Bloodline (55 page)

• A week later in an apartment at the Park Central, Rothstein got into a poker game with two California gamblers. They played for forty-eight hours. Rothstein lost over three hundred thousand dollars. He said he would pay it off the next day, then left and went to Lindy’s, where he decided the game had been fixed and announced he would never pay off. On November 4, he got a phone call at Lindy’s and said he was going to the Park Central again to play poker. Later that night, Rothstein was found in a service entrance of the hotel, bleeding from a bullet wound in the stomach. Two days later, he died in the hospital without identifying his attackers.

• Police raced to Rothstein’s private office. They found a fire blazing in the office fireplace and three men going through Rothstein’s files. After a few telephone calls, the men were released. One of them was later identified in police records as “Charles Lucania, a waiter.” Nothing incriminating was ever found in what remained of Rothstein’s files.

• In the closing months of 1928, ten gang members were shot on the streets of New York as the war between Maranzano and Masseria heated up. Masseria had a bigger “army,” but Maranzano was willing to offer gang leaders a bigger piece of the pie, and some of the better-known thugs, like Joe Profaci and Joe Bonanno, came over to the Maranzano side. Masseria was annoyed but not yet frightened. He told Luciano, “Keep hitting them bastards,” and then told Luciano that Frank Costello was spending too much money paying graft at city hall. “Tell him to cut it out. We’re gonna go broke.” The weekly payoffs were then ten thousand dollars. Luciano told Costello to increase the payments. “We’re going to need everybody on our side before this is all over,” he said. “What about Joe the Boss?” Costello asked nervously. “He’s my worry,” Luciano said.

• New York governor Al Smith, campaigning to end Prohibition, lost the presidential election to Herbert Hoover. But although he had lost, everyone knew that Prohibition’s days were numbered. In Albany, Franklin Delano Roosevelt succeeded Smith as governor.

CHAPTER
10

1928–1929: The War

For the first time since Prohibition started, Tony had again found joy in police work.

All through 1928, Captain Cochran had come up with one amazing tip after another and Tony and his Italian Squad had made a string of spectacular arrests.

In March, they foiled a hijack by Masseria’s men of a Maranzano liquor truck. They seized three thousand gallons of whiskey and arrested five bootleggers, and the leader of the hijackers—believed by Tony to be Bugsy Siegel—escaped only by hiding in a storm sewer.

Only a few weeks later, Cochran gave Tony detailed information on a burglary planned at a Midtown diamond dealer’s office. When the burglars broke in late at night and started to crack the safe, Tony’s men were waiting for them.

An illegal Midtown card game was held up. Two players were shot, but when the robbers left the hotel suite, they walked into a horde of plainclothesmen from the Italian Squad.

There were a string of such cases all through the year, all set up by tips received from Cochran. Tony knew his commander had an informant someplace inside the mobs, but he did not bring the subject up or question his identity. The fewer who knew about confidential informants, the better chance those informants had of staying alive.

The Italian Squad was all over the city, and Kinnair, the
Daily News
reporter, who seemed to delight in tweaking the mob, dubbed them “The Flying Squad,” and wrote in a column, “The mob spends most of its time these days looking over their shoulders. Because they know The Flying Squad is coming after them.”

Tony’s only dissatisfaction came because city hall was so corrupt and the fix was in at so many levels that most of the gangsters he arrested were out on the street in hours, and time after time grand juries—manipulated by crooked district attorneys and judges—refused to indict them. Someday, he hoped, that would change. In the meantime, all he could do was keep the heat turned up.

One night in Tommy’s apartment, Rachel looked up from the
Daily News
and told her husband, “Your father’s really having a field day, isn’t he?”

“He’s as happy as a clam,” Tommy said. He was putting on his jacket when Rachel said, “Are you going out again tonight?”

He nodded. “Up to the library. Got to study for the bar exam.”

“Tommy, do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.

“What?”

“You go out mostly every night,” she said. “How much studying do you have to do? You should have everything memorized by now.”

“Trust me, honey, no girlfriend. I’m really working.”

Rachel smiled. “I know. I’ll see you when you get home.”

Tommy kissed her and left, but walking away from the apartment he wondered if he was doing the right thing.

For nearly a year, he had gone out, days and nights, whenever he could, hanging out in poolrooms, in small neighborhood speakeasies, in places where he was not known and where small-time hoods congregated, listening to their bragging, encouraging them in their crackpot schemes, and then phoning Captain Cochran at home and reporting anything he thought was real.

Around the gin mills, he was known only as Vito.

He had never told anyone about his secret life, and the longer he lived it, the more heavily it weighed on him that he was deceiving Rachel. But some instinct told him that there was danger in telling anyone.

And, besides, Rachel would want to know why he persisted in it, why he had put himself in the front lines of fighting crime when his career as a lawyer waited for him. Tommy wondered how he could answer that question, especially to someone who was naive about the mob’s corroding influence. For Rachel was like Tommy had been: she thought that everything would be all right and the mob would stay on its side of the street and out of the lives of normal law-abiding citizens. But how to tell her about how the mob had reached into his own family; how they had brought Nilo a new life as a murderer; how a gang leader named Luciano had tried to corrupt and twist Tina’s life?

How to tell her that law, real law, didn’t start in courtrooms; it started on the streets with cops fighting crime and that he could think of no more important career for a man to have.
And so, I’ve grown up to be my father,
Tommy thought ruefully.

Someday, and probably soon, he was going to have to own up to all of it. Probably Rachel would force him off the job, but he would not deal with that until he had to.

He pulled his leather jacket tighter around him and walked downtown, toward the city’s garment district.

*   *   *

S
OON AFTER THE
N
EW
Y
EAR,
Tony was called into Captain Cochran’s office at the headquarters of the Italian Squad. “Luciano’s been squawking that you’re harassing him.”

“Oh?”

“He complained to city hall and city hall’s complaining to me.”

“Are you telling me to lay off?”

“Look, I know there’s something personal between you two, and that’s none of my business. But don’t you have enough to do? We’re making arrests right and left and you already work twelve to sixteen hours a day. Why bother with Luciano? He’s just another gee.”

“No, he’s not, Captain. While no one’s been looking, he’s taking over everything in this city. Nothing moves without Luciano’s okay. The bootlegging’s his; the whores are his; the shakedowns are his. It’s all Luciano. And this has nothing to do with personal.”

Cochran looked exasperated. “Come on, Tony. We’ve got Masseria and Maranzano killing each other’s guys on the street, and you’re worried about some guy nobody ever heard of.” Cochran leaned forward across his desk. “Tony, Luciano’s got friends. You keep this up and you’re going to get your head handed to you. That’s just friendly advice.”

Tony stood. “Thanks, Captain, for your concern.” He left the office, and on his way home that night picked up a retirement form from the personnel clerk. That night, after Anna had gone to sleep, he sat at the kitchen table and filled out the form.

He had told Captain Cochran that his scrutiny of Luciano was not personal, but of course it was.
The son of a bitch robbed me of my daughter.

Tina was singing now at the new Midtown club that had been named for her. It was Nilo Sesta’s club, and that galled Tony even more. She had gone from working for Luciano, one thug, to working for another thug.

What ever happened to my little girl who used to play at being a nun? Yes, Captain, it’s personal. Very goddamned personal.

He finished filling in the form but left the date blank, then put it inside his jacket pocket.

*   *   *

A
T THE END OF
J
ANUARY,
Sofia Sesta gave birth to a son. He was a healthy handsome boy of eight pounds, two ounces. His parents named him Salvatore. Maranzano, his godfather, was present at the private baptism and christening service, which Nilo decided to hold in their apartment because it was not safe to spend too much time in public, not even in church.

Tina did not attend but sent flowers and a silver cup for the baby. After everyone had left the apartment, Sofia threw the flowers and the cup in the garbage.

• Two weeks later, in Chicago, Dr. Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, a local optometrist, walked into the garage of the S.M.C. Cartage Company at 2122 North Clark Street. He had no business there, but he knew the place was the headquarters of some local bootleggers and he liked to associate with criminals. For their part, the thugs treated Schwimmer like a mascot, letting him hang around, in return for which he made sure their wives and girlfriends and families got the very best in the latest eyewear.
    
In the garage that morning were six members of the Bugs Moran gang: Adam Heyer, James Clark, Al Weinshank, John May, and two brothers, Pete and Frank Gusenberg, who had fearsome reputations as Moran gunmen.
    
A few minutes after Schwimmer arrived, five men—three of them in police uniforms—drove up to the garage in a black sedan, the kind often used by police. As the men went inside, walking past a German shepherd named “Highball,” Moran and two of his henchmen, Ted Newberry and Willie Marks, pulled up across the street. They saw the men in police uniforms and decided to avoid the police raid by going for coffee instead.
    
Meanwhile, inside the garage, the men in police uniforms lined the seven men up against a bare brick wall. While the men’s backs were turned, two of the “policemen” pulled Thompson submachine guns from under their uniform coats and cut down all seven men. Six of them were dead before they hit the floor; Frank Gusenberg died in the hospital, refusing to name his assailants.
    
The gunmen had disappeared, but in case there were any doubts who they worked for, Moran cleared it up later when he told reporters: “Only Capone kills like that.”

• The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre ended Capone’s troubles with the remnants of Dion O’Banion’s Irish gang, which had continued to oppose him. Its members drifted off and Moran himself seemed to vanish from sight. He was reduced to supporting himself by petty burglaries and armed robberies and died in prison.

*   *   *

“
T
HIS IS A GOOD IDEA,”
Joe Masseria said, slapping the back of his hand across the newspaper. “That Capone, he knows how to deal with people who cross him.”

He grinned across the table at Luciano, who sipped his coffee and then made a show of inserting a cigarette into a long holder before lighting it.

When Luciano did not answer, Masseria said, “This is what I want you to do, Charlie. Hit that Maranzano. Hit all them bastards who take his side. Let’s get rid of that Castellammare
stronzo
once and for all.”

“It sounds good, doesn’t it, Joe?” Luciano said in his usual soft voice.

“Goddamn right.”

“But there’s one thing wrong with it,” Luciano said, his voice patient, as if he were a schoolteacher tutoring a slow student.

“Yeah?” Masseria said suspiciously.

“Inside a year, Alphonse is going to be in jail,” Luciano said.

“Bullshit. Not in Chicago. He owns that city. Like I oughta own this one for all the money we’re paying those politicians.” He looked across the small restaurant and bellowed, “Hey, girlie. What the hell, you on strike? Some more coffee here, huh?”

“You’re right, Joe, he owns Chicago, but this is bigger than Chicago. The whole country’s gonna go nuts because of this … what do they call it? Valentine’s Massacre. I give Al a year, tops. And if we start acting the same way, I give us a year, too.”

“And what do we do meanwhile?” Masseria demanded. “Maranzano’s hit, what, eight of our guys? We let him keep that shit up?”

“We’ve hit more than that of his,” Luciano said. “What we do is we just keep defending ourselves and let this blow over. This city’s asleep, let it stay asleep. Why get everybody annoyed?”

“Who’s asleep? You got that goddamn Flying Squad riding around busting up everything. I thought this Tony Falcone was a friend of yours.”

“Never my friend,” Luciano said.

“Well, you was humping his daughter, right? Didn’t that put you in the family?”

“I was humping his daughter ’cause she was good in bed and she made a lot of money for me at the club and because I knew it made old man Falcone nuts to think that his daughter was my whore. I just wanted to make his life miserable.”

“Now he makes me miserable.”

“Just a lot of newspaper stories. We’re bigger than ever. Let things be for now.”

Masseria’s brow was wrinkled, as if in confusion, and then slowly he let a big smile cross his broad, stupid face.

“I got it,” he said. “We try to keep things quiet and then, when they are, then we hit Maranzano. That’s good thinking, Charlie.”

“Leave Maranzano to me,” Luciano said.

After his weekly breakfast with Masseria, Luciano went to the small office Meyer Lansky kept in a nondescript building near the city’s Bowery.