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She was rich and powerful and he intended to blackmail her. Johnny
Stompanato was the one who would help put the plan in place.
"I can't understand it," Mickey told the press, which was
all over him. "I thought she liked him very much. We were happy
-- Cheryl and Johnny and me. We used to go horseback riding
together."
Then, after he went to the morgue to retrieve Johnny's body, he
talked to the press again.
"I don't like the whole thing," he said. "There's
lots of unanswered questions … I'm going to find some of those
answers no matter what happens."
Weeks after the homicide, one of Lana's attorneys stopped by the
house with a package. Inside was a series of negatives showing a
naked, sleeping Lana Turner. Johnny had taken them.
"He had asked her [Lana's maid] to keep [them] for him just
before he met me in England," Lana wrote. "He told Arminda
that the contents were extremely valuable to him, and that she should
keep it safe until he came to reclaim it."
Other negatives in the roll showed Johnny having sex with another
woman.
With a few darkroom tricks, "he could hold them over you for
blackmail," Lana's attorney said. Together, they destroyed the
negatives and burned them. They flushed the ashes down the toilet.
Mickey wasn't finished yet. The blackmail plan had fallen through,
but Mickey knew that Stompanato had kept the love letters he and Lana
had exchanged. Cohen dispatched one of his hoods to break into
Johnny's apartment and steal them. Then he leaked them to the press.
If he wasn't going to make money off Lana Turner, he was damned sure
going to arrange it so that she was finished in Hollywood.
The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was the first to break the
story, and two days before the inquest they reprinted every word of
Johnny's letters to Lana and hers back to him. The letters provided an
intimate look at Lana and Johnny's relationship, from steamy early
letters talking of "our love, our hopes, our dreams, our sex and
longings" (Lana to Johnny) to her pleas for space later on.
"You must let me alone in my 'own world' for a while, to rest,
think, rest, think," she wrote to Johnny.
Cohen freely admitted that he leaked the letters.
"I thought it was fair to show that Johnny wasn't exactly
'unwelcome company' like Lana said," he told the Herald
Examiner.
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