“In exchange for…?”
“For a piece of what you make down there.”
“You don’t expect me to stay there forever…”
“Hell no. Jesus, that would be a fate worse than fucking death, you ask me,” said Charlie. “Just till we see which way this wind’s going to blow over.”
“In the meantime we all gotta make arrangements,” said Frank. “That’s why you need to cool off the Dutchman and put yourself on ice for a while.”
“Why isn’t Dutch here, Frank?” I asked. “You guys trying to cut him out or something?”
There was an awkward silence around the table. Meyer looked at the floor, Frank looked over my head and Luciano looked even oilier than usual.
“Let’s put it this way, Owney,” said Meyer softly. “Dutch ain’t no team player.”
“He don’t get along with the group,” said Charlie.
“And he sure as hell don’t play nice,” said Frank. That was clear enough for me, so I decided to keep my mouth shut as Costello looked around the room. “That about it?”
Lansky and Luciano nodded. “That’s about it,” said Frank.
I got up to leave and this time nobody stopped me. “Have a nice time down in Bubbles,” said Costello. “I hear the golf is great down there.”
“Come down and visit some time, Frank,” I said. “You too, Meyer, Charlie. Bring your sticks.”
“We should all live so long,” Meyer was muttering as I departed.
On my way down to Bubbles I saw the news that Roosevelt had beaten Smith for the nomination. I felt sorry for Al, who was a good egg, but that’s the way the ball bounces.
I heard all about it from Charlie Lucky. Longy Zwillman brought the deal to the Roosevelt camp, Lansky to the Smith forces: the nomination in exchange for calling off the Seabury dogs. There were plenty of delegates for whom the Outfit had done favors, run booze, got girlfriends abortions, and it was time to call in the chits.
I never got it straight whether Roosevelt’s men actually agreed to the deal or whether they faked Longy out of his socks, but somebody gave somebody a sign or signal and the next thing you know, FDR was up there on the podium, making his acceptance speech, tryin’ to pretend he still had pins under him, and every newsie going right along with the scam.
“I talked to Smith right after, told him how sorry I was,” Charlie phoned me later. I was in my suite at the Arlington Hotel. Agnes was in bed with me.
“What did Al say?”
There was a short pause on the other end of the line. “He said, ‘Charlie, you have just made the biggest mistake of your life. Frank Roosevelt’s word isn’t worth the mouth it comes out of. I ought to know. He will fuck you sideways. He will kill you.’ ”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints,” says I, hanging up.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” Agnes asked me as I turned back to her. I rose and looked out the window, down onto Central Avenue, looking at a little building across the way called the Southern Club and Grill, which sat right next to an apartment building that looked like good old 440 West 34th, shrunk in the Hydrox Laundry.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You know I don’t cotton to that popish talk.”
“Then don’t pay me no never mind,” I said, trying to speak her language.
When I got back to New York a week later, I found out that the parole board, at the urging of Democratic presidential candidate Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, had revoked my parole and ordered me back to Sing Sing the next morning.
Chapter Sixty-One
I wasn’t going to go without saying good-bye to my Mother. This entailed being driven down to 34th Street while lying flat on the floor in the back of a car in the dead of night. I got out near the rail yards and dove into one of our old Gopher tunnels, scooted through the usual shite, trotted under 34th Street toward Pennsylvania Station, detoured off to the right, came up the back stairs of 440 and let myself in to my mother’s place.
I featured the bulls staked out for me in the front, and I had to laugh that they would think I’d be so dumb as to fox-trot in my own front door, when there were a million other ways into any dump in the nabe, but how would they know that, they were new Irish, fancy-pants, no pigs in the parlor, lace-curtain with hot water and toilets, and some of ’em even with electric fans to keep ’em cool instead of honestly sweating the way we used to.
I let myself in the front door, waking my mother. “Go back to bed, Ma,” I barked, and she did. My lines was tapped, that I knew. The first call I made was to Joe Shalleek telling him to stall, and the second call was to my sister, May, a few floors below, but her husband, Jack, said she was asleep, and the third thing I did was call Agnes in Hot Springs and tell her I might have trouble making our dinner date next week, but then again I might not.
“What’s the trouble, Owen dear?” she said. Agnes had a kind of sweet disposition that’s hard to find in a woman, but then we were still courting. They’re all lovey-dovey and sweet-talky while you’re courting them, but after the ring, forget it, buddy, you’re on your own.
One little detail I had left out of my relationship with Agnes, which got more serious every time I visited, was the fact that I was still legally married. I’m not sure it would have mattered very much—the crazy kid was head over heels for me—and in fact my bein’ a Catholic was much worse in her eyes, not to mention her old man the Postmaster’s, than being married. There weren’t a hell of a lot of Catholics in Bubbles, not to mention Irish, but there were at least two Catholic churches, and the rest of ’em was all heathen Christian of one sort or another.
I have to admit, I never felt very comfortable around Christians, you know, those kind of Christians. Although I couldn’t prove it, sometimes I suspected that they hated us Catholics more than they hated the Jews, which didn’t seem to make much sense since we both more or less believed in Jesus Christ His Own Good Self, although they were more than a little wobbly about the BVM, which is the Blessed Virgin Mary to you. In fact, I think they even hated us more than they hated the coloreds, especially down South, where the coloreds were at least useful, up to more or less the present day.
Loretta—you remember her—was still alive and living up in Yonkers. I’d sorta lost track of time, but I figured my little girl was almost twenty by now, and there was hardly a month or a year that went by that I didn’t wonder what had happened to her. I knew she was still kicking because she kept cashing the checks I sent her, and I had a coupla photos of her at her First Communion and her Confirmation. Still, I realized that Loretta and I were going to have to have a chat sooner or later, especially if I wanted to marry Agnes, which I was seriously considering owing to the present political situation.
For the truth was I had a tough play to make and I was only going to get one shot at it. It reminded me a bit of the situation way back when I had to wreck the Gophers in order to save them, and it was funny that the same bloke should find himself in the same situation twice, but I guess that’s what keeps the Man Upstairs amused and interested in our little fates.
The outlines of this play were still forming in my mind as I made my fourth phone call, to Vannie Higgins, the flying lobster fisherman on my payroll. He and I both had taken aeroplane lessons from a retired Army flyboy, Major Thomas G. Lanphier, who just so happened to have been a friend of Charles Lindbergh. In fact, I’d bought a plane from Lanphier, which I was hangaring out on the Island. “Feel like a trip, Vannie?”
“Owney?” I’d obviously rousted him.
“Meet me at Roosevelt Field in an hour, and you can forget about the money you owe me.”
“Gee, Owney—have you seen the papers? They’re lookin’ for ya everywhere.”
“What the hell do you think I’m callin’ about?” I snarled.
“Ya don’t have to get sore about it,” said Vannie.
“An hour,” I said, and hung up.
I figured me and Vannie could make Hot Springs in four or five hours, and from there
I could plan my next move. I hadn’t thought Roosevelt would move so fast, but a guy with the world in his hip pocket and the White House in his sights is liable to do anything, which reminded me of my fifth phone call, which was by rights to the Dutchman.
This was my luck that night: Dutch was in bed with a broad, answering the phone out of breath.
“What?”
“It’s me.”
A girl’s giggle, faint and vaguely familiar, and then: “Whattaya want at this hour?”
“We got trouble.”
“You’re tellin’—hey, cut that out—me?”
“Roosevelt’s a rat.”
“Knock it off. I’m talkin’ to—”
“You’ve gotta warn everybody. Meyer, Charlie, Frank.”
I heard Dutch hiccup. “Fuck ’em. What’ve they ever done for me?”
“Have it your way. But you might want to think about relocating.”
More noises, sex noises. “I’ll take it under advisement, Counselor,” said Dutch.
“I’m going out of town for a while.”
“Have a nice trip,” he said as he rang off.
The hell with him. I tried.
Hiram took me out to Garden City in a plain old Chevy, which we figured nobody would be looking for. The cops were so used to seeing me toolin’ around in my Doozy, or at the very least a Packard, that a Chevy with a Negro at the wheel and a white man in the backseat, like he was drunk and headin’ home to Long Island after a night out on the town, wouldn’t look too hinky.
“You want I should wait, Mr. Owney?” asked Hiram, anxious. My first instinct was to say no, but things were different now, things were changing on a daily basis, make that hourly, and so I told him to pull the car into the bushes and watch, just in case.
I stood out there in the dark, feeling like a fool. Worse, feeling like an animal—hunted, and in my own town, the only town I’d ever known and ever cared to know. The one I’d traveled so far to get to, and now this—some cigarette-smoking cripple who’d married his own cousin like some hillbilly boy from Arkansas was driving me out of New York. That’s when it struck me that among the Christians, there wasn’t hardly any difference between the toffs and the toilers, between the high life and the low life. When you got right down to it, they all married their cousins, one way or another.
The more I thought about the situation, the angrier I got. I began to feel like one of my mug fighters, like Camera, who’d been told to take a dive—or worse, a coward who was running from a fight. I’d been battling cops all my life, and since when had I run from ’em? Since never is when, and this was no time to start.
This was my state of mind when Vannie finally pulled up. Hiram flashed the lights at me a couple of times, so I knew he was coming, and I was ready for him, a brand-new play in mind.
“You serious about the dough?”
“Why else would I have invited you here?”
“The pleasure of my company?”
We walked together to the hangar where they kept my plane, which was called an Ireland, something I liked. It’s hard to believe now, but back then you could more or less come and go as you pleased, and so the night watchman didn’t see nothing amiss about two fellas taking their flying machine out for a spin. I made sure the flatfoot saw both of us, chatted a bit, small talk, and then Vannie had the craft ready and I said so long, bet you never thought you’d ever meet Owney Madden, eh, and at that the guard’s jaw dropped and I reminded him to keep his mouth shut until we were long gone if he knew what was good for him.
I threw a kit in the crate and stepped in as Vannie fired her up. “Where we going?” he said as the props began to spin.
“Arkansas. You heard of it?”
“Ain’t that kinda far away? I told my—”
“Yeah, you told your mother you’d be home for breakfast. But you won’t be.”
“But—”
“But nothing. You’ll do as you’re told or you’ll be sorry.”
“But I got business—”
“We’ll take care of it.”
“But—”
“Can’t you say anything but ‘but’? Let me put it this way: if I see your face in New York in the next couple of weeks, you’re a dead man.”
That seemed to get his attention. “Okay, you don’t have to get sore about it,” he said. “I was just—”
“Going to shut up. So shut up and listen.”
I gave Vannie his instructions, which was to get himself to Hot Springs and make like we’d both gone. Agnes would “put me up” at her father’s house on West Grand and she’d store my things there, to prove I’d checked in. I’d had the foresight to grab a newspaper on the drive out, so there was even a copy of that day’s Mirror for good measure. As for Vannie, he was to stay down there and make himself as scarce as possible for as long as possible, at my expense of course.
The plane was starting to move as I slipped out and hit the ground. I saw Vannie take off, bank, nearly clip a stand of trees, gain altitude and disappear, and hoped like hell he took my threat seriously. I couldn’t afford any more double crosses, but if he tried to hand me one, I was in a position to do something about it. Unlike with Roosevelt.
Good old Hiram was waiting for me by the time I trudged back to where the car was hidden.
“Have a nice trip, Mr. Owney?” he said.
“Ask me in four or five days, Hiram,” I replied. “Until then, I’m on holiday.”
“Where to now? Where you ain’t gonna be, I mean.”
“How’s the Bronx sound?”
“Good as anyplace else not to be,” said Hiram, starting up the engine.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Four or five days was about how much I figured I had before the cops caught up with me, and about the time I needed to put my plan into action.
Here’s the way I had it figured: First, Roosevelt was going to beat Hoover standing on his head unless the country saw him as too New York, too Tammany, which it wasn’t going to do. Second, he’d have to show he was tough on crime, by which he mostly meant bootleggers like me—a cheap ploy that didn’t cost him nothin’, seein’ as how Repeal was right around the corner. Third, the Outfit was going to be under a lot of pressure, and I knew us well enough to know that we didn’t handle pressure very well. There were too many hoods like Charlie Lucky and his gunners, too many crackpots like the Dutchman who got mad and got even pretty much in one motion, and not enough brains like Lansky or diplomats like Costello. Temper had always been our weak spot, going back as far as Monk and his club. Our instincts were to slug first and worry about the cops later, and I include myself in that roster as well.
Fourth, with the heat on, Charlie and the boys would try to grab for everything they could right now. Dutch may have been nuts on the subject of Dewey, but he was onto something. Dewey was a humorless little prig with a mustache who wasn’t above shaking down campaign contributors himself, as I heard and believed it. What we were witnessing was nothing less than a reversion to the old days, when the pols ran us instead of us running them. Only this time, they were adopting some of our tactics against us: cutting deals and then welshing, shaking us down for protection, muscling in our rackets. I guess it’s easy to be a ruthless sonofabitch when you don’t have to worry about the Law, when you are the Law, but if you ask me, it’s dishonorable too. Honor is one thing and trust is another, but when both of them break down, you got chaos, which is what I could see coming like the old Death Avenue express.
Thoughts of persons such as Mayor Walker and Jimmy Hines floated through my mind. The Seabury johnnies were after the Mayor full-time now. Beau James! The mug who, when he was Al Smith’s right-hand man in the state Senate, had legalized prizefighting and allowed the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers to play baseball on Sunday! And saved the nickel subway fare when he was Mayor, takin’ his argument all the way to the United States Supreme Court! What had all them other bums in fancy suits done for the people compared to Jimmy? And what had he ever done t
o them? But Jimmy’d been too deep in the rackets for too long for them to spare his hide. Between the gangsters and the politicians there was going to be a bloodbath for sure, and whether the bodies were blown apart by bullets or the newspapers was a distinction without a difference.
So here was my agenda: save as much of my businesses as I could, try to keep as much of the peace as possible and get the hell somewhere safe to enjoy my old age. I’d already been as close to death as I ever wanted to be, and had no intention of repeating the experience anytime soon.
It seemed to me Dutch was the key. He had the shooters and the territory. If the two of us worked together and stayed together, we could keep Charlie Lucky and his troops at bay, long enough for us to salvage whatever the crooks in the federal and state governments were going to let us keep.
I sat in the backseat, low, and when we got to Queens, I hit the floor and stayed there until Hiram told me we were in the Bronx, 543 Brook Avenue to be exact, where the Dutchman and Joey Noe had started in the rackets and Dutch still kept a private pad for sentiment’s sake. Brook Avenue was a street rendered innocuous by its proximity to Webster Avenue to the west and the railroad tracks to the east in darkest Morrisania.
I told Hiram to wait a block or so away and as my car glided up and idled for a moment I jumped out and hit the buzzer for Dutch’s place. After just a couple of punches the door buzzed me in and there I was face-to-face with Abe Landau and Lulu Rosenkrantz. Abe was bald and looked like a college professor; Lulu was balding and looked like a mug. But they was both tough eggs, as good in a fight as anybody I ever saw. Which is why when I hear folks talking, especially down here in Bubbles, about what pansies the sheenies are, I just wish they could have known Dutch, Bo, Abe and Lulu, could have seen them in action like I did.
We were all old friends, but they seemed very surprised to see me when I told them I had to see Dutch in a big hurry.
“He ain’t in,” said Abe.
“He’s busy,” said Lulu.
Since they spoke simultaneously, I knew right away something was up. “I don’t care if he ain’t in or he’s busy, this is real important, can’t wait, and since when did either of you yeggs know me to give ya malarkey when it wasn’t completely called for?”
And All the Saints Page 37
