TOM DEWEY GREW up in Owosso, Michigan. Born in 1902, he passed the first years of the century among the shopkeepers and waitresses of small-town America. Wearing princely little boy outfits, hair parted neatly, eyes wide, he knocked out his small-town teeth playing left guard on the small-town football team. He spent summers in the Upper Peninsula, that overgrown piece of Michigan wilderness where Ernest Hemingway set his first stories. In high school he acted in a minstrel show (The Dudes of Blackville) and edited the school yearbook (The Spic). And though he delivered papers before school and did odd jobs after, he never missed a single day of school. He was the perfect son of an old Republican family. His father, during a youthful stay in New York, pledged to fight Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic machine. So from the beginning, some of Dewey’s dreams were political: he would carry on his father’s fight, take on big-city corruption. But he had other dreams, too. He wanted to sing opera, the great halls of the East, grown men in tears. So, after a few years at the state university, he went to New York for the same reason Meyer Lansky’s dad went to New York: to start his real life.
When his dreams of a life in music began to fade, Dewey enrolled in Columbia Law School. (He was in the same class as Paul Robeson, the black bass who later turned Communist and moved, for a time, to Russia.) Dewey got his degree in just two years. After a stint in private practice (1925–1931), he was named chief assistant to George Medalie, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. So began his fight with organized crime—a son taking on his father’s obsession, storming the beehive of city corruption. How strange! Tom Dewey, this kid from the sticks, against the underworld! What could he know? More than coming from a different place, he came from a different part of time. How many years lay between Michigan and Delancey Street? A hundred? A thousand? What could he know of the violence of the ghetto? Three thousand people lived in Owosso, the same number that filled a single East Side block. Tom Dewey was grappling with an army of exotics, men who seemed to threaten everything Owosso stood for.
And what did the gangsters stand for? More than anything, even more than money and power, they stood for a style, a way of life. They used the right words (jackpot, beef), wore the right clothes (wing-tips, spats), hit the right clubs (Hotsy Totsy, Stork). Never would they be the dupe, sucker, do-gooder, rule follower. For men like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, who wanted more than anything to look cool, being taken down by Dewey must have been the greatest insult of all. Dewey was perhaps the most ambitious geek in American history. While Luciano was escorting blondes uptown, Dewey was still back in Michigan, setting a shameful record—perfect school attendance. When his parents suggested he miss a day to see his grandparents, he fired off a Little Lord Fauntleroy note: “Much as I love my grandparents, my job is to be at school learning what I can,” he wrote. “It’s all part of the preparation for the future.”
In the twenties, gangsters had for the first time pushed beyond the cities, running drugs and whiskey into the nowhere towns of America. They came as underworld strangers: Rothstein’s boys riding whiskey past sleepy Long Island farms; Reles heading upstate for target practice; Strauss filling contracts in the Bible Belt. The evil of the city had bled the countryside clean through. It’s what Hemingway was getting at in “The Killers”; what Iowa-born artist Grant Wood gets at in paintings like Death on the Ridge Road, which shows black sedans burning through lush green countryside. With the arrival of Tom Dewey, small-town America would at last return the favor, visiting judgment on the city. “Dewey came along at just the right time to ride the issue to fame,” Herbert Brownell told me. “Previously gangsters were known as a city problem, and people despised the city. As the gangs got more powerful, though, this became a national problem, and Dewey was the hero taking them on.” By going after gangsters, Dewey would also acquire some of their luster. Whether he liked it or not, he would forever be known as half an equation, a player in the story of American crime.
Tom Dewey tried his first major Mob case in 1933; it was the trial that brought down Waxey Gordon. By the thirties, Gordon was one of the richest gangsters in America. Like all rich gangsters, he was suspected of not paying his taxes. In the end he was tripped up, not by the feds, but by underworld rivals. When Lansky and Luciano grew tired of trading shots with Waxey, they let some documents find their way to Dewey’s office. The documents showed Gordon had not paid taxes for ten years, in which time he made something like $5 million.
The trial made Dewey a star. As he cross-examined witnesses, his face worked like an accordion, folding and unfolding, drilling the gangster with rapid-fire facts and questions. His attack on Waxey seemed personal. It was not just organized crime Dewey was after; it was the impudence of the criminals, how they looked and dressed, trying to pass as real Americans. Dewey was not content to convict Waxey; he wanted to expose him for the crass thug he knew him to be. Gordon was sentenced to ten years in a federal prison.
Dutch Schultz was next. A more formidable foe than Gordon, Schultz, whose real name was Arthur Flegenheimer, grew up in Jewish Harlem. He borrowed his name from a legendary member of the old Frog Hollow Gang. In the early twenties he rode shotgun on Rothstein’s whiskey trucks. He later put together his own gang, a collection of uptown Jewish toughs, with skills as specialized as the members of a SWAT team: Bo Weinberg, a proficient killer; Abbadabba Berman, who processed numbers like a computer; Lulu Rosenkrantz, a freewheeling sharpshooter. After Prohibition the gang entered the rackets, extorting money from the swankest restaurants in Manhattan: the Brass Rail, Rosoff’s, Lindy’s. They also moved into the Harlem numbers game, a primitive form of the lottery. “Schultz asked the black gangsters who ran numbers to a meeting,” Ralph Salerno told me. “When they came in, Dutch set his forty-five on a desk and said, ‘I’m your partner.’ ”
Unlike Lansky or Luciano, Schultz didn’t fancy himself a businessman. He knew his power lay in the threat of violence. He was a tough, a sharpie, trouble in a crowd. He was dark eyes, tight mouth, bent nose. A chorus girl said he looked like Bing Crosby with his face bashed in—a great description. What is a gangster if not a grotesque version of a pop star, a celebrity gone punk, one feature sounding an off note? Schultz knew this about himself; he had an uncanny ability to see himself as he believed others must see him—an unrefined, bent-nosed Jew. “What’s the matter you don’t want to come in with me?” he asked a Harlem gangster. “You think maybe you’ll find a man with horns on his head?”
By the thirties Schultz was perhaps the most visible gangster in New York. He had twice been tried for income tax evasion. He was acquitted first in Syracuse in 1933; when charges were again brought in 1935, in a case put together by Dewey, Schultz’s lawyers had the venue changed to a small town upstate: Malone, New York. Church. Street. Stop sign. Schultz went up a few months before the trial. On the advice of a PR firm, he moved into a small hotel, introduced himself to strangers, gave to local charities, wore modest suits. When asked why he did not wear more elegant clothes, he said, “I think only queers wear silk shirts. I never bought one in my life. Only a sucker will pay fifteen dollars for a shirt.”
He was seen at church socials, block parties, bingo games. A week before the trial, he went into a local church and converted to Catholicism; he was not the first or last Jew who, looking to play in the sticks, shed his faith. By the time the jury was asked to deliberate, Schultz had fooled or bribed the entire town. There is a picture of him just after acquittal, the broad smile of a kid who has stolen a student council election. “This tough world ain’t no place for dunces,” he told reporters. “And you can tell those smart guys in New York that the Dutchman is no dunce, and as far as he is concerned, Alcatraz don’t exist. I’ll never see Alcatraz.”
In the wake of the trial, word came to Schultz from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia: You’re not wanted in New York City! Don’t come back! To avoid arrest, Dutch settled first in Connecticut, then across the river in Newark. Each night his gang met at the Palace Chop House, a steak place a few blocks from Newark’s Penn Station. In photos the restaurant is gloomy, with dirty white tablecloths and wobbly chairs, a place where a cook stands in the kitchen door, frowning. There was a room up front with a dozen or so tables and the kind of long, always empty oak bar you today see in Bennigan’s. The gang always took a table in back, maybe a dozen paces from the bathroom. There was a mirror behind the table, and a gunman facing the mirror could keep an eye on the hall leading from the bar. The gang was still collecting thousands each week from the numbers game.
Dewey filed fresh charges against Dutch Schultz, going after his restaurant rackets. Mayor La Guardia was going after Dutch’s gambling empire, having his slot machines confiscated, dumped on barges, busted up. The papers ran photos of the mayor, ringed by the East River, sledgehammering the machines. And all the trials, the days in court, had loosened Schultz’s hold on his other rackets, too. Hoods were moving on his territory. No one had believed he would return from his trial in Malone. “The loudmouth is never coming back,” Lucky Luciano had said. These must have been dismal days for Dutch, weeks without Sundays, years without holidays. He caught Bo Weinberg conspiring with Luciano. Weinberg was fitted with cement shoes and dumped in the East River. In 1936 Schultz called a meeting of the Syndicate board, the criminal body that ran the underworld.
The board met in a hotel in Manhattan. I picture the men (Lepke, Gurrah, Lansky, Luciano, Siegel, Adonis, Schultz) seated around a long table, waiters bearing silver trays. Out a window the chaos of the city. For years Schultz had been able to work in the face of uncertainty, which must be a definition of courage. But the struggle had at last caught up with him. He had grown shabby in exile. With a fedora pushed back on his head, he must have looked like a small-town merchant putting up a sign: “Everything Must Go!” He asked the Syndicate to kill Tom Dewey, who he said would not quit until every important New York criminal was in jail. The gangsters decided to investigate, seeing if Dewey could be killed. The matter was turned over to Lepke, who turned it over to Albert Anastasia, who ran the day-to-day affairs of Murder Inc.
Anastasia came to America from Italy in 1917. He came ashore illegally in the night with nothing but what he wore. He had sad, swollen cheeks. As he spoke, his pupils wandered into the corners of his eyes. His nose spread out across his face. He had huge hands. He was known in the underworld as Lord High Executioner. He was said to have personally killed fifty men. He was Lepke’s most trusted aide, the man Louis turned to when there was trouble.
Anastasia borrowed a baby. It was a friend’s kid, and I wonder where that kid is today. Some adult out there was perhaps the most realistic prop in underworld history. (Send me a postcard.) Albert took the kid in a stroller to Dewey’s apartment building at 214 Fifth Avenue. Over several mornings that week, Anastasia, strolling the kid around the block, mapped Dewey’s routine, the path he followed through life. Hidden in this routine, between the newsstands and car rides, was the prosecutor’s death.
Dewey came out of his building each morning at around eight. Flanked by bodyguards, he climbed into a car and headed downtown. A few minutes later he stopped at a drugstore. As Dewey went in, got a cup of coffee, made a call from a phone booth in back, the bodyguards stood sentry outside. Dewey was checking his work messages before the long ride to Center Street. Albert A. figured he could be waiting at the counter when Dewey came in. When the prosecutor went to make his call, Albert would follow, silence his pistol, shoot the DA through the glass. He would kill the counterman and any customers before slipping into the street. By the time the bodyguards got suspicious, he would be long gone. “Sure, Dewey got all kinds of death threats,” Edward Lumbard, who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, told me. “But he was never afraid. He was very courageous and forthright. Nobody was going to get in his way. He thought he was doing the right thing. We all did, and we were young and heaven knows what the future was going to be.”
Anastasia presented his plan to the board the following week. I like to imagine him holding up pie graphs and using an overhead projector. I know this never happened, but wouldn’t it be funny if it did? When Albert A. sat down, Schultz was sent from the room. That’s how it worked. When the board was discussing your future, you waited outside. Who wants to be yelled down by an out-of-his-mind gangster?
The men decided against the plan. Even if it went without a hitch, everyone would know it was a Mob hit. And the resulting heat would be more than anyone cared to imagine. It might buy Schultz a few months, but everyone would suffer. It was like taking arsenic to cure a cold. Not everyone agreed. Gurrah Shapiro wanted Dewey dead. He thought the DA would sooner or later lock up everyone. But in the end, the plan was voted down eight to one. “I suppose they figured the National Guard would have been called out if Dewey was killed,” said Frank Hogan, who later served as Manhattan’s DA. “And I guess they wouldn’t have been far wrong.”
When Schultz heard the decision, he flew into a rage. “You guys stole my rackets, and now you’re feeding me to the law,” he yelled. “Dewey’s gotta go! I’m hitting him myself in forty-eight hours.”
“That meant his death warrant was signed,” Doc Stacher, one of the old East Side Jews, later told Uri Dan. “All of us agreed he had to die. He had been ranting and raving. He thought Lansky, Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, and all the rest of us were combining against him and were going to steal his money. At first Albert Anastasia, the most efficient killer of all, was supposed to do the job,” Stacher went on. “But even though Dutch Schultz had become a Catholic, our Italian partners looked at us and we all knew this was an internal Jewish matter. It was the understanding we had with each other. And the Italians like Charlie Luciano respected our wishes to keep this in the family.”
So all of a sudden Lepke had a new assignment. Take out Schultz before Schultz takes out Dewey. And they had to work fast; Schultz was a time bomb ticking in everyone’s ear.
Crime bosses contracting the murder of another crime boss—as rare as the rooking procedure in chess. Lepke tapped Charlie Workman for the job: Charlie the Bug, Handsome Charlie. “We all agreed we should step aside and let Workman organize the execution,” Stacher later said. “The Bug had been in the organization from the beginning, and in my opinion he was just as cold and ruthless as Anastasia.”
Mendy Weiss was chosen to work with the Bug. A rising star in Lepke’s machine, Weiss was a throwback, an echo of the old days, Plug Uglies and killings on the docks. It was as if some gene, the old-time gang gene, proved recessive, skipping the generation of Lansky and Siegel but reappearing in Weiss. A police report later said of him: “While he is the generally recognized successor to the throne of Lepke, it is alleged that he has a very low intelligence quota, bordering on ignorance. He is of the gargantuan type and is given to the use of ruthless brutality to squelch opposition.”
Mendy wore the cheapest suits from the cheapest stores. His coats were roomy, and his pant cuffs dragged on the street. When he pulled his hat over his eyes and smiled, he was nothing but teeth. When he pulled his hat over his eyes and frowned, he was nothing but nose. He had a big, what-the-fuck-you-looking-at snarl. Describing him in the thirties, a detective unknowingly penned a great sketch of the Jewish gangster in general: “From information received, it would appear Weiss is not addicted to gambling, does not drink to any great extent, does not make a habit of associating with women other than his wife, in whose company he is invariably seen when he goes out socially, and is perpetually smoking cigars.”
Two nights after the Syndicate meeting, Workman and Weiss were driven to the Palace Chop House in Newark by a man called Piggy, a member of a New Jersey outfit who knew the streets. Piggy was like one of the guys Jack Kerouac gets a ride from in On the Road: colorful, then gone. At 10:15, as Piggy waited outside, Charlie and Mendy went in the door. The front room was empty, just a bartender and some waiters milling around. Weiss opened his overcoat, flashing a sawed-off shotgun. “Everyone quiet,” he said. “Get down on the floor.”
As Mendy handled the people up front, Workman followed the voices to the back room, where Schultz’s men were at their regular table, going over receipts: Lulu Rosenkrantz, Abe Landau, Abbadabba Berman. Workman raised his .38 and began firing. Landau slid to the floor and reached for his gun. Lulu kicked over the table and returned fire. Berman probably settled his mind on a beautiful algebraic equation and waited to die. Mendy then walked back, his shotgun blazing. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bullets filled the air. Lulu was shot seven times. Berman was shot six times. Two bullets smashed the mirror above the table. “It was like a Wild West show,” Workman later said. Five bullets lodged in the restaurant’s mint green walls.
Landau, hit once in the neck, once in the arm, kept firing. Mendy had him pinned in a corner. But where was Schultz? Workman let his .38 fall to the floor, took out a .45, and went into the bathroom. There was no one at the urinals, and the mirror above the sink was empty. He killed Dutch in a stall, hitting him below the chest with a .45 slug that went through his stomach, large intestine, gall bladder, and liver before landing beside him on the floor. A second bullet lodged above his head in the wall.
Workman came out to see how Weiss was doing. Everything was okay, so he went back into the bathroom. Bending over, he felt through Schultz’s pockets. This was his specialty: heisting the mark. A guy like Dutch might be carrying ten, twenty grand. No. All Schultz had was a three-inch switchblade. Things were quiet when Workman came back to the dining room. The walls were covered with blood. Berman was crawling across the floor. There was a siren in the distance. Where was Weiss? When Bug came through the front room, the waiters were still on the floor. The whole thing had taken maybe four minutes. Workman could not find Mendy or Piggy or the car outside. He heard a shot behind him. Landau, bleeding from his neck, had reeled after him, firing wildly. Workman shot back, and the bullet spun Landau like a bear in a shooting gallery. He fell onto a garbage can. Workman ran.
Dutch had gotten to his feet inside and made it to the front room. “First thing I noticed was Schultz,” the bartender told police. “He came reeling like he was intoxicated. He had a hard time staying on his pins, and he was hanging on to his side. He didn’t say a cockeyed thing. He just went over to a table, put his left hand on it to steady him, and then he plopped into a chair, just like a souse would. His head bounced on the table, and I thought that was the end of him, but pretty soon he moved. He said, ‘Get a doctor, quick.’ ”
This story has been told before, always from Schultz’s perspective. On my bookshelf I have maybe six different renderings, like different artists’ versions of the same event—The Last Supper. “Oh the air is bad burned air and humid with blood,” writes E. L. Doctorow in Billy Bathgate, his fictional portrait of Dutch Schultz. “Mr. Berman slumps forward on the table, his pointed back stressing the material of his plaid jacket in a widening hole of blood.” The story always ends with Landau’s last heroic shot, playing for pride alone. And the killers racing into the night. “A speeding car without lights a half block away fishtails and wavers a moment and in another moment it is lost in the shadows of the street,” writes Doctorow. But what happened next?
Realizing he was alone, Workman ran from the chop house, through a little park, where he dumped his bloodstained overcoat, through a swamp, and into a dump. He walked all night, his shoes full of rain on the shimmery blacktops of New Jersey, looking for the way into Manhattan. He found some train tracks and followed them east. He got angrier as the night wore on. Here he was, doing all the work, killing the big man, and what was Mendy Weiss doing? Running at the first sound of sirens. Mendy had left Workman to die. No way around it. Did everything but put a gun in his mouth. Workman must have been thinking this all the way home, railroad tie to railroad tie, stepping aside to watch a train blow by, the wheels throwing up sparks and water. He followed a tunnel under the Hudson River. When he got to the Lower East Side, the diners were full of businessmen, papers twice folded to read the sports. As Charlie walked past the corners filling with young hoods, he caught the buzz: Mendy Weiss has killed Dutch Schultz.
Workman went to sleep at a friend’s apartment in Chelsea. He woke in the afternoon and sent a message to Lepke. He wanted to kill Weiss. Ditching a partner during a job is a capital offense.
Lepke met Workman and Weiss a few days later at Weiss’s house at 400 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. Lepke heard out Workman. He then called in Weiss. “I claim that hitting the Dutchman was Mob business,” said Mendy. “And I stayed until hitting Dutch was over. But then the Bug went back in the toilet to give the Dutchman a heist. I claim that was not Mob business anymore—that was personal business.”
As Lepke listened to the killers, he probably asked questions. Maybe he asked them to repeat things, to say everything a second time. Maybe he spoke softly, so the men had to lean in to hear. Probably he took his time, pausing between sentences, between words. Hearing him talk on such occasions was probably like hearing someone read a key to a crossword puzzle out loud. WELL-GENTLEMEN-DIFFICULT-PROBLEM. Tricks to slow things down, calm tempers; tricks I learned from my father, who learned them on the street as a kid, spying on gangsters.
Lepke told Workman his grudge was not worth more killing. “Forget about it,” he said. “It was a mistake, and tell everybody not to talk about it.”
What about Weiss taking credit for hitting Dutch?
“What’s the difference who shot him?” said Lepke. “He’s shot. Let’s forget about him. It doesn’t make a difference. Why don’t you fellows forget the whole thing?”
Workman was sent to Miami to cool off. Luciano was down there, too, and Bug went to see him. He needed to borrow cash. Workman was still complaining when he got to Lucky’s hotel. “Here’s the money,” said Luciano. “Now stop talking about that other thing.”
After getting hit in the Palace Chop House, Schultz and his men were taken to Newark City Hospital. Over the next few hours, Landau, Berman, and Rosenkrantz all died. Schultz lived longest. Nurses passed in and out of his room; blood passed in and out of his body. Five thousand cubic centimeters in transfusion. I have a photo of Dutch taken a few hours after he was shot. He is flat on his back in a hospital bed, a blanket pulled to his waist. His face is covered with creases, his hair greased with blood. He looks as if he’s trying to sit up, to see who is coming through the door, but really he is just looking at his body. There is a hole in his side, blood running to the sheet. His mouth is locked in a frown, less of disappointment or pain than concentration—a man surveying the damage. He slipped in and out of consciousness. When he came to, Newark detective Luke Conlon asked questions. Schultz probably answered as best he could, but he was dying. The exchanges were cryptic, like late night conversations I have with my girlfriend when she is mostly asleep but I don’t know it.
“Who shot you?” Conlon asked.
“The boss himself,” said Dutch.
“What did he shoot you for?”
“I showed him,” said Dutch. “Did you hear me meet him? An appointment. Appeal stuck. All right, Mother.”
“Was it the boss who shot you?” Conlon persisted.
“Who shot me? No one.”
“We will help you,” said the detective.
“Will you get me up?” asked Schultz. “Okay, I won’t be such a big creep. Oh, Mama, I can’t go through with it. Oh, please, and then he clips me. C’mon, cut that out! We don’t owe a nickel. Hold it. I am a pretty good pretzler.”
“Why did they shoot you?”
“I don’t know, sir,” said Schultz. “Honestly, I don’t. I don’t even know who was with me. Honestly. I went to the toilet. The boy came at me.”
“The big fellow gave it you?” said Conlon.
“Yes, he gave it to me.”
“Do you know who the big fellow was?”
“No,” said Dutch. “I will be checked and double-checked. Please pray for me. Will you pull? How many good ones and how many bad ones? Please, I had nothing to do with him. He was a cowboy in one of the seven-days-a-week fights. No business. No hangouts. No friends. Nothing.”
As the hours passed, Schultz became even less intelligible. His temperature had climbed to 106 by the following afternoon. He slipped into a fever dream. In his last hours he was talking nonstop, a ramble of names and places, snapshots from a dying mind. At four P.M., hoping to gather clues, the cops put a stenographer at his side. The result was gangster prose, mostly nonsensical, but here and there shot through with beauty. “There are only ten of us and there are ten million fighting somewhere in front of you, so get your onions up and we will throw up a truce flag,” said Schultz. “He eats like a little sausage baloney maker . . . the sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up . . . my gilt-edges stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in . . . Please, Mother. You pick me up now . . . a boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand kiln . . . please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s commander. Mother is the best bet, and don’t let Satan draw you too fast. I am half-crazy. They won’t let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Give me something. I am so sick. Give me some water, the only thing that I want.”
Schultz fell into a coma at six P.M. He died a few hours later. In the coming weeks, his empire was divided among the Syndicate board, with Lepke and Gurrah taking the restaurant rackets. In the coming years, Schultz’s final words, that great mystical document, were shared by fans of organized crime. Like the writings of Nostradamus, people see things in it, hidden meanings, portents, portents of portents. I suppose the amateur sleuths who once went again and again through the transcript are today tuned in to police scanners.
The gangsters had done Dewey no favor. The death of Schultz may have boosted his life expectancy, but it also set back his career. The Schultz case was to cement Dewey’s fame. Now he would have to find another big score—not good news for the gangsters. Tom Dewey, so long occupied with Schultz, would go after the other bosses.
Dewey’s ambition soon found Charles Luciano, who was living as Mr. Ross in room 39D of the Waldorf-Astoria. With Schultz gone, Luciano was the big gangster on the New York scene. He was one of the most powerful men in the city, with full control of the docks: what went in, what came out. Each night he showed up in the swankiest clubs with the swankiest girls; each morning he showed up in the gossip columns. Why did Tom Dewey go after Lucky Luciano? Because he was the fattest thing on the menu.
In 1936, with voters convinced the city was run by gangsters, Governor Herbert Lehman, an uptown Jew, appointed Dewey special prosecutor of organized crime. It was a new office, created for a man many believed fated to save New York. Though just thirty-two, Dewey already had the cold stare for which he would be remembered. At times his features seemed to fade away until only a mustache remained, the reedy little mustache that came to mean Tom Dewey. Maybe he is what happens when a mustache takes over, wresting power from the eyes and nose, gaining free reign over a face. On certain Brooklyn streets, the mustache became an object of hatred, the embodiment of all that was wrong with the Republicans: arrogance, contempt for immigrants. In my father’s neighborhood, when Dewey came on screen during newsreels, the audience booed. “To many people, he was known only as the man who went after gangsters,” Herbert Brownell told me. “He was seen as an object of punishment, something wrathful. He lost his identity and became just another piece of bad news.”
Dewey rented office space on the thirteenth floor of the Woolworth Building, a white tower a few blocks from the courthouse. For the first time in New York history, the prosecutors would go after the bosses instead of the soldiers. Dewey turned his office into an anticrime factory, as intent on turning out convictions as Motown was later on turning out hits. Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes; Lucky, Lepke, Gurrah. We’re gonna be famous, boys! Famous! He refused to underestimate his prey; his office was soundproofed and routinely checked for bugs. Afraid cops on the beat could be bought off, he hired his own police, an enforcement wing. He also hired a crack team of investigators and prosecutors. He wanted only those obsessed with crime, convinced they were the agents of Good. Tom Dewey, what a righteous man! He was the spirit of his small-town father come back to finish a task: rid the city of evil, starting with the rackets—illegal cartels that seized control of entire industries. He would even go after those rackets that controlled outlaw industries, like gambling or loan sharking, where crooks muscled crooks. And he had a plan, a way to deprive gangsters of the tricks that kept them in power. Instead of making arrests here and there, he would take the underworld by surprise, locking up hundreds of crooks in a single day. If he was going after gambling, his cops would lock up every bookie, runner, and shylock, preventing them from comparing stories or muscling informants. Dewey’s best attacks on the underworld were as unexpected and devastating as Pearl Harbor.
On January 31, 1936, Dewey went after the prostitution racket. At eight P.M., after the police reporters had filed their stories, Dewey’s cops began arresting call girls and madams and pimps and bringing them back to the Woolworth Building. For the world of prostitution, it was a complete rout. By midnight there were over one hundred girls in the office. So no one working late in the building got wise (they might unknowingly tip gangsters), the hookers were brought to the thirteenth floor in the freight elevator. Every few minutes the doors clanged open, sending another wave of color into the halls. Girls sat smoking in dark offices, filling the air with smoke and echoes. Some of the most legendary prostitutes in New York were here: Polack Francis, Sadie the Chink, Jennie the Factory. Together they held the secrets of the street, fetishes and crazes, what every man was hiding from his wife. The women sat in the office all night. By dawn they were tired, confused, ready to talk. Looking bleary-eyed across the desk at Dewey (frown, mustache), they spoke of money they made and where it went. In story after story one name came up: Mr. Ross. Sooner or later some part of every score made its way to Mr. Ross, a big shot who lived in the Waldorf. Once Dewey identified Ross as Luciano, it was easy to build an equation: If Lucky is paid by pimps, then Lucky must be the pimp of the pimps, the force behind New York prostitution. In just a few months in his new job, Dewey had brought an indictment against the most powerful gangster in New York.
In 1936 a warrant was issued for Luciano’s arrest. Lucky would not surrender. He instead went down to Owney Madden’s resort in Hot Springs. Madden paid off enough cops and judges to delay arrest for months. Men like Lucky rarely fled the country; they were American, and by God if they would be run off by some glee club squirt like Tom Dewey. In any other situation, Lucky might have turned himself in, and gotten it over with. But the charges caught him by surprise. Prostitution? Since the early twenties, when he was just the brightest of the East Side rats, Lucky had been involved in every form of devilment—theft, bootlegging, shylocking, drug running, racketeering, killing. Maybe the only thing he never touched was prostitution. “Charlie had the same revulsion about running brothels that I did,” Meyer Lansky later said. “He believed no respectable man should ever make money out of a woman in that horrible way.” That fall twenty Arkansas Rangers came for Luciano. He was cuffed and put on a train, green fields giving way to the parched brown autumn of the North.
The trial lasted three weeks. Judge McCook’s courtroom overflowed with spectators. Gangsters in candy-striped suits cut the room into neat squares of color. Lucky, in somber grays, was full of hope, of action. There is a picture of him in court, surrounded by lawyers. They look straight ahead. He looks off to the side, into the camera. Cameras understood the gangsters in a way the cops never could—the camera knew these were the brightest men in the room, shedding light as they walked.
Dewey called dozens of witnesses, prostitutes who flashed the name “Mr. Ross” like a mirror, something to catch the jurors’ eyes. The case looks flimsy in retrospect, a construction of fragments and half-truths. The hookers spoke of their lives, how they had been degraded, their innocence sold for a dollar, which often found its way to Mr. Ross. Of course, by paying Lucky, the pimps were really just paying the Syndicate, a tribute that bought protection from cops and judges, the very system that was now judging Luciano. Lucky did not help himself on the stand. He was picked apart, his manners as much on trial as his actions. The Daily News claimed: DEWEY RIDDLES LUCIANO.
One of Dewey’s final witnesses was Molly Brown, a chambermaid at the Waldorf. Brown identified Lucky as Mr. Ross. She said Lucky’s room was often the last to be made up, that he almost always slept in. I suppose this showed Luciano as a man without a clear means of support, or maybe it just showed him as a loafer, but it strikes me as an attack on late sleepers. If sleeping late is a crime, I and a lot of my friends belong in jail. I’m not saying Luciano was innocent; he was probably the least innocent man alive. I just don’t think he was convicted for the crimes he committed; he was convicted for being considered a criminal. It would be like getting Al Capone for tax evasion if Al Capone had paid his taxes. There was something un-American about it. Just because you’re a crook doesn’t mean you should be railroaded. To the underworld, Dewey had broken the rules. “With the gangsters, we had a certain understanding,” Ralph Salerno told me. “The gangsters said to us: Don’t frame me. Don’t drop a little envelope in my pocket, then run up and say, ‘I caught you with narcotics.’ That’s a frame-up. That’s a no-no. That’s what I demand of you, Ralph. But what I give you in return is, if you ever catch me right, I go to jail and do my time. And they don’t drag me out of the courtroom saying, ‘You son of a bitch, you and your family are dead.’ None of that crap. I’m a professional. And if you be a real professional, too, and catch me right, then it’s not personal.”
The day the verdict came in, Foley Square in front of the courthouse filled with people, mostly Italian immigrants rooting for Lucky. Faceless old men, features worn down by life; broad-shouldered sons, their boots caked in mud; daughters drawn in a single stroke, dark steady eyes; frock-coated Betties, facial hair dark and coarse. They stood all morning in a sky cut by buildings. At noon the verdict ran in whispers through the crowd: Guilty. The jury spent an hour reading the verdict: Guilty on 558 counts.
There are reasons you should never let your friends call you Lucky, reasons entirely too obvious to discuss. Charles Luciano was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in prison, the longest penalty ever given for prostitution. “After sittin’ in court and listenin’ to myself bein’ plastered to the wall and tarred and feathered by a bunch of whores who sold themselves for a quarter, and hearin’ that no-good McCook [the judge] hand me what added up to a life term, I still get madder at Dewey’s crap than anythin’ else,” Luciano wrote in his autobiography, The Last Testament. “That little shit with the mustache comes right out in the open and admits he got me on everythin’ else but what he charged me with. I knew he knew I didn’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with prostitution, not with none of those broads. But Dewey was such a goddamn racketeer himself, in a legal way, that he crawled up my back with a frame and stabbed me.”
When Luciano went to prison, he left behind stories for the public, lessons for the gangsters. For Lansky, his friend’s fate was best read as a fable, a moral waiting patiently at the end. From Luciano’s fall, Lansky took away the prize of anonymity. He came to cherish the shadows, the background. A gangster in the papers is a gangster headed for a fall, a piñata every cop in America wants to bust open. In the future, Lansky would steer clear of the flash bulbs. He would live a humble life, a tract house in North Miami Beach, just another retired peddler, a shrug and smile saying, “Forget me. I’m just a schnorrer.”
Lepke took away a different lesson. It’s nothing new: two men read the same text and hear different stories. To Louis, Lucky Luciano was just another example of what the bastards will stoop to. Here was a man who did everything right, paid off cops, bought politicians, hid the money, distanced himself from violence, paid his taxes. And what happens? The government cooks the case, gets low-level crooks to send him away for the one thing he never did. For Lepke, the story had a bloody moral: You only beat the prosecutors if you destroy the case; you only destroy the case if you steal the witnesses—an errand he would run long after Dewey left for the governor’s mansion, and the fight was taken up by Frank Hogan in the Manhattan DA’s Office, William O’Dwyer in the Brooklyn DA’s Office, and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. To meet such threats, Lepke remade Murder Inc. from the enforcement arm of the Syndicate to his own private army, a troop that would act on his every fear, every suspicion. He was forever looking for loose ends, anyone with a gripe, who might fall into the wrong hands, a tool in a prosecutor’s plan. He was looking for people like Joe Rosen, a garment industry trucker whom Lepke drove out of business.
When he took over Rosen’s company, Lepke promised to take care of him. A few weeks later Rosen was fired by his new boss. He went to Lepke’s office to see a man named Rubin. “Lepke and you promised I would be taken care of,” Rosen said. Lepke got Rosen a job driving for Garfield Express, a local trucking company. Again Rosen was fired. He was out of work for eighteen months. He opened a candy store in Brownsville, but almost no one came in. Like all men who have seen their prime brush past, Rosen began talking of the old days, back before that thug Lepke ruined him. In 1936, when Dewey began investigating the garment rackets, Rosen was an obvious problem. He was just the kind of loose end Lepke wanted tied down. Lepke got Rosen another driving job, but he soon quit, complaining of a bad heart. This upset Lepke. “Rosen is going around Brownsville shooting off his mouth,” he said. “He is saying that he is going down to Dewey’s office.”
Rubin told Lepke he would take care of it. He sent a few dozen union members to Rosen’s candy store to buy things they probably didn’t want. I like to think of them there, truckers and cutters, ruddy faces peering through frosted glass—Yeah, give me five dozen ring-dings—like something from O. Henry, where beneficence rains down. A few days later, when Dewey’s men began asking around Brownsville, Lepke sent Rubin to the candy store. Handing Rosen an envelope, Rubin said, “Here’s two hundred dollars. Lepke wants you to go away until things cool down.” Before he left, Rubin turned and said, “You better do what he says.”
Rosen went to see his son in Reading, Pennsylvania, a coal town in the Allegheny Mountains. Rosen was one of the first of many possible informants Lepke gave the ultimatum: Dead or out of town. It was Lepke’s version of a witness relocation program: relocate the witness so he cannot testify. Louis moved them to the hinterlands, the West or a drowsy southern street, where they could lead a new life, far from prying prosecutor eyes. For a lot of people, dead or out of town was not such an easy choice. Out of town meant away from the smells, memories, streets, friends, family, plans, promises, appetites, comforts of home. Dead or out of town. What’s the difference?
Within a week Rosen got a note from his wife. She was sick. Seizing on the excuse, he rushed east, the Manhattan skyline rising up in his train window. He was soon back on the street, his silhouette visible in the candy store, the small-town sight of a merchant checking inventory. Lepke had a reputation for calm; his manner was cool and direct, but there was an edge to it. A man who loses control is a man who makes mistakes, gets killed. Lepke knew that. But this was too much. Of course this pathetic little guy can’t hold a job. He can’t even stay out of town. Lepke’s eyes flashed when he heard Rosen was back. Albert Tannenbaum was in the next room. Why should Allie, who was in to see Lepke several times a month, remember this particular day? Because this was the only time he ever heard Lepke lose his temper. “I stood enough of this crap,” yelled Lepke. “That son of a bitch Rosen, that bastard, he’s going around again and shooting his mouth off about seeing Dewey. He and nobody else is going any place and do any talking. I’ll take care of him.”
A few days later Sholem Bernstein saw Pep Strauss on the corner. Pulling Sholem aside, Strauss said, “Go clip me a car.” Soon after that, Sholem and Louis Capone went for a ride. As they spoke, the storefronts of Brownsville ran past. Taking a right onto Sutter Avenue, Capone, his wide, somber face caught in profile, pointed to a small candy store and said, “That is where somebody is going to get killed.” He drove on, past parched lawns and run-down houses, stopping when they reached a siding near some train tracks. Pulling over, Capone said, “This is where you will dump the car.” And that’s how Sholem found out he would be driving getaway, following a route as carefully plotted as a distant star system. Capone had figured this the best way to the drop, where the men would dump the kill car and make their escape. Pointing out each landmark (“Watch this,” “Make sure here”), Capone took Bernstein again and again from the candy store on Sutter, left on Wyona, right on Blake, left on Pennsylvania, right on Snediker, right on Livonia, and then on to Van Sinderen, a dusty half road that runs along the BMT tracks, the course forming a neat line, a constellation in the Brooklyn night. “He showed me the route again and again,” Sholem later said. “Seven or eight times we went over it. I learned it by heart.”
As he left Sholem on the corner, Capone said, “Go steal plates. Take them where they won’t be missed right away. Put them on the hot car and bring it over at about half-past ten.”
The triggermen would be Pep Strauss and Mendy Weiss. Jews to kill a Jew; experts to erase a glitch. A few nights later the men drove by the candy store but did not like the setup. It was across from an ice-cream shop, a haunt of some local shylocks. Pep was afraid some of the sharks might recognize them as they fled. Why kill one rat just to create another? They decided to fill the contract early the next morning, before the ice-cream place opened.
Strauss showed up at the candy store at 7:30 A.M. Weiss was just then in the shadows near Rosen’s house. When Mendy saw Rosen step into the street, he ran around the corner, where Sholem was waiting. “That rat just come out,” he said. “Go over and get the car and stop in front of the candy store. Be sure the motor is running.”
When Rosen got to his store, he undid the locks, switched on the lights, began setting up for another day of not much business. When he saw the men coming through the door, he maybe thought, Customers! Probably not. Weiss and Strauss, the look in their eyes was probably not the look you see in the eyes of those off to buy candy. Before Rosen could say a word, the killers were shooting. Smoke drifted from the barrels of the guns. When their time came, marks often saw nothing but the flash of guns. A few months before, when Dasher killed a thug named Spider Murtha, the woman with Murtha told the cops she remembered not faces or clothes or voices, but only “the blue flames from the pistols.” Hit twice in the chest, Rosen streaked blood on a glass candy case as he fell to the floor. In the street, Sholem was just another commuter riding car pool, waiting for his passengers. When he heard the shots, he leaned across the seat and pushed open the door. Strauss and Weiss walked from the store, smoothing their coats. When they got in the car, Sholem hit the gas, lurching off into early morning Brownsville. He followed the getaway route turn by turn, as easy and inevitable as a chain of events in a dream.
When Sholem reached the BMT tracks, two cars were waiting. Louis Capone was at the wheel of one; Little Farvel Cohen was at the wheel of the other. The killers rumbled off in Capone’s car. Sholem took a last look through the kill car, like a man searching a hotel room before he checks out, then got in with Little Farvel and was gone, streets just stirring to life. “When did you learn the identity of the murder victim?” a prosecutor later asked.
“When I picked up the paper that night,” said Bernstein. “I seen a picture of the killing and the name. I didn’t know the man.”
A few months later one of the boys came across another loose end. Whitey Rudnick, a low-level member of the troop, was seen meeting with a lawyer on Dewey’s staff. Being seen with a cop or a prosecutor—not good. Whitey was a heroin addict, a junkie who sailed the rough spots on water and cocaine—a weakness that made him vulnerable to cops, prosecutors, anyone who might cut a deal. He was what the boys called a floater, a solitary figure who rambled each night through Brooklyn. “He used to drift on all the corners,” Reles said.
“See, I told you the bastard was a stool pigeon,” Pep said one day.
“Who?” asked Reles, having just arrived at the corner.
“Your pal Rudnick,” said Pep. “I seen him coming out of Harry Browser’s car.” Browser was a prosecutor in Dewey’s office. “You know what that means,” Strauss went on. “That bum has to be taken.”
Reles had known Whitey for years on the corner and before that at Elmira Reformatory upstate. Before the boys decided to kill Whitey, they would have done him almost any favor. Everyone liked him.
“Well,” said Reles, “if he has to be taken, we will take him.”
To let the world know why Rudnick was being killed, the boys decided to plant a note on him, something to identify him as a rat. “I’ll have Sholem grab us a typewriter,” said Reles. “He’ll bring it to my place and we’ll write the note over there.” The typewriter must have looked funny in the Kid’s house, an oddly cerebral touch, an off note in a bawdy song.
The gangsters got to work a few nights later. They would forge a letter, Browser thanking Rudnick for the helpful information. When the note hit the newspapers, the boys figured, the headlines would do the rest: RUDNICK KILLED FOR TALKING TO DEWEY.
The typewriter was broken. Reles held the ribbon as Pep hacked away. They began: Freind George.
“No, you got it wrong,” said Reles. “You got ‘friend’ spelled backwards.”
“What the fuck?” said Pep, looking up. “Does it start with a D?”
“No, Pep. It’s spelled f-r-i-e-n-d.”
“What are you, a genius?” said Pep. “How the hell should you know anything about this shit?”
“I don’t know shit about shit, but I know you’re wrong.”
They couldn’t decide. It was a terrific fight. I imagine them going at it, a Brooklyn living room, figures in a window, yelling, hands waving, grunts, sighs. I see them in a long line of great comedy teams: Abbott and Costello, Gleason and Carney. “All right,” Pep finally said. “I’ll try it your way.”
He rolled in a fresh sheet of paper and typed: “Dear Friend.”
Both men looked at the page. “Yeah, you were right,” said Reles. “That ain’t it.”
“See, jackass,” said Pep. “What’d I tell ya?”
Pep put in another page and typed:
Freind George:
Will you please meet me in NY some day in reference to what you told me last week. Also I have that certain powder that I promised you the last time I seen you. PS I hope you found this in your letter box sealed. I remain your freind. YOU KNOW, FROM DEWEY’S, THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE.
Handling the note, Reles wore gloves. When finished, he sealed the envelope and slid it to the back of a drawer. He then burned the wasted paper in the bathroom, flushing the cinders down the toilet.
For the next few nights Reles waited on the corner, note in pocket. Dasher was with him. When they got Whitey Rudnick, they would take him to Happy Maione’s garage in Ocean Hill, where Strauss and Maione would be waiting. When a lawyer later asked Reles if the boys had any more definite plan, he said, “We didn’t need any plan. We are experts.”
For three nights Reles and Maione waited on the corner midnight to five A.M. They watched traffic, heard kids brag, saw lights go off and on. They went out early the fourth night, May 25, 1937. At around four-thirty A.M., Reles saw a figure stealing along the building line. “It’s him,” he said. “It’s Rudnick.”
“You’re crazy,” said Dasher. “That ain’t him.” Then, when the figure got closer: “Shit. You’re right. That is him.”
Dasher ran for his car. Rudnick was probably familiar enough with the routine to know what it meant when Dasher, seeing him, went off the other direction. Turning on his heels, Rudnick went the way he came. When Dasher came by in his car, he rolled down his window. “We have to take him tonight,” he told Reles. “If I have to drag him in the car, I will get him tonight.”
A few minutes later Reles got in his own car and drove to Ocean Hill. Across from Maione’s garage was an apartment where his grandparents lived. Happy’s grandfather was very sick, a bedridden old man surrounded by relatives. Now and then there was a rap on the garage door: a cousin telling Happy how the old man was doing. He was dying up there, warped wood floors, shadows, priests. It must have been a strange night for Maione, death, violence, old age, murder, the same note rung again and again.
Reles took his time getting to the garage. He was growing tired of the life, the struggle of every night. By the time he showed up, the job was mostly done. Coming through the door, he saw Dasher pinning Rudnick to the floor; Pep tying a rope around Rudnick’s neck; an ice pick on the ground next to Pep. “We don’t need you,” said Happy, holding a meat cleaver. “The work is all over.”
Stepping into the driveway, Happy wiped his hands. “You would not think a skinny bum would put up a fight like that,” he said. “It was not as easy as it looked.”
A few minutes later a neighborhood kid showed up with a clipped sedan. As Happy directed, the kid backed the car into the garage, next to the body. Dasher took Rudnick by the feet and Pep got him by the shoulders; they pushed him into the backseat. “Was there difficulty putting Rudnick’s body in the car?” a prosecutor later asked.
“He was too long,” said Reles. “Dasher crumples his legs up; you know what I mean? That makes a guy shorter.”
As they folded the body, it let out a groan. It must have been like some spooky Isaac Bashevis Singer story, where the dead cry out, a reproach from the other side: Why have You forsaken me? “This goddamn bum ain’t dead yet,” said Strauss, pulling the body onto the running board. He reached for the ice pick and punched some holes in Rudnick. “That oughtta finish the bum,” he said. The killers slid Rudnick back into the car. Leaning in, Happy said, “Let me hit this son of a bitch for luck.” And he took a few whacks with a cleaver. “One of them butcher things like you hit bones or meat with,” Reles later explained. “All I know, I hear the dull noise.”
The boys got in the car and lit out for the far reaches of Brooklyn. Reles followed in the crash car. They left the kill car, which had been stolen in East New York, on a residential street in Bushwick. After switching off the ignition, Happy slid the fake note into Rudnick’s pocket. Settling into the crash car, he said, “When they find the guy with the note in his pocket, there’s going to be some big splash.”
When cops found the body the next morning, they were more impressed by the carnage than the prose. “As he [the cop] looked inside he made a ghastly find,” a prosecutor later told a jury. “Propped up against the door, in the rear compartment of this car, was the mutilated body of a dead man. His head was gashed; his hair was matted with blood; his shirt was bloody; there was a rope tightly knotted around the throat of the corpse at the level of the larynx or Adam’s apple. The neck and face above this constricting rope were intensely blue. The tongue protruded between the lips.” The boys had stabbed Rudnick over sixty times.
When Happy got back to his garage, the sun was just coming up. The street was full of sour-faced men and teary women. The men held hats and touched handkerchiefs to their eyes. Their coats fell into the shadows, leaving their heads suspended, a magician’s trick. Happy rolled through the faces, eyes, mouths. Stepping from the car, he was surrounded by relatives. Your grandfather died tonight, Happy. Looking across the crowd, he must have realized the gift the old man had left him: an alibi. No way. Happy Maione had nothing to do with this. What kind of sick bastard kills a junkie the very night of his grandfather’s death?
Lepke went into hiding in the summer of 1937. Things had been getting increasingly difficult for the boss. The feds were closing fast with a narcotics rap, the business he inherited from Arnold Rothstein. William O’Dwyer, the Brooklyn DA, was looking into Lepke’s racketeering. Heading the investigation was Burton Turkus, a young prosecutor who would soon prove more dangerous than the Ambergs, Shapiros, or Schultz mob. “He doesn’t conform to the general pattern of the prosecutor,” wrote Sid Feder, a reporter for the Associated Press. “He dotes on the theatrics of the courtroom and the criminal trial. But he is neither politician nor publicity hound. He looks like the movie version of a DA—suave, dynamic in conversation, sharp.” To gangsters, Burton Turkus was “Mr. Arsenic.”
Lepke was tipped a few days before the first indictment came down. Rather than wait for the knock on the door, he decided to vanish, to go off somewhere, to orchestrate from the shadows, destroying the government case before it could be made. When all the talkers had been silenced and all the sinners bought off, he would come in alone, a smile and a suit ready to be judged. Until then he would be gone, as vague as smoke in a bottle. Where would he go? Well, he would not make the same mistake as Luciano. He would not go somewhere like Hot Springs, a not very well kept secret, where lawyers could extract him like a splinter. And he would not follow the lead of Vito Genovese, who fled with money to Italy. For Jews, Europe was becoming the worst jail of all. Lepke would instead do what Anne Frank and so many other European Jews would do just a few years later. Disappear at home, moving from this world into a parallel of hidden stairs and false doors, a phantom gangster.
Before Lepke went on the lam, he called a meeting of underworld bosses. Lansky was there, and so was Bugsy Siegel, Albert A., Moey “Dimples” Wolensky, who worked for Lansky, and Longy Zwillman, the boss of Newark. These men had all known Lepke since he was a kid, and it was as though they had come to say good-bye. Louis was going off the map, where he could not be seen or heard. He wanted the blessing of these men before he went. After all, it was other members of the Mob who would have to hide and protect him; and when the cops got frustrated, they would take the heat. Lepke explained his plans, how he and Gurrah would split, both lamming it but not together, how Albert A. would keep them hidden, how Mendy Weiss would take over the troop but still follow Lepke’s command. The other gangsters agreed this was the only way: What the hell, Lep, we don’t want the feds should fry ya!
Louis Lepke was the most wanted man in American history. When the cops realized he was missing, they acted as though a drum of plutonium were gone. Their investigation swelled into a massive manhunt, with more cops out looking for Lepke than ever beat the brush for Jesse James. As Mussolini, Tojo, and Hitler were just hitting their stride, J. Edgar Hoover called Lepke the most dangerous man alive, Public Enemy Number One. Over one hundred thousand Wanted posters were printed and sent to post offices and police stations, passed out at ball games and schools, tacked to phone poles and grocery pegboards, hung in train depots, embassies, and consulates around the world: a dark, melancholy face seen at two angles; low forehead, tired, spaniel eyes. He was soon being spotted everywhere. There were false Lepke sightings in England, upstate New York, on a yacht off South America, in Warsaw, Poland, where he was said to be planning a kidnapping, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Canada, Vermont, the West and Northwest, in bars, hotels, casinos, swimming pools, restaurants. People hoping to find Lepke probably saw themselves in the newspaper under the headline HERO! For those hoping not to find him, that same headline was MISSING! For those with not much going in their lives, the idea of Lepke, the criminal at large, supplied a harmless diversion. In the years before the Second World War, Lepke was a drama here at home, a national treasure hunt: Where is the gangster?
Where was Lepke? Off radar, moving place to place, house to house, surfacing for a meal, a drink, a talk. Even now his whereabouts in those days remain mysterious. What we do know comes from talkative gang members, like Reles and Tannenbaum. Putting the pieces together, we are left with a herky-jerky film shot on super-eight, full of jumps and skips, some frames missing, others burned at the edges.
Lepke hid first in Newark, New Jersey. Gurrah was in Newark, too, a basement room across town. They sometimes met late at night, a Romanian-Hebrew restaurant for goulash. They would sit long after the plates were cleared, talking, playing cards. A lamster should never stay too long in one place; his path through the world soon makes a pattern, and patterns can be detected. When fall came, Gurrah left for the Midwest, some safe town where a wanted man can melt into the trees. Without Lepke to watch him, Gurrah began acting up. The silence of underground life was too much for him, and he was soon turning up in clubs, at bars, making phone calls. Mendy Weiss got in touch with Lepke. He wanted to reunite the gangsters, hoping Louis could pacify his old friend, the mind could ground the body. But Gurrah wanted more than a familiar face; he wanted his old life back. Gangsters of a certain sort, wild, physical gangsters, wilt in hiding. Like certain species of vine, they die without constant exposure to the sun. Gurrah complained of chest pains, shortness of breath. On April 14, 1938, too sick to go on, he turned himself in on a racketeering charge. He was sent to prison for life.
Lepke spent a few months out west, a ranch in the hills. Lansky went to see Lepke, to tell him to break up his gang. The Syndicate would keep Workman on salary; the other boys would go their own way. Lansky said the gang would run out of money, then become a burden on the other bosses. It was the first sign of discord, the first suggestion that Lepke in hiding was trouble. “Nothing doing,” he told Lansky. Without his boys, Lepke knew he would be just another old man holed up in an apartment, hiding from the world.
When Lepke got back to town, he put himself in the charge of Albert A., who moved the boss place to place, a step ahead of the cops. Lepke lived for a time above a nightclub in Coney Island, Cavitola’s Oriental Danceland, 2780 Stillwell Avenue; Cavitola was related by marriage to Louis Capone. From there, Lepke went to live in the house of a friend’s friend on Ninety-first and Avenue A, a few blocks from Reles. For the Kid, a rock star had moved to the neighborhood. He spent a lot of time over there, becoming close to Lepke, someone who shared his secrets. Reles was one of Lepke’s few links with the street, with everything exciting. When the Kid walked through a doubled-locked door, down a dark hall, his face coming in and out of the light, Lepke must have felt a kind of envy, the jealousy the dead have for the living. Reles would sometimes take Lepke on ghostly, late night drives, the boss gazing at the flat, unwinding roads of Brooklyn. He rarely got to see his family. The world came to him through newspapers only or else on the words of those sheltering him, gangsters who brought him news in dribs and drabs, each with his own motives, each coloring the facts with his own ambition, his own desires.
Of course, all the boys wanted to see Lepke. Being taken to the hideout was like being entrusted with a national secret. One night Mendy Weiss ran into Albert Tannenbaum. Hey, Allie? Want to see the boss?
Sure. Who doesn’t?
“Well, if you’re a good boy, you’ll get to see him,” said Weiss.
A few weeks later Weiss met Tannenbaum at Yiddel Lorber’s, the joint near the Williamsburg Bridge where Pretty Amberg was killed. Little Farvel Cohen was there, too. The three men got in a black sedan and went to a deli, where they picked up sandwiches and champagne. It was New Year’s Eve 1938. From there they drove through Brooklyn like guys in a cop show trying to ditch a tail: the wrong way down one-way streets, cutting through alleys, doubling back. They reached the hideout at eleven. They came through the door one at a time, hugged the boss, smiled. Corks were popped, coats draped across chair backs. They talked into the early morning, legs shuffling past the cellar window. Though he rarely left his room, Lepke said he needed new suits. He was like an iron-willed British colonial wearing dress reds in the jungle. Tannenbaum took Lepke’s measurements; a few days later he would bring over the clothes.
At three A.M. the boys got up to leave. Lepke pulled Weiss aside. The boss said he wanted to see his wife; he had not spoken to her in months. “Don’t worry,” said Mendy. “I’ll take care of it.” Mendy must have liked having control over his boss. Here was the most powerful man anyone knew, and he couldn’t walk out the door; he was as beautiful a piece of wasted work as a ship in a bottle.
Keeping Lepke hidden was not easy. For Albert A. it was almost a full-time job. He was like a man playing chess, always five moves ahead, guessing when neighbors would get wise, when the cops would show up. A hideout is like a carton of milk; it should be marked with a date of expiration. If you get three months out of a hideout, you’re satisfied. Even the best spots, the back room of some old lady’s house, could go bad in an instant. When it did, Anastasia had to have the next move planned, and the move after that. At one point, perhaps tired of the basement-to-basement shuffle, he tried to build Lepke a more stable existence. Calling in Tannenbaum, Anastasia explained his plan, how Tick-Tock would move to Elizabeth, New Jersey, start a business, buy a house. In a few months, when Tannenbaum was established, Lepke would move in. Work hard, he told Allie. Keep regular hours, dress simple. Tannenbaum would be working closely with Longy Zwillman, the boss of Newark.
Longy’s boys asked Tannenbaum what kind of business he would start. A haberdashery, said Allie. Zwillman at first said okay, then changed his mind. He wanted Tick-Tock to sell bottled mineral water. He gave Allie $300 to get started. Allie went alone to Elizabeth, an entrepreneur looking into dusty For Rent windows. In town he used his wife’s maiden name, Milburn, and told people he had moved from St. Louis. Who could believe him? He had a tight little gangster mouth and the war-torn features of a man whose boss is on the lam. He called his store the Union County Mineral Water Company. From a distributor he bought water at twenty cents a gallon, which he would then sell for thirty-five cents. He opened a bank account with his gangster money, bought a Ford, and hired a seventeen-year-old kid to run deliveries. For a week he took orders and wrote checks, glimpsing the life his father must have wanted for him.
Tannenbaum found a house, eighty dollars a month for a wood-frame, two-story, one-family corner of suburbia. It was surrounded by tall shrubs, as he was told it should be. There were three bedrooms, a glassed-in porch, heated garage, living room, dining room, pantry, kitchen. When he was on his way out for furniture, he got a call from Zwillman: FBI agents are going around Elizabeth asking questions; return to New York City. For Anastasia, one of a dozen plans had gone bad; for Allie, an errand had been wasted. But what about the delivery boy? Did he get another job? Does he still tell the story? Somebody knows; not me.
Anastasia at last found the perfect hideout: a basement apartment on Thirteenth Street in Brooklyn. The building was owned by Mary Porzia, an old lady from the same part of Calabria, Italy, as Anastasia. In the winter of 1939 Reles drove the boss to his new home. Lepke had grown a mustache and wore a fedora pulled low over his eyes. He had gained twenty pounds and had the haggard look of a fugitive; he left some of his defiance in each vacated hideout. Next to Lepke sat a red-haired woman with a baby: Buggsy Goldstein’s sister-in-law and nephew. Anyone searching for Lepke would probably be looking for a dark, solitary gangster, not a family man.
Lepke lived in an apartment below the stairs: kitchenette, sitting room, bedroom. Over the next few months he would run the troop from the cellar, giving orders that changed lives across the country. The other boarder in the house was Eugene Salvese, a longshoreman from Italy. Though Salvese had come illegally to America, he was trying to set things straight. He had been several times to the American embassy, through lines that wound out the door. One evening he pushed back his blinds for a look at the street: storefronts, stoops, garbage cans. Across the way he saw a stocky man staring at the building. There was something suspicious about him. After a while he walked off; Salvese watched him go. A few days later Salvese was introduced to the stranger. “Eugene, I want you to meet someone,” said Miss Porzia. “This is Abraham Reles. We have a new boarder, and Mr. Reles will give you that man’s rent.” Each week Salvese met the Kid at the Saratoga Avenue subway station, where he picked up Lepke’s rent: fifty bucks. Salvese was paying ten.
One night, as Salvese was walking home from the docks, he met Reles in the street. “You’re a good fellow,” Reles told him. “Don’t talk to anybody about the boarder in the basement. You work hard for a living. If you do as I say and don’t talk to anybody and be a good fellow, maybe you won’t have to work anymore.”
“I have always worked for a living,” said Salvese, turning away. “Why should it be different now?” After that, Reles told the landlady he did not want Salvese around when he came to see Lepke.
Each night, on his way home, Salvese picked up the papers for Lepke: the Daily News, the Daily Mirror. He had no idea of Lepke’s fame and knew him only as a strange man who never went out, who lived for his newspapers. A snapshot of Lepke near the end: closed in a bunker, following his fate in the press, a blip on a radar screen. There were stories about the boss every day: some overzealous small-town cop spotting the name “Bukalter” on a mailbox and launching an investigation. Julius Bukalter turned out to be an eighty-three-year-old Lithuanian-born Jew, a retired teacher who once taught on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side. A letter from a man who spotted some crazy wandering the woods with a shotgun; could this be Lepke spying for Germany? “I’m pretty sure there are some airforce bases around here,” wrote the concerned citizen. “Maybe this is the criminal out gathering information for the enemy.”
In the spring of 1939 Salvese went to Cuba. His idea was to travel to Havana, turn around, and reenter America, this time legally. On the wall of the U.S. Immigration Office in Cuba, he saw a Wanted poster. The face on the poster was hard to make out, but he was almost sure it was the man in the basement. When no one was around, he took down the poster and folded it into his pocket. When Salvese got back to New York, Lepke had already moved on. Pulling aside his landlady, Salvese took out the poster. “Look at this,” he told her. “This is a fine mess you’ve dragged me into, especially when I’m trying so hard to become an American citizen. I have lived in America fourteen years, and this might be the end of it.”
Porzia told Salvese he needed a rest. She suggested he spend time in Saratoga. When he said he could not afford such a trip, she said money was no problem, that he should pack a bag and go the next morning to a corner on Saratoga Avenue. She knew some men who would drive him upstate and find him a cheap place to stay. When Salvese showed up, Reles was waiting. Taking Salvese’s arm, Reles nodded to a car. “I went over to the car and I was very much afraid to get in,” Salvese later said. “I thought I was going for a ride. But they hustled me into the back of the car and off we went, driving like the hammers of hell. All the time we drove, they spoke only to each other and seemed not even to notice me. They called each other Harry and Al.”
Salvese was left at a rooming house on the edge of town. He spent a month up there, walking the woods, swimming—Lepke’s way of paying a man for his trouble, buying his loyalty, his silence. When Salvese got back to Thirteenth Street, he was tan and relaxed, not a bad word to say of anyone.
Lepke was living with Dorothy Walker, the daughter of gangster Fatty Walker. After dinner Lepke would push back his chair and say something nice about Walker’s cooking. He complained about the last person he stayed with, Miss Porzia, whose menu drove him to distraction. Sometimes it was spaghetti every night for a week. Reles was often with Lepke. When the gangsters talked business, Walker excused herself to the next room. She was not impressed with Reles. To his face she called him Shorty. Behind his back, who knows? The hideout was at 2720 Foster Avenue, a few blocks from Midwood High School, where my mom would eventually be a shy freshman in cat-eye glasses. Lepke slept in the back room of the brick house, a stoop and a porch out front, no different from a dozen other houses on that sad street. To the north the road climbed a rise before running off to the stores of Kings Highway. At Midwood the teachers must have discussed Lepke, how man is done in by crime, ruined by dark angels. And here, a short walk away, a newspaper spread across a kitchen table, was the wreck himself, looking no different than their fathers.
There was probably disagreement about Lepke in the high schools of Brooklyn. To teachers, who were often from middle-class Protestant homes, it was a simple case of a thug run amok. To students, who watched immigrant fathers struggle to find a place in America, Lepke was more complicated. While men like my grandfather had a clear sense of right and wrong, it was hard for sons not to admire gangsters. In Reles and Strauss they saw fearless Jews, men at war with an unfair world. As cops were combing streets for Lepke, Nazis were boycotting and tagging Jews in Germany, persecution that was maybe not well-known in the rest of America but was talked about in Brooklyn. Most Jews still had family in the old country, and the bad news came in letters that grew cloudier and cloudier, before the letters stopped coming altogether. In a time when the leaders of the West still hoped to strike a deal with the Fascists, gangsters were among the few who understood the enemy. When asked by Burton Turkus what he thought of the situation in Europe, Reles said, “It’s a cinch.”
“What do you mean, a cinch?” asked Turkus.
“They’re just the same as the Combination,” said the Kid. “We are out to get America by the pocketbook. When we have to, we kill people to do it. Hitler and Mussolini, they’re trying to do the same thing, only they’re trying to get the whole world. And they will kill people by the millions to get it.”
The gangsters were a prototype of a new kind of Jew, the sporty, all-terrain model that would emerge from the ashes of World War II. Men like Lepke and Lansky were among the first Jews to know the truth about violence, that people pity the victims but yield to the victors. Long before the Holocaust, they knew about learning, how little it means when jackboots hit the landing. These men were not religious in the go-to-temple, keep-the-Sabbath way, but they were all for the Jews. The best of them knew there was no running away, that you either become more of yourself, running toward your identity, or become nothing at all, Jonah fleeing God. As the war came, they understood Nazis in a way most law-abiding adults could not. They knew what men are capable of, how far someone like Hitler would go, and they knew it could not be fought with reason or treaties or sanctions. The gangsters, who cared mostly about getting rich, knew some things were just not about money. They knew the only way to deal with Nazis was the way you would deal with them on the street. Not only would this win admiration from kids like my dad, it had a sound intellectual underpinning: it is hard for someone who has just had his lip split to believe he is a superman. “We knew how to handle them,” Meyer Lansky told Uri Dan. “The Italians I knew offered help, but as a matter of pride, I wouldn’t accept. I must say I enjoyed beating up Nazis. There were times when we treated some big anti-Semite in a very special way, but the main point was to teach them that Jews cannot be kicked around.”
Pro-Nazi groups began organizing in America in the mid-thirties. Fueled by a rabid anti-Semitism, they had names like the German American Bund. “A pro-Nazi organization that spread Nazi-style anti-Semitic slogans,” Lansky went on. “They strutted around and made threats, like throwing all Jews into concentration camps.” By 1939 the American Nazi movement was strong enough to attract twenty-eight thousand people to a rally at Madison Square Garden. “I was always very sensitive to anti-Semitism, but during those years other people also became worried,” Lansky said. “Important WASPs, as we would call them now, openly made anti-Semitic statements, and some magazines and papers backed them. This worried Jewish leaders, including the most respected of all, Rabbi Stephen Wise. He sent a message asking me to do something about this dangerous trend. Another Jewish leader who was worried was a respected New York judge, an important member of the Republican Party. We knew each other, and one day in 1935 he came to see me and said, ‘Nazism is flourishing in the United States. The Bund members are not ashamed to have meetings in the most public places. We Jews should be more militant. Meyer, we want to take action against these Nazi sympathizers. We’ll put money and legal assistance at your disposal, whatever you need. Can you organize the militant part for us?’ ”
When Bundists held a rally that spring in Yorkville, a German neighborhood on the Upper East Side, Lansky showed up with some friends. As they approached, it must have seemed they had stumbled into Berlin, sneers and swastikas, raised arms and thigh boots, Nazi banners snapping in the wind. “We found several hundred people dressed in brown shirts,” Lansky remembered. “The stage was decorated with pictures of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only about fifteen of us, but we went into action. We attacked them in the hall and threw some out the windows. There were fistfights all over the place. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran. We chased them and beat them up, and some of them were out of action for months. Yes, it was violence. We wanted to teach them a lesson. We wanted to show them Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”
Out west, torpedoes like Mickey Cohen, a pugnacious flyweight of a gangster who made his name as Bugsy Siegel’s bodyguard, were fighting similar battles. When Cohen was doing time in an Arizona jail, an outspoken Nazi sympathizer named Robert Noble was put in an adjacent cell. Cohen, who had been reading newspaper accounts of Noble’s tirades, bribed guards to put him alone in a cell with Noble and his Nazi cohort. “All of a sudden the door opens at the other end and here comes Noble and this guy with him, these Nazis who hate General MacArthur,” Cohen writes in his autobiography, In My Own Words. “They were real weasel bastards. I grabbed them both and started bouncing their heads together. With the two of them, you’d think they’d put up a fight, but they didn’t do nothing. So I’m going over them pretty good. The wind-up is they’re climbing up the bars and I’m trying to pull them down. They’re screaming and hollering so much, everybody thinks there’s a riot. After this got heard about, I’d get calls from places like the Writers’ Guild to help with their problems with Nazi bastards. One time there was even a judge who called me about a Nazi Bund meeting. I told him all right, don’t worry about it. So we went over there and grabbed everything in sight—all their bullshit signs—and smacked the shit out of them, broke them up the best we could. Nobody could pay me for this work. There ain’t no amount of money to buy them kind of things.”
The most legendary piece of Nazi fighting by a Jewish gangster happened around this time. Bugsy Siegel was having an affair with Dorothy DiFrasso, an Italian countess. In 1938 DiFrasso took Siegel home to the Villa Madama in Rome. The guest rooms were occupied by visiting German diplomats: Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. When Siegel learned of this, he decided to kill the Nazis, charting their path through the day, comings and goings, when they could be taken. When he told the countess his plans, she frowned. “You can’t do that,” she said.
“Sure I can,” said Siegel. “It’s an easy setup.”
According to actor George Raft, a friend of Siegel’s who used to tell this story, Bugsy was dissuaded only when the countess explained what would happen to her and her husband—they would be killed. No one knows just how closely this account stays to the facts, but it hardly seems to matter. Half a story or a sentence fragment is sometimes enough to bring solace, to give something as huge as the Holocaust a human dimension. Since the Holocaust often seems inevitable, those who ran it have the power of historical agents. The fact that Siegel was in position to kill two such agents makes the tragedy seem more manageable, something that might have been killed one Nazi at a time. You see, for people like me, who were born long after Germany was defeated, the worst part of the Holocaust was never the dead bodies; it was the way Jewish victims were portrayed. In history class at my junior high school in Illinois, we were forced to sit through films, spooled by some A/V geek, that showed images of the Holocaust: all those Jews waiting to be shot, looking ahead with already dead eyes, trees in the background, hands covering genitals. In none of those pictures was there even a faint suggestion of personality, an individual. There was only a silent, wide-eyed mass, the shame of being marched naked, being seen by women, by men. If, in just one of those photos, a condemned man had his arms stretched wide, a big circumcised prick swinging free, his eyes alive, then all the deaths would have been one degree easier to take. For forty minutes I would sit there, surrounded by non-Jewish classmates, my eyes burning, my neck starting to itch. At recess I would walk up to Clay Mellon, biggest kid in our school, the bully who ran everything, and say, “You stupid asshole.” For people like me, what Siegel did, even if it was no more than a plan, made me dismiss the qualification my father tagged to the story: “Don’t forget, Bugsy was an outlaw, a bad man.” Fuck that. Bugsy was a kid at recess walking up to the bully, saying, “You stupid asshole.”
For many gangsters, fighting Nazis was more than just an act of defiance; it was an expression of patriotism. For mobsters, taking on the enemy was a way to again feel part of the mainstream, a player in the national project. A few years later, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, even members of the military began to acknowledge this; it was something they could use. As intelligence officers grew increasingly fearful of enemy agents, sensing a spy in every shadow, whom did they turn to? Gangsters. In February 1942 the Normandy, a French cruise ship converted to carry American troops, caught fire while docked on the Hudson River. Experts suspected sabotage. German U-boats had already sunk 120 merchant ships off the American coast. Members of naval intelligence knew many dockworkers were immigrants from Italy, men like Eugene Salvese. Would these men help Mussolini? They could do so by telling foreign agents when military cargo was scheduled to depart or where troop ships like the Normandy were docked. Loose lips sink ships.
A few weeks after the fire, a naval intelligence officer contacted Socks Lanza, a thug who was said to control New York Harbor. When the officer explained what he wanted the gangsters to do—seal leaks, keep a lookout for suspicious doings on the docks—Lanza got in touch with Lansky. Meyer said only one man could fill the bill: Charlie Luciano. Though Lucky had already spent four years in prison, he still had ultimate authority on the docks. Moved to a better cell in a better prison, Luciano was soon sending word through Lansky to the waterfront capos. “I gave Cockeye [a mobbed-up dockworker] the orders,” Lansky explained. “Go down to the piers and find out who is loyal and who is not loyal. You have to see that there are no strikes and that the job is done quickly when military stuff is loaded. And we have to make sure everybody keeps his mouth shut about troop movements. That means going into bars to make sure the crews and longshoremen don’t start sounding off when they get drunk.” Showing up at naval intelligence on Church Street in Manhattan, Lansky said, “I can promise you one thing. There will be no German submarines in the port of New York.”
When the navy was planning the invasion of Sicily, Luciano had old friends draw detailed maps of their hometowns on the island. He also put officers in touch with the Sicilian Mafia, criminals who could steer troops through the roads, customs, and shortcuts of a foreign land. Just before the invasion, Luciano contacted navy officials: he wanted to accompany troops ashore. He would serve as a liaison, the perfect go-between. Maybe he saw himself returning home at the head of a vast army. Though his request was denied, the government did remember Luciano’s contribution. In 1946, about a year after V Day, he was paroled. Tom Dewey signed the release. Along with freedom came an order of deportation: Luciano would be returned to Italy, where he would lose power, grow old, take a young wife, wear a smoking jacket, and, in 1964, die of a heart attack.
Luciano sailed from America on February 10, 1946. Pier Seven. Bush Terminal. Brooklyn. A noisy, sad afternoon, photographers crowding out his last look at the city. Friends came to say good-bye. Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, Meyer Lansky, Ben Siegel, Longy Zwillman, Owney Madden, Tommy Luchese, Joseph Bonanno, Carlo Gambino. The farewell swelled into a party, boasts, plans, promises to meet again, oysters, pasta, wine. When photographers moved in for a shot, they were blocked by a line of stern-faced stevedores, bailing hooks dangling from each hand. High in the sky, seagulls wheeled. When the foghorn blew and the ship departed, the birds flapped off across the harbor, over the tenements and clubhouses of lower Manhattan, the gray suits of Wall Street, the courtrooms and jails of Centre Street, the delis of the fast disappearing Jewish East Side, Ratner’s and Katz’s, and down into the early morning bustle of Little Italy.