garage they tried to burn me up. 'What'd they do that for?' the jedge axes me, and I says,'Cause he wants to know where there's a still I'm s'posed to know about. But I told Diamond I don't know nothin' 'bout no still.' And the jedge says, 'Why'd he think you did?' And I says, 'Cause I'm haulin' twenty-four barrels of hard cider I'd picked up down at Post's Cider Mill.' 'Who for?' says the jedge. 'For me,' I says. 'I like cider. Drink a bunch of it.' 'Cause I ain't about to tell no jedge or nobody else 'bout the still me and old Cy Bartlett got between us. We do right nice business with that old still. Make up to a hundred, hundred and thirty dollars apiece some weeks off the fellers who ain't got no stills and need a little 'jack to keep the blood pumpin'. That Diamond feller, he surely did want to get our still away from us. I knew that right off. Did me a lot of damage, I'll say. But sheeeeee. Them fellers with guns is all talk. Hell, they don't never kill nobody. They just like to throw a scare into folks so's they can get their own way. Son of a bee if I was gonna give up a hundred and thirty dollars a week for some New York feller.'
JACK AMONG THE MAIDS
The Streeter incident took place in mid-April, 1931. Eight days later, the following document was released in the Capitol at Albany:
Pursuant to section 62 of the Executive Law, I hereby require that you, the Attorney General of this state, attend in person or by your assistants or deputies, a regular special and trial term of the Supreme Court appointed to be held in and for the County of Greene for the month of April, 1931, and as such term as may hereafter be continued, and that you in person or by said assistants or deputies appear before the grand jury or grand juries which shall be drawn and sit for any later term or terms of said court for the purpose of managing and conducting in said court and before said grand jury and said other grand juries, any and all proceedings, examinations and inquiries, and any and all criminal actions and proceedings which may be taken by or before said grand jury concerning any and all kinds and-or-criminal offences, alleged to have been committed by John Diamond, also known as Jack (Legs) Diamond and-or-any person or persons acting in concert with him, and further to manage, prosecute and conduct the trial of any indictments found by said grand jury or grand juries at said term or terms of said court or of any other court at which any and all such indictments may hereafter be tried, and that in person or by your assistants or deputies you supersede the district attorney of the County of Greene in all matters herein specified and you exercise all the powers and perform all the duties conferred upon you by Section 62 of the Executive Law and this requirement thereunder; and that in such proceedings and actions the District Attorney of Greene County shall only exercise such powers and perform such duties as are required of him by you or by the assistants or deputies attorney general so attending.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Governor of the State of New York
Jack thus became the first gangster of the Prohibition Era to have the official weight of an entire state, plus the gobble of its officialese, directed at him. I find this notable. I did what little I could to throw a counterweight when the time came. I cited the whole affair as a cynical political response to the harsh spotlight that Judge Seabury, his reformers, and the Republican jackals were, at the moment, shining on the gangsterism and corruption so prevalent in New York City's Tammany Hall, with Democratic Gentleman Jimmy Walker the chief illuminated goat. FDR, I argued when I pleaded Jack's case in the press, was making my client the goat in a Republican stronghold. I voiced particular outrage at superseding the Greene County District Attorney.
But my counterweight didn't weigh much. Jack went to jail and I understood the spadework done in Albany by Van Deusen's vigilantes. FDR even sent his personal bodyguard to Catskill as an observer when the swarm of state police and state attorneys moved toward Jack's jugular.
Knute Rockne told his men: 'Don't be a bad loser, but don't lose. '
Fogarty got me out of bed to tell me Jack had been arrested and that he himself was going into hiding. Jack and Kiki were in the parlor at Acra, and Fogarty was playing pool in the cottage when the trooper rang the bell under the second step. Three times. Jack's straight neighbors thought three was the insider's ring, but it was the ring only for straights.
Jack tried to talk the trooper into letting him surrender in the morning by himself, avoid the ignominy of it, but the trooper said nix, and so Jack wound up on a hard cot in a white-washed third-floor cell of the county jail. Tidy and warm, not quite durance vile, as one journalist wrote, but vile enough for the King Cobra of the Catskills, as he was now known in the press.
I worked on the bail, which was a formidable twenty-five thousand dollars: ten each for assaulting Streeter and Bartlett, five for the kidnapping. Uh-oh, I said, when I heard the news, heard especially how young Bartlett was. What we now are dealing with, I told Fogarty, and Jack too, is not a bootleggers' feud, which is what it was in a left-handed way, but the abduction of children in the dead of night. Not a necessary social misdemeanor, as most bootlegging was contemporaneously regarded, but a high crime in any age.
I called Warren Van Deusen to see if I could pry Jack loose by greasing local pols, but found him haughtily supporting the state's heavy anti-Jack thrust. 'Kidnapping kids now, is he? I hear he's holding up bread truck drivers too. What's next? Disemboweling old ladies?' I wrote off Warren as unreliable, a man given to facile outrage, who didn't understand the process he was enmeshed in.
It has long been my contention that Jack was not only a political pawn through Streeter, but a pawn of the entire decade. Politicians used him, and others like him, to carry off any vileness that served their ends, beginning with the manipulation of strikebreakers as the decade began and ending with the manipulation of stockbrokers at the end of the crash, a lovely, full, capitalistic circle. Thereafter the pols rejected Jack as unworthy, and tried to destroy him.
But it was Jack and a handful of others-Madden, Schultz, Capone, Luciano-who reversed the process, who became manipulators of the pols, who left a legacy of money and guns that would dominate the American city on through the l970's. Jack was too interested in private goals to see the potential that 1931 offered to the bright student of urban life. Yet he was unquestionably an ancestral paradigm for modern urban political gangsters, upon whom his pioneering and his example were obviously not lost.
I hesitate to develop all the analogies I see in this, for I don't want to trivialize Jack's achievement by linking him to lesser latter-day figures such as Richard Nixon, who left significant history in his wake, but no legend; whose corruption, overwhelmingly venal and invariably hypocritical, lacked the admirably white core fantasy that can give evil a mythical dimension. Only boobs and shitheads rooted for Nixon in his troubled time, but heroes and poets followed Jack's tribulations with curiosity, ambivalent benevolence, and a sense of mystery at the meaning of their own response.
Fogarty, sitting at a bar and waiting for a female form to brighten his life, and meanwhile telling a story about a gang-bang, felt alive for the first time in a week, for the first time since they hauled Jack in and he took off up the mountain. A week in a cabin alone, only one day out for groceries and the paper, is enough to grow hair on a wart, shrivel a gonad.
Fogarty found solitude unbearably full of evaporated milk and tuna fish, beans and cheese, stale bread and bad coffee, memories of forced bed-rest, stultifying boredom with one's own thought. And then to run out of candles. The old shack on stilts was down the mountain from Haines Falls, half a mile in an old dirt road, then a quarter of a mile walk with the groceries. He walked down from the cabin to his old car every morning and every night to make sure it was still there and to start it. Then he walked alone in the woods looking at the same trees, same squirrels, same chipmunks and rabbits, same goddamn birds with all that useless song, and came back and slept and ate and thought about women, and read the only book in the cabin, The World Almanac. He related to the ads-no end to life's jokes:
Last Year's Pay Looks Like Small Change to These Men Today; Raised Their Pay 500% When They Discovered Salesmanship… Have YOU Progressed During the Past Three Years?… Ask Your Dealer for Crescent Guns, 12-16- 20-410 Gauge… A Challenge Made Me Popular!… This Man Wouldn't Stay Down… It Pays to Read Law… Success-
