Good-time Charlie was a pimp.1 His wife was a prostitute and she stuttered. She stuttered so badly that the Dewey people never could make much sense out of what she was saying. But that did not keep her from making a living for Good-time Charlie.
In the light of Charlie’s later behavior, his wife became an important witness. The Dewey men had a good idea why Charlie acted as he did, but because his wife stuttered so much, they never could be certain. So sometimes it is advantageous to have a wife who stutters.
According to various accounts, Good-time Charlie was in on the ground floor of the prostitution bonding combination which started up in the late summer of 1933. Moving spirit in this venture (which belied the common impression that economic enterprise was dead in that blighted year) was Jimmy Fredericks, who later was to assume prominence in the industry by such methods as blackjacking a madam and threatening to kill her dog.
This Fredericks, or Frederico, had been a criminal since childhood. He always blamed his own anti-social tendencies on the brutality of a parental school where he was sent for truancy, though that may be discounted, since he had a feeble-minded brother who was sent away for assaulting a child. So far as I know, Jimmy had only one job in his life. Paroled from a burglary term in Elmira, when he was seventeen, he worked at $9 a week as a machine helper for a refrigerator company, but soon decided that was too tough. So he started sending prostitutes up into vacant rooms of the tall loft buildings in the garment center, where they would be convenient to men in the clothing factories, and took 25 per cent of their earnings. After serving another prison term, five years at Sing Sing for grand larceny, with a bit extra tacked on for an escape, Jimmy ran a string of cordial shops on Staten Island, apparently as a blind for other activities.
Fredericks was now a squat, fat, bull-necked mug in his late thirties, with oily hair and a dark, beetling brow. He hung around on the sidewalk in front of a chain drugstore at Seventy-second Street and Broadway, and people around there had him figured out for a shylock. He did shylock, with other people’s money; and if he told any debtor to pay up, the debtor tore everything loose to get the money, for Jimmy was that kind of guy. He also had his little business of booking prostitutes, out of a doctor’s office in Thirtieth Street; but he let his assistants run that and just took his cut on the profits.
So now Jimmy decided to go into the business of bonding prostitutes. According to various witnesses his associates included Diamond-toothed Eddie, Yock Goldstein, Tony Pisanelli, and Good-time Charlie.
This venture was to be on a bigger scale than any of the sort that had been operating before. The promoters knew that, to make real progress in biting every prostitute for $10 a week, they had to have financial backing and to stand in right with the mob downtown. So, the stories go, they went to see Jerry Bruno and he thought it was a good idea.
[All through the prostitution trial, witnesses mentioned this Jerry Bruno, one of the Mulberry Street bosses, as a member of the combination. But all this came from accomplices; there was never enough corroboration to arrest him and bring him to trial: Eventually, Jerry Bruno was tried and convicted by the federal authorities as a boss in the narcotics business, and in that same drug case Ralph Liguori, Nancy Presser’s boy friend, was brought down from state prison and also convicted.]
Everything seemed to be going fine, but then one day Jimmy Fredericks came to his stooges in the booking office, Danny Brooks, Billy Peluso, and Little Bingie, with a sad announcement. He said he had “lost a decision downtown” and had to get out of the bonding business.
Now, more than two years later, as the Dewey men pursued the prostitution case, they wanted to know what happened at that meeting downtown, when Jimmy Fredericks lost the decision. So they sent out cops to look for men that might have been there, and they brought in Good-time Charlie.
Yes, said Good-time Charlie, he had been in that combination with Jimmy, and one day they had all been called downtown to a meeting. They did not know what it was all about, but they went to a restaurant in Mulberry Street and were put to wait in a back room.
Then, accompanied by Little Davie Betillo, into the room came a dark, intense-looking man with short legs and a squinting right eye. It was Charlie Lucky, said Good-time Charlie.
“It was funny,” said Good-time Charlie. “We were sitting down there, but when Charlie Lucky came in, all the Italians stood up.
“He talked to Little Davie awhile, and then he turned to us.
“'You guys are through,’ he said; ‘I am giving the business to Little Davie.’
“Then he turned around and walked out again. We were sitting down, but all the Italians were standing up.”
So Jimmy Fredericks and his crowd were out of the bonding racket, for Little Davie was the boss now, not Jerry Bruno. According to Good-time Charlie, Little Davie hated the guts of Jimmy Fredericks and said he would keep Jimmy from making a living if he went broke doing it.
But after Little Davie had been running it awhile, the guy who was managing the bonding was not getting anywhere; so he hired back Jimmy Fredericks to do the work. After that Jimmy was busy. He had collectors, Yoke, Teddie, and Chappie, who went to all the houses every week to collect; and then he turned the money over to Tommy Bull. He had Little Bingie on the telephone, and when a joint was pinched Jimmy would get word of it through Bingie. Then he would have to hunt up Tommy Bull and get the money to bail the girls out.
They would not trust Jimmy to keep a supply of bail money on hand, and that was a pain in the neck. Because when girls were pinched, Jimmy would have to hunt all over the place for Tommy; and lots of times he could not find him, because Tommy would be somewhere sleeping off an opium Jag.
The investigation of a criminal case is much like prying the lid off a paint can. Once you get it started, it comes fast.
Mildred Harris had inadvertently mentioned Charlie Lucky and the Unione Siciliana; Good-time Charlie had talked, and though Good-time Charlie was not the easiest man in the world to believe, everything now was pointing at Lucky.
Danny Brooks, who was brought down from Dannemora, Little Bingie, Billy Peluso, Dave Miller, and Pete Harris all said that they had been told, by bigger men who had been arrested in the racket, that the boss was Charlie Lucky. They had all wanted to know about that and had asked questions, because they wanted to know whom they could rely on for backing if they were grabbed by the cops.
Now Thelma Jordan was talking too, to Harry Cole. She too had been told that Lucky was the boss. Jimmy Fredericks had told her. And Bennie Spiller, after he was taken into the combination, often had mentioned Lucky. He had talked about the regular Tuesday night meetings of the combination, told of meeting Lucky there. She and Bennie had driven Fredericks to the Waldorf one night, when he said he had to meet Lucky.
Dewey, stalking the big shots, had undertaken to smash a minor racket by the way; and the trail had led to the biggest shot of them all.
Charlie Lucky had not been seen in New York since he had slipped away in November, after the murder of Dutch Schultz. He had been in Miami since, had registered with the police there in December. He had stayed there with a friend who ran a gambling house. Undercover inquiries brought forth that Lucky was now taking the waters at Hot Springs, Arkansas, a favorite winter resort of the bigger criminals.
A trusted detective of the New York force was at Hot Springs for a holiday. Word went out from Dewey to grab Lucky. The racketeer was found sitting with friends on Bath House Row, was arrested, and was promptly turned out in $5,000 bail.
When he heard of that, Dewey nearly burned up the long distance telephone wires. He sent word to the Arkansas authorities that Lucky was “Public Enemy No. 1, the most powerful and dangerous racketeer in the country.” Thereupon the judge hastily called Lucky back and held him in $200,000 bail.
In New York witnesses were quickly taken before the grand jury, an indictment was voted, and extradition papers were started west by airplane. Bad weather forced the plane down, delayed the papers two days.
Big money and the friendliness of Hot Springs to its paying guests were at work for Lucky. He had a half dozen of the town’s most prominent lawyers working for him, including members of the Legislature and city officials.
Attorney General Carl E. Bailey of Arkansas entered the lists in behalf of Dewey. Lest something untoward occur, he sent twenty state troopers at dawn to take Lucky away from the Hot Springs jail and spirit him away across the mountains to Little Rock. Bailey did not deny reports that he had been offered $50,000 to lay off, but announced that “Arkansas cannot be made an asylum for criminals” and the state’s honor was “not for sale for blood money.” The whole thing gave Bailey a buildup which was probably decisive when, later that year, he was elected by a narrow margin as Governor.
For ten days the extradition fight went on. It was delayed by court orders and stays of execution, proceedings in both state and federal courts. Then Dewey noticed a law point. They were bound by a court stay not to take Lucky away for two days, but legally that did not mean forty-eight hours. At a minute past midnight, ten hours before Court met to consider the matter further, they were free to remove Lucky. At a nearby junction there would be a train at midnight. Hold the train!
With the approval of another court, Charlie Lucky was taken from his cell at midnight.
“I am being kidnapped!” he shrieked, as he was rushed to the waiting train for New York.
Back home, Lucky maintained a pose of injured innocence.
“I may not be the most moral and upright man who lives,” he said, “but I have never stooped so low as to become involved in prostitution. I have never been mixed up in anything so messy.”
That was to be the rallying note in future months for his friends in the underworld, his friends in the sporting world, his lawyers, as they spread the inevitable cry that Lucky was being, had been, unjustly prosecuted. He was a racketeer, a crook, all right, said his supporters, but in this case they had him wrong. Many people along Broadway still say that.
Lucky’s arrest was indeed a shocking, humiliating thing. Gangster though he was, his position in the underworld carried the dignity that went with power. He was a big man in big things. But here he was arrested, accused of being mixed up in a little, dirty, cheap-jack racket. For though the prostitution racket might some day have become big and strong and successful, it never really did. But a conviction for failure would be just as serious as a conviction for success; prison would be just as confining, just as cold.
Back in New York, Justice McCook held Lucky in the unusually large bail of $350,000.
“I am in a fog!” cried the master of the underworld, and covered his face with his hands.
1 “Good time,” along with its other meanings, is a technical term used by vice cops in their testimony in Women’s Court. It used to be, at least, that whenever a vice cop found a prostitute with a man he asked him what he was doing there; according to testimony, the man almost invariably replied: “I came for a good time.”