For five years while Dave Miller was a constable in Pittsburgh, he did very well in a business way. He and Ruth were a young couple, having babies, and salting away a little money. Being a constable didn’t pay very much, but Dave had a regular income from shaking down speakeasies and cat houses.
According to Dave he got personally mixed up with prostitution, which was to be his ultimate downfall, because his wife didn’t understand him. In the midst of a quarrel one day she walked out on him, and his spirited response was to go out and bring home a prostitute. The girl was there when Mrs. Miller came home the next day; and, after a somewhat strenuous scene, both women stayed on in the house, the girl earning her keep in a professional way. That’s the way Dave tells it, but I think his perspective is a bit cockeyed. Even before that, probably, the Miller household was not very straightlaced. There is testimony that Ruth herself did the work on the girl’s day out.
Before long the Millers were arrested for keeping a disorderly house. Some of the neighbors thought it wrong for such things to be going on in a home with small children. Dave lost his job as an officer of the law.
After wandering here and there for a while, the Millers came to New York in 1929 and set up housekeeping with their three children. Dave started out peddling dresses from house to house, and there is no better way of learning the ins and outs of the city. Soon he was especially selling dresses in houses of prostitution, for harlots were the best customers he found. Clothes were a part of their stock in trade. The girls were vain, they had money to spend, and very little sense about how they spent it. Dave always let on his goods were cut-rate, and even if they were not stolen, he hinted they were hot; because then the girls thought they were getting real bargains. The girls would buy more than they could afford, even ermine wraps and other such nonsense. Then Dave would fix it up with their bookers that they had steady work for a while, so they could pay him off.
He got along all right. Peddling dresses in brothels is really a very profitable business, having no overhead. Sam Samuels got his start that way and now he owns one of the finest apartment houses on the Grand Concourse, with city officials and judges for tenants. Sam’s prosperity gave him overconfidence, however, and in 1935 he complained to the police that there was a racket in prostitution. The police, inquiring, found out Sam was running a couple of joints himself, and sent him to prison. Nobody should ever blow the whistle for the cops unless he has dropped his own burglar’s tools.
Soon Dave struck up partnership with a fellow named Harry Chicago, and they decided they would open up a joint. They supplied the credit and the backing, but they had their wives do the actual running of the place. Such arrangements of wrong-doing by remote control, so to speak, are very common in the underworld. In this case Dave and Harry Chicago were especially safe. Their joint could not possibly be pinned on them, for it is the law that a wife can’t testify against her husband. But after a couple of months the cops closed it up.
Chicago and Dave had made a lot of contacts in the business by now, girls, madams, bondsmen, lawyers, and they decided to go into partnership as bookers. They started out with a string of girls and about ten houses, and soon were doing pretty well. Then they split the book and went their own ways, and Dave went on alone to develop his business as a booker.
Ruth stayed home now most of the time and took care of the children, but now and then she worked for a week or so, for pin money. If you want to make Dave Miller mad, just suggest that he ever made his wife work as a prostitute, or even asked her to. It was entirely her own idea, Dave insists, and she didn’t have to do it either. He was a good provider.
Dave Miller! Didn’t you have any moral scruples about all this?
“Any more what?” asks Dave.
The ancient industry of prostitution had fallen to a low state in New York City during the twenty years after the World War. There were various reasons. For one thing the demand had fallen off. There had been a great increase in what had been called amateur competition. Also, thanks to the propaganda of Havelock Ellis and other sex psychologists and moralists, there had been a decrease in marital dissatisfaction.
Another reason for the plight of the industry was that Tammany Hall had learned, by long experience, that prostitution was a bad thing to touch. Back in the Nineteenth Century prostitution was wide open and paid regular dividends in political protection. In those days the Haymarket and other dance halls of the Tenderloin ran without restriction, and even the waitresses were wenches; gentlemen could sit drinking wine in private boxes or booths, where, in the inner recesses, ladies of th12 establishment would entertain them in manners we shall forbear to mention. There were joints of all kinds. Over in Twenty-third Street the Seven Sisters had their row of houses, where gentlemen must come in evening dress, and the accomplishments of the inmates included the playing of the harp. The Lexow investigation of the 90’s, exposing what had been going on, to the fascinated horror of the populace, brought retribution to the city’s rulers. A few years later, William Travers Jerome founded his career as a public prosecutor on the brass check, token of harlotry. The politicians, for the most part, learned it was safer to rely on less obvious forms of graft. For the population of New York, cosmopolitan as it is, broadminded as it is, and little inclined to mind other people’s business, has one characteristic. The public is disposed to be tolerant, even sentimental, toward the poor prostitute; but it burns up whenever it hears about any man taking a girl’s earnings away from her.
During the administrations of Mayor Hylan and Mayor Walker, Tammany ran a “clean” city. There were, it was pointed out, no women soliciting in the streets and no joints running wide open. And this was convincing to the average citizen. Your average citizen is very naive and uncomplicated. When he thinks about sin, the one thing that immediately pops into his head is going to bed with somebody he is not married to. Since the city had thorough outward order and decency, the voter decided that things were pretty clean. So the politicians were able to get away with murder in other directions.
A “clean” city turned out to be profitable for the exploiters of sex. There is always more money to be made out of the titillation and exacerbation of the sex impulse than out of its consummation. The male in heat is a generous, :flamboyant show-off; but gratify his wants and he becomes a sleepy pinchpenny fellow. The cleaner New York became, the more clothes came off the girls in the Vanities, the night clubs, the burlesque houses, and the more “art” magazines there were on the newsstands. Clip joints flourished, where men on the hunt were enveigled by taxicab drivers with vague promises, where hostesses plied them with drinks, and where finally a delegation of gorillas presented a bill which seemed as big as Finland’s war debt, and was as promptly paid. Taxi dance halls flourished, and there too men hunted in vain. This was the golden day of the gold digger, the teaser, the torrid virgin.
“Hello, sucker!” cried Texas Guinan. “Give the little girl a hand.”
But the little girls gave nothing.
There were hustlers in the streets, of course. But they were wary.1 They did not dare solicit openly, but cultivated a friendly, demure eye. To find them a man had to be an ogler, a nervy fellow. He had to risk having his face slapped in public, or being denounced as a masher. And even if he did make a girl on the street, he had no assurance that she would deliver. She might be just a shill who would take him to a bar where she could collect a commission on the drinks, and then, having got him plastered, roll him for the rest of his dough.
Then, as it has been mentioned, there was Polly Adler, catering to the twelve cylinder trade; and as the years went on she had a competitor in Peggy Wild. Peggy Wild is an Italian girl of sultry, mongoloid features, whose real name is Margaret Venti. She was once married to a traveling man, and had a lot of time on her hands. She was renting a room in her apartment to a show-girl who had a number of gentlemen friends, and frequently there were occasions when the young men needed more girls to make up a party. Peggy got started arranging such things; one thing led to another; and the first thing she knew she was one of the town’s leading call house madams. For years Peggy ran a joint at Saratoga during the racing season, and that made her many valuable contacts among sportsmen, politicians, and underworld people.
At first when Peggy ran a house the price was high, but gradually she settled down to the standard $2 joint. Anybody who thinks that is a come-down, says Peggy, just doesn’t know anything about the business. Just as the big automobile business is in Fords and Chevrolets, so the real profits in prostitution are in low-priced mass production. When a John comes to a $25 joint, says Peggy, he feels as if he is buying the place. He expects it to be luxuriously furnished, and he wants to sit down, be entertained, talk, and have a party. He probably wants to get plastered, which will make a joint conspicuous to the neighbors. All that is unprofitable. But when you are running at $2 you can keep the overhead down, and run the customers through rapidly and discreetly. The John realizes that everything is strictly business, and he didn’t come there to talk.
When a madam is running a joint at $20 and making a go of it, according to Peggy, you can be sure her chief course of revenue is not prostitution, but is probably blackmail. A high-priced joint attracts the high-class trade, and occasionally brings in an eminent citizen of high respectability and reputation. In return for a lively evening, especially in these days of fast camera lenses, such an eminent citizen may feel impelled to make contributions over a long period. But that sort of thing is outside the scope of any really honest madam.
Of course, for a price any madam is glad to close her joint for the night and entertain one party. There was one memorable night of that sort at Peggy’s, when Vincent Coli, then a high lieutenant of the Schultz mob, gave her a $500 bill and bought the house for the evening. He was entertaining Al Capone and other big shots from Chicago, as Peggy remembers it, and wanted to show them a good time without making them conspicuous.
The $2 joints which sprang up all over New York, in the days when the city was clean, were small hideaways, usually in second or third rate apartment houses. Respectable neighbors, minding their own business, generally suspected nothing queer; though the building superintendent usually had to be sugared to keep him from noticing too much. These places were thoroughly unlike the wide-open houses of other cities, such as the Four Deuces in Chicago where Al Capone got his start; there the girls sat on crowded benches, around a large room, and customers took their pick. Here in the New York joints there were usually only two girls, three at the most, often only one.
The chief asset of the madam was her list of customers, men whom she recognized when she looked through a peephole. She would accumulate her list through the years, and when she moved, or opened up a new joint, she would send out cards with the address, perhaps bearing some cryptic initials such as M.O., for “men only,” and a sales slogan which would be intelligible to the recipient. Such as:
GET YOUR RADIO FIXED
The customers were a varied lot. There were married men with frigid or invalid wives, who would not expend the time, the money, or the risk for extra-mural love affairs. There were impatient young men whose sweethearts were technical virgins, and staid bachelors who tried to order their lives like clockwork. There were men who could not afford wives and sweethearts, and men who had no homes, and men so deformed in body and spirit that they could not find their mates. There were men in whom welled up unaccountable desires, which could not be confided even to a lover, but demanded to be satisfied among strangers, in dark and secret places. There were many who to most of us would seem to be just plain scum, but in whom doubtless the psychiatrists could find traces of humanity. All these poured nightly into the joints of New York, and then like shadows departed. Much has been written and many tears shed, over the frail girls who since Genesis have fluttered through their brief days of gaudy degradation, to pass on into limbo, no one knows where. Less has been said of the male miseries and hungers which pour like a torrent through these sink holes, these furtive joints, modern bits of Sodom.
In the one-girl houses the men took what they got. In the two-girl houses they had a choice between a blonde and a brunette. But the madams sought to vary the fare. Not only did they change the girls each week, but they sought versatile entertainers. To get steady work, a prostitute had to be at least a “two-way” girl, and the more ways she had the better. Jennie the Factory used to complain about it—comfortable, fat old hausfrau Jennie, as she sat crocheting in a lull of business, chewing the rag with an old customer. Jennie didn’t know what the younger generation was coming to; the old-fashioned fornication didn’t satisfy it any more. Jennie blamed it on the war, and all the fancy ideas that had been brought home from France. Jennie the Factory shook her head and sighed. Ach! it wasn’t like it was in the old days, when she herself was hustling. Jennie of course was subject to an illusion. Her clientele had changed. Young men did not sow their wild oats at Jennie’s any more. They did that in Ford cars and tourist cabins. And more and more her customers were the misfits, the dregs of the city. Well, as in any business, the customers were always right. The girls minded at first; but as Helen Kelly told Judge McCook, they got used to it after a while. Normal or abnormal, what an adaptable creature the human animal is!
In a hostile environment, operating furtively in a vast metropolitan labyrinth of seven million people, the prostitution industry adapted itself in special ways. There were plenty of girls, there was a continual flow of them from the small towns of the East and Middle West, usually experienced before they came, eager to go to work. Almost invariably they had pimps, who put them in touch with the proper people. But even so the business of shuffling the girls up each week, and getting them on time to their hidden places of work, required special attention. Thus sprang up the specialty of the booker, agent between the girls and the madams; and if the bookie had a number of good houses, it was a very profitable business indeed.
Before the bookie would do business with a madam, he had to satisfy himself of her responsibility, be sure she would not gyp the girls and thereby start trouble. And she had to establish her credit by getting an O.K. from a bondsman, who would promise to bail out her girls if they were arrested. Usually the bondsman would require the madam to deposit with him security for $500, $1,000 or whatever the cash bail would amount to if there were an arrest. All this was necessary, so that the girls might be bailed out as soon as arrested, and not be tempted to open up and talk. For if they opened up, the booker was faced with a long term in prison.
If there were enough cash for the bail bond, that was sufficient practically to guarantee that the girls would be turned loose.
The business of springing the arrested girls and madams was in the hands of a group of prostitution lawyers and bondsmen who made their headquarters in a row of cubbyhole offices on West Tenth Street, across from Jefferson Market Court and the Women’s House of Detention. It was very simple. They gave $25 or $50 to the arresting cop to omit essential parts of his testimony and $25 to the prosecutor, John C. Weston, to keep him from squawking. And the girls walked out. It was as easy and cheap2 as that, though the lawyer and bondsman generally contrived to keep most of the cash bond for themselves, making it costly for those who put up the money.
There were always enough penniless and friendless women to go to jail and make a good record for the cops and prosecutor, and often enough they were sent away on perjured testimony. The arresting officers in these cases were plain-clothes men attached to the various inspection districts, commonly known as the vice squad. Their work, entrapping women in sexual commerce, was of a sort repugnant to any red.,-blooded Irishman; and, by a sort of natural selection, the vice squad specialists came to include as bestial a lot as could be found in a large and generally decent army of men. They kept the city “clean” so far as outward order and decency went, and in the process many lined their own pockets.
All this was exposed in great detail by Judge Seabury in the first of his investigations, in the autumn of 1930. There was some housecleaning around Women’s Court, some vice cops were sent to prison, the framing of women and the use of perjured testimony were supposed to have been stopped, but apparently the fixing of cases went right on, under somewhat more difficult circumstances. The confession of Prosecutor Weston was found to be insufficient evidence even to disbar the lawyers who had customarily paid bribes, and such leaders of the ring as Abe Karp continued to practice in the courts.
Business went on as usual. Indeed, it was better than usual for a while. The Seabury inquiry had been confined to corruption in the courts, and had not brought to light at all the widespread operations of the bookers. But the vice squad was incapacitated. Cops quit making prostitution arrests for a while, because there was such a stink surrounding the whole matter. The madams and the bookers did business unmolested.
Such was the situation when Dave Miller came to New York, and broke into the prostitution business.
By the dreadful depression summer of 1933, Dave Miller was one of the most prosperous citizens in New York. He had a string of very good-looking girls, and. was booking them into an average of about twenty houses, scattered through Manhattan and Brooklyn. His ten per cent on the girls’ earnings ranged from $300 to $400 a week, and the overhead of the business was not high. Aho there were the presents he got from pimps who wanted him to put their girls into good jobs. He lived with his family in a fine house at 17 West Seventy-first Street, and did a lot of his business over the telephone from there. Most of his work was done on Saturday and Sunday, when he would go around to the various houses and collect his commissions.
One day in July, 1933, a fellow named Crazy Moe came to see Dave, bringing with him another man whom he called Charlie. This Crazy Moe had formerly run a joint up in Eighty-sixth Street and Dave had sent him girls.
But now it seemed he was getting into a tougher racket. He said that a combination was being formed and if Dave would put him and Charlie on his payroll he would see that Dave was not bothered. Dave was indignant. He didn’t want to have anything to do with gangsters. Not even Crazy Moe.
Dave called in the housemaid and told her to take a good look at his two visitors in case she was ever needed for a witness. You would have thought that Dave was in the most respectable business in the world the way he went about it.
“What the hell did you get me into?” said the fellow named Charlie to Crazy Moe. He got very mad and walked out of the place. Then Dave told Crazy Moe to get out too.
One night a month later, Dave and his wife decided to go to the movies. There was a good gangster picture at the Rivoli. They parked their car in Fifty-fourth Street, by the Alba Hotel, between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, and started to walk toward the theatre.
Suddenly four men came up behind them in the darkness. One of them grabbed Dave by the shoulder, spun him around, and pinned him against the wall of the house they were passing. Another gave Ruth a little shove, and she walked on down the street a few steps, out of earshot. She knew enough not to ask questions, or make a commotion, or stick her nose too much into her husband’s affairs.
Dave was dumbfounded for a minute, and just stood there not saying anything. He thought at first it was a stickup. Something poked him, and glancing down, he saw a glitter. The point of a long knife was held against his stomach.
“Say, what’s this all about?” said Dave finally.
“Here’s what it’s about,” said one of the men. “You got twenty-four hours to get out of town. You got to pick up and get out of town by midnight tomorrow night.”
With that one of the men gave Dave a smack in the face, and with a renewed warning to get out of town, they walked off down the street and left him there.
Dave started to go on with his wife, but then turned and walked rapidly after the men.
“Hey,” he called. “Wait a minute. What is all this about?”
“You know what the boss said,” one of the four told the others. “We can’t tell him nothing.”
“Listen,” said Dave, overtaking them. “What is all this about? Who can I see to straighten this out? Who are you guys and who can I see?”
“Well, who do you know?” asked the fellow that did most of the talking.
“I don’t know anybody,” said Dave. “But who are you, and I will have somebody see you.”
They started naming a lot of names, haphazard, big shots that Dave didn’t know; and they weren’t getting anywhere.
“Do you know Moey?” Dave said finally, playing a hunch. “What Moey?” said one of the fellows.
“The only name I know him by is Moey,” said Dave. “All I know him by is Crazy Moe.”
“I know Moey,” said the fellow. “He is all right. You tell Moey to get in touch with me.”
“Who will I ask him to get in touch with?” asked Dave. “Just tell him to get in touch with Whitey,” said Whitey. And then the four fellows went away. They were Joey Levine, who Dave later knew was partners with Little Abie Wahrman, and Whitey and a fellow known as Jersey Ralph, and an Italian fellow that Dave never did know the name of.
Dave Miller went back to his wife, and they didn’t think any more about going to the movies. He drove her home in his car, and then went back downtown looking for Crazy Moe.
He found Moe on the sidewalk near Broadway and Fifty-first Street, where he usually hung out. This little neighborhood of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, just above Times Square, might almost be called the capital of the underworld, of the half world, and of all the catch-as-catch-can industries of sport and entertainment. Stand on the corner, and sooner or later there will pass by everyone who amounts to anything in the fight and wrestling games, the kingdom of jazz and swing and tap dancing, the industries of gambling, narcotics, liquor, and of the strong-arm and the snatch. Around those streets there’s always a lot of angles to be straightened out. This Crazy Moe hung out there, and knew a lot of people.
“Are these fellows the combination you were talking about?” asked Dave.
“No,” said Moe. “That isn’t the combination, but I think I know who they are.”
Crazy Moe gave kind of a grunt, and then started down the street. They turned into Stewart’s Cafeteria at Fiftieth Street and Broadway, and Crazy Moe went around speaking to this fellow and that. He talked for a while to a pimply faced fellow, and then came back to Dave, and they got in Dave’s car, and Moe said to drive over to Brooklyn. So they drove downtown, and across the Manhattan Bridge, and way out on Myrtle Avenue to a little flyblown speakeasy, and there in a booth across from the bar was Whitey, with the Italian fellow that Dave didn’t know the name of.
“Say, you got a lot of nerve,” said Whitey to Dave. “You got just so long to get out of town.”
“Lissen,” said Crazy Moe. “This guy Dave Miller come in here with me, and I expect to take him out the same way I brought him in.”
So then they began to talk business.
“I come over to find out what this is all about and try to straighten it out,” said Dave.
“Well,” said Whitey. “If you give us ten grand, we’ll do the same to the fellow that we was supposed to do to you.”
“What fellow?” asked Dave.
“You heard me,” said Whitey. “You give us ten grand, we’ll do the same to the fellow that we was supposed to do to you.”
“Nobody carries ten grand in his pocket,” said Dave. “Besides, I ain’t got $10,000.”
“Well,” said Whitey, “that’s our offer and that’s the way it stands.” And he wouldn’t talk any more.
Dave and Crazy Moe drove back to Manhattan. Crazy Moe told Dave he would have to pay, for this was a tough crowd and meant business. Moe said he would see Dave the next day, and meantime he would see what he could do. Dave went home to bed, but did not sleep much.
Next day Dave had a telephone call from Whitey, putting on the heat, and Dave told him to be there at his meeting with Crazy Moe. So when Dave arrived at a speakeasy to meet Moey, there were the four fellows he had met on the street the night before. Dave and Moe tried to bargain with them, but they still held out for $10,000.
“You give us ten grand, and we’ll make you the biggest man in New York,” said Jersey Ralph.
“I'm satisfied the way I am,” Dave said. “I like it this way. I don’t want to be the biggest man in New York.”
So they talked back and forth, and Dave tried to talk them down, but he could not make any headway.
“Well,” said Jersey Ralph finally, “you still got till 12 o'clock tonight to get out of New York.”
Dave Miller got in a cab and rode home. He was feeling pretty sore. Here he had worked for four years and built up a nice business, and now this gang of loafers wanted to take it away from him. Damned if he would stand for it! Damned if he would run! When he got home, he called up Abe Karp, his lawyer.
“Abe, make me out a will to sign, leaving everything to my wife. I got gangsters putting the arm on me,” said Dave; and he told Karp how things were.
Karp came up to Dave’s house with the will. Dave signed it. And then Karp took a surprising step.
This Karp was a wise apple. He had been dealing with cops, those with the vice squad at least, for a long time. There was no more accomplished operator in Women’s Court and in spite of all the charges and evidence he had just brazened his way unscathed through the Seabury inquiry. He was very bold. Karp called up the West Sixty-eighth Street station and asked them to send over a couple of detectives. Within a few minutes Dave’s doorbell rang, and there when he opened it, like a pair of human mountains stood two cops. Dave knew right away they were cops. When you are in his business, you can smell a cop a mile away.
“Mr. Miller?” said the cops, introducing themselves. “Mr. Karp said you had been threatened with grave bodily harm. We are here to protect you from bodily harm.”
Dave told some sort of vague story about being threatened. He took the cops down to Stewart’s Cafeteria and out to some places in Coney Island as if he was hunting for the gangsters. What he would have done if he had found any of them I don’t know. It is hard to imagine Dave really going to bat on a complaint to the police.
The next two days were hell. In the side streets, if Dave were without the cops, lurked gangsters ready to pounce upon him. But here in his front parlor were two officers of the law. Good Lord! What if a cop should pick up a phone call and get an earful! If the cops caught on to him, Dave knew they could hand him five to ten, maybe twenty years.
When Dave went out in the street, the cops went along, and it was just as if he had leprosy. Nobody Dave knew would talk to him. He couldn’t do any business. Those cops were poison.
The second day Dave’s telephone rang.
“We know you’ve got coppers with you, but we are going to get you, coppers or no coppers,” said a man on the wire and then hung up the phone.
Dave didn’t know what to do. He was scared of the gangsters but quite as much afraid of the cops. He stood it for another day and then gave the cops the air. He told them he didn’t need protection any more. That was all right with the cops. They had felt kind of foolish, for Dave wouldn’t tell them anything much about himself.
Rid of the cops, Dave felt easier. He moved about the city furtively, staying away from his usual haunts as much as possible. Next day he got a telephone call from a fellow named Six Bits.
“Say, Dave,” said Six Bits, “I got a new package, and it’s a honey. We're over on Broadway. Come on over and give a look.”
Now this Six Bits was a pimp who usually had pretty snappy girls, so Dave said he would be right over to give a look at the package.
He went down in the elevator and out to his car, and he had just opened the door to get in, when Bang! it sounded as if a gun had gone off right close to his ears, which indeed was the case.
Dave dropped to the floor of his car. Two or three more bullets came spanging through the glass above him. Dave found himself thinking, vaguely, that it was a very good thing he had shatter-proof glass in his car. He lay quivering on the floor for a while, and then took a peek out. A car had been passing him, he knew, and now he saw it down the street, turning into Central Park West. He made a break and dashed back into the house.
Hardly anybody else was in the street at the time, and nobody did anything about this shooting. New York people don’t like to meddle into matters that do not concern them.
Dave got in touch with Crazy Moe as soon as he could, and told him to renew negotiations with Joey Levine. This was a situation, Dave said, that had got to be straightened out.
It was several days before Moe could get an appointment, and Dave stayed in the house nearly all the time. Every time he started to go out, his wife, Ruth, went into hysterics. Finally Moey called him downtown, and Dave went to a restaurant at Sixth Street and A venue C, on the lower east side. When he arrived, Moe was already there, with the four fellows who had put the arm on Dave.
“Well, what are you going to do about this?” said Joe Levine, tough-like, when Dave came in.
“What can I do?” asked Dave. “What do you want me to do?”
“Well, we decided to take $5,000 off you,” said Joe, “and then you will pay us $200 a week protection money.”
“Two hundred!” said Dave. “And what kind of protection do I get for that? Will you protect me from stick-ups? Will you protect me from the police if I get a grab?”
“No, we can’t do that,” said Joe. It was just as Dave thought, a shakedown, pure and simple.
“Why was I shot at?” asked Dave.
“That is the orders we got,” said Joe.
“Who gave the orders? Who do you fellows represent?”
“Oh, we can’t tell you that.”
It went on that way for some time, and finally Dave saw he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was in hot water, he was licked, and the only thing for him to do was take a powder.
“Let’s have a drink,” said Dave.
So Dave bought them all a drink, went home, put his furniture in storage, and took his family to California.
Thus protection came to the prostitution bookers of New York.
With the other bookers things went better. Cockeyed Louis, old, feeble, and nearly blind, paid $200 a week, and so did Nick Montana. Pete Balitzer, whose business was smaller, paid $100; but Jimmy Fredericks, who was running a small book with Danny Brooks, didn’t have to pay, because there was a combination now and Jimmy was in the combination. Charlie Spinach paid. He had his hangout in the cafe at 121 Mulberry Street, which was also the office of Little Davie. But after a while Charlie Spinach disappeared, and we do not know what became of him.
It may be true that life begins at forty, but it is pretty tough to be a specialist in a line of business and have everything washed out from under you at that age, so that you have to start anew. At least, so Dave Miller felt.
He stayed in the West for three months, then came back East and bought a gasoline filling station at Mineola, Long Island. That did not do so well, so he sold it at a loss and bought another at Glen Cove. That also was a bust. Dave did not know much about servicing automobiles, and there was not much money in it anyway. A year later Dave got sick, and his wife could not run the place, so he sold out again. By March, 1935, he was down to his last few hundred dollars, and had to find a job. He decided he had to get back into booking.
Dave had been in the city now and then and had run into some prostitution people, so he knew how things were. One day he had seen Bennie Spiller, and Bennie told him there was a combination now and everybody had to pay $10 a week, because that was before Bennie was taken into the combination himself.
Now Dave went to Bennie and told him he had to get back in the business, and whom should he see to get the O.K. Jimmy Fredericks, said Bennie, and he could find him at Joey Silvers’s cigar store. So Dave got Joey to arrange a meeting with Jimmy and they met in Joey’s store at Fifty-first Street and Seventh A venue.
Jimmy was glad to see Dave, because things were not going so well. If you want to run a business, you have to have fellows in it who know how. Charlie Spinach’s book had dwindled away to almost nothing, and now that he had disappeared, Spike couldn’t make it pay. Danny Brooks wasn’t able to make much money out of Jimmy’s old book. Jimmy told Dave to meet him there the next day, because meanwhile he had to take it up with somebody else.
The next day Dave met Jimmy and was introduced to Little Davie Betillo, who was Jimmy’s boss. This Little Davie was a slim, boyish-looking fellow, with curly hair; and to look at him at first you’d think he was just a little harmless punk, even maybe you might think he was a softie. But that would be a very wrong idea. Little Davie had been out in Chicago for five years, and it was not until just before Lucky took over that Davie carne back to New York. It was said that Davie had been one of Al Capone’s most highly regarded assassins out there, and that gave him a big build-up when he came back home. Just how big he was with Capone I don’t know, but it was the reputation he had and traded on. Nobody questioned it. Little Davie was not a fellow anybody questioned.
“I'm broke and want to get back into booking and I understand you have to pay,” Dave Miller told Little Davie. Davie went off with Fredericks and talked a little while, and then told Miller, “O.K., we're going to give you Spike’s places.”
“I am broke,” said Dave Miller, “and how much will I have to pay? I can’t pay anything now.”
“You won’t have to pay nothing for the first two weeks,” said Little Davie. “After that you will have to pay $50 a week. Now I will have to O.K. you with downtown.”
So then Little Davie went into a telephone booth and called a number, and Dave heard him ask for Little Abie and then after a wait he got someone on the wire.
“This is Davie talking,” he said. “I just O.K.’d Dave Miller. You know, that fellow you shot at. See that he is not barred. He is going to work for us.”
Dave Miller got his orders and instructions from Jimmy Fredericks. Spike would show Dave his places. There were only about a half dozen, but Dave would soon be able to build the business up to more than that.
“All the houses that you get, you have got to call up and turn in, and then we bond them,” said Jimmy.
“What do you mean, how do you mean you bond them?” asked Dave.
“Each girl pays $10 a week,” said Jimmy. “Then if there is a pinch we pay half the bail and the madam pays half.”
Jimmy told Dave to call up Little Bingie at the Walcott Hotel if there was a pinch at any of the joints, and then Tommy Bull would get the bail money up, for he was the treasurer for the combination.
Spike was getting out of the business. He had been Charlie Spinach’s telephone boy, and then Charlie had disappeared, leaving Spike with his chain of houses, which had dwindled to a mere five or six, and not such good houses at that. Spike carried on for a while, but he could not get more than about $50 a week out of the chain; and when Jimmy Fredericks insisted on his paying $50 a week to the combination, Spike said he would throw up the book and get out. When Spike showed Dave Miller around the joints, the layout didn’t look like much. Dave saw he was going to have to drum up a lot of business, and get a lot of snappier girls, if he was going to make a living. But he knew he could do it, if they would let him alone. He was a capable booker.
A couple of days later Jimmy Fredericks called Dave down to a hangout where he was having lunch, introduced Dave to his own assistant, Danny Brooks, and told Danny to turn their sixteen joints over to Dave also. That seemed like a break. He could start making money right away. But a few days later he was called down to Joey Silvers’s cigar store to meet Jimmy and Danny and Little Davie. Davie told him there was a new arrangement.
“You are to draw $50 a week and expenses, and Danny is to draw $50 a week,” said Davie. “And whatever money is left over you are to give to Danny and Danny is to put it in a slip of paper and give it to Jimmy, and he will give it to Tommy Bull.”
Dave’s heart sank. So this was it. They were going to load him up with work, and make him work on salary. He couldn’t keep his family on $50 a week. But he made no protest. Little Davie was not a fellow anybody argued with.
“I thought I was gonna work alone,” he said to Jimmy after Davie had gone. “What’s the idea?”
“Well, we weren’t making any money on our book,” said Jimmy, “and that is why we are turning over these places, and letting Danny work with you.”
So he was supposed to make money for them, that was it. Deep down in his heart, Dave cursed them all. Well, he knew more about the business than any of them. He would make a living.
Danny wasn’t much help. He was a little Italian, whose real name was Caputo, and he’d been in a lot of things at one time or another, and unsuccessful at most of them. He had been a gunman, pimp, night club operator, and also in show business. He had owned the Thrills and Frills of 1926, but went broke with that on the road, and then had a piece of Texas Guinan’s Padlocks. By 1933 he was down to the point of being a one-bottle bootlegger, and then he had taken to hanging around with Jimmy Fredericks. Jimmy had been booking houses at the time, but couldn’t drive a car, so Danny had driven him around. Then when Jimmy had started in the bonding racket, he had let Danny and Billy Peluso run his book and they split the money three ways. None of them had got much out of it; but when Jimmy said he was going to give the book to Dave Miller, Danny squawked, because he had just bought a new car. So he was allowed $50 a week for installments on the car, gasoline, and his own expenses.
For a few weeks Danny was around with Dave, but then he quit doing anything but come around to Dave’s on Sunday to collect the money. The vice cops had got on to Danny, and Jimmy told him to lie low for a while. He stayed over in Brooklyn and made a horse book, and picked up numbers. That summer Danny ran into hard luck. He sent his girl up to work in a joint in Westchester, and then happened to go up there one night when it was raided. Danny was pinched and the girls talked. Dave paid Danny’s wife $10 a week while he was in jail, and then for ten weeks he gave Danny $50 a week to pay his lawyer’s fee. But Danny was convicted and got seven and one-half to twenty years in Dannemora for the crime which is called “compulsory prostitution.”
The crime of “compulsory prostitution” figures a good deal in this story, and it is well that we understand what it means. There is nothing whatever “compulsory” about it. In the penal law, that word appears in the title over the definition of the crime, probably a vestigial remnant of some day long past when the Legislature was excited about the horrors of white slavery. The crime is a felony, and anyone who places a woman in a house of prostitution, or maintains a woman in a house of prostitution, or accepts any part of the earnings of a prostitute without a legal consideration, is guilty of compulsory prostitution, even though the girl is willing and eager to work in a joint and share her earnings. Pimps and madams are all guilty of compulsory prostitution, but are seldom prosecuted for it. Usually when they are sent away, it is on some misdemeanor charge, for a short term.
After he was rid of Danny Brooks, Dave soon found he was able to make a good living. He turned in his money every week, but he always held some out. He generally saw to it that the combination didn’t get more than $75 a week out of him, which was more than they had been getting out of the book before.
He was able to do this because he gradually got together a classier line of girls, who were able to make more than the ones Danny and Spike had had. Also there were madams that didn’t want to bond with the combination, and Dave held their houses out and didn’t report them.
With all his contacts in the business, Dave soon had the lowdown on the whole situation. The bonding had started at just about the time when Dave was chased out of town, and now the bonding and the booking were two separate departments of the same business. The bookers were under control of the mob, and they were supposed to turn in lists of all their joints, so that the bond collectors could go around every week and get $10 for each girl.
As Jimmy Fredericks had explained, the $10 was a kind of insurance, or contribution for “fall money.” When there was an arrest, the girls were bailed out right away, the madam putting up half the money and the combination putting up the other half The combination also saw to it that the girls did not go to jail. As soon as a girl was bailed out, she would go to the bonding office, at 117 West Tenth Street, where Abe Karp’s law office had been. Abe had been disbarred by this time, but he was still there, as chief advisor. The girl would have a lawyer and the bondsman would be Jesse Jacobs, but Abe would do the brain work. He would listen to the girl’s story and decide whether she would be a good witness for herself. If the cops had broken into the place, or otherwise bungled the job, the case would be a sure turnout, and Abe would let it go right to trial. Sometimes he would coach the girl on a plausible story to tell. Sometimes he would just see that the cops were fixed. A case was never allowed to go to trial unless Abe knew it was going to be dismissed. If he could not beat the case, the girl was told to forget her bail and go on the lam. (When the Dewey office checked up, it found that not one of the girls working under the combination had ever been sent to jail, though a couple had been put on probation.)
This might seem to be a reasonably good proposition for the madams, especially since they put the $10 a week on the girls’ board bills and made them pay it. But even so most of them did not want to bond. They knew it was a racket, a shakedown. And besides, there is no more rugged individualist than the average madam. She doesn’t want anybody else messing into her business, and especially she does not want gangsters.
The bonding idea was not new. A number of bondsmen had been doing it during 1932. Dave Miller had a customer who had paid $15 a week to a bondsman on her one-girl house for a whole year before she got onto it. Then she figured she had spent more than $700 for nothing, for she had never had a pinch. This madam, Joan Garry, had learned her business from the ground up, and she knew a customer when she saw one. She always had a peep-hole, or an arrangement so she could look down into the street and see who was ringing the bell before she let him in, and thus was able to avoid trouble. So finally she gave the bondsman the air, and started saving up her own bail money.
Then in August, 1933, Jimmy Fredericks came and told her she would have to bond with him, pay $5 for herself and $10 apiece for the two girls she had at the time. He even tried to make her put down a cash deposit of $500 for her share of the bail. She refused. Charlie Spinach told her he could not book girls to her house if she did not bond, but she refused with vigor, for this Joan Garry was a hell-roaring termagant if anyone started telling her what to do or stepping on her toes. She said she would get her own girls. Little Abie and a couple of thugs came to see her, and when she refused to pay the bond money, they took the joint apart, ripped and smashed her furniture to smithereens. Joan’s dander was up now. She would be damned before she would bond. Then Charlie Spinach booked Gashouse Lil in her place, and Lil introduced Ralph Liguori to Joan. Ralph came around after Lil had left, was admitted by Joan, and stuck up the joint; he hunted through the coffee cans and everything else and took out every cent there was in the place. Jimmy Fredericks told Joan she would have less trouble if she bonded, but she cussed him out, and he cracked her head open with a blackjack so she had to have ten stitches taken in it. There was further argument later, in which Jimmy blacked her eye, but she finally capitulated when he drew a revolver and threatened to shoot her dog. She paid the $15 a week, but never did pay the big cash deposit.
Even after she started bonding Joan had some trouble, and then she found the combination was of some use. Through 1934 she found it necessary to move every two or three weeks, because as soon as she was settled in a place there would be men coming to the door whom she recognized as cops or stick-up men. At last she found out that an un-ethical competitor, a madam known as Nigger Ruth, was putting the finger on her, and sicking the cops on her. So she went to Jimmy Fredericks and complained, and Jimmy put the arm on Nigger Ruth and made her stop.
Even so Joan thought the bonding was not worth while, and especially she hated to have collectors coming up to her house. In 1935 when Dave was booking for her, he had to collect the bond money himself a couple of times because the collector, a fellow named Yoke, could not get in Joan’s house. She hated the collector’s guts.
Joan was right, obviously, about the bonding. It was a gyp. A legitimate bond fee is 3 per cent, or $30 for $1,000 bail when security is furnished; and any madam who knows her business can get a case taken care of for a few hundred dollars. No one group had a monopoly on the arts of bribery and perjury. But once the city chamberlain had returned the bail money to the combination, after girls were turned out, the madams never got back the half that they had put up. Sometimes the combination just kept the money, and sometimes it rendered a phoney statement to the madam showing where her money had gone, charging $175 for the services of the lawyer who got $25 a case, and otherwise exaggerating its expenses.
There were enough grabs so that the bail money put up and lost by the madams was enough to pay all the overhead of the combination, for salaries were small. The money paid in by the bookers and the $10 a week paid by the girls were just so much velvet for the boys downtown.
As Dave learned the system it became apparent that, theoretically, it was a perfect racket. Through the bookers, the combination controlled the supply of girls and kept a check on the houses, which would not be permitted to operate unless the weekly bond money was paid. And expenses could be met by chiseling from the madams, so that everything else was pure profit.
That was the theory, but it did not work out so well. Just as the benefits of mass production and centralized management sometimes fail to materialize when a lot of corporations are merged into some colossus of industry, so the bonding racket failed to produce as well as expected. For one thing the police, now under Mayor LaGuardia, were active and were knocking off joints so fast that their numbers did not greatly increase. For another thing, everybody in the whole racket was chiseling everything he could. They were stealing Little Davie blind.
Little Davie, to tell the truth, didn’t know his business; and he wasn’t able to tend to it properly. Operating by remote control, he was just like some banker in Wall Street trying to run a factory in Kansas or a studio in Hollywood. He knew about as much about prostitution as Richard Whitney knew about applejack and peatmoss.
The only language Little Davie knew was force. Every now and then he would call a meeting of the bookers and would sail into them. Little Davie would have big Jerry Bruno there and somber mysterious Vito, with all his gold teeth, to back him up. And Davie would tell the bookers they were all louses, and he was going to kick Jack Eller’s big fat belly off him, and if any louse held out a lousy joint it was going to be a $200 fine, or it was going to be a $500 fine, and they were all louses.
Then Jesse Jacobs would make a speech and tell the bookers they should report all their joints, and tell them to sit down now and write down all their joints on a piece of paper and not leave any out.
Then Jesse would sidle around to Al Weiner, who would be writing up his list of joints, and whisper to him.
“Leave out that joint of mine, Al,” Jesse would whisper. So Al would leave out Jesse’s joint and whatever other joints he did not want to put in.
So that was the way it went. It did not do Little Davie any good to call them louses, because he did not know anything about the prostitution business.
Under Little Davie’s executive direction, the racket never averaged more than $2,000 a week profit for the combination, or $100,000 a year, which was very small money for such a lot of big racket men as there were in this prostitution combination. Every time a little money accumulated in the treasury, they would whack it up into a lot of small percentages, cut the melon among themselves, and so the combination was always broke and sometimes had a hard time scraping up the money for bail bonds. This was a new racket. It was expected to produce big money, but had not done so yet.
A big-shot racket man has to have a lot of money, and he has to be free and easy with it. The bigger he is the more leeches and parasites and hangers-on he has, and the bigger he is the bigger the standing army of gunmen he has to maintain, to keep some other big-shot from taking his rackets away from him. Lots of times people wonder what becomes of all the vast sums of money that pour into the rackets, what the big-shots do with it all. But the big-shots have to have a lot of money, because they do not own the business but are the front men for combinations; and they have to whack up with the combinations, and whack up with their lieutenants, or they would not be big-shots any more. That is why the big-shots had a lot of weight and worry on their shoulders in 1934 and 1935 for bootlegging was washed up and Mayor LaGuardia had dumped all the slot machines in the bay and the cops were knocking off all kinds of joints, but there were still lots of fellows that had to make a living and couldn’t be dumped out in the street the way Waxey Gordon tried to do, and they would have a hard time getting on home relief or WP A. And that is why these fellows were fooling around with a little thing like this prostitution business, which was a hot stove.
Dave Miller knew what he was talking about when he told Jersey Ralph he did not want to be the biggest man in New York, for it is a very expensive thing to be the biggest man in New York.
Dave had been doing very well when he had his own little business, before he got chased, and now that he was back he was getting along all right too.
He had to, because his family expenses were running high, with doctors’ bills and everything. For some reason or other, one of Dave’s little daughters was a very nervous child. She had St. Vitus’s dance. Dave had the doctor in and told him the best was none too good, and just for that one little girl, with serums and things, the expenses were running $40 a week.
That $40 a week seems like a high figure, even for a good doctor, but Dave swears to it. It is good to think that the money was going to an ethical professional man, devoted to the relief of human suffering, rather than to a lot of grasping, cruel racketeers.
Dave was not thinking much or talking much about whys and wherefores that Saturday evening, while the big raid was on, as he sat there in Dewey’s office making a statement to Jacob J. Rosenblum of the Dewey staff. Facts were the thing. What did you do then? What did you say and what did he say?
Dave was sitting there, spilling out his facts, and his weak heart was jumping and turning cartwheels, and his handkerchief was damp from wiping his good eye, and he had been promised that when he went to prison he would be put in a special place, under special guard, so he could not be murdered.3
“Who is the head of the racket?” asked Rosenblum.
“I heard once when I wanted to come back and I wanted to get started and they mentioned Charlie Lucky,” said Dave. “I have never seen him.”
“Who told you Charlie Lucky was one of the bosses?”
“One time I asked Danny Brooks who was the big guy and he said: ‘Don’t say anything. Charlie Lucky gives him the O.K.'”
Later on, after Dave had thought it over, he was able to remember another conversation about Charlie Lucky.
“After Nick Montana and Cockeyed Louis were arrested, I got a call from Danny Brooks one night and he said, ‘Pick me up we have got to go over to Mulberry Street,'” he said.
“So we went over there to that cafe and I saw Jimmy Fredericks and Bennie Spiller was standing there talking. I talked to Jimmy and I said, ‘What is this about?’ He says, ‘A meeting, we are going to take the houses away from Al Weiner.’ I says, 'I don’t want them,’ and he says, ‘Why?’
“I says, ‘Why his father is in trouble. This fellow has been fooling around with the police so much, what is going to stop him from going and hollering copper?’
“Jimmy didn’t say anything to that, and then he and Bennie left, and Danny and I went out and got dinner. When we got back we sat there in the car, and Little Davie was talking with Jimmy, and then he came over to us.
“He came over to me and he says, ‘We were going to take Al’s places away,’ he says, ‘but forget about it. You were right and forget about it.’
“So then Davie went away and Jimmy came over to the car and we chewed the rag a while. I asked him, ‘Who is going to take care of me in case of trouble?’ I says, ‘You know Nick got locked up and Cockeyed Louis got sent away.’
“Jimmy says, ‘Aw, what are you worrying about? You cockeyed son-of-a-bitch you are always worrying.’
“I said, ‘Well, you know I ain’t got no money. I would like to know what this is all about. Who is going to take care of me?’
“And Jimmy says, ‘We will.’
“ ‘Who are “we”?’ I says. ‘Who is the “we”?’
“He says, ‘Davie and Abie and ——’
“And I says, ‘And who? And who?’
“And he says, ‘And Charlie Lucky.’”
Such was Dave Miller’s story. So far as Lucky was concerned, it was only hearsay up to this point. But from the first witness to break after the big raid, Dewey had heard that Charlie Lucky was in the background.
When, later, Miller told his story on the witness stand, he related his story of the talk with Jimmy; but when he came to the mention of Charlie Lucky’s name, as he sat there facing the gangster himself, Dave couldn’t bring himself to say it. He testified that Jimmy told him those behind the racket were “Dave and Abie and Charlie,” and that he did not ask or know what “Charlie’s” last name was. But such is the fortune of trying a case with human witnesses.
1 In 1939 there were still hustlers in the streets, but they were still more wary. It was their custom to pick up only those men who came along in motor cars and whistled at them; for they knew that vice cops and stool pigeons were not provided with cars and could not thus entrap them. This developed into a great nuisance for lone women on the streets at night; it became common for them to he followed along the street by whistling men in a motor car.
2 Bribes paid to public officials usually are small. Once an officer accepts money, he has placed himself in the power of the crooks, and he becomes a cheap and unconsidered part of the underworld organization.
3The prisons of New York today are dotted with colonies of Dewey witnesses, who have been given special protection against murder in prison. That is the first thing they ask for, before they agree to talk.