I nodded, impressed. "Electronic data processing comes to bookmaking. Very nice!"
Chickie laughed. "Very efficient. We process around eighty thousand dollars a day here. We figure we have to run it like a business. The days of the little guy in the candy store with a notebook in his hip pocket are over."
"How does the Off-Track Betting affect you?" New York's OTB offices around the city had originally been approved by the voters not only as a way of making money for the city and as a convenience to the bettor, but also as a means of driving out the underworld bookie.
Chickie grinned again. He appeared to be a happy man. "It hasn't hurt us much at all, though I was worried about it once, when it first started. People like to deal with an old established firm, I guess, and they're sort of suspicious of a government running a betting operation.
"And of course, we're heavy into numbers, and the government isn't into the numbers game."
"Not yet, anyway," Louie chimed in. "But the way things are going, they probably will be before long." He clapped me on the shoulder. "What do you think, Nick? Pretty slick, isn't it? Uncle Joe may look and act like an old Mustachio Pete, but this has got to be the most modern setup in the business."
Louie's ebullience was exceeded only by his naiveté. The Counting House was a step up in underworld organization, but it was hardly the last word. I could show Louie a Mafia-operated communications center in an Indianapolis Hotel that would make New York Telephone look like a PBX switchboard. The results of every gambling event in the country — racing, baseball, basketball, football, you name it — pour into that hotel every day, and then are relayed in microseconds to betting parlors from coast to coast.
Still, the Counting House was an interesting innovation: centralized, organized, efficient. Not bad. "Great," I said. "Terrific!" I tugged at my ear lobe. "I guess you run your trucks business through here, too, huh?"
Louie frowned. "No, but… I don't know, it might not be a bad idea at that. Sort of a central command post, you mean?"
"Right."
Chickie looked a little pained. "Well, we really haven't got a lot of room to spare up here, Louie, to say nothing about how hard it is to get someone you can trust these days."
I had to laugh. He was right up to his throat in underworld business but acting like any office manager in any legit concern… worried that he might have more work to do, or might have to change his ways of doing it. Honest people aren't the only ones who resist change.
"Nick's new in town," Louie explained, "and I thought I'd show him our showcase operation. Anyway, Uncle Joe's going to have Nick and me going over all the operations one of these days, just to see if we can't tighten things up a bit."
"Yeah." Chickie looked dubious.
"We're mostly going to be worrying about security," I said.
Chickie brightened. "Oh, good. I could use some help there."
"You've been having some trouble?" I asked.
He sighed. "Yeah. More than I want. Come in my office and I'll tell you about it."
We all went into a nicely paneled office in one corner of the big loft. A neat carpet was on the floor, and steel filing cabinets lined all of one wall. A fat safe squatted blackly just behind Chickie's desk. On the desk top were the pictures of an attractive gray-haired woman and a half-dozen children of varying ages.
"Have a seat, guys." Chickie gestured at a couple of straight-back chairs and settled himself into the swivel chair behind the desk. "I got a problem, maybe you can help me with."
Louie hunched his chair up and gave him a confident grin. For the moment, he'd forgotten that Popeye had given him some pretty explicit instructions. Uncle Joe wanted someone killed.
"What's up, Chickie?" Louie asked.
Chickie leaned back and lit a cigarette. "It's Lemon-Drop Droppo, again," he said. "At least I think it's him. He's been ripping off our runner again. Or at least someone is."
"Hell, Chickie," Louie interjected. "Someone's always ripping off the runners. What's the big deal?"
"The big deal is that it's getting to be a big deal! We got hit fourteen times last week, already five times this week. I can't afford that."
Louie turned to me. "We usually figure three, four times a week we're going to have a runner get taken for whatever he's carrying, but this is a lot more than usual."
"Can't you protect them?" I asked.
Chickie shook his head. "We got a hundred forty-seven guys bringing cash in here every day from all over the lower Manhattan territory. There's no way we can protect 'em all." He grinned. "In fact, I don't even mind if a few of them get ripped off once in awhile, makes the others more careful. But this is getting to be too damned much!"
"What about this Lemon-Drop Droppo?"
Louie laughed. "He's been around a long time, Nick. One of the Ruggiero bunch, but sometimes he goes off sort of independently. He was a runner himself once, for Gaetano Ruggiero, and it seems like every time he's short of cash, he picks on a runner. They're pretty easy pickings, you know."
"Yeah." Runners are at the very bottom of the crime ladder. They pick up the money and the betting slips and run it to the policy bank, and that's it. They're usually half-batty old winos, too far gone down the chute of aged poverty to do anything else, or young kids picking up a fast buck. There are thousands of them in New York, loathsome little ants feeding off the discarded carrion of crime.
"Think it would help if we got rid of this Lemon-Drop character?"
Chickie grinned again. "Couldn't hurt. Even if it's not him, it might scare someone else off."
I nodded and looked at Louie. "Might even kill two birds with one stone, Louie."
This kind of reality didn't come easily to Louie Lazaro. He looked sour. "Yeah," he said.
"How come they call him Lemon-Drop?" I asked.
Louie answered. "He's a nut about lemon drops, eats them all the time. I think his real name is Greggorio, but with a name like Droppo and a bag of lemon drops in his pocket all the time… I'd really hate to hit him just for ripping off a few runners. I mean, hell, I went to school with the guy. He's not so bad, just kind of nuts."
I shrugged. I'd been doing a lot of that on this assignment it seemed. "It's up to you. It was just an idea."
Louie looked unhappy. "Yeah. We'll think about it."
"What's this two birds with one stone bit?" Chickie asked.
"Never mind," Louie snapped.
"Yes, sir." Chickie was still very much aware that Louie was Popeye Franzini's nephew.
There was an awkward pause. I waved a hand at the row of gleaming file cabinets, each stack locked with a formidable looking iron rod running from the floor up through each drawer handle and bolted to the top of the file. "What you got in there, the family jewels?"
Chickie stubbed out his cigarette and grinned, glad of the change of atmosphere. "Those are our files," he said. "Records of the whole thing from A to Z."
"Everything?" I tried to sound impressed. "You mean for the whole betting operation?"
"I mean for the whole organization," he said. "Everything."
I looked around. "How good is your security?"
"Fine. Fine. That part of it I'm not worried about. We're on the fifth floor here. The other four floors are empty except for a couple of apartments we use in emergencies. Every night we put steel gates across each landing. They fit right into the wall and lock there. And then there's the dogs," he added pridefully.
"The dogs?"
"Yeah. On each floor we got two guard dogs, Doberman Pinschers. We let 'em loose each night, two on each floor. I mean, man, there ain't nobody's gonna come up those stairs with those dogs. They're mean sons of bitches! Even without them, there's no way anyone's going to blast through those gates without alerting Big Julie and Raymond."