And then my father reached me and Schwinn’s men flattened and scattered and Schwinn himself cowered, using me as a shield to deflect the mighty blow he anticipated would shortly, very shortly, come his way. But no such blow arrived. My father simply snatched me from Schwinn’s grasp, spit, and dragged me like a laundry bag out from the wings and down the short set of stairs at the side of the stage and up the side of the auditorium. While what was left of the audience squalled around us, up on the stage the intruders busied themselves disassembling the rally’s various props. The banners were pulled to the floor of the stage, the sculptural swastika knocked flat. Then stomped on. Within ten minutes, the auditorium had emptied of most of the able-bodied and left to it were the plenteous injured and moaning. A siren sounded in the distance, coming down Figueroa. More sirens.
This evening may have destroyed the hall but it would somehow right my father, help him find a place set apart from the peddlers of Boyle Heights he despised, law-abiding men who were content to sell shirts, furs, and scrap metal—or paint houses—patiently waiting while their children went to school and became doctors and lawyers, who then moved up to the new postwar subdivisions in the Valley, the vast new housing tracts from which Jews were not restricted from buying a home, leaving Boyle Heights a ghost town of elderly Jews and my grandfather’s Breed Street shul a dilapidated monument to a vanished era. No, his new buddies from Schwartzman’s bar—Cohen, Rothman, Shaman, like Lansky, Siegel, and Stein—were not interested in sacrificing themselves for the next generation, not interested in being left behind, not interested in timidity.
Mickey Cohen, business finished in the center aisle, jumped up onto the stage, grabbed the microphone off the podium, and faced what remained of the battered audience, blood all over his face and his suited shirtfront. His amplified voice filled the auditorium: “Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment. Only next time it will be worse for you bastards. Spread the word.”
And then he reached into his bloody suit pocket and held up a pistol, waved it like a flag before discharging it directly into the framed portrait of the Führer, the auditorium filling with the gun’s banging retort. Hitler stared out of the picture with a bullet hole in his head.
The police sirens wailed at the front of the building, the red lights of the police cars made a dizzying circuit of the auditorium, and The Jew Boy was calling to his men, “We gotta scram!”
My father and I ducked through a side door, my father in his hurry practically lifting me into the air like a kite, my mother’s sandals flying off my feet, as he ran and I flew, a dark cobbled- together mess of sweat and panic, streaking through the alley behind Fifteenth Street toward our Cadillac, dark and still, an island away from the chaos we’d caused.
Our ride home was made in silence. What I had seen was too fantastic to be approached by language. But as we left downtown and drove northeast to Boyle Heights, my father began to laugh, to pound on the steering wheel, to look at me with bemused disbelief, and then he made me solemnly promise I would tell my mother none of what had happened tonight.
And that was the first of my father’s many gigs for Mickey Cohen, for which he was always paid handsomely and always in cash. Mickey Cohen carried with him a fat roll of thousands of dollars wherever he went. And this gig led, eventually and inexorably, to others, and finally to our trip out to Las Vegas in Benny Siegel’s coupe in 1945, and from there, to our life now, such as it was.
31
Las Vegas
1951
I didn’t know back then at the Deutsches Haus what Herr Schwinn was talking about when he ranted about international Jewry, about vice, money, and motion pictures. But I understood it better in 1951. And I suppose you could say that Estes Kefauver of 1951 was just a new version of, a more respectable incarnation of, Schwinn, circa 1939. Kefauver’s rant was the same as Schwinn’s—Jews, vice, money, Jews, foreigners, parasites, gangsters—minus mention of the motion pictures.
For months, Nate had been dodging subpoenas to appear before Senator Kefauver’s hearings on organized crime conducted in St. Louis, in Kansas City, in Chicago, in Philadelphia, in Cleveland, New Orleans, and Detroit. Nate even dodged Kefauver’s big day in Las Vegas itself, but eventually Nate and his lawyer decided that since the Kefauver tour looked as if it would never stop, with further dates in Miami, New York, and Washington, in fifteen cities all across the country, Nate might as well appear in Los Angeles, a place out of sight of Vegas and the uncomfortable local publicity that would accompany such an appearance here. Los Angeles was a reasonable distance away and the hearings there were set on a date that was not in the middle of a brutal summer. And so Wilbur Clark, Moe Dalitz, and some of the other Desert Inn crew, who had also been subpoenaed, drove out with Nate to the coast.
All he’d done, Nate assured me as he was packing, was a little bootlegging back when he lived in Detroit, transporting liquor across Lake Erie with his buddies, the group of them dubbed the Jewish Navy and Lake Erie dubbed the Jewish Lake, and with that bootlegging money he’d bought some nightclubs and a wide array of legitimate businesses of interest to any legitimate businessman. But there was something in his voice, the slightest ping of mendacity. A legitimate businessman. I knew this was what he wanted to be, what he would try to impersonate, for the rest of his life. So obviously he thought my brain was as childlike as my face. Which was fine. The less he knew about what went on in there, the better.
Because I knew only some of what Nate and all the men I knew like him had done was legitimate. And everything legitimate had been funded by money that wasn’t, money from liquor and gambling. But the former was legal now, the latter legal here. Legitimate businessman. Maybe. Maybe now.
But I said nothing.
And Nate said, “Don’t watch me on television, Esme. You don’t need to see all this.”
But, of course, I did watch him. I ate breakfast in the DI coffee shop (where I knew every hostess, every waitress, every busboy, every cook, just as my father had once known every man and woman who worked Hollywood Park) and I watched every minute of Nate’s appearance before the Kefauver committee on organized crime on the coffee shop television. My father even came over to join me, taking advantage of Nate’s absence to visit me here at the hotel, the one place on the Strip he avoided in order to avoid the man who had gobbled up his daughter whole. Wolf. Wolf with a cock.
But today Nate was gone from the DI and from the desert at large, and my father was here and we watched together the televised Senator Estes Kefauver, with his big black spectacles and his many assistants and his stenographers and his piles of papers and records and recorded testimonies, holding court at the Federal Building in downtown L.A., not all that far from Boyle Heights—or from the Deutsches Haus, for that matter. Nate told me he’d heard that Kefauver carried with him in addition to all his paperwork, his constant requests for girls. The minute he arrived in a new city, he’d cry, “Get me a girl,” Kefauver as promiscuous as any goon, even as he was sharpening his pencils to hone in on American crime in all its various permutations. And who was supposed to supply him with that girl but the very goons Kefauver was in Los Angeles to grill, someone like, say, a Ben Siegel?
Because Ben had always run brothels in Los Angeles, and, of course, as my father and I found out later and so disastrously, the concomitant abortion parlors. Even Mr. Mayer had visited Ben’s whorehouses, and when he did, he had the place emptied of all other customers so it would be just him and the ladies, flowers waiting to be picked. Yes, even the lion of Hollywood needed sustenance, the particular sustenance provided by a young, beautiful woman, a sustenance I would come to learn all men needed, though for different reasons, especially powerful men, who sometimes lost their heads in search of it or searched more safely for it on the screen. And when we came out to Vegas, Ben brought the business with him, though I hadn’t known it then, installing at the Flamingo cigarette girls or hatcheck girls or cocktail waitresses or showgirls, girls who, when sum
moned, disappeared discreetly down the various unsupervised wings of the hotel. All this was done quietly, of course, with circumspection, through a word to the bellhops or the valets or the pit bosses or the bartenders, the quiet aside, “Get me a girl,” which was another reason my father never wanted me out there on the casino floor.
It seemed this morning I knew every man who made an appearance on that coffee shop television, all of them men from Hollywood, many of whom had then gone to Las Vegas, as we had, men who had taught me how to play stud poker (“Make it a shutout, little girl. Don’t let ’em score a single point.”) or who brought me flowering orchids, the pots wrapped with big cheap bows, or who had me run to the kitchen for another slice of cake when they were having a meeting in the Flamingo’s offices or who said, “Baby E, be a good girl and go tell Gus Greenbaum I’m here,” men who ran the hotels and the casinos and the counting rooms and the nightclubs I called home. Men whose names I’d been hearing my whole life were being subpoenaed and were sitting at tables before microphones, where they dodged questions or pled the fifth, Frank Costello, Joe Sica, and most familiar of all, Mickey Cohen, who had dressed himself in an elegant bespoke suit—I believe by now he owned his own haberdashery—a suit that camouflaged to some degree his burgeoning weight.
When he had fought as The Jew Boy, he had been small and thin, but now he was middle-aged, thickset, thicker than I remembered, his chin and jowls too ample. What would he think of me, now, also changed, Baby E all grown up, too big to sit on his lap anymore, too big to let win at cards, too big to be presented with a cellophane box he’d hold behind his back, making me jump for it, a box from his very own Michael’s Greenhouses, a box I would recognize at once? Within the plump innards of the box would be nestled a big peony wrist corsage, all blowsy pink, my favorite flower and favorite color, as Mickey, of course, knew very well.
“Would you like this, Baby E?” And he would wink at me.
As answer, I would grab at the corsage, “Oh, oh, oh,” and slide it immediately on my wrist, Mr. Cohen beaming at my pleasure.
But Mickey wasn’t being questioned today about corsages. He was being questioned about illegal gambling and tax evasion, and when he opened his wallet and showed Kefauver the $287 inside the leather folds, saying this was all the money he had in the world, he was broke, dead broke, and had to borrow from friends, my father pounded the coffee-shop table with his fist until his eggs shook and the silverware clanged, laughing at Mickey’s bravado. But when Cohen was eventually indicted and sent to jail, as he would be within a few years, it would be for not paying taxes on that $287 and its remaining unreported brothers. My father finished pounding the table and sipped at his coffee, but had to put his cup down when, a minute later, Mickey told the senator that if he so much as spit on the street, it made the front page, and both the coffee shop and the televised courtroom erupted with laughter.
What was it about the public and about Hollywood that so liked the spectacle of mobsters, applauded their theatricality both in its films and outside them?
The actor George Raft had been close to Benny. Hollywood people were always guests at Ben’s parties in Beverly Hills. Benny’s membership at the Hillcrest Country Club—a country club!, albeit a country club for Jews—had been sponsored by two Hollywood moguls. Harry Cohn was such good friends with the murderer Johnny Roselli that he never had labor trouble at Columbia. Maybe Hollywood saw itself in these men, brothers who’d taken different paths but came from the same place, outliers hacking out their own routes in the American wilderness, like any pioneer, rough and tumble, furious with the obstacles in their paths, utterly determined and ambitious, making themselves kings of their own empires if they couldn’t rule the empires already in place.
By lunchtime, Allen Smiley, in handcuffs, was carted out from prison where he had been rendered unable, unlike Nate, to skirt a subpoena. I knew Allen because he had been Benny Siegel’s best friend and the two of them were always together in Los Angeles, where they held court at the Brown Derby restaurant. And when he sat down at the long witness table, my father said, “I never liked Al Smiley,” which surprised me because my father had always been so congenial around him and because while my father and Benny discussed business, Mr. Smiley would make a quarter appear and disappear between his fingers for my entertainment.
Mr. Kefauver’s assistant, Downey Rice, started the questioning, and he first wanted to know Smiley’s exact name, his Russian name, which was not Smiley, but Smihoff, which was established as a Jewish name, the Smihoffs immigrants from Kiev, because the first thing the Kefauver committee always did was establish the ethnicity of the person being questioned, usually Jewish, sometimes Sicilian, less often Irish. Implication: somehow not really American. Mr. Smiley, which was how I still thought of him, did everything he could not to answer any questions, but eventually he agreed that Meyer Lansky and Moe Sedway and Moe Dalitz were associates of his.
Then he was asked about the night Benny died, about a long distance telephone call he had made to Las Vegas before he and Benny left their Santa Monica restaurant and drove to Virginia Hill’s house, the house where Benny was killed while Smiley sat beside him on the sofa.
Rice: Think back to June 20, 1947, when you were at the restaurant and see if you can think of making any telephone calls.
Smiley: I’m quite certain I didn’t make any telephone calls.
Rice: There is some indication that there was a telephone call made to Las Vegas just shortly before that. Do you know anything about that?
Smiley: I am sure I did not make it because if it was a long distance telephone call I would have more reason to remember it.
Rice: You are certain you made no long distance telephone calls to Las Vegas that night at all?
Smiley: I am certain I did not.
After the murder, Smiley testified he immediately gave over his interests in the Flamingo to Gus Greenbaum, saying he didn’t care anymore about the place, that it could have burned up for all he cared, and even I, sitting here at my coffee shop table, four years after the fact, could see that Kefauver was implying that Allen had traded his shares of the Flamingo and even Benny himself to save his own life, and that perhaps he hadn’t even known for sure until Ben’s assassins finished their nine shots and had vanished down Linden Drive that he himself wouldn’t be next despite the deal that he’d made. And that’s when I understood that after Smiley made his call to Vegas, someone in Vegas had made another call—who?—and the culmination of all those calls was that Ben was killed within the hour and that’s why my father didn’t like Al Smiley, even if my father hadn’t said a word about him to me since Benny died in 1947.
My father had stopped eating and so had I.
Waitresses were taking orders on their pads, busboys were clearing tables and ferrying glasses of water and cups of coffee, guests were eating and leaving, eating and leaving. My father ordered a piece of pie, another coffee. He was wearing a new gold pinkie ring, clunky enough to be ostentatious and monogrammed with a fancy S with an arrow etched through it, Ike Silver, cupid? Ike Silver, archer? or whatever that meant, and one of the nice silk suits he’d taken to dressing in since his promotion to box man.
By the time my father finished his cherry pie, Nate appeared at the long wooden table where those compelled to testify were asked to sit, microphone before him, attorney next to him, Nate’s legs crossed comfortably, elegantly, as he reclined in his wooden chair, relaxed and smiling his genial, appealing smile, appearing sanguine, his thick silky black hair slicked straight back and flattened with some kind of industrial-strength shellac. He had removed his signet ring, which he and all the men I knew wore, the better to show the senator and company that he was not like Ben Siegel or Mickey Cohen or Allen Smiley or my father. And though Nate appeared on this small screen, Nate’s appearance on any screen at all, where usually stars like Clark Gable or Gary Cooper appeared, seemed to conflate him with those men. This was a performance, and though Nate had watched me perform
many times, this was my first time to watch him.
Mr. Kefauver himself led the questioning, which made me understand that Nate was considered a big catch, not a little guppy like Allen Smiley, tossed to the assistant, Mr. Rice. Well, surely I already knew this, but still, it made me nervous enough to put down my fork.
Kefauver: You got your start from rum running, didn’t you, back in the old Prohibition days? You got yourself a pretty little nest egg out of rum running, wouldn’t you say?
Nate: (shades of Mickey Cohen) Well, Senator, I didn’t inherit any money.
Certainly not. Not from that father stealing checks out of mailboxes.
My father frowned. If he’d enjoyed Mickey’s cheekiness, he wasn’t enjoying Nate’s.
And then Nate was asked about a dizzying number of clubs I had never heard of, the implication being these were gambling clubs, clubs not only in Detroit, but also in New York and Miami and Kentucky, so many clubs that Nate had run or had a percentage in over the past thirty years, clubs that must have housed secret gambling rooms just as the Bacon Club with its two-way mirrors and men with machine guns and mountains of cash had been hidden inside Mickey Cohen’s Clover Club, where my mother ended up dancing in late 1939. And Nate was asked not only about clubs, but about racetracks, horse tracks and dog tracks, and hearing the jumble of names and dates made me realize all over again and with a jolt how much older than I Nate was and how long, how many decades, he had been running what all the men I knew called “joints.”
Kefauver: Have you ever been investigated regarding your interests in any of these clubs or illegal casinos in this country over the last thirty years?
Nate: I don’t recall.
Kefauver: You don’t recall any investigations in thirty years?
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 17