Almerdell Forrester, using the name Ann Forst, first made headlines in Los Angeles in April 1940 for her involvement in a large prostitution syndicate. LA County sheriff George Contreras seems to have given her the nickname “The Black Widow” apropos of nothing. The press ran with it and the name stuck.
In his “as told to” memoir, In My Own Words, Mickey Cohen recounts the time he held up a brothel, run by a woman he calls Hollywood’s “top madam,” noting that he became friends with the madam’s brother, whom Cohen calls a fellow criminal. Some sources have presumed the madam he refers to was Lee Francis. But he could have been talking about Ann Forrester. Her brother, Orville, was definitely a criminal. Or, as he saw it, the victim of vendettas and political frame-ups just for trying to be a good citizen who simply had the bad luck to be around when guns were being fired.
J. H. Graham 