“I have two more sons.”
Oh brother.
“Is it worth it, Jim?”
“Nobody has ever stood up to these dago sons of bitches. If I stand up to ’em, they’ll back down.”
“You really think so?”
“Let ’em run their competing wire service. They’ll never deliver the quality product I can, so they’ll never put me under. I caught ’em tapping my phones, pirating my news, and got a court order against ’em!”
But he was ranting on: “There’ll be some poor bastards operating handbooks out there, feelin’ they gotta pay for both services, letting themselves be shook down…but if
Coming from most people, talk of standing up to the Outfit would go past suicidal into idiotic. But Ragen had coexisted with the Outfit for years; despite all the talk of “dagoes,” he’d been cordial with Guzik and thick with Dan Serritella, the longtime state senator and longertime Capone mob crony. Serritella even had business ties with Ragen, who had taken control of the horse-race wire service business in 1939, shortly before Moe Annenberg, his mentor, got sent up for tax evasion. Since then, the Outfit had been content to pay the price for Ragen’s service; but of late they’d been trying to buy in. Ragen had been resisting all offers, despite Guzik’s assurances that the little Irishman would be kept on as a partner.
“Those greasy sons of bitches would need my know-how at first,” Ragen told me, “but then some fine morning you’d find me gutted in an alley, with my dick stuffed in my mouth.”
“And then what would you have to say for yourself?” I asked.
“And this guy Siegel is a fruitcake,” Ragen said, distastefully, ignoring my remark, shifting in the client’s chair across from my desk. “They call him ‘Bugsy’ and it fits.”
It seems Guzik, in response to Ragen’s rebuffs, had set up a rival wire, Trans-American, in cooperation with the East Coast version of the Outfit, the Combination; the West Coast branch of Trans-American was under this fellow Ben Siegel.
I nodded. “I’ve heard of the guy. Out of the old ‘Bugs and Meyer’ gang in New York. What’s he doing in California, anyway?”
Ragen snorted. “Hanging around with movie stars. Screwing starlets. Pushing his wire service down people’s throats. He’s a thug in a two-hundred-dollar suit.”
“Have you had any run-ins with him?”
“His people roughed up my son-in-law out there-pretty bad,” he said, referring to Russell Brophy, who ran the L.A. Continental office. “The lad went to the hospital over it.”
“No offense, Jim,” I said, with gentle sarcasm, “but there was a day when you used the strongarm approach yourself-back when you were circulation chief for the
Ragen waved that off; then he smirked humorlessly, saying, “Well, the crazy bastard
I tapped my finger on my desk. Said, “I think you should consider selling out. You’re, what? Sixty-five? You can retire and take the Outfit’s dough and get your sons into something legitimate.”
Ragen’s face turned redder than usual and he clutched the arms of the wooden chair, like a guy in the hot squat when they turned on the juice. “My business
“But you’d be out of it. I didn’t say go in business with them. I said sell out to ’em-take their money, and run. You’ve had your fun.”
The red faded but his mouth became a tight line, which parted, in a barely perceptible manner, as he said, “You think I’m getting old, Nate?”
“You’re not getting any younger. Hell, neither am I. But you
The tight line curved upward into the slightest smile. “Bullshit, Heller. You love your work.”
“I love to eat, Jim. Without working, I don’t get to.”
“You love your work, you love bein’ in business. What would you do with your time, lad, if you didn’t have your work, your business? Where would you go? What would you do?”
“I’d think of something,” I said, lamely.
“You’ll die in harness, just like me. Christ! I’m not gonna let a bunch of wop pricks muscle me out of my business! Now, are you in, or are you out?”
Quite frankly, I would’ve been out, friendship or not. And what Ragen was calling a friendship was more a friendly acquaintance. But he had a niece named Peggy, about whom I’ll tell you later. At which time you’ll better understand why I said:
“Yeah. I’ll play bodyguard for you. Or anyway, I’ll put two of my ops on it. I don’t want to be around when the bullets start to fly.
But here I was, two months later, a hot late June afternoon at rush hour, just before six o’clock, cruising down State Street in a black Ford behind Ragen’s dark blue Lincoln Continental.
We’d started on foot, at Ragen’s office at 431 South Dearborn; it was hot and muggy and our clothes were sticking to us. Few of the men on the street were wearing their suitcoats; we stood out, some, accordingly. Of course Ragen-wearing a crisp-looking light brown suit and a green and yellow striped tie and a dark brown snap- brim-looked cool, unbothered by the heat. Except for that one day in my office, I’d never seen the little hardass otherwise.
When we reached the parking lot, two blocks later, Jim had climbed into his car alone (once a week his staff bodyguard, a racing sheet truck driver, got the day off, and this was the day) and we-me and Walt Pelitier, an ex- pickpocket detail dick, like most of my ops-got into the bodyguard car, Walt behind the wheel, me riding with shotgun in my hands, my nine millimeter automatic snug under my shoulder, an old friend I’d rather not get reacquainted with.
For fifteen minutes or so, we’d had an uneventful journey. We’d just passed through the remnants of the once-proud Levee district, reduced from its former red-light and saloon glory to a handful of rundown bars and weedy vacant lots. We were heading south on State, making our way to Beverley, a nice neighborhood on the far South West Side, one of those sedate upper-middle-class areas that whispered money. Ragen and his family lived there, in a spacious two-story with a sprawling lawn, at 10756 Seeley. So, for two months now, in the apartment over the garage, had Walt Pelitier.
We were not, at the moment, in a nice neighborhood. We were, in fact, in the midst of a colored corridor that might charitably be described as a slum; we were at the west end of the South Side Bronzeville, and the black faces that watched Ragen’s fancy car slide by were not sympathetic. Several blocks to the right, across the tracks, yet worlds away, was a nice neighborhood. A white neighborhood.
A certain irony, here, was not lost on me: Ragen’s late brother Frank had, in the first couple decades of the century, ruled “Ragen’s Colts,” a vicious street gang which began, as so many gangs in those days did, as a baseball team. Frank, the star pitcher, offered his team’s slugging services to the local Democratic Party, for whom they won votes in much the same muscular manner as brother Jim won readers for the
To my knowledge, Jim had never been a part of the notorious Colts, but it still chilled me, momentarily, to be gliding through the very black area where the Colts had, back in 1919, started the city’s biggest race riot. It should be kept in mind that one member of the Colts publicly derided the Ku Klux Klan as “nigger lovers.” On this very street, not so many years ago, blacks had been shot on sight, residences had been burned and dynamited, shops looted. That “nice” white neighborhood, a few blocks over, had been the scene of reprisals, as colored world war
