The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (28 page)

It amazed me how powerful the press was in fashioning this public image. Shushan had climbed, fought, gouged his way to the top of the circumcised gangster universe; I had arrived because, as with Saul and David, the departing monarch had tapped me for the job. But so far all I had done was show up. Now I would have to do something. And though I knew what to do, I did not know if it would work.

Clearly I was not expected to actually take up my role as recording secretary, a job too menial for a man wearing such a custom-made suit, and custom-made rep: the old recording secretary was back at his old post, my old post, inscribing notes in elegantly lettered Yiddish. He smiled in my direction. Feivel (Franklin) gave me a thumbs up. Though I had notes in my head for a twenty-minute speech, I decided to cut it short. This was a crowd that wanted action as much as I did.

“Brothers of Bhotke,” I said. “I am pleased and proud to be among you this evening. Being a son of Bhotke, a grandson in fact, means more to me than being in the papers. Until recently you were the only family I had. And so I come back to you tonight to ask your help in showing respect to our perhaps departed member, Shushan Cats, a brave defender of the Jews, who has done as much with the baseball bat as Sandy Koufax has done with the ball. As we await word of Shushan’s fate, and though we may fear the worst, I ask you to join with me tomorrow in a show of solidarity with Shushan, to exhibit to the world at large that though he is missing, though his fate is in doubt, we of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society are solidly behind this Brooklyn hero, a Jew who took shit from nobody. Tomorrow, gentlemen, I ask that you come forward, take a long lunch break from your jobs, your shops, your practices, your day-to-day lives. Tomorrow when you join us in solidarity, holding up the symbol that made the reputation of Shushan Cats, a boxer who fought under the name of Kid Yid, a decorated Marine, a defender of his people, you yourselves will
be
Shushan Cats, as I have become Shushan Cats. Dear brothers of Bhotke, let us tomorrow show New York, America, the world, that the spirit of Shushan Cats resides in all of us. My associate will now distribute directions to and instructions for tomorrow’s demonstration of solidarity. Long live Shushan Cats!”

As one the entire population of the room, some two hundred men, rose to their feet. “Long live Shushan Cats!” they shouted. “Long live Israel! Long live the Jews!”

Was I manipulating them or they me,
and
Shushan,
and
any symbol they could grab hold of to obliterate the obdurate memory of a Holocaust that had not only wiped out millions of Jews, including several hundred from Bhotke, but their memory. Most of the Bhotke members had emigrated in the twenties and thirties; some had sailed out of the then-free port of Danzig as late as 1939, the Hitlerites having sunk the next ship in the harbor. Some arrived in the late forties and early fifties, decorated with blue numbers on their forearms or, if they had fought as partisans in the forests, a parallel coldness of heart like that of caged animals who were now free except for the memory of the cages and of those who had put them there. Even those like my father, who had come to America as infants, carried with them the ever-present nightmare of the survivor.

Of the entire village of Bhotke, only one man had survived the initial slaughter in 1939 when an SS battalion had entered the village. According to his testimony, the village rabbi had gone out to meet the commanding officer bearing the traditional bread and salt of peaceful welcome. He was cut down on the spot, after which those too old or too young to work were herded into the synagogue to die in its flames. Deemed fit for labor, the remainder were trucked off to the Bialystok ghetto, from which they were eventually taken by rail to the death camps. Was it any wonder that a Jew who brandished a baseball bat and feared no one, and who was known to fear no one, might become a hero to the Jews who survived?

To the members of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, Shushan Cats was no criminal. The criminal statutes held no validity for those to whom the law meant only authorized starvation, torture, death. Everything done to the Jews of Europe, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the Communists, the Socialists, the crippled, the mentally and physically retarded and the mentally and physically ill—
everything
done to these had been absolutely legal, sanctioned by legitimate courts whose judges sat in black robes and vetted each and every decree as binding, fair, in the public interest, legal. Under these circumstances, that Shushan Cats was a Jewish gangster not only could not be held against him, but was a matter for celebration.

By noon the next day the first of the Bhotke members began to appear on the fringes of Little Italy. A half-hour later there were seventy or eighty. By one a hundred fifty were gathered in the street facing Dolce Far Niente. Justo later told me that by the time I was inside sitting down with Auro Sfangiullo, the supply of baseball bats had run out and Ira had been sent off to the wholesale hardware stores on Canal Street to buy up broom sticks, ax handles and lengths of pipe.

“You are a boy,” Sfangiullo said to me as he motioned to a third seat at the table in the rear where he was chewing on a piece of crusty Italian bread with which he’d mopped up the clam broth that was all that remained of his rigatoni. It was not difficult to understand why everyone called him
dottore
. At once diagnostic and prescriptive, he seemed to be able to reduce everything to symptoms and their cure. “But they say you are intelligent, so maybe an old man in the body of a child, eh?” His lip curled upward on the left side, like a scimitar. It took me some time to realize it was half a smile. “What do you say, Dickie? Boy or man?”

The other, who had shaken my hand desultorily after I had pressed my lips to Sfangiullo’s, looked me up and down like a side of beef. “Maestro, I couldn’t say,” he said, saying all. “It’s hard to know what the newspapers are so wild about. Shoeshine, he was one tough kike. But this, maybe he shaves, maybe not.” The man’s expression needed no translation. It was a grin of triumph.

“You’re Dickie Tinti,” I said.

“You’re a fucking genius,” he said.

Sfangiullo placed his bony hand on Tinti’s well-tailored sleeve, out of which a French cuff peeked out enough to reveal a gold cufflink the size of a quail’s egg. “Dickie, this is a guest.”

“This guest is trying to eat my breakfast, maestro.”

It was hard to dislike Tinti. For a crook he was at least honestly what he was. I had expected him to be here: What he was was predictable.

At forty Dick Tinti had succeeded his father as head of a small but violent family dealing in fresh flowers, prostitutes and smuggled cigarettes—some said drugs too. If that last were true he could hardly be expected to sit at a table in public with Auro Sfangiullo, who drew the line at narcotics. But it was also said the good doctor had a piece of a piece of a piece of people who did. On his own account Sfangiullo was scrupulous about heroin, which was becoming a plague in New York. When eventually Auro Sfangiullo died—in bed, of a stroke—all the families without exception rushed to see how much horse they could put on the street. But while Sfangiullo ran the city for the imprisoned Vito Genovese, the white poison would not be sanctioned, at least not officially. In this Auro Sfangiullo was like some revered cardinal who managed not to notice that his priests regularly molested altar boys.

“
Dottore
, I hardly expected to come to talk to you about the Tintis and find one of them with you. Would you prefer I return another time?”

“My boy, if you wish to fix your situation, you should do it sooner rather than later. How many bookmakers on your list these days?”

I honestly did not know. “One less than last week. Mr. Tinti seems to believe Shushan Cats does not have an agreement with yourself,
dottore
.”

Tinti smiled genially. “Nothing personal, but Shoeshine Cats is dead.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Kid, let’s just say if he’s not somebody overpaid somebody else a huge amount of money. Shoeshine is no more.”

I turned back to Sfangiullo.
“Dottore,
what if Shushan is alive?”

“What if, suppose that, let’s assume this, for the sake of argument it could be...” The older man smiled like a grandfather, not a godfather. “In this world we deal with the little we
do
know. What we
do
know is what we read in the papers: Got into a car with the wrong people, never seen again. For the purposes of our business there is no longer a Shoeshine Cats, a lovely man when he was with us. I mean it from the heart: a lovely, lovely man. Very trustworthy. Very... good. Believe me, when we get into business with a person of the desert persuasion, this means that person is on the up and up.”

“I have every reason to believe Shushan Cats is still among the living,” I said, not believing a word of it. “Meanwhile, Shushan has asked me to hold down the fort.”

Tinti laughed out loud. “We took over what’s his name, that queer in the theater district, runs a book out of a hotel on West Forty-Sixth.”

“Arnold Savory.”

“Exactly. You aren’t holding down the fort, you’re holding down a fart. You know what Shushan would’ve done if we’d moved in on anything of his, even an old sock he was throwing out because it had a hole?” He drew his finger across his throat. “You’d be talking to one dead Dick Tinti, kid. But as you can see, I’m very much alive.”

“Shushan’s organization has a writ from you,
dottore
. I ask that you honor it.”

Sfangiullo nodded his head as though he had already thought this over. “Young man, your boss is dead. I am informed you are the new boss. I know nothing about you other than that you are a smart Jewboy. I knew your father. Also a smart Jew. Smart is good. But you need more than smart to succeed in this business, which is to say survive. The Tintis are not my people. They are independent. So far as I am concerned, the question of the protection of the bookmakers is a territorial dispute.”

“Because the Tintis are promising you a piece of a percentage they wish to charge the bookmakers, while with Shushan you have a piece of a flat fee.”

“Economics is a significant factor in the American dream.”

“The Tintis are going to squeeze the bookies until they collapse, one by one.” I looked at Dick Tinti, then back. “You know they’re greedy.”

“Other bookmakers will arrive. Americans like to gamble. Now the state is talking about getting into the lottery business. This year you have a referendum in New York City on off-track betting. If it passes—and what do you think, it won’t?—that’s another nail in the coffin of the bookmakers, except there’s other sports, thank Christ, so maybe, maybe not. If you look into the future maybe you want to take a bet on the future of the bookmaking business. That’s not my arena. All I know is I made a deal with Shoeshine and I stand by it. But unfortunately Shoeshine is gone, so I got no deal. And you got no deal either, kid. That’s the fact. I didn’t make no deal with Shoeshine’s heirs or appointees. Only with Shoeshine. You want to argue with the Tintis, be my guest. It’s an open franchise as far as I’m concerned. Now if you’ll excuse me.” A short heavy man in a blue suit and light blue silk tie had come to whisper in Sfangiullo’s ear. While he did so, Sfangiullo nodded like a medical professional hearing of his patient’s progress.

It came to me there was another reason Shushan may have been killed: with the future of bookmaking in New York so uncertain, Sfangiullo could have decided he wanted more cash now than in the long-term. Maybe there would be no long term. Tinti would certainly be ready to give up more of his take, and would drain the bookies unmercifully on the theory they only have a short time anyway. Maybe the gambit I had devised was academic: economics will out. From the way Sfangiullo looked at me as the blue-suited man walked away, it did not matter. My plan was already in play.

“I am informed there is an element in the street,” Sfangiullo said, staring hard at me.

“An element?”

“Niggers.”

“Really?”

“Also chinks.”

“Also spicks and kikes, if you want to use racial slurs,
dottore
.”

“The whole street in front is full of hebes with baseball bats. At the Allen Street corner there’s a gang of chinks. The other corner looks like Harlem there’s so many jigs. Why are they here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably they’re friends of Shushan Cats. Why don’t you invite them in and ask them? I’m sure they’d like a coffee.”

“How many of these animals you got dirtying up my street?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think a bunch of coloreds and chinks and lampshade people intimidates me?”

“Not at all,” I said. “But they might intimidate Mr. Tinti here.”

Tinti laughed.

I knew I had him. “Frankly they’re nonviolent, like the ones in Birmingham, Alabama.”

“They got what was coming to them,” Sfangiullo said. “They break the law.”

“Ah,” I said. “I’m so glad you see eye to eye with the attorney general on that.”

Sfangiullo drew his hand silently across his throat. Not his finger, his whole hand. This was not a gesture. It was language. “The older one they should kill first,” he said. “Because he’s the president. Then the Bobby one. Both Kennedys, scum.”

“But duly elected,” I said, pushing it.

“Elected, they can be dis-elected. They hate the Italians. They hate anybody that isn’t like them. Jimmy Hoffa, a legitimate labor leader, maybe with his hand in the cookie jar, maybe not, as if the Kennedys they’re different, they are hounding him into a grave. Castro, he tried to bring good things to Cuba, they turned him into a Communist. Some Communist—a baseball pitcher. Batista, this son of a bitch we had to pay off every minute just to run a casino, him they protected, but when Castro came in they got scared. Maybe it’s going to look bad for America if this guy, an honest leader, says okay, no more bribes, instead we got to pay taxes for casinos so he can build schools and hospitals and what not. You think anybody in the gambling business would care? You think it’s pleasant to do business in a place where everybody is selling his own sister? Where you can get the clap from eating a ham sandwich? Where nobody can read and write? I’m not kidding with you. You want to run a casino you need people who can read and write and don’t die on you in the middle of their shift because of some mysterious disease. No, John F. Kennedy, he doesn’t like that. Wants to replace Castro with another Batista. Let me tell you something. I’m a crook. All my friends are crooks. Every man I know practically is a crook. Everybody here, here in this room, we’re all crooks. But there isn’t a one of us wouldn’t want to be dealing with Fidel Castro, not that crook Batista, because Batista he was a crooked crook. His word meant nothing. He stole all the money from his people and spent it on whores and drugs and who knows what filthy depravity. You think Castro would close down the casinos if John F. Kennedy he said, ‘Dr. Castro, you’re a democrat. You’re for the people. You got a live-and-let-live attitude. What can we do to help?’” He took out a white handkerchief, hawked up and spat into it. “Excuse me, but that John F. Kennedy, his brother, his other brother, the fat one that drinks too much, the whole family should rot in hell.”