Gary Wean’s Preposterous Life – Part 1

The early years of gangsters, Hollywood, and trying to blackmail the sitting American president

Gary Wean was one of the heroes of my journey.  Like so many of us, Gary’s life was hard to believe.  Gary’s book was similar to Dennis Lee’s, in that Gary only wrote it when he slowed down enough so that he could do it.  Dennis’s most significant books were written from behind bars and his wife typed them up.  Gary’s was written between customers at his business, after he was railroaded out of his policeman’s career, and his wife typed it up. 

This post will be on Gary’s early years.  He was born in the Midwest, Iowa as I recall, in 1921.  Like nearly all American men born around then, Gary served in World War II.  Gary was a naval gunner who fought in the Pacific Theater, and like so many men who did that, Gary never made it back home and stayed on the West Coast.  Gary became an LA policeman in 1946.  Gary had various jobs at the LAPD, including traffic cop, detective, and most famously, he put Mickey Cohen under surveillance.  Cohen worked for Al Capone early in his career and ran the Mob scene in LA.  One of his close associates was Bugsy Siegel, who “built” Las Vegas, and Cohen is credited with inventing the Las Vegas race wire, for betting on horse races.  My stepfather was part of that milieu, as a Frank Sinatra sound-alike with his own lounge act.  On one of Frank’s records, it is my stepfather singing, not Frank. 

As Gary discovered in the first year of his police career, the horseraces were rigged, as Cohen demonstrated to Gary at Hollywood Park, when Gary directed traffic there.  While directing traffic at Hollywood Park, Gary saw Cohen with a man with who he later learned was Jack Ruby, and Gary had a conversation with Ruby once on the Mob’s plans for New Orleans and Havana.  Ruby was not the two-bit nightclub owner that the Warren Commission portrayed him as, but he was a high-ranking mobster who also worked for Al Capone early in his career. 

Just like in the movies, Cohen hung out at racetracks, boxing arenas, bars, ethnic restaurants, and the like.  A member of Cohen’s entourage was Harry Pregerson, who Gary saw in Cohen’s company, and Gary thought that Cohen paid for Pregerson’s law school.  It was Gary’s first brush with Jewish-gangster judges and attorneys. 

Pregerson eventually became a federal judge in the most corrupt federal court in the USA – the Ninth Circuit District Court.  I have noticed that the greatest criminals invest great effort in cultivating a reputation for honesty, philanthropy, and the like.  Some of the greatest criminals on Earth style themselves as “humanitarians,” and the USA’s adoption of the “humanitarian intervention” rubric for its imperial interventions is a classic gangster tactic.  Pregerson said that his conscience was his guide.  Several years ago, I was approached by the original Watergate attorney, who had kept an eye on Pregerson since the 1970s, as he witnessed one of Pregerson’s judicial irregularities. 

Dealing with the escapades of politicians, gangsters, and Hollywood celebrities was Gary’s daily life at the LAPD.  The movie LA Confidential was kind of a biography of Gary, but he didn’t get the happy ending.  In those early years, Gary became close friends with Audie Murphy, the USA’s most decorated World War II hero who became a movie star.  Murphy married a Hollywood actress, owned racehorses, and flew his own private plane, living that glamorous Hollywood life.  Gary moonlighted as Murphy’s bodyguard. 

Gary was making life difficult for LA gangsters, and Pregerson was able to get Gary fired from his LAPD job, which is when Gary first moved to Ventura County, where our paths would eventually cross. 

After a few years in Ventura County, Gary got a job back in LA as an investigator for LA’s district attorney, and he soon put Cohen under surveillance again.  One of Cohen’s specialties was blackmailing people.  One of Cohen’s hoods was Johnny Stompanato, the Italian Stallion of the Hollywood scene.  Cohen arranged for Stompanato to meet Lana Turner, who had a very healthy libido and was swept off her feet by Stompanato’s lovemaking skills.  Cohen arranged for the lovers to stay at a Malibu cottage for a weekend, and Cohen put a hidden microphone in their bed.  Cohen made a record of their lovemaking sessions, which became a hit at Hollywood parties.  When Turner’s daughter killed Stompanato, that record became a “must have” item, and Cohen sold thousands more records of the lovers. 

Jack Nicholson’s character in Chinatown was partly based on Fred Otash.  To get a flavor of how Gary wrote, he described Otash as, “without any equal, the most conniving, thieving, lying shamus the Hollywood scene ever experienced.”  Otash also worked with Confidential magazine, a tabloid, which was the inspiration for LA Confidential.  Otash tried to wreck a courtroom appearance that Gary made in a case that Melvin Belli worked on, in a Hollywood-party setup, but Gary did not take the bait. 

During his surveillance activities, Gary discovered that one of Cohen’s close associates was Menachem Begin, the mass murderer who won a Nobel Peace Prize as Israel’s prime minster.  Begin was a regular visitor who availed himself of Cohen’s hookers.  Cohen and Begin would meet in a Yiddish diner and speak Yiddish.  Gary had a Yiddish-speaking informant who he had sit in the booth next to Cohen and Begin, and Gary was also able to record their conversations. 

The 1960 Democratic National Convention, at which JFK was announced as the democratic candidate for president, was held in LA, where JFK met Marilyn Monroe at a wild party that his in-law, Peter Lawford, threw at his Malibu home, replete with high-class hookers.  Gary looked in on that party.  Lawford was a member of the Rat Pack.  The legend was that Frank Sinatra introduced Monroe to JFK, but Gary knew that Joey Bishop, under the orders of Cohen, convinced fellow Rat Pack member Lawford to throw the party and have Monroe there.  Their plan was to get a reading on JFK’s intentions for Israel, and they were using Monroe as the highest-class hooker on Earth to seduce JFK and get him talking after sex.  JFK was a legendary philanderer, they figured that JFK would easily fall for Monroe’s charms, and they were right.

Gary saw Otash as he tried to bug Lawford’s home, and Cohen tried to get a recording of JFK and Monroe in bed, like he did with Stompanato and Turner, to blackmail JFK.  Gary thought that Otash was not successful, but Otash seems to have gotten a movie of JFK, RFK, and Monroe in a ménage à trois, which was nearly actioned off publicly in 2014 before an anonymous bidder obtained it.  That took a lot of brass, to try to blackmail the sitting president. 

Gary wrote that Cohen, Begin, and Ruby were all part of that Monroe situation.  Gary was sure that Monroe was murdered by Cohen’s underlings, as they were concerned that she might talk about what had happened.  Gary named names.  In his surveillance activities, Gary found that Cohen and Begin were obsessed with JFK and his intentions for Israel.  Cohen was an arms dealer for Israel and even “donated” a warship to Israel. 

There are many funny moments in Gary’s book, such as when he tailed some of Cohen’s hoods to a restaurant, where they met with Ventura County’s leading land baron, Martin (“Bud”) Smith.  I grew up in a bowling alley in Smith’s development, only a few miles from my home (my mother worked there).  Before I ever met Dennis, my father told me that people who crossed Smith simply disappeared.  At the restaurant, Gary noticed some DEA agents there.  While Gary was tailing Cohen’s hoods, the DEA was tailing Smith to the same meeting.  Smith made it big in the drug trade, but the Feds could never catch him and Smith became a noted “philanthropist.” 

That was quite a milieu to run around in, but what happened in 1963 made that all pale to insignificance, and that comes in the next post.