Most of the next year I spent in prison. Out on the sidewalk things were happening, mostly not good things. Talk about being on ice: the end of the Castellammarese War was playing itself out, Dutch and Charlie Lucky got to shooting each other, Jimmy Walker resigned and sailed to Europe, Roosevelt got elected, trouble everywhere you looked. Worst of all, Prohibition was on the way out, given the bum’s rush by the Congress that had cheered it a baker’s dozen years earlier and awaiting the inevitable thirty-sixth state to ratify its demise.
Me, though, I was nice and safe up the river, protected on all sides by gray stone walls and armed men who, for the first time in my life, were on my side. My food was catered, on account of my bad stomach. I had my flowers and my birds. It wouldn’ta looked good for Lucky and Meyer and Frank to come visit me, but George Raft, big star that he was, showed up several times. What few women who worked in the prison went nuts, and once they’d figured out that he and I was friends, they were even nicer to me than before. I wasn’t just a gangster; I was the pal of a movie star.
We never discussed my sister.
“There’s a picture I might do,” he said, “called Each Dawn I Die, with Cagney. I’m the bad guy.” Georgie was always dithering over his roles, the dummy.
Cagney I liked. From time to time we’d met either in one of my clubs, like the Stork, or on my visits to Hollywood, where he always seemed to be imitating me in the picture shows. Born on the Lower East Side, he had the real mug’s swagger. He was about my size, seven or eight years younger, not quite as good-looking but okay if you liked your hoodlums fake instead of real.
I tell you, I’ve lost track of all the movies that have featured me. I knew all the writers and producers back then, including Runyon and Mark Hellinger, so I wasn’t too surprised when various versions of my own good self popped up on the screen. Offhand, I can think of Raft’s imitation of me in Scarface, Cagney in The Public Enemy, Cagney again in Blonde Crazy and Lady Killer, although I never mashed no tomato’s puss with a grapefruit, nor kicked one in the bum and thrown her down the stairs. My favorite was Lady for a Day, even though Warren William didn’t look a thing like me, but since I’d let Runyon steal the story of Madame la Gimp and call me Dave the Dude, I figured I’d go along with it.
I almost drew the line when Hellinger and that one-eyed Walsh fella did The Roaring Twenties, where Cagney was so obviously a cross between me and Larry Fay that I thought about suing for breach or invasion of something, but Shalleck told me to sit down and shut up, it wasn’t every mug who got part of his life story up there on the screen. When Cagney got plugged at the end, it made me wince a little, though, since Larry Fay had gone out feet first in much the same manner in 1932, on New Year’s Eve yet.
They let me out on July 3, 1933, one day before Independence Day. They gave me back my suit and my Panama, plus $51.52, which I’d earned while in stir. That included $17.52 for my labors with the flowers and the pigeons, twenty bucks for “rehabilitation” and the fourteen dollars I had in my pocket when I checked in. They offered me a new suit and a train ticket to New York, the way they do all the released birds, but I didn’t need either one of them. “I got my own car,” I said. “As for the suit, I wouldn’t wear them rags if you paid me. Give ’em to some other mug.”
The wagon was waiting outside, a brand-new shiny green Packard coupe that went well with my suit. Only problem was there was a horde of reporters clustered between me and the car. Flashbulbs popped, which usually enraged me, but this time I was actually glad the newspapermen were there, because I had something to say to them. First, though, I had to wait out a barrage of their dumb questions. I often wondered who was stupider, the reporters or the cops, and never could pick a winner. Still can’t.
“How’s it feel to be a free man?”
“Are you goin’ back to the rackets?”
“Whaddya think about Repeal?”
Stuff like that.
“Boys,” I said, “listen up and write this down.”
You wanna get a pack of jackals like journalists quieted down, just tell them to listen up and write this down.
“I’m through with the rackets. I’m through with broads, beer and Broadway. I’m through bein’ a punk.”
“How old are ya, Owney?” shouted one jerk.
“Forty-one years old. It’s time to start thinkin’ about retirement, about goin’ somewhere I can raise my flowers and my birds in peace and quiet.”
“A changed man, huh?” said a yertz in a cheap hat and a bad suit.
That gave me an idea. “Changed man? You bet I am. Remember what you boys used to call me?”
“Owney the Killer!” they all shouted. Reporters find a story that works, they stick with it until the readers get sick of it.
“Well, now you’ll be calling me Owney the Hermit. That’s how changed I am.” They loved that.
One of our new boys, Jim O’Connell, was the wheelman, a nice kid. Joe was in the back with Frenchy. “Everything jake?” I asked.
“Ain’t like it was,” said Frenchy, who’d put on weight I think he was eatin’ too good on my nickel. “Never is, is it?”
Joe Shalleck handed me my discharge papers. “You’re still under aegis of the parole board until July 1, 1935, which means that legally you’re not to leave the jurisdiction—”
“I got things to do,” I reminded him.
“Correct, although legally—”
“Legally a million bucks ought to go a long way toward making my life easier. Is everybody paid?”
Shalleck nodded. “The bribe’s been paid,” said Frenchy, who never had much of an ear for subtlety.
“I don’t like that word. It’s like ‘tax.’ Let’s call it…an investment. An investment in the Plan.”
“You mean the Arrangement,” corrected Shalleck.
“Whatever you wanna call it, just do it.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Good.” Joe shut up, which was a rare and wonderful occurrence. “Where’d we get the car?”
“I stashed the Doozy,” said Frenchy. “Figured it’d be safer that way.”
“Have it shipped down the Springs, quiet,” I said. “Didja bring the map?”
Frenchy handed me a road map of the United States. I traced the route to Bubbles with my finger. “Fourteen hundred miles—”
“Thirteen hundred and ninety-three,” said Frenchy.
“Thirteen hundred and ninety-three miles each way. Too bad it ain’t closer, but if it was any closer, it wouldn’t be no good to us. Bulletproof?”
I was referring to the Packard. From the front seat, O’Connell spoke up. “Take a tank to knock this baby over,” he said.
“Where’s the Dutchman?” There was an uneasy silence in the car. “Well, where the hell is he?”
“Gone fishing,” said George.
“Somewhere upstate, in Jersey, who knows?” said Joe. “Good riddance to dead rubbish.”
“Find him. We got some unfinished business.”
Frenchy plunked out a big mitt, took the map from me and folded it up neatly. “Things ain’t going too good for the Dutchman,” he said.
“I’m all broke up about it.”
“There’s muttering he’s cuttin’ a deal for himself. State, feds, whatever it takes.”
“That’ll be the day. Dutch may be crazy but he ain’t no canary.”
“On the other hand,” said Joe, “I have it on the highest authority, and I am talking the highest authority, just about the top of the line, and I mean all the way down the line, or up the line, whichever, from Pennsylvania Station to Washington, District of Columbia, that Dutch’s still making noises about sending Bo Weinberg and Abe and Lulu to visit Thomas E. Dewey on his morning stop for coffee and doing unto him what Bo did unto the late Vincent Coll. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Not from an officer of the court,” I agreed.
“Nor from Joseph Shalleck, private citizen, who has every hope and intention of living a long, happy and prosperous life and dying in his bed and not in custody somewhere at age oh I don’t know, let’s say ninety-two or thereabouts.”
We passed through Yonkers and I thought about my wife, Loretta, and our little girl, not so little now, twenty-one years old, all grown up, and I wondered what had become of her. I wondered if Margaret ever thought of me, and if she did, what she thought of me.
Then we were driving down through Harlem toward the Cotton Club, and all at once a terrible wave swept over me as I realized that I was going to lose all this, my city, the only city I’d ever really known and certainly the only one I loved. I loved her from her head to her toes, from the northernmost reaches of the Bronx, where Monk and Kelly had slugged it out, down to the tip of the Battery and across to Brooklyn, where so many of our associates lived, then up through Queens, past the laundry, and all the way out to the tip of the Island and across to the Jersey Shore, where so many of our rum cutters had sailed, during the glorious days of the Noble Experiment, when men like me made this country what it is today. I cursed the fate that was forcing me to leave it, and then I thanked the Good Lord above for allowing me to have thirty years here, including time spent behind bars, to live and work and realize my destiny. Still, it was a smart play and nobody ever said of Owney Madden that he didn’t know a smart play when it came up and introduced itself.
A few days later the Packard and my own good self were through the new Holland Tunnel and then the long drive through Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee to Arkansas, down to Little Rock to stop in to pay my respects to the Governor and hand him a little token of our esteem, the first of many, and then over to Bubbles, Hot Springs, to see my sweetie, Agnes, and ask her to marry me. I thought she was going to faint dead away.
Agnes had been up to see me plenty in New York, and I always took her to the clubs, the speaks, anyplace glamorous, because she just ate that stuff up, like a kid gobbling an ice cream cone. It struck me during our courtship and later marriage that I could stash a good deal of cash on and about her person, in the form of bracelets, necklaces, rings and all manner of jewelry that dames swoon for, and did she ever swoon. Each time I gave her something she acted like she’d never seen anything like it, which in most cases she hadn’t, but she’d take it, trembling, from my hands and then put it on or try it on or model it in some way that she thought might appeal to me, and whether it did or it didn’t didn’t really matter because we were both getting what we wanted out of our deal.
“When shall we be married, Owen dear?” she asked. She really did talk like that. All southern girls do, most of ’em anyway, particularly when they want something.
“I’ll be fully discharged from parole in the summer of 1935,” I told her. “Right after that.”
“We’ll live here of course.” Here being 506 West Grand. Not far from the federal court building, where I knew I’d be spending some time, Arrangement or no Arrangement, and just down the road from Hot Springs High School, on which I’d be laying some charitable contributions, to establish my bona fides.
She’d been born in that house, which had belonged to her father, James Demby, the Postmaster. It was small, but had plenty of room for addition and expansion, and best of all it could be fixed up to accommodate my special needs. I put in a wing for myself, with plenty of avenues of escape if any of my old friends came calling in a bad mood. I also bombproofed the garage and put the mail slot there, in case any of my old friends sent me an explosive token or two. There was even a spot for my pigeon coop, and they say down here in Bubbles that every homing pigeon in town is descended from my flock.
I spent the next couple of years shuttling back and forth like this, closing down operations up North and setting them up down South. McLaughlin proved to be a most understanding Mayor, especially after Frenchy and I took him out for a drive one day and Frenchy stuck a gun in his ribs while I explained the facts of life to him. After that, everybody continued to kick back to Leo, and Leo kicked back to me; I gave Costello a piece of my action up North and Frank steered my clubs legit, just like we’d agreed. It was all part of the Arrangement.
Marty and his girl Kitty got married on the first of May 1934, but I had to miss the wedding on account of business. Which business I can relate quickly.
I found Branagan without much difficulty. He’d made it to retirement, pension, his little tin box full. I’d kept his palm greased through thick and thin, and the one good thing I can say about the former roundsman was that he was fairly cheap, drank no more than necessary to get himself plastered and had himself a nice flat on the Upper West Side. He was still chasing underage quim, which is what I found him with on the night I came to call and cash in his chips.
I shot him once, point-blank as he answered the doorbell, in his knickers just like the way I remembered him, only this time it wasn’t Jenny Gluck, except that it was, if you get my meaning. Anyway, I didn’t have no time for chitchat, this was just business, putting paid to an overdue account, and to his credit he never said a word, not when he opened the door, not when he recognized me even though my hat was pulled down low, not when the slug crashed through his forehead, right between the eyes, and he pitched backwards onto his Oriental carpet, the blood seeping out from the back of his dead head, and the girl—she really was a girl, not even close to a woman, even though we got older younger back then—not knowing whether to weep from sorrow or fear. I threw my coat around her and escorted her out the door, down the stairs and into my car and I took her home and never once asked her name.
Which reminded me that there was one thing about Branagan I never knew and that was his Christian name. If he even had one.
After a little friendly persuasion, Loretta gave me a Reno divorce, in August 1934. I was almost a free man.