“The town, too. No one helped, they didn’t like my pa ‘cause he enjoyed a little gamblin’ and drinkin’. Bunch of holier-than-thou barn Baptists treated us lower than dirt.”
“Well, I guess you aren’t going back there.”
“Can’t. I burned it before I left.”
“The ranch?”
“The town.”
25
THREE YEARS LATER
Con came down the stairs of the Lucky Irishman. He had been standing at the railing on the second-floor landing watching the action at one of the poker tables. He was the unofficial casino manager. Mintz was involved in offshore gambling out of San Pedro, L.A.’s port, and spent half his time keeping the ship afloat out beyond the twelve-mile limit and the Coast Guard off his back. That left Con running the Lucky Irishman. Cheating was the biggest problem—by the customers, by the hired help. A casino was a bank with loose money lying everywhere in sight and reach and there was always someone who couldn’t resist the temptation.
At the bottom of the stairs, he nodded at the ladderman who was sitting on a tall stool smoking a cigar as he kept an eye on the tables. “The punk wearing the zoot suit at table three.”
A punk to Con was a guy who thought he was tough but wasn’t. Guys like the one wearing the zoot suit ran small-time rackets, backroom dice or cards in places like L.A. or Kansas City. When they came to Vegas they thought the odds casinos used to relieve suckers of their money weren’t meant to apply to them and they expected to walk away with a killing. Sometimes they cheated.
To Con, a zoot suit, with its wide-shouldered, six-button, double-breasted jacket and high-waisted pants was the mark of a city guy who didn’t know what tough really was. Three years in Vegas had rubbed some of the corn off of Con, but he wasn’t that far from the days when he roped cattle and wrestled them to the ground to cut their balls off. He still wore a cowboy hat and boots, but the hat was now a Stetson and the boots handmade in Mexico. They complemented his Mississippi riverboat gambler’s pinstriped suit and fancy red-silk vest. He packed a long-barreled Colt .44 with the holster tied down to his right leg and a long-handled boot knife.
“What’s the gaff?” The ladderman snicked cigar ash onto the sawdust floor. His job was to sit on the elevated stand and spot cheats and skimming, but he had learned long ago that Con could smell them when they walked through the door.
“Lap cards.”
An old technique, tried and true: A player drops a high card or two, an ace or king in his lap, and switches when he needs to improve a hand. The zoot suit, with its oversized, bulky jacket and pants, was perfect for hiding cards.
“I’m going to take him out back,” Con said. “I’ll have Benny make sure no one follows us out. Let me have your cigar.”
Benny was the relief bartender, floor sweeper, and bouncer. He was at the row of nickel grinders playing his favorite slot machine, screen stars. The machine had only one reel and it paid off on some stars, nothing on others. Humphery Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Ronald Coleman paid off. Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Zachery Scott were losers. The big payoff was twenty nickels for Betty Grable, the actress who had her legs insured for a million bucks and was the GIs’ most popular pinup girl. It was the only honest slot in the house. Mintz kept it honest because Betty Grable was his favorite star.
“He loves white bread,” Mintz’s accountant, Sol, told him many times.
Con had long ago figured out that the reason Mintz made so many trips to L.A. wasn’t only for business. Sol confirmed his suspicion that Mintz had a girl stashed away in a pad off of Sunset Boulevard.
“A bottle blonde with big cans. I met her when I dropped off some folding money when Mintz was back East.”
“How’s he handle his marriage?” Con asked.
“He married a woman for her money. To him, that’s all she has, money. At first he took an extra drink at night to handle it. Now he porks any babe that will stand still long enough.”
“I’m taking someone outside,” Con told the husky bartender. “Watch the door.”
Nickels were dropping into the coin tray of the slot. “Hey, I just won ten on Gary Cooper. He’s my favorite actor, you know, the strong silent type, doesn’t say much. Did you see him in Along Came Jones? Laughed my ass off when he got mistaken for outlaw Dan Duryea. I heard he can take John Wayne with his dukes.”
“Don’t bet on it. The Duke would wipe the shit off his boots with that skinny drink of water.”
Con casually moseyed over to the poker table where zoot suit had the biggest pile of cards. As he went across the room, the gritty throaty voice of Fran, one of the two B-girls Mintz kept at the joint, could be heard singing from the bar, where she was entertaining a couple of soldiers from Camp Roberts sent out to practice desert maneuvers during the atomic blasts in the desert. “You’re in the army now / you’re not behind a plow / you’re digging a ditch / you son-of-a-bitch / you’re in the army now!”
The last few years had been good for the club and Vegas. The war had brought the army—air force and the atomic bomb to the desert, along with soldiers with money in their pockets. Mintz was pleased to help the war effort by relieving soldiers of their money at the gambling tables and providing an even more intimate form of relief—two rooms upstairs were used by house girls for “entertaining” when they weren’t hustling the customers for drinks.
The club had six poker and two blackjack tables, a layout for New York craps, and a dense pall of tobacco smoke. Only the poker tables and smoke went full time. The club also took bets on national sporting events and got the scores in from telephone calls from the East and Chicago. A single row of four nickel machines and one quarter slot machine were against the wall that led down the hallway to the bathrooms. Mintz made little money off the slots and only kept them to amuse the wives waiting for their husbands to finish playing cards or craps, but increased his take by using ten-stop machines—slots that had only ten symbols that could appear on the pay line on each of the three reels that spun, instead of the standard twenty. There were still twenty symbols on each reel—cherries, oranges, yellow bells, black jackpot bars—but half of them never made it to the pay line because the spinning wheels had a gearwheel that only allowed them to stop at every other symbol.
Cheating was frowned upon by the casinos only when they lost money at it.
Four other players were at the poker table when Con approached. He recognized three of them as regulars, one a local, and quickly eliminated the fourth as a possible backup to the punk. Some of the punks brought a buddy along packing heat in case things went to hell. He deliberately avoided looking at the punk as he came up to the table.
“Throw me some luck, Con. I’ve lost my shirt and I’m down to my short hairs,” the local player said.
“Sometimes luck isn’t a lady but a real bitch,” Con said. As he spoke, he “accidentally” dropped the cigar into the punk’s lap.
The guy shot up from his chair, brushing his expensive suit. “Fuck!” The cigar flew out of his lap. So did an ace of diamonds.
The local stared at the card on the floor like it was a snake. “Holy shit.”
Con took the punk’s arm and led him away from the table. He had four inches and fifty pounds on the guy. The fingers of his big hand completely engulfed the punk’s arm.
“We need to have a little talk,” Con said.
He led the guy into an alley at the back of the club. When they got outside, the punk jerked his arm loose and faced Con.
“Listen, pal, I’ve got friends in town—”
“Not in my place you don’t.”
“Let’s make a deal. You keep the chips on the table and I’ll give you a hundred-dollar watch—” His hand went in under his coat where the long gold chain of a pocket watch hung down the front of his baggy pants.
Con moved with the speed of a striking rattler. He clamped his big hand over the man’s gunhand, and twisted his arm into a hammerlock
. He took away the gun, shoved the punk’s face up against the building, and held him there while he shook the bullets from the five-shot .38 onto the pavement.
“I admire a good card mechanic,” Con said, “a guy who’s so smooth with his hands that you can’t see him ripping off a card from the bottom, or a good number-two man who can deal seconds. If I think he’s really good, I even invite ’em to sit down and show me his stuff.”
“You’re in deep shit, pal, I’m going to—”
Con hit him in the small of the back, then the kidneys. He slammed the guy’s head against the brick wall. The punk dropped to his knees.
“But you’re not a mechanic, pal, you’re just a chippy,” Con said.
The ladderman came out of the back of the club. “Benny’s watching the door. I didn’t spot a backup.”
“Let him know he’s not welcome back here,” Con said.
As he went back inside, the ladderman pulled a sap from his coat pocket and brought it down on the man’s jaw as he looked up.
26
Mintz came back to the club from a trip to L.A. with news that they were going to have visitors. “Bugsy Siegel and the Little Man are coming. You know who they are?”
“I read the papers. Siegel’s some kind of gangster, New York or someplace.”
“You’re in the stone age, Con. Lucky Luciano’s the boss of bosses for the whole country, not just New York. The Little Man is his right hand and Bugsy’s the Little Man’s number one.”
“Who’s the Little Man?”
“Meyer Lansky, that’s who.”
“The guy who owns a piece of this place?”
Mintz glared at him. “Who told you that? That asshole Sol? He’s got diarrhea of the mouth.”
“Naw, hell, I heard you talking to him on the phone.” That was true, but Con didn’t know who Mintz had been talking to until Sol told him. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that Mintz skimmed a cut off the top each month and sent it to Lansky, and put another cut away for himself, before he figured Uncle Sam’s take.
“Keep your mouth shut about it—it ain’t nobody’s business.”
“These guys, they’re all with the Syndicate?”
“That’s what the papers call the boys, but Unione Siciliane, that’s what Luciano likes to call it, like Frankie Yale used to call the rackets before Capone had him bumped off for hijacking his liquor. It’s only for guineas—Jews can’t join—but the Italians all have muscles for brains, so Lansky runs the business end.”
“What about Bugsy Siegel? He got muscles for brains, too?”
“Don’t you believe it. Ben’s almost as smart as the Little Man and neither one needs outside muscle to handle their beefs. It’s the other way around. All these boys were all tough Lower East Side kids, got to know each other running rackets on the streets. When Luciano went into bootlegging, Bugsy and the Little Man formed the Bug and Meyer Gang and sold him protection, riding shotgun to fight off hijackers and hijacking when the money flowed that way. Now check that out, cowboy. A couple Jews, one not much taller than a bar stool, providing protection to Sicilian gunsels. That tell you how tough these guys are?
“You know how they met? The Jews on the Lower East Side had the Irish on one side and the Italians on the other—and the guineas and the micks were both bigger than us. We had bigger brains and smaller muscles. The Irish toughs hung around waiting for us to get out of school and would make us drop our pants to show our circumcisions. But the Italians were more mercenary. When Luciano was a teenager, he ran a gang of toughs who sold protection to Jewish kids on their way to school and back. It was penny-ante stuff, but hey, in those days a nickel bought a beer. Luciano told this pint-sized runt to fork over his pennies for protection and the runt told him he didn’t need protection: He put up his dukes and told Luciano to fuck himself. Now imagine that, here’s this big guinea son-of-a-bitch backed up with his punks talking to this little kid, and you know something, Luciano took one look at the kid and said, shit, he don’t need no protection. That little guy was Meyer Lansky.”
“Little guys are the toughest,” Con said.
“They have to be. Lansky’s only about five-three, five-four. Bugsy’s bigger, but he’s not big like you dumb-ass cowboys.”
“Bugsy’s a funny name for a guy.”
“He’s chaye, it’s Yiddish, it means he’s crazy wild. Usually, the guy’s pretty straight—hell, he can be a good joe, pick up the tab after a meal, be real polite to the ladies—but piss him off and hey, watch out, your ass is grass and he’s a lawnmower.”
“How’d you get to know these guys?”
“I ran a carpet joint out on the Jersey shore for Meyer, a real sweet roadhouse, carpeting you could bury your toes in and a real cut-glass chandelier right in the middle of the place. Our sheriff lost the election and the new one came in with axes and busted up the place so the bum that paid for his election didn’t have no competition. After that, I floated out west to Little Rock and Hot Springs before settling down here.”
Mintz poked his finger in Con’s chest. “You watch yourself when you’re helping them out. It’s Mister Siegel, you understand, and Mister Lansky, no Bugsy or Little Man stuff. Luciano is the only one who can call them by their street names. To the rest of us, they’re Ben and Meyer. To punks like you, they’re Mister. You got it?”
“Yeah, Mister Mintz, all except the part about helping them out.”
“Sam Pollack at the Silver Horseshoe owes Meyer start-up money from when he was opening the club and he’s missed a couple of payments. Bugsy was coming out to Vegas to look-see a club and Meyer came along to collect. Meyer asked me to accommodate him with some local muscle.”
Con grinned. “Is that what I am? Local muscle? Muscles between the ears like the Sicilians?”
“You’re whatever these boys want you to be—and you’ll shut up and like it. Don’t let their hundred-dollar suits fool you; these guys would just as soon kill you as look at you.”
“I’m not rubbing out anyone—”
“Now don’t be stupid, they only kill when it’s absolutely necessary and then only each other. Luciano laid down the rules: Killing’s bad for business. Killing civilians gets bad press and the boys hate bad press.”
That evening Bugsy and Meyer ate dinner at the club with Mintz and Sol. Kosher delicacies were brought in from L.A.’s Fairfax district. “They’re meat and potato guys, but I don’t want them to think they can’t get good kosher food in Vegas,” Mintz said.
He also didn’t want them to be lonely—his B-girls joined them for dinner.
Con played the “Bones” dice slot machine as he listened with one ear to the table conversation. The machine used standard dice combos—seven, eleven, snake-eyes, and so forth—instead of fruit, bells, and bars. From his eavesdropping he learned that Siegel had an itch to build a casino out on Highway 91, the ribbon of blacktop that left downtown and snaked across the desert to California.
Mintz bad-mouthed the idea. “Ben, you’re talking a mile out of town. There’s nothing out there but a couple fancy motels that pretend to be resorts, the Last Frontier and the El Rancho. No one wants to go out to that strip of sagebrush and rattlesnake nests to gamble when they can come downtown where all of the action is. For the size of place you’re talking about, people hav’ta come out from L.A. just to gamble. No one’s gonna do that. If it weren’t for the dog faces out at the army camp, we’d be a ghost town.”
“No one comes out from L.A. because all you’ve got here is a bunch of nickel-dime sawdust joints,” Siegel said. “They got more action at Woolworth’s counter than how you grind nickels from truck drivers and soldiers. Look what they got in Palm Springs? Indians own the town but Hollywood money has gone out there and turned it into an oasis. And there ain’t a damn thing to do there except play golf and tennis. The Hollywood crowd likes excitement and they don’t mind spending money. Give them a place to gamble with some class and they’ll come out here. When they do, the rest of the
suckers will follow.”
Sol had told Con earlier that he didn’t like the gangsters. “Some people think these morons are glamorous, but they’re just crooks who steal more than other crooks. Bugsy and Meyer started Murder, Inc., before Lepke Buchalter and Anastasia took over the action. Lepke had a reputation for hurting people, but he’s no more. They fried him at Sing Sing and the warden lowered the juice so he’d cook slower. My cousin got mixed up in the rackets, was talking to the cops because the mob tried to kill him. They poisoned him when he was in the hospital.”
Sol warmed to the subject and went on with his harangue. “Back in the old days, the twenties and early thirties, the mob was divided between two Mustache Petes, two old-time Sicilians who had spaghetti bellies, thick lip hair, and made people call them ‘Don this’ and ‘Don that’ like they was manor born. One of the black mustachios had a handle of Masseria and the other was Maranzano. When Luciano and the boys were coming up in the rackets, these guys both squeezed Lucky to have him kill the other.
“Luciano knew he was being used and he had to play it clever to keep from getting rubbed out himself. He pretended to team up with Masseria and lured him to a restaurant without his body guards. When Lucky got up to take a piss, four of his boys came in and loaded the mustachio with lead. That made Maranzano head of the American mob with Luciano his number two. But Marazano ain’t no dummy and he immediately puts a hit out on Lucky and gives the contract to Mad Dog Coll.
“Lucky got Bugsy and Meyer and the boys together to figure out how to hit Maranzano before Lucky got it. Once Lucky went down, so would all his boys, Jews first. Maranzano didn’t want no Jews in the organization. It was Meyer who spotted Maranzano’s weakness. Maranzano had a thing about the IRS. He was worried more about them than the FBI because he couldn’t account for all the dough that came his way. So Meyer brought in four Jewish gunsels who could pass for IRS auditors and spent weeks training them to walk and talk like accountants. Then he sent them over to Maranzano’s offices.
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