We make a trip to Scotland. We set up a deal, a thousand cases of scotch a month.
“That’s bootlegging!”
“Of course it’s bootlegging.”
“You wanna go to jail?”
“Listen to me. Everybody drinks. I’ve got friends who buy booze by the case. Rich guys. Connected people. We keep our clientele very select. We make a run a month. I’ll setup the sales, you handle distribution. The cut’s fifty-fifty.”
Nayles looked at him for a very long time before he decided the kid was serious.
“Make it sixty you, forty me,” he said finally. “You’re footin’ the bills.”
Keegan smiled. “Quit your job, “ he said, “we just went into business.
In the next few years, Francis Scott Keegan, the proper Bostonian college student, split his studies between business and the arts. He read voraciously and listened to music constantly. During the same time, he also was known variously as Frank the K, Scotch Frank, and Frankie Kee, a nickname whose subtle patriotic reference was lost to most of Keegan ‘s business competitors. Keegan had studied how territories were divided among the more noted gangland mobs of the day: Alfonse in Chicago, Louis the Lep in Brooklyn, Dutch Shultz and Frankie C in Manhattan, Willie Knucks in Philly, Legs in upstate New York, Nukey Johnson in Jersey and of course Luciano, Charley Lucky, who called all the shots. Boston was wide open, nothing but nickel rollers there. Nobody in the mobs paid much attention to him. Unlike his competitors, who bought scotch from offshore freighters for four dollars a bottle, cut it three or four times and sold it for eighteen dollars a fifth, Keegan paid three-fifty a quart and sold it to his customers uncut for fifteen dollars a bottle.
The fact is, Keegan liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of good liquor, a booze steward to the very rich. He never thought of himself as a bootlegger. Hell, everybody he knew drank. Keegan just didn’t like the sound of the word. Besides, he really wasn’t in the shabby end of the business. No bathtub gin, no homemade poison. His specialty was Scotch whisky imported straight from Edinburgh, perfectly aged and light as mist.
His circle of friends at Boston College were all rich or near rich, a snobbish set which suited Keegan just fine. They were all potential customers—and they all had friends who were potential customers.
“I know this wonderful bootlegger but he’s shy, “Keegan would tell them. “I’ll put the order in for you. “And the goods were delivered like milk to the back door. His was definitely a select clientele: two governors, half a dozen senators, one of Broadway ‘s brightest comedy stars, half a dozen Catholic bishops spread from Jersey to Connecticut to New York to Massachusetts, and one future president of the United States. He performed a service, got rich and everybody was happy. Well, almost everybody.
When the word got around, Arthur Flegenheimer, who had adopted the name Dutch Shultz so it would fit into newspaper headlines, blew up and went to the big man himself
‘Lookit here, Lucky,” Schultz told Luciano, “we got this Irish ass- hole, this Frankie Kee, he’s sellin ‘uncut scotch less‘n we‘re gettin’. Uncut. The word gets around, it ain‘t good for business, it s unfair competition, I say, and I say we burn the little shit and be done with it. An object lesson.
‘So do it,” Luciano answered around a mouthful of pasta. “Why the hell you askin’ me for? It ain’t like you re gonna bump off Calvin Coolidge.”
Keegan fit comfortably into the schizophrenic life-style he had adopted. He read six newspapers a day, everything from The New York Times to the Boston Globe to the New York News and Mirror to the Racing Form. He studied everything from the stock market to the morning lineup at Hialeah. And he had a way with language. He could turn his Irish brogue on and off at will, and had a keen perception of the differences in cadence and vernacular between the two worlds he had chosen, the social world of Boston and the underworld of the East Coast. He was as comfortable being Francis Keegan, discussing a fluctuation in the stock market with a Boston banker, as he was being Frankie Kee, discussing the pros and cons of a gangland rub-out with a Sicilian mobster. It was one of many lessons he had learned tending bar in the Killarney Rose saloon. When in Rome, talk like the Romans, when in Boston, speak as a proper Bostonian.
The Boston Ambush, as he would refer to it later in life, was a particularly cowardly act, the first perpetrated by Shultz. Keegan had been to the theater. As he got out of his car, a black Ford squealed around the corner and he heard someone yelling, “Shoot, shoot.” He dove behind the car as a half dozen shots rang out. He fit the ping in his side, then the burning, deep in his back, and he knew he had been shot. The shooter, a Philadelphia gunsel named Harvey Fusco, never made it back to Philadelphia to spend the ten thousand he was paid to do the job. When the Manhattan Limited pulled into Broad Street station, Fusco was found sitting in his compartment, the New York Daily Mirror in his lap, his eyes crossed and staring up at the bridge of his nose at the single. 45-caliber bullet hole there.
Frankie Kee was never a suspect. He was in Boston General in intensive care when it happened. Since the authorities didn‘t know Fusco ‘s bullet had put him there no connection was ever made. For the record, Francis Scott Keegan ‘s attack went down as an attempted stickup. As for Keegan, he was never sure who had disposed of Fusco. It was one of those unclaimed favors one simply takes for granted, savors and forgets.
So Shultz tried unsuccessfully to give Frankie Kee the big gift-
