CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Early in 1914 E. C. West launched the League’s concentrated antivice campaign that urged that attention be paid to the heinous connection between alcohol and commercialized vice. Ruthlessly he exposed the fact that harlots were encouraged to solicit customers in the back rooms of saloons and received commissions on alcoholic drinks they were able to sell. When these prostitutes were arrested, the saloon keepers paid their fines. In Chicago alone, West thundered to the press, nine hundred and twenty-eight tarts were counted in the back rooms of two hundred and thirty-six saloons in a single night, and the back rooms of four hundred and forty-five saloons had contributed directly to the delinquency of fourteen thousand girls in Chicago every twenty-four hours. Something had to be done. In response the National Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association hastened to endorse the Anti-Profanity League of America and urged all saloon keepers to display the League’s cards behind their bars.

In 1913 Congress was at last compelled to make a move toward correcting the interstate shipment of liquor under the protection of the federal government. The Anti-Saloon League rammed through the first great national victory of the dry movement with the passage of the Webb-Kenyon Law, which provided heavy penalties for the shipment of liquor into a dry state. When the national board of trustees met early in 1913 to discuss the forthcoming twenty-year jubilee convention of the League, they voted that the time had come to strike out for national prohibition. Everything was concentrated on the Congressional elections of 1914. All Protestant denominations were behind the drive, working through state leagues that directed the campaign locally. “We loosed an avalanche of letters, telegrams and petitions upon Congress. We started with about twenty thousand speakers, mostly volunteers, all over the United States. We went into every Congressional district,” West told the Chicago Tribune after the victory, “and we triumphed even beyond our hopes.”

But it would be at least two years before the League would control two-thirds of the votes in either house. Sure, patient strategy kept them from pressing for an amendment to the constitution in 1915 or 1916. “Had we attempted otherwise,” E. C. West wrote in the American magazine in the mid-twenties, “we might have delayed passage for several years. The strategy of the day dictated holding off, insofar as rushing Congress was concerned, but we repeated the results of 1914 in 1916, and we won again. And we knew that the prohibition amendment would be submitted to the states by the Congress just elected.”

President Wilson called the 65th Congress into special session to declare a state of war with Germany. The President had a war program for Congress. He insisted that this take precedence over any dry legislation. However, the League did get the Food Control Bill passed as a war measure, and in its final form it prohibited the manufacture of distilled liquors from any foodstuffs. It went into effect September 8, 1917, and it was generally conceded that alcohol, at least as hard liquor, was finished forever in America.

At last the victory of victories was realized: a resolution submitting the Eighteenth Amendment to the states was adopted on December 18, 1917. On January 16, 1919, the Secretary of State announced that the states had ratified the amendment and that its purpose as a law of the nation could go into effect one year from that date.

E. C. West and Don Vito Cascio dined at the Hotel Sofitel at the Gare Maritime in Cherbourg in May 1917. West had arrived for their meetings that morning aboard the Aquitania and had spent the day talking with the farmers from the Calvados cooperatives. The two men enjoyed a simple meal of baked clams in a sauce of breadcrumbs, butter, lemon, shallots and white wine. They didn’t talk business because Don Vito was travel-weary. After dinner they strolled back to the ship. West had booked two staterooms, one on each side of a large sitting room with a private deck. As they breakfasted the next morning the ship was being moored at Southampton. They spent the day and the evening working in the big stateroom. At eleven that night, when the ship was at sea, they took three turns around the deck and retired.

It was a comfortable eight-day crossing. They worked ten hours each day and continued to talk about their plans at meals. When the ship reached New York West disembarked, and he never saw Don Vito again. The old man remained aboard to be visited during the eighteen hours in port by his special delegate in America.

The agenda during the crossing began with their examination of the draft of the Volstead Act to enforce prohibition, over which E. C. West had labored for four years in the most exhaustive planning of its loopholes. In a special sense the Volstead Act was to be their license to operate. They analyzed the characters and abilities of the leaders for the twenty-three marketing areas. These men had been proposed by Don Vito’s special delegate for his recommendations. “His Sicilian people are very sound. Torrio is excellent, for example. Masseria is fine. I don’t know the American choices except by hearsay and his recommendation, and he knows his business.”

“Yes, he does,” West said. “I gave him his head. I recommended no one. With my father I’ve been around the New York people all my life, but he chose better men than I would have picked.”

“Well—we’ve been at this business longer than you.”

They went over the Horizons A.G. warehouse stocks in the Bahamas, Cuba, the Florida Keys, Nova Scotia, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Lunenberg, Mexico, Vancouver Island and Canada. West told the delighted old man that after the passage of the Food Control Bill, which had finished distilling forever in the United States, Horizons A.G. had purchased thirty-seven distilleries together with their inventories and had arranged to have half the contents of 600,000 barrels of government-bonded bourbon and rye whiskies siphoned out and replaced with neutral spirits and water in warehouses around the country.

They went over the operating manuals with care, and Don Vito approved of West’s thoroughness of method. “We have never needed such precise planning, because there hasn’t been anything new in our business for hundreds of years. But men accustomed to basics such as extortion or strong-arm work or running some gambling and a few whores will have no concept of how to move around in this new big business. Sometimes you’re going to think you brought in a lot of chimpanzees to run your bank, but their individual styles of working have to be taken into account. One man is a blusterer and he takes chances. Another man uses a gun or a knife to solve all the problems. Let them have their styles, but let them learn the fundamentals of the new, big business, which is what you have given them here in this operating manual, Zu Eduardo. They must have it drummed into their heads what you want them to deliver and how much it is going to cost them and precisely how much protection they can count on.”

West explained the long-term effects for Horizons A.G. that the Goff-supervised short-term commercial banking would achieve. He told how Tobin would function as a procurment and collections officer. He related the work of both men to the work of Don Vito’s special delegate, who would be in the field on an operational level supervising recruitment at first and tightening every bolt by teaching the operating manual and, where necessary, seeing that it was enforced. “He and Goff have the personal element to cope with. Tobin has it to a lesser degree. They’ll all be dealing with undisciplined, uneducated and often illiterate immigrants whom we will be turning into rich men overnight—so fast, in fact, that they’ll think they did it all themselves.”

“That’s the big problem,” Don Vito agreed. “A bunch of hoodlums who think they did it all themselves. Guys who can only think with their knuckles or guns will think they planned their way into a million bucks, and if they don’t, the newspapers will convince them they did.”

“Mostly it takes money—in terms of ships, trucks, garages, guns, warehouses, breweries, distilleries and gasoline. These men haven’t learned to count that high.”

“The main thing—and I will say this again and again to Benito when we have our meetings—is that they have to understand that none of them have to think except the way they’ve always been thinking or else this whole thing will be too big for them,” Don Vito said emphatically. “I had to kill a dentist once. He was a good dentist and he had been a friend of the friends all his life. But he had trained so hard and he took so much pride in being a dentist that he began to forget the ethos of our business. He began to complain that if it was found out that he was a friend of the friends, it could hurt his position. Not his practice, you understand. Even if he had been a very bad dentist they would all have had to flock to him because he was one of us. But for his position as a dentist. Among other dentists in the different international dental conventions he had to go to—that was his use to us, as an opium courier. We had made him a famous dentist among the dentists of the world, but he didn’t understand what he was doing and he wanted to get out, so I killed him. The lesson is: Never send a man on a boy’s errand. Use brutes where they must be used and be glad they cannot think. Keep searching for the people who see life as we do and give them a chance to think.”

West explained the basis of the operation. “They will all need capital to go into what you call the new, big business. Your man will instruct them as to whom they can borrow from for quick, safe, sure action. We lend them the money on short term—turning the money around in thirty days for twenty percent interest. We lend them the money to buy the merchandise. Your man gives each local leader a list of eight or ten suppliers who all work under Tobin. They all buy from us at sixty dollars a case, liquor that cost us, on an average, about four dollars a case because we buy it by hundreds of thousands of cases. All right. They will need ships, boats and crews, weapons, payoff money and fuel to get their stocks into the United States, because, in the first phase at least, we’ll sell it legally outside the country. Again we lend them the money, for that and for the trucks to move it and for weapons to protect it and for men to guard it, distribute it and sell it. All short-term commercial banking. Thirty days at twenty percent. Now—the business will move through four phases. The first phase will be to use the available American stocks we’ve been stockpiling. Every idiot and his brother will think they’ve doped it all out. They’ll plan to steal from the warehouses or hijack it or get it with forged government withdrawal permits, and, frankly, with the administration we are about to have in Washington, they’ll be selling the real permits like bakers selling bread. But we’ve been stockpiling in the states and in Europe and in Canada since 1913. Not that we won’t get more than our share of those withdrawal permits. For example,” West continued with not a little self-appreciation, “I bought thirty-four wholesale drug companies, because they will control both medical permits and the permits to withdraw denatured alcohol. The denatured alcohol is for antifreeze and hair tonics and things like that. But the way I saw that the law was drawn, once that alcohol changes hands—once, that is, it goes from one wholesale drug house to another—the second firm cannot be prosecuted or made to account for what it has done with the alcohol. There is no problem in extracting the foreign agents; then the alcohol is ready for use in liquor again. That’s a part of Phase Two—when the so-called available stocks seem to be running out.

“We’ve stockpiled sugar—my God, do we own sugar!—and stills. Your man will set up the stills with families in the big city slums, so many of them that even if the enforcement agents were going to stay honest they couldn’t find more than ten percent to stamp out. And we’ll give them industrial alcohol and druggists’ denatured alcohol just to whet their palates for more drinkable stuff. Then we’ll move into Phase Three and run stocks in from Canada, the Bahamas, Cuba, Nova Scotia, the Keys and Vancouver Island. Naturally, there will be small operators buying in Europe and Canada, but our commitments will have to be served first because we placed the orders—the continuing orders—first, and the home-country distilleries will have their own native market demands to meet in terms of supply.”

“What’s Phase Four, in the name of heaven?”

“Our own distilleries operating inside the United States. We’ll be running our own breweries from the very beginning,’ of course, because the Volstead Act, as I wrote it, permits the manufacture of quote cereal beverages with an alcohol content of not more than one-half of one percent unquote. When it reaches the consumer it will be four-to-six-percent beer, I assure you. But by the time we’re ready to distill our own hard liquor the local politicians and the police and the courts will all be working smoothly together and they’ll all be a part of our business. The federal agents will wear themselves out. After a while the enforcement money from Congress will be cut down to a trickle. I plan a weekly output from all our distilleries—those we own now and those we’ll acquire—of not less than five hundred thousand gallons of good alcohol produced with quality controls to be sold at prices within the reach of all. I think I should get a medal for that.”

“My God, all this money and we get medals too?” the exuberant old man cried.

“I’ve stockpiled a hundred thousand barrels of Canadian neutral-grain spirits now, in case Phase Four comes on sooner than I’ve calculated. It’s forty gallons to a barrel, making ninety gallons of the merchandise itself. But that’s how it works. Everything is simple. First Goff and the short-term credit. Then Tobin with the stocks and the collections. Then, finally, your man will tell each local gang, as he sets it up, where it has to do business, and not only do we sell them our liquor and finance them for their operation at a short-term twenty percent but your man tells them they have to pay us one-sixth of the gross from their first dollar for making everything possible.”

Goff liked his work. He even liked to sit and stare at the portrait of Patrick J. West by his friend James McNeil Whistler in the gambling house at 5 East 44th. He liked the simple solutions that a big organization could afford. When Big Jack Zelig’s mob had graduated from wrecking stuss houses and small-time gambling pads on the Lower East Side and had decided they could make big money by offering to wreck big-time gambling houses uptown, they had started with one of Goff’s three houses, the one at 208 West 45th, and Goff had told Zelig to come back in twenty-four hours for an answer. Then he had called Willie Tobin. Then Tobin had called Paul Kelly, who had moved down from Harlem in 1911 to open the New Englander Social and Dramatic Club on Seventh Avenue and 51st Street, from which base he handled all E. C. West’s muscle work in mid-town. And when Kelly had talked it all over with Big Jack Zelig, Zelig never bothered to come back to see Goff again.

He expanded his interests nicely before prohibition came in. He fenced stolen goods such as diamonds, bonds and silk. He bought inheritances in advance from the children of wealthy families at discounts. He leased the top floor of Jimmy Hine’s political club for gambling at $500 a month against 15 percent of the winnings. Then prohibition arrived and he was in the biggest action.

In theory, lending large amounts of money to criminals in forty-one states should have been a business with considerable risk. But, as Goff believed, as West had theorized at the bank, a criminal is as much a living piece of his society as a clergyman or a steeplejack. They existed with everyone else in the national tapestry. The rational and the irrational were like different colored threads animating the entire design. The threads themselves did not know which was which. America was the first country to invent egalitarian big business, wherein the greatest combined force of commerce was marshaled to serve the greatest number of people. It was an ideal within the larger ideal. America was the first nation to produce big-business poets and painters and composers—and the first to produce big-business preachers. It was proper for such a country to produce the first big-business criminal requiring large-scale bank credit. However, just as big-business hospital insurance and health services were available to him on a short-term basis because merely by living he represented a risk as much as did health-insurance policyholders, banking facilities had to be expensive. In fact, until E. C. West had studied the problem there had been no really safe way of securing a loan to a criminal borrower.

However, in 1912, following a personal appeal to the limited partners of Horizons A.G., it was agreed that two new insurance companies should be formed at once, utilizing capital that would be apart from Horizons funds but prorated to the partners on the same basis as Horizons shareholdings. By 1919 these companies were thriving under their brisk West managements, operating out of branch offices that covered all states, employing actuaries, salesmen and adjusters, and building reputations for paying claims promptly. Both firms grew in time to insure tens of millions of American lives. They were sound, profitable operations for their founders. Their single, infinitesimal operational difference from any of the other life insurance companies was that, as a matter of principle, neither company questioned or refused applications for life insurance submitted by Arnold Goff on the lives of others—all the policies having Mr. Goff (or one of Mr. Goff’s forty-three companies) as beneficiary. Nor was there any undue investigation or delay in paying claims in the event of the sudden death of any of these policyholders. By and large it was an extremely profitable branch of insurance practice because the policies carried high premiums for extremely short terms, and the premiums, naturally, were paid through Goff by the borrower.

If an operator had an Atlantic rum fleet, he had capital requirements requiring a revolving fund—maintained at a level of a million and a half to two million dollars—for liquor purchase (from Willie’s branch), all ships, high-speed boats and shoreside trucking equipment, plus insurance, payroll, fuel, warehousing, garaging and protection. He had to hire large amounts of capital, and he had to hire it from Goff to spend it on Willie.

Not that he didn’t get full service for it. For example, through Edward’s friends in the White House Willie was able to acquire two hundred unused Liberty motors that had been built for torpedo boats in World War I at 12 percent of their original cost. They had bought boat yards in the Bahamas. The motors were fitted into new hulls and the finished boats were sold for 165 percent of their original cost. After sale the boats were berthed in New York along the Brooklyn waterfront and at a marine garage on the East River with direct access to Hell Gate, and also Bayshore, Long Island, and at Westhampton. Each boat came equipped with a Horizons amulet, a dory hung over the stern for protection against the Coast Guard, who were paid to harass free-lance operators. With the amulet, the Coast Guard escorted the boats into port safely. This offshore arm of the government was an alert, enthusiastic organization that was ever willing to help. During the peak holiday rush periods, for example, Coast Guard Cutter 203 loaded on 700 cases at sea along Rum Row, then unloaded them at the Canal Street dock for seven dollars a case, which they shared partially with the New York policemen who helped off-load the cargo.

Of course it was neither profitable nor possible to buy everyone’s cooperation. There was occasional trouble. Willie’s branch concentrated all its lawyers in the Knickerbocker Building at 42nd Street and Broadway, where they established a pattern of rapid legal assistance that was a model in every way.

The large breweries were operated under lease from Horizons by the gangs in the principal national market areas. This was an enormously profitable business; in 1928 wholesale beer sales in Chicago alone amounted to 1196,680,000. But the operating expenses of the gangs were high: police, federal agencies, armed guards, insurance and brewery rental were some peripheral factors, in addition to which they were required to pay one-sixth of their gross to Horizons.

Further capital was borrowed through Goff for the operation and maintenance of all other income-producing activities demanded by the operating manual that Horizons enforced: narcotics, brothels, gambling, nightclubs, race tracks, roadhouses, slot machines, policy rackets, laundries, restaurants, dance halls, speakeasies, booking agencies, sugar brokerage, labor organizations, alky-cooking, taxis and strike-breaking and extortion rackets.

The national capital requirement of all mobs in all national market areas came to a substantial four hundred and twenty-six million dollars annually, which might have been a perilous risk for Horizons A.G., through Goff, the monopoly banking agency. However, all loans were secured with life insurance policies in Arnold Goff’s favor. If the borrower died naturally, the policy would honor the amount of the debt. If, as sometimes happened, there were unintelligent borrowers who did not want to pay the debt, they knew they would be putting a break-even price on their heads. Which is to say that although Arnold Goff became one of the mythical figures of modern American crime, and although he was gifted and clever with numbers, he was only a technician, who worked for 2 percent. By 1917 he was already about the most exciting figure to be pointed out at a race track or at a Broadway opening. By 1921 he was the sort of hoodlum-sportsman about whom people enjoyed believing anything. He had fixed the 1919 World Series, not less than two world championship prize fights and a baker’s dozen of big stake races.

Yet he didn’t seem at all sinister if you didn’t happen to look into his eyes. He had talcum-pale skin, noodle-soft, and shining hair. He was a full-time ladies’ man with a stable of mistresses and still time for the big whorehouses. He had a chin dimple, and there are chin-dimple buffs just as there are women who hang around musicians. He continued to be a fence for stolen jewelry even after the enormous action started, but more often than not, after the sets were broken up they were most likely to rub off on some pretty girl. Fencing wasn’t the only part of his business that he held out on E. C. West. He financed a chain of bucket shops, the rawest kind of Wall Street stock swindle; but like everything else he did or tried to do, sooner or later it came to West’s attention.

At the time he attempted his first double-dealing with E. C. West, Goff held life insurance policies in his favor totaling eleven million four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, which meant that his 2 percent share of the short-term loan action represented by the policies would be two hundred and twenty-eight thousand, two hundred and forty dollars. If that was an average thirty-day, short-term aggregate loan, then Goff’s income from banking alone (and it was the big banking that made all his other income possible) could be figured roughly at two million seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars a year—tax free.

The short-term commercial banking was done through forty-three Goff companies that had been incorporated in eleven states but that operated regionally in the nation under such banal names as Goffair Mortgage or Arnlegal Furniture or Allgoff Enterprises. The collections were made by these companies and remitted on the same updated thirty-day loan basis to the West National Bank in New York. William Tobin, executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., a Swiss company, held power of attorney on each of the forty-two Goff company accounts. Using these at the end of each fiscal quarter, he withdrew 98 percent of all Goff company funds and caused the West National to remit these funds to the Horizons A.G. numbered account at the Forster-Appenzeller Bank in Grabs.

That it was a sound system was proved by the fact that it was never investigated, even after Goff was shot to death on April 19, 1928. Goff’s own life was insured in two policies of seven million five hundred thousand dollars, each in the favor of Horizons A.G. of Grabs, Switzerland.

Regardless of what caused his death, Arnold Goff’s problem was never entirely one of greed. His major problem was that he hated E. C. West. As those things so often seem to happen, he hated him for the most irrational of reasons.

On the first day of each calendar quarter Goff was required to meet with the head of the West National Bank. He was the representative of forty-two companies that deposited with the bank, therefore anyone would have seen that these were normal business meetings. He would be driven to the bank building between Fulton and Wall, forty-seven stories high with a lobby displaying enormous murals by Roja-Hunt depicting man at his nets bringing in the fruits of the sea, and the lobby floor seeming to shine with gold. E. C. West’s office, on the thirty-third floor, was reached through a series of rooms like Chinese boxes, each room with a different decor and each manned by a bulky civilian who bulged above a different exquisite desk.

Arnold Goff did not hate West because West had made him a multimillionaire. He hated him because at the end of every one of their meetings since 1911, originally held in the old building on West 14th Street, West would always dismiss him with that contemptuous false smile that might have been peeled off the front page of the World and say, “Now, don’t tell Bella Radin what we talked about today.”

On January 2, 1924, everything seemed to be just the same. Goff was passed through the exquisite guard boxes into the last room, where West was sitting soldier-straight as always, confidently handsome and physically healthy and, to Goff, as attractive as a fish cake with a mustache. They greeted each other. Goff sat down. The meeting invariably opened with West handing him the bank’s statement showing that his forty-two accounts had remitted 98 percent of their bank balances to a Swiss bank. Goff had always been convinced that West was just an ice-water banker with a little more than the usual banker’s larceny in him. He thought West had happened to inherit those three gambling houses and had never really been a part of them. He considered West a smart square who had figured out this clever banker’s dodge of short-term credit for businesses that weren’t legit, but he never ever conceived that West had anything to do with mobs and booze and vice, because West had not intended him to think that way.

That morning his revulsion for West rolled over him like waves of icy water. He blurted out what he refused to contain any longer. He didn’t wait for the bank statements to be extended.

“Listen, Mr. West. Do you know what it cost me to be allowed to sit here and do business with you? A law practice!”

“It wasn’t much of a law practice, Goff.”

“And did I ever tell you—or maybe you read it in the papers and it slipped your mind—that my father killed himself in 1919 and left me a cowardly note that said he was ashamed of me?”

“He might have been ashamed of you. I’m ashamed of you myself. But he killed himself because he was in the terminal stages of cancer.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t make a fortune betting the way I told you to bet on the 1919 series?”

“Betting?” West looked at Goff as if he were drunk. And he was almost drunk. It had been a three-day New Year’s Eve celebration. “I don’t bet.”

“All right. So let it go. Okay. Never mind. What’s the difference? What I’m talking about is this. For a hundred dollars you sold Bella away from me.”

“Bella?”

“Bella! Bella Radin!”

“You look as though you’re going to vomit, Goff.” West opened a desk drawer and took out a silver flask. He slid the flask across the desk. “Hair of the dog.” Goff opened the top of the flask gratefully and took a long swallow. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

“Now—shall we go over these statements?”

Goff shot an accusing finger at him. “You took her away from me!”

“I bought information from the woman. That was thirteen years ago. She accepted one hundred dollars that she said she was going to deposit in your joint account. But you wanted to lose that woman. She took the money for you, but you were glad for the excuse to drop her.”

“All right. Never mind. What’s the difference?”

“If you think she can be had for money, go buy her back.”

Goff’s eyes filled with drunken tears. His instability shocked West. “It’s too late. She got married. She has kids.”

“Goff, what do you want? Please tell me what you want?”

Goff’s trembling finger leveled at his enemy again. “Just don’t mention her. When I walk out of here, don’t say what you always say. For the first time in thirteen years just don’t say it-okay?”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

“Now may I get on with business?”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you read about the daylight robberies of the bank messengers carrying negotiable Liberty Bonds that have been going on over the past eighteen months?”

“Yes. I saw that.” Goff sat up quite straight.

“Why did you organize those robberies?”

Goff stared. His face darkened visibly because he could not have grown paler. “What are you talking about?”

“You are a thief.”

“Now, just a minute here!”

“You are a cheap package-snatcher—or should I say a mastermind of package snatchers?—and you disposed of the bonds through those tinhorn bucket shops you organized.”

“Who said that? That’s a goddam lie. Who said that?”

“Goff, I want the money to be handed over to Willie Tobin before this bank closes on Friday.”

“You want the money? That wasn’t your bank that was hit. They never hit your messengers.”

“Call it a fine.”

“A fine. The bonds were worth five million dollars! God knows how many people could have been involved. God knows where all that money could be now.”

“I hired you to work as a moneylender, not as a thief. You endangered my business when you had those packages snatched. Bring the money to Tobin by Friday afternoon or you’ll be out of business.”

That sentence, which West thought could close him out, composed Goff, and his eyes showed their old, hard hatred. “You know banking, Mr. West, and you figured out a very good thing for me. But you don’t know the people I work with, and you don’t know how to put me out of business.”

West studied him the way a great chef de cuisine might look at the daily garbage. “Friday afternoon, Goff,” he said.

“Up your ass,” Goff answered and walked to the office door. As he touched the doorknob West called out to him and he turned. “You forgot your bank statements,” West said, holding them out. Goff returned and accepted the envelope. He walked to the door again and West called out again. He turned.

“Now, don’t tell Bella Radin what we talked about today,” West said with mock severity.

When Goff reached the pavement on William Street he was nearly ill with rage. He forgot that he had driven to the bank in his car or that his driver was standing at the building entrance. He strode past the man, who came after him, touching his arm. Out of reflexive frustration Goff turned and struck the man heavily in the face, making him stagger sideways. Shocked at what he had done, he felt his anger cool. As curious crowds began to gather he helped the driver to right himself and, mumbling apologies, hurried the man toward the car. The driver was as astounded by the blow as by the fact that for the first time Goff had acknowledged him at all. They got into the car and Goff told the driver to take him to the Park Central Hotel. He peeled a fifty-dollar bill off a large roll of money and leaned forward to drop it in the driver’s lap.

There were fourteen telephone messages at the hotel, but he ignored them. He ran a very cold bath and lay in it for ten minutes because that was what relaxed him most. He got into pajamas and a robe and called room service to send a waiter into his kitchen to make him a cup of Ovaltine. In about twenty minutes he felt calm and sleepy. It was five minutes to six. What was he in such an uproar about? He stretched out on the bed and began to sort everything into its place, but not all of the pieces would fit. How in God’s name had West known he had engineered the bond heist? How had he found out he had floated the bonds away through the bucket shops—and how did he know Goff owned bucket shops? What was wrong here?

The only thing that could give Goff satisfaction gave him enormous satisfaction. West had had a fair run in the money-lending business. Ninety-eight percent of that kind of a turnover for thirteen years should be enough for the greediest banker in the world. West was finished now. It was all Goff’s business now—100 percent Goff’s. He felt so good about it that he began to marvel at the brass of the ice-water bastard demanding to be paid five million dollars from somebody else’s bonds and calling it a “fine.” He was willing to steal the money from Goff, then call it a fine for stealing. Well, the cold-ass grabber had made his own square bed and he could have it. West saying he was going to put him out of business was a very funny line. Goff fell asleep.

He awoke to the sound of his doorbell ringing and to a pounding on the door. He rolled out of bed and put on a light. The noise stopped. He started across the living room toward the door when the ringing started again. “Shut up!” he shouted. “And you better have a goddam good reason.” He opened the door.

Three men stood there. Incredibly, one was Joe “the Boss” Masseria. He tried to register that before he saw that the other two were Frankie Yale and Frankie Marlowe. Joe the Boss hadn’t shown himself out of his neighborhood for years because he had decided that it was dangerous to call attention to himself. He did the thinking. He had lieutenants to do the work. He ran all the rackets in New York: booze, narcotics, the Italian lottery, vice, extortion—name it, they belonged to Joe the Boss. Charley Lucky ran Manhattan for him. Ciro Terranova ran uptown and the Bronx. Frankie Yale ran Brooklyn for him. Joe ran all the big hoods, all the rackets, and he was head of the Unione, and in all the years he had done business with Goff they had met only once.

What the hell was this? He stared at Frankie Yale, his pal, his contact, the man he did business with and with whom he had had many a wonderful time. Goff was in the nightclub business with Frankie Marlowe and they owned a couple of fighters and a couple of horses together. Goff knew so much about these three men that the way they stood there looking at him was frightening. Frankie Yale was the richest man in Brooklyn, it occurred to him fleetingly. Yale had once sent a pair of diamond cufflinks to a newspaperman because the man had written that he was “the Beau Brummel of the underworld.” Joe the Boss was maybe three and a half times bigger than Capone—not Capone’s scrapbook, Capone: Frankie Yale was the specialist for fancy hits. He handled only very big hits. He had killed Jim Colisimo and Dion O’Banion as a favor. And Marlowe was Yale’s chief gunman.

“What is it, boys?” Goff said shakily. “What’s the matter?” His voice broke. Masseria pushed him on the chest and sent him backward into the room. Marlowe locked the door.

“Frankie, listen—” he said to Yale.

“Shuddup.”

He had made Yale! He had made all of them. Without the money he had lent them they would be nothing—stevedores sweating on the docks or pimps or strong-arms. This was too much. Something had gone wrong. “I never keep cash here,” he said. “I swear there isn’t six grand in the whole place.”

“Arnold?”

“Yes, Joe?”

“I got a contract to hit you.”

“Hit me?” He looked frantically from one face to the other. His mouth became unsteady and he had to grit his teeth to stop its trembling. “Why? Whose contract? This is impossible. I do everything right. I help everybody. I helped you. Who wants me hit?”

They stared at him and he slid downward into a chair.

“Who?” Masseria asked resentfully. “You wanna know who? You think I turn out to handle goddam hits, you son of a bitch? You think I come alla way up here and Frankie comes alla way from Brooklyn because we wanna hit a fucking shylock?”

Goff was trembling uncontrollably. “They can’t pay you what I can pay. There isn’t anybody in this entire business, coast to coast, who can pay you more than I can pay. Lemme walk outta here with a suitcase and get on some ship. I’ll go so far nobody’ll ever see me again. I’ll be like dead. You’ll collect twice—from them and from me. Okay?”

Masseria nodded to Yale. Yale grasped the front of Goff’s robe and pajamas and pulled him to his feet. “Why don’t you do what you’re told, you prick.”

“Do what, Frankie?” Goff was weeping. “I’ll do anything. Tell me what.”

“Tomorrow when the banks open you get outta here and you take a payoff from certain bonds you got and you bring it downtown to a certain guy, you know who.”

Goff gaped. He couldn’t seem to make himself understand. “You mean—West?”

“Shaddopp!” Masseria roared. “I don’ wanna know who! You unnastan’? You know who. That’s enough. You hear?” Yale hit Goff in the gut with all his professional force and dropped him retching on the floor. Masseria walked up beside him and kicked him viciously in the head with his heavy shoe. He rolled Goff over with his foot so that Goff was staring up at him. “You get me mixed up wit’ people like this again,” he said with heavy anger, “and you’ll wish to God somebody would take a contract to come in and only kill you.”

In 1912, because of his extensive political connections, William Tobin, a well-known New York attorney, was named to the action committee of the National Brewers’ Consortium and to the defense committee of the Personal Liberty League of the Distillers’ Appeal. For the entire alcoholic-beverage industry he was able to swing into action such hopeless projects as the employment of dozens of costly experts to analyze dry strategy—which was available in the daily newspapers for two cents—and the beverage industry’s boycott of firms that he pointed out as opposing traffic in beer and spirits (because they had tried to discourage on-the-job drinking by employees), such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, Procter & Gamble, and the United States Steel Corporation, which were then blacklisted. The Heinz Company was cited as an enemy because its founder was president of the Pennsylvania Sunday School Association, which had endorsed prohibition.

The Tobin Committee was able to raise rages among companies and consumers alike. Tobin succeeded in setting the brewers against the distillers and the vintners against the breweries, so that each secretly expected to drive the others out of the market; the brewers, particularly, had hopes of arranging to manufacture the only national alcoholic beverage. He also advised groups to bribe the wrong politicians, who would then vote dry or run shouting to the newspapers. Each dummy “front” organization Tobin formed for his industries to fight the prohibitionists was somehow exposed and destroyed. Wherever possible he guided the alcohol manufacturers to do everything wrong, every possible public and private mistake. All in all, Tobin made popular mistakes for his people, wholly aided by the fact that Americans had been educated for a generation through the WCTU’s educational committees. Americans deeply wanted the brewers and distillers to be guilty.

His job well done, Tobin left political contact work in 1914 to accept a post as executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., a Swiss corporation dealing in imports. The new appointment made Tobin very happy. He was miserable when he was separated from Eddie, filled with dread and woe, since all the while he served the wet cause Eddie forbade him to attempt to come within a mile of him. They could not be seen together. Tobin could understand that that was necessary functionally, but it made him miserable, and were it not for the fact that he had to telephone Eddie every night to get his instructions and find out what it was he would be required to do next, he simply did not think he would have been able to stand it.

But that was over now, thank God. Eddie had given him a wonderful six-window office directly over Eddie’s own office in the new West National Building. A direct telephone connection had been sunk into the building wall within a copper cable where no one could tamper with it. Willie Tobin had never known any other life than working for the Wests. Paddy had chosen him when he was thirteen because he had been so silent. Paddy had put him through law school and had broken him into politics; then Eddie, marvelous, marvelous Eddie, had polished him.

Willie was a small-boned man, elegant in his movements and his almost epicene taste in clothes, with large, limpid brown eyes that stared passively, even adoringly. He had a wonderful flair for scarves, which he wore instead of ties—not in public, of course, but at the office, since he saw no one but the staff personally; everything was done on the telephone. He still had the knack of silence, because he knew Eddie admired that, but with the staff he could rattle on like a blue jay. He had an entirely male staff. He thought that was much the best thing, considering the types who might possibly decide to visit the office—a bunch of hairy gorillas. Willie just seemed to vanish at the end of the working day. He never invited even the closest staff people to dinner or to his place even though some of them had had very, very big eyes over that prospect. He’d taken some of them to lunch. He’d taken a few of them to important performances of the ballet or to really good art shows, but never just one of them, in fact never less than three of them. He certainly had no women friends. He was absolutely crazy about Irene West—that was clearly there for everyone to see except Irene and Edward West. But when the staff people talked it over at their places almost every night of every week of the year they decided that Willie adored Irene because she was so close to Eddie that some of that wonderful stuff must rub off on her.

Willie’s life, public and private, was like a human extension of a complicated telephone system. Edward West always knew where to find him simply because he tried not to stray from the telephone unless Eddie had okayed it first. He placed and took eighty and ninety telephone calls from New York, most states and Europe in the course of his twenty-four hour self-imposed duty. He concentrated the essence of these calls into précis form and took them himself to Eddie’s office every morning, heavily sealed, names identified in code. He was, or became, absolutely indispensable because he lived to perfect ways to make himself indispensable to Eddie. But he made no grandiose efforts to advertise his brave activities. He did prodigies of work without showing effort. He murmured rather than spoke. He had the analytical ability to think his way through the consecutive parts and movements of a watch, but only the extremely observant (which did not include Edward West) knew he was as intelligent as he was because he really did work hard at diverting attention from himself. “You are not there to bellow opera arias,” he told himself.

He was passionately interested and extremely learned about the dance because, incomprehensibly, the dance was the topic Eddie most enjoyed talking about—in fact it was the only topic that was certain to soften him, to relax his mind and the stern muscles of his face. Sometimes, when this happened, Willie would miss seeing those wonderfully strong, stern lines. But in a way he knew he was making Eddie happy.

Willie had started with the Wests at two dollars a week. When Paddy died he was making twenty-two as Paddy’s confidential man, then Eddie had raised him to thirty. By 1924 he had nine million dollars banked in Switzerland, earned by his commission of one percent of the handle on liquor procurement and one percent on national collections. He didn’t find very much to spend it on. Besides clothes, elaborate birthday and Christmas presents for Eddie (and Irene) were about the only expensive items. He had a wonderful wardrobe of just about every kind of wonderful clothes in closets and chests and stored trunks and some day when he really got the chance he was going to rent a sixteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, live in four rooms and line the walls of all the rest with closets for his wonderful clothes. He kept canaries. And after a few years of banking so much money he began to collect one each of every automobile ever made. He got his back up for the first time with Eddie and really did have to stamp his foot when he was told they were going to move to Bürgenstock West for good. He simply refused to budge until Eddie had agreed that he could take his car collection with him.

Sunday was usually his quiet day. He just relaxed in the apartment with the canaries, doing needlework on ladies’ evening handbags, a recreation he had learned from that ruffian of an old lawyer, F. Marx Heller. He was able to complete three bags a month of his own designs, and he sold them to an uptown outlet for thirty dollars each. He lived at the New York Athletic Club on 59th at Sixth in a comfortable seven-story brownstone building. Every morning and night he took an icewater plunge in the eight-foot-square tank the club kept for drunks—which had a fifty-pound cake of ice floating in it at all times—then had a wonderful deep, deep Swedish massage from Fred or Barney. He never fraternized at all in the club and only tipped on Christmas Day and June 25 lest they get some idea that he was somehow trying to make himself popular.

He really preferred the bachelor life, he told Irene, because his hours were so irregular and there was so much traveling (which was true at least in the early years). Eddie could call him at all hours of the night to pass on instructions to the special representative or to sober up some big-time trial lawyer in the ice-water plunge or to take sixty or seventy thousand dollars downtown to Arnold Goff or to find the right sort of cooperative doctor to help out at Rhonda Healey’s request. He really liked Rhonda. She put up with so goddam much.

When he had just about settled himself in the new Horizons offices, with the most divine view of the two rivers anyone had ever seen, Eddie (and Irene) got back from that endless honeymoon, and he was sent off to Europe in Eddie’s wake.

He had two steady travel beats after that, and the way it seemed to work out, Eddie always sent him to the Bahamas, Cuba, the Keys and Mexico in the summertime and to Canada only in the winter, for God’s sake. And he had a lot of travel inside the country. Eddie broke the ground, but he had to finish the arrangements to take down half of the six hundred thousand barrels of government whiskey in 1915. Then he and the special representative had to get it moved, then to see that it was stored safely. There were about twenty gallons to the half barrel, or about four million cases of uncut whiskey. They had to begin to buy garages practically in wholesale lots all over the country, and Eddie made Willie qualify for a realty board license so that he could split commissions with local realty agents on the sales. They’d be needing garages soon enough anyway, and, all told, the three hundred thousand barrels of whiskey cost only two dollars and eighty cents a case, including all payoffs and transport. Naturally this didn’t prorate the cost of the garages, but it included the grain alcohol and water mix that they had used to fill the barrels to the top again. It was a terribly difficult job of organization, but Eddie and the special representative had said Willie had a genius for logistics. The genius part that met the eye was that five years later they were selling the whiskey that cost them two-eighty a case for sixty-four dollars a case. And it was so good that after that the buyer got it he cut it again.

Eddie wanted him to go to Europe before the war started in order to finish all the details Eddie had begun in France, Scotland and England while he and Irene were on tour.

Willie closed for three million five hundred thousand cases of Scotch at a unit cost of eight dollars a case, including shipping costs, for delivery to their warehouses (which he had bought or built) in the Bahamas and in the Keys not later than July 15, 1919, under a delivery schedule that was to begin—wartime shipping slowing things down as it could—on April 15th, 1915. He bought seven hundred and fifty thousand cases of red and white wine and a hundred thousand cases of vermouth in France because Eddie had reasoned that although they could get it cheaper in Italy and Germany by holding the wine off the market until the market stabilized, the rich Americans would have sour palates from lousy red wine and they’d be ready to pay eighty dollars a case for French wine that had cost six dollars a case in the big bulk lots. By that time they wouldn’t know one wine from the other—beyond red and white, of course—so Eddie had him buy the hard, hard reds of the Côte-Rôtie, which was wine that demanded plenty of aging, and they took delivery on that at once. Wanting to be fair with the American people, Eddie did not accept delivery on any white wine (an assorted bag) that was more than two years old. The label printers would see to all the details of marques and vintages. He bought one million two hundred thousand cases of champagne at eleven dollars a case because Americans had been brainwashed into believing that they could drink only champagne to celebrate or commemorate important occasions—otherwise they would suffer bad luck; and they got ninety-five a case for it.

He finished up the heavyweight cognac arrangements in the southwest, then went back to Paris determined to see an “exhibition” before he left because everyone said that was the thing to do. Little did he know that, having become the greatest individual customer for French wines in all history, the vintners would have been happy to stage an “exhibition” for him themselves, throwing in all wives and daughters.

He did see one in the Rue Chabanais and not only disapproved of it but (privately) thought it a silly waste of time. Publicly he did his best to pretend to be most enthusiastic, whereupon the banker they used in Paris immediately felt it necessary to fix him up with this cow-cunted young whore who couldn’t speak a word of English, and they had sat in a drafty room for a half hour until he felt it was safe enough to come out. He had had to give her fifty dollars (with a finger to his lips), and she had rushed him and kissed him and he had almost vomited because God knew where that mouth had been!

He sailed out of England for Canada, where he reserved stocks of neutral grain spirits for delivery, at order, beginning in February 1922; he had also stockpiled a matching quantity of neutral grain spirits in the States. He bought eight hundred thousand cases of Canadian whiskey, then went to Cuba, where he reserved two hundred thousand cases of light and two hundred thousand cases of barreled rums in a general Caribbean mix. When the major reserving/buying was completed he began the work of warehousing his stores in the more expensive storage facilities inside the States and in the feeder stations ringing the country. When all arrangements were completed, in December 1918, they had a total of sixteen million four hundred thousand cases on reserve order or ready to be shipped.

Eddie had acted shrewdly. He knew that the mad scramble to make a killing would start just before the ratification of the amendment. But he also knew that there could not possibly be enough liquor in Britain, France and Canada for the nationals of those countries in addition to thirsty Americans and that the case-unit prices would soar tremendously. And he was 100 percent right.

Eddie had known about the brewery loophole that would appear in the Volstead Act because he himself had put all the loopholes there. Many discouraged brewers didn’t have the interest left to hold onto their plants for a long pull, and none of them had any interest in making “cereal beverages.” They were willing to sell their breweries to Horizons A.G. or they were willing to lease their breweries for the duration of prohibition. If a well-placed brewery could not be bought or leased, it was Willie’s job to have its directors brought to trial in a federal court and to have the breweries closed under injunction. That usually brought the owners around.

The limited partners of Horizons A.G., who were influential in the various regions, were very helpful in brewery acquisitions. When prohibition came and the manufacture of “cereal beverages” with an alcoholic content of not more than one-half of one percent was legalized, the breweries (Horizons leased a hundred and forty-two of these to local mobs in the national marketing areas) ran full blast making “near beer,” which they delivered to the speakeasies together with a container of the alcohol that had been removed from it at the brewery. The bartender could then return the alcohol to the beer barrel with a compression pump or pour it into the glass by hand—as the customer preferred. Then the Chicago chemists came up with wort, which was green beer with no alcohol at all, so there could not possibly be any legal objection. When these barrels were delivered the speakeasies needed only to drop yeast into them and let the beer ferment on the premises, so that the hangovers were so much less horrible. Beer was an enormous profit-maker (and yielded one-sixth of its gross sales to Horizons A.G.). It cost six dollars a barrel to make and sold to speakeasies for fifty-five dollars a barrel. Beer outsold liquor over the bars at the ratio of twenty-three to one.

Chicago was a very big beer territory. It handled sixty thousand barrels of beer a week. New York wasn’t as big for beer per capita, but its yield was four times that of Chicago from everything else; and New York was handling one hundred and thirty-seven thousand barrels a week. Nationally, when the share of Horizons A.G. was one-sixth of eight billion dollars—quite apart from the wholesale liquor business, the brewery rentals and the short-term credit banking—New York was the biggest gross unit producer of all national market areas with nine hundred million a year. But of course Chicago had the biggest star attraction of any market area, Al Capone.

When Eddie finished his estimates in 1930, averaging the income for the decade just spent at a gross of thirteen billion dollars a year, it was established that the rackets and their dependent industries had become the biggest American industry then and in the nation’s history.

Willie supervised 193 employees in the West National building and 74 in the field, plus 11 buying representatives and expediters who worked outside the country. The field people were used to verify inventories and to check duplicates of deposit slips against lading bills and gross-income figures filed under the special representative’s control. It was not a complex structure. The mobs borrowed capital from Goff, who was Horizons A.G. but did not know it, to buy/lease from Willie Tobin, a Horizons employee, then shared one-sixth of their gross operating profits with Benito Rei, who was Horizons A.G. and also the special representative of Don Vito Cascio Ferro, capo di capi, chosen to assist E. C. West in a most important phase of the over-all operation.

At eight-thirty on a March morning in 1915, while E. C. West was going through the morning mail at the League office in Washington, Congressman Rei was announced. Rei had just begun his second term in the House. He and West had had several pleasant meetings, usually at lunch, in the regular course of West’s friendly coverage of the members of Congress as a member of the League’s legislative committee.

Rei was an Illinois Republican, a well-balanced, well-educated man who held a degree from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He was a regular on everything except Italo-American legislation, but in no way a party hack. His most effective strength was his ability to influence other members on voting difficult bills.

“Are you wet or dry this morning?” West asked affably as the congressman sat down. Rei was neither wet nor dry. He would vote on the prohibition issues as the party required.

“It feels a little bit more wet out this morning,” Rei said. He refused a cigar.

“What can we do for you?”

“I bring a message.”

“How very kind of you.”

Rei smiled, took a long white envelope from his inner pocket and slid it across the desk. It wasn’t sealed. West pulled at the flap and a yellow handkerchief of heavy silk fell out showing a large VCF embroidered in black in one corner. Startled, West looked quickly at Rei. Rei smiled blandly. “I have been to the old country on a holiday,” he said. “Don Vito sends to you fond greetings, Zu Eduardo.”

Zu, in the Sicilian speech, was the closest to a title any man would accept to indicate that he was a “friend of the friends.” The tremendous excitement of the moment covered West’s forehead with a light sweat. The thought of his mother filled his heart like a soaring flight of primrose flamingoes. If only she could know! If only she could be there to see that the leader of the brotherhood, the true leader, had acknowledged that he was merely a soldier of the son of Maria Corrente.

Rei and he met the following morning on the enclosed deck of the 10 A.M. ferry leaving South Ferry in Manhattan for St. George, Staten Island. They went over the operating manual together.

The working manual Rei was to administer would be applied to seventy-two major and twenty-six minor gangs working in the twenty-three national market areas, whose leaders, lieutenants and business managers were to be recruited wholly by him—Sicilian as well as non-Sicilian, Jewish, Irish, Polish and Negro. Each gang would be accountable to Rei operationally through its leader and financially through its business manager. Rei would undertake all the essential protection approaches there were on a high emergency level. The labor force for each gang was to be recruited by the leader and the lieutenants from among the available force of bank robbers, car thieves, gunmen, gamblers, pimps, strong boys, hold-up men and muscleheads. The gang leader would work within the broad lines of the unwritten operating manual, interpreting it wherever he chose except in areas of payoffs, collections, procurements, and short-term capital borrowing. Each gang, depending on whether it was major or minor, agreed to develop, to exploit within their abilities, income opportunities derived from: alcohol, narcotics, brothels, gambling, nightclubs, race tracks, roadhouses, slot machines, laundries, restaurants, dance halls, hotels, speakeasies, breweries, labor organizations, band booking, sugar brokerage, strike-breaking, taxis, political poll-watching, shylocking and extortion. When required by Rei, each gang leader would follow his orders or supply whatever assistance might be necessary as well as agree to submit to Rei’s arbitration, or to the arbitration of his delegate when Rei should consider arbitration necessary.

Rei was a native American, three years older than West. He was a trained business administrator and a factor in state and city politics and more than cognizant of the byways of national politics. His brother, Ira King, was an important banker in California.

Rei did not run for a third term. In 1916 he became president and chief executive officer of the National Immigrant Investment Bank, a small bank of long standing that Horizons A.G. capital acquired and recapitalized at six million dollars and that Horizons owned. With the aid of Rei’s own connections and the assistance of Horizons’ limited partners, as well as through the cooperation of Pick, Heller & O’Connell, it became a repository for substantial federal, state and municipal funds. It began to handle more and more industrial transactions. It became the correspondent bank of the Western Alliance Trust (Ira King’s bank) and the West National Bank in California and New York respectively. Horizon partners and other national leaders served as the bank’s directors.

Each of the gangs in each of the national market areas was required to form companies through which income for Horizons A.G. would flow, and in return for the opportunities and protection afforded them were required to pay to Horizons A.G. one-sixth of the gross earnings from all activities, indirectly. Willie Tobin held powers of attorney on these accounts through his seventy-four field representatives, and he would withdraw Horizons’ one-sixth share from each of the twenty-one hundred and nineteen companies on the last day of each month and remit these collections through the West National Bank to the Horizons account in Zurich. Quadruplicate slips went to Rei, the regional representatives, the gang’s business manager and to Tobin. Punctuality in collections and a right count were enforced by Rei.

The first killing Rei ordered (as the Horizons A.G. administrator) eliminated (Big) Jim Colisimo, a vice industrialist and gang chieftain of Chicago’s South Side, on May 11, 1920, one hundred and fourteen days after prohibition had become the national law. Rei’s administrative problem had been aggravated by the fact that prohibition did not invent the gangster. Colisimo’s operations had been earning about a half million dollars a year for many years, but he was a stodgy, old-fashioned vice operator, and the scope of his understanding of the new opportunities and his interest in exploiting them was limited. His death, a stile that separated the old-style hit-or-miss criminal from the superbly mechanized and fluidly organized big-business-organization criminal, was a historic moment in the developing American meaning.

It began there—the watershed of modern American crime—and it resolved moral factors for every American born thereafter, instituting approaches to social, governmental, financial and international problems that were henceforth to be based upon an entire people’s contempt for law and authority. As it developed it learned. For example, on April 28, 1929, at E. C. West’s insistence, Benito Rei ordered an organizational convention to be held at the President Hotel at Atlantic City, New Jersey. Each leader present was a Horizon A.G. franchise holder with a clearly defined territory in which he exploited business opportunities that had first been coordinated in the West operations manual and in which he held monopolistic power.

At the convention Rei insisted upon and enforced a cartelization and streamlined the enforcement procedure from a wasteful, overlapping, scatter-shot and haphazard punitive system to a centralized, organized single-unit national murder-squad system that was more efficient and, more important, more controllable in the blatant yellow-press, public-relations sense. West was tired of useless and wasteful/impulsive killing, therefore it was rechanneled and made industrially pragmatic. The essential cartelization was necessary to spread the industrial energy to all parts of the company’s branches, equally in and throughout the twenty-three national market areas. It was West’s conception of the carefully phased development of an industry that had demonstrated a greater growth rate than any other in American history. And all projects confirmed that, if carefully planned and prudently cultivated, it would continue to lead the rest of the nation for many decades afterward and, given proper managerial impetus, for the long, long-range foreseeable future.

When he had had his first meeting with Benito Rei aboard the Staten Island ferryboat on that March morning in 1915, that was the true dawn of the new America. He had said with his even voice and straight-forward look: “Let all of them make names and money for themselves.” For the industry he created, for the first industry of the greatest democracy in the world, the words were prophecy and became the nation’s lodestone.

Even the humbler hoodlums did well. The estate of the late Vincent Drucci was in excess of four hundred thousand dollars. Jack Zuta, business manager for one of the smaller mobs, the Aiellos, left behind balance sheets, promissory notes, canceled checks, ledgers and transaction records showing that, out of the gang’s weekly average income of four hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars, the amount of one hundred and eight thousand, four hundred and sixty-nine dollars was paid out weekly to “M.K.,” Oberta’s code for Rei—“Mafia King.” The Aiellos were a poor-relation, church-mouse sort of gang.

Hymie Weiss, the earnest Polish-American who caught up the mantle of Dion O’Bannion when it fell, was only twenty-eight when he was shot to death, but he left an estate of one million three hundred thousand dollars. Jimmy La Penna was so unimportant that he made no effort to try to conceal his bank accounts from the government, thus making it simple to discover that in one calendar year he had deposited eight hundred and four thousand, one hundred and seventy-six dollars and ninety-seven cents in his personal bank account. In the following year, when organization reshuffling had reduced him to an even smaller status, he banked a total of three hundred thirty thousand sixty-six dollars and thirty-nine cents.

A former whorehouse waiter named Greasy Thumb Guzik, whom Rei had chosen to become business manager of the Capone organization in Illinois, told the police during the James Ragen murder investigation, “I got more cash than Rockefeller and there’s twenty of us with more than I have. No one’s going to push us around.”

West had wanted them to make names for themselves, as indeed they did. The names they made on one occasion became part of a parlor guessing game at a party given by the Wests for the visiting Prince of Wales. Irene invented the game because she thought it would amuse the royal guest. Everyone took a turn at recalling the names of gangsters as recorded in the adoring, gee-whiz daily press, always the daily fan magazines of big-business crime and an important factor in its rise to American industrial leadership. The guests thought of such names as Cheeks Ginsberg, Charley Bullets, Schemer Drucci, Bugsey Siegal, Yankee Schwartz, Dingbat Oberta, Klondike O’Donnell, Bummy Goldstein, Joe Bananas, Uncle Goldberg, Jimmy Blue-Eyes, Shimmy Patton, Blinky Palermo, Potatoes Kaufman, Dandy Phil Kastel, Piggy Lynch, Fur Sammons, King Angersola, Spunky Weiss, Gameboy (and his brother, Honeyboy) Miller, Tootsie Cohen, Joe Adonis and Dimples Wolinsky. Only the highest Russian political leaders and the ranking American military figures cherished more infantile pet names, but, as E. C. West explained to the prince, “I imagine they all wear their childish names the way savages wear paint or tattoos—to frighten away enemies and evil spirits.”

Prohibition fused the amateurism and catch-as-catch-can national tendencies of the early days of the republic with a more modern, highly organized lust for violence and the quick buck. It fused the need to massacre twelve hundred thousand American Indians and ten million American buffalo, the lynching bees, the draft riots, bread riots, gold riots and race riots, the constant wars, the largest rats in the biggest slums, boxing and football, the loudest music, the most strident and exploitative press with the entire wonderful promise of tomorrow and tomorrow, always dragging the great nation downward into greater violence and more and more unnecessary death, into newer and more positive celebrations of nonlife, all so that the savage, simple-minded people might be educated into greater frenzies of understanding that power and money are the only desirable objectives for this life.