Reporter John Clark and gangster Mickey Cohen a story from the "Front Page"

My father, no slouch in the writing department, sent along a newspaper related story from his past. His father and mother (my grandfather and grandmother) rented a small apartment in Los Angeles to John Clark, a newspaperman.

Most of what follows is in my father’s words. (photo at left is Mickey Cohen)

“John Clark and Mickey Cohen”

Location: A small downtown office at the Los Angeles Daily News.

The time: Early to middle 1950s.

John Clark: John was an excellent newspaper man who had at times, held positions of city editor, but his hard drinking would get him fired or demoted from time-to-time. He would dry out and get his job back. At the time of this incident John was a rewrite man at the Daily News and a feature writer. Don’t imagine newspapers hire rewrite men any more. A good rewrite man could take the basic five W’s from a reporter in the field calling from a public pay phone (are any of those left?) and create a major front page story continued on inside pages. As I already said, he was an excellent writer. John was assigned to create a week’s feature on local mobster, Mickey Cohen.

Mickey Cohen: Mickey was a well known mobster with close ties to the Mafia. As a front Cohen operated a men’s clothing store on the Sunset Strip just east of Beverly Hills. His office was in the back of the store (never heard of anyone actually buying men’s clothes there) where he took care of his business. At one time while leaving a Sunset Strip night club, a sniper from across the street took a shot at him with a rifle. The shot missed Cohen but blew away a body guard. Cohen always insisted he was simply a small business man selling men’s clothes. Right, a small businessman who needed a body guard. Another time his armored Cadillac had been ambushed and there were five or more bullet holes in the driver’s door. None of the projectiles got through the outer steel. Another question, why would a simple small business man need an armored car? Anyway, when asked about the holes in his car door, Cohen shrugged and speculated that the damage was the result of vandals with a drill.

OK, so now you know the players – or almost all of them in this saga. The series on Cohen began in the Daily News on a Monday and continued each day through Friday. In the articles that were anything but flattering to Cohen, John Clark made reference to Cohen’s age and almost each time there was a different age published as no one actually knew his real age.

After three installments, John received a personal call from Cohen who complimented John on the “excellent” feature, but complained about the incorrect references to his age. Cohen told John he would send a couple associates over to show the reporter his birth certificate to clear up the confusion.

That afternoon, two guys straight out of central casting, for gangsters and hit men entered John’s small office at the paper. These were the days when anyone could walk off the street and enter any office or department in a newspaper. Heck, when I was a young “tub thumper” (Note from Jim: A public relations person in the old days, it's meaning today is quite different) I would enter the offices and deliver my stories directly to the city editor.

Back to the story, the two men sat across the desk from John, said nothing for a long pause, then one leaned across the desk and with his face close to John’s said, and these are the actual words, “Mickey wants you should take a vacation to Bermuda!” At that they rose and walked out of his office and the newspaper. One of the two never said a word. Oh, by the way, John never did see a birth certificate.

John lived in a small apartment in Los Angeles owned by my mother and father (Note from Jim: My grandfather and grandmother) where my brother and sister-in-law, Bill and Mona, also lived. We had become friends with John and heard all this first hand from him. At the time he was divorced from his wife due to his drinking.

Epilogue: Not too long after this “event” John drowned in a fishing accident, falling from his boat in a lake up in the Sierras. It was considered simply a case of a drunken fisherman falling out of his boat and never connected to Mickey Cohen.

Jim’s Note: Found the following in a clip that I googled from another reporter at the Daily News who also interviewed Mickey Cohen:

“JONES: People used to cook stuff on a hotplate back there, their lunches and stuff like that. And there was always coffee going. When I was first there, I used to have to come in at 4 o'clock in the morning and start the coffee. Well, there one guy, a great rewrite man named John Clark, but he was a drinker. And you'd have to call him and wake him up, because you couldn't depend on is alarm clock to wake him up. You'd have to call him and be sure he was alert and on his feet so he could get to work. That was part of my job, to start the coffee and get a hold of John Clark, so he could come in on the early shift. He was due in at 5 on the early morning rewrite.”

There’s another long Los Angeles Times story that mentions the above and includes this great description of the Daily News. (Sounds like a place me and a lot of my friends in the business would have loved to work at):

"There were five papers," says Joe Saltzman, a journalism professor at USC. "At that time, you would get drunk and screw up and get fired, but it wasn't a big deal because you would go to another newspaper. But to get to the Daily News was what everybody wanted to do. Everybody who wanted to be a hard-drinking, tough newspaperman--and that included women--would go to the Daily News. It was a newspaperman's paper. These people were in the mold of the 'Front Page' kind of reporters. They drank a lot, they cursed a lot, they worked all kinds of hours. They didn't care about any authority. They were out to get the L.A. Times, which they considered the conservative enemy of newspapers."

Any paper of the era could have made the "Front Page" claim, but few were a self-styled champion of the downtrodden, the irreverent enemy of blunderbuss authority.

"The Daily News loved to find ways to make fun of the Los Angeles elite, the power brokers," Wagner says. "I don't mean bring someone down with investigative journalism or a big expose. It was almost as if there was a competition among reporters and staff--'How can we embarrass so-and-so today? What can we do to humble this arrogant person?' So if they caught some city official picking his nose, I can assure you that that photograph would be in the paper."

On another search I found the following short segment in a story about the history of the Daily News:
RINGER: Have you heard of John Clark?
...
RINGER: He was a rewrite man, and absolutely wrote the cleanest copy you ever saw. He drowned himself in MacArthur Park, in about four feet of water, falling out of one of those little boats. He was a very strange guy. (A little different story than what my Dad recalled).

From another website on Mickey Cohen: Mickey Cohen, head of Los Angeles gambling rackets, maintained a host of powerful friends, including Frank Sinatra - who once appealed to him to get mobster Johnny Stompanato to stop dating Ava Gardner. Depicted by Harvey Keitel in the 1991 film "Bugsy" and by Paul Guilfoyle in 1997's "L.A. Confidential."