City of Devils

by Paul French

  The French Concession authorities finally decide to get tough on slot machines—upping taxes in the hope that the raft of small bars and holes-in-the-wall that exist solely on their slots take will go out of business. It hits Jackpot Riley’s pocket hard—fifty one-armed bandits are confiscated and smashed up overnight, with more gone from Blood Alley, including those in the Manhattan. Paris has fallen to the Axis powers, and the Japanese are effectively running the Frenchtown police now, with pro-Vichy officials’ compliance. Their ronin cronies install their own slots in the bars and boîtes of the Concession; Jack can’t do a thing about it.

  The Municipal Council and the SMP are pressing harder than ever for the Badlands casinos to be shuttered. They’re mostly foreign-run, and the SMP is obsessed with maintaining the fiction that the foreign powers are all good and that Shanghai is not a haven for white gangsters and ne’er-do-wells. The Badlands makes that position hard to maintain. The Japanese issue an order to eight Badlands joints to close, but it soon becomes clear the order is cover for a hostile takeover by the Kempeitai themselves with their Chinese puppet pals out of number 76. Thirty or forty number 76 goons raid the Broadway Club, occupy it, and reopen it as the New Asia Club, with collaborators managing it. Rumour has it the new managers paid a stone-cold hundred grand in Chinese dollars to number 76 for the right to take it over. The Hollywood reopens as the 1238 Club, with roulette wheels and opium-smoking divans just where they’d been the day before. The Monte Carlo reopens as the 99 Shanghai Club. It’s whispered those clubs that reopened paid a ten grand ‘special tax’ to the Japanese.

  And Farren’s? Joe and Jack have greased the wheels with suitcases stuffed with cash to Jack’s Japanese contacts, and they’re pulling in the Settlement elite, which means they slip down the list of those joints to be busted … but Jack can only restrain the demands so much, and those excessive taxes are starting to bite into the profits. They need to make more. Joe’s clever idea to lure in those worried about the bullets over in the Badlands? A Gone with the Wind night. The flick is on at the Roxy on the Bubbling Well Road, and the whole town has seen it. Lay it out—an old-fashioned waltzing competition with a hundred bucks prize money for the best couple. The Aristocrats of Harmony will play Southern songs; the Hartnells will demonstrate how to waltz with West End class. Joe takes out half-page advertisements in the North-China Daily News, the China Press, and the Shanghai Mercury and Evening Post—but not the Shopping News. The idea of giving any gelt to openly Nazi-loving Don Chisholm sticks in his craw, and he point-blank refuses.

  On the night, plenty of Scarletts turn up, but Nellie steals the show in hoops and crinolines—‘Fiddle-dee-dee, this war talk’s spoiling all the fun’. Joe had begged her to come, and eventually she agreed. The boychiks are kitted out in Union blue, the bartenders in Confederate grey. The Aristocrats don blackface with straw boaters, minstrel-style. Vertinsky shows up in Rhett Butler duds, Boobee as a super-sexy Southern belle. Sandra Hartnell is sweet, sweet Olivia de Havilland, and Frederic’s got up as Leslie Howard. The cigarette girls, trays piled high amid complimentary Farren’s matchbooks, are dressed tonight as saloon bar sweeties, the Chinese staff in cowboy gear. The chorus girls twirl their hoops to flash lacy drawers, and Sandra Hartnell sings ‘Pennies from Heaven’ for the crowd. Even Jack Riley, looking over the balcony from the roulette tables, is all gussied up as Robert E. Lee with Evelyn on his arm in a tight, tight corset looking like the sexiest of camp followers. The band drowns out the gunfire popping outside the front door.

  But there’s a war on … right outside the door, just across the Soochow Creek, and in Europe too. With Paris fallen and the old marshal establishing his Vichy regime across France’s empire, collaborationist gendarmes are patrolling Frenchtown virtually arm-in-arm with the Japanese, and half the Sûreté has skipped town to Hong Kong to join up with de Gaulle’s Free French. Everyone knows that the war will come to the Settlement soon enough. Tokyo knows it best of all.

  * * *

  SHOPPING NEWS —‘BREVITIES’—

  MONDAY, JULY 16, 1940

  All of Shanghai is preparing to raise a toast and wish fare-ye-well to the brave lads of the Seaforth Highlanders as they prepare to depart our fair Settlement. We’re sad to see them go, but are they needed any more? London believes they will be better stationed in their colony of Hong Kong. Perhaps it is not us who should be weeping, but rather them, swapping the Paris of the Orient for the Barren Rock?

  As rice prices spiral so there have been disturbances at shops and distribution centres. These disturbances—let’s call them what they are: ‘riots’—seem to us to be created by the SMP themselves through their actions of firing above the heads of the crowd, despite Commissioner Bourne’s optimistic warning to the Chinese public to ‘seek shelter in such cases’. This is the height of stupidity, for how are the hundreds of Chinese shoppers seeking food to know when the police are to start shooting and, even if they knew, where are they to go to avoid police bullets? These actions show the antiquated policing methods that prevail in the Settlement and are reminiscent of the old ‘SHOOT TO KILL’ orders of the 1920s.

  It is no secret that a serious feud has existed for many months between the police and the gangs of desperadoes who have selected the Western reaches of our Settlement for their activities. Scarcely a week goes by but that some policeman is killed or wounded and while we do not wish to give the impression of tenderheartedness toward armed desperadoes we cannot seem to see how society is the gainer if from one to a half-dozen law-abiding citizens have to be sacrificed for every desperado that is bagged!

  Taking in the new plethora of nightlife in the Western District will require some fine dresses ladies, and JOSEPHINE’S on the Yuen Ming Yuen Road is the place to buy. Take this issue along this week and receive a 25 per cent discount on all gowns, shoes and accessories. Proprietor Mr. Henry H. Cohen awaits you for a personal fitting on the second floor.

  Know something we don’t? Call up and whisper in our ear. Editorial: Rm 540, 233 Nanking Rd. Tel: Shanghai—10695

  * * *

  28

  Foreign gangs are running the biggest casinos in direct violation of all laws, and the Japanese aren’t serious about clamping down on them—WASPs or no WASPs. The scenes on the Avenue Haig appear as if from Hieronymous Bosch, the killings and beatings too much, the attack on Godfrey Phillips a step too far. The China Coast newspaper editorials ask where the long-promised WASP patrols are. The public is outraged, so the papers say—Shanghai is ‘agog’ at the audacity of the foreign criminals at loose in the city. Anti-rackets campaigner J. B. Powell at the China Weekly Review characteristically doesn’t hold back and declares the Badlands to be a ‘Monte Carlo Regime’. The wags respond that it’s more like the French Riviera, just without the sun or the sand, but with all the chancers, gold diggers, fake Russian aristocracy, and call girls.

  The SMP is pushing hard for action, and Commissioner Bourne’s career is on the line. Crime Squad boss John Crighton is dispatched to turn the city’s underbelly upside down and declares ‘war on the Badlands, war on the foreign rackets and the foreign casino operators’. You can expect Thompsons, you can expect Mausers, you can expect the Riot Squad’s Red Maria and armoured cars backed by baton-wielding Chinese constables and sharp-shooting Sikhs. Commissioner Bourne vows that ‘this scourge on Shanghai’s good name will be ended’.

  Meanwhile, the American Court for China that provides justice for American citizens in Shanghai announces plans to appoint a new U.S. marshal with powers of arrest to support Little Nicky and other Treasury agents in ending the embarrassment of their citizens’ criminality in Shanghai. Yes, he’ll be armed; yes, he’ll take down any American gambling kingpin in the city who dares raise his head above the Soochow Creek’s stagnant water. They hold back from actually naming Jack Riley—but only just. The Honourable Judge Milton J. Helmick of the U.S. Court for China, a thin man with a jutting chin on the end of a long neck, declares, ‘We will have no Chicago on
the Whangpoo’. Word of Shanghai’s lawlessness spreads: Time magazine calls Western Shanghai the city’s ‘Little Sicily’. Shanghai’s war on crime has just ratcheted up a notch, and the gauntlet has been thrown down—by Shanghai’s newspapers, by Shanghai’s police, by Shanghai’s justice system. They intend to end the good times for the rogue foreign gangsters in the Badlands.

  * * *

  A call requires a response. Things are getting too crazy. The Japanese and number 76 want their taxes; refusal is unacceptable. The police and the courts are arming up; the press is castigating the Badlands and its nightlife proprietors. A united front is called for. Peace is paramount if the Badlands is to continue to profit.

  Carlos Garcia is perhaps the one man who knows everyone in the foreign gangs of Gudao Shanghai and whom everyone in the rackets respects. Garcia calls a meeting; he declares the urgent need for talks. The mutually agreeable and neutral place for a sitdown is Sasha Vertinsky’s joint, the Gardenia on the Great Western Road. Garcia says when crackdowns come, it’s the gangs who go to war with each other and do the police’s work for them—he saw it in ’29 when he did a year in Ward Road Gaol, thanks to an SMP crackdown.

  On the night of September 5, 1940, the Kempeitai order the barriers lifted for the long line of Caddies, Packards, and Studebakers with number 76–issued laissez passers to ease access to these Badlands bosses. They arrive at the Gardenia and park right alongside Jack Riley’s low-slung MG roadster. A car thief would have a dream haul tonight; a car thief would be dead and dumped in Soochow Creek if he even thought about it.

  The Gardenia is all blue satin walls and avant-garde art Sasha Vertinsky picked up someplace on his travels, a giant samovar behind the counter. There’s an open bar with Boobee mixing and pouring while waving her cigarette holder about; hors d’oeuvres and caviar with vodka shots for any who want the delicacies. The hatcheck girls and the cigarette sellers are sent home, the Russian boys from the Broadway Mansions are hired to man the doors back and front and the street outside, Red 9s bulging, saps and coshes ready—‘Izvinite, so sorry, closed tonight.’ The men who run the rackets of foreign Shanghai will not be disturbed.

  Vertinsky mixes with the gangs. Gossip is the Russian vice, and Vertinsky’s specialty. He makes everybody laugh, breaking the tension. His breath is like pure battery acid when he whispers in your ear, his eyes usually bloodshot. His daily diet? Champagne and cocaine exclusively. The joke was nobody had ever seen Vertinsky eat—ever, not one solitary bliny, not even a lowly bowl of kasha. Joe Farren’s boychiks called him Nosferatu, with his fishing-hook nose, heavy-lidded eyes, his English tangled in Russian vowels, his growling Ukrainian r’s. He blinked noticeably slower than most people, the languid eyelid flicker of the cokehead. It was disconcerting all the same, along with his propensity to let his head droop forward and then suddenly snap back up and stare straight at you. He rouged his lips, powdered his face—Count Dracula, the master of ceremonies for the evening.

  The gangs assemble, a gathering of the high-crime milieu of Shanghai come to talk. The puppets are installed in number 76, just yards from the Gardenia, the Japs on the border of the Settlement, and now Bourne and the WASPs are looking to interfere with business. There can be no fighting over the spoils up and down the Great Western Road, along the Avenue Haig, the Edinburgh Road, and across the Badlands. Demarcation is needed—separate spheres of influence.

  Carlos Garcia, running to fat in his beige suit, holds court with tall and gaunt Stuart Price, the legendary old man of the Shanghai rackets. Both men are respected; both men are wealthy almost beyond measure. Their judgments will be considered fair; their decisions just. Jack Riley is backslapping and handing out complimentary Farren’s chips, sipping seltzer courtesy of Boobee, who knows he’s mean as a coot but doesn’t drink or smoke. Boobee has one of the boys nip out back and get Jack a pot of coffee you can stand a spoon in, just how Lucky Jack likes it. Joe Farren is close by, showing the unity with Riley most said couldn’t happen; Joe’s consigliere, Albert Rosenbaum, is also on hand. It’s not quite a gathering of friends, but at least of men with mutual interests.

  Fat Tony is there, still running high-stakes baccarat and illicit wheels at the 37427; so is José Bothelo, who runs Macao visas and letters of transit from his base at the Silver Palace Casino. Veteran Brit casino organiser Bill Hawkins and Vertinsky sit at a table with the Route Voyron gypsy clan who chain Lucky Strikes and don’t say much. Evil Evelyn arrives and toasts Jack for the old times in Manila. She’s tonight’s only female, excepting Boobee. Word has it she’s actually going to open a joint with Axis protection on the Edinburgh Road. The Gardenia is, tonight only, a Badlands sanctuary for the white racketeers of the city.

  What is agreed? Peace among the gangs, a united front against the WASPs. Any arguments will be mediated by Garcia and Price, the longest-serving bad hats of Shanghai. There will be no more feuding, no more stunts like Jack rolling round the floor of the Canidrome with Buck Clayton. Riley waves his hands in the air—‘Okay, okay!’ A standard ten grand a day tax per venue to the Japanese—everyone would pay; everyone could afford it; Jack could sell it to the Japs as good business all round. The Kempeitai would be guaranteed their profits and could ease off the enforcement. Everyone would combine to share roulette tables with any joint that had its tables smashed or confiscated by the WASPs or the SMP, so business could carry on as quickly as possible. Call it what it was: a syndicate, like the American gangs had formed at Atlantic City back in ’29. Those legendary names all in one room—Luciano, Capone, Lansky, Lepke Buchalter and others—each supporting the other for maximum profit and survival. This sitdown was the Shanghai version. The Badlands would be stitched up, the transition complete from the old world of Big-Eared Du as emperor and the Green Gang, where the foreigners existed on the fringes, to a new world, one where the Badlands was theirs, all theirs, and ruled by their syndicate.

  Truce on, all to play for now in the Badlands. The men and women who’d come to Shanghai—from Mexico City, the Marseille Panier, London’s East End, the slums of Lisbon, the American Midwest, New York’s Lower East Side, across the Russian steppes from Bolshevism, the Jewish ghetto of Vienna and all points in between—create a gangster’s paradise, sanctioned by the Japanese Imperial Army. They toast, they drink; Vertinsky entertains, Boobee pours. Peace reigns, roulette wheels spin unhindered, profits are maintained, taxes paid. From now on, to go against any member of the Shanghai Badlands syndicate is to go against them all.

  29

  There’s a new mensch about town. He’s spinning the wheels at Farren’s, playing baccarat over at the Arizona, fan-tan at the Ali-Baba—anywhere anyone will give him a marker. He introduces himself to all and sundry as Sam Titlebaum, newly arrived from Chicago. There’s a radio war going on—Chisholm and his new sidekick, Herbert Erasmus Moy, a New York–Chinese newly arrived in Shanghai and turned traitor, are ranting on pro-Nazi XGRS while former newspaper columnist Carroll Alcott is pushing the Allied cause on rival station XHMA. New boy Titlebaum is moonlighting on the radio at XHMA as Carroll Alcott’s stand-in when the big guy needs a break. He’s just as anti-Axis as Alcott and boasts he’s going to get a U.S. marshal’s badge along with a shiny Colt .45—fast-tracked, ’cause he’s a righteous thief-taker.

  Jack figures having a future U.S. marshal owe you is a worthwhile investment and lets him get in to the house deep. Titlebaum bets large and loses big as Jack and Joe listen to his all-American hero tales. He props up the bar at Farren’s, ordering stengah after stengah. Everyone loves his gab. Born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, ex-Chicago PD and served with honour. Doubt that? You might. Titlebaum claims a reputation as a big-mouth cop who swore holy hellfire on the city’s gangsters. The legend, according to the man himself: he carries a bullet in the hip from a gun battle with one of Capone’s goons out in some back alley. Incapacitated from active duty, he crossed over to the press, worked for the Seattle Star as their Chicago correspondent and became a bigtime columnist,
syndicated in a couple dozen states, ripping into police corruption and connivance between cops and gangsters. Organised crime was a scourge smothering American democracy; rotten cops were gutting the heart out of the Stars and Stripes. America needed big men with big guns; men who could take back the country for the decent working stiff—Gary Cooper meets Walter Winchell, against a Depression-era backdrop of soup kitchens and hobo camps.

  He claims things got hot: plenty of death threats from criminal elements and dirty cops equally, bullets in envelopes sent to his office, his name spelled out in newsprint cut out of the dailies—Tittlebaum, Titlebawm, Titebom—the spellings never much good. Slow-moving cars prowling around his pad in the early hours; guys looking at him strangely in taverns. So, Sam says, he hopped ship to China and pitched up in the Settlement. Jack dismisses him as a loudmouth, a self-aggrandising fantasist, and writes him another marker.

  But things work out the way Sam said they would. The Honourable Judge Milton J. Helmick of the United States Court for China gets what he’s been calling for: a righteous American marshal with a five-pointed star and a gun on his hip. In mid-September, Sam Titlebaum goes down to the U.S. Court and files the paperwork to get himself a badge and a gun, which is rushed through on the nod by the local district attorney, Charlie Richardson Jr. He’s introduced to Little Nicky, who squares him on the priorities of American justice in Shanghai: no more nighttime forays to Farren’s for Sam; no more shooting the shit with Jack and Joe.