Legs (8 page)

* * *

Joe Vignola was in jail eight days when his wife got
a phone call. Somebody, no name, told her: Look on such and such a
page of the Daily News about what happened to Walter Rudolph. Walter
Rudolph was the DA's corroborating witness, and two kids had found
him lying off the Bordentown Turnpike near South Amboy, wearing his
blue serge suit, his straw hat alongside him, eleven machine-gun
slugs in him.

I was called into the case at this point. Vignola's
lawyer was suddenly inaccessible to Vignola's wife, and an old show
business friend of mine, Lew Miller, who produced Broadway shows and
had patronized the Hotsy and gotten to know Joe Vignola well enough
to go to bat for him, called me up and asked me to see what I could
do for the poor bird.

Memory of my first interrogation of Joe: Why did you
tell the cops what you saw? Why did you identify photos of Jack
Diamond and Charlie Filetti for the grand jury?

Because I wanted people to know I had nothing to do
with it. Because I didn't want them to put me in jail for withholding
evidence. And a cop slapped me twice. But why, really, Joe? Did you
want your name in the l papers, too?

No, because Billy Reagan had talked and would be the
main witness and because the cops had at least twenty-five other
witnesses who were in the club, and they told the same story I did,
the DA said.

But, Joe, knowing what we know about Jack Diamond and
people like him, how could you do it? Was it time to die?

Not at all. Basically, I don't approve of murder, or
Jack Diamond or Charlie Filetti either. I was brought up a Catholic
and I know the value of honesty. I know what a citizen has to do in
cases like this. Don't I hear it in church and on the radio and in
the papers about being a good citizen? We can't let these bums take
over America. If I don't stand up and fight, how can I expect the
next guy to stand up? How could I look myself in the mirror?

But why, Joe? Lay off the bullshit and tell me for
chrissake, why?

Why? Because it takes big balls. Because Jack Diamond
was always cracking wise about the guineas and nobody is going to say
that Joe Vignola is a yellow-bellied guinea. Joe Vignola is an
Italian-descent American with big balls.

Big balls, Joe? Was that really it'?

Right.

You dumb bastard.

* * *

I got in touch with the lawyer for Charlie Filetti,
who they caught in Chicago and hit with murder one. They hadn't
picked up Jack. I told the lawyer poor Joe was of no use to the
prosecution because he would not be able to remember anything at the
time, and that I wanted to be in touch with somebody in the Diamond
gang who I could relay this message to at first hand so that Jack
would also know what Joe was up to, which was not much. The lawyer
put me on to Jimmy Biondo, who met me at the Silver Slipper on
Forty-eighth Street one night. We talked briefly, as follows:

'You guarantee he's no pigeon?"

"I guarantee," I said.

"How?"

"Every way but in writing."

"The bum. The fuckin' bum."

"He's all right. He won't talk. Lay off the
telephone threats. He's got three kids and a nice wife. He's a nice
Italian boy like yourself. He doesn't want to hurt anybody. He's an
altar boy."

"Funeral for altar boys." said eloquent
Jimmy.

"I guarantee you. What do you want from me? I'm
his lawyer. He can't fire me. He hasn't even paid me yet."

"Fuckin' ". . .said Jimmy.

"Easy does it. He won't talk."

"Fuck . .

"I guarantee."

"You guarantee'?"

"I guarantee."

"You better fuckin' guarantee."

"I said I guarantee, and when I say I guarantee.
I guarantee."

"Fuckin' well better . .

"Right. Jimmy. You got my word. Joe won't talk."

"Fuck."

* * *

Joe told me Jack Diamond, disguised as a Boy Scout,
came through the bars of his cell one night and stood alongside Joe's
bunk as he slept. "It's time to have your ears pierced,"
Jack said to Joe, and he shoved the blade of his Scout knife into
Joe's left ear. Joe's brain leaked out through the hole.

"Help me," Joe yelled. "My ear is
leaking." From the next cell somebody yelled, "Shut up, you
looney son of a bitch."

But Joe didn't feel he was looney. He told the
Bellevue alienist how it was when they wanted to know why he hid food
under the bedclothes.

"That was for Legs Diamond. If he wants a bite
to eat and I got nothing, that's trouble."

"Did it occur to you that the food would rot and
give off a stench?"

"Rotten. it doesn't really matter. It's the
offer that counts."

"Why did you cover your head with the blanket?"

"I wanted to be alone."

"But you were alone."

"I didn't want visitors."

"The blanket kept them away?"

"No, I could see them through the blanket. But
it was better than nothing."

"Why did you hide the spoon?"

"So my visitors would have something to eat
with."

"Then why did you scratch at the concrete floor
with it?"

"I wanted to dig a place to hide so the visitors
couldn't find me."

"How did you tear up your fingers?"

"When they took my spoon away."

"You dug at the concrete with your fingers?"

"I knew it'd take a long time; the nails'd have
to grow back before I could dig again."

"Who visited you?"

"Diamond came every night. Herman Zuckman came,
cut up the middle and half a dozen iron bars inside him, and wire
wrapped around his stomach to keep the bars from falling out. He
dripped muck and seaweed all over. 'What did you do wrong, Herman?' I
said to him.

" 'Jew people have a tough life,' " he
said.

"And I told him, 'You think it's easy being
Italian?' "

"Any other visitors?"

"Walter Rudolph came in to cheer me up and I saw
daylight through his bullet holes."

The night the dead fish
leaped out of Herman's tuxedo Joe finally won his straitjacket.

* * *

The judge ordered the acquittal of Filetti after four
days of trial, saying that the state had utterly failed to prove its
case. Jack, still a fugitive, was never mentioned during the trial.
Of the fifteen witnesses who testified, not one claimed to have seen
Filetti actually shoot anybody. Joe Vignola, who was described as the
state's most important witness, said he was dozing in another room
when the shooting broke out and he saw nothing. His speech was
incoherent most of the time.

Billy Reagan testified he
was too drunk after drinking twenty shots of gin to remember what
happened. Also, Tim Reagan's last words, originally said to have
incriminated Diamond and Filetti, were not about them at all, a
detective testified, but rather a violent string of curses.

* * *

Jack was a fugitive for eight months, and most of his
gang, which was an amalgam of old-timers and remnants of Little Augie
Orgen's Lower East Side Jews, drifted into other allegiances. The
bond had not been strong to begin with. Jack took the gang over after
he and Augie were both shot in a labor racketeering feud. Augie died,
but you can't kill Legs Diamond.

Eddie Diamond died in January, 1930. Jack was still a
fugitive when he met Kiki Roberts in April at the Club Abbey. and he
immediately dropped Elaine Walsh. Half a dozen gangland murders were
credited to his feud with Dutch Schultz during these months.

He saw the Jack Sharkey-Tommy Loughran fight at
Yankee Stadium, as did Al Smith, David Belasco, John McGraw, and half
the celebrities of New York. Jack couldn't miss such a show, even if
he did have to raise a mustache and sit in an upper deck to avoid
recognition. He bet on Loughran, like himself a Philadelphia mick;
but Sharkey, the Boston sailor, won.

The crest of his life collapsed with the Hotsy
shooting. All he'd been building to for most of a decade—his beer
and booze operations, the labor racketeering he built with and
inherited in part from Little Augie, his protection of the crooked
bucketshops which bilked stock market suckers, an inheritance from
Rothstein, his connections with the dope market, and, most
ignominiously, his abstract aspiration to the leadership mantle that
would somehow simulate Rothstein's—all this was Jack's life-sized
sculpture, blown apart by gunpowder.

Dummy, you shoot people in your own club?

Jack got the word from Owney Madden, his old mentor
from Gopher days, a quiet, behind-the-scenes fellow who, after doing
his murder bit, came out of Sing Sing in 1923 and with a minimum of
fanfare became the Duke of New York, the potentate of beer and
political power in the city's underworld. Madden brought Jack the
consensus sentiment from half a dozen underworld powerhouses: Go
someplace else, Jack. Go someplace else and be crazy. For your own
good, go. Or we'll have to kill you.

Jack's pistol had
punctuated a decade and scribbled a finale to a segment of his own
life. He had waged war on Schultz, Rothstein, and half a dozen lesser
gang leaders in the Bronx, Jersey, and Manhattan, but he could not
war against a consortium of gangs and he moved to the Catskills. I
knew some of this, and I was certain Charlie Northrup knew much more,
which is why Charlie's spitting beer at Jack and mocking him to his
face did not seem, to say the least, to be in Charlie's own best
interest.

* * *

After Charlie walked out of the Top o' the Mountain
House Kiki said she was sick of the place and wanted to go someplace
and have fun, and Jack-the-fun-seeker said okay, and we stopped at a
hot dog stand, Kiki's choice, and sought out an aerial bowling alley
which intrigued her and was a first for me. A genuine bowling ball
was suspended on a long cable, and you stood aloof from the pins
below and let the ball fly like a cannon shot. It then truly or
falsely spun through the air and knocked over all the pins your luck
and skill permitted. Kiki scored sixty-eight and almost brained the
pinboy with a premature salvo, Jack got one fourteen and I won the
day with one sixty-four. Jack was coming to respect my eye at least
as much as he respected my legal acuity.

From bowling we went to miniature golf, where we
played eighteen holes. Some holes you climbed stairs to and putted
downhill. Kiki went first at one of those, and when you stood to the
rear of her, as Jack and I did—Fogarty and The Goose were consuming
soda pop elsewhere—you had total visibility of the girl's
apparatus. She wore rolled silk stockings with frilly black garters
about five inches above the knee, the sheerest pair of lace panties
I'd theretofore seen, and areas of the most interesting flesh likely
to be found on any mountain anywhere, and I also include the valleys.

I see her there yet. I see her also crossing and
uncrossing her silkiness, hinting at secret reaches, dark arenas of
mystery difficult to reach, full of jewels of improbable value, full
of the promise of tawdriness, of illicitness, of furtiveness, of
wickedness, with possibly blue rouge on the nipples, and arcane
exotica revealed when she slips down the elastic waistband of those
sheerest of sheers. They infected my imagination, those dark, those
sheer, those elasticized arenas of that gorgeous girl's life.

I did not know that the
infection would be prophetic of Kiki, prophetic of revelations of
flesh, prophetic of panties. Nor did I know that this afternoon, with
its sprinkles of rain interrupting our sport, would be the
inspiration for Jack to initiate his organized shakedown of hot dog
stands and miniature golf courses all over Greene and Ulster
counties.

* * *

Kiki showed me a clipping once with a coincidence
that made her believe in destiny. It's was an item out of Winchell,
which said, "Dot and Dash is a mustache. Yaffie is an arrest.
Long cut short is a sawed-off shotgun. White is pure alcohol. Simple
Simon is a diamond .... " It appeared the day before Kiki met
Jack at a nightclub party, and she was just about to go into
rehearsal for a new musical, Simple Simon.

I look back to those early
days and see Kiki developing in the role of woman as sprite, woman as
goddess, woman as imp. Her beauty and her radiance beyond beauty were
charms she used on Jack, but used with such indifference that they
became subtle, perhaps even secret, weapons. I cite the dance floor
episode at the Top o' the Mountain House as as example, for she had
small interest in whether it was Jack who danced with her or not. Her
need was to exult in her profession, which had not been chosen
casually, which reflected a self dancing alone beneath all the
glitter of her Broadway life. "I must practice my steps,"
she said numerous times in my presence, and then with a small radio
Jack had given her she would find suitable music and, oblivious of
others, go into her dance, a tippy-tap-toe routine of cosmic
simplicity. She was not a good dancer, just a dancer, just a chorus
girl. This is not a pejorative reduction, for it is all but
impossible for anyone to be as good a chorus girl as Kiki proved to
be, proved it not only on stage—Ziegfeld said she was the purest
example of sexual nonchalance he'd ever seen—but also in her
photogenicity, her inability to utter a complex sentence, her candor
with newspapermen, her willingness to trivialize, monumentalize,
exalt, and exploit her love for Jack by selling her memoirs to the
tabloids—twice—and herself to a burlesque circuit for the
fulfillable professional years of her beauty and the tenacious years
of Jack's public name. More abstractly she personified her calling in
her walk, in her breathing, in the toss of her head, in her
simultaneous eagerness and reluctance to please a lover, in her
willingness to court wickedness without approving of it, and in her
willingness to conform to the hallowed twentieth-century chorus-girl
stereotype that Ziegfeld. George White, Nils T. Granlund, the
Minskys, and so many more men, whose business was flesh, had
incarnated, and which Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Odd McIntyre,
Damon Runyon, Louis Sobol, and so many others, whose business was to
muse and gossip on the ways of this incarnated flesh, had mythicized.
And as surely as Jack loved pistols, rifles, machine guns—loved
their noise, their weight, their force, the power they passed to him,
their sleekness, their mechanical perfections, their oily surfaces as
balm for his ulcerated gangster soul—so did he cherish the
weaponistic charms of Kiki. And as the guns also became his trouble
as well as his beloved, so became Kiki. She did not know such
ambivalence was possible when she met Jack, but her time alone with
The Goose on the mountaintop was the beginning of her wisdom, painful
wisdom which love alone could relieve.