He didn’t say anything.
So, for a while, I didn’t say anything.
Then, quietly, Tim said, “So now you’ve told me.”
“Now I’ve told you.”
Eyes tensed, shaking his head, he asked, “Why? Why come here and confront me? Why not just let Giancana take me for a ride?” He searched my face, in desperation.
“Or is this…is this one last expression of a friendship we shared—to give me a few hours to get the hell out?”
I shrugged. “Well, it is out of friendship, in a way. More with Bill, than you. I don’t think I want Annabel to have to suffer further, finding out that her husband’s partner was a greedy psychopath who betrayed him. I thought I’d do you the favor of offering you a graceful way out.”
He reared back. “And what would that be?”
I nodded toward the .38. “Bill Drury’s gun. Your partner’s weapon. Cops kill themselves all the time—ex-cops, too.”
A hollow laugh, an unbelieving grin. “You expect me to pick this gun up, and shoot myself?”
“Yeah.”
“One bullet in it, right?”
“Right.”
“Why wouldn’t I just turn it on you?”
“That’s an option. But you even hint at pointing that gun at me, the gun I’m pointing at you will fire first.”
“I might get lucky.”
“At this table? Anyway, if by some fluke you shot me before I could stop you, Sam Giancana would still finish the job. You’re a dead man, Tim. The question is, how do you want to go out?”
His head almost twisted off, from shaking side to side. “Suicide? Why the hell would I—”
“We can shoot it out right here, and I’ll plead self-defense, and reveal your whole sorry history. Or you can die a tragic police hero, depressed over the death of his murdered partner.”
“I’m a Catholic, Heller. I’m not—”
“You’re an excommunicated Catholic, Tim. And do you really think you’re going anywhere but hell? Jesus is going to forgive your sins?”
“…He might.”
“Then go out with a little class. Don’t be just another gangland slaying. Don’t be the Judas that made Annabel Drury’s life even more miserable.”
“What about my kids? You’re a father.”
“You sold them out a long time ago, Tim. Anyway, you want them to remember you as a tortured soul, or a crooked cop? Up to you.”
He swallowed again. “Cold. So cold….”
Was he talking about me, or the temperature?
His eyes seemed woozy, suddenly. “You think I’m a piece of shit, don’t you?”
“What does that matter?”
“You’re worse than I am.”
“Maybe.”
He looked at me, then he looked at the pearl-handled gun. Me, gun, me, gun, me, gun, me, gun….
He picked it up, careful not to aim it my way. He held it in his palm and looked down at it.
“Father forgive me,” he said. “Forgive my sins.”
And he lifted the revolver to his temple and squeezed the trigger. The echo was like a thunder crack in the room; blood and brains and bone matter splattered the empty china hutch, and he tumbled off the chair, sideways, onto the floor, somewhat on his back, his empty eyes staring up at me.
“Good choice,” I said.
And I went out and got my coat and hat, walked unseen into the chill night—the drizzle had let up—and strolled across the woods to my Olds.
From May 1, 1950, to September 1, 1951, the Kefauver Committee heard over six hundred witnesses, racking up close to twelve thousand pages of testimony from minor hoods to major mob figures as well as government officials on every level. The senator’s circus traveled to fourteen cities and put on public display, for the first time in any significant manner, the ongoing connection between crime, politics, and business.
The last stop on the Kefauver tour was the big one: New York, with the entire hearing televised. Notorious mob courier Virginia Hill—who, once upon a time, Charley Fischetti had introduced to Ben “Bugsy” Siegel—brought some sex into the midst of the violence; and former NYC mayor William O’Dwyer generated some genuine pathos, a crime-busting former D.A. brought down by corruption. The real star, however, was Frank Costello, the east coast’s elder statesman among racketeers.
Or anyway, his hands became stars. Costello refused to be photographed, and the TV cameras focused on his nervous hands—tapping, rapping, clenching, unclenching, fingering cigarettes—accompanied by his whispery, raspy off-camera voice. He fudged, he fidgeted, he hedged, he refused to produce material, he stormed out, and of course refused to answer many of the questions on grounds of self-incrimination. Cited for contempt, sentenced to eighteen months, indicted and convicted for income tax evasion, Costello was a major mobster clearly brought down by the Crime Committee.
The Kefauver Committee turned out scores of recommendations, some commendable, others ridiculous. Of nineteen bills proposed by the committee, one—the Wagering Stamp Act— passed…and proved unenforceable. Of forty-five contempt citations to uncooperative witnesses, only three convictions resulted, the courts generally backing up the mobsters’ fifth amendment rights.
On the other hand, the national race wire racket— Continental Press—was forced to shut down in 1952. And the hearings pressured the Immigration Service and IRS into prosecuting hundreds of mobsters during the next eight years. Even J. Edgar Hoover had to admit the existence of the Mafia. Convictions and deportations led to mob warfare, as various individuals and factions fought for control.
And in 1952, Estes Kefauver ran for president, his fame as a gangbuster helping him accumulate the largest number of committed delegates at the Democratic National Convention. But the party regulars—including Harry Truman, who’d been tainted by corruption the committee uncovered—controlled the uncommitted delegates, and Kefauver was denied the nomination.
Kefauver did become Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential running mate; the Demo duo lost to Eisenhower and Nixon, tried again in ’56, and lost again to Ike and Dick. The senator played out the remainder of his congressional career as a strong, independent, progressive voice in national government. He died of a heart attack in 1963.
Kefauver’s pit bull, Rudy Halley, used his fame on the Crime Committee to run as an independent and win a seat on—and eventually the presidency of—the New York City Council. He tried to be a reformer, without much success, and ran for mayor in 1953, losing as badly as Tubbo Gilbert had that sheriffs race. Oddly, Halley was associated with (legal) gambling interests toward the end of his short life; he died of pancreatitis in 1956. He was only forty-three.
The other counsel, George Robinson, who was from Maine, I lost track of.
The impact of Kefauver’s televised hearings was perhaps the first real demonstration of the power of television. This was not lost on Joe McCarthy, in his efforts to capitalize on the public’s paranoia fueled by the protracted war in Korea, and he convinced many Americans that Commies might be living next door or lurking under the bed. Ultimately the unforgiving tube brought McCarthy down, of course, revealing him in the Army hearings as a liar and a bully, and he died in disgrace, in 1957, in the same mental ward as his mentor, Jim Forrestal.
Columnist Drew Pearson’s muckraking style paved the way for modern investigative reporting, but his real heyday was the 1950s. He died of a heart attack in 1969. Even more than Pearson, Lee Mortimer’s successes were tied to the ’50s. Married five times—calling into question Sinatra’s insistence that Mortimer was homosexual—the New York Mirror columnist wrote several more Confidential books with Jack Lait, hosted a radio show, and died in bed of a heart attack in March 1963.
A heart attack took Rocco Fischetti, as well. He made peace with the Outfit, though his role was diminished; he maintained residences in Florida and in Skokie, Illinois. He told me once— we became, oddly enough, friendly again—that his sole ambition was not to die violently; he feare
d winding up shot to death in an alley, flung against garbage cans. He got his wish, dying a low-key death on a visit to relatives in Long Island, New York, in July 1964. He was sixty.
I never told him, by the way, that I was the one who busted up his trains.
Frank Sinatra made his comeback, as you may have heard, and he continued to be friends with Joey Fischetti, who received at least an occasional fee as a “talent agent,” particularly for Sinatra’s dates in Miami Beach, including at the Fountainbleau Hotel, with which Joey was affiliated.
In early 1951, Sinatra was asked to provide the Kefauver Committee with an interview, and he complied—a top secret one, at four in the morning in a law office at Rockefeller Center. He told them nothing—a list of gangsters was read off to him, and he informed committee lawyer Joseph Nellis he knew them “to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to…. Well, hell, you go into show business, you meet a lot of people.”
Perhaps because of my request to Pearson to apply gentle pressure, Kefauver accepted this private testimony and chose not to embarrass Frank by calling him as a hearing witness.
But Frank’s mob connections would dog his heels his entire life—five grand jury subpoenas, two IRS investigations, a congressional summons, and a subpoena from the New Jersey State Crime Commission would follow over the years. So would a Congressional Gold Medal, presented to him by President Clinton in 1997, the year before Sinatra’s death.
Joey Fischetti passed away some time in the ’70s, if I recall, but Frank had long since grown tighter with one other mobster—Sam Giancana. Throughout the early ’50s, following the Kefauver hearings, the leadership of the Chicago Outfit passed between Ricca, Accardo, and Giancana. During this period numerous gangland murders—all unsolved—were committed; one of the first was an attorney named Kurnitz, who turned up along that same Calumet City roadside as those two heroic police detectives. His throat had been slit and his tongue had been cut out and stuck in the new aperture.
In the early ’50s, Giancana engineered a violent takeover of the numbers rackets from black policy kings. His interests eventually included Las Vegas, Mexico, and Cuba, and he ran in show business circles that included Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis, Keely Smith, and his longtime paramour, Phyllis McGuire of the singing McGuire Sisters. He shared a mistress with President Kennedy, and his involvement with the CIA is thought to have led to his murder in his Oak Park home—shot in the back of the head, frying up sausages.
Paul Mansfield was true to his word and drove his wife Jayne to California, after he got out of the service; she kissed the ground hello, shortly after they crossed the state line. Shortly after that, she kissed Paul goodbye. She made it in Hollywood, but via New York, playing a Marilyn Monroe-like character in a Broadway play by the author of The Seven Year Itch; this led to a 20th Century Fox contract, and major motion pictures, most notably The Girl Can’t Help It.
Jayne—like Mamie Van Doren (a onetime Charley Fischetti sweetheart)—became a road company Marilyn. Her sexbomb persona seeming increasingly passé as the repressed ’50s gave way to the swinging ’60s; she made a nudie cutie movie, promoting it by posing nude for Playboy, which led to a famous pornography charge for the magazine. Before her auto accident death in 1967, she had been reduced to TV guest shots, cameo appearances in movies, nightclub strip acts, and leads in low-budget foreign films. For all the highs and lows of her bizarre career, however, Jayne did achieve her goal of enduring stardom.
Jack Ruby made a name for himself, too.
The A-1 Detective Agency thrived in Chicago and Hollywood, and I maintained residences in both cities, though I would always be a Second City boy at heart. Sometimes I would stay in L.A. long enough to be jarred, on my return, by the changes in my town. Oh, the underlying casual corruption remained the same. But much of the character of the first half of the twentieth century in Chicago was getting chipped away at, as the second half got under way.
In 1960 the Chez Paree closed, for example, made irrelevant by the intimate likes of Mr. Kelly’s, the Happy Medium, and Hefner’s Playboy Club. Riverview amusement park shut down in 1967—all the famous rides sold off, the attractions demolished…including Aladdin’s Castle.
The Federal Building was pulled down in 1965, and a new one with much less character took its place; but the Monadnock Building still stands, and St. Andrew’s Church is open for business.
As for Tim O’Conner, he got a hero’s funeral—not as elaborate as those Calumet City coppers, but a nice sendoff, though under the circumstances St. Andrew’s was out of the question. No Bishop Sheil sermon and high mass for a suicide, after all. Everybody felt for Tim, caught up in despondency like that, over the death of his friend and colleague, Bill Drury.
A lot of people thought it was sad—tragic even—that poor Tim couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. That a nice Catholic boy like that had died while excommunicated, committing a mortal sin, and was condemned to burn in the flames of damnation for eternity.
Of course, I didn’t buy any of that shit; but the thought sure as hell was comforting.
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material. Some minor liberties have been taken with time, primarily for reasons of pace—for example, moving the death of Charley Fischetti up slightly, so that the narrative would span weeks and not months.
This novel is a departure of sorts from the Nathan Heller “memoirs” of recent years. The first four Heller novels— beginning with True Detective (1983)—focused on Chicago and organized crime. With the fifth Heller, Stolen Away (1991), a new pattern for these novels was established, only tangentially involving Chicago and the mob: starting with his role in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, Heller has cracked famous unsolved historical crimes, most recently the Black Dahlia murder (Angel in Black, 2001).
In recent years, a number of avid readers of the series have suggested that Heller seemed overdue in returning to his Chicago roots. Commercial considerations—giving in to the obvious audience appeal of a world-famous crime (the Huey Long assassination, the Massie rape/murder case) or mystery (the Roswell Incident, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart)—have made it difficult to convince editors to allow Heller a return to his Chicago haunts. I thank my former editor, Joe Pittman, and present editor, Genny Ostertag, for their understanding and support of what might seem to be a departure from a successful format.
For Heller to develop as a character in his historical context, I considered it necessary for him to leave the ’30s and ’40s behind and move into the ’50s and ’60s. Since The Million-Dollar Wound (1985), in which real-life police hero William Drury was first introduced as a recurring figure in Nate Heller’s life, I have known that the Kefauver inquiry—Drury’s role in which led to his murder—was a necessary (and potentially powerful) subject for exploration in these memoirs.
This novel serves as an introduction to—and a bridge into—the 1950s and ’60s, should my readers (and the publishing industry) be interested in following my detective and me into these fascinating, suitably crime-filled eras. Thus this novel centers not on a famous crime so much as a famous time in crime, when the TV-fueled shadow of congressional inquiries…not only Kefauver’s beneficial one but McCarthy’s injurious one…fell across the American landscape. The unsolved murder of William Drury—the theory behind the solution of which I, as usual, stand behind—may not have the household-name familiarity of some of Heller’s previous cases; but it remains an historically significant, important, even pivotal crime.
My research assistant George Hagenauer and I began gathering material for this novel in 1985—and our first hurdle, sixteen years later, was locating the research materials we’d assembled for a book we had both back in ’85 assumed would be happening soon; and our second one was refamiliarizing ourselves with that material, specifically, and with Chic
ago mob history, in general.
I had the additional chore of renewing my general Chicago chops (George, born and raised in Chicago, has this stuff in his blood). I always thank George for his help, but this time I really should shout that gratitude from a rooftop. (Also, though he hasn’t taken an active role in the research in some time, Mike Gold was one of the original architects of the Heller Chicago/mob history; thanks, Mike.)
Much of what George gathered for Chicago Confidential was original newspaper material, and he also scoured the bound volumes of the Kefauver Crime Committee testimony, sending along to me reams of photocopied material from both sources. This book draws more than anything on the original coverage in the Chicago press and those bound volumes of testimony. The scene involving Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert’s appearance before the Kefauver Committee incorporates material from a Gilbert appearance before the Chicago Crime Commission as well as newspaper interviews.
As indicated in the text, the lively journalism of Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer was key to this work; if my portrait of Mortimer was in any way unflattering, chalk that up to his karma…but know that I love reading the Lait/Mortimer Confidential books, which have had a huge influence on the Heller memoirs, never more so than this time around. Chicago Confidential (1950), Washington Confidential (1951), and U.S.A. Confidential (1952) all extensively cover the Chicago mob, the Drury story, and the Kefauver inquiry. I also consulted an imitation of their successful series, Washington Lowdown (1956), by Larston D. Farrar.
Most of the characters in this book are real-life figures and appear under their actual names. Jackie Payne is a fictional character, however, suggested by Rocco Fischetti’s documented wenching and woman-beating, including throwing a former Miss Chicago out of the Barry Apartments penthouse, leaving her and her bags on the nearest street corner. Fred Rubinski is a fictionalized Barney Ruditsky, a real-life ex-cop turned private eye in Los Angeles. Tim O’Conner is a fictional character, as is lawyer Kurnitz; both have historical counterparts, though I do not mean to impart the sins of the fictional characters upon the real people. O’Conner is designed to suggest that traitors existed on the police force, while Kurnitz suggests the not too radical theory that criminal lawyers are sometimes as much criminal as lawyer.
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