Mile High (18 page)

He expanded his interests nicely before prohibition came in. He fenced stolen goods such as diamonds, bonds and silk. He bought inheritances in advance from the children of wealthy families at discounts. He leased the top floor of Jimmy Hine's political club for gambling at $500 a month against 15 percent of the winnings. Then prohibition arrived and he was in the biggest action.

In theory, lending large amounts of money to criminals in forty-one states should have been a business with considerable risk. But, as Goff believed, as West had theorized at the bank, a criminal is as much a living piece of his society as a clergyman or a steeplejack. They existed with everyone else in the national tapestry. The rational and the irrational were like different colored threads animating the entire design. The threads themselves did not know which was which. America was the first country to invent egalitarian big business, wherein the greatest combined force of commerce was marshaled to serve the greatest number of people. It was an ideal within the larger ideal. America was the first nation to produce big-business poets and painters and composers—and the first to produce big-business preachers. It was proper for such a country to produce the first big-business criminal requiring large-scale bank credit. However, just as big-business hospital insurance and health services were available to him on a short-term basis because merely by living he represented a risk as much as did health-insurance policyholders, banking facilities had to be expensive. In fact, until E. C. West had studied the problem there had been no really safe way of securing a loan to a criminal borrower.

However, in 1912, following a personal appeal to the limited partners of Horizons A.G., it was agreed that two new insurance companies should be formed at once, utilizing capital that would be apart from Horizons funds but prorated to the partners on the same basis as Horizons shareholdings. By 1919 these companies were thriving under their brisk West managements, operating out of branch offices that covered all states, employing actuaries, salesmen and adjusters, and building reputations for paying claims promptly. Both firms grew in time to insure tens of millions of American lives. They were sound, profitable operations for their founders. Their single, infinitesimal operational difference from any of the other life insurance companies was that, as a matter of principle, neither company questioned or refused applications for life insurance submitted by Arnold Goff on the lives of others—all the policies having Mr. Goff (or one of Mr. Goff's forty-three companies) as beneficiary. Nor was there any undue investigation or delay in paying claims in the event of the sudden death of any of these policyholders. By and large it was an extremely profitable branch of insurance practice because the policies carried high premiums for extremely short terms, and the premiums, naturally, were paid through Goff by the borrower.

If an operator had an Atlantic rum fleet, he had capital requirements requiring a revolving fund—maintained at a level of a million and a half to two million dollars—for liquor purchase (from Willie's branch), all ships, high-speed boats and shoreside trucking equipment, plus insurance, payroll, fuel, warehousing, garaging and protection. He had to hire large amounts of capital, and he had to hire it from Goff to spend it on Willie.

Not that he didn't get full service for it. For example, through Edward's friends in the White House Willie was able to acquire two hundred unused Liberty motors that had been built for torpedo boats in World War I at 12 percent of their original cost. They had bought boat yards in the Bahamas. The motors were fitted into new hulls and the finished boats were sold for 165 percent of their original cost. After sale the boats were berthed in New York along the Brooklyn waterfront and at a marine garage on the East River with direct access to Hell Gate, and also Bayshore, Long Island, and at Westhampton. Each boat came equipped with a Horizons amulet, a dory hung over the stern for protection against the Coast Guard, who were paid to harass free-lance operators. With the amulet, the Coast Guard escorted the boats into port safely. This offshore arm of the government was an alert, enthusiastic organization that was ever willing to help. During the peak holiday rush periods, for example, Coast Guard Cutter 203 loaded on 700 cases at sea along Rum Row, then unloaded them at the Canal Street dock for seven dollars a case, which they shared partially with the New York policemen who helped off-load the cargo.

Of course it was neither profitable nor possible to buy everyone's cooperation. There was occasional trouble. Willie's branch concentrated all its lawyers in the Knickerbocker Building at 42nd Street and Broadway, where they established a pattern of rapid legal assistance that was a model in every way.

The large breweries were operated under lease from Horizons by the gangs in the principal national market areas. This was an enormously profitable business; in 1928 wholesale beer sales in Chicago alone amounted to 1196,680,000. But the operating expenses of the gangs were high: police, federal agencies, armed guards, insurance and brewery rental were some peripheral factors, in addition to which they were required to pay one-sixth of their gross to Horizons.

Further capital was borrowed through Goff for the operation and maintenance of all other income-producing activities demanded by the operating manual that Horizons enforced: narcotics, brothels, gambling, nightclubs, race tracks, roadhouses, slot machines, policy rackets, laundries, restaurants, dance halls, speakeasies, booking agencies, sugar brokerage, labor organizations, alky-cooking, taxis and strike-breaking and extortion rackets.

The national capital requirement of all mobs in all national market areas came to a substantial four hundred and twenty-six million dollars annually, which might have been a perilous risk for Horizons A.G., through Goff, the monopoly banking agency. However, all loans were secured with life insurance policies in Arnold Goff's favor. If the borrower died naturally, the policy would honor the amount of the debt. If, as sometimes happened, there were unintelligent borrowers who did not want to pay the debt, they knew they would be putting a break-even price on their heads. Which is to say that although Arnold Goff became one of the mythical figures of modern American crime, and although he was gifted and clever with numbers, he was only a technician, who worked for 2 percent. By 1917 he was already about the most exciting figure to be pointed out at a race track or at a Broadway opening. By 1921 he was the sort of hoodlum-sportsman about whom people enjoyed believing anything. He had fixed the 1919 World Series, not less than two world championship prize fights and a baker's dozen of big stake races.

Yet he didn't seem at all sinister if you didn't happen to look into his eyes. He had talcum-pale skin, noodle-soft, and shining hair. He was a full-time ladies' man with a stable of mistresses and still time for the big whorehouses. He had a chin dimple, and there are chin-dimple buffs just as there are women who hang around musicians. He continued to be a fence for stolen jewelry even after the enormous action started, but more often than not, after the sets were broken up they were most likely to rub off on some pretty girl. Fencing wasn't the only part of his business that he held out on E. C. West. He financed a chain of bucket shops, the rawest kind of Wall Street stock swindle; but like everything else he did or tried to do, sooner or later it came to West's attention.

At the time he attempted his first double-dealing with E. C. West, Goff held life insurance policies in his favor totaling eleven million four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, which meant that his 2 percent share of the short-term loan action represented by the policies would be two hundred and twenty-eight thousand, two hundred and forty dollars. If that was an average thirty-day, short-term aggregate loan, then Goff's income from banking alone (and it was the big banking that made all his other income possible) could be figured roughly at two million seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars a year—tax free.

The short-term commercial banking was done through forty-three Goff companies that had been incorporated in eleven states but that operated regionally in the nation under such banal names as Goffair Mortgage or Arnlegal Furniture or Allgoff Enterprises. The collections were made by these companies and remitted on the same updated thirty-day loan basis to the West National Bank in New York. William Tobin, executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., a Swiss company, held power of attorney on each of the forty-two Goff company accounts. Using these at the end of each fiscal quarter, he withdrew 98 percent of all Goff company funds and caused the West National to remit these funds to the Horizons A.G. numbered account at the Forster-Appenzeller Bank in Grabs.

That it was a sound system was proved by the fact that it was never investigated, even after Goff was shot to death on April 19, 1928. Goff's own life was insured in two policies of seven million five hundred thousand dollars, each in the favor of Horizons A.G. of Grabs, Switzerland.

Regardless of what caused his death, Arnold Goff's problem was never entirely one of greed. His major problem was that he hated E. C. West. As those things so often seem to happen, he hated him for the most irrational of reasons.

On the first day of each calendar quarter Goff was required to meet with the head of the West National Bank. He was the representative of forty-two companies that deposited with the bank, therefore anyone would have seen that these were normal business meetings. He would be driven to the bank building between Fulton and Wall, forty-seven stories high with a lobby displaying enormous murals by Roja-Hunt depicting man at his nets bringing in the fruits of the sea, and the lobby floor seeming to shine with gold. E. C. West's office, on the thirty-third floor, was reached through a series of rooms like Chinese boxes, each room with a different decor and each manned by a bulky civilian who bulged above a different exquisite desk.

Arnold Goff did not hate West because West had made him a multimillionaire. He hated him because at the end of every one of their meetings since 1911, originally held in the old building on West 14th Street, West would always dismiss him with that contemptuous false smile that might have been peeled off the front page of the
World
and say, “Now, don't tell Bella Radin what we talked about today.”

On January 2, 1924, everything seemed to be just the same. Goff was passed through the exquisite guard boxes into the last room, where West was sitting soldier-straight as always, confidently handsome and physically healthy and, to Goff, as attractive as a fish cake with a mustache. They greeted each other. Goff sat down. The meeting invariably opened with West handing him the bank's statement showing that his forty-two accounts had remitted 98 percent of their bank balances to a Swiss bank. Goff had always been convinced that West was just an ice-water banker with a little more than the usual banker's larceny in him. He thought West had happened to inherit those three gambling houses and had never really been a part of them. He considered West a smart square who had figured out this clever banker's dodge of short-term credit for businesses that weren't legit, but he never ever conceived that West had anything to do with mobs and booze and vice, because West had not intended him to think that way.

That morning his revulsion for West rolled over him like waves of icy water. He blurted out what he refused to contain any longer. He didn't wait for the bank statements to be extended.

“Listen, Mr. West. Do you know what it cost me to be allowed to sit here and do business with you? A law practice!”

“It wasn't much of a law practice, Goff.”

“And did I ever tell you—or maybe you read it in the papers and it slipped your mind—that my father killed himself in 1919 and left me a cowardly note that said he was ashamed of me?”

“He might have been ashamed of you. I'm ashamed of you myself. But he killed himself because he was in the terminal stages of cancer.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you didn't make a fortune betting the way I told you to bet on the 1919 series?”

“Betting?”
West looked at Goff as if he were drunk. And he was almost drunk. It had been a three-day New Year's Eve celebration. “I don't bet.”

“All right. So let it go. Okay. Never mind. What's the difference? What I'm talking about is this. For a hundred dollars you sold Bella away from me.”

“Bella?”

“Bella!
Bella Radin!”

“You look as though you're going to vomit, Goff.” West opened a desk drawer and took out a silver flask. He slid the flask across the desk. “Hair of the dog.” Goff opened the top of the flask gratefully and took a long swallow. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

“Now—shall we go over these statements?”

Goff shot an accusing finger at him. “You took her away from me!”

“I bought information from the woman. That was thirteen years ago. She accepted one hundred dollars that she said she was going to deposit in your joint account. But you wanted to lose that woman. She took the money for you, but you were glad for the excuse to drop her.”

“All right. Never mind. What's the difference?”

“If you think she can be had for money, go buy her back.”

Goff's eyes filled with drunken tears. His instability shocked West. “It's too late. She got married. She has kids.”

“Goff, what do you want? Please tell me what you want?”

Goff's trembling finger leveled at his enemy again. “Just don't mention her. When I walk out of here, don't say what you always say. For the first time in thirteen years just don't say it-okay?”

“Is that all?”

“That's all.”

“Now may I get on with business?”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you read about the daylight robberies of the bank messengers carrying negotiable Liberty Bonds that have been going on over the past eighteen months?”