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preferred making a buck to going to school that he once skipped six weeks of the first grade entirely. It took him a year and a half to graduate to second grade.
    Little Mickey was a natural street urchin. He was out on the avenue so much that numbers runners were soon leaving slips with him. Local bootleggers left “packages” with him for important clients. He learned the finepoints of craps and pool sharking. He even got into extortion, frightening a neighborhood barber into paying him to stay away. Naturally, Mickey soon moved into bootlegging as well.
    Mickey’s entree came from his brothers Harry and Louie, who had opened a pharmacy at the corner of Pico and Bond. At first they employed Mickey afternoons as a soda jerk, but talent will out: Mickey was soon operating the still behind the store. One morning in 1920, police raided the Cohen family pharmacy and caught Mickey red-handed. That’s when another defining feature of Cohen’s personality came out—his dangerous temper. Instead of being taken into custody quietly, Mickey assaulted one of the arresting officers with a hot plate. He was seven.
    What followed was a lesson Mickey would never forget. One of his brothers called a well-connected relative who made the charges go away. For Mickey, it was a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. As he would later write in his memoirs, “It was all a fix. My brother had the connection.” Much of his subsequent life would be devoted to the search for “the fix.”
    The fact that Mickey’s brothers had entrusted their still to a seven-year-old might seem like conclusive proof that the brothers Cohen were not concerned with young Mickey’s moral development, but in fact, such a conclusion would be unfair. Oldest brother Sam did care. Sam was a religious man. He decided to enroll Mickey in Hebrew school. Unfortunately, while waiting to meet the rabbi, Mickey “got into a beef” with another kid and slapped him in the mouth. He was promptly sent home with instructions to never appear at synagogue again.
    Clearly, Mickey had a calling—a criminal one. But he was hardly a criminal mastermind, as his midday holdup of a movie theater box office demonstrated. A successful heist requires forethought and planning—a “tipster” to provide intelligence, a stolen getaway car (ideally one with “cold” plates), perhaps even a “tail” car to throw anyone who pursued you off the chase. Cohen seems not to have considered what would happen after he got his hands on the money. As a result, the police nabbed him before he could escape from the scene. This time, “the fix” wasn’t “in.” He was sent off to a Dickensian reform school on Fort Hill, overlooking downtown. Mickey would later describe being beaten almost every day of his seven-month stay with a shredded old bicycle tire for “any old thing.” Even for a hardened street kid, it was a nightmare. When Mickey got out of this prison, he resolved never to go to school again. He had almost finished the second grade. He would not learn to read (or to add or subtract) until he was in his thirties, a shortcoming that would complicate his later life as a stick-up artist.
    While Mickey started his criminal career at a precocious age, he washardly unusual in choosing a life of crime. By late 1922, Los Angeles was experiencing an unprecedented crime wave. Statistics from the period are sketchy, but the best estimates suggest that “virtuous” Anglo-Saxon L.A. had a homicide rate that was nearly twice that of the racially mixed, immigrant metropolis New York City. In fact, with a population of only half a million people, Los Angeles was closing in fast on the total homicide tally of Great Britain, whose population was 44 million.
    The cause of this surge in homicides was mysterious, but to Harry Chandler and the business establishment, its potential consequences were profoundly worrisome.
    “The white spot of America,” bemoaned one contributor to the
Times
, was