MICKEY COHEN: The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster
by TERE TEREBA

hidden chronicles from the LA underworld 1921-1976

“THIS IS A SLASHING GOOD BOOK — A RAZOR-SHARP BIO OF MALEVOLENT MACHER MICKEY THE C: THE CONFOUNDING KINGPIN OF L.A. CRIME. BUY THIS BOOK NOW — IT’LL HANG YOU OUT TO DRY!!”
—James Ellroy, iconic L.A. author

“In Mickey Cohen, Tere Tereba brings to life the pugnacious nature of a hoodlum unique in the annals of American gangsterism. Boxer, thug, gangster, celebrity—Cohen’s life started in the gutter and spilled out into the glitter and glamour of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. Tereba captures the essence of the man and his times with insight and flair.”
—T.J. English, New York Times best-selling author of Havana Nocturne and The Westies

“Mickey “The Hood With Nine Lives” Cohen finally gets his due. With great style and boatloads of new information, Tere Tereba has crafted a page-turner about the greatest gangster LA has ever seen. Celebs, gamblers, politicians—for decades they all bowed to Cohen’s vise-grip on Southern California. Few lived on the edge as long as Cohen, and fewer still earned a biography this entertaining. As MC himself might say: “Buy it if you know what’s good for you.” ”
—Pulitzer Prize nominee Gus Russo, author of The Outfit and Supermob

“Mickey Cohen got a lot of good breaks in his wild ride of a life, and here comes another: Tere Tereba gives the gangster the biography he has long deserved—an intense, straight-shooting, rocket-fast read, full of gossip, gore, and great research. Cohen’s life is a fascinating slice of American history, and Tereba captures it poignantly.”
—Jonathan Eig, best-selling author of Get Capone

“An arresting, high speed account of Hollywood’s homegrown Superstar of crime—dangerous, outrageous, bulletproof Mickey Cohen, the man the Mob could not kill…Tere Tereba writes a white hot true crime classic.”
—Lee Server, best-selling author of Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing

“Tere Tereba knocks it out of the park. Equal parts biography and history, Mickey Cohen is electric—filled with detail that makes your senses tingle. Stunning new facts about living hard and fast in the world of organized crime and Hollywood reveal the place and era as it really was. Los Angeles noir at its darkest best, if you love The Godfather, The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire, run—don’t walk—to read this book.”
—Rikki Klieman, attorney, TV legal analyst, and best-selling author

“The underworlds of all great North American cities have at one time or another been dominated by an iconic gangster. For Los Angeles, that meant Mickey Cohen, native son. This highly factual, rapidly-paced biography chronicles not only tough-guy poster boy Mickey, but the City Noir whose appetites and ambitions he serviced, exploited, and, paradoxically, exemplified.”
—Kevin Starr, University Professor and Professor of History, University of Southern California

“He hung out with people like Bugsy Siegel, Nick the Greek, Frank Sinatra, and Candy Barr. Ben Hecht wrote about him. Robert F. Kennedy went after him. Nikita Khrushchev complained that gangsters like him prevented him from visiting Disneyland. Mickey Cohen was at the epicenter of criminal Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s, and there was something charismatic and charming about the tiny (five-foot-five) Russian Jew who hailed from a Jewish ghetto in Brooklyn, got his swagger in Cleveland fight clubs, and inherited Siegel’s L.A. when Bugsy was murdered. Tereba brings the bantamweight crook back to vivid life in this biography, along with the night clubs and race tracks he frequented and the no-holds-barred L.A. in which he flourished. This is a remarkable biography, in that Tereba takes a long-gone, mostly forgotten criminal and through her lively re-creation of the ’20s and ’30s, the decades in which Cohen was formed, and the later years when he ruled, makes you care.”
—Connie Fletcher, Booklist (May 2012)