A Bloody Business

by Dylan Struzan

  The producer says, “I’ll need a choreographer and time to rehearse.”

  Gordon says, “A bunch of broads kickin’ their legs in the air don’t need rehearsal.”

  The producer mops the back of his neck with his handkerchief.

  Gordon says, “I’m sure you remember what it’s like to shuffle acts around the Catskills. Now get outta here.”

  The producer cuts a hasty path back to his cluttered office and yells at his secretary, “Goddamn gangsters. Get Polly Adler on the phone.”

  A minute later, the secretary yells in her best southern drawl, “Miss Polly won’t be back until this evening. Y’all will have to call her then.”

  The producer stares out the window at the Knickerbocker across the street. He can see into Waxey Gordon’s outer office. On the street below, a dozen cars swarm the Knickerbocker’s entrance, blocking traffic in all directions. New York’s finest arrive en masse, escorting Buckner’s agents through the hotel lobby.

  Buckner, short and squat, is in the lead. Since April, since the Nantisco, since his tipster got murdered in retaliation, he has been rabid to nail Waxey Gordon’s operation.

  The phone rings in the producer’s office. The secretary’s sister, working the Knickerbocker’s switchboard, reports the raid.

  “Jesus,” the secretary responds. “Jesus H. Christ!”

  “What?” the producer says.

  “It’s a raid on Waxey Gordon,” she says.

  Buckner’s agents swarm into Gordon’s outer office then into the main rooms where the heart of the shipping business lives. Nothing is left untouched, not even the toilet paper which is unrolled and searched for hidden messages. The agents confiscate Waxey’s maps, codebooks, timetables, ship-to-shore radio, lists of names, even the Time magazine with George Gershwin on the cover.

  The producer, glued to his panoramic window, grabs binoculars and watches the beehive of activity surrounding the infamous Waxey Gordon.

  Benny, having coffee at a café across from the Knickerbocker, watches too.

  When the agents finish, Gordon’s office is bare.

  The man with connections yells at his secretary, “Get the maid up here with some goddamn toilet paper.”

  Benny ventures into the Knickerbocker lobby. Guests are aflutter. He heads to the King Cole Bar and orders a sandwich. A couple of Wall Street brokers chatter coolly at the end of the bar.

  “Did you know that was Waxey Gordon?” one laughs. “Irving Wexler, real estate magnate, my ass. You could tell he was a gangster just by looking at him. Waxey. You gotta love the monikers these guys come up with. Jesus, why not Slippery Jew?”

  “Legs Diamond,” the other says. “What does a guy called Legs have to do to get that name?”

  “He can run,” the first one says. “It’s a prerequisite to being a gangster.”

  “Maybe it means he can dance,” the other says.

  “Nah. You don’t have the sense of it. It isn’t like Joe College. It’s like Scarface, you know. It’s a badge of courage for being in the fight.”

  “They call him Snarky, too, like fancy dresser.”

  “Yeah, if you think a pea green suit is fancy.”

  “Rocky.”

  “Boo Boo Hoff.”

  “Ice Pick Willie. Now there’s a proper name.”

  They laugh and point to their empty glasses. The bartender pours vodka into a shaker and mixes two martinis.

  “Martini di Arma di Taggia created this drink right here,” the bartender says, pouring.

  “It doesn’t matter who the bartender is, it takes a Rockefeller to make it famous,” the first one says, then turns to his friend. “I’m walking down Fifth Avenue this morning and I run into one of my clients, nice-looking woman, you know, the kind you could enjoy. She introduces me to her husband. She says, ‘Darling, this is Larry.’ Larry! When have I ever been Larry? My dick is Larry but only my wife can call it that. Everybody else talks to Lawrence.”

  The second guy laughs and says, “Larry the Weasel.”

  “Big Larry,” the first guy says. “Hey, do I look like a ‘dese and dem’ kind of guy?”

  “I don’t know. What kind of clients do you have?” the other one says.

  “I don’t care as long as they pay the bill,” the first one says.

  Benny shoves his sandwich aside and pays the bill. He takes the Knickerbocker’s outlet to the Times Square subway station. The moniker conversation chips away at his sense of accomplishment. The suit, the hat, the tie, the handmade shoes have not erased his Bugsy image.

  The subway rattles through the underbelly of the city. Benny is lost in a haze of confusion and bad judgment. He overshoots his exit and is forced to hoof it back to the Cannon Street garage.

  Meyer looks up from his newspaper with raised eyebrows.

  Benny says, “The Knickerbocker was raided. Buckner had his whole damned mob in there. Tore the place apart…Irving …the real estate guy…was all that was left of his office. I hung out in the bar for a while. I gotta say, you were right. I was wrong.”

  Benny hangs his head in derision coupled with rage.

  “Waxey isn’t worth your regrets,” Meyer says.

  “Not Waxey,” Benny says.

  “Irving neither,” Meyer says.

  “You got it wrong,” Benny says. “Two Wall Street assholes were in the bar drinking martinis. These fucking cocksuckers. Fucking arrogant assholes. I’d like to introduce them to Snarky or Ice Pick Willie and see how they’d fare. You know what I’m saying? Cocksucking pigs.”

  Meyer waits for Benny’s rant to get to the point.

  “They were laughing their heads off that we’re too fucking stupid to use a nickname that don’t insinuate us. Bugsy. That’s a helluva reputation. You’re in this, too! The Guy, the Little Guy. People call you that. Not Meyer. See this is all a game to those lawyers. They take our money and laugh all the way to the bank. They thought Waxey meant Slippery Jew. Fucking cock-suckers!”

  “Why do you let people put a label on you?” Meyer says.

  “I don’t let nobody do nothin’. You know that.”

  “Then why are you so worked up?” Meyer says.

  “They called us slippery Jews,” Benny says.

  “They called Waxey a slippery Jew. What do they know?”

  “Weren’t you the guy told me I should forget using Bugsy and use my name?”

  “Did I?” Meyer says. “I simply mean that your name is who you are. Nicknames, those are just labels for those that need to know. They call me the Guy when somebody might be listening. It’s better than saying Meyer Lansky. Bugsy, that’s different. It means something different. You aren’t buggy. You have a hot temper but you aren’t buggy. At least, you don’t want people to think you are.”

  “Why not?” Benny says. “It scares the shit out of them.”

  “Those that need to be scared already are, just hearing Benny Siegel. Forget these guys. We’ve got business to take care of.”

  Meyer’s calm erases Benny’s rage as it has so often in the past.

  The evening edition of the New York Times runs the news that an International Bootleggers’ Ring is under investigation. Liquor found among the lumber cargo of the Nantisco has led investigators to the Knickerbocker and Longacre Buildings, where thirty agents swarmed the premises.

  Buckner begins to link together a conspiracy involving M. Greenberg, I. Wexler, C. Kramer and A. Ross. The agents find a customer list and a key to a code that reveals a business in alcohol: American whiskey, Scotch whiskey, Champagne, and gin. They also find large maps of the Atlantic Ocean that show harbors, shipping lands, and various points that Buckner senses are drop-off spots.

  As details are uncovered, the finger of blame turns to Mrs. H. Fuhrmann as the informant. She was angered when the bootleggers refused to turn over her husband’s salary for the liquor shipment. The newspaper reported that her husband was with the raiding Prohibition agents when they entered the offices at the Knickerbocker and Lon
gacre Buildings. The Government has put the couple into hiding.

  Chapter Eight

  Part of Something Is Better Than All of Nothing

  WINTER 1925

  ’Tis the season for dutiful parents to lay their hands on the perfect holiday gift so that their children, lost in comparisons, will be able to hold their heads erect when they return to school. Times Square swarms with resolute shoppers. Arnold Rothstein passes time in front of the Argosy Book Store on 59th Street while his wife braves the crowds. Behind the Argosy’s holly-trimmed, oversized plate-glass window, a tiny steam locomotive skirts the display at regular intervals while Saint Nick and his reindeer soar overhead. Christmas and Chanukah square off on competing sides of a cotton mountain. Dennison’s Christmas Book touts celebration ideas from church decorations to party planning. The Story of Chanukah sits beside a Mother Goose offering of Rhymes For Jewish Children.

  Rothstein snickers. The news is out. Mother Goose has judiciously excluded one of his childhood recitations:

  Jack sold his gold egg

  To a rogue of a Jew

  Who cheated him out of

  The half of his due

  The Jew got the goose

  Which he vowed he would kill

  Resolving at once

  His pockets to fill

  The Morgan Journal claims Chanukah is the “true children’s holiday.” Rothstein watches the pack mules loaded down with bags from Bloomingdale’s and Bergdorf Goodman hopping from store to store to fill the empty hands of eight days of tradition and decides the Journal might be right.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” shouts Bloomingdale’s Santa.

  The corner newsboy, a pugnacious urchin with a red nose, drowns him out.

  “Federal agents closing in on Volstead violators, read all about it!” the kid shouts.

  Arnold trades the rhyme in his head for the latest headline. He steps to the curb to read the Volstead article. The bankroll in him gloats over Waxey Gordon’s bad luck but the Big Brain, as Rothstein is called, worries about collateral damage.

  Two of New York’s finest dawdle over a can of ash, spreading a thin layer over the ice-covered cobblestones.

  “You missed a spot,” grumbles the round Irish cop with a heavy brogue as he pushes the trolley holding two cans of ashes. “We wouldn’t want Mrs. Vanderbilt to stub her little toes now, would we?”

  “Them people have servants that carry them from store to store,” the other cop says. The sweat-soaked shirt trapped under his heavy blue wool coat creates an icy chill whenever he pauses, so he presses on. “It ain’t human havin’ that much money. Look what it does to them.”

  He works the wooden-handled shovel around the calluses of his hands and digs another scoop from the can.

  Rothstein scours the front page for any hint of what Emory Buckner and his men have learned from the Knickerbocker raid and finds nothing. No bond-runner nor fixer nor chiseler, thus far, has been able to break the silence surrounding the case. Buckner has, as the Times reports, padlocked the lips of his aides. Only Waxey Gordon knows the details of what Buckner uncovered and he isn’t talking.

  Rothstein grouses.

  “What’s wrong?” his wife says, her voice soft and sweet.

  “What’s right?” Rothstein says.

  A year ago, Emory Buckner was as wet as the next guy. Then he accepted the U.S. Attorney position and went dry as a Quaker convert. He refused to employ any man unwilling to embrace the path of teetotaler.

  Carolyn, Rothstein’s raven-haired shiksa wife, entwines her arm with her husband’s. Together they shuffle along the icy sidewalk.

  Rothstein says, “I want to buy you something.”

  Carolyn says, “Christmas or Chanukah?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rothstein says. “Holidays are for children. What do you say we invest in a piece of real estate for your neck?”

  “Liquid assets?” Carolyn smirks. “Why don’t we just stop by the pawn shop and buy back what I used to own?”

  Rothstein frowns. “You’re a cynic, Carolyn,” he says, “just like my mother.”

  They plod across the ashes of Broadway and past the arched entrance of the Lyric Theater where the Marx Brothers appear nightly in The Cocoanuts.

  Carolyn hums the introduction to Berlin’s melody then sings, “‘If you told me that I’m the lucky young man…’” She chucks her husband under the chin. “You know what they say, lucky in love, unlucky at cards.”

  “Don’t even joke,” Arnold says.

  * * *

  Ratner’s deli throbs with a boisterous hubbub of controversies. Nig Rosen, the six-foot-something of a shtarker sitting across from Meyer Lansky, eavesdrops on the morning’s kvetch at the next table. Henry Ford’s latest anti-Semitic remarks in the Dearborn Independent, with a readership of over 700,000 people, fuel fears on the state of Jewish workers in America.

  A heavyset clothes-cutter, still smarting from the insistence on piece-work, contemplatively scrubs his thick, black beard. The era of the craftsman is dead. In its place rises mighty mass production that threatens to dissolve skilled labor and empower the moneyman.

  “Management takes the lion’s share,” he says. “The rest of us can take what they hand us or starve. Somebody should take Ford to the cleaners just like he’s taken his factory workers.”

  A choir of complaint runs through the restaurant. Tempers soar in defense of the young Jewish lawyer at the center of Ford’s accusations and just as quickly, a ray of hope electrifies the room. The young lawyer is Aaron Sapiro. He has clapped Ford with a million-dollar libel suit in reprisal for his insults in the Dearborn.

  Three tables away the conversation boils into violent debate. “Sapiro has an obligation to all Jews, not just to himself. Let Ford put that flowery signature on a million-dollar check for the evil he’s done. What’s a million dollars to a goy like Ford?”

  The clothes-cutter says, “What? A Jew can’t set the standard for a fair price without it being a conspiracy? A Jew doesn’t deserve a decent wage for breaking his back in the field? God should see to it that all the factory workers in Detroit find out what a mamzer Ford really is and then they should quit. Let him build his own cars; see how much he’s worth without a factory full of slaves. And let me tell you something else. He made it plain knowledge in the book about his life that he never liked the farm. His father wanted him to take over the family farm but he refused. He’s too good for this work so he’s going to deny the people that do it a decent wage? Ach.”

  Rosen says, “Ford’s factory workers are the best paid of any.”

  Meyer says, “Of course they are. It’s good strategy. It doesn’t change the fact that Henry Ford blames the Jews for the war. Or that he claims Jews engage in the ‘needle trades’ because they have an aversion to manual labor and an abhorrence of agricultural life. Hypocrite. He complains that Jews have a desire to arrange their own affairs and therefore refuse to live outside of cities. What does that mean except that he wants us out on the farms where he can control how much we earn? He bought that newspaper to further his own views. Do you know that he’s been dropping anti-Jewish pamphlets from airplanes all over Germany? Who needs a devil when you have Henry Ford?”

  The waiter brings menus, an unnecessary inconvenience that dries up the conversation. The menu is freshly minted, a list of daily specials printed in red and stacked neatly into small paragraphs resembling upside down pyramids.

  The waiter says, “New paper, same old choices. The salmon is fresh.”

  Meyer nods.

  Rosen orders vegetable soup and plenty of onion rolls.

  The waiter scribbles on a white pad, collects the menus, and heads to the kitchen.

  Rosen says, “Why is your garage full of Fords?”

  “They’re basic, black, and everyone has one. Ford wants us all to look the same. Let him pick me out of the crowd.”

  The Mutt and Jeff Club, as the waiters quietly refer to the late morning conclave of Nig Rosen and Meyer
Lansky, has convened because Meyer insists the two sit down every Monday to touch base over a nosh.

  Meyer says, “We’re ready to make some moves in Philadelphia.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rosen says, which is what he always says when Meyer proposes an idea that hints of something he doesn’t like.

  “Opportunity,” Meyer says, undeterred.

  Meyer passes the pickles.

  Rosen shifts uneasily in his seat. He slaps too much butter on his onion roll.

  “Have you been following the case Buckner is building against Gordon?” Meyer says.

  “Yeah, so?” Rosen says. “What’s that got to do with Philly?”

  “Gordon is done in New York City. He has business in Philadelphia. He might shift his base of operation.”

  “He’ll never leave New York. It’s too profitable,” Rosen says.

  “We could stand to put a few guys in Philadelphia. Do it while Gordon is busy searching for the ship captain that fingered him.”

  The waiter brings the salmon and soup.

  Rosen says, “I gotta go with Texas Guinan on this one. I’d rather have a square inch of New York than all of Philadelphia.”

  Texas, the one-time chorus girl turned proprietor, runs the 300 Club on 54th Street where George Gershwin is known to play piano for a lark. The club is the latest hangout for Vanderbilts and Whitneys and Morgans. They just adore the quick-witted Queen of the West.

  “That’s not the point,” Meyer says. “We’ve come too far to let the likes of Waxey Gordon get the upper hand in a major city. We want to bring you up the ladder. Understand? You’re not afraid of the competition, are you?”

  “There’s a sucker born every minute,” Rosen says, stealing another of Guinan’s favorite phrases.

  “Philadelphia is sixty miles from Atlantic City. The sheriff is on the take. You truck the booze coming in through Atlantic City to Philadelphia and send it by train all over the country.”

  “We’ve got that in Jersey,” Rosen says.

  “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Meyer says.