A Bloody Business

by Dylan Struzan

  Charlie says, “I’ll check around, see what I can find out.”

  Sabella has no choice but to agree. Days pass before Charlie bothers to give Sabella a call.

  “The way I hear it,” Charlie says as though the information is fresh off the street, “the Jews and the Irish took revenge. Didn’t you check the taxpaids? The Jews marked that shipment so they could find the guys that have been knocking them over. You aren’t trying to tell me that a mob can’t protect what is theirs, are you? Listen, Sally, it ain’t worth hijacking the Jew mobs when I can hook you up with the guys bringing in the booze. You hook up with them and they will handle the trouble.”

  Sabella says, “I ain’t interested in doin’ business with no kikes.”

  Charlie says, “Jews aren’t interested in your neighborhood stuff; they got neighborhoods of their own.”

  There’s silence on the line.

  “The Jews are here to stay. And they know how to make money,” Charlie says.

  “I’ll let you know,” Sabella says.

  * * *

  The garment strike that started last December continues to rage. The goal is a forty-hour work week. In a meeting held at the new Madison Square Garden last May, fur strikers gave a ten-minute demonstration of cheering, stamping, hat-waving, hat-throwing, shouting, and whistling and held out for their cause.

  The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union meets. Workers push for a guarantee of thirty-six weeks of labor throughout the year. The manufacturers push back. The ILGWU goes on strike July 1, 1926.

  Spurred on by the worker’s discontent, the Communist faction tries to seize control of the unions. The Socialist faction fights back. Manufacturers hire schlammers to beat sense into workers who refuse to work. Governor Al Smith creates a Mediation Commission but the ILGWU cannot agree on the commission’s suggestions.

  The strike enters week 24, becoming the longest strike on record. Cloak makers insist it is impossible to live twelve months on six months’ worth of work. Unions hire their own gangsters. Little Augie Orgen and three members of his gang are arrested for shooting one Samuel Lendman, a strike picket. After four more striking garment workers are shot, District Attorney Banton warns garment manufacturers and union heads that he will stop the violence if they don’t.

  From 34th to 42nd Street, factories groan from inactivity as violence escalates.

  “It is bad enough to have a strike,” Governor Smith says, “but violence in an industrial controversy is absolutely inexcusable and merits the most severe condemnation.”

  There it is, out in the open. While the business world keeps tabs on how many bathing suits are sold and worries over the “raw silk situation” in Japan, the violence takes center stage in the news. Nineteen cloak designers are assaulted, intimidated and kidnapped by union officials.

  Cloak and suit manufacturers quibble over the selling season’s lack of distinctiveness in fabrics. Underwear prices drop. Button manufacturers are encouraged by a new style trend that puts buttons in vogue.

  The strike enters its twenty-eighth week. President Coolidge confers with labor chiefs. Governor Smith urges arbitration and calls in Abe “the Just” Rothstein, respected member of the needle trades. Arnold Rothstein contemplates the news. In a moment of clarity, he realizes his father will have no more success than the governor at settling the strike. Negotiators have come upon two immovable and uncontrollable forces, the unions and the manufacturers. Both continue to hemorrhage money that fills gangsters’ pockets.

  For six months, two mobs have cracked skulls, thrown acid, exploded bombs, and broken bones. Strikers have been jailed for disorderly conduct. The unions reel. Bankruptcy looms.

  “Stop futzing around with these guys. Call the other Rothstein,” a garment lawyer says.

  Arnold Rothstein agrees to the meeting. He leaves the Plaza and hails a cab.

  “Lower East Side,” he says. “Cannon Street.”

  It is late on a Friday afternoon. Sabbath is approaching. The cabby swerves through a maze of pushcart vendors rushing to get home. Meyer Lansky looks up from a book about Julius Caesar as Rothstein’s cab comes to a halt.

  Rothstein takes a seat in Meyer’s front office.

  “Neither the communists nor the socialists are willing to budge. Management is losing ground. The unions can’t get the head-crackers out. My father…” He laughs. “I’m not the neighborhood goyishe kop,” Rothstein says which literally means non-Jewish head but which actually means someone who fails to use his head. “I’ve got a meeting with the union heads and the manufacturers tomorrow. When I walk in, I want to know that Little Augie and Jack Diamond are going to play ball. In exchange, they get a piece of the pie.”

  “The pie being?” Meyer says.

  “Unions,” Rothstein says. “What else?”

  Jack Diamond is tightly associated with Rothstein. Little Augie is the fly in the ointment. Augie is a hard-headed Hasid in gangster clothing. He has no desire to settle the strike. Only one guy can influence Augie and that’s Lepke Buchalter. Only one guy can influence Lepke Buchalter and that’s Meyer Lansky. By now, Benny is running around with Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro. The fast friends have become the triple threat of the Jewish mobs.

  “I’ll take care of Jack,” Rothstein says. “I’ve got plenty of what he wants. He’s obsessed with getting his mother out of a rundown tenement. If her sisters are in a sweatshop grinding out $1.68 a day, she won’t leave. He buys her rugs and settees to spiff up the place but it’s like putting a gold ring in a swine’s snout. She won’t give up the iron bed that flakes paint every-where…or the chamber pot.” Rothstein cops a brogue. “‘Can’t ya at least put that thing outside when you got compnee?’ He’ll see the value of settling with the manufacturers if he thinks it will get his mother out of the ghetto. Can you…will you talk to Lepke?”

  Meyer says, “Why not you? He can be reasoned with.”

  “We both know he wants into the unions,” Rothstein says.

  “Lep’s mother was part of the fainting brigade.”

  Rothstein says, “A fainting woman can bring a union meeting to a standstill.”

  Jewish mothers are the cornerstone of the fight against deplorable working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 brought the battle to a head. One-hundred-forty-six workers died, mostly young girls, trapped behind locked doors that were management’s tactic for limiting cigarette breaks. The eighth floor of the Asch Building went up in smoke. Girls jumped out windows to escape the flames only to fall a hundred feet to their deaths. The catastrophe was over in half an hour but for a solid week afterward, the police held lanterns over numbered, rough-wood coffins while relatives searched for loved ones. Seven bodies were so severely burned they were unidentifiable.

  “You should go to Augie first,” Meyer says.

  Rothstein says, “Lepke knows what we want. He’s a smart guy. He’ll figure out the rest. But I don’t think he will listen to me.”

  Meyer nods. He meets Lepke at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Meyer lays out Rothstein’s plan to settle the strike.

  “Augie won’t go with it,” Lepke says.

  They wind their way up Lookout Hill and check the view from Far Rockaway to Sandy Hook. In the opposite direction, the view spreads from the Bay and the Hudson to Jersey Heights and New York City.

  Lepke says, “Augie’s got one thing on his mind and one thing only, sluggin’. Can Rothstein really make a deal?”

  Meyer says, “He’s going to try. If I was part of the unions or the manufacturers, I’d settle. If they don’t settle soon, the government steps in. Then what do they have? A whole lot of nothing.”

  It doesn’t take a genius to realize what’s at stake. Meyer doesn’t even have to ask. Lepke calls Little Augie who, in turn, calls in his gang. They meet at Augie’s dilapidated office. Lepke lays out the plan. Rothstein will offer to settle the strike in exchange for a piece of the unions.

  Augie says, “Unions. Fainting and s
pitting…what kind of bullshit is that? You have to crack heads if you want change. They’d be stupid to settle for that. I ain’t stupid. I ain’t about to settle for no piece of the unions.”

  Gurrah jabs Lepke in the ribs.

  Lepke says, “Can’t you see the logic in taking a piece of the action?”

  “Since when did I die and put you in charge?” Augie says.

  Augie picks at the stuffing that leaks through the rips in his armchair.

  Lepke says, “This is our chance. You don’t have the good sense God gave you.”

  The hair on Augie’s neck prickles to attention.

  Augie says, “If God had any sense, we wouldn’t be here. Workers will always strike. Manufacturers will never give them an even break. You gonna run to Arnold Rothstein every time there’s a strike? You trust this two-bit hustler? The unions are bust. What are we gonna get from them?”

  “Management is ready to make a deal,” Lepke says. “Unions will be flush again.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  Gurrah Shapiro says, “Part of something is better than all of nothing.”

  “Shut your mouth, Gurrah. Nobody asked you to think,” Augie says. “You got my answer. Let Rothstein fall flat on his face just like his father. This strike ain’t gonna be settled.”

  Augie pounds the table with his fist. He is sticking with the obstinacy he learned from his father. The rituals of Judaism were meant to be enforced without compromise or reason.

  That evening, Meyer meets Arnold Rothstein at Owney Madden’s place in Harlem where the orchestra plays hot jazz and a chorus line of black girls in loose-fitting silk tops and short-shorts wiggle and jiggle their way to center stage. The dancers’ hands fly back and forth in a mock Charleston. Long, muscular legs glisten under the hot stage lights.

  Arnold Rothstein calls for Champagne. He raises his glass to the ILGWU labor leaders who, despite Augie’s position, pronounced the strike settled. Gossip circles rave about Abe the Just and whisper about Arnold Rothstein. For the first time in as long as he can remember, Arnold Rothstein feels good about himself. People who run in certain circles, many of whom frequent the bohemian nightclubs, recognize his accomplishment.

  Madden scoots closer to Texas Guinan and raises his glass to Rothstein.

  “To the man of the hour. May all our fathers’ failures wind up our successes,” he says and downs the Champagne.

  Rothstein tips the etched amber glass to Madden and sets it down without drinking a drop.

  “He never drinks,” Madden explains to Texas.

  “Never?” she drawls. “What a shame.” She raises her glass. “To my father’s failure,” she says, and drains it.

  “Texas, here, has a new club all her own,” Madden says, “the 300 over on 54th Street.”

  “If it’s good enough for Gershwin, it’s good enough for the likes of you lot,” she says. “I got the best broads, the best band, and the best suckers in town. You gentlemen should come down sometime.”

  “But don’t lay a hand on her broads,” Madden says. “She’s got a lot of micks on her side who are happy to enforce her rules, make sure nothing happens to them broads. Am I right, Tex?”

  “Right as rain,” she says.

  Rothstein says, “That’s highly unusual for this town.”

  Anne Citron, Meyer’s date for the night, scowls.

  “Good for you,” she says to Texas. “Good for you.”

  “Did you hear,” Madden says. “One of Emory Buckner’s agents is calling it quits. He claims sixty-five percent of New Yorkers are violators and therefore the law cannot be enforced.”

  “The law makes criminals of us all,” Meyer says.

  The singer, a high-yellow with sleek pinned-back hair and smooth confidence, takes the stage and eases into “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

  Mae West, draped in silk and surrounded by a group of vaudevillians, makes her way through the club. Madden rises instantly upon catching sight of her.

  “Sit down, honey,” she says, “you’re blocking the view. Can’t you see these boys are in love?”

  She nods to the singer and then pulls up a chair, shooing the vaudevillians to another table. The singer wraps up her song and takes a bow. The orchestra strikes up a dance number.

  Madden says, “You ever hear of the Washingtonians?”

  “Those boys in their ivory towers in D.C.?” West says.

  “Nah,” Madden says. “The bandleader is a guy called Duke Ellington. He’s got six guys backing him up. They’re playing in a joint over on 49th and Broadway called the Kentucky Club. You know the place?”

  “I can’t say that I do,” she says.

  “I talked to the bandleader. He’s smart, this guy, I don’t mean nigger smart but real smart. He says that white kids anxious to free themselves from the Puritan stranglehold come into the club to listen to something more upbeat.”

  “White kids need freedom about as much as Henry Ford needs another factory to pump up his bankroll,” Rothstein says.

  “You’re cynical,” Madden says.

  West fluffs her hair and says, “Don’t take it personal but that boy’s got it right. It’s hard to have fun when you have to be clean all the time. Why do you think people keep drinkin’ when it’s against the law? It’s the only way they can forget their chains.”

  Madden thinks maybe she’s got something there, and maybe Duke Ellington has, too.

  Chapter Ten

  Never Let Your Guard Down

  NEW YEAR’S EVE 1926

  “Beau” James Walker performs his first official act as New York’s mayor by fanning the party atmosphere of the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. The one-time songwriter and son of an Irish-born assemblyman steps up to the microphone and warbles one of his own tunes: “Will you love me in December as you do in May…?” The loudspeakers crackle in the cold.

  Benny Siegel leans out the window of his fifth-story suite and shouts, “You’ll be lucky if they still love you in the morning!”

  “Nobody can hear you,” the redhead says.

  She sprawls, bare, between perfectly white silk sheets that hug the curves of her body.

  “Do I give a shit?” Benny says, slamming the window on the near-zero chill outside. He stokes the hot embers of a flagging fire and throws on another log.

  The inebriates below harmonize over the top of the Mayor’s song: Should auld acquaintance be forgot…

  The redhead says, “You remember what happened last time you stood that close to the flame?”

  If he could, Benny would blush, but he can’t, so he sneers.

  The redhead gathers up the silk sheet and twists it around her body. Long, slender legs play peekaboo as she strolls from the bed to the fireplace. By the time she reaches Benny, the silk has dropped down to around her waist using the same move that got Mademoiselle Fifi busted in the Minsky’s Burlesque raid. Benny drops the fire poker and tackles her mid-stride. She falls onto a mink coat cast thoughtlessly on the long couch. The fur bristles against her back. Benny grabs her muscular legs and presses them open. He mounts her and thrusts himself, impatiently, between her chorus girl thighs.

  She giggles.

  Benny grunts. In a blaze of ecstasy, he falls across her, panting and spent.

  “Goddamn,” he says as if Santa got it wrong and misplaced his lump of coal. “Goddamn,” he repeats.

  Outside, Jimmy Walker finishes his ballad. The crowd’s roar rattles the windows of the suite. The redhead sits up and gathers her unruly locks into a short ponytail at the base of her neck. Benny pours another round of Champagne.

  “To Old King Cole,” the redhead says, her green eyes flashing with disgust. “May the old buzzard never rest in peace.”

  Benny nurses the Champagne bottle.

  “Who the fuck is Old King Cole?” he says.

  “Haven’t you ever looked at the mural over the bar at the Knickerbocker? Old King Cole, the guy in the mural, that’s John Astor,” she says. “T
he Fourth. The guy that built the Knickerbocker. I bet you don’t even know where he got his millions.”

  “Off the backs of factory workers,” Benny hazards.

  “Wrong!” she says. “His grandfather, John Jacob Astor, was America’s first multi-millionaire.” She stares at the blazing fire and snugs the mink around her shoulders. “The old man made millions in fur. And then did it all over again in real estate.” She stops with a pregnant pause. “And opium.” The word swirls from her lips like smoke from a pipe. “The grandson, that’s the guy in the mural, inherited a shitload of money, built the Knickerbocker, and then went down with the Titanic.”

  “Jesus,” Benny says.

  “You only live once,” she says, copping a Mae West drawl, “but if you do it right, once is enough.”

  The roar of the crowd outside dies off. Benny beats a path to the window, the redhead close behind him. Mayor Beau James strokes the countdown to midnight with the beat of his black walking stick.

  “Ten, nine, eight…” The crowd counts down in unison.

  The iron and wood ball that hangs above Times Square waiting to usher in 1927 glows with 2,500 watts.

  “Four, three, two…”

  Christmas lights bob in the rustling trees that line the streets. Gentleman Jimmy tips his hat.

  “One!”

  The ball drops. A cacophony of whistles and cowbells, horns and cheers, deafen the merrymakers in the Square.

  Benny turns to the redhead ready to go again.

  “Happy New Year!” he says.

  Buried in the Times Square crowd of revelers are Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stromberg, as Nig Rosen and his wife are known in polite circles. Already, they’ve had too much Champagne. They carry their buzz to the Cotton Club where the party is just getting started. By dawn, they drag themselves home for some scrambled eggs and a little hair of the dog. A few hours later, Rosen catches a cab and meets up with the gang at Katz’s Deli.

  “Is Tunney gonna give Dempsey a shot at getting the title back?” Benny says over a salami sandwich.

  It is a simple question with an equally simple answer.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Nig Rosen says. “A fight like that would pull in a lotta dough.”