holes.

“Somebody just took a drill and punched those holes,” said Benny. The cops removed the door and shook half a dozen slugs out on the floor. Benny doubled up with laughter, handed out cigars and went off to Chicago for a vacation. So did his friend Levinson.

In August they came back, went about their business as if nothing had happened. Late one night last week they prepared for an important conference in a blue-walled, chintz-curtained Hollywood apartment. Benny slipped a cocked Mauser under the bedsheets and hid a .32 in the closet. Levinson laid down a Gladstone bag containing two sawed-off shotguns. As it turned out, these arrangements proved sadly inadequate.

A few minutes after a knock sounded at the door, Levinson was dead on the floor with three slugs in his body. Benny the Meatball was out on the dark street yelling, “Help, help, help!” Five bullets had gone right through him, and he soon fell dead. Residents of the apartment looked out and saw a black automobile drive away.

The cops didn’t think they would find out who rode off in it, but they had an idea that Los Angeles might get quite noisy in the next few months.