by Al Zuckerman
So Iz had stopped keeping his ear to the ground. Besides, there was the National Syndicate now with its strong law against violence for personal reasons—the Syndicate of which Izzie was a charter Member of the Board. To continue the peacemaking begun back in Atlantic City, Iz, Sally, and Lepke had gotten the dozen or so top guys together, and they’d made agreements about territories and how to settle arguments. The rule was no rub-outs, anywhere, without the approval of the Board. And Magiunto and everyone else knew that Louie Lepke enforced that rule.
But for putting the clip on a casino, there was no rule.
What to do? Run and hit him? Not the easiest thing. Besides, Iz had to abide by the Syndicate code, or else. Hitting the muzzier could be made right only if Iz came up with the proof. And where could he get that? At two in the morning? And in a hurry. The buzzing in his ears grew loud. It hurt. But it did not stop him from calling everyone in, and starting to give orders.
Farvel the Landlord had decided that coming to collect his promised fee from Magiunto might be dangerous, deadly even; but his girlfriend Luella had sweet-talked him into at least coming to ask for it; and now she waited in a taxi parked a short way from the Belle Bay Club. She didn’t notice a nearby DeSoto coupe obscured by shrubbery. Its occupants were studying comings and goings to and from the nighterie. Nor did she spot among the boats dotting the moonlit blue-black waters one that recently had dropped anchor, and whose crew of one also was scrutinizing the Belle Bay—from behind.
Farvel’s hunch about The Trigger proved, like they say at the track, to be right out of the feed box. Twenty minutes after he’d been warmly welcomed, lavishly congratulated, he’d also been strangled, shackled to a ninety-pound cement base for a one-way-street marker, and dumped off an unused pier down the beach from the Belle Bay.
Luella, seeing the bulky, blanket-wrapped object being lugged along the shoreline, bit her tongue to keep from screaming.
The other unseen observers in a way felt gratified.
Iz heard a noise, a tapping. It got loud, a hard knocking. Waking, he remembered having set the alarm. One hour, till four o’clock he’d given himself. It felt too soon, though. And then he heard the baby screaming. David, poor kid. He rubbed his eyes, reached under the couch cushion for his gun, and hoisted himself up.
His mind already was working. Still no line on Dominic Manzo, though. From the second Pig Eyes had dipped through the Mayflower door, Iz had seen him as a tip-off. But to what? The former torturer of Boris Chichikov—on him be peace!—played, lost, and kept losing, and not always so small either. Which made no sense. Pig Eyes was no sport.
Suddenly, slipping a belt through his pants loops, Iz froze. Of course. Manzo was a plant, a phony to keep Iz from sniffing the real gaff. Which meant that Pig Eyes had to be working for The Trigger. Which also meant that Magiunto had to know about Iz’s old tangle with Pig Eyes, had planted Manzo for a come-on to tie up Hargett’s attention.
Iz reached for the door knob. A fierce whisper stopped him.
“What’s going on? Why such a racket?”
He turned to Hannah, emerging from the bedroom in her white robe and cream-smeared face, and looking like a ghost of an angel.
“I’ll open, and in a minute we’ll both know.”
“Momzerim!” she cursed. “A baby’s screaming, and they’re frightening him, your friends probably. Can’t they hear?” And without waiting for an answer, she glided off into David’s room, who screamed on despite her cooings.
In the dim hotel corridor was Red Tannenbaum, who’d been Iz’s number one alky salesman. Immaculate still in his full dress, though his breath had turned stale, he recounted step-by-step The Landlord’s final movements on earth.
Iz for an instant felt a twinge of pity for the schlemiel, then a hard belly anger—at himself for not punishing the rat years ago, and even worse for his having grown soft and given the weasel a break here.
So Farvel was the finger. But what had the sneak fingered? And how?
Suddenly there was more knocking. The baby, who’d quieted, began screaming again.
Iz made a face, and tilted his chin for Red to go answer.
Blinkie, blackish circles under his eyes, tuxedo rumpled, tie askew, half-blinded by the lights, shuffled in. He clutched a cardboard satchel. Silently he flicked its clasps and turned it upside down. Decks of cards in their boxes poured onto the moth-eaten couch.
“You setting us up for a friendly little game?” Red quipped, trying to be jovial.
Izzie’s electric mind grasped a meaning almost as the first deck slid out. “Paperwork?” he asked softly.
Blinkie, nodding slowly, heaved a sigh that was a lament. “Just about every deck we had—doped up.”
Red crinkled his brow, incredulous. “I don’t get it. Any shmuck dealer’ll spot gaffed cards in no time flat—one lousy shuffle.”
Jesus, every dealer, every stickman, if they’d all been working for Magiunto, Iz’d have to—do what to them?
Blinkie was answering Red Tannenbaum, nodding, “Edge work, and you’re absolutely right. Line work, also no big problem.” The pit boss eased his bulk onto the couch. “Cut-outs, block-outs, shadings, trims, they can be harder to catch on, but never this hard.”
“So what else you got?” Iz, fists tight, wanted and didn’t want to hear more.
Blinkie heaved another huge sigh. “Sorts,” he murmured.
Red grimaced, bewildered.
Iz, also at a loss, gave no sign.
“They’re the worst,” the casino manager elucidated. “Marked cards what nobody really marks.”
Nathanson, fingers still deft despite his exhaustion, slipped a deck from its box, fresh-broken tax stamp still on it, and holding the cards inches from Red’s eyes, slowly rifled the deck. Then he waited a minute before he asked, “Well, wha’d you see?”
Red shrugged, still squinting.
Iz took a try, and faintly shook his head.
“See, cause all it is,” Blinkie went on sadly, “is printing imperfections.”
Iz saw a glimmer, then a blinding light. “And some guy spots those imperfections—and sorts them out?”
“A sharp mechanic,” Blinkie nodded, “will sort through five hundred good decks, or five thousand. He finds one design a smell below center, another an eentsie bit pushed to the left. But always it’s in the printing. He don’t touch the cards. He don’t add a drop of ink nowhere. And slowly slowly slowly he puts together a deck with four, five, maybe ten of these boo boo designs in one pack.”
So that was Farvel’s thing, running in the cards! And it could’ve been trick ivories too, and who knew what all else? Which meant the dealers could’ve been clean. Probably were. His throat loosened. Breathing felt easier. For a split second he smiled.
Blinkie was showing how on the back of a heart ace the crisscross design had a bottom line different from the rest of the deck.
Iz’s mind already was elsewhere.
The Trigger was protected by the equivalent of deep moats, impregnable castle walls, and stalwart knights whose armor ranged from automatic revolvers to Thompson guns, or as his boys called them, Chicago choppers. Against a more modern or at least more unexpected weapon—poison gas—Magiunto’s troops had no experience and no defense. So, of the predicaments still confronting Iz, the least was how to nab his foe.
Harder would be getting Pirone to go along with what had to be done next. Magiunto was something of a relative, through Pirone’s sister. Sally’s owing his hide to Iz was one thing. But, as Iz well knew, family was family.
Putting through the call to Sally took some doing, because a line from Palm Beach (where The Trigger was being kept) to upstate New York in those days meant going through switchboard after creaky switchboard fourteen times up the Atlantic Coast. But Sally himself was as well-equipped as the era permitted: he had his own phone extension in a small office directly adjacent to the warden’s at Dannemora.
Minutes after Blinkie had broken the news about
the “sorts,” Iz had decided how he wanted to handle Magiunto.
Pirone, hearing the details, had grown hot, outraged. As Iz’s partner, he too had been crossed, kicked in the balls as it were. For such disrespect, it seemed wholly fitting that the bum should be hit—but Sally’s sister crept into the thinking. She’d reproach him forever. So he too sidestepped, and tossed the hot potato back to Iz.
“What could be done that would satisfy you?”
“Having him added to the list,” Iz decreed, using turf talk for having him castrated.
Pirone had dried up in the mouth, stunned. This wasn’t the Izzie he knew. Or was it?
Izzie, hearing his own words, felt a little nauseous.
A long minute passed before Pirone protested, “That, look, well, it’d be worse than scratching the dumb nag.”
“What else we got left, fix him up with a splint? Pretty soon, and it could start getting unhealthy again.”
Eventually Sally Happy came around. “I guess a clean scratch’d be too good for that goat. But how in hell you ever gonna negotiate that?”
Iz thought he knew, but soon found he didn’t.
Frenchy Patru, the peerless carver at the Mayflower, couldn’t even stammer out an answer; he just shook his head. Iz upped the offer to twenty Gs, a sum it’d take the sous chef eight years to earn in that steaming kitchen. Still, there was no bending him.
One thing Iz did glean from his sessions with Patru was that unless the job were done by a doctor, the unnamed man who was to be “treated” probably would not survive.
Only he could find no doctor. Two who were willing to consider the proposition ran out upon learning the patient’s name. A third, an opium puffer who’d lost his license, confessed he’d never done anything like this before and couldn’t guarantee anything. The trouble was Iz wanted Magiunto to live.
Days went by, a week. The Mayflower, with all-new cards and dice, was prospering.
It was Morris, his round face slightly disfigured from Little Nathan’s bomb, who finally broke the impasse. He suggested a horse doctor. Wasn’t this after all what owners often did to their ponies? Around the track somewheres hadn’t there oughtta be a sawbones who could turn the trick?
Such a specimen was speedily unearthed, a wispyhaired, spectacled oldster who tipsily bragged, “You ever hear of Exterminator? Nineteen eighteen? Never’ve took the Derby, hadn’t been for me.”
The old rummy agreed to a three day dry-out, while Harry shopped for scalpels, surgical clamps, sutures, chloroform, whole blood, oxygen, sterilized dressings, masks, rubber gloves, gowns and a cautery iron. Anyone who asked was told these items were for an amateur theatrical.
Kayo Kronsky was posted inside the kitchen-operating room to make sure things happened as they were supposed to. Roping up the Wop and slipping him the mickey was no sweat. But when the watery-eyed vet plucked a scalpel from the steaming tray and traced the initial incision along Magiunto’s bulging scrotum, Kayo started choking, gasping for air. The doc shot him a look, and began to cleave. Despite his advanced years, the rumpot wielded the blade deftly. The blood flow, from the first, was heavy. Soon the toweling could no longer absorb it, and the gore began to stream off the table down onto the linoleum. With a soft thud, Kayo too slipped down, out cold.
Harry the Doctor stayed just outside. His job was to guard, to verify, and then pay off. The clumps of organlike meat the horse-knifer displayed to him could have been cut out of a sheep. But there was proof: Kayo oddly splayed on the bloody floor—and the wound where Trigger Joe’s gonads once had been. Harry abruptly rushed out, and threw up on the foundation shrubs.
* * *
After that, except for roughing up some Jew-baiting Bundists at a Nazi rally in New York, Izzie never caused a hand to be raised against anyone. He never had to.
Peace was made. Magiunto resumed running his bordellos and Iz took over the contract with the National Wire Service. Hargett was to be the Service’s new Florida wholesaler. All bookmakers in the Sunshine State became his clients, but only at his pleasure. With that gravy train, and with the Mayflower running like a clock, his livelihood became well assured.
But he was after more. That spring he formed an investment group to purchase a financially troubled Hallandale race track. The autumn following he invited additional partners into his syndicate and bought a downtown Miami dog track. A month later he created a partnership to equip a gaming establishment in Boca Raton.
The men Iz invited to join in these deals mostly were former bootleggers: Jews, Italians, a Swede, an Irisher, even a colored. Several had been number one in their home cities. Each was a smart businessman who’d come to acknowledge that payoffs were more effective than bullets.
Within a year, all had profited beyond their expectations. Within five years, beyond any of their dreams. By then, suitcases crammed with Federal Reserve notes were being power-boated in from Cuba. Thanks to Iz’s farseeing courtship of Domingo Guzman while the exiled corporal dictator had been a lonely refugee in nearby Pompano Beach, and thanks to Guzman’s reclaiming the presidency (largely through a Hargett loan), Havana’s old-hat casinos were transformed into ingeniously efficient Hargett operations—to whose management Izzie brought not only his energies, but also passion, even love.
It was his much-beholden investors who set Iz free to devote himself purely to business matters. Those who had been preeminent in their respective cities grew even more powerful, thanks to the cash from Hargett-run enterprises. Those who had been less prominent, thanks to the Hargett connection, often rose up. It became manifestly in all their interests to watch over their wonder-worker and make sure he no longer needed to concern himself with physical security.
But as Iz’s aging poppa liked to quote, “‘There is a time to get, and a time to lose, a time to keep, and a time to cast away …’ Nothing endures but change.”
World War II came. One of that holocaust’s lesser casualties were the gambling junkets to the Caribbean. Just before the War, “Judge” Louis Lepke got his in the Sing Sing hot seat. Shortly after the Allied victory, Sally Happy was deported to an Italy he had never known. De jure chairmanship of the National Syndicate passed to Izzie, who nonetheless refrained from participating in the burgeoning opportunities in unions, black markets, and narcotics. Real estate had begun to interest him, though, as did hotels and banks, along with—always and everywhere—gambling. He continued to live modestly and most obscurely, too preoccupied with building his hidden empire to be much noticed.
BOOK 2
CHAPTER 1
Andrew Feld, pulling down his garage door, liked feeling his arms’ strength—not that much was needed, he kept the rollers so well oiled. For a moment, the tugging’s pleasantness staved off the problem. Hell! Should he tell Edith, not tell? No matter what his wife advised, would there be anything he could do about this thing? And his oath, what about that?
His head reeled … breaching security … very minor way, couldn’t really hurt national interest—but he shuddered.
He was no Red, not even remotely pink; but other fellows who weren’t either suddenly were “risks,” getting tossed out on the street. Adlai Stevenson, he would put a stop to this McCarthy insanity. Except the idiot American people would never elect so good a man.
None of which rambling brought Andrew any closer to a decision. If only he could bury this in a file somewhere, forget it. … Hah! As if Isadore Hargett would fit into a file. Izzie was small enough. But what file could contain that man—while he still operated, while he just breathed?
What if the fellows in crypto were wrong, what if that Pilgrim Baby stood for someone else, not Hargett?
Andrew’s hand felt hot, thinking how he hated Izzie’s guts sometimes. Yeah, but Andrew also owed the guy, and loved him kind of. Andrew wished he didn’t.
* * *
“Edith, the stuff at my office, you know I’m not allowed to talk, so I always leave it there, usually. But today—I don’t know.”
“W
hy?” Now she turned, shot him a look, “Is something wrong?”
“Well. …” He saw her lips—they’d been sweet once—freeze half open, her eyes searching him. And they shone, lit up. Fear, poor thing. With Edith, all news had to be bad news. Were they to be driven from their house, stricken with cancer? “Izzie Hargett, I’m afraid. …”
“To him?” she interrupted, awe creeping into her voice, and reverence. “Something’s happened to him?”
“Now you understand, whatever I say can’t go beyond. …”
“Oh no, Andy,” she was shaking her head pityingly. Already she had him dead and buried. “Oh, that can’t be.” She bit her lip, stifling a cry. “What happened?”
Hargett most years would blow them to a Miami Beach vacation, or contribute the lion’s share—Andrew insisted on always paying something. And now to her the gangster was next thing to a God. She of course knew from nothing how their friend got so he could be so generous. To Edith, Izzie just happened to own hotels, which just happened to be among the fanciest in the world, and also happened to be Andrew’s buddy from way back when it was Andrew who’d been the terrific one, whispering Yiddish translations of the teacher’s gibberish, smartening up greenhorn Izzie about the differences between Ginnies and Irishers. That at least was how their host would reminisce. Andrew remembered it a bit different.
Edith jerked the faucet shut, then came to him. “It’s so bad, you can’t get yourself even to tell me?”
“Look, it’s just a—rumor about him.”
“So then—what kind?”
He’d come to the sticking point, the edge of a precipice. Andrew swallowed. “Someone—we haven’t been able yet to figure who—seems like they’re planning to—kill him.”
She shut her eyes.
He felt a hot flush—anger. Why? Was it he was jealous that for Izzie Hargett his Edith should be so moved?
“So—what are you doing?”