Roscoe (24 page)

Mac ate rotten smoked ham every day, hates ham, collected eggs, fed chickens, cleaned coops, hates chickens, walked horses to the pond, got squeezed between them, doesn’t like horses
either. The farmer cursed Mac for mistakes, knocked him down with the flat of a pitchfork, he’ll kill me, Mac decided. At dawn he turned the horses loose, threw the sleeping farmer’s
only shoes into the pond, left on the run, got a ride to Albany with a housepainter who hired him to do first coats, but the weather changed, no painting. His aunt also told him the bank was
kicking her and Mama out of the house, three months’ rent overdue, so Mac went to Albany City Savings Bank and asked for President Henry J. Goddard, who was eating a banana.

“You want a banana, young fella?” President Goddard asked.

“My mother is losing her house and I have to help her.”

“How can you help?” the president asked.

“I’m a housepainter,” he said. “I clean and paint houses.”

“A regular contractor.”

“I can fix houses for the bank,” Mac said.

“This is a great, great country,” President Goddard said. “Put the boy to work.”

A bank guy took Mac to one of the bank’s worst houses, three floors, five apartments. “Forty dollars when they’re all cleaned, painted, and papered,” said the bank guy.
“Here’s ten on account.”

Cleaning, painting was easy, but the wallpaper was peeling, filthy, Mac ripped it down. How do you put it up? Woman across the street saw Mac going in with armloads of wallpaper, watched him
dump the same paper in the trash, something wrong. Woman, Hattie, asked Mac what happened. Mac said he’d put fifteen double rolls on five ceilings but it fell off. Hattie said she’d
fix that and showed him the secret: a broom that swept the paper tight and straight. Mac got the knack, collected his thirty dollars, and bought his mother a hundred roses and a toy diamond
ring.

Mac moved into Hattie’s house, went to school, got work delivering oysters anyplace for Bill Keeler’s restaurant, including whorehouses. One of the Poole sisters let him in one
night, took the oysters, put them in dirty dishwater. She left Mac in the kitchen, didn’t pay him, went into the parlor, and fell over. Mac looked in and saw the four Poole sisters,
good-looking whores, all whacked on the pipe, money on the table. Mac pocketed the money and grew out of oyster transport, but not before he got to know whores, and liked a few.

He stayed on with
Hattie, quit school after eighth grade, and grew up with chalky teeth and the wrong jobs, housepainter, would-be carpenter. Then, one day, Hattie told him to go see O. B. Conway, the police
detective who was king of the night, and Mac became a cop.

Mac Rising

In 1928, after he disarmed, with a garden rake, a one-eyed Polish psychotic wielding a shotgun, an act of indisputable initiative, dexterity, and courage, O.B. persuaded the
chief: Take Mac out of uniform, make him a detective.

In 1929, after Pauly Biggers killed two people and took a fourteen-year-old girl hostage and said he’d kill her, too, if they didn’t let him drive to Canada, Mac, unarmed, talked an
hour and ten minutes to Pauly, making the Canadian escape arrangements. When Mac and Pauly finally agreed and shook hands on it, Mac shot Pauly between the eyes with a .22 pistol device he had
rigged into the left armpit of his coat, in emulation of Albany’s Silent Gunman of 1916. O.B. got Mac a ten-dollar raise.

In 1930, Mac and O.B. found four members of the Polka Dot Gang, who all wore polka-dot ties on the job, raiding a boxcar loaded with alcohol destined for Al Brisbane’s two downtown
drugstores. Mac shot two of the three, but O.B. got hit in the leg and went down in the open. Mac stood up and covered him, two guns blazing, pulled him out of danger, shot a third Dotter (the
fourth got away), but took a bullet in the side, and everybody went to the hospital. Mac was wearing a silk shirt, and when they pulled the shirt out of his wound, out popped the bullet, no surgery
needed. Mac realized bullets don’t go through silk, and after that O.B. also wore silk shirts. O.B. threw a party for Mac, thanks for saving my life, and bought him a new .38 police special
with a pearl handle.

Mac and O.B., close as brothers, roamed the city, and Mac met Patsy, who was Jesus, also Moses. O.B. had organized the truck convoys that brought Patsy and Bindy’s beer into town early in
Prohibition and was so savvy and ruthless Patsy made him deputy chief of the Night Squad, with orders to keep out hotshot hoodlums and freelancers with beer to sell. Nobody but the organization
sells beer in Albany. Let no hoodlum set up shop in our town. Mac and O.B. shot up several trucks of Italian bootleggers who ignored the rules, also several Italians. Patsy thought the world of Mac
and his shooting, but O.B. was Patsy’s man, and in 1930 Patsy made him supreme boss of the Night Squad.

Mac and Pina: A Love Mess

Mac met a cute singer at the Kenmore and they married and lasted long enough to have twins. One morning Mac’s wife, in her small black hat and fur jacket, stood in the
doorway saying, “If you want me, come after me.” Mac said, “You’re back in two days or don’t bother,” and watched her high heels, her black stocking seams, and
the sweet swagger of her ass as she walked to the taxi. The end. Mac bought a two-family house on Walter Street, moved his sister in downstairs, no rent if you raise the twins, Sis. Mac lived
upstairs and saw the twins sometimes. One night at Joey Polito’s Spaghetti House (opens 3 a.m., two broads always, no spaghetti), Mac saw Giuseppina serving drinks, just off the boat.

“You like?” Joey asked Mac. “I dress her up for you.”

Joey sent Pina into the ladies’ room with a suitcase and she came out,
Madonna santa,
too much for this
joint. You shoulda seen her. Mac got her a waitress job in a real restaurant with good tips, and then it was Mac and Pina. One customer, a car dealer, gave her a Pontiac. She had no license, but
she drove to Atlantic City for a garment makers’ convention, came back, and threw eleven hundred in tens, twenties, and fifties on her bed for Mac to see. Some tips. He could have cried over
how great she looked, that long black hair, those perfect calves, those fantastic tits, how she rose so high in the world working for tips, which is what she called it. Do what you know how, was
Mac’s credo. Mac and Pina, for months and months. Mac and Pina, this could last.

O.B. got to like Pina’s looks. One morning, after work, when Mac was going to Pina’s place, he saw O.B. come out and get into his car. Some say O.B. should not have done this, and
Mac is a member of that club. Pina said O.B. paid for what he got, just another Giovanni. Mac made an effort to believe her. Pina could’ve given Mac the clap, the crabs, and the syph, he
wouldn’t mind as long as she was there after work. But then she stayed out. Where? Mac tried patience, but had none. The way his wife left him, bingo, he left Pina, who moved out of her place
and in with the Dutchman, upstairs over the Double Dutch nightclub, where the Dutchman had B-girls of his own but none like Pina. Pina liked the Dutchman’s big apartment, nice plants, thick
rugs, picture window looking at the river, watch the boats go by. Dutchman played Italian music for Pina, Mac never thought of that. Dutchman gave her a diamond big as the end of a cigarette, Mac
couldn’t afford that. Dutchman bent her in two, tied her up, gagged her, Mac didn’t go for that stuff, didn’t know Pina did, a girl’s gotta have her fun. Pina would still
screw Mac silly if he came around, but Mac gave up Pina. Everything except thinking about her.

Mac and Jack

Roscoe stuffed himself into the front seat of Mac’s car for the ride to the Notchery, imagining what was happening inside Mac’s head, same old thing, revving
himself up with the necessary iron to face the unknown worst the world offered him day after day. But today had substantially more gravity, as Mac prepared to lead the invading army into a war
between the McCall men maddened by the will to excess, power gone berserk, not a first for either brother. When these fellows are wrong they are wrong
fortissimo.

Today was also different for Roscoe, the outsider about to become the intermediary; and nobody but Mac knew that yet. There was an antecedent for such a condition: late fall 1931, Jack (Legs)
Diamond, still recovering from being shot in the arm, lung, and liver seven months earlier, on bail waiting for his second trial in Troy for kidnapping and torturing a trucker, here he was suddenly
in the Elks Club, pulling up a chair to sit down for a little pinochle with Roscoe, Marcus Gorman, and Leo Finn, one of the Party’s aging bagmen, an ex-schoolteacher and still a bit of a
literatus,
who knew his Yeats and Keats and could call up fragments on cue, which amused Jack.

“So—how are all your bullet holes doing, Jack?” Roscoe asked.

“You don’t have to answer that,” said Marcus, whose fame was in a crescendo from representing Jack in court.

“They’re coming along,” Jack said.

“You don’t seem to mind being shot,” Roscoe said, “you handle it so well and so often.”

“Being shot’s not so bad,” Jack said. “The problem is getting even.”

“My buddies gut-shot me in the war,” Roscoe said.

“Accidentally on purpose?” Jack asked.

“Exactly.”

“Amazing,” said Leo. “Just what Willie wrote.”

“Willie?” said Jack. “Is that one of your old poets?”

“The same. . .‘A heavily built Falstaffian man / Comes cracking jokes of civil war / As though to die by gunshot were / The finest play under the sun.’ ”

“Civil war,” Jack said. “I know about that. It was my buddies who shot me in the back with two shotguns.”

“Your war never ends, does it?” Roscoe said.

“No, but I’m too young to retire,” Jack said, and Roscoe dealt the cards.

Jack was thirty-four and had been an outsize presence in Albany all that summer, turning up at the Elks, at the best restaurants, a regular at the Kenmore’s Rainbo Room, headlines in the
papers every day about his upcoming trial and his crushed mountain empire. Since the late 1920s Jack, the best-known gangster in the East, had been the Emperor of Applejack in the Catskills, doing
business in eighteen counties, running beer out of the Kingston brewery he took over after Charlie Northrup disappeared, highjacking fellow bootleggers, his specialty. He’d terrorized most
Catskill roadhouses and hotels into handling his goods, converted law enforcement to his persuasion—the sheriff of Greene County gave pistol permits to his whole gang, made Jack a deputy
with a badge. But then Jack kidnapped and tortured Clem Streeter (burned his feet, hung him from a tree) for refusing to say where he was hauling twenty-four barrels of hard cider, the raw element
of applejack. And when Clem told his story next day, well, that did it. We can stand anything but torture, said Governor Roosevelt. And in the spring of 1931, he sent state troopers and his
attorney general down to rupture Jack’s empire up the middle and sideways.

Marcus won Jack a change of venue from Catskill to Troy, and Jack then transferred his wife, girlfriend, and select henchmen into a six-room suite on the second floor of the Kenmore. In July,
the jury at Jack’s first Troy trial acquitted him of assaulting the trucker, and Jack the celebrity soared socially over Albany rooftops, ubiquitous in the town’s speakeasies, awaiting
the second trial—another acquittal? His ultimate plan: go into business upstate, away from the Catskills, new gang, new territory, new connections.

Long story short: Jack, after the Elks Club pinochle game, offered Roscoe a business proposition—cheap beer, no matter what price he had to undercut, cheaper by a dollar a barrel than the
Waxey Gordon beer Mush and Bindy were bringing into Albany. Save your money! Buy from Jack! Where was Jack getting his beer now that the troopers had closed his brewery?

“There’s beer everywhere,” said Jack, who had links to breweries in Fort Edward, Troy, Yonkers, Manhattan, Coney Island. But Jack’s beer came with Jack’s baggage.
Albany Detective Sergeant Freddie Robin had been slouching on a sofa in the Kenmore lobby, assigned to watch Jack’s pals troop in and out for business and sociality: the Thorpe brothers,
homegrown thugs who, a year hence, would bring in Lorenzo Scarpelli to kill Bindy and Mush; also Honey Curry and Hubert Maloy, who would evolve into kidnappers themselves in 1938, holding
Bindy’s son, Charlie Boy, for ransom; plus Vincent Coll, Fats McCarthy, and Dutch Schultz, a trio of swaggering notables who had left corpses all over Manhattan in the beer wars. Newsmen had
kept score on who was ahead in the corpse count, and Jack won. Did Albany need beer that came in coffins?

“Jack, your proposition sounds tempting,” Roscoe said, “but Waxey’s beer is well liked. I can’t imagine the boys switching.”

“Can you check it out with Patsy and Bindy?” Jack wondered.

“I’ll pass the question along,” said Roscoe.

When he told Patsy about the offer, Patsy said, “That fella’s going to be a serious nuisance if they don’t put him in jail.”

Roscoe
at that moment
became the outsider in future Jack talk: Patsy trusting him like nobody else, but keeping him apart from certain cosmic decisions. You run the Party, Roscoe,
I’ll run the nighttown—as if they could be separated. But Patsy believed in separate realms of power, pitted even his closest allies against one another when it suited him. Like pitting
chickens. Competitive truculence. See who survives.

And so monitoring Jack fell to O.B. and Mac. They followed him when he left the Kenmore and moved into the Wellington Hotel, next to the Elks Club. They pressured the Wellington to put him out,
and followed him to the Pine Hills where he stayed with the bootlegger Nick Farr. With the Thorpe brothers, Farr was helping set up Jack’s embryonic upstate beer network. Farr’s
neighbors hadn’t known what he did for a living, but they recognized Jack from the newspapers and alerted the police. O.B. and Mac told Jack he was upsetting the citizenry and was no longer
welcome in Albany. Get lost, Jack.

Jack sent his wife, Alice, to her apartment on 72nd Street in Manhattan, then moved in with his girlfriend, Marion (Kiki) Roberts, upstairs over Sylvester Hausen’s card game on Nineteenth
Street in Watervliet. He switched between there and a house in North Troy until the second week of December, when the trial was about to begin. He also called Bindy and said he’d dropped the
idea of bringing in beer, but how about permission to go into the insurance business in Albany? Insurance meant collecting premiums that insured the buyer against Jack Diamond’s resentment of
people who wouldn’t buy his insurance. Bindy, like Roscoe, passed Jack’s request on to Patsy.