Mile High

by Richard Condon

  If an operator had an Atlantic rum fleet, he had capital requirements requiring a revolving fund—maintained at a level of a million and a half to two million dollars—for liquor purchase (from Willie’s branch), all ships, high-speed boats and shoreside trucking equipment, plus insurance, payroll, fuel, warehousing, garaging and protection. He had to hire large amounts of capital, and he had to hire it from Goff to spend it on Willie.

  Not that he didn’t get full service for it. For example, through Edward’s friends in the White House Willie was able to acquire two hundred unused Liberty motors that had been built for torpedo boats in World War I at 12 percent of their original cost. They had bought boat yards in the Bahamas. The motors were fitted into new hulls and the finished boats were sold for 165 percent of their original cost. After sale the boats were berthed in New York along the Brooklyn waterfront and at a marine garage on the East River with direct access to Hell Gate, and also Bayshore, Long Island, and at Westhampton. Each boat came equipped with a Horizons amulet, a dory hung over the stern for protection against the Coast Guard, who were paid to harass free-lance operators. With the amulet, the Coast Guard escorted the boats into port safely. This offshore arm of the government was an alert, enthusiastic organization that was ever willing to help. During the peak holiday rush periods, for example, Coast Guard Cutter 203 loaded on 700 cases at sea along Rum Row, then unloaded them at the Canal Street dock for seven dollars a case, which they shared partially with the New York policemen who helped off-load the cargo.

  Of course it was neither profitable nor possible to buy everyone’s cooperation. There was occasional trouble. Willie’s branch concentrated all its lawyers in the Knickerbocker Building at 42nd Street and Broadway, where they established a pattern of rapid legal assistance that was a model in every way.

  The large breweries were operated under lease from Horizons by the gangs in the principal national market areas. This was an enormously profitable business; in 1928 wholesale beer sales in Chicago alone amounted to 1196,680,000. But the operating expenses of the gangs were high: police, federal agencies, armed guards, insurance and brewery rental were some peripheral factors, in addition to which they were required to pay one-sixth of their gross to Horizons.

  Further capital was borrowed through Goff for the operation and maintenance of all other income-producing activities demanded by the operating manual that Horizons enforced: narcotics, brothels, gambling, nightclubs, race tracks, roadhouses, slot machines, policy rackets, laundries, restaurants, dance halls, speakeasies, booking agencies, sugar brokerage, labor organizations, alky-cooking, taxis and strike-breaking and extortion rackets.

  The national capital requirement of all mobs in all national market areas came to a substantial four hundred and twenty-six million dollars annually, which might have been a perilous risk for Horizons A.G., through Goff, the monopoly banking agency. However, all loans were secured with life insurance policies in Arnold Goff’s favor. If the borrower died naturally, the policy would honor the amount of the debt. If, as sometimes happened, there were unintelligent borrowers who did not want to pay the debt, they knew they would be putting a break-even price on their heads. Which is to say that although Arnold Goff became one of the mythical figures of modern American crime, and although he was gifted and clever with numbers, he was only a technician, who worked for 2 percent. By 1917 he was already about the most exciting figure to be pointed out at a race track or at a Broadway opening. By 1921 he was the sort of hoodlum-sportsman about whom people enjoyed believing anything. He had fixed the 1919 World Series, not less than two world championship prize fights and a baker’s dozen of big stake races.

  Yet he didn’t seem at all sinister if you didn’t happen to look into his eyes. He had talcum-pale skin, noodle-soft, and shining hair. He was a full-time ladies’ man with a stable of mistresses and still time for the big whorehouses. He had a chin dimple, and there are chin-dimple buffs just as there are women who hang around musicians. He continued to be a fence for stolen jewelry even after the enormous action started, but more often than not, after the sets were broken up they were most likely to rub off on some pretty girl. Fencing wasn’t the only part of his business that he held out on E. C. West. He financed a chain of bucket shops, the rawest kind of Wall Street stock swindle; but like everything else he did or tried to do, sooner or later it came to West’s attention.

  At the time he attempted his first double-dealing with E. C. West, Goff held life insurance policies in his favor totaling eleven million four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, which meant that his 2 percent share of the short-term loan action represented by the policies would be two hundred and twenty-eight thousand, two hundred and forty dollars. If that was an average thirty-day, short-term aggregate loan, then Goff’s income from banking alone (and it was the big banking that made all his other income possible) could be figured roughly at two million seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars a year—tax free.

  The short-term commercial banking was done through forty-three Goff companies that had been incorporated in eleven states but that operated regionally in the nation under such banal names as Goffair Mortgage or Arnlegal Furniture or Allgoff Enterprises. The collections were made by these companies and remitted on the same updated thirty-day loan basis to the West National Bank in New York. William Tobin, executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., a Swiss company, held power of attorney on each of the forty-two Goff company accounts. Using these at the end of each fiscal quarter, he withdrew 98 percent of all Goff company funds and caused the West National to remit these funds to the Horizons A.G. numbered account at the Forster-Appenzeller Bank in Grabs.

  That it was a sound system was proved by the fact that it was never investigated, even after Goff was shot to death on April 19, 1928. Goff’s own life was insured in two policies of seven million five hundred thousand dollars, each in the favor of Horizons A.G. of Grabs, Switzerland.

  Regardless of what caused his death, Arnold Goff’s problem was never entirely one of greed. His major problem was that he hated E. C. West. As those things so often seem to happen, he hated him for the most irrational of reasons.

  On the first day of each calendar quarter Goff was required to meet with the head of the West National Bank. He was the representative of forty-two companies that deposited with the bank, therefore anyone would have seen that these were normal business meetings. He would be driven to the bank building between Fulton and Wall, forty-seven stories high with a lobby displaying enormous murals by Roja-Hunt depicting man at his nets bringing in the fruits of the sea, and the lobby floor seeming to shine with gold. E. C. West’s office, on the thirty-third floor, was reached through a series of rooms like Chinese boxes, each room with a different decor and each manned by a bulky civilian who bulged above a different exquisite desk.

  Arnold Goff did not hate West because West had made him a multimillionaire. He hated him because at the end of every one of their meetings since 1911, originally held in the old building on West 14th Street, West would always dismiss him with that contemptuous false smile that might have been peeled off the front page of the World and say, “Now, don’t tell Bella Radin what we talked about today.”

  On January 2, 1924, everything seemed to be just the same. Goff was passed through the exquisite guard boxes into the last room, where West was sitting soldier-straight as always, confidently handsome and physically healthy and, to Goff, as attractive as a fish cake with a mustache. They greeted each other. Goff sat down. The meeting invariably opened with West handing him the bank’s statement showing that his forty-two accounts had remitted 98 percent of their bank balances to a Swiss bank. Goff had always been convinced that West was just an ice-water banker with a little more than the usual banker’s larceny in him. He thought West had happened to inherit those three gambling houses and had never really been a part of them. He considered West a smart square who had figured out this clever banker’s dodge of short-term credit for busi
nesses that weren’t legit, but he never ever conceived that West had anything to do with mobs and booze and vice, because West had not intended him to think that way.

  That morning his revulsion for West rolled over him like waves of icy water. He blurted out what he refused to contain any longer. He didn’t wait for the bank statements to be extended.

  “Listen, Mr. West. Do you know what it cost me to be allowed to sit here and do business with you? A law practice!”

  “It wasn’t much of a law practice, Goff.”

  “And did I ever tell you—or maybe you read it in the papers and it slipped your mind—that my father killed himself in 1919 and left me a cowardly note that said he was ashamed of me?”

  “He might have been ashamed of you. I’m ashamed of you myself. But he killed himself because he was in the terminal stages of cancer.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t make a fortune betting the way I told you to bet on the 1919 series?”

  “Betting?” West looked at Goff as if he were drunk. And he was almost drunk. It had been a three-day New Year’s Eve celebration. “I don’t bet.”

  “All right. So let it go. Okay. Never mind. What’s the difference? What I’m talking about is this. For a hundred dollars you sold Bella away from me.”

  “Bella?”

  “Bella! Bella Radin!”

  “You look as though you’re going to vomit, Goff.” West opened a desk drawer and took out a silver flask. He slid the flask across the desk. “Hair of the dog.” Goff opened the top of the flask gratefully and took a long swallow. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

  “Now—shall we go over these statements?”

  Goff shot an accusing finger at him. “You took her away from me!”

  “I bought information from the woman. That was thirteen years ago. She accepted one hundred dollars that she said she was going to deposit in your joint account. But you wanted to lose that woman. She took the money for you, but you were glad for the excuse to drop her.”

  “All right. Never mind. What’s the difference?”

  “If you think she can be had for money, go buy her back.”

  Goff’s eyes filled with drunken tears. His instability shocked West. “It’s too late. She got married. She has kids.”

  “Goff, what do you want? Please tell me what you want?”

  Goff’s trembling finger leveled at his enemy again. “Just don’t mention her. When I walk out of here, don’t say what you always say. For the first time in thirteen years just don’t say it-okay?”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Now may I get on with business?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Have you read about the daylight robberies of the bank messengers carrying negotiable Liberty Bonds that have been going on over the past eighteen months?”

  “Yes. I saw that.” Goff sat up quite straight.

  “Why did you organize those robberies?”

  Goff stared. His face darkened visibly because he could not have grown paler. “What are you talking about?”

  “You are a thief.”

  “Now, just a minute here!”

  “You are a cheap package-snatcher—or should I say a mastermind of package snatchers?—and you disposed of the bonds through those tinhorn bucket shops you organized.”

  “Who said that? That’s a goddam lie. Who said that?”

  “Goff, I want the money to be handed over to Willie Tobin before this bank closes on Friday.”

  “You want the money? That wasn’t your bank that was hit. They never hit your messengers.”

  “Call it a fine.”

  “A fine. The bonds were worth five million dollars! God knows how many people could have been involved. God knows where all that money could be now.”

  “I hired you to work as a moneylender, not as a thief. You endangered my business when you had those packages snatched. Bring the money to Tobin by Friday afternoon or you’ll be out of business.”

  That sentence, which West thought could close him out, composed Goff, and his eyes showed their old, hard hatred. “You know banking, Mr. West, and you figured out a very good thing for me. But you don’t know the people I work with, and you don’t know how to put me out of business.”

  West studied him the way a great chef de cuisine might look at the daily garbage. “Friday afternoon, Goff,” he said.

  “Up your ass,” Goff answered and walked to the office door. As he touched the doorknob West called out to him and he turned. “You forgot your bank statements,” West said, holding them out. Goff returned and accepted the envelope. He walked to the door again and West called out again. He turned.

  “Now, don’t tell Bella Radin what we talked about today,” West said with mock severity.

  When Goff reached the pavement on William Street he was nearly ill with rage. He forgot that he had driven to the bank in his car or that his driver was standing at the building entrance. He strode past the man, who came after him, touching his arm. Out of reflexive frustration Goff turned and struck the man heavily in the face, making him stagger sideways. Shocked at what he had done, he felt his anger cool. As curious crowds began to gather he helped the driver to right himself and, mumbling apologies, hurried the man toward the car. The driver was as astounded by the blow as by the fact that for the first time Goff had acknowledged him at all. They got into the car and Goff told the driver to take him to the Park Central Hotel. He peeled a fifty-dollar bill off a large roll of money and leaned forward to drop it in the driver’s lap.

  There were fourteen telephone messages at the hotel, but he ignored them. He ran a very cold bath and lay in it for ten minutes because that was what relaxed him most. He got into pajamas and a robe and called room service to send a waiter into his kitchen to make him a cup of Ovaltine. In about twenty minutes he felt calm and sleepy. It was five minutes to six. What was he in such an uproar about? He stretched out on the bed and began to sort everything into its place, but not all of the pieces would fit. How in God’s name had West known he had engineered the bond heist? How had he found out he had floated the bonds away through the bucket shops—and how did he know Goff owned bucket shops? What was wrong here?

  The only thing that could give Goff satisfaction gave him enormous satisfaction. West had had a fair run in the money-lending business. Ninety-eight percent of that kind of a turnover for thirteen years should be enough for the greediest banker in the world. West was finished now. It was all Goff’s business now—100 percent Goff’s. He felt so good about it that he began to marvel at the brass of the ice-water bastard demanding to be paid five million dollars from somebody else’s bonds and calling it a “fine.” He was willing to steal the money from Goff, then call it a fine for stealing. Well, the cold-ass grabber had made his own square bed and he could have it. West saying he was going to put him out of business was a very funny line. Goff fell asleep.

  He awoke to the sound of his doorbell ringing and to a pounding on the door. He rolled out of bed and put on a light. The noise stopped. He started across the living room toward the door when the ringing started again. “Shut up!” he shouted. “And you better have a goddam good reason.” He opened the door.

  Three men stood there. Incredibly, one was Joe “the Boss” Masseria. He tried to register that before he saw that the other two were Frankie Yale and Frankie Marlowe. Joe the Boss hadn’t shown himself out of his neighborhood for years because he had decided that it was dangerous to call attention to himself. He did the thinking. He had lieutenants to do the work. He ran all the rackets in New York: booze, narcotics, the Italian lottery, vice, extortion—name it, they belonged to Joe the Boss. Charley Lucky ran Manhattan for him. Ciro Terranova ran uptown and the Bronx. Frankie Yale ran Brooklyn for him. Joe ran all the big hoods, all the rackets, and he was head of the Unione, and in all the years he had done business with Goff they had met only once.

  What the hell was this? He stared at Frankie
Yale, his pal, his contact, the man he did business with and with whom he had had many a wonderful time. Goff was in the nightclub business with Frankie Marlowe and they owned a couple of fighters and a couple of horses together. Goff knew so much about these three men that the way they stood there looking at him was frightening. Frankie Yale was the richest man in Brooklyn, it occurred to him fleetingly. Yale had once sent a pair of diamond cufflinks to a newspaperman because the man had written that he was “the Beau Brummel of the underworld.” Joe the Boss was maybe three and a half times bigger than Capone—not Capone’s scrapbook, Capone: Frankie Yale was the specialist for fancy hits. He handled only very big hits. He had killed Jim Colisimo and Dion O’Banion as a favor. And Marlowe was Yale’s chief gunman.

  “What is it, boys?” Goff said shakily. “What’s the matter?” His voice broke. Masseria pushed him on the chest and sent him backward into the room. Marlowe locked the door.

  “Frankie, listen—” he said to Yale.

  “Shuddup.”

  He had made Yale! He had made all of them. Without the money he had lent them they would be nothing—stevedores sweating on the docks or pimps or strong-arms. This was too much. Something had gone wrong. “I never keep cash here,” he said. “I swear there isn’t six grand in the whole place.”

  “Arnold?”

  “Yes, Joe?”

  “I got a contract to hit you.”

  “Hit me?” He looked frantically from one face to the other. His mouth became unsteady and he had to grit his teeth to stop its trembling. “Why? Whose contract? This is impossible. I do everything right. I help everybody. I helped you. Who wants me hit?”

  They stared at him and he slid downward into a chair.

  “Who?” Masseria asked resentfully. “You wanna know who? You think I turn out to handle goddam hits, you son of a bitch? You think I come alla way up here and Frankie comes alla way from Brooklyn because we wanna hit a fucking shylock?”