Homicide Special: A Year With the LAPD's Elite Detective Unit by Miles Corwin

Author:Miles Corwin [Corwin, Miles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, True Crime, Murder, Mystery & Detective, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781627799188
Google: Ti53CgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B014PCLXDQ
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Published: 2015-10-19T23:00:00+00:00

Part IV

THE CANYON

14

On the morning of January 11, while Lambkin and Marcia put the finishing touches on their props, Homicide Special picks up its first case of the new year. This is another cold case of sorts. The murder took place three weeks ago—an eternity for homicide detectives.

The victim was Susan Berman, and she had a premonition that she would die a violent death. At the age of thirty-five, twenty years before her murder, she wrote: “I am never secure and live with a dread that apocalyptic events could happen at any moment.”

Her father, Dave Berman, was a notorious gangster whose FBI file described him as a “trained killer” and a “stickup man.” Arrested during the Depression for kidnapping a mob bootlegger, Berman eventually served seven years in Sing Sing. A New York City detective called him “the toughest Jew I ever met.”

During the early 1940s, Berman headed a gambling empire in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but when Mayor Hubert Humphrey shut down the illegal clubs, Berman headed for Las Vegas. He helped run hotels and casinos for Mafia bosses—Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano. Berman also was a business partner of several gangsters, including Bugsy Siegel. After Siegel was knocked off in 1947, Berman and his partners took over his project, the Flamingo Hilton. Eventually, Berman would own parts of several other hotels, including the Riviera.

Susan Berman grew up on the Las Vegas Strip as a Mafia princess. When she was four, her father taught her to play gin rummy so the three bodyguards who lived with the family could keep her occupied. In third grade she learned math when her father gave her a slot machine and a roll of nickels. She finished her homework every afternoon in a casino counting room. Liberace sang “Happy Birthday” to her when she turned twelve.

Yet, Berman was unaware of her father’s extensive arrest record and organized crime connections. He was always nattily attired in a tie and business suit with a monogrammed white handkerchief in the pocket, and she believed he was simply a hotel owner. Berman was told that the three men who lived with them were simply her father’s “friends.” Her mother, a former tap dancer, referred to the family’s occasional late-night trips to Los Angeles during mob wars as “vacations.” Decades later Susan finally realized that the reason the windows in their custom-built house were set so high was to prevent assassination attempts from the street.

Her childhood abruptly ended shortly after her twelfth birthday when Dave Berman died during an operation. The threat of violence that permeated the family’s life in Las Vegas rapidly destroyed Susan’s mother, who suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and was institutionalized. A year after her husband’s death, she died of an overdose of barbiturates. Some friends believed she had been murdered to prevent her from inheriting a share of her husband’s Las Vegas hotels.

Susan was sent to live with an uncle in Lewiston, Idaho. Chickie Berman was a bookie and a compulsive gambler who had dodged several contracts on his life.

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