As they got out of the car, he said, “We don’t know what we’re going to find here, but if there’s any rough stuff, Mario, leave it to me.”
With Mario following him, they entered the building through a small side delivery entrance and moved, unnoticed, through the building until they came to a large open room.
Tommy recoiled and threw out an arm to halt Mario. They saw a woman sprawled naked across a table that looked like some sort of pagan altar. She was moaning.
“I … oh, God. That’s Tina,” Mario said. The two brothers ran across the large room. In a corner of the room was a large motion picture camera on a tall tripod stand.
Mario tore off his black priest’s jacket and tossed it over Tina. Then he lifted her in his arms and started for the door.
Tommy almost vomited at the sight. Tina’s face and body were bloodied.
Outside, Mario was getting into the backseat of the car, cradling Tina on his lap as if she were a child. She seemed to be regaining consciousness.
Tommy hopped behind the wheel and drove quickly away.
“Where do you want to go, Mario?” he asked.
“There’s a Catholic hospital only a few blocks away.”
Tommy careered the car around a corner. Tina opened her eyes feebly just then and looked around blankly. When she saw her brothers, she began to scream and kept on screaming, despite Mario’s efforts to calm her, until she passed out.
Inside the hospital, Mario’s Roman collar was like a letter from the pope, and when a gaggle of nuns helped him get Tina into a room Tommy drove back to the warehouse.
There were still no signs of people around. He went into the large room and opened the side compartment of the movie camera, which had been left behind. Inside was a large spool of movie film, and angrily Tommy wrenched it from the machine and unwound it onto a big pile on the floor. Then he set fire to the film and watched it burn down to ash.
All the while, he asked himself how Tina could have gotten involved in something like this. He knew none of the details, but he was sure of one thing: if she had never met Charlie Luciano, it never would have happened.
When the film was totally burned, Tommy walked through the rest of the warehouse, but it was unused and empty, devoid of even so much as a desk or a filing cabinet. The only thing he found was a small dressing room with some makeup on a table and Tina’s clothes hanging over a dressing screen. There was a bottle of red wine in the room and a glass with lipstick on the rim. He smelled the wine and knew it had been drugged. So that was how it had been done.
He took the clothing back to the hospital, where he found Mario waiting for him outside Tina’s room.
“How is she?”
Mario answered, “It’s pretty bad. She was slapped around and roughed up by a bunch of goons, but no major damage. They’re just going to keep her overnight for observation.”
“She say who did it?”
“She’s still groggy. I think she was drugged.”
“I know she was,” Tommy said.
“But she said she never saw them before. She didn’t know them.”
“Were they Luciano’s men?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t know. I think she would have said.”
He took Tina’s clothes and carried them to her room. “She’s sleeping,” Mario said. “The nurses say there’s no point in our hanging around.”
“You can take the car. I’ll stay. I’ll get a lift back to the city.”
“One thing she said. Don’t tell Papa.”
“Why not?” Tommy asked.
“She’s afraid he’ll shoot somebody or get himself shot. She doesn’t want him to know.”
Tommy thought, then nodded. “Just us,” he said.
After Mario left, Tommy went inside and sat at Tina’s bedside all night long. It was in the small hours of the morning before they finally had a chance to talk. Tina told him the whole story.
“Have you been having trouble with Luciano?” Tommy asked, but his sister shook her head.
“Charlie wouldn’t do this. Not to me.” She started to cry softly and Tommy patted her hand and murmured reassuringly, “You’re right. Now go back to sleep. You’re going to be fine.”
In the morning, with a pair of dark glasses and extra-heavy makeup, Tina looked good enough to travel, and she and Tommy rode back to Manhattan in a cab. After swearing Tommy never to tell their father what had happened, she insisted on being alone in her apartment for a while.
Tommy left her, went to his own apartment, and sat by the telephone for a long time. He had been wrong and his father had been right. No one could coexist peacefully with the mob, with the gangsters. It was in their blood, and they would keep coming after you, keep poisoning everything they touched, until you were surrounded by dirt and evil. The only way to get rid of dirt was to scrub it off. But he had always thought that was somebody else’s fight. Until now.
Tommy telephoned Captain Cochran at the Italian Squad.
“Tommy Falcone, Captain. Can you talk?”
“Yeah. Your father’s out of the office.”
“About that job. I’m your man.”
“Good. Go through the motions of getting off the force. File your resignation papers.”
* * *
WHILE TOMMY WAS ON THE TELEPHONE, a reel of movie film and an envelope of still photographs was delivered to Nilo at his apartment.
* * *
TINA QUIT HER JOB as headline singer at Luciano’s Ross’s Club. He did not protest; he announced that the club was closing.
* * *
AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, after Tommy had publicly left the police force, Rachel Mishkin moved into his apartment. She started to paint constantly, filling the tiny space with canvases of a hideousness almost impossible to describe, and lately she had developed the annoying habit of singing little songs to herself while she was painting.
She smiled a lot, too, and now she had insisted that he meet her father—her mother was dead—and no day but this one would do.
Tommy looked up at the wall clock over the counter in the diner. It was after 10:00 P.M. and they were nearly an hour late. Rachel had warned him about that. There was no counting on her father, she had said, when he was out rallying workers to more and more union militancy.
The front door of the restaurant flew open and Rachel breezed in, followed by a stocky man with water running down his face. Obviously, neither had thought of an umbrella and both were soaked to the skin. In a moment, Rachel was with Tommy, shaking her wet frizzy curls in his direction, and she smelled so pure, so fresh and sweet, that his sour mood vanished on the spot.
“Have I ever told you you remind me of this dog I had once?” Tommy asked.
“Oh, be quiet. You never had a dog. I remember you telling me all those sad stories about how deprived you were as a boy.”
“Well, I intend to have a dog someday. And you’ll remind me of him then.”
She laughed and kissed him warmly.
“Isn’t he wonderful, Daddy?” she said.
Her father shrugged elaborately, water splashing from the top of his nappy head, too.
The whole family are like water spaniels, Tommy thought. They should go nowhere without bath towels.
“Look at her,” her father said. “Only one generation away from the old country and already she is trying to talk like the English. God save us all.”
Tommy extended his hand. “I’m Tommy Falcone, Mr. Mishkin. And I’m glad to meet you. I’ve read a lot about you.”
Mishkin shook his hand. “I just bet you have and none of it good. Sit down and do us all a favor. Don’t call me Mr. Mishkin. Everybody—friends, enemies, everybody—calls me Lev. She calls me Lev,” he said nodding toward his daughter. “Why should you be different?”
The waitress came and, unbidden, presented them with three coffees. When she left, Mishkin said, “I came to offer you a job.”
“I’m living off my savings for a while,” Tommy said. “While I
finish law school.”
Mishkin shook his head. “There are too many lawyers already. You could work for me.”
“Doing what?”
Mishkin squinted at him, stood up, and leaned across the table. While he was a short man, Tommy noted he was immensely thick through the chest and shoulders. He had deep, piercing eyes that he purposely used to good effect—eyes set in a face that looked as if it had been made of leftover pieces of putty stuck together to make an approximate ball.
“You were once a policeman,” he said. “I won’t be coy with you. I’ll tell you straight out. I know everything there is to know about you. If I didn’t know it, I wouldn’t be here speaking to you. So I will speak to you straight from the shoulder, as you Americans say.”
He sipped his coffee and seemed to find it distasteful, because he pushed the cup away. “Sugar,” he said. “People in America think everything needs sugar. Nothing needs sugar. Anyway, union organizing is a hard business. Maybe even a brutal business. Our men have spilled much blood. I warn you I am not a patient man. I believe in the Old Testament, not the New. I don’t believe in turning even the first cheek. I believe in an eye for an eye. Are you following me, or does your mouth always hang open?”
Tommy self-consciously snapped his mouth shut. “I follow you,” he said.
“So. So not so many years ago, the bosses in the clothing factories see that they are losing to us. That we are organizing their members, and they do not know what to do. All their normal threats and beatings do not work. Still, they do not give in. No. They find new ones to bring violence to us. They go to this man, Joe Masseria, the one they call ‘the Boss,’ and he does a good job. He scares many of our people, kills some. It is looking bad for us. And then I remember that every organism, every nation, everything has its own internal enemies, enemies far more subtle and dangerous to itself than anything that could attack it from the outside.”
Mishkin bellowed a “tea” order to the waitress and waited for it to arrive. This time, inexplicably, he half-filled the cup of tea with sugar before sipping at it. Throughout his whole recitation, Rachel stared at him in rapt attention while fondling Tommy under the table with her near hand.
“So,” Mishkin said, “I ask questions. I find that this Boss Joe has many enemies within his own organization. But most of them are thugs, no smarter, no better than Masseria. I ask more people and I learn of the one, Salvatore Maranzano, the one they call ‘the Castellammarese.’ I go to him, not hat in hand, but as one man to another, one chief to another. We talk. I offer him money, much money to work for me and to fight Masseria’s men whenever it is needed. This he agrees to do, and within a few months everything is back where it was before the trouble started.”
Rachel was trying to unbutton Tommy’s fly, and he found it more difficult to concentrate.
“So far, so good,” Mishkin said. “That was six months ago. But now there’s a problem.”
“Maranzano wants your union,” Tommy said.
“How do you know that? Does this come naturally to you Italians?”
“If Machiavelli lived here in New York today, he’d be a plumber,” Tommy said. “Of course he wants your union, because everything he gets is something that Masseria doesn’t have. When the war between them comes, the one with the biggest army will win.”
“So I’m a pawn?” Mishkin asked. “You’re telling me I’m a pawn?”
“Something like that,” Tommy said. “So what’s this job?”
“I don’t know. Maybe negotiate. Maybe shoot them. I don’t know. All I know is these people are one step ahead of me. I decide to go into a factory, they are there first. If I get people signing union membership cards, they are there with the muscle before I get them all signed up, and the next thing I know, they control the shop steward and they talk of starting a new union. They are too damned smart for me.”
“There’s probably a leak inside your own organization,” Tommy said. “That’s how they know what you’re up to.”
Lev Mishkin smiled at his daughter. “See? Already he’s thinking straighter than I am. Why don’t I figure out things like that?” He said to Tommy, “I need you. I need some goyische kup. Some non-Jew brain who can think like these people, who can figure out what they’re doing so we can do something about it and get on with our lives.”
“You deal with Maranzano directly?”
“No. Not anymore.” Mishkin smiled slyly. “One of his lieutenants, Danny Neill. You know him?”
“I know him,” Tommy said softly.
“Good. You talk to him. Make them go away. I don’t need them anymore. Let’s try to make one business in New York that these gangsters don’t control.”
“I don’t think I can negotiate with him,” Tommy said.
“Why not?”
“Because the last time I saw him, I threatened to kill him.”
“Good. Don’t negotiate. Murder. Whatever you want, as long as you get it done.”
“Look, I’m not going to mess up law school. But let me nose around on my own time and see what I can find out. I don’t know anything about unions. Is there somebody who could help me?”
There is a man I’ve worked with for many years. We first met back in one of the czar’s prisons in 1903 or 1904. His name is Harry Birchevsky, and he knows the garment business and he’s one of us Jews. You know the law and Italians. Together you ought to be unstoppable.”
“You wish,” Tommy said.
“I’ll want to pay you,” Mishkin said.
“Whatever you think it’s worth. After I do something.”
Rachel’s face swung toward Tommy. “Good answer,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“But from now on, don’t turn down jobs. We’ll need money for the baby we’re going to make tonight. And we still have to get married.”
Tommy looked at her in shock, then turned his face to Mishkin. The old man said, “Get married. Please, by all means. And knock her up. Then maybe she’ll stop grabbing you in public restaurants.”
• Tommy had wound up telling no one in his family, not even Mario, that he was working undercover for the police department, and he had decided that the less Rachel knew, the better. But the secrecy weighed heavily on him, and one night he decided to talk to his old friend Tom Dewey. He found Dewey in a Masonic Hall, giving a tub-thumping speech in favor of a Republican candidate in an election. Tommy was mesmerized. In politics, Dewey had obviously found his calling; the idea of starting a law partnership with Tommy would be the last thing on his mind now. Tommy left without talking to him and continued to carry his secret alone.
• On October 16, 1927, Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen, who ran the labor rackets for Masseria, finished dinner at a restaurant on Norfolk Street in Little Italy, then walked outside to get a cab. When the cab pulled up, waiting in the backseat was Orgen’s right-hand man, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. He cut down Orgen with a spray of .45 caliber bullets. Also wounded was Orgen’s bodyguard, Jack “Legs” Diamond, who told police he never saw the killer. Lepke took over the labor rackets; in a month, he controlled the cutters’ union, whose nineteen hundred members cut all the garments being sewn in New York. Without them, more than fifty thousand workers who sewed garments would be out of work. The manufacturers paid up for labor peace. Luciano said of his good friend, “Lepke loves to hurt people.” He suggested that Lepke pool his talents with those of another good friend, Albert Anastasia. Murder Incorporated became Luciano’s personal army.
• As more and more thugs moved from Masseria’s mob to Maranzano’s, Nilo found out that Joe Adonis’s driver had been the one who had ratted him out to the police, after the killing of the young boy in Italian Harlem. One night, as the driver, Ric-Rac Greenwald, a loud, obnoxious thug, left a Broadway speakeasy on an errand for his boss, his car was pulled over to the curb by another car. Ric-Rac pulled his gun and was so intent on the people in the other car that he never noticed Nilo step from a building behind him, open the rear do
or, and put four bullets into his head. Adonis was outraged. He demanded that Luciano retaliate against Maranzano just to teach them a lesson. Luciano met with Meyer Lansky and Albert Anastasia. “Maybe it’s time that we let these two Mustache Petes kill each other off,” Luciano said. “And if they don’t, I will,” Anastasia proclaimed, and hugged Luciano. “I been waiting for this for years,” Anastasia said. Two nights later, the Maranzano driver known as Rock was shot to death. The Castellammarese Wars, which pitted Maranzano’s forces against those of Joe the Boss Masseria, had begun.
• Right after Thanksgiving, Tommy and Rachel were married in a small family ceremony, conducted by Father Mario and a rabbi. Only the immediate families attended.
• In Hollywood, a young man named Walt Disney made his first animated film about a mouse named Mickey. On Broadway, Helen Kane was singing “boop-boop-a-doop.”
• Beer cost three dollars a barrel to make in New Jersey. Speakeasy operators in New York paid fifty dollars a barrel.
• In living rooms, people played with Ouija boards, and everybody dreamed of owning a Duesenberg automobile, just like actor Douglas Fairbanks did.
CHAPTER 9
Fall and Winter 1928: The War Years
In Dannemora, Nilo had spent many hours thinking of Maranzano’s crime family and how it should be restructured. He had convinced himself that Don Salvatore was too willing to talk even when talk was useless, too slow to act even when action was the only possible course.
He vowed that when and if he got out of jail, he would not make those mistakes. The only way to fight Masseria would be to fight him every step of the way. No victory should be conceded to Joe the Boss. Maranzano’s men should fight not just for the bootlegging, but for control of the drug trade, prostitution, the unions, gambling. Every time a Masseria underling turned around, he should find a Maranzano man coming after him.
I want them all to be scared to death—Luciano, Adonis, Siegel, even Masseria. When they are terrified, we will have won.
When he rejoined the gang, Nilo had the chance to put his ideas to the test. He still paid lip service to Maranzano’s idea of his being Danny Neill, the next-generation lawful tycoon who would run the family, but in practice he became the hammer behind all Maranzano’s operations. His natural cruel streak had also been honed while he was in prison. The lives of others meant nothing to him now, and some of the Maranzano henchmen feared going out on jobs with him because Nilo was too quick to start shooting, too ready to get everyone, including himself, killed.
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