The Hunt aka 27 (16 page)

It was a story Keegan liked. It had drama, it had romance, it had a touch of tragedy and a touch of mystery. There was also a semblance of truth to it, so he never disputed it. He never repeated the story as fact, either. Keegan never talked about himself at all, he let others do the talking.

Then there was the other part of the story. That Keegan had made his fortune as a bootlegger while attending Boston College, dealing only with the families of rich college friends.

Another rumor, also not without some merit.

“But what does he
do?”
the proper Bostonians would be asked, and the answer was usually the same. “He’s
. . .
rich.”

A perfectly respectable response.

Actually Rose Clarke
was a
countess and Clancy Keegan
was a
bartender. When they married, she bought the bar for him and when she
di
ed
during the influenza epidemic of 1903, Keegan followed close behind, the victim of a broken heart, its shards awash in a sea of Irish whiske
y
.

Francis, only Jive at the time, was reared by his trustee, his father’s brother Ned, a sly entrepreneur who took his stewardship seriously and managed the bar into a classic East Side watering hole. Ned Keegan reasoned that a bar need only to attract hearty drinkers to be a success and so he concentrated on the heaviest drinkers he .knew, reporters and politicians. He pandered to them, providing extra phones for the reporters and a couple of nicely appointed rooms on the second floor for those times when they either couldn’t make it home—or simply required a little privacy for a couple of hours. There was an unwritten rule that the second floor was a kind of neutral ground for both the politicians and the reporters, as a papal decree had proclaimed it o
f
f limits to inquiring minds.

Many a devious political plot was hatched in the scarred oaken booths of the Killarney Rose—to be unhatched just as quickly by eavesdropping journalists, yet the two sects kept coming back. Gossip and news was a commodity oft/u place, to be bartered, sold and traded between drinks, and so The Rose, as it was known to regulars, prospered. And while Ned Keegan tried to keep his young charge out of the place and under the watchful eye of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, his efforts failed. By the time he was fifteen, Francis was bussing tables. At sixteen he had graduated to tending bar.

Like all good bartenders, Francis mastered the art of carrying on one conversation and listening to another at the same time. He never wrote anything down—but he had a long memory. It was at The Rose that he learned his most valuable lessons: never repeat anything he saw or heard; the quickest way to a politician’s heart was through his wallet; bribery was only illegal if one got caught; all sin was relative. It quickly became patently clear to young Francis Keegan that one
m
an ‘s meat was indeed another man‘s poison.

By the time he was twenty, Francis had fought as a doughboy in the trenches in Europe. When he returned in 1918, a hero from the war, Ned offered to buy The Rose from him.

Half a million dollars.

Not bad for a kid with only a couple of Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and two years of bartending to show for his twenty years.

“Now what ‘re ye gonna do?” Ned asked.

“I’m going to get rich, but first I’m going to college,” Keegan answered. “Up in Boston. There a lot of class in Boston and there no such thing as a rich bum.”

He had been there less than a year when he called Jocko Nayles and invited him to lunch at The Rose. It had been two years since he had seen his wartime buddy. Nayles
’s
clothes were neat but showing wear and he wore the mottled tan of a man who spends long, hard hours working in the sun.

“What ‘ye you been up to?” Keegan asked him.

“Y’know, kid, I’m on the docks.

“You like
it?”

“Nobody likes it, it’s a living.”

“I’ve got a better idea, Jocko. I’ve got an idea where we can make a couple of million dollars a year.”

“Yeah, sure. What‘re we gonna do, rent out the White House?”

‘
J
ocko, I got half a million dollars. We buy a couple of fast boats.

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. “Q
u
it 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
f
i
fth, Keegan paid three-fifty a quart and sold it to his customers uncut for
f
ifteen
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
g
ettin’. Uncut. The word gets around, it a
in
‘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 schizoph
re
nic 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 d
i
fferences 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
w
as 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 l
i
fe, was a particularly cowardly act, the first perpetrated by Shultz. Keegan had been to the theater. As he got out of his car, a blac
k
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 w
a
s 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
n
ose at the single. 45-caliber bullet hole there.

Frankie Kee was never a suspect. He
w
as 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 o
f
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
-
the concrete overcoat and the deep swim. But Keegan, touched with the luck of the Irish, always proved equal to the challenge. Each time the Dutchman failed, his assassins felt the sting of his Irish vengeance in strange, sometimes almost supernatural ways. One of his attempted assassins was kicked to death by a racehorse in a stable at Belmo
n
t Park. Another choked to death on a chicken bone during a birthday celebration in Reuben’s Restaurant in Manhattan.

“Listen, pal, I never
lift
ed a finger against anybody, “Keegan once told Albert A at a meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, where Anastasia had been sent to put Frankie Kee in a box
a
nd Dutch Shultz out of his misery. “It just that bad things seem to befall people I particularly don’t like. And Albert, I particularly don’t like you
a
s much as anybody I know.”

Anastasia, probably the New York mob’s top killer and a man unaccustomed to insults, was so astounded he didn‘t say anything in response. At first he didn‘t even tell anybody that this smartass mackerel snapper from Boston had insulted him. Then his anger got the best of him. When he decided to start his own Boston Tea Party, Arnold Rothstein stepped in.

A few days after the Anastasia meeting, Keegan was in The Rose for dinner, his Uncle Ned serving the best Kansas City sirloin east of the town itself Ned slid into the booth opposite him.

“I heard this rumor that you put the double hex on Albert A,” he whispered in his Irish lilt. “Tell me it a lie. Tell me
yer not mixin
’
it up with them Guineas. Jesus, Francis, they’ll cut off yer jewels n’ have ‘em fer breakfast.”

“Now why would I do a silly thing like that, Unc?”

“But you talked to him, didn’t ye. Ye had a conversation with Albert A.”

“He wanted to buy my Rolls.”

“So what ‘d you tell ‘im?”

“I told him
no dice.
Told him it wou
ld
n‘t fit him.”

“You told Albert A that? That it wouldn’t fit ‘im?”

“Yeah. I told him he was too small for it.
He
shrank another two inches when it sank in.”

“Why ye do things like that, Frankie? Ye better watch yer step, son, them dagos have a short
fuse.”

“Been tried, Unc. “He wiped his mouth
with
his napkin. “I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

“What ‘re ye gonna do, sell a bottle a scotch to the mayor? “Ned said with a snicker.

“I’m going uptown to Central Park.”

“Central Park is it?”

“A meeting with A. R.”

“Rothstein himself’ Are ye crazy, then?” Ned shook his head. “I ‘II tell ye this, boy, when I die they’s gonna be hell t ‘pay. When I
get to heaven yer old man’s gonna kick my ass to Baltimore and back fer lettin ‘you go astray.”

“And well he should,” Keegan answered with his cockeyed smile.

Arnold Rothstein, who had been known as A. R. since his teens, was a democrat in the true sense of the word. Every day he held court on the same bench in the southwest corner of Central Park just of
59th Street, listening to deals, requests for loans, entertaining favors.
W
ant to shack up with a chorus girl? Ask A. R. Want to buy a load of whiskey and willing to pay the interest? Ask A. R. Want to fix a cop, bribe a judge, dispose of a witness, fix the 1919 World Series? Ask A. R. Want to lose a bundle in a poker game? Sit across the table from A.R.

Keegan had leaned on the stone wall on Central Park South watching him for about ten minutes. Not as trim as his pictures showed him to be, Keegan thought. Getting bald. But you could sense the power in the man, sitting with his back ramrod straight in his gray pinstripe and polka dot bow tie. All brains, thought Keegan. There sits the most powerful gangster in the world. More powerful than Capone, Luciano, Costello, any of them. Just sitting there in the sun feeding the pigeons. It s a crazy world.

Finally he strolled down the path and stood in front of the big man. Rothstein looked up at him for a moment through
n
arrowed eyes, then held out his hand.