Jericho (11 page)

I had the Stick with me. I couldn’t find a natural way to carry it. Use it like a cane or carry it under my arm? Nothing seemed right. I thought about sticking it down my pants leg but that’d be ridiculous. So I just tried to be nonchalant with it.

Early every morning the drivers at the big post office on Georgia leave their trucks right there in the loading area in the garage and go off to do something—I’m not sure what; get their work orders for the day or punch the time cards or just check in—leaving em unattended. If they’re going to the can, they wouldn’t be doing it at the very same time every day to the minute. I knew which ones left their motor running, which shut their engine off but sometimes left the key in the ignition, which ones practised safer habits than that. The trick was to move quick like a rabbit when at least one truck didn’t have anybody around it and there were no other drivers in sight and no dispatcher or supervisor walking the ramp. Intelligence told me that usually every morning at this time there was such an opportunity, but it was brief. What
it came down to was a question of being fast enough to take advantage of it.

I was wearing a dark blue shirt, zippered jacket and blue work pants that almost matched and second-hand black lace-ups and new white socks, though I wasn’t wearing any of the necessary insignias. I felt like an idiot. My hair was tied back in a ponytail. Most of all I was out of place because of the Stick. I was carrying it out in the open but trying not to make a big deal out of it. I carried it like it was just something I always had under my arm, like everyone had one.

The moment came and I grabbed it like it was a passing freight. I took a quick look in the back. There were stacks of empty mail sacks, really a lot of em. This was an extra blessing: at least I wasn’t stealing mail. I drove out as quickly as I could without being too obvious about how I did it. Beth wasn’t waiting right outside her place the way she was supposed to be. I thought of honking but then thought better of it. I double-parked and went inside to get her.

[This was my grandfather Lonnie talking years ago about stuff that happened even farther back:]

When I finally caught up with Cappy Smith, he was over in Chinatown, winding his watch. Chinatown was only a couple of blocks long and you couldn’t really call it Chinese. It was just this smear of runny neon, a puddle of light across the Detroit River from Snaketown, which is where the play was. Boy, you should have seen old Windsor in those days. It was really something. The play! You can’t begin to imagine. To think that they tore it all down to put up some goddam park.

Today the young smartasses call it To Let Street. But in the old days Ouellette was like the extension of Woodward on the other side of the river, which was in its glory, not like today. All that’s gone now. But I can remember it if I stand at Ouellette looking east by Sandwich. There on the left side is where the British American Hotel was, down by the ferry docks. The BA was a Victorian-looking place, very elegant, very old-fashioned and flush with play if you knew how to open your eyes. You could get play on room service in those days. Of course, the Citizens never quite twigged to this, especially the Yanks, who couldn’t get over the idea that they had to come south to cross into Canada. Somehow that pissed off their whole concept of what geography was. It confused them. Maybe that helps explain how they were such pigeons.

From the BA you could spit to Riverside Drive, which was lined with big mansions built by the boys back in the olden days. When I was growing up, there were still people there who’d done business with the Purple Gang—Jewish gangsters, very famous. They showed you could unionize anything, including murder.

[When Lonnie said this, I thought of Elvis singing “Jailhouse Rock”: “The whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang.”]

This was different from what was called the Jewish Navy. That isn’t some anti-Jewish insult; this is what they called themselves. It was an organization that ran booze across the river in fast boats during the spring, summer and fall and used cars pulling sleds the rest of the time. A lot of the stuff was flown straight to Chicago. A lot was sent all over the Midwest and the northeastern states, sometimes in big
tanker trucks, not even bottled. But of course a lot got drunk in Detroit too. Everybody was running booze on some level. People paid doctors a couple of bucks to write them prescriptions and then took the bottles over to Detroit in a suitcase. Penny-ante stuff like that. There were whole families doing it, whole streets and neighbourhoods. I’ll tell you this, speaking as a history buff, Prohibition brought people closer together. People that made money together stayed together. People that had to share secrets had a bond that was too dangerous to break. Old Log Cabin was the best there was.

No more than a couple of blocks down from the BA was the Prince Edward Hotel. It was near the entrance to the Tunnel, which people called the Funnel. Windsor was the wide end where you poured in all the booze, Detroit was the narrow end where it came out all day and night. The Prince Eddy was a big modern place with a plain front like a face with no expression. Very ritzy. Some of Snaketown’s most prominent individuals kept rooms there full-time. That’s one of the signs of a city, you know: when people live in hotels and leave their shoes out at night to be polished and come down in the morning and always get a cigar at the stand in the lobby, even if it’s a cigar for later, and always find a cab right outside. That’s practically the whole definition of Civilization. That’s the way we used to think when I was a young fellow your age. The fashion back then was for wide, wide trousers. I had a pair with twenty-four-inch cuffs, can you believe it, and a crease you could shave your face with.

[Lonnie laughed one of those laughs that sounded like it might turn into a wheeze or something even worse.]

My buddies and I would go over to Detroit to drink and chase the girls and listen to the bands. We’d always start out at Woodward and Monroe and end up someplace in the Circus. But that’s another story. I was starting to tell you about Cappy Smith, about the murder of Cappy Smith. He was the same age as me when he got deep-freezed the night after I went looking for him because I had overheard that bad things were going to happen. So I always felt that I was living out the rest of my days on his behalf, if you know what I mean. They got him while he sat having dinner with his girlfriend and her family in an ordinary-looking house. Four men, at least two with kerchiefs over the lower part of their faces, busted into the kitchen. Words were exchanged. One guy shot Cappy in the gut with a
.45
, then kicked him in the face and ribs. Another one robbed him of a few thousand dollars’ worth of jewellery and cash. Cappy and the intruders all seemed to be acquainted, though Cappy refused to identify them during the half-hour he had left to live. It didn’t look like the usual robbery. What it looked like was people from Detroit were delivering a message to the Mayor of Snaketown.

This was an incredibly big story at the time because there hadn’t been a really high-class gangster killing on the Canadian side in a very long while. Lots of sledgehammer stuff, but no killing. Even the Toronto papers went real big with it. Especially the Toronto papers. They all had people down here, swarming over the place. I remember that the front page of the
Globe and Mail
next morning had a black banner headline with type two inches tall:
WINDSOR GANG WAR CLIMAXED BY MURDER.
The papers were all sensational in those days, not that there wasn’t stuff
to get sensational about. Aside from the fellows involved, I was probably one of the last couple dozen people to see Cappy alive. I really got scared I was going to be dragged into it somehow.

Cappy lived right here where we’re talking now, at the Dempster. Needless to say it was quite the place in those days. Big lobby with a humidor and all the out-of-town papers. It was owned by Harry Hourmouzis, long dead, who already had another hotel not far away. He was a well-known Lebanese all-round athlete. Not a professional, but he’d played baseball in an amateur league—that kind of thing. You were always reading his name in the sports pages of the
Border Cities Star.
His other place, the Royal, which still had an old sign on it that said
YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME
, was a centre of betting activity. By this I mean playing the ponies. The numbers racket was pretty much confined to certain segments of the population, but people all over the city, hell, all over the country, were nuts about betting on the horses in those days, even more than people are now about pro sports and lotteries put together. Besides the two tracks here, there were the four tracks in Toronto—the original Woodbine, Thorncliffe, Long Branch and Dufferin—plus of course Fort Erie and Hamilton. But this wasn’t enough to satisfy folks back then, and they bet on races at all the American tracks too. There was even one betting shop in downtown Windsor that broadcast the radio results over loudspeakers outside. The cop walking the beat would hear all this stuff about the fourth at Narragansett and he’d have to just carry on like he was hard of hearing. The rumour—that’s what we called the truth in those days—was that the Lebanese was paying some of the people at the station house to play deaf.

Of course there would be raids from time to time. Usually they fell on a Tuesday. That’s because a certain Protestant minister would preach a sermon on Sunday about the evils of gambling and the
Star
would publish it the following day. But the raids never seemed to surprise anybody. Least of all the Lebanese, who had long since expanded into fancy gambling clubs where there were crap tables and roulette and so on, in addition to bookmaking. Later someone set up a rival spot, the St. Clair Sporting Club. In these places outside the city limits, the rumours were about the politicians and the provincial cops instead of certain people on the Windsor force.

Remember, this was in the forties, before you could buy a legal drink of liquor in a cocktail bar in this province, despite the way it had supplied booze to half of America all during the twenties and into the thirties. Once in the late thirties a friend of mine, a grown man, actually got pinched for buying tobacco on a Sunday. It wasn’t the tobacco that was illegal; it was doing business on a Sunday. Of course he was a nobody like me. Rules like that didn’t apply to the Mayor of Snaketown or the Lebanese, who, everybody said, were friends of the working man, real square dealers. But this reputation took a quick tumble when, after one of the newspaper “crusades,” the cops raided the Lebanese’s permanent suite at the Prince Edward (the Lebanese didn’t live in his own hotel). They missed him—he got away through a back door—but he dropped a key that turned out to fit one of the security boxes in the hotel safe. They got a court order to open it. What they found was a box full of loaded dice. They looked and felt like regular dice, but no matter how long you rolled them you got nothing but sevens and elevens.

Besides the gambling there was the prostitution. A carryover from the horse-and-buggy days was the rule that to get a beer parlour licence you needed to qualify as a hotel and have sleeping rooms upstairs. Even the smallest beer parlour had at least three of these rooms. This was a great bonanza to the neighbourhood as the rooms were rented out to whores by the hour. The morality cops especially made prostitution raids, but the business was so spread out and so tied up with the gambling that it couldn’t be separated out nicely. There was a lot of jockeying for power, if you’ll pardon my play on words. Cappy Smith, a former beer-runner and one-time boxer (though he was just a short guy), was an example. He was a muscle type that would put the squeeze on some of the pimps—you know, for a rake-off—while also making book. As the investigation developed, it came to look like bigger fry were putting the squeeze on him in return. This is his story as best I can remember it, and I think I remember it pretty clearly.

Like I was telling you, when Cappy went in the Frigidaire it was big news. There were gangsters in Canada but Canada was also a place where American gangsters liked to come to play or hide out. There were reliable witnesses that saw no less than Al Capone in Windsor briefly, about the time he was having his tax troubles in Chicago, where more than five hundred hoodlums got killed by other gangsters during the fourteen years that the Volstead Act was in force. (Five hundred killings, a few arrests, no convictions.) It’s a wonder that it took twenty years from the start of American Prohibition for this particular form of public entertainment, what the papers called the gangland slaying, to arrive in Canada, which is what was happening in the Cappy Smith
case if you believed what you read, which nobody in their right mind did in those days. I saved the clippings.

[Lonnie picked up an old scrapbook. The paste had shrunk, making the pages curl.]

It says here that “the murder of Smith was swiftly followed by one of the greatest manhunts in Canada’s criminal annals.” This meant they were rounding up all the rounders they knew and throwing them in the tank overnight on vagrancy charges. The cops were told to bring in Eyetalians especially. (That’s how the word was pronounced back then—and Cappy’s real name wasn’t Smith, needless to say, it was something like Cappy Vermicelli.) Cappy’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend and her family had told the investigating officers that the gang that burst into the house “looked like Eyetalians.” When they finally broke the case, the two suspects were Scots, the MacLeod brothers—Donald, who was about thirty and was always called Mickey, and Sandy, who was only nineteen. To tell their story I’ve got to tell you more about how things were run in those days.

Gangs looked to gambling and girls and were always trying to figure some way to control the whole pot in both rackets. But this was hard to do because of how everything was divided up not just according to neighbourhoods but street corner by street corner. You’d never see the Lebanese down around the Dempster here. He may have
been
here, but you’d never see him. He was the big cheese, but he had I don’t know how many little cheeses working for him all over downtown. Cappy was one of them. Cappy also owned a little roadhouse of his own outside the city (it was famous for its barbecue), but he made his public appearances, conducted his real business, at the Prince Eddy coffee shop, a
great place in those days, run by a husband and wife. The wife personally made all the desserts and pastries, including a wonderful pineapple pie. I think she invented it. I’ve never seen it on any other menu and I never pass that corner even now without tasting it.