Playland (14 page)

A tainted oyster, it turned out.

I still have a copy of that conference-room photograph pinned to the bulletin board in my office. It was one of the three I kept, of all the hundreds I looked at, as if in those three photographs I would find the secret of Blue Tyler that for so long eluded me.

It was as if she was not meant to grow up.

“Naughty, naughty, Blue Tyler’s hips were hiccuping at the Mocambo with J. F. French’s lad Arthur … they’re that way, they say, but ukiddinme? We hear she’s only fit for a king.” Winchell, of course, antennae quivering.

Fit for a king.

Specifically Jacob King. Born Yakov Kinovsky, Red Hook (Brooklyn), 1907. Playboy. Man About Town. Millionaire Sportsman. Hotel Investor. Polo. Tennis. Yachtsman. A man who collected headlines.
DENIES MOB LINKS … ACQUITTED … NOT CHARGED … NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION … PLANS NEVADA HOTEL EMPIRE … WILL PRODUCE TYLER WESTERN, OTHER PIX … DENIES HOTEL OPENING POSTPONED … “JUST FRIENDS,” BLUE SAYS … “ONLY BUSINESS ASSOCIATES,” KING SAYS
.

Then:

T
here have been two indifferent cut-and-paste biographies of Jacob King written over the years, the tone of each reflecting the national infatuation with the underworld and its more marketable citizens. Both books are a collage of the same old clips and the same old police files and booking sheets and court transcripts, the same unsubstantiated accusations, the same slipping memories and inductive leaps and fanciful conjectures. The films about Jacob King, in which his character appeared either pseudonymously or under his own name (or to be more precise the Americanization of his own name), were no less inventive. Usually he was portrayed in one of two conflicting ways, the low-budget version being Jacob as a murdering, sexually impotent hood, impotence that all-purpose motivation in bad movies, cut-rate filmmakers (and upmarket ones as well) never having understood that motivation is a terrible explanation of character. Then there is the big-budget version, with Jacob as tragic romantic hero trying to go straight and grab a legitimate slice of the American dream, but unable, or perhaps unwilling, to cut the umbilical cord tying him to his violent past. Whatever the medium, whatever the perverse alchemy of fact, factoid, and fantasy, Jacob King was always perceived as larger than life, a criminal of many parts.

It is instructive here to examine the criminal passport of Jacob King, preserved in the archives of the New York Police Department, and on microfilm as well at the United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C. 20537, the result of a 1949 federal investigation into the circumstances of his death, and of the 1951 Kefauver hearings on the world of organized crime. In the dull abbreviations of police bureaucrats, Jacob King’s yellow sheet, as it is more familiarly called, shows the stopovers he made as he traveled the world of crime, absent the romantic filter through which his actions were later viewed. I quote at random:

Two entries, of interest primarily in that sometime between the ages of sixteen and eighteen Yakov Kinovsky decided that his personality and his success in the criminal calling warranted his Americanizing his name to Jacob King. K-I-N-G. Four letters that would fit neatly into the tabloid headlines he would later court so assiduously. K-I-N-G. Even in his teens Yakov Kinovsky already considered himself the stuff of criminal royalty.

There were a number of other arrests for assault with intent to commit murder in the first degree, and in every instance the result was “Case dism. (insuff. evidence),” Jacob King’s reputation over the years inducing a passion for discretion among those in a position to testify against him. Only once did he ever go to trial in a capital case, on the charge of “Mrdr 1st,” and the disposition (1/6/47) was “not glty. by jury,” a verdict Jacob King owed largely to the fact that while he was in custody at the Tombs, remanded there without bond throughout the investigation and trial (the only time he was ever incarcerated for a sustained period), the state’s two leading witnesses were murdered, the first blown apart by a bomb delivered in a Christmas poinsettia, the second shot to death as he was evacuating his bowels in a men’s room stall at Sunnyside Arena in Queens during a preliminary four-rounder the night Lulu Constantino won his twenty-ninth consecutive featherweight fight against Lefty Lew Mann in the main event.

As a record of mayhem, Jacob King’s rap sheet was not all that more evocative than those of more run-of-the-mill thugs. What made him distinctive was the spur-of-the-moment inventiveness with which his forays into criminal violence were said, if only on the basis of hearsay, to have been conducted. In the case of Jacob King, “aslt w/dang. wpn” could mean severing the victim’s fingers from his left hand with a hammer and chisel (“complaint w/drwn, case dism., 6/26/39”), or wrapping another victim in duct tape until he suffocated and died (“case dism., insuff evidence, 5/25/42”). Such was his fame as time wore on that all the more esoteric crimes of violence throughout the five boroughs began to be ascribed to him, alibis notwithstanding, even when Walter Winchell would vouch that Jacob King was at Hialeah the day Vincente Crociata was thrown off the Williamsburg Bridge, even when Damon Runyon would attest that Jacob King was sitting in the press box at Briggs Stadium in Detroit (Yanks over the Tigers, 6–5, two homers by Hank Greenberg) the day Leo Spain’s tongue was cut out in the laundry room of a whorehouse on Fort Washington
Avenue in upper Manhattan. It did not matter. In the city rooms and the police shacks, he had become a man to whom stories attached, like lint to a cheap suit, and in the world in which he had chosen to travel, being known as a man of spontaneous violent invention only enhanced his criminal pedigree.

Murder, the skill at which Jacob King was said to be most proficient, has an almost sexual appeal, and sexual undertones ripple through the descriptions of the more heinous of his alleged homicides. Here, in
Jake—A Gangster’s Story
, is how the murder of a small-time hoodlum named Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon is described:

Or his ninth. Or his fourteenth. That Jacob King was never charged with the murder of the unfortunate Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon (who was born Hyman Krakower on Staten Island and who had, to the best of anyone’s memory, never been to Pittsburgh) and that there were no witnesses to the crime were quibbles easily overridden by city editors with deadlines to meet and headlines to write. There was speculation, and there was an autopsy report whose dry medicalese lent bogus authenticity to the speculation. Even this was not enough. “This is for being a rat and a fink,” Jacob King is reported to have said when he shot Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon that dark December night in Brighton Beach, in the borough of Brooklyn, in the city of New York, although Pat Muldoon was not available to testify as to the accuracy of the last words he is supposed to have heard, his corpse having been dropped into New York Harbor lashed to a pinball machine to weigh it down, and punctured with an ice pick to let its air and body gases dissipate, further discouraging flotation, with the result that it did not surface until the spring solstice, and then with its face and all other identifying features having been worn away by its season in the roiling winter waters of Sheepshead Bay. Even his pecker had fallen off, a source of great good humor in the press shack, his shriveled dingdong, it was said, a tasty hors d’oeuvre for a bluefish with delicate taste buds, another footnote in the continuing legend of Jacob King.

Why Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon had been marked for assassination has never been satisfactorily explained, although it has been said (so often that it has assumed the weight of fact) that Jacob King took the contract as a way of cementing his bona fides with the man who later became his mentor and protector (at least while
it suited him), Morris “The Furrier” Lefkowitz, who was indeed a furrier, a student of mink and fox and sable and ermine and Persian lamb, as well as the lesser pelts, those he called with some scorn the unimportant furs, the raccoon, the seal, the beaver, and the coypu. “I am only a simple furrier,” Morris Lefkowitz would invariably say on those occasions when the authorities asked him to comment on some civic perfidy or municipal outrage with which they thought he might have been associated or about which he might have the kind of knowledge that any public-spirited citizen might wish to share, and it is a fact that in a life of crime that spanned sixty-one years, Morris Lefkowitz was such a solid citizen that he never spent a single night in jail.

It is also said that Morris Lefkowitz had no particular quarrel with Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon, a minor hit man who had practiced his murderous art for him on a number of occasions, his only crime (in the eyes of Morris Lefkowitz, if not in the eyes of a dozen federal, state, and municipal law enforcement agencies) being that Morris Lefkowitz had grown used to him, uncomfortable with him, the way a man with sap still rising in his system begins to grow uncomfortable with a wife who has begun to snore in her sleep with her mouth open, a wife whose stomach muscles have grown slack like a rubber band that has lost its snap. Jacob King was new and brash, contumacious, it is true, but smart (an adjective that had never been applied to Pittsburgh Pat Muldoon, example enough his being a Jew who took an Irish nom de guerre, the harps to Morris Lefkowitz being the fattest of the world’s fatheads), and Morris Lefkowitz liked the cut of his jib, liked both Jacob King’s head for figures and his capacity for violence, the two rarely, in Morris Lefkowitz’s experience, going hand in hand, wondered in fact if Jacob King should be placed in his organization’s line of succession.