Prostitution is a lonely life. There are so many men who just come and go, impersonally. Even regular playmates do not take a girl very seriously. Nancy Presser needed a real boy friend, and in the spring of 1931 she got one.
It was probably some thwarted maternal instinct in Nancy which caused her to take up with Ralph Liguori. He was such a runt. Nancy was a trifle more than average size, and Ralph stood less than five feet two. But he was chunky and he was tough.
They went for each other the first moment they met, in a speakeasy one night in 1931. To him she was a glamour girl, friend of big racketeers. Ralph was flattered when she gave him the eye, like a freshman who has made the grade with a prom queen. Ralph was, he gave her to understand, a big shot holdup man, and he spent his money with a lavish masterful hand.
At first they had a date only now and then, just chippied a bit. Nancy was a busy girl most evenings, and Ralph was a roving free lance up and down Broadway. But gradually theirs got to be a steady relationship. Nancy for the first time had a real boy friend. Nature is a determined force, and when her major purposes are thwarted or perverted, they are likely to burst forth in strange ways with pent-up rushing force. Unsuspected springs of affection welled up in Nancy, and on Ralph she lavished them.
To other gangsters she had been merely a momentary plaything. But now she and Ralph seemed to belong to each other. He let her share his life. With Ralph, for the first time, Nancy became a real gun moll. His specialty was robbing houses of prostitution.
They took each other seriously. Ralph’s family were respectable people over in Brooklyn, and his sister worked for $25 a week in an office in the Bronx,. an hour’s ride from home on the subway. The sister also took care of Ralph’s little son, for he had a wife somewhere, and sometimes she gave Ralph money when he needed it. Ralph used to take Nancy home for Sunday dinner, introduce her as his girl friend, a cigarette girl in a night club. Nancy put on her most dazzling manners on those occasions; it gave her a little thrill to feel that she was bringing glamour into the drab lives of these home folks. Twice she took Ralph home with her to Auburn on vacations, and introduced him as her fiance; and then did she hold her head high! Ralph had a big Cadillac car that he had bought second hand, several years old but still shiny, and they cut a dashing figure in the streets of Auburn.
But the course of love did not run entirely smooth. Ralph had another girl named Lillian Cardella, or Gordon, but commonly known in the profession as Gashouse Lil. Lil barged into Nancy’s room one day and cut loose with such a stream of profanity that Miss Presser was quite breathless for a moment before she could recover her dignity and her voice. Then she laid Gashouse out.
“Just imagine,” said Nancy to Ralph later. “Just imagine her talking to me that way. But I told her off. I ast her where she got off talking to me that way, and her nothing but a dirty two-dollar bag!”
Gashouse was not a permanent obstruction. Ralph was getting fed up with her anyway. Madams didn’t want to hire Gashouse any more because she had acquired a reputation, in the past, for working in a place and then putting the finger on it for Ralph to come around and clean it out with a holdup. It had got so Ralph had to get her jobs himself, go to the madams and tell them to hire Gashouse. They protested, but they knew Liguori or knew his reputation well enough so that they did what he wanted. But even when Gas-house Lil was working, the revenue wasn’t as much as it should be. For she had got such a swelled head over having a tough gorilla for a boy friend that she was sassy with the customers, and wouldn’t take the trouble to please them. You'd have thought she was doing them a favor, the way she acted. Of course that got around among the trade, and business fell off.
Eventually Gashouse got sick. She had to go to the hospital for an operation, one of those occupational hazards which a girl in the business encounters sooner or later. So she asked Ralph to cash in on a life insurance policy she had, to get the money for the hospital bill. He was glad to oblige, and he got Nancy to forge the endorsement on Lil’s check when it came. He gave Gashouse $200 of the money, and used the rest to pay off on his car. He had traded in the Cadillac for a Cord. The new car was fancy, with all the shiny gadgets it could hold, and Ralph and Nancy could practically feel the envious eyes fixed upon them as they drove along Broadway. They didn’t bother with Gashouse Lil after that. She was washed up anyway.
Liguori had the habit of sleeping around in various hotels, always under some other name than his own. For some time he spent part of the week in Lil’s hotel, as Mr. Cardella, and part of the time in Nancy’s hotel, as Mr. Presser. Gradually he took to spending most of his nights with Nancy. He was her pimp now, and regularly she gave him money.
Nancy also helped Ralph in his business. Even when he was not there, he kept his guns in Nancy’s room, and before long, when he would go out on a holdup, he would have Nancy come along and carry the gun until he got ready to use it. Possession of a pistol without a license is a penal offense in New York, and Ralph did not want to take any more chances than necessary. But it made Nancy feel important to take the risks. It was thrilling.
The first time Nancy went on a holdup with Ralph was at Jean’s Place in West Seventy-first Street. She took the guns from under the mattress in her room, and they got in Ralph’s car and picked up his partner, a fellow named Johnnie. Nancy sat in the car and waited outside Jean’s, while they went inside to do the robbery. There was not any great risk in that for Ralph because he knew no one from a house of prostitution was going to squawk to the police. That was a pretty smart racket, Nancy thought.
After the boys came out, Liguori headed the car downtown and they dropped Johnnie on Broadway.
“How much'd you get?” asked Nancy.
“About $200,” said Ralph.
“Hey, hey, we’ll go on a party tonight!” cried Nancy. This was easy money, this was swell.
“Nix, I don’t get it all,” said Ralph. “Got to report down at the office. Here, take this but don’t say nothin’ about it.”
He handed her a pretty little platinum wrist watch, set with small diamonds. It had Mary Lou engraved on the back of it. Nancy put it on and held up her hand for Ralph to admire. She kept it and treasured it always. It was one of the few presents Ralph ever gave her.
Liguori swung his car across town and down the east side, along Lafayette Street way down to Grand, then across past Police Headquarters and around the corner a couple of blocks into Mulberry Street. Nancy could not imagine what was the business at the place where they stopped. There was a dirty soft drink sign at the window, but nothing that made it look like a going establishment. Liguori went in, nodding to a group of hard-faced men who were hanging around the entrance. Nancy felt a vague uneasiness as she waited. Later she was to become well acquainted with the dives of this neighborhood, but never was to feel entirely at home. Ralph came out after a while, looking glum, not saying anything, and they drove away.
Gradually Nancy learned that, while Ralph was very proud to be tied up with “downtown,” the connection was not entirely happy. To outsiders he might seem a big shot because he was in the Italian mob, but in reality he was merely a cheap jack of all work, an odd job man who was not even on the regular payroll, who was rewarded only with crumbs dropped by the bosses. Before he could go on a hold-up, he had to get the O.K. from bigger men. That was why he had depended on Gashouse, and now on Nancy, for money. The wages of crime, except for those who give the orders, are pitifully low. When a criminal organization is a going concern, it finds plenty of people ready to work for it for chicken feed, just as youngsters working up in any legitimate business accept small wages for the prestige of the connection and for the experience they are getting.
Protection, of course, was an advantage. Once Liguori got arrested on one of his errands, and detectives beat the living tar out of him trying to get a confession. Much as they deny it, the police do that. One reason is that when they have their hands on a crook, they want him to remember it; and the chances are very good that the next day, in magistrate’s court, he will be sprung.
In this case a high police officer of the neighborhood had a caller next day, a prominent politician of Tammany Hall, who gave him and his command a thorough bawling out for their treatment of Ralph. The police officer, who had not realized Liguori was so well equipped with friends, was apologetic. The case later went out the window.
We have to slide rapidly and sketchily over this incident because it deals with important people. To support the story there are only Nancy’s word and Ralph’s word, and circumstances are such that they both would deny it now. Doubtless the politician and other persons concerned would object to having their names used with such insubstantial support. Possibly the tale is exaggerated, for there is nothing that so builds up the ego of people like Ralph and Nancy as the knowledge that a cop is subservient or crooked. At any rate the story goes that Ralph and the police officer became good friends after that. They would drink together at a bar, and it is said that once the policeman came to Nancy’s room to call on Liguori. After all, Ralph was a man with connections.
After 1933 Ralph made fewer and fewer expeditions to hold up houses of prostitution, because the mob was protecting the joints, but there were many other adventures in which Nancy took part. Sometimes she went with Ralph and waited while he shook down restaurants on the upper east side. The downtown mob, it seems, had a restaurant racket which, though less tightly organized, was similar in many respects to that by which the Dutch Schultz mob terrorized the food industry in all the Times Square area. It had taken command over a waiters’ union, which is no longer in existence, and like the Schultz mob put the squeeze on the employers by starting strikes. Liguori’s part was to put the bite on the proprietors for $1,000, $2,000 or more to bring an end to their labor troubles. It was the riskiest role in the whole racket, so it was a small man’s job, the same part that was played for the Schultz mob by Louis Beitcher, who collected hundreds of thousands of dollars shakedown money while working at a salary of $50 a week.
Two or three times Nancy went with Liguori and others to piers on the North River, where they got cans of opium that had been smuggled ashore from ships.1 Nancy, got a tremendous thrill out of those nights, because they let her carry the opium, and told her to say it was hers in case the cops picked them up. They would take it over and leave it in a garage in Brooklyn.
Nancy had known all along, of course, that Liguori’s mob were the big guns in the dope racket. Ralph always got her morphine for her. She no longer smoked opium, but she was using quite a bit of morphine, a quarter of a cube three times a day. The first time had been one morning when she had a frightful hangover and couldn’t sleep. Nancy’s customers expected her to get drunk with them, and this time she had been fool enough to do it, in a big way. A girl friend gave her a morphine pill which put her to sleep and gave her a good rest. After that she used it every once in a while, and it became more and more frequent, for there were many hard nights in a playgirl life such as Nancy led. She found it soothed her nerves, and she was living on her nerve most of the time now. After a while she started taking it regularly as a hypodermic. She would take a small cube, cut it in quarters with a knife, and dissolve each quarter in water for a shot in the leg.
Nancy knew very soon, vaguely, that Charlie Lucky was the head man of Liguori’s mob, that he had succeeded Joe the Boss. That is, she heard it vaguely. Ralph did not talk about Lucky at all, and she did not ask. But Nancy had plenty of people from whom she learned about the underworld. All during this period she was going out with her other friends, most of whom were much bigger than Ralph. Liguori, she had learned long since, was pretty small fry; but he was her man, and that was that. Once when she and Liguori went into a restaurant, Luciano was sitting there with some of his crowd, and while Ralph looked the other way, Lucky gave her the eye with a nod toward Ralph, as if to tell her he did not want them to stop at his table. Liguori, though he objected strenuously, was getting to be known around town as Ralph the Pimp.
Nobody talked much about Lucky. He was there. You saw him around, and he was treated like some sort of god, but if anybody mentioned his name he was likely to be told to shut up. Everybody in the underworld knew about Charlie Lucky, but they didn’t know much that was specific about him, and they knew he was not to be gossiped about. He did not want it. Ownie Madden had got himself talked about, and the parole board had sent him back to prison. Al Capone and Waxey Gordon and Dutch Schultz had got themselves talked about, and were either in prison or on the lam. Lucky was content to be obscure.
Nancy’s friendship for other gangsters, big fellows, was one of the things that was to come between her and Ralph. For, sad to say, their boy and girl love affair was to turn to bitterness and a fierce struggle of wills for dominance.
First, there was the matter of money. After 1933 Ralph began demanding more and more of it from Nancy. When they first met, Liguori and two or three other fellows had had a prosperous little business of their own. A part from his holdups, and the money he was drawing down from Gas-house, Ralph in those days had several joints that were paying him and his associates $25 every week for protection.
There were two basic ways of running a house of prostitution in those days. One was fly-by-night, hopping from place to place every few days to avoid detection by the hoodlums who would come to shake the joint down if they found it. The hoodlums would demand money, and if not paid they would take the joint apart. The hoodlums used only strong-arm methods of extortion; they would not threaten to report the joint to the police. That was considered unethical, and was done only by stool pigeons.
The other way of running a joint was to have a location more or less permanent, and pay protection to a group such as Liguori’s. Then if some hoodlum came around for a shakedown, the madam would stall for time and make an appointment for next Thursday, say. Then on Thursday she would have her protectors there to meet the visitor. The interview ordinarily would be without rancor or unpleasantness. Liguori probably would know the hoodlum, and would merely tell him he was protecting this joint, and please lay off. Usually that was all. Unless he wanted to muscle in and start a war, the hoodlum would just take a powder. Of course, jurisdictional disputes often arose; and in that case the bosses downtown would be asked for a decision. Thus the system grew into a pyramid, with the bosses distributing territorial monopolies so everybody could make a living, like a political leader distributing patronage. Thus cohesive groups developed, with reserve strength for emergencies.
Nowadays everything was different for Liguori. The downtown combination had taken over the bonding of the houses, and the protection rights had gone to other fellows. Ralph was permitted to stick up a joint now only when it was not paying up properly, to put the arm on it for the combination. Even then he got only part of the dough. He had been crowded down to the point where he had small pickings. It was that way for almost everybody in the depression following Repeal. Some of the regular payroll men in the mobs, gunmen, got down as low as $25 a week.
But a guy like Liguori had to have plenty of money. He had to spend easy, like the others, or he would look like a crumb. Liguori liked to brag about the night he lost $38,000 at Saratoga, which everybody knew was a lie; but after that he could not lay a $2 bet on a horse, or Willie Spiller would think he was a joke. When a man was tied up with down-town, his bets had to run into real money. He had to pack a bankroll, even if it was the Philadelphia kind, of brown paper with a century note wrapped around the outside. Sometimes if Liguori ran short of money he would borrow from a shylock at the regular rate, six for five. That is, if he borrowed $100 from Bennie Spiller this week, he would owe $20 a week for six weeks; if you couldn’t pay up promptly, that ran up into real money. If the ponies were running against a guy, the losses and the loan sharking drained off dough like nobody’s business.
Ralph accused Nancy of holding out money on him, which of course she was doing, though she hardly dared give him less than $125 a week. Nancy was an independent wench, used to having money of her own, and the idea of handing it all over to a man never appealed to her, even if the man was Liguori. Ralph started to crab about the money she was spending for junk, which ran sometimes up to $50 a week when she was sniffing cocaine as well as taking her shots. He started buying her heroin instead of morphine, because it was cheaper, and told her to take it and like it.
Then Liguori started getting jealous. He bellyached about her running around with other men. When it was strictly business, that was one thing, but Nancy was a girl who played around. He bet she was chippying with a lot of those guys for nothing, he bet she was untrue to him. It was the old, old story of a career woman and her man. Nancy was far more successful in her work than Ralph in his. She could play around with guys so big they wouldn’t even give Ralph a tumble. It burned him up.
Nancy, of course, was not making as much money as she had been accustomed to. It was tough bucks in those days for everybody, and especially so for a luxury girl. Business men weren’t throwing their money around the way they had, and many of her old friends had dropped out altogether. Prison, homicide, and Prohibition repeal had wrought great changes among her gangster friends. It seemed almost as if a century had come easier in the old days than a sawbuck now. Competition was keen too. A lot more girls were going into the business than there had been in prosperous times, and some of them were very young and pretty and were cutting prices.
By 1935 Nancy had got really afraid of Ralph. He was unreasonable. At those times when she couldn’t work, Ralph said she was loafing. There was no satisfying the man.
Finally he said the thing for her to do was to go in a house, where he could watch her. He would get Pete Harris to book her. It would mean $2 from a customer, and half of that to the madam, instead of $10 or $20, but there would be more customers. She would have a steady income, for once, and it would keep her from running around with other men.
Nancy heard the words with dull chilling dread. For weeks, months, she had been fearing this.
“Nuts,” she said. “I'm never going to do that.”
Ralph dropped the subject for the time, but came back to it next day, when she told him she was nearly out of heroin.
“Lissen, baby,” he said. “No more of that stuff for you until you do like I say.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Nancy. “I got plenty places I can get that. You needn’t think you're so smart.”
One day Ralph smacked her and pushed her around, punched her in the ribs. She fought back.
“Say,” she said. “You need your wagon fixed, and I know guys that can fix it.”
Sure, she knew plenty of guys who could fix Ralph’s wagon. They were tougher than he was. But down deep inside she knew, dully, that she never would ask them. Nancy had pride. She could not just imagine herself going to someone and saying that her man wanted to make her work in a $2 house, and please don’t let him do it. She knew too it wouldn’t do any good. She was Ralph’s, and one man wouldn’t interfere with another man’s racket, unless he wanted to take it himself. And she knew no one but Ralph would want to take her for keeps.
Another day the battle grew hotter than usual. Ralph punched her, she scratched back, and he shoved her back on the bed. Then Nancy saw through horrified eyes that Ralph had drawn a shining sharp knife. She snatched at his wrist, and as they grappled, the blade cut an ugly red gash across her arm. It was weeks before it healed up decently at all. She still has the scar.
After that Nancy decided she might as well give Liguori’s idea a try. Liguori saw Pete Harris about booking her, and though Harris was not eager to take her on, he yielded to urging. Nancy went to work at Jennie the Factory’s place.
“So Liguori made you go to work in a $2 house!” exclaimed an interested lawyer long later.
“Yes, he did,” said Nancy. “And he was mean and rotten about it too!"
Nancy didn’t like her new work. She had always considered herself an artist, but in this job she had no time for anything like that. It was routine.
Six calls had been a very busy night in the past, but this first week she took in 800 checks. A check was a dollar, and each customer was two checks. Nancy had a narrow blue card, and each time she turned over money to Jennie, the madam would punch the card once for each check. Some of the money was from $2 customers and some paid more. Nancy lost count of how many there were. It was all pretty much of a blur, and she could never have kept track without the blue card. It was like rushing the trade through a barber shop or, even more, like a shoe-shine parlor. Though she took in $800, at the end of the week after paying the madam’s $150, Pete Harris’s $15 commission, $85 board, and $5 to the doctor, she had $95 left for herself. She told Liguori as she gave it to him that she would never do it again.
He kept at her. One day he wrapped a wire coat hanger around her neck and choked her, and she doesn’t know what might have happened if she hadn’t managed to scream before it tightened. A passing bellhop banged on the door, and that stopped Liguori.
All through that year of 1985 the struggle waged between them. Nancy had her old clientele she did not want to neglect and lose; and that made it difficult when she was working in a joint all afternoon and evening. But some weeks Ralph was not able to get bookings for her, since the madams remembered Gashouse and hated Liguori. Sometimes Nancy was booked, but she just didn’t go to work. Ralph dealt with the first problem as he had with Gashouse, by taking Nancy to the madam and demanding that she be given a job. As for Nancy’s rebellion, he took her to work at noon every day and waited a while outside to be sure that she stayed. Even so, Nancy worked in joints only about a dozen weeks in all of 1985.
Toward the end of the year Ralph got worse and tougher. He started complaining again about the money it cost for Nancy’s dope, and one day he insisted she stay home and take the cure. Nancy was taken off heroin that week so rapidly that she collapsed, and had to be taken to a sanitarium in Connecticut for two weeks. Ralph was very mad about that. After she had been through that ordeal she was off dope, but in a weak condition, and much more pliable to Liguori’s will.
But rebellion still was there. Nancy had figured out a way to hold out money on Liguori. Whatever the madam bargained for with the customer, Nancy had to turn over. But her tips she could keep for herself. So she worked for tips instead of just checks. The fiat $2 fee didn’t call for much; a girl didn’t even undress. There were lots of ways in which Nancy could earn extra money. The madams stood for it, even though it cut down the week’s gross, because the customers liked Nancy and she made good will for the house. Nancy liked it better too, apart from the money. It gave her some chance at self-expression, she felt less like an automaton, she regained some of the self-respect she had felt in her days as a free lance. But when Liguori got wind of it he was sore. He got so he would sit in the front parlor where Nancy was working and watch her. If she stayed out of the room more than fifteen minutes with a customer he would raise holy hell.
On the night of February 1, 1936, Liguori was sitting in the front parlor reading the racing form, at the place of Polack Frances in West Twenty-third Street, while Nancy proceeded with the activities of a busy night. She went in the back room with her eighth customer of the evening, and they had been there hardly more than a few minutes when there came a thunderous bang on the door. It swung open, and framed there stood a huge figure of a man. Nancy knew by just the looks of him that he was a cop.
“Put on your clothes,” he said. “The joint is pinched.”
Nancy moved slowly as her customer hurried out. Suddenly she felt very tired. Looking at her face in the mirror, she noticed that it was puffy.
Nancy Presser had done a lot of living in the last ten years. A small fortune had flowed through her fingers. She had known excitement, carried her head high, played with big shots.
Now she was twenty-four years old. She had a gnawing hunger for morphine. She did not know yet that she had a 4 plus Wassermann test, but there was a nagging ache in her side. She hopefully told herself that was not an abscess, but was where Liguori had punched her. Nancy was twenty-four years old, and she was an aging, diseased, two-dollar whore. In the hands of the law.
All this trouble, she told herself indignantly, on account of that damned Ralph Liguori!
Ralph was being pushed out the front door with the customers as Nancy came into the parlor. She had regained her composure now and walked defiantly. The policeman who had found her grinned.
“This is a good case, sergeant,” he said. “Right in the act. Besides, I’ve seen her around a lot on Broadway. She’s a well-known whore.”
Nancy drew herself up into a picture of outraged dignity. She spoke sharply, imperiously, in the voice she reserved for house detectives and unpleasant head waiters.
“Sir!” she said. “Don’t be so vulgar! The word is prostitute.”
1 Along with Jerry Bruno, a big shot in the mob, and a drug smuggling ring including some night club owners from Texas, Ralph Liguori was convicted of drug running in a Federal Court trial in the spring of 1988.