Daughter of the King

by Lansky, Sandra

  If I thought about it, crime seemed pretty disorganized, guys robbing banks and eventually getting shot. Kefauver, however, had this new theory that crime was a lot more complicated than that, much less the shoot ’em up that you saw in the movies and more like making lots of money by controlling the labor unions and not paying taxes on it. The reason they didn’t make movies on organized crime was that it was so boring, like banking or accounting. I nearly fell asleep watching these hearings and was amazed that the public had tuned in in such massive numbers. They were getting a real-life cops-and-robbers drama, or at least a white-collar version of one, and I suppose the thrill was to see powerful men like Daddy and Uncle Frank burned at the stake.

  Uncle Frank was on television when I was watching. He seemed nervous and fidgety and incredibly uncomfortable. He testified to Kefauver that he was too sick to testify. I believed him. He wasn’t his normal self. At Dinty Moore’s and elsewhere he had always seemed so cool and controlling. Later it was said that with his tailored clothes and the gravelly voice, he was Marlon Brando’s role model for The Godfather. To me, he always seemed like Secretary of State Dean Acheson, quiet and commanding and even better dressed. That’s surely why they called him the prime minister. Maybe Uncle Frank had stage fright. Very few people were used to being on television. Here was Frank Costello, one of the most intimidating men in America, intimidated by the camera, if not by Kefauver. He may have controlled the biggest city on earth but on the small screen, he was no match for Arthur Godfrey or Milton Berle.

  There wasn’t much Italian about Frank Costello. Not anymore. After all, he had a Jewish wife and an Irish name and my Daddy as his good friend. He was pure American, which went against the point of the Kefauver Committee that organized crime was an Italian thing, and that Daddy was the exception who made the rules for a bunch of Sicilian trigger men. That was the image in those books I bought. Maybe in the Roaring Twenties, the Sicilians, just off the boat and known as Moustache Petes, for their Old World facial hair, had treated New York like an East Coast version of the Wild West, but now it was all business: Big Business, the Irish mayor, and Daddy and Abe Zwillman and Frank Costello all worked together. Estes Kefauver had a big problem with that. To him that was un-American.

  “What have you done for this country, Mr. Costello? What contributions have you made?” Kefauver, in his southern drawl, attacked Uncle Frank. The senator’s attitude seemed clear that the only good and pure Americans were the founding fathers and Daniel Boone. If you were a later immigrant, you were a freeloader to begin with, and you usually got worse. Italians, Irish, Jews, they were all sinister, up to no good. Kefauver was practicing racial or ethnic profiling long before they had a name for it. “Come on, Mister Costello, tell me one single thing you have done for this great country of ours in return for us giving you citizenship. You can’t, can you?” Kefauver kept pressing.

  “I pay my taxes,” Uncle Frank finally replied, and the entire courtroom broke out laughing, as loud as the black-tie audience at the Costello-owned Copacabana might have laughed at a Joe E. Lewis one-liner. That shut Kefauver up.

  But only for a while. Uncle Frank’s lawyer made a big speech denouncing the televising of these hearings as making a “spectacle” of justice akin to feeding Christians to the lions at the Roman coliseum. How could his client get due process of law if he was inhibited by the camera to speak to his counsel? Kefauver offered the compromise of forbidding the televising of Costello’s face. The lawyer took the deal. It was a dreadful mistake. Instead the camera stayed close-up on Uncle Frank’s hands. What beautifully manicured hands they were. However, they were terribly nervous, shaky hands, fidgeting, twisting fingers, pouring glass after glass of water, reaching for his fine silk handkerchief to wipe away the endless sweat on his brow. That handkerchief was the equivalent of worry beads and, boy, was Uncle Frank ever worried. The public naturally assumed that he had something to be worried about. They didn’t write it off to performance anxiety.

  Frank Costello looked shifty and guilty as sin. And sin, in the form of gambling and connections to elected power, was what Kefauver was driving at. He wasn’t trying to call him a murderer or a drug trafficker. His questions, or the ones I could understand, were fairly simple. Were you convicted of possessing a weapon back in 1918? Did you ever travel to Cuba? Did you ever meet with Meyer Lansky? Did you ever meet with Mayor O’Dwyer? Did you ever meet with Benjamin Siegel? Did you ever meet with Charles Luciano? Of course he had. Yet Uncle Frank refused to answer the questions, and his refusals were accompanied by the endless wringing of his hands. Worried about looking bad to the television audience, he ended up looking terrible.

  I was upset by Uncle Frank’s awful performance, one that would have closed a Broadway show on opening night. When Mommy came home from the psychiatrist, I couldn’t control myself, spilling the beans about the books I bought and the show I’d seen. I was worried they were going to take Daddy off to jail, and all of his family along with him. Tell me that it isn’t so, I was begging her, in effect. And that’s exactly what she did. “Please, honey, do not believe anything you read!” she insisted emphatically. “Do not believe this stuff. It’s all lies.” She tore up the paperback books and threw them in the trash. Then she called room service to come and take out the trash baskets so I couldn’t fish the pages out and read them again.

  “What about what I see?” I asked her.

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw Uncle Frank. He was right there on television”

  “Did you see him do anything?”

  “No . . . But he looked . . . scared.”

  Mommy just laughed. “Uncle Frank isn’t scared of anything.”

  “He looked scared. He looked like someone who just got caught doing something he shouldn’t.”

  “Like you at Lake Mahopac?”

  I blushed, remembering Jimmy C. “A little.”

  “Uncle Frank was just acting. So they’d leave him alone.”

  “But he lied. He said he didn’t know . . . Daddy.” I was nervous now even mentioning Daddy’s name around Mommy. After Teddy it had become an unmentionable.

  Mommy laughed again. I think she had seen the hearings, too. The whole city was watching them. “He didn’t say he didn’t know him. He didn’t lie. He just didn’t answer. That’s a big difference, honey. Why give those people anything? They are no good.”

  “They say we’re no good,” I replied. “They’re the law.”

  “They are not the law. They are politicians,” Mommy said, as if “politicians” was the dirtiest word in the dictionary. She explained that whatever Uncle Frank had done in the past were petty crimes, that everybody had something bad in their past they didn’t want to talk about.

  “Not me,” I said. “Not Paul. Paul’s perfect.”

  “Knock on wood,” Mommy answered. “It was hard in those days, hard if you had just come to this country from Europe.”

  “Did Grandpa Citron do anything bad?”

  Mommy didn’t answer that one. “His family was rich.”

  “Isn’t Uncle Frank rich? He’s really rich.”

  “He didn’t start that way,” Mommy said.

  I was perplexed. If you weren’t rich to begin with, was it okay to do bad things, crimes, to get rich? Is that what everybody did? “Did Daddy do terrible things, too?” I blurted out.

  Mommy kept silent for a while. She held her breath. Then she spoke very deliberately. “Your father is a good man, a very fine man. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing wrong in what he did. You know Uncle Frank. You know your Uncle Joe. Do they seem like bad men to you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do they?”

  “They seem nice.”

  Mommy sighed. “These awful politicians, they just want to get rid of good people like General O’Dwyer and put their own people in.” She called the mayor General. He had been a general, a war hero, before winning election as mayor. By a landslide. She seemed right. He was a gen
eral. Paul was going to be a general. So was Gordon MacRae, at least in the movie. Generals couldn’t be bad.

  Mommy went on defending a world she was no longer part of. Did she want to be? I didn’t know. Probably anything to be back with Daddy. That, sadly, was a lost dream. “You don’t hear them talking about all the good things these men do. They help the poor. They get them food. They get them jobs. They pay their hospital bills. They pay for college. They pay for funerals. And they keep this country safe. Just think how your father saved this city, the waterfront thing . . . Please, Sandi, please don’t watch this garbage,” Mommy begged me.

  “It’s just sensationalism.” she continued. “Honey, newspapers and television make money by scaring people. They scare people about what they call the Cold War, they scare people about the Communists, they scare people with the atom bomb. Now they’ve found something new to scare people with. They’re scaring people with your father. They’re scaring people with Uncle Frank. Please . . . It’s just to sell newspapers and stupid books like those.” She waved her arm at the trashcan and called room service once more to come up and take it away.

  I promised Mommy I’d ignore the hearings. Ha! I lied through my teeth. How could I ignore something that called my entire identity into question? This was my initiation into adulthood, even more than Jimmy C. That I was the daughter, not of a great businessman, but of a great gangster, was the stuff of the greatest identity crisis a teenager could ever have. And I certainly couldn’t discuss it with Daddy. Mommy had given her last word on the subject. Paul was at West Point. Buddy might rat me out to Daddy for asking. And I was too ashamed of the whole thing to mention it to my friends Terry and Eileen, and never to the girls from school. So I bottled it all up, but couldn’t stop listening. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah. I wasn’t supposed to look or else I’d turn into a pillar of salt.

  I’d find appliance stores on Broadway and just blend in with the crowd gathered inside. I’m sure those hearings sold more televisions than Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan combined. They made New York TV-crazy. The number one song was Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz.” My eyes would be filled with images of the coonskin cap–wearing man from Tennessee in one part of a store while over in the record department my ears would be bombarded by Patti Page’s warbling “ . . . the beautiful Tennessee waltz.” At one hearing, I was especially thrilled to see Virginia Hill in the flesh. She lived up to her reputation for sex appeal, a brunette bombshell with a fabulous body to go with a fabulous mouth. I had heard from Buddy all about this “bad girl,” the endless stories of wild high living with Uncle Benny that nobody wanted me to hear. She wore a big hat and a big mink coat. She had the goods, and she liked showing them off. Nothing shy about this lady. I really liked her. She was gorgeous and sassy, just the opposite of proper and demure Aunt Esther. I could see why Uncle Benny and Uncle Joe both fell for her. She seemed like one of the guys. What an aunt she would have made.

  Virginia Hill told Kefauver and the self-righteous senators to go jump in the lake. When Virginia left the hearings, she slugged a nosy woman reporter. Then she cursed the rest of the press, wishing an atomic bomb would wipe out all of them. She called them “goddamn bastards.” When, in one final closed session, the Kefauver people asked her why these powerful men gave her so much money, her answer was basically “because I’m worth it.” Her precise answer, which could not be reported in the papers or heard on television, was that she gave the world’s greatest blow jobs. Although this didn’t make the official news, it somehow got out and got the whole city whispering about it, even the older, more sophisticated girls at Calhoun. Miss Hill’s forte was way over my young head; I would have been thrilled just to be kissed again, the old-fashioned way.

  Virginia Hill had star quality. The camera loved her. None of my uncles had it. Uncle Joe Doto (Adonis) was handsome enough to be a star but stiff. Uncle Willie Moretti tried to be funny, a real Milton Berle. How could he be in the Mafia, he quipped. He didn’t have a membership card. But Estes Kefauver and his colleagues were hardly a comedy audience. He even invited Kefauver to visit him down at the shore in Deal. Kefauver declined. Mayor O’Dwyer ended up looking bad. Just to ask him if he had ever met Daddy branded the once-beloved mayor with a scarlet letter. That he was friends with Uncle Frank spurred the most dire assumptions that he was bought and paid for. Name an uncle, give the mayor cooties, that was the Kefauver game.

  When I couldn’t see the hearings on television, I’d listen to them and the endless commentary on the radio in my room, playing it very low so Mommy wouldn’t hear it. The worst was a show hosted by the Hollywood actor Robert Montgomery, who would say the meanest possible things about Daddy and his circle, far worse than what Kefauver was saying. Narcotics, prostitution, murder galore. He had a beautiful voice, but a vicious tongue. He made me so angry and so protective of Daddy. I later found out that Montgomery was a right-wing, anti-Semitic Republican, a Red Scare fanatic who had denounced a lot of his Hollywood colleagues as pro-Russian Communists a few years before and destroyed their careers. Because he was a skilled actor, he spoke with the greatest authority, so what he said sounded like it had to be true. How I wished that Gordon MacRae, with his own beautiful voice, could come to Daddy’s rescue.

  I dreaded the day Daddy would be called to the stand, but in the end, to my great surprise, that day never came. Daddy didn’t play chess, but he would have been a champion if he had. He knew every move. He knew that Kefauver was out to get him, maybe more than any of his associates. He had to get Kefauver, and he did, by finding out everything he could about this sainted senator from Tennessee. Yes, his grandfather had been a minister, yes, he taught high school, yes, he went to Yale. But, from his vast network of information from uncles around the country, Daddy found out that the coonskin man also went to the track. He didn’t go there just to watch the pretty horses. He went there to gamble.

  Estes Kefauver was a compulsive gambler, maybe even an addicted gambler. And it wasn’t limited to horse racing. Tennessee, the entire South, was full of gambling emporia, road houses, carpet joints, nightclubs, bookmaking centers, owned by Daddy’s associates and sometimes part-owned by Daddy himself. Daddy knew who the important clients were. If Big Brother was watching Daddy, Daddy was also watching Big Brother. The year Kefauver had spent school teaching in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Owney Madden’s gambling town, was his introduction to Sodom. But he didn’t look away. He jumped in. The Holy Roller was the ultimate hypocrite.

  That year may have turned Kefauver into a crusader; it also turned him into a gambler. He had a terrible conflict. He never told the public he was fighting his own demons. The only demons he acknowledged were Daddy and Uncle Frank and Mayor O’Dwyer, and he was out to get them. Estes Kefauver didn’t take his road show to the places he frequented. He didn’t “expose” Memphis and Nashville and Chattanooga and Atlanta and Little Rock. Those were too close for comfort. Daddy, all by himself, had gone to see Kefauver, armed with log books from the race tracks and other information and quoted the Bible to him: “Let he without guilt cast the first stone.” Plus he had a thick sheath of Kefauver’s gambling IOUs. Those were Daddy’s ultimate trump.

  Daddy had several meetings with Kefauver, at first by himself, then accompanied by his famous criminal lawyer, Moses Polakoff. Polakoff was a tough, powerful man who looked more like a boxer than a lawyer. Maybe that’s why his most famous client, Jack Dempsey, liked him so much. Polakoff also was the lawyer for Lucky Luciano and many of the big nightclubs in Manhattan. Despite his tough façade and louche clients, Polakoff was a real intellectual. As I said, I always called him “Professor” because he was so scholarly. Before the divorce, Daddy and the Professor used to sit for hours in Daddy’s study at the Beresford talking about American history, Thomas Paine, and democracy. I’m sure Daddy would have loved to scrap the jukebox business and just go and enroll in West Point with Paul and lead a life of the mind. If anyone would have appreciated a college education, it was he.


  Even if Daddy hadn’t gone to Yale Law School like Estes Kefauver, he wasn’t at all intimidated by Kefauver’s education and by his power. Daddy got exactly what he wanted, which was to not appear at the official hearings, and to not be photographed or televised. In most businesses, the rule was that any publicity was good publicity. But as we saw with Frank Costello, for Daddy and my uncles, any publicity was bad publicity.

  Although Daddy’s meetings with Kefauver were behind closed doors and supposedly top-secret, word leaked out, just as it had with Virginia Hill’s famous line about her special amorous skills. There were just too many assistants and reporters snooping around the Kefauver road show. What captured the public’s imagination was the exchange that leaked out between Daddy and Kefauver about the senator’s passion for gambling. Kefauver reportedly admitted that he liked to gamble, but he didn’t like the idea of “you people,” as he said to Daddy, running the gambling show in the U.S.A. “You people.” In New York City, those were fighting words. In the capital city of America’s melting pot, right versus wrong, cops versus robbers, may have mattered less than us versus them. The immigrant population of New York was “you people” and on the other side was a drawling, arrogant, white churchman from Tennessee, of the Old Confederacy, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Southern nativists were often equal-opportunity bigots. They hated blacks, Jews, Asians, Catholics, whom they called “Papists,” whether Irish or Italian, all with equal venom. I had seen the separate water fountains in Miami, and I just knew they were wrong. Kefauver may have been a liberal Democrat, but he was still a southern man, a Dixie man, and New Yorkers didn’t trust him anymore than he trusted them.

  Daddy was quoted in the papers as having said to Kefauver, “I will not let you persecute me because I am a Jew.” Those words made him something of a folk hero in New York City. They made him my hero as well. Until that moment, I had never even thought of him, or myself, as a Jew. Suddenly I realized what I was, what we were, and that anti-Semitism was worth fighting against, whether in World War II, or in America. Moses Polakoff, the Professor, was also a master of public relations. He let it slip to the press that not only had Daddy thwarted Hitler’s agents on the docks in the war, but he was a major financial supporter of Israeli independence in 1948, by buying Israel bonds and providing arms for Israel’s freedom fighters. Daddy could not stand back and allow the country where his own refugee grandparents were buried to be extinguished by the Arabs, who were being supported by our ostensible friends, the British.