Holt McCallany Cast in GANGSTER SQUAD

Holt McCallany has been cast in the upcoming new 1940's Los Angeles cop film Gangster Squad. He will take on the role of a bodyguard to the main enforcer Mickey Cohen played by Sean Penn.  McCallany recent starred on the FX original series Lights Out, and he will join one hell of a great cast that also includes, Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena and Giovanni Ribisi.

Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer is taking on the project from a script written by Will Beall, a former Los Angeles Police officer. This is a movie I'm actually very excited about, the story is awesome and interesting, and I love cop/gangster movies. There is a great talented team of people developing it as well so it should turn out to be a fantastic film.

The film is based on the series of articles over at the LA Times written by Paul Lieberman back in 2008. The articles examine an LAPD unit that's set up in the 1940s to fend off the growing influence of the East Coast Mafia in the city. The police group ended up becoming very powerful, and the battles with the Mafia escalated, leading to mayhem and betrayals. The LAPD unit was a secret "off the record" police task force who went after Meyer Harris "Mickey" Cohen, a high-profile gangster who was a member of the "Jewish Mafia".

Cohen started out as hired muscle for Al Capone in Chicago, but blossomed as a mogul after being sent to Los Angeles by Murder, Inc. kingpin Meyer Lansky to surveille Bugsy Siegel, who Cohen helped set up the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and ran it's sports betting operation. He also ran a panoply of L.A. businesses, presumably as fronts to launder money — including floral shops, paint stores, nightclubs, casinos, gas stations, a haberdashery, and an ice cream parlor — before getting busted for tax evasion in 1950 and serving four years in federal prison.