MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  Big Tony's "Fat Boy," he had been derisively called as a youth. A spoiled kid from Shaker Heights, a baby-faced mama's boy who in his teens had been forced to grow up, when his papa was murdered.

  Now he was the most feared, most powerful man in the Mayfield Road gang. Or at least, he and his cousin Angelo Scalise together were the most feared; it had been a long time since Sal himself had pulled a trigger. Little Angelo, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of that.

  Other than the milk, the only clue to an impartial observer that Black Sal Lombardi had a nervous stomach, a pre-ulcerous condition his doctor called it, was the almost imperceptible flinch of his face, a momentary wrinkling about the eyes, when somebody in a lane close to the thin-walled bar hit a strike. The echoing sound of bowling pins clattering against smooth wood made Sal jumpy. He didn't show it much. But it made him jumpy.

  He liked nothing better than to hang out in a saloon with Ange or any of his other close Murray Hill pals, putting beers away, playing pinochle, bullshitting with the paesans. They'd talk broads, they'd talk boxing, they'd talk betting, they'd have a hell of time. Used to be a night in a bar was Sal's favorite way to relax.

  Lately it had been different. He had never liked hanging out in the Pla-Mor bar, because the noise from the lanes was an annoyance. But lately no bar was pleasing to him, because booze, even beer, seemed hard on his stomach. The only thing that soothed his jittery belly was warm milk.

  Even his goddamn food had to be mashed up for him or he couldn't stomach it; if he wasn't puking, he was constipated, and when he wasn't constipated, he had the fucking trots. If he'd had a sense of humor, he would have smiled at the irony of "Baby-Face Sal" (a nickname he had shaken years ago), now at the height of his power, reverting to a baby-like diet. But he didn't smile, or have a sense of humor.

  It was that goddamn Ness. That goddamn fucking Ness. In the last six months that cocksucker had driven damn near all the gambling out of the county, and Sal had no piece of the northern Kentucky action—all of that was in the pocket of Horvitz and other Syndicate types too big to fuck with.

  Fortunately, about the same time, Sal had sewed up local pinball distribution, and now—thanks to friends on the City Council—the machines were even legal. Many of Sal's enterprises were legal these days: real estate, linen supply, auto sales (he got his Cadillacs for cost, that way). Not long ago he'd made a small killing selling coal to the city of Cleveland.

  No, the loss of income from the shuttered bookie operations was hardly crippling Sal, whose numbers action had grossed millions in the last five years. But it was annoying, and he had lost face.

  Which was why Sal was here tonight, to meet with his cousin Angelo. More trouble, this time on the numbers front. Ness trouble. And, at the same time, out-of-town competitors trying to move in on them. Sal sighed, though it was barely noticeable.

  He sipped his milk. He didn't mind the taste of it and had even come to love the soothing warm flow as it found its calming way to his twitchy belly. The glow of the warm milk hitting his stomach was better than Jack Daniel's.

  Some people were going to have to die. No way around it. Sal regretted that, though not for any moral reason; he had a reputation for being shrewder, more far-sighted than his papa. Sal had displayed an ability to maintain reasonably peaceful relations with both his fellow racket bosses and the policy niggers in the Roaring Third. This earned him respect, which (although he wasn't conscious of the fact, exactly) he wanted more than money.

  Though his earliest memories were of the same slum area where he now ruled (by proxy, mostly) the colored numbers racket, Salvatore Lombardi had grown up in the wealthy suburb of Shaker Heights. Big Tony, Sal's papa, was one of the first Italians to dare infiltrate that Protestant enclave, and Sal had spent most of his life living in the family mansion on Larchmere Boulevard; he lived there still, though Mama was gone now, and none of his brothers and sisters lived under that gabled roof.

  Sal had warm memories of his papa, and much pride in the memory of the mighty immigrant Black Hand leader.

  Big Tony Lombardi was only sixteen when he left a politically turbulent Italy behind, finding his way from New York to Cleveland, where he worked as a fruit and vegetable peddler. Getting active in the Black Hand, Big Tony used extortion money to buy his own wholesale sugar distribution company. He brought over first his three brothers, and then his boyhood chums, the Torellos, to help in the business.

  Big Tony crowned himself corn-sugar king of Cleveland, making a fortune selling to bootleggers. He built a monopoly the good old-fashioned Black Hand way: He warned his competitors to quit and, if they didn't, had them shot.

  Tears would warm Sal's cold dark eyes when he recalled the booming bass of his massive papa singing opera in the front parlor of the Larchmere mansion. And a startling sound it was, in that proper Protestant neighborhood. Not that any neighbor ever complained: Six feet tall, three hundred pounds, papa was a mustached bear of a man, a brute in diamond jewelry and silk shirts.

  Sal remembered vividly when papa had pulled him out of the private Catholic school in Murray Hill, and sent him east to a boarding school. Sal had thought he was being punished for some unnamed something, not realizing a shooting war had broken out between Papa and the Torellos, and that it was dangerous for Sal, even with his bodyguard/chauffeur, to make that daily trek from Shaker Heights to Murray Hill.

  So Sal, after fighting off an older kid who tried to cornhole him, ran away from the boarding school. He mugged an old man in a train station and took the train home. He figured his papa would beat him—though he'd only had a few halfhearted beatings from his father, when he was a lad—but when he peeked tentatively in the kitchen window, to see if Papa was home, his father looked up from his breakfast and saw his son, framed in the window. And papa began to cry.

  Papa had gone to the window, reached his big arms out and hauled fifteen-year-old Sal up and in like he was a tyke, and hugged the boy fiercely and sat him down to breakfast. Mama had only smiled and served him. Sal's only other memory of that breakfast was glancing over at the window and seeing it filled with one of his father's ever-present bodyguards.

  Sal wasn't entirely sheltered. He had some idea of what his father's business was. Papa had made sure of that, having teenage Sal from time to time accompany underlings of his father's, as they made their rounds, collecting money from bootleggers and loan sharks. Papa stressed early on the importance of business—that money was something you made.

  "You will not inherit my money," Papa said many times, "you will inherit my business—and my good name. Take neither lightly."

  Papa had taken him, when he was perhaps twelve, to see the corpse of a man who had betrayed him.

  "This is what happens," Papa said, as they stood in a warehouse looking at a naked white corpse in pools of blackening blood, "to stupid people."

  Stupid people, Sal was taught, were those who were too greedy, who were not loyal, who stole from their friends. It was made clear to the boy who was being groomed to be a "don" like his father that this could happen to him. It was also made clear that he could, and should, make it happen to those who betrayed him.

  On an autumn evening in 1927, Big Tony and his brother Ralph, dressed in their usual natty attire, diamond stickpins winking in the neon night, entered the barber shop of Octavio Torello. A meet had been set up by Dominic Toscari, a confidant of both families, to settle the differences between the one-time friends, the Lombardis and the Torellos. The Torello barbershop had been agreed upon as a meeting place, because it was widely accepted that one does not shit where one eats. Therefore, violence was unlikely to break out.

  Big Tony and Ralph were unarmed and had no bodyguards with them. They would play some cards with their old friends, work their out their differences like gentlemen.

  They walked to the rear of the shop, toward the card room, greeting acquaintances as they went, filling the air with friendly chatter. Then the two men entered the card room and the air
filled with unfriendly chatter, from a crossfire of automatics.

  Big Tony was dead when he hit the floor, seven bullets in him, two in the head. Uncle Ralph took a slug in the left leg and another in the stomach, but he was a younger man than papa, and he chased one of the gunmen through the barber shop, out onto Woodland Avenue.

  "I got you now, you bastard," Uncle Ralph said, cornering the gunman in front of the butcher shop next door, charging him, and as he did, the gunman whapped Uncle Ralph in the forehead with the butt of the now-empty gun, driving it into his head like he was pounding a nail.

  Uncle Ralph smiled, in a silly stunned way, and then fell on the pavement and died.

  There were a number of witnesses, and the murder story in some detail was widely known in the Italian community. But no one talked to the police—not after the butcher, who got a good look at the killer who pistol-whipped Uncle Ralph, was shot in front of his shop, inches from where Uncle Ralph had fallen.

  Cleveland had never seen a funeral like Papa's and Uncle Ralph's—silver caskets and brass bands and thousands of mourners lining Woodland Avenue, seven hundred autos winding their way to Calvary Cemetery. Big Tony Lombardi was beloved in his world, a man generous to a fault, free with his money and his favors to less fortunate Italian families on the east side.

  It was important that Sal rise to his father's legend. To be a great man, a generous man.

  And so, two years later, the eighteen-year-old Sal instructed his mama to drive him and cousin Angelo to East 110th Street, just south of Woodland, less than one hundred feet from the Torello barber shop where papa had died. Portly Mama, still in widow-black, her gray-touched black hair in a bun, her tiny kind eyes behind round black-framed glasses, called out to a man in the front of the barber shop. She was behind the wheel and the man had to lean in the passenger's side window. With a small, sweet smile she asked him to fetch Dominic Toscari at the nearby Torello sugar warehouse.

  "Tell him Mrs. Lombardi wishes a word with him," she said.

  Dominic—a swarthy, stocky, cocky fellow—obediently complied, swaggering up to the black Cadillac limo with a smile and a ready, "Hello, Mrs. Lombardi—what can I do for you on this fine day?"

  "You can die, bastard," Sal said from the back seat, and he leaned out his window and began firing his revolver. Dominic's smile barely had time to leave his face as he twitched and danced and died.

  Little Angelo jumped out of the car, on the street side, and came around and put a few bullets into the corpse, just so he wouldn't feel left out. Then, in a touch one of the papers referred to as "the melodramatic gangland calling card of death," Angelo dropped an ace of spades on the body of Big Tony's betrayer.

  And the big car roared away, with Mama at the wheel.

  The aftermath was long and hard on the family. Sal and Angelo fled to San Francisco and hid out. Mama was arrested on a first-degree murder charge. The prosecutor made it clear to Mama that she would be released if her son and nephew gave themselves up. The Lombardis, old Black Hand family that they were, understood this tactic; their fortune had been built on extortion, after all.

  Mama was tried and acquitted of the murder charge, and in February of 1930, Sal and Angelo returned to Cleveland and gave themselves up. It seemed the state's star witness, another cousin of theirs, had decided to move to Italy; the climate was healthier there and, besides, their cousin had come into some unexpected money.

  The Torellos had fallen like leaves in the coming months: Sam was gunned down in Frank Milano's Venetian Cafe on Mayfield Road. Vincent Torello went for a ride in the country, the one-way variety.

  The five remaining Torellos gathered in January of 1932 at the corner of Woodland Avenue and East 11Oth.

  "What the hell is this about?" Octavio Torello demanded of his brothers.

  They looked at him curiously. The wind was blowing snow around from flurries of the day before.

  "We got your message to meet you here," Pasquale Torello said, shrugging.

  In moments the men realized they'd been summoned by phone messages that none of the others had sent.

  "It's a fucking set-up," Octavio said. "Get the fuck outa here, you guys ..."

  But the black limo was already pulling up, the snout of a machine gun already pointing its about-to-scold finger at them. The Torellos had time to go for their guns, but not to draw them, before the fusillade ripped into them, shook the life from them, dropped them rudely to the pavement, corpses overlapping, blood of one running into the other.

  Bloody Corner, they called it now. That corner where the Lombardi-Torello feud had begun and finally ended. It started as business—the Torellos wresting away Big Tony's corn-sugar empire—and ended in sheer revenge. The massacre at Bloody Corner came at a time when corn sugar and bootlegging were fading into the past.

  And the policy and clearing-house racket was beckoning to the future.

  Those early strong-arm years—the Torello war, the muscling-in on the Big Four policy kings, the executions of various independent policy operators—had earned respect for Black Sal Lombardi and his formidable second-in-command, Little Angelo Scalise. Their well-earned reputation for violence had allowed Sal to maintain a comparatively peaceful reign of power.

  As for the niggers on the east side, there had been no bloody uprisings, or even strikes by policy writers (like Dutch Schultz ran into).

  As for the police, Ness had been so tied up fighting crooked cops and labor racketeers since he got in office, the policy racket had been benignly neglected.

  Only now, word was, the safety director had Black Sal's favorite, fattest source of income targeted for special attention. Seemed fucking up Sal's bookie operations wasn't enough to satisfy that goddamn Boy Scout.

  And to top it all off, there was this Pittsburgh problem that Angelo wanted to talk about. Sal sighed, sipped his milk, and waited for his cousin. The sound of a strike in the lanes made Sal jump a little and then the sound of a yelp, a painful yelp at that, really unnerved him. So much so that it almost showed.

  Angelo strutted into the small, sparsely populated bar, laughing; it was a sharp, hacking laugh. Angelo's thick lips were spread to reveal large white teeth; his dark eyes were glowing with amusement. Wearing a gray bowling shirt with Angelo sewn cursively over one pocket, he was a thin, monkey-like man who stood five-foot-five. He strode up to the booth and clapped his hands once and said, "That kills me."

  "You got to stop doing that," Sal said.

  "What?" Angelo said, innocently, his smile dropping away.

  "Hitting the pin boy like that. I heard him yelp."

  Angelo slid into the booth, laughing again, but softly. "That kills me. Little bastards should move faster. I ain't got all day."

  Angelo waved to the bartender. There was no waitress and no booth service, but in Angelo's case, that didn't matter. The bartender brought him a beer.

  "So what's the story?"

  Angelo shrugged, sipping his beer, wiping off a foam mustache. "Ness is heating up. He's gonna try to make the niggers talk."

  "It won't work."

  "It sure as hell won't. I'm spreading the word that any black bastard who talks to the cops is a dead black bastard."

  Sal shook his head wearily. "How many times I got to tell you? You got to treat 'em right. They're people too."

  Angelo made a guttural noise deep in his throat. "They're fucking monkeys," the monkey man said.

  Sal's cheek twitched with disapproval. "I'm not saying you don't get tough with 'em when they deserve it. But you got to treat niggers with respect like anybody else."

  "Yeah, yeah. Well the niggers ain't the problem right now."

  "What is? Pittsburgh?"

  "Fucking Pittsburgh, yeah," Angelo said, nodding. He finished his beer, waved for another. He leaned forward and waggled a finger at Sal. "We're gettin' too soft. We got to show some fuckin' muscle again."

  "What do you propose?"

  "There's only about a dozen of these Pittsburgh punks in tow
n at this time."

  "Are they Syndicate guys?"

  "Who the fuck cares? They bleed like anybody. They got themselves plopped down in the middle of the Roarin' Third, offering the suckers odds of 500 to 1."

  The normal odds were 600 to 1.

  Sal sipped his milk. "What makes them think we'll let 'em get away with undercutting us like that?"

  "They think we got our hands full, with Ness on our butts."

  "Do they. And what do you propose?"

  "I propose to kick their Pittsburgh asses outa town. Personally."

  Sal nodded, but he motioned gently with one hand. "We have people who can do that for us. And if we spread the word to the nigger policy writers that we're going to pay more than the Pittsburgh boys do, well ..."

  "Hey, fuck that! We'll spread the words that any jig that works for the Pittsburghers is a dead jig, capeesh?"

  The bartender quickly deposited the second beer before the animated Angelo and departed.

  The dark little man pointed at himself with a thumb. "And I'm gonna take care of this personal. This is a matter of respect. Of making sure they know and everybody else knows that just because we run a smooth racket, that don't make us soft."

  Sal thought about that. "A matter of respect," he said softly.

  "Yeah. That's exactly what it is."

  "I like that," he said, and smiled. "Yeah. Go ahead, Ange. Take care of it yourself. Have yourself some fun for a change."

  The sudden sound of a strike in the lane just beyond the thin wall didn't make Sal flinch a bit.

  Angelo finished his beer, grinned wolfishly, and said, "Guess I'll go out and bowl a few lines."

  "And cripple a few pin boys?"

  Angelo laughed. "You're a good guy, Sal. You may got a weak stomach, but you still got both your balls."