Mile High

by Richard Condon

  CHAPTER NINE

  Two people to whom Pick, Heller & O’Connell sent the book did not respond beyond returning it. Of the remaining twenty-eight, six saw the book as a blueprint for action within moral responsibility. The book had made clear to them for the first time that it was their Christian duty to become a part of the prohibition movement, and they wished to meet with Mr. West to implement that duty.

  The remaining twenty-two factors—corporations, investment bankers, families, and individuals—asked for meetings and detailed information. Eddie handled the six militants in three days, with four additional days for travel. He accepted even contributions of fifty thousand dollars from each of them for his Crusade for Tomorrow Foundation and convinced them earnestly that they would be saving old lives, reshaping young lives and giving their nation a chance to become the example to the world. He promised them early action and a constant sense of participation through reports. The ladies in this group asked him if he were not young to lead such a cause. He said he was glad he was young because it would keep him strong. He pointed out that he was young to be the president of a bank. He and the ladies left the strongest answer unspoken—the sponsorship of Mr. Pick and his partners. The fund of three hundred thousand dollars was an important part of his plan. He would use it to buy himself a high place in the councils of the prohibition movement and it would give him more necessary muscle in the twenty-two meetings that were about to start.

  All the meetings were to be held in C. L. Pick’s office. The first meeting was with the executive vice-president of the largest investment bank in the Midwest. The bank officer, Mr. Padgett, immediately demanded the point of the meeting.

  “All right. What’s it all about?”

  “Money,” Eddie said after one of his better lengthy pauses.

  “How?” Padgett was no pauser. His value to his bank was his instinct to go for the throat.

  “It’s all in the last third of the book. We would own most of that.”

  “But can it work?”

  “Oh, it can work,” C.L. said dreamily, staring at the new door. “Of course one would need to see a prohibition law on the statute books.”

  “What about that?” Padgett asked Eddie.

  “If I didn’t have a plan for handling that we wouldn’t be here. The details are all in my safe at the bank. It will take not less than three days to go through all of it.”

  “I can make the time.”

  “Before you make the time perhaps you should know the requirement.”

  “How much?”

  “I’ll need seventy-five million dollars and the possibility of a twenty percent overcall.”

  Padgett turned, aghast, to stare at Mr. Pick.

  “Mr. West is not offering anyone all of the investment. He requires a national spread of investors. The company will be a limited partnership in its form, Mr. Padgett. Two hundred shares will be issued, one hundred shares will be sold. The buyers will own fifty percent of the company, which will be a Swiss company with not reportable income, all shares being issued to bearer. Mr. West will be the only general partner and sole operator of the company. He will assume general liability and will hold the other one hundred shares.”

  “What’s the requirement?”

  “Not less than one half of one share, which would require three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, or any number of shares up to a maximum of twenty shares, which would cost fifteen million dollars.”

  “Let’s be realistic here,” Padgett said emphatically. “Mr. West is a pretty young fellow to expect to take down fifty percent of that kind of company.”

  “We are not haggling, Mr. Padgett,” Eddie murmured. “Take it or leave it.” He had suddenly realized when they lighted up like this that it was all as good as he had thought it was and that this was the answer to his being so young.

  “It isn’t Mr. West’s age, Mr. Padgett,” Mr. Pick explained. “It is his unique point of view, which is the result of his experience. You are not a New Yorker or you would know the extent of the connections of Mr. West’s late father, Patrick J. West, one of the great political leaders of our city, friend of as extraordinary a cross section of American life as one could imagine, ranging from the Presidents of the United States to—well, for example, to the leaders of criminal society in our national life. I would say, after considerable thought, that it might be quite impossible to find another banker of Mr. West’s over-all practicality for this situation. Mr. West is also a lawyer. For another thing, the passage of the prohibiting law itself may be nine years away, and in nine years, of course, Mr. West will be that much older.”

  “The book guaranteed five years. Prohibition by 1916.”

  “The book guaranteed nothing. There may be a war. Wars delay some things.”

  “But what money are you putting up to demand fifty percent?” Padgett cried in anguish, turning back to Eddie.

  “I’ll be using three hundred thousand dollars to get me the best entry into the present prohibition movement so that I can help from the inside. That will cost you nothing. I’ll be using part of that fund to plant the right people with the distillers’ and brewers’ associations to make sure they make mistakes. And I’ll be giving my time, which is quite a bit more money than three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for a half share each year and considerably more money than three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and for ten half shares over the next ten years. I own my bank, Mr. Padgett. I’ll be working for prohibition and against its enemies. I’ll be buying shipyards in the Bahamas, acquiring Army, Navy and U. S. bonded warehouse stocks of liquor before anyone else can get them, setting up the capital flow to finance the wholesale regional organizations and the organizations within those organizations to distribute and sell the liquor stocks, later to manufacture liquor stocks, later to buy breweries through us and make and deliver beer to this country. I’ve got to head the group that chooses the next President of the United States in the elections that will follow the enactment of a national prohibition law because the tone of prohibition enforcement has to be set properly throughout the drinking nation or we’ll have twice the job on our hands. That’s one of the reasons why I have to have a national spread of influential investors. Further, I’m going to have to educate about thirty or forty men whom the community might possibly call disreputable, who will educate the three to five thousand extremely disreputable men who will employ a half million roughnecks who will move the liquor, sell it and serve it regardless of legal punishments. If bribery becomes necessary, and it will, Mr. Padgett, it will have to be done on a—”

  “Conjectural bribery is a condition of Mr. West’s extrapolation,” C.L said softly.

  “It’s all planned,” Eddie said. “As far as I see it, it’s all done. All it needs now is capital, and that’s why we’re here. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a share. Two years after prohibition gets under way each share will be worth about seven-million-five. In five years, about seventy-five. In twelve years, about five hundred million.”

  “Who else has seen the book?” Padget wiped his mouth with the linen handkerchief from his breast pocket.

  “You’ll never know, Mr. Padgett. And the others’ll never know that your people have seen it.”

  Padgett was slowing down. “Well—uh—how can that amount of money be handled without a finance committee?”

  “I’m the finance committee.” Eddie looked at him coldly, feeling stronger for having forgotten how to smile such a long time ago.

  “In any event,” Mr. Pick said, “all funds will be expended by double signature—Mr. West’s and either mine or one of the senior partners of this firm. All accounting will be done from Switzerland. Each limited partner will be given a statement of account quarterly.”

  Twenty-two investment units—investment trusts, institutions, individuals or holding companies—bought one hundred shares of Horizons A.G., a corporation formed in the town of Grabs, Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
The Swiss lawyers had offered the city of Chur as the corporation base, but E. C. West had studied the map and advised counsel that he would prefer Grabs if it were much the same corporately. It may have been the only joke West ever attempted.

  The largest holding among the limited partners was twenty shares, bought by a colossally wealthy eastern family trust. The smallest holding was one half share offered by the general partner from his 50 percent to Pick, Heller & O’Connell. Records of the owners of the bearer shares, for purposes of profits distribution, were locked in vaults of the Grabs branch of the Forster-Appenzeller Bank.

  E. C. West grew a rich, brown mustache as heavy as any worn by the Imperial German General Staff, then on maneuvers in Silesia. Even Willie Tobin, whom he had known since childhood, was instructed to address him and to refer to him as E.C. and E. C. West, respectively. In 1912, just three and a half months after the formation of Horizons A.G., the Swiss banking system developed and secured its government’s endorsement of number accounts, which were protected by federal law from disclosure by any Swiss bank of any depositor’s identity, and the Horizons A.G. accounts were therewith transferred from name to a number.

  E. C. West had made an excellent start. He owned 50 percent of a company that had seventy-five million dollars in cash on deposit and had earned it with an investment of three thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars to Arnold Goff for the presentation brief, two hundred and twenty dollars for a fire lieutenant, one hundred dollars to two customs agents, the promise of a promotion to the police officers who had detained Mr. Pick, plus cab fares, incidental expenses and casual entertainment.

  As an afterthought he changed the formative name of The Crusade for Tomorrow Foundation to The American Crusade Incorporated, a nonprofit Delaware corporation, on whose engraved letterhead appeared the names of the flower of American community leadership—not only the six contributing members who had made the crusade possible but many of the twenty-two investors whose presence anywhere would be incandescent.

  E. C. West was elected as its executive secretary and empowered to seek a voice in the councils of the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition party. E. C. West became the crusading peer of Wayne B. Wheeler, Bishop James Cannon, Jr., the Reverend Purley A. Baker, William E. Johnson, Ernest H. Cherrington, the Reverend George Young and William Jennings Bryan. With Wayne B. Wheeler entirely sold, as E. C. West’s first great goal, they worked out the telling shift into the strategy of national (as opposed to state or local) referendum.

  The question of time limit on ratification was worked out with Senator Warren G. Harding (Rep., Ohio), with whom West became the closest of friends. The two men had a great deal in common to begin with, to be sure, and when their busy schedules permitted they slipped off to New York, over a series of eight or ten weekends, where West was able to show the senator the sort of wonderful, wide-open time he had perhaps heard about but still couldn’t quite believe existed in such opulence. On the fourth, fifth and seventh weekends Mr. West invited Senator Harding’s political counselor, Mr. Harry Daugherty, to join them. If such a degree of palship were possible, Daugherty and West became even thicker than West and the senator. It was marvelous. If the boys wanted to gamble, they won. They never lost once on what must have been a dozen trips up to New York and they played at three different gambling nouses, all deep-carpet houses with the best champagne and many beautiful women. The senator expressed a passing, if wistful, admiration for the queen of the Police Gazette, Miss Lorette des Anges. On his third visit to New York with E. C. West the senator was delighted to discover her as his dining partner at Reisenweber’s. He made such a tremendous hit with her—for he was an extremely handsome and amiable man—that, in his words, she just seemed to “crumble all up” at the end of the evening and practically pleaded to get into bed with him.

  Daugherty avowed to Mr. West that he “really knew New York like no other man.” Some of the bordellos he got them into were about the most luxuriously sensual the two men had ever seen. And the women!—they said they just couldn’t believe there were women like that. Mr. Daugherty half jested that there hadn’t been one jeer or catcall when he had taken his first girl up the grand staircase. The senator asked E.C. how he could just seem to take over all these places and E.C. answered imperturbably, “I own them”—a really good laugh.

  Senator Harding’s views on ratification were that without a limitation he feared that several senators who were shaky on the enactment might turn wet. Behind closed doors E. C. West told Mr. Wheeler that this was a trick of Senator Harding’s, who believed the amendment could be defeated in this way. But West and Wheeler knew the strength of the dry movement in the Senate and the House. They asked Senator Harding how much of a time limit he had in mind. Harding said he thought five years would be sound. Wheeler and West then offered him a six-year limit, and Harding immediately proposed this on the floor of the Senate and it was adopted. Later, while the Eighteenth Amendment was pending in the House, West was strolling along a corridor in the Senate Office Building with Bishop Cannon, chairman of the Anti-Saloon League’s legislative committee. They encountered Harding, who grinned broadly and told them that the time limitation they had agreed on meant the end of any chance for prohibition, because the amendment could not possibly be ratified by the states within six years. West and the good bishop grinned even more broadly. “Senator,” Bishop Cannon told Harding calmly, “the amendment will be ratified within two years. We know that three-fourths of the states are ready to ratify.”

  The amendment was ratified by a majority of the states of the United States of America in twelve months and twenty-nine days.

  E. C. West had begun his work with the Anti-Saloon League as assistant to Ernest Cherrington, chief of the League’s educational and publications division, late in 1911. Soon, under his fanatic urging, the League was publishing more than forty tons of a powerful assortment of publications each month, an amount that reached more than 250,000,000 book pages and ranged from weekly, bimonthly and monthly periodicals to pamphlets, tracts and folders, even including one national daily. By accepting West’s counsel as a full-time consultant the Methodist Book Concern and the WCTU, in their combined output, equaled the amount of League publication.

  In 1914 Mr. Wheeler announced that the expenses of the drys had reached a peak point of two and a half million dollars a year, 90 percent of which came from “the little people of the country.” He recalled for the press that “in only one case did the national organization receive as much as fifty thousand dollars from a single source, The American Crusade Incorporated, and only five persons contributed ten thousand dollars or more. Furthermore, we have spent less than one hundred thousand dollars directly in electing drys to the Congress.” It was like killing a dragon with sandpaper.

  In 1912, E. C. West was named liaison officer among the League, the WCTU, the Methodist Conference and the Prohibition party. He was now at the executive council level, and he began to bring some of the most influential men and women in the United States to meet Mr. Wheeler, Bishop Cannon and William Johnson, who complimented these leaders effusively on their achievements toward a dry America. The great names E. C. West revolved through the doors of the prohibition movement were limited partners of Horizons A.G., friends and associates of those partners, clients of Pick, Heller & O’Connell or founders or friends and associates of the founders of The American Crusade Incorporated. They were powerful publishers, great bankers, leading industrialists, famous lawyers. And the flow was so constant that it began to seem that E. C. West was vitally connected with almost everyone of consequence in the nation. He was such an alert, forceful and gifted young man.

  Every one of Mr. West’s visitors impressed upon League executives that in his opinion it was excruciatingly important to abandon the local option and state-wide prohibition strategy in favor of a national referendum. Late in 1912 the League moved to endorse that constant recommendation. Only William Jennings Bryan
demurred, but he had never been right in his life. The three principal prohibition agencies announced for the first time their total solidarity and accepted as their common goal the total abolition of the liquor trade. The original and basic plan to dry up the United States by steps and stages, first in villages, then in the towns and counties, then throughout whole states, until the nation had been overcome was abandoned forever. The new policy required an amendment to the Constitution, therefore every professional politician in the United States on every level of government was to be enlisted—not necessarily through outright “purchase” of his cooperation, although if that became necessary it would be done.

  E. C. West’s central strategy was to bring every imaginable pressure on candidates and officeholders; to maintain an espionage system that would reveal the enemy’s plans; to unload on the voters a barrage of truths, half truths and imaginative postulates that would synthesize the educational work of the previous thirty years; and to refuse to falter even if it became necessary to bring direct pressure on individuals in politics through business, banking and even family connections. All permutations and combinations of effect were directed toward the end of causing the Senate and the House of Representatives to act in the national interest by delivering the legal preconditions that would then place the issue squarely before the people of the United States—who could, after all, be persuaded to do absolutely anything, E. C. West assured his partners.

  “If ever any subject was thoroughly discussed before the American people it was the prohibition issue. If ever the American people had a full and fair chance to make up their minds and declare their decisions at the polls in the election of candidates for legislative office, it was in connection with prohibition,” E. C. West told The New York Times in 1923. “No other amendment ever before brought before the people of this country has received such uniform support from both political parties, from every section of the country, and has been ratified by such an overwhelming majority of the states.”