On this day in 1976 the King of Los Angeles passed away from stomach cancer, at the age of 62.

Mickey Cohen started his mob life in the early 1930’s, where he became an enforcer for Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit.

By the 1940’s he was working under Bugsy Siegel in setting up the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, as well as the race wire. In 1947 the contracted hit was put on Bugsy’s head and he was killed in that same year.

Mickey Cohen reacted violently to Siegel’s murder. Entering the Hotel Roosevelt, where he believed the killers were staying, Cohen fired rounds from his two .45 caliber semi-automatic handguns into the lobby ceiling and demanded that the assassins meet him outside in ten minutes.

On this day in 1976, Mickey Cohen — the flamboyant, fearless, and perpetually headline-grabbing King of Los Angeles — drew his final breath, succumbing to stomach cancer at the age of 62. Few figures in American organised crime managed to live as loudly or as dangerously as Cohen, a man who turned the West Coast underworld into his personal stage and seemed almost supernaturally resistant to the violence that consumed so many of his contemporaries.

Born Meyer Harris Cohen in Brooklyn in 1913, he was raised in the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of Los Angeles after his family relocated west. A natural scrapper, he found his early calling in boxing, turning professional as a teenager and fighting across the country. It was through those rough-and-tumble circles that Cohen drifted toward organised crime, eventually landing in Chicago during the early 1930s where he served as an enforcer for Al Capone's formidable Chicago Outfit. The experience sharpened him considerably — Capone's operation was a masterclass in brutality, discipline, and the mechanics of criminal enterprise on a grand scale.

By the 1940s, Cohen had been dispatched west and placed under the wing of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the National Crime Syndicate's man in California and Nevada. Together they worked the race wire racket and were deeply involved in the development of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, the grand and chaotic project that would eventually cost Siegel his life. When Siegel was assassinated in June 1947 — shot through the window of his Beverly Hills home in a hit widely believed to have been sanctioned by the East Coast bosses, including figures closely connected to Lucky Luciano's network — Cohen's grief curdled quickly into fury.

His reaction was as theatrical as it was dangerous. Convinced that Siegel's killers were holed up at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood, Cohen stormed the lobby armed with two .45 calibre semi-automatic handguns and blasted rounds into the ceiling, issuing a thunderous challenge for the assassins to face him outside within ten minutes. Nobody took him up on the offer. It was a moment that perfectly encapsulated the man — reckless, loyal to a fault, and utterly indifferent to consequence.

Cohen survived multiple assassination attempts, two federal prison stints, and decades of intense law enforcement scrutiny before illness finally claimed him. His life became a blueprint for the glamorised gangster archetype, directly influencing countless films and books, and cementing Los Angeles as a city with its own rich and blood-soaked mob history.