Mile High (11 page)

When rum became the currency of the slave trade in the last half of the 18th century, Americans drank more than at any time in history and this thirst grew as rum became one of the important factors in the colonial economy …

Eddie grinned with pride in himself for conceiving exactly how it could all be accomplished as he read that the first prohibition law had been passed in the colony of Georgia in 1735 and that all those for whom the law ostensibly had been passed immediately neglected their work and devoted themselves to plotting how they could insure a free and ample supply of ardent spirits. The first moonshine stills ever operated had started to work. Rum runners from the Bahamas began an extensive trade. Blind tigers sprang up in every Georgia settlement until there were as many drinking places per capita in the colony as there were in London, and bootleggers worked in all districts selling rum from peddler's packs.

… the movement to prohibit alcohol must be seen, in the largest sense, as a struggle between rural and urban America. The first colonists brought with them the doctrine that rural life was good, that city life was wicked. The farmer was the backbone of the nation. The new Constitution was written to protect rural rights, i.e., disproportionate representation in the U. S. Senate of the rural countryside as against the cities. State capitals were founded in isolated rural villages such as Albany and Harrisburg. State taxation gave the power to the rural people, whose taxes were not sufficient payment for it. Birth in a log cabin was essential to the suitability of presidential candidates.

By eleven o'clock that night Eddie was marveling and making carefully separate sidenotes on such things as the most famous medical man of his time, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Surgeon General of the Continental Army and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his pamphlet of 1785, “An Inquiry into the Effect of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body and Mind,” laying out fundamental lines on which all prohibition efforts to follow would be argued.

… for the transition period between drunkenness and temperance Dr. Rush recommended the use of laudanum or opium mixed with wine.

In 1788, Fisher Ames, the man who had defeated Samuel Adams for Congress, campaigned on this statement: “If any man supposes that a mere law can turn the tastes of people from ardent spirits to malt liquor, he has a most romantic notion of legislative power.”

However, the College of Physicians in Philadelphia was influenced by the Rush Report to send recommendations to Congress in December 1790, when the legislature was considering new revenue laws against West Indies rum and the Rush Report caused the formation of the first temperance associations in America.

The first temperance society in the world was organized in March 1808 by Dr. Billy J. Clark, “a young and intrepid physician” of Moreau, Saratoga County, New York. Within the next decade temperance societies were formed in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Pennsylvania. Only candidates who guaranteed to support a prohibition law, state-wide, were endorsed for the legislature, and it was demonstrated that the people would vote for him regardless of party lines. The individual response of these citizen-voters, however, was so overwhelmingly in favor of hard liquor and against all laws that sought to prohibit their manufacture and sale that every manner of bootlegging and moonshining was resorted to until the temperance movement lost all it had gained.

Eddie was awed by the stultifying
emotion
that managed to wreck perfectly sound plans decade after decade. He had solid admiration for the firm grip of the temperance movement on the schoolbooks used in all public schools that taught from the earliest grades that alcohol was evil, but he deplored that none of them seemed to see the path by which they could follow up and consolidate such gains. The profit motive was missing, he decided. No American movement could hope for success unless great numbers of people could be helped to share in the clearly available profits from their work. “… 122,000,000 copies of
McGuffey's Reader
were in the schools and they formed the minds of rural Protestant America,” and “In 1873 the Women's Christian Temperance Union persuaded the Congress and state legislatures to pass laws requiring temperance teaching in all public schools. By 1902, every state and territory except Arizona had such a law but, as a foremost critic wrote: ‘There can be no indoctrination without misrepresentation.' A sample instruction in all schools: ‘A cat or dog may be killed by causing it to drink a small quantity of alcohol … it often happens that the children of those who drink have weak minds or become crazy as they grow older.'”

Clearly alcohol
in the cities
was the terrible threat to the nation from the point of view of the temperance societies. The census figures showed that wicked city dwellers and the foreign-born were nearly half the population of the United States. This made the drys desperate and entreated urgency. The old rural America was being attacked.

… Frances E. Willard, 34, Dean of Women at Northwestern University, was elected president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1879 when the Union was organized in twenty-three states. Within a decade she had established branches in every state, city, town, village and hamlet, and the total prohibition movement took over the control of the most vigorous part of the prohibition industry. These gallant helpers praised the mothers and the schools that indoctrinated the young for thirty years. They pointed out the great evils ascribed to the Pope, atheists and the devil, to jazz and to bootleggers, expressed the dread of the great social change and the struggle as to whether citizens shall be free to drink alcohol as a test of strength between social orders. Through this great trumpet it was established, hopefully forever, that the determined rock of prohibition was the granite base on which the evangelical church militant is founded, and with it are involved an entire way of life and an ancient tradition. The overcoming of prohibition will mean the emergence of the cities as the dominant force in America—as dominant politically as they are already dominant economically.

When he finished editing, West called Willie Tobin to have him begin to choose a printer-binder whose price would be right in consideration of the city printing business Eddie would be willing to swing his way. He asked Willie to have such a printer at the hotel at nine-thirty the next morning. He awoke his secretary by messenger to her father's house at one-fifteen in the morning. His note asked her to assemble five typists for emergency work on day and night shifts and asked her to come to the hotel the next morning at nine forty-five with two strong office boys and a wagon to transport eleven volumes of typescript to the assembled typists at the bank.

At a quarter to four in the morning he changed his mind. He called Arnold Goff at the 38th Street gambling house and asked him to please secure the use of his father's loft for emergency typing, then he sent another messenger to awaken Miss Mechanic's family so that she could receive the revised instructions.

After he had discussed the project with Miss Mechanic and the people from the printer-binders and they had all left with the typescripts to take them to the loft, Eddie donned police-issue storm rubbers, a warm scarf and a greatcoat and went out in the rain to march with the Tammany contingent in the procession of fifty thousand people mourning the deaths of one hundred and forty-three women who had been trapped in the Triangle shirtwaist fire.

After the parade he and John Kullers went to Delmonico's for a business meeting. They ate downstairs. The Leader was still touchy about not having been warned about the Pick, Heller & O'Connell plan. Kullers was a bulky, pink man who wore silver-rimmed glasses and examined everything he touched—plates, napkin hems, handshakes and cigarettes. After holding a short beer up to strong light for minute analysis he sipped it.

“What do you expect to find when you stare at beer that way, John?” Eddie asked.

“You never know. Eleven years ago some smart guy slipped a goldfish into a beer on me. And I caught poison ivy from a baseball bat. Always look is best, Eddie.”

“You know a man named Arnold Goff, John? A lawyer?”

“I don't think so. But bring him in here, let me look him over top to bottom, and I'll tell you exactly.”

“I'll send him to you tomorrow. He's going to run the gambling and some of the payoffs for me.”

“Is that so? How'll I know him? We don't want me talking that kind of business to the wrong guy, do we, Eddie?”

“He'll be wearing a mauve necktie, John. A middle-sized, pale man.”

“Got you.” The waiter set a steak down in front of Kullers, who pierced it at one end with his fork (which he had previously scrutinized) and lifted it slowly off the plate, watching it closely.

“What do you think you might find there, John?”

“It could be anything, Eddie. A man in Twin Lakes, Pennsylvania, put itching powder on a steak and gave it to his brother-in-law as a joke. The man choked to death before his eyes. What can I do for Goff, Eddie?”

“Get to know him. Put the word out that I sold out the houses to him. After he operates for four or five months I think we could recommend to the other leaders that he handle all their contact work for police payoffs and like that. It could mean cleaner politics on election day. What do you think, John?”

“I like it. And I think the boys'll go fer't.” He lifted a huge baked potato out of its dish and slipped a jeweller's loop over his right eye to go over the surface of the potato skin carefully. “Your father, God rest his soul, coulda told you what the blight did to the potatoes in Ireland. The blight come from right in this country, you know.”

“Let me know what you think after you look Goff over,” West said.

It was Wednesday night and Eddie and Goff had dined at Mouquin's. “I'm selling you the three gambling houses,” Eddie explained, “then you'll assign them back to me. Think you can run them?”

Goff gave him a wintry smile.

“Two percent of the net to you. My man keeps the books. As soon as I sell out to you we won't know each other, except as depositor and banker. This is the last time we'll be together in public. You are about to become a famous gambler. I'm just a banker, nothing more or less. If you want to talk on the phone, call Willie Tobin. If you have straight political problems with cops or with muscle, call John Kullers. This is the operating policy: Any client is entitled to win up to twenty-five hundred dollars. That's fair both ways. But if a client pushes to win more than twenty-five hundred, then you send a mechanic in to take it back from him. Don't take it all. Drop him down to a thousand ahead, then pull the mechanic and let him try to start to run it up again.”

“You must have three marvelous operations.”

“Yes. My father thought so. He established the bank with a lot of that money. You'll think so, too, when you count your two percent of the handle. But I have other plans in work, and in a few years, when you count your two percent from all that, you'll know that the three gambling houses were only your front, my friend.”

He left Goff at the 45th Street house at two-fifty the next morning and went to a brownstone on West 37th Street. He strode past the parlor and went to the back of the building on the main floor, entered what appeared to be a cloakroom, then let himself into a small, cosy room where a colored waiter in rich gold and purple brought him a bottle of Vichy water. Five minutes later Rhonda Healey came in, an extremely handsome, thirtyish woman who wore a long sequined gown and long sequined gloves and hair piled on top of her head in a haute-bouffante style that had expired about nine years before. She greeted Eddie warily and sat down at the small table. She had been Paddy's last sweetheart because he had been certain she had never been a whore. “I know whores for over sixty years,” he told Eddie, “and Rhonda was either big-time show business someplace or she's from a rich family and just likes to be around this business. Aaron Burr was in and outta fifty notch joints and never fooled once.”

“I missed you at the funeral,” Eddie told her.

“I was there.”

“They told me.”

“He was a great man.”

“He was.”

“What can I do for you, Eddie?”

“Before Paddy passed on we had talked about plans for reorganization when the right time came and—”

“Am I being fired?” She started to stand up. He waved her back into the chair.

“Why should you be fired?” he asked after she had perched on the edge of her chair for a while.

“That's what I meant—I was shocked to think—”

“But why should you think it?”

She couldn't look at him. Paddy had proved she wasn't a whore but he hadn't proved she wasn't a thief.

“The way you did that—it was as though you wanted to run away,” he said regretfully. “Now I'll have to run an audit on you and your bar and your towel count and your financial life.” They stared at each other. She shrugged. She said, “I've been dragging two hundred a week. You couldn't have found it. I sell them my own wine.”

“If I couldn't have found it why did you tell me?”

“Because before you'd let a woman beat you out of anything you'd tear this whole business apart.”

“You're smart.”

“Okay, Eddie. I'll be gone in the morning.”

“No. I'm glad we had this talk. You were too good to be true, and to be honest, it had me worried. I mean, Paddy trusted you, and that was preposterous for Paddy. Let it go. What I came in to tell you is that I want to sell all eight cat-houses to you, then have you sign them back to a few companies of mine. After that you'll be in charge of the whole operation.”

“You mean Paddy owned
eight
of these joints?”

“This is the best one. Your end of the operation will be two percent of the net, and when the word gets out you are the owner maybe some people will try to move in. If that happens call Willie Tobin at the Franklin Street saloon or at the New York A.C. He'll take care of everything. As always, I'm just another customer. Okay?”