Ashes From A Burning Corpse (An American True Crime Reporter in the 20th Century Book 3)

by Noel Hynd

  At the time, The Boston Post was the top selling daily paper in New England, but the Hearst papers were now competing with it. Newsstands were war zones. Some papers hired thugs to throw acid on the competing papers or to slash the tires of the competitors’ trucks or rough up each other’s reporters. Prohibition was in full force but one never would have known it from the newsrooms or the speakeasies, which were everywhere. I would arrive at work at six in the morning and wrap up my day’s assignments at two p.m. After that, a lot of us would pile into taxis and go see the Red Sox at Fenway or the Braves at Braves Field. All of us had hip flasks. Some of us had guns. I had a pair of brass knuckles, just in case. We had a lot of friends. We had a lot of enemies. Sometimes the distinction between the two was vague. There were fights and brawls. It was rough work but exhilarating, a good time to be alive and a young man in what seemed like a limitless America.

  I liked my peers. I even liked my work, gory as it sometimes was. Who would have known? Before I even knew it had happened, I had become a “fact crime” reporter.

  I was offered better jobs with better money in other cities. I left The Boston Post in 1923 at the age of twenty. I signed on with for a stint in Philadelphia on the Public Ledger and then The Philadelphia North American.

  I made a fair bit of money, invested in the booming stock market and made more money. Taxes were low. I was restless. I wanted to see the world. I got a passport, quit my reporting job in Philly and travelled to Europe by steamship. I arrived in Paris on May 3, 1924, my twenty-first birthday. I enjoyed that city in its jazz age best and stayed in a sleazy walk-up residence on the rue Delambre. There was an inspired Japanese artist named Foujita who lived upstairs and an American style bar across the street called the Dingo that was open all night. I went to the Louvre, sat in the cafes, heard great music and was witness to several great fistfights at La Coupole and outside of Le Select.

  After six weeks, I moved along to Florence and then Rome. There, Mussolini had just dropped all pretense of democracy and set up a legal dictatorship. I saw the right monuments and left Rome quickly, not being terribly fond of the obnoxious Fascists marching up and down the streets.

  When I returned to America, I found a small apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City. It was the heyday of newspapers in the big city. I had a solid reputation from Boston and Philadelphia. I had no trouble finding a job. I took some night courses at Columbia University to improve myself and I went to work on a scurrilous late afternoon newspaper named The New York Evening Graphic.

  The Graphic was a world and a story unto itself.

  The New York Evening Graphic was a tabloid newspaper founded in 1924 by Bernarr MacFadden. MacFadden was a rival and mortal enemy of William Randolph Hearst. He was a bodybuilder and a publisher, an odd mix. The paper was new, young; an upstart. It elevated breathless sensationalized reporting into an art form and defined tabloid journalism in its day. It was even printed on pink paper so that the yokels who paid a nickel for it could spot it quickly on the newsstands.

  The Graphic had the nerve to display the slogan, “Nothing But the Truth” up on the front page each day beneath the paper’s flag, but then its writers and editors proceeded to never let the truth get in the way of a lurid story. Suffice it to say that I covered crime, organized and disorganized, for that paper, interspersed with the occasional society sex scandal. If the two elements were in the same story, so much the better, and I had a front pager.

  I should admit: it was a disgraceful venture. I loved working there. I savored it, every rotten disreputable moment of it.

  Sometimes the lurid stories needed no embellishment. When I first arrived, the editors at the Graphic baptized me by giving me an underworld beat. I filed stories but, by agreement, I never used my real name. The newspaper was careful. I phoned in everything and only my editor knew who I was. We used the by-line of Allen West so that I wouldn’t turn up in the Hudson some morning wearing concrete boots.

  By 1928 I was regularly on the front page. I had a hell of an undercover story.

  A mobster named Joey Noe had opened the Hub Social Club, a small hole-in-the-wall speakeasy in the Bronx. He hired a guy named Fleigenheimer to work as a bouncer and enforcer. Fleigenheimer had a reputation for beating people to a pulp within sixty seconds. I went up to the Bronx one night with a couple of other thirsty reporters and we witnessed this.

  It wasn’t pretty but it was impressive.

  Eventually, Noe made his strong-arm guy a partner, maybe out of self-defense. Noe and Fleigenheimer soon opened more joints up and down Gun Hill Road and Bruckner Boulevard. To avoid the high delivery costs of beer, they bought their own trucks. A brewery owner on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn supplied their beer. Fleigenheimer rode shotgun to protect the beer trucks from other gangs.

  There were two Manzi brothers, Calabrians, who already controlled an operation in the Bronx. They refused to buy suds from Noe and Fleigenheimer. The Manzi brothers didn’t know what they were dealing with. Eventually, the elder brother, Johnny Manzi, agreed to cooperate, but younger brother Louie balked. One night the Noe-Fleigenheimer gang grabbed him off the street. They beat with a tie iron and hung him by his thumbs from a meat hook. Then they wrapped his eyes in a tight bandage smeared with discharge from a gonorrhea infection. His family ransomed him for fifty grand. Shortly after his release, he went blind. From then on, the Noe-Fleigenheimer gang met little opposition as they expanded to control the beer supply for the entire Bronx.

  No arrests. No prosecution. The cops were all on the pad.

  I wrote this one up in the Graphic. We couldn’t print the part about the gonorrhea or the cops being on the pad. The notion of the crooked corrupt cop was unknown to the American middle class at the time. It was ironic. There was a lot of made-up stuff that we could print and a lot of true stuff that we had to lay off.

  But our audiences loved it, laughing and chortling as they moved their fingers and lips as the read along. The Noe-Fleigenheimer gang loved it, too, because it served as a warning for their ongoing ‘customers.’ I was now launched in the big city. And by that time Fleigenheimer was known as his tabloid name, Dutch Schultz.

  Dutch sold a lot of papers for us. He also liked reading about himself. He made it known that the Graphic was his favorite daily. One time he sent over a thank you note with a case of Canadian Club.

  With the end of Prohibition, Dutch Schultz sought illegal income elsewhere. His answer came in two forms: Otto Berman, and the Harlem numbers racket. The numbers racket required players to choose three numbers which were determined at the end of each day by the last three digits of the amount race track bettors placed on races at either Aqueduct or Belmont Racetrack.

  Otto Berman, nicknamed “Abbadabba,” was a middle-aged accounting whiz who aligned himself with Schultz. In a matter of seconds, Berman could mentally calculate the minimum amount of money Schultz would need to bet at the track at the last minute to alter the odds, thereby ensuring that he always controlled which numbers won. Berman would last longer than Noe and Fleigenheimer, by the way, as mob assassins caught up to them in 1931 and 1933, respectively.

  The Graphic pioneered a new form of telling the news, influenced directly by a ‘confession’ magazine called True Story, which McFadden had also founded and which had

  produced for him a great fortune. The magazine devoted itself entirely to stories of human experiences told in the first person. As applied in the Evening Graphic, the account of a woman who had murdered her husband was to be written in a breathlessly frantic first-person voice.

  The real-life suspect was to be interviewed in jail—anything was possible if a reporter spread around enough of his boss’s ten-dollar bills at a detention facility—and her ‘confession’ was to be published under her own signature.

  The headline over such a story might have been:

  I BUTCHERED MY HUSBAND

  BECAUSE HE STANK

  OF ANOTHER GIRL’S

  TEN CENT PERFUME!

>   While I worked there the Graphic’s circulation rocketed to a million copies sold each day. They were a ‘picture’ newspaper before the New York Daily News and The New York Mirror. They, or I should say we, had pictures that no one else could get. We had these pictures that no one else had for one reason—these pictures didn’t exist: the guys down in the press room had invented something called “the composograph.”

  The composograph created “photographs” of events which had never been photographed, such as Rudolph Valentino’s corpse in 1926. That one sold so many papers that the next day they had a “photo” of Valentino’s spirit being greeted in heaven by Enrico Caruso. The concept of a camera in Heaven didn’t bother the Graphic’s readers because, in all objectivity, they were morons and believed in such things. They seemed reassured that such things existed, bless them. Exploitative and mendacious, we were referred to as The PornoGraphic.

  The other newspapers were irate with us. They hated us. They berated us. They blasted us while morning papers stole news from our evening editions. Eventually, the other tabloids swiped most of our techniques, except for The New York Times and the Herald-Tribune which were for better educated readers and were above such things.

  We were a genuinely disreputable rag, but we had some fine young talent.

  From the beginning, the paper featured a gossip column by a young guy not yet thirty years old named Walter Winchell. Another young guy named Ed Sullivan wrote a sports column entitled Sport Whirl. Later Sullivan wrote a show biz column called Ed Sullivan Sees Broadway.

  There was another writer named Sam Fuller who worked for the Graphic as a one of the other crime reporters. As a young crime reporter with the Graphic, he was shown how-to by veteran crime reporter Rhea Gore, the wife of actor Walter Huston and the mother of John Huston. Fuller’s first big “scoop” was when he became the first journalist to report the death of Jeanne Eagels, a movie and Broadway star who’d fallen victim to a narcotics habit that thrilled our readers.

  Fuller was the American-born son of Russian-Jewish immigrants named Rabonovitch. They changed their surname to Fuller in tribute to a doctor named Sam Fuller who came to the U.S. on the Mayflower. Sam served as a rifleman in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division during World War II. Fuller saw action in North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach on D-Day, and then on through Europe to Czechoslovakia. He was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart. He later used many of his war experiences in Hollywood to write war and crime movies.

  There was an artist named Ernie Bushmiller, the son of a Bronx bartender. Ernie started as a copy boy for the guys who drew the comics, but it turned out he was a brilliant artist. He had the soul of a comedian, the hands of a great artist and the instincts of a steely-eyed accountant. For the Evening Graphic, he created a successful comic strip titled Mac the Manager. Later Ernie made a ton of money creating and drawing the comic strip Nancy. God bless him, the strip would run for decades.

  We also had a daily horse racing tout panel called “Asparagus Tipps” which selected the best wager of the day at any eastern track. It was usually provided by a weaselly little man named Irv Papp, who quietly arrived each day and drew the panel and left. But the actual pick was provided by an immense mobbed-up fat guy who was known only as Tony and who everyone sane was afraid of.

  Winchell and Sullivan. Fuller and Bushmiller. I knew them professionally and they were friends. I knew Irv and Tony, too, but cut them some careful distance.

  I hung around with the Graphic through the stock market crash of 1929 and into the 1930’s. I married for the first time and lived with my wife, June, in Tudor City, just south of where they would eventually build the United Nations. By then I had moved on from the newspapers to writing and editing the major true crime magazines while picking up a book contract or two in the process.

  Over those years, I drank too much and smoked like a chimney. But it went with the territory. I could be fussy and nervous and cantankerous. I frittered away my first marriage after eight years simply by ceasing to work on it or give it proper attention. On the way home from work, there were too many bars or earlier speakeasies.

  In 1937, I got lucky. I was driving one night and a drunk ran a red light and smashed into the car I was driving. My right knee was shattered. I would never walk quite straight again, but would use a cane. I booked a cruise along the St. Lawrence River in Canada as part of my recovery, and on that cruise, not yet exactly divorced, I met a wonderful woman from a fine family of home builders in northern New Jersey.

  She was engaged to someone else at the time. She told me so and showed me the ring when I sat down at her table to chat with her. “Is your fiancé on the ship?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “Well, that was damned careless of him,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “I’m going to marry you.”

  She, not yet exactly married, stared at me. “What do you do for a living?” she asked.

  “I’m a true crime writer. Possibly the best in America.”

  “You think so, do you?”

  “A lot of people think so.”

  “You’re the most conceited man I’ve ever met in my life,” she said. She stood up and left the table. Well, it was a start. I pursued. I turned up the heat of my charm. I made my case. When the ship returned to port, she returned the ring. We were married in Stamford, Connecticut, January 15, 1938, much to the grudging chagrin of her family who were devout Christians and not happy about a divorced man.

  My new bride and I went to Hollywood in 1940. I sold some stories to the movie and radio people. Crime stuff. My new wife and I stayed at the St. James on Sunset. The skies were blue. Every day was a great day. I met producers, actors, directors and other writers. It’s like that when you’re on a roll.

  I got to know some producers and film men. Joe Mankiewicz was a favorite, a college man and a class guy. Joe was doing well this year, too. He had just been nominated for The Philadelphia Story for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941. Now he was writing his own stuff and directing it, too. Joe had his themes, his topics. He liked the clash of aristocrat with commoner. That one always worked.

  I got to know a man named Joe Schenk. Joe was a whip-smart Jewish Russian guy who built a carnival and amusement ride place call Palisades Park in New Jersey. You can see it from Manhattan. Joe later went into the film business and founded Vitagraph Studios. Vitagraph was a big deal twenty years ago.

  He once spotted a cutie on one of his sets. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Her name was Norma Talmadge, a top young star with Vitagraph. She has since had three husbands and still counting, but Joe was the first. In 1917, when he was married to Norma, they formed the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation, which made a lot of dough, even during the Depression. They divorced in 1934.

  Schenck then built a home out in the desert. When I was in California with my second wife, Joe invited us out to his place and we stayed out in Palm Springs. He reminded me of Meir Lansky, and that’s a compliment. Joe had learned how to behave like a gentleman.

  Appearances were always important in Hollywood.

  In 1933 Joe partnered with Darryl Zanuck to create Twentieth Century Pictures. The latter merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935. As chairman of the new Twentieth Century Fox, he was one of the most powerful people in the business.

  Then there was big trouble. Caught in a payoff scheme to buy peace with the militant unions, Joe was convicted of income tax evasion and spent time in prison before being granted a presidential pardon. Joe rarely granted interviews. I was honored when he granted me a long one in 1940 and Liberty Magazine prominently published it.

  I had a producer friend downstairs, also, when I finally moved to 530 Park Avenue. His name was Mike Todd. He was crude, obnoxious, brutish, charmingly crooked and a fine friend. Mike had been producing stuff on Broadway since the thirties. He used to tell me how he had burned through a million dollars of other people’s money before he was twenty-one. Tw
ice.

  Mike began his career in the construction business, where he made, and subsequently lost, his first fortune. He opened the College of Bricklaying of America, buying the materials to teach bricklaying on credit. The school was forced to close when the Bricklayers’ Union did not view the college as an accepted place of study. Todd and his brother, Frank, next opened their own construction company. They served as contractors to Hollywood studios, soundproofing production stages during the transition from silent pictures to sound. Their company went belly-up when its financial backing failed in first year of the Depression. There went his second fortune.

  But Mike was a stubborn son of a bitch.

  During the big Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago ten years ago, Todd produced a girlie attraction called the Flame Dance. In this production, the best looking female dancers he could find were sent on stage to flaunt their stuff while a big band played music. As the number went along, gas jets on stage would burn off parts of the ladies’ attire, leaving them looking naked. It was a dandy new variation on a strip tease, something that never goes out of style.

  Mike hit a big-dollar bulls-eye with that one. The act was a big hit, all anyone could talk about at the Century of Progress. Mike moved his show to the Casino de Paree nightclub in New York City, over on West Fifty Fourth Street at Broadway. The Casino de Paree was a theater and restaurant known for its revues, dancing, and side shows. There were fire eaters and animal acts in addition to the pretty girls. Mike’s timing was sagacious. His show opened just in time for the end of Prohibition.

  Mike got his first taste of Broadway and then started to produce shows. He moved into the building I was in a few years before me. We’d say hello in the lobby and the elevator. We became friends.

  Friends. From writing and entertainment, I had some interesting ones.

  Enemies, too. From writing about some other people, I had some nasty ones. Most of them just said spell the name right and don’t say I did something I didn’t do. And they’d cut you a break.