Goff was trembling uncontrollably. “They can’t pay you what I can pay. There isn’t anybody in this entire business, coast to coast, who can pay you more than I can pay. Lemme walk outta here with a suitcase and get on some ship. I’ll go so far nobody’ll ever see me again. I’ll be like dead. You’ll collect twice—from them and from me. Okay?”
Masseria nodded to Yale. Yale grasped the front of Goff’s robe and pajamas and pulled him to his feet. “Why don’t you do what you’re told, you prick.”
“Do what, Frankie?” Goff was weeping. “I’ll do anything. Tell me what.”
“Tomorrow when the banks open you get outta here and you take a payoff from certain bonds you got and you bring it downtown to a certain guy, you know who.”
Goff gaped. He couldn’t seem to make himself understand. “You mean—West?”
“Shaddopp!” Masseria roared. “I don’ wanna know who! You unnastan’? You know who. That’s enough. You hear?” Yale hit Goff in the gut with all his professional force and dropped him retching on the floor. Masseria walked up beside him and kicked him viciously in the head with his heavy shoe. He rolled Goff over with his foot so that Goff was staring up at him. “You get me mixed up wit’ people like this again,” he said with heavy anger, “and you’ll wish to God somebody would take a contract to come in and only kill you.”
In 1912, because of his extensive political connections, William Tobin, a well-known New York attorney, was named to the action committee of the National Brewers’ Consortium and to the defense committee of the Personal Liberty League of the Distillers’ Appeal. For the entire alcoholic-beverage industry he was able to swing into action such hopeless projects as the employment of dozens of costly experts to analyze dry strategy—which was available in the daily newspapers for two cents—and the beverage industry’s boycott of firms that he pointed out as opposing traffic in beer and spirits (because they had tried to discourage on-the-job drinking by employees), such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, Procter & Gamble, and the United States Steel Corporation, which were then blacklisted. The Heinz Company was cited as an enemy because its founder was president of the Pennsylvania Sunday School Association, which had endorsed prohibition.
The Tobin Committee was able to raise rages among companies and consumers alike. Tobin succeeded in setting the brewers against the distillers and the vintners against the breweries, so that each secretly expected to drive the others out of the market; the brewers, particularly, had hopes of arranging to manufacture the only national alcoholic beverage. He also advised groups to bribe the wrong politicians, who would then vote dry or run shouting to the newspapers. Each dummy “front” organization Tobin formed for his industries to fight the prohibitionists was somehow exposed and destroyed. Wherever possible he guided the alcohol manufacturers to do everything wrong, every possible public and private mistake. All in all, Tobin made popular mistakes for his people, wholly aided by the fact that Americans had been educated for a generation through the WCTU’s educational committees. Americans deeply wanted the brewers and distillers to be guilty.
His job well done, Tobin left political contact work in 1914 to accept a post as executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., a Swiss corporation dealing in imports. The new appointment made Tobin very happy. He was miserable when he was separated from Eddie, filled with dread and woe, since all the while he served the wet cause Eddie forbade him to attempt to come within a mile of him. They could not be seen together. Tobin could understand that that was necessary functionally, but it made him miserable, and were it not for the fact that he had to telephone Eddie every night to get his instructions and find out what it was he would be required to do next, he simply did not think he would have been able to stand it.
But that was over now, thank God. Eddie had given him a wonderful six-window office directly over Eddie’s own office in the new West National Building. A direct telephone connection had been sunk into the building wall within a copper cable where no one could tamper with it. Willie Tobin had never known any other life than working for the Wests. Paddy had chosen him when he was thirteen because he had been so silent. Paddy had put him through law school and had broken him into politics; then Eddie, marvelous, marvelous Eddie, had polished him.
Willie was a small-boned man, elegant in his movements and his almost epicene taste in clothes, with large, limpid brown eyes that stared passively, even adoringly. He had a wonderful flair for scarves, which he wore instead of ties—not in public, of course, but at the office, since he saw no one but the staff personally; everything was done on the telephone. He still had the knack of silence, because he knew Eddie admired that, but with the staff he could rattle on like a blue jay. He had an entirely male staff. He thought that was much the best thing, considering the types who might possibly decide to visit the office—a bunch of hairy gorillas. Willie just seemed to vanish at the end of the working day. He never invited even the closest staff people to dinner or to his place even though some of them had had very, very big eyes over that prospect. He’d taken some of them to lunch. He’d taken a few of them to important performances of the ballet or to really good art shows, but never just one of them, in fact never less than three of them. He certainly had no women friends. He was absolutely crazy about Irene West—that was clearly there for everyone to see except Irene and Edward West. But when the staff people talked it over at their places almost every night of every week of the year they decided that Willie adored Irene because she was so close to Eddie that some of that wonderful stuff must rub off on her.
Willie’s life, public and private, was like a human extension of a complicated telephone system. Edward West always knew where to find him simply because he tried not to stray from the telephone unless Eddie had okayed it first. He placed and took eighty and ninety telephone calls from New York, most states and Europe in the course of his twenty-four hour self-imposed duty. He concentrated the essence of these calls into précis form and took them himself to Eddie’s office every morning, heavily sealed, names identified in code. He was, or became, absolutely indispensable because he lived to perfect ways to make himself indispensable to Eddie. But he made no grandiose efforts to advertise his brave activities. He did prodigies of work without showing effort. He murmured rather than spoke. He had the analytical ability to think his way through the consecutive parts and movements of a watch, but only the extremely observant (which did not include Edward West) knew he was as intelligent as he was because he really did work hard at diverting attention from himself. “You are not there to bellow opera arias,” he told himself.
He was passionately interested and extremely learned about the dance because, incomprehensibly, the dance was the topic Eddie most enjoyed talking about—in fact it was the only topic that was certain to soften him, to relax his mind and the stern muscles of his face. Sometimes, when this happened, Willie would miss seeing those wonderfully strong, stern lines. But in a way he knew he was making Eddie happy.
Willie had started with the Wests at two dollars a week. When Paddy died he was making twenty-two as Paddy’s confidential man, then Eddie had raised him to thirty. By 1924 he had nine million dollars banked in Switzerland, earned by his commission of one percent of the handle on liquor procurement and one percent on national collections. He didn’t find very much to spend it on. Besides clothes, elaborate birthday and Christmas presents for Eddie (and Irene) were about the only expensive items. He had a wonderful wardrobe of just about every kind of wonderful clothes in closets and chests and stored trunks and some day when he really got the chance he was going to rent a sixteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, live in four rooms and line the walls of all the rest with closets for his wonderful clothes. He kept canaries. And after a few years of banking so much money he began to collect one each of every automobile ever made. He got his back up for the first time with Eddie and really did have to stamp his foot when he was told they were going to move to Bürgenstock West for good. He simply refused to budge until Eddie
had agreed that he could take his car collection with him.
Sunday was usually his quiet day. He just relaxed in the apartment with the canaries, doing needlework on ladies’ evening handbags, a recreation he had learned from that ruffian of an old lawyer, F. Marx Heller. He was able to complete three bags a month of his own designs, and he sold them to an uptown outlet for thirty dollars each. He lived at the New York Athletic Club on 59th at Sixth in a comfortable seven-story brownstone building. Every morning and night he took an icewater plunge in the eight-foot-square tank the club kept for drunks—which had a fifty-pound cake of ice floating in it at all times—then had a wonderful deep, deep Swedish massage from Fred or Barney. He never fraternized at all in the club and only tipped on Christmas Day and June 25 lest they get some idea that he was somehow trying to make himself popular.
He really preferred the bachelor life, he told Irene, because his hours were so irregular and there was so much traveling (which was true at least in the early years). Eddie could call him at all hours of the night to pass on instructions to the special representative or to sober up some big-time trial lawyer in the ice-water plunge or to take sixty or seventy thousand dollars downtown to Arnold Goff or to find the right sort of cooperative doctor to help out at Rhonda Healey’s request. He really liked Rhonda. She put up with so goddam much.
When he had just about settled himself in the new Horizons offices, with the most divine view of the two rivers anyone had ever seen, Eddie (and Irene) got back from that endless honeymoon, and he was sent off to Europe in Eddie’s wake.
He had two steady travel beats after that, and the way it seemed to work out, Eddie always sent him to the Bahamas, Cuba, the Keys and Mexico in the summertime and to Canada only in the winter, for God’s sake. And he had a lot of travel inside the country. Eddie broke the ground, but he had to finish the arrangements to take down half of the six hundred thousand barrels of government whiskey in 1915. Then he and the special representative had to get it moved, then to see that it was stored safely. There were about twenty gallons to the half barrel, or about four million cases of uncut whiskey. They had to begin to buy garages practically in wholesale lots all over the country, and Eddie made Willie qualify for a realty board license so that he could split commissions with local realty agents on the sales. They’d be needing garages soon enough anyway, and, all told, the three hundred thousand barrels of whiskey cost only two dollars and eighty cents a case, including all payoffs and transport. Naturally this didn’t prorate the cost of the garages, but it included the grain alcohol and water mix that they had used to fill the barrels to the top again. It was a terribly difficult job of organization, but Eddie and the special representative had said Willie had a genius for logistics. The genius part that met the eye was that five years later they were selling the whiskey that cost them two-eighty a case for sixty-four dollars a case. And it was so good that after that the buyer got it he cut it again.
Eddie wanted him to go to Europe before the war started in order to finish all the details Eddie had begun in France, Scotland and England while he and Irene were on tour.
Willie closed for three million five hundred thousand cases of Scotch at a unit cost of eight dollars a case, including shipping costs, for delivery to their warehouses (which he had bought or built) in the Bahamas and in the Keys not later than July 15, 1919, under a delivery schedule that was to begin—wartime shipping slowing things down as it could—on April 15th, 1915. He bought seven hundred and fifty thousand cases of red and white wine and a hundred thousand cases of vermouth in France because Eddie had reasoned that although they could get it cheaper in Italy and Germany by holding the wine off the market until the market stabilized, the rich Americans would have sour palates from lousy red wine and they’d be ready to pay eighty dollars a case for French wine that had cost six dollars a case in the big bulk lots. By that time they wouldn’t know one wine from the other—beyond red and white, of course—so Eddie had him buy the hard, hard reds of the Côte-Rôtie, which was wine that demanded plenty of aging, and they took delivery on that at once. Wanting to be fair with the American people, Eddie did not accept delivery on any white wine (an assorted bag) that was more than two years old. The label printers would see to all the details of marques and vintages. He bought one million two hundred thousand cases of champagne at eleven dollars a case because Americans had been brainwashed into believing that they could drink only champagne to celebrate or commemorate important occasions—otherwise they would suffer bad luck; and they got ninety-five a case for it.
He finished up the heavyweight cognac arrangements in the southwest, then went back to Paris determined to see an “exhibition” before he left because everyone said that was the thing to do. Little did he know that, having become the greatest individual customer for French wines in all history, the vintners would have been happy to stage an “exhibition” for him themselves, throwing in all wives and daughters.
He did see one in the Rue Chabanais and not only disapproved of it but (privately) thought it a silly waste of time. Publicly he did his best to pretend to be most enthusiastic, whereupon the banker they used in Paris immediately felt it necessary to fix him up with this cow-cunted young whore who couldn’t speak a word of English, and they had sat in a drafty room for a half hour until he felt it was safe enough to come out. He had had to give her fifty dollars (with a finger to his lips), and she had rushed him and kissed him and he had almost vomited because God knew where that mouth had been!
He sailed out of England for Canada, where he reserved stocks of neutral grain spirits for delivery, at order, beginning in February 1922; he had also stockpiled a matching quantity of neutral grain spirits in the States. He bought eight hundred thousand cases of Canadian whiskey, then went to Cuba, where he reserved two hundred thousand cases of light and two hundred thousand cases of barreled rums in a general Caribbean mix. When the major reserving/buying was completed he began the work of warehousing his stores in the more expensive storage facilities inside the States and in the feeder stations ringing the country. When all arrangements were completed, in December 1918, they had a total of sixteen million four hundred thousand cases on reserve order or ready to be shipped.
Eddie had acted shrewdly. He knew that the mad scramble to make a killing would start just before the ratification of the amendment. But he also knew that there could not possibly be enough liquor in Britain, France and Canada for the nationals of those countries in addition to thirsty Americans and that the case-unit prices would soar tremendously. And he was 100 percent right.
Eddie had known about the brewery loophole that would appear in the Volstead Act because he himself had put all the loopholes there. Many discouraged brewers didn’t have the interest left to hold onto their plants for a long pull, and none of them had any interest in making “cereal beverages.” They were willing to sell their breweries to Horizons A.G. or they were willing to lease their breweries for the duration of prohibition. If a well-placed brewery could not be bought or leased, it was Willie’s job to have its directors brought to trial in a federal court and to have the breweries closed under injunction. That usually brought the owners around.
The limited partners of Horizons A.G., who were influential in the various regions, were very helpful in brewery acquisitions. When prohibition came and the manufacture of “cereal beverages” with an alcoholic content of not more than one-half of one percent was legalized, the breweries (Horizons leased a hundred and forty-two of these to local mobs in the national marketing areas) ran full blast making “near beer,” which they delivered to the speakeasies together with a container of the alcohol that had been removed from it at the brewery. The bartender could then return the alcohol to the beer barrel with a compression pump or pour it into the glass by hand—as the customer preferred. Then the Chicago chemists came up with wort, which was green beer with no alcohol at all, so there could not possibly be any legal objection. When these barrels were delivered the speakeasies needed only
to drop yeast into them and let the beer ferment on the premises, so that the hangovers were so much less horrible. Beer was an enormous profit-maker (and yielded one-sixth of its gross sales to Horizons A.G.). It cost six dollars a barrel to make and sold to speakeasies for fifty-five dollars a barrel. Beer outsold liquor over the bars at the ratio of twenty-three to one.
Chicago was a very big beer territory. It handled sixty thousand barrels of beer a week. New York wasn’t as big for beer per capita, but its yield was four times that of Chicago from everything else; and New York was handling one hundred and thirty-seven thousand barrels a week. Nationally, when the share of Horizons A.G. was one-sixth of eight billion dollars—quite apart from the wholesale liquor business, the brewery rentals and the short-term credit banking—New York was the biggest gross unit producer of all national market areas with nine hundred million a year. But of course Chicago had the biggest star attraction of any market area, Al Capone.
When Eddie finished his estimates in 1930, averaging the income for the decade just spent at a gross of thirteen billion dollars a year, it was established that the rackets and their dependent industries had become the biggest American industry then and in the nation’s history.
Willie supervised 193 employees in the West National building and 74 in the field, plus 11 buying representatives and expediters who worked outside the country. The field people were used to verify inventories and to check duplicates of deposit slips against lading bills and gross-income figures filed under the special representative’s control. It was not a complex structure. The mobs borrowed capital from Goff, who was Horizons A.G. but did not know it, to buy/lease from Willie Tobin, a Horizons employee, then shared one-sixth of their gross operating profits with Benito Rei, who was Horizons A.G. and also the special representative of Don Vito Cascio Ferro, capo di capi, chosen to assist E. C. West in a most important phase of the over-all operation.