Button Man

by Andrew Gross

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “What happened? Nothing happened. There was a big wait. Her assistant said she had to see the lines she already buys.”

  “You mean you didn’t even get to show her the line?” I was angry. I knew we had something right for her. All we had to do was get it in front of her.

  “You think it’s so easy?” He flung the box of chocolates across the table. “You fucking do it. Be my guest.”

  “All right, maybe I will,” I said back in the same anger. I’d never seen my brother lose his temper before. But I was nervous as hell. In production I was the boss and could do anything I wanted. But sales … I didn’t even know how to make a sales call. That night, I got drunk and went over and over what I would say.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, an hour early, I dragged the sample case up to her office at 1225 Broadway on an open sales call. I was nervous as a kid playing the violin at Carnegie Hall. This was the first time I’d ever been in front of a customer on my own.

  I figure I’ll be the first in line, but to my shock, when I get there, there are already at least thirty salesmen ahead of me waiting to show their lines. And every one seems to have wool coats with fur on them—fur collars, fur sleeves. A few people there knew me from the trade and knew I didn’t go on sales calls. They gave me questioning looks like, What the hell are you doing here, Morris? Aren’t you in the wrong place? One by one the ones in front of me go in—there’s an assistant at a desk in front of a frosted-glass partition open at the top, Mrs. Mossman behind it. You could hear her voice—stern, no-nonsense. All business. One after one, the salesmen come back out, most of them with the same look Sol had on him the other day, like their own mothers had passed away. Once in a while, one would come out with a bit of a smile, and maybe gives a friend who was still on the line a wink and a thumbs-up. Then the telephone would ring and no one would go in for a while. I waited. An hour passed. Then two. I practiced over and over what I would say.

  I sat there for over four hours. At one thirty, there were still at least ten people ahead of me. I asked the assistant how long she saw salesmen for and she told me, “Mrs. Mossman has to leave today at two. She has an appointment in the market.”

  Two? I saw clearly I wasn’t even going to be able to show her my line. I wasn’t even close.

  But I wasn’t going back without her seeing me.

  I opened my case and went up to the partition. The assistant said, “Sir, I told you you’ll have to wait your—”

  I took my two best fur-collared numbers and flung them over the partition. Then I yelled out so anyone behind it could clearly hear me, “Sixteen seventy-five for either of them. See if you can beat it!”

  At first, there was no response. Just silence. I figure I’d dug my own grave, but so what, at least I wasn’t going back without her seeing what we did.

  Horrified, the assistant ran in the buyer’s office, going, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mossman, I tried to tell him you were—”

  But before she even got the words out of her mouth, Muriel Mossman came out with one of my samples. Gray haired, a tweed suit well below her knees; heavy, low-heeled shoes. She looked like that drill sergeant who had thrown me in the ring in the army.

  “Who’s the wise guy?” she asks dourly and looks around. I’m standing there and her gaze centers on me. I figured I’d just collect my samples and be told to leave and never come back.

  Instead, I go, “I’m the wise guy. Sixteen seventy-five for either of them. You won’t find a coat like that at a better price.”

  “Roselle, who is this person?” She glared at me.

  I didn’t scare easy, but the way she looked at me, fire in her eyes, my insides were rolling over. Behind me, I heard a few of the salesmen snickering.

  “I’m Morris Raab,” I said.

  “Morris Raab … I’ve heard of you,” she said. Still, I figured the next words out of her mouth would be, Well, Morris Raab, collect your samples and get the hell out.

  Instead she held the fur-trimmed number out. “And you can deliver these? Just like they look here. Same quality? For that price?”

  “As many as you need,” I said. Though I knew I had to figure out how to back up my word.

  “All right, then Morris Raab, come on in,” she said, motioning me into her office. “Roselle, hold my calls.”

  * * *

  I didn’t get back to the office until almost five. I dragged my sample case into the office and threw it on the desk. Sol was going over some figures, no doubt seeing my downcast face and thinking I’d suffered the same fate as him.

  “So…? Get anything? It’s not as easy as you think out there, is it?”

  “I got one.” I dug into my case and produced a signed purchase order from a store in Pennsylvania and put it on his desk.

  He picked it up. Three styles. Eight of a number. He looked up and his face split into a smile. “Sonovabitch, Morris! I’ve been trying to crack Muriel Mossman for two years and you finally did it.” He got up and slapped me on the back with true excitement.

  “I got this one too,” I said, and pulled out another. From a store in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Four styles. Twelve of a number.

  Sol looked it over and his face lit up. That was two more than he’d been able to get in two years.

  “And this one…” I reached inside my case and brought out a third order. This one, from Perkins-Watkins, a big department store down South. Three styles. Sixty of a number.

  By then he was dumbstruck.

  “I forgot, this one too…” To his amazement, I kept taking out orders from my case and dropping them on the desk. “Oh, yeah, and this one…” Soon, the pile of orders I’d received was eight inches high. From all over the country.

  It was a lot. A real lot.

  Stunned, Sol sat back down. He started going through them one by one, writing down the quantities in a column, punching them into an adding machine. I kept hearing the ka-ching, ka-ching of the machine, totaling them up, knowing each one was a block on which our future would be built.

  “There’s sixty,” he finally said, and looked at me. “Over three thousand pieces.” He turned over the last one. “That’s over fifty thousand dollars, Morris.”

  “Fifty-three thousand, six hundred and three,” I said. “And we deliver ’em, just like we showed ’em, next time we’ll get ten times that amount.”

  From then on Muriel Mossman became like a mentor to me. And there wasn’t much argument that I was in charge of the firm.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1933

  The Amalgamated Needle Trade Workers Union had been representing workers in the garment trade for fifty years, and for thirty of them, Abraham Langer had been its most successful rep.

  In the early years, it was fruitless work, as Abe went company to company with no one wanting to hear his message; even the workers themselves were afraid just listening would cost them their jobs. Then, in 1911, there was the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Asch Building near Washington Place and Greene Street: 146 sewers lost their lives, most of them young immigrant women; the outer doors had been blocked against escape so that they wouldn’t take unauthorized bathroom breaks. The entire city was appalled. The newspapers took up the labor cause, headlines excoriating the firetrap and the victims’ deplorable working conditions. One by one, garment makers were forced to give in. In 1917, the Russian Revolution championed the plight of workers worldwide. Strikes were organized, speakers ranted in the streets against greed and capitalism and the abuse of labor for profit; newspaper headlines took up the cause of women. All Abe ever wanted was to give a voice to the small and the powerless. Suddenly it was as if the whole world had taken up his cause.

  He went from shop to shop, factory to factory, listening to the workers’ complaints, but Abe’s way wasn’t to overthrow anyone. Everyone knew him, worker and factory owner alike. His easy way and natural sense of humor made him as liked as anyone on the street. Anyone would be
able to find him in his booth at Eddie’s, the restaurant on the Lower East Side that was his makeshift office. “Why don’t you cut your workers a break,” he would tell a stubborn factory owner over coffee. “You want to keep them happy, don’t you? Happy workers make happy clothes. The better workmanship alone will pay the difference in wages.”

  One by one, they all began to come in line.

  But in the late 1920s, things began to change. The gangsters got in the game. Suddenly the unions no longer had the interests of the workers in mind. They were taken over by mobsters, racketeers. Not only did they force companies to join up through intimidation and force—cracking heads and kneecaps, setting places of business afire or destroying a garment maker’s inventory—they formed what they now called buying directives, bullying their way into the trim and raw material markets, forcing a company to buy exclusively from them and not on the open market.

  It was no longer about labor reform—it was just about money. Tons of money. And bloodshed. And extortion. And the politicians had their hands out too.

  For a year or two, Abe found a way to push back against what was happening. His union still operated freely, and the only way for a manufacturer to protect themselves was to join a competing union. His. He got threats himself, but went on. But soon the syndicate grew too powerful to fight back against. One by one, they started chipping away at any companies who didn’t buy in. The Amalgamated Needle Trade Workers Union started losing membership.

  “I can’t buy fur unless I go directly through them,” a client would complain. “My prices are soaring.”

  “Abe, you’re a good man, I’ve known you a long time,” another would say. “We were always able to do business in the past. But the business has changed.…”

  “It’s only changed if you give in to them,” Abe would insist.

  One day, he was beaten up in an elevator coming from one of his manufacturers and told if he knew what was good for him to keep his nose out of things.

  The Amalgamated Needle Trade Workers Union began to lose its hold.

  Then, on the morning of April 24, 1933, things collapsed entirely. The office doors burst open and ten thugs, faces covered, wielding heavy clubs and lead pipes, charged in. They smashed desks and filing cabinets and shattered frosted-glass partitions. Anyone who stood up against them was knocked viciously to the floor. Ezra J. Potash, the union’s president, came out of his office. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “How dare you barge in here like this?”

  One of the attackers struck him on the back with a lead pipe and Potash slumped to the floor. One of the union’s longtime employees charged one of the attackers and got clubbed in the head. Blood pooled on the floor. People shouted, “They can’t do this. Call the police!”

  “We can do this,” the head of the masked attackers said. “And don’t bother with the police. You can be sure, they won’t be coming.”

  It was clear what he meant. The union had paid them off to stay out of it.

  “Employees of the Amalgamated Needle Trade Workers Union,” the head of the thugs addressed the office. “As of today, there’s been a change. You now all work for the International Fur Dressers Protective.”

  “The Fur Dressers…” There was a gasp. Potash pulled himself off the floor. “You have no legal right to—”

  “You want us to show you our legal right?” Another club to the back and Potash was on the floor again, blood coming from his scalp. “Any further questions about legalities?” The intruder addressed the crowd. “Anyone feels the need to report anything, you’ll get a lot worse than a little bump on the head. You understand? From now on, the Fur Dressers Protective calls the shots here. Anyone objects…” he looked around the room, “there’s the door.”

  No one moved.

  Until Abe Langer got up on a stool and shouted, “Listen to me. You all submit, you’ll be signing away everything you believe in. We’ll make sure the press will hear about this. These people are just hoodlums. What they’re saying is extortion. They won’t get away with it.”

  Two goons pulled him down and threw him onto the floor. They began to kick and stomp on him. One goon pulled him up and another rammed the blunt end of a lead pipe into his head, a crimson gash opening above Abe’s temple.

  “I have friends,” Langer kept saying. “People will hear about this. You may have the guns and the fists, but I’ve been around this street longer than you’ve been alive.”

  “Friends, huh? In that case, Leon, maybe you oughta show Mr. Langer here to the complaints department.” The leader nodded to one of his crew.

  “Sure. Follow me, Mr. Langer,” the accomplice said. He and one of the others peeled Abe off the floor and dragged him over to the window. The entire office murmured in fear. One of the goons threw open the window. Abe squirmed, trying to wrestle out of their grasp.

  The offices were eight stories up over Midtown Manhattan.

  “Complaints are on the first floor,” one of the two holding him said. “I’m pretty sure this is the quickest way down.”

  “Please, please,” Abe begged. “I have children.”

  To the shock of everyone watching, they hurled him out. Abe’s hands cycled vainly to latch onto a landing that wasn’t there. His desperate cry echoed all the way down.

  Everyone just stood in silence, a pall of shock and disbelief. No one could believe what they’d just seen.

  Abe Langer was one of the most revered people in the labor movement.

  “Anyone else have any complaints?” The leader of the intruders looked around.

  A few of the women were whimpering.

  “Any one of you cares to say something to the wrong people or make a case about anything here, think twice,” the leader said, “’cause now you know what’s in store for you.”

  No one moved.

  “In that case, welcome to the International Fur Dressers Protective, ladies and gentleman. First order of business is to let your clients know their union has now changed.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Two years went by. The Crash made things hard for the garment trade.

  Still, Raab Brothers grew.

  Morris and Sol now made coats for the largest stores across the country. Department stores like Macy’s and Bamberger’s in New York and New Jersey, Marshall Field’s in Chicago, J. L. Hudson’s in Detroit, Dayton’s in Minnesota, and the Emporium in San Francisco, battling the shift in the nation’s fortune, all now came in and worked out buying plans with them. Along with hundreds of smaller shops through the resident buying offices, who, just a few years before, wouldn’t even take their call. Their price point gave them the right niche for the country’s changing fortune.

  After a year, Morris and Sol moved their offices from the cramped, two-room production space on Chrystie Street to larger quarters in a brand-new loft building on West Thirty-sixth Street, in a part of town where many of the clothing companies were setting up. They also purchased an old uniform plant up in Kingston, New York, out of receivership, which came with one hundred workers, where they were able to keep their operations out of sight from the local unions. Morris had developed a tough-guy reputation as one who was uncompromising with their customers. You wanted their line, you had to buy it their way, as it was presented—no concessions, no returns. Unless it was a matter of quality—which, in their case, was rare. Everyone in the industry joked, one guy you didn’t want to get into a beef with over how he ran his business was Morris Raab. But he and Sol delivered their product, always as promised, and it generally sold through. And though they were equal partners, the reins of power had shifted; Sol now worked for him. Morris was just thirty-two, but he had fast become a known and respected figure in the trade.

  After he and Ruthie married, they moved uptown into a three-bedroom place on West End Avenue with a view of the river. They had a son and named him Samuel, which pleased his mother greatly. Morris couldn’t believe that such a perfect little creature had sprung from him, such a rough-and-tum
ble guy. He and Ruth hired a nanny and she continued her job at a publishing company that printed educational textbooks. He supported his mother, who chose to remain downtown in her familiar neighborhood.

  They held lunches at their apartment on Sunday afternoons, where the entire family gathered. Even Harry would drop in, though he continued his infatuation with his old friends and still declined Sol and Morris’s invitations to join the firm and begin a real career. He now lived in a small walk-up apartment on Lex and Twenty-third. Morris had a Packard; a boat he and Ruthie kept at a marina in Oyster Bay; more money than he could spend, though most of it he and Sol plowed back into Raab Brothers as it grew. When he held up his infant son, Morris thought back to the hardscrabble kid who had never backed down from fights on the Lower East Side; who had been picked on and beaten in the army; who had dutifully studied the marker maker at Majestic Garment Company and picked up a trade; and who was ashamed to even open his mouth in front of customers or show his obvious lack of education. He couldn’t believe the path his life had taken, all the good things that had come to him—most, he felt certain, because he had never just taken no for an answer and settled for what he knew in his heart was wrong: a vibrant woman like Ruthie, who would have been unattainable to a clumsy lug from the Lower East Side who had never read a book; a son, who would now not need a benefactor like Pip had to make his own way in life; a successful business and a comfortable home.

  Yet, even in all his good fortune, Morris saw the business had begun to change.

  The ILGWU, Amalgamated Needle Trade Workers, and the Fur Dressers Union, were all now squarely in Louis Buchalter’s palm. Word was that it was he who had gunned down Jacob Orgen on Norfolk Street—he and his crony Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. Morris’s industry friends who were unionized all complained that the union was squeezing them dry: their workers’ dues went up and they had to make good for it, or risk losing them to a more agreeable union shop. And they also had to make onerous payments—protection payments, everyone knew: protection from the union itself, which would make life hell for anyone who balked at them or refused to play along. The union’s strong-arm tactics would shut down a company at the slightest resistance, smashing expensive equipment, destroying valuable inventory, even causing physical harm to the owners, who were petrified to stand up to them. These were garment makers, not union crusaders. Who knew where the money they doled out to the unions went? Certainly not to the workers they claimed to represent. More likely, directly into the pockets of the mob. The very people who perpetuated this policy of intimidation. And anyone who stood up to them got hit, and hit hard. Not with picketing or work stoppages, or threats. But with blackjacks and lead pipes; with fire bombings and stink bombs that could render a warehouse full of merchandise not even worth the hangers the clothing was draped on.