Inherit the Mob (28 page)

“OK, I’ll be ready anytime. And Al—thanks for including me in.”

When Grossman got back to the Fontainebleau he found three little white message slips from Mr. Sleepout, Bad Abe and Indian Joe. “Sounds like a vaudeville act, don’t it?” Grossman said to the bewildered message clerk.

The phone was ringing when he opened the door to his room.

“Al, it’s Sleepout. I left word, you don’t answer your messages?”

“I just walked in,” said Grossman.

“I hear you’re getting the boys back together, you don’t call me?”

“Where did you hear that?” asked Grossman.

“Whattya mean, where? It’s all over the place, everybody’s talking. They call me up—‘So what’s the deal with Al?’ I’m too embarrassed to say my pal Al is in town and didn’t even call me.”

“Hey!” said Grossman. “Cut that shit out, I ain’t into guilt trips.”

“Guilt trips, he ain’t into guilt trips. You becoming a hippie or something?”

Grossman laughed in spite of himself; it was a phrase he had picked up from Bev. “Nu, you in or out?”

“Since you’re asking, in,” he said.

“Harry Millman will be in touch with the details,” said Grossman.

“What’s the matter, you couldn’t take a few minutes yourself, tell me what’s happening? I have to hear from Horseface Harry?”

“I told you, goddammit—” Grossman began, and then heard the chuckling on the other end. “OK, OK, I don’t have time to dick around. I’ll see you in the city.”

“Not if I see you first,” said Sleepout, and hung up laughing.

Grossman saw eight more men in the next three days. Four were too old or too sick to make the trip to New York. One, Baboon Bernstein, had become a Seventh-Day Adventist and only wanted to talk about salvation. Three—Bad Abe Abramson, Indian Joe Lapidus, and Pupik Feinsilver—were in. Along with Millman, Zucker, Weintraub and Sleepout Louie he had seven guys. There was only one more person he wanted to see—Shulman.

Shulman’s house was located on a street of neat three-bedroom bungalows in a neighborhood of retired school principals and Midwestern insurance salesmen, a few blocks off Collins Avenue. There were well-tended beds of flowers in front of the houses, and late-model
Japanese cars in the driveways. Shulman could have afforded better.

Grossman rang the doorbell and waited. He had called ahead; Shulman was not the the kind of person you just dropped in on unannounced. They hadn’t seen each other in more than ten years, and Grossman wondered how he would look to Shulman. He had dressed with care for this meeting, in a sport shirt with some slack to hide his potbelly, a dark brown blazer, tan pants and polished loafers. As he had ever since he first met Jerry Shulman, more than fifty years before, he wanted to impress him.

Their first meeting was on the corner of Canal Street and East Broadway, when they were both twelve. Shulman sold the
New York World
on that corner; one day Grossman showed up with a stack of
Post
s. “This is my corner from now on, kid,” he told Shulman.

“There’s enough room to go around,” said Shulman. “Besides, nobody can own a corner.”

Grossman knocked Shulman’s papers on the street. “You wanna make something of it?” he challenged.

“Nah,” said Shulman. “I don’t feel like fighting over a corner. If it’s that important to you, there are other corners.”

Grossman was infuriated by Shulman’s blasé attitude, as if the little kike in raggedy clothes sold newspapers as a hobby. “I’m gonna kick your ass for you,” he said.

“I won’t let you do that,” said Jerry Shulman. “I’ll move to another corner, but you can’t kick my ass.”

Grossman set down his papers and charged. Shulman sidestepped and tripped him into the gutter. Several grown-ups passing by laughed, but nobody tried to break it up. Grossman got back on his feet and leaped at the newsboy, who backed away, forcing him off balance again. “What are you, some kind of a jujitsu guy?” Grossman asked through clenched teeth. “I’ll show you jujitsu.” He picked up the lid from a garbage can and heaved it at Shulman, who blocked it with a forearm. By now a large crowd had gathered and they were cheering the boys on.

“Let’s quit,” said Shulman. “There’s no point in putting on a free show for these people.”

“I’m gonna kick your ass,” Al Grossman said, although for some reason he felt like crying.

Suddenly Shulman turned to the crowd. “You want to see us fight,” he yelled, “you gotta pay.” He took off his cap and circulated among the men on the corner, who grudgingly tossed in a few pennies or a nickel. Al Grossman stood there waiting, unsure of what to do.

“Winner take all?” Shulman asked.

“Yeah,” said Grossman, trying to regain some of his attitude. “Come ’ere, kid, I’ll break your neck.”

Shulman walked toward him. Suddenly Grossman was on the ground, and the crowd spun above him. He struggled to regain his feet, and when he did, Shulman knocked him unconscious.

Al woke up a few minutes later. Shulman had propped him up, half sitting, against a brick wall, and was back on the corner hawking papers. Grossman rose groggily. “My brother’s Max Grossman,” he said. “He’s gonna come down here and kill you.” Max already had a reputation in the neighborhood as a hood, but Shulman seemed totally unimpressed. “If you tell on me, he’ll laugh at you,” he said, and Grossman realized that he was right. He stood on the corner, fists clenched, not knowing what to do next. Shulman reached into his pocket and took out a handful of coins. “Here,” he said. “This is from the fight. You earned it.”

“You hit me with a sucker punch,” said Al Grossman. “I’ll kick your ass next time.”

Shulman looked at him evenly with warm brown eyes. “You can’t,” he said flatly.

Grossman saw Shulman around the neighborhood from time to time, but they never fought again. One day, when he was seventeen, he walked into the Cream of New York Deli and found Shulman sitting with his brother, Max, and Al Axelrod. They treated Shulman with respect, he noticed jealously—more like a contemporary of theirs than of his.

They were talking business, and Max ignored his younger brother. “You’re going to need somebody to go with you,” he told Shulman. “You can’t do this alone.”

“How about him?” Shulman said, gesturing toward Al.

“Him? He’s a kid.”

Shulman turned to Grossman. “How about it?” he said. “You want to take a truck ride with me to Michigan?”

They spent three days on the road, transporting a load of stolen radios and appliances to a dealer in Detroit. By the time they got back to New York, Jerry Shulman was Al Grossman’s best friend.

It was an unequal friendship. Shulman was more like an older brother, someone Al came to with problems or asked for advice. He admired Shulman’s quiet competence, his intelligence and his courage. He had class, never raised his voice or started trouble. For Max and Al and the other neighborhood wise guys, crime was a way of life; for Shulman, it was a boost out of the Lower East Side. On Hester Street there were two kinds of kids—good boys, who studied hard, helped their fathers and dreamed of being doctors; and wise guys, who carried guns and talked about becoming millionaires. Alone among the kids in the neighborhood, Jerry Shulman was accepted by both crowds, sometimes serving as an ambassador between them.

Shulman was the first person Grossman knew personally who attended college. He went to NYU and studied, of all things, American history. He also supervised Max’s numbers operation. When he graduated, Max gave him a new Packard as a gift.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Al, who was by then working full time for his brother, received a medical discharge. Shulman refused a similar offer and joined the marines. He came home in 1945 with a Silver Star, a Purple Heart and the same softly self-confident manner he had before the war. He went back to school and earned a master’s degree in history. To pay for it, he worked for Max as an organizer in the garment union.

During those years, Al and Shulman frequently hung out together. Although he was working and going to school, Shulman found the time to go up to Yankee Stadium for a ball game or to join Al at Jones Beach with a case of cold beer and a couple of girls. He never bragged about his wartime experiences or flaunted his education. He spoke quietly and sensibly, although Al knew that in dealing with the garment workers he did what needed to be done.

One day in the spring of 1948, Shulman came by the Cream of New York and announced that he was going to Israel to fight. At first Al tried to dissuade him, but Shulman wouldn’t be talked out of it. “It’s the right thing for me to do,” he said.

“I suppose you think I ought to go, too,” Al said, but Shulman shook his head.

“If you don’t feel like it’s your fight, you shouldn’t get into it,” he said.

“How come everything is your fight?” Grossman flared. “Who appointed you the avenging angel?”

“It’s not like that, Allie,” he said, laying his hand on his friend’s cheek, a tender gesture that only Jerry Shulman could have gotten away with. “It’s just the kind of time we’re living in, that’s all. Don’t worry, I came back last time, I’ll come back this time.”

Shulman did come back, although it took him six years. After the war he completed a doctorate in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and married an Israeli girl named Dina. When he brought her to New York, in 1954, Max greeted them at the airport with a new Cadillac and the keys to a duplex on Park Avenue.

For the next three years, Jerry Shulman was the only gangster in the United States with a Ph.D. During those years he undertook special assignments for Max Grossman, who kept him far away from anything dangerous. Once, when Al Grossman tried to involve Shulman in a diamond-smuggling operation, Max had vetoed the idea. “Smugglers are a dime a dozen,” he told his younger brother. “Jerry’s too valuable to waste. He knows how to talk to people.”

In 1957, after the heads of the Mafia were rounded up at Appalachia and the McClellan Committee began looking into Max Grossman’s affairs, Jerry Shulman quit for good. He moved his wife, Dina, and their four children to Florida, where he got a job teaching history at the University of Miami. As far as Al knew, he had been legitimate since then, but he never turned his back on his old friends. Whenever Max Grossman came to Miami, he was always invited to dinner, and often he and Shulman spent evenings together. His association with Jerry Shulman, whom he naturally and affectionately called “Professor,” was a source of pride.

After Shulman moved to Miami, Al Grossman found it hard to spend time with him. He made Grossman feel crude and ignorant. Whenever he was around Shulman, Al dropped his wise-guy routine but he had nothing to replace it with. Gradually he let the friendship
fade, but never lost his sense of admiration, almost awe, for his boyhood rival.

Now he stood on Shulman’s front porch, wondering whether Shulman would be willing to come back with him to New York. The others, trapped in boring lives and staring death in the face, had been pushovers; as Weintraub had said, they were players looking for one last roll. But Shulman was a different story; and the appeal to him would have to be different.

The door opened and Grossman found himself staring into the face of a frail, emaciated old man; Jerry Shulman, he could see, was very sick. His even features seemed pinched, and the straight hair, once brown, was entirely white. Only the soft, intelligent brown eyes looked the same.

The old man took Al’s hand in a weak grip. “Hello, Allie,” he said. “It’s good to see you. Come in and sit down.”

“Hello, Jerry, how’ve you been?”

Shulman chuckled. “I’ve been better, I suppose. I’m dying. You look great.”

Grossman cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Ah, you’ll live forever,” he said.

“Now, there’s a sobering thought,” said Shulman. Grossman looked around the book-lined living room, searching for something to say. “You read all these books, Professor?”

Shulman shrugged. “In my line of work, you pick up a lot of books. For some reason people think it’s an appropriate gift. That set of the Britannica over there came from Max, as a matter of fact. Someday he’ll probably be in there.”

“Max? In the encyclopedia?” The thought amused Grossman and he smiled.

“Sure, Max was a historical figure,” said Shulman.

“My boy, Velvel, has an Irish friend who said the same thing,” said Grossman. “Somehow I can’t picture it.”

“Well, no man is a hero to his valet,” said Shulman and frowned. “Or,” he quickly added, “to his brother. How is Velvel? I see his stuff in
Foreign Affairs
from time to time, and of course on television.”

“Velvel’s in trouble, Jerry. That’s why I’m down here.”

“What kind of trouble? I thought he was back in New York.”

“You don’t think you can get in trouble in New York? You been down here too long.”

Shulman laughed. “You’re probably right,” he said. His face turned serious. “Tell me what kind of trouble Velvel’s in,” he said.

Shulman listened to Grossman’s account with an intense, concerned expression. When Grossman came to the part about the death threat and Flanagan’s stabbing, he winced and shook his head. “It’s hard to believe that Luigi Spadafore would do something like that,” he said. “Of course it’s been years since I’ve seen him, but even so, it doesn’t sound like him.”