And All the Saints

by Michael Walsh

  “Costello ain’t no guinea name,” I objected. “That’s Irish through and through.”

  “You never heard of a name change? Used to be Seriglia, Castiglia, something like that. Everybody wants to be Irish these days.”

  “ ‘The Irish was born to rule.’ A great man said that to me once.” I turned to Fay. “What’s in it for you?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Protection.”

  “From who?”

  “Punks like this Dutchman. Like Legs.”

  “Mugs is everywhere, Owen,” said Big Frenchy.

  “Which is Larry’s point,” says May. It seemed to me she and he were a little too cozy, but this was no time to think about that. Especially when she said: “Meet our new partner.”

  Somebody had refilled my champagne glass. “What can I do for you? My gang’s shot.”

  I thought May was going to sock me.

  “Not for long,” said Fay. “Besides, you know what I see when I look at you?” I hoped I was looking my best. “Jimmy Hines. Tammany. The whole damn Democratic Party. Maybe even the whole damn country.”

  Fay raised his glass. “Here’s to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. Long may they flourish. Long may we prosper.”

  I drank to that. My head was swimming, not from the booze but from the possibilities. A couple of hours ago, I was just another yobbo, leaving the can with two cents in his pocket and wanting a shoeshine. All of a sudden I was partners in a front company that was making plenty of legitimate green and with a back end that was sky’s-the-limit.

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Money, dames, you name it.”

  I looked over at May. “Don’t need no dames.”

  “Everybody can always use dough.”

  “How’re we fixed?” I asked Frenchy.

  He dug around in one of his cavernous pockets and pulled a fistful of little ledger books. He opened each one and toted up the numbers in his head. “After allowin’ for interest and not countin’ whatever our investments done today, and near as I can figure, we got about—”

  “It don’t matter what you got,” interrupted Fay. “It’s what we’re gonna get.”

  “How much?” This to Frenchy.

  Frenchy blushed a bit. “Okay, we got exactly one million two hundred thousand five hundred and seventy-two dollars and forty-eight cents.” The big lug blushed a little. “Until tomorrow, when I recalculate the interest.”

  I looked at him like he was off his noodle. “What are you, hockey?” I said. “Where’d that come from?”

  Frenchy took a little notebook he kept in one huge pocket and consulted it. “Protection. Newspaper slugging. Fencing of swag from New York Central Railroad. Blind pigs and tigers.” He glanced up. “We turned the Winona into a pig, low overhead, high profit. Opened a bunch more.”

  Back to the ledger. “Poll watching and other services to Tammany Hall. Plus I’ve been playin’ the market.” He gave a massive shrug. “Liked the odds.”

  Fay was looking at me. “We got a deal?”

  I was looking at my sister. “To us,” I said, raising a glass to Monk and Plunkitt, to Francis and Mary, to Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints, past, present and to come.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Prohibition had put a kit and caboodle of legit businesses out of business, so there were plenty of formerly going concerns available for ten cents on the dollar. One of them turned out to be on Tenth Avenue, not far from my own dear 352. It was called the Phoenix Cereal Company, formerly the Clausen and Flanagan brewery, which had tried to sell near beer, but nobody wanted to drink it. They wanted the real stuff. And since this Dutchman character uptown wasn’t giving it to them, I figure it was up to me to do it. I had Frenchy buy the place for cash.

  For what Fay and I’d realized was that, far from putting the likes of us out of business, Prohibition was just about the biggest and best gift anyone could have wished for. I learned from Hines later that Tammany had fought it tooth and claw, only to be overwhelmed by a motley crew of goo-goos, Midwestern Protestants and frigid women.

  Still, part of me suspected the hidden paw of the Tiger behind it all. Just because you outlaw drink don’t mean that people is going to stop drinking. Far from it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as the poet said, but not abstinence; and the absence of John Barleycorn was going to be plenty felt. When a man’s worked up a thirst, then someone is going to have to slake it, and one of those someones was going to be me.

  Which is why I suspected complicity down the Wigwam. However long the Experiment lasted, fortunes were going to be made by men bold and brave enough to see their opportunities and take ’em. And once the country got good and sick enough of Prohibition and them what brought it, why then there would surely be Democratic administrations in Washington as far as the eye could see. You could count on it.

  Folks today got Prohibition all wrong. They think it was about bootleg whiskey and bathtub gin, and in part it was, but in small part. Mostly it was about beer, because beer is what America drank. The Irish drank it, sure, but so did the Italians and the Germans, and I’d even known a few Jews to imbibe on occasion. The workingman enjoyed his brew after a long day, and so did the ladies, even though not many of them would admit it, owing to their sensitivity on matters relating to the passing of gas, not to mention their figures. Even little kids drank beer; it was like water, only better and healthier, ’cause at least it was brewed, whereas the water, most of it came right out of the rivers and streams and collect ponds, and God only knew what lived or was dumped in that water. You ask me, water’s killed more folks than beer ever did, but try telling that to a goo-goo.

  Now, the amazing thing about Prohibition was that, after the first couple of years, many of your big towns, being sensible places not given to religious or sexual hysteria, gave up entirely trying to enforce the law, and left it up to the feds to do the dirty work. Old Frog and Toe was one such municipality, especially what with the Tiger bein’ on the side of the workingman and all, and we quickly found there weren’t going to be no trouble from John Law if we kept our heads down and our noses clean.

  Which got me and Larry to thinking. Why not combine our various interests and start thinking big? I mean, really big. Sure Larry was making a fortune using his taxis to run booze, and I was making some dough offering muscle and political clout. But why not go further? No one ever went broke giving the American public what it wanted, and what it wanted right now, more than anything, was a drink.

  Here’s the thing about the liquor business: When times is good, as they was then, when people are workin’ hard and makin’ money, then folks want to drink, unwind with a little hot toddy or glass of cordial after a long day. And when times is hard, men out of work, business bad, aren’t they even more in need of a drink then, to kill the pain, still the doubt and offer that fleeting glimpse of happiness that can only be found in a bottle?

  This was the genius of what we were doing: the more biscuits we made, the more taxis we could buy, and the more taxis we bought, the more booze we could run all over town. Cops, even feds, didn’t stop taxicabs very often, and even if they did, they had to know where to look for the shipment. We didn’t just stick it in the boot anymore; no, we had our fancy cars specially outfitted with drop-down compartments in the backseat that could only be opened by the driver. A passenger could pull the privacy curtains, knock on the glass and have himself a party—a party that would vanish the minute the Law hove into view. But why drink in a taxi when you could drink in a club?

  Besides, the taxi business was a tough racket. There were competing companies, and I do mean competing, just like the shtarkers and sluggers in the newspaper wars. To own the corner of Lexington and 42nd or the area around Pennsylvania Station was to mint money on all the rubes that was pourin’ into the city, not knowin’ up from down and scared of the els and streetcars and subways, none of which they had back in their hick towns. All you had to do to win their trade was play a
little rough.

  Frenchy and I managed to pull together some boys from the old days and some boys from the new days. We never had the kind of numbers Monk did in his salad days, or even the Gophers did at their apogee, but the great thing about New York was there was always a new group of lads maybe wantin’ in brains but plentifully endowed with muscle, desirous of taking a shortcut up the arse of a city that wouldn’t let ’em onto Park Avenue unless they fought their way there.

  All we needed was product. The Phoenix still had its official Treasury Department permit to manufacture near beer, but nobody wanted to drink that tiger sweat when they could get the real stuff. The first bottle of Madden’s No. 1 beer rolled down the chute about a year after I got out of college. The man I hired as my brewmaster was none other than the son of old Wagner, our former landlord, who’d taken his old man’s place at Bernheimer and Schwartz until the goo-goos closed it down.

  In light of my unfortunate experience at the Arbor I myself had forsaken the Creature—not for any moral reasons, but because it had proved inimical to my survival—so when Reinhard Wagner handed the bottle to me, I hiked it to Larry Fay, who took a swig and pronounced it fit for human consumption.

  One of the Phoenix’s advantages was that it took up pretty much the whole city block, which meant a big stretch of road front on Tenth—one-twentieth of a mile, to be exact—two side streets, plus lots of loading docks in the rear. To make matters even more convenient, it was only a hop and a skip from the Central rail yards, the happy scene of so many youthful adventures, which meant that shipping upstate would be no problem, provided the right amount of moolah was schmered around.

  All I asked of my boys was that they played straight and they shot straight. I couldn’t forbid drinking, but I didn’t encourage it neither, unless they got in dutch and needed a little courage to back themselves up. A couple of beers was always good for putting the fight into a lad, in my experience, which meant I didn’t entirely begrudge them drinking whatever fell off the trucks once in a while.

  Within a couple of months we had nearly a million half-barrels rolling down the service ramps, netting us a tidy profit of seven million bucks a year. All it took was water and yeast and hops and someone who knew what he was doing, all of which we had in abundance. The hard sauce was tougher, which is why we got it from Canada or, better yet, hijacked it from one of the rival gangs that was springin’ up all over New York, and with whom we had started trading shots and I don’t mean highballs.

  This is where my old Gopher training came in handy. One time we knocked over a private home up in the Berkshires somewhere near Stockbridge that was stocked to the ceiling with quality hootch. We managed to jack most of it into our vehicles. Only problem was the cops stopped one of our trucks somewhere around Bedford, just my luck the one I was ridin’ in, and there I was, a parolee aboard a hijacked booze truck. They wanted to bust me right there, but I managed to convince the cop with a case of wine and a couple of bottles of malt that I’d been out hitchhiking, and how was I to know it was a booze truck?

  So all that poteen needed a place where it could flow free and unimpeded and that’s how Larry and I came to open our very first club, the El Fey.

  The thing was that folks, our kind of folks, needed a place to unwind late at night, a place you had to dress up to go to, a classy dump where a fella could meet a dame and not have to worry overmuch about the preliminaries if you were both in the mood. A place where you could have a decent meal and wash it down with some spirits, where you could hear a band and enjoy a floor show of girls who forgot to wear their overclothes that night.

  Back in my Gopher days you had your blind tigers and blind pigs, but they was no proper place to take a filly to, filled with hoods and mugs of all descriptions, places where there was plenty of gunfire from punks who didn’t know how to shoot straight, drunk or sober. The Winona Club had been my first attempt at what the papers were now calling speakeasies, but I didn’t have the resources to do it right. Now I did.

  The other thing needed was girls, and there was nobody better at finding them than a Swedish fella I’d met on my wanderings about town named Nils T-for-Thor Granlund, who was from Lapland, of all places. You know I’m telling you the truth because you can’t make this stuff up. Granny had the best eye for dames I ever saw; he’d worked as a picker for both Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll, and if your taste ran to dolls barely older than fifteen who looked good naked sitting in a giant champagne glass, then Granny was your man. Nice work if you could get it, and Granny got it.

  Which is how I met Texas Guinan. She’d been knocking around New York, nightclub work here and there, and we got mighty chummy, if you know what I mean, but it turns out she had even more of a yen for fifteen-year-old broads in champagne glasses than the customers did, and so the two of them was a match made in somewhere, ’cause Granny put the pulchritude onstage and Texas, brassy Texas, got the suckers sucking down the booze until the girls were even prettier than they were in real life, and we were all even richer.

  I don’t want you to get the idea that the El Fey or any of our other clubs later were in any wise knocking shops. I strictly forbade it, and Granny was such an old prude that he wouldn’t even let his girls sit at the tables with their mothers, brothers or boyfriends, and as for dating any of the mooks that came in, forget it. I’m not saying that Larry didn’t help himself to the talent from time to time, and whenever Georgie come ’round, well the squealin’ was enough to bust your eardrums, but by and large things was pretty respectable—respectable enough not to get closed down very often, but disrespectable enough to give a mug the feeling that he had a shot.

  I did let the girls guy the law a bit. They even had a song they liked to sing, which Texas herself led ’em in:

  The judge says, “Tex, do you sell booze?”

  I said, “Please don’t be silly.

  I swear to you my cellar’s filled

  With chocolate and vanilly.”

  Most of all, what struck me was how easy this all was. Sure there was some rough stuff from time to time, whether it was clientele getting outta hand in the clubs, speaks that didn’t want our booze and every now and then a necessary killin’ or two. But God bless America: here our very own government had up and handed to enterprising young lads like me riches beyond the fancies of avarice, and no end to it in sight.

  I took a chunk of change and leased a couple of apartments in a swell new dump at 440 West 34th Street, closer to Tenth than to Ninth, down the road from St. Michael’s parish church, and just a short stroll from the Phoenix. I put Ma and May in one flat; the other, the penthouse, I kept for myself. It was a swell place, and I had it fixed up to a T. On the roof, I built a fancy new pigeon coop, plus a trophy room because let me tell you my birds was winnin’ prizes every competition I put ’em in. I knew my Da would have been proud of me.

  The Phoenix was hard to miss, an enormous pile at the corner of 26th and Tenth. It looked like a brewery, it smelled like a brewery and it was a brewery, as everybody in the Kitchen knew. More important, everybody in the Kitchen knew it was my brewery which meant that nobody in the Kitchen knew it was my brewery. And after all them years of battlin’ the roundsmen, I began to look upon them as friends, almost, for with the proper donations to the Benevolent Fund, they could be made to go suddenly blind whenever they were in the neighborhood. This is how you had patrolmen, lieutenants and police captains able to retire to their estates in the Catskills or the Adirondacks or the Jersey Shore without costing the taxpayers a cent over their annual salary, and what could be wrong with that?

  The thing about a bribed cop is, absent the presence of a meddling bunch of goo-goos, a businessman could mostly expect that cop to stay bribed. It was a sad fact of life in New York that pretty much every thirty or forty years there was a commission impaneled to investigate so-called corruption, which it more or less did, depending on who got to ’em, and then another voluminous report would be issued with much cluck-clucking and hand-wring
ing and the like. That report itself would soon be gatherin’ dust in some city archive, the newspaper would have moved on to some other shame of the city and business could be transacted in peace for another generation or so. The last one had been the report of the Lexow Committee back in 1894–95, which had taken the Wigwam down a peg for a while, but then life went on. It always did.

  In any case, our cops stayed bribed, especially if they knew what was good for them, and so any enforcing of the Volstead Act was pretty much up to the federals. I hired as many off-duty and former coppers as I could to be my guards, with the happy result that if there was a raid coming on, we would be notified plenty in advance.

  Of course every Eden has its serpent, and in our case it was the Department of the Treasury. Federal agents were harder to bribe than city cops, not because they were more honest, but because they were fewer and farther between. They didn’t have relatives or business interests in New York, not the way a copper did, and sooner or later they’d go back to Washington anyway, so it didn’t make much sense to offer ’em a bribe, nor for them to take one. Therefore, not only did we need a reliable set of informers down Centre Street who would warn us about any activity from Washington way, we also had a series of alarms and signals that made the Winona Club’s look like baby talk.

  One afternoon I was sitting in my office at the Phoenix, which was near the front of the building, overlooking Tenth. After my fox-trot with Patsy at the Arbor I fixed things so that I always had plenty of outs should I get in a tight spot, and in this instance I’d rigged it up so’s I could scoot down the stairs and out through a disused Central Railroad tunnel and be struttin’ on Broadway before the feds could pin their badges on.