Under the Skin

have a talk with the owner—a dozen or so cafes and about as many filling stations and pool halls.

Ragsdale must’ve thought he was being smart just because he stayed away from any joint that already had our machines in it. Maybe he thought the Maceo brothers wouldn’t care that he was working in Galveston County so long as he dealt only with joints free of Maceo machines. Maybe he was so dumb he thought they wouldn’t even hear about it. But Sam Maceo had friends everywhere and they had eyes and ears all over. They reported everything they heard that might mean some outsider was working this side of the county line. Sam would then pass the information to Rose and Rose would decide what to do about it.

What set Rose off about Ragsdale and the Dallas outfit wasn’t just the money they were siphoning out of a few mainland joints. What galled him was their lack of respect. He couldn’t blame outsiders for wanting to get in on Galveston’s easy money, but he did blame them if they tried to get in on it without Maceo permission. Sometimes Rose would let an outside bunch work its game on the county mainland—never on the island—but only for a percentage of the gross. If the outside outfit thought the Maceo cut was too high, Rose would shrug and wish them luck and that was the end of the discussion. Only fools tried to work their game in Galveston County without Rose’s blessing. Those who did try it could count on Rose taking swift measures to set things straight.

I was one of the measures he could take.

So were about two dozen other guys, the bunch of us known as “Rose’s Ghosts.” We saw to it that Maceo territory was defended and Maceo will was done. We were a fairly open secret—even the chief of police and the county sheriff knew about us—but you’d never see a word about us in the papers except as “person or persons unknown.” Besides discouraging outside outfits from crossing the Galveston line, we protected the Maceo interests in neighboring counties. We collected the Maceos’ money—the daily take from Maceo clubs, the cuts from places renting Maceo equipment, the loan payments from businesses staked with Maceo cash. We kept the grifters out of the Maceo casinos. Hell, we kept them off the island altogether. We came down hard on drunkrollers and room thieves, even harder on strongarms and stickup men. Although few of the good citizens ever said it out loud, most of them knew that the real law enforcement in Galveston wasn’t the cops—it was us.

It was in the Maceo brothers’ interest to keep their gambling rooms honest and make sure the hotels and the city streets were safe. The “Free State of Galveston,” as everybody called it, was the most wide-open place in Texas, probably in the country, and what kept the highrollers and big spenders coming was the knowledge they wouldn’t be cheated at the tables or robbed on the streets. Like the cathouse district that had been doing business on the island ever since the Civil War, the Maceos ensured the town a steady prosperity—even now, while the rest of the country was getting hammered by the Depression. It was a benefit not lost on the islanders, who knew a good thing when they had it.

Rose was a master of backroom business with the local politicians and the cops. One recent morning when I’d gone to Rose’s office to deliver some cash I’d collected in Texas City, the secretary hustled me right in, even though Rose had the county sheriff in there with him.

I handed Rose the bag and he peeked in it and took out a half-inch pack of hundreds and dropped it on the desk in front of the sheriff.

“There you go, Frankie,” he said. “A little contribution for the Lawmen’s Association.”

I’d seen the sheriff coming and going from Rose’s office many a time and we had sometimes exchanged nods. But I doubted he’d ever accepted money from Rose in front of anybody, and he looked uneasy about it.

As the sheriff put the money in his coat, Rose pointed at me and said, “You know Jimmy here, don’t you, Frank? Let me tell you, they don’t come any better than this kid. A real whiz at taking care of business, you know what I mean? And he got a sharp eye. Don’t miss a thing. He sees something and click, it’s like his mind takes a picture of it.”

The sheriff gave me a careful once-over and we exchanged one of our nods. We all sat there without saying anything for a long moment before the sheriff made a show of checking his watch and saying oh Christ he was late for an appointment. He said so long to Rose and let himself out. When the door shut behind him Rose and I turned to each other and laughed.

The look the sheriff gave me had been both wary and somewhat impressed. Like everybody else, he knew Rose wasn’t one for openly praising anybody, not like Sam, who was always telling guys how swell they were, no matter if they were a crooked local judge or a visiting shoe salesman from Tulsa, some regular highroller from Houston or a whorehouse bouncer who came in once a week to drop ten bucks at the blackjack tables. It wasn’t any wonder Sam handled the public-relations end of things. Most city officials from the mayor on down were personally acquainted with both brothers, but it was Big Sam, as everybody called him, who dealt with them in public. He was the happy glad-hander, the drinking buddy with a thousand jokes—or, when it was called for, the gracious host of impeccable manners. He was the one to hand over the big contributions to the latest charity drives and to help local politicians cut the big ribbons with the outsized scissors, to bring in big-time celebrity entertainers to perform for free at civic events, to serve as the sponsoring host at sporting competitions and bathing beauty contests. He paid for smart orphan kids to go to college and made large weekly contributions to all the local churches. Sam used charm and generosity to promote the Maceo interests, and Rose used the Ghosts to protect them. They were a perfect team. And I knew that under his goodbuddy exterior Sam was no less serious than his big brother. Rose called the shots, but he always consulted with Sam first, always sought his advice. They were damn close brothers and partners to the bone.

Some of the Ghosts had been with the Maceos since back in the bootleg days. I’d been with them not quite two years—but I’d been Rose’s main Ghost from the time I joined him. Whenever he had to go out of town on business, I went with him, and if it was just the two of us, I did the driving. The other Ghosts got their orders through various captains but I took mine directly from Rose and I answered to nobody but him. And after he’d agreed to let me have them as my regular partners, Brando and LQ answered only to me.

This had been a busy week. Just a few days before Rose sent us on the Ragsdale business, Brando and I had tracked down a pair of strongarms who’d been working the island for about two weeks. They’d been stalking big winners out of the Hollywood Dinner Club—the Maceos’ biggest and fanciest place. They’d follow them back to their hotel and jump them in the parking lot, in one case even busting into the guy’s room. A Ghost captain had put some boys on the problem but they hadn’t been able to get a lead on the thugs, and Rose was fuming. By the time he put me on it, six customers had been robbed and two of them beat up. I collected Brando and we started hunting.

Two days later we found them on the mainland, in the Green Dolfin Motor Court just east of Hitchcock. They had a suitcase with twelve grand and were ready to cut for New Orleans. If they had settled for the eight thousand they got off the first few muggings, they would’ve made away clean, but they got greedy—just one more job, then just one more. It’s how it was with smalltimers. No discipline. No sense of professionalism. An hour after we caught up to them they were on a freight train bound for Kansas City. We’d had to load them aboard the boxcar because their hands and knees didn’t work anymore after Brando used a claw hammer on them.

As we started back to the office with the suitcase, Brando did his impersonation of Rose, adjusting and readjusting his necktie knot, eyes half-closed, mouth slightly pinched, saying in a heavy Sicilian accent: “Goddamn, but I hate a fucken thief.” It made me grin every time.

At first Rose was angry when I told him the strongarms were still alive, but when I told him what we’d done to them he paced up and down for a minute, thinking about it, and then laughed.

“You see why I love this kid?” he said to Artie Goldman, his head bookkeeper. Artie just sat there and looked a little out of sorts. He never did like to hear about my end of the business. “Goddamn genius,” Rose said. “Every time those two punks even think of how nice it’d be if they could walk into the kitchen for a glass of water, every time they need to blow their nose or wipe their ass, they’re gonna remember how stupid they were to try thieving in Galveston.” He adjusted my necktie and then his own and beamed at me.

The next day he saw to it that the money got back to the customers who’d been robbed. The strongarms had spent about three hundred of it but he made up the difference from his own pocket. That’s how he was.

LQ told the owner at each place where Ragsdale had put his slots that the machines now belonged to the Gulf Vending Company and the standard fee for their use was 50 percent of the take. A company representative would come by every night to collect. If the owner had any complaints, any trouble from the cops or anybody else, he was to contact the main office on the island and the company would deal with the problem.

None of this seemed to be news to the owners. Even the ones who didn’t really want any machines in their joint weren’t about to argue. They knew the score. What the hell—they got 50 percent of something as opposed to 100 percent of nothing, and they knew they could count on Maceo protection. What was there to complain about?