At eight-thirty on a March morning in 1915, while E. C. West was going through the morning mail at the League office in Washington, Congressman Rei was announced. Rei had just begun his second term in the House. He and West had had several pleasant meetings, usually at lunch, in the regular course of West’s friendly coverage of the members of Congress as a member of the League’s legislative committee.
Rei was an Illinois Republican, a well-balanced, well-educated man who held a degree from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He was a regular on everything except Italo-American legislation, but in no way a party hack. His most effective strength was his ability to influence other members on voting difficult bills.
“Are you wet or dry this morning?” West asked affably as the congressman sat down. Rei was neither wet nor dry. He would vote on the prohibition issues as the party required.
“It feels a little bit more wet out this morning,” Rei said. He refused a cigar.
“What can we do for you?”
“I bring a message.”
“How very kind of you.”
Rei smiled, took a long white envelope from his inner pocket and slid it across the desk. It wasn’t sealed. West pulled at the flap and a yellow handkerchief of heavy silk fell out showing a large VCF embroidered in black in one corner. Startled, West looked quickly at Rei. Rei smiled blandly. “I have been to the old country on a holiday,” he said. “Don Vito sends to you fond greetings, Zu Eduardo.”
Zu, in the Sicilian speech, was the closest to a title any man would accept to indicate that he was a “friend of the friends.” The tremendous excitement of the moment covered West’s forehead with a light sweat. The thought of his mother filled his heart like a soaring flight of primrose flamingoes. If only she could know! If only she could be there to see that the leader of the brotherhood, the true leader, had acknowledged that he was merely a soldier of the son of Maria Corrente.
Rei and he met the following morning on the enclosed deck of the 10 A.M. ferry leaving South Ferry in Manhattan for St. George, Staten Island. They went over the operating manual together.
The working manual Rei was to administer would be applied to seventy-two major and twenty-six minor gangs working in the twenty-three national market areas, whose leaders, lieutenants and business managers were to be recruited wholly by him—Sicilian as well as non-Sicilian, Jewish, Irish, Polish and Negro. Each gang would be accountable to Rei operationally through its leader and financially through its business manager. Rei would undertake all the essential protection approaches there were on a high emergency level. The labor force for each gang was to be recruited by the leader and the lieutenants from among the available force of bank robbers, car thieves, gunmen, gamblers, pimps, strong boys, hold-up men and muscleheads. The gang leader would work within the broad lines of the unwritten operating manual, interpreting it wherever he chose except in areas of payoffs, collections, procurements, and short-term capital borrowing. Each gang, depending on whether it was major or minor, agreed to develop, to exploit within their abilities, income opportunities derived from: alcohol, narcotics, brothels, gambling, nightclubs, race tracks, roadhouses, slot machines, laundries, restaurants, dance halls, hotels, speakeasies, breweries, labor organizations, band booking, sugar brokerage, strike-breaking, taxis, political poll-watching, shylocking and extortion. When required by Rei, each gang leader would follow his orders or supply whatever assistance might be necessary as well as agree to submit to Rei’s arbitration, or to the arbitration of his delegate when Rei should consider arbitration necessary.
Rei was a native American, three years older than West. He was a trained business administrator and a factor in state and city politics and more than cognizant of the byways of national politics. His brother, Ira King, was an important banker in California.
Rei did not run for a third term. In 1916 he became president and chief executive officer of the National Immigrant Investment Bank, a small bank of long standing that Horizons A.G. capital acquired and recapitalized at six million dollars and that Horizons owned. With the aid of Rei’s own connections and the assistance of Horizons’ limited partners, as well as through the cooperation of Pick, Heller & O’Connell, it became a repository for substantial federal, state and municipal funds. It began to handle more and more industrial transactions. It became the correspondent bank of the Western Alliance Trust (Ira King’s bank) and the West National Bank in California and New York respectively. Horizon partners and other national leaders served as the bank’s directors.
Each of the gangs in each of the national market areas was required to form companies through which income for Horizons A.G. would flow, and in return for the opportunities and protection afforded them were required to pay to Horizons A.G. one-sixth of the gross earnings from all activities, indirectly. Willie Tobin held powers of attorney on these accounts through his seventy-four field representatives, and he would withdraw Horizons’ one-sixth share from each of the twenty-one hundred and nineteen companies on the last day of each month and remit these collections through the West National Bank to the Horizons account in Zurich. Quadruplicate slips went to Rei, the regional representatives, the gang’s business manager and to Tobin. Punctuality in collections and a right count were enforced by Rei.
The first killing Rei ordered (as the Horizons A.G. administrator) eliminated (Big) Jim Colisimo, a vice industrialist and gang chieftain of Chicago’s South Side, on May 11, 1920, one hundred and fourteen days after prohibition had become the national law. Rei’s administrative problem had been aggravated by the fact that prohibition did not invent the gangster. Colisimo’s operations had been earning about a half million dollars a year for many years, but he was a stodgy, old-fashioned vice operator, and the scope of his understanding of the new opportunities and his interest in exploiting them was limited. His death, a stile that separated the old-style hit-or-miss criminal from the superbly mechanized and fluidly organized big-business-organization criminal, was a historic moment in the developing American meaning.
It began there—the watershed of modern American crime—and it resolved moral factors for every American born thereafter, instituting approaches to social, governmental, financial and international problems that were henceforth to be based upon an entire people’s contempt for law and authority. As it developed it learned. For example, on April 28, 1929, at E. C. West’s insistence, Benito Rei ordered an organizational convention to be held at the President Hotel at Atlantic City, New Jersey. Each leader present was a Horizon A.G. franchise holder with a clearly defined territory in which he exploited business opportunities that had first been coordinated in the West operations manual and in which he held monopolistic power.
At the convention Rei insisted upon and enforced a cartelization and streamlined the enforcement procedure from a wasteful, overlapping, scatter-shot and haphazard punitive system to a centralized, organized single-unit national murder-squad system that was more efficient and, more important, more controllable in the blatant yellow-press, public-relations sense. West was tired of useless and wasteful/impulsive killing, therefore it was rechanneled and made industrially pragmatic. The essential cartelization was necessary to spread the industrial energy to all parts of the company’s branches, equally in and throughout the twenty-three national market areas. It was West’s conception of the carefully phased development of an industry that had demonstrated a greater growth rate than any other in American history. And all projects confirmed that, if carefully planned and prudently cultivated, it would continue to lead the rest of the nation for many decades afterward and, given proper managerial impetus, for the long, long-range foreseeable future.
When he had had his first meeting with Benito Rei aboard the Staten Island ferryboat on that March morning in 1915, that was the true dawn of the new America. He had said with his even voice and straight-forward look: “Let all of them make names and money for themselves.” For the industry he created, for the first industry of the g
reatest democracy in the world, the words were prophecy and became the nation’s lodestone.
Even the humbler hoodlums did well. The estate of the late Vincent Drucci was in excess of four hundred thousand dollars. Jack Zuta, business manager for one of the smaller mobs, the Aiellos, left behind balance sheets, promissory notes, canceled checks, ledgers and transaction records showing that, out of the gang’s weekly average income of four hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars, the amount of one hundred and eight thousand, four hundred and sixty-nine dollars was paid out weekly to “M.K.,” Oberta’s code for Rei—“Mafia King.” The Aiellos were a poor-relation, church-mouse sort of gang.
Hymie Weiss, the earnest Polish-American who caught up the mantle of Dion O’Bannion when it fell, was only twenty-eight when he was shot to death, but he left an estate of one million three hundred thousand dollars. Jimmy La Penna was so unimportant that he made no effort to try to conceal his bank accounts from the government, thus making it simple to discover that in one calendar year he had deposited eight hundred and four thousand, one hundred and seventy-six dollars and ninety-seven cents in his personal bank account. In the following year, when organization reshuffling had reduced him to an even smaller status, he banked a total of three hundred thirty thousand sixty-six dollars and thirty-nine cents.
A former whorehouse waiter named Greasy Thumb Guzik, whom Rei had chosen to become business manager of the Capone organization in Illinois, told the police during the James Ragen murder investigation, “I got more cash than Rockefeller and there’s twenty of us with more than I have. No one’s going to push us around.”
West had wanted them to make names for themselves, as indeed they did. The names they made on one occasion became part of a parlor guessing game at a party given by the Wests for the visiting Prince of Wales. Irene invented the game because she thought it would amuse the royal guest. Everyone took a turn at recalling the names of gangsters as recorded in the adoring, gee-whiz daily press, always the daily fan magazines of big-business crime and an important factor in its rise to American industrial leadership. The guests thought of such names as Cheeks Ginsberg, Charley Bullets, Schemer Drucci, Bugsey Siegal, Yankee Schwartz, Dingbat Oberta, Klondike O’Donnell, Bummy Goldstein, Joe Bananas, Uncle Goldberg, Jimmy Blue-Eyes, Shimmy Patton, Blinky Palermo, Potatoes Kaufman, Dandy Phil Kastel, Piggy Lynch, Fur Sammons, King Angersola, Spunky Weiss, Gameboy (and his brother, Honeyboy) Miller, Tootsie Cohen, Joe Adonis and Dimples Wolinsky. Only the highest Russian political leaders and the ranking American military figures cherished more infantile pet names, but, as E. C. West explained to the prince, “I imagine they all wear their childish names the way savages wear paint or tattoos—to frighten away enemies and evil spirits.”
Prohibition fused the amateurism and catch-as-catch-can national tendencies of the early days of the republic with a more modern, highly organized lust for violence and the quick buck. It fused the need to massacre twelve hundred thousand American Indians and ten million American buffalo, the lynching bees, the draft riots, bread riots, gold riots and race riots, the constant wars, the largest rats in the biggest slums, boxing and football, the loudest music, the most strident and exploitative press with the entire wonderful promise of tomorrow and tomorrow, always dragging the great nation downward into greater violence and more and more unnecessary death, into newer and more positive celebrations of nonlife, all so that the savage, simple-minded people might be educated into greater frenzies of understanding that power and money are the only desirable objectives for this life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Daniel West was born on May 15, 1914, on the same day as his father’s favorite mistress’s favorite dachshund, missing by six days the first Mothers’ Day-by-law in the nation’s history, which had been thunderingly sponsored by Senator Heflin of Alabama.
Daniel was born at West Wagstaff, his parents’ new country house at Sands Point, Long Island. The house and all its grounds had been blessed by the cardinal the day before Irene and Edward occupied it. This was not any ritual gesture. Irene planned that she and Edward were to be buried in West Wagstaff’s rose garden when they died and she wanted to be able to think of it from the beginning as consecrated ground.
To commemorate Daniel’s birth, Grandfather Wagstaff established an investment account in trust for the boy and suggested that it wouldn’t be a bad idea at all if Edward were to match his one hundred thousand dollars. Edward, who had just tied up eight hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars in the completion of West Wagstaff for Irene and Daniel, said he certainly wouldn’t try to vie with Walter Wagstaff when it came to giving presents, but he would be entirely willing to take personal charge of the investment of the trust’s fund. “If you ask me,” Grandfather Wagstaff said, “that’s even better.” Edward, despite his relative youth, already had major interests in nineteen companies and was a director of eleven. He was as good as his word. He invested the infant’s money in Canadian neutral-grain spirits and increased its value twenty-two times in 1922, then reinvested it.
The mother and child did very well. Humorously enough, the baby was a dark, sharp-featured Sicilian-looking infant, which baffled everyone. Edward dashed in to see his wife at the first signal from the doctor. He was bursting with pride. He had had a good night’s sleep. Irene had been considerate as always and had been delivered of her child after Edward had been refreshed by his nine hours of sleep, after he had had a good, hot breakfast, and after he had had the chance to talk to the bank and to Willie Tobin. He kissed her lovingly and caressed the red-blonde hair away from her forehead. She smiled at him happily, looking no more worn than if she had just returned from a strong ocean swim. “How is he?” she asked faintly.
“The doctor says fine. But they haven’t shown him yet.”
“Do you think we should have him baptized now? This morning? Just to be sure?”
“Well, they said he’s a very healthy baby.”
“We can always do it again at the church and have a nice party afterward. Suppose someone dropped him? He’d never go to heaven. He’d never see God.”
“I’ll ask the cardinal, darling. It certainly seems like a good idea to me.”
Two nurses, quite ugly but wearing enchanting uniform caps, came in with the baby—one to fight the father off if that became necessary. But the father hung well back. The nurses gargled over the bundle of blankets as they handed it to the mother and drew back. “He’s beautiful—oooooh, he’s so beautiful, madame,” the fat nurse said.
“You may look now, sir,” the escort nurse told Edward. He sidled across to a point three feet away from the side of the bed to beam down at the sleepy red face. Suddenly his eyes filled with tears. “Why, he looks like my mother,” he said, the words tangling themselves in the lacy intricacy of the emotion.
“Oh, Edward, darling!” Irene said. “You are so sweet. You really look as though you might weep.”
The nurses withdrew.
“It’s so unexpected,” Edward said.
“Perhaps he’ll be a dancer. Would you like that? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
The tears brimmed over in his eyes. “Yes,” he answered. “Yes, it would.”
E. C. West was twenty-six years old in 1914, but he offered exterior sternness and had achieved such significant positions in fields as varied as oil production, insurance, aluminum, transportation and banking that no measure of him could be taken in terms of his age. He was welcomed at the White House. Not less than once a month, because of his relentless crusading for the Anti-Saloon League, he was to be found on the front pages of American big-city newspapers—but never as just another blue-nose; whenever he was photographed he used that dazzling, overwhelming smile that was seen by no one except newspaper readers.
When the Wests had returned from Europe in September the year before, they hadn’t been able to begin to entertain because they had had no house. Before they’d sailed for Naples they had approved the final plans for West Wagstaff. Irene spent most of
her time working with architects and decorators and landscape gardeners, and in a short time she became quite visibly pregnant, which made her all the less interested in entertaining, no matter how keen Edward was to start.
Edward dropped right back into his old, demanding schedule, dividing his time between Washington and New York, between the League and the bank, and needing to double his efforts at the bank because he had only half the time to accomplish what had to be done. But he did not relinquish his commitment to the League, and he was tremendously admired for this. He was far too tactful (and far too busy) to arrange such a thing himself, or risk upsetting Irene and her family in some public adventure, so he had Rhonda Healey find him a mistress and set her up in a flat in Washington close by the League offices—an assignment that was carried out well and in short order.
The 1914–15 year was a wonderful year. War came just as he had predicted on his return from Europe when he had so advised the President publicly. The League was now pushing full ahead for the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution. The twenty-two partners of Horizons A.G. were more than pleased with all developments and were so impressed with Edward that they had begun to ask him to serve on boards and to invest where they were investing. All this interest had been somewhat accelerated by the Wagstaff connection, of course. Walter Wagstaff was the old establishment, industrially and socially, and most certainly a power in the land. Having him as a father-in-law seemed to add to Edward’s maturity.
The Wests wintered in Palm Beach, renting the Gelbart house belonging to the old headmaster of Eddie’s beloved old school, until Irene could decide whether she wanted to build or buy in Palm Beach. Then they bought a house on East 55th Street in New York and gradually settled into a migration schedule that found them on 55th Street from late October until early January, blissfully at Sands Point from April until October and at Palm Beach in between. Old Professor Gelbart at last agreed to sell his house to Edward because he was an alumnus and because he had three hundred thousand dollars.
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