Inherit the Mob

by Zev Chafets

  Belzer opened the door wider, and the diplomat, who had been standing behind him, walked in. A man in his late fifties, he gently shook Ida’s hand, intoned a Hebrew phrase and then addressed the room in general. “Max Grossman was a great friend of the state of Israel,” he proclaimed. “His loss is a loss to all of us.”

  This was news to Gordon, who looked at his father quizzically, but the old man’s face gave away nothing. “You must be William Gordon,” said the diplomat, extending his hand. “I am an admirer of your writing. Your series on the Palestinians was first rate, really excellent. I only wish more of your colleagues were able to bring your perspective to the complicated issues that—”

  “I didn’t know that Uncle Max had anything to do with Israel,” said Gordon. “I didn’t even know he had been there.”

  “I don’t believe that he ever was in Israel,” said the consul uncomfortably, sensing that he had said too much.

  “He had passport problems,” said Grossman.

  “Precisely,” said the Israeli. “But he was always there in spirit when he was needed, I assure you. And now, Mrs. Grossman, let me convey, once again, our condolences.” He shook hands all around and left the room.

  “What did Uncle Max do for Israel?” Gordon asked, his journalistic curiosity aroused.

  “Here and there, this and that,” said Ida.

  “Perhaps I should mention it in my talk,” said the rabbi, but Grossman shook his head. “No business, just personal stuff,” he said in a gruff tone. The rabbi nodded so emphatically that dandruff swirled off his shoulders.

  From the chapel they could hear the swell of voices. Grossman looked at his watch. “So, you gonna say something or not, big boy?” he demanded.

  Gordon shook his head. “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. No disrespect intended.”

  “Forget it, then,” said Grossman. “Rabbi, you do all the talking. And remember, keep it short and sweet. Nothing fancy.”

  Gordon helped his aunt to her feet, and she stubbed out her Kent. “We’re having Chinese at the shivah,” she said. “How’s that for a little class?”

  The Tribune’s late edition hit the streets during the funeral; on the way from the cemetery Flanagan bought a copy, and read the obit aloud as they headed to Ida’s East Side penthouse.

  “Max Grossman, reputedly one of America’s leading crime lords, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York after a long illness. He was eighty-five years old.

  “Grossman was born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1897 to Jewish parents who emigrated to the United States from Russia. After leaving school at the age of fifteen, he formed his own gang, known as the Max and Ax mob, with childhood friend Al “the Ax” Axelrod, who was shot to death in a gangland slaying in Palm Springs in 1951.

  “Grossman and Axelrod worked briefly for crime king Arnold ‘the Brain’ Rothstein before going into business for themselves. Their activities allegedly included extortion, armed robbery, bootlegging and contract killing.

  “In 1929, Grossman reputedly helped found the Syndicate, the national crime commission that ruled the underworld for decades. He was closely aligned with Luigi Spadafore and other reputed Mafia figures. He also had close ties with Louis “Lepke” Buchhalter of Murder Incorporated, Charles “King” Solomon of Boston and the Purple Gang of Detroit.

  “Known as a diplomat and organizational genius, Grossman helped pioneer gambling in a number of Latin American countries, established close ties with leading Democratic politicians in New York and around the country, and founded a chain of department stores run by his younger brother, Albert.

  “Over the years, Grossman was the subject of numerous investigations, but his only criminal conviction was for vagrancy, in 1923. Law enforcement agencies were convinced, however, that he stood at the pinnacle of organized crime for decades. In 1957 he was threatened with contempt of Congress for refusing to divulge information to the McClellan Committee.

  “In recent years, Max Grossman lived in quiet retirement in his Upper East Side apartment. He is survived by his wife, Ida, his brother, Albert, and his nephew, William Gordon, who serves as a columnist for this newspaper.”

  “Thanks for the publicity,” Gordon said. “I don’t remember seeing my name in there before.”

  “A last-minute addition, boychik,” said Flanagan. “Just giving the story a local angle. By the way, when we get to your aunt’s, don’t mention who wrote the obit, OK? People are touchy sometimes.”

  Flanagan had nothing to worry about; none of the mourners at Ida’s had read the Tribune. They filled her large living room, sipping coffee from painted china cups and Canadian Club from standard barroom highball glasses. Along the sides of the room, elderly Jews sat on sofas and munched dim sum delicacies. The mood of the room struck Gordon as decidedly upbeat.

  “Aunt Ida, this is John Flanagan, he works with me at the paper,” he said.

  “I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Grossman,” he said, and she smiled through a puff of cigarette smoke. “You too, Mr. Grossman,” he said to Gordon’s father, who grunted.

  “You ever been to a shivah before, Mr. Flanagan?” asked Ida. “It’s like a wake, only for Jews. We have plenty of liquor,” she added knowingly. “Get yourself a drink and feel at home.” She drifted off, leaving Flanagan with Gordon and his father.

  Flanagan scanned the room with intense curiosity. Suddenly he touched Gordon’s arm and gestured toward a tanned, dapper, gray-haired man who was daintily chewing an egg roll. “Isn’t that Handsome Harry Millman, Mr. Grossman?” Flanagan asked.

  “I don’t know any Harry Millman,” replied Grossman, but Flanagan didn’t even hear him. “Sure, it is,” he said. “Somebody pointed him out to me at the Carnegie one time. “He’s a living legend. I can’t believe it.”

  “Who the hell is Handsome Harry Millman?” Gordon asked.

  “Don’t you know anything about your own heritage?” said Flanagan. “Handsome Harry Millman was one of the hit men in the Dexter Avenue massacre in Detroit in the thirties. He got life. At his trial, he complained that he was only rated number six on the FBI most wanted list. You never met him?”

  “I never heard of him,” said Grossman again, and looked hard at his son. Gordon shrugged. “Me, either.”

  “Jeez, this place is like the hall of fame,” said Flanagan. “Who else is here, Mr. Grossman?”

  “I’m gonna get some more Chinese, Velvel,” he said, ignoring the question. He started to move away, then stopped, seized Flanagan’s elbow and squeezed hard. “This is a solemn religious occasion,” he said to the Irishman in a hard tone. “You wanna eat, eat. You wanna drink, drink. You wanna sightsee, scram.”

  “Your old man is the real McCoy,” Flanagan said to Gordon. “How did you get to be such a pussy?”

  “You wanna ask questions, beat it,” Gordon said in a passable imitation of his father’s gravelly voice. “I’m Wildman William Gordon, and I bump off Irish pen pushers for the fun of it. Jesus, Flanagan, grow up. These are a bunch of geriatric cases. What the hell are you so excited about?”

  “Excited? Listen, when I was a kid, my mother used to tell me, ‘Eat your dinner or Max and Ax will get you,’ ” said Flanagan. “And now, here I am, in Max’s apartment. Come on, be a guy, who are some of these people?”

  “I don’t know most of them myself,” Gordon said truthfully. His father and uncle had always been extremely careful not to mix business with family. They had expected him to become a doctor, and hadn’t been any too pleased when he chose journalism as a career. To them, newspapers were too close to their world, and they had a poor opinion of reporters, whom they considered professional stool pigeons. Gordon was just about to explain this to Flanagan when a small man with a long scar across his right cheek came up and put a gnarled hand gently on his cheek. “Hello, Velvel,” he said. “Vos macht a yid?”

  “Hello, Uncle Abe,” Gordon said. “You look good.”

  “I feel like an astronaut. Why no
t? You been here long?”

  “Just got here. Uncle Abe, this is John Flanagan, who works with me. Abe Abramson.”

  “Your mudda done it,” Flanagan said with a wide grin. Abramson blinked, stared and then burst into loud laughter. Already a little drunk on the Canadian Club, Flanagan turned to Gordon. “It’s 1937, right? And one Abe “Bad Abe” Abramson is shot in a card game on Hester Street. The cops arrive. ‘Who done it, Abe?’ one of them asks. ‘Just tell us who done it.’ And Bad Abe looks up at the cop and says, ‘Your mudda done it.’ Right?”

  To Gordon’s amazement, Abramson laughed again. “Your friend here is what, some kind of historian?” he said. “How’d you hear that one?”

  “The code of silence,” said Flanagan, drunker than he appeared. “The common bond between your world and mine. Velvel doesn’t understand about that.”

  “Where’d you find this guy?” Abramson asked with mock anger; it was obvious that he was enjoying the attention.

  “Maybe we could get together sometime, talk about the old days,” Flanagan suggested.

  “Sure, why not, I’m the nostalgic type,” said Abramson. “I live in Florida these days, you ever get down there, look me up.” The old man punched Gordon on the arm. “Your mudda done it,” he laughed. “Oh, by the way, Velvel, Nate Belzer wants to talk to you in your uncle’s office. He says come in when you get a chance.”

  “I’ll go see what he wants now,” Gordon said. “Uncle Abe, show this Mick around, all right? He wants to be Damon Runyon.”

  “A fine type of gentile,” said Abe. “I knew him in Miami.…”

  Belzer was waiting for Gordon in Max Grossman’s study. He sat behind the large old-fashioned desk, idly flipping a pencil in the air. “Pull up a chair, Velvel,” he said. “I want to talk to you about your uncle’s will.”

  A few years earlier, Fortune magazine had listed Max Grossman as one of the five hundred richest men in America. The old gangster had no children, and since learning of his death that morning Gordon had been wondering if he might be in line to inherit some money.

  “Velvel, you know what your Uncle Max did for a living?” he said, coming straight to the point.

  “He was a retired businessman who owned a chain of department stores,” Gordon said, reciting by rote the answer he had been given as a teenager on the way to a preppy boarding school. It was a good answer, one that had served him well through twenty-five years, and he had no desire to hear anything different now.

  “Your uncle had various interests,” said Belzer. “He owned department stores, that’s true. Your father and he had a number of department stores. But there were some other things as well. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Not really.”

  “Come on, Velvel. You’re a big boy now. It’s time you knew about the family business.”

  “Where’s my father?” Gordon asked, sounding childish, even to himself. “If we’re talking about family business, how come he isn’t here?”

  “He’s not here because he doesn’t want to be here,” said Belzer. “I want to show you something.” He opened a leather briefcase and slid a neatly stapled set of papers across the desk to Gordon. It was covered with numbers. Big numbers, with dollar signs in front of them. “Read,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Gordon had been reading all his life. When he was seven, his mother took him for the first time to the main branch of the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Thirty-five years later, he still remembered vividly how she had browsed through the card catalog, jotted something on a slip of paper and, within twenty minutes, received two thin volumes of Greek mythology, complete with pictures of gods and snakes, from a hole in the wall. She explained that someone called a librarian had filled the order; as the only child of wealthy, indulgent parents, he had imagined that the librarian had written the books just for him.

  Seven-year-old William Gordon became a fanatical reader, a fact he was careful to conceal from his friends. He did not want to be considered a bookworm, and he sometimes intentionally failed to answer questions in school to avoid that reputation.

  Then, at the dawn of puberty, Gordon discovered a practical use for literature—it was a means of learning about sex. Just after his Bar Mitzvah he swiped a paperback marital guide from the rack in a drugstore. The book inflamed his imagination and gave him a precocious awareness of girls and the fun he could have with them. That year, at summer camp, he employed his knowledge to bluff his way into the cot of a seventeen-year-old counselor from Westchester who smelled of bubble gum and shampoo.

  The following autumn, Gordon was sent, under protest, to Grayling Academy, a prep school in Vermont. There he again found a practical use for his reading habit. Grayling was going through a liberal phase, and the emphasis was on “creative processes” and “independent thinking” rather than on memorization and discipline. Gordon persuaded the headmaster to allow him to substitute “extracurricular reading” for classes, and turned in reports on books he had already read, a system that allowed him enough free time to become a better than competent basketball player and to comb the adjacent villages for willing townie girls.

  Gordon’s mother, Else, was a pretty, somewhat vague woman whose father, a German Jewish snob, founded the Monarch Department Store chain and then lost it through inattention. He was bought out by Al Grossman, acting for his brother, Max; and Al took the daughter along with the rest of the inventory. Else Grossman wanted her son to attend Princeton and become another F. Scott Fitzgerald. Al, who seldom interfered in the boy’s education, hoped he would study medicine at Columbia, but not enough to insist. Gordon, who considered authors sissies, and hated the idea of spending his life with sick people, disappointed them both by going to the University of Wisconsin and majoring in journalism.

  After three years in a boys’ school, Gordon fell in love with the University of Wisconsin. He was delighted by the accessibility of co-eds, beer and a real library. He racked up an impressive number of conquests among blond small-town English majors looking for an intense Jewish intellectual from the big city; joined ZBT and became a star fraternity jock, although he wasn’t quite good enough for varsity sports; and, for the first time, brought his reading out of the closet. He concentrated on history and international politics; even then, he knew he wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

  In his senior year, he was appointed editor in chief of the college newspaper. He also changed his name from Grossman to Gordon, because he thought it looked better as a byline. The previous editor had been hired by the Detroit Free Press as a city reporter, and Gordon expected to travel the same route—a Middle Western apprenticeship followed by a job with a New York paper, and then on to the Orient Express.

  During spring break, Gordon flew back to New York to attend his uncle’s annual seder. By this time his parents had already moved to the large red brick house in Scarsdale, but Max and Ida stayed in their East Side duplex, which he had visited twice a year—on Thanksgiving and Passover—for as long as he could remember.

  By no means religious, Gordon’s family belonged to no synagogue and observed few holidays—Al Grossman went to his office even on Yom Kippur unless there happened to be a World Series game. But Passover was special, a time when the family gathered to recall the humble roots from which their present affluence had sprung. The holiday always made Gordon nostalgic, although he was never certain what he was nostalgic for.

  That year the seder began no differently from all other seders. Max Grossman sat at the head of the table, a black silk skullcap on his thick white hair and a noncommittal look on his face, while his friend Nathan Belzer chanted the Hebrew prayers. Gordon was, by that time, well aware that his uncle was a notorious gangster, but he could never relate the movie image of a crime lord to the old Jewish man he had known all his life. Max had a soft voice with just the smallest Yiddish inflection, and, unlike his mercurial brother, he was rarely animated. If Gordon had to choos
e a single word to describe his uncle, he would have picked “ordinary.”

  Theirs was a distant relationship. Max and Ida were childless, and the old man didn’t relate easily to children. Occasionally, as a small boy, Gordon had tried to charm his uncle with self-consciously precocious comments about the adult world, but Max had refused to be charmed. “Your boy is a good talker, Al,” he said once, and Gordon, who knew that his uncle had spent a lifetime keeping his mouth shut, realized that it was not a compliment. Since then, he had been as silent around his uncle as good manners permitted. So, when Belzer completed the seder with “Next year in Jerusalem” and Max leaned over to him and said, “Velvel, I’d like to talk to you alone for a few minutes,” Gordon had been astonished.

  Max took Gordon into the large study off the living room, closed the door and sat at his desk. His nephew sat across from him in a straight-backed chair, trying to remember if he had ever had a private conversation with the old man. He couldn’t recall one.

  “You’re finishing college this year,” Max said.

  “That’s right, Uncle Max,” said Gordon, determined to be taciturn.

  “Have you decided yet what you want to do?” he asked. It was, Gordon assumed, a preliminary question; the old man must have known from Gordon’s father that he planned to become a journalist.

  “I want to be a newspaperman,” he said, choosing the word for its practical, hard-bitten sound. “Eventually, I’d like to become a foreign correspondent, but that’ll take a few years.”

  “Have you ever thought of going into the business?” Max asked in a flat voice. “Your father could use you maybe.”

  “I’m not too interested in department stores, Uncle Max. Besides, I don’t think I’d be good at it.”

  Grossman nodded at the justice of this evaluation. “Probably not,” he said. “I hear your name is Gordon now.”

  Gordon flushed with surprise; he hadn’t yet told his parents about the name change. “It’s a pen name, Uncle Max,” he said. “I didn’t have it officially changed or anything. How did you know?”