CHAPTER THREE

Pick, Heller & O’Connell was the most widely influential and distinguished law firm in the United States. Their clients were the principal owners of the republic. Pick, Heller & O’Connell did on a gargantuan scale what Paddy West had done municipally all his life. Lawyers were the managers of America in the exquisitely powerful sense of managing all the managers of business, industry, religion and government. They made all the dangerous decisions. They handled the negotiations in which no manager or proprietor could safely appear. They were the high-yield gold thread in the tapestry of American wealth and power. The thread crossed all boundaries, entered all strong rooms, and infected/guided all of the consciences of a most unified colossus. The lawyers were not only the intelligence of a monolithic establishment, they were its fusion. They interlocked with other lawyers, communicating in a special dialect. Their fabric was strengthened each year by the top 10 percent of the graduating classes of the law schools of five universities.

Pick, Heller & O’Connell employed two hundred and sixteen lawyers in their main offices in Wall Street. They practiced marine law in offices at Bowling Green, where they maintained a staff of twenty-seven lawyers.

Eddie West had direct entry to the counsels of the firm because his roommate in his second year at Harvard had been C. L. Pick, Jr. Furthermore, Francis A. O’Connell was chairman of the Metropolitan Citizens’ Committee for Good Government and had known Paddy West well. But Eddie didn’t think those credentials would be good enough for what he wanted. He would be greeted by Mr. Pick or Mr. O’Connell, then turned over to a junior partner, and that simply would not do. He had pondered the problem. He had a first-class mind. He decided it would be better to cause each of the senior partners—C. L. Pick, F. Marx Heller, Francis A. O’Connell—to become individually and immeasurably indebted to him. The nature of indebtedness was that it had to acknowledge superior power. If it should occur to all of them at some later date that they had been framed, they would also be aware that if he had been able to frame them once he could frame them again, so they would do what he would ask. A part of his plan would offer shock and surprise. Its biggest part would depend on the fact that their advanced years and almost hermetically entrenched position at the top would have made them rusty at self-defense in the oversimplified arena of New York politics. As he saw it, no matter what they did in their panic, no matter how much muscle and cunning they brought to bear, he would be able to close all the doors.

The plan began with the arrival of eight city firemen, under a lieutenant, all wearing fire helmets and rubber coats, who swarmed through Pick, Heller & O’Connell’s fourteenth-floor office checking wiring, pounding on walls and vents, then clearing all personnel off the floor, interrupting many serious client conferences. Word was passed immediately to F. A. O’Connell, who did not bother to leave his office to shout at the firemen but telephoned the fire commissioner. He lost his temper, which two doctors had warned him never to do again, when the only satisfaction the commissioner would give him was to ask that he have the senior fire officer present telephone him at once.

O’Connell was a blond, red-complexioned man who dressed as exquisitely as any standard duke. He went out to find and halt the firemen and discovered that two entire floors had by then been cleared and condemned. He found the fire lieutenant outside C. L. Pick’s office on the sixteenth floor. Inside that office the extremely fragile, elderly C. L. Pick, doyen of all American corporation lawyers, was conferring with the head of the country’s largest steel company who also happened to be the head of the largest investment bank. “Sorry, buster,” the lieutenant said to O’Connell, “this wiring is a sin and a shame. It all has to come out. Lives are endangered here. Go to it, boys.” He signaled three firemen with axes and they began to chop at C. L. Pick’s wall that was lined with irreplaceable paneling that had been removed at enormous cost from the walls of the town hall in Littlecot, Lindfield, Sussex, England, and was four hundred and nine years old. They could hear Mr. Pick’s tiny screams from within as the axes broke through. Despite O’Connell’s attempt to fling himself on the axemen, the two outraged elderly men inside the room came into full view. The banker, a man with a nose like a boxing glove, cried out in tones that might have shattered windows, “What the hell are you doing?” and C. L. Pick shrilled, “Arrest those men!”

O’Connell charged the fire lieutenant with a chair and forced him to stop the axemen and to agree to telephone the commissioner. During all this the third senior partner, F. Marx Heller, slept on soundly on the leather settee in his office on the seventeenth floor.

On the following morning Heller was visited by investigators from the United States Customs Service who asked him to accompany them to Ellis Island for questioning on charges of smuggling. Heller was very stout and white-haired with used, stained tea bags under his eyes, whose perpetual expression was that of a man who is struggling not to bite people. Also he was more suspicious than a failing prince. He did not answer.

“Did you cross from Le Havre on the liner Connubia late in the summer of 1907?”

“Yes.”

“Did you occupy staterooms A-402 and 403 on that crossing?”

“I don’t remember.”

“The records say you did.”

“What about it?”

“I have a warrant for your arrest.”

“Who issued the warrant?”

“Judge Heneghan. Special Sessions.”

Heller spun his chair away from them and looked out the windows at the confluence of rivers. “Come back in forty minutes,” he said. “I have to talk to my partners.”

“We’ll be waiting right outside,” the shorter man said.

“I wouldn’t try any tricks if I were you,” the other man advised him. They left. Heller told his secretary to find Mr. O’Connell and get him there on the double.

O’Connell burst into the room. “I haven’t got the time, Marxie, whatever it is. The Leader was in Albany until noon today and I’ve got to get up to the Hall to see him or we’ll never be able to hold up our heads again.” He started out again.

“Halt!” Heller roared. The younger man stopped and turned. “Lock the door,” Heller said, “and pull up a chair very close, on this side.” O’Connell moved himself into place. “We are being framed,” Heller said in a soft whisper.

“No! How? Why? Who?”

“The Fire Department condemned three floors?”

O’Connell nodded with agitation.

“Two customs men are waiting outside. They have a bench warrant to take me to Ellis Island for questioning on smuggling charges.”

“No!”

“Yes. Now hear this. One: We are being framed, and that is so heinously unthinkable that I will skip over it for the moment. Two: I am going with these men to Ellis Island—”

O’Connell began to object. Heller gripped his shoulder. “Listen to me! If we protest this thing and begin to defend ourselves legally we’ll be falling right into the trap being set by whoever it is out there who is out to get us.”

“Get us?”

“If we fight right now everything will go straight into the papers, and what client could have confidence in us if we couldn’t handle a silly thing like a fire violation or the claptrap nonsense of a smuggling charge? Nozzir. I’m going with these men and listen to them for twenty-four hours. Tell my wife to go over and stay with my daughter tonight. In the meantime, you and C.L. go for the Leader’s throat and tell him that if he doesn’t clean this mess up now we’ll run a reform ticket next November and fill up a war chest that will back Tammany right out of politics.”

A middle-aged secretary broke into the room. “Mr. Heller! They’ve arrested Mr. Pick!”

“Whaaaaat?”

“Miss Sage says she heard the police charge him with complicity in the murder of Tessie Quintell, the Golden Girl of the Tenderloin.”

Heller stared at O’Connell glassily. “Get over there, Frank.”

“To the Tombs?” Criminal law was a mystery to O’Connell.

“Send young Charley Pick to the Tombs. You get uptown and strangle the Leader.”

O’Connell was shown into the Leader’s office. The Leader was wearing a dark woolen shawl around his shoulders as he sat in a tall rocking chair behind the vast desk. He wore a high-crowned straw sailor hat of the kind affected by retail butchers. “Sit down an’ take a load offa your feet, Frank. What’ll you have?”

“Anything. Straight.”

“Southern Comfort for Mr. O’Connell, Artie,” the Leader said to the man who had ushered O’Connell in. “It’s the best thing for you, Frank. Mostly fruit. I used to work with Louis Herron, the bartender who invented it in ’75. It’s a patented drink, of course, you know, but the missus makes this for me at home. Anyone can make it, you know. Add fresh peaches and peach brandy to bonded bourbon and let it all stand in an oak barrel for eight months.”

“Listen to me, you—”

“It’s a fine drink if you like peaches, peach brandy and bourbon. Say, I found out about them tambourines.”

“What tambourines?”

“You remember at that Holy Name breakfast when I asked you where I could get some tambourines wholesale? That was you, wasn’t it?”

“No! Now listen, goddammit—”

“Anyway, I had the word wrong. It was tabourets. Man was thinking of startin’ a shish kebab joint but he switched. How’s the missus?”

“C. L. Pick is an old and delicate man. They have him downtown in that—”

“It looks like my boy Peter will be made a monsignor and be sent off to the North American College in Rome. He’ll have to learn Eyetalian, you know, but that’s nothin’ to them fellas. Marty, the other boy—”

O’Connell belted the Southern Comfort, stood up, leaned far over the desk and stared at the Leader three inches away from his astonishingly blue eyes. “New York City police have arrested C. L. Pick and have thrown him into the Tombs on a charge of complicity in the murder of some tart. New York City firemen came into our offices yesterday and ripped it up with axes. Marxie Heller has been taken to Ellis Island on charges of smuggling. What the hell are you going to do about that and who the hell is responsible for this shameful mess?”

When Mr. O’Connell left Tammany Hall he was shaken and frightened. The Leader had not only been greatly shocked, but every bit of it had been news to him.