Whiskey River (23 page)

The young man’s name was Albert Brock. He was an auto worker—
ex
-auto worker now, he reflected—by default, having had to give up employment as an independent steelhauler when the bank repossessed his rig. He was twenty-four and a native of Ecorse, a little town downriver from Rouge owned down to the doorknobs by the Purple Gang, so he was no stranger to rotten barrels. He had a good speaking voice and a controlled kind of anger that might have brought him a career in politics if he hadn’t lived his whole life downwind of the local political situation. It was inevitable, working where he did, that he’d be chosen as a spokesman for unionization. In that very bar he had taken part in the kind of after-work discussions conducted in low voices that can so easily come to nothing unless converted into action by an event like the woman’s firing that morning. Brock and a handful of others, some of whom, if captured, would almost certainly be singled out for special treatment—the boot in the stomach, the nightstick applied to the kidneys—had managed to escape after the strike deteriorated into a melee. The problem, he saw now clearly, was that they had acted too fast, in the first heat of their anger, without a proper plan. That wouldn’t happen again.

“How are you going to lead any more strikes if you’re out of work?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m new at this like everyone else. But I’ll learn.”

I called the story in to Walter DiVirgilio on the rewrite desk. Howard Wolfman gave it four inches on page 16 without Fred’s picture or the interview with Albert Brock. The facts weren’t changed, exactly, just turned ass-backward with details acquired from a last-minute telephone call to the plant brass, like a sports story with the correct score, but with the teams switched. The headline read DEARBORN POLICE QUELL COMMUNIST RIOT. I understand Brock still has a clipping, tacked to a bulletin board in his office at the American Steelhaulers local. He was elected to head it last year, and he’s no friend of the Detroit press.

B
Y THE BEGINNING OF
February, with Jack Dance’s trial two weeks off, Joey Machine had other things on his mind. Shortly after the Connor killing in November, agents of the United States Treasury Department had invaded the house on Sylvester Street armed with sledgehammers and a warrant, punched through a plaster wall, and seized a stack of ledgers containing transactions relating to the East Side operation. They then began to construct a case, digit by digit, zero by zero, decimal point by decimal point, against Joey Machine; not for murder or extortion or bribery or gambling or violation of the Volstead Act, but because he hadn’t paid his taxes for the years 1924 through 1930. Encouraged by similar proceedings involving Al Capone in Chicago, the agents paid a call on Joey at the Acme Garage and informed him he was under arrest for income tax evasion.

But there would be no jail for Joey. Not then, anyway. The federal men, explaining neatly that Mr. Machine had too many enemies in the Wayne County Jail while managing to imply that the turnkeys there might accidentally leave him alone in the booking room with the door open if he was of a mind to use it, which if you thought that you didn’t know Joey, put him up at the Statler pending arraignment. I was among the scribes waiting in the hotel lobby on his morning in court when the accused came off the elevator towing four men whose pressed raincoats and hats all worn at the same conservative angle made him look like a hunky dressed up for a funeral. His bargain-basement coat and homburg, new since Frankie Orr had lost the originals off the Belle Isle Bridge, already showed wear, and his short brown-and-yellow necktie flapped outside his vest, an untidy flag for that fleet made up for the most part of the sartorially bureaucratic faithful. In the rear, towering over everyone in a black wool topcoat and size twelve fedora, lumbered Dom Polacki, and Nathan Rabinowitz walked beside Joey in a soft hat and herringbone tweeds carrying a maroon leather briefcase.

Some reporters expressed surprise in print that Rabinowitz should represent both Joey Machine and Jack Dance in their respective travails, mortal enemies that they were. Those reporters were new to the underworld scene. In those days attorneys glided in and out among opposing camps like Homer’s meddlesome gods, invisible when they had to be, vocal when required, and crucial to the outcome, in which their own stake, at most, was minimal. The role seemed dangerous but wasn’t. Of all the mob rubouts of my personal knowledge and all those I had ever heard about in Detroit and other places, all the slain hoodlums, stool pigeons, bulls, bookkeepers, molls, reporters, radio commentators, clergymen, aldermen, doormen, wheel men, bag men, juice men, trigger men, men of distinction, tramps, sharps, sawbones, cookers, bookies, runners, waiters, hotel clerks, nurses, housewives, children, and other innocent bystanders—Christ, even one optometrist, that schlemiel Schwimmer who wandered into the Chicago garage massacre—of all of them buried in gangland state and family plots and potter’s fields or holding down the bottoms of great bodies of water, I knew of not one lawyer in private practice who had lost his life. It was as if their briefcases deflected bullets, their framed diplomas composed in Latin and printed in German Gothic cast a halo over their heads that defied the shiv and the garrote. They were like those insects the scientists said would inherit the earth after the great global holocaust they’d been predicting since Genesis. It was depressing to think of a world populated only by cockroaches and their attorneys.

“How are you pleading, Mr. Machine?”

“What’s jail food like at the Statler?”

“Who’s minding the store?”

“Where are your handcuffs?”

“Why don’t they just convene court in your suite?”

“When’s the victory party?”

He wasn’t as smooth with the press as some of his fellow public enemies. It would never occur to him to single out one or two reporters he recognized and call them by their first names like the President did, establishing a friendly atmosphere and sending them away to write that Mr. Machine appeared calm and confident, that bullshit, and he hadn’t learned the art of throwing a glib line over his shoulder like a hunk of meat for the pack to claw one another over while he made his escape. Instead he stopped and considered for the better part of a minute. The federal men fidgeted. I think they really believed, these Washington policemen who pounded their beats with slide rules and adding machines, that his gang was going to barrel through the revolving doors any minute and try to bust him loose like Billy the Kid, but they were too well-mannered to lift him by his armpits and charge the exit. God knew what a Detroit bull would make of them.

“They say I owe three and a half million in tax,” Joey said finally. “I don’t see it, but I offered to pay them anyway. They turned me down. They’d rather blow half a million on a trial they can’t win. I ask you, is that any way to run a government in a depression?”

They liked it. Pencils scratched. “You gonna make ’em give you back your books, Joey?”

“How many times did the big guy order room service?”

“Who pays for the room, Uncle Sam or the policy suckers?”

I asked, “What do you hear from Frankie Orr?” His head swung around, and just before our eyes met I saw another Joey Machine. Not the buffoon who couldn’t keep his tie inside his vest or the harried businessman who bellyached about the fucking kikes who wanted to put holes in him, but the slum-bred little Italian stove fitter who blew up Phil Dardanello, kidnapped Pete Rosenstein out from under the murderous gaze of his own Purple Gang, and threw Harry Fleischman and Frank Kornblum into the Detroit River with heavy six-volt batteries tied around their necks because they’d spiked his best brand with strychnine; the president, chief comptroller, and chairman of the board of the most ruthlessly efficient criminal enterprise between Capone’s South Side and Luciano’s Harlem and the sole executive survivor of every beer war that had taken place in the nation’s fourth largest city since 1919. It was the face he had made when, as his late dismembered partner had once put it, somebody tried to steal a goddamn dime from Joey.

Which was what somebody was doing, a lot of dimes. Anyone with his ear to the ground was aware that while Joey had been involved with planning his defense against the income tax beef, leaving the nuts and bolts of his rumrunning, saloon, and gambling operation to subordinates, someone else had been cutting himself in on the numbers racket in the Black Bottom and the handbook on the East Side. Two of Joey’s collectors—gray men in green eyeshades who recorded the bets on little squares of rice paper suitable for swallowing in the event of a raid, changed the greasy coins into stacks of bills, and carried them in leather satchels to the Acme Garage—had vanished along with their satchels, and a third had announced his retirement, all within the ten days since the feds had gone public with their intention to indict Joey. The figures were still infinitesimal, but the East Side book was falling off. The rumbling in the pipes said the Conductor had set up shop in Machine territory, and if you knew how Frankie Orr had killed Vincenzo Cugglio aboard the New York elevated railway, you didn’t have to ask who the Conductor was. The only question was whether he was acting independently of Sal Borneo or the Unione was behind the invasion.

All this paraded across Joey’s doughlike face as his gaze swept the assembled reporters, looking for the one who had asked him about Frankie. It settled on me and his expression returned to normal. I don’t know if he placed me. More than a year had passed since the interview in the blue monoxide air of his office over the garage, and except for one telephone conversation and a brief impromptu press conference among a yapping crowd of scribes and bulls on the steps of 1300 after the Sylvester Street shooting, we had had no personal contact in the time between. In the depths of his legal and business dilemma I was just a newshound who had asked an impertinent question.

“Never heard of him,” he said, and resumed walking.

The men from the Justice Department, caught napping, lunged to close ranks around him and the party swept out of the lobby and into an Oldsmobile ragtop sedan parked in the loading zone in front of the hotel. We were left on the sidewalk watching it glide down the street escorted by a Detroit black-and-white fore and aft.

“Say one thing for you,” said Chet Mooney, the
News’s
police reporter and a horse’s ass of the first water in spats and a pearl stickpin, “you know how to break up the ball before it gets old.”

I told him where to stick his pin.

The arraignment took five minutes. Joey pleaded not guilty, the judge set bail at fifty thousand, Rabinowitz paid the court clerk, and Joey walked out of the Federal Building a free man with a May 18 trial date. Nobody cheered when the bail was announced; if Jack Dance was Robin Hood, Joey Machine was Sir Guy.

Forty hours later, around midnight, a green Nash sedan slowed down in front of the Griswold House and an unidentified man in the backseat dumped a bundle into the street that rolled over several times and came to rest against the curb. Then the sedan sped off. The hog-tied corpse was identified as Leo Campania, a suspected leg-breaker, killer, and all-around dogsbody for the Unione Siciliana, which kept its headquarters at the Griswold. Forensic pathologists in the Coroner’s Court Building removed a .38-caliber revolver slug from Campania’s brain, tested it, and reported that it had been treated with garlic.

Fred Ogilvie took a picture, that Howard decided not to use, of the corpse on the dissecting table—mouth slack, eyeballs glittering crescents, hair matted in back where the bullet went in—and I wondered, looking at it, if this was the same Leo whom Frankie Orr had asked for when it came time to remove Clyde Norman’s ensanguinated body from the Griswold’s private dining room. What Joey lacked in finesse he made up for in the art of plain speaking. For the time being at least, he had reclaimed his title to the East Side.

As always an investigation was launched, and as always the streets were cleared of lowlifes for a few days, including one George “Stink” Barberra, who was let go after a telephone call to relatives in Philadelphia seemed to confirm he’d been visiting them the night Leo got capped. It was the kind of thing for which Jack Dance got picked up all the time, but he had two of Kozlowski’s dicks to vouch for him. The Nash, believed to have been the same car involved in the fire-bombing of Jack’s rented house on Howard, was winched out of Lake St. Clair six weeks later. It was registered to a Moses Cleveland whose address on Fort Street turned out to belong to the Presbyterian Church, and who on further investigation was found to have died in infancy in 1903. Long before that, public interest in the case had languished. As the election year of 1932 crept closer, the Democratic drums were beginning to beat a funeral tattoo for the Hoover Administration in the form of a platform based on economic recovery and Repeal. Watching bootleggers killing one another off contained all the drama of a duel between the last two dodos.

But spectacle was always current. In March, Andrea St. Charles got the assignment to cover a wedding at St. Boniface Cathedral downtown, followed by a reception at the Griswold. Salvatore d’Annunzio Bornea, a/k/a Sal Borneo, had the honor to announce a ceremony uniting his daughter, Maria Aletta, to Francis Xavier Oro, formerly of New York City. The bride wore ivory lace brocaded with pearls, a Paris original, with a veil and an eight-foot train borne by her bridesmaids in lavender gowns and picture hats, and the bowers of orchids and white roses in their profusion brought back memories of the Dardanello funeral in 1925, a $100,000 affair complete with bronze casket and the most ostentatious floral display of all bearing a card signed by Joey Machine as neatly as he had wired the bomb that put Phil in the casket to begin with.

No such token from Joey arrived at the wedding, at which if he was invited, he didn’t show.

My own absence was less conspicuous. Andrea, whose press invitation allowed her to bring a guest, had asked me to escort her (“seeing as how this is as close as any girl will ever get you to the altar, poor dear”), but I said weddings made me nervous and begged off. The truth is I was yellow. I never set foot in the Griswold from the night Frankie Orr cut Clyde Norman’s throat until they tore it down. The spot where it stood still gives me the cold shimmies.