The Bootlegger Read online

  “Get some sleep, Isaac. I’ll stay here.”

  “In a while.”

  • • •

  “ISAAC! HE’S AWAKE. He’s asking for you.”

  Bell stepped silently into the room. Van Dorn lay flat on his back, his eyes closed, his cheeks oddly slack, and it took Bell a moment to realize they had shaved his beard and whiskers. His head was bandaged from crown to eyebrows. The biceps of his left arm wore another bandage, as did the crook of his right elbow where the tubing for blood transfusions had been inserted into his vein. Just visible below the hospital bedsheet was the top of an enormous dressing that encircled his chest. His eyes were closed. His lips were moving.

  “Put your ear to him,” Dorothy whispered. “He’s trying to speak to you.”

  Bell leaned close to do as she asked.

  “Isaac.”

  “I’m here, sir.”

  “Listen.”

  “Right here.”

  “You must . . .”

  Bell looked at Dorothy. “We shouldn’t tax him. He should rest.”

  “Listen!” she shot back. “He won’t rest until he talks to you.”

  Isaac Bell spoke in normal tones. “I’m here, Joe. What do you want me to do?”

  “Protect the outfit,” Van Dorn whispered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s in worse shape than I am.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “Stop lying. I’m touch and go. So’s the outfit . . . I lost Justice.”

  Bell knew he meant his longtime contract to help the Department of Justice pursue bank robbers, motorcar thieves, and white slavers across state lines. He was not surprised. The Bureau of Investigation had greatly increased its force of special agents during the war and consequently was no longer willing to pay for nationwide investigations by a transcontinental detective agency.

  Bell said, “We knew that was coming.”

  Van Dorn whispered, “Treasury threw me a bone.”

  He meant, of course, the Coast Guard contract that had gotten him shot. A favor from one of Joe’s many Washington friends, it would be canceled tomorrow morning when officials demanded to know why a civilian detective was in a gunfight on a Coast Guard vessel. No matter that investigating who in the Guard took bribes from bootleggers was for the good of the Service, the contract was lost.

  But that was the least of the agency’s troubles.

  Bell leaned closer.

  “How’d you make out with Ellis and Clayton?”

  “They’re leaving town.”

  “Iceberg,” Van Dorn whispered.

  The nurse jumped up. “That’s enough. He’s hallucinating.”

  “No he’s not,” said Bell. He nodded sharply at Novicki to get the nurse out of his way. Van Dorn was saying that his life’s work was threatened by the corrupting effect of Prohibition. Two house dicks taking bribes were only the tip of the iceberg. The new men replacing detectives lost to the war and the flu pandemic were susceptible to corruption. And when the word about him firing Ellis and Clayton got around, how many Protective Services boys would quit to sign on with less scrupulous agencies with lower standards?

  “Isaac.”

  “Right here.”

  “I’m counting on you . . . Protect the agency.”

  “Rest easy,” said Bell. But he had his work cut out for him. It was less a matter of protecting the agency than saving it.

  5

  HAIG & HAIG SCOTCH WHISKY, twenty thousand cases in a freighter from Glasgow, landed in British colonial territory at the Bahaman port of Nassau. Import duty was paid and the whisky was locked in bonded warehouses. Six thousand of the cases were sold to the captain of the Bahamas-registered staysail schooner Ling Ling. He paid the export duty and cast off immediately for Long Island’s Rum Row.

  During the warm and pleasant Gulf Stream sail north, Ling Ling’s crew worked on deck. The contents of twelve thousand bottles were stretched—doubled to twenty-four thousand—by mixing the authentic Haig & Haig with grain alcohol and distilled water and adding tea for color. They pasted counterfeit labels that guaranteed the contents on the extra bottles and sealed them with corks boiled in tea to make them look old. Then they repackaged the bottles in ham-shaped burlap bags holding six each, padded with straw, for ease of handling.

  Ling Ling arrived off Fire Island on a dark night when the Coast Guard cutter CG-9 was picketing the schooner Aresthusa, steaming circles around it to keep taxis from picking up booze. A few miles away, flat-bottom boats slipped alongside Ling Ling. They loaded a thousand “hams” and sped to Fire Island, keeping a sharp eye peeled for “Prohibition Navy” patrols and for hijackers. Approaching the beach, they waited for the lights of a foot patrol to pass by. Then they landed in the surf, several miles east of the Blue Point Coast Guard Station.

  The hams of Haig & Haig were loaded into carts that men trundled across the narrow island on a boardwalk laid in the soft sand. Fishing boats with oversize engines raced them five miles across Great South Bay and up an unlit channel and into a narrow creek. Cars and trucks were waiting at a dock just beyond the bright lights of a rambling wood-frame hotel. Music and laughter drifted across the marsh from which the creek had been dredged.

  The Haig & Haig was quickly moved off the boats into the cars and trucks. The hotel’s handyman and dishwasher helped with the loading and were rewarded with a bottle each. Farm trucks, laundry trucks, and milk and grocery vans hurried off in various directions. Some small cars followed, Fords and Chevrolets with hidden compartments for their owners to smuggle a dozen bottles.

  Last to leave were the big cars driven by professional bootleggers. Buicks, Packards, and Cadillacs—with seats removed to make more room for the Haig & Haig and with heavy-duty springs added to carry and conceal the extra weight—formed a convoy on the Montauk Highway and headed west toward New York City, seventy miles away.

  The two-lane, all-weather road was dark. The towns it passed through were small, consisting of little more than a white church and a shuttered general store or filling station. They drove fast with their lights off, trusting to a starry sky and a sliver-thin moon.

  A town constable and two Prohibition officers spotted the convoy and gave chase in a Ford. The bootleggers in the Buick that was protecting the rear of the convoy saw their headlights.

  “Cops?”

  “Hijackers?”

  Either way, they weren’t stopping.

  The Prohibition officers started shooting their revolvers.

  “Hijackers!” shouted the bootleggers.

  “Hold on!” The driver stomped hard on the Buick’s four-wheel brakes. The car stopped abruptly. The Ford, equipped only with two-wheel brakes, skidded past, the officers shooting. The Buick’s occupants, convinced that the cops were hijackers, opened fire with automatic pistols, wounding the constable.

  Ahead lay Patchogue, a fair-size town, with a lace mill, streetlamps, and a business district along the highway, which was renamed Main Street as it passed through. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had called an emergency meeting to denounce the Suffolk County sheriff for failing to arrest the bootleggers who were racing across Long Island nightly. The meeting was running late. The guest speaker—a wealthy duck farmer and a leading light in the Ku Klux Klan, which had declared war on rumrunners and bootleggers—was likening the sheriff to “an un-American Bolshevik,” when he was interrupted by a telephone report that an auto chase had resulted in the murder of a constable.

  “Men!” bellowed the duck farmer. “If the sheriff won’t stop ’em, we will!”

  He led a citizens’ posse into the street to ambush the bootleggers’ autos. The volunteer fire department stretched their hook and ladder across the highway.

  • • •

  THE BOOTLEGGERS, fearing more trouble in a larger, better-lit town, and still fifty long miles from the city, pulled their cars to the side of the road and sent a scout ahead. He reported that the fire department had blocked the highway and citi
zens were arming themselves with squirrel guns. The drivers turned to the boss—a former stickup man from Brooklyn who had put up the cash on behalf of associates there to buy the Haig & Haig from the fishermen—and hoped he had a plan.

  His name was Steven Smith. But his men and the New York police called him Professor Smith, because he was always thinking and could usually be counted upon to come up with some way out of a fix like this one.

  “Does the town have a church?” the Professor asked.

  “A whole bunch,” said the scout.

  Professor Smith chose one a distance from Main Street and sent two of his cousins to splash gasoline on the front steps and set it afire. Flames leaped to the steeple. When the fire department ran to put it out, and the citizens followed to watch, three Buicks, a Cadillac, and a Packard raced on toward New York with their Haig & Haig.

  Hours later, the Brooklyn bootleggers finally felt close enough to New York to sigh in relief. Almost home. Less than a mile to the garage that the Professor had rented under the Fulton Street Elevated.

  • • •

  MARAT ZOLNER had a five-ton Army truck that had been modified with a bigger motor and pneumatic tires. When fully loaded, it still wouldn’t top thirty-five miles an hour, but whoever chased it would have to contend with five armed men wearing blue uniforms in the Oldsmobile behind it.

  “What’s taking them so long?” asked Zolner’s driver, a member of a once powerful, now rapidly fading West Side gang called the Gophers. The driver knew the tall, lean Marat Zolner only as Matt, who hired him often for high-paying jobs.

  They had parked under the El and had been sitting there for hours. The driver was jumpy. Marat Zolner was patient, an icy presence in the shadows, unmoving, yet taut as a steel spring.

  “They might have broken down. They might have run into cops. They might have run into someone who wanted to take it away from them.”

  “Like us,” the driver snickered.

  “Here they come.”

  Five big town cars weighted down with heavy loads were pulling up, drivers blinking headlights for their garage to open its door, unaware that the man inside was tied up with a gag in his mouth. Zolner waved to his men in the Oldsmobile and they piled out with guns drawn.

  • • •

  THE DRIVER of the Cadillac stopped short. “This don’t look good.”

  “Relax,” said Professor Smith. “It’s only cops.”

  “I thought you paid them off.”

  Suddenly, Smith didn’t like the look of this either. He said, “I did.”

  “Looks like they want a raise.”

  “I don’t think they’re cops,” he said too late. The sight of the uniforms had discouraged the bootleggers from pulling their guns. Now guns were pointed in their faces and pressed to their temples. Smith saw no way out. At best, even if they managed to win a gun battle in the street, the noise would attract the real cops. Even though they had already pocketed his payoff money, they would have no choice but to confiscate his Haig & Haig when a shoot-out woke up the neighborhood.

  Smith raised his hands, signaling the others to give up. They were ordered out of the cars and frisked. Their guns were taken away. One of the bogus cops pointed at a five-ton truck parked across the street. “Load the truck.”

  Again, Smith saw no way out of the fix. The booze was lost. But the hothead in the last Buick, the one who had shot at the Long Island constable’s Ford, grabbed for the nearest gun. He was a big man, and fast. He clamped a powerful hand around the phony cop’s wrist and squeezed so hard that the man cried out and dropped the gun into the Buick driver’s other hand. A hijacker stepped behind him, jammed a pistol against his spine, and pulled the trigger. The driver’s body muffled the shot, but it was still loud.

  “Load the truck!”

  Smith’s men rushed to obey before anyone else got shot or the cops came. In less than ten minutes all the cars had been emptied and the five-ton truck was rumbling away on groaning springs, trailed by an Oldsmobile full of exultant gunmen.

  • • •

  MARAT ZOLNER and his driver took the truck across the Brooklyn Bridge, ditched three of the least reliable gunmen, and worked their way uptown, stopping twice to sell Haig & Haig to a speakeasy in the old Tenderloin and a chophouse whose owner was desperately trying to lure back the patrons he had lost to joints serving illegal liquor. The majority of Zolner’s haul was destined for popular speakeasies on 52nd and 53rd streets whose customers the newspapers had dubbed “the rich and fast.”

  The sky was getting bright. It was nearly seven in the morning and people on the sidewalks were heading to work. A cop was waiting outside Tony’s.

  Marat Zolner said, for the benefit of passersby, “Officer, we have a delivery for this establishment. Could you possibly direct traffic around the truck so we don’t jam up the street?”

  He slipped the cop a fifty-dollar bill and the cop muttered, “Where you guys been? My shift’s almost over.”

  With the cop overseeing the operation, Marat Zolner’s men passed ham after ham of Haig & Haig across the sidewalk and down to the speakeasy’s cellar entrance. Zolner carried a leather satchel with gold buckles to the heavy front door and knocked. A peephole opened.

  “Joe sent me.”

  The door swung open. “Hey, pal, how’s it going?”

  “Long night. How about you?” He handed the bouncer ten dollars.

  “We had one for the books. Park Avenue dame lost her pearls on the dance floor. Searched napkins, tablecloths, and floor sweepings. No dice.” He lowered his voice. “There’s a guy with the boss. I’d look out if I was you.”

  Zolner pulled a bottle of Haig & Haig from his bag to thank the bouncer for the warning. Then he walked through the empty joint where a sleepy waiter was upending chairs onto tables and knocked on the owner’s office door. Tony himself opened it. He looked worried. “Come in,” he said. “Come in. How’d you make out?”

  “Am I interrupting you?”

  “No. No. Just talking to a fellow here who wants to meet you.”

  Zolner said softly so only Tony could hear, “I know it’s not your fault.”

  “Big of you,” Tony muttered back.

  “Do me a favor. Count what I brought and hold my money out front.” He stepped aside to let Tony pass, then entered the office and shut the door. The office was a small, dingy inside room but furnished comfortably, with a carpet and a leather couch in addition to Tony’s desk. A heavyset thug in a good suit rose from the couch. He was wearing his hat.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Long night,” said Zolner as he placed the satchel on the desk.

  “I’ll let you go in a minute.”

  “How much?” asked Zolner.

  “Half.”

  “Half? That would make you the richest Dry agent in the country.”

  “I’m not a Prohibition agent. I’m a businessman and you’re doing business on my block. It costs half to do business on my block.”

  “You’re not a government agent?” asked Zolner.

  “I just told you.”

  “I had to be sure,” said Zolner. “Half, you say?” He dropped one hand into the satchel and the other into his pocket.

  “Half— Hey!”

  Zolner had crossed the space between them in a single swift step. He smashed the thug’s teeth with a blackjack in his right hand and swung a twelve-inch length of lead pipe against his temple. “Businessman?”

  The thug swayed, eyes popped wide, feet frozen to the floor, blood pouring from his mouth. Zolner dropped him to the carpet with a second bone-smashing blow of the lead pipe.

  At the front door of the speakeasy he counted the money Tony had waiting, piled it into his satchel, and returned fifty dollars.

  “What’s this for?”

  “You need a new carpet.”

  Before crossing Central Park to Fern’s town house, Zolner made one more stop on the Upper West Side to buy a Prohibition agent breakfast at the Bretton
Hall Hotel. For five hundred dollars, the federal officer told him about a government raid planned against a leading whisky runner’s downtown warehouse.

  “Where will they take the booze?”

  “Customs. The Appraisers’ Stores, down in the Village.”

  Zolner passed the agent a bottle wrapped in burlap.

  “What’s this?”

  “The real McCoy. Haig & Haig.”

  6

  “EVERYONE DOWN HERE is praying for Mr. Van Dorn . . . Well, not everyone, but you know what I mean.”

  Dr. Shepherd Nuland, the New York County Medical Examiner, indicated a crowd of unclaimed corpses hanging upright in a refrigerated vault and then shook Isaac Bell’s hand warmly. It was an elevator ride and a short walk from Joe Van Dorn’s hospital room to Bellevue’s morgue.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “The docs aren’t making any promises,” said Bell.

  “And how are you doing, Isaac?”

  “I’ll feel better after I’ve seen the rumrunner who got shot at Roosevelt Hospital.”

  “Figured you might. I’ll do him myself. You take notes.”

  He gave Bell a white apron and a gauze face mask scented with oil of cloves and led him to a postmortem table where the body of the murdered rumrunner waited under a sheet. A stenographer was standing by. Nuland told him to go to lunch, and tugged off the sheet.

  The Medical Examiner’s blithe disregard for official procedure was a wrenching reminder of Joe Van Dorn’s great gift for friendship. Rich, powerful, and accomplished men across the continent would jump to lend him a hand. Gather debts but never flaunt them, he had taught Bell from the first day of his apprenticeship. Forgive small sins. Offer help. Give favors, they’ll be returned.

  Isaac Bell opened his notebook to take Nuland’s dictation.

  “Caucasian male. Twenty-five to thirty years old. Sturdy. Muscular.”

  Bell saw a large bandage around the man’s left thigh that the bedclothes had hidden last night. The Medical Examiner cut it off with scissors and whistled in amazement. “One tough hombre to walk on that.”