of Louis Campagna, the cold-eyed, putty-faced Capone enforcer who since his mentor’s incarceration had become Nitti’s right-hand man. Actually, I had to go through somebody who answered that number, gave me another number, which got me to Campagna, who had me give him the number I was at, and finally Nitti called me, five minutes later.
“So what do you have, Nate?”
“Not a lot,” I said. I felt uneasy. I always felt uneasy talking to Nitti. “I just thought I should touch base.”
“I know you, Nate. You wouldn’t call unless you thought you had something.”
“Well, Frank,” I said, feeling awkward calling him that, “I been nosing around, talking to people, and it’s pretty clear this Hauptmann character is a patsy. For one thing, the lawyer the Hearst people provided him was a guy named Reilly, who…”
“Yeah, yeah, the Bull of Brooklyn, Frankie Yale’s old mouthpiece. ‘Death House’ Reilly. That I know.”
“Well, it smells, wouldn’t you say? And none other than Capone’s old lawyer Sam Leibowitz also offered his services to Hauptmann; telling the world his client was guilty seemed to be his idea of fair representation…”
“Sure, sure. All this I know. Nate, tell me something I
Getting off to a swell start: Nitti aggravated with me already.
“Well,” I went on, “the late Isidor Fisch was clearly some kind of small-time hustler—smuggling furs, probably smuggling dope, too, for Luciano, working out of East Harlem, which is Luciano’s turf, after all. Also a petty con man and maybe a hot-money fence. Hauptmann was his pal, maybe even his accomplice in fur and dope smuggling—
“So Fisch was just a fence who bought some marked bills?”
“No, that’s not my reading of it at all. I think Fisch plays a bigger role in this than that. Fisch seems involved in the extortion itself and maybe the kidnapping. He and two of the Lindbergh servants, including the dame who supposedly killed herself, belonged to a spiritualist church right across the street from Fisch’s apartment house.”
There was a pause.
Then Nitti said: “I can’t see Al getting Luciano or Madden or Costello or any of the East-Coast guys involved in this. They’re too smart. Dutch Schultz, maybe. If this little Fisch is the only connection to the people we do business with…”
“No. There’s also a guy named Wendel.”
“Wendel?”
“He’s a disbarred lawyer. A half-nuts con man who tried to scam Capone a few years back.”
Nitti knowing the name made my skin crawl.
“That’s him. There’s a story I haven’t confirmed yet that Wendel approached Capone with the kidnap plan. At the moment, some hick cops have got Wendel under lock-and-key and armed guard, out in the boonies, squeezing worthless confessions out of him like popping pimples.”
There was urgency in his voice; whether this news made him happy, angry, worried or what, I could not read. “Is this going to come back to Al? Or the Waiter?”
“Ricca’s name has not come up,” I said. “Wendel, and the inimitable Gaston Means, who I also talked to, are bad witnesses. They are both such fucking liars and con men that if they do tell the truth, no one will be able to tell. Both of ’em are being held in the nuthouse, by the way. Well, two different nuthouses.”
“Their testimony would be worthless?”
“Unless somebody checked out their stories, and came up with better witnesses. And time is goddamn short for that; Hauptmann sits down in a couple weeks, you know. How well do you know Gaston Means?”
“Know of him, is all.”
“It occurs to me that enlisting the likes of Wendel and Means, unreliable as they are, would be a stroke of genius on somebody’s part—whether Capone or Ricca.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
“Well, even lunatics like Wendel and Means know enough not to cross Capone, or Ricca. Means likes his skin too much, and Wendel had an instructive close call with Capone back around ’30. Yet in their way, these guys are savvy crooks, with connections in the underworld and elsewhere. They also both got more balls than sense. So they could get the job done. But suppose the kidnapping goes awry? Capone and Ricca had to know this thing was risky at best, that it might just blow up in everybody’s face.”
“I wouldn’t trust screwballs like Wendel or Means with the garbage.”
“Ah, but Frank, that’s the beauty part. Even if Means or Wendel decide to talk, were dumb enough to finger Capone and Ricca—who would believe them? With their records, with their individual eccentricities, they make the perfect fall guys.”
There was a pause; I let him think. Then he said: “So what’s going to happen?”
“I’m working to try to clear Hauptmann. That’s what Governor Hoffman’s paying me to do. I’m finding a lot out, but so far I don’t see any of it doing any good.”
“You don’t see this coming back to Chicago. You don’t see this landing in the Outfit’s lap.”
“No. Not yet, anyway.” The hell of it was, I didn’t know whether Nitti wanted it to, or not.
“Okay,” Nitti said. “Okay. Appreciate you checkin’ in, Nate. You’re a good boy.”
The phone clicked dead.
