This is a work of fiction. Real historical characters appear in it, including Peter Panto, Frank Hogan, Fathers Philip A. Carey and John M. “Pete” Corridan, Burton Turkus, Toots Shor, Henry Fink, William McCormack, Robert Moses, Cardinal Francis Spellman, Generoso Pope, Frank Costello, “Sam the Subway Man” Rosoff, “King” Joe Ryan, Monsignor “Taxi Jack” O’Donnell, Frank Hague, Cockeye Dunn, the occupants of the Rats Suite, the remaining members of Murder, Inc., and assorted other hoodlums and racketeers, both in and out of high office.
There are other characters who will no doubt bear a resemblance to real individuals. They are, however, fictional. In order not to cast aspersions on the innocent, I have invented names and backgrounds, and even altered slightly the dates of some actual events.
My goal was to depict New York City in all the gaudy glory of its postwar heyday, and to sift to the bottom of what remain to this day some of its worst and most mysterious public scandals. These have been largely forgotten, but once they held both the nation and the world’s greatest city spellbound. They provided the gist of a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of newspaper articles, investigations that would make the careers of some of the most renowned prosecutors of our time, and America’s first major, televised congressional investigations, the Kefauver hearings.
Did I get to the heart of one of the greatest locked-door mysteries of all time? I can only compare my conclusions to the conjectures of Burton Turkus, “Mr. Poison,” the assistant district attorney who sent the killers of Murder, Inc., up the river.
In his book Murder, Inc., written in 1951 with Sid Feder, Turkus speculated about the presence in the Rats Suite of a “guard who did not sleep [and] opened the door for an outsider that morning—a stranger never mentioned, either then or in all the recurring revivals of the Reles scandal in the past ten years. Such an outsider would have had to be someone with considerable authority—authority enough to gain admittance and to keep his presence quiet afterward. If one of the witnesses, say, had awakened and spied him, he would have needed such authority that he could have sealed the witnesses’ lips by a threat of a prison term, perhaps, or a murder prosecution, or death. And finally, his authority would have had to be such that Reles would have accepted his entry into the bedroom.”
As such, one part or another of this story has been told before, in iconic dramas such as A View from the Bridge, On the Waterfront, The Godfather: Part II, and countless other books, movies, and plays.
Fortunately for me, there has been a wealth of outstanding nonfiction and investigative journalism regarding the period my book covers. When it comes to depicting the people and events that defined the murky, lethal world of New York’s vanished waterfront—and especially the tragic murder of Peter Panto—I am endlessly indebted to my old (well, not so old) friend Nathan Ward and his wonderful book Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront. For a Red Sox fan, he sure knows his Brooklyn.
James T. Fisher’s brilliant history On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York was indispensable in steering me through not only the harbor, but the theological disputations of the Catholic Church at what was the height of the “Catholic moment” in both New York and the United States. So too was John Cooney’s outstanding biography The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman, which included some terrific anecdotes.
The definitive work on Abe Reles and the incarceration of the other squealers in the Rats Suite is the late Edmund Elmaleh’s The Canary Sang but Couldn’t Fly. Eddie had researched Murder, Inc., for almost a decade, and died, suddenly and inexplicably, almost on the eve of the book’s publication—an especially cruel fate for a first-time author. He leaves behind an invaluable and riveting study, and his literary legacy has been well protected by the very generous Kathi Kapell. Eddie and I spoke a couple of times when we were working on our respective books. I don’t believe I told him anything he didn’t already know, but he was a tremendous help to me.
Very useful as well was Turkus and Feder’s inside story of fighting the mob, Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate, and Leonard Katz’s Uncle Frank: The Biography of Frank Costello. And as always, the bible on gangland, Virgil W. Peterson’s The Mob: 200 Years of Organized Crime in New York came in very handy.
Yet no source on the whole career of Murder, Inc., particularly in the context of Brownsville and the Jewish-American experience, proved more helpful than my friend Rich Cohen’s vivid, bold, and uncompromising Tough Jews. Rich knows where all the bodies are buried, figuratively and literally.
When it came to crime and its intersection with the governance of New York, I relied on George Walsh’s superb account, Public Enemies: The Mayor, the Mob, and the Crime That Was. Very helpful too, in tracing the rise of New York’s first postwar mayor from penniless immigrant to Gracie Mansion, was William O’Dwyer’s unfinished memoir, Beyond the Golden Door, closely edited and supplemented by his brother, the last fighting liberal, Paul O’Dwyer. And my friend Peter Quinn’s Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America was also a great aid, right down to its Woolworth Building cover.
Barry Cunningham’s Mr. District Attorney is a fine biography of the legendary Manhattan DA Frank Hogan. And the greatest American book ever written about urban politics, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, proved as valuable as ever, particularly when it came to describing the wanton destruction of the old Bronx. Jan Morris’s New York ’45, meanwhile, is as scintillating and effervescent as the time and the place it describes, a small but hugely pleasurable treasure.
To lead me through the vanished Mexico City of over sixty years ago—then a bustling, colorful capital of fewer than three million souls, just at the beginning of the runaway growth that would transform it—I turned first to Carlos Fuentes’s seminal novel Up Where the Air Is Clear.
Pete Hamill’s classic memoir A Drinking Life provided not only an invaluable take on Mexico City through the eyes of a transplanted American, but also served as a terrific guide to Mexico in general and particularly Acapulco—also transformed now beyond recognition. Quite helpful too were the collections The Mexico City Reader, edited by Ruben Gallo, and Mexico City Through History and Culture, edited by Linda A. Newson and John I. King.
Just as useful to me as all these outstanding books were the many newspapers and magazines that New Yorkers once took for granted. I begin, of course, with Malcolm “Mike” Johnson’s series of waterfront exposés in what was the glorious penumbra of the New York Sun. There has really been nothing else like it in the history of American journalism: fifty front-page pieces over the course of two years. The series won Johnson a well-deserved Pulitzer—though it was not enough to prevent the setting of the Sun, the closing of which marked the beginning of the end of the golden age of New York newspapers.
I owe much of my descriptions of Mayor William O’Dwyer’s Mexican exile to Lester Velie’s shrewd and meticulously reported articles in the August 7 and August 21, 1953, editions of Collier’s magazine. Just as well executed and even more daring were Velie’s pieces for Collier’s on Bill McCormack and the battle for the waterfront: “Big Boss of the Big Port,” February 9, 1952, and “A Waterfront Priest Battles the Big Port’s Big Boss,” February 16, 1952.
Time magazine’s cover story on O’Dwyer—“New York’s Mayor O’Dwyer: A Hell of a Town”—ran in its June 7, 1948, issue; while Life’s cover story on the second Mrs. O’Dwyer, Sloane Simpson—“New York’s First Lady Entertains U.S. Mayors”—appeared on May 29, 1950. Both were valuable, although much more so was Mimi Swartz’s poignant study “Sloane, Alone,” in the June 1997 edition of Texas Monthly.
For my depiction of both El Ranchito and Henry Fink’s Shangri-La in Cuernavaca, I am indebted to Philip Hamburger’s superbly rendered “That Great Big New York Up There,” a “Reporter at Large” piece that appeared in the September 28, 1957, issue of The New Yorker. I am sorry to report that the subject of Mr. Fink also provided an object lesson in the fleeting nature of the new journalism. I had the good fortune to run across the Internet memoir of an American expatriate, a young married woman with children and some sort of show business background, who went to live in Cuernavaca in the 1950s and wrote very well of both the city and Fink, whom she knew and liked. I was able to use some of her descriptions, but when I went back to properly credit her, I found her site had been taken down from the web, and it has since disappeared entirely. She has my apologies for not being able to offer her the kudos she deserves.
In general the Internet proved to be as simultaneously helpful and exasperating as it always does. Other media also were of use. My description of Toots Shor’s came in good part from watching Kristi Jacobson’s terrific documentary about her grandfather’s remarkable watering hole. Nothing else was really necessary.
In writing this book, I have been blessed, as always, with having so many wonderful friends, relations, and colleagues to rely on.
Professionally, I must thank as always my friend and agent, Henry Dunow, and all of the wonderful, friendly, and efficient people at Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner, especially the ever-patient, efficient, and helpful Yishai Seidman.
Henry did me yet another great service by finding a home for this book at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This is my first outing with Houghton, and they have proven to be an excellent choice in every possible way. My publisher, Andrea Schulz, was immensely patient, helpful, and friendly. My editor, Nicole Angeloro, improved The Big Crowd immeasurably, with her insights and gentle but firm insistence on keeping what is a very complex story as clear and as concise as possible. Margaret Wimberger, with her meticulous copyediting, fact checking, and cheerful encouragement also made an invaluable contribution to the finished manuscript. I found all three of these individuals to be good company as well as consummate professionals. Any mistakes or problems that remain after their work was done are strictly my own fault.
I would also like to extend my thanks to two people who first believed in this book and brought it to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They are Eamon Dolan and Jane Rosenman, who was to be my editor but was never able to serve as such. I regret not having had the chance to work with her, but it is at least a consolation to run into her regularly on the streets of the Upper West Side.
The contributions made by friends and family are too many to mention here, I’m embarrassed and very grateful to say. I have acknowledged some of them in the dedication: my sister Pam Baker and her husband, Mark Kapsch, who have been so good about putting me up on my New England sojourns and so supportive in many other ways. My wife, Ellen Abrams, has been a wonderful helpmate as always, not only in promoting this book, providing me with a tutorial in women’s fashions from the postwar world, and tracking down any number of 1950s tourist pamphlets on the Prince Hotel and Mexico City, but also in always believing in this story and encouraging me to write it.
Finally, I would like to thank three people who were very much friends in need: Nancy Sheppard and (two of) my (other) amazing brother(s)- and sister(s)-in-law, Matt Brinckerhoff and Sharon Abrams. You were lifesavers.