Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “Not in any way, sir.”

  “Then what do you think happened at No Gun Ri and all these other places?”

  “My guess is that some poorly train U.S. Army commanders repeatedly, and without ambiguity, ordered forces under their control to target and kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield. Sir.”

  “There were atrocities on both sides. Remember that.”

  “So, with respect, are you saying that the fighting men of the United States of America are no better than a murderous pack of Soviet-backed Reds, sir?” Cooper said.

  The Major’s eyes raged. He snatched back the report. “Get the fuck out of here,” Lansing said. “If you ask any more questions I’ll have you court martialed. Got that? Dismissed!”

  Cooper saluted. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  Lansing didn’t return the salute. The army accelerated Cooper’s discharge.

  Cooper fooled around with a few other careers in the mid-1950s. He was an insurance investigator in Illinois, then moved east, took a cheap-o apartment in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and wrote occasionally for American pulp crime magazines. In his first year, he grossed thirty-seven hundred dollars. He also worked part-time as a waiter in a drinking-and-fighting place on West 14th Street named Cirillo’s, where booze and cocaine flowed freely.

  Cirillo himself manned the bar at most hours and kept one automatic pistol under each end of the counter. In this neighborhood, there was plenty of crime. Cooper had plenty to write about. Later he moved to the more upscale Landmark Tavern at Eleventh Avenue and 46th Street, where he observed much. The place was a popular haunt for Irish gangsters from the West Side. He kept his mouth shut and learned when not to write about something.

  Cooper had some noteworthy relatives swinging from branches of the family tree. Back in Illinois, growing up, he had been a favorite nephew of his uncle, Eddie “Shiv” O’Connor. Shiv, a smiling religious man who never missed Sunday Mass, was a labor enforcer, pickpocket, burglar, leg breaker and—as needed—killer, though never convicted.

  Uncle Shiv sported a jaunty felt fedora, pin striped suits and polka-dotted ties, under which he usually wore a bullet-proof vest. One time in 1925, Shiv and a friend were hanging out on Washington Avenue when a car rolled to a halt nearby. Someone from within shouted, “Hey, Shiv!” in a friendly tone. This was quickly followed by the rhythmic rat-tat-tat-tat of machine gun fire, which Shiv managed to duck. The prospective hit was the first known use of the Thompson machine gun in the Chicago bootleg wars of the 1920’s.

  The Tommy gun, named after General John T. Thompson of World War One fame, was light, lethal and fluid. It could fire a thousand rounds a minute. Its use didn’t fall under any laws covering pistols or rifles. It redefined mob warfare in the era. Due to its distinctive sound, it became known in the press as “the Chicago typewriter.”

  One night in June of 1953, after Cooper was back from Korea, Kevin, Uncle Shiv’s son, was at Toots Shors’ booze-fueled saloon on Manhattan’s West 51st Street. Kevin was on his honeymoon with his bride Rita. They were seeing the sights of Manhattan and the famous circular smoky bar at Shors’ was one of them. Mickey Mantle was propped up against the bar that night, a Hall of Fame arm around a major league blonde. So were Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason. A regular who was conspicuously missing was mobster Francesco Castiglia, now known as Frank Costello, and recent star of the televised U.S. Senate Kefauver hearings on organized crime. Costello was serving a prison sentence.

  Kevin had promised his dad that he would stay out of trouble in the Big Apple. But a couple of sore-at-the-world Brooklyn punks named Tommy and Jimmy were at the bar also. They made insulting remarks to Kevin’s wife, Rita. Kevin paid the bar tab and left with his lady. The punks followed.

  On the street, a friend joined them. They made chicken noises and confronted Kevin. One of them, the leader, pulled a knife. “How’d you like your nuts cut off, you queer?” he asked.

  The man wasn’t just a hood. At nearly six feet four, he was a big hood.

  Kevin shoved the thug in retaliation. Then all three jumped Kevin. They punched him savagely, with one of the goons peeling off to grope his terrified wife at the same time. By coincidence, Frank Cooper was arriving at Shor’s with two old army buddies and recognized his cousin. Cooper, still lean and hard-nosed from his combat tour, charged directly into the melee, fists flying, his Irish up. The punk with the knife came directly at him.

  Cooper threw a left fist and heard the crunch of the man’s nose under the impact. When the man reeled backward, and the knife flew away, Cooper went for the knockdown with a fierce uppercut. It broke the man’s jaw and shattered two teeth. Before the man could fall, Cooper grabbed him by the shirt, held him, and landed a devastating knee to the man’s groin.

  When the second punk grabbed Rita, Cooper chicken-winged him, turned him and threw him in front of a speeding taxi cab. Cooper savored the skidding tires, the screeching horn and the thunderous crunch of the cab’s front end slamming hard into the body. Cooper’s buddies took care of the third one as a crowd gathered. It was over quickly; three punks down.

  Kevin, Rita, Frank Cooper and the ex-G.I.’s got out of there fast. Unwilling to call it an evening, they headed to Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Bar. It was only weeks later, through the grapevine, that Cooper learned he had rumbled a trio of low level stick-up men in the Luciano crime family. Dangerous guys they were, but none too bright. They let it be known that if they ever found out who had thrashed them, that person’s body parts had a dump site waiting for them at the sewage treatment plant on Ward’s Island near the Triborough Bridge, “dick and balls first,” as went the threat on the street.

  But Cooper had waded in with his punches so fast that the three punks had never gotten a good look. Word travelled to Chicago where several Hibernians had a good laugh. Frank Cooper became Uncle Shiv’s favorite nephew. Uncle Shiv hung the family nickname “Frankie Fists” upon Cooper. “A good Irishman always respects a good brawler,” said Shiv. “Us Bog Trotters gotta stick together.”

  Chapter 10

  Cooper caught on as a police reporter with the tabloid New York Daily Mirror in May of 1955. He loved working on the Mirror. He remembered walking into the newsroom for the first time, looking for a job: there were overworked reporters pecking at ancient typewriters, editors hurling obscenities like verbal grenades. Smoke rose in gray thunderheads. The city editor interviewing him took a cigar from his mouth and appraised the ex-soldier in front of him.

  “Now what the fuck do you want, punk?” the editor asked.

  Cooper, gesturing at his surroundings, said, “All this.”

  “You’re goddam crazy.”

  “Yeah. I know. I’ll fit in fine.”

  The electricity and vibes of a New York City tabloid brought out Cooper’s best. His articles were excellent. He developed a reputation as a quick study and a streetwise rough-and-tumble writer-reporter. Sources talked. Good copy followed. No one was too sacred to be called out and castigated. His elbows were sharp. His editors gave him a long leash.

  The Daily Mirror was a distinctive place to work in the 1950’s.

  The paper had been founded in 1924 by William Randolph Hearst to compete with the New York Daily News. By the 1930s, the Daily Mirror was one of the Hearst Corporation's flagship papers. By 1956, The Daily Mirror had the second widest circulation in the United States, trailing only its East Side rival, the News.

  Cooper stayed in contact with the “bad” side of the family back in Chicago. On occasion, Cooper made discreet phone calls. Uncle Shiv would quietly help him establish underworld contacts in New York, particularly if it embarrassed Italians. There often was much that was useful in some bad people, Cooper knew. The family contacts juiced his work for The Mirror.

  Early on, The Daily Mirror established its own formula. It would out-News the News. Its content would be ten per cent news, eighty-eight percent gossip and entertainment and two percent total crap. In April of 1927, the newspa
per hit its stride, devoting substantial resources to the divorce of real estate tycoon Edward West “Daddy” Browning who at age fifty-one had dumped his wife and married Frances Belle “Peaches” Heenan, “an aspiring actress,” all five feet six, one hundred sixty-three pounds of her, three months before her sixteenth birthday.

  She was, Browning told reporters from The Daily Mirror, “the girl of my dreams.” Her mother bestowed her blessing. Despite the noisy efforts of meddlesome child welfare agencies to obstruct the lovebirds, they married.

  To celebrate her sixteenth birthday, Daddy bought an enormous cake, a yard high, for “the most luscious peach of them all.” Glittering on the birthday girl's arm were four platinum bracelets, studded with diamonds. In the weeks that followed, New York went nutso for the modern Cinderella. Great mobs followed as she went about her spending sprees. So did reporters from the Daily Mirror. Alas, the fairy tale marriage was over by October fifth. Peaches cleared out her closets—at least thirty grand worth of goodies—and went home to mother.

  “I was an innocent little bird in a gilded cage,” sniffled poor Peaches.

  By January of 1928, Daddy and Peaches were in divorce court. Inquiring minds wanted to know all about it. The Daily Mirror faithfully reported every accusation, sob, shriek, gasp, and sigh. Peaches showed up in court wearing an $11,000 Russian sable coat, a gift from the man whom she would soon depict as a prince of depravity.

  Peaches told of her nightmare. Browning made her look at dirty French magazines. He marched around with no clothes on and insisted she eat her breakfast in the nude. He kept a noisy African honking goose in their bedroom. He played bizarre practical jokes, like jumping out behind her and yelling, “Boo!” At other times, she said, her innocent sensibilities were astonished, such as “when he came lumbering into our bedroom dressed as a sheik and growling at me like a bear” and when the trained goose honked and flapped on cue during those special and deeply intimate moments in their bedroom.

  “I'm a good girl,” Peaches wept on the stand.

  In contrast, she said, Daddy was “a perverted monster.” She spoke of “depraved tastes” and “abnormal activity.” Sometimes at night in the bedroom, she said, “Daddy bounced on the floor on his hands and knees and made funny noises.” When she objected, she recalled, “Daddy cuffed me to the floor and continued.”

  But Browning's lawyers brought out “evidence” suggesting there were at least fifty previous “sheiks,” an army of former boyfriends in the orchards of Peaches’ fruity past.

  When it was his turn, Browning said that his dream girl had never acted as a wife. Far from it, he insisted. She had never even kissed him, he said, and at one point her mother had moved in with them. Peaches and her mom were nothing but a pair of gold-digging schemers and he had never had the pleasure on consummating the marriage, an important legal point.

  The judge ruled that Peaches had abandoned her husband. The court granted Daddy a legal separation. No alimony. But public opinion turned against Browning and his feathery pal, the trained goose. When Browning died in 1934, the goose got stuffed. Peaches went into vaudeville to tell all about it. There it remained for twenty-two years.

  On a hot early evening in August of 1956, Frank Cooper was in the newsroom of the Daily Mirror on New York’s East 43rd Street when the managing city editor, an arch and pervy middle-aged Hunter College graduate named David Taub, abruptly summoned him. Taub had a tipster in every hospital emergency room in the city, many of them equipped with tiny cameras. At the end of each month, Taub paid off with ten-dollar bills, bottles of Johnny Walker and baseball and hockey tickets that he’d scammed from his pal on the sports desk, the consistently brilliant Dan Parker.

  “What are you doing right now, mensch?” Taub asked.

  “It’s seven thirty. I’m getting ready to go home, Dave.”

  “Ever heard of someone named ‘Peaches’ Heenan?” the editor asked.

  “Not till now.”

  “Heenan was the center of a bedroom scandal thirty years ago. She just slipped and fell in her bathtub in an apartment six blocks from here.”

  “Drunk?” Cooper asked.

  “I’d guess.”

  “Dead?”

  “Isn’t it great? Yup. Gloriously drunk and spectacularly nude. History of malnutrition,

  epilepsy and alcohol. I need two thousand words for the ‘Irish comics.’” Taub said.

  “The what?”

  “The obituary page, dumbfuck. You’re writing hers. Get your sorry ass up to the clippings morgue on the eighth floor. My gentlemanly demeanor prohibits me from sharing a set of five memorable photographs of the death scene. But they’re in the envelope on the edge of my desk,” he said, indicating an enticing gray envelope that was within Cooper’s reach. “If you steal a furtive glimpse, it’s on you, you sick depraved voyeur.”

  Cooper reached. He looked. He winced. He gasped.

  “These pictures are horrible,” he said. “Are we printing them?”

  “Good God, no! What sort of tasteless sordid amoral enterprise do you think we’re running here? Take a look at her boobs. She’s face up stark raving jaybird naked!”

  Cooper looked again. “Yeah. I see that.” Taub, as usual, was a man of his word. “So, I assume you want the obit to be licentious and lurid?” Cooper asked.

  “Lowbrow, leering and louche.”

  “Fast or good?”

  “I want both, Cooper,” Taub said. “You have one hundred and ten minutes to make tomorrow’s early edition. No one else has the story yet. Go! Get your cynical ass on the move.”

  “Sure, Dave. Thanks.”

  “My pleasure, meshuganah.”

  Cooper spent seventy-five minutes researching The Daily Mirror’s clippings and then thirty minutes writing an obit straight into an Olympia portable typewriter.

  The tabloid ran a nice big saucy must-read-this obituary the next morning above the by-line of Francis X. Cooper.

  PEACHES HEENEN BROWNING, 46.

  STARRED WITH GOOSE AND WOLF

  IN LURID JAZZ AGE SEX SCANDAL

  It was Cooper’s first obituary. Between street assignments, he wrote two to five obits a week, mostly for fun. Taub threw the sleaziest ones Cooper’s way out of professional admiration.

  A year later, Cooper met a cute flight attendant named Judy from Minnesota. They married in 1958. They found a larger apartment on the West Side near the newly opened Lincoln Center. For a while, there were no limits to anything. Life rocked. Everything was copacetic.

  Chapter 11

  During the early decades of the Daily Mirror, several outstanding young writers and photographic journalists worked there, including Ring Lardner, Jr. and the political commentator Drew Pearson. Also there was gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who had been lured away from the even more disreputable New York Evening Graphic. Winchell had initiated his radio show and in the 1940’s and 1950s was syndicated in more than two thousand daily papers. But the Mirror was his home base.

  Winchell wrote a daily Broadway column. He wielded extraordinary power as a purveyor of gossip, innuendo and opinion. He invented the language of tabloid journalism. A pregnant woman was ''infanticipating.” She and her husband would soon join ''the mom and population.'' If a couple split up, Winchell said they were ''sharing separate teepees.''

  Winchell held court every night at The Stork Club, a former speak-easy and now a glossy night club at 3 East 53rd Street, a place where there were more ladies on laps than napkins. Sherman Billingsley, a former bootlegger from Oklahoma, had first established the club on West 58th Street during Prohibition. After an incident when Billingsley was kidnapped and held for ransom by Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, a rival of his mobster partners, Billingsley became the sole owner of the Stork Club. Ownership of the posh club became more secure in February of 1932 when gangsters Dutch Schultz and Leeds-born Owney Madden, a Winchell pal, put a $50,000 bounty on Vincent Coll's head. Shortly thereafter, Coll was machine gunned to death while using a p
hone booth at a drug store at Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street.

  From Table 50 at the Stork Club, Winchell held court and did his live radio broadcast, summoning ball players, boxers, stage and screen stars, politicians, royalty and mobsters to his table. He demanded to know what they were doing. He drew people and attention to the joint and never paid a nightly check.

  Winchell’s voice, well known across America from his radio show, was a tough-guy break-neck staccato. His visual trademarks were a snap-brim fedora, often with a press ID in the hatband and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He mingled with the mob, palling around with Al Capone and Frank Costello. One of his biggest coups came in 1939 and involved Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, described by the FBI as ''the most dangerous criminal in the United States.''

  Lepke Buchalter had created an effective organization for performing contract killings for the New York underworld in the 1930s. Winchell called it, “Murder, Inc.” The name stuck. Many mobsters wanted to insulate themselves from any connection to murders of rivals. So Lepke’s partner, mobster Albert Anastasia, later to be gunned down in a barber’s chair at the Park Sheridan Hotel on Central Park West, would relay a contract request from the underworld to Buchalter. Lepke would assign the job to Jewish and Italian gang members from Brooklyn. Everyone was happy except the victim.

  On July 25, 1939, some of Lepke’s mob gunmen were waiting to whack a short pudgy man named Philip Orlovsky. They made an honest mistake. They whacked a short pudgy sheet music publisher named Irving Penn, instead. The wrong-man murder in front of Penn’s home in the Bronx brought down the wrath of New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey. Suddenly Dewey was rounding up everyone Lepke knew. The other mobsters were buckling under the pressure. Lepke was “hot,” which was bad for business. It was only a matter of time before someone found his bullet-riddled carcass.

  Lepke went into hiding, but he also knew that a federal prison was the safest place. So it made good sense to surrender. Walter Winchell was known to be tight with the FBI. Winchell received an anonymous phone call on Saturday the 5th of August. “Lepke wants to come in,” a voice informed him. “But the talk around town is that Lepke will be shot while supposedly escaping.”