I turned myself in at the front gates of Sing Sing two days later, July 6, 1932. I made an entrance that Raft would have been proud of. I was wearing a three-piece double-breasted green and blue suit with dark oxfords and white spats and a two-thousand-dollar Panama hat with a silk band. I had a reputation to uphold.
Big Frenchy and little Joe Shalleck were with me as we pulled up. “Don’t worry about a thing, it’ll be all took care of before you can shake a monkey’s uncle at it,” said Joe.
“What’s it gonna cost me?” I asked, handing Frenchy Monk’s .38 for safekeeping as he blasted the klaxon to let the screws know we was here.
“Six figures—maybe, I hate to say it, may God close His ears, seven.”
“Whatever it takes.”
“Peace of mind, you can’t beat it with a stickball bat,” said Joe.
I shook hands with both of them. “So long, boss,” said Frenchy.
“See you in a year, George. A year,” I repeated, speaking to George but looking at my lawyer. “If I ain’t out in a year, get our money back.”
The car roared away, leaving me standing there in front of the Big House. A couple of the screws had poked their heads out to see what the fuss was.
“It’s Owney Madden,” I shouted.
“Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Sheba,” said one wiseacre, a dope named Crocker.
“Open up, ya screw, or I’ll rap ya in the snoot.”
I saw the other guard staring at me. “It is Owney Madden,” he said.
“Get outta here.”
“No, really. That’s Owney Madden. I recognize him.”
They were about to start debating my identity in earnest when I shouted: “Get the Warden before I get angry.”
I couldn’t believe that I had to stand there in the broiling July heat while I waited for these two nitwits to get Warden Lawes, but after about ten minutes, with me wilting, along came Clement Ferling, Lawes’s secretary.
“Hello, Mr. Ferling, I’m coming,” I shouted.
Naturally Ferling recognized me and got those gates open right quick, and a few minutes later there was the Warden, God bless his soul, greeting me like a long-lost pal and booking me right then and there.
“Where have you been, Madden?” said the Warden. “They’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Jesus, Warden Lawes, am I hungry. Do you think you could possibly send a couple of the boys down to ‘21’ to fetch dinner?”
Lawes snapped his fingers and Ferling went running off to place the order.
“In New York, where else?” I said with a smile, a smile that was returned by the Warden. For a head screw, he was all good, really cared about me who woulda cut his throat without thinking twice about it had circumstances warranted, and maybe that makes him a saint or maybe that makes him a chump, I dunno.
“Why didn’t you turn yourself in to the parole board in the city?”
“Didn’t want the publicity,” I replied.
I had to give up my swell threads for gray prison garb of course, but Dr. Sweet was there too, to give me an examination as soon as I got settled in my cell. The Warden took good care of me right off the bat, excusing me from work detail, letting me raise flowers in the garden, all my usual haunts.
Charlie or Meyer might have got to me had they really tried, but I was more powerful at Sing Sing than they were, and it was about then that I figured out that having a cop next door to you might not be such a bad play as long as the cop was on your side. Since I stayed away from the work details, the laundry and the exercise yard, I was pretty secure.
I was also pretty sick. Those damn Duster bullets was acting up again, and Dr. Sweet had to put me under the knife once more. Before I went out, I asked him whether maybe this time we could get rid of the five slugs still walkin’ around with me, but he reminded me they weren’t the problem, it was the other six, the missing ones, ghost bullets whose wounds hadn’t healed properly. Just before they give me the laughing gas I told him to give it one more shot, so to speak, and he replied he’d do his damnedest, which he did, but it didn’t matter in the end, for when I woke up, they were still there, my little Arbor souvenirs.
Here’s why I was so sanguine about going back to prison. The state may have been giving me what for, thanks to Roosevelt, but we still had a friend or two on the parole board. At my hearing some of the goo-goos raised the usual fuss about Al Smith’s commutation, about whether I did or did not work at the Hydrox Laundry, the old rigmarole about whether I was or was not released from parole board custody, even that jolly little incident with the feds and my beer trucks, all supposedly to prove that I was still in the rackets even after they let me out of stir. I skipped the hearing on account of my health.
“You know what that schmuck Cahill said?” Joe asked me on his first visit.
“I can guess.”
“You don’t have to guess, I’ll tell you. Here’s what that schmuck Cahill said, something like ‘His hands’—that’s your hands, not my hands—‘may be red with the blood of his fellowmen, but there’s nothing in the record now before us to show it.’ You know what I said?”
“I can’t guess.”
“I popped right up and said, ‘I couldn’ta said it better myself,’ and then I sat down again.”
“How’d it go over?”
“Not too good. They ruled against you.”
“Did we take care of it?”
Joe gave me a quick nod, then coughed loud and opened his briefcase to flash me something. One of the screws saw him and started to sidle over. “Beat it, ya mug!” I said, and he stepped back like a good boy.
I could see the name of the parole board members who was on our side, and I could also see the amount of money they and their sons and heirs were going to wind up with if they played it straight. There were a bunch of Irishmen on the board—Fagan, Moore, Canavan—and we figured one or more of ’em was hankering for an estate upstate somewhere. All it took was one million dollars in cash.
“How can we be sure it’s on the level?” I asked.
“Simple,” said Joe. “It’s part up front and part on delivery.”
“Not to mention cement overshoes and a dip in the drink if anybody welshes.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I did.”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“That’s what I like about you, Joe,” I said as he got ready to leave. “You’re blind and deaf—but not dumb.” I think he took it as a compliment, but I’m not sure. It was always hard to tell with Joe if he even knew what a compliment was.
So there I was, sitting pretty. From time to time Warden Lawes would call me into his office for a catered dinner, and he’d fill me in on the continuing mayhem in town. One day in early October we sat down for a little heart-to-heart, just like in the old days.
“You’re smart, Madden. I always said you were smart.”
“Thanks, Warden.”
“You’re not like those other men.”
“Who would they be?”
“Men like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. Gangsters.” The Warden offered me one of his fine seegars, but I told him I’d stick to my cigarettes, even though Dr. Sweet was after me to stop smoking, on account of my lungs and bronchitis and emphysema and other diseases I can’t spell, and mostly because, in his opinion, cigarette smoke and holes in one’s lungs didn’t mix, but I’d been smoking since I was a kid and wasn’t about to stop now, although I hated the coughing. “Mark my words, they’ll end up like all the other hoodlums—dead in some gutter somewhere.”
I’d been in that very gutter, rose from it in fact, but kept my mouth shut.
“But not you, Madden. You’ve got a head on you—a fine head that ought to be turned toward honest, profitable pursuits.”
“The laundry business sure is lousy, I’ll give you that.”
“You know what I mean.” That was what I always liked about Lawes. He knew the score but had to pretend he didn’t.
“You could be right about that,” I admitted.
“We’ll need some flowers for the prison chapel altar next week.”
“Happy to oblige.”
“Good lad,” he said. I got up to go.
“There’s one more thing,” he said, and I sat down again. He got a grave look on his face as he rummaged through some papers on his desk and came up with a telegram. Although I’m certain he’d already read it, he read it silently to himself, looked up at me, started to say something, then didn’t, and then he handed it to me. It was from my brother, Martin, and all it said was:
“OWEN, MAY PASSED AWAY LAST NIGHT.”
My tongue wouldn’t work, but all the questions were on my face.
“Last night. She found the shotgun that you gave…”
I’m told it took four men, including Warden Lawes, to hold me down and still enough for Dr. Sweet to get the needle in me.