GANGSTER SQUAD (THE BOOK THIS TIME)

Not long ago, I watched the 2013 film, GANGSTER SQUAD and posted a positive review of it here on the ol' blog. After seeing the film, I was interested in reading the book that it was based on. As luck (fate?) would have it, a few days later I found a copy of the paperback book at a library sale for the grand sum of fifty cents. How could I go wrong?

GANGSTER SQUAD by Paul Lieberman is a thick book. But the 550 pages of text fly by at a fast clip thanks to Lieberman's breezy, casual writing style which at times carries faint echoes of the prose stylings of James Ellroy. Using LAPD documents and oral histories of the men and women involved, Lieberman delivers a colorful portrait of the Gangster Squad, a secret unit of LAPD cops formed with, at first, the sole aim of harassing gangster Mickey Cohen. Lieberman eschews a strict, formal chronology and his narrative (which contains a multitude of characters), skips around in space and time.

Lieberman also leaves out an index, notes on sources, a formal bibliography or any of the other standard accoutrements of a work of historical non-fiction. He keeps things loose and informal and does acknowledge the many interviews he conducted over the years with survivors of the Gangster Squad, their spouses and their children (in some cases, grandchildren).But the story is so engaging, the anecdotes so rich and vivid, that I really can't complain.

The inevitable comparison between the source material and what ended up on the screen in the movie version shows the film (of course) playing extremely fast and loose with the historical facts, but hey, it's Hollywood.

What's interesting here is how the Gangster Squad eventually evolved into the Intelligence Division of the LAPD, moving from a "non-existent" secret unit to having their offices adjoining Chief Parker's digs in police headquarters. The unit is made up of various straight-arrow cops but the big three characters here are Jack O'Mara (played in the movie by Josh Brolin), Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) and surveillance expert Conwell Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi).

Cohen, played in the film by Sean Penn in an over-the-top performance, comes across as a two-bit punk with delusions of grandeur. Oh, he was definitely a big time mobster in Los Angeles, but his reach, fame and reputation didn't extend too far beyond the City of Angels. Cohen was convicted and sent to prison twice for income tax evasion and never engaged in the kind of spectacular shoot-outs depicted in the movie.

GANGSTER SQUAD is vividly drawn portrait of a city in transition, moving from the organized crime hey-days of the pre-war era to the end of the line in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There's plenty of brave, intrepid cops, clever con men, B-girls, gangsters and TV stars (Jack Webb and DRAGNET rate an entire chapter).

Both the book and the movie are enormously entertaining but if you must choose a version of GANGSTER SQUAD to experience, stick with the facts and go with Lieberman's book. It's richer, fuller and wilder than anything a Hollywood screenwriter could conjure up. 

Thumbs up.