The Overlords & the Wild Ones

by Matt Braun

  Ira Aldridge was a portly man, amiable in manner, somewhere in his early fifties, with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair. They chatted a few minutes about the late Joseph Durant, and Aldridge expressed his deepest sympathy. His eyes went moist as he spoke of the loss of his closest friend.

  “But no more of that,” he said with an open smile. “We’ve laid Joe to rest and you’re here now to take his place. I know he would be pleased, very pleased.”

  Durant cleared his throat. “Well, the thing is, I plan to sell the bank. I’m a movie stuntman, not a businessman. It’d never work.”

  “Of course it would,” Aldridge protested. “I’ll be right by your side, and banking is far less difficult than people think. You’ll catch on in no time.”

  “Sorry, but it’s not a matter of catching on. I’ve got a motion picture waiting on me in Los Angeles.”

  “You don’t understand, Earl. May I call you Earl?”

  “Wish you would.”

  Aldridge appeared agitated, his hands darting like birds. “Your uncle devoted his life to the People’s Bank & Trust. He thought of it as a bank for the common man, the little people. Unless you stay on, it will all have been for nothing.”

  “You lost me there,” Durant said, an eyebrow lifted quizzically. “What’ve I got to do with anything?”

  “William Magruder is the only man in Galveston with money enough to buy this bank. And he was your uncle’s mortal enemy. The man’s an out-and-out scoundrel!”

  “Who’s William Magruder?”

  “One of the two richest men in town,” Aldridge said. “He owns the Galveston City Bank and half the Island. He’s old money, and lots of it.”

  Durant shrugged. “Then he’s the man I need to talk to. Sounds like a hot prospect.”

  “Good God, you can’t do that! Magruder tried every underhanded tactic imaginable to force us out of business. Your uncle fought him tooth and nail, just to keep the doors open.”

  “Not my fight,” Durant observed. “How much is the bank worth, in round figures?”

  Aldridge sighed wearily. “A hundred thousand, perhaps a little more.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Earl, do you understand what I’m saying? Magruder would shut down the bank and foreclose on every poor soul who’s struggling to buy a home or keep from going under in a small business. The man has no scruples. None!”

  “Look, don’t get me wrong,” Durant said uneasily. “I’ve got nothing against the common man, and I respect what Uncle Joe tried to do. But any whichaway, I wasn’t cut out to be a banker. That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “I see.” Aldridge deflated back into his chair. “So you plan to contact Magruder?”

  “Unless you’d like to buy the place yourself.”

  “I regret to say I haven’t the means.”

  “Then I guess Magruder’s the only game in town.”

  “Joe Durant would be disappointed in you, Earl. Very disappointed.”

  “I reckon I’ll have to learn to live with that.”

  Durant walked out the door. A moment later Catherine Ludlow stepped into the office. She was a wholesome young woman, in her early twenties, with a shapely figure, auburn hair, and eyes the color of larkspur. Aldridge was slumped in his chair, and she moved closer to his desk. She gave him a look of concern.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Aldridge?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Aldridge muttered. “The heir to our little kingdom took the wind out of my sails.”

  “Mr. Durant?” she asked uncertainly. “What did he do?”

  “I fear it is what he plans to do.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Catherine, he intends to sell the bank to William Magruder.”

  “Omigosh!”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Ira Aldridge thought he heard the faint knell of doomsday.

  The Gulf sparkled with silvery starlight. The moon was down, and apart from the luminous iridescence of the stars, the water spread onward into an infinity of darkness. High clouds scudded northward on a gentle breeze.

  The Cherokee, a twenty-six-foot Chris-Craft with twin Liberty engines, appeared out of the starlit swells. A salty spray laced off the bow as the sleek mahogany hull sliced through the surface chop. The course was south by southwest out of Galveston.

  Diamond Jack Nolan stood in the cockpit. His gangland moniker stemmed from the diamond ring he wore on his pinky finger, and tonight his chiseled features were a study in concentration. Whizzer Duncan, his second in command, stood beside him cradling a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun. A man of slight build, with wispy hair and pale eyes, Duncan was dangerous as a pit viper.

  To the rear, in the Cherokee‘s wake, was a fleet of fifteen wooden lugger boats. The luggers rode low in the water, powered by twin 100 horsepower engines, and in the dark resembled nothing more than large rafts. Aboard the boats were Nolan’s rumrunning crew, hard men armed with Winchester 12-gauge pump shotguns and 1918 A1 Browning Automatic Rifles. Their eyes strained southward into the inky waters.

  The dim glow of a lantern appeared off the port bow of the Cherokee. The pilot, on Nolan’s order, quickly throttled down, the hull of the speedboat plowing roughly through the troughs. A three-masted schooner, the Shark, loomed ahead, ninety feet at the waterline and painted a dull black. The ship swayed at anchor against rolling swells, armed men stationed at her gunwale. She was all but invisible except for the guttering lantern.

  The Cherokee swung in under the lee of the schooner. The weathered rigging of the ship creaked in the breeze, audible over the rumbling growl of the speedboat as it throttled down to idle. The fleet of luggers stood off a hundred yards out, bobbing in the swells, armed crewmen at the alert. Nolan clambered up a rope ladder thrown over the side of the ship and nimbly hopped onto the deck. Whizzer Duncan covered him with the tommy gun.

  Captain Rob McBride, master of the Shark, waited amidships. He was powerfully built, with a red beard, and in the swaying lamplight, he looked every inch the pirate. He greeted Nolan with a crushing handshake and a booming laugh. “Jack, my darlin’ boy, it’s good to see you again!”

  “That goes double for me, Rob. I take it you found fair winds along the way.”

  “Aye, laddie, we did indeed.”

  Nolan and McBride were business associates, not friends. Their relationship was one of wary neutrality, mutual respect underscored by guarded watchfulness. Smuggler and rumrunner, brothers in a dangerous trade, neither of them ever chanced being robbed by the other. Their truce was maintained by parity in firepower.

  “I’m bearing a load,” McBride said with his pirate’s grin. “Fifteen hundred cases, all as you ordered, Jacko. Scotch, gin and bourbon.”

  Nolan handed over a fat manila envelope. “Sixty thousand, just as we agreed. You can count it.”

  “Why, of course I will, no offense intended.”

  McBride riffled through the cash, all in hundreds. On his signal, one of the crewmen waved the lantern back and forth over the side of the ship. The lugger boats motored in one at a time, idling in the lee of the black schooner. The crew hoisted nets out of the hold, loaded with crates wrapped in burlap, and lowered them to the waiting boats. The rumrunners worked with quick efficiency to stack the crates.

  Captain Rob McBride was but one of hundreds of skippers smuggling illegal spirits. The Volstead Act, enacted by Congress in late 1919, had ushered in the era of Prohibition. A decade of campaigning by temperance leaders, who decried the evil of strong drink, was the moving force behind the law that took effect in 1920. Evangelist Billy Sunday cursed the influence of demon rum, arguing that “whiskey would make the world a puking, spewing, staggering, bleary-eyed, tottery wreck.” He and his fellow temperance leaders turned off the spigot.

  Yet little could they have foreseen that banning liquor would plunge America into the wildest, most turbulent time in history—the Roaring Twenties. Mobsters throughout the country were quick to grasp the potential, and tens of thousands
of speakeasies sprang up across the land. Smugglers routinely sailed from Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, anchoring offshore in international waters, and provided a steady source of booze for the rumrunners. Prohibition backfired, to the tune of millions of dollars in illicit trade.

  Jack Nolan, for his part, thought it was laughable. Galveston, with Quinn and Voight at the helm, became the conduit for bootleg liquor throughout Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and other states across the Southwest. The Federal Prohibition Agency headquartered in Houston was on the pad, and in six years, there had never been a raid on the bars and nightspots in Galveston. The good times rolled, and with it an avalanche of untraceable cash. The shipment being transferred to lugger boats would later be off-loaded to bootleggers at a deserted beach on the mainland. Tonight’s haul, at a return of five for one, would net a cool $250,000.

  A veteran of the late war, Nolan looked upon Prohibition as kid’s stuff. In France, at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood, he’d been brutalized by the sight of death. The generals on both sides pitilessly waged war by pitting massed strength against massed strength, and victory fell to those who demonstrated a superior ability to bleed. After the armistice, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. The medals meant nothing; he was merely thankful to be alive.

  Upon returning from the Western Front in 1920, his cynicism was matched only by his ruthlessness. Through a friend, he caught on with Quinn and Voight, and slowly moved through the ranks to become the lieutenant of Galveston’s underworld. He often thought the work he did for them was mild compared to the war, and he was sometimes amused that the trenches in France had prepared him well for the life of a gangster. He was head of the rumrunning operation, the mob’s chief enforcer, and on occasion, a killer. He did good work.

  Shortly before midnight, the lugger boats were finished loading. Nolan shook hands with Captain Rob McBride and went down the rope ladder to the Cherokee. By now, after years of running illegal booze, the operation was conducted by a standard drill. The men in the luggers had their orders; and they knew which beach had been selected on the mainland for tonight’s delivery. The bootleggers would be waiting with trucks, and Nolan would join them in time for the payoff. He first had to attend to the Coast Guard.

  The fleet of luggers turned northeast for the mainland. The Cherokee came about, motors rumbling, and took a heading due north. The Coast Guard station was located on the northeastern tip of Galveston Island, and they routinely patrolled the southern waters, searching for rumrunners. Nolan’s immediate mission was to intercept the patrol and decoy them west, away from the lugger boats. He felt a rush of adrenaline at the prospect of action.

  Twenty minutes later he spotted the silhouette of CG-204 from the Galveston station. The cutter was seventy-five feet long, armed with .50 caliber machine guns and a one-pounder cannon mounted on the forward deck. Intended for pursuit, the cutter was capable of speeds up to thirty-five knots. But Nolan was unconcerned about being overtaken, for the Cherokee, powered by Liberty aircraft engines, could outrun any vessel on the Gulf. His purpose was to lure them into pursuit.

  Whizzer Duncan snapped a 100-round drum magazine into his Thompson chopper. The magazine was loaded with incendiary rounds, and when he opened fire, a stream of white-hot tracers spewed across the water. Nolan’s standing orders were to engage the Coast Guard, rather than kill seamen, and the tracers fell short of the cutter. The response was immediate: a blinding flare soared skyward, illuminating the night, and the one-pounder cannon roared. A geyser of water exploded off the bow of the Cherokee.

  The Liberty engines thundered and the speedboat took off on a westerly course. The Cherokee planed across the water, skimming the surface, its wake pocked by slugs from the machine guns on the cutter. CG-204 gave chase just as the flare died out and the sleek little boat zipped away at fifty knots. The cutter throttled up, her massive screws churning astern, but it was no contest. The Cherokee disappeared into the inky waters of the Gulf.

  Later that night, Diamond Jack Nolan walked into the Hollywood Club. His smile was that of a cat with a mouthful of feathers, and he carried a satchel stuffed with three hundred grand in cash.

  He thought Ollie Quinn and Dutch Voight would be pleased.

  Chapter Three

  The Strand was one of the major finance centers between New Orleans and San Francisco. From the Civil War to present times, the port of Galveston was also one of the busiest shipping points in the world. The wharves along Water Street handled more exports than any harbor in America except New York. The language spoken along the Strand was the language of commodities and exchange, and money.

  High in a windless sky, the sun was a white orb as Durant crossed the Strand the next morning. Yesterday, after leaving the bank, he had called and made an appointment with William Magruder for ten o’clock. He regretted the hard feelings with Ira Aldridge, but he had no qualms about dealing with one of the Island’s wealthiest men. Business, after all, was business.

  The Magruder Building was a ten-story brick structure at Twenty-second and the Strand. The lobby opened onto a vaulting atrium, towering upward to a domed ceiling limned by a massive skylight. Durant took a birdcage elevator to the tenth floor, the marble corridors flooded by the skylight and the warmth of the sun. A suite of offices for William Magruder & Company occupied the entire floor.

  A secretary ushered him into Magruder’s lavishly appointed office. Overlooking the wharves, it was furnished with wing chairs and a couch crafted of lush morocco leather. The walls were lined with nautical oil paintings, and at the far end of the room, framed between windows with a view of berthed ships, was a broad desk that looked carved from a solid piece of ebony. The room seemed somehow appropriate to the man behind the desk.

  William Magruder was a figure of considerable girth. His hair was plastered to his head like black paint on a boiled egg, and wattled jowls hung from his fleshy features. His beady eyes and stern, scowling countenance left the impression of a man who brought sighs of relief whenever he departed a room. He extended a meaty hand.

  “Good of you to come by, Mr. Durant. This is my son, Sherman.”

  A younger man, somewhere in his early thirties, rose from the leather couch. The resemblance was uncanny, though the son was taller and his puffy, ruddy face was that of a hard drinker. After a round of handshakes, Sherman settled back onto the couch and Durant took one of the wing chairs. Magruder lowered himself into a throne-like judge’s chair behind his desk.

  “Allow me to offer our sympathies for the loss of your uncle. We never saw eye-to-eye, you understand, but he was a good man. Solid as they come.”

  “Yes, he was,” Durant said. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

  “So you’re here to sell his bank, is that it?”

  “Are you a mind reader, Mr. Magruder?”

  “Why else would you be here? Matter of fact, who else would you sell it to?”

  Durant had done his homework. Last night, over drinks in a bar, he’d talked with a garrulous man who turned out to be a native of Galveston. He learned that the Magruders and the Seagraves were the two aristocratic families of the island. For all practical purposes, they controlled the economic lifeblood of the community. They were, in a very real sense, like feudal lords of old.

  William Magruder owned the Galveston City Bank, the Galveston Cotton Exchange, several hotels, and the largest insurance company in the Southwest. George Seagrave, the other financial lion, owned the Galveston Daily Chronicle, the largest sugar mills in Texas and Louisiana, and the Gulf Railroad, which had merged with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and added several million to his empire. Together, they owned the Galveston Wharf Company, which encompassed the entire waterfront. Galveston was the only deep-water harbor in Texas, and that gave them control of all shipping, domestic and foreign. They extorted a ransom in dockage by virtue of their monopoly.

  “So, young man,” Magruder said without expression. “What’s your proposition?�
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  Durant spread his hands. “A hundred thousand dollars and it’s yours. Ira Aldridge says it’s worth that and more.”

  “Aldridge is a nitwit and everybody in town knows it. I’ll give you twenty-five.”

  “I’m not here to horse trade, Mr. Magruder. A hundred’s my price.”

  Magruder laughed a blubbery roar. “I like a man who sticks to his guns. Let’s say fifty and call it a deal.”

  “No, sir,” Durant said, poker-faced. “A hundred, take it or leave it.”

  “You’re out of your league here, bub. Nobody in a thousand miles would buy that ten-cent bank and butt heads with me in Galveston. Your uncle learned that the hard way.”

  “Maybe so, but I won’t be blackjacked into a fast sale. You’ve heard my price.”

  “Mr. Durant,” Sherman interrupted smoothly. “We had you checked out and we know you’re a stuntman in moving pictures. Be prudent, take fifty thousand and consider it a windfall.” He paused with an oily smile. “You’ll never get a better offer.”

  Durant knew something about Sherman Magruder as well. Last night he’d learned the heir to the throne was a Yale graduate, considerably more urbane and sophisticated than the old man, and some thought he was even shrewder. He was jokingly referred to as “the bootlegger’s friend,” a man who loved his sauce.

  “The answer’s the same,” Durant said stubbornly. “I won’t let it go for less than market value.”

  “Market value?” Magruder snorted. “Your uncle was a fool and it appears to run in the family. The market value is what I’m willing to pay. Not a nickel more!”

  Durant stood. “I reckon I’ll just have to put it on the market and find out. Thanks for your time.”

  “You listen to me, bub. You won’t get an offer between here and Chicago! Nobody would dare come into my town.”

  Durant walked out the door. When it closed, Sherman slowly wagged his head. “Nice going, Pop. You insulted the man and drove him off.”

  “Goddammit, Sherm, don’t you tell me how to run my business. I know what I’m doing.”