by Andrew Gross
But for every person in the coat business, there were a hundred in the rag trade. A lot more competition. I didn’t know if I could make a go of it or not. For a while, it was order to order.
Then one day I got a call from Abe Zincas, the buyer at Interstate stores. “Style 8102. Color navy, Morris. Got any around?”
“8102?” I didn’t even know the style by number. It wasn’t one of our better sellers. I had to look at the sketch. It was a little nautical number, with a navy-and-white-trim bib in front. I said, “Let me look at the stock sheet. Why?”
“Because it’s sold twelve out of twelve in the first week. You got a clicker, baby!” A clicker was something you couldn’t keep in stock. “I’d take a hundred if you had ’em in stock.”
Three weeks later I had his hundred. And a thousand more ready to ship. The manufacturers had to hold them. I didn’t even have a warehouse to put them in.
8102.
After that, I was a dress man forever.
It brought me back to life.
But it also brought the hammer of the union back down on me.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“I wish you had called me, Morris.” Irv sat next to Morris at the bar at 21 Club, eight months after he’d been in his new business. It had been a long time since they’d spoken. “I heard you had some trouble. I tried to reach out to you. Maybe I could have helped. But you never returned my calls.”
“They were troubles of my own making,” Morris said. “Things I thought I could handle myself. I just got in over my head. I didn’t want to put you in the middle.”
Truth was, Morris knew, the last thing Buchalter needed to hear was that Morris had run to the Feds. He would have put him out for good.
Irv stirred his rye and soda. “A suspicious warehouse fire. A bogus fire department report. A cop standing outside who didn’t see anyone going in. I’m not sure I’d say those were entirely of your own making, Morris.” Irv looked back at him. “And I get why you didn’t want to get me involved.”
Morris’s old friend had kept much of the baby fat he’d had as a kid. Now, he had dark, wavy hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and eyes that reflected some of the gravity and rough edges that came with taking on the kind of people he was trying to put away.
Morris asked, “How’d you know about all that, anyway?”
“It’s my job to know about all that. And I might have been able to help you, if you were serious about going after the people who did it.”
“If I were serious . . .” Morris sniffed amusedly. “I’ll call that a joke. Anyway, I know who did it, Irv.”
“I mean serious about finally putting them away, Morris. For good. We’re not the New York City Fire Department. We don’t have our hand in someone’s pocket. You read the papers. You see we’re making progress now. Dutch Schultz—I know we’ve been close to shutting him down twice, but the next time he steps across the river into New York, he’s ours. We’re shutting his lucrative numbers racket down. And your friend Buchalter . . . he’s up next on the dance card. One or two people in your business have even begun talking to us.”
“They have, huh? And what’s happened to them?”
One of them had taken an unexplained fall out of a hotel window in the place they were being protected in. “A canary can sing,” Lepke was said to have remarked, “but they sure can’t fly.” The other, part of the fur dressers union, recanted everything before trial when the front windows of his home on Long Island were riddled with bullets.
“Look, I’ve just started up again, Irv.” Morris sipped his scotch. “I promised Ruthie, I’m gonna do things differently this time. We’ve got two kids now. . . .”
“And I heard they’re beautiful.” Irv grinned. “I guess they must take after Ruthie.” Morris smiled too. “Still, that doesn’t sound like the Morris Raab I knew.”
“Is that why you asked me here, Irv? You want me to show you a picture of the kids?”
“No.” Irv finished his drink. “That’s not why at all. You want to know why?” He stood up and tossed a few bills on the bar. “C’mon, walk with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just walk.” He nudged his way through the bar crowd to the back of the restaurant. Morris took a last sip of his drink and went after him.
Near the rear, where carvings of jockeys and paintings of racehorses adorned the wood-paneled walls, they came to a spot near the kitchen, red-vested waiters and busboys hurrying by. A brass door handle protruded from the wall. Otherwise, Morris wouldn’t have even known there was a door there. Irv twisted it open and motioned Morris inside.
The room was small and dimly lit, hidden from the public. It was clearly a holdover from the restaurant’s speakeasy days. The only furniture was a table that could seat around eight.
But there was only one man sitting at it. Legs crossed, jet-black hair slicked back, mustached, in a gray pinstripe suit.
“Mr. Raab . . .” The man stood up, extending his hand. “I’m Thomas Dewey.”
The special prosecutor’s face was one of the best known in the city in those days. The sharp cheekbones; the dark mustache; dark eyebrows; the obsidian, narrow slits for eyes. He was the one public figure with the integrity and backbone to stand up against the mob, and along with Eliot Ness in Chicago, one of the most admired lawmen in the land.
Morris had met a lot of famous people in his time—politicians, athletes, gangsters—but he was proud to shake this one’s hand.
Dewey motioned to the table. “Please have a seat.”
Irv pulled out a chair in between them, leaving Dewey and Morris face-to-face.
“What’s your drink, Mr. Raab?” the special prosecutor inquired. He raised a finger and a red-vested waiter came in.
“Scotch.”
“Mine as well. Macallan Twelve, all right with you? I keep a bottle here.” When Morris said that it was, Dewey looked at Irv to see if he would have the same and then the waiter ran off to fulfill their orders.
“Sorry for all the secrecy, Mr. Raab,” the special prosecutor said. “These days, if we met in public, there’d be a team of photographers flashing their bulbs before you even took a sip, and both our faces would be on the morning edition of every paper in the city. I can’t imagine that association would work to your benefit either.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Morris said. He looked around. “Your private room?”
“The city’s. I just use it for occasions.”
Their drinks arrived and Dewey lifted his glass. “To the public order. And to whatever it takes to get it restored.”
“L’chaim,” Morris said, lifting his glass, unsure if he should feel honored at the invitation or angry at Irv for setting him up.
“To life, yes,” Dewey said. “To life well lived.”
The three of them took a sip. “The reason we asked you here, Mr. Raab, with all this subterfuge, is to try and interest you in a bit of a bargain. Counselor Wechsler here says you’re a man who’s not afraid to consider one. You’re well aware of what we’re doing . . . ?”
Morris nodded that he was. “You’d have to have your head in the sand not to be.”
“We’re going to systematically rid this city of the criminal vultures who have drawn their sustenance from it for the past twenty years. As you may know, we’ve got Arthur Flegenheimer, known to most as Dutch Schultz, under our thumb right now. He may have gotten off that trial, but he can’t even venture back into the city where all of his business is located without being picked up. The mayor’s got an open warrant against him if he as much as sets his foot back here.”
“Word is, he bribed a whole town to get out of it the last time,” Morris said.
“That may well be true,” Dewey conceded. He took a sip of scotch. “But I’ve got sixty prosecutors, tax experts, and forensic investigators who promise me it won’t happen again if we do nab him. Are you a betting man, Mr. Raab?”
“I’ve been known.”
“Well, I’d
bet on my side the next time around. And after Schultz, we’re on to the rest of them. Luciano. Anastasia. And then Lepke and his pal Shapiro, in the garment trade. Which Assistant Prosecutor Weschler here tells me you have some firsthand familiarity with, and which is what brings you here.”
Morris said, “I came here to have a drink with an old pal, that’s all. Irv may have told you I don’t snitch on people and I can handle my own matters in life.”
“He did. He did say that. He said you were a very stubborn fish to reel in. But I wonder, Mr. Raab,” the prosecutor looked at him, “just how is all that stubbornness and independence going for you these days?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean?”
Dewey put down his drink. “I heard you had built up a big business, Mr. Raab, until a handful of months ago, and that you were one of the very few garment company entrepreneurs who stood up to Mr. Lepke and Mr. Shapiro and refused to buckle under to the unions.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“And for all your steadfastness and moral compass, you were threatened in a variety of ways, including the attempted hijacking of one of your delivery trucks, where you were forced to defend your property yourself, and, in further retaliation, your warehouse filled with goods was set afire, which resulted in your business shutting down. Do I have that right? I commend you for that stubbornness, Mr. Raab, and determination, but I’m afraid such steadfastness will not be victorious on its own. What I’m offering is the power of the strongest law enforcement team ever assembled in this state to help you rid us of these vermin for good.”
“I’m just a garment, guy, Mr. Dewey.” Morris shrugged and took another sip of his drink. “But in my estimation, what I would tell you is, it won’t work.”
“What won’t work, sir?” Dewey inquired.
“Your big-shot team. Any more than the last one did. Or the one before that.”
“It will work, Mr. Raab. This is no charade this time, I assure you.”
“It won’t, respectfully, as long as your own house is the first one you need to clean up,” Morris said firmly. “How do you think Schultz and Lepke have been able to beat your legal team thus far? Twice now.”
Dewey stared at Morris. “You didn’t strike me as a cynic, sir, but as a man of action.”
“The New York City Fire Department signed off on some completely bogus explanation to write our warehouse fire off as a boiler accident. My little son with an Erector Set could have looked at the place and told you the inspector was full of shit. But what isn’t full of shit is that Buchalter’s got his men there squarely in his palm. Time after time, when people stood up against them, people with some guts, your vaunted New York City Police Department declined to even look into it. I personally know one who lost his life when he was flung out of an eighth-story window and another who had acid thrown in his face, who both tried to stand up to them. You turn state’s evidence against Murder, Inc., you know better than any, you usually don’t make it to trial.”
Dewey nodded. “I’m aware of all these things. Including the tragic circumstances behind the death of your friend Abe Langer. Were I the district attorney, I assure you those crimes would not have gone uninvestigated.
“But I want to assure you, it’s not only the Schultzes and the Lepkes we’re going after this time around, Mr. Raab. But the corruption and collusion that has ingrained itself in and infected our city agencies as well. From the police to the fire department to the DA’s office. We’re going to wipe out the contagion, Mr. Raab, from the heart out, as well as those in the carcass who have enabled them. Wherever it falls. I’ve got a hundred thousand call logs my investigators are painstakingly making their way through, conversation by conversation. These people will have to worry every time they pick up a phone, whether in some candy store in Brooklyn, or in city hall.”
Morris sipped his scotch. He looked at his watch. “You said you wanted to talk to me about some kind of bargain.”
“We need people who aren’t afraid, Morris,” Irv stepped into the conversation, “who can testify against the extortionists. Firsthand. We feel, once people stand up, there’ll be many others who won’t be afraid to follow.”
“We’re not just going after murders, Mr. Raab. We’ll get them where it hurts them most. In the bank account. On restraint of trade. Extortion.”
“You know as well as me, Irv,” Morris shrugged, “what happens to those who go state’s evidence against Murder Incorporated.”
“We know,” Dewey took over for his aide, “and while we can’t offer you anything as an inducement to come forward, other than to do the right thing and help us finally rid this city of them for good, we do know you’re trying to rebuild a business for yourself, and there are always various things that come up that may be helpful in that—city contracts, say, uniforms for the mass transit department or the police, big contracts, and enterprise loans. . . .”
“The man who can’t be bribed is trying to bribe the rest of us when he needs some help.” Morris shot a smile to Dewey.
“Not bribe. We don’t look at it that way. We just know you’d be taking a risk, and risks should be rewarded, if they are successful, just like in business, don’t you agree?”
“We need your help, Morris,” Irv said. “You’ve faced them down firsthand. People respect you. They’d come on board if you led the way. Right now, everyone’s scared. Just give it some thought.”
Morris glanced at his watch and said, “We’ll see.”
“We know you’ve known Louis Buchalter a long time,” the special prosecutor said. “Since before he took the name Lepke. Assistant Prosecutor Weschler says, at times, he’s even shown a liking for you.”
“He didn’t seem to show much of a liking when he burned my business down.” Morris smiled cynically.
“Still, maybe he’d trust you enough to in some way implicate himself. If we fed you a kind of narrative. Of entrapment. It’s not easy to get close to him, Mr. Raab. Maybe for the good of the city, you’d be willing to wear a wire.”
“A wire?” Morris put down his drink and the tightening of his jowl said there was no way he’d agree.
“Dutch Schultz is as good as gone, Mr. Raab,” the special prosecutor said. “But this Lepke-Buchalter character . . . He’s far more protected. Maybe even from the inside. He’s consistently been able to stay a step ahead of us. We need someone who’s close.”
“I figure you don’t speak Yiddish, Mr. Dewey?”
“No, I can’t say I do.” Dewey smiled.
“Then I’ll let Irv translate. Gey fiefen ahfen yam.”
Irv looked at Morris and shrugged. Dewey waited. “If I translate it loosely, sir,” Irv said, “it means, go peddle your fish somewhere else.”
“You’ve got the wrong man, Mr. Dewey. Irv could have told you that.” Morris drained the last of his scotch and got up. “I wish you luck, though. Now, I’m afraid I have two little ones at home, so I’m going to have to say goodnight.”
Irv stood up too, but the special prosecutor remained seated. “I appreciate your time, Mr. Raab. But I don’t want you to underestimate my determination to get this job done. I know you have two young children and a charming wife. And as you’ve noted, with reason, it hasn’t always fared well for those seen to have cooperated with the government when it comes to these types. . . .” Dewey looked at him. “Not at all . . .”
“I’m not sure I understand just what you’re saying, Mr. Dewey?” Morris stared back. He looked the special prosecutor in the eye.
“I’m saying, as clearly as I can, sir, you can work for us, in secret, and help us rid the city of these vermin. Or, we can let the word out in other ways that you’re working with us, if you get my drift. And see where the chips fall.”
“A man with my lack of experience in the law might take that as just your own Ivy League form of extortion,” Morris replied. “What would you say, Irv?”
His friend was silent.
“We just want your co
operation, Mr. Raab,” Dewey said. “Any way we can. Now let me tell you what a pleasure it was to have this chance to meet you.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
That fall, no one was feeling the heat of Thomas Dewey’s reach more than Dutch Schultz.
By the slimmest of margins, the mobster had successfully escaped conviction on two federal tax evasion charges. Most people, including Schultz himself, knew if he was brought to trial a third time, he would be going away for a long time. New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia issued standing orders that if Schultz as much as stepped across the river into the city, where the vast majority of his business was located, he should be arrested on sight and taken into custody.
That October, the crime syndicate commission that had been formed by Albert Anastasia, Joe Bonanno, Lepke associate Jacob Shapiro, and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano met in secret at a restaurant in the Bronx, to figure a way to carve up Schultz’s lucrative numbers racket once the gangster was inevitably put away.
Banished to New Jersey, Schultz set up his headquarters at the Hotel St. Francis in downtown Newark, worried that on the other side of the river a power grab had arisen within his own ranks, centered on his once-trusted lieutenant, Bo Weinberg, who was now peddling himself to the commission as someone who could run Schultz’s operation. Incensed, the Dutchman called for an emergency meeting and braved the price on his head to attend the secret gathering in Brooklyn.
Schultz cockily assured them he wasn’t going anywhere. That in fact, he had already dealt with his rebellious lieutenant who just weeks before had tried to make the case before them that going forward they should deal with him. “He won’t be coming around here no more,” he chuckled. And indeed Weinberg was never heard from again. Schultz claimed he had a plan that would get the heat permanently off his back. And theirs.
