Life and Death of a Tough Guy (20 page)

Too many killings, too much publicity. Everybody was shaking a head — the public, the law, and the lawless. Men like Lucky Luciano and Lepke (of L. and G.) decided something had to be done about the mad dogs who, as every sober underworld character agreed, “were plain lousing up the racket.” Something had to be done about the publicity hounds who spat at public opinion. About Al Capone in Chicago, about Dutch Schultz, Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond and Spotter Boyle in New York. Guys like that were just plain bad for business. After all, the beer and whiskey business or the gambling or whorehouse business — take your choice, pal — we’re no different from any other business. It was lawyers and accountants, supply and demand. The same customers, buying the new radios and the new cars, were also patronizing the speaks, the horse parlors, the whorehouses.

The sober men, the solid men, sent the word to practically every big-shot racketeer to come down to Atlantic City and talk things over. The beer barons came, and the hoss-thieves who ran the horse parlors, and the men who ran the dope dynasties, and the princely pimps who had organized chains of little pimps, and the fabulous friends of both Labor and Management.

From New York, Spotter Boyle accompanied by Emmanuel Farber, traveled down to Atlantic City and in the banquet room of a big hotel sat at a great big table whose shining surface reflected the faces of this first convention of big-time criminals. Al Capone was there, fat and dark and waving a hand when he talked as if expecting the newspaper photographers any minute, still behaving as if he owned Chicago. He was about to be dispossessed, but he didn’t know it yet. He didn’t know that the New York organizers of the convention had secretly scratched a bookkeeper’s red line through his name. Opposite Al Capone at that shining table sat the big men of Chicago whom his gunmen had missed, Moran and Aiello. Mob war in Chicago had to stop, the New York organizers argued. Stop everywhere. The country was sick of it. There was a new president in the White House, Herbert Hoover. The federal agents were buzzing around in every town looking for a club. A new time was coming. “Prohibition wasn’t going to last forever!” — this was a big slogan at the convention. And: “We’ve got to get ready for changes.” And: “We’ve got to trust each other.” And: “The public’s dumb but we can’t spit in their face forever.”

And the first thing that had to be worked out was this Chicago thing. Now suppose Al Capone makes peace with Moran and Aiello and what’s left of the O’Bannions. Yeh, peace, Al, the gangland diplomats argued; all this shooting has to stop. Wait a minute, Al, wait a minute everybody. You’ll all get a chance to sound off. Wait a minute! Public opinion, ever hear of public opinion? Public opinion has to be satisfied. The suckers have to get something, so this is what we’ll do. You, Al, you’ll go to Philly and get yourself pulled in for carrying a gat. Wait a minute, Al! The public’s in a lather about you, Al, it’s the only way. You’ll get six months in jail and the suckers’ll quiet down, they’ll be satisfied. Al Capone’s in jail, see, and everything quiets down, Chicago quiets down. Your interests won’t get hurt, Al. Johnny Torrio’ll look after your interests. Torrio, the guy who brought you to Chicago in the first place. Torrio and Aiello and Moran here’ll run Chicago ‘til you get out and no more war.

Scarface Al Capone didn’t want any part of it, but he was talked into the deal by the diplomats from New York. They had everything figured out — the future all cleaned up and ready for the oven like a twenty-pound Christmas turkey.

Take booze for instance. Yeh, booze. Ain’t that a mess half the time? When we got too much booze in New York what do we do but dump it in Philly. And you guys out in the sticks are no better. In Detroit and Cleveland you get your booze from Canada. You war with Chicago where they depend on industrial alky. That’s bad business. That’s all wrong!

There were a lot of things all wrong and the convention organizers now revealed their pet project, the real reason for calling the convention:
A Central Office
.

A central office to milk the last whiskey millions out of the prohibition cow.

A central office to put gambling, prostitution, narcotics, the labor rackets on a solid business basis.

A central office to eliminate headaches, headlines and headline hunters.

A central office ticking like a thousand-dollar watch with everything and everybody, rackets and racketeers, moving like hour hands, minute hands, and second hands, all the way down the line.

The Spotter, cagey as ever, sought out the New York organizers, confessed he’d been off-base. Hell, he was no mad dog like Al Capone or Dutch Schultz. From now on, he’d let the central office handle his headaches. Privately he said to his lawyer, Farber, “If they can get Al to go to jail, who are we to buck ‘em?”

• • •

“In The Office, there’s gonna be one guy in charge of enforcement,” the Spotter notified Joey when he returned to New York.

“What’s that?” Joey asked.

“What you been doin’, kiddo. This Charley Valinchi over in Brooklyn. You’ll be with him, Joey. And your side-kick, Georgie, too. Now wait a minnit before you start askin’ questions. This is a real break for you. It’s workin’ direct for The Office. A real break, kiddo!”

The Spotter was lying a mile a minute as Joey would discover in the months that followed. But even with the news piping hot off the Spotter’s tongue he could see something was wrong. There was
wrong
in the Spotter’s eyes. There was
wrong
in the little smile the Spotter gave him free of charge. It was all
wrong
.

Not that Charley Valinchi was a bad guy. The trouble with this enforcing was that instead of one boss, he now had a dozen, with Charley the only one with a face. The Office didn’t have a face. Lucky Luciano, Lepke, the other big-shots — they were faceless. The Office! With Charley Valinchi their errand boy. And if Charley was only a high-class errand boy, what the hell was he, Joey kept asking himself. Where was he going now? What was ahead of him? When he’d been working for the Spotter, there was always the feeling he could get to be somebody. True, the Spotter’d kept him down, had him mobilize Local 23 only to double-cross him, but he’d played his cards close to his chest, and with the John Terry job, the local’d dropped into his lap, and after the Quinn job, he was in solid. Or thought he was. It was clear as a bell that the Spotter’d just been waiting for the chance to get rid of him. True, his dough came from Local 23 — that was one of The Office’s laws: its enforcers got their living from their own private rackets — but he no longer had much to do with Local 23. His new job was with The Office. Enforcing! And what was that? Nothing. A guy could be brainy or dopey, fox or dumb-ox, and it made no difference. I’m stuck, Joey was thinking, stuck for life….

• • •

Charley Valinchi summoned his enforcers when he wanted them to his restaurant out in Brooklyn. It was located in one of those run-down slums across the bridge from Manhattan where the red brick houses squat side by side like silent old folk on a park bench. The kind of neighborhood where the kids are always saying, “Nothin’ ever happens here.” Good times or bad, the worn red brick houses looked just the same. The collapse of the Wall Street boom in October 1929, the first cries of panic, the first waves of unemployment hadn’t made much difference to the looks of this neighborhood or to Charley Valinchi’s restaurant, the Napoli. Like a dozen other 75c-for-an-eight-course-dinner Napolis, the walls had been decorated with murals of Italy, daubed on by an artist, half sign-painter and half hungry. There was Venice and the gondolas, Rome and the Coliseum, all done in ghastly bluish greens and funereal reds like the drawings for a wax museum.

Joey walked from the subway late that spring evening over toward the Napoli. He felt that he’d about worn a path from the subway to the restaurant this last year. The errand boy of an errand boy — that was what he’d come down to, he brooded. Christ, I better stop thinking of it or I’ll go nuts. He hoped that tonight Charley wouldn’t be sending him on another out-of-town job. From one month to the next, there was no telling. He’d been to Kansas City once, to Detroit twice, and lucky he’d missed out on LA.

“Out there in the sticks they know who they gotta get rid of,” Charley Valinchi had explained to Joey before his first trip. They could do the job themself. Sure, but when we control it from New York, it’s easier to keep it quiet.”
Keep it quiet
was a favorite of Charley Valinchi’s. More than once he had said, “Keep it quiet, boys. The soft pedal, boys. The soft pedal.” Which meant simply that the old way of plugging a mark full of holes and leaving the dead meat on the sidewalk was now n.g. New ways for a new time. The enforcers mixed the enforcees with cement. They soaked them in gasoline and burned them to a crisp in the stolen murder cars. It could be a rockhead of a gambler up in Boston moving into territory where he had no right, to be dumped into the river where he could argue territory with the eels. Or the kidnapping of some Baltimore junk peddler getting a little too cozy with the Narcotics Squad, who, when buried in a field out of the city, could be depended upon not to start up a big funeral. The office was against big funerals. Big funerals were headlines.

The Napoli was empty when Joey walked inside, with only its lone waiter Gregorio reading a newspaper at one of the red and white cloth-covered tables. “Hello,” Joey said.

Gregorio smiled nervously. He was an old man and he’d never gotten used to the young men who came to see Charley Valinchi just before the Napoli closed for the night.

Joey turned into a doorway, into a narrow corridor. He passed the gaudy green-painted door of the Men’s Room, the paintless door of a broom closet, and in the rear of the corridor paused at a fine mahogany door with an engraved copper plate lettered: PRIVATE.

There was a story behind that door which had hung once in a Brooklyn Heights mansion. There, in a neighborhood of elegant brownstones overlooking Brooklyn harbor, an old shipowning family had lived for three generations. When Charley Valinchi had bought the property in the lush prohibition time, he had occupied the office on the third floor: PRIVATE. On the floor beneath, Charley operated one of the classiest restaurant-speaks in all Brooklyn. He had sold the property in 1928 just before the crash and was sentimental enough to remove the mahogany door with its engraved copper plate. “My good luck,” Charley would say.

Joey knocked, a voice said come in. He entered a room fitted up like an office. Charley Valinchi was sitting at a broad flat desk talking to two men. He had a yellow pencil behind one ear, in the lapel of his dark blue suit an almost fresh carnation — a habit continued from his years as a big-time speakeasy prop. His dark face was round and it had been handsome, but like the carnation, the bloom was gone. He looked like a floorwalker after a long hard day. With him, waiting for Joey’s arrival, were Chuck Tillio and Walter Rozak. Chuck wore a conservative brown suit, but Walter Rozak was dressed as in the old prohibition days, in a light suit the color of cake icing and a necktie that could have lit up a dark room.

“Joey, you’re always late,” Charley said.

“How’s the West Side Kid?” Tillio asked, while Rozak smiled, his fat pink face like a mean rabbit’s.

“Sit down,” Charley said briskly. “Let’s get going here.” He opened a folder on his desk. “This is a guy in our territory….”

The trial had begun. In the home territory of The Office, Charley was more than the chief enforcer. He was also the judge and he always had a trial, although the man on trial was never present. Always, too, there were witnesses, sometimes as many as eight or nine. But tonight in the case of Milty “The Poet” Finestein, there was only Tillio to defend Milty and Rozak to prosecute him. If the judge decided Milty was guilty, Joey would take it from there.

Charley Valinchi was consulting some scribbled notes in his folder. He lifted his head and said, “A couple months ago, in Febu’ry, to be exact, this Finestein comes knocking on the door and gets to see somebody in The Office. We can forget who, somebody big. He comes with a pitch how Dutch Schultz ain’t satisfied muscling into Harlem and taking over the numbers racket from the dinges, but how Dutch got plans to take numbers all over the state. Oh, yeah!” the judge reminded himself, nodding at Joey. “This Finestein’s one of Dutch’s number runners. He still is. That’s the trouble with Finestein. The story we get, he’s reportin’ on us to Dutch. The guy’s working both sides of the street.”

“He’s a stool pigeon,” the defense lawyer without a degree, Chuck Tillio, conceded right away. “What I say though is, The Office can use all the stool pigeons it can get with a guy like Dutch Schultz. There’s a guy always been a nuisance. He was a nuisance when he was makin’ beer. He’s a bigger nuisance now. He gives everyone a bad name. What I’m tryin’ to prove is we need stool pigeons in the Dutchman’s mob even if they ain’t a hundred percent reliable stool pigeons — ”

The judge broke in sternly. “What’s all this guff? A hundred percent reliable? You can either depend on a stool pigeon or you can’t depend. Finestein’s reporting to us on the Dutchman and the next day he turns around and reports to Schultz. Don’t forget Schultz is smart. How do we know he didn’t tell Finestein to come to us in the first place?”

“Where’s the proof?” defense counsel demanded.

Walter Rozak said: “The proof’s in the Dutchman’s own big mouth and I’ll prove it — ”

“I’m not through yet,” defense counsel said.

“You are so!” the judge overruled him.

Joey sat there, smoking, only half listening. The hell with them all, he was thinking. With Charley Valinchi the judge, and Chuck Tillio sweating to make a good case for a stool pigeon, and Walter Rozak sitting there like a tub of lard. The hell with this trial and the next trial. The hell with the God damn Office pulling all the strings and making them all jump. And the hell with himself. Why should he leave himself out? A God damn errand boy!

“When I say you’re through, you’re through,” the judge was saying to defense counsel. His words to Joey seemed to be a sentence pronounced on himself.