I cringed and reached into my pocket to pull out a C-note. “Here you go.”
Bertram reached over and touched Levon’s hand. “You boys want to come and stay over sometime, just say the word. We got lots of dope and you can have all you want.”
“We should get back to town,” Levon said, slowly withdrawing his hand. “We got a show to do.”
“We can get close, if you know what I mean,” said Bertram.
Jim Fred slapped his hand on the table. “I’d bet the rest of my fingers these cats don’t go that route,” he laughed.
“We sure appreciate the smoke,” I said. Things had taken an awkward turn, and we knew it was time to move.
—
A new season of changes was upon us. Our song repertoire was evolving at a faster pace. Over the last year you could feel the Hawk going in one direction and the Hawks going in another, and it went beyond the music. A while back Ronnie had gotten married to a wonderful girl, Wanda Nagurski, sister of the famous football player Bronko Nagurski. Wanda was like one of the guys, with a remarkable sense of humor and an extraordinarily high tolerance for Ron’s shenanigans. Ron became understandably involved in his new family life. Some nights he didn’t even show up at our club dates, and people coming out to see Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks only got half the marquee.
He had also decided he wanted to hire Bruce Bruno, a young Italian American singer we had met through Morris Levy in New York during our run at the Roundtable nightclub. Adding Bruce was part of Ron’s idea for building his Ronnie Hawkins Revue stage show. Bruce looked good, danced good, and sang his butt off.
When Bruce came into the fold, it was immediately clear that he came from a different planet from the rest of us. Here we had five true-blue Canadians, plus a favorite son from the Mississippi Delta; now we were adding a New York Italian. And while we were grounded in rock ’n’ roll and R&B, Bruce specialized in power ballads like “The Twelfth of Never” and songs that showed off his considerable talent for Jackie Wilson–like vocal acrobatics and dance moves. When he wasn’t singing, he played tambourine and tried to blend in as naturally as he could, but onstage with the Hawks he sometimes looked as out of place as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.
Performing that big vocal material meant his throat had to be in top form, which it frequently wasn’t. Almost half of the time, Ron would introduce him and Bruce would point to his throat and shake his head. Soon Ron grew impatient with Bruce’s excuses. He would turn his back to the audience and chew Bruce out in front of the rest of us. “I didn’t hire you to play fucking tambourine, I hired you to sing, and you better start singing quick or I’m gonna stop paying.”
“Sorry, man,” Bruce would respond. “I got a sore throat and I can’t hit the notes.”
“You’re gonna have more than a sore throat to worry about,” Ron would snap back.
When Bruce smoked weed, he became incredibly funny, doing voices and accents and improvising scenes with characters from his old neighborhood in New Rochelle, New York. He would come into the room doing a funky walk, with one arm hanging low, one leg stiff as a board, and the other arm swinging front to back, mimicking one of his favorite buddies. He’d make a face, then croak, “I’m Stone the Bone. And I want to be left alone.” He’d give us some skin, then turn and do the walk right out of the room. We’d all fall down laughing. You could tell he was just nailing it; the voice and swagger felt totally authentic. It made us totally dig Bruce and enjoy having him on board.
—
I noticed something changing about Levon during this time, a certain maturity setting in. His southern drawl softened, and he began to dress in a more sophisticated way. He became more inquisitive about worldly things, more citified. He grew a goatee, and an unusual one at that—it curled forward at the bottom and became quite full. Levon’s wild beard didn’t sit well with the Hawk. Every once in a while he would say, “Son, you look like an old billy goat with that damn thing on your face. Hell, girls don’t want to be kissing a dirty old billy goat.”
Levon got tired of seeing a bunch of different girls all the time and started dating a girl named Sandy from a more upper-class family in the west end of Toronto. Sandy had one brown eye and one gray eye, dark hair, and an electric smile. She and her girlfriend Rosalind first came to the Concord Tavern with their boyfriends. Then the girls started coming on their own. Soon they had both dumped their boyfriends, whom Levon referred to as “Greasy and Bumps.” Levon starting going with Sandy, and I started seeing Roz, who also came from an upscale family but looked the opposite of Sandy: tall, with white-blond hair and delicate, pale skin, very pretty.
Sandy and Roz traveled with us to many of our gigs throughout Ontario. Levon and Sandy were crazy about each other, while Roz and I were along for the ride; we had a lovely time but we weren’t in the same league.
On one of our nights off, Levon and I, along with Connie and Mama Kosh, drove a couple of hours to the Buffalo Auditorium to catch Otis Redding; Jerry Butler, with Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions; and Junior Walker and the All Stars.
Otis was astounding; that voice slayed me. He could be such an exciting performer, but it was the ballads that completely took me away, songs like “These Arms of Mine.” Junior Walker and the All Stars were a very different Motown act—raw, sax-blowing energy in a league all its own. A four-piece unit, they sounded like eight. When the guitar player fell to his knees on “Shotgun,” Junior Walker tore the roof off the joint. And during Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions’ set, the hall became an R&B prayer meeting. The crowd stood and swayed to the music in a trance. Curtis had a mellow, fluid guitar style, and used a certain tuning that I had never seen before.
After the show we were speechless and left in a daze. Wanting a bite, we found a nice-looking club and stopped to digest the incredible music we had experienced. Just as we got some drinks and started to recover our senses, some musicians took the stage, and a woman came out and sat at the piano. The lights came up and, lo and behold, it was Aretha Franklin. We couldn’t believe it. She took us to church and beyond, and this became one of the most memorable musical nights of our lives.
—
That fall, I ran into a couple whom I had met once through Natie. They were involved in his business scheme. The husband seemed overly happy to see me. “Listen,” he asked very gently, “would it be possible for my wife and I to talk to you for a few minutes? It’s quite important.”
I didn’t feel comfortable with this, but I tried to be congenial. We went to their house for coffee and what I hoped would just be a little chat, but it turned out to be an interrogation. “Jaime, there has been crazy talk that your uncle has been collecting bags of cash from investors, taking it home, going down to the basement, and burning it in the furnace.” The guy wrung his hands. “This is very disturbing, Jaime. We’ve invested most of our life savings in this venture and need to know what is going on. Can this insanity be true?”
I told them I had never personally seen Natie burning money but I had seen him take some shopping bags down to the basement of his old house in Willowdale.
“Oh God, no!” his wife shouted. “Should he be institutionalized? Please, is he burning our money?”
Increasingly agitated and bewildered, they kept asking each other what to do. Suddenly their radio playing in the background stopped for breaking news: The president of the United States, John Kennedy, had been shot.
“Oh my God, did you hear that?” I asked. “This is horrible. I’m sorry, I have to be going.” Shaken, I showed myself out and headed back to the hotel.
Like so many of us, I would always remember exactly where I was at that terrible moment on November 22, 1963. By then I’d been gigging in the United States for a couple of years, and it felt like my roots straddled both sides of the border. Kennedy’s assassination was devastating. It seemed to me that everyone loved him. How could this happen? The news hit me hard, like a blow to the chest.
—
I went
to visit Natie a few nights later after we had finished playing our evening’s set at the Concord. In those wee hours everyone in the house was asleep except for Natie, who thought sleeping was a waste of valuable time. I related the couple’s story about his burning money. He laughed. “That’s a good one! I wish everybody thought I burnt it. They’d stop giving me so much aggravation.”
The next weekend I went up to Natie and Fran’s again for a little family visit. As I entered the lobby of their apartment building, I saw someone I recognized from the Concord—Tony, the fellow with the notorious reputation who had cornered me to ask about Natie and Paul Volpe. Tony looked sharp in a sleek gray tailored suit. When he spotted me, he smiled and waved me over.
“Hey, Robbie! Just the person I wanted to see.”
I kept walking, but he caught up with me in front of the elevator just as the doors opened. He pushed me inside and stuck an ice pick under my chin. “We’re going up to visit your uncle.”
I was terrified. Tony was known to be fucking crazy and this wasn’t for show. I tried to calm him down. “Tony, come on, what are you doing? I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” he responded. “But I’ve got a job to do, and there’s a big payday in it for me. It’s business. We’re going up to the apartment, and you’re going to knock on the door. Just say it’s you. I’ll take it from there.”
My mind raced through my options as I stared at his clenched jaw. The ice pick pressed deeper and I lifted my head to ease the pressure. I felt numb with fear and knew I had to think fast.
“Natie’s not there,” I said finally. “He’s upstairs at Saul’s penthouse.”
“Then we’ll go up there,” growled Tony. He banged the button for the top floor. Saul was a creditor and friend of Natie’s who had hung in with him for the long run, hoping to get paid by wearing Natie down with patience and loyalty.
When we reached Saul’s apartment, Tony slipped the ice pick in his pocket and knocked politely on the door. Saul answered the door with his wife a few feet behind him, and before I could say anything Tony pushed past me and grabbed Saul by the face. He started making demands. I signaled to Saul’s wife to call Natie to alert him.
“Natie’s not here,” stammered Saul.
“Then where the fuck is he?”
Saul shook his head. “I don’t know, Tony.”
Tony slapped him across the face. “We’re going to their door, and you’re going to knock.” He dragged Saul out of the apartment and pushed him toward the elevator. “Robbie, you and Saul are going to knock and say it’s you.”
“Tony, I can’t do it,” Saul said. “I can’t.”
Tony grabbed Saul’s face again. “You’ll do it, Saul, or I’ll rip your fucking head off.”
“Leave him alone,” I said. “I’ll knock on the door and see if he’s even there.” Knowing Saul’s wife had called them, I knocked. “It’s Jaime. Hello?” I knocked again. No answer.
Tony charged the door with his shoulder, then tried kicking at it. He landed a couple of powerful blows, but the door was too thick. It didn’t budge. After a few more minutes of kicking and cursing, Tony gave up and walked away, shouting threats.
I watched him make his way down the hall. Before he’d gone more than a few paces, he turned around to face me. “I’m not done here,” he promised. He pointed the ice pick at me. “I’ll be back, and I get results.”
A few minutes later, when Saul and I told Natie and Fran what had happened, Natie looked at me with sadness and terror in his eyes. He said, “Jaime, you shouldn’t come up here anymore until I take care of this.” Then he picked up the phone and called Paul Volpe.
The next day I heard that Natie had been committed to a mental hospital. When I spoke to Fran, she claimed he’d had a breakdown. He wasn’t looking after himself, she said, and he needed proper care to make sure he was going to be all right. I knew she was protecting him—I didn’t believe for a minute that this was anything but part of a plan for him to “disappear.” Then Natie called me from the “funny farm,” as he called it.
It had been necessary, he explained, to remove himself from the scene until things settled down and Paul Volpe had gotten things worked out. He also had a court appearance coming up in the diamonds investigation. “The authorities are suspicious that the stones were stolen, but they can’t figure out who they were stolen from.”
“So where does that leave you?”
“I’m in good shape. There’s no way they can prove I had any knowledge of the stones being illegal in any way.”
It wasn’t long before Natie had himself sprung from the mental institution. Assuring me it was now safe, he invited me over to the apartment for one of our usual meals and a visit with the family. Everybody looked refreshed, calm, and collected, and as usual, it was lovely to see my cousins David and Vicki. Fran took me to the kitchen, where an older man wearing an apron over an expensive-looking shirt and tie was standing at the stove, humming an Italian ditty as he stirred a pot of sauce.
“I’d like you to meet my nephew, Jaime,” Fran said to the man. He smiled, bowed his head to me politely, and continued stirring.
“Jaime,” Natie called to me. “Come here, sit down. I haven’t seen you for a while.” I joined him in the living room. After about fifteen minutes, the older man came in, still wearing his apron. He spoke quietly with no preamble.
“This is the way it works,” he said. In his right hand he held the ladle, pointing it like a baton as he explained. “If anyone rings that buzzer or knocks on that door, I will be in charge of dealing with that. I’ll step outside and sort out whatever the problem is. You do not open the door unless I say so, to let me back in. We all understand?”
Everybody nodded, and he returned to the kitchen and went back to cooking. I turned to Natie.
“What was that all about?”
“Paul Volpe and his brothers, they’re looking after things. This gentleman has come up from New York to make sure everything works out without any crazy nonsense,” Natie said. I nodded, but I wondered what this old gentleman was going to do about a vicious guy like Tony.
A couple of hours later we were watching the new president, Lyndon Johnson, on television when we heard a commotion and a hard knocking at the apartment door. I startled to my feet, but the man from New York held up his hand, motioning us to be still. Nobody moved.
Carefully, he took off his apron and donned his suit jacket. He tightened his tie, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway.
“Fran, you take the kids, go into the back bedrooms and close the door until this gets settled,” Natie said. As I sat with him he seemed remarkably composed, puffing on his Sweet Caporal cigarette. “He’ll get things worked out,” Natie assured me.
A few minutes later there was a knock. Natie got up and peered through the peephole. “It’s me,” the man said calmly. “You can open the door.”
Natie opened it and the man strolled in. Natie lifted his chin questioningly. The man looked at me, wondering if he could speak freely. My uncle nodded.
He explained that he’d informed the four people at the door that they were in a different league now. This was no longer local hoodlum stuff. “You mustn’t come around here bothering these people ever again,” he’d told them. “Or I will come and take care of you personally. If you ever bother this man again, I will find you and kill you, and I will kill everybody in your family. This is what I do. Now I want you to leave.” He looked at Natie and me, shrugged, and said, “They understood.”
And with that, he took off his suit jacket, put the apron back on, and returned to the kitchen, singing the same Italian song.
“He’s responsible for Mafia kingpin Albert Anastasia’s assassination in the barbershop in New York,” Natie told me under his breath. “He is a very, very dangerous man. I don’t like all this threatening of violence and gangland tactics, but sometimes you have to settle things down.”
An hour later the family gathered around the ta
ble for a quiet dinner. The man served us pasta with the sauce he had cooked, and it was delicious. I asked where he got the recipe, and to my surprise his eyes grew watery. It took a moment before he was able to speak. “From my grandmother in Sicily,” he said finally, “before she passed on.”
—
In early 1964, Uncle Natie was put on trial for possessing stolen diamonds. The Volpe family and its associates could protect him from his irate creditors, but not from the Canadian authorities—Natie’s connection with Volpe and the Mafia left him with a reputation for being a Canadian Meyer Lansky, the major Jewish crime figure in the U.S. known as “the Mob’s Accountant.”
Natie didn’t want his trial to become a big public spectacle, so he hired an inconspicuous, low-key attorney. I attended the hearings to lend support to Natie and the family, but also because I wanted to experience a real trial firsthand.
Natie spoke cautiously at the trial, always calm, never admitting anything. If he was going to be convicted, they would need to have him dead to rights. Aunt Fran displayed little emotion as she watched everything play out. I was fascinated but frequently found myself distracted by Natie’s lawyer, who had a habit of scratching the back of his balding head and picking at the scabs. I had my concerns about Natie’s defense, and as soon as I could I told him straight out that I didn’t feel his lawyer was doing a good job. “He doesn’t make me confident,” I said. “He keeps picking at the scabs on his head.”
Natie just laughed. “He has some kind of nervous tic. He’s serving a certain purpose, Jaime. I think it’s going to work out for the best.” Natie spoke often of his plan to secure enough money to start some new insurance or finance company, a business that his son David and I could one day take over, similar, he said, to the Bronfmans’ Seagram’s business in Montreal—they had started out as bootleggers.
The hearings consumed me during the days. I went as often as I could, and though I found the procedure fascinating, it also made me feel sick. When the verdict finally came down, Natie was sentenced to six years in prison. All his dreams for the Klegermans’ future evaporated into thin air. He acted as if this wasn’t necessarily a terrible outcome. But I felt awful for Aunt Fran, David, Vicki, and Uncle Morrie, and I was devastated to see someone I loved and appreciated being hauled away in handcuffs. Natie had lovingly made himself my mentor and had become a father figure. It was a terrible feeling of helplessness to have him taken down. It broke me in two, a loss that pushed me deeper into my refuge, music.
Testimony Page 14