by Joe Corso
Red had a hard time keeping a straight face, but he managed to look serious when he answered him. “I appreciate it Piss Clam, but I think it would be better if you stayed here and watched this place for me.”
Piss Clam looked at him and he was serious as a heart attack when he replied. “Got it, boss. Don’t worry about the Starlight Club. I won’t let anything happen to it.” The boys had a hard time to keep from laughing.
CHAPTER 36
The four men arrived at the warehouse at 1:45 in the afternoon and parked their car in front of the building. Shooter and Joey Bones found some folding chairs while rummaging through one of the spare rooms in the warehouse and brought them to the office. They opened the chairs and placed them in a neat oval in front of the large desk Red was sitting behind and settled into the chairs. The first thing Tarzan did was take out the Dunkin Donuts coffee containers and the two-dozen donuts they bought. When Tarzan ordered one-dozen doughnuts, the clerk informed him that for another fifty cents he could get another dozen doughnuts, he knew that this was a no lose offer so he bought the two dozen donuts. So besides the coffee, they had a variety of doughnuts to enjoy while they discussed how they were going to deal with Reynolds. Red gestured to Joey and Shooter. “You two are going to keep tabs on Reynolds again. As soon as we see the driver show up at Reynolds’ house with the second man, we’ll grab him the following day when he’s alone and we’ll bring them here. Listen carefully now. We’re not murderers, so treat the driver with care. I don’t want him hurt but I also don’t want him to see your faces. If he sees your faces, then you leave me no choice but to kill him and that’s something I don’t want to do. So don’t put me in that position, cause if you do, I’m gonna take it out on you two - and it won’t be pleasant. I’ve given you fair warning, so act accordingly. Understand?” They both knew that if they weren’t careful, they could be the ones who wound up in the car compactor at Red’s junkyard.
“Don’t worry, Red. We’ll be careful. The driver won’t see our faces, but what about Reynolds? It’s gonna be tough to hide our faces from him when we snatch him.”
“I don’t care if Reynolds sees your faces because once we have him, he won’t live long enough to be a problem.”
Monday morning, the boys were in their car, which was parked a short distance from Reynolds’ place, where they had an unobstructed view of his house. Shooter checked his watch; it was eight o’clock, Monday. They knew from all the days they spent watching his house and timing his comings and goings that Reynolds always left his home at 8:15 a.m. At 8:15 sharp, Monday through Friday, a driver pulled to the curb, stopped in front of his house, and picked up Reynolds to drive him to work. On Wednesday, and sometimes on Thursday, a second man accompanied the driver. Joey spoke up. “Look, we got lucky because a second man showed up today with the driver. Tomorrow, we grab the prick.”
This was the break Red was looking for. Later that morning, Red finalized his plans. “Just in case something goes wrong and they see your faces, we’re gonna disguise you two guys. Tomorrow, you’ll wear these wigs.” Red pulled two black wigs out of a bag and held them up for Shooter and Joey to see. “And you’re both gonna wear fake mustaches. And you will wear these.” He reached into the bag and pulled out two sets of aviator sunglasses, the large ones. “These disguises will keep you alive because the driver won’t to be able to identify you. I can’t stress that enough because if the man is innocent, don’t put me in a fuckin position where I have to kill him. It’s Reynolds and his two men that I want, and not the driver. Tomorrow morning when Reynolds leaves his home, follow him until he reaches the park. It’s about a mile from his home. Stop him there and ask them to step out of the car. Once they’re on the sidewalk, put the cuffs on them and put them in the police car as fast as you can. I don’t want a real cop spotting you making an arrest and then pull you over to see if you need help or something. Once they’re in the car, give them a shot of this. It’ll put them to sleep.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out two syringes to show to them. “Then bring them to the warehouse.”
The next morning, Joey Bones and Shooter watched Reynolds get into the car. They followed it until they reached the park. Joey put on the interior flashing lights while Shooter put the dome light on the roof. They pulled alongside Reynolds’ car and motioned for them to pull over. Reynolds was annoyed at having been stopped by the police, wasting his precious time. He intended to give them a piece of his mind as soon as he got back to his office. Joey walked over to the window and asked the occupants to please step out of the car. Reynolds sputtered, “Do you have any idea who I am?”
“Please step out of the car, sir,” Joey calmly ordered.
“This is ridiculous,” Reynolds spit out. “When you finish harassing us, I’m going to get a great deal of pleasure in reporting you to your superiors. I’ll see that you two are fired. And that’s a promise.”
Joey opened their jackets, reached in and took their weapons. “Now get in our car.” Joey opened the back door. “Get in please and watch your heads.” The driver asked Shooter what the infraction was for which they were stopped. What did they do wrong? What law did they break? Reynolds was waiting for answers to his questions. But the cop simply ignored him and said, “Just get in the back, please. You’ll find out soon enough. Now get in the car.” The two men reluctantly got into the car with Reynolds complaining of what he would do to these cops when this was over. Joey and Shooter each took out the syringes without them seeing them do it. They opened the back doors as if to check on something and quickly jabbed the needles into their necks. The two men tried fighting, but it was too little too late. They got back in the car and drove to the warehouse where Red and the boys were waiting for them.
The bay door was open in anticipation of their arrival. When they finally arrived, Joey drove the car slowly through the open bay door then he pulled the car deeper into the empty warehouse. As soon as the car drove past him and it cleared the door, Trenchie pushed the button that brought the large bay doors down, closing behind them.
“How long will these guys be out?” Joey asked.
Red said, “The Grim Reaper told me that the shot would keep them out for a couple of hours.” Red took the pictures out of his shirt pocket and looked at the driver, then at the pictures. He wasn’t one of the men in the pictures. Red motioned to Shooter. “Get Joey to help you and carry him to the room next to the office. Blindfold him and handcuff him to a stanchion so he can’t get loose. I don’t want him to be able to take the blindfold off. If this guy sees us and can ID us then we’ll have no choice; we’ll have to kill him … and I don’t want to do that. My bet is this guy is just a civil servant who works for Reynolds and it’s his bad luck that he was assigned to pick him up every day and has no idea his boss is a killer. Now take him to the room next door, handcuff him to something secure, put tape over his eyes and a sack over his head. By doing that you’ll be keeping him alive, understand? Now get Reynolds and take him to the office. I want him nice and fresh when he wakes up, so to make him comfortable, sit him in that old leather chair. Oh, and Shooter, make sure the recorder Jeff gave us is ready to record, I want everything he says caught on tape.”
“I have the recorder in the car. I’ll go get it and set it up. It’ll be ready to record when he wakes up.”
“Good, do it.”
CHAPTER 37
Reynolds woke up two hours later with a pounding headache, the result of the drug he was given. Reynolds put the fingers of both hands on his temples and rubbed them, trying to clear the cobwebs and stem the pounding in his head. The pounding began to abate slowly and his head cleared a little. “Get him some coffee,” he heard a voice say. He opened his eyes and when his vision cleared, he saw Big Red standing before him, leaning against the front of his desk wearing a cold shadow of a smile and staring at him with a bemused expression on his face. “So! You’re finally awake. How do you like your coffee?”
Reynolds looked around at the men in the
room. He tried to stand, but he couldn’t. He realized he was taped to the chair. “Who are you and what do you want with me?”
“Who I am is of no importance. What is important is, I want your life.”
Reynolds couldn’t believe what he just said. “Why would you want my life? I did nothing to you.”
“Oh, but you did, Emil. Your men shot and almost killed my man at the Garden. You killed Marilyn’s bodyguard and then you killed Marilyn. Now don’t go denying it, Emil, I know everything, so there’s no use in you denying it. What I don’t know is where to find the two men who drugged Marilyn and took her from Cal Neva. And I assume those were the same men who gave her the enema that killed her.”
Reynolds knew his life depended on telling these men everything he knew because they obviously knew so much already, so he decided to answer their question openly and honestly. “Go ahead and ask your questions and I’ll do my best to answer them for you.”
Red knew the questions he wanted answers to. “Why did Bobby Kennedy want Marilyn dead?”
“Bobby wanted her neutralized, not dead. He wanted her placed in a sanitarium where she’d be out of the way and wouldn’t be a threat to the president any longer.”
“That sounds like a lot of horseshit to me, Emil.”
“No, no it’s true. Bobby didn’t have anything to do with Marilyn being killed. Look, I’m not saying that he was sad that she died, ‘cause he wasn’t, but he didn’t have her murdered.”
“So you’re admitting it was murder.”
“Yes! I admit that she was murdered, but not by us.”
“Who, then?” There was a long pause before he spoke. Then he shrugged his shoulders, surrendering. “Sam Giancana.”
His answer floored Red because Sam was the last guy he would ever have pinned Marilyn’s murder on. “Why the fuck would Sam Giancana want Marilyn killed?” he asked.
Reynolds shrugged his shoulders. “He wanted to embarrass the president and he thought by killing her he would be getting back at Jack. But for a smart guy, he sure wasn’t thinking clear. Because by killing Marilyn he didn’t realize that he was doing the Kennedys a favor.”
“Let’s back up a little. How about the guys that killed her bodyguard?”
Reynolds laughed. “Those morons. I hired them to kidnap Marilyn. We wanted to scare her into keeping quiet. Instead, what did those jerks do? They killed her bodyguard; that’s what they did. That act alone almost took down the presidency. Killing him was the last thing we wanted to happen. Hoover was salivating, hoping to find something to prove it was us that sent those boys in to kill Marilyn, but he came up short. He had nothing because you guys killed them all. It wound up being a gang hit gone bad.”
“What about the attempted hit on Nixon at the Garden?”
“We knew Marilyn had knowledge of some heavy facts about the president’s plans as well as what the president already put into motion. Some were very good, others were in the grey area and some bad like the Bay of Pigs invasion, which she knew the inside facts about. But everything she knew was very sensitive and if the press got a hold of that information, it would have caused national security problems. We were certain she told Nixon what she knew. The president as well as the attorney general talked about sensitive issues in front of Marilyn and never dreamed she would someday use the information she heard against them.”
“So why kill Nixon? It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“It does if you’re Giancana. Here again, Giancana figured that by killing Nixon it would point a finger to the Kennedys and make them look like the guilty parties.”
“Did you drug my man and take Marilyn from Cal Neva?”
“Yes. It was me and two other men.”
“Who were these men?”
“They were Sam’s men.”
Red was confused now. “How the hell did Sam Giancana’s men get involved with you, the attorney general’s top man?”
“Giancana contacted me one day. Said he’d like to have a meet and I agreed. At the meeting, he said that he’d like to help us. When I asked him why, he simply said that he was in a position where he could help us and he’d like to do us that favor because maybe someday he’d need a favor in return. I never told Bobby about this, as paranoid as he is, he’d have a fit if he knew I got him involved in her murder. Sam’s men handled Marilyn. They took her to her home and waited for the right time and then they administered the drugs. I didn’t know about it. If I did, I would have tried to stop them.”
Now Red was in a tight spot. Reynolds had seen his face, but didn’t know who he was. But now he knew what he looked like and he could certainly identify him from a mug shot.
Reynolds seen to know what he was thinking. He looked at Red. “Look, if you’re worried about me recognizing you, I won’t ever mention what happened between us to anyone, so don’t worry about me looking at a mug shot and pointing you out. Bobby doesn’t know that I was the one that had your man and Marilyn drugged, so it’s not in my best interest to do that. He doesn’t know that Giancana’s men killed her and the last thing I want is for him to find out about it. So you see, I’d be in as much trouble as you if he ever finds out.”
Red thought about the situation for a moment. Then it came to him. “You can buy your life, Emil, but you have to earn it by doing something for me.”
CHAPTER 38
Giancana’s men parked their car in front of the warehouse and walked over to the front door. They knocked, but there was no answer, so they called out to Reynolds. Getting no answer, they tried the door and it opened, so they walked in. The warehouse was empty except for a car parked deeper in the cavernous warehouse. They saw the light on in the office to their left and they walked over to it. The door was unlocked, so they opened it and walked into the office. To their surprise, there were men in the room pointing their guns at them.
The Giancana men had received a phone call the previous night from Reynolds, asking them to fly to Washington and to meet him in a warehouse the attorney general used at times. He lured them there with the promise of a lucrative job he had for them that would make them a lot of money. They asked if he could tell them anything over the phone, but Reynolds was vague and the men understood that because the phones could be tapped. But he offered them a tidbit by telling them it was similar to the job they did for him in Cal Neva. The men liked that. It was a simple matter to pass a drugged drink to someone, and then, when they were unconscious, do whatever the job called for.
Before the men realized what was happening, Joey Bones and Shooter jabbed syringes into their necks and in a few minutes, the men passed into a blissful sleep. Red told Shooter to drag them to the metal table in the lunchroom. Each man was placed one at a time on an old stainless steel table with his pants pulled down to his ankles. The enema bag filled with the deadly drugs was inserted into his anus and the bag emptied inside of him. The same procedure was applied to the other man. They were still unconscious when it was over and they were placed in their car, which was then driven to the park near Reynolds’ house and left there. The following morning, they were found dead of an overdose of drugs. The police weren’t ruling out murder, but until the autopsy was completed, they were ruling it a double suicide. The autopsy would tell the true story. The case was put on hold while the authorities awaited the coroner’s report. Red couldn’t really blame Sam Giancana for trying to get back at the Kennedys; he only wished he knew about it before Marilyn was killed so he could have tried to reason with him. If he and Red had a chance to talk, Giancana might have reconsidered having her killed. Red would have explained to Sam that he wouldn’t be getting back at the president by killing Marilyn Monroe; it would be just the opposite. He would be helping him because if he killed Marilyn, he eliminated her telling the media what she knew. It was the opposite of what Giancana expected. In fact, another unintended consequence of her death was that it allowed the attorney general to enter her home and take whatever of Marilyn’s he wanted and there was no one th
ere to protect her possessions or defend her home from intruders. Now the question was what to do about Reynolds. Red had no problem keeping his promise to him and letting him go, but now there were complications. Even though Red had sequestered him in another room, Reynolds was no fool. He knew Red had Giancana’s two men killed. Red had told Reynolds that he let them go. He added. “Whatever happens to them, it’s out of my hands.” Even though his men objected, Red decided to let Reynolds and his driver, who still hadn’t seen any of their faces, live. Reynolds assured Red that both he and his driver would not to say a word to anyone. But before he left, Red warned him what would happen if he told anyone.
Red and his men drove back to Queens. Red had been determined to kill Reynolds and now that he let him go, he had to live with his decision to allow him live. He changed his mind about killing him when he heard Reynolds’ explanation of what had happened. He knew he was just following orders. Reynolds’ big mistake was when he accepted Giancana’s offer of help because Giancana wasn’t a man who did favors for someone without there being something in it for him. Sam always had an ulterior motive. Red knew that once Giancana made up his mind to kill someone, he wasn’t easily talked out of it. Thinking back on it, he figured that if he tried to talk Sam out of killing Marilyn, he might have started another gang war. By doing it Red’s way, they got the men that killed Marilyn. And he had the satisfaction of knowing that Joe DiMaggio handled her funeral with class and dignity. DiMaggio wouldn’t allow Sinatra or his Rat Pack friends to attend the small funeral service because he blamed them for her death. He didn’t allow any reporters at the service but one, and that was his friend, Walter Winchell. Joe DiMaggio Jr. wore his Marine dress uniform to the funeral service. Red was there, but he stayed outside, unnoticed in the shadows. He came to pay his last respects to a woman he loved. He knew that he loved her when he could no longer hold this enigma known as Marilyn Monroe in his arms. He always knew her passion for him could cool at any moment and the affair would be over with not so much as another thought for his feelings. But in the short time they were together, he discovered that he loved her. Being the realist, he knew she could never be his. She was a woman for the world, but with all the men she met and loved in her life, Joe was the one who held a special spot in her heart. She loved him in her own way. Red heard through the grapevine that the day she died, she was supposed to remarry Joe, who had never stopped loving her.