I heard later that Dutch had a few things to get off his chest before he went, which I guess is true of all of us who get more than a couple of seconds of reflection before the curtain falls. They got a stenographer into his room to take down what he was saying. It never ceases to amaze me that, at a time like this, the bulls will sit there and ask a man who’s half-dead and out of his noodle the same dumb question: “Who shot you?” As if a mug like the Dutchman would tell them, because the real gangster’s answer is always the same: “Nobody shot me.”
I know.
“Please make it fast and furious…I will be checked and double-checked and please pull for me…Oh, I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant…They are Englishmen and they are a type. I don’t know who is best, they or us…A boy has never wept…nor dashed a thousand kim…Mother is the best bet, and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.” Poetry, if you ask me. The Dutchman’s last words were: “I want to pay, let them leave me alone,” and he finally settled his account about eight-thirty in the evening.
But not before he got his wish to become Catholic. Father Cornelius McInerney baptized him and gave him the last rites bang-bang, one after another, snatching Arthur Flegenheimer from Satan’s jaws once and for all. Most of us can look forward to quite a space between baptism and extreme unction, but the Dutchman got it all over within a couple of minutes. He was always efficient.
Since it was my Arrangement, I had him buried up at the Gate of Heaven cemetery in Yonkers, in hallowed ground and with a tallis around his shoulders. Talk about covering your bets. Dutch’s grave is still there, not far from Larry Fay’s. I wish I could be with them when my time comes, but Agnes won’t hear of it, so I’m slated for planting in the family plot in Greenwood Cemetery down here. Among the Protestants, that’s where you’ll find me—quite a fate for a boy who lived his life among his peoples, the Catholics and the Jews.
Frenchy died in September of 1939 in his rooms at the Warwick Hotel, heart attack, what were the odds at his age. He’d just got back from the spread that “Mr. Fox” and Jane had in Florida and was going over some numbers when the odds caught up with him.
We gave him a hell of a send-off, like in the old days, you woulda thought it was Chicago during the reign of the Big Fella, flowers, hearses, the works: six open cars chockablock with flowers, me in the third car, all the way from the Simons Funeral Parlor to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, way up, near the Yonkers line and Van Cortlandt Park, which some people called Vannie but I didn’t. “You helped everybody,” my arrangement said, “God will help you.” At the funeral I met George’s real wife and kids for the first time. He had a daughter, who wrote me for money later. I gave it to her.
I managed to get in and out of town without any trouble that time, but then that fat little goo-goo La Guardia called a press conference and solemnly swore to all the coyotes that if I so much as set a toenail in the great City of New York again, he’d have me arrested on the spot for vagrancy. Mr. Fusion: half-Jewish, half-Republican, and neither half a good half.
“Excuse me, Your Honor?” said one of the reporters. “Did you say for ‘fragrancy’?” You see what I’d had to put up with all those years.
Arrested I was too, a whole bunch of times. You could argue that I wasn’t quite keeping my half of the bargain, but then I didn’t really expect the feds to keep theirs.
Mostly I visited the city to go to the fights, in which I still had plenty of interest and interests. My tomato can Camera went all the way to the title, thanks to the fights we fixed, but like with most sad sacks, things went wrong for Camera. He was in with Ernie Schaaf, a nice fighter, and clipped him with a light right, just the way he was told to, and Schaaf was being paid to take a dive anyway, but nobody had told us that Schaaf, who’d been smacked around pretty good by Maxie Baer in his previous bout, was concealing an injury—his head wasn’t right—and so when the big Powder Puff tagged him, he fell down like he was shot.
“Nice act,” said Frenchy, who was sitting beside me at the Garden, but I could see Schaaf’s legs twitching, the sight I always hated, and then they fetched a stretcher and rushed him to Polyclinic, where the great Rothstein had expired, and where he lasted a couple of days in a coma and died. I sent Schaaf’s family ten grand, anonymously, I felt so bad for the chump.
We put old Satchel Feet in with Baer for his next title defense, and the long and the short of it is I laid a couple of hundred grand on Maxie, no strings attached, and he put Primo on his can eleven times until finally the ref stopped what the papers the next day called the “Comedy Battle,” and that was the end of Camera. We shipped him home to Italy, where they say Mussolini stole all his money. Shalleck told me later that somebody wrote a book about it. All’s I know is, don’t blame me.
Maxie was a good-lookin’ lad who liked dolls better than he liked training. Joe Gould decided to replace him with Jimmy Braddock, the Cinderella Man, a light-heavy moving up in class who decisioned Max in fifteen at the Garden on June 13, 1935, just before I left town. I won a bundle on that one and so did Maxie. “You know I never bet on anything unless it’s a fight and I know what round I’m going down in,” he told me. Smart fighter.
Braddock was my last champ. Prizefighters, like gangsters, don’t last very long: the public gets bored easily, whether your map is on the cover of Ring magazine or hanging up in the post office. We wanted Jimmy to go out on top and the one who gave me the idea of how to do it was Mae West herself, who turned up in Bubbles, sitting plump and pretty in one of the suites at the Arlington. As luck would have it, Agnes was visiting a sick relative or something, and so I strolled across the street to spend some time with her. After we’d spent our time, she rolled over and said, “I got a favor to ask you.”
She pulled her nightgown around her shoulders. It’s funny that Mae was always sensitive about her figure, her being a big movie star and all. “There’s this colored boy I been seein’.”
“Yeah?”
“Pugilist. Well equipped for the title.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Everybody’s ducking him like it was the first of the month.”
“You mean Louis. The Brown Bomber.”
“I got other names for him.” She turned back toward me, her nightdress splaying open, and I got an eyeful of two of the things I’d always admired about Mae and then we visited some more.
Then I picked up the phone and called Mike Jacobs, the promoter associated with the Twentieth Century Club, and made the deal for a title bout, Braddock-Louis. Braddock knew he didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance against a puncher like Joe Louis, but I softened the blow by telling him about the deal I’d made with Jacobs. Not only would he get his usual slice of the gate, but he’d also get ten percent of Jacobs’s share of everything Louis would ever earn as a champion. That was a deal nobody could say no to.
I told Jimmy to make it look good, and he did. Chicago, June 22, 1937. He dropped Joe in the first round, put him down right on his brown backside, but Joe rallied as we all knew he would and took Jimmy out in the eighth, busted his nose, closed both his eyes. Jimmy had one more fight after that, a ten-round decision over Tommy Farr, and then retired. A hell of a mug.
I don’t want you to get the impression that all the fights were fixed back then, just the ones that counted. Went up for the Marciano-Moore fight in September of 1955, forty-buck ringside seat at Yankee Stadium, courtesy of Al Weill, the champ’s manager. Al wrote to me the week before the fight, with this prediction: “I figure this to be tough fight in the early rounds, but the Champ should come on strong in the middle and finish him in the later rounds.” That Al was some kind of prognosticator, because sure enough Archie floored the champ early, but the Rock came back and took him out in the ninth. Marciano retired undefeated after that fight, two million bucks to the good. It was worth getting rousted to see that.
I bring this up because while you trust a fixed fight, you couldn’t trust Washington, and those politocos who are always screaming abou
t cleaning up the fight game wouldn’t dare to apply the same dudgeon to themselves or their own rackets.
Take what happened to Lepke, fried at Sing Sing. Wouldn’t ya know it, that fink Winchell was involved, got Lepkeleh to surrender to none other than that fairy Hoover, Edgar not Herbert, on the condition he got to dodge the Big Rap in New York State, but of course the feds double-crossed him. That was in March of 1944. A Presidential election year, and guess who was still running for President?
Which pretty much explains this: Lepkeleh got a forty-eight-hour stay from my old friend Tom Dewey, now sitting pretty as Governor of New York, when he claimed to have information on various rackets that could reach all the way to the White House. I knew that meant all the way to “Clear it with Sidney” Hillman, chief of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, which meant all the way to Roosevelt, and sure enough, they stayed Louis just long enough to find out everything he knew and then they fried him anyway.
The day Lepke died they also jacked up the juice for Louis Capone and Mendy Weiss, who went down not for the Dutchman hit but a whack job on some stoolie named Rosen. Charles the Bug got life and was let out last year after a mere twenty-two years in a Jersey stir. Like me, he got left behind when Piggy the Putz took off, and had to make his way back to New York, where they picked him up with blood all over his hands. He took it like a man. When it was clear the fix was in at his trial, he stood up, switched his plea from not guilty to non vult and told the judge: “I, Charles Workman, being of the opinion that any witness called in my defense will be intimidated and arrested by members of the District Attorney’s office or police officials and not wishing members of my family and others to be subjected to humiliation on my account, do hereby request no witnesses in my defense except myself.”
Deny, deny, deny—and when you can’t deny any longer, when they got you dead to rights, attack the cops and the prosecutors. I was so proud of the Bug that I took care of his family for all the years he was in the slammer.
Three years after Dutch went down, Jimmy Hines got busted by Dewey for protecting the Dutchman’s policy rackets. He was tried, convicted and sent to Sing Sing for four years. Everybody figured with his connections he’d soon be sprung, but Roosevelt let him dangle. That was the thanks Hines got from FDR, after all he done for him.
I was determined not to let that happen to me. One of the first things I did in Bubbles was buy the federal judge, and a good thing too because the feds didn’t even wait a decade to welsh on me. They tried to deport me as an undesirable alien in 1943, just because I was still carrying my British passport. Luckily my pet judge was on hand to naturalize me PDQ, and when the Washington goons came down, I told ’em to go piss up a rope. All it cost me was a cool quarter of a million. For added protection, I moved the police chief, Ermey, in next door, just over the hedgerow. I even had him appoint me a reserve police officer, “reposing special confidence in the worth, ability and integrity of Owen Madden.”
The neighborhood kids used to rumor that there was an underground tunnel between our houses, just in case a higher authority than the chief came calling. They also whispered that I was trainin’ my pigeons to carry secret messages all the way to New York, to my gangster buddies, or maybe to Hollywood and George Raft, the big movie star, to avoid the prying eyes and ears of the FBI agent who set up housekeeping right across the street and never got a goddamned thing on me. I never told ’em otherwise.
My strategy in Bubbles was to make friends with everybody, whether I needed to or not, because you never knew. I bought all the uniforms and trophies for the Hot Springs High School sports teams and marching bands, anonymously of course, because for some reason, though the town was proud enough of my residence there, nobody seemed to want my name on anything, which was fine with me. What wasn’t fine with me was when I bought a brand-new life-size statue of the BVM, complete with Lourdesian grotto, for St. Mary’s Catholic Church, the one across the street from Ouachita Hospital, which gratefully accepted my gift so long as my moniker wasn’t attached to it. A statue of Mary, in honor of…
My mother died in June of 1947. Marty, as usual, was the bearer of the bad news. He sent me a telegram, which arrived at the Hot Springs Western Union office at 11:39 A.M. Central Daylight Time, which was precisely sixteen minutes after he sent it from New York. “OWEN, MOTHER IS CRITICALLY ILL. BEST REGARDS TO YOU BOTH. MARTY.”
By which, of course, he meant that she was already dead.
After I had Frank Costello make sure there wasn’t going to be no trouble with the cops, Agnes and I drove up to New York for the funeral. It was at St. Mike’s too, just like May’s, and I shed a tear or two not only for Mary Agnes O’Neill Madden, the pride of the Burren, whose life was like her hope chest, which was to say empty, but for my sister, May, who never had a life, and for myself, who got the life I asked for, not to mention deserved.
That was my last official visit to a Catholic church, because Agnes was an adherent of the Christian Church, as they call it down here. I always thought I was a Christian, but she informed me I was just a Papist, which in Arkansas was a dirty word, like “nigger.” Sure, from time to time I was able to sneak into a Mass or two, but I was fugitive enough without having to be on the lam at the altar as well.
Roosevelt finally kicked the bucket in Warm Springs, Georgia. Tom Pendergast’s errand boy, Truman, more or less left me alone, although I almost had to face the Kefauver Committee, which convened in 1950 and ’51, right on schedule, a generation after Judge Seabury and his mob. I would have had to testify, except that Fortune smiled on me the year before, when Tennessee Estes came down to the Springs for a little rest and relaxation.
To you Kefauver was Mr. Crime Buster and Vice Presidential Candidate, but to me he was just another cheap Washington hoodlum out for a good time. He arrived with a juggy babe, and I hosted them at one of my clubs, out of town where nobody would see him, together with a couple of local officials. Wouldn’t you know it, as we were motoring back in my new Packard, the Doozies having gone under in ’37, one of the politicos suffered a shock or seizure of some kind, don’t ask me how it happened, so all of a sudden there was Mr. Crime Buster in a touring car with a blonde not his wife, my own good self—a gangster of some repute—and a fresh stiff.
“Don’t worry, Senator,” I told him. “I’ll take care of everything.” The stiff went to Ouachita Hospital, DOA, the blonde disappeared into a Kansas City whorehouse and the Senator trudged back to the Arlington Hotel with a plausible tale of an automotive breakdown. End of problem. End of my testimony. All my life, I never seen a hound like a Congressman, and that’s God’s honest truth.
The bum did drag poor Costello down to Washington, though. Frank refused to let the TV cameras show his phiz, and so all America saw of the Prime Minister of the Underworld was his hands, his shaking hands, and his dese-dem-and-dose voice, which more or less fixed the image of the goombah gangster in the public consciousness forever after.
As for Charlie Lucky, his luck finally ran out. Just as we’d said, Dewey trained his sights on the former Salvatore Lucania as soon as Dutch ate lead and forgot to digest it. The Special Prosecutor nailed Scarface Junior in ’36 on a hooker beef—“extortion and direction of harlotry,” you gotta love it, the revenge of the two-dollar hooker. Maybe even the revenge of Mary Frances Blackwell, although I didn’t like to think about it.
I got a kick out of the fact that where does Charlie run while under indictment but to Bubbles, my Bubbles, checking in to the Arlington under one of his pseudonyms with a fleet of gunners and broads and asks me—me—to bail him out. After all he done for me. I told him yes, which was more or less true and more or less a lie, because I had one of my flunkies ring up the Gov and order him to a meeting. The normal course of business in Arkansas was I would tell the state’s chief executive what to do and hand over a suitcase full of cash—never too much, fifty or sometimes a hundred grand, because we didn’t want these rubes to get the wrong idea about the value of dough—and t
hen he would get back in the unmarked car driven by the unmarked State Trooper and do what I told him.
At this particular meeting, I gave the Gov fifty grand, which Charlie thinks is to buy protection, but which in reality is to buy the presence of the Arkansas National Guard, which shows up and takes him into custody, gee I’m so sorry, and packs him off to the slammer for thirty to fifty in Siberia. Eventually they shipped Lucky back to wopland and I guess he got delusions of George Raft glamour or something, because he was at the Napoli airport a couple of years ago, strolling out to shake the mitt of some Hollywood producer, when he up and drops dead of a heart attack, right there on the tarmac. See Naples and die.
I got a kick out of what Dewey said about Hot Springs. “The whole crowd are a complete ring: the Chief of Police, the Chief of Detectives, the Mayor and the City Attorney.” Well, sure, Tom—that’s how you do it right.
As for me, I got Bubbles and Garland County running pretty much the way I liked it. I bought up or opened as many gambling clubs as I could manage—the Vapors, the Tower, the Belvedere and my headquarters, the Southern Club and Grill, which was tucked in next to the Medical Arts Building, one of the tallest in town; it reminded me of good old 440 West 34th. You shoulda seen the looks on their faces as one hero after another waltzed in the front door, magic names, like Costello and Lansky. Them Hot Springs hillbillies ate that stuff up, let me tell you.
I held court in the Southern Club every day, one of my Jack Russells by my side. As one died, I’d replaced him or her with another: Sissy, Thomas, Ginger, Blackie, Tammy. I never went anywhere without a dog; Paramount Theaters even gave my little Sissy a lifetime movie pass. Monk had his kits and his boids; I had my Jacks and my pigeons.
With Costello looking after my investments in New York, and Hot Springs ticking over nicely under Leo McLaughlin, Meyer and I went into business with our friend Batista down in Cuba, casinos and so forth. Meyer would shuttle back and forth between Lanskyland in Florida and Havana, while I would send my brother, Marty, there to look after my end of things. Marty liked the work; it helped him buy that farm of his in Virginia, the one he shared with Kitty. Marty was all the family I had left now, what with Ma and May gone and my daughter, my baby Margaret, not such a baby anymore, never really here, at least for me. The daughter to whom I’ve left the grand sum of One Dollar and No/100 in my Last Will and Testament, “whose exact address and married name I do not know, but who did live in Yonkers, New York.”
And All the Saints Page 43