The Jews in America Trilogy (143 page)

The ambushers, who were working for the Lansky organization, were able to make off with the whiskey, but Lansky himself was furious. Whiskey, he roared, was replaceable, but human lives were not. Besides, eleven bodies strewn along the roadside meant that there would be police and federal investigations—the last things he wanted. His men had been
instructed that, whenever any actual shooting started, they should run for their lives, and no doubt the Lansky employee who returned the Irish fire would have been disciplined, were it not for the fact that he was already dead.

Later, Lansky learned that the “importer” of the Irish whiskey whom he had robbed was the son of a Boston bartender, Joseph P. Kennedy. For the rest of his life, Lansky would claim that Joseph Kennedy had passed on his vendetta to his sons, Bobby and John, and that Bobby Kennedy's efforts, as United States attorney general, to root out organized crime were in fact a personal attempt to “get even” with Lansky for that long-ago hijacking.
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Meanwhile, to the north of Lake Erie, another gentleman was emerging who was becoming very important to Meyer Lansky and his flourishing American bootleg business. His name was Samuel Bronfman, and it was not long before Lansky and Bronfman had entered into an arrangement that would be enormously profitable to both.

Sam Bronfman was also the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, but there the similarity ended. Unlike Lansky's parents, Sam Bronfman's father, Yechiel, had been reasonably well-to-do in the old country. Yechiel Bronfman had owned a gristmill and a good-sized tobacco plantation in Bessarabia, in southwestern Russia, and had thought himself on good terms with the czarist government. All that ended, however, in the face of the Alexandrine pogroms, and in 1889 Yechiel decided to emigrate, leaving the plantation and gristmill behind him. Nonetheless, when the Bronfman family set out for North America, they could afford to bring with them a personal maid, a manservant, and even their own personal rabbi—plus the rabbi's wife and two children. Nor was theirs a piecemeal emigration; the Bronfmans traveled as a family. With Yechiel came his nearly nine-months-pregnant wife, Minnie, their two sons, Abe and Harry, and a daughter, Laura. On shipboard, their third son, Sam, was born. (Later, like Sam Goldwyn, Sam Bronfman would take a couple of years off his age and
claim to have been born in 1891, not 1889, and give his birthplace as Brandon, Manitoba, rather the the mid-Atlantic.)

The family's initial destination was the little Canadian village of Wapella, in southwestern Saskatchewan, where the Canadian government was offering homesteading sites to immigrants. In the next few years, Wapella—the neighboring towns bore such names as Red Jacket, Uno, Beulah, Birtle, and Moosomin—would become one of the first all-Jewish settlements in North America.

But the ocean crossing, or perhaps the trauma of resettling his family, seemed to take some of the enterprising spirit out of Yechiel Bronfman, who soon simplified his name to Ekiel. He was unprepared for the rigorous climate of the Saskatchewan prairie, and it was soon clear that the sacks of tobacco seed he had brought with him from Russia, intending to start a new plantation, would be of no use to him here. The first summer, he tried wheat, but his crop was killed by frost, and presently he was forced to abandon farming and was reduced to going into the bush, where he cut logs to sell for firewood. With a sleigh and yoke of oxen, he hauled his wood into town, some twenty miles away. The family's first home was a drafty lean-to, and their diet consisted mainly of potatoes, dried apples, and prunes. To further straiten the family's circumstances, four more children were born in fairly rapid succession—Jean, Bessie, Allen, and Rose—giving Ekiel Bronfman eight children's mouths to feed. Times were hard.

But by the mid-1890s, when the two oldest boys, Harry and Abe, were old enough to help their father, there was improvement. From hauling and selling firewood, the Bronfmans were able to branch out into selling frozen whitefish to their Jewish neighbors. The sleigh and oxen were replaced by a horse and wagon, and the Bronfmans, father and sons, would transport anything that their neighbors needed carted. The drayage business led them naturally into a bit of horse-trading. Most of these trades took place in the bar of a local hotel called the Langham, the town's only watering place, and for some of these transactions Ekiel brought along his next-youngest son, Sam. Sam would be seated on a barstool, told to keep his mouth shut and his ears open and learn the business. One thing young Sam apparently noticed during these long horse-trading afternoons at the Langham bar was that a great deal of liquor
was being consumed there, and with relish.

One day, according to a family story, Sam Bronfman, age eleven, was on his way to the Langham with his father to close a deal over drinks, and said, “The Langham's bar makes more profit than we do, Father. Instead of selling horses, we should be selling drinks.”

If the story is true, it was a shrewd observation. In the early 1900s, the hotel and bar business was a lucrative one in Canada. The railroads were rapidly opening up the western part of the country, and hotel space was at a premium. A hotel could not survive without a bar, which was where it made most of its money. Ekiel Bronfman seems to have sparked to his son's suggestion. There was, after all, a curious coincidence. The name “Bronfman,” in Yiddish, means “brandy man.” Though no known Bronfman ancestor had been in the liquor business, they had dealt in grain—an ingredient of whiskey.

Financing a hotel venture, it turned out, was no great problem. Eager to promote more bars, distillers and liquor-store owners were willing to lend money to promising hotel operators. This was how, in 1902, Ekiel Bronfman was able to scrape together the money to buy his first hotel—the Anglo American in Emerson, Manitoba.

The Anglo American, as expected, prospered. Ekiel was able to repay his loan, and presently the Bronfmans could expand their interests again, this time investing in a series of modest apartment houses. Soon there were three more hotels, in Winnipeg.

The quality of the hotel clientele in western Canada in those pioneering days was, of course, not uniformly high, and later it would be claimed that the Bronfman caravansaries were little more than brothels in disguise. To this, Sam Bronfman liked to reply, “If they were, then they were the best in the West!” But what is certain is that from the beginning it was Sam who was the guiding spirit of the hotel business, and whose chief bailiwick was the bar receipts.

By 1916, these receipts had mounted to the point where Sam was able to purchase his first retail liquor outlet, the Bonaventure Liquor Store Company in Montreal, which was then Canada's largest city. The store was small, but it was well located, near the railroad station, where travelers leaving for the western provinces—many of which were going dry—could
get in their supplies. Also, it enabled Sam Bronfman to be his own supplier, eliminating the cost of a middleman.

Meanwhile, south of the border, the advocates of Prohibition were gathering their forces. Everywhere the Carrie Nations of America were taking to the lecture platform, proclaiming that alcohol was undermining American industry, the home, the family, the teachings of Jesus, the will of God. The Anti-Saloon League of New York even claimed that drink had been behind the Russian revolution. “Bolshevism flourishes in wet soil,” one of its leaflets warned. “Failure to enforce Prohibition in Russia was followed by Bolshevism. Failure to enforce Prohibition here will encourage disrespect for [the] law and invite Industrial Disaster. Radical and Bolshevist outbreaks are practically unknown in states where Prohibition has been in effect for years. BOLSHEVISM LIVES ON BOOZE.”

From such rumblings in the United States, and the fact that the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment began to seem assured, it occurred to Sam Bronfman that this might well be the moment to move from bartending and liquor retailing into manufacturing. Yet another middleman would be eliminated.

“Distilling” would be too polite a word to use for Sam's initial efforts. It was more like simple mixology. From the United States, he was able to buy several hundred thousand gallons of raw, overproof alcohol at bargain prices in the panicky pre-Prohibition sell-offs. This he simply thinned with an equal amount of water, added about half as much again real whiskey, and tossed in a bit of caramel for color, plus a dash of sulfuric acid. The purpose of the sulfuric acid was to speed the aging process. While real Scotch whiskey might be aged for two to twelve years, Bronfman Scotch could be aged in about two days. To be sure, there were some mishaps in the beginning. One batch of “Scotch” came out of the vat an alarming purple color. But with more thinning with real Scotch, and some more caramel, the right color was finally achieved and the batch was thereby saved. Next, all Sam had to do was bottle the results and slap on labels. A printer was found who promised that he could produce convincing counterfeits. To be sure, some of his work was either amateurish or deliberately misleading. Johnnie Walker came out as Johnny Walker, Glenlivet was Glen Levitt, and Haig and Haig was Hague and Hague. But few of the customers seemed to notice.

What no one noticed, either—not even Sam Bronfman himself—was that with this haphazard mixing of alcohol, real whiskey, and other ingredients, Bronfman was in the process of inventing a whole new category of alcoholic beverage: blended whiskey. Could he have possibly known, as early as 1920, that one day the most popular and largest-selling whiskeys on the North American continent would be blends? Or that he himself would one day elevate blending to an art form with the declaration, “Distilling is a science; blending is an art”? But what Sam Bronfman surely noticed—as came to light in 1922, when the Canadian government began wondering why none of the Bronfmans had filed any income tax returns—was that a mixture that cost only $5.25 a gallon to produce could be bottled and sold for $25 a gallon. And that, when the distillery was running well, it could process five thousand gallons a week, which put sales figures at half a million dollars a month, or an annual profit of more than $4,500,000.

With Prohibition in effect, Meyer Lansky, who was now very much aware of Sam Bronfman's operation, at first dismissed him as an amateur; his product simply was not good enough for the kind of customers Lansky wanted to serve. But Sam, putting his brother Harry in charge of the distilling operations, had been busily running about the countryside and dashing off to Britain to line up Canadian and Scottish distillers and persuading them to let him be their distributor. He had also, with his profit sheets, been able to make a convincing case for himself with Canadian banks, and to obtain loans, which gave him added capital with which to perfect his blending process—so that every bottle of whiskey produced under the same label would taste the same as every other. And once the Saint Pierre-Miquelon connection had been established, with Sam able to import bona fide brands, Lansky became interested. Sam Bronfman came down from Canada and wooed Lansky with lavish dinners. Lansky responded by getting Bronfman tickets to the heavyweight “prizefight of the century,” between lack Dempsey and Luis Angel Firpo in 1923. A deal was struck, and the two men became partners, a relationship that lasted through Repeal and after.

What impressed Lansky the most was that what Bronfman was doing was all perfectly legal—in Canada, that is. Bronfman had no trouble with customs or police on the Canadian
side of the border. In fact, the Ottawa government actually encouraged the export of liquor to the United States by refunding the nine-dollar-a-gallon tax that it imposed on all liquor sold for consumption within Canada.
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What was good for Canadian distillers, Ottawa argued, was good for Canada, and in the first year after the passage of the Volstead Act, export sales shot up to a record twenty-three million dollars—a considerable boost to the Canadian economy. As the Canadian
Financial Post
editorialized, “Rum running has provided a tidy bit towards Canada's favourable balance of trade.”

Sam Bronfman and Meyer Lansky made an odd pair. Like Lansky, Bronfman was short of stature and, at five feet five inches, stood only an inch taller than his American dealer. But whereas Lansky was thin, and never weighed more than 135 pounds at any point in his life, Bronfman tended to plumpness, and his round, pink face often shone with a deceptively cherubic twinkle. Also, whereas Lansky was basically only interested in making money, Sam Bronfman had begun to entertain far greater ambitions. The Canadian social establishment was, and to an extent still is, a tight-knit one of old, Anglo-Saxon, Church of England families, who regarded themselves as a smaller and, if anything, more select aristocracy than the British nobility, on whom they modeled their behavior and attitudes. Their ranks were guarded by such exclusive men's clubs as Montreal's Mount Royal and Saint James's. Sam Bronfman, now in his thirties and a rich man, had begun to court the members of this hidebound Canadian inner circle, with an eye to one day being included in its membership. In the process, he would feign elaborate disinterest in the source of his new wealth, and would bridle at the suggestion that he himself was a “bootlegger.” In his bespoke suits from Savile Row and his hand-benched English shoes from Lobb of London, he affected the appearance of an English country squire in the city for a few days on a bit of business. He even added a few Briticisms to his speech with an occasional “I say!” or “Fancy that!” He professed indifference to the ultimate destination of his whiskey during Prohibition—that was in the hands of men like Meyer Lansky. Never, he insisted, had he ever transported a single drop illegally across the border, nor, he would add with a wink,
had he ever counted the empty bottles of his brands on the other side of Lake Erie. Instead, he concentrated on building an imposing turreted mansion at the summit of Westmount, Montreal's most fashionable suburb, and began filling it with “ancestral” trappings—suits of armor, “family portraits” of no known origin—all with the aim of creating an effect of instant Old Money. The name he gave to the Westmount residence said it all: Belvedere Palace.