Legs (31 page)

But maybe he is by this time, Fogarty thought, for
he'd left Jack at the Albany Hospital, checked him into emergency
under a fake name, called Marcus and got Padalino to take him back to
his car at Coxsackie, Then, with the leftover whiskey in his lap, he
headed south, only to have a fly land on his hot dog bun. Bun with a
hole in it now.

The temperature gauge on the Studebaker was back in
the red, almost to 220 again. He drove toward the first possible
water, but saw no houses, no gas station. When the needle reached the
top of the gauge and the motor began to steam and clank, he finished
the whiskey dregs, shut off the ignition, threw the keys over his
shoulder into the weeds and started walking.

Four cars passed him in fifteen minutes. The fifth
picked him up when he waved his arms in the middle of the road, and
drove him three miles to the roadblock where eight state troopers
with shotguns, rifles, and pistols were waiting for him.

Poem from the
Albany
Times-Union

Long sleeping Rip Van Winkle seems
At last arousing from his dreams,
And
reaching for the gun at hand
To drive
invaders from his land.
The Catskills peace
and quiet deep
Have been too much disturbed
for sleep.
The uproars that such shootings
make
Have got the sleeper wide awake.

Fogarty called me and asked me to appear for him at
the arraignment, which I did. The charges had piled up: Kidnapping,
assault, weapons possession, and, in less than two weeks, the federal
investigators also charged both him and Jack with multiple
Prohibition Law violations. His bail was seventeen thousand five
hundred dollars and climbing. He said he knew a wealthy woman, an old
flame who still liked him and would help, and I called her. She said
she'd guarantee five thousand dollars, all she could get without her
husband knowing. Fogarty had more in the bank, enough to cover the
bail, but unfortunately his accounts, like Jack's and Alice's, were
all sequestered.

Two of Jack's transient henchmen—a strange, flabby
young man who wore a black wig that looked like linguine covered with
shoe polish, and a furtive little blond rat named Albert—also
inquired after my services, but I said I was overloaded.

"What are you going to do about bail?" I
asked Fogarty, and he suggested Jack. But Jack was having trouble
raising his own, for much of his cash was also impounded. Beyond
Jack, the woman, and his own inaccessible account, Fogarty had no
idea where to get cash. His new Oldsmobile was repossessed for
nonpayment a week after his arrest.

"How do you plan to pay me?" I asked him.

"I can't right now, but that money in the bank
is still mine."

"Not if they prove it was booze profits."

"You mean they can take it?"

"I'd say they already have."

I liked Joe well enough—a pleasant, forthright
fellow. But my legal career was built on defending not pleasant
people, but people who paid my fee. I follow a basic rule of legal
practice: Establish the price, get the money, then go to work. Some
lawyers dabble in charity cases, which, I suspect, is whitewash for
their chicanery more often than not. But I've never needed such
washing. It was not one of Jack's problems either. What he did that
had a charitable element to it was natural, not compensatory
behavior. He liked the woman whose cow needed a shed, and so he had
one built. He disliked old Streeter and showed it, which cost him his
empire. I've absorbed considerable outrage over Jack's behavior with
Streeter, but few people consider that he didn't really hurt the old
man. A few burns to the feet and ankles are picayune compared to what
might have happened. I understand behavior under stress, and I know
Streeter lived to an old age and Jack did not, principally because
Jack, when tested, was really not the Moloch he was made out to be.

Seeing events from this perspective, I felt and still
feel justified in defending Jack. Fogarty took a fall—twelve and a
half to fifteen, but served only six because of illness. I feel bad
that anyone has to go to prison, but Fogarty was Jack's spiritual
brother, not mine, and I am neither Jesus Christ nor any lesser
facsimile. I save my clients when I can, but I reserve the right of
selective salvation.

* * *

Jack took pellets in the right lung, liver, and back,
and his left arm was again badly fractured. The pellet in his lung
stayed there and seemed to do him little harm. The papers had him
near death for three days, but Doc Madison, my own physician,
operated on him and said he probably wasn't even close to dying. He
beat off an infection, was out of danger in ten days, and out of the
hospital in four and a half weeks. One hundred troopers lined the
road for forty-seven miles between Albany and Catskill the day he
left the hospital for jail, to discourage loyalists from snatching
away FDR's prize. New floodlights were installed on the Greene County
jail (lit up the world wherever he went, Jack did), and the guard
trebled to keep the star boarders inside: Jack, Fogarty, and Oxie,
who had gained fifty pounds in the eight months he'd been there. The
feds indicted Jack on fourteen charges: coercion, Sullivan Law and
Prohibition Law violations, conspiracy etc., and it was two weeks
before we could raise the new bail to put him back on the street. It
really wasn't the street, but the luxurious Kenmore Hotel in Albany,
a suite of rooms protected by inside and downstairs guards. The
troopers and the revenue men continued their probing of the
mountains. They found Jack's books with records of his plane rentals,
his commissioning the building of an oceangoing speedboat. They found
the empty dovecotes where he kept his carrier pigeons, his way of
beating the phone taps. They found his still on the Biondo farm, and,
from the records and notations, they also began turning up stashes of
whiskey, wine, and cordials of staggering dimension.

The neatly kept files and records showed Jack's
tie-in with five other mobs: Madden's, Vannie Higgins', Coll's, and
two in Jersey; distribution tie-ins throughout eighteen counties in
the state; brewery connections in Troy, Fort Edward, Coney Island,
Manhattan, Yonkers, and Jack's (formerly Charlie Northrup's) plant at
Kingston; plus dozens of storage dumps and way stations all through
the Adirondacks and Catskills, from the Canadian border to just west
of Times Square.

The first main haul was evaluated at a mere $l0,000
retail, but they kept hauling and hauling. Remember these
booze-on-hand statistics the next time anyone tells you Jack ran a
two-bit operation. (Source, federal): 350,000 pints and 300,000
quarts of rye whiskey, worth $4 a pint retail, or about $3.8 million;
200,000 quarts of champagne at $10 a bottle, or $2 million; 100,000
half-kegs of wine worth $2.5 million, plus 80,000 fifths of cordials
and miscellany for a grand estimated total of $10 million. Not a bad
accumulation for a little street kid from Philly.

Catskill was looking forward to Jack's trial, which
was going to be great for tourism. The first nationwide radio hookup
of any trial in American history was planned, and I think somehow
they would've sold tickets to it. A hundred businessmen, many of them
hotel and boardinghouse operators, paying up to three hundred dollars
in seasonal tribute to the emperor, held a meeting at the Chamber of
Commerce, a meeting remarkable for its anonymity. Fifty newsmen were
in town covering every development, but none of the hundred attendees
at that meeting were identified.

What they did was unanimously ratify a proclamation
calling on one another not to be afraid to testify against Jack and
the boys. Getting tough with the wolf in the cage. There was even
talk around town of burning down Jack's house. And finally, what
Warren Van Deusen had been trying and not trying to tell me about
Jack was that half a hundred people had written FDR letters over the
past two months, detailing Jack's depredations. It was that supply of
complaints, capped by the Streeter episode, which fired old Franklin
to do what he did. That and politics.

The abandoned getaway car of Jack's would-be killers
turned up with a fiat tire on Prospect Avenue in Catskill, behind the
courthouse. The Browning repeaters were still in it, along with a
Luger, a .38 Smith and Wesson, and two heavy Colt automatics with
two-inch barrels, all fully loaded. The car had a phony Manhattan
registration in the name of Wolfe, a nice touch, and when perspective
was gained, nobody blamed Murray for the big do. Too neat. Too well
planned. A Biondo job was Jack's guess.

My chief contribution to the history of these events
was to snatch the circus away from the Catskill greed mob. They
squawked that Jack was robbing them again, taking away their chance
to make a big tourist dollar. What I did was win us a change of venue
on grounds that a fair trial was impossible in Greene County. The
judge agreed and FDR didn't fight us. He hopscotched us up to
Rensselaer County. With Troy, the county seat, being my old stamping
grounds, I felt like Br'er Rabbit being tossed into the briar patch.

Attorney General Bennett paid homage to Jack at the
annual communion breakfast of the Holy Name Society of the Church of
St. Rose of Lima in Brooklyn. In celebration of Mother's Day he said
that if men of Diamond's type had listened to the guidance of their
mothers, they would not be what they were today.

"One of the greatest
examples of mother's care," the attorney general said, "is
the result which the lack of it has shown in the life of Legs
Diamond. Diamond never had a mother's loving care nor the proper
training. Environment has played a large part in making him the
notorious character he is today. A mother is the greatest gift a man
ever had."

* * *

Alice came out of the elevator, walked softly on the
rich, blue carpet toward the suite, and saw a form which stopped all
her random thought about past trouble and future anguish. The light
let her see the hairdo, and the hair was chestnut, not Titian; and
the face was hidden under half a veil on the little clawclutch of a
maroon hat. But Alice knew Kiki when she saw her, didn't she? Kiki
was locking the door to the room next to Alice's. Then she came
toward the elevator, seeming not to recognize Alice. Was it her?
Alice had seen her in the flesh only once. She was smaller now than
her photos made her out to be. And younger. Her face looked big in
the papers. And at the police station. She had sat there at the
station and let them take her picture. Crossed her legs for them.

She passed within inches
of Alice, explaining herself with the violent fumes of her perfume.
It was her. But if it truly was, why didn't she give some form of
recognition, some gesture, some look? Alice decided that, finally,
Kiki didn't have the courage to say hello. Coward type. Brazen street
slut. Values of an alleycat. Rut whore. Was it really her? Why was
she here? Would Jack know?

* * *

Kiki saw Alice coming as soon as she stepped out of
the room, and she immediately turned away to lock the door. She
recognized the fat calves under the long skirt with the ragged hem.
On the long chance Alice wouldn't recognize her, Kiki chose to ignore
her, for she feared Alice would turn her in. Kiki the fugitive. But
would Alice run that risk? Jack would kill her for that, wouldn't he?
Kitchen cow.

Why did life always seem
to be saltwater life for Kiki, never life with a sweetness? Violence
always taking Jack away. Violence always bringing back the old sow.
Meat and potatoes pig. Why was fate so awful to Kiki? And then for
people to say she had put the finger on Jack. What an awful thing to
think. The cow passed her by and said nothing. Didn't recognize her.
Kiki kept on walking to the elevator, then turned to see Alice
entering the room next to Kiki's own. But how could that be? Would
Alice break into Kiki's room? But for what? Why would she rent a room
next to Kiki's? How would she know which one Kiki was in? Kiki would
tell Jack about this, all right. But, Fat Mama, why are you here?

 
* **

The Kenmore had status appeal to Jack: historic haven
of gentility from the mauve decade until Prohibition exploded the
purple into scarlet splashes. Its reputation was akin to Saratoga's
Grand Union in Diamond Jim's and Richard Canfield's day. It was where
Matthew Arnold stayed when he came to Albany, and Mark Twain too, on
the night he lobbied for osteopathy in the Capitol. It was where
Ulysses S. Grant occasionally dined. Al Smith's son lived there when
Al was governor, and it was the dining room where any governor was
most likely to turn up in the new century. It boasted eventually of
Albany's longest bar, always busy with the chatter of legislators,
the room where a proper gentleman from Albany's Quality Row could get
elegantly swozzled among his peers.

Sure Jack knew this, even if he didn't know the
details, for the tradition was visible and tangible, in the old
marble, in the polished brass and mahogany, in the curly maple in the
lobby, in the stained glass, and the enduring absence of the hoi
polloi. Jack was always tuned in to any evidence of other people's
refinement.

He dominates more memories of the place even now than
Vincent Lopez or Rudy Vallee or Phil Romano or Doc Peyton or the
Dorsey Brothers or any other of the greater or lesser musicians who
held sway in the Rain-Bo room for so long, but whose light is already
dim, whose music has faded away, whose mythology has not been handed
on.