Cop befriends a crook

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"They said, 'We tried to place him under arrest and he wouldn't come,' " Wooters recalled. "So I went over to him, all my 165 pounds, and I said, 'Whalen, I understand you're a tough guy, really good fighter.' He said, 'Where's your badge?'

"So I said, 'Now do you want to go easy, or want to go hard?'

"He says, 'Dick, what's your name?' So I tell him." Whalen flashed a smile befitting a movie star and said: "Oh, hiya, Jerry. I heard about you."

And that's how the renegade cop met the renegade gangster and how they became friends for life, or however long life could last, in Los Angeles of the 1950s, for someone named Jack "the Enforcer."

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Whalen might well have heard of Jerry Wooters, for things had a way of happening around the charming rogue of a cop who exuded a screw-you edge to crooks and his bosses alike. He'd joined the force on a lark in 1941 when a friend said, " 'The police are giving an exam. Let's go down and take it.' It cost a buck."

The LAPD was filling its ranks after its purges of the 1930s, when a mayor and police chief sold promotions and a secret unit planted a bomb under the car of a city reformer. Wooters paid his $1 and became part of the generation that was supposed to change all that.

In one of his first raids as a vice officer, 20 suspects escaped a gambling house when he tangled with the home's pet terrier, earning the headline: "Faithful Fido Mutilates Seat of Raiding Officer's Pants."

Later, Wooters boasted how he was going to avoid the war by enlisting in a reserve unit at a movie studio. Then he arrested a judge's nephew at a gay bar, and, BOOM, they sent him to the Pacific in a B-17 and gave him a big Brownie camera to take pictures of Japanese positions.

Over Guadalcanal, an enemy round blew the head off the gunner next to him. Later, a shell crippled the plane, leaving the crew adrift in a raft. They were certain a Japanese patrol would finish them off, but Wooters bet the others that an American destroyer would get to them first, on the fifth day. "I won $30," he said.

After he came home with his medals, that penchant for gambling eventually landed him on the Gangster Squad. Wooters was a uniformed sergeant along Wilshire when he crashed its Christmas party. The secretive unit had invited some civilians who quietly helped it, as in setting up a front company to lease phone lines that carried signals from bugs planted around town.

One squad member blew a gasket when he saw the scene in a back room: Someone they had not invited, a cop no less, was down on the floor, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, trying to separate some of those civilians from their money.

"Well, you know, God dang, to have a man in uniform, especially a supervisor, playing craps, which was illegal," recalled Con Keeler, the squad's bugging expert.

Imagine his surprise when Sgt. Wooters joined their ranks.

With Mickey Cohen sidelined by a tax case, the LAPD saw an opening to crush bookmaking in the city. The Gangster Squad needed a sergeant who really knew the world of bookies. Wooters had worked them during his time in vice.

Thus did it take on the cop who would enrage Mickey and lead the investigation that changed the rules for policing in California, that in his first assignment.

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Charles Cahan had been a runner for a bookie, then overnight, "he had about six joints . . . the Cadillac convertible . . . all the fancy broads," Wooters recalled. "[Chief] Parker said, 'I want this son of a bitch in jail.' "

No problem. Cahan operated out of houses, stationing phone clerks upstairs. The squad would sneak in at night and hide microphones. The squad's budding electronics genius, Bert Phelps, used Wheaties from the kitchen as glue to reattach a piece of wallpaper -- a flower -- over a bug in a wall. After they picked up Cahan and 14 others in April 1953, the cops were matter-of-fact at the trial. No, they hadn't bothered with warrants. How did they get through a door? "Kicked it open." A window? "With my foot."

Wooters insisted he warned prosecutors to protest when defense lawyers began harping about a bug under a dresser. He told the district attorney, "You've got to bring out that this is not a bedroom -- you can't violate a man's bedroom." All he got back was "Jesus Christ, who's prosecuting this case?" It was no different than what they'd done for years, after all.