The Letter Writer (36 page)

After finishing any novel which combines the real and the imagined, some readers inevitably ask how much of it was true. Quite a lot, in the case of this book, especially with regard to the unholy alliance that U.S. Naval Intelligence and District Attorney Frank Hogan cooked up with the Mafia to secure the New York waterfront against sabotage and enemy submarines.

It is also well established that the burning of the luxury liner
Normandie
was a major impetus to the arrangement. Even though a subsequent Navy inquiry established that the fire was an accident, that didn't stop several Mafia figures—Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky, in particular—from claiming years later that mob hit man Albert Anastasia, a Luciano ally, had arranged the burning of the ship in hopes of engineering a better deal for his imprisoned boss. For me, their claims raised the possibility that, at the very least, a fellow as unpredictable as Anastasia might have indeed concocted such a plot, even if he never brought it to fruition.

The subplot involving Harris Euston, Herman Keller, and the scheme to raise capital for the German government by selling Reichsmarks for dollars is also rooted in fact, as described in Charles Higham's 1984 book,
Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot.

It's interesting to look at some of the well-documented particulars of the Navy-Mafia deal to see how they align with events in this novel. Naval Intelligence operatives at first tried to do the job themselves, but failed miserably when mob guys and their union allies easily saw through their cloak-and-dagger approach. Navy Captain Roscoe C. MacFall then decided that his intelligence people should enlist the help of the underworld, and his point man was Lieutenant Commander Charles R. “Red” Haffenden.

MacFall and Haffenden sought advice from DA Frank Hogan and his rackets investigator, Murray Gurfein, on how to best approach the Mafia. Gurfein suggested that the Navy contact Joseph “Socks” Lanza, because of his control over the Fulton Fish Market. Lanza agreed to do what he could, but soon discovered that many colleagues suspected a trap because Lanza was under indictment at the time. Lanza suggested that the only way to get everyone on board would be to obtain the blessing of mob boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who was serving a thirty- to fifty-year sentence at a state prison in remote Dannemora, New York. Gurfein telephoned Luciano's attorney, Moses Polakoff, who suggested Meyer Lansky as the best choice to approach Luciano on the government's behalf.

Lansky, as he tells Cain in chapter 41, was indeed patriotic about the war effort, and about opposing Hitler. He really did get into violent scrapes at Bundist rallies in New York in the 1930s, and he really did try to enlist in the Army at the age of thirty-nine. And, just as described in this book, he helped initiate the Navy's waterfront security deal with the Mafia by participating in a face-to-face meeting with Gurfein and Polakoff on a Saturday morning in April 1942, at the Longchamps Restaurant on 57th Street—the same breakfast meeting which Danziger witnesses in chapter 12.

Just as described here, the three men discussed moving Luciano to a more convenient location. Also as depicted in the book, the three men then continued their discussion by taking a taxi to the Hotel Astor, where they met Red Haffenden, who indeed had a suite of offices at the hotel under the auspices of the Executives Association of Greater New York. From then on, Haffenden used the Astor office as a sort of safe house for his increasingly frequent meetings with mob figures, although later he became so chummy that they began brazenly visiting him at Naval Intelligence offices in the federal building on Church Street.

State authorities did, in fact, move Luciano to a more convenient location at Great Meadow prison, and Lansky became a regular visitor as part of the deal. A wide array of other notorious mob figures soon joined the parade to Great Meadow under the auspices of the Navy arrangement. No one ever bothered to bug those meetings, and it has always been assumed that Luciano discussed matters well beyond his work for his country. Thus did the U.S. Navy make it easier for Luciano to keep running his criminal enterprises.

Although Hogan gave his blessing to the arrangement, he never lost his skepticism of some of the figures involved. He ordered a wiretap of Lanza's phone at the Meyers Hotel, and in one instance recorded Haffenden approving of activities that resulted in mob figures beating up a union official who was trying to organize a strike on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Other excesses were also overlooked or glossed over. As one historian has noted, there were approximately thirty unsolved murders on the New York waterfront between 1942 and 1950.

Gurfein, as mentioned in the book, did leave the DA's office not long after helping bring about the arrangement, to become an officer in the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA.

But the biggest lingering question mark concerns the role played by Anastasia, whose Murder, Inc. was known by then to be operating out of Midnight Rose's candy store in Brooklyn. If he had indeed pursued some sort of plot to burn the
Normandie,
as Luciano and Lansky later claimed, how would he have reacted if fate had preempted his plans with an accidental burning? That tantalizing possibility—and the current lack of a clear and convincing answer—drove much of my plot.

This, in turn, left me wondering whether Anastasia would have taken it upon himself to remove all traces of such a plot, in order to keep from jeopardizing the deal his boss had negotiated with the Navy. If so, how would Anastasia's associates have reacted to his possible excesses? The historical record provides the answer I eventually chose for my plot: In June of 1942, just as the Navy-Mafia arrangement was hitting its stride, and only a few months before Anastasia's fortieth birthday, the government accepted his enlistment into the U.S. Army, which promptly posted him to Fort Indiantown Gap, in Pennsylvania.

There is also a historical basis for the character of Danziger, at least as far as his occupation as a letter writer is concerned. My inspiration for him was a seven-paragraph description of “Alexandroff the Letter-Writing Man” in a 1932 book,
The Real New York,
by Helen Worden, an item which also appeared under her byline in the “Talk of the Town” section of the October 8 issue of
The New Yorker
that same year. Worden depicted a tall, broad-shouldered “Cossack” of indeterminate age who wrote letters for his illiterate and non-English-speaking neighbors of the Lower East Side from an office on East 4th Street. He spoke Russian, Polish, and German, charged fifty cents per letter, and wrote about five letters per day. All well and good, but this was the passage that intrigued me the most, with its rich well of possibility:

When Alexandroff isn't writing letters, he is answering questions. Across his window is inscribed, “Alexandroff—Information.”…Through the thousands of letters he reads (his little shop is the local post office) he is closely linked with the current situation in the small towns of Europe…“Alexandroff is wise,” the neighbors say. “He knows much.”

After reading that, how could I possibly resist?

I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance in the course of researching this book: Ellen Belcher, special collections librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Barry Moreno, librarian at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum; Professor Trevar Riley-Reid, librarian at City College of New York; the staff of the Municipal Archives of the City of New York's Department of Records (especially for their help in using the wonderful archive of photos taken by the city tax assessor of every property in the city in 1938–40); and the staffs of the New York City Public Library and of the archives of the New-York Historical Society.

I would also like to thank the Graduate Center of the City University of New York's Center for Urban Research, for its wonderfull
y informative website,
1940snewyork.com
.

Dan Fesperman's travels as a writer have taken him to thirty countries and three war zones. His previous novels include
Lie in the Dark,
which won the Crime Writers' Association of Britain's John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel;
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows,
which won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller; and
The Prisoner of Guantánamo,
which won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers. He lives in Baltimore.