by Al Zuckerman
But from being careful about a guy, jumping all the way to rubbing him out—why …?
That’d need hate. And when had there been hate?
Once definitely was after Manzo got hold of Boris. Even though the reason Little Nathan couldn’t be reached was that he was down the South Jersey coast for an import deal, Boris had blamed Beckstein for not being there to call off the torture, and then had refused to see him or even talk to him on the phone. Izzie had had to step in as go-between. Which made Nathan mad as hell, and in some weird way he’d blamed Iz. But that had been so many months ago. …
And one other time, way back, was when Little Nathan had told Izzie to use his pop for a rabbi.
The law provided that a Jew was allowed for sacramental purposes a gallon of wine annually, to be distributed to him by his rabbi. The rabbi needed only to present a list of his congregants to the Prohibition Bureau, and he would be issued a permit allowing him to withdraw from bonded stocks an equivalent amount of wine. Except who was a rabbi? No archbishop certified them. So the Republican clubhouse boys who held the clerk jobs would, for a small bribe, happily grant their official seal to any old Jew who showed up with a reasonable-looking list. As a result, so-called rabbis were retailing wine in apartments, pool rooms, groceries, and even pork stores.
Khayim had been reluctant. Izzie knew that if he pleaded hard, his father would have agreed. But what for? The profit from a few hundred or even a thousand gallons of Malaga wasn’t worth it—not in terms of Poppa’s health.
Little Nathan for weeks had been enraged nonetheless.
But what would he be mad about right now?
“You got,” Izzie asked his friend, “any other ideas?”
“I’ll think on it.”
“Thanks, Sally.”
“Be careful, Iz.”
He’d be careful, all right. If this heavy music had been Nathan’s—he’d be more careful than any man had ever been.
Little Nathan sat up, reached out in the dark, snared the glass without fumbling, and filled his mouth, throat, mind with the warming Scotch. Seemed like a hundred hours he’d been shifting around, settling into positions he couldn’t get comfortable in—much less sleep in.
That fuckin Izzie. What to do with him now? Bring in some first class out-of-town help and accomplish the job right? Or forget the whole thing? It hadn’t been exactly smart, Nathan realized, his losing his temper just because some sidekick at Waxey Gordon’s office hadn’t recognized him. Nathan should not have let the kid be the one to go in there all the time with the boodle. The hang-up was, the kid was so damn efficient.
And then Gangy’s story about Iz’s taking kickbacks from Pirone. Could the muscle have been lying? … Nah, Rudnick was too lame-brained to have made all that up out of his own head. But that didn’t prove it was true either.
Too bad he couldn’t just send the kid packing, but the little big ears knew too damn much. “Ask Mr. Hargett,” every customer, every supplier, “Ask Mr. Hargett.” The putz knew everything. Which made him the most terrific kid around, if you could be sure he wasn’t hyping you. But why the hell shouldn’t he be? Crazy not to. If not today, then next week.
No, Izzie would have to go. And this time with some Detroit talent. Eighteen-carat stuff. Because if there were slipups a second time, the kid would catch on, and fast as an electric light. And Izzie with that Nutsy Dubrowsky and the rest of his crew could get rough back.
RRRRRNNNNNG!
Who the fuck was calling now? Nathan didn’t move. He didn’t want to pick up the phone. He didn’t want even to touch it.
RRRR—
“Yeah?”
“Boss, that you?”
He recognized the voice of Gray Mendy, his doorman and second bouncer at the Corfu. Shit, probably a raid. “Yeah, what’s up?”
“Big Gangy, boss. …”
Nathan kicked his feet out from under the covers and reached for the night table where he kept a gun, while he snapped, “What about him, what happened?”
“They—they took him for a ride.”
“They?” Nathan felt his windpipe tightening. “Who? Who took him?”
“I dunno. They conked me from behind; I on’y jus’ came to.”
Nathan sprang to his feet, fingers clenched fast around the steel of his new Luger automatic. Two-to-one this was Izzie. Had to be. Brass-face kid had somehow got the right slant and put the sneeze on Rudnick. All right, but when? How long ago? Shit, right now Hargett and his muscle pals could be outside the house.
“Shmuck,” Nathan snarled softly into the phone, “think careful—like it’s your own skin I’m talkin. When? How long ago? What time’d this happen?”
“Say, maybe, I dunno, half an hour.”
“Clear out the club, close it and do a fade,” he barked. “Hole up till you hear from me.” Nathan slammed down the receiver, and barefoot hurried out to the Gramercy Park brownstone’s front room salon to alert his nighthawk, Long Boy Hymie.
Some hawk. Long Boy, stretched out, legs drooping off the couch, didn’t even stir. What Nathan could see of the street, circular sections made eerily visible by the street lamps, seemed deserted. The park’s black shapes loomed quiet as a cemetery.
He’d lam out, then do his thinking. And it’d be faster and probably just as safe if he left Hymie.
He grabbed his shoes and slipped a raincoat on over his pajamas. He knew an all-night speak on Lexington. From there he’d call a cab.
Half a block east he heard footsteps behind him, rapid footsteps. His hand tightened on the gun, and he swiveled his head for a look back.
More than one guy. A block or so back. Hard in the dark to pick out exactly how many. Two shadows darted behind a parked car. They didn’t want him to see them. Bad news.
But one joker, someone small, hatless, running like he wasn’t worried a bit about who saw him, was coming up fast. The jerk passed under a streetlight, and Nathan saw a fleck of bright blue. One jack had a sweater that color. Hargett.
The shiver down his spine felt like ice.
Little momzer. Nathan would chop him, burn him personally.
But was the kid packing a rod? He didn’t usually. What difference? No choice. Nothing else to do. Crazy stupid to start blasting here, in the middle of a million sleeping John Does and cops. But what else…?
Ducking behind a cement balustrade, stiffening his arm, aiming for the blue chest, Nathan squeezed the Luger.
CRAAAACK! CRAAAACK! CRAACK!
Gevalt, the maniac was still coming, running, charging right toward him, as if bullets couldn’t hurt him, as if he were Christ, or the Angel of Death, or the Evil Eye himself.
CRAAACK! CRAAAAACK!
Had he missed again? Nathan was hypnotized by the flailing shadowy arms and legs, churning closer, bigger. But that was Hargett. Running right at the bullets. The kid was not human, not real—a fiend.
Nathan’s guts suddenly left him. This was an Evil Eye. He yearned desperately to spit, to ward it off, but no time.
Last shot. His whole arm wobbled. He clamped his jaw together, steeled himself, aimed.
CRAAAACK!
The kid was tripping, stumbling. Nathan, relieved, drank in air.
Should he run, get away from those other two? Or first make sure the punk bastard was really finished?
Nathan’s blood froze. He gagged. Hargett was still coming at him.
Minutes later when the police arrived, they found a nauseating sight. The corpse’s forehead had been laid open to the bone, its face bludgeoned, possibly by a pistol, so ferociously that it had become a pulp of disconnected teeth and red ooze. And the corpulent body had been impaled on an eight-foot-high wrought iron fence, four pointed spikes through its chest.
Though photographs of the maimed man were published in newspapers across the nation, law-enforcement agencies failed not only to apprehend his killer but even to identify the body.
Nathan’s employees, accountants, and lawyers, with the exception of Big Gangy
Rudnick who vanished without a trace, continued in their functions. None complained of the bootlegger’s absence. Beckstein’s old mother was too intimidated by the manner of her son’s death to speak up, especially since one of his former corporations continued sending her a regular check.
Izzie’s fantastic derring-do was prompted more by rage than by bravery—as also was his violence. From the moment Big Gangy gurglingly uttered Little Nathan’s name, Iz had become a creature possessed. But Iz’s rushing in the face of bullets also had been an act of desperation. At the last moment Izzie’s gun had jammed. This though he never told anyone. Nor did anyone ever find out that when he was safely home, Izzie had fainted dead away—right after the call that told him his brother would recover.
Izzie’s reputation as a guy not to be fooled with was established by Julie and Harry, who had witnessed a determination so indomitable that they could attribute it only to supernatural powers. Izzie, while tearing into Beckstein, had also been suffering from a bullet that had broken his collar bone.
Stills and bottling plants west to Minneapolis and south to Saint Louis all got the news. And the underworld’s keenest minds took note too of other of Izzie’s characteristics. The young man had had the finesse to consult with Waxey Gordon and Joe Masseria and get their okay before sullying the profession’s good name with unpleasant headlines. Hargett had had the farsightedness too to offer Waxey a seventy-five percent interest in Little Nathan’s New Jersey business and the Mafia don a fifty percent share in the Brooklyn enterprise. The young fellow knew how to make important friends.
In the two years before the jazz age writhed in its death throes, a victim of the stock market crash of 1929, Izzie formed connections with bootleggers across the land. As his own man, he prospered. When he was not quite twenty-six, his assets approached two million dollars.
CHAPTER 4
The onset of the worst economic depression this country had ever seen, combined with Repeal and with the all-consuming internecine greed of the alky business’s overlords, led to the wiping out of almost every top bootlegger in Chicago and New York, America’s two commercial nerve centers. Waxey Gordon and Al Capone’s careers were smashed when they were jailed for income tax evasion. Dion O’Banion, Frankie Yale, Arnold Rothstein, Jack “Legs” Diamond, Joe “The Boss” Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano and Dutch Schultz exited the scene more bloodily.
For Izzie, though, first there was a happy period. Taking Little Nathan’s empire in hand, Izzie plunged into the workaday give-and-take of deal-making: on sugar, yeast, bottles, machinery, real estate, imported goods, and accommodations with the law. He liked face-to-face meetings, testing himself and his adversary. Within months he had become, on a local level, adept at business practices earlier pioneered by the Duponts and the Mellons, such as fixing prices and divvying up markets.
Headaches, of course, were never-ending. Or, as he put it when Marilyn, concerned, would demand to know why he was swallowing aspirins like they were peppermints, “I got more problems in my head than an anthill has ants.” A freight car laden with cracked, unusable bottles. The Harrison building heating boiler exploding in frigid January, knocking out production for three weeks, causing customers to turn to other suppliers. The Brooklyn foreman moonlighting a fur-loft heist and getting himself nabbed. The dynamiting of three rigs, each loaded with a full eight hundred cases, marking the collapse of a long-nurtured, tortuously negotiated deal to spread his distribution into New Brunswick and Trenton.
Despite all this, bossing his own business stimulated him, at times thrilled him, as nothing ever had. And Garden State Varnish grew.
The first big trouble came on Saint Valentine’s Day, February 11, 1929. A light snow was powdering Chicago, the temperature fifteen degrees below freezing, when five hired killers, two of them masquerading in police uniforms, invaded George “Bugs” Moran’s red brick warehouse-garage on North Clark Street, lined seven men unloading a shipment of Canadian whiskey up against a wall, and swung their tommy guns back and forth three times at the victims’ heads, chests and stomachs; then blasted them with shotguns. Police found corpses held together only by shreds of flesh. Faces were all but obliterated. So brazen and fiendish a massacre, photographs of which sickened newspaper and magazine readers around the world, made Chicago appear to be a howling wilderness. A hundred-thousand-dollar reward was offered, the highest such price in history. Izzie, though more than a thousand miles away and in no way involved, was shaken, as indeed were all who toiled at helping America quench its great thirst.
Until that day, most Americans viewed bootleggers more as folk heroes than as criminals. But suddenly the nation shuddered, and then was engulfed in a tidal wave of disgust. The slain were family men, husbands, a father of six little children. Capone, who had been the pride of Chicago, the hero of the downtrodden, was hounded out of the city he had all but owned. Although his alibi was airtight, since he was in Florida at the time, his enmity towards Bugs Moran was common knowledge. Suddenly the Chicago police had to stop using their departmental vans for whiskey deliveries; in other municipalities the cops had to make a show of smashing bottles.
Izzie’s interests were not seriously harmed, but at West Street he lost seventy cases of precious, uncut Dewar’s. Which was not the problem. The problem was how to put the kibosh on such headline-dominating slaughter, before he and every other nose-to-the-grindstone booze guy really was forced out of business—if not by gunsels, then by the Government.
Izzie so far had managed to forestall large-scale attacks on his cookers. He had no illusions, though. His adroit arrangements could crumble in an instant. New York was ripe for a Chicago-style bloodbath, especially since Arnold Rothstein, the arbiter of the underworld, had been killed in 1928. And back in 1927, emissaries from Illinois had ended the career of Frankie Yale, the number one operator in Brooklyn, as a reprisal for his hijacking Capone-owned shipments from Europe en route to Chicago. Attacking into Jersey from the Bronx with exploding pineapples, young maniac Dutch Schultz (born Arthur Flegenheimer) had begun swallowing small chunks of Waxey Gordon’s empire. Around Greenwich Village and East Harlem, Salvatore Maranzano’s Castellamarese Sicilians were waylaying and garroting boys connected with Joe the Boss, while setting trap after trap for “the head of all heads” himself. So while Izzie quietly raked in profits like autumn leaves under a big oak, he knew that one lighted match could send the whole pile and him too up in flames.
To try to stave off such a disaster, he badgered Sally and others into joining with him and the other rational and forward-looking distillers to organize a nationwide peacemaking conclave. Getting the big Jews to sit down would be Izzie’s department. Three months later, in May, some thirty entrepreneurs foregathered at the President Hotel adjacent to the boardwalk in Atlantic City. They came from as far as Kansas City. Of different temperaments and backgrounds, they had essentially two things in common: age—youthful, all but one or two in their thirties or forties; and vulnerability—with a wish jointly to lessen it.
Al Capone was invited strictly for “class”—as a lure. He’d come, he explained to the reporters who dogged him everywhere, only for the sun and salt air. His likeness was splashed on hundreds of front pages.
Izzie passed unnoticed by the press. At twenty-six he was the youngest there. Through three long days of speechmaking and across-the-table discussion, although he was called upon and accorded a turn, he never once rose to speak—always deferring to Sally or one of his other colleagues. Some inchoate instinct insisted, no, he wasn’t ready. Besides, a reticence might set him apart a little.
Yet the loose agreements which ultimately were reached, although publicly propounded by others, in no small measure derived their thrust from him. In private, often with Sally to make the introductions, his reserve melted. In the dub car on the train down from New York, in the hotel sipping breakfast coffee, on the boardwalk at night, he low-voicedly gabbed away with men, many of whom would rather fight than eat, men nearly twice his age�
��and they listened. Shooting up guys, he’d ask with a wry smile, was that ever really good for business? Couldn’t intelligent businessmen find different sides of the street to work, draw some dear lines on a map, peacefully settle who runs what? And if when Scotch, or any other basic product suddenly got scarce, they all had access to a central clearing point, wouldn’t that be a great way for trading off surpluses, and for keeping their cost from shooting up out of sight? Sure, there’d always be muscleheads stepping out of line. But that would be another beauty of this new organization. If a member had to be gaffed, the organization, everybody together, would take on the job.
Izzie was by no means the sole proponent of these views. Lending great prestige and an awesome record of accomplishments to their advocacy was elder statesman John Torrio, who’d flourished with similar arrangements in the Chicago area as early as 1916. To Torrio and a few others of his ilk, Izzie was the most intriguing person there.
Izzie’s rep stemmed, above all, from what seemed to be his innate gift for business. Nearly everyone in bootleg earned a healthy profit. But Izzie, shipping the same quantity as another dealer and selling it for a similar price, would earn more—often a great deal more. One reason was, he bought better. Most big stills, using real or phony candy companies as fronts, purchased their sugar and molasses from wholesale grocers or directly from the giant U.S. sugar corporation. Izzie, while still with Little Nathan, had journeyed to Cuba. He had inspected plantations, cane-milling plants, cane-juice clarifiers, raw-sugar boiling houses, temperature-controlled crystallizers. He had visited refineries—those whose machines were mossy, clanking, rust-encrusted relics of the nineteenth century and modern plants all electric-powered. The refinery owners took to the young, eager-to-learn gringo, so keen to please that he insisted on conversing with them in his halting Spanish—at least for the first few minutes. They felt fatherly toward the peak-eared little fellow who bravely pretended that he enjoyed their peppery food. But when he brought the discussion around to price, they sensed themselves in the presence of a shrewdness rarely encountered in one so young.