Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster: The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen

By: Brad Lewis

Narrated by: Kevin Fabian

Mickey Cohen, who died in 1976, was a colorful, feared West Coast gangster-gambler who knew the biggest names in Hollywood including the Rat Pack, was a confidant of Bugsy Siegel, a friend of Las Vegas' late Liz Renay and on first names with the biggest guys in the Mafia, plus Frank Sinatra, Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. Brad Lewis' book about Cohen draws from thousands of resources - a virtual treasure trove of Mafia-related books, articles and interviews.

Written by a tough and knowledgeable insider, Lewis tells the whole Mickey Cohen story with this biography. All the whispered anecdotes, the news items and the underside of the crime rackets where Mickey operated are in this book, open to scrutiny. From Bugsy Siegel to Lucky Luciano and Albert Anastasia to Meyer Lansky and Carlos Marcello, Mickey knew them well and worked closely with them for many years. This is Mickey Cohen - inside and out!

©2007 Bradley B. Lewis (P)2012 Bradley B. Lewis

Critic reviews

"I found Celebrity Gangster intense, dramatic, a real page turner." (Irwin Winkler, Producer of Rocky, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas)

"Never in my years of reading for pleasure, has such an infamous mobster as the late Mickey Cohen been written about with such insight, truthfulness and good humor as Brad Lewis has accomplished in this page-turning bio. For anyone into Jewish or even gentile folklore, this is a must read." (Arthur Marx)

" Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster is a fascinating portrait of how a Boyle Heights newsboy grew up to cross paths with movie stars, religious leaders, jetsetters and newspaper folks when he wasn't dodging assassination attempts on Sunset Boulevard." ( Los Angeles Times)

Good read

The book itself is informative and well-written. The narration is too fast and jumbled to the point that it is distracting. It read like a nervous graduate student presenting a paper at his or her first ever National Conference.