Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (54 page)

LEGO pays for its employees’ business cards. Big deal. Most companies do that, right? But the Danish company’s business cards are special: They’re little LEGO people, with the employee’s name and contact info on the little LEGO person’s shirt. And the figures are designed to look like the person they represent.

Background:
Rothstein was one of the earliest leaders of American organized crime. He wasn’t a gun-toting mobster, though—he was a planner, bankroller, and political fixer. Instead of muscle, he used brains to forge alliances among underworld factions and crooked politicians. He kept a low profile as he financed the bootlegging activities of Dutch Schultz and other gangsters. But Rothstein was also a compulsive gambler. In September 1928, he bought into a high-stakes poker game run by a man named George McManus. The game lasted two days; Rothstein lost $320,000. Claiming the game was fixed, he refused to pay up.

The Place:
On November 4, Rothstein received an urgent phone call from McManus to meet him at the Park Central Hotel. The Park Central was (and still is) located across the street from Carnegie Hall. Opened in 1927, this ritzy hotel quickly became one of Manhattan’s most popular spots. Ben Pollack’s orchestra (featuring Benny Goodman) packed them in nightly at the hotel’s Florentine Grill. It was a public place with lots of people around—a place where Rothstein would have felt safe.

The Hit:
Hotel employees later found him in the stairwell holding his abdomen—he’d been shot. Was it because of the debt, or had one of his rivals simply found a viable excuse to eliminate him? No one knows for sure, because in the one day that Rothstein lived, every time police asked him who shot him, he answered, “Me mudder did it.”

Background:
Only 33 when he died, Schultz was the FBI’s Public Enemy #1, and one of the best-known criminals of his day. During Prohibition, “The Dutchman” bootlegged beer, ran an illegal saloon in the Bronx, and forced rival saloons to buy beer from
him…and
only
from him. He was an extortionist who also ran illegal gambling and slot machines, and didn’t hesitate to murder anyone who interfered with “business.”

Schultz’s activities got a lot of attention from the Feds. In 1933 he was indicted on charges of income tax evasion, but he beat the rap. When he did, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was furious. He banned Schultz from New York City and ordered special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey to investigate the Dutchman’s rackets. Now Schultz was furious—he asked the “National Crime Syndicate” for permission to take Dewey out. They said no (it would have brought the full force of the Feds down on all of them). After Schulz stormed out, the other bosses decided that
he
needed to go.

The Place:
The Palace Chophouse on E. 12th Street in Newark, New Jersey, was no palace—just a dark, narrow bar and diner. But since Schultz was no longer allowed to operate in New York, he used a room in the back of the Newark restaurant as his office. And that’s where he was on the night of October 23, 1935.

The Hit:
At 10:15 p.m., two gunmen walked into the Palace. They found Schultz in the men’s room and shot him in the chest, and then gunned down three of his cronies in the restaurant’s back room. Schulz died two days later in the hospital, but never said who shot him.

Background:
Masseria was an old-line Sicilian mob boss whose ultimate goal was to become head of the Mafia in New York. Not sharing Masseria’s dream, though, were younger “family” members Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese. They wanted him out of the picture, as did powerful mobsters Lepke Buchalter and Owney Madden. When another rival mafioso, Salvatore Maranzano, began to encroach on Masseria’s businesses, Joe the Boss fought back. That was the beginning a power struggle that came to be known as the Castellammarese War, during which more than 60 men (on both sides) were killed. Luciano and Genovese secretly contacted Maranzano and offered him a deal: If he’d end the bloodshed, they’d whack Masseria. Maranzano agreed.

The Place:
On April 15, 1931, Luciano invited Joe the Boss to a
meeting at the Nuova Villa Tammaro Restaurant, a cheap “spaghetti house” in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. They ate, played some cards, and then Luciano went to the bathroom.
The Hit:
According to eyewitnesses, while Luciano was in the bathroom, two unknown men strolled into the restaurant, fired 20 shots at Masseria, and strolled out again. Luciano took over Masseria’s crime family. The Nuova Villa Tammaro’s owner, an Italian immigrant named Gerardo Scarpato, shut down the restaurant and moved back to Italy. Six months later he returned to New York and was murdered. No one was ever convicted.

Background:
After Gallo and his two brothers split off from the Profaci Family in 1950s, they were involved in several high-profile mafia battles in New York City. The wars were put on hold in 1961 when Gallo was convicted of extortion and sent up the river. (In prison, he reportedly amused himself by trying to poison his fellow convicts with strychnine-laced Italian food.) When he got out in 1971, Gallo resumed his war against Joe Colombo, whom he had never forgiven for murdering one of his men. After Colombo was gunned down that June as he was walking to the podium to deliver a speech at the Italian-American Civil Rights League’s Italian Unity Day, the heads of the Five Families surmised that it was Gallo who had ordered the hit, even though they had no proof. They put out a contract on Gallo’s life.

The Place:
In the wee hours of the morning of April 7, 1972, Gallo was winding down after celebrating his 43rd birthday at the Copa Cabana (Don Rickles was performing). He and his friends wanted something to eat. They went to Chinatown, but everything was closed, so they went to nearby Little Italy. The only place that was open: Umberto’s Clam House—the newest restaurant in the “old neighborhood,” owned by another mobster, “Matty the Horse” Ianniello.

The Hit:
Two (or possibly more) gunmen were waiting at Umberto’s. They opened fire. Gallo was hit five times and still managed to stagger out into the street, where he collapsed and died. No one was ever charged with Crazy Joey’s murder.

New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority officials were left red-faced in January 2009 when the opening of a new subway station had to be postponed. Reason: The gap between the platform and the train car was four inches wide. Although that distance wouldn’t pose a danger to most abled people, it violates the Americans With Disabilities Act, which specifies that the gap can be no longer than
three
inches. The goof was blamed on engineers, who failed to take into account the slight curve of the platform. Cost of the extra inch: a two-month delay in opening the station and $200,000 to extend the platform.

In late 2007, two Maryland state assessment workers, both new to the job, were entering data into all of the counties’ proposed budgets for 2008. At one point, one of them accidentally entered the
estimated
taxable real estate for Montgomery County in 2008, instead of the
actual
2007 numbers. That single incorrect number created a domino effect that threw off several other county budget estimates. Once officials realized something was wrong, it took eight months and a small army of number-crunchers to find the error. In all, it threw off budget estimates by $16 billion and cost taxpayers more than $31 million to correct.

In February 2008, a ground crew was preparing a B2 Stealth Bomber for takeoff at a U.S. Air Force base in Guam. They noticed odd readings coming from three sensors that relay information to the flight computer. Unfortunately, this particular crew hadn’t heard about an “unofficial fix” to send a blast of hot air through the system to evaporate any moisture on the sensors.

Instead, they recalibrated the sensors and cleared the plane for takeoff. But as it sped down the runway, the moisture evaporated. Result: The sensors sent incorrect data to the computer. “The pressure differences were miniscule,” said Maj. Gen. Floyd Carpenter, “but they were enough to confuse the flight control system.” As the plane lifted off, the pilots thought they were traveling at 158 knots but were actually only going about 124 knots. The plane immediately stalled; the pilots ejected as the left wing dragged against the ground…right before the $1.4 billion bomber erupted into a huge fireball. (Update: Removing moisture from the sensors pre-takeoff is now an
official
fix.)

In 2001 Marguerite Nunn intended to donate a $130 check to Zoo To You, a nonprofit wildlife education program. But due to what was later deemed a “software error” on her computer, her zip code was entered into the amount box on the check. Result: She donated $93,447. When Nunn, an innkeeper from Paso Robles, California, realized the error two weeks later, she asked for Zoo To You to return her money. But they’d already spent more than half of it (the check had cleared the bank because Nunn and her husband Tom had recently sold some property). The nonprofit paid back $30,000, and then a little more over the next few years, but nothing came after 2006. Seeing no other choice, the Nunns sued. In 2009, eight years after the initial goof, they were awarded a settlement reported as “somewhere in the middle.” When all was said and done, the error cost the couple tens of thousands of dollars.

David Blair, the original second officer of the
Titanic
, was relieved of duty shortly before the ship set off for New York on April 10, 1912. In Blair’s haste to leave, he forgot to turn over all of his equipment to his replacement. One of the forgotten items was the key to the crow’s nest telephone. Blair had also left the crow’s nest binoculars in his cabin. According to crew survivor testimony, if the lookouts had been given the binoculars, they would have seen the iceberg sooner. And if they’d had access to the phone, they could have alerted the bridge sooner. Either scenario might well have given the
Titanic
enough time to get out of the way.

The English language is like a living organism—always growing in some areas while shrinking in others. Those in charge of tracking this change are called
lexicographers
. Their mission: To scour new books, articles, and other media to determine which new words are taking hold and which old ones are being used less and less. Then, about every 10 years or so, they update official dictionaries such as
Merriam-Webster’s
and
The Oxford English Dictionary
. So, as “rightsize” and “phat” nudge their way into the
lexicon
(the vocabulary of a language), archaic words like “oppugnant” and “pantdress” find themselves on the chopping block. If you, like us, are sad to see “oppugnant” go, then start working it into your daily conversation, along with the rest of these little-used words…before they’re gone forever.