The men were grouped around one of three big conference tables that took up much of the floor space of the spare, masculine, wood-panel-and-glass office.
On one side of the table was Bob Chamberlin, looking almost professorial in a three-piece suit, smoking a pipe whose tobacco had a sickly sweet signature. Next to him was bullet-headed Sergeant Moeller of the vice squad, in a lived-in-looking uniform, cap on the table before him like a blue and white meal; he was an unpretentious, street-smart cop Ness had come to respect.
Detective Curry sat across from them, wearing a blue suit with a darker blue tie hanging loose; Albert looked bushed-the boy must have been up all night working, if the bags under his eyes were admissible evidence.
And next to Curry, in shirtsleeves but with his tie snugged tight, was big Will Garner, Ness's old comrade from the Chicago bootleg-busting days. The Indian was smoking a cigar of a cheap, harsh variety, its fumes battling the sweeter ones of Chamberlin's pipe.
Ness was at the head of the table, standing; like Chamberlin, he wore a three-piece suit and a tie. He rarely took off his jacket or loosened his tie, and today was no exception, though it was stuffy in the office. Too cold outside to open a window, not cold enough for steam heat to kick in. Pipe and cigar smoke swirled like fog.
"I've spoken to Prosecutor Cullitan," Ness said, tossing a fat manila file folder on the table before him, "and he's in back of us all the way. He's eager to take another of our 'epic investigations,' as he puts it, to the grand jury."
"Well then, Eliot, it's going to have to be the numbers racket," Chamberlin said, gesturing with his pipe. "We've done a hell of a job, harassing the bookie joints damn near out of business… but we don't have anything directly on Lombardi and Scalise."
"They're too well insulated," Moeller said, with a matter-of-fact shrug. "And not all the bookie joints are Lombardi's, anyway."
Ness nodded. "We tend to think of Lombardi as the 'Little Caesar' of the Mayfield Road gang, and he's certainly its single most powerful figure. But under the general umbrella of the Mayfield mob are half a dozen interrelated, overlapping but independent racket bosses."
"The numbers racket, though," Moeller said, lifting a forefinger, "is Lombardi's alone. Him and his cousin Scalise."
The haggard-looking Curry sighed. "But isn't Lombardi just as well 'insulated' where numbers are concerned, as he is in his bookie-joint interests?"
"Oh yes," Moeller said, nodding. "I know of eighteen direct underlings, and some fifty pickup men… Lombardi and Scalise own the colored east side, but you rarely if ever see them there, these days."
" These days," Ness said, and pointed his finger at Moeller. "That's the key."
"What do you mean, Eliot?" Chamberlin asked, relighting his pipe.
Ness held up five fingers. "When Lombardi and Scalise muscled in on the policy racket, just five years ago, they came on strong-Young Turks, second-generation mafia intent on proving themselves. Meaning they did much of the work themselves… Scalise particularly."
Moeller was nodding again. "And Scalise does, on occasion, show up himself to this day, if some heavy intimidating needs doing. Besides which, that sadistic little bastard likes that sort of thing."
Ness flipped open the manila folder before him. Mug-shot photos of Lombardi and Scalise, enlarged to 8"-by-10" size, stared at the men.
"Unlikely as it seems," Ness said, "Salvatore Lombardi is only twenty-eight years old, and his cousin Angelo a year younger."
He pointed at Lombardi's picture; the face was a fleshy oval with a placid expression and baby-faced features, though the dark eyes were gun-metal hard.
"Sal took over the family bootlegging business when his papa, Anthony, 'Big Tony' they called him, was gunned down in 1927 by the Torellos."
"I take it Big Tony was a Mustache Pete," Garner said.
"Yes," Ness nodded, "a traditional Black Hand racketeer who considered himself a pillar of his immigrant community. In Chicago, of course, and New York, street toughs like Capone and Bugsy Siegel rose up and rubbed out the Mustache Petes. But in Cleveland, the Mustache Petes were never deposed, and today the Mayfield Road gang is run largely by their children."
Chamberlin knew all of this, at least vaguely; Moeller knew it by heart. But young Curry, and out-of-towner Garner, knew little and nothing, respectively, of the Mayfield Road gang's brutal history.
"Are these kids as tough as their daddies?" Garner asked, a nasty smile working around his stub of a cigar.
"Don't underestimate them, just because they didn't come up from the streets," Ness cautioned. "Remember two things when you're tempted to write off Black Sal Lombardi: His early years were spent in one of the roughest tenement sections of America; and at twenty-eight he's no younger than Capone was at the peak of his power."
Ness plucked the photo of Scalise out of the folder and slid it down the wooden table where the men could get a better look at the narrow-faced, hollow-eyed, liver-lipped gangster.
"As a case in point," he said, "Sal and his cousin Angelo, when they were both still teenagers, took care of the Torellos personally, in a series of killings that culminated in the slaughter at so-called 'Bloody Corner' back in '29."
"Were they convicted of those crimes?" Garner asked.
"No," Ness said.
Garner laughed silently, flicked his cigar ashes into a round glass tray, and said, "And today they got hired help, doing the dirty work."
"Providing the insulation," Curry added.
"Today they do," Ness said, and smiled nastily. " Today. Yesterday, five short years ago-no. Five short years ago they were Young Turks who wanted that side of town to know who was boss. Who to fear."
"They made their point," Moeller said, glumly, raising his hairy eyebrows. "Nobody on the east side, black or white, has ever offered evidence against them."
"Let's come back to that," Ness said. "Let's consider just what the nature of the Lombardi set-up is. Sergeant Moeller, for the benefit of the rest of us, who aren't as intimately acquainted the vice scene in Cleveland, share a little history with us. Please."
Ness sat down.
Moeller stood. "Five years ago, the numbers business in Cleveland was in relatively harmless hands. The 'Big Four' policy kings were Rufus Murphy, John C. Washington, Willie 'the Emperor' Rushing, and Frank Hogey. Hogey was the only white, but his help was mostly colored. Anyway, Lombardi and Scalise made threats, raided some places, finally began a shooting war. Murphy was killed, shot down in his driveway. Washington was shot, too, but not killed. Rushing and Hogey were worked over. Washington recovered, and retired, defeated. Rushing and Hogey are Lombardi's stooges, now."
"Before the Big Four were muscled in on," Garner asked, "did they control the whole numbers racket on the east side?"
Moeller shook his head, no. "There were any number of independent operators. These poor sons of bitches were made examples of by Lombardi. I can think of five, offhand, who were flat-out murdered, usually by cruising assassins."
"This wasn't all confined to '33," Ness said. "Over the years, whenever an independent operator has tried to find a niche on the east side, he's been rubbed out."
Back in '36, less than two months after he took the safety director job, Ness had encountered an example of Lombardi and company's discipline: A young independent policy writer named William Wiggens turned up dead in a ditch in the suburb of Pepper Pike. A colored youth barely twenty.
Moeller sat down, as Ness again rose, saying, "The late and unlamented Dutch Schultz of New York City, at the peak of his perverted power, never enjoyed a numbers set-up as profitable and perfect as Lombardi's. Schultz was smart enough, in the wake of Repeal, to horn in on the Harlem numbers racket… but he was content to take the bad with the good, the losing days with the winning ones. Here in the Forest City, though, there's no such thing as a losing day for the Mayfield gang."