My Ears Are Bent (20 page)

The relatives were waiting to claim the bodies of the three men who helped kill a barfly for $1,290. It took them a long time to kill Malloy. It took the State only sixteen minutes to kill them.

Harry Lewis, an unobtrusive, well-mannered fellow from the lower East Side, has been one of the country’s most accomplished pickpockets for thirty-five years. Frequenting such crowded places as theater lobbies, rush-hour subways and skyscraper elevators at noon, he has slyly pulled wallets from thousands of pockets. He has worked in many Eastern cities and a “yellow slip” at Police Headquarters shows that he has been arrested at least fifty-three times; the slip is by no means complete.

He is forty-eight years old and he looks years younger, despite the fact that he is almost completely bald. The terse slip shows that he has worked under six aliases. The first time he was arrested he called himself Noah Berns. That was in 1901, and he was charged with being an incorrigible child. The last time he was arrested he called himself Harry Lewis.
On this occasion he was standing in a hallway of the National Broadcasting Company’s studio on the eighth floor of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. At the time of his arrest, according to the complaint, he “had his left hand in the left trouser pocket of an unknown man.” The charge was jostling.

A court stenographer telephoned me about Lewis. He said he thought Lewis was “unusually bright for a pickpocket.” I went up to talk with the pickpocket in the Seventh District Jail, a grimy structure beneath the Sixth Avenue elevated tracks at 317 West Fifty-third Street. Lewis was in a cell, waiting to be sentenced. When he was taken before Magistrate Michael A. Ford in West Side Court he refused to say anything except, “I guess I’m guilty.” In his cell he had two tattered wild west magazines and four packages of cigarettes. The stenographer said that when the jailer came to take him out of his cell to stand before the judge he turned down a page in one of the wild west magazines to mark his place. After putting in his guilty plea he went back to his cell and resumed his reading.

I sent in a note and Lewis consented to see me. He came out and sat for a few minutes on a dirty wooden bench facing a row of cages in which new arrivals are placed. He was an erect, muscular person, with brown eyes and regular features. He was facing three years in the penitentiary, but he did not
seem particularly disturbed by his predicament; later I found out that confinement had ceased to bother him. In the moving pictures a pickpocket usually is a cringing, shifty-eyed person, but Lewis had a frank gaze, and he spoke dispassionately about the way he made a living. I noticed that his hands were broad and that his fingers did not look nimble. He was dressed in a blue suit of a Broadway cut but apparently of good quality. His shoes and his shirt were new.

“This is the first time I ever talked with a reporter,” he said. “What did you want to ask me?”

“I wish you would tell me something about your racket,” I said.

“Racket, hell!” said the pickpocket. “It’s not a racket. It’s petty thievery. I never had a racket. Picking pockets is no good any more. The officers on the P. P. Squad [the Pickpocket Squad] know my face and I get dragged in every time they see me. It’s like butting your head against a wall.”

For emphasis the pickpocket slapped the dirty jail wall. The conversation was interrupted by a girl in one of the cages who wanted a cigarette. The pickpocket pushed a cigarette through the cage, lit it for the girl and gave her the package.

“I would like to have a psychiatrist go over me because I am sure there is something wrong somewhere,” he said. “I must have a twist in my brain. It
may be environment, even. I am an East Side boy and there was seven in the family and I had to get something in my belly some way. When I get a roll I am not a pickpocket any longer. I am a gambler then. When it goes the thing starts all over again.”

He was asked to demonstrate the technique of picking pockets, but he refused.

“The pickpocket is regarded as the lowest type of criminal,” he was told. “Do you have any pride in your work?”

“Not particularly,” he said. “I would rather be a bookmaker. I like gambling better. I am more of a gambler than a pickpocket. I know I am considered the lowest type of crook, but that don’t mean anything. I mean, the cops are always calling me a cockroach and squawking about how I steal a poor man’s pay. Hell, I’m not the only one that steals the poor man’s pay. Everybody steals the poor man’s pay. There are plenty of bank presidents no better than I am.”

The pickpocket’s face was tanned and he looked as if he had passed several weeks on a Florida beach.

“I been in the sun,” he said, “but I won’t say where. I keep in shape. What gets most of the pickpockets is dope. That is the finale, when they start doping. Liquor, yes. Women, yes. But dope, no. That washes you up. When a pickpocket loses his nerve he starts doping. The most I ever done in a stretch was fifteen
months, and if I could get out of this mess I would like to go straight.”

“The detective said you always say you are going straight when they arrest you,” I said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Lewis, with resentment in his voice. “I know picking pockets is wrong and all that sort of thing, but that’s not the point. I got to eat.”

I asked the pickpocket several other questions, but he grew morose and would not answer them. He volunteered some information about his life in jail.

“I sleep,” he said. “I am able to sleep for weeks at a time. I think I am abnormal that way. I can sleep out a sentence.”

A moment later Lewis looked at me and said, “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, buddy. If you’ll excuse me …” I asked him if I could send him some cigarettes, but he shook his head and said, “I got pals on the outside. They see that I get tobacco and magazines and that stuff.” Then he shook hands and went back to his wild west magazines. I left the jail and went down to Police Headquarters to see Captain William J. Raftis, the head of the P.P. Squad. I wanted to ask him how Lewis rated as a pickpocket. The Captain said that Lewis was good.

“He has never been a lush roller,” he said. “I mean he has never picked the pockets of drunks. He has
always worked on pants pockets. Anybody could rob a drunk on the subway, or a night worker catching a nap on the way to work. Some people get into such a deep sleep on the subway you could saw their legs off. Lewis often works with a confederate, who feigns drunkenness and crowds a victim. Then Lewis picks the victim’s pocket.”

Captain Raftis said that most of the expert pickpockets started out quite young. Lewis began his career around 1904.

“In those days,” said the Captain, “there were no compulsory education laws and kids could roam the streets and get into bad company. Also there were no laws directed specifically against pickpockets. We are not breeding many pickpockets now. My squad, and the various new laws, make it almost impossible for them to work. We have detectives working crisscross on the subway and watching all big crowds. Just as Lewis said, a pickpocket in these days is just butting his head against a wall.”

On one side of the stage at the Alvin Theatre two tall chorus girls in rehearsal bloomers were sitting on a bench eating three-decker sandwiches and gulping light brown coffee from a cardboard container. Both girls were drinking from the same quart container,
and they smudged lipstick on the rim of it every time they took a swig. They were talking with their mouths full.

An actor came in and stood beneath a sign which read: “Fire Laws Require No Smoking On Stage.” Standing there, the actor took out a paper book of matches and lit a cigarette. Actors were rehearsing in every corner of the stage. Some were singing and others were yelling lines at one another. Two tapdancers stood off to one side pitching nickels at a crack in the stage. The dancer whose nickel hit nearest the crack tapped his way forward and picked up his winnings.

In the pit a piano player with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his sneering mouth and a felt hat on the back of his head was banging away. Ethel Merman stood in the middle of the stage in a big white fur coat. It was chilly on the stage. Once in a while a chorus girl would put her arms akimbo, lean forward and shiver. A rehearsal of “Red, Hot and Blue!” was in progress.

The star of the show, Jimmy Durante, sat on a shaky chair tilted against the bare bricks in the back wall of the stage. He looked as if he were trying to get as far away from other humans as possible. His face was haggard. When he took his cigar out of his big, ragged mouth his hands shook.

“I can’t drink,” he said, shivering. “Only my great
sense of responsibility forced me to show up at the pickle works today. I can’t drink. It’s all right if I take a glass of vermoot, or some red wine. Yeh, that’s all right. But last night I’m feeling thirsty, so I go to this joint across the street and I say to the bartender, ‘Recommend me something.’ So he give me what he called an Alexander. I had about six of these here Alexanders, and I get dizzy. When I go home I hit the bed and it whirls around like an electric fan. I am seasick. I’m in an awful fix. I want to die.

“First time that happened in weeks and weeks. I am going on the water wagon. I’m going to sit up there with the driver, and hold on tight. That is, except for some wine with meals. Red wine, what they used to call Guinea Red, only I never liked that terminology. The French they like red wine as much as the Italians.”

A chorus girl walked by, a beautiful redhead with long white arms.

“Don’t believe anything he tells you,” she said.

Durante jumped up and gave the girl a resounding smack on what might be called the hips. She squealed with laughter.

“You great big angel,” said Durante, forgetting his hangover.

He got up and walked out to the orchestra, and sat down in one of the front seats, a $5.50 seat. He stuck his feet up on the seat in front. He appeared
more cheerful. Two chorus girls sat in back. One was talking and the other was cracking her chewing gum.

“So he said to me, ‘You’re just what the doctor ordered,’” said the chorus girl. “And I said, ‘Your doctor must be a dentist, you big bum, keep your hands off me.’ Can you imagine. I only met him half an hour and he’s trying to kiss me.”

“Yeh,” said her colleague, “the big bum.”

“I sure do like this life,” said Durante. “When I was a kid down on Catherine Street I used to have a job, delivering papers. I would grab this bundle of 500 papers, night editions, see? And I would get on the elevated and take them up to the four newsstands at Third and Fourteen Street. In those days a paper would only have twelve pages, and a kid could handle 500. Nowadays it would crush a kid if you tried to pile that many on him. It would pulverize him.

“So I take them up there. Then I rush around to the dives in the neighborhood. I would peep under them swinging wicker doors they had on the saloons, and I would see the men dancing with these dames, and drinking, and the piano player knocking the hell out of the piano, and I would think to myself, I would think, ‘Geeze, if I could just get me a job in there it would be like in heaven.’ I still feel the same way. The stage may be the pickle works to some people, but it’s a big box of candy to me. Look at that blonde over there. Boy!”

Sitting there in the dark theater, nursing his hangover, the big-nosed comedian began to talk about his childhood, the days when he used to run wild on Catherine Street, raising hell with the other kids, the days when he liked to go barefooted and they had to run him down and catch him every winter to put shoes on him, the days when he learned that if he stuck his nose in the air and talked and kept on talking he was bound to say something funny. That is still his technique. He learned it when he lived at 90 Catherine with his brothers—Michael, who became a photoengraver, and Albert, who became a cop, both dead now. His father, robust old Bartholomeo Durante, now eighty-seven, who ran a barber shop at 87 Catherine, used to think he was nuts when he came in, talking incoherently about some experience he had in the street.

“We kids used to have a good time,” he said. “They tore down where my home was and where my pop had his shop. They tore it down to put up this high-class tenement house, this Knickerbocker Village. Most of the old-timers moved out long ago. I take a walk down there sometimes at night by myself to see the mob, what’s left of it. Like I drop in to see Eddie De Rosa. He runs a drugstore at 94 Catherine.

“Geeze, used to when some kid would pop me in the nose or maybe I got a nail in my foot I would rush up to Eddie’s, and he would stick some iodine and
court plaster on it. I go down to see Eddie, and we talk about the old days, when the East Side amounted to something.

“I went to P.S. No. 1. I quit about the sixth or seventh grade. When I was younger I would tell people I went to high school, but what’s the use of bluffing? People know I’m not an educated man.”

The comedian forgot all about his hangover. He said he likes to go into a pizzeria for a pizza, or rubber-pie, the big cheese and tomato pies you see in the windows of Italian restaurants. Or a dish of spaghetti with three big dippers of meat sauce. He is about as unaffected as a subway guard, and when he gets to talking about groceries nothing stops him. He will drop into a coffeepot with a copy of Variety sticking out of his coat pocket and climb up on a stool. Ten minutes later he will be telling the counterman how to run the joint.

The comedian snapped his fingers.

“Say,” he said, “you should see my pop eat. He’s an old man, eighty-seven. Now he lives over on Palmetto Street in Brooklyn, with my sister, Mrs. Lillian Romano, but he was with me two years in Hollywood. What a lot of laughs I get out of him!

“He loves his wine. On the way out we was eating in the diner of the train and I took this waiter aside and told him to give Pop a bottle of wine, but
to take it away when he had one glass. So he does. But when he picks it up my pop made a grab for it. He jerked it out of this waiter’s hand. Boy, did he grab. I nearly died laughing. This Negro waiter said, ‘Mr. Jimmy said to give you some water.’ Pop exploded. He said, ‘Water you wash your face. Wine you wash your stomach.’ Boy, did he let out a yell when he saw that wine disappearing! ‘Where you go with the wine?’ he yelled at this waiter.