by Mike Ashley
On this particular night in 1925, my father was enjoying a free dinner in one of Rothstein’s restaurants, when Rothstein himself swept in with five women, one on each arm and the others trailing close behind. Or two were close behind the gambler, the fifth seemed to be hanging back and not at all happy, looking around as if not sure what she was doing there. More of a girl than a woman, and yet Casey sensed a strength in her. She was not going to pretend she was having a ball with the dazzling Arnie. Casey sensed something else too – she was from out of town, and had not been in the city for long. It was there in a certain wariness, her evening dress not quite in the latest fashion, a shade less daring.
Just as the group reached the ornate curtains that Casey and every other cop in midtown knew hid the corridor that eventually led to the guarded door of the casino section of the restaurant, the woman put her hand on the shoulder of the woman in front of her and began to whisper urgently. She was still whispering as the entire party disappeared behind the curtains. Casey went back to his lobster dinner, but the woman stuck in his mind. It wasn’t only that she was beautiful with a great body, it was a certain openness, honesty, he had sensed in her. She wasn’t someone who played games.
He couldn’t understand why a woman like that would trail around after Rothstein, so maybe he was wrong in his assessment. Then she suddenly reappeared through heavy curtains looking flushed and angry. As fast as he had pounced on the looking-for-trouble Polack in the blind pig, Casey left his table to intercept her half way across the restaurant toward the door.
He flashed his shield. “Anything wrong, Miss?”
“If you count unwanted pawing as wrong.”
“Depends on how far the pawing went.”
“Not that far,” She sighed and shrugged. “My own fault, I suppose. When Janet, that’s my friend who lives in the city, said I should come with her to meet this famous gambler, it sounded like fun. It wasn’t.” She gave a small shiver, and then turned on a dazzling smile. “Thanks for coming to rescue me anyway.”
Casey took the plunge. “Have you eaten dinner?”
“Not a bite, and I’m famished.”
“Then join me. I’ve just started, and it’s on the house for my date too.”
She hesitated less than a second. “Well then, I guess I’m on my first date in the city.”
Things moved quickly after that. They found they hit it off, had a lot in common, and she was, basically, a Midwestern girl who wanted home and hearth, love and children. Fun, yes, but stability more. She liked a lot about the long party that was Manhattan in 1925, but she also liked a solid detective with a good job and a sure pension later. Being a friend of Owney Madden and his cronies, Casey was in a position to offer both.
They were married less than five months later. Madden insisted on throwing the reception in one of his Harlem Clubs, and with the help of Bobby Astor found them a nice three-bedroom apartment in Chelsea that Casey could almost afford on his salary. Madden squeezed “wedding presents” out of a lot of people, all in cash, to help make up the difference, and Bobby Astor advised them to put the cash into stocks and bonds and watch it grow. That’s how you got to be an Astor. A year later I was born: Daniel Tadeusz Fortune. (The Tadeusz was for my step-grandmother who had moved into the third bedroom soon after my grandfather died.)
Life was good for Casey, thanks largely to Owney Madden, and Bobby Astor, especially Bobby Astor, who, being in a legitimate business and an Astor, was untainted by crime. The apartment was a steal, my mother turned out to be a lot more eager in bed than in public, his investments were paying and growing handsomely. He took my mother out to dinner, to the theater, dancing, and clubbing. My step-grandmother took care of me, told me stories of the old countries and my grandfather. Time passed easily, Casey made first grade, I grew.
Then came 4 November 1928.
Casey was never sure later why he decided to drop into the speakeasy on Fifty-Sixth Street next to the Park Central Hotel that night. He recalled he’d worked late on a nasty homicide, but had called it a night at ten and headed home. He had even called to tell my mother he was on his way. Something had to have caught his interest, or aroused his suspicions, to sidetrack him, and he found himself in that particular speakeasy. Whatever had brought him there must not have worked out because he recalled having only two beers before leaving a few minutes before eleven.
The single gunshot echoed muffled from the Park Central Hotel. As Casey ran toward the sound, two shadowed figures came out of the service entrance of the hotel. One collapsed in the entranceway, the other hurried away toward an alley across the street. Casey reached the service entrance. The man on the ground was Arnold Rothstein! A patrolman was already running from the opposite direction. “Take care of Rothstein,” Casey shouted to the patrolman. Call an ambulance, and call in!” and plunged into the dark alley.
He reached to draw his revolver.
“I wouldn’t do that, kid.”
Stray light from a window in the building to Casey’s left picked out the face of Owney Madden, and the two-inch barrel of a Colt Detective Special aimed at Casey.
“I heard Rothstein’d been welshing,” Casey said. “Over three hundred grand, but I never heard any of it was your money, Owney.”
“You think I’d shoot Arnie over the nicker? He was a friend. You don’t shoot a friend over nicker.”
“What do you shoot a friend over?”
“Business, kid. Times’re changing, prohibition ain’t lastin’ forever. Lansky tried to talk to Arnie, but he wouldn’t listen. He was always a gambler at heart, a showboat, a loner. He wasn’t never goin’ to fit in the new organization Meyer, Charley Lucky, me, and some other guys ’ave in mind.”
Casey nodded to the Detective Special. “What now? You going to shoot me too? Am I a matter of business, too?”
“Everything’s business, kid. So you tell me. Do I have to shoot you?”
There in the darkness of the alley, patrol cars and the ambulance arriving out on Fifty-sixth Street behind him, Casey battled inside himself. For five years Owney Madden had been a friend. Much of what he had he really owed to Madden. Yet Owney had never asked him to do anything illegal, never pressured him, never bribed him, never used him, and somehow he knew that if he said Owney did not have to shoot him the gangster would believe him and trust him. Something Lansky, Luciano, even Rothstein never would. They would have shot him already.
Finally, Casey said, “I won’t keep quiet if another guy is convicted of shooting Rothstein.”
“Fair enough, kid.”
Madden grinned, lowered his pistol, and vanished into the darkness. Casey never heard a door open or close, but he knew Madden was gone, and he knew he would say nothing even if Rothstein died, and, somehow, he felt good.
Madden, a gangster and a killer, took his word, knew he was a man of honor.
The arrival of a large package soon after did not make Casey feel better, but it didn’t make him feel worse. He’d made his decision without any promise of money. But the money was nice, and Bobby Astor was happy to invest it all in the best blue chip stocks. Casey and my mother began to think of an even better apartment in a better area. Maybe even the Upper East, or Central Park West. Perhaps private school for me.
A year later the dreams ended, the party was over, if not the booze. Only now the drinking was half hearted at best, and at worst to drown sorrows, to get through the desperate nights and days. Black Monday, the stock market crash, that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. The flow of money, built on nothing more than the sand of optimism and straw of arrogance, slowed to a trickle.
My father lost everything we had, and on his salary alone we couldn’t afford the spacious Chelsea apartment. My mother tried to get a job, but she had never worked in her life except on a farm, knew nothing but homemaking, and the unemployment lines got longer and longer. No one in business or government seemed to have any idea what to do.
Madden slipped Casey a few bucks, bu
t even gangsters had lost in the crash, and lost even more as the flow of customers slowly dried up and blind pigs, speakeasies, breweries, and bootleggers started to shut down. To top it off, the Seabury Commission investigating Mayor Jimmy Walker to find out where all his money had come from began to turn up the corruption in the NYPD, and everyone came under scrutiny down to beat patrolmen. Casey couldn’t risk taking any more money from Madden.
That was when we moved to the five floor walk-up on East Ninth Street near First Avenue, and my father started to brood. Not instantly, or constantly, but gradually increasing over time as he went about his job in this changed world where a robber could turn out to be no more than a man out of a job trying to put food on the table or pay the rent. It became a more ambiguous world for a cop, where it was sometimes hard to tell who was the victim.
Madden also lost a bundle in the crash, but it didn’t bother him too much. “Just shows you a bloke should stick to what he knows. I’m a gangster, I make my money outside the law, and that’s what I do. Only we gangsters got to change. We got to get organized. Irish, Jews, and Italians. We got to cooperate instead of fightin’. There’s always something illegal people want: gambling, women, the hard drugs. We’ll always make plenty of money.”
He brooded about Jimmy Walker, who, unable to explain where all his money had come from, was forced to resign as Mayor, but skipped the country with all his loot and did not return until he was safe from prosecution, and later was appointed by Mayor LaGuardia as arbiter to help solve garment district disputes. And through it all, the accusations and investigations of his corruption, he was the well-paid president of a music record company.
But he brooded most about Bobby Astor. Nothing happened to Bobby Astor because of the crash. He had as much ready cash as ever. At first, Casey couldn’t understand this. He knew that Bobby had invested heavily in all the same stocks he had advised Casey to buy. Only later did it transpire that Bobby had been tipped that certain major companies were on the brink of going under, and with half the nation overextended buying on low margins, the whole financial structure was on the verge of collapse. He immediately began to sell short, covering his possible losses, and when the collapse came, his profits and losses more-or-less canceled out and he even made a few bucks.
What Casey didn’t understand was why Bobby hadn’t warned him.
“Wouldn’t work, old man. Too many people start selling short the market gets the wind up, and crashes before I’m covered. I had to be very careful and space my transactions over a fair period of time. Warning you would have been extremely bad business.”
I was four when disaster struck both the nation and my family. Too young to understand, but not too young to feel, and I felt my father’s bitterness. Somehow it was not the same as what my mother felt. She was afraid and angry, given to despair, partly by our changed circumstances and partly by my father’s brooding. Only my step-grandmother seemed unchanged. She had lived through it all before.
Prohibition ended, the high rollers were gone, Arnold Rothstein was dead, Bobby Astor straightened out and took over one of the family businesses, and Owney Madden closed most of his midtown operations and concentrated on Harlem. The years passed, my mother eventually got a job as a sales clerk in a department store, and I grew up.
I was ten or eleven when I finally could put words to what I had sensed as a four-year-old. My mother’s reaction had been, and was, fear, anger and hate for Bobby Astor and Jimmy Walker and Owney Madden. My step-grandmother expected the betrayal and inhumanity, it was always the way of the rich and powerful. But my father’s brooding came from being a sucker, an honest cop who trusted friends. For not understanding the world and playing the angles the way the rich, the corrupt, and the crooked did. For being no one, nothing.
“I’m not nothing,” I told him with my ten- or eleven-year-old hubris. “I’m me.”
“Are you now, Danny?” His voice became gentle then. He put his hands on my shoulders and sat me down facing him on the couch. But his eyes were not gentle. He wanted me to understand what he understood. “Let me tell you a story. Do you remember the gambler Arnold Rothstein?”
“I’ve read about him. He got shot because he lost a lot of money in a card game and wouldn’t pay. The police suspected a couple of the other players, but only charged one of them, and he was acquitted. So no one knows who did it.”
“I know who shot him, Danny, and it wasn’t about gambling.” He told me the story of that night on Fifty-sixth Street and in the alley. “I thought Owney took my word I wouldn’t turn him in because he trusted me as a friend, and an honest man.” He laughed, and now the bitterness was back. “But it wasn’t that at all. He knew he didn’t have to kill me. He knew the chances of anyone being convicted for the death of Rothstein were nil – too many important people were deep into Rothstein’s activities, they couldn’t risk anyone talking. He knew even if I did report what I saw that night, nothing would come of it. Too many “legitimate” bigwigs were involved with Owney. There were no other witnesses. No one would listen to me. I was a nobody, a nothing.”
The breaking point came in 1938. Casey had been the lead detective in a Park Avenue homicide investigation into the beating to death of a young man’s fiancée. His family was old, wealthy, and important. Hers wasn’t. The boy was acquitted. Next day Casey got up, kissed my mother, hugged me, and left for work.
He never came home.
He didn’t show up at the precinct either, or turn in his badge and guns.
When he didn’t report for three days, the NYPD put out an APB, but with three days’ start in 1938, as long as he didn’t try to use his badge or his guns, they were not going to find him except by luck. No credit cards then, no computers, no Internet.
I never saw him again, and I hated him for it.
My mother tried to hold us together. She worked longer hours, his precinct took up a collection for us and, although Casey had not put in his twenty years, he had a pension coming, and his Lieutenant, a man named Gazzo, talked the higher-ups into approving its payment to his wife. I got odd jobs to help out. But not too long after, my step-grandmother died, and without her I went wild.
My mother couldn’t stand being alone night after night, and all the men she knew were cops. There were a lot of cops, and eventually Lieutenant Gazzo himself who was kind to her. My foray into petty crime ended the day I fell into the hold of a Dutchman ship while looting it with my buddy Joe Harris and lost my left arm.
In the hospital I had plenty of time to think. Of how my father finally saw the world, and of how my grandfather had always seen it. For my father, in the end, there was only power, wealth, and dominance by each individual who could achieve that by any means, legal or illegal. Every man for himself. That was the odd isolation he had sensed that first night at Owney Madden’s table with Roth stein, Jimmy Walker, and Bobby Astor. Friends, but business was business.
For my grandfather the world was everyone on earth working together to achieve the fullest human potential. Community. No one growing rich and powerful on the sweat of others. No human being exploiting another human being.
The war came, and I tried to enlist. Naturally, they turned me down. One-armed soldiers are produced by war, not sent to fight one. I joined the merchant marine. After the war I continued to ship out. Long voyages give you plenty of time to read, and there were a great many things I wanted to learn, question I needed to ask. From time to time I stayed ashore and went to various colleges and universities. I never got a degree, that wasn’t what I was studying and learning for. Eventually I landed back in Chelsea, got a one-room office with a window on an air shaft, and put my name on the door: Dan Fortune, Private Investigator.
Why? Because I still had a lot of questions: Why we do what we do; why do we believe what we believe; why do we make the laws we make. Who was the criminal and who was the victim?
It took me years to finally understand my father. How he felt trapped, his life over, and he had nothing, was
no one. He ran, not away from us, but towards being “someone”. Whether he achieved it or not, legally or illegally, I don’t know. What I do know is when I finally came to terms with his need, I knew I would never be like him. I would follow the dream of my grandfather, old Tadeusz, not that of my father.
And my mother? She died young. Still unable to be alone, still lost. One of the victims.
Kiss the Razor’s Edge
MIKE STOTTER
I wanted one story in this book that looked at the vicious underside of the gangster’s world, not in America but in Britain, in London’s East End. And I knew the man to do it. Mike Stotter was born and bred in the East End, treading the same steps as his fictional characters in “Kiss the Razor’s Edge” but with less violence – he also boxed for East London and became Junior All London Champion Runner Up, a short-lived affair, a weak nose preventing him going any further. Mike has worked at various jobs ranging from BBC TV through to Asset Management. His short stories have appeared in various anthologies including, The Best of the American West (Vols 1 and 2), Desperadoes, Future Crimes and The Fatal Frontier. Mike was the editor of Shots Magazine, which he continues on his website devoted to the genre, < www.shotsmag.co.uk > .
Blood.
You’d expect to see blood in a boxing match. It stands to reason, doesn’t it?
Whenever Billy Griggs fought there was blood. Usually the opponents. And the fight tonight didn’t look as if it was going to break the mould. Billy was sixteen years old and stood just shy of six feet. This was going to be his first fight in the lightweight division, having fought these last six months at light flyweight. His opponent was Whirlwind Washington who boxed out of Camberwell. He was five feet seven and had been around a bit. But Billy had him outreached and out-classed. Griggs had wanted to be called Billy the Kid, after the Old West killer but his second christened him Billy “Fast Hands”. Not that exciting but it went down well with the punters.