“A gunsel couldn’t just walk into the offices because there was an army of thugs guarding the mustachio. But these four ‘accountants’ came in flashing phony government IDs, and Maranzano let them into his private office to check out books that had been cooked. They loaded him up with lead and gutted him like a slaughterhouse pig, and next thing you know Luciano was boss of bosses. Gave both of the Mustache Petes a big going away: Must have been a hundred black limos, bumper to bumper; goddamn flowers came in by the trainload. It was something to see, really something to see.”
The mob protected Vegas. “It’s off-limits to hit any of the joints. One time two guys came in with shotguns and took the day’s take. Mintz just shook his head and handed over the money. Then he made a phone call to a hotel down the street. When the bad guys hustled out of town, two of Albert Anastasia’s boys were in a car behind them. Anastasia’s boys waited until they crossed the state line and then pulled up beside them and sprayed ’em with a machine gun.” Sol shook his head. “You don’t mess with these guys no how.”
“It’s funny, you say the Jew mobsters and Italian mobsters are pals, but I hear Mintz calling Italians names every time he talks about them.”
“Yeah, I never said they were pals, they’re business associates. And there’s no name-calling face to face. We call them wops, guineas, or dagos behind their backs. They call us Hebes, mockies, or geese. But the Italians and Jews all eat from the pie, so they don’t kill each other. Unless it’s necessary.”
“What do they call guys like me?” Con asked.
“Schnooks.”
Business must be good in the rackets, Con thought, looking over Bugsy’s clothes when he was introduced to him. Bugsy dressed sharp in his snap-brimmed hat, pinstriped suit with high-waisted trousers, suspenders and narrow pegged cuffs, a rakishly tailored overcoat with fur-lined collar, handcrafted shoes with pointed toes that shined so you could comb your hair in the reflection, and a handmade silk shirt with six-inch collar points. Everything was monogrammed, Sol told Con.
That evening after dinner, Con dropped Bugsy and Meyer off and waited in an alley behind the Silver Horseshoe. He drove them in Mintz’s 1942 Packard touring sedan, the most luxurious automobile Con had been in, and he loved to drive it. Black with dark red sides, it was a seven-passenger model with a running board, duel spare tires on side mounts, a jump seat behind the driver, and a minibar that pulled out from the back of the front passenger seat. Mintz had told him it was one of the last cars produced in America in late ’41 and bought it the day the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. After that, American car factories started turning out tanks and airplane engines.
“The best American car made, better than a Cad,” Mintz had told him. “FDR rode in one to the inaugural the day he was sworn in. Hell, it’s even Stalin’s favorite car. That Ruskie liked a Packard so much FDR had the tooling sent to Moscow so the Ruskies could make them.”
Mintz claimed he once loaned the car to Warner Bros. for Bogart to ride in for the opening of Casablanca but Mintz made a lot of claims and Con sometimes wasn’t sure what side of the line they fell on.
Bugsy and Meyer came out a few minutes later with a very frightened Sam Pollack. “Drive,” Bugsy said, after they hustled Pollack into the backseat. “Find a place where the sand is soft and the digging is easy.”
They put a shovel on the floor of the backseat so Pollack would feel it under his feet during the ride.
Con was uncomfortable taking orders from the gangster, especially an order like that, but he knew he had to wait to see how the hand played out.
When he had driven a few miles outside of town, Con turned off onto a dirt road that he knew went to an old abandoned mine.
“Bugsy, I—” Pollack said.
“What’d you call me?”
Bugsy hit Pollack. Then again. And again. “All right, that’s enough,” Meyer said. “Pull over here,” he told Con.
Con pulled the car over and brought it to a stop. The two men yanked Pollack out of the backseat. Bugsy knocked the casino owner to the ground. Meyer got the shovel and threw it down on the ground by Pollack.
“Start digging,” Bugsy told him.
Con felt the long-barreled .44 he kept tucked in his belt. He wasn’t sure what to do. He was more concerned about being mixed up in a murder than Pollack’s life.
“I didn’t mean to cheat you!” Pollack said. “It’ll never happen again.” He was shaking.
Bugsy pulled out a gun from a shoulder holster. “Dig, you bastard.” He fired the gun at Pollack’s feet, kicking up dirt on the man.
Meyer looked on impassively. Con watched with an increasing sense of apprehension. If they killed Pollack, they would not want a witness around to pin it on them. There was also something unreal about the situation. A gangland hit was not something he had experienced and he watched the scene unfold as if he was watching a movie.
When Pollack had dug out a foot-deep hole about man-length, Bugsy and Meyer climbed back into the car. “Once around the park, James,” Bugsy said, grinning.
On the way back, the two in the backseat talked about how Bugsy and George Raft, the gangster-playing movie star, had become pals. They never mentioned Pollack, whom they left standing knee-deep in the empty grave. The casino owner would have to hoof it back to town. Con had no doubt in his mind that every time Pollack counted out the cut he sent the boys back East, he’d remember the grave waiting for him.
27
The next day, Mintz handed Con a yard. Con looked at the hundred-dollar bill and raised his eyebrows.
“From the Little Man. He says you did real good last night. But he had a question. He saw your hand itching to pull your heat out. What did you plan to do with that cannon—rub out Pollack … or the boys?”
Con grinned. “Hell, wouldn’t you know it, I saw a coyote out in the bushes and was going to blast it if it came any closer.”
Con drove the two gangsters down Highway 91 for about a mile out of town. There wasn’t much out there: the couple joints that weren’t much more than fancy motels—the El Rancho and the Last Frontier—along with a lot of dry, ugly desert. Bugsy wanted to show Meyer where he envisioned someday putting a carpet joint. Mintz didn’t come along. He was noticeably nervous around Bugsy. Smart man, Con thought. Bugsy walked around with a stick of dynamite on a short fuse between his ears.
Con leaned against the car and rolled a cigarette as Bugsy laid it on the Little Man. “We’re wasting our time with illegal clubs and gambling ships. We pay the cops and politicians through the nose and we still get shut down every time some news rag runs a story about civic corruption.” He swept his hand at the desert. “Look at this. We could build a real casino, not a sawdust joint, but a gambling palace bigger and better than anyone’s ever seen. And we won’t have to pay a dime to anyone for the privilege to operate.”
“I don’t know; it’s a long way from L.A. In the summertime, the tires on a car can melt just coming down the highway.”
“Naw, the weather here’s not that bad, it’s resort stuff—a few bad days a year and months of sunshine and light breezes. I’m telling you, Meyer, I’ve gotten in tight with that Hollywood crowd. If I build a fancy playground for them, they’ll come. They’ll fly, drive, any way they can to drop a bundle at the tables.”
“You’re too damn much of a gambler,” Meyer said. “Running a casino is a business, not a gamble. Gamblers can win and lose, but a businessman has to win every time. Especially if you’re going to be borrowing the money from Lucky and the boys. They don’t want to see their bread stuffed down a toilet hole.”
Listening to the two talk, Con wasn’t so sure people would drive all the way from L.A. to drop money in the Nevada desert, but there was no doubt that the town had a lot of appeal to the racketeers in Chicago and the East. Elliot Ness had done a good job for Vegas when he went after Capone for tax evasion. Was it a coincidence that in 1931 Capone was convicted of tax evasion—and Nevada legalized gambling? The mob soon learned t
hat they could run money through the sawdust joints in Vegas and get it back clean. Not that Vegas was that important to the mob—it was small potatoes compared to the return from illegal gambling, prostitution, protection, and hijacking rackets.
Mintz never complained about the cut he gave Meyer for the Lucky Luciano gang each month. “It’s a cost of doing business,” Mintz told him, after Con revealed he knew about the action, “like taxes. Only if you don’t pay these guys, they cut your nuts off.”
Mintz himself had a small-time racketeering background before settling in Vegas. He boasted that he met Meyer Lansky at a bar mitzvah in Brooklyn and hit him up for a loan to start the Lucky Irishman after he had dumped a card room in Jersey when a gang war broke out.
“Meyer has finesse. He knows the business end of the rackets: what the percentage should be, the cuts, what the politicians and cops should rake in.”
Siegel got his way and the desert oasis he wanted alongside the narrow strip of blacktop leading to L.A. went up in the desert. When he was in town during the construction, Siegel often asked Mintz for Con and the car. Con wasn’t sure if he liked him or the car better.
Con watched the Flamingo being built and heard the rumors about the overruns on construction and suspicions from the mob that Siegel was skimming. Skimming their money. “That ain’t healthy,” Mintz told Con.
Bugsy wanted all men in black tie for the grand opening the day after Christmas 1946, but relented and let Con attend in his riverboat gambling outfit since Con couldn’t find a tux in his large size. Even the janitors had to wear tuxedos.
Con drove Mintz to the gambling palace, going by the fabulous pink neon Flamingo sign.
It was raining like hell.
“Jimmy Durante, Rose Marie, and Xavier Cugat are opening,” Mintz said. “Bugsy’s arranged for planeloads of stars to fly in, but half the flights are grounded in L.A. because of the weather.”
As he and Mintz raced across the half-empty parking lot to the door, Mintz said, “Not a good sign, not good at all. The boys aren’t going to be happy.”
Mintz said only a few of the Hollywood crowd showed up, but to Con, it was like getting his own movie studio tour—George Raft, Sonny Tufts, Charles Coburn, George Sanders, Vivian Blaine, Lon McAllister, with shows featuring Tommy Wonder, the Tunetoppers, Eddie Jackson, Jimmy Durante, and Xavier Cugat.
“There’s more stars here than a Texas night.”
Mintz shook his head. “You don’t see Coop, the Duke, Lana, Ginger; they all got grounded in L.A. Bugsy hasn’t even got the hotel finished. People are staying at the El Rancho and motels. Siegel opened it early because the place is hemorrhaging dough.”
Con came with Mintz to watch the gambling action as an accommodation to Bugsy, to make sure there was no skimming by the help. They came back the next night. Half the crowd had gone home. The following night they sat in the lounge and watched Jimmy Durante.
“There’s twelve of us in here,” Mintz whispered. “Holy shit, an audience of twelve watching Jimmy Durante. The boys aren’t going to like this.”
Mintz never identified exactly who “the boys” were, but it wasn’t hard to figure. Lucky Luciano was out of prison and deported, but still ran the mob. Meyer, Siegel, Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis—they all still reported to Lucky. It was those “boys” and others like them who bought into Siegel’s desert dream, which was now looking like a nightmare.
The Flamingo closed after the first of the year.
Bugsy had paid a visit to Mintz that left Mintz sweating. “He needs to raise money. I told him I can’t put any more into it. I thought the bastard was going to blast me on the spot.” He bit the end off a cigar and spit out the piece. “I need you to take a trip for me.”
“L.A. again?” Con asked.
“A little farther. Havana.”
“Havana? You mean Cuba?”
“That’s the only Havana I know.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Lucky is coming in from Sicily to talk to the boys. The joints in town have taken up a collection to help make things more comfortable for Lucky in his exile. We need someone with muscle and a rod to deliver it.”
“You want me to take a bag of money to Havana?”
“Yeah, I want you take a bag of money.”
“Why not go yourself?”
“Because I’ve got you to do my dirty work.” He tapped his own chest, spilling cigar ash on his coat. “My ticker has been acting up. I can’t stand any excitement, you know what I mean?”
“Think someone might go for the dough?”
“Sure, and if they get it, you can throw yourself under a train. There ain’t gonna be no place to run if you fuck Luciano.”
It would have been faster flying to Miami, but Con, who could have faced stampeding cattle, took the train because he was sissy-scared of boarding an airplane. He hung onto the bag of money and kept his .44 handy, but the rail ride to Miami turned out to be uneventful. Once there, he caught a boat for Havana. He was still a couple miles out to sea when he got a whiff of something sweet and pungent.
“It’s Havana,” a sailor said. “Coffee roasting, rum and sugar boiling, tobacco drying. And the perfume of the putas in the city. Cowboy, there are more whores in Havana than cows in Texas.”
The town vibrated under Con’s feet. The action was like rodeo day, only the excited animals were cars, busses, and people. Noise from the sidewalk cafés, casinos and bars, ships in the harbor, whores and hustlers on the street hammered and pounded him. The town was one big bordello. Everyone was whoring, from the customs official who held out his hand for mordida to the cab driver who overcharged and the kid who banged on the taxi window and shouted that he could get you a cold drink or a hot woman.
Con checked into the hotel Mintz instructed him to and immediately left a message for Meyer at the front desk. He wanted to get rid of the bag of money before it grew wings and flew away.
“Mr. Lansky will meet you in the lobby in twenty minutes,” a clerk told him over the phone.
Con took a seat in the lobby near the entrance to the hotel casino. He smoked two hand-rolled cigarettes before he saw Meyer and Bugsy come out of the casino with a third man. He recognized Lucky Luciano from his pictures but was surprised how handsome the mobster looked, even though he had a drooping eye, part of the damage caused when he was taken for a ride. The eye added extra malice.
Con started to get up, but sat back down. None of the three looked happy. Luciano and Meyer stared across the lobby empty-eyed while Bugsy’s expression was murderous. Con had seen Bugsy loose his cool twice: when they took Pollack for a ride in the desert and opening night at the Flamingo, when a man naively called him “Bugsy” and he kicked the man in the pants. He was sure he was about to witness number three. Luciano paused by his chair.
“I’m telling you to get back to Vegas and straighten things out,” Luciano said in a subdued voice.
“Nobody tells me what to do. Anybody who tries to push me around is going to get his ass burned.”
“You’re out of—”
“Fuck you, I’m tired of taking heat over the Flamingo. If you cheap bastards had given me the backing I needed, I wouldn’t have gotten holes in my knees begging from outsiders.”
Bugsy stomped away, his face a mask of fury. Luciano still had the deadpan expression on his face but his eyes followed Bugsy’s exit. Meyer’s expressionless face cracked a little and for just the briefest moment Con thought he saw a look of remorse on Meyer’s face, but it went blank again.
He turned to Con and took the bag. The two mobsters walked away without saying a word.
That night, as Con was standing at a craps table watching the action, he felt Meyer’s presence beside him.
“Tell Mintz to let the boys in Vegas know that Lucky was pleased with their gift.”
“Sure thing.”
They watched the throw of the dice. “You know,” Meyer said, “people have been throwing bone
s across the table for thousands of years. Did you know Palamedes, a hero of the Trojan War, invented the game and taught it to his fellow Greeks during the siege of Troy?”
“I never knew that, but Mintz claimed some Greek invented the slot machine way back when.” Mintz had also told him that Meyer loved knowledge and was almost pedantic about demonstrating it.
“Sort of. A guy named Hero of Alexandria made a vending machine for holy water two thousand years ago.”
Con moved aside a little to give Meyer room at the table. “You want to place a bet?”
Meyer shook his head and moved away from the table and Con followed him. “I got a good lesson about gambling a long time ago,” Meyer said. “When I was a kid, my mother sent me to the bakery with a nickel. Being a wise guy, I dropped the nickel at a curbside craps game. I went home busted and my mother cried because it was her last nickel. But, you know, Con, it was a good lesson because I figured something was wrong with that game. I kept watching and finally figured out it was all a dance. The guy running it would have a shill play and let him win, with loaded dice, of course, and when everyone got excited and threw down bets, he’d switch the dice and rake in the suckers’ dough.
“Even when the dice aren’t loaded, there’s no such thing as a lucky gambler. There are just winners and losers. The winners control the game.”
They paused to watch the action at a roulette wheel. “Luck depends on how you use it,” Con said. He threw a hundred-dollar bill on 00.
“You sure you want to do that?” Meyer asked.
“Positive.” Con used his big frame to subtly push back a croupier. His hand disappeared below the table as he leaned over the table as if he was really interested in the action. The ball spun, flipped and flopped, and came to rest in the 00 canoe.
After collecting thirty-five hundred dollars from an unhappy croupier, Con sauntered away from the table with Meyer.
Sin City Page 12
