We both thought it sounded just peachy keen, and that’s how George Raft was born. Goo Goo Knox was right all along.
A hack named Rowland Brown warmed him up, casting him as a gangster, how about that, in Quick Millions, followed by Hush Money and Palmy Days. I saw them all. George couldn’t act much—his tough-guy image was mostly derived from imitating me—but he looked swell, and the dames liked him a whole bunch. The studio was flooded with letters from teenage girls in Omaha.
So I wasn’t surprised when I heard Hawks had cast George as the second banana in his new picture, Scarface, with Muni Weisenfreund, a Jewish Rialto thespian who’d changed his name to Paul Muni, good idea. The plot was pure Al Capone, the character of Guino Rinaldo was pure me, if I was a wop.
Except for the ending, I liked Scarface and so did the Big Fella, who got a private screening from Hawks and gave the director a souvenir tommy gun in return. But let me tell you, I coulda sworn I was looking at myself up there on the screen. Georgie had imitated just about everything about me: the way I wore my fedora, the way I dressed, the way I moved. About the only thing I didn’t do was toss a nickel incessantly, the way his character did, but I guess that’s what they call artistic license, or maybe it’s just acting.
Once George was established out there, it was just a matter of time before we talked Mae into bringing her act West. Ever since Sex, I’d been backing Mae’s shows on Broadway; after each performance, I’d send one of my boys, usually Georgie, over to the theater to take half the b.o. in cash. That’s how Diamond Lil got produced at the Royale on 45th Street, and when Hollywood came calling, they bought it too and called it She Done Him Wrong.
Anyway, George suggested to somebody that they bring the great Mae West to Hollywood, which they did, sticking her in one of his pictures called Night After Night. Raft played a gangster, Mae played herself. I saw the movie and called Georgie in Hollywood. “You thought you were the gonoph,” I joshed him. “She stole everything but the scenery.” After that she and Georgie were both big stars, and I was proud of them.
The only problem with Los Angeles, which I otherwise liked, was that between the cops and the moguls there wasn’t much room or opportunity for real gangsters. The LAPD had a policy that any convicted or suspected gang member from the East who showed his face anywhere in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard would be arrested for vagrancy and put on the next train for Timbuktu. Needless to say, this was cramping all our styles, but especially mine, since I had interests in the picture business as well as the racing game, and it was mighty inconvenient for me to keep shuttling back and forth between the coasts. One day I spoke to Meyer about it.
“We’re workin’ on it.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Benny and me. We got a plan.” Meyer always had a plan. The only question was whether those plans included you, and how.
“So can you give me a little help?”
“Not at the present time.”
Which meant you should only drop dead. One thing I didn’t like about Meyer was that he was interested only in business, which come to think of it was the one thing I liked about Meyer. There was no room for sentiment with Lansky, not when it came to the coining of coin, and if he had a partiality toward his fellow Hebrews and the wops he worked with, well, that was understandable.
I’d come to Meyer because, as things were turning out, he was more or less the guy who called the shots. Everybody respected him. He was a little fella, littler than most of us, who tended to be little guys in the first place, but he didn’t have no record of killing, so nobody was really afraid of him. You always felt with Lansky you could take him out anytime you wanted to, shoot him, beat him to death with your shoe, what have you, which is why nobody ever did. People were scared of crazy Benny, and you basically didn’t want to cross Charlie Lucky, especially not after he whacked his own boss—I mean Joe the Boss—at a lunch at Coney Island. Which is how the Castellammarese War was settled, because somebody had to settle things between the Mustache Petes, and it might as well be someone of the Italian persuasion, which it was.
It seems that Charlie and Joe were one afternoon dining, if you can call it that, because Joe could really shovel pasta down his gob, when Charlie got up to go to the can and along comes a bunch of gunners including Benny Siegel, Joey Adonis, Vito Genovese and a vicious punk named Albert Anastasia—you talk about your ’27 Yankees, your Murderers Row, even though this was ’31—and that was it for Joe the Boss. That other Mustache Pete, Maranzano, got his a little later, and after that Charlie Lucky was King of the Wops, no questions asked.
Here’s the funny bit. Maranzano had hired none other than Vincent Coll to take out Charlie Lucky, and Coll, running late, was coming to see the capo outside his office near Grand Central when the Mad Mick spots four sheeny gunmen heading for the same location, so off he waltzes twenty-five grand to the good without having to do a damn thing. If Vincent had only been on time, he might have saved me a lot of trouble, but I guess you can’t change history, only tell it the way it really happened.
Yeah—L.A. One night I’m in my hotel—the Mark Twain I think it was—and comes a cop a-knocking on the door, and I do what I wouldn’t do in New York, which is grab a heater, because them L.A. cops was bad, totally unscrupulous when it came to the use of firearms without provocation. Most of their income they derived from shaking down hookers and dope fiends, real low-life stuff. Honest graft they wanted no part of, so you couldn’t buy ’em, and even if you could, you couldn’t trust ’em to stay bought, which is just about the lowest thing you can say about a man, in my book. This is what happens where there ain’t nothing like Tammany or the Democratic Party to take care of the workingman.
“You Owney Madden?” says the flatfoot, who thought he looked like an actor. In my experience all L.A. cops think they look like movie stars, and are just hoping to God they’ll find some fella they don’t have to sleep with to agree with them so’s they can get on with their real careers.
“That’s Mr. Madden to you, Officer,” I said politely. There was no point in arguing with L.A. cops, I always found.
“Wise guy, huh? How’d you like a trip up to see Mulholland Falls?”
“How’d you like to speak to my lawyer, Officer…say, what’s your name?”
“Fogelman.”
“Might want to work on that.”
“Grab your things. We’re going downtown.”
“Lemme make a phone call.”
“Who you calling? Mae West?”
I dialed the Ravenswood in Hancock Park. “Gimme Miss West,” I told the operator.
Well, wasn’t that the magic word. I could have said “the President of the United States” and the cop wouldn’t have been impressed, but Mae West was different. Mae West was a movie star.
“Go on…”
“Talk to her yourself, you don’t believe me.”
She sounded a little out of breath, but otherwise she sounded exactly like Mae West. “Hiya, dearie,” says herself.
“Fella here wants to speak with you. Name of Fogelman.”
“Is he adorable?”
“Man in uniform.”
“Trouble, huh?”
“You said it. Know anybody?”
“The D.A.’s a personal friend of mine. Mr. Fitts.”
“Say hi to—” I turned to the cop.
“Come on, smart guy.” He grabbed the receiver and slammed it back in its cradle.
We took a ride downtown and by the time we got there Officer Fogelman had been relieved of his duties and assigned to a desk job down on Jefferson somewhere in the colored section. A couple of the detectives drove me back to my hotel, peppering me with questions about Mae and George Raft and all the big shots I knew.
Mae and I had lunch the next day. Seems that just by pure chance Buron Fitts’s wife was back East visiting her family that night, and so Mae went over to the D.A.’s house for a glass of cordial and one thing led to another and my name came up and in the ti
me it took us to get downtown Mr. Fitts had already made the phone call consigning poor Fogelman to purdah. That Mae really had a way with words.
Chapter Fifty-Four
That was pretty much it for me in the City of the Angels—Mrs. Fitts was only going to be conveniently out of town once, at least to hear Mr. Fitts tell it—so after that episode I turned my attentions south, to Hot Springs, the crookedest little town no one has ever heard of.
Hot Springs had been an open city since as long as anyone could remember, right back to the Civil War. It was a tiny little burg, squeezed in between two hills, North Mountain and West Mountain, which I suppose you could view as the Arkansas equivalent of the North River and the East River of my youth, and it had a splendid row of bathhouses—the Superior, the Maurice, the Quapaw—lining the main drag, where people from all over would come to take the waters.
The town liked to boast that the waters were good for a variety of ailments, whether you bathed in them or drank them, but the main ailment they were supposed to cure was venereal disease, which is what had made Bubbles so popular with the folks up North. A gentleman who’d caught a dose from a drab could leave, say, Pittsburgh on a business trip, scoot down to the Ouachita Range and while away a pleasant couple of weeks or so, especially since Hot Springs had a thriving sporting house district. So you could get cured of one dose of the clap then turn right around and pick up another, all in the same locale.
It was Lansky’s idea to go South. Meyer was looking for a spot between our business interests in Florida, which consisted mostly of racing and gambling, and the big cities of the East. A place off the beaten track, but not entirely uncivilized. We looked around, at Nashville, Charlotte, Savannah, but couldn’t find nothing suitable. Until one day we were talking about baseball.
Maybe we were thinking back to Big Al’s performance at Atlantic City, I dunno, but anyway the topic of baseball came up and of course the Yankees, and I remember that the Yanks used to stop off in Hot Springs on their way north from spring training. It was the kind of town built for Babe Ruth, with food, drink and whores, and no inconvenient lawmen to make trouble for people like Colonel Ruppert, the Yanks’ owner. The town also had a thriving gambling industry, which was mostly conducted in back rooms in the stores across the street from Bath House Row, and with all that moonshine being distilled in the Ouachitas, there was booze aplenty.
“I been there a couple of times,” I told Costello one afternoon. Of the three East Siders, I liked Frank the best, he had the most class. The Little Man was smart and Charlie Lucky was cunning, but Frank was the kind of guy you could be seen with in public. Nobody didn’t like Frank, and Frank didn’t like nobody. “There’s an Irishman mayor, McLaughlin. We can do business with him. Might be a good play.”
“Right in New Orleans’s backyard too,” mused Costello. He was a big guy even back then, beefy, looked like a well-fed diplomat or something, dressed in $350 suits. Judges loved him and he loved them, especially when they were on his pad, which most of them were. Frank had moved up to Harlem as a kid, which was another thing I liked about him. We were the same age too, older than the other mugs. Plus you had to love a guy whose first beef was robbing his own landlady and then beating the rap. “Sam Carolla, his boy Carlos Marcello—they ain’t gefilte fish.”
I had another reason for wanting to go to Hot Springs. The Dutchman, who had an eye for such things, had told me about a cute little frail working the gift shop of the Arlington Hotel, Capone’s old hangout when he was taking the water. The Arlington was a big fancy pile, commanding the turn of Central Avenue as it threaded its way between the hills, and I could see why the Big Fella liked it. From a fourth-floor suite—Al always stayed in room 442—gunners could command the avenue coming and going, so Mr. Brown could sleep easy when he was in town.
My first stop in Hot Springs was to see Mayor Leo P. McLaughlin—“the Jimmy Walker of the Ozarks,” the press called him. He was a type I knew well, a kind of cut-rate Big Tim Sullivan, not as nutso and not as dangerous. He rode around town in a horse-drawn carriage with a pair of horses he called Scotch and Soda and generally was the picture of self-important paddywhackery. The two of us got along well enough, although he could probably tell I was fixing to move the Combination into his territory, and I could tell that he could tell, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t care. I told him I’d be back with a more refined business plan, and we shook hands.
My next stop was the gift shop, to see the little filly. She was as cute as a bug in her pert cloche, with a neat figure and a nice pair of ankles.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?”
That was not the kind of question a gentleman asked a southern lady, but I was from up North.
“Miss Demby, sir.”
“You got a first name—you know, a Christian name?”
She blushed a little. Maybe she reminded me a little of Freda Horner, maybe she didn’t. “Agnes.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say.”
“Always liked that name.”
“How come?”
“My mother’s middle name. ‘The little lamb.’ ”
“Huh?”
“You know, like Agnes Day, the lamb of God.”
She gave me the fisheye. “Is that some of that Catholic stuff? Papa says to keep clear away from that Catholic stuff. It ain’t Christian.”
“How’d you like a soda, Miss Agnes?”
She blushed again, which meant she’d had plenty of practice. She was obviously used to strange men sweet-talking her. She came out from behind the counter, so I could feature her gams through her dress. It was almost always hot in the South. Diaphanous. Nice.
“I’m working.”
“All day?”
“I get off at five.”
“Soda shop’s still open then, I’ll bet.”
She gave me the eye. I was taller than she was, which was a plus. “I guess so.”
“So we got a deal?”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Madden.”
Now she frowned, and I wondered if my reputation had preceded me. “That Irish?”
“I’m from England, as a matter of fact.”
I could see the relief. “For a minute there you had me worried. Papa says—”
“Papa?”
“The Postmaster.”
“Pick you up at five.”
She was dumb, but not much dumber than most geese. “Papa says I have to be home by seven. Eleven at the latest.”
We had a swell time. Agnes showed me around Hot Springs, up and down Central Avenue along Bath House Row, then north, heading out of town. I was driving my Doozy. She was plenty impressed, which was the way it should be with a dame.
“We call this Park Avenue.”
“We got one of those back in New York. Maybe you heard of it?”
Ixnay. “Is it as nice as this?”
I looked at the houses, big frame dwellings for prosperous hillbillies.
“Nah,” I said. “Not a patch.”
I got a good gander at the whole town, better than Dutch had. I have to say it wasn’t bad at all.
Because I believe in planning ahead, I wrote her as often as I could. Mostly mushy stuff. “To my Agnes, whom I know to be the swellest fella in the whole world and believe me I met nearly most of the men and women worth meeting in this little world. Agnes, you’re the most marvelous girl I have ever met and I adore you and I idolize you with all the love in my…” You get the idea. The things we do for safety, if not love.
We were engaged six months later. For the ring I gave her a rock bigger than the Ritz. She’d never heard of that either, but then, she was a Republican.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Dutch finally earned his fee with regards to Legs Diamond in a Dove Street flophouse in Albany. Even though I’d been keeping pretty close tabs on the family Marrin, I was relieved to hear the girl with him when he died was the dame named Kiki Roberts, a real dish with a
mouth on her even fouler than Dutch’s, which is saying something.
Bo Weinberg made sure he didn’t miss the Clay Pigeon. Somebody—Abe Landau, I’ll bet—held Legs down on the double bed while Bo pumped three shots into his head. It wasn’t too tough, since Jack was dead drunk at the time, and then he was just dead. Among his personal effects, the cops found some religious medals and a rosary. It was December 17, 1931, the night before my real fortieth birthday. Me, I was in Hot Springs, visiting Agnes, because…
I had plenty of trouble at home. Roosevelt, the Governor of New York, had turned me down flat for the pardon which, looking back, was our first indication that he wasn’t going to be the compliant Tammany man we’d been promised. Al Smith, his rabbi, had already turned against him, because Roosevelt was making no bones about wanting to run for President in 1932, when everybody knew the nomination by rights belonged to Smith unless he didn’t want it, which he very much did.
I hadn’t had too high hopes for the election of 1928. Being a British subject, not to mention a convict, I couldn’t vote legally, for one thing, although that had never stopped me before. For another, I figured there was no way a country full of thin-lipped, milk-drinking Midwestern Republican Protestants was going to elect a Democratic Irishman from the Lower East Side and sure enough Hoover clobbered him. But Al figured he had a real shot this time, because something had changed and that something was what everybody was callin’ the Depression.
Money comes and money goes, we all know that, but this Depression really caught the country in the outhouse with its pants down around its ankles and the flies buzzing something fierce. One day everything was jake, nowhere to go but up, and the next folks were running around like it was the end of the world, and down wasn’t low enough. We figured it wouldn’t affect the nightclub business much, and at first it didn’t. But then it did. Because if you read your history books, you’ll see that Depression and Repeal pretty much went together like a Packard and a Thompson machine gun, if only you were smart enough to see it.
And All the Saints Page 33