If a girl wants to go places, see things, and meet people you read about in the newspapers, she can have no more effective equipment than natural blonde hair, pretty face, slim figure, high spirits, and low morals. Along that line Nancy Presser had just about everything. Before she quit school and got her working papers, Nancy waited until the lawful age of fourteen; but nobody ever told her about the age of consent.
While other girls of her age were still waiting to be kissed, Nancy left her home in Auburn, N.Y., got a job as a waitress in Albany, and discovered that a Senator who grudgingly tipped her a dime at lunch was eager, twelve hours later, to be far more generous. Nancy took this economic discovery on to Manhattan. At sixteen she wore orchids, went to the most expensive night clubs, saw the “Scandals” three times in a season, and got paid for it all.
Things happened rapidly in those days, which were 1928. Men stampeded in droves after common stocks and preferred blondes, and Nancy, like everything else, was going big. There were big sugar daddies galore, big butter and egg men, big brokers, big bootleggers; and Nancy, who rated as a big blonde, had her telephone number ready for all.
It is appalling to think of the years of prison eligibility that were incurred by the big friends of willing young Nancy, for the statutory crime of rape upon a child.
She gave no warning that she was jail bait. Nancy had the dancing freshness of youth, but already there was a deep-breasted maturity about her, and a voluptuous fire that she got from a Polish mother. From her father came a well-thewed, big-boned Nordic body, fit for heavy duty. With it all she had breathtaking beauty. Men liked to be seen with Nancy. She was such a gorgeous animal, she dressed so beautifully, and she looked respectable, but not too respectable.
She wasn’t really a professional yet. On arriving in New York, Nancy first got work as an artist’s model and then as a model for hats and dresses. Her education progressed apace. Other girls taught her that her Albany wardrobe, of which she had been so proud, was practically rustic; and soon Nancy, except for her complexion, was a picture of utter urban sophistication.
She started going to parties, and there were plenty of parties in those days. The Arrival of Buyers department in the Times was Nancy’s social and business index. It ran for columns every morning, and all the customers had to be entertained. Nancy had never had any idea, in the days when her girl friends were going to work in factories, that making money could be so easy, or so much fun.
For one reason Nancy was so popular was the youthful zest and enthusiasm she put into her work. That was before one of the older girls took her in hand and told her she would burn her life out that way, instructed her in ways and means to avoid a mixture of pleasure with business. Nancy took the warning seriously and began reserving her ardors for purely social occasions. It was then, I suppose, that she really became a prostitute. The men never knew the difference. She was too good an actress for that. She always took pride in her professional skill.
Nancy’s pay as a model soon amounted to nothing more than pin money, and it was really a bore to have to get up in the morning and go to the shop. She kept at it because of the contacts it gave her, but gradually she grew to think less and less of millinery buyers and cloak-and-suiters. Miss Presser had moved far beyond the social sphere she had known in Auburn and her clientele was of the sort to build up her ego. She had two steel executives from Youngstown who called up when they came to the city, and a toolmaker from Cleveland. She had gray-haired gentlemen who would pay her $75 to go to the theatre with them, and who then, having cut a dashing figure in public, would bid her a chaste good night. To go to dinner with a man, Nancy’s price was $20. The big night of her whole career was an occasion when she was invited to the hotel room of an old dodo from the West. She stayed late, told him dirty stories, kissed the bald spot on top his head, and drank champagne with him until they both fell asleep in separate twin beds. He gave her a $1,000 bill.
By now Nancy was a busy high-class call girl, but for all the men she saw, she did not have any boy friend. She had not met any pimps yet and from what she heard of them she did not want to. She did have some girl friends whom she had met here and there at parties. One of them was a call girl named Betty Cook and it was through her that Nancy had her first inevitable meeting with the underworld. Betty Cook had a man named Charles Luciano.
This Luciano was good-looking for an underworld man. True, his legs were a bit short for his body, but he had a sharp-cut profile and crisp, wavy, black hair. He was, as Betty said, on the George Raft type. Betty regarded him with a mixture of infatuation and black fear.
Luciano was a hard character along Broadway. He was in the dope business, had some kind of tie-up with Arnold Rothstein and Legs Diamond. The relationship between Luciano and Betty is not entirely clear even now, and it is something we cannot find out about definitely. Betty long ago quit being a call girl and is married now (happily, I hope) to a policeman outside the state of New York; and she has never been available for any further inquiry, which is just as well.
Nancy saw all that she wanted of their love affair. She was eating with Betty one evening at the Tip Toe Inn at Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway when Charlie came in and joined them. Right away he and Betty got in an argument.
As Nancy sat and listened, anger boiled up in her. She had never heard a man. talk to a girl like that, and there was nothing shrinking about Nancy. Managing men was her business and she had never stood in awe of them. She spoke up sharply to Luciano. She told him to quit talking to Betty that way. That was no way to treat a girl.
Luciano turned to her slowly, stared at her steadily, coolly for a while without speaking. She will never forget the icy black anger in his eyes. His eyes held hers as if by force. Now she knew why Betty Cook feared him like death. This man Luciano was full of pent-up force, and serpentine malevolence seemed to strike from his stone-like face.
Nancy got out of there as soon as she could. She said she was sorry, she had to be getting along. She forgot to take her change from the cashier, and she dashed down into the Eighty-sixth Street subway entrance and hurried aboard a train. After the train door was closed, she looked back, out the window. That was silly, for she knew no one had followed her.
Now and then after that Nancy saw Luciano on the street, or in restaurants. He hung out around Dave’s Blue Room, an all-night restaurant in Seventh Avenue above Fifty-first Street, and on the sidewalk in front of Moe Ducore’s drug store at Forty-ninth—that segment of the Broadway neighborhood which was to become celebrated in Damon Runyon’s short stories. Luciano nodded casually when he saw her. She always smiled and spoke to him very nicely, but did not stop to talk. Neither of them had any notion of what important roles they were to play in each other’s life.
Nancy’s contacts with the underworld were made in other directions. She quit her job as a model after she had been set up in an apartment by a fellow named Joe. He was a married man and Nancy has forgotten his surname, but he had a flower shop on Broadway, or at least that was his front. Nancy did not stay with him very long. Being a kept woman cramped her style, and Joe quit paying the rent when he discovered that she was having regular weekly meetings with two other men, one of whom greatly improved her wardrobe, “being as he was in the dress business.” Though Nancy sometimes says she was a good girl until she met Joe, his only real importance in this story is that he took her on a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and there she met Willie Weber, Chink Sherman, and other members of Waxey Gordon’s mob, who were there for a holiday.
Waxey Gordon was probably the biggest bootlegger in the eastern states. An experienced member of Dopey Benny Fein’s old east side gang,1 Waxey was ready for action when Prohibition came along, and soon had a rum running syndicate with fleets of fast boats going to Rum Row, private radio stations, secret codes, and all the trappings of bootlegging romance. Later he went in mostly for breweries, and also invested his money in various legitimate enterprises. He owned at least three hotels in the Times Square sector of New York. Waxey was the bankroll for “Strike Me Pink,” a musical show starring Jimmy Durante; and one night, with a gesture truly baronial, he took the chorus of the show in a private car up to Great Meadow Prison for the entertainment of the felons there confined. The warden is said to have been mightily pleased at this generosity and concern for the comfort of his charges. Nancy Presser went along on the trip, and had the time of her life.
Steel company executives were all right, but as spenders they were not in the class with Nancy’s bootlegger friends. When she got in with the Waxey mob, she knew she was really in the big time. It was as fine a lot of mugs and killers as she could have tied up with anywhere. Mobsters were in need of entertainment, and Nancy was there to provide it.
There is widespread assumption, encouraged by a ditty of W. S. Gilbert’s, that when a felon’s not engaged in his employment his capacity for innocent enjoyment is as great as any other man’s. The contrary is true. Nancy’s friends were primitive, uncomplicated, untutored mugs, dripping with money, with very few ways in which to spend it. True, some of them were pigeon fanciers, followers of an engrossing but inexpensive sport always favored by gangsters. They could gamble. They could go to fights and, as some of them did, take over actual operations in the fight racket. They could loaf around in night clubs. But, while the normal man thinks of pleasure and relaxation almost synonymously with alcohol, the bootlegger had to be very careful of how he sampled his own wares.
The racket man lives under tension. Death may at any moment be behind his back. In such circumstances alcohol may easily become his master. And though criminals be tolerant in most matters, they will not long associate with a lush. Alcoholics lose their nerve. Drunkards talk too much. The drinking man becomes dangerous, and is likely to be disposed of with little ceremony, by means conveniently at hand. It is very easy to take a drunk for a ride.
Women, of course, were always there. But in them also the average man’s pleasure was denied the racketeer, for he had too much of them. In sex matters, lacking a romantic attachment, the elements of uncertainty and pursuit are much of the pleasure. But these are absent when every girl is a push-over. When all a man’s girls are as easy as Nancy, the joy of the chase just is not there. Add to this the racketeer’s tradition, widely believed, that “a guy who won’t go for a dame is yellow,” and the gangster’s sex life is hardly a happy one. The demands made upon him by his companions, if not by his own self-esteem, are almost superhuman. This combination of alcoholic abstinence and strenuous sex were the reasons why Nancy’s friends went in so extensively for the smoking of opium.
Hitting the pipe, at least so the gangster told himself, was not habit forming. If a man were careful, he could be a “pleasure smoker” and use the pipe occasionally for an opium jag without becoming a hopeless addict, as with heroin or morphine. A man was not charged up all the time. If lodged for a day or so in jail he might crave the drug, but he would not have the gnawing, crazy desire that would make him become a squealer. But opium relieved tensions, it made a man forget the dangers of life, it made him feel as if he were walking on air. It built up his ego, made him feel important. And it was aphrodisiac.
Waxey’s mob were confirmed opium smokers and soon introduced Nancy Presser to the pastime. Nancy went to her first opium smoking party when she was seventeen years old. Being a beginner, she smoked only four or five pills, but even that made her very sick. Not so deathly ill, however, as the time she went opium smoking after drinking beer all evening. Nancy would try anything once, and has tried most of them, but beer and opium smoke is a combination she would not advise anyone to tackle. Alcohol and opium never mix well anyhow.
The party was in one of Waxey’s hotels, in West Forty-sixth Street, and Nancy went with Willie Weber. Three other couples were there, for the pipe was a sociable habit; and when they all had arrived, the word was given downstairs that the room was not to be disturbed. Then the door to the corridor had its cracks all thoroughly stuffed with cotton wadding, and taped also, so that fumes could not escape and perhaps bring a crash raid by police. The windows were taped too, as if for fumigation, and heavy blankets were hung over the windows, to catch and hold the fumes and keep the air heavily saturated. When the place was thoroughly airtight, the smoking began. Nancy thought it was really quite thrilling.
Chink Sherman prepared the pipe.2 The opium was a gum-like substance which he had in a small can. In an alcohol lamp he would heat the end of a little metal rod, something like a crochet needle, and then work it around in the opium until a little pill of the gum had been formed on the end. This pill he would place on the bow I of the pipe. The pipe was a metal tube, about an inch in diameter and nearly three feet long; the bowl was a large, hollow pan-like protuberance near one end, with a tiny hole at the center. The smoker would place the bowl with its pill in the flame of the lamp, and, as the opium bubbled, would suck the fumes in through the bowl, slowly inhaling them. They all sat cross-legged at first, on mats on the floor, and took turns with the pipe, passing it around from one to the other.
After the first few pipes, the party really began to get going. Nancy was not shocked. She took everything in her stride, even in those days. But since on this evening she was more sick than doped, the proceedings appeared different to her than to the more active participants. Nancy, though she would not use such words in describing it, had never seen or imagined such slobbering, orgiastic promiscuity in all her life. Each man seemed to think he was Priapus himself, or a Casanova trying to live a whole autobiography in an evening. To Nancy, who was not without experience, and even though she dropped off to sleep rather early, it was amazing.
She was to learn later that opium smoking did not mean much to women, except to soothe jaded nerves. It made them feel lazy, sleepy, and acquiescent, that was all. But to a man, it seemed to swell and exalt the ego. It made him feel lord of all men and, more immediately, the unquenchable lord of all women. Whether it actually made him more powerful may be questioned; it made him think so, which served the purpose. To Nancy it always seemed that it magnified the effort and minimized the accomplishment, but whatever the men wanted was all right with her. Nancy, who later took to morphine, never cared much for the pipe. But she smoked often, for the social advantages. After all, it was not every girl who could be on such intimate terms with one of the toughest mobs in America. Nancy was even able to smoke sometimes with Waxey himself. He was a hard, flint-eyed man, but at such times he became almost human.
Nancy had practically made the grade, in one of the most inaccessible groups in New York Society. She was so appreciative of her luck that she operated in this sphere on practically an amateur basis. That is, her friends gave her presents instead of dealing on contracts. She was what was known in those days as a very nice dish. Her clothes came from the most expensive shops, and her furs were the best that could be stolen. Nancy lived at the Hotel Emerson, Seventy-fifth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. There were swankier addresses, but her social ambitions did not run toward the east side, and it was a convenient business location. A fine retinue of clients had her phone number, she was on good terms with head waiters all over town, and had working arrangements with bellboys in various places. In one evening she might be a caller at a half dozen hotels and apartments, for a whacking price at each. She could afford to take a night off now and then to play with her boy friends.
Even so she would pile up a bankroll every now and then, and would take a trip. On one of these in 1930 she had an especially good time. She went to Hot Springs and stayed at the Arlington Hotel and there, through some of Waxey’s crowd, she met Al Capone’s brother Ralph and Machine-Gun Jack McGurn, the gunner whose marksmanship made the St. Valentine’s Day massacre such a precise ministration of death. She went back to Chicago with them and spent a week playing around. They took her out sight-seeing one night with a convoy of liquor trucks. As a visitor in Chicago, she was sorry not to meet Al Capone himself, but he was wintering in Miami.
Back home, Nancy’s contacts broadened. Two or three times she went on parties at the penthouse of Joe Masseria, known as Joe the Boss, atop a luxurious apartment building in West Eighty-first Street, just off Central Park and across the greensward from the American Museum of Natural History. Nancy didn’t know much about Joe the Boss except that his wife was away and he was a big shot in the Unione Siciliana. She didn’t know much about the Italian mob, except that everybody was afraid of it. She hardly realized that she was treading the inner sanctum of underworld society.
Everybody in town knew about Waxey Gordon. He was famous, a newspaper character. Hardly anyone had heard of Joe Masseria. At one time Joe had been on the verge of notoriety. During the summer of 1922 he was engaged in three pistol ambuscades on the crowded sidewalks of the city, one of them a sanguinary encounter within a block of Police Headquarters. The casualties of those fights were: wounded—thirteen men and women, mostly innocent bystanders, and one pony which was hitched to a lemonade cart; killed—one gangster, one bystander, one street cleaner, and one ten-year-old girl. Joe Masseria got two bullets through a new straw hat and two arrests on his police record. The arrests were no more effective than the bullets. Joe had a pistol permit.
After that summer of 1922 Joe Masseria had dropped into obscurity. Such a development, with a criminal, may mean that he has reformed or become unimportant. With Joe it meant that he had become too important to do his own dirty work any more. He was questioned after important murders, but the police had nothing on him, and the newspapers had nothing about him that they could print. He was Joe the Boss now, New York leader of the Unione Siciliana, a diversified criminal enterprise which stemmed from the deadly secrecy of the Sicilian Mafia, and which had its ramifications in all parts of America.
At the penthouse of Joe the Boss one night, Nancy found herself looking into a pair of eyes that had about them something that was hauntingly familiar, and yet had a quality more sinister than ever they had in memory. The man was introduced to her as Charlie Lucky, and she realized she was talking to her acquaintance of two years ago, Charles Luciano. There was a scar on his face now, and a droop to his right eyelid which multiplied the somber ruthlessness of his expression.
Luciano may have been at the bottom of the social ladder when she first had met him, but he was mounting fast. Already he was Joe Masseria’s right-hand man. The year before, in 1929, Luciano had been found unconscious one night on a lonely street in Staten Island, slumped down in a stolen car, his face slashed, his mouth taped, his head beaten. Straightway he met a degree of fame, as the gangster who had been taken for a ride, and who had lived to refuse to tell the tale to the grand jury. Men began calling him Lucky.
Luciano had not been taken for a ride in the usual way, but had been taken out and tortured by men who wanted to find out where the mob had a vast cache of narcotics. One version of the event has it that his captors were led by Legs Diamond, and that as part of the procedure Luciano had his forefingers forced into the barrels of a loaded shotgun. A version which seems closer to the truth is thnt the kidnapping was faked by officers of the law. At any rate, he met the test and refused to give up the secret. After that the men of his mob treated him with new respect. In such ways leaders are made.
Nancy was not abashed by his new eminence. She too had progressed in the world. But she treated him with new interest and regard. Here, obviously, was a young man who was rising in the world and marked for success; and Nancy specialized in those. She smiled in her prettiest way, talked her hottest line, and nothing was said of past unpleasantness.
For the time being Nancy’s big time contacts were mostly with the Waxey Gordon mob. She got pretty friendly with Waxey himself. But that mob and the security of Nancy’s social position were to disintegrate with the end of Prohibition and other devastating events of 1933.
When the federal government made beer legal again, in the spring of 1933, Waxey had either to go legitimate or go broke. He was loaded up heavily with breweries,3 and they would be a loss to him unless he could operate them.
He went about the business of reorganization in an orthodox way. Obviously he would not need artillery to help sell legal 3.2 beer. So, the story goes, he notified his torpedo men their services would no longer be required. It was another case of technological unemployment. But the trigger men turned out to be less docile than other industrial workers who were thrown on the scrap heap in that springtime of depression and panic.
The headquarters of the Gordon beer syndicate was in an elaborate suite of rooms in the Elizabeth-Carteret Hotel in Elizabeth, N. J., and there was a visitation there on the afternoon of April15, 1933, by a committee of unemployed. Gordon, whom they had expected to find there, was absent, so the deputation lodged its devastating protest with his two chief lieutenants, Abe Greenberg, who fronted for him in the hotel business, and Max Hassell, who ran the Pennsylvania end of the beer syndicate. Greenberg stopped five bullets with indiscriminate parts of his person, but a more delicate job was done on Hassell. He received one bullet through the heart, and one, neatly, through each ear.
Waxey dropped out of sight. He was so upset that he quit shaving. He was found several weeks later by federal agents, sound asleep in a secluded hunting lodge in the Catskill Mountains, while his bodyguard also snored. Waxey seemed glad to exchange this location for the greater security of a jail. In the interlude, federal men had wound up three years of investigation and indicted Gordon for violating the income tax laws.
It did not come out until long later how Waxey came to miss the committee which called upon him that springtime afternoon in the Elizabeth hotel. He escaped because he was in an adjoining room, in bed with a blonde. According to Nancy Presser, she was the blonde. She says she was never so startled in all her life.
Thus do trivial matters influence great events. The April impulse of a racketeer, at an inappropriate time of day, the incontinence of a convenient harlot, these changed the whole course of events in the underworld.
If Waxey had been killed that afternoon, it would have wiped out years of work by a young federal prosecutor in New York, Thomas E. Dewey. There would have been no trial six months later, and Waxey would not have been sent off to prison for ten years, as a sardonic exclamation point on the repeal of Prohibition. And if Dewey had not been the man who convicted Waxey Gordon, it is entirely unlikely that he would have been chosen, in the summer of 1935, as the special prosecutor to lead a crusade against the racketeering mobs whose march to power had ruffled even the blase complacency of New York.
Big events often hang on such slender threads of chance. If that were all, this one would have been too trivial to mention. It might seem improbable that the stars of Tom Dewey and Nancy Presser should ever cross again, especially so that the two should ever meet. But life holds more improbable events than fiction.
It was to be told, years later, that Nancy Presser also was the girl who went to bed with Luciano, who had become the top man of the underworld.
1 Dopey Benny was a pioneer specialist in the field of industrial gangsterism. There was hardly a strike for years in which Benny did not enlist his sluggers on one side or the other, sometimes on both at once. But he was a piker. He collected small money, and it never occurred to him that he might become the boss of those who hired him.
2 Dapper little Chink Sherman was the one who spread the notoriety of Dutch Schultz by shooting him one night in the Club Abbey, a racket hangout in West Fifty-fourth Street. A Schultz man retaliated by cutting Chink seven times with a beer bottle, broken for the purpose.
Chink used to sit at a corner table in Dinty Moore’s and speak with cloying politeness when he was passed by Police Commissioner Mulrooney, who would go on to his own table muttering his indignation. Chink infuriated the cops, especially one time when they knew he had killed two men in Los Angeles but found he apparently had been a conspicuous figure along Broadway through all that same week. They were convinced he had made a rapid airplane trip to California, but could not prove it.
The week after Schultz was murdered in 1935 (doubtless mere coincidence) a farmer noticed a trail of blood leading to a barn in the Catskill Mountains. A few turns with a shovel disclosed a fresh body in a grave of quicklime. It was Chink. He had been done in with a hatchet.
3 The blow of repeal to the alcohol and whisky men was not so severe. Taxes were fixed so high that there still remained an ample margin of bootleg profit on goods with counterfeit labels.