Paul Lieberman Exclusive Interview

by Helen Earnshaw | 11 December 2012

Paul Lieberman

Paul Lieberman penned the book Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles which has now been adapted into a Hollywood movie.

I caught up with the writer to chat about the story being the book, tracking down these people and having his work adapted for the big screen.

- You penned the book Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles so can you tell me a little bit about it for anyone who is not familiar with the story?

It is a story from what we call noir era Los Angeles, which is the period of the thirties, forties and early fifties, and life was murky in the City of Sunshine - so it a tale from the shadows.

What I did was track down member of a secretive Los Angeles police unit that was given the job of driving the mob and organised crime figures from Los Angeles after World War II.

Los Angeles was a city that fancied itself as different from it called the cess-pool cities back east - New York, Chicago and Philadelphia were grimy places where these gangsters could kill each other all they wanted.

Los Angeles, going back forever, always viewed with great fear the evil outsiders - in other word evil came from without - and even in the eighteen hundreds they were starting to form special details to drive out these people as they thought that the bad guys would come to enjoy the sunshine and victimise this glorious city of palm trees and self invention.

There was this real squad that was formed right after World War II when Los Angeles had burgeoned as this modern giant and powerful city and all of a sudden there were all these gangster killings.

They had taken these police officers that were fresh back from the war and said ‘get rid of these gangsters’ - the #1 gangster was this guy called Mickey Cohen and he was a real showboat. My book traces a sixteen year campaign by these guys to bring Mickey to justice any way that they could.

- They are such larger than life characters and this is such a rich era I wondered what initially sparked you interest in this story?

I view this as a defining era for Los Angeles as it is a very cynical time and what is says is ‘truth is not found in the sunshine it is found in the shadows’ and ‘justice is not found in a marble courthouse but in the back allies’ and this cynical view defines the underside of Los Angeles. The question is was their any untold story from this era?

And when I stumbled on this very secretive gangster squad and its fifteen year quest to get Mickey Cohen… it had never been told because the whole idea of this squad was it remained secret.

So that was the appeal because to stumble upon an untold story from the defining era of Las Angeles was just a gift and you don’t ignore a gift.

- The story started as a series for the Los Angles Times…

What I did was I wrote a seven part series for the Los Angeles - it really was nothing like you normally see in a newspaper because it was looking back at the past of the city.

So that was that the start of it and after the stories came out Hollywood came knocking and it seemed like a… I was smart enough to say yes. So that then started the process to turn it into a film.

- I was reading that it took you over a decade to track down surviving members of the police unit so how difficult a process was it collating all of this information and all of these stories?

Some of them were willing to talk, I won’t pretend otherwise, and some loved the idea that someone was listening to these stories. And some of these guys had been telling these stories to their families and their families had heard them so many times that they were like ’oh that old story’ - the stories were spectacular though.

But others absolutely would not talk. The original bug man for the squad, he planted hidden microphones and broke into all sorts of places, he absolutely refused to talk to me and I would knock on his door and send letters and he basically told me ’those are bodies that are buried let them lie there’.

I really wanted to get the original bug man and after ten years one day he just answered a question and I wound up speaking to that guy more than a hundred times. And I ended up growing close to him up until his death - he died just weeks after filming on this had ended at the age of ninety seven. So tracking some of them down was quite a chore.

But then there was the gangster side of things and it was led by Mickey Cohen and he was the showboating gangster of Los Angeles and he was really meant for the city because he was ’look at me, look at me’ much like the city is.

The culminating event is the killing of a guy called Jack ‘The Enforcer‘ Whalen, he was a rising gangster who had been a pilot in the war, and he was shot down by Mickey and his men in a dark restaurant in the closing days of the 1950’s and so I really wanted to find the men who were with Mickey that night. I tracked down two of those and that was also a lot of work.

- When you are working on something like this you build your own opinion/view on what happened but after hearing their stories first hand how did those opinions and views of the people and the time change?

I did go through some ups and downs. What happened is all these guys lived past their time, as many people do, you grow old and time escapes you.

These guys were very rough and they didn’t know very many rules and they would take hoodlums up into the hills and put guns in their ears and they stripped them down and left them in desert. They bugged people’s bedrooms - they got one mobster on sex practices; it was nothing to do with the mob just what he was doing with his girlfriend.

So it is rugged stuff and while on one hand you are exhilarated that people go against the rules but on the other hand… one of the main cops who is played in this movie by Josh Brolin said to me once ‘we would be indicted today for things we did everyday back then’.

So how do you feel about that? Well you feel two different ways about it. Most of these cops were anonymous foot soldiers and they weren’t glory boys and they did a very dirty job - the people who are give dirty jobs in the military or the spy services are disposable and the bosses become the glory people and are the guys that do the dirty work fade into the background.

What was stunning and what made these guys so appealing was what they did with the rest of their lives; one of the cops who was a bug man became a judge and the most roguish of the cops, who is played by Ryan Gosling, he became a multi-millionaire businessman.

So he spent the last days of his life living in a house on the beach in California and he would sit there drinking and watching the girls so by. Another one had a daughter who became a Harvard professor.

So they really were remarkable who, after they did this dirty work, proved what they were made of. So that also changed my opinion.

They were not like people that you encounter today who are often are so boastful and they make up stories - I did check all of the stories by the way I didn’t assume that everything was true; I am fanatical about that I just wanted to make sure.

In the modern day people tell stories and they puff up their own role in events but these guys were the opposite and I think it was to do with the fact that they went through the Depression and many of them fought in World War II - the guy played by Ryan Gosling was shot down over the Pacific and was left floating on a raft.

They tended to tell stories where they were coming up short - the guy who was shot down over the Pacific was like ‘I was a draft dodger at heart; I didn’t want to go and tried to get out of it’.

People today would make themselves the second coming of John Wayne and that was something that I found appealing about them as they were humble in that regard.

- This story has now been adapted for the big screen so how did all that come about?

There were a lot of people who were interested in making it but it was a project that was attached to Warner Bros. Warner Bros was the studio that pioneered a lot of the great gangster movies with Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney.

This film is set in 1949, this was the type of thing that interested me, and that was the year that Warner Bros came out with one of the great gangster films called White Heat in which Jimmy Cagney ends up on top of an oil refinery that is blowing up and he says ’Made it, Ma! Top of the world’.

So there was the real story here, which was the start of things, but also the American history of gangster films - which was a whole other phenomena - so this was the chance for Warner Bros to do a modern day gangster film and I thought that would be fun - it was hard to say no to that.

- Well you have slightly touched on my next question I wondered if it was an opportunity that you jumped at or did you have some reservations in handing your work over?

Do you know the film Arthur - the original one with Dudley Moore?

- I do yes.

In that the aunt wants to give him the inheritance and Liza Minnelli says ‘what did you do?’ And he says, ‘I am not stupid’. I jumped at the chance.

What you have to recognise is that Hollywood takes over and you have to understand that. I certainly was not going to be the final decision maker on anything and as long as you understand that - but I was able to give a lot of input and my opinion was sought.

In the end it is going to be the creative work of other people and you just let them do what they do. So in that respect I said ‘I am going to go along for the ride and let’s see what they make of it’. That was my attitude.

- You spent so long on this project researching and getting to know and understand the people involved in the story so what do you think about the casting?

You have touched on what has been the most emotional part for me as I am still in touch with the families of these cops - a couple of the cops from back in 1940’s are still alive; one of the guys who is ninety six went to the set.

When they asked me who I thought should play Mickey Cohen Sean Penn had been high on my list and it was amazing that they got him. For him it was a chance to create an iconic figure in American history.

The main cop is played by Josh Brolin and when he was cast we had a conversation and he said “what do you think I can bring to the table?’ And I said ’you represent centeredness’ - his character is very centred and he knows himself and is a solid citizen.

And the cop that he is play Jack O’Mara was the solid citizen as he was church-goer - even though he did things that went way over the line - he was a family man and was married to his childhood sweetheart. So that part did seem on the mark even though the characters are very dramatised in the film - there are a lot of shootouts.

The real O’Mara slept with a Tommy gun under his pillow but in reality though they did not have wild shoot outs in the street. But in a gangster movie you don’t keep the Tommy gun on the violin case it does have to come out.

Ryan Gosling takes on the role of cop Jerry Wooters and in real life he was a ladies man - he got married late and he was a real operator.

The family of Jerry Wooters let me see all of his old letters from when he was in the war he had kept all these photographs of himself with nurses - I mean one after another and it was hilarious to me. His family one knew him as the husband and father and so on but this guy had kept all these pictures.

At that time most people got married very young but he stayed a bachelor until his mid thirties and he finally wooed an airlines stewardess and he would throw parties with airlines stewardesses for the other cops.

So in a sense Ryan Gosling, who today is a great heartthrob, playing Jerry was kind of fun for me. I would have liked for these cops to still be around to see who is playing them but the producers did a great job in assembling that cast.

- So what did you think of the film - have you had a chance to see it yet?

I have. You have got to understand the film… I am delighted that I was able to do a book and the book is there and it is the real story - the film says that it is ‘inspired by’ and that is accurate.

It is an adventure/gangster tale and the real trip of it has been seeing the characters that I met in real life become film characters. In the film they are much wilder than they were in reality and the shoot-outs are about making a Hollywood gangster film - they were not the stuff that happened in the real world.

But what is good is the studio has been open about that. All I can think about is the real life characters and I still have a lot of contact with the families and I have nursed them through.

One of the daughter of the main cop Jack O’Mara started attending every filming session that she could - he died a number of years ago - and one of the most touching things for me was to see this become an occasion for her to make peace with her father’s death.

She attended the filming and she started thinking about her father and revisiting all the places that they had lived and went back to the grave to tell her father about the filming.

For me the film has become an occasion to stay in touch with all of these families and that has been the most rewarding part for me.

- Finally what is next for you are there more books in the pipeline?

I have a couple of things lined up. Our shared experience today is not so much the printed word but images so I definitely have a couple of other movie projects that I would love to see happen - until they happen I am not going to advertise them.