The Devil's Odds

by Milton T. Burton

  “I’d shut that bunch down, too, if they’d let me do it.”

  “I know you would,” I said with a laugh. “But that’s just because you’re against fun of any kind.”

  “Shit,” Grist muttered.

  “Sam and Rosario run a pretty civilized operation,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah,” Grist said. “But that kind of flagrant disregard for the law can’t lead to no good. If we’re gonna allow gambling, then we ought to go ahead and legalize it.”

  “The politicians can’t do that,” I said, grinning. “They have to cater to the church crowd.”

  “Shit.…” he growled once again.

  I got to my feet and shook hands with both men. “I’ll see you this evening, Charlie.”

  “Be on time. You wouldn’t want to miss the fun.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Outside interest in Galveston and its lucrative nightlife was nothing new. There had been at least one earlier attempt to take over the island rackets that I knew of. An old friend of mine, a Galveston County deputy who’d actually been involved, told me the story not long after he retired. In 1928, Chicago crime lord Al Capone decided to annex the Maceo brothers’ operation to his own growing Midwest empire. To determine just what would be involved in such a move, he sent his trusted right-hand man, Frank Nitti, down to Texas. Nitti was well acquainted with the island of Galveston and its people. Years earlier he had worked a few months for an old-time Galveston rumrunner named Johnny Jack Nounes. But things had changed since Johnny Jack’s day, as Nitti soon discovered.

  Friends in Chicago informed the brothers of Nitti’s trip. When his train pulled into Union Station late that night, it was met by a high-level Maceo employee named Anthony Regilla. My deputy friend was also part of the welcoming committee that evening, along with another deputy sheriff and a huge, marginally retarded man everybody called Jimmy the Chop. Regilla told Nitti’s bodyguards they needed to take a hike because their boss was going on a midnight tour of the Island.

  “Nice car you got there,” Nitti muttered nervously as they steered him toward a sleek Packard touring car that sat at the curb, its powerful engine purring softly.

  “Belongs to Papa Rosario himself,” Regilla said as he opened the rear door for his guest. “He wants us to take good care of you.”

  The big Packard glided eastward along Seawall Boulevard until at last it came to a stop beyond the north end of town. The five men climbed from the car and stood motionless and silent for a few moments while the moon hung high in the southern sky and the waves lapped gently against the sand. At last Regilla suggested they all take a stroll out on the north jetty. To Nitti it seemed as though they walked the better part of a mile out over the Gulf until finally they stopped at a place where several dark and disturbing stains discolored the jetty’s granite blocks. Nitti later admitted that his heart almost stopped beating when the giant, child-minded Jimmy reached under his coat and drew out an enormous meat cleaver whose well-honed blade gleamed like antique silver in the pale light of the full moon.

  “Jimmy is fascinated by crabs,” Regilla said pleasantly. “He loves to feed ‘em.”

  “That’s right,” my friend agreed. “It’s always the high point of his week when he gets to come out here.”

  The other deputy dropped a large, paper-wrapped package he’d been carrying. Jimmy quickly slit the package’s binding with his cleaver and pulled the paper aside to reveal a fresh beef brisket. It was only a matter of a few swings of the cleaver and the brisket was rendered into pieces. Next, Jimmy pulled a length of heavy cord from his coat and tied one end of it to a large chunk of the meat. Then he threw the meat over into the water on the shallow side of the jetty and waited patiently for a couple of minutes before pulling it gently to the surface. Three large crabs hung from the thick, suety morsel, one of them almost as big as a dinner plate.

  “Friends of yours, Jimmy?” one of the deputies asked.

  “Aren’t they pretty?” Jimmy asked in an awed voice, his eyes bright and innocent.

  “By the way, Frank,” Regilla asked, “just what the hell are you doing down here anyway?”

  The Chicago hood smiled weakly and muttered, “Sightseeing, I guess you’d say.”

  “Seen enough?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  They were almost back to the beach when Regilla threw his arm around Nitti’s shoulders. “Say, Frank, Rosario wanted me to remind you about that eight thousand you owe him from the old days when you were working for Johnny Nounes. He hoped you might find it convenient to go ahead and take care of it while you’re here.”

  Nitti nodded enthusiastically. “Sure. I ain’t got that much cash on me, but I guess I could wire Chicago and have it sent down.”

  “That sounds great, Frank,” Regilla said with a beaming smile.

  The men waited at an all-night coffee shop on Avenue A until the Western Union office called to say the money had arrived. Then they escorted Nitti back to Union Station and put him on the morning train.

  “Come back and bring your wife, Frank,” Regilla said before Nitti boarded his Pullman. “This is a great town to visit, but you can see the business opportunities are limited.”

  * * *

  On my way to Galveston I stopped at the edge of town and bought a Houston paper to read later when I had my lunch. According to the headlines, the battle for Stalingrad still raged on, the casualties enormous in the savage Russian winter. I got back in my car and headed westward down U.S. 87 along Boliva Peninsula toward the Galveston ferry. The land was treeless and flat, its emptiness relieved only by a few beach houses scattered here and there. Traffic was light that morning, and I pushed the little Ford up to eighty, slowing down only through the tiny communities of High Island and Gilchrist. Occasionally off to my left I could see the waters of the Gulf rolling onto the beach in two-foot breakers beneath a sky that was leaden and gray.

  It took the ferry about twenty minutes to cross the three miles to Galveston. I drove down Ferry Road over to the Gulf side of the island, and then turned westward on Seawall Boulevard. A mile farther down the casinos and nightclubs began. Off to my right loomed the great Hotel Galvez at Twenty-first and Seawall, and across the street the Balinese Room sat far out over the Gulf on its pilings, its three-hundred-foot catwalk making it all but impregnable to even the most determined police raiders. Not that any cops raiding the place were likely to be very determined.

  Its owners, Sam and Rosario Maceo, had come a long way from humble beginnings since the early days of Prohibition, when a colorful pair named Ollie Quinn and Dutch Voight ran a bootlegging outfit on Galveston Island known as the Beach Gang. They had a fleet of fast speedboats that went outside the twelve-mile limit, met the booze-laden ships coming in from Cuba, and then ferried the goods ashore at night. At the time the Maceo brothers were barely grinding out a hard living. Both were barbers, and both were willing to take a few risks to get ahead in the world. Rosario was living in a run-down beach house on West Beach at the far end of town when Ollie Quinn came to him and offered him fifteen hundred dollars to let his men hide a load of whiskey under his home for a few days. Rosario agreed and then sweated blood the whole time the liquor was in his possession; he’d been born in Sicily and was subject to deportation if he was caught. After Quinn’s henchmen picked up the booze, Quinn himself came to pay Maceo. The barber shook his head and told Quinn to roll the money over, that he wanted to buy into the operation. At that point Ollie Quinn made what turned out to be the worst business decision of his life: he said yes. By 1930 he and Voight were out of the action and the Maceos controlled all the illegal liquor coming in through the eastern part of the Texas Gulf Coast.

  The brothers prospered during the 1920s and made a lot of money out of bootlegging, but it was gambling that became the mother lode of their empire. In 1926 they opened a place called the Hollywood Dinner Club, the first air-conditioned nightclub in the United States. Next came the Turf Athletic Club. Both were fashionable spots,
and each had a casino in the back. Then in the late twenties they bought and remodeled an opulent nightclub that sat several hundred feet out over the Gulf at the end of a long pier. Over the years this place went through several name changes, but right after Pearl Harbor it was redecorated in a South Seas decor and christened the Balinese Room. In a few short months it earned the reputation as the most opulent nightspot on the Gulf Coast, and it, too, had its casino in back.

  These clubs were directed toward the carriage trade, but the pair also owned taverns and dives throughout the city and out along Highway 87 all the way into Jefferson County, each with its hidden gambling room. In addition, they owned thousands of slot machines scattered about in grocery stores, bars, and barbershops all over the upper coast—a completely open operation in a state whose laws permitted absolutely no legal gambling.

  My father hadn’t been a serious gambler, but he loved his Thursday-night poker games in town with his cronies, and each year, in the spring after roundup was over, he made a weeklong trip to the coast, where he played modestly in the casinos. Generally, he broke about even and had a good time. When I was in college he began to take me with him on these junkets, and I met the Maceo brothers on several occasions. I liked both men, though Sam was the more personable of the pair.

  I stopped by the Turf Athletic Club on Twenty-third Street, where the syndicate had its main offices, only to be told that Sam was at the Balinese Room.

  “Since the remodeling job he’s fallen in love with the damn place, mate,” said Little Tommy Trehan, a diminutive Cockney who was the syndicate’s oddsmaker for local sporting events. Tommy had been born the unwanted offspring of an East End slattern, and for him the Great War had been a blessing, an easy escape from the slums and a dead-end life. At seventeen he’d wormed his way into the British Army when the ranks began to thin after the Somme campaign and the recruiters stopped being so fastidious about the regulations concerning a soldier’s size. In the trenches he took a bullet in the leg, lost part of a lung to mustard gas, and along the way earned a couple of citations for bravery. While recuperating in an Allied convalescent center, he’d met and made friends with a Texan named Jack Amber. The two of them got on so well that when the war ended Trehan came to the States with him to visit and recuperate and wound up staying, and the pair went into business together.

  “Mind calling to tell him I’m on my way over?” I asked.

  “Be glad to, mate.”

  I drove back to Seawall and parked on the beach side of the street. The entryway to the Balinese was decorated to look like a beachcomber’s shack. Behind the entry an enclosed walkway extended out over the Gulf to the club itself. The door was unlocked, but the joint appeared deserted.

  Public places that are normally crowded and full of loud talk always seem eerie to me when they’re deserted, and it was a lonely walk down the long, cavernous hallway with my footsteps echoing back at me. At last I came to the mezzanine, where I found a man in a white waiter’s jacket running a vacuum cleaner over the carpeted floor. He’d no more than opened his mouth to speak when the door to the South Seas Showroom swung open and Big Sam Maceo stepped out and smiled when he saw me.

  A widower nearing fifty, he was tanned and fit in his white knit polo shirt and dark tweed sports coat that looked English and expensive. He had a thickset, muscular body and a round, happy face and exquisitely barbered, coal black hair that showed some gray at the temples. An affable man, the year before he’d married a Hollywood starlet named Edna Sedgewick, a tall, classy girl from an old, semiaristocratic Rhode Island family. From what I’d heard, it was a good union.

  “Virgil Tucker,” he said happily, and stuck out his hand to shake mine. “What brings you up here? Business or pleasure?”

  “Urgent business, Sam,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  “Sure,” he replied, his voice a little puzzled. He turned to the waiter. “Bring us come coffee, will you, Joe?” he said and pushed the door to the showroom back open to usher me in.

  We took a table near the stage. The new decor was South Seas splendor, with exotic murals and the most elaborate black neon I’d ever seen. The waiter quickly returned with our coffee.

  “This is the first time we’ve seen each other since your dad died,” Maceo said, spooning sugar into his cup. “And I just want you to know that I’m sorry. He was a hell of a guy.”

  “Thanks, Sam. We appreciated the wreath you sent.”

  He gave a diffident half shrug. “He was a good customer and a good friend.”

  I grinned. “You never won much off the old man.”

  He waved off my objection. “Who cared with a man like that? Hell, I was proud to have him patronize my places. His passing was a loss to the whole state.”

  “I agree, but from what I’ve seen here this morning I may be the one sending flowers to your wake if you don’t take a few more precautions.”

  His eyes hardened. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “Angelo Scorpino and Marty Salisbury.”

  “How come you know about that business?” he asked, his voice surprised.

  “I got dragged into it,” I said and went on to give him the whole story from the moment I first saw Madeline Kimbell in the Weilbach barroom, leaving out the damage I’d done to Nolan Dunning. “She claimed Arno was one of the killers,” I said in conclusion. “And Grist says both of them work for Scorpino.”

  He shook his head and stared out across the room. “I’m shocked that they would murder a man like him,” he said softly. “The newspapers said it was a robbery. They took about five hundred dollars off him.”

  “Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that. That must have been to make it look like a heist.”

  “However they did it, it was a stupid move,” he said firmly. “That’s the kind of crap that can bring the wrath of God down on an operation.”

  “How well did you know DeMour?”

  “Not well at all, really. I heard a lot about him because he was so well known here on the coast, but I only met him a couple of times. I know for a fact, though, that he never gambled, not in our places or anywhere else.”

  “Was he as honest as everybody claims?”

  Maceo nodded. “Yeah. Oh, he was human, like all of us, and he had his weakness. But he was discreet about it.”

  I didn’t ask what that weakness was, and that was a big mistake. At the time it didn’t seem important. If I had asked, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble.

  Instead I said, “According to Grist, something put DeMour on a reform bender. The story is that he was going to run for the state senate and try to force a legislative investigation into political corruption in Jefferson County if he was elected. Which meant investigating the links between law enforcement and the rackets. And nobody doubted he could get elected. Grist thinks Salisbury just decided to nip the investigation in the bud by killing DeMour before he got elected and did any damage. It’s common knowledge that Salisbury is after your operation. If they’d kill a man as prominent as DeMour just to head off an investigation, then you’re sure as hell vulnerable.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed grudgingly. “Maybe I need to be a little more careful.”

  “There’s no maybe to it, Sam.”

  He turned to beckon the waiter. “Joe, call the Turf Club and have Rosario send Mort and Benny over here. And tell him to keep some people with him until I get a chance to explain.”

  “Sure, Sam,” the waiter replied. “What’s up?”

  Maceo grinned and nodded his head toward me. “My friend here thinks that somebody may want to poke some holes in this precious carcass of mine. Can you believe it?”

  “We can’t have that,” Joe said, returning the grin. “I’ve got a rod backstage. Maybe I ought to go up to the door and wait till they get here.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Maceo said.

  “Loyal employee?” I asked once the man had left.

  “Cousin.”

  �
�Even better.”

  “You know, Virgil, I never expected this. Salisbury’s been over here to talk to me twice, but I thought we were a long way from gunplay.”

  “What was his proposition?”

  “He said that if we took him in as a partner he could double our margin.”

  “How?”

  “Just what you would expect. Rigged tables, magnets, cardsharp dealers. Every kind of crooked crap you can imagine.”

  “It’s the way guys like him think, Sam.”

  “Yeah, and it’s stupid. Treat your customers right and they’ll keep coming back year after year. Screw them, and you may make a bundle off them once, but they’ll go someplace else the next time they want to gamble. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve visited with casino operators all over the world. Bali, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Monte Carlo. And they all say the same thing. Run an honest operation and over the long run you still win because the odds are in your favor.”

  “Grist told me he’s just waiting for the word from Austin to run Salisbury out of the state,” I said.

  “I heard the same thing. I got some friends in the capital myself.”

  “I wonder why it’s taking this long.”

  He rolled his eyes. “What else could it be but politics? Change of administrations. This new governor is in no hurry to give the word to move.”

  He meant Coke Stevenson, an arch-conservative rancher from Junction who’d been the first house speaker in the state’s history to serve more than one term. He’d moved up from lieutenant governor to governor the year before when his predecessor, a consummate clown named W. Lee O’Daniel, had resigned to run in a special election for the U.S. Senate.

  “They don’t call him Calculating Coke for nothing,” I said. “My aunt Carmen claims he keeps his ear so close to the ground that it’s full of grasshoppers. Have you thought about dealing with the Salisbury problem yourself?”

  He shook his head. “That won’t work. We’re just not equipped to fight a war against the likes of Angelo Scorpino.”