Chapter Thirty-One
LATE LAST SUMMER—AUGUST 5, 1939, if that’s specific enough for these proceedings—a Mrs. Janet McDonald, divorcee, pulled her car into her garage, closed the door, ran a hose from the tailpipe through a hole in a window into the car, and went to sleep with her daughter Pearl, aged eleven, beside her on the front seat. Within two days of the murder-suicide, copies of a letter bearing Mrs. McDonald’s signature were delivered to all the Detroit newspapers and to authorities at the city, state, and federal levels. It read:
On this night, a girl has ended her life because of the mental cruelty caused by Racketeer William McBride, ex-Great Lakes Numbers House operator. McBride is the go-between man for Lieut. John McCarthy.
He arranges the fix between our dutiful Lieut, and the Racketeers.
Should you care to learn more of this story, get in touch with McBride through Ryan’s bookie, 222 Lafayette Street West; Phone Clifford 1572.
He glories in telling lies, so don’t believe everything he tells you, as I did.
Janet McDonald
The sob sisters got a lot of play out of the tragic plight of this woman scorned, who evidently held that her daughter had been wronged as deeply, hence the decision to take her along; I can only imagine what a pro like Andrea St. Charles would have done with it if she’d lived to write about it. Meanwhile there was the expected public outcry, the expected raids on bookie parlors city wide, the expected interrogations, and the expected exoneration of McCarthy, head of the Detroit Rackets Squad, by his superiors. But the newspapers pressed for deeper action, and within three weeks of Janet McDonald’s suicide, a one-man grand jury was appointed to probe accusations of widespread corruption in the police department. Despite the almost exclusively Irish nature of this alleged conspiracy—McCarthy had begun his career in law enforcement under the political patronage of Big Jim Dolan, the Irish Pope, dead in 1937 of a cerebral hemorrhage—its slow uncovering during testimony led to a panic of resignations throughout the department, among them that of Deputy Commissioner, formerly Chief of Detectives, Valery Kozlowski. He is now presumably caring for his crippled wife and using his rubber truncheon to train stallions on his ranch near Kalamazoo. I miss him in the way you miss the enemy you know, whose dangers and weaknesses are predictably familiar. Perversely, I don’t miss the reasonably honest Hermann Gabriel, who took a disability pension and moved to Arizona when the Prohibition Squad was disbanded.
The resignations rocked gangland. Having established prices and a payoff system comfortable to all parties, the vice lords were now forced to begin negotiations all over again with the reform people. Breaking in new partners is always frustrating.
It’s no problem of Joey Machine’s, however. In 1932, Detroit, having beaten the rest of the nation to the punch by drafting its own law against the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages a year before the ratification of the Volstead Act, repeated its boldness by lifting the ban locally twelve months ahead of Repeal. But by then, Joey’s monopoly of the policy business on the East Side had cushioned the blow, and in the fall of 1935 he was conducting an aggressive campaign of defense against a brand new charge of federal income tax evasion, this time for the years 1931 through 1934, from his newly bulletproofed headquarters above the Acme Garage when he fell victim to his unvarying weekly routine, the only truly tidy element in his messy, haphazard, miserly life. Monday through Friday found him putting in his daily twelve hours at his desk, taking all his meals in as he counted receipts and kept tabs on the betting with his collectors by telephone; Saturdays he rested at home with his wife in Rochester; Sundays he paid a visit to the house on Sylvester, where the books were kept, to tally the weekend take, always heavy after the Friday payday. The raid by the Treasury Department in 1931 had forced him to install an early-warning system there, and he no longer offered an easy target to boulevard shooters by walking to the corner, using his car instead for errands of twenty blocks to a hundred yards, but every Sunday between 1:00 and 1:10 P.M. he and Dom Polacki and one or more of his accountants drove around the corner to a little walk-up restaurant where he enjoyed his usual plate of pasta and clam sauce washed down with red wine before returning to the books at 2:30.
At 2:24 P.M. Sunday, October 20, Joey was walking down the narrow staircase from the restaurant to the ground floor with Dom and a bookkeeper named Anthony Napolitano when a man standing at the bottom swung a Thompson submachine gun out from under his coat and sprayed thirty-seven bullets up the stairwell. Dom, a fast shooter for his size but not known for his accuracy, got off two shots from the .32 revolver he carried under his right arm without hitting the assailant, who made his escape in a late-model Auburn driven by another man. Dom Polacki, born Casimir Mischiewicz, was killed instantly when a .45 slug tore through his heart. Napolitano was pronounced dead at Detroit Receiving Hospital with a bullet in his brain. Joey Machine was hit in the chest and stomach but lived for another three hours, babbling deliriously, while a police stenographer sat by his bed at Receiving jotting down his ravings. During the last hour he lapsed into unconsciousness. In one of those ironical twists the press loved, the coroner declared that the shot that actually killed Joey was fired from Dom Polacki’s gun—a ricochet.
The transcript of his rambling last comments appeared in all the newspapers the next day. About the only thing in it that made sense was the recurring plea: “Get the kike off my a—.”
The killer and his driver were never identified, although both had been seen clearly by several witnesses. It was decided that they had been shipped in from out of town for the job. No arrests were made, but it’s widely assumed that Frankie Orr put Joey on the spot, with or without the approval of Sal Borneo, who by then was in semi-retirement after a disabling stroke. Currently, Borneo’s attorneys are fighting his indictment on charges of income tax evasion and labor racketeering on grounds that he’s too ill to stand trial. The rumor is he’s dying, which, if true, will make him the first member of Detroit’s organized underworld to expire from natural causes. Meanwhile Frankie—Mr. Oro now, a family man with a slightly undersize eight-year-old boy and a wife who only comes out at weddings and funerals—has been elected unanimously to head the Unione Siciliana. He hasn’t garroted or used a steak knife on anyone in a long time, which I count an improvement forced upon him by his new executive status. He pays taxes, has his suits made at the same place that dresses most of the General Motors board of directors, and surrounds himself with bodyguards with college degrees who know how to tie a formal bow and look no more menacing in evening dress than the Detroit Lions at a polio benefit.
Back to 193. Despite the fact that the serial numbers of the revolvers used in the Collingwood Massacre had been filed off by an expert, the three killers and the man who drove the car away afterward were identified in record time. Inspector Frank Fraley of the Canfield Street station told Kozlowski that eyewitness descriptions at the scene fit two of the three men he had ordered out of the nearby Orlando Hotel the previous night on complaints that they were using their adjoining rooms as an office. He knew them because they had all been guests of the station at one time or another: Irving Milberg, Harry Fleischer, and Henry Keywell. All three were known Purple Gang killers who hired out to all sides in the gutter wars; Fleischer and Keywell were commonly believed to have been among the shooters who carried out the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre for Capone. In the early confusion, some of the papers reported that the slaughter was the result of an altercation with members of the Little Jewish Navy, the Purples’ archenemy of the moment. The Banner got it right from the start, thanks to Walter DiVirgilio’s ability to bring coherence to my late-night call to the rewrite desk. The Times got it right, too, for reasons I’ll go into later.
The warning the state police broadcast over its new radio band said that the suspects in the massacre were “desperate men who would rather shoot it out than submit to arrest.” They must not have heard it, because within two days of the event all four, Barberra included,
surrendered without resistance when police raided the apartment where they’d been hiding less than twenty blocks from the Collingwood; a neighboring tenant had grown suspicious and tipped off the bulls. The four were relieved of nine pistols and revolvers, several boxes of ammunition, and ten thousand dollars in cash.
The evidence when they came to trial was convincing. Inspector Fraley’s claim of having ousted them from the Orlando Hotel suggested that they’d been using it as a base of operations while they cased the Collingwood. Upstairs apartment dwellers who had witnessed the flight of two of the killers down the back stairs picked Stink Barberra and Henry Key well out of a lineup at headquarters. Under heavy interrogation in the Beaubien basement, Irving Milberg, believed to have been the wheel man, identified Harry Fleischer as the third shooter, the one who had brushed past me on the front stairs. Add to that Jack Dance’s dying reference to Barberra, related on the stand by Chief Kozlowski as if he’d been present when it was made, and the traces of garlic the police lab found on all four of the bullets removed from Jack’s body, and Wayne County Prosecutor E. Wharton Clay had the strongest case he’d had against anyone since the Sylvester Street shooting, with happier results for justice in the absence of a Nathan Rabinowitz to speak for the defense. (The word in the back rooms was that a grateful Joey Machine, who had not been named by the defendants in interrogation, had tried to enlist Rabinowitz’s services in their cause, only to learn that the famed criminal attorney had retired from practice.) After a brief deliberation, the four were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, a major blow to the Purple Gang’s reputation for invincibility and an indication of how thoroughly a public beset by the Depression had grown weary of flashy gangster residue from the dead twenties. The convictions held in appeal.
Of the four, Irving Milberg and Harry Fleischer are serving their terms in the Southern Michigan Penitentiary at Jackson, and Henry Keywell, branded an incorrigible, has been removed to the prison’s tougher branch in Marquette in Michigan’s rocky Upper Peninsula. George Barberra, after several unsuccessful escape attempts, was transported to Alcatraz in 1936, where last January he and Arthur “Dock” Barker, late of Ma Barker’s celebrated family of outlaws, were shot and fatally wounded by guards while preparing to swim to the mainland and freedom. Barker died later in the prison infirmary, but Barberra was dead when they pulled him out of the water.
Vivian Dance, formerly Mrs. Gus Woodbine, née Vivian Louise Deering, married Tom Danzig a year or so after Jack’s death, but the marriage didn’t take and she went back to Southampton, a divorcée two times over and quasi-notorious gangster’s widow—social pariah, thrice married, a woman whose photograph had appeared in newspapers outside the society pages. I lost track of her after that. I hadn’t seen her alone since the night she kissed me getting into a cab in front of a blind pig after Jack’s acquittal in the Sylvester Street trial. Maybe she’s looking for a pair of scissors to cut Tom’s paper. She attended Jack’s funeral, of course, but I didn’t, although I sent flowers. (A geranium plant, actually, earth-smelling and tough of leaf, which I thought he’d have appreciated.) It would have been like watching them bury an empty can.
The Banner, like its fellow Detroit tabloids the Daily and the Mirror, did not survive Prohibition. It folded at the end of 1933 after a period during which it became a grotesque parody of itself at its lurid peak, as when it offered cash prizes to readers for locating missing parts of a corpse some psychotic had deposited in trunks throughout the city, treating it like a contest. As circulation fell off, I entertained the fantasy that my position as a syndicated columnist would prevent me from going down with it; hadn’t I placed first in the 1931 Continental News Syndicate’s Excellence in Journalism competition with my five-part series on the Black Bottom? The framed certificate was on the wall next to my desk, I had made a down payment on a new Marmon roadster with the $150 check. But I had failed to take note of the trend when editors began canceling my column, until by the end of my three-year contract with CNS it was appearing in less than a hundred newspapers, with the number going down weekly. Lloyd Bundle bought me lunch at the Statler and informed me that as of August 1, I was free to begin negotiations with other parties. “Very sorry, Minor, but it seems you’re associated in the public mind with bootleggers and hijackings and midnight massacres, all that rat-a-tat stuff, and nobody’s interested anymore, not even Hollywood. Musicals, that’s what they’re making now. You might consider moving out there, I hear they need writers. Your stuff would sound great in Dick Powell’s mouth.” I thanked him for the advice and didn’t hit him even once.
On New Year’s Eve, 1933, I attended a party in the Banner offices to celebrate a fresh deck, Repeal, and the short loud life of a newspaper whose final issue had hit the streets six hours before. Nearing midnight, Howard Wolfman invited me into his office, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and filled two glasses. “I bought this just today,” he said, setting down the bottle. “My first illegal act, if you don’t count libel.” He looked buttoned-down as always in his thick sparkling eyeglasses and snug necktie and navy cashmere jacket despite the heat of a malfunctioning radiator; in the city room the female file clerks, inhibitions seriously damaged, had already begun taking off sweaters and shoes and stockings, with more to follow. The scene was being replayed in offices and private homes and restaurants across the city, across the country. The Big Thirst was being slaked after thirteen years, fourteen in Detroit.
I picked up my glass. “I don’t think we’ll be raided tonight.”
“I hope not. I’d have to get out an extra, and I can’t pay for the ink.” He raised his. “To anything. To truth in journalism, honesty in government, and—what?”
“Absent friends.”
“They’re all absent.” We clicked glasses and drank. It was the first and only time I ever saw him imbibe. Readers and detractors of the Banner alike would have been surprised by the neat quiet man behind the splashy headlines, the grainy pictures of corpses in puddles with their eyes blown out.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him.
“A fellow I cubbed with on the Chicago Daily Journal is getting up a picture magazine in San Francisco. He wants me to edit it. I’m not sure just how one goes about editing pictures, but I’m broke enough to give it a try.”
“He wouldn’t by any chance be looking for writers?”
“No one wants writers anymore, Connie. They want photographers and cartoonists. Jensen signed a contract with the Saturday Evening Post last week.”
“I hope they throw in a year’s supply of matches.”
“Do you need money? I can get an advance from my friend in San Francisco and arrange a loan.”
“Thanks. I’ve got an interview Tuesday morning with Roberts and Gorman.”
“Ad copy?”
“People will always need to sell things.”
“We can’t all be tabloid writers.” He took one more sip and poured the rest of his glass into a potted plant. “I never did understand what people see in this stuff. It wasn’t worth a revolution.”
“Everything’s worth a revolution,” I said. “Even revolution.”
“See, that’s what was wrong with your stuff. You always had to educate people.” He stuck out his white hand. “Take care, Connie.”
I took it. “Good luck in Frisco.”
“I won’t need it. It isn’t a real town, like Detroit.”
I never saw Howard again. I never saw the magazine either. It folded after one issue.
There isn’t much left to tell about Jack Dance, the dry time in Detroit, and me. I heard Hattie Long got out of the life after Joey was killed and bought into a legitimate beer garden in Royal Oak; but I said that. I haven’t seen her since the night she came to tell me about Jack’s insane plan to kidnap Joey Machine right out of the Acme Garage.
That last conversation with Andy Kramm I mentioned took place in the visitor’s room at the Wayne County Jail.
A boyish-looking thirty-three in denims, with his fair hair combed forward over a thinning widow’s peak, his bright blue eyes and thousand-candlepower grin—the one mannerism, I always thought, that Jack borrowed from anyone—he chain-smoked Chesterfields he bummed from me but seemed resigned to his year-and-a-half sentence, if not to the penny-ante nature of the crime of which he’d been convicted, the armed robbery of a service station in Romulus.
“Fifteen bucks and change, that’s all there was in the till,” he said. “Not even a buck a month for how long I’ll be away. That’s as many bullets as them bums fired in that room at the Collingwood.”
“Why’d you stick it up?”
“Tapped out. There’s no money in legging no more, now that they’re fixed to make it legal.”
“I never thought I’d see the day when a bootlegger would be standing in a breadline.”
“You won’t, neither. We’re crooks, not tramps. Nor Communists,” he added quickly. “I’d like to see this bum Stalin try to muscle in on the East Side. There’d be caviar shit all down Mt. Elliott.” But his own mention of the Collingwood affair had started him thinking in another direction. “I didn’t see you at Jack’s funeral last year.”
“Would’ve been spooky if you did. I wasn’t there.”
“Too bad. It was okay. They kept out the pukes and the press, it was private. First time I had on a yarmulke since my cousin Ray’s bar mitzvah. I bet I know why you didn’t show up.”
I told him my reasons.
“That ain’t it,” he said. “Not all of it. I bet it was because Tom was there.”
“Tom’s doing okay. I hear they’re going to make him assistant city editor at the Times.” I was changing the subject.
“He’s marrying Vivian, did you hear that?”
“I heard. The town’s not that big.”
Whiskey River Page 28
