The Million-Dollar Wound

by Collins, Max Allan

  I got up from behind the desk and put a hand on his shoulder. “You got to do it, Barney. You got to check in someplace and take the cure. You can keep the publicity down to a minimum if you go into a private sanitarium, you know.”

  “I… I hear the best place is the government hospital at Lexington. But then everybody’d know…”

  “They’d understand. People know what we went through. They don’t understand the extent of it. But they’ll forgive you.”

  “I don’t know, Nate.”

  “You could start with forgiving yourself.”

  “What…what do you mean?”

  “For killing Monawk.”

  He looked up at me, the tragic brown eyes managing to hold still long enough to lock mine. “You…you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked away. “H-how long have you known?”

  “A little over a month. The night some people broke into my office, it was. Like you, I’d been having nightmares. I dreamed I killed him myself, in one, that night. But when I woke up, I knew I hadn’t. After I thought about it, though, I knew why I’d dreamed that—you killing that poor son of a bitch was the same as me killing him. It was as hard for me to accept, to live with, as if I’d done it myself. That’s why I blocked it, pal. You been sticking a needle in your arm to forget. I managed to forget without any help.”

  He was shaking his head. “God, God. I didn’t mean to.”

  I squeezed his shoulder. “I know you didn’t. He was screaming, giving us away; you had the forty-five in your hand, and you put a hand over his mouth like you did before, only this time the gun just went off. It was an accident.”

  “But I killed him, Nate.”

  “Not really. The war killed him. You were trying to save all us poor wounded bastards, him included.”

  “I didn’t know anybody else saw it happen.”

  “I don’t think anybody did, but me. We were all hurting so bad we were floating in and out of it. But if anybody did, they’ll never say a word.”

  He was looking at the floor. “I… I should have reported it. Admitted it. I let them hang this hero shit on me…what kind of man would do that?”

  “That’s just it. You’re just a man, Barney. And fuck, you were a hero that night. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been.”

  “I killed him. I kill him over and over in my dreams…”

  “The dreams will pass.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it, Nate. You shouldn’t have cut off my supply.”

  I patted the shoulder. “Someday you’re going to have to learn to live with it. Until that time, go on from town to town selling bonds by day, and scrounging up your fix by night. But don’t do it in Chicago.”

  “This is my hometown, Nate—my family’s here…”

  “They’ll be here when you decide to come back, too. And so will I.”

  He stood, shakily. “I know you did this out of friendship…but it was still wrong…”

  “No it wasn’t,” I said.

  He and his voodoo cane stumbled out of the inner office; I didn’t help him.

  “You might try the abortionist across the hall,” I said.

  “You bastard,” he said. But some of the old fight was in his eyes. Barney was still in there, somewhere, in that shell. Someday maybe he’d crawl out.

  Barney wasn’t the only local boy to make it big in the papers as a war hero. There was also E. J. O’Hare’s son, “Butch”—a.k.a. Lieutenant Commander Edward Henry O’Hare, a combat pilot who in 1942 received the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting down five Jap bombers. He died in aerial combat in 1943, and in ’49, Chicago’s International Airport was renamed O’Hare, honoring the son of the proud father who had died eight years earlier, in combat of another sort.

  Antoinette Cavaretta, Mrs. Frank Nitti, looked after her stepson well. She managed her late husband’s finances, battling (and winning) various IRS assaults; and she continued receiving payments from an Outfit source, namely her old Sportsman’s Park crony Johnny Patton. In 1955 she requested mob banker Moe Greenberg turn over the capital of a trust fund Frank had set up for his boy Joe. The boy was twenty-one, now, and it only seemed fair. Greenberg refused. The Outfit sided with Mrs. Nitti. Moe Greenberg turned up dead on December 8, 1955.

  The boy, Joseph, grew up to be a successful businessman.

  Les Shumway, incidentally, was still working at Sportsman’s Park as late as the early sixties. How his charmed life extended beyond Nitti’s death, I never knew; perhaps the widow Nitti’s fine hand was at work there as well.

  As for the others, many are dead, of course. Jack Barger, in ’59, having branched out from burlesque into pioneering the drive-in movie business. Johnny Patton. Stege. Goldstone. Campagna. Wyman. Sapperstein. Sally. Eliot. When you get to my age, such lists grow long; they end only when your own name is at the bottom—and you’re not alive to put it there, so what the hell.

  Pegler had quite a run, for the ten years following the Pulitzer he won for the Browne/Bioff expose. But he grew even more arrogant, once he’d been legitimized by the prize. His anti-Semitism, his hatred for the Roosevelts, his blasts at the unions, at “Commies,” became an embarrassment. His offkilter opinionated writing grew increasingly self-destructive, until finally he met his downfall when he libeled his old friend Quentin Reynolds. In the 1954 court battle, Louis Nizer—your classic New York Jew liberal lawyer—skewered him; it was never the same after that. By the end—June 1969—he’d lost his syndicated column and was reduced to contributing monthly ramblings to a John Birch Society publication.

  Montgomery, of course, continued to star in motion pictures through the late forties; but he began directing, as well, and was a pioneer in the early days of TV. His interest in politics and social concerns never abated; he was the first TV media adviser to a U.S. president (Eisenhower) and was a vocal critic of the abuses of network TV, being an early advocate of public television. He also continued to be outspoken on the subject of the mob’s influence on Hollywood; his Chicago contact in such matters was Bill Drury.

  Bill waged his war against the mob for the rest of his short life, despite largely trumped-up charges of misconduct that finally lost him his badge. He was fighting for reinstatement, and preparing to testify to the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee, when he was shotgunned to death in his car on September 25, 1950.

  On October 5, 1943, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Phil D’Andrea, Frank Maritote (a.k.a. Diamond), Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe and John Roselli were found guilty in the federal court in New York. Each was sentenced ten years and fined $10,000. A co-conspirator, Louis Kaufman, head of the Newark, New Jersey IA local, got seven years and a $10,000 fine. I did not testify against them; with Nitti no longer a defendant, and after a discouraging interview with me, Correa declined to call me.

  Ricca, Campagna, Gioe and D’Andrea walked out of stir on August 13, 1947, having served the bare one-third minimum of their sentences that it took to make them eligible for parole. Nobody in history ever got out of prison on the very day they became eligible for parole—till Ricca and company. The fix, obviously, was in—and it stretched clear to Tom C. Clark, attorney general of these United States, who (it was said) received from Ricca, by way of payment, the next open seat on the Supreme Court, in 1949. Of course, it was actually President Harry Truman who nominated Clark—Campagna’s lawyer, by the way, was St. Louis attorney Paul Dillon, Truman’s “close personal friend” and former campaign manager.

  I don’t know, exactly, what became of Nick Dean, his wife, and (I presume) that fabled hidden million Estelle Carey never had. The government tried to deport him, back in the early fifties, but it fell through. Last I heard of him, he was in South America. He may be there still.

  Browne simply faded away. For a time he had a farm in Woodstock, Illinois, near Chicago; and I heard he moved from there to a farm in Wisconsin. I hear he died of natural causes. If so, he managed that
by keeping out of any further union and Outfit business, after his release from prison.

  Bioff was the Outfit’s prime target, but he too, for a time, was spared. While still in prison, Ricca was said to have ordered contracts on both Bioff and Westbrook Pegler, but was talked out of it, having been advised that killing them would only create martyrs, and public opinion would be so against Ricca and company that their paroles (already in the works) might not go through. A low profile was needed.

  That was advice Bioff might well have taken. But in 1948 he helped the government again, testifying in a tax case against the Outfit’s Jake Guzik and Tony Accardo. Then he belatedly took the low-profile route, settling with his wife and kids on a farm outside Phoenix, Arizona, where he became a stockbroker. He called himself Al Nelson, and got chummy with Barry Goldwater, to whose campaign for U.S. Senate he’d made a political contribution of $5,000.

  But, gradually, Willie’s itch for action got him back in the mob’s domain. By early 1955 he was trying to worm his way into the gambling scene in Nevada, specifically a joint in Reno, using the same old strong-arm tactics he’d perfected as a pimp. And in the winter of that same year he was hired by Gus Greenbaum to be in charge of entertainment at the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas; Greenbaum was discouraged by his Outfit friends from hiring Bioff, but Gus felt Willie, with his Hollywood contacts, could “persuade” big-name acts to work cheaper. Labor man Willie had no problems working for management.

  Two weeks after his latest airplane ride with Senator Goldwater (the senator, in his private plane, from time to time chauffeured Bioff and his bride to various parties around the Southwest), Al Nelson, a.k.a. Willie Bioff, strolled out of the kitchen door of his luxurious Phoenix home on East Bethany Road and climbed behind the wheel of his pickup truck. He waved to his wife; she was waving back, from the kitchen window, when he put the foot to the starter, which was followed by an explosion that blew the truck and Bioff apart, showering Mrs. Nelson/Bioff with glass from the window where she’d been waving. Every window in the house was shattered. And parts of Willie and his truck lay glistening in the desert sun. The former panderer’s charred former finger bearing a $7,500 diamond ring was found in the grass two hundred feet from the house.

  Willie’s Vegas mentor Greenbaum was killed in 1958; he and his wife were trussed up in their home and their throats slashed.

  Such deaths were typical of the post-Nitti Outfit’s style; the headlines were often bloody, the heat was frequently stirred up. Not until the 1960s did the style revert, somewhat, to Nitti’s lower-key approach.

  The Chicago local of the IATSE, by the way, continues to be linked to the Outfit; in 1980 the Chicago Tribune reported that the feds had identified twenty-four men with mob ties as members of Local 110. And the second-highest-paid labor leader in the entertainment industry, Variety said in 1985, was the business manager of that local, who took home nearly a million in salary and expenses over the latest ten-year period.

  As for me, from time to time I had dealings with Nitti’s successors, but never again did I come to know one of the mob bosses in the way I knew Nitti. My agency, A-1, is still around; but I retired years ago.

  Barney? On January 12, 1947, he was released from the U.S. Public Health Service addiction hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where he had admitted himself voluntarily three months earlier. He’d gone that route because (he told me later) he heard “those private sanitariums ain’t tough enough.” Also, by going to a government hospital, he’d make a clean breast of it, publicly; he might encourage others with the same problem to come forward, too. It was also a gesture to his wife, who had recently left him, of his sincerity about quitting the stuff. Cathy was there for him, when he got out of Lexington.

  “The withdrawal gave me the miseries,” he told me, “because the reduced dose of morphine wasn’t enough to kill the cramps and the sweats. I learned quick enough where the expression ‘kick the habit’ come from. When they gradually cut down my dope, I got spasms in the muscles of my arms and my legs actually kicked. And then I was back there again, Nate. On the Island. I kept fighting the Japs in that muddy shell hole, over and over again. But now I don’t have to go back there no more.”

  I hope nobody does.

  Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of my conflicting source material, and the need to telescope certain events to make for a more smoothly flowing narrative. The E. J. O’Hare and Estelle Carey cases are complex and, in order to deal with them both within this one volume, the use of compressed time and composite characters was occasionally necessary. While in most cases real names have been used, I have at times substituted similar or variantly spelled names for those of real people, when these real people—particularly, more minor, non-“household name” historical figures—have been used in a markedly fictionalized manner. Such characters include Nate and Barney’s fellow Marines and soldiers in the Guadalcanal section; Sergeant Donahoe; the Borgias; and Wyman. All of these characters did, however, have real-life counterparts.

  While numerous books and newspaper accounts were consulted in the writing of the Guadalcanal section of The Million-Dollar Wound, several books proved particularly helpful. Semper Fi, Mac (1982), by Henry Berry, a Studs Terkel-style oral history of the Marines in the Pacific, was far and away the most valuable resource for that section, and is highly recommended to any readers interested in exploring this subject further. Very helpful as well (and recommended reading) were (are) two Marine memoirs: With the Old Breed (1981), E. B. Sledge; and Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980), William Manchester. And, of course, the autobiography of Barney Ross (written with Martin Abramson), No Man Stands Alone (1957), provided the basis for Barney and Nate’s story; it should be noted that the death of a Marine by “friendly fire” in this novel is fictional, although it grows out of an admission in the Ross autobiography that such an event nearly occurred. Otherwise, the account of Barney Ross’s experiences in that bloody, muddy shell hole is a true one.

  The portrait of Westbrook Pegler is drawn primarily from two biographies—Pegler: Angry Man of the Press (1963), Oliver Platt; and Fair Enough: The Life of Westbrook Pegler (1975), Finis Farr. Also consulted were Pegler’s own writings, including the collections ’T Ain’t Right (1936) and George Spelvin, American, and Fireside Chats (1942), as well as his newspaper columns pertaining to Bioff and Browne. The anti-Semitic behavior of Pegler depicted here is reflected in these biographies to an extent, as well as in Louis Nizer’s My Life in Court (1961); but is based also upon an interview with an acquaintance of Pegler’s who was on the receiving end of the columnist’s prejudice.

  As was the case in True Crime (1984), the portrait of Sally Rand herein is a fictionalized one, though based upon numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and especially drawing upon Stud Terkel’s oral history Hard Times (1970); but I feel I must label it as fictionalized, as I know of no historic parallel in Sally Rand’s life to her relationship with Nate Heller. Her portrait in these pages is also drawn from a 1939 Collier’s article by Quentin Reynolds. The portrait of Robert Montgomery is largely drawn from another Collier’s article by Reynolds of approximately the same vintage (it is typically Heller-ironic that two articles by Quentin Reynolds, whose libel suit against Westbrook Pegler spelled the beginning of the end for the feisty columnist, served as major reference sources for this novel). The Montgomery portrait was further drawn from Current Biography (1948) and Contemporary Authors, his own book Open Letter From a Television Viewer (1968), and various other magazine articles and books.

  Other books that deserve singling out include The Legacy of Al Capone (1975) by George Murray—the only comprehensive study of the post-Capone mob era, and a very valuable reference to the writing of the Nitti Trilogy; The Tax Dodgers (1948), a memoir by Treasury Agent Elmer L. Irey (with Will
iam J. Slocum); and The Extortionists (1972), a memoir of Herbert Aller, business representative of the IATSE for thirty-six years.

  The portrait of Antoinette Cavaretta, the second Mrs. Nitti, must be viewed as a fictionalized one. Although the basic facts of her business involvement with Nitti, working as E. J. O’Hare’s secretary, marrying Nitti, etc., are accurate, few interviews with her exist (and these brief interviews were at the stressful time of her husband’s death); my imagined portrait of her is largely drawn from the newspaper accounts of the day, and from material in Murray’s The Legacy of Al Capone and Ed Reid’s The Grim Reapers (1969). Also consulted (in regard to Antoinette Cavaretta and other mob-related figures in this book) were the transcripts of the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee hearings. Nate Heller’s speculations about Cavaretta’s personal relationship with Nitti prior to their marriage—including her possible role in O’Hare’s murder—should be viewed as just that: speculation; and speculation by a fictional character in a historical novel, at that. It should be noted, however, that the Kefauver investigators explored the same area in the questioning of various Chicago crime figures.

  Several hardworking people helped me research this book, primarily George Hagenauer, whose many contributions include helping develop the theory regarding Frank Nitti’s “setting up” Al Capone, and exploring the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nitti’s death. In the previous two volumes “from the memoirs of Nathan Heller,” True Detective (1983) and True Crime (1984), which with this novel comprise the Nitti Trilogy, theories regarding the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak, and the substitution of a “patsy” in the FBI-sanctioned shooting of John Dillinger, were respectively explored; these theories, however, had been discussed and developed, in part at least, by previous crime historians. To our knowledge, no one has ever before questioned and explored the circumstances of Nitti’s suicide, or seriously suggested that Nitti engineered Al Capone’s fall; these theories are new to this volume. Despite their presentation within this fictional arena, we offer, and stand behind, these as serious theories and invite further research by crime historians, which we feel will only serve to demonstrate the legitimacy of our claims. (We have, for example, visited the Nitti death site, the terrain of which tends to confirm our notion that a gunman or gunmen may have been firing at Nitti just prior to his suicide.)