The Valachi Papers (17 page)

"They just know you're in the numbers with Bobby Doyle."

"Who tipped them off?"

"Shapiro," Block said.

Valachi recalls that he was not especially surprised at the news. "This Shapiro," he says, "was acting pretty big. A couple of days before he come up and told me how much he likes me. I just said, * Yeah?' but I was thinking, where does
he
get off telling me he likes me."

Valachi immethately alerted the three silent partners he and Doyle had—Frank Livorsi, Joe Stretch, and Joseph Rao:

Well, the next thing we know, two guys from this outfit walk into our main office in Harlem. It happens that Joe Rao is the only one of us there at the time, and these guys want to know how Bobby Doyle and me fit in with him. "We are all partners in the business," he says. So they tell him they want to give us protection for $500 a week.

"From what?" Joe says. They say there could be all kinds of trouble, you never know from where, and they would handle it for us. Joe goes along with them and asks when they want the first payment. They say they will be back for it on Saturday. We all got a good laugh when we heard this. If they had come, it would have been a slaughter. But they don't show up.

So now Joe Rao decides to put the snatch on Shapiro. When they got him, they tell me to get over there and talk to him. They had him in the back of a truck in this garage, and he was beat up good. His skull was busted, and there was blood all over the place, and there was a rope around his neck. I think Jimmy Blue Eyes, right name Vincent Alo, was holding the rope.

As soon as Shapiro sees me, he yells, "Save me! Save me!"

Was he kidding—save him? What could I do? They were asking him if Moe Block was in on the deal. I tried to find out myself, but the way Shapiro was yelling anything and everything when he got a jerk on that rope, I couldn't make out if Moe was in it or not. Well, that was the end of this Shapiro. He was put in a drum full of cement—the kind they use for oil—and dumped in the East River. I guess he's still there.

I kept Moe on because a good controller was hard to find. Even if he was in with them, he learned a good lesson, and I figured he wouldn't be pulling nothing again. Right?

Valachi was doubly thankful for his Cosa Nostra membership when he found out that the man behind Green and Stein was

Dutch Schultz. For all his power, Schultz was necessarily ignorant of internal Cosa Nostra affairs. "When The Dutchman took over the numbers in Harlem," Valachi says, "he had cut in Ciro Terranova and the boys on 116th Street. Now all he knows about me and Bobby Doyle is that we used to be with Maranzano against Ciro and Charley Lucky and Vito. So when he hears about us being in the numbers right under his nose, he figures we are just outlaws." Since Joseph Rao was widely known to be an associate of Terranova's, Schultz was understandably put out when Green and Stein reported back to him that Rao was also a partner in Valachi's numbers bank. As it turned out, it was simply another gambit in Luciano's strategy to make the Cosa Nostra supreme in the U.S. underworld:

The way I understood it, The Dutchman goes to Ciro and wants to know what the hell's going on. Now Ciro is up a tree as he don't know about Joe Rao being with us either. Then he finds out from Joe Rao that we have the okay personally from Charley Lucky and Vito to book numbers. So Ciro calls Charley Lucky, and Charley says to tell The Dutchman that we are being allowed to build up our business in order that they, meaning Ciro and The Dutchman, can take it over. Naturally Ciro has to do what Charley orders. When I hear all this, it don't take much for me to see that Charley Lucky has something in mind for The Dutchman and that Ciro Terranova, who is supposed to be such a big shot, ain't in on it.

I am right. Right after this Vito Genovese tells me and Bobby Doyle that The Dutchman has got to go. Vito says the Jews have agreed. He says not to go out looking for him, but to shoot if we happen to bump into him somewhere. In other words, the thing is not to tip him off.

Dutch Schultz was a natural target for Charley Lucky Luciano. As a practical necessity, Schultz would develop a working alliance in the Harlem numbers racket widi someone like Terranova; to do otherwise meant taking on the entire Italian underworld. But he remained stubbornly apart from the overall coalition Luciano was forming with such groups outside the Cosa Nostra as the so-called Bug-Meyer mob, run by Meyer Lansky and Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, and the gang headed by Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro. Personally Schultz had become just as much an anathema to Luciano; he was the complete gangster caricature—flashy, boisterous, insatiably self-centered. Even more galling was the fact that Schultz, for all his crude ways, possessed a considerable talent for spotting and organizing new business opportunities. At the peak of his career as a Prohibition beer baron, he not only was one of die first to see the potential of the numbers game, but had also organized the immensely profitable restaurant racket. Schultz first strong-armed his way into control of the waiters union. Next he formed the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association. If a restaurateur wished to avoid a strike or perhaps a stink bomb during lunchtime, he joined the association — at a price.

The idea of dividing up the Schultz empire had always appealed to Luciano. But the project had to be handled with some diplomacy. Schultz was nobody to treat lightly. Born in the Bronx as Arthur Flegenheimer, he quickly earned a reputation as a bully-boy. As a result, he was called Dutch Schultz after a local brawler who was active around the turn of the century. The alias stuck, much to his subsequent dismay when even he recognized that he was getting too notorious. Once he was heard to complain that it was because his adopted name made life easy for newspaper headline writers. "If I had stuck with Arthur Flegenheimer," he observed, "nobody ever would have heard of me."

By the late 1920s Schultz had absolute control of beer distribution in the Bronx. The methods he used to get to the top were incredibly brutal. The last Prohibition beer wholesalers standing in his way were two Irish gangsters, John and Joseph Rock. John Rock, after sizing Schultz up, decided to retire. His brother, however, elected to fight it out. He was promptly kidnapped by Schultz and his men. They beat him up so badly that he became a permanent cripple. It was just a start. Before they dropped him on a Bronx street, they smeared pus on a strip of gauze and taped it tightly to Rock's eyes. Eventually he went blind. Such tactics smoothed the way for Schultz into his other ventures. Any numbers banker, restaurant owner, or union leader who felt like protesting always had Joseph Rock as an example to reflect on.

Luciano's initial chance to move came when Schultz was indicted on the same kind of income tax charges that sent Al Capone to prison. Schultz went into hiding for some eighteen months while his lawyers vainly attempted to resolve the case. During the time Schultz was a fugitive, Luciano dickered with his chief lieutenant, Abe (Bo) Weinberg, about adopting a more cooperative attitude than his boss. Weinberg was amenable. Even when Schultz finally surrendered, it made little difference; the evidence against him seemed airtight. But Schultz, with some lavish spending in the right places, was acquitted.*

^::
'At his trial in the tiny upstate town of Malone on the ground that he could not get a fair hearing in New York City, his biggest coup in influencing the jury was supplying children in the local hospital with flowers and candy.

The first to suffer the consequences was Bo Weinberg. Valachi heard about it from Bobby Doyle. "Remember that Weinberg you thought was such a nice guy?"

"Yeah," Valachi countered, "so what?"

"Well, he's dead and buried. The Dutchman done it."

"Hey, that's why I ain't seen him around lately," Valachi said. "What happened?"

"The word is that The Dutchman found out he was playing around with the Sicilian."

Weinberg's body was never found. He simply vanished. According to Valachi, he was carried out of a midtown Manhattan hotel in a trunk after a heated confrontation with Schultz. "When I heard all this," Valachi told me, "I figured The Dutchman wasn't long for this world himself."

For a time an uneasy truce prevailed between Luciano and Schultz. Then the government, refusing to let Schultz settle up his back taxes, began preparing another indictment against him. A New York City grand jury also began looking into his connection with the numbers racket, and an up-and-coming Justice Department attorney named Thomas E. Dewey was brought in as a special prosecutor. Schultz was furious. One of his own lawyers had warned him that if something wasn't done, Dewey would "indict us all."

One night Valachi got an intimate glimpse of Schultz's state of mind. I Ie happened to go into a restaurant called Freddie's Italian Garden, on 46th Street west of Times Square, just as Schultz was leaving a dinner conference with Luciano. Luciano remained behind, and Valachi was later invited to join his table. When someone in the group mentioned Schultz, Luciano smiled and remarked, "All The Dutchman can talk about is Tom Dewey this and Tom Dewey that."

Schultz's solution to his problem—assassinating Dewey —gave Luciano the chance he had been waiting for. He found almost universal agreement among underworld chieftains that if Schultz were allowed to murder Dewey, it could trigger exactly the kind of all-out drive against organized crime that they were anxious to avoid. Thus Schultz himself had to be liquidated. It was about this time that Valachi heard from Vito Genovese that Schultz was to be killed on sight. But in the end, three of Lepke Buchalter's gunmen were specifically given the contract. As Valachi noted to me, "Charley Lucky figured it was best all around that The Dutchman's own kind took care of him.''

On October 23,1935, Schultz was shot down in a bar and grill in Newark, New Jersey. He did not die at once. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, he received the last rites in a local hospital from a priest while a police stenographer recorded his final fever-ridden remarks; but they read like lines in the mad scene from
King Lear.
For someone who fancied himself a tough character his last coherent sentence was a pathetic moan: "Let them leave me alone."

Buchalter inherited Schultz's restaurant racket,
and Luciano and Genovese took over the huge Harlem numbers bank they had eyed for so long. "Charley Lucky opened the numbers up for everyone in the Family," Valachi says, "except of course you couldn't go into another member's territory or take his controllers and runners." To oversee it, Valachi's ancient enemy, Ciro Terranova, was replaced by another Luciano lieutenant, Trigger Mike Coppola. The erstwhile Artichoke King did not protest; getting on in years and in poor health, he was glad to go into retirement. As Valachi says with a measure of regret in his voice, "Ciro was able to die in bed."

To all intents Luciano's strategy was flawless, and a sense of well-being filtered throughout die Cosa Nostra. Valachi's numbers operation prospered to the extent that even he did not mind the additional "ice," or police payoffs, which expansion entailed. Out of his profits he financed a "classy horse room" in White Plains, New York, where suburban matrons could while away their afternoons betting on races across the country. He also began to dabble m a little loansharking on the side. "If you ask me how I was doing," Valachi recalls, "I would have to say I was doing okay."

But Dutch Schultz got in a last snicker from beyond the grave. The public had long been indifferent to, if not amused by, racketeering; indeed, a Luciano or even a Schultz was as much a prize for a hostess of the day as the latest bestselling audior or matinee idol. Suddenly, as occurs periodically, a tremor of righteous indignation swept the country. It could not have happened at a worse time for Luciano. In New York Special Prosecutor Dewey, hard-nosed, politically ambitious, a Republican not at all shy about poking into a corrupt Democratic machine, was out to make a name for himself as a rackets buster. Deprived of Schultz as a target, Dewey zeroed in on Luciano, ironically the man who probably saved his life, and he would use a surefire subject—vice—to rivet everybody's attention on the case.

Valachi picked up a hint of the trouble to come during a rare visit to a Manhattan bordello. "I didn't go in for this," he says, "but one night some of the guys wouldn't let me say no." While he was there, he overheard one of the whores whispering fearfully that they were Charley Lucky's boys and to be careful. Valachi did not think Luciano would especially appreciate his name being bandied around like that, and he intended to report the conversation. Before he could, however, Luciano was arrested in Hot Springs, Arkansas, at Dewey's request and returned to New York to face trial on multiple counts of compulsory prostitution. "Well," Valachi told me, "I was stunned. Charley Lucky wasn't no pimp. He was a boss."

In a way Valachi was right. Luciano really did not need prostitution as a source of income, but he got into it precisely because of the responsibilities of his position. When the Prohibition bonanza was over, a certain amount of unemployment resulted in Cosa Nostra ranks, and the search for new rackets was at a premium. At the time vice in New York was based more or less on the free enterprise system; upwards of 200 independent brothels were operating in the city and doing a handsome business. For Luciano it was simply a question of organizing them into a cartel himself or letting someone else beat him to it, as Dutch Schultz had done in the numbers game.

Luciano, as history has recorded, was sentenced on July 17, 1936, to thirty to fifty years in prison. Even worse for a man of Charley Lucky's fastidious tastes, he ended up in Dannemora, a bleak, maximum-security penitentiary near die Canadian border not inaccurately known among convicts as Siberia. There he remained until 1942, when his controversial role during World War II began.

The Navy had become alarmed about possible sabotage and intelligence-gathering activity along the New York waterfront by enemy agents. Somehow die idea took hold of enlisting the organized underworld on die docks to prevent this, and what better intermediary to arrange it than the top man himself? Luciano's first tangible benefit for his cooperation was being transferred from Dannemora to a more accessible and comfortable prison just