by Al Zuckerman
When he became his own boss, Izzie again took off for the mosquitoey, malaria-ridden Oriente, Camagüey and Las Villas Provinces. For almost a month he rode about on cramped trains, was buffeted on rugged Sierra Maestra roads, while he made certain that he was buying his blackstrap molasses and sugar for less than any other bootlegger in the U.S. With the same thoroughness he went about procuring his bottles, wooden cases, yeast, disodium phosphate, spare parts for his vehicles—and tommy guns for his muscles.
Izzie published no annual reports. But the word got out. He had partners—the two biggest dealers in the East. And they in turn had accountants who would preempt Izzie’s bare office—a hastily walled-off corner of the Harrison factory, decades of grime ground into its splintery floor—and pore over his ledgers as indefatigably as prospectors sifting pans of sand for hidden specks of gold. Izzie, enjoying good health and wishing to continue to do so, wisely made it a point to bury no such specks. The income and expense statements these eagle-eyes totted up were, in a word, astounding. And these men were cynics, impressed by nothing but irrefutable, hard numbers.
The number-checking boys were only the first to be amazed. Waxey Gordon normally didn’t deign personally to count a lot of cash. But on a sweltering July Saturday some three months after he had acquired his seventy-five percent interest in Garden State Varnish, the figure mentioned as his piece of that week’s take struck him as so grossly bounteous that he turned the canvas overnight bag upside down, spewed the mound of twenty dollar packets onto his inlaid desk, and set about retallying the money himself.
When Gordon—whose subordinates, including New York’s Mayor Walker, called him Mister Wexler, or Irving, but never Waxey—shoved the sawbucks back into the suitcase, he believed it. This was no fluke. Seventy-five percent of the Hoboken pot now was bringing him more than any of the comparable-sized cookers he owned one hundred percent.
He convened his four still chiefs. Did they realize that Beckstein’s gopher, a kid so green he still smelled from herring, was making each one of them look like a baboon? But now, finished! No more cocking around. Every rathole had better be plugged, and on the quick, or one of these nights they’d find themselves in deep water. Then Mr. Wexler called in Izzie. Jocular, all smiles, he asked, weren’t there other ways in which they might perhaps broaden the scope of their association?
Sally Pirone, acting for Joe Masseria, followed an almost identical course.
Izzie in both instances begged off as diplomatically’ as he could. His night-and-day grind, he explained, was already far more than one small guy like himself could handle. He didn’t know how much he fooled them; all he knew was that he had to avoid deals where he’d be called upon to put the skids under other rum rings, which could lead to their putting the whacks on him. Maybe it would be his blood, maybe theirs; what for? A lot of ball-busting for which the big boys would pay him some crumb of the action?
The overtures kept coming, though, from wheels in other cities, men whom he got to know trading his excess Scotch for their oversupply of Canadian, his 190 proof for their French via-Saint Pierre brandy, his trucks and wheelers for their speedboats and go-through guys. Izzie Hargett, it came to be known, was a one-way egg. If he said his groceries were uncut Haig & Haig, they were. His 190 proof tested out 190. If the goods happened to be redistilled industrial alky with a touch of poison still in it, he admitted it. His merchandise arrived when promised, and his lettuce did too. And the word was out that if Hargett was in a deal, it made money—unusual money. Propositions had come in as far back as 1927: to participate in a fleet of Lake Erie powerboats; to oversee cookers in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in Norfolk, Virginia, in Allentown, Pennsylvania; to take over a hurricane-damaged Las Villas sugar mill; to buy into a world famous Dundee, Scotland distillery. Except for a few close-by still offers, he declined them all, always giving the impression that making the decision had been agonizing. He did have his hands pretty full, especially in wholesale sugar, which he’d been able to expand without having to play in the backyard of anyone who might get his life insurance canceled. Sure, he was limiting his potential take, but also his chances of becoming shark bait.
He knew that as long as he could make the bucks, serious money, he would be valuable to Waxey and Joe the Boss. So valuable that they would not push him. So valuable that Izzie’s health and well being would become goddamn necessary—vital. And the more top guys involved, the more vital—so long as the payoff to them stayed good. And mightn’t this lead eventually to his effectively controlling not only them, but also their organizations?
That was the plan he’d bit by bit formulated, and that was the plan that stayed with him.
Then there were the friends—whose contributions though unforeseen, had been essential to his success—from the days in the schoolyard at P.S. 165 ten long years before. Blinkie Nathanson, grown fat as a house, ran a central truck-dispatching office out of West Street for the two stills and the bottling plant. Louie Okun, sporting a dapper pencil-line mustache, managed the Club Corfu and the four smaller speaks. Red Tannenbaum, having built up an encyclopedic store of dirty jokes, traveled Westchester and Connecticut, selling the 190 proof to juice joints. Harry Klauber, who’d been given his own office with a gold-lettered sign on the door, “Chief of Credit and Collections,” did little but provide Izzie with a physically imposing presence.
Izzie had even managed to stay close with Julie Dubrowsky, who with Little Nathan’s death was now known throughout the trade as Hargett’s partner. Izzie could never have made his extensive expeditions to Cuba without a no-nonsense and wholly trustworthy right hand at home to deal intelligently and firmly with thefts, raids and other potential catastrophes. So Julie was payrolled fifteen hundred a week—more than Izzie himself took. But it was a limited partnership. Julie got only ten percent of his employer’s action. No one knew this, however, but those two. It was Izzie’s way of keeping Julie from being referred to as his old chum’s second fiddle.
But Izzie knew the “partnership” couldn’t last. Nutsy had never grown up. He was still apt to flare up on slight provocation, to bet huge sums on which of two flies would land first on a sugar cube, to match his manhood against anyone’s. And he was, Iz knew, accommodating himself while stashing away a stake and keeping his eyes open wide for an angle. Julie was not meant to take a back seat to anyone. That he was dancing, even temporarily, to the tune of a jack he considered his peer, was perhaps the most compelling testimony to Izzie’s tact.
Not all Izzie’s old buddies depended on him for their beans and beer. Andrew Feld clerked for a porcelain giftware importer by day, and by night dozed through engineering lectures at City College. Ernie Blomberg managed the Empire Theatre and was laboring to compose a comedy. Reuben Silverberg had escaped from his father’s refrigerators to a clerkship with a Canal Street attorney. Dan Keohane earned slightly better money at a Tammany-connected midtown law firm. Months would go by with Izzie’s having no contact with any of them. Nonetheless he stayed close to them all. For when he saw them, he joined into their worlds so feelingly, that despite the infrequency of these get-togethers, each of his old buddies felt that Izzie was his closest friend.
* * *
His family had become less of a bulwark. Morris was gone. Izzie had arranged for his brother to be offered a half-interest in an eighty-room Miami Beach hotel at a price which Iz persuaded Morris, his cheeks rosy again despite the scars, was too good to turn down; he would no longer be dazzled by the gyrating numbers of the bootleg business—nor exposed again to its “accidents.”
Rhea too was gone, married to Jacob Meiselman and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her young man was taking in regular money just for studying—and from the blue-blood goyim. Izzie missed Rhea. Hers was the one smile he could always believe and feel refreshed by. And he felt more pride at his kid sister and her husband’s Harvard scholarships than at his own vastly larger prizes.
His father too in a way was gone. While recovering his s
trength in the Catskills, following a cardiac confinement at Mount Sinai, Izzie’s prematurely aged pop had met a widow whom forty years earlier he’d known in Brest-Litovsk. A jaunty lady, built like a small armored car, she now owned a hardware store on Jerome Avenue not far from the brand-new Yankee Stadium—a store known, she crowed, all over the West Bronx for its linoleum. Her name was Fanya Koppelman, and she and Marilyn took an instant dislike to one another. So when Mr. Khargetnish decided to wed the lady, there was no question of her moving into the West End Avenue apartment—not that Mrs. Koppelman had the slightest desire to. Izzie, to help Khayim have at least a shot at making his voice heard in what promised to be an unequal match, bought the apartment building which housed Fanya’s store and gave it to his pop as a wedding present. She might run the store, but he at least could be the landlord. As it turned out, their arrangement worked. But Iz rarely got up to the Bronx, and he missed the old man.
* * *
Then Iz got married. It didn’t happen quite so simply as it had for his father.
In late November of 1928, Julie and then Harry the Doctor (a nickname Klauber had acquired ever since he’d been the one to stop Julie’s bleeding when Dubrowsky had been wounded at the cellar crap game) on successive days were shot at and almost killed while fighting off hijackers, presumably Maranzano men teeing off against Iz’s Masseria-connected alky. Izzie had turned for advice to Pirone, the only investor Iz had deemed it prudent to take into his burgeoning sugar business. Pirone, a Calabrese, was wily enough to keep both Sicilian camps beholden to him because of his efficient wholesaling of both sides’ home brew, the stuff manufactured in thousands of stinking slum tenements. Sally’s information was vague. The Dutchman maybe, or possibly Vincent Coll acting as a free lance, but not Maranzano. Izzie’s own sources came up with varying hypotheses, but also none which pointed to the Sicilians. Izzie was stymied. Only one truck had been lost so far, but he was worried.
For three days and nights, all piercingly cold, Iz had lived in his Packard, personally commanding the escort of his Brooklyn trucks over the Manhattan Bridge, westward on Canal Street’s slippery cobblestones, and through the still-new, white-tiled Holland Tunnel to Harrison. There were no new attacks. As mysteriously as they’d begun, they stopped. On the second day, though, his nose began to run and on the third his throat grew sore. The postnasal phlegm choking him and burning away at his gorge would not stop. Getting dressed after his first bit of sleep, he blacked out bending to pull on his pants. He dragged himself to West Street nonetheless, gasping for breath and hurting with every swallow. By afternoon, he’d lost his voice totally. And his throat was aglow as if with hot coals. He wondered if he weren’t about to die.
For the second time in his life—the first had been at Ellis Island—he was looked at by a doctor, an unkempt gray-haired crocus who pronounced, “Not only you got tonsils, but also adenoids.”
The following day, lying between crisp sheets in Beth Israel Hospital on Second Avenue, he felt cool, soft, but also firm fingers about his wrist. Groggy still from the anesthetic, he opened his eyes and saw a haze which solidified into a girl—all in white. Her dark eyes shining, she put a finger to her mouth. No, he mustn’t try to speak.
Her name was Hannah Minkoff, and she quickly decided that he was more determined and sure of himself than any man she’d ever met, more serious than either of her two on-again, off-again interns, and more prosperous—but that mainly because he owned an automobile.
Izzie spent money sparingly. He wore respectable enough factory-made suits, and was guarded about his wealth. One of the qualities he appreciated in Hannah was her respect for the dollar. And he liked her conservative clothes which she sewed herself, her unwillingness to be tempted to eat trayf, her knack for getting on with his sister Marilyn and his stepmother Fanya, her interest in his wartime reminiscences, and her contentment to keep silent when he was in no mood to talk or to listen.
They were married in a narrow brownstone Harlem synagogue, half a block from upper Park Avenue, underneath whose elevated railroad tracks Hannah’s father peddled woolens and cottons by the yard to kerchiefed immigrant women. The shul was poor, prayer books in tatters, walls faded, cracked, but somehow holy, as if its flaking paint were imbued with generation upon generation of tears and dreams. Izzie hadn’t been in such a place since childhood. He felt discomfited and nostalgic.
At the moment of stamping his shoe down on the glass, he hesitated. He’d courted this white-gowned, lustrous-skinned girl with such headlong fervor that he’d never planned how he’d handle her finding out about his business. To Hannah and her family, he was a sugar importer and wholesaler, which after all was the truth. She’d be happier not knowing more. What did she need it for? Her job would be children—diapers, formulas, raising up boys, men he could count on, who might become his true partners. Not that he was ashamed of bootleg. Just the opposite. But the dangerous aspects might worry her needlessly. Sooner or later she’d find out of course, and then she’d live with it too—like the rest of his family.
He kicked down, shattering the glass. The guests all applauded. It took him forever to gather her thick veil and move it out of the way, so he could kiss her. His fingers felt clumsy, stiff, made of wood. Finally his lips were pressing against hers. Her smells, sweet flower scents, and a faint bitterness too, made blood race to his head. Her flesh so pliant, yielding. His. His wife.
He’d raise this pushcart owner’s daughter up with him into—an empress. He’d give her every good thing she could ever dream of.
CHAPTER 5
The sun’s warmth crept through his skin and seemed gently, pleasantly to be baking its way into his bones. Eyes closed against the early afternoon glare and against the spatters of sand kicked up by kids racing to and from the surf, he felt at peace, almost glad he’d let Rhea, in from Boston, persuade him to come. Beaches were not his favorite. Who had the patience to lie around for hours? For a swim he liked a clear Catskill lake, and for a little sun, the room at West End Avenue. No sand dirtied up his hair there, and the phone was close by. But with Morris and his family up North for July at a bungalow in the Wavecrest section of Rockaway, and with the Manhattan temperature in the nineties, Izzie had had to admit a family outing might be nice. Still, at breakfast he’d urged Hannah to go without him. He’d pointed to a helter-skelter pile on his night table, Havana sugar reports, Dundee offerings, Bordeaux agents’ correspondence. He did not mention two shipments of Canadian rye due in from Buffalo which were a day late. He had a presentiment they’d need angleworming—from Schultz’s boys, or from God knows who—and he ought to stick close. Rockaway was only an hour away, but a lot of dough could burn up in an hour. …
Now, lying between his wife and sister-in-law, sated with cold chicken, sour pickles, rye bread and oranges, listening to Lillian’s lecture on breast-feeding, “The milk ain’t got no good vitality unless every bite of food inside the mother is fresh—like eggs ya know positive is only one day old.” Izzie forgot his Canadian rye. In his mind’s eye he saw a baby, a lusty one, gobbling at Hannah’s breast—his son.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Fingers cold. Calloused.
“Boss, ya better get up.”
Blinded by the brightness, without seeing he knew. It was Kayo Kronsky, his barrel-chested wheelman.
Izzie rose and lurched away from the others, not looking back. This—whatever it was—would not be for women to hear. It took a minute before they reached an unpopulated patch of beach.
“Okay, let’s have it.”
“It’s Mister Dubrowsky, boss.”
Julie—hurt? “What about him?”
“He says they put the snatch on Mister Pirone, but not to jump outta your skin, cause he’s personally gonna take care a them Ginnies.”
Iz’s panic swelled. Sally jammed up was worse. “What Ginnies?”
“I dunno. He jus’ said them double-crossin hopheads.”
Tensed to race to the car, Izzie first turned back to his
suddenly anxious sisters, brother, wife. His business was worrisome enough in general, without their knowing its particulars.
“There’s a fire at the warehouse.” Then as if hell-bent to extinguish it, he tore off across the hot sand, Kayo sprinting behind him.
Izzie dove into the Packard, still in his bathing suit, his guts tight, mouth dry, ears buzzing. He hadn’t felt this scared since his brother was burnt up.
Sally was his life insurance.
Lately, though, the normally chary Italian had gone skating out onto thin ice. Wholesaling horse had proved such a bonanza that he’d decided to go the whole shebang and import it too, and he’d managed to unsnarl some of the innermost veins of what had been Arnold Rothstein’s empire. The former Number One had spent two years and about a million dollars setting up the operation and been killed before he’d seen a nickel back from narcotics. But Sally had begun to reap Rothstein’s harvest. This meant he was frying much of the fat off what had been the monopoly of a long-established semirecluse who lived in a walled estate in Riverdale, and whose name was Vito Belcastro.
Iz knew all this because Sally, earning generous dividends from Izzie’s sugar trade, had invited his pal to take a piece of the dope action. The circumspect Jew had declined. Hopheads gave Izzie the creeps, as did Belcastro. The rumble was that the old man had grown up in Tunis, which may or may not have been true. But it was a known fact that Belcastro was the only hop merchant in the U.S. whose enforcers were Arabs and Turks, and that anyone so foolish as to incur Mr. Belcastro’s displeasure might expect to have his private parts sliced off with a curved toothedge dagger and then have them stuffed down into his throat until he strangled to death.