The Cold Six Thousand

”They brought him back.

Frankenstein came. Frankenstein went. Nuns fluttered and fussed. Don’t hurt me--I’m Protestant French.

Frank destapled him. Nuns shaved him. He dehazed. He saw razors and hands. He rehazed. He saw Japs and Betty.

Hands fed him soup. Hands touched his dick. Hands jabbed tubes in. The haze sputtered. Words filtered through. Decrease his dose--don’t addict him.
He dehazed. He saw faces:

Student nuns--the brides of Frankenstein. A slight man--Ivy League threads--John Stanton-like. Memory Lane: Miami/white horse/Outfit-Agency ops.

He squinted. He tried to talk. Nuns went ssshhh.”

Maybe if James Ellroy had been born in New York instead of Los Angeles, he might have been a hip-hop star instead of a writer. I’m personally glad he was born in LA because no one has come to define the underbelly of Los Angeles, or frankly the whole nation, like Ellroy.

In the Underworld USA Trilogy, he turns his attention on the Kennedy assassination. The Cold Six Thousand picks up where American Tabloid left off. Wayne Tedrow Jr., Las Vegas detective, is flown from Las Vegas to Dallas to murder Wendell Durfree, a black pimp who has run afoul of the casinos. Tedrow Sr. thinks it might be good for his son to be in Dallas in November of 1963.

He’ll be a witness to history.

How’s Senior know?

There is a lot of speculation regarding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. There is, of course, the lone gunman theory, held by people who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald worked alone. There is a theory, one of the more speculative ones in my opinion, that the brothers Ngo Dihn Diem and Ngo Dihn Nhu in South Vietnam had ordered the hit. It would be a death activated contract, meaning if something happened to the brothers, then the contract would be triggered; the brothers were assassinated November 2nd, 1963. There is the theory that the mafia had Jack taken out. Bobby, from the Attorney General’s office, crusaded long and hard to destroy organized crime in America. The mafia had been approached by Jack and Bobby’s father to help get the boy wonder elected. If they were king makers, they certainly had every reason to feel fucked over. There is also the theory that the CIA had Jack murdered as payback for the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba. There are a plethora of other theories, but these are the ones that I find most interesting.

So what Ellroy is doing with this series is blending real life people with fictional people. The names he uses for his fictional characters are so well chosen and the characters are so well developed that I found myself googling some of the names to make sure I hadn’t forgotten someone who was actually a living breathing person from the 1960s. Even though he seems like a made up person, President Lyndon B. Johnson was actually real and really did say things like this: ”Then why is that cocksucker trying to cornhole me when I’ve bent over backwards to befriend him?”

The same people who are involved in the Kennedy assassination are moved right into operations in Saigon where they start manufacturing H to pay for more clandestined operations that are best not revealed to Congress. The germ freak Howard Hughes (how freaky does he look now?) tries to buy into the casino business in Vegas. A tide of Hughes money is flooding the desert dry streets, and how much of it is skimmed and how it is used is beyond Howard’s control. ”Mr. Hughes injects codeine in his arms, legs and penis. He eats only pizza pies and ice cream. He receives frequent transfusions of ‘germ-free’ Mormon blood. His employees routinely refer to him as ‘the count,’ ‘Count Dracula,’ and ‘Drac.’” Yeah, okay Howie has definitely gone batshit crazy.

The thing about the lone gunman theory is that you can’t just believe that Oswald acted alone. You would also have to believe that Bobby Kennedy’s assassin and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin worked alone. What seems like the most tidy of explanations when something happens once suddenly becomes more improbable with each occurrence.

Lee Harvey Oswald/James Earl Ray/Sirhan Sirhan.

”Time sluiced. Time slithered. Time slid.”

We meet true believers here, people who think men like JFK, RFK, and MLK are going to be allowed to make a difference, but unfortunately, there are people who believe that men like this are a threat to the American way of life...check that, the American white way of life. ”King’s dead. Bobby soon. Shit will peak and resettle. The Poor People’s March tanked. The riots upstaged it. Fools popped their rocks and resettled. Chaos is taxing. Fools tire quick. King’s death let them roar and resettle. Bobby will go. Dick Nixon will reign. The country will roar and resettle.

The fix will work. Peace will reign. His type will run things. He saw it. He felt it. He knew.”

His type? Yeah, equality feels like inequality. If the black man is standing on the same level as the white man, then things are not as they should be. Equal equates to whites feeling discriminated against. Ellroy does not shy away from the deep-seated racism that has been passed down from generation to generation in this country as if it were a part of the family DNA. The Civil Rights movement was an assault on the liberties of those who defined themselves by the people they feel superior to.

The left leaders were wiped out to make room for Tricky Dick Nixon.

Could Dick have beaten Bobby? He almost beat Jack. From hindsight, we think that Nixon would have no chance against Robert Kennedy, but Dick was Loki the trickster, a chameleon graced with feral intelligence. To support him, one has to ignore his shifty eyes, his fishbelly pallor, and the flickering image of the scared boy behind the mask. Maybe enough Americans would have believed that Bobby could restore the Camelot facade. That he could make us feel like anything is possible again. That he would represent the very best of what America could produce. Some would vote for the spectre of Jack. Some would feel that we owed the Kennedys for their sacrifices.

I would have liked to see a debate between Bobby and Dick.

This novel will take you behind the curtain, into the black cesspool of American politics. Ellroy will lay out some facts before you. He will speculate for you. He will show you the hidden face of the 1960s. The ”Cordite and blood. Cheap wine. Burned silencer threads. Brass knucks/a sash cord/a pachuco switchblade. Burned bone and vomit. Scented towelettes.”

I’ve always appreciated James Ellroy, but this is the first book where I really understand the genius that takes his writing beyond just storytelling. His staccato, slip slide, rapid-fire, rap battle style reflects a mind weighing and balancing thousands of pieces of information as he searches for the right words to express the complexity of his thoughts.

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★★½

Difficile da digerire. Piatto, monotono e con una prosa troppo frammentata e frenetica quasi priva di sintassi.

Rimane comunque un romanzo di Ellroy, per cui gli ingranaggi nella trama scattano e rendono le ultime 100 pagine una vera bomba. Rispetto ad "American tabloid", questo libro è ancora più spietato e amaro.

Ellroy mostra un affresco di un grande incubo americano dove tutto è deciso dall'FBI del folle Hoover, una frangia della CIA e la mafia. La storia americana dimostra che chiunque si schieri apertamente contro questi poteri forti finisce ammazzato.

Our author and his genre vice, he can’t shake it. He fiends. Ellroy, oh boy.

I was pleased he avoided excessive hocus pocus here, well, outside of J Edgar Hoover pulling a ridiculous number of strings. Yeah the plot device of the female friends being daughters of the featured protagonists has long disappeared. The libidinal images of spouses and GFs asserts itself here instead.

The idea here that Dealey Plaza launched a wave of operations which shifted the course of history, replete with transcripts from Hoover advising the unwitting. There’s torture and narcotics, more slurs and epithets than one might want to. It just grew tired. There’s no need to connect events within a narrative arc by such threadbare characterization.

It went from Dallas to Vegas to Vietnam ringing in Sonny Liston, Jack Ruby and other assorted murderers and martyrs. Despite the last of those I don’t consider us witnesses. Perhaps just paroled from the slog by the turning of the final page.

Kennedy � morto, l'America � viva. Tu sei in mezzo e sei anche un pretesto. Pochino per rimanere al mondo. Datti da fare, � il posto delle opportunit�. E' il Grande Sogno dove svegli sono in pochi e vogliono rimanerlo. Complotti, gente che conta e gente che fa numero; gente che fa dei numeri, veri con molti zeri. Neri ce n'� pochissimi, negri quanti ne vuoi e bianchi tinti e tigri e cubani e Amerikani e vietnamiti boocoo. Anche se Barb Jahelka, Arden "Smith" e Janice Lukens Tedrow sono fra le migliori donne che mai potreste incontrare nella vostra vita, non innamoratevi subito. In ogni caso crescono fin quasi a raggiungere i personaggi principali: Wayne Tedrow, Ward Littell e Pete Bondurant.

If you want to try to get wise about politics, violence and crime, the easy way, then read this seminal book of history, secret history, historical fiction, and language. I think it's more interesting than AMERICAN TABLOID, the first in his "Underworld Trilogy," because events and figures like JFK/RFK(and their murders), Vietnam, civil rights, Martin Luther King (and his murder), are more dramatic than what happened during the time span of American Tabloid. The central event in American Tabloid was the Bay of Pigs, a crucial event that led to larger ones. AT conveys a potent image of violence, crime and their uses to political systems, but this book gets to the sick soul of power in America and power in general.

Nowhere have I read a more devastating exposure of the grip that racism and violence had on life and politics in America, and still does, though the racism is not as virulent. Ellroy does it all in the language of the streets: jive talk and jive turned back against the jive-talkers, Yiddish, goomba-talk, redneck hickoid hate talk, and country club hickoid hate talk - a chorus of demons.

Ellroy tags the Mafia as the origin for the Kennedy hit: revenge for not going after Castro, who took their casinos, and for Bobby's aggressive investigations. He tags Hoover and by extension, high level CIA types, as fully aware, presumably from wiretaps and snitches. They are complicit since they did nothing to stop it. Ellroy names three CIA-connected hit men, including Chuck Rogers, as the shooters, so you have to presume there could have been foreknowledge from top level CIA, but Ellroy keeps it pretty obscure, unlike later in the story, when he spells it out country simple that Hoover made the MLK hit happen.

He describes the rampant conservative and right wing hatred for the Kennedys, and Hoover and any police and intelligence agencies were and are right/extreme right wing. The shooters in this story, and in most credible accounts, are three pros, including a French national, who have been involved with the CIA for a long time, including anti-Castro activities. Not all historians agree on who the possible shooters were, but all serious writers agree that Oswald was the patsy. I don't believe that anyone who looks at the evidence can be considered serious if they still believe that Oswald killed JFK from the book depository.

Ellroy doesn't clear the CIA stench from the JFK hit, though he loses some intensity and impact by not tracing it to the top levels and exposing names: Dulles, Helms, Ted Shackley, et al; even Old Man Bush has been credibly implicated. He has no problem hanging the MLK hit on Hoover. He does explicitly call heroin smuggling in Vietnam a CIA job, though he calls it “unsanctioned,” or rogue. Heroin is all over American Tabloid and THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, and heroin, in those days, was Indochina-based with French intelligence/Corsican mob sources, later co-opted by the CIA, once they entered Vietnam. Calling the drug dealing unsanctioned is saying that the agency lacked the most basic form of control over it's agents, which I don't believe.

I recommend Douglas Valentine's great and crucial books: THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF, and THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK: these books prove that the US government was involved in the drug trade for a long time, and essentially controlling it from Vietnam on. So the Mafia at it's highest levels, had CIA handlers who had the finger on them, and who controlled the raw material source and top level distribution. Drugs were money, extortion, control and power and that is CIA turf before it is Mafia turf. In other words, the mob works on their turf, as administrators, overseers and fall guys. Excluding this top level aspect of the origin of the Kennedy hit, diminishes the book's historical impact.

Ellroy focuses on Cuba as the source of Mafia rage, but Kennedy's reluctance to attack the island was the source of rage in the highest levels of large factions in the US government and military and their rage is far more deadly and long-reaching. The Mafia could provide cover and obscure the true source of any hit, including JFK and RFK. Also, Kennedy, though involved in Vietnam, was reluctant to escalate, and that was an even bigger source of rage than Cuba to the war profiteer scum and the anti-commie, religio-apocalyptic psychos, who would have annihilated the planet in a nuclear war if they had their way. That would have certainly stopped communism and those nuts thought Jesus would swoop them all up into paradise. Ellroy omits all this.

Ellroy has called the book too long, some of the more violent scenes could go, especially the scene on the boat where Pete Bondurant kills four men who double-crossed him. He kills them while he is having a "moderate" heart attack! It's just bad action movie stuff. Some other scenes are too heavy on the sadistic details, and could be nixed, which would also edit some of the individual character's, like Wayne Jr.'s story line, and let the book focus more on the big historical events. But, I don't think these are major problems – I was never bored.


I've heard Ellroy described as “right-wing,” probably from poison pen weenies, scandalized by the many racial slurs, while missing the point entirely. The slurs are part of the tone and all of the style, even if they're coming from the narrator or author's voice; this is the language of hatred and this is the language that people anywhere, who seek and get power, speak, just listen to the Nixon tapes. It can wear you down after 650 pages but that's the point, you're supposed to be exhausted by how relentless these shitbirds are.

From p.492:

Mr. Hoover spoke in D.C. Mr. Hoover wooed the American legion. He watched. He stood at the back of the hall.
The hall roared. Mr. Hoover sailed clichés. Mr. Hoover attacked Dr. King. Mr. Hoover looked old. Mr. Hoover looked frail. Mr. Hoover spewed HATE.
Littell watched.
Mr. Hoover ceded irony. Mr. Hoover ceded taste. Mr. Hoover relinquished control. Mr. Hoover spewed HATE.
It was unassailable/unvanquishable/unmediated.

American Tabloid was about criminals making history and culminated with the plot to kill Jack Kennedy. In The Cold Six Thousand, the characters aren't trying to make history, they're just trying to survive it.

American Tabloid is one of my all-time favorite books. The second part of this trilogy has always been a bit of a disappointment to me. I read both again to prep for the release of the final book, Blood's A Rover. With that one sitting here, just waiting for me to start reading, I'm feeling a bit more charitable to this one now.

I judged it harshly because after the mind blowing brilliance of American Tabloid's fictional re-telling of the JFK years from the perspective of a cop/criminal trio of Ellroy patented Bad White Men, anything was going to seem like a let down. Ellroy's crazy fragmented writing style works brilliantly when he keeps it on a leash like he did in L.A. Confidential or American Tabloid, but when it gets away from him, it slips into near self-parody, as I think it did in White Jazz. He comes dangerously close to that in this one, too.

And while American Tabloid felt like an epic re-telling of American history during the JFK era, The Cold Six Thousand has always had a slightly grungier and grimmer tone. That's understandable since American Tabloid mirrored the JFK administration. Even the guys trying to scam and steal their way to greatness felt like they were making history as they did it.

Here, with the fallout of the JFK assassination plot hanging over everything and coloring all the characters with varying degrees of paranoia and guilt, the schemes feel small-time and cheap, no matter how much money is involved or how grand the plot.

Howard Hughes wants to buy every casino in Vegas, and the Mob is selling, provided they keep their own people in place to run their skim operations and steal crazy Howard blind. Vietnam is ramping up and everyone in the book sees it as a business opportunity to start large scale heroin smuggling operations to fund their own pet causes.

An aging J. Edgar Hoover is obsessed with bringing down Martin Luther King Jr. for having the nerve to demand equal rights. All the players are worried about what Bobby Kennedy actually thinks about his brother's death and what he plans to do about it. Loose threads to the JFK plot are getting ruthlessly snipped and the only way to stay alive is to stay useful to the men in power which means that even the worst of them are being told to do things that push them to their limits and beyond.

Adding to the grimmer tone of this one is the new guy, Wayne Tedrow Jr. He starts out as a relatively clean Vegas cop being pushed towards contract murder by his rich asshole father, who wants him to join the family business of peddling hate against anyone but white Americans. When Wayne is given cause to start hating too, it makes him one of Ellroy's most uncomfortable characters to read about.

Wayne isn't an ignorant racist just hating for hate's own sake. He knows it's evil and wrong, but he's so committed to it that he practically creates his own purer form of racism that's scarier than the worst redneck rants. And he's one of the main characters so spending several hundred pages in his head isn't exactly a joy ride.

But reading this one now, after some time has gone by after my initial disappointment, I think I've gotten a better idea of what Ellroy was going for. Here's hoping that he can finish off the '60s and wrap this up in style.

There's something about the JFK assassination that lends itself to a sort of dark American fairy tale. The infinite conspiracy theories. The convergance of gangsters, spies, and Hollywood. The very American concept of a total nobody being able to take out the most powerful man in the world. "American Tabloid"--which this book is a direct sequel to--felt a little like an ultraviolent take on "National Treasure", with three unbelievably evil men taking on the horrific, depraved caper of the century. But what happens when it's over?
"The Cold Six Thousand" is BLEAK. The same "everybody loses" attitude as its predecessor, but the lofty, high-concept scheme in this one is fighting against the civil rights movement. An unrelenting stream of awful choices, despicable characters, and brutal violence. Without JFK tying them together, the sprawling cast is all spun off in their own deranged worlds, doing unthinkable things just to stay alive. Tragedy on a national scale. Heroin, Las Vegas, the KKK: THIS is America, where a man would do anything for six thousand dollars.

A book that tries to say a lot of things with sentences never longer than 5 words. Ellroy continues to rip the glossy veneer off the ‘60s with even more brutal force. The entire package feels less impactful than ‘American Tabloid’ but is a necessary step. The most interesting stuff here concerns the nature of hate, how it spreads, how it’s exercised, It’s habitual nature and its ultimate destructive power. This power is, of course, exemplified by the book doubling the assassinations.