Mile High (20 page)

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.

At eight-thirty on a March morning in 1915, while E. C. West was going through the morning mail at the League office in Washington, Congressman Rei was announced. Rei had just begun his second term in the House. He and West had had several pleasant meetings, usually at lunch, in the regular course of West's friendly coverage of the members of Congress as a member of the League's legislative committee.

Rei was an Illinois Republican, a well-balanced, well-educated man who held a degree from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. He was a regular on everything except Italo-American legislation, but in no way a party hack. His most effective strength was his ability to influence other members on voting difficult bills.

“Are you wet or dry this morning?” West asked affably as the congressman sat down. Rei was neither wet nor dry. He would vote on the prohibition issues as the party required.

“It feels a little bit more wet out this morning,” Rei said. He refused a cigar.

“What can we do for you?”

“I bring a message.”

“How very kind of you.”

Rei smiled, took a long white envelope from his inner pocket and slid it across the desk. It wasn't sealed. West pulled at the flap and a yellow handkerchief of heavy silk fell out showing a large
VCF
embroidered in black in one corner. Startled, West looked quickly at Rei. Rei smiled blandly. “I have been to the old country on a holiday,” he said. “Don Vito sends to you fond greetings, Zu Eduardo.”

Zu, in the Sicilian speech, was the closest to a title any man would accept to indicate that he was a “friend of the friends.” The tremendous excitement of the moment covered West's forehead with a light sweat. The thought of his mother filled his heart like a soaring flight of primrose flamingoes. If only she could know! If only she could be there to see that the leader of the brotherhood, the
true
leader, had acknowledged that he was merely a soldier of the son of Maria Corrente.

Rei and he met the following morning on the enclosed deck of the 10
A.M.
ferry leaving South Ferry in Manhattan for St. George, Staten Island. They went over the operating manual together.