That’s what I call merciful.
The Bug and I wrapped his body in a sheet, popped it in the trunk and dumped it in Park Slope, on 8th Street, not far from the hospital, which wasn’t going to do him any good at this point, and Green-Wood Cemetery, which was.
Chapter Sixty-Five
I turned myself in at the front gates of Sing Sing two days later, July 6, 1932. I made an entrance that Raft would have been proud of. I was wearing a three-piece double-breasted green and blue suit with dark oxfords and white spats and a two-thousand-dollar Panama hat with a silk band. I had a reputation to uphold.
Big Frenchy and little Joe Shalleck were with me as we pulled up. “Don’t worry about a thing, it’ll be all took care of before you can shake a monkey’s uncle at it,” said Joe.
“What’s it gonna cost me?” I asked, handing Frenchy Monk’s .38 for safekeeping as he blasted the klaxon to let the screws know we was here.
“Six figures—maybe, I hate to say it, may God close His ears, seven.”
“Whatever it takes.”
“Peace of mind, you can’t beat it with a stickball bat,” said Joe.
I shook hands with both of them. “So long, boss,” said Frenchy.
“See you in a year, George. A year,” I repeated, speaking to George but looking at my lawyer. “If I ain’t out in a year, get our money back.”
The car roared away, leaving me standing there in front of the Big House. A couple of the screws had poked their heads out to see what the fuss was.
“It’s Owney Madden,” I shouted.
“Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Sheba,” said one wiseacre, a dope named Crocker.
“Open up, ya screw, or I’ll rap ya in the snoot.”
I saw the other guard staring at me. “It is Owney Madden,” he said.
“Get outta here.”
“No, really. That’s Owney Madden. I recognize him.”
They were about to start debating my identity in earnest when I shouted: “Get the Warden before I get angry.”
I couldn’t believe that I had to stand there in the broiling July heat while I waited for these two nitwits to get Warden Lawes, but after about ten minutes, with me wilting, along came Clement Ferling, Lawes’s secretary.
“Hello, Mr. Ferling, I’m coming,” I shouted.
Naturally Ferling recognized me and got those gates open right quick, and a few minutes later there was the Warden, God bless his soul, greeting me like a long-lost pal and booking me right then and there.
“Where have you been, Madden?” said the Warden. “They’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Jesus, Warden Lawes, am I hungry. Do you think you could possibly send a couple of the boys down to ‘21’ to fetch dinner?”
Lawes snapped his fingers and Ferling went running off to place the order.
“In New York, where else?” I said with a smile, a smile that was returned by the Warden. For a head screw, he was all good, really cared about me who woulda cut his throat without thinking twice about it had circumstances warranted, and maybe that makes him a saint or maybe that makes him a chump, I dunno.
“Why didn’t you turn yourself in to the parole board in the city?”
“Didn’t want the publicity,” I replied.
I had to give up my swell threads for gray prison garb of course, but Dr. Sweet was there too, to give me an examination as soon as I got settled in my cell. The Warden took good care of me right off the bat, excusing me from work detail, letting me raise flowers in the garden, all my usual haunts.
Charlie or Meyer might have got to me had they really tried, but I was more powerful at Sing Sing than they were, and it was about then that I figured out that having a cop next door to you might not be such a bad play as long as the cop was on your side. Since I stayed away from the work details, the laundry and the exercise yard, I was pretty secure.
I was also pretty sick. Those damn Duster bullets was acting up again, and Dr. Sweet had to put me under the knife once more. Before I went out, I asked him whether maybe this time we could get rid of the five slugs still walkin’ around with me, but he reminded me they weren’t the problem, it was the other six, the missing ones, ghost bullets whose wounds hadn’t healed properly. Just before they give me the laughing gas I told him to give it one more shot, so to speak, and he replied he’d do his damnedest, which he did, but it didn’t matter in the end, for when I woke up, they were still there, my little Arbor souvenirs.
Here’s why I was so sanguine about going back to prison. The state may have been giving me what for, thanks to Roosevelt, but we still had a friend or two on the parole board. At my hearing some of the goo-goos raised the usual fuss about Al Smith’s commutation, about whether I did or did not work at the Hydrox Laundry, the old rigmarole about whether I was or was not released from parole board custody, even that jolly little incident with the feds and my beer trucks, all supposedly to prove that I was still in the rackets even after they let me out of stir. I skipped the hearing on account of my health.
“You know what that schmuck Cahill said?” Joe asked me on his first visit.
“I can guess.”
“You don’t have to guess, I’ll tell you. Here’s what that schmuck Cahill said, something like ‘His hands’—that’s your hands, not my hands—‘may be red with the blood of his fellowmen, but there’s nothing in the record now before us to show it.’ You know what I said?”
“I can’t guess.”
“I popped right up and said, ‘I couldn’ta said it better myself,’ and then I sat down again.”
“How’d it go over?”
“Not too good. They ruled against you.”
“Did we take care of it?”
Joe gave me a quick nod, then coughed loud and opened his briefcase to flash me something. One of the screws saw him and started to sidle over. “Beat it, ya mug!” I said, and he stepped back like a good boy.
I could see the name of the parole board members who was on our side, and I could also see the amount of money they and their sons and heirs were going to wind up with if they played it straight. There were a bunch of Irishmen on the board—Fagan, Moore, Canavan—and we figured one or more of ’em was hankering for an estate upstate somewhere. All it took was one million dollars in cash.
“How can we be sure it’s on the level?” I asked.
“Simple,” said Joe. “It’s part up front and part on delivery.”
“Not to mention cement overshoes and a dip in the drink if anybody welshes.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I did.”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“That’s what I like about you, Joe,” I said as he got ready to leave. “You’re blind and deaf—but not dumb.” I think he took it as a compliment, but I’m not sure. It was always hard to tell with Joe if he even knew what a compliment was.
So there I was, sitting pretty. From time to time Warden Lawes would call me into his office for a catered dinner, and he’d fill me in on the continuing mayhem in town. One day in early October we sat down for a little heart-to-heart, just like in the old days.
“You’re smart, Madden. I always said you were smart.”
“Thanks, Warden.”
“You’re not like those other men.”
“Who would they be?”
“Men like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. Gangsters.” The Warden offered me one of his fine seegars, but I told him I’d stick to my cigarettes, even though Dr. Sweet was after me to stop smoking, on account of my lungs and bronchitis and emphysema and other diseases I can’t spell, and mostly because, in his opinion, cigarette smoke and holes in one’s lungs didn’t mix, but I’d been smoking since I was a kid and wasn’t about to stop now, although I hated the coughing. “Mark my words, they’ll end up like all the other hoodlums—dead in some gutter somewhere.”
I’d been in that very gutter, rose from it in fact, but kept my mouth shut.
“But not you, Madden. You’ve got a
head on you—a fine head that ought to be turned toward honest, profitable pursuits.”
“The laundry business sure is lousy, I’ll give you that.”
“You know what I mean.” That was what I always liked about Lawes. He knew the score but had to pretend he didn’t.
“You could be right about that,” I admitted.
“We’ll need some flowers for the prison chapel altar next week.”
“Happy to oblige.”
“Good lad,” he said. I got up to go.
“There’s one more thing,” he said, and I sat down again. He got a grave look on his face as he rummaged through some papers on his desk and came up with a telegram. Although I’m certain he’d already read it, he read it silently to himself, looked up at me, started to say something, then didn’t, and then he handed it to me. It was from my brother, Martin, and all it said was:
“OWEN, MAY PASSED AWAY LAST NIGHT.”
My tongue wouldn’t work, but all the questions were on my face.
“Last night. She found the shotgun that you gave…”
I’m told it took four men, including Warden Lawes, to hold me down and still enough for Dr. Sweet to get the needle in me.
Chapter Sixty-Six
I arrived before the mass, while she was still lying in the John Simons Funeral Parlor at 428 West 34th, between our apartment building and the church. I’d passed it every Sunday morning on my way to Mass, and now here I was in it.
Warden Lawes was kind enough to let me out for the day, as long as I was back to Ossining by nightfall. I told the guard they had to send with me to go have himself a drink or two on me at the bar across the street.
My Mother was kneeling in front of the coffin, mouthing the rosary so only the dead could hear it. I told Ma I wanted to be alone with my sister one more time before we put her in the ground, and she understood. Marty helped her into the next room and I closed the door.
The lid was down, because it had to be. There was no way even the most skillful mortician would have been able to put her back together, although I paid them well enough to try. So I’d bought her a gorgeous mahogany casket with gold fixtures, cost a couple of grand, because I wanted her to have the best, as usual.
“Didn’t quite work out the way we hoped, did it?” I began.
“Not the way I hoped. It was supposed to be you and me—”
“And it was—”
“Except there was never quite enough room for me.”
Don’t be surprised that May was talking back. We Irish know you can talk to the dead, especially the recently dearly departed, and they’ll talk right back, even if you’re the only one who can hear them. We have some of our best conversations that way. When one person’s alive and the other one’s dead, that’s the only time we can say some of the things we’ve always wanted to say, but couldn’t in this world and that won’t matter in the next. I used to wonder what they meant by Limbo and now I finally knew. May and I, we were both in Limbo, just on opposite sides of the waiting room is all.
“I was trying to take care of you.”
“You sure took care of me, all right. I hated you sometimes. Didn’t you ever feel it?”
“If I did, I didn’t believe it.”
“How I wished I could be like you. Do what you did, all that you did. I wished I had your moxie, your willingness to hurt people to get your own way. How I envied you your freedom.”
“It came with a price.”
“So did my imprisonment. Now I’m in the smallest cell of them all.”
One of the funeral home workers, an old man, poked his head in, interrupting us. “What do you want?” I groused.
“Thought I heard voices,” the old coot said.
“You thought wrong, so go pour yourself another drink and have another think, in that order. Get me?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Madden,” he said. He closed the door and vanished.
“Sorry,” I said. “Where were we?”
“Do you ever dream? I used to. Maybe I’m dreaming now. Maybe you are too.”
“What do you dream about?”
“Sometimes I dream about Ireland, about when Da and Ma were kids, before they met, before we existed.”
“I dream about being way up high, higher than the roof at 352, higher than the penthouse at 440.”
“Then what?”
“Jumping.”
“But not falling.”
“Soaring.”
“Like your birds.”
“Better. Higher.”
“Sometimes I wished you were dead. You know what else I wished?”
“I don’t want you to say it.”
“That sometimes I wished I was dead?”
“You got your wish.”
“And you never quite got yours.”
I tried to lift open the lid of the coffin, one of those Dutch door lids, but it was screwed down tight, like somebody was afraid she’d get out.
“What are you trying to do?” she said.
“Kiss you good-bye.”
“Too late for that now. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
There was a cautious knock at the door, which I recognized as Marty’s. “Be right there.”
“Guess we gotta break this up, huh?” said Sis.
“Why didn’t we have this talk sooner?”
“We couldn’t. We were going places, remember?”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“At least you’ll be with me for my big moment.”
The next thing I knew, my brother was putting his hand on my shoulder and telling me it was time.
We kept the funeral small, only immediate family, and so the mourners at St. Mike’s included myself, Marty and Ma, Jack and Alice Marrin, Frenchy. Raft was in California, Diamond was dead and Dutch…The organist played “The Last Rose of Summer.”
I kept my hand on the coffin the whole service, holding her hand through the wood, right up to the altar, letting her know by my touch that I hadn’t left her, that I’d never leave her. I rode in the hearse with her and stayed by her side until they lowered her into the ground and started shoveling dirt on her.
I had three bullets in my .38, so right there Frenchy cracked open the cylinder and took one out for me. I threw it into the grave with a prayer and a blessing for what we never had. The other two I kept for myself, until the time was right.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Most of the next year I spent in prison. Out on the sidewalk things were happening, mostly not good things. Talk about being on ice: the end of the Castellammarese War was playing itself out, Dutch and Charlie Lucky got to shooting each other, Jimmy Walker resigned and sailed to Europe, Roosevelt got elected, trouble everywhere you looked. Worst of all, Prohibition was on the way out, given the bum’s rush by the Congress that had cheered it a baker’s dozen years earlier and awaiting the inevitable thirty-sixth state to ratify its demise.
Me, though, I was nice and safe up the river, protected on all sides by gray stone walls and armed men who, for the first time in my life, were on my side. My food was catered, on account of my bad stomach. I had my flowers and my birds. It wouldn’ta looked good for Lucky and Meyer and Frank to come visit me, but George Raft, big star that he was, showed up several times. What few women who worked in the prison went nuts, and once they’d figured out that he and I was friends, they were even nicer to me than before. I wasn’t just a gangster; I was the pal of a movie star.
We never discussed my sister.
“There’s a picture I might do,” he said, “called Each Dawn I Die, with Cagney. I’m the bad guy.” Georgie was always dithering over his roles, the dummy.
Cagney I liked. From time to time we’d met either in one of my clubs, like the Stork, or on my visits to Hollywood, where he always seemed to be imitating me in the picture shows. Born on the Lower East Side, he had the real mug’s swagger. He was about my size, seven or eight years younger, not quite as good-looking but okay if you liked your hoodlums fa
ke instead of real.
I tell you, I’ve lost track of all the movies that have featured me. I knew all the writers and producers back then, including Runyon and Mark Hellinger, so I wasn’t too surprised when various versions of my own good self popped up on the screen. Offhand, I can think of Raft’s imitation of me in Scarface, Cagney in The Public Enemy, Cagney again in Blonde Crazy and Lady Killer, although I never mashed no tomato’s puss with a grapefruit, nor kicked one in the bum and thrown her down the stairs. My favorite was Lady for a Day, even though Warren William didn’t look a thing like me, but since I’d let Runyon steal the story of Madame la Gimp and call me Dave the Dude, I figured I’d go along with it.
I almost drew the line when Hellinger and that one-eyed Walsh fella did The Roaring Twenties, where Cagney was so obviously a cross between me and Larry Fay that I thought about suing for breach or invasion of something, but Shalleck told me to sit down and shut up, it wasn’t every mug who got part of his life story up there on the screen. When Cagney got plugged at the end, it made me wince a little, though, since Larry Fay had gone out feet first in much the same manner in 1932, on New Year’s Eve yet.
They let me out on July 3, 1933, one day before Independence Day. They gave me back my suit and my Panama, plus $51.52, which I’d earned while in stir. That included $17.52 for my labors with the flowers and the pigeons, twenty bucks for “rehabilitation” and the fourteen dollars I had in my pocket when I checked in. They offered me a new suit and a train ticket to New York, the way they do all the released birds, but I didn’t need either one of them. “I got my own car,” I said. “As for the suit, I wouldn’t wear them rags if you paid me. Give ’em to some other mug.”
The wagon was waiting outside, a brand-new shiny green Packard coupe that went well with my suit. Only problem was there was a horde of reporters clustered between me and the car. Flashbulbs popped, which usually enraged me, but this time I was actually glad the newspapermen were there, because I had something to say to them. First, though, I had to wait out a barrage of their dumb questions. I often wondered who was stupider, the reporters or the cops, and never could pick a winner. Still can’t.
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