He was sixty.
I never told him, by the way, that I was the one who busted up his trains.
Frank Sinatra made his comeback, as you may have heard, and he continued to be friends with Joey Fischetti, who received at least an occasional fee as a “talent agent,” particularly for Sinatra’s dates in Miami Beach, including at the Fountainbleau Hotel, with which Joey was affiliated.
In early 1951, Sinatra was asked to provide the Kefauver Committee with an interview, and he complied—a top secret one, at four in the morning in a law office at Rockefeller Center. He told them nothing—a list of gangsters was read off to him, and he informed committee lawyer Joseph Nellis he knew them “to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to…. Well, hell, you go into show business, you meet a lot of people.”
Perhaps because of my request to Pearson to apply gentle pressure, Kefauver accepted this private testimony and chose not to embarrass Frank by calling him as a hearing witness.
But Frank’s mob connections would dog his heels his entire life—five grand jury subpoenas, two IRS investigations, a congressional summons, and a subpoena from the New Jersey State Crime Commission would follow over the years. So would a Congressional Gold Medal, presented to him by President Clinton in 1997, the year before Sinatra’s death.
Joey Fischetti passed away some time in the ’70s, if I recall, but Frank had long since grown tighter with one other mobster—Sam Giancana. Throughout the early ’50s, following the Kefauver hearings, the leadership of the Chicago Outfit passed between Ricca, Accardo, and Giancana. During this period numerous gangland murders—all unsolved—were committed; one of the first was an attorney named Kurnitz, who turned up along that same Calumet City roadside as those two heroic police detectives. His throat had been slit and his tongue had been cut out and stuck in the new aperture.
In the early ’50s, Giancana engineered a violent takeover of the numbers rackets from black policy kings. His interests eventually included Las Vegas, Mexico, and Cuba, and he ran in show business circles that included Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis, Keely Smith, and his longtime paramour, Phyllis McGuire of the singing McGuire Sisters. He shared a mistress with President Kennedy, and his involvement with the CIA is thought to have led to his murder in his Oak Park home—shot in the back of the head, frying up sausages.
Paul Mansfield was true to his word and drove his wife Jayne to California, after he got out of the service; she kissed the ground hello, shortly after they crossed the state line. Shortly after that, she kissed Paul goodbye. She made it in Hollywood, but via New York, playing a Marilyn Monroe-like character in a Broadway play by the author of
Jayne—like Mamie Van Doren (a onetime Charley Fischetti sweetheart)—became a road company Marilyn. Her sexbomb persona seeming increasingly passe as the repressed ’50s gave way to the swinging ’60s; she made a nudie cutie movie, promoting it by posing nude for
Jack Ruby made a name for himself, too.
The A-1 Detective Agency thrived in Chicago and Hollywood, and I maintained residences in both cities, though I would always be a Second City boy at heart. Sometimes I would stay in L.A. long enough to be jarred, on my return, by the changes in my town. Oh, the underlying casual corruption remained the same. But much of the character of the first half of the twentieth century in Chicago was getting chipped away at, as the second half got under way.
In 1960 the Chez Paree closed, for example, made irrelevant by the intimate likes of Mr. Kelly’s, the Happy Medium, and Hefner’s Playboy Club. Riverview amusement park shut down in 1967—all the famous rides sold off, the attractions demolished…including Aladdin’s Castle.
The Federal Building was pulled down in 1965, and a new one with much less character took its place; but the Monadnock Building still stands, and St. Andrew’s Church is open for business.
As for Tim O’Conner, he got a hero’s funeral—not as elaborate as those Calumet City coppers, but a nice sendoff, though under the circumstances St. Andrew’s was out of the question. No Bishop Sheil sermon and high mass for a suicide, after all. Everybody felt for Tim, caught up in despondency like that, over the death of his friend and colleague, Bill Drury.
A lot of people thought it was sad—tragic even—that poor Tim couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. That a nice Catholic boy like that had died while excommunicated, committing a mortal sin, and was condemned to burn in the flames of damnation for eternity.
Of course, I didn’t buy any of that shit; but the thought sure as hell was comforting.
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible—and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of conflicting source material. Some minor liberties have been taken with time, primarily for reasons of pace—for example, moving the death of Charley Fischetti up slightly, so that the narrative would span weeks and not months.
This novel is a departure of sorts from the Nathan Heller “memoirs” of recent years. The first four Heller novels— beginning with
In recent years, a number of avid readers of the series have suggested that Heller seemed overdue in returning to his Chicago roots. Commercial considerations—giving in to the obvious audience appeal of a world-famous crime (the Huey Long assassination, the Massie rape/murder case) or mystery (the Roswell Incident, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart)—have made it difficult to convince editors to allow Heller a return to his Chicago haunts. I thank my former editor, Joe Pittman, and present editor, Genny Ostertag, for their understanding and support of what might seem to be a departure from a successful format.
For Heller to develop as a character in his historical context, I considered it necessary for him to leave the ’30s and ’40s behind and move into the ’50s and ’60s. Since
