Given that there was only two mooks who wasn’t invited to our little beach party, and both of them paddies who sunburned easy, I had pretty much narrowed it down culpritwise. Then I thought over the whole roster of my colleagues and pretty much opened it up again. That was one of the problems with this business: when your enemies are your friends and your friends are your enemies, it’s hard to know which you’d rather have.
The papers the next day said “Four Killed in Harlem Auto Accident,” by which they meant the four white men in the Packard. There was no description of any of the damage, because newspapers didn’t much care about coloreds one way or the other, and that was about it, because I phoned Winchell and got him to squash any further coverage if he knew what was good for him.
I’ll tell you, though, the thing that really put a damper on my day was when I got to the Cotton Club and there was Herman Stark telling me that Vincent Coll had grabbed Big Frenchy and wanted $35,000 for him alive and nothing at all for him dead, and what was I going to do about it?
Chapter Fifty-One
“What happened?”
“Went out to get a sandwich. Vincent grabbed ’im.”
“When and where?”
“Seventh Avenue, outside the Argonaut.”
“We sure it’s Coll?”
“Rang about an hour ago.”
“Where’s he got George?”
“Westchester somewhere.”
“Still alive?”
“Best of our knowledge.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Briefly.”
“What’d he say?”
“Pay ’im.”
I had to think about this for a minute. It wasn’t the money, exactly, although $35,000 was a lot of dough. And I liked George, couldn’t do business without him. It’s just that I didn’t like the precedent, as the shysters say. You start paying ransom for a mug, next thing you know, some ape is grabbing the whole zoo. You gotta draw the line somewhere, and the question I was facing was whether that line was on my side of Frenchy, or Vincent Coll’s.
I pulled a thumb in the direction of my car. “Get those dents out pronto,” I said.
I never liked Coll, Irish or no Irish. I knew his folks, and they were decent enough, but there was something wrong with Vincent from the start. He was still a kid, and looked like a cross between a choirboy and a movie star. Famine Irish, catnip to the dames. But he was missing a screw or two. I’d known plenty of stone killers in my time—hell, the tabs said I was one myself—but Coll was different. Just like Jack and Eddie Diamond, Vincent and his brother Peter were both no good. The last thing I needed was two crazy micks, make that four, loose cannons all, and so I decided to call Dutch.
The rules was like whacked like, but I never liked them rules. What with my clubs and various other business enterprises and all, I was trying to keep the muscle to a minimum. Oh, I wasn’t against killin’ a harp when he needed killin’, as Little Patsy Doyle proved, but there was something unseemly about the entire enterprise, something untoward, and for this hit I preferred to contract out.
I finally rousted the Dutchman out of bed with one of his babes. I don’t know what it is about a mug with a gun to a dame, but even the nicest girls drop their knickers pronto when they meet a real hard guy, and Dutch had as much success as any of us in that department, even though he had no manners of any kind and never did learn how to treat a lady.
“Who is it?” the nameless dame said, and I could just tell over the wire she was blonde too.
“None of your business,” I said. “Gimme Dutch.”
I could hear various noises and while I waited I thought about May, and May and Jack, and then started to get really mad. I was steamin’ by the time the Dutchman came on the line.
“What is it?”
“That gobshite Coll.”
“What else is new—hey, lay off, will ya?” I could hear broad noises in the background and then the sound of a hard smack. “What’s the situation?”
“Grabbed Frenchy. He’s shakin’ me down,”
“Whattsamatta, ya don’t love me no more?” That was the twist. Another slap and she shut up.
“Where are you? Slipper, Fey, Livingstone or Cotton?”
“Cotton.”
“Be there in a half.” Since you could practically spit into the Bronx from Lenox and 142nd, I knew he would be.
I went up on the roof to visit my pigeons, have a smoke and think things over. The new Yankee Stadium was only a few blocks away, just across the Harlem River; I could practically hear the crowd noises. In my mind I watched the Bambino swing the bat, which made me think of the Big Fella and the way he swung the bat—talk about your Murderers Row—and then there was the Dutchman, running a comb through his greasy hair.
“This fuckin’ paddy, this sonofabitch piece a shit Irisher, how many times I gotta tell ya, he’s gotta go. I don’t care what you say, he’s gotta go and he will go, if I have to do it myself.”
He looked at me like I was objecting or something.
“The sonofabitchin’ bastard has been hijacking my beer trucks and generally fucking me up and down the Hudson River for the last six months.” Dutch plunked himself down next to me and the birds. “Jesus, between him and Diamond, I don’t know who to hate more.” He turned to me: “You’re a smart guy, Owney—who should I hate more?”
“Your call, Dutch. It’s all the same to me. All’s I know is one or both of ’em took a shot at me today, and I’m plenty sore about it.”
I offered him a cigarette and we talked things over but good, not just the hit, but the beer business, about politics, about Roosevelt’s chances to make the leap from Albany to Washington. We talked about Dewey, an up-and-coming lawyer agitating for an appointment to the D.A.’s office. Dewey was a Republican, which meant he was a reformer, which meant he was a goo-goo, which meant he could be trouble. That’s the kind of relationship we had; most people didn’t like Dutch Schultz, but you could talk straight with him, and as long as you were both armed, there was never any trouble.
In the end we decided that both Legs and Coll had to go. There were lots of things we were all willing to put up with, including a rubout or two, but hijacking booze and kidnapping aides were out of the question.
“They being micks and all, seems only right you should put ’em down,” said Dutch.
“Ixnay. I got a grudge against Vincent. That don’t look good to the cops or the newspapers.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Thirty thousand dollars. Double that for both of ’em.”
A thought occurred to Schultz, which didn’t happen very often unless it involved a heater. “Jeez, what if Coll tries to grab one of us while we’re lookin’ for him? That crazy sonofabitchin’ bastard—”
“Maybe you got a point there.” It wasn’t that I was yellow, but you never knew what the Mad Mick might be up to. Untethered, he was nuts. It behooved us, as my Mother said, to be careful, to play this smart.
“Maybe I’ll go down to Polly Adler’s and stay there for a while.” Ugly little Polly Adler ran the classiest whorehouse in town, conveniently located on West 54th Street, practically next door to Dutch’s own Chateau Madrid and just down the street from Legs’s Hotsy-Totsy Club.
It’s a good thing Big Frenchy’s gone these many years now, because I never did have the heart to tell him that Dutch and I discussed his fate dispassionately, the way businessmen ought to discuss things.
“What if you just pay?” Dutch asked.
“Maybe I will, but I want my money back.”
He gave me a look. “You goin’ soft?”
“Goin’ smart.” I finished my fag, right down to the butt, even though my lungs hurt like holy hell. “Got enough holes in me to last a lifetime.”
“You gonna pay both of us?”
“One thing you gotta learn, Dutch,” I said. “Patience. I’m a long-term investor. Plus I know you won’t let me down.”
I sent a couple of m
y lesser boys, who were expendable and didn’t know it, up to Westchester with a suitcase two days later. They came back with George, not much the worse for wear. His clothes were a little mussed, like he slept in them, but otherwise he looked all right to me.
“What took you so long?” he asked, miffed.
“Business,” I replied. We’d waited the extra day to see if Coll was serious about the kidnapping racket, as opposed to simple murder. Because if he wasn’t, if he gave us back a corpse in exchange for our dough, then we wouldn’t bother with him if he nabbed somebody the next time, assuming he was still alive to do so.
“Am I worth it?” I could see he was a little sore.
“That’s up to you,” I joshed.
Except to say yes or no, George didn’t speak to me for forty-eight hours.
Chapter Fifty-Two
May got married in 1931 at St. Mike’s to a fella named Jack, but it wasn’t Jack Diamond. There was a Democrat district worker officer, name of John F. Marrin, Jack, who done a few things for me. I liked Jack. I liked him for a number of reasons. He was young, strong, healthy, didn’t drink much, was good to his family. I liked his sister, Alice, a quiet religious sort of girl. Most of all, I liked the fact that he wasn’t going nowhere, that he was content to be who he was, and wasn’t going to get mixed up in what Costello was calling Our Thing, especially if he knew what was good for him.
I gave my sister the choice of marrying this Jack, Marrin not Diamond, or spending the rest of her life locked in her room. You may laugh at that today, but back then we really did things like that, and everybody had a crazy cousin or uncle living in the attic, who only came down at mealtimes, and sometimes not even then, and if they did that often enough, one day one of the kids would tiptoe up the stairs to see if Uncle Dan was all right and there he would be, dead, and so you’d have to plant ’im, and that would be that.
May thought about it for a while, not that there was much to think about, and then she give me her answer and it was, how about that, yes. When I told Jack, it was like he won the Irish Sweepstakes, he couldn’t believe his luck. “Take care of her, treat her good. You hit her, you’re a dead man. I’ll give you one of the apartments at 440. I’ll make sure you have a good job, plenty of money, people to watch over you. Only one thing.”
“What’s that, Mr. Madden?” He was polite too.
“You don’t brag about our relationship. You don’t mention to nobody you’re my brother-in-law. You keep your wife out of my clubs, out of my business and out of my life unless I send for her. Clear?”
He nodded.
“I picked you because you’re a good man, Jack. Because I trust you. Think you can handle it?”
Another nod.
“Do you think you can handle her?”
“I’ll sure try, Mr. Madden.”
“Good lad.” I handed him two packages, one large and one small. “Open the big one first.”
He tore the brown paper off an elongated box, reached inside and extracted one of Frenchy’s prize shotguns.
“Watch it, it’s loaded,” I cautioned. “For home use only. I don’t expect you to ever have to get involved in any rough stuff, but if trouble comes looking for me and finds you or your family instead, this will help you settle it. Now open the other one.”
Inside was the biggest diamond ring he’d ever seen. “That’s your engagement ring. Give it to her tonight. Don’t tell her where it come from. She’ll know anyway.”
I saw the picture in the paper a few days later. She was wearing a beautiful diaphanous dress with a plunging neckline and a ruffle at the bottom, her long arms bare and elegant. There were three rows of pearls around her neck, a double strand and a single. Her hair was marcelled in high style, but just a couple of curls were peeking out from beneath a broad-brimmed hat of the very latest fashion. Her left hand, with its carefully polished nails, rested lightly on her hip, displaying a diamond-studded watch, which I’d given her, and on her ring finger, Jack’s rock. “Miss Madden Engaged to Mr. Marrin,” the story said.
What struck me most, however, was her face. Her mouth was crimped in the Madden smile, a small crooked tight-lipped slash that the three of us shared with our mother, and which on her signaled a private emotion so deeply buried no one could ever excavate it. Her blue eyes were angled ever so slightly to the left, as the photographer had probably commanded, but they were still looking right at you, unblinking, frank and wise. They were looking right at me, and always would be.
Marty gave the bride away. Big Frenchy was the best man. Ma and Alice Marrin were the bridesmaids. There were no guests. May cried. I didn’t, because I wasn’t there.
Chapter Fifty-Three
On behalf of Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky and the rest of the ruling council, I was traveling all over the country. To Chicago, to visit with Al until he got busted by the feds and shipped off to the Rock, and to work with Moses Annenberg on our race-wire racket. To Cleveland and Detroit, keeping an eye on our supply lines. To Florida of course, especially as I was now the major silent investor in several fine racetracks down there. I even got to New Orleans once in a while, to see if we could bring those fellas onto the reservation. But the New Orleans mob was always recalcitrant, and so we mostly left them alone until Meyer could figure out a way to approach them without getting killed.
I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I knew this life couldn’t last, and maybe it was time to start thinking about life after Manhattan, just in case. There were two places I really enjoyed going, and they were Los Angeles and Hot Springs, Arkansas, which everybody called Bubbles on account of the natural hot springs found there—forty-seven of them in all, each one percolating along at 143 degrees.
Los Angeles you know all about from the movies and whatnot. What you probably don’t know is how much we—and I’m primarily referring to the Big Fella and myself—influenced the picture shows. To this day there’s some journalist or producer johnny coming down here to Bubbles to see if I’d sit for an interview or sign away the rights to a life whose rights I signed away to a higher power than Hollywood long go. One of my boys, who drove a cab in his spare time, brought a writer right to my front door on West Grand and told me all about how the guy was a swell fella, I’d love talking to him, etc. and so forth, but one thing I never do is change my own rules no matter what, and those rules said no reporters ever, and if it was good enough for Runyon and Winchell, it was good enough for this mug, and so I told my boy, “You ever bring another reporter to this house I will cut your heart out.” He believed me, and that was the end of that.
Producers, though, were another story. For that, I have George Ranft to blame.
You remember Georgie, my old pat from our salad days in the Kitchen. Not cut out for the gang life, but a keen observer of it. As it turned out, our racing businesses were growing mightily, and so I went out to the Coast to see about some investments in Santa Anita and I took Texas and Georgie with me, because they both wanted to be in pictures, and the pictures would want them to be in ’em if they knew what was good for them.
First time I got to Hollywood, I understood right off why the gangs’d never had much luck here: the real gangsters was running the studios. I don’t mean those mugs was real gangsters, though they talked tough enough, like their Hebrew brethren back East, but in a real fight I knew they would fold up like a cheap squeeze-box, not like Monk or the Dutchman. Still, they had a similar way about ’em as we did, being used to getting their way and so forth, plus the directors and the actors not to mention the actresses really liked to drink, and the long and the short of it is we all got along swell, and with no one did I get along sweller than Howard Hawks.
Hawks had been at the Silver Slipper more than once, and was quite fond of Texas, so with his help we got her into a couple of pictures, including Queen of the Night Clubs, which I think came out around ’29, don’t hold me to it, Georgie would know. Talkies was all the rage, and nobody could talk like Texas, but whatever she had in the c
lubs she forgot to bring to the screen—maybe you had to be there—so Hawks was looking to do something else, and one night at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills he brought up the subject.
“Say, Madden, what would you think about doing a picture about your life story?”
“Sure, Howard,” I said, slicing off a piece of choice flank steak, “except that then I’d have to cut out your heart.”
Hawks laughed but Georgie said: “He ain’t kidding.”
“What about the Big Fella?” I followed up. “You know how much he loves publicity. Wasn’t he just on the cover of Time magazine?”
“You bet, boss,” said Georgie.
“You think?” asked Hawks.
“I know. Al loves the limelight.”
“What if we make the picture and he doesn’t like it?” Hawks looked kind of nervous, who wouldn’t?
“Worried about your health?”
“Don’t worry,” said Georgie, patting Hawks’s arm. “They only kill each other.”
“Except when we don’t.”
I saw Hawks staring at Georgie, his face, his shape. Only a bona fide director could stare at another guy that way and get away with it. “What about you, George? Think you’d like to be in pictures?”
I thought Georgie was going to kiss him right there in the Derby. That was another thing a mug in Hollywood could do and not get punched in the chops. If there was anything George Ranft had wanted all his life, it was to be somebody, a big shot, a mug that didn’t risk getting whacked by other mugs, except playing let’s pretend. A movie star.
“Me?”
Hawks let out his breath. “We’d have to change the name of course…”
“You ain’t gonna give me no homo name, are ya?” asked Georgie. “Besides, what’s wrong with my handle?”
“Yeah,” I chimed.
Hawks breathed in. “Too kraut, too hard to say. No offense.”
“You got a better idea?” I asked him.
He thought for a moment. “How ’bout we just drop the ‘n’? How’s ‘George Raft’ sound?” He looked at both of us. “Got a nice masculine ring to it.”
And All the Saints Page 32
