Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

“I have just lost a decision downtown,” said Fredericks.

  “What decision?”

  “Lucky has given a decision against me.”

  By that, Fredericks meant that Luciano had made it clear that he was getting into the business of prostitution and Fredericks had to hand over his books to Luciano’s associates Abie “the Jew” Heller and David “Little Davie” Petillo. Under the new regime, Brooks would act as both a booker and carry out “bonding.” Bonding demanded each girl pay $10 a week. For this money, when the girl was arrested, she would get the service of a lawyer and half her bail paid; her madam would put up the other half of the bail bond. The men who worked together to obtain this money called themselves “the Combination.” Brooks wasn’t happy with carrying out both of these criminal acts from his own office.

  “You have nothing to worry about,” said Fredericks, “because this is the toughest thing to convict anybody on.”

  “I am kind of scared,” said Brooks. “I don’t know what to do. I want to know who is behind this.”

  Fredericks said that he was behind it.

  “But you haven’t any money,” said Brooks. “I want to know the truth.”

  Fredericks said that Abie the Jew and Little Davie were behind the racket, as he’d said before when they took the business directly away from him.

  “And who?” insisted Brooks.

  “Lucky,” said Fredericks.

  The October 1933 meeting was a crucial moment. This was when Luciano moved in on the business of prostitution in New York. A week before, several small-time gangsters had come together to form their own bonding Combination. As well as Jimmy Fredericks, they included Sam Warner, who later described the meeting in more detail. It took place in Alphonso’s Restaurant on Broome Street near Mulberry. Word then got out about their proposed Combination, and Luciano wasn’t happy with it. He called in all the participants to meet him at the restaurant. He arrived twenty minutes after they’d gathered. As soon as Luciano entered the room, “all the Italian men stood up and greeted him just as if he were a general,” said Warner. Little Davie Petillo spoke to them in Italian and then Luciano made his speech.

  “Listen, you fellows are all through; from now on Little Davie is taking over the bonding.”

  With that, Luciano walked out of the restaurant. Warner and the rest were too frightened to say anything. There was a new bonding Combination in town and that was headed by Luciano with the Mott Street Mob handling its administration. Little Davie Petillo, Abie the Jew, Tommy “the Bull” Pennochio, and Jimmy Fredericks were the senior managers charged with enforcing it.

  Unwisely, Sam Warner and a few of his associates carried on collecting their bonds for a week after the meeting. Finally, at one brothel, one of the madams told them that Little Davie wanted to see them. He told them that if they didn’t cut it out, their heads would be broken. They instantly stopped their operations.

  Later, in June 1935, Danny Brooks drove another booker called Dave Miller to a meeting in Mulberry Street. Jimmy Fredericks was there and so was Little Davie. Their main topic of conversation was another judgment from above that took over Cockeyed Louis’s part of the business and gave it to Miller, but Miller was concerned about his own security if things went wrong.

  “Who is going to take care of me in case of trouble?” he asked Fredericks. “You know Cockeyed Louis got sent away.”

  “What are you worrying about?” snapped Fredericks. “You are always worrying.”

  “I ain’t got no money,” said Miller. “I would like to know what this is all about. Who is going to take care of me?”

  “We will,” said Fredericks.

  “Who is we?”

  “Davie and Abie and … Charlie.”

  This was just the information Dewey had hoped to get. He wanted to know that Charlie Luciano was at the apex of this particular crime pyramid.

  Al Weiner, son of Cockeyed Louis, wasn’t happy about the new regime, either. He made a complaint to the police in June 1935 in which he said Luciano was extorting money from him. The official police department report said Luciano obtained the sum of $100 from Al Weiner “by wrongful use of force and fear on the part of the aforesaid Al Weiner by threatening the said Al Weiner to do an unlawful injury to his person.”

  Luciano would accept no competition in this business.

  Confirmation of Luciano’s reign of terror came from another source arrested in Dewey’s sweep of the brothels—Flo Brown. Also known as “Cokie Flo,” a name she detested, she was a morphine addict and madam. She had lived with a series of low-level gangsters in Chicago before deciding to set up her own brothel in Manhattan at 22 West Seventy-sixth Street. In 1933, she was booking with Cockeyed Louis Weiner, but this came to an end when the Combination took over. She bonded with them and opened a new house. She also became Jimmy Fredericks’s girlfriend, but this ended badly when she gave him $100 as a Christmas present and he gave her nothing. It only made things worse when she found out that Fredericks had given his previous long-term girlfriend a mink coat.

  In spring 1934, Brown said she went with Fredericks to a meeting uptown at a Chinese restaurant on Broadway. Luciano was there with the head of the Mott Street Mob, Tommy “the Bull” Pennochio, and Little Davie Petillo. Brown said that most of the conversation was in Italian, but what she did hear was that Fredericks told Luciano that some bookers were holding out on him—they didn’t want to surrender their joints and pay bonds to him.

  “I’ll tell you what you do,” said Luciano. “Bring all the bookers down tomorrow and I will put them on the carpet and we will see that that doesn’t happen again.”

  “Nick Montana is the worst offender,” said Fredericks. “He collects bonds and keeps it and then when the place gets pinched they run to me and I don’t know anything about it. I am not able to take the girls out because I didn’t know they had been paying bond.”

  “Have them all come down,” said Luciano, “and we will straighten the matter out.”

  Fredericks later told Brown that they “bawled the devil” out of the bookers and that Montana was the most defiant. “Nick thought he would get away with it because he had a brother—big shot in Harlem,” said Fredericks. “We didn’t care whether he had fifty brothers, he had to kick in just the same.” Luciano levied a fine of $500 on every booker holding out on a joint.

  Further evidence of how the Combination worked was provided by Mildred Curtis, girlfriend of Tommy “the Bull” Pennochio, also picked up in Dewey’s raids. Sitting in the Foltis-Fischer restaurant on Forty-seventh Street in early 1935, she asked Pennochio how the bonding business worked.

  “The bookers send the girls to the joints,” he said. “We collect ten dollars every week from each girl. In case of trouble we protect them. In case a girl gets in trouble we get them out.”

  “How do you get the girls to pay the ten dollars?” Curtis wondered.

  “We have men go around and collect the money and the bookers turn in all their joints and the madams tell the girls to pay.”

  Later, Curtis and Tommy the Bull met Luciano in the Hotel Century.

  “One of our joints was pinched in the seventies,” said Pennochio, “you know which one I mean. What shall we do about it?”

  “Who are the cops?” asked Luciano.

  Pennochio mentioned the precinct.

  “Oh that is easy,” explained Luciano, “we can take care of them.”

  That was all part of the bonding service.

  On one occasion when the police raided several houses, Fredericks swung into action, saying “We’ve got to get pictures taken of the broken locks. The doors were broken down without warrants. We have to get three or four lawyers to represent the madams and girls. If we have just one, people will realize it’s a Combination.”

  “Who gets the most money of the bunch?” Curtis later asked Tommy the Bull, meaning the profits of the Combination.

  “Well, Lucky, he is the boss, gets the most,” said Tommy the Bull. “Then I get
second and the rest of them are all even.” Pennochio acted as the treasurer, keeping control of the total bond money and doling it out to madams when a house had been raided. Extra money was raised from bookers in the form of protection money, pried out of them depending on how much business they were doing.

  Pennochio was originally a drug dealer, operating from 72 Mott Street, and had been arrested in 1929 for selling narcotics, spending eighteen months in the penitentiary. He also had a loan shark business. Luciano gave Pennochio permission to enter the prostitution racket.

  That the income from bonding was only part of the income generated by these gangsters was made clear when hotel burglar Joe Bendix asked Luciano if he could work as a bond collector for him in June 1935. Bendix had known Luciano for nine years and always brought him his best stolen jewelry.

  “You know, Joe,” Luciano told him, “it doesn’t pay a hell of a lot. It only pays thirty-five or forty dollars a week.”

  “It doesn’t make much difference,” said Bendix. “I’m not doing anything anyhow. I need the money. It’s better than nothing.”

  “All right,” said Luciano, “I’ll tell Davie to put you on. See me again. I’m always around.”

  A couple of weeks later, Bendix saw Luciano at the Villanova restaurant.

  “I put you on as a collector for $40 a week,” he told Bendix. “You know the other collectors only get $35 a week but you are kind of ‘high-hat,’ so we’ve got to give you a little more.”

  Sometimes the madams had to be protected from other gangsters who didn’t fully appreciate the strength of the shield now provided by the Mott Street Mob. In July 1935, one of the bonded brothels was held up by some petty criminals from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As soon as Jimmy Fredericks heard about it, he got in a car with two other enforcers and drove over to Brooklyn to find the holdup crew. That Fredericks was the chief tough guy in the Mott Street Mob was made clear when Tommy the Bull told his girlfriend that Fredericks was a “gorilla.” “If anybody needs taking care of he straightens them out.”

  When Fredericks tracked down one of the small-time robbers, he smacked him, saying, “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from these joints—to stay away from joints that are bonded. That they belong to Charlie Lucky. Keep away from these joints.”

  Of course, Dewey loved it every time someone mentioned that Luciano was behind the entire operation. Luciano got a sense this was happening too much, as bond collectors kept referring to him as the ultimate sanction for what they were doing. He had become the top criminal brand and he instructed Fredericks to tell them not to mention his name in connection with the Combination. But it was too late for that.

  The life of some of the girls working in Luciano’s brothels could be brutal. Pauline Burr was just seventeen when she stayed at the Girls’ Service League, a charitable organization helping unemployed young women, in 1935. She was five feet four inches tall, with chestnut hair and an attractive face. She liked walking with a friend around the Lower East Side, where she was introduced to a handsome Italian named Al. She gave him her telephone number. A few days later, a man phoned her saying he was a friend of Al’s. This was Patrick Kane and he took Burr to dinner in Chinatown. After a few days of going out together, Kane asked Burr to marry him. She agreed and met him at the Paris Hotel, but when she turned up Kane was not in the room but two other men were.

  A friend had accompanied Burr to the hotel and told her not to stay. When Kane arrived, he was furious with Burr for bringing along another girl and told her they had been married that afternoon. When the friend checked with a social worker at the Girls’ Service League, she said there was no record of Burr’s “marriage.” By then, however, Kane had moved Burr to the Alexandria Hotel. There, all Burr’s clothes were taken away from her and any pretense of marriage to Kane was abandoned. One October night, five men were brought to her room. She was forced to have sex with all of them. She had entered Luciano’s world of prostitution. Burr was taken from hotel to hotel, where she was rented out to men. Kane passed her on to another booker known as Ko-Ka-Mo Joe. If Burr refused to do what he said, Kane threatened to turn her over to the police, telling them she was a bad girl and a prostitute.

  A few days later, the forlorn Burr was taken to an apartment on West Fiftieth Street. There she was sold to another booker for $300. She was told to submit quietly to the life of a prostitute, as she could make a great deal of money out of it, but she ran away from the apartment. She went back to Ko-Ka-Mo Joe, who had shown a degree of kindness toward her, and he took her away to Philadelphia. When they returned to New York in November they were arrested. Joe was held on a charge of statutory rape. When Burr was examined by a doctor, he said “her body is covered with black and blue marks from mistreatment and that her coccyx is injured possibly from sex violation. She walks with difficulty and throughout the interview complained of pains in the back.”

  Sometimes the men wanted to get out of the business, too. Pete Balitzer was a booker who got into trouble with the Combination. Pete’s girlfriend, Mildred, tried to sort it out for him by talking to Little Davie Petillo. She saw him on Mulberry Street.

  “What is this I hear about this bonding of houses and the protection of bookies?” she asked him. “Pete is having a lot of trouble with the East Side fellows and I hear that you are interested in it; is that right?”

  Little Davie said he was.

  “They are asking Pete for a lot of money,” she carried on. “He can’t pay it. I would like for you to do something about it.”

  Little Davie shrugged and said Pete had to pay up like all the other bookers. She wanted to know who was heading the operation. “Is Lucky behind this?”

  He said he was. Mildred later told Little Davie she was getting married to Pete and he still wanted out of the business.

  “He can’t get out,” said Little Davie, “he owes too much money.”

  She said it was a shakedown racket and that Pete was ending up borrowing from the Mob’s own Shylocks. The money was going around in a circle. Mildred then said she was going to see Luciano directly about the problem.

  “It won’t do you any good,” said Little Davie, “because anything I do is all right with him.”

  Shortly after they got married, Mildred Balitzer made the journey all the way down to Miami in January 1935 to see Luciano. She saw him at the racetrack and talked to him at the Paddock & Grill Bar.

  “You know I am married to Pete now,” she told Luciano. “I want Pete to get out of the business, but he can’t get out because of the money he owes. They constantly shake him down.”

  Luciano said he’d have a word with Little Davie back in New York. Mildred didn’t forget and wouldn’t give it up. Five months later she met with Luciano at the Villanova Restaurant on Forty-sixth Street. Luciano told her that he’d spoken to Little Davie and there was nothing he could do to help Pete. “When he pays the dough and not until then he can get out.”

  “That goes back to the same argument,” said Mildred exasperated. “He can’t get out. He can never catch up. He can never pay.” She then changed tack. “You are the only one who can do anything for me. Please do something for me.”

  Luciano was resolute. Business was business. He said there was nothing he could or would do about it.

  “You know the racket,” he concluded. “Let them alone.”

  For Mildred Balitzer that was the end of the road.

  Peggy Wilde was a madam of some experience. Her first brothel was on Ninety-fifth Street and Broadway in the early 1920s and there she entertained both Legs Diamond and Charles Luciano. Raised in East Harlem, she had married a musician at sixteen and had a child at seventeen. When the musician left, she set up her sex business. By 1934, the Combination called on her. Johnny Fredericks told her: “You have to bond or you can’t run.” She said she’d think about it, but over the next two weeks strangers came to her house and harassed her. Other madams advised her to bond and avoid trouble. She did so.

  The fate awai
ting madams who messed around with the Combination was made clear when Tommy the Bull spoke to Luciano. He told him about a madam who was paying for three girls, but was really running five.

  “What should we do about it?”

  “Take good care of her,” said Luciano, “next week she will know what to give.”

  “Okay,” said Tommy, “I will see [an enforcer] tonight and tell him what to do.”

  In another instance, when madam Dago Jean refused to bond, Luciano told Little Davie to “go ahead and wreck the joint.”

  All these women would eventually have their day of vengeance in court and were happy to give their testimony to Dewey and his investigating team. When one Nancy Presser spoke to them, she even revealed a little of Luciano’s personal sex life. Nancy had known Luciano for eight years and was one of his many on-off lovers. When she visited him at his hotel room at the Barbizon-Plaza, she told him that she was hard up and thinking of working in one of his brothels. He told her not to work there and if she ever needed money to ask him and he would give it to her.

  Presser’s best friend was Thelma Jordan and she added a further dimension to this relationship when she revealed the following intimate detail to the investigators: “Nancy Presser told me that Charles Luciano was diseased during the time of her visits to him at the Barbizon-Plaza and that he used to give her money despite the fact that she did not have relations with him.”

  Throughout this investigation, it is surprising that Luciano’s second-in-command, Vito Genovese, was never brought into the picture. According to Nick Gentile, Genovese had been involved in the operation of brothels throughout the 1920s. Perhaps because of Luciano’s direct involvement, Genovese had shifted his own interests to other rackets, such as setting up gambling clubs. Gentile was in competition with Genovese in this field and described the services they offered.

  “These premises, decorated in an expensive fashion, were located in the section occupied by Chinatown and the lowest element of New York,” recalled Gentile. “It was frequented by people of all races: Syrians, Chinese, etc., individuals who lived on the fringes of society, capable of anything, thieves, assassins, who for a handful of dollars, were always ready to undertake any crime whatsoever.