With the decision taken to push for a national amendment in 1913, E.C. West was moved upward to places on both the finance and legislative committees of the League, retaining his portfolio as interagency liaison with the other major agencies.
It was Clarence Padgett who actually “discovered” Warren G. Harding. A great many of the interests of the bank that employed Padgett were in Ohio, and naturally he was very close to the George Cox machine in Cincinnati, where it operated from a saloon headquarters. Cox put Harding into the State Senate in 1901, and he stayed there, except for a run for governor in 1910, until he was elected to the U. S. Senate in 1914. Harding wasn’t any deep thinker, but he didn’t have to be. He was as amiable as a whore at a bankers’ convention. The only time in his life he ever voted against the party line was over a local-option bill that the party wanted passed. His “manager,” Harry Daugherty, made him vote dry because the Anti-Saloon League wanted that option badly, and the party would be a lot quicker to forgive him than the League. And the League remembered. When Harding ran for the U. S. Senate, Wayne B. Wheeler himself publicly forgave Harding for owning brewery stock, saying that the stock was the only payment Harding could get for the advertisements the brewers placed in Harding’s newspaper. He was a country courthouse senator in 1914 and President of the United States six years later—his progress having been achieved with the private support of the League, which, publicly, on E. C. West’s emphatic advice, had refused to support either presidential candidate.
Padgett “found” Harding in the gubernatorial campaign in 1910 and he talked him over with George B. Cox. “Warren ain’t much,” Cox said, “but he does what you tell him to do.” E. C. West liked the sound of that. He went to Ohio to meet Harding and consequently also met Mr. Harry Daugherty. “He’s a big, sweet dummy,” West told his partners. “And I have to agree with Daugherty—he looks like a President. And heaven knows, he’s the easy-going opposite of Woodrow Wilson.”
In the Spring of 1919 Horizons A.G. was in full agreement on the make-up of the 1920 ticket, and gradually West impressed the importance of this opportunity on the leaders of the League by his tested method of bringing in distinguished visitors to underscore his confidence in the candidate. In turn the League, unaware that West’s business and industrial forces were on the same tack, began the line-up of the cadres of the senators of the old guard who would handle the nomination under the orthodox convention proceedings.
The League, indeed the entire movement, was thrilled at the victory of their “hand-picked” new President at the very outset of the force of the Eighteenth Amendment as the law of the land. Then the sound of clinking bottles was heard through every open White House window.
“We’re beside ourselves with admiration out here,” Padgett told West on the telephone from Chicago. “You did it! You actually went and did it!” West did more than that. He introduced Elias H. Mortimer as the official White House bootlegger.
CHAPTER TEN
In the years between the formation of Horizons A.G. in 1911 and the day constitutional prohibition went into effect everywhere in the United States at 12:01 A.M., January 17, 1920, E. C. West had greatly consolidated his position. He had married and had had one son, Daniel Patrick. His efforts for the prohibition movement (his day-to-day work on its behalf among national leaders), his closeness to the President and the administration, the nature of his partners in the Swiss company, the increased strength of his position with Pick, Heller & O’Connell, his wife’s father’s influence and the influence of her family had greatly enhanced the yearly statements of the West National Bank. It was now a bank of the first echelon with total resources of $455,493,531, as of its annual statement issued on December 31, 1919, with deposits on that date totaling $301,768,091. West’s national influence was seen not only through his stunning successes for the prohibition movement. He had won the admiration of the national business community for the decisive assistance he had brought to the desperate labor unrest, particularly in the steel industry in 1915—16, when he had organized an army of effective strikebreakers from New York and elsewhere, mainly through Dopey Benny Fein and Paul Kelly. This experience had given him insight into the labor opportunity that he was to bring to fruition in the garment industry in New York in 1925, installing his friends Louis Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro, then, earning while learning, moving upward while he promoted still other labor leaders to effective control of the labor movement.
Before C. L. Pick’s death in 1916 (when his place in the firm was taken by West’s old roommate, C. L. Pick, Jr.) the old man had asked E.C. to visit him at Locust Valley. He was quite weak by then but wholly amiable. “Was it you or Evans Dwye who framed us in 1911, Eddie?”
“Why, C.L. I—”
“Have no fears, my boy. It’s just one of those tiny things left unexplained that have interest only to me. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My word!”
“There was a good reason, C.L. I had to do it because—”
“I know. I know,” the old man said, staying him with a fragile hand. “We could never have taken your bizarre plan seriously—nor could we possibly have sponsored it—if we had not been so grotesquely indebted to you. It was good thinking, Eddie. You were born a master criminal, perhaps the greatest I have ever met in a lifetime of practicing corporate law.”
E.C. thanked him because he knew the old man meant it as a sincere compliment.
“Do you still own those six lots of your father’s between Fulton and Wall?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You must build a new bank there. A skyscraper filled with money.” He sighed. “Ah, how I envy your coldness of spirit, Eddie, your inability to understand that mortals feel pain.” He delivered his sere and ghastly laugh. “You paranoiacs are the true romantics.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
If one is vaguely ashamed of being the son of a woman who wore a black shawl and who spoke only Sicilian, who spoke to one’s father only in obscenities knowing that no one but her son could understand her, then one does not marry beneath oneself, simply because of the conviction that there is no one beneath one. If one spent eight telescoped years acquiring ten years of education at the Gelbart Academy, Yale and Harvard, in terms of envied personality, envied by all one’s peers, and if one then became the youngest bank president and in relatively short order formed a company having assets of seventy-five million dollars, then went on to help direct one of the greatest social movements any nation has ever known, then one does not seek the hand of some mere commoner. Neither did Edward Courance West.
Irene Wagstaff was a red-blonde with very fair skin and pale green eyes, therefore she did not in any way resemble E. C. West’s mother. Irene Wagstaff’s bosom did not bulge exceedingly nor was it flat. She had skin for a botanist to wonder over and a look of such youth and freshness that all thought of giving and taking pain went out of West’s mind, although not forever.
Her father was Walter Wagstaff, a railroad president-more than sufficient station for the times. He was a director of a large steel company, of the leading cooperative of the coming citrus industry, of an industrial chemicals complex and of an automobile-manufacturing firm near Detroit, Michigan, that seemed capable of doubling its value every year. He was also a consecrated prohibitionist, because liquor dragged down the efficiency of the workingman, and he and his daughter were devout Roman Catholics.
Irene was twenty years old, one of two children. Her religious conviction was prodigious, if unilateral: Mass every morning, Communion twice a week, and a confessor more regularly used than other girls’ hairdressers. She was a throwback Catholic. She was fulfilled by the show-business side of the faith as opposed to the theological, by the costumes and processions and glorious singing that had been designed for ages and times long gone when there had been nothing to do for diversion except make love, go to war, work to exhaustion or respond to the slogan that church services were better than ever. Irene was an ende
aring but never immoderately bright girl. She was in no way stupid; she never tried to pass her Catholicism along. When she met Edward, for example, she didn’t ask him whether he was a Catholic or, when they were courting, whether he would attend Mass with her or take Communion with her. She just went to church and got enormous pleasure out of it, as one gets from a classical play one has seen and enjoyed many times, a play with a simple plot or perhaps a plotless, mindless ballet. Irene was intact. She was one of those oddities who are either born whole or who somehow, as impossible as it seems, grow up whole. She made people happy merely by sitting and walking and being. She made E. C. West marvel.
Their meeting was correct in every way. West was a leader of the prohibition movement. His crusading activities were regularly reported in the national press. Because of that, because he was a banker and because he had requested it through the League’s lecture bureau, he was invited to address a meeting of the American Bankers’ Association on topics of prohibition. The members were circularized with a warning not to miss the meeting. As a bank director, Walter Wagstaff attended the luncheon, gorged on his own dry convictions. He was stunned with admiration for the speaker. When the meeting was over, Mr. Wagstaff sought West out to introduce himself. In the course of their very brief talk Mr. Wagstaff said that he didn’t suppose Mr. West got to New York very often, and E.C. explained that he lived in New York, that he spent only the first three days of each week in Washington. “In that case,” Mr. Wagstaff said, “why don’t you come to dinner next week?”
Casual students of the West legend might have said that he fell in love with Irene the moment he entered her father’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, measured the vast entrance hall with his expert eye, took in warmth from the huge Delacroix that hung on a stair landing facing the door and entered the pleasant library of rare first editions.
He and Mr. Wagstaff shared a half bottle of Poland water. The two Wagstaff daughters entered the room together. One was more lovely than the other, depending on the lighting each one found to settle in, and the lighting that fell on Irene was superb.
Within the week E. C. West had convinced himself that it was time he married. He was impressed by Walter Wagstaff. Marriage would lend another dimension to his position both as a banker and as a crusader and it would permit him to undertake more formal entertainment, which was becoming really quite necessary. It would aid in dissembling the impression he gave of being too young. And he had fallen in love with Irene. They became engaged three months after they met, Irene was quite pleased too.
Irene saw her fiancé (and everything else within her view) in the same manner that she saw the church: as he and others represented him to be; as the church and others said the church would be forever. She wanted serenity above all else, and she would not countenance deceit and gossip and scandal about others. A great storm of the period was caused by the findings of the Pujo Committee of Congress, which her father and Edward and her sister Clarice discussed over and over again at dinner until she had had to register her own belief that the committee must be mistaken, that what it charged could simply not be true. The committee’s report had stated that a dozen men, headed by J. P. Morgan, James Stillman, George Baker and the Rockefeller family, controlled the money markets of the United States. It asserted that they controlled: “a hundred and eighteen directorships in thirty-four banks and trust companies having total resources of two billion, six hundred million, seventy-nine thousand dollars; thirty directorships in ten insurance companies having total assets of two billion, two hundred and ninety-three million dollars; a hundred and five directorships in thirty-two transportation systems having total capitalization of eleven billion, seven hundred and eighty-four million dollars; sixty-three directorships in twenty-four producing and trading corporations having a total capitalization of three billion, three hundred and thirty-nine million dollars; twenty-five directorships in twelve public-utility corporations having a total capitalization of two billion, one hundred and fifty million dollars.” Altogether the twelve men represented three hundred and forty-one directorships in one hundred and twelve corporations having aggregate resources that were four times the size of the British national debt.
Irene deplored. Mr. Wagstaff justified. E. C. West envied but did not despair, because among the twelve men were some of his partners in Horizons A.G.
Not being in the remotest way paranoiac, Irene’s reactions to Edward were not at all like his to her. He acquired the fixed idea that he was being persecuted by “them” because “they” separated him from her for three days each week. He experienced heady delusions of grandeur when Mr. Wagstaff put his private railroad car at his disposal for his journeys to and from Washington—a private car that had gold dinner service, wine bins, jewel safes, a sunken marble bathtub, nine complete and different sets of slip covers for the furniture, electric partitions to enclose or widen rooms, a staff of four uniformed by Wetzel, a parlor organ and a garage for a car at one end with its own ramp and sleeping space for a chauffeur and a mechanic. And her religious devotion induced him to falsify and pretend to the Wagstaffs that he had been a ravenously devout Catholic all his life, even though he paid for that in vicious responses of memory that made him see his mother shuffling under that black shawl on her way to seven o’clock Mass every morning of all the years.
Irene loved him. At first she liked what she saw and what she was told about him. Then she liked it all better and better. He was handsome in an imperial way and a stunning dresser. Her sister, Clarice, crooned over his name and proclaimed that he was “the absolute dark-horse catch of the year,” so Irene began to improve on what she saw and made him trim his moustache to something less formidable. Slowly, through her father’s eyes, she began to see also a remarkable achiever, a young bank president whose board of directors held a collection of some of the most important men in the United States. For such an unneurotic, unfragmented woman respect was the only solid frame of love a woman could feel for a man. And her father had said, “He is young to achieve such an eminence among such doctrinaire people, that’s one thing. But the main thing, the important thing, is that a man of his age is able to see the vision of a nation no longer reeling under the yoke of alcohol. Youth knows idealism, yes. Youth is the time for idealism. But to be so determined to move that idealism into tomorrow, to give one-half of his time with no hope for direct profit at his stage of life, at an age when other young men feel that every second must be used to further only themselves—by God, Irene, that is admirable.”
Two days before the wedding the groom went uptown to see Paolo Vacarelli. They sat in the wagon in front of the poolroom to have their meeting.
“Hey, Eduardo,” Vacarelli said. “What’s all this bluenose stuff you’re doing?”
“I’m going to tell you soon, but not now. Only one thing: it’s good.”
“Good for what?”
“Good for business.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m getting married. We’re going to Europe for the honeymoon.”
“I read about it.”
“We land at Naples, then we go to Palermo.”
“That’s the way you going, hey?”
“I want a yellow handkerchief from you to Don Vito.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s a little soon for what I have in mind, but my people think there’s a war coming, so I’ve got to talk to Don Vito soon, while I can. Can you do it?”
“You mean will I do it?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t want to talk about it? You just want me to send you in blind.”
“It’s going to be a very good thing, Paolo. Before I get back, Don Vito is going to tell you that too. Okay?”
“Okay, Eduardo. You got it.”
“Send it to the bank tomorrow.”
“You got it.”
They were married by the cardinal at St. Patrick’s at a nuptial High Mass with a fantastic organist and choir (Irene thought), and it was a
most important social event for Catholic New York. Irene was thrilled to hear the cardinal call Edward “Eddie” and to speak so fondly of his father. In all the time she had been going to St. Patrick’s they had never met the cardinal, who was now—as Clarice put it—“an old friend of the family.”
Bishop Cannon and Wayne B. Wheeler came to the church. They approved of his projected sixty-day “holiday” because he would receive the press at all European capitals to provide an “intimate explanation” of the prohibition movement. Mr. Wheeler said jokingly, “I’d go easy on those European wines if I were you.”
On their wedding day, June 17, 1913, they sailed for Naples aboard the Conde di Orselino for a grand tour honeymoon.
Don Vito Cascio Ferro, capo di capi of the Sicilian Mafia, a charming, cultivated gentleman of immense dignity with a long, white beard, was wearing linen knickerbockers and a gray, piped Norfolk jacket when he entertained E. C. West at luncheon in his palazzo facing the Bay of Palermo from the higher base of Monte Pellegrino.
In 1909, as a “personal response” to the effrontery of the police commissioner of New York, Theodore Bingham, who had sent police lieutenant Joseph Petrosino to investigate the Mafia, he had personally shot Petrosino to death at the center of the Piazza Marina in full view of more than one hundred witnesses, then had returned to his carriage to be taken back to the dinner party from which he had excused himself, a party attended by the high aristocracy of the city. Of the twenty murders of which he was acquitted in his lifetime Don Vito admitted to only the Petrosino affair, for which he was never charged. “It was a challenge,” he would say. “My action was a disinterested one, taken in response to a challenge that I could not afford to ignore.”
E. C. West put the yellow silk handkerchief marked in one corner with a large V for Vacarelli into a heavy manila envelope. He sealed the envelope with a wide band of wax, marked the wax in three places with his signet ring, allowed it to harden, then took it to the hall porter of the hotel to ask that it be delivered by hand. The porter summoned a page, then noticed the addressee’s name on the envelope. He stared at West. He waved the boy away. He put on a flat cap with a shiny black visor and left the hotel to deliver the envelope himself. He returned with an invitation to lunch for the following day written in Don Vito’s hand on heavy parchment, rolled and tied with a striped green, red and black ribbon.
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