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

by Noel Hynd

  I had a wonderful friend named Herbert Ludwig Nossen. He was our family physician, a very bright man who had been born in German in 1895. He had emigrated to America in the 1920’s and gone to medical school here. He had delivered my daughter, a priceless gift.

  He had written an influential book titled Twelve Against Alcohol. The book comprised twelve true case histories of what was then called “dipsomania,” with the alcoholic’s own story in his or her own words. The work intended to present the realistic components of the problem. There were eleven instances of people being cured. There was one case where the patient did not want to be cured.

  I read his book and contacted him through his publisher. We became friends. He started to counsel me about drinking. I went to work on the problem. God knew, the man had enough on his plate. He was a German Jew who had emigrated to America. His parents had tried to emigrate but been stopped by the Nazi regime. He hadn’t heard from them for almost two years.

  My magazine publisher, Fawcett Publications, was in a new building on West Forty-Fourth Street. I took a couple of meetings there, too, with my top editor Ken Gelb, the big boss at True Magazine, while I was back in Gotham, and my more immediate boss, Joe Verona, who was the Articles Editor

  The famous Hippodrome Theatre had been just across Forty-Fourth Street. It had once been the world’s largest theatre with a seating capacity of more than five thousand and a two-hundred-foot stage. In its day, the theatre had state-of-the-art theatrical technology, including a rising glass water tank. It had been home to some of the greatest vaudeville shows ever. When I was in my twenties, I saw Harry Houdini do his disappearing elephant act. There had also been silent movies. Chaplin. Jolson. Fatty Arbuckle and Lillian Gish.

  The Hippodrome had been demolished in 1939 and replaced by an office building. I still missed the old place. In my editor’s office on a Thursday afternoon, I looked out the window and saw wage slaves in other offices confined to their desks where trapeze artists had once flown through the air. But what could one do? The world changes whether one wants it to or not.

  I looked from the window back to my Articles Editor. Joe Verona was the son of a cop from Naples. Joe had gone into the newspaper and magazine business with me in 1926, when we both were twenty-three. He was one of the first friends I’d made in New York and was still one of my best. He dished me bread-and-butter assignments and never let me down. I made a point to never let him down.

  He was happy with the reports I was filing. He was publishing them himself, then farming out the reprint rights across the free part of the globe, mostly North America.

  The company was making money. Joe was making money. I was making money. Nobody was complaining. But I couldn’t get Alfred de Marigny out of my mind, flawed individual that he was, unjustly imprisoned as he remained.

  Joe Verona and I went up to see the Yankees play at the stadium on Saturday, September 26th. We took our wives. The Yankees won the game and the pennant with a 2-1 victory over Detroit in fourteen innings. Bill Dickey bounced a single over the mound in the bottom of the fourteenth and the Yankees had their fourteenth pennant of the century. Rizzuto, my favorite, was gone to the war. DiMaggio didn’t play. Spud Chandler pitched the complete game, as did the losing pitcher. The St. Louis Cardinals had run away with the National League, so the upcoming World Series would be a rematch of the 1942 classic, which the Cardinals had won.

  I wondered about getting tickets to the Series. And that made me wonder how long I was staying.

  I spent Sunday with my wife and daughter. My sister, Edythe, came in from New Jersey and we all had lunch. On Monday morning, my phone rang.

  It was a representative of a man named Thomas Dewey, a former prosecutor in New York whose office I had worked with on many times. Dewey was now governor of New York State. He wanted to talk to me. That’s right: the Governor of New York wanted to talk to me, alone and in private. There was a lunch meeting booked for the following Tuesday at The New York Yacht Club—a secure site, I knew—on West Forty-third Street.

  I said I’d be there.

  And while I had been en route to New York, yet another curious event had taken place.

  A stranger had walked unannounced into the Schindler offices in New York. He introduced himself as Harry Phillips, formerly an investigator in the United States Treasury Department and no friend of Harold Christie. He obtained a meeting with Walter Schindler, Ray’s younger brother who managed the agency. Phillips had, he said, been reading in the newspapers that Ray Schindler was working on the Oakes case.

  “True, and so what?” asked Walter, who was pretty much a no-nonsense guy.

  “Well,” said Phillips, “I thought perhaps you would like to know something about this man, Harold Christie.”

  “What about him?” Walter asked, folding his arms before him.

  “Well, for one thing,” Phillips began, “Christie is something less than the lily-white holier-then-holy character that the upper bracket citizens of Nassau would have you think he is.”

  Christie, Phillips continued, had been a major rumrunner during Prohibition days, reputedly pals with the Capone mob in Chicago, and had been in some sort of trouble with the federal government in the early Nineteen Twenties. This we knew, but Phillips claimed he had much more. As Phillips recalled, there had been a body attachment in Boston—a legal process similar to a warrant for arrest—out for Christie about the false registry of a ship, but the attachment had never been served.

  To say the least, Phillips now had Walter Schindler’s attention.

  The Boston offices of the Schindler organization examined the federal records there but drew a blank. Walter Schindler phoned Phillips and said that that he must be mistaken.

  “The hell I am,” said Phillips. “I’ll go up to Boston and retrieve the record myself.”

  “You do that,” Walter Schindler said. He dismissed Phillips from his office and shook his head, convinced that the man had wasted his time and was possibly a nut. There were plenty of them around.

  CHAPTER 18

  Thomas Dewey had graduated from Columbia University Law School two decades earlier and had been admitted to the New York Bar thereafter. Dewey was a credible Republican when there weren’t many around—to my mind too many had been windbag isolationists and Nazi apologists. He served as chief assistant to the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York from 1930 to 1933. When he became the U.S. Attorney, he also served as special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Homer Stille Cummings, Ray Schindler’s friend. It was a tight little world of legal eagles where, for better or worse, everyone knew everyone.

  In 1935, Dewey was appointed the special prosecutor for a grand jury investigation into vice and racketeering in New York City. Dewey gained national attention by going after the hoodlums who controlled organized crime in New York. As a writer of true crime, I came to know him. I worked frequently with his office.

  Dewey’s crusade began with an attack on prostitution, gambling and loan sharks. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover labeled mobster “Dutch” Schultz, my old acquaintance from Evening Graphic days, Public Enemy No. 1. Schultz was a dangerous sorehead by this time and didn’t much care for the compliment. With Dewey leading the investigation, Schultz set out to convince his mob associates that assassinating Dewey would be a great idea.

  Word of the proposal traveled fast to the top shelf hoods: Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lanksy. Dutch’s response backfired like a cheap twenty-two. Even with a $10,000 reward on Dewey’s head, the mob’s goon squad, Murder Inc., opted to get rid of Schultz instead. The syndicate’s national board did not want the trouble that would come from snuffing a prominent prosecutor. It would be bad for business.

  Schultz and three associates were whacked in at 10:15 p.m. on October 23, 1935 at the Palace Chophouse at 12 East Park Street in Newark, New Jersey, which he used as his new headquarters. Two bodyguards and Schultz’s accountant were the other three unfortunate souls.

  With Lucky Luciano now expose
d to the public eye, Dewey brought him to trial for running prostitution rings all over New York City. Luciano kept clean records, so it was not easy to convict him—like his counterpart, Alfonse Capone of Chicago. Nevertheless, Dewey succeeded in convicting him on ninety counts of prostitution, and in 1936, Luciano was sent to prison for thirty to fifty years. Dewey obtained seventy-two convictions out of seventy-three prosecutions, a better batting average than the lordly Joe DiMaggio.

  Following that mighty blow to the national crime syndicate, Dewey’s was elected the New York District Attorney in 1937. He received credit for the convictions of numerous mobsters. Continuing his quest to put an end to organized crime, Dewey ran for governor of New York in 1938, but lost the election.

  In 1940, Dewey made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The party instead turned to an insurance salesman from Ohio named Wendel Wilkie. Wilkie lost to Franklin Roosevelt’s third term candidacy. But Dewey ran again for governor of New York in 1942 and won. So now Thomas Dewey was Governor, sitting across from me in a private booth in the dining room at the ritzy New York Yacht Club. There were plenty of trophies around, including the America’s Cup, but no actual boats, other than some impressive models.

  In smart circles in Manhattan and Long Island, a remark attributed to socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the hard-living hard-drinking daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, skewered Tom Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake.” The remark targeted Dewey’s neat mustache, tight proper collars and impeccably dapper dress. He did in fact look just like the little plastic man on millions of American wedding cakes. If ever there were a verbal bulls-eye in seven scathing words, this was it.

  “Here we are at the N.Y.Y.C, Governor,” I said when we met for lunch, “and I didn’t know you owned a boat.”

  He looked at me for a second and then laughed out loud, which was unusual. Like most prosecutors, Dewey was a serious man, not given easily to merry thigh-slappers. “I don’t, Alan. It’s private in here,” he said.

  “No life preservers necessary?” I asked.

  “Not here,” he said affably. “But maybe down in Nassau Town.”

  “Ah,” I said. “You’ve been keeping track of me.”

  “Very much so. I read your book, by the way. Passport To Treason. Well done! Nice work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re a Republican, I assume,” he said, playing with me.

  “I’m registered as one.”

  “I’m happy to have your continuing support.”

  “I’m always happy to vote for a great American,” I said.

  He took the compliment gracefully and gave a little nod.

  He was not stupid. I wondered if he knew I was lying. The truth was, I had voted for Roosevelt three times. Dewey at his worst could be a stuffed shirt. There was something about him that was a little too pat. I didn’t completely trust him. But unlike a lot of writers, I had never caused any problems for Mr. Dewey’s office or ambitions. I received points for that.

  A third man arrived. I didn’t know him. He was introduced to me as Leonard Gaitskell, an assistant U.S. Attorney from the Southern District of New York. He was there to represent the current U.S. Attorney, James McNally, who was now in the job that Dewey had once held.

  After exchanging greetings, I looked back to Dewey. I cocked my head. “So? Is Nassau what we’re here to talk about?” I asked.

  “Mostly, yes.”

  “On the record? Off the record?” I asked.

  “Strictly off,” he said. “All right?”

  “All right,” I said. I had a fountain pen and note pad on the table. I put them away.

  “What do you think?” the governor asked. “Is de Marigny guilty?”

  “That’s not for me to decide.”

  “I asked you what you thought.”

  “I think the case against him is highly flawed,” I said. “Whether they’ll convict him or not is another matter.”

  “How is your pal Schindler doing?” Dewey asked. “Ray’s not as smart as he thinks he is. In fact, he’s a pretty much of a fraud, in my opinion. Silver hair to match his silver tongue. A charming fake, but a fake.”

  Gaitskell grinned.

  “Ray’s uncovering a few things,” I said, playing my cards closely. “The existing powers are doing their best to make things difficult for him, but he has a way of pulling the rabbit out of the hat at the last minute.”

  All four eyes and ears were fixed on me.

  “I’ll say this, also,” I added. “Ray’s been ingratiating himself around town. He and Nancy de Marigny and that blonde, Marie af Tolle, they’re winning a public relations battle which may be crucial. Sentiment on the island is turning toward the accused.”

  “Is that right?” Gaitskell said, intrigued.

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  “They control the press pretty tightly down there, don’t they?” Dewey asked.

  “They don’t control the press so much as they control what the press has access to,” I said. “Similar result.”

  “Ray is doing good public relations for the accused?” Dewey asked.

  “It may not help,” I said, “but it could. Jurors are jurors. In the end, they’re perfectly free to accept or reject any evidence put before them and do whatever they damned feel like.”

  The two law school graduates exchanged a knowing glance.

  “What do you hear about the Duke of Windsor?” Gaitskell asked.

  “Quite a bit. None of it good.” I paused. They waited. “He comes across as a bit of a featherhead,” I said.

  They laughed.

  “He’s a royal ass!” Dewey muttered. “Practically an out and out Nazi, as well as an idiot.”

  “Practically?”

  All three of us shared a longer laugh. More small talk followed. Then Gaitskell moved the conversation along.

  “Alan,” he said, “if I may call you ‘Alan,’ here’s what my office is curious about. Does the name Meyer Lansky come up? What about Lucky Luciano, also?”

  “In what connection?” I asked.

  “Oakes’ death.”

  “Their names have come up. There’s a lot of loose talk in Nassau. Rumors mostly. Wealthy people dealing with gangsters the same way they used to deal with the rum runners. Fill up their coffers on the sly with some dirty business. No one’s going to prosecute their friends. Everyone’s hand is in the same cookie jar as long as it’s a white hand. The non-whites don’t get anything. We all know that.”

  Gaitskell continued. “We hear stories that Cuba might not be so safe a bet for the Chicago boys after the war,” the AUSA said. “Their boy there, Camacho, might lose the free election next year. Or he might get overthrown. We’re hearing stories that the Miami and Chicago mob might want to hedge their bets and set up gambling in the Bahamas. See what I’m suggesting?”

  It only took a few seconds. Then I did.

  “But Sir Harry would have been a bluenose about such things,” I said. “As the wealthiest man on the island, he wouldn’t mind bedding the wives of several of his friends. But he was too much the moralist to want to hear a roulette ball clinking around a wheel or the shuffle of cards.”

  “It’s just a theory,” Dewey said.

  “It could have accounted for his murder,” Gaitskell suggested. “If Oakes was blocking the expansion of gambling into the Bahamas, now or in the future, there could have been a lot of people who’d stand to profit by his death.”

  “And the mob could have easily arranged a middle-of-the-night murder,” Dewey said, his eyes tight.

  I shrugged. “Possible,” I said. “It’s a working theory.”

  “Is Schindler working that angle?” Dewey asked.

  “If so, I haven’t seen it,” I said.

  “Why would he ignore that?” Gaitskell asked.

  “Ray’s job is to keep Nancy de Marigny’s husband off the gallows,” I told him. “Anything else is incidental.”

  “Ah.
Okay,” Gaitskell said.

  “If you hear anything,” Dewey said at length, “would you be good enough to advise Mr. Gaitskell?”

  “Snitch my information with the prosecutors?” I said, with a smile. “You’re asking an honest reporter to share information with a prosecutor?”

  “Let’s be high minded,” Dewey said, never having trouble reaching for a platitude. “We need to keep a step ahead of these hoods. For the war effort. We wash your hand, you wash ours. Gentleman to gentleman.” He paused. “It is a given, of course, that if we can help you or Ray in return, that will happen. Just call me at the Governor’s office.”

  When I was in New York, there was no problem calling from a pay phone anywhere in the city. Just bring a fistful of nickels. But how I was supposed to get information to them from the Bahamas was not explained. Nor was it obvious. Every phone in Nassau was suspect these days. Western Union and Telex were monitored. Any regular mail to a noteworthy address was no-doubt read by a special office of the colonial post office before it got onto a boat or plane to head off the island.

  But, “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, agreeing actually to nothing.

  We shook hands and ordered lunch.

  ***

  On the same afternoon in Boston, Harry Phillips, the former Treasury Department investigator who had come to see Walter Schindler with some backstory on Harold Christie, was in for a nasty surprise. There was nothing in the federal indexes in Boston to indicate that Harold Christie had ever been accused of any infraction of a federal law there at any time. Phillips was dead certain that an arrest warrant for Harold Christie had been issued in the early 1920’s. He was dead certain because he had worked the case and held the paperwork in his own hands. This simply didn’t add up.

  All federal records of the day bore numbers that were recorded on federal indexes that give the names of persons accused. So now Phillips set himself to the tedious task of going through every number in the indexes beginning in 1920. What he hoped to find was that one number in the indexes was missing. And sure enough, the next day his persistence paid off. He found what he wanted.