Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City 21 The Electrician “[W]hat’s the meaning in the underworld or the racket world when somebody’s ‘lights are to be put out?’” —Robert Kennedy to Mickey Cohen, 1959 BY LATE 1958, Mickey Cohen was back in the rackets. His target was Los Angeles’s lucrative vending machine market. His modus operandi was pure muscle—threatening vending machine owners with bodily harm if they didn’t pay him for protection. As word spread that Cohen was back in business, old friends resurfaced, asking favors of the sort that Cohen had once dispensed so freely. Among them was Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn. Cohn had the temperament of a first-class gangster. “Bullying and contemptuous” (other common descriptions include “profane,” “vulgar,” “cruel,” “rapacious,” and “philandering”), an ardent admirer of Benito Mussolini (whose office he re-created for himself on the Columbia lot and whose picture he proudly displayed even after the Second World War), Cohn delighted in the fear his presence could create.
