'What happened to them?'
'They went to jail.'
'How much a month did you collect for him?'
'Little over a grand. This was back in '26, '27.'
'How much did you collect, total?'
'Twenty-five grand, easy.'
'Why did you stop collecting for him?'
'He turned that over to some people working for him, and started hitting me up for dough.'
'People working for him? Who?'
'Who do you think? Cops.'
Ness paused for a moment. His mouth felt dry. He drank some beer and said, 'You've been very helpful.'
'Cooper's greedy. He wasn't satisfied with what he had coming to him. He wanted the other guy's share, too.'
'I'll be satisfied,' Ness said, 'to see Cooper get what's coming to him. Do you think you know of others who might be willing to talk out against Cooper? Former associates of yours, perhaps?'
Brody suddenly got cautious again, eyes narrowing. 'I can think of a couple…'
'There's safety in numbers. If I can take a crowd of you former bootleggers to the grand jury, there will be less chance of reprisals from Cooper's cops.'
Brody tapped his fingers on the table. 'Let me go see if my customers are thirsty. Let me make another phone call.'
He got up and went to the bar.
'What do you think?' Wild asked.
'I think Cooper's a corrupt son of a bitch, and I think we're going to nail him.'
'So you think Brody's going to come back here and give us some names?'
'Yup,' Ness said.
And in fifteen minutes, Brody did.
Ness and Wild drove directly to a modern two-story brick home in upper middle-class Cleveland Heights, overlooking Cleveland and Murray Hill. It was a gently rolling, somewhat wooded residential area, reeking nicely of money. Not wealth, exactly, but plenty of money.
Abe Greenburger had plenty of money. Unlike Joe Brody, he had stayed in the wholesale liquor business after Repeal. Ness had heard rumors that Greenburger had ties with the Mayfield Road mob, ties which may have explained why he'd prospered to such a degree. Like Brody, he chose to live in a suburb, beyond the reach of Captain Cooper's 'department-within-the-department.'
Greenburger, a small dark bald man, was dressed in an expensive suit. He had only an hour for Ness and Wild before a business meeting 'downtown.' A handsome, serious-looking man of about fifty, he ushered them into a study dominated by dark wood and leather-bound books, pulling up a swivel chair from behind his desk for himself while his two guests sank into a soft brown leather couch.
'My experiences collecting money were much the same as my friend Joe Brody's,' Greenburger said. 'But I only did so for about a year, collecting perhaps nine thousand dollars. The captain fired me, in a sense. Because I used bad judgment.'
'How's that?' Ness asked.
'I delivered a satchel of cash to his home. He was furious about the intrusion.'
'Where was the usual drop?'
'In his office at the precinct house. On his desk. Did Joe tell you about the clambakes?'
'Why, no.'
Greenburger smiled, his teeth very white in his tan face. 'That was an extra gouge the captain devised. He would have his cops sell tickets to the things, above and beyond the regular payoff.'
'Tickets to the clambakes, you mean?'
'Yes. They'd rent a hall or use some speakeasy, someplace with a big back yard for standing around steaming and eating the clams, and there'd be gambling, chuck-a-luck mostly, and liquor, cheap liquor, for sale. And two big empty beer barrels, into which the guests, bootleggers mostly, were to toss money.'
'How much would that amount to?'
'I counted the proceeds on one occasion, when Captain Cooper was too drunk to do so himself. It came to slightly over three thousand dollars. Can I offer you gentlemen something to drink?'
The third interviewee of the afternoon did not offer Ness and Wild anything to drink. Lou Shapiro had been out of the beer business a long time. And his surroundings did not resemble those of his former associate Greenburger, nor those of Brody, for that matter.
Shapiro was the only one of the three former Cooper collectors still in Cooper territory-the Fourteenth Precinct, to be exact. He was unemployed, living in the basement of a transient workingman's rooming house, in an apartment, a 'crib,' that was a converted coal bin. The stark unpainted rough wooden walls, the bare mattress on a steel frame, the hooks on the wall that held his patched clothes, seemed bitter reminders to Shapiro of what had been denied him.
'They took it damn near fast as I could make it.'
Shapiro had the same basic build as Greenburger. Unlike Greenburger, however, Shapiro had a full head of curly hair, the only possession of his that Greenburger might envy. A skinny unshaven rat of a man, he sat on a tattered, at-one-time overstuffed chair that he'd scavenged. His hands were in his coverall pockets. It was cold in the former coal bin.
'I paid the bum twenty-five grand over five years. I was running a little beer parlor that should've been a gold mine. To try and get on his good side, I gave him the names of some places and offered to collect for him.'
'Did you?'
'Yeah, two hundred to two-fifty a month. This was in '27 and '28. Then the cops took over collections. And the monthly rate went up, even for me, who used to collect for him. As long as we paid off, they didn't raid us. But the first month you missed a payment, or said you didn't have the dough, you got hit. If you tried to operate without paying off, they'd frame you with a phony raid, if they couldn't catch you for real. Then they'd offer to fix the case, if you kicked in.'
'Do you know anything about these so-called 'clambakes'?'
'Clambakes, picnics, benefits. Every few weeks some cops would come in and, in addition to the regular bite, would shove five of these tickets in your mitt at five bucks apiece. I went to one of these shindigs once, since I bought the tickets anyway, hoping to get something out of it. There were so many police there I was sure they must've imported 'em from Chicago or someplace. The party lasted all day and into the night. There was a lot of booze that the cops got free from us and then turned around and sold to us at fifty cents a shot. That was rubbing it in, don't you think? I didn't stay till the thing was over because the cops were getting drunker and drunker and fights began breaking out. I didn't like the looks of it and that's the last one I ever went to.'
'But you kept buying tickets.'
'Sure. Once I complained when they tried to peddle me tickets for a 'benefit' that took place the night before. A cop grabbed me by the throat and said, 'What the hell difference does it make? You never go to them, anyway!' I bought the tickets.'
The scruffy little man raised a fist and shook it at a small basement window, railing against his lot in life.
'I worked my butt to the bone for years and look what I got to show for it! And that bastard Cooper's within spitting distance of me, raking it in.'
'What do you mean?' Ness asked.
'Just down here on Ivanhoe Road-bookie joint, the dough just rollin' in. The Black Swan Club. That's his place.'
'His place?'
'Sure. He owns it.'
