The Head of the House

by Al Zuckerman

  Farvel’s legs felt jellyish, like they might buckle. He grabbed a handful of plates, stuck them in the dish washer rack, and breathed in deeply. The sweaty walls were starting to spin around. He was afraid he might pass out.

  “What about my tigers?”

  Izzie heard the question, but the buzzing in his ears was louder, like a mosquito in the dark, inches away, droning. He had to hold himself in from snapping at poor Harry. The buzzing seemed to thrum, “More cash, boss. More cash, boss.” And in Iz’s mind he again saw two-ton Blinkie—his old whiz of a bootleg dispatcher, now his pit boss—waddle up to him, over and over, each time more hesitant, sorry-looking, guilty even. Not one shot in a thousand that this had been Blinkie’s fault. Dice could run bad. Cards could crap out. But—but as gone to hell as tonight?

  “D’you hear me, Iz?”

  And now Harry pestering him about tigers. What the hell was—and then Iz remembered. Yeah, he’d heard that, gambling talk for outside guards. Good old Doctor, filling up his head with proper words, trying to tune in on this business good.

  “You want they should come back tomorrow regular time?”

  His treasure, his all gleaming white Mayflower, with the real history-book, southern-mansion pillars out front, and ankle-deep rugs inside every room, just hardly launched, and already gone under. Maybe all but sunk. But Harry, trusty ox, not this, not any tiling would stop him from doing a job Iz had told him, not till The Doctor’s legs folded up.

  Beneath the buzzing, Izzie’s mind still computed fast: what to tell the crew? One of them (or two or three) might have helped work this clip, if it’d been a clip. Which could mean sifting through forty, fifty guys, counting spindlemen, stickmen, dealers, kitchen greaseballs. And then add on the flossies, two hatcheck girls, the half dozen bar waitresses. Have them all sit tight? Put the quiz on them? What would he get? Grilling that many people could take hours, days. And then if the gyp had been strictly outside, it’d be a waste. There’d be nothing.

  And that’d ruin the help for tomorrow.

  One thing he’d all but made up his mind was about tomorrow. To reopen. His Mayflower, that he’d rewired, repiped, reroofed, rebuilt from foundation piling reinforcements to the beds of lilies along the front walk, so the place was as classy as anything in Hot Springs or Saratoga, and prettier too—this bubeleh of his was going to get another crack. So that left him a day—less, really—not a lot of breathing space to pin down the rib-up. Unless some force beyond all reckoning had chosen to blacken his destiny, there had to be a way to smoke out the rat, and to do it just as good in the next five, six hours as in a month. And if worst came to worst, and he ended up with a handful of nothing, well. …

  And even if this bloodhound thing were to work, and quick: still, what about money? Would he have enough left to bank the play—if for an hour or two of openers he had to take the short end again? Reuben, Reuben, what was taking so long? His American-born cousin and pal who’d come down to double-check leases, deeds, and the million and one other lawyer papers—it felt like a year already since Silverberg had locked himself in to retally. Iz calculated that if Blinkie’s first-time-around figure, just under fifty Gs, checked out, to reopen would be tight but not impossible. With that much, plus maybe fifty more that Iz could scare up on the Jersey real estate, there’d be breathing space for a second shake.

  Tonight’s gravy had to be big news, rocketing by now all through Broward County, most of Dade, probably up as far as Palm Beach. Tomorrow the marks’d be sniffing blood. They’d flood him. He could recoup, and big, if he played, and if the percentages ran how they were supposed to, if if if. …

  He decided. Blinkie’s count, even if a few bucks high, had to be ninety-nine percent okay. He spoke dully. “Send your tigers home. And everyone else. Regular time tomorrow.”

  “What about our own boys?”

  Izzie tapped his knuckles, counted: Morris, Red, Louie, Kayo, Blinkie. The buzzing eased as he remembered them. Except for Kayo—useful, God knows, but a wolf you had to keep on a steel chain; Izzie felt warmed thinking of those guys out in the lounge, waiting on his word, worrying, their heads buzzing too, probably. One was his brother, but Iz felt as if all of them almost were. Last few years things had gone to hell in a bucket, but you’d never know it from them, from how they’d all stuck by—so far.

  At thirty-two Isadore Hargett, casino operator, looked almost the same as the boyish bootlegger who six years earlier had gambled and come out a double winner, saving his own neck and resurrecting Sally Happy from the dead. But though Iz’s body had stayed slight, his eyesight keen, teeth solid and white, and his wavy hair still thick and wholly brown, beneath these surfaces he had changed: He’d gained assurance.

  Through his bootleg years he’d lived with a deeply buried but nonetheless constantly nagging fear that the men he dealt with might, by some quirk, discover the truth, that the Hargett who dressed, spoke and gave orders as if he were a man, really was just a kid masquerading as a grown-up, a big-talk little greenie putting on an act.

  Now in 1935, poorer than he’d been in years, and living in a country riddled with despair, on the verge maybe of bloody revolution, Izzie saw himself quite differently. If he went bust, it’d be painful but temporary. Sure, there were plenty of guys with bigger houses, bankrolls, vocabularies than he—and some with more and tougher strongarms. But most of them, maybe all, if they were to strip down naked, to how they’d act with knives at their throats—he knew now that they’d be shitless puppies and he the grown-up. God or whoever had first dealt out the cards had given him a good hand. It was up to him now to keep on playing it smart. When he’d run against bullets to get Beckstein, and chanced poison gas to snatch Sally, Izzie had thought he’d had lucky breaks. Now he knew better. He was worried, but not afraid. At thirty-two he had the poise of an old general who’d lived with exploding bombs for twenty grisly years, who’d confronted the Angel of Death and fates worse, and who knew he was a match for anyone—but only if he knew who his enemy was.

  Iz, as he had in times past, would have turned for help to Sally, except that the now not-so-Happy Pirone was in the can, nailed by a punk federal attorney named Dewey who’d made the case against Sally’s cathouses; which, compared to Pirone’s other businesses, were scant as belches in a windstorm. And the rap was a not-to-be-believed twenty years. The day Sally Happy’s final appeal got nixed, headlines were as tall as when Capone himself rode off to boarding school. Even from Dannemora, the most remote of New York’s prisons, Sally nonetheless retained a say in much of the big action. But for Iz to get to him from Florida in one day—how?

  And Iz had no Julie Dubrowsky to turn to, either. Even when two thousand of Izzie’s mirrorlike, chrome-plated slot machines had been whacked to shards by Mayor LaGuardia’s cops wielding axes, Nutsy had refused to take a pay cut. His price was his price. Both men knew Iz had income still from outside action, and could carry Julie until something else got going, but Iz also knew Julie had a good stash, and that no one else was chomping to pay him fifteen Cs a week. But Julie, as if oblivious to the Depression and to the extreme heat everywhere, had held to his dare, wished his old pal a breezy good-bye, and lit out for California.

  After the slot machine smashup, Iz had fallen back on the insurance he’d kept in the kick, the old Garden State Varnish Company. Federal and state excise taxes were pushing the price of legal alky up so high that some of Iz’s old juice-joint customers had sought him out. Now he’d accommodate them. Though the heavy sugar was gone from the business, a buck still could be made; but he also knew he’d have to move in and out fast. The laws had been made tougher. And Treasury guys were now doing the cellar-smelling, and then gumshoeing after how much a guy spent on socks and underwear to get him on an income tax rap. With those Feds, there was no dependable way to put in the fix.

  So Iz, with two out-of-work brothers-in-law, and a father and brother too who needed help weekly, had quite naturally started giving thought to the protection busines
s. Union organizing and the violence that went with it were endemic to New York’s most populous and most Jewish industry, garment manufacturing. Since the War, the safeguarding of strikers and union organizers from management goons, and of management’s plants and products from union-wrought fires and bombs, had grown into a bonanza, second among Izzie’s peers only to bootleg. With Prohibition gone, it had become number one.

  Iz had nosed around slowly, carefully. Gurrah Shapiro and “Judge” Louis Lepke, he ascertained, really were dragging down more money than God. Except their money smelled a little. Sometimes a lot. Of blood. Being a big guy in bottled spirits had involved rough stuff—and worse; but basically he’d been selling booze and not the breaking of legs. No, this protection business wasn’t fitting for a Jew, or at least not for him—since Lepke and Shapiro after all were Jews.

  Iz’s being a father also had influenced him. Watching his ten-month-old David half up on his chubby little knees struggle to pull open a closet door was a whole new excitement, and one that aroused partially dulled sensitivities. Tender feelings which he had for this fluffy-haired baby, who could now scoot under beds fast as a little demon, spilled over into his business life. Evenings soon as he came home he’d peer into the darkened crib. Sometimes he’d imagine his son grown tall, robust, a real American—not a shrimp like himself. And this tiny screamer some day his right hand, his partner. But in what? A leg-breaking business? No, this kindt would never sweat the law, never know even what that meant. His son would hold that beautiful head of his up high as the American flag.

  Iz had Reuben take him around to deal-making lawyers and the companies they represented: trucking outfits, a bedspring maker, a fuel-oil distributor, two different cemetery groups. Weeks of digging around stretched into months. Iz settled finally on a sand-and-gravel quarry out on Long Island. The company’s books, painstakingly checked and double-checked, showed juicy profits for forty-three years, and looked a cinch for forty-three more. Inside of one, Iz felt lucky to get away and still hang onto his shirt. And meanwhile the dough coming in from his Pirone-run businesses had diminished so much Iz could stuff his nose with it and still not have trouble breathing. Plus Hannah was pregnant again.

  His pop, seeing circles under Iz’s eyes, told him to take a vacation. Reuben did too. When Sally Happy echoed them, Iz reserved half a Pullman car for his family and Harry’s, they rode and in thirty-seven hours they were in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

  Owney Madden, who’d been the smoothest of the New York Irishers back before Izzie even knew the word Prohibition, had the place in his pocket. The town wasn’t big—a few thousand all-year-rounders—but plenty big enough obviously for these quiet-speaking, small-town, banker-looking types who came for the mineral water, sedate hotels, golf—and of course the gaming rooms. The one week Iz had planned on zipped by, and he was only beginning to get a handle on exactly how the wheels were made to go round. He put off leaving—indefinitely.

  Watching a wizened, near-tottering oldster bend to his cupped hand and blow into it before rolling the dice, Iz suddenly saw the blowing as the man’s desperate straining to breathe fresh life back into himself. He found himself wondering, was this dice thing just a money game, or was it something bigger, deeper?

  A while later when another old bird got hot, more and more people from all over the room crowded around. A few of them reached out and touched his sleeve, his back, his ear even, as if his luck were some kind of electric charge they could draw off to themselves.

  What made this strange—mystical, kind of—business work? What really was the casino owner selling? Occasionally a player took home some folding money, but at best one out of twenty. Yet men everywhere, no matter how well-heeled, seemed hungry to buy what these craps layouts and roulette wheels delivered—hope, a little hope. It figured. And one wallet in a place like this could be worth a hundred small horseplayers, a thousand policy bettors.

  Here was the new kingdom Izzie had dreamed of finding and making into his own.

  “You realize,” the aging Khayim, first hearing his son’s plan for a casino, chided, but with a twinkle, “you’ll be transgressing Jewish law.”

  Iz had smiled and then wondered to himself, back when it was Jews enforcing the laws, how’d they ever handle that one? Same as now? Guys putting in the fix? Except with the brass buttons also being Jews, wouldn’t they have been too wised up ever to write so hopeless a law?

  “Any man,” Pop was waving his finger sternly, “known to gamble was forbidden ever to become a judge, or even a witness in a court.”

  “Tottenyu, who doesn’t at least now and then play a little cards?”

  “The wisdom of our fathers”—the would-be scholar was not to be deterred—“was that gamblers are more greedy than most men, therefore more susceptible to taking bribes, therefore more likely to let the course of justice be twisted.”

  And such a brain, Iz sighed to himself, spent his life mumbling prayers, checking coal deliveries and making change for a nickel-and-dime hardware.

  Iz’s curiosity, though, had yet to be satisfied. “Pop, such a law, how’d they enforce it?”

  “How is any law enforced? Fines. Penalties.”

  “And for gambling?”

  “You had to pay back double. It was considered stealing.”

  “Two men play a little. One loses, one wins. Where’s the stealing?”

  “To that our fathers would answer you, it isn’t fitting for a Jew to throw away his precious substance in silly games; but it is yet more shameful that because of one Jew’s foolishness, a second Jew should enrich himself.”

  “But what about winning from, say, a Gentile? Was that all right?”

  “Well,” Khayim shrugged, maybe a trifle embarrassed, but again with a twinkle, “here in this country, that they’d call a—small offense.”

  * * *

  The problem was how and where to set up this not-so-small offense. He’d have to spring for serious money. And he could install rugs ankle deep and waitresses straight out of Ziegfeld’s chorus line, and still the joint would drop dead unless there were high rollers living all around it. And where were they? Half the country, lined up for the dole, didn’t have two cents to gamble on anything. And the other half was just barely squeaking by.

  The only way would be to hit on a resort, someplace like Hot Springs, where these goldfish like to come. He thought a minute. Hot Springs was small potatoes compared to Florida, in the wintertime anyway.

  It didn’t take brains or special prowling to know the number one spot was Miami. Racetracks, hotels, private mansions, lotta butter-and-egg men. Iz stayed at Morris’s hotel with the cracked stucco walls and began to explore. Miami, he concluded, all Dade County, for that matter, had two wrongers. Size. Too big for the fix to be low cost and also to be in really solid. And second, an ex-Maranzano torpedo named Trigger Joe Magiunto, who’d “arranged” that all horsebooks around town got the wire service through him. Magiunto also owned the whorehouses, squeezed protection from the nightspots, and ran two fair-sized sawdust joints.

  Iz, arriving to pay a courtesy call, was struck by the bull-like operator’s expert barbering, as if the heavy stubble of Magiunto’s beard had been shaved back under the skin. In the course of conversation The Trigger, brimming with pride about his domain, let drop that there hadn’t been an “accident” in the whole neighborhood in more than a year. And if no one came looking for trouble, there probably wouldn’t be any for a lotta years more.

  The police on Magiunto’s payroll, Izzie learned, had jurisdiction in Dade County only. So Hallandale, just a few miles out of town over the line in Broward, might be a possibility.

  In the busy year which followed Iz’s visit to Trigger Joe, the only smell of trouble had come two weeks ago down at the Florida East Coast train station, where Abbadabba Sheinkopf was due to arrive on the Orange Blossom Limited. Iz and Harry had waited and waited, but no one even resembling the nimble-fingered card-and-dice mechanic had showed. A day went by. A
nother. A week. No letter, no phone call, not a breath from the nebbish-looking shark. Iz, through the many months he spent renovating and equipping the Mayflower, had studied the house percentages on craps layouts, the twenty or so varieties of gaffed dice and the ways they could be slipped in and out of a game, and cardsharp methods such as a concealed strip of sandpaper or an inky fingernail to mark the pasteboards at the blackjack table. And he had come to realize that only a Class A hustler like Sheinkopf could keep on top of all the grifters who’d come along. But no Abbadabba. Vanished. Plucked off the face of the earth. Iz phoned, sent wires, to Saratoga, Hot Springs, Myrtle Beach, Baltimore, New York. A blank every time. The smell grew worse. Something had to be out of line. But with the million-and-one other pressures of the gala opening bearing down on Iz, he ran out of time to dope out what had happened to the mechanic.

  Now he saw. No Abbadabba, and tonight’s fiasco. Two to one, they were connected.

  The clip had been put in somehow. But how? Blinkie, a sharp pit boss, had had his eyes everywhere, as had Harry, Morris, Reuben, himself, even Ernie Blomberg who’d booked the entertainers and come down with Harry Earl. So then how? And more important—who? Magiunto? Nothing to go on, purely a guess, but who else had a reason?

  Izzie had believed that the live-and-let-live had been set solid. Emissaries not only from Sally Happy, but from Chicago, Tony Accardo himself, Ralph Fischetti from Detroit, even the Number One, Louie Lepke, all had dropped by Morris’s hotel for a hot glass of tea with Izzie, and had then called on The Trigger with the message that Iz wanted things quiet, and in return Iz would stay completely out of Dade. Word had always come back that Magiunto was a hundred percent for keeping the lid on, and would go along. An uppercrust vacation spot, after all, could drop dead in a minute if rough stuff started happening around. The swells could just as easily forget about coming.