Operation Underworld (15 page)

A block away from the Fulton Street Fish Market, there stood a three storey brick warehouse, circa nineteen twenties. The two hobos standing at the side door were surprised when they saw the bright yellow sign nailed to the door:
CLOSED BY ORDER OF NEW YORK CITY BOARD OF HEALTH. INFECTED RATS FOUND ON PREMISES
.

“What’s it say?”

“What’sa matter? Can’t you read? It says, ‘Closed… for… remodlin’.”

“Damn! I really liked that place, too. Spacious, nice gentle ambience.”

The two disappointed men turned and walked away in search of other accommodation, and a place to share their bottle of vintage Thunderbird wine.

Originally used to store large shipments of dry goods, the warehouse was abandoned in the late thirties when temperature-controlled storage and the advent of more efficient trucking came to lower Manhattan. With most of the windows broken out and literally every single fixture, removable or not, having been removed, the building was of little use to anyone except some of the less desirable hobos who had been banned from the doorways, streets and sewers of the Lower Bowery.

Of course, New York being New York, the building might have been abandoned but that didn’t mean it wasn’t occupied. Voices could be heard emanating from the basement. They were the voices of Lanza and Haffenden. The words, however, had a Marconian crackle to them.

In a small room, in the basement, were two men. The room they were in was in the extreme corner of the lower level, and its door had a crooked sign hanging by one nail which read:
JANITOR
. The two men wore bulky headsets and were staring intently at the RCA eight inch reel-to-reel tape recorder, while listening to the play-back of
Operation Underworld
’s two prime players.

“What the hell do you make of that?” one of the agents asked, sliding his bulky headset down around his neck.

“Got me by the short ones! I figure the guys at the Hollywood belong to Lanza. But this other guy he’s reportin’ to has to be somebody pretty god-damned big.”

“Well, it sure as hell ain’t Luciano. Must be some new boss, moved in to take over.”

“The Commander?”

“Where the hell do they come up with these ridiculous names?”

That night, Harry Bridges remembered coming around the corner onto Broadway, and then the stars were swirling in front of his eyes, and his vision blurred to a haze. Now he sat in the back of a car with a huge man sitting on either side of him, and his arms were pinned behind his back.

A short time later, he was in the back room of a restaurant, lying on the floor, still blindfolded, beaten and bruised, while sounds of banging pots and crashing dishes surrounded him. Acar pulled up outside, and he was man-handled into the back seat. At LaGuardia Field he was escorted onto a plane, shortly before take-off, and he understood that, except for in the movies, he had no reason ever see New York again.

The next morning, even before he had eaten his eggs, Socks was back on the phone with The Commander.

“We don’t anticipate any more trouble concerning that Brooklyn Bridge deal. He got on a plane last night.”

“Alright. What about Brooklyn?”

Lanza hesitated before answering. “No, nuthin’ yet.”

“We need a meet after the weekend. Monday, the usual place, alone. If you get there first, don’t order the fish.”

“I won’t.”

Lanza had a nervous feeling as he hung up. Not only was this operation taking away from his own business time and making no contribution to his impending case, it appeared to be rapidly gaining in intensity and scope. Worst of all, what if Jimmy The Bull was right? No one anywhere had discovered any saboteurs.

Times for meetings were on a rotational basis per day. In other words, if a day was given over the phone, it actually meant the day after, and depending on which day the meeting was actually on, the times were previously set. For example, Mondays were always three o’clock, Tuesdays were always four o’clock and so on. If a special, unscheduled meeting was necessary, a code word was used in the conversation and special couriers were utilised. Late that afternoon Socks got a special courier.

Lucky Luciano had a close partner, Frank Costello. Frank Costello had a top-notch bookie, Eddie Erickson. Eddie would regularly meet with Walter Winchell. Every so often, in order to get the inside scoop on ‘bigtime’ crime stories, Winchell would pass information on winning horses to a very highly placed law enforcement official. The same official who now stood at window number three of the betting cages.

The elderly man in the cashier’s cage read the ticket the gambler had just slid across the counter.

“Belmont. Albany Eddie to show in the third.” He looked up at the small man in the dark suit with the oval, baby face. The cashier recognised him instantly, even without the two bodyguards standing on either side of him. Double-checking the clipboard hanging next to him to confirm the results, the cashier filed the ticket and counted out the man’s $250.

The man stepped off to one side and faced into the wall to put the money away, and one of the short, pugnacious men with him commented as he removed his wallet from his breast pocket.

“You don’t bet too often, Chief, but when you do, you sure can pick ’em.”

“You just have to know how to study the ponies, agent. That, and a little luck.”

The opened bill fold showed an ID card with a red stamp across it which read,
DIRECTOR
and a picture of the little man, as well as a small, toy-like gold badge. The name under the photo read: J. Edgar Hoover.

Belmont Park was the third leg of The Triple Crown and one of the oldest and largest racetracks in the country. Although races were normally restricted or suspended in the winter months, the combination of the mild weather and the wartime atmosphere persuaded the owners to extend the season.

Saturday was always the best day to be there. There were specials at the restaurant, happy hour started earlier, and there were more races to bet on. Whenever someone brought a friend to the track for the first time, they were careful to bring them in through the main arcade. For it was here that the excitement flowed over the lucky losers at its strongest, and the absolute sensation of privilege at being allowed to donate your money to such a fine establishment was most appreciated. It is highly probable that this is the very atmosphere that first inspired Buggsy Siegel to claim to have conceived the idea of a casino in the middle of the desert, to his compatriots a few years later.

The awful stench of the food and cigar smoke permeated the arcade and flowed out onto the first few tiers of stadium seating, where they collided with the pleasant aromas of horse shit and damp turf.

“What time is it?”

Looking at his watch, short agent number one answered, “Half past five, Mr Hoover.” All three men wore identical dark suits, white shirts, Fedoras and shiny black shoes so you couldn’t tell they were FBI.

“Alright, you two go and watch the races. Meet me by concession stand three, at six o’clock.”

“But Mr Hoover, we’re supposed to stay with you at – ” short agent number two began to protest, but was cut short.

“
I SAID GO, GOD-DAMN IT
!”

They went.

Hoover was the most successful bureaucrat in the history of Washington DC. From the time his father got him his first job at the Department of Justice, in June of 1917, his borderline fanaticism, which he mistakenly believed to be loyalty, grew ever stronger and increasingly self-perpetuating.

In no time at all, J. Edgar’s ability to manipulate knowledge and information before it reached the people had grown to legendary proportions.

During the Deportation Hysteria of the early 1920s, Hoover worked at the Enemy Alien Registration Section, appropriately abbreviated EARS, of the Bureau of Investigation. It is from the ‘reports’ of the misguided scientists who testified with ‘scientific proof’ that aliens, especially Eastern European Jews, were by-and-large undesirable, (due to everything from crime and disease to an increased tendency to display feeble-mindedness), that he first learned how easy it was to dupe the American public.

Performing centre stage with a backdrop of anti-immigrant fever suited Hoover’s purist mentality, as well as taught him that oldest of government bureaucrat’s tricks. Find something or someone to label a dangerous common enemy, and after shining the spotlight on them, rally supporters to mould into a power base on the premise that you are the man to defeat that enemy. Before the First War it was the Eastern Europeans, mostly Jews, during the Second War it was ‘The Hun’ and later it became the communists.

Appropriating money wherever he could, Hoover began to build his empire within The Empire. However, money was not the only ingredient in the Hooverville recipe.

From his early days in the Twenties, Hoover learned that money and political influence bought access to the broadsheets, accompanied by sympathetic stories which would go a long way towards helping him achieve his dream of becoming a national hero.

He sensationalised his police stories through the media with consummate skill. His personally approved police dramas for the
Lucky Strike Hour
, a popular radio show, were by 1932 specifically designed to establish his bureau, and by default himself, as pop culture icons. The children’s episodes of
Junior G-Men
, broadcast nationwide, told youngsters how to recognise and report suspicious persons to the local authorities, as well as teaching them how they should think and behave if they were going to grow up to be good little agents. Follow-up shows such as
Gangbusters
and
This Is Your FBI
continued his unending quest for popularity.

Ironically, even though it was from his hatred of aliens that Hoover built a career, it was an alien that would help him establish it once and for all in the public eye by giving him Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger. From the first time ‘Baby Face’ Nelson called them “G-men” and John Dillinger’s body was splashed across the front page, J. Edgar knew he would be a star.

His big break came in 1924 when the Bureau reached an unprecedented level of corruption. He seized the chance when it was offered and accepted the directorship of the Bureau, and took the post on the condition he be allowed to isolate it from politics, effectively transforming it into an autonomous entity.

By 1941, Hoover had been in service for twenty-five years, twenty-one of those years as Assistant Director or Director, and although most career individuals would consider themselves prime candidates for retirement, J. Edgar wasn’t even halfway through his dictatorship.

How was a multi-million dollar government organisation, which was later able to enact law allowing a file to be compiled containing the details of every one of its citizens’ personal lives, held at bay by a criminal syndicate which Hoover claimed did not exist?

The answer is very basic. Hoover was bought.

Lucky Luciano understood two principles regarding the approach towards the American way of doing business when he established The Commission: every man has his price, and when attempting to buy someone, always start at the top.

J. Edgar’s inane fear of bad press had kept him away from open confrontations with organised crime, and his policies regarding this behaviour are well documented. Through his consistent and unwavering public denial of the existence of organised crime, Hoover did more to help the criminal syndicates than any other single entity up until the circus known as the ‘War On Drugs’, (which seems to have replaced the ‘War On Poverty’ but has recently taken a back seat to the ‘War On Terror’).

David Marston, a retired FBI agent, in his much acclaimed book,
Inside Hoover’s FBI
, commenting on the relationship of organised crime and the FBI under Hoover, stated that, “… although they, [the FBI and organised crime], were presumptive enemies, in the first four decades they competed primarily for newspaper space.”

This may have been an understatement. Marston, in the same publication, comments that, “J. Edgar Hoover was the best FBI Director Organised Crime ever had.”