Mile High

by Richard Condon

  Just as E. C. West had made one “joke” in his lifetime, and that not a memorable one, he also allowed himself this single romantic period. It began on his wedding day, picked up momentum as they moved across Europe, then found the square root of itself upon the Bürgenstock. The day they left for Paris he turned off some tiny petcock within his soul and allowed the gigantic tenderness and euphoria to begin to diminish very slowly, as sand falls to the inert chamber of an hourglass. It was gone soon enough.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Early in 1914 E. C. West launched the League’s concentrated antivice campaign that urged that attention be paid to the heinous connection between alcohol and commercialized vice. Ruthlessly he exposed the fact that harlots were encouraged to solicit customers in the back rooms of saloons and received commissions on alcoholic drinks they were able to sell. When these prostitutes were arrested, the saloon keepers paid their fines. In Chicago alone, West thundered to the press, nine hundred and twenty-eight tarts were counted in the back rooms of two hundred and thirty-six saloons in a single night, and the back rooms of four hundred and forty-five saloons had contributed directly to the delinquency of fourteen thousand girls in Chicago every twenty-four hours. Something had to be done. In response the National Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association hastened to endorse the Anti-Profanity League of America and urged all saloon keepers to display the League’s cards behind their bars.

  In 1913 Congress was at last compelled to make a move toward correcting the interstate shipment of liquor under the protection of the federal government. The Anti-Saloon League rammed through the first great national victory of the dry movement with the passage of the Webb-Kenyon Law, which provided heavy penalties for the shipment of liquor into a dry state. When the national board of trustees met early in 1913 to discuss the forthcoming twenty-year jubilee convention of the League, they voted that the time had come to strike out for national prohibition. Everything was concentrated on the Congressional elections of 1914. All Protestant denominations were behind the drive, working through state leagues that directed the campaign locally. “We loosed an avalanche of letters, telegrams and petitions upon Congress. We started with about twenty thousand speakers, mostly volunteers, all over the United States. We went into every Congressional district,” West told the Chicago Tribune after the victory, “and we triumphed even beyond our hopes.”

  But it would be at least two years before the League would control two-thirds of the votes in either house. Sure, patient strategy kept them from pressing for an amendment to the constitution in 1915 or 1916. “Had we attempted otherwise,” E. C. West wrote in the American magazine in the mid-twenties, “we might have delayed passage for several years. The strategy of the day dictated holding off, insofar as rushing Congress was concerned, but we repeated the results of 1914 in 1916, and we won again. And we knew that the prohibition amendment would be submitted to the states by the Congress just elected.”

  President Wilson called the 65th Congress into special session to declare a state of war with Germany. The President had a war program for Congress. He insisted that this take precedence over any dry legislation. However, the League did get the Food Control Bill passed as a war measure, and in its final form it prohibited the manufacture of distilled liquors from any foodstuffs. It went into effect September 8, 1917, and it was generally conceded that alcohol, at least as hard liquor, was finished forever in America.

  At last the victory of victories was realized: a resolution submitting the Eighteenth Amendment to the states was adopted on December 18, 1917. On January 16, 1919, the Secretary of State announced that the states had ratified the amendment and that its purpose as a law of the nation could go into effect one year from that date.

  E. C. West and Don Vito Cascio dined at the Hotel Sofitel at the Gare Maritime in Cherbourg in May 1917. West had arrived for their meetings that morning aboard the Aquitania and had spent the day talking with the farmers from the Calvados cooperatives. The two men enjoyed a simple meal of baked clams in a sauce of breadcrumbs, butter, lemon, shallots and white wine. They didn’t talk business because Don Vito was travel-weary. After dinner they strolled back to the ship. West had booked two staterooms, one on each side of a large sitting room with a private deck. As they breakfasted the next morning the ship was being moored at Southampton. They spent the day and the evening working in the big stateroom. At eleven that night, when the ship was at sea, they took three turns around the deck and retired.

  It was a comfortable eight-day crossing. They worked ten hours each day and continued to talk about their plans at meals. When the ship reached New York West disembarked, and he never saw Don Vito again. The old man remained aboard to be visited during the eighteen hours in port by his special delegate in America.

  The agenda during the crossing began with their examination of the draft of the Volstead Act to enforce prohibition, over which E. C. West had labored for four years in the most exhaustive planning of its loopholes. In a special sense the Volstead Act was to be their license to operate. They analyzed the characters and abilities of the leaders for the twenty-three marketing areas. These men had been proposed by Don Vito’s special delegate for his recommendations. “His Sicilian people are very sound. Torrio is excellent, for example. Masseria is fine. I don’t know the American choices except by hearsay and his recommendation, and he knows his business.”

  “Yes, he does,” West said. “I gave him his head. I recommended no one. With my father I’ve been around the New York people all my life, but he chose better men than I would have picked.”

  “Well—we’ve been at this business longer than you.”

  They went over the Horizons A.G. warehouse stocks in the Bahamas, Cuba, the Florida Keys, Nova Scotia, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Lunenberg, Mexico, Vancouver Island and Canada. West told the delighted old man that after the passage of the Food Control Bill, which had finished distilling forever in the United States, Horizons A.G. had purchased thirty-seven distilleries together with their inventories and had arranged to have half the contents of 600,000 barrels of government-bonded bourbon and rye whiskies siphoned out and replaced with neutral spirits and water in warehouses around the country.

  They went over the operating manuals with care, and Don Vito approved of West’s thoroughness of method. “We have never needed such precise planning, because there hasn’t been anything new in our business for hundreds of years. But men accustomed to basics such as extortion or strong-arm work or running some gambling and a few whores will have no concept of how to move around in this new big business. Sometimes you’re going to think you brought in a lot of chimpanzees to run your bank, but their individual styles of working have to be taken into account. One man is a blusterer and he takes chances. Another man uses a gun or a knife to solve all the problems. Let them have their styles, but let them learn the fundamentals of the new, big business, which is what you have given them here in this operating manual, Zu Eduardo. They must have it drummed into their heads what you want them to deliver and how much it is going to cost them and precisely how much protection they can count on.”

  West explained the long-term effects for Horizons A.G. that the Goff-supervised short-term commercial banking would achieve. He told how Tobin would function as a procurment and collections officer. He related the work of both men to the work of Don Vito’s special delegate, who would be in the field on an operational level supervising recruitment at first and tightening every bolt by teaching the operating manual and, where necessary, seeing that it was enforced. “He and Goff have the personal element to cope with. Tobin has it to a lesser degree. They’ll all be dealing with undisciplined, uneducated and often illiterate immigrants whom we will be turning into rich men overnight—so fast, in fact, that they’ll think they did it all themselves.”

  “That’s the big problem,” Don Vito agreed. “A bunch of hoodlums who think they did it all themselves. Guys who can only think with their knuckles or guns will think they planned their way in
to a million bucks, and if they don’t, the newspapers will convince them they did.”

  “Mostly it takes money—in terms of ships, trucks, garages, guns, warehouses, breweries, distilleries and gasoline. These men haven’t learned to count that high.”

  “The main thing—and I will say this again and again to Benito when we have our meetings—is that they have to understand that none of them have to think except the way they’ve always been thinking or else this whole thing will be too big for them,” Don Vito said emphatically. “I had to kill a dentist once. He was a good dentist and he had been a friend of the friends all his life. But he had trained so hard and he took so much pride in being a dentist that he began to forget the ethos of our business. He began to complain that if it was found out that he was a friend of the friends, it could hurt his position. Not his practice, you understand. Even if he had been a very bad dentist they would all have had to flock to him because he was one of us. But for his position as a dentist. Among other dentists in the different international dental conventions he had to go to—that was his use to us, as an opium courier. We had made him a famous dentist among the dentists of the world, but he didn’t understand what he was doing and he wanted to get out, so I killed him. The lesson is: Never send a man on a boy’s errand. Use brutes where they must be used and be glad they cannot think. Keep searching for the people who see life as we do and give them a chance to think.”

  West explained the basis of the operation. “They will all need capital to go into what you call the new, big business. Your man will instruct them as to whom they can borrow from for quick, safe, sure action. We lend them the money on short term—turning the money around in thirty days for twenty percent interest. We lend them the money to buy the merchandise. Your man gives each local leader a list of eight or ten suppliers who all work under Tobin. They all buy from us at sixty dollars a case, liquor that cost us, on an average, about four dollars a case because we buy it by hundreds of thousands of cases. All right. They will need ships, boats and crews, weapons, payoff money and fuel to get their stocks into the United States, because, in the first phase at least, we’ll sell it legally outside the country. Again we lend them the money, for that and for the trucks to move it and for weapons to protect it and for men to guard it, distribute it and sell it. All short-term commercial banking. Thirty days at twenty percent. Now—the business will move through four phases. The first phase will be to use the available American stocks we’ve been stockpiling. Every idiot and his brother will think they’ve doped it all out. They’ll plan to steal from the warehouses or hijack it or get it with forged government withdrawal permits, and, frankly, with the administration we are about to have in Washington, they’ll be selling the real permits like bakers selling bread. But we’ve been stockpiling in the states and in Europe and in Canada since 1913. Not that we won’t get more than our share of those withdrawal permits. For example,” West continued with not a little self-appreciation, “I bought thirty-four wholesale drug companies, because they will control both medical permits and the permits to withdraw denatured alcohol. The denatured alcohol is for antifreeze and hair tonics and things like that. But the way I saw that the law was drawn, once that alcohol changes hands—once, that is, it goes from one wholesale drug house to another—the second firm cannot be prosecuted or made to account for what it has done with the alcohol. There is no problem in extracting the foreign agents; then the alcohol is ready for use in liquor again. That’s a part of Phase Two—when the so-called available stocks seem to be running out.

  “We’ve stockpiled sugar—my God, do we own sugar!—and stills. Your man will set up the stills with families in the big city slums, so many of them that even if the enforcement agents were going to stay honest they couldn’t find more than ten percent to stamp out. And we’ll give them industrial alcohol and druggists’ denatured alcohol just to whet their palates for more drinkable stuff. Then we’ll move into Phase Three and run stocks in from Canada, the Bahamas, Cuba, Nova Scotia, the Keys and Vancouver Island. Naturally, there will be small operators buying in Europe and Canada, but our commitments will have to be served first because we placed the orders—the continuing orders—first, and the home-country distilleries will have their own native market demands to meet in terms of supply.”

  “What’s Phase Four, in the name of heaven?”

  “Our own distilleries operating inside the United States. We’ll be running our own breweries from the very beginning,’ of course, because the Volstead Act, as I wrote it, permits the manufacture of quote cereal beverages with an alcohol content of not more than one-half of one percent unquote. When it reaches the consumer it will be four-to-six-percent beer, I assure you. But by the time we’re ready to distill our own hard liquor the local politicians and the police and the courts will all be working smoothly together and they’ll all be a part of our business. The federal agents will wear themselves out. After a while the enforcement money from Congress will be cut down to a trickle. I plan a weekly output from all our distilleries—those we own now and those we’ll acquire—of not less than five hundred thousand gallons of good alcohol produced with quality controls to be sold at prices within the reach of all. I think I should get a medal for that.”

  “My God, all this money and we get medals too?” the exuberant old man cried.

  “I’ve stockpiled a hundred thousand barrels of Canadian neutral-grain spirits now, in case Phase Four comes on sooner than I’ve calculated. It’s forty gallons to a barrel, making ninety gallons of the merchandise itself. But that’s how it works. Everything is simple. First Goff and the short-term credit. Then Tobin with the stocks and the collections. Then, finally, your man will tell each local gang, as he sets it up, where it has to do business, and not only do we sell them our liquor and finance them for their operation at a short-term twenty percent but your man tells them they have to pay us one-sixth of the gross from their first dollar for making everything possible.”

  Goff liked his work. He even liked to sit and stare at the portrait of Patrick J. West by his friend James McNeil Whistler in the gambling house at 5 East 44th. He liked the simple solutions that a big organization could afford. When Big Jack Zelig’s mob had graduated from wrecking stuss houses and small-time gambling pads on the Lower East Side and had decided they could make big money by offering to wreck big-time gambling houses uptown, they had started with one of Goff’s three houses, the one at 208 West 45th, and Goff had told Zelig to come back in twenty-four hours for an answer. Then he had called Willie Tobin. Then Tobin had called Paul Kelly, who had moved down from Harlem in 1911 to open the New Englander Social and Dramatic Club on Seventh Avenue and 51st Street, from which base he handled all E. C. West’s muscle work in mid-town. And when Kelly had talked it all over with Big Jack Zelig, Zelig never bothered to come back to see Goff again.

  He expanded his interests nicely before prohibition came in. He fenced stolen goods such as diamonds, bonds and silk. He bought inheritances in advance from the children of wealthy families at discounts. He leased the top floor of Jimmy Hine’s political club for gambling at $500 a month against 15 percent of the winnings. Then prohibition arrived and he was in the biggest action.

  In theory, lending large amounts of money to criminals in forty-one states should have been a business with considerable risk. But, as Goff believed, as West had theorized at the bank, a criminal is as much a living piece of his society as a clergyman or a steeplejack. They existed with everyone else in the national tapestry. The rational and the irrational were like different colored threads animating the entire design. The threads themselves did not know which was which. America was the first country to invent egalitarian big business, wherein the greatest combined force of commerce was marshaled to serve the greatest number of people. It was an ideal within the larger ideal. America was the first nation to produce big-business poets and painters and composers—and the first to produce big-business preachers. It was proper for such a country to produce the fir
st big-business criminal requiring large-scale bank credit. However, just as big-business hospital insurance and health services were available to him on a short-term basis because merely by living he represented a risk as much as did health-insurance policyholders, banking facilities had to be expensive. In fact, until E. C. West had studied the problem there had been no really safe way of securing a loan to a criminal borrower.

  However, in 1912, following a personal appeal to the limited partners of Horizons A.G., it was agreed that two new insurance companies should be formed at once, utilizing capital that would be apart from Horizons funds but prorated to the partners on the same basis as Horizons shareholdings. By 1919 these companies were thriving under their brisk West managements, operating out of branch offices that covered all states, employing actuaries, salesmen and adjusters, and building reputations for paying claims promptly. Both firms grew in time to insure tens of millions of American lives. They were sound, profitable operations for their founders. Their single, infinitesimal operational difference from any of the other life insurance companies was that, as a matter of principle, neither company questioned or refused applications for life insurance submitted by Arnold Goff on the lives of others—all the policies having Mr. Goff (or one of Mr. Goff’s forty-three companies) as beneficiary. Nor was there any undue investigation or delay in paying claims in the event of the sudden death of any of these policyholders. By and large it was an extremely profitable branch of insurance practice because the policies carried high premiums for extremely short terms, and the premiums, naturally, were paid through Goff by the borrower.