Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  The next day, the two met for lunch, but it didn’t go well. Nitti felt he had the momentum in Hollywood. Why should he give it up? Nitti ended the lunch meeting and walked out of the restaurant. Then a car drove past and sprayed him with bullets. Nitti survived the assassination attempt but was sufficiently cowed to give in to Luciano’s demands. Nitti stuck to the studio business; Luciano kept his drug racket.

  With this success under his belt, Luciano was feeling in an expansive mood. His attention switched back to Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café. Despite its popularity, it was running at a loss and Todd was forced to use her own money to keep it afloat. She soon found out why it was losing money when her business partner, Roland West, complained to her that it was Luciano’s mobsters who were draining them of cash. They wanted him to order alcohol and meat only through them and wanted him to take more than he needed. Their accountant was part of the racket and West blamed Todd for her love affair with the Mob. He wanted her to buy him out. She refused, but said she would have a word with Luciano.

  Luciano was always happy to meet the film star and spent the evening of November 25 with her. He told her she should rent out the second floor of the restaurant as a casino, which he could run. Todd wasn’t interested, seeing this would only lead to deeper involvement with the New York Mob. When she said that would happen over her dead body, Luciano replied coldly—“That can be arranged.”

  Todd was heartbroken. It looked like the end of her restaurant as Luciano threatened to swallow it up in his vice empire. Her mother advised her to talk to the police and on December 11, she made an appointment to see District Attorney Buron Fitts six days later. Somehow, Luciano heard that Todd was about to go to the cops and immediately took a flight to L.A. on the thirteenth.

  On the evening of Saturday, December 14, 1935, British comedy star Stanley Lupino was hosting a party for Thelma Todd at the Café Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard. At the time, she was living in an apartment above her restaurant but had lost her keys and planned to stay at Roland West’s home, just a quarter mile away up two steep flights of steps. She kept her car in his garage and they had a row about her staying with him that night because he didn’t want to be disturbed. He told her not to come back any later than 2:00 A.M., otherwise she would find the door locked.

  At first, the celebrity party cheered up the actress. “She drank a cocktail before dinner,” said Ida Lupino, the comedian’s daughter, “and a little brandy and champagne during dinner.” But as midnight came and went, her mood darkened. By coincidence, Pat Di Cicco, her ex-husband and a close associate of Luciano, was at a separate event at the Trocadero. He saw her but said nothing to her, he later claimed.

  Actor Arthur Prince sat next to Todd at dinner. “During the early part of the evening,” he remembered, “she was very gay. Later—I’d say around 2 o’clock—she went over to Sid Grauman’s table. He was with three people. When she came back she was terribly depressed.” She had told Grauman to phone West that she was on her way to his house. Outside the restaurant, chauffeur Ernest Peters was waiting to drive her back, but Todd seemed very agitated.

  “She told me to drive at top speed and not to make boulevard stops. I drove between 65 and 70 miles an hour,” said Peters. “Miss Todd was afraid that because she had been the target of extortion notes she might be slain or kidnapped by gangsters.”

  Peters was the last person to see her alive. On Monday morning—a full twenty-four hours after this last sighting—Thelma Todd was found dead sitting in the front seat of her large Lincoln Phaeton convertible parked in the garage of West’s cliffside residence. A maid discovered her. She was slumped forward with her head on the wheel. The death made front-page news.

  “Coagulated blood marred the screen comedienne’s features,” said the Los Angeles Times, “and stained her mauve and silver evening gown and her expensive mink coat when she was found, her blonde locks pathetically awry, in the front seat of her automobile.” None of the thousands of dollars worth of jewels around her throat and wrist was touched.

  Later that day, Dr. A. F. Wagner, county autopsy surgeon, stated categorically that Todd had died early Sunday morning about 5:00 A.M. “The autopsy showed monoxide poison, to the extent of 70 per cent of total saturation, in her blood,” he said. “There may have been other contributing causes, but that definitely was the major factor. The fumes were breathed accidentally. Either she went to sleep with the motor running or was overcome before she could help herself.”

  He explained the blood on her face by saying she probably hit her head on the wheel when she fell forward. Roland West’s testimony to the coroner on December 19 added to this conclusion.

  “I went to the garage and rushed in the door,” said West, “and there was Miss Todd lying over there. I put my hand onto her face and there was blood and I wiped it off on my handkerchief.” He told the maid to get help. “[I] looked to see how much gas was in the tank and it was almost empty. I know from the position that she was trying to get out of that car. I know that, because otherwise she would not have been turned in the way she did.”

  The time of Todd’s death was soon disputed, however, as a friend came forward to say she had spoken to the film star on Sunday afternoon. Martha Ford, wife of actor Wallace Ford, talked to her on the telephone. She had invited Todd to a cocktail party.

  “Sunday afternoon she telephoned me,” insisted Ford. “She said, ‘Darling, do you mind if I bring a guest?’ I replied, ‘Of course not. Who is it?’ ‘You’d never guess, and you’ll be surprised when you see,’ she said. I told her I was dying of curiosity, but she would not tell me anything more. Then she said: ‘You know who this is, of course? It’s Thelma—your Hot Toddy.’ That was a nickname she liked to call herself. Then she said, ‘Oh, and another thing—I went to a party last night and I’m still in evening clothes. Do you mind?’ I laughed and said to come in anything she wanted, but to hurry. Then she hung up.”

  Who was the mystery date? Was it Luciano? He was in L.A. that weekend. Several witnesses came forward to say they had seen an attractive blonde in an automobile like hers sitting next to a dark-featured man.

  Jewel Carmen, Roland West’s ex-wife, gave a statement to the police in which she said she saw a blonde looking like Todd driving in a chocolate brown Lincoln Phaeton on the Sunday evening before her body was found. A mysterious man was sitting next to her. “He was dark, foreign-looking,” she said, “wearing a pepper and salt colored fedora hat and coat that matched.”

  A shop assistant said she had seen Todd four days before her death and she was openly worried about money, paying up front for a hat she had ordered. “You’d better get your money now because I may be broke by the first of the year; a great many changes are going to take place in my life by the first of the year.”

  The reasons for Todd’s financial concerns soon came out in the press. They said she had been the object of several extortion notes and threatening letters. All written on plain white paper of good quality, they bore New York postmarks. Signed “The Ace of Hearts,” one of the notes demanded $10,000 from the actress or he would blow up her café. They were followed up by several long-distance phone calls coming from the “Ace.”

  In the months leading up to Todd’s death, two men were arrested in New York in connection with the threatening notes. One of the extortionists was identified as twenty-six-year-old Edward Schiffert, but his parents said he was mentally unsound and shouldn’t have confessed to the charge. He ended up in Bellevue Hospital. The other man, arrested over the summer, had all charges dropped against him. Despite these arrests, the threats kept coming and worried Todd to the point that she dreaded picking up the telephone for a long-distance call.

  After her death, the headwaiter of Todd’s restaurant said he’d received several phone calls promising to murder him if he spoke out about the case. The maid who discovered the body said a “couple of mean-looking men” approached her and told her not to mention the Mob when giving evidence.

  By Dec
ember 24, there were too many suspicious circumstances for the police to let the case rest as an accidental death and it became a hunt for murder clues. A further autopsy report said “the throat of the actress bore swellings or bruises such as might have been made by the jamming of a bottle neck or a pipe into her mouth.” In addition to this, two of her ribs were fractured and her nose broken. The foreman of the grand jury, convened to investigate the death, added to the mood of malevolence by saying that “murder by monoxide” might be the conclusion of the case.

  The final verdict, however, reverted to the original finding. On the fateful night, Todd’s chauffeur dropped her outside her restaurant. She couldn’t open the door to her apartment, so she walked up the hill to West’s house. It was after 2:00 A.M. West wasn’t in his home but sleeping in a bedroom he had in the café. When she got no answer from West’s home, rather than walk all the way back down to the café, she spent the night in her car in his garage. Drunk, she kept the motor on to keep herself warm and subsequently died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Roland Button, Todd’s lawyer, was not happy with the finding and told the district attorney he could prove that Luciano had murdered her, but her movie producer, Hal Roach, possibly under Mob duress, leaned on DA Fitts and the matter was dropped.

  Thelma Todd’s heartbroken mother concurred with the official version.

  “It would be quite natural of her to go to her car rather than inconvenience anybody,” she said. “The loneliness of the walk would not frighten her, because she had no fear—none whatsoever … . If her face was injured it would be due to her falling over when she became unconscious. I am sure of that because my daughter was happy, very happy, and she had no enemies.”

  Todd’s ex-husband, Pat Di Cicco, echoed this sentiment when he was interviewed in New York. There was no truth to the rumor that they were going to remarry, he told an L.A. reporter.

  “It was merely a coincidence that I was at the Trocadero Saturday night when she was there too. We were in two different parties. I merely observed her as she was dancing but I don’t know with whom she was dancing.”

  Was Di Cicco keeping an eye on her for Luciano?

  “I have no theory as to the cause of her death,” he insisted. “It certainly is confusing. But she had no enemies. There was no reason why she should have committed suicide. And she never took those threatening letters seriously.”

  Pat Di Cicco was wrong. She took the letters very seriously; and she had the worst of enemies—Lucky Luciano.

  If Luciano had the film star murdered to protect his own extortion business in Los Angeles, he had gotten away with it. But the clock was ticking on his own freedom. Other women he had exploited over the years were about to have their day in court when the biggest gang-busting trial came to Manhattan in 1936.

  8

  CITY OF SEX

  “Am writing this letter more for the benefit of the unfortunate women,” wrote an anonymous informer in June 1931. “I have a sister whom I saved and is now married happily.” The informer had apparently saved her from a life of prostitution and was now telling the Sixty-seventh Precinct police in Brooklyn about a pimp who controlled girls in several “disorderly houses.” His business was run from a restaurant on West Twenty-second Street, Coney Island, owned by a woman called Yedis Porgamin, who also had a profitable sideline in buying stolen jewelry and trading in illicit bonded whiskey. The pimp was Louis Weiner, known as “Cockeyed” Louis. “He sends the women to the disorderly houses and receives their pay every Saturday night or Sunday.” He and his assistant, Albert Letz, buy and sell women, said the informer. “White Slave girls from out of town 16 or 17 years old. Sells them off to Bethelem, Easton or Lancaster, Pa.”

  The informer recommended the police put a tap on the restaurant telephone and directed them to one of the brothels. “Open all hours this is the biggest house in the business,” he or she said with some urgency. “Please work on these right away and I hope you don’t send men that you can bribe. Once you can land Cockeye Louis and Al Lucks or Yedis Porgamin you break the biggest white slave ring in the country fast and sure because they already pay police protection.”

  The police took the advice seriously and tapped the restaurant phone, recording the following conversation on September 1, 1931, at 2:40 P.M.

  “Hello Lucky, this is Frank.”

  “Frank who?”

  “The sheik.”

  “Oh hello there Frank, how are you?”

  “I am sick.”

  “Listen Frank, the hell with the women, money and Cockeyed Louis, you take care of yourself. We need you to drive, you know that … .”

  “Frank” then asked to speak to Louis, but “Lucky” dismissed that.

  “Louis is too drunk to talk to you or anybody else so forget it.”

  A copy of this phone tap and the informer’s letter ended up on the desk of Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Dewey. The reference to “Lucky” may have intrigued him, but it was most likely not Lucky Luciano but the lieutenant of Cockeyed Louis, Albert Letz, also known as “Al Lucks.”

  The letter did corroborate other information that placed Cockeyed Louis at the center of a prostitution racket in New York State and, by 1935, that was very much on Dewey’s mind. When he declared his war against organized crime in July of that year, vice was at the top of his list. “We are concerned with those predatory vultures who traffic on a wholesale scale in the bodies of women and mere girls for profit,” he said. It chimed a bell with many fellow citizens who had sent in their own reports of organized vice.

  On July 7, 1935, one concerned New Yorker called on Dewey to turn his attention to the homosexual trade of young men. He described it as a “meat market” located in Times Square, a little park behind the Forty-second Street Library, and Fifth Avenue up to Hotel Plaza. “You would find out that the streetboys in New York are mostly not born in this town,” he wrote. “They come from Boston, Hollywood, from all the different regions and states of this country. As to their former positions, if they had any, they are sailors, or ushers or bellboys—anyhow come mostly from positions which made them wear a uniform.”

  It was not just the gay prostitutes themselves who concerned the author of this letter, but the criminals involved with them. “We all will be very grateful to you,” he told Dewey, “if you can clean this town from the overabundance of vice. Believe me, that the street boy ‘industry’ is one of the most dominant vices, because of the different crimes connected with this filthy business.”

  It was a strong condemnation of just one aspect of the sexual criminal life that infected New York City in the early 1930s, but what really interested Dewey was the organized crime behind mainstream heterosexual prostitution. Letters from concerned citizens provided piecemeal evidence, but he needed to create a much more substantial picture of how prostitution in New York functioned and for that he needed to talk directly to the girls and pimps involved. On February 1, 1936, Dewey triggered a raid on brothels across Manhattan and Brooklyn that pulled in 125 prostitutes, madams, and bookers. By questioning them, Dewey and his investigators—chiefly Eunice H. Carter and Murray I. Gurfein—got just the information they needed.

  An important link in the flesh trade was the “booker”—sometimes called a “bookie.” He supplied the girls for the madams who managed the brothels. It was the booker who ensured the flow of new girls through brothels throughout the city and the country, keeping regular clients happy with a change of faces. Cockeyed Louis was a booker on a major scale and his son, Al Weiner, took over the business from him. Typically, a booker might handle two hundred girls at a time and would take 10 percent of what they earned. The madam took half—and in 1936 a prostitute might generate around $300 a week.

  Surprisingly perhaps, the profits of prostitution had not really interested organized crime in the 1920s, largely because they had their hands full handling the trade in illicit alcohol and narcotics, but with the end of Prohibition in 1933, mobsters began to search for other sources o
f income. A sign of this pressure being brought to bear on Luciano was recorded in an incident in February 1934.

  The police received an anonymous telephone tip-off saying that five men had entered the offices of financial broker Balsam & Co. on Broad Street in New York’s Financial District on February 13 at 5:00 P.M. The men demanded several thousand dollars and a percentage of the business in return for their protection. Two of the tough guys were alleged to have been Luciano and Bugsy Siegel, and they intended to put pressure on twenty-five other brokers to join their racket. When the police interviewed Louis Balsam, he confirmed that two men had visited him, saying they were forming a committee to protect brokers in the area, but they did not ask for any money at the time and he could not identify them. Photographs of Luciano and Siegel were shown to other brokers around Broad Street, but none identified them as the racketeers. The police interest was enough to discourage the mobsters from persisting with this enterprise.

  Moving in on legitimate business was much harder than putting pressure on illegal activities—victims who were also criminals could hardly go to the cops—so Luciano muscled in on the sex business. Bookers such as Cockeyed Louis and his son Al had been allowed to dominate it for several years, but now senior criminals took an interest and their days of independence were numbered.

  Danny Brooks was one of the bookers brought in by the police and he had an interesting story to tell Dewey’s team. He worked for Jimmy Fredericks, who was connected with the Mott Street Mob and was a dominant force in the vice trade. He worked out of an office at 117 West Tenth Street. In October 1933, he came to Brooks with bad news.