by Paul French
Every kind of rumour swirls around the Sammy Wiengarten murder. Sammy was trying to cut the Portuguese out of the whore-for-Macao-visas action in Hongkew; Sammy had screwed the Corsicans on a Frenchtown deal; Sammy cheated at cards and scammed the high-stakes Russian card games at the Broadway Mansions for plenty of gelt; Sammy didn’t pay the SMP enough protection money; got on the wrong wide of Jack Riley’s Friends by rigging their slots to pay him plenty and leave Jack a smidgeon; barred a lushhead marine who took it really personally; raped his Chinese chef’s daughter and was righteously revenged by the old man. What nobody says is that New York decided Sammy must have fucked over Yasha and Lepke by setting up his own San Francisco routes and they, seriously pissed, got Du’s Green Gang boys to sort him out. It makes sense at their end—there’s dope coming in from Shanghai to the west coast that they don’t know about. They figure their Shanghai connections are fucking them over. Maybe, but that’s loose talk. Implicate Big-Eared Du and you’ll get hatcheted and burned too if you get loose-lipped.
Little Nicky asks around and gets … bupkes. He appeals to the SMP for any information—veteran Detective Sub-Inspector John Crighton, who heads up the SMP Crime Squad, is keen to co-operate. He taps his legendarily extensive list of informers in the Shanghai underworld. Crighton’s snouts say Sammy’s killing was dope-related but that he wasn’t cheating the New York mob. They say someone else is running dope out of Shanghai in competition with the Hongkew mob—but they don’t know, or won’t say, who. John Crighton hits a wall; Little Nicky knows the feeling.
Still, the SMP has to explain it somehow to keep the newspapers off their backs; the pushy hacks like rangy, chain-smoking J. B. Powell over at the China Weekly Review editorialise that the SMP can’t control a dope-related crime wave. So the SMP got a yarn from their opposite numbers in the Frenchtown Sûreté that seemed to explain Sammy’s murder. The Sûreté’s theory cooked up in their Route Stanislas Chevalier HQ? The Portuguese mob were looking to muscle in on Sammy’s action and sent over an ex-Frenchtown flic who’d been fired for selling guns to lieu-maung out the back door of French police headquarters to apply some pressure on Sammy. The rotten flic was crazy sweet on a Russian hostess over at the Metropole Gardens Ballroom on Gordon Road. The Natasha was costing him serious money in furs, jewellery, and good steak, and he needed extra cash just to keep her attention. The theory was plausible; he’d been in the Red Rose earlier that night complaining he needed cash and looking desperate. The SMP and Sûreté scoured the Settlement and Frenchtown, but the supposedly lovestruck ex-flic conveniently turned up OD’d soon after in a Chapei flophouse; the Sûreté closed the file. It was a tale anybody who knew Shanghai could easily believe.
Whatever … Sammy Wiengarten was out of the dope business. In fact all business was over for Sammy, after fifty years of running the Jukong Alley. His brother Al takes the hint, sells up at a knock-down price, and skedaddles to Tientsin for a quiet life running a small dive bar, never to speak of his Shanghai days again. Most of Shanghai forgets the Wiengartens in a weekend and moves on. But Joe mourns Sammy. He’d been a good friend. Joe and Nellie see him buried and tell each other that Sammy was a mensch; he’d never have betrayed Yasha, never have crossed Lansky, and DSI Crighton’s Crime Squad theory courtesy of the Frenchtown flics’ imagination was junk. Someone else was moving dope out of Shanghai to the States.
Still nobody looks in the direction of the Slots King.
14
Jack’s side project is getting harder to hide. Crawley is shipping heroin out, but not before he has personally consumed a fair amount of it. Jack’s got enough cash to seriously sit down and talk with Joe about buying a stake in his planned nightclub and becoming pit boss. They agree in principle over dinner at the Venus, subject to Jack accruing the necessary front money.
After Sammy is murdered, Jack thinks it’s time to shut down the Velvet Sweet Shop operation, but Crawley and Ah Lee aren’t interested, and so the sideline rolls on. Jack continues to bring in more slot machines from the Philippines and Macao with his Velvet Sweet Shop proceeds, and Crawley works out a deal to stuff the machines with black market guns too. They come courtesy of U.S. marines in Manila with gambling and dope debts who’ve traded their service firearms to pay off the vig after the super-high interest rates the casinos charged left them high and dry. It’s good money, but risky—Riley knows better than most that U.S. Army–issue firearms showing up all over Shanghai at armed robberies and kidnappings, or on the hips of self-appointed warlords, will push U.S. authorities in China to act. He’s not happy, but Crawley’s addicted to his own product now and not listening to sense anymore.
Then Crawley, getting ever more greedy, gets a slots contact of his own and starts smuggling machines into Shanghai, selling them to joints that didn’t truck with Riley and the Friends. Dope’s one thing, but the Slots King isn’t about to let anyone else in on the one-armed bandit action. Jack makes a call, and Schmidt and some Friends go out with sledgehammers to smash up Crawley’s bogus slots and anyone they find installing them. Partnership over.
But how to deal with Crawley himself? The man is getting in deeper and deeper, injecting more of the product, stewed nightly to the hilt, increasingly desperate to get more cash and send out more dope via the marines and nurses. Jack insists they need to cool things or get roasted like Sammy. Ah Lee agrees it’s got too crazy, but Crawley’s not listening; he’s dope-brave and not fearing anyone including Lepke, Lansky, and Big-Eared Du. The man is heading off the rails—walking round Hongkew clubs with a serious-looking Mauser C96 sticking out his belt, scaring the swells, and embarrassing everyone by beating the shit out of his White Russian wife in public. Then he starts turning up in Frenchtown bars where business gets done smooching his seventeen-year-old secretary. Riley knows he has to distance himself from Crawley fast and calm things down.
Then Crawley goes totally off the reservation. He rapes his Chinese maid, touches up his Russian squeeze’s eleven-year-old daughter—molests his own stepdaughter and laughs about it. He’s an angry drunk who pulls his gun in one too many nightclubs. When he does it at DD’s a couple weeks into January, just days after Sammy’s funeral, Joe is at the bar and tells Crawley to quit it. Crawley’s drunk, he’s high, he’s up in Nellie’s face, leering and asking her how she’d like to mule dope for him to San Fran in her Russky snatch. Jack heads over and sucker-punches Crawley before Mickey bundles him away from the gawping punters. But it’s too late: Crawley’s smutty suggestions have let the cat out of the bag, and Joe sees it all clearly now.
Joe sends Nellie home in the Canidrome Buick and goes back to DD’s angrier than anyone has ever seen him. He finds Jack sitting round after-hours with his crew and tells them all he needs to talk to Jack personally and privately. Joe doesn’t shout, he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t get aggressive—that’s not Gentleman Joe’s way. He tells Jack he knows he’s been side-dealing to San Francisco with Crawley, and that he’s responsible for Sammy Wiengarten getting bludgeoned and burnt to a crisp. He’s fucked up the good thing they all had. Jack can forget running a casino at any Farren’s joint; any understandings they might have had are off. Joe’ll keep schtum to avoid a war, but that’s that—the two of them are finished. And Jack should make no mistake: if the boys in Hongkew and New York worked this out there would be one hell of a war in Shanghai. Everybody, except Little Nicky and the SMP, will lose if that happens, so Joe will bite his tongue. But Joe and Jack are finished. Joe gets up and leaves; Jack sits there and fumes.
But Jack doesn’t forget Crawley. The next day Schmidt rousts him from his opium dreams and escorts him to the docks while Mickey packs his bags. Jack tells Crawley he needs to go lie low for a while back in California, clean himself up. When he’s straightened out they can restart the business. Crawley knows he’s gotten seriously out of line and jumps at the ticket home. He steps off the boat in San Francisco a few weeks later for his R and R and is met at the bottom of the gangplank by customs officers, courtesy
of a Little Nicky telegram from Shanghai. They find a large stash of heroin in his luggage alongside some stolen U.S. Army guns. Paul Crawley disappears into a federal penitentiary for a mighty long time.
Just how Little Nicky knows Crawley’s coming home, not to mention the contents of his luggage, is anyone’s guess. The U.S. Treasury agent’s Shanghai office is in the phone book; Little Nicky himself takes the calls.
* * *
It’s the dames who eventually lead to the fall of Lepke Buchalter and the East Coast drop-offs—those swell-looking gals travelling solo. Nicky had been looking at the liners out of Shanghai to the States. But he eventually cast the net wider and started to check the sailings to Europe via Suez. Girls, travelling alone, plenty of luggage, some with newly minted husbands carrying passports from every banana republic south of Texas. Showgirls, cabaret hoofers, students who’d never seen the inside of a lecture hall, ‘secretaries’ who hadn’t been gainfully employed for some time, if ever, and had never touched a typewriter in their lives. Shanghai to Marseilles; Cherbourg to New York. Girls born in Russia, girls born in Harbin but travelling on Portuguese, Cuban, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Greek passports to ease their access out of Shanghai, into Europe, on to the States, always taking roundabout routes to Manhattan. Girls who shouldn’t have money for a steerage crossing going first class on P&O, with a suite on the Messageries Maritimes, or reclining on a deck lounger on Norddeutscher. It smells bad; the whisper is Hongkew Jewish nightlife connections to Louis Buchalter and Yasha Katzenberg. Little Nicky tracks the girls, has his agents meet them in Manhattan to search their bags and scoops up plenty of dope from under their lingerie and dresses. They carve up their luggage trunks and find untold riches. He follows the trail backwards and breaks the ring, busts the bent customs officers. He teams up with the French Brigade des Stupéfiants, and they pick up more showgirls from Shanghai arriving in Marseilles with heroin-stuffed trunk cases for onward passage to New York. The girls go to prison, but not one of them squawks—they don’t know anything anyhow, because the Hongkew boys used too many cutouts to track back to them easily.
The whole business starts falling apart throughout early 1937. Every ship docking up and down the East and West Coasts of the United States is met by Little Nicky’s U.S. Treasury agents. And not just the U.S.; it’s the earlier stops too, to prevent the couriers getting off early and travelling overland: Marseille, Cairo, Port Said, Alexandria, Genoa. They rigorously check manifests in Cherbourg, Trieste, Hamburg, and Southampton for anyone whose journey originated in Shanghai or any other China Coast port from Weihaiwei down to Hong Kong. It works; the shipments getting through slow to a trickle. Word quickly gets back to Shanghai, and few are willing to be couriers anymore. Joe and the Hongkew boys figure it’s time to shut it down; it will only be a matter of time before Nicky tracks the girls back to them. They’d kept quiet so far, the cutouts had worked in obscuring their involvement, but that wouldn’t last forever. It’d been a good thing while it lasted; everyone had banked some serious cash and, Sammy excepted, was alive to spend it.
By autumn ’37, Louis Buchalter has a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head and an indictment against him, in absentia, in federal court on conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the United States. But Katzenberg disappears after Nicky gets too close—back to Romania, the smart money says. Little Nicky wants to arrest the Shanghai end of the routes too. He tracks the trail back to the Shanghai Docks, downriver at Woosung and the landing stages at Wayside and Yangtszepoo Roads in Hongkew, but there it goes stone cold dead. But best not jump too far ahead …
15
In February 1937, with the demise of his dope routes and the fallout with Joe, Jack is hitting the bennies hard as Chinese Shanghai gets ready for its own new year. He’s cracking drunks’ heads a little too much on Blood Alley; bouncing bad debts at the Bamboo Hut a little too vigorously, losing it a little too regularly with Nazedha. The casino with Joe was Jack’s shot at the major leagues, to rise up from bar owner and Slots King to rank with the likes of Garcia, to own the town. Now that dream is a bust.
The Chinese New Year party for 1937 is a big, big deal at the Canidrome Ballroom–goodbye to the year of the rat, welcome to the year of the ox. Tonight, Jack T. Riley has taken a table right on the edge of the dance floor, a slightly glass-eyed Babe on one side of him, a surly Natasha on the other. He’s wearing a tux, sipping ginger ale from a crystal champagne glass, but up close he’s jagged—fingers drumming the table, knees jerking; eyes darting about incessantly. He’s rubbing his forehead till it’s cherry red, chewing his bottom lip till it bleeds, grinding his teeth. Jack’s not thinking straight, and those in the know see he’s out for trouble. Everyone knows Joe and Jack have fought over something and that their casino deal is off. Now Jack’s here to disrupt, pure and simple: to ruin everyone’s night. Babe and the Natasha are suitably over-lubricated and underfed, ready to cheer old Riley on. But Joe and Nellie aren’t there. Jack could have sent some Friends down to sort this out, but he enjoys taking care of this sort of business. When he’d got a call out of the blue at the Manhattan from Tung and Vong saying they needed a favour and did he still want to piss Joe off, it had made his day. Let the fun begin …
* * *
Buck Clayton, his Harlem Gentlemen, and the beautiful Derby are still a smash at the Canidrome, leaving takings down at other nightclubs all over Shanghai. But, uniquely for any foreign act in the city, Buck and the boys are being paid American-level salaries in genuine American dollars. Shanghai’s got inflation jitters bad and, with China’s national currency collapsing due to ever-present fears of Japanese invasion, Messrs. Tung and Vong are feeling resentful at paying out real American greenbacks, costing them more every month. They’ve got a solution, but it involves the Slots King and some Jack Riley–inspired mayhem.
Jack sits right up front and stares down Buck on the bandstand, unnerving him. Buck is teeing up the band for the introduction of the Hollywood Blondes. The girls come out of the wings from the right-hand side and start their routine. It’s eleven p.m. and Jack is still staring; Buck is staring back now; neither man blinking. Then Jack is on his feet, neck all twisted up, pointing, telling him, ‘Turn your eyes the other way’, and when Buck doesn’t, Jack calls him a ‘black son of a bitch’. Buck walks over to confront him, but Jack doesn’t wait and swings wide on the surprised Buck. He knocks him down on the dance floor, jumps on him, and rains blows to his head. The Hollywood Blondes are screaming and scattering while the Harlem Gentlemen ditch their instruments, pour off the stage, and pile on. There are several dozen tables of gussied-up and tuxedoed swells watching with their mouths wide open. Seems Blood Alley just came to the Canidrome for the night.
Jack is tough; he’s Navy prizefighter good, but he’s overwhelmed. He gets in a few punches, but the boys swarm him and beat the living shit out of him, sitting on his chest, banging his head on the dance floor, delivering some kicks to his ribs. Derby, soft and sultry, all café crème, now shows her wild side to protect her man. She jumps in for a swipe at Jack, ripping red fingernails down his face—part varnish, part Riley’s blood. Her nails hurt more than Clayton’s solid punches to the face. Jack is losing badly, even with Babe on Derby’s back like a doped-up banshee.
Eventually the fight gets broken up and Riley is kicked out, bloodied, with a smashed-up nose, cut lips, and a cracked rib, but laughing out loud. Bloody and bowed himself, Buck makes it back onto the stage—Derby, torn dress still just about hanging together, breathes deeply and then wows the stunned audience with a deep and throaty ‘Stormy Weather’ like nothing just happened. But the job’s done. Doesn’t matter what everyone in the crowd knows and says, that mad Jack Riley started the scrap and Buck was the innocent party—Tung and Vong exercise the clause in Buck’s contract that says he’s out if there’s any trouble. The next night Tung and Vong bring in a Manilamen band that costs a fraction of what Buck and the Harlem Gentlemen do and they take Chinese dollars as pay. The Canidrome never did s
uch good business again.
Joe finds out and goes crazy, but stubborn Tung and Vong won’t budge. Jack’s revenge is sweet. Joe feels bad for Buck and gets the boys a new gig with Sol Greenberg over at the Casanova. But the good times are over, and Buck can see the Japanese asserting themselves on the streets more and more. The band plays the Casanova till they’ve scraped together their fares back to California, and then they jump on a steamship and head for home.
16
By July 1937, tensions are rising across the country. Manchuria wasn’t enough for the rapacious Japanese, and they moved south, towards the old imperial capital that had been won and lost by so many warlords in the previous two decades. At the Marco Polo Bridge, just outside the ancient city’s walls, they engineered an ‘incident’, a supposedly kidnapped Japanese soldier, and used it as a pretext to invade. The Japanese soldier wandered back to camp a few days later after sleeping off his hangover, but by then the Imperial Army had captured Peking, occupied the Forbidden City, patrolled the ancient city walls, marched through the crowded hutongs. They moved swiftly on to take the treaty port city of Tientsin. Most people think they’ll come for Shanghai next as they move south. Tokyo will want to control the Yangtze trade.
Joe is run ragged. Every night he crisscrosses town in the chaufferred Buick sorting out problems, soothing frayed nerves, calming angry punters, making sure everything stays nice on the dance floor. The dope cash has dried up, and he needs to build his stash from running floor shows to try to keep his nightclub dream alive. He starts his evening at the Canidrome, making sure the swells are seated and fed and the band is playing the sweet tunes with Teddy Weatherford. The place is not the same since Riley smashed the joint up, but it’s still pulling in plenty of punters—the Hollywood Blondes and the Manilamen band aren’t too bad. He and Nellie don’t talk so much these days; Joe’s still an errant husband too regularly. But they might take a turn, cut a waltz for the early-evening crowd. Gentleman Joe and Sweet Dusky Nell are still a draw, even if they’re staring daggers at each other as they slide across the ballroom floor.