I let him pay the check.
But for all my bluster, I wasn’t sure this ton of lard would ever really pay.
Once again, I was in the Greenlease mansion in Mission Hills, sitting on the leather-upholstered sofa beneath the mural of hunters and hounds heading toward the trees. Bobby Green-lease’s father, seated next to me, was dressed much as he’d been at the beginning of all this, five years ago — a dressing gown (this one black and orange) over pajamas with slippers. I was in a short-sleeve sport shirt and slacks, having just made the four hour-plus drive from St. Louis. At almost ten o’clock P.M., his wife was in bed. He was having bourbon, and had made me a rum and Coke.
His manner was as quiet and friendly as ever. Behind the white-haired, strong-jawed countenance of a successful man of business, he had a kindness, a goodness, that had made him the perfect prey for the slimy likes of Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady.
My host wanted me to be frank about my investigation and I was. In detail, but not in writing. Client confidentiality covered us both, so even last night’s brutal fight in that Ace garage got recounted.
“I don’t know if it’s any consolation,” I said, wrapping up, “but everyone who came into contact with that money had about as much luck as those guys who dug up King Tut.”
His thin lips formed a thin smile. “The Greenlease curse?”
“You could call it that. The money went through so many hands, diminishing each time, nobody made much. That cop Shoulders lost his job, went to prison, and is having heart attacks for a hobby, when he isn’t bawling his eyes out in self-pity. Dolan is a guilt-ridden wreck, living in fear, going from promising police officer to gas station attendant and with a growing family to support. That cabbie Hagan is eking out an existence, afraid of his shadow. I saw the O’Day woman shot and killed right in front of me. Two mob guys are dead because they tried to move that money. And the bank used in the laundering is in trouble with the feds, with the top mobsters feeling the heat. Again, if it’s any solace to you.”
He sipped bourbon. “It would not be to my wife. She is a tender soul, a loving, Christian woman. I, however, am a businessman. A capitalist, unashamed, and for me — who has spent so much effort making money, pursuing money — I cannot stomach the thought of anyone profiting off my boy’s murder. It just leaves too bitter a goddamn taste.”
“I understand. I love my son, too.”
He rested his hand on my arm. Squeezed. “So what you’ve done, what you’ve learned, Mr. Heller... Nate... does provide solace. To me. I can accept the plague of locusts these bastards have brought down upon themselves as their due punishment. I only wish the money that went into the Teamsters coffers could have led to the fall of this Hoffa creature.”
I shook my head. “Probably not possible. The laundering process protects them. Too many hands. Money came into their pension fund through a bank. Legal, aboveboard, just good old-fashioned business.”
I had told Bob Kennedy the same thing on the phone today. That the Greenlease money was a dead-end unless his accountants were miracle workers at exposing dirty laundry.
Stoic in his disappointment, Kennedy had said, “We’ll, uh, get him next time.”
I’d called Hoffa, too, with the “good news.” He laughed at “Booby” coming up empty again. But to put it in context, when I spoke to Bob, he was on a secure government line; Hoffa had to go to a phone booth.
I said to Greenlease, “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve probably made more money off these sons of bitches than they ever got out of you.”
“How is that?”
I shrugged. “Every damn one of these St. Louis gangsters drives a Cadillac.”
Initially that hit him like a punch; then he began to chuckle and finally outright laugh. He stood, as did I, put his arm around my shoulder and walked me out. Told me he’d again made arrangements at the Hotel President, where I could leave the loaner Caddy.
At the door he said, “I hope you won’t consider this overly, well, uh... bloodthirsty of me to say.”
I half-smiled. “Bloodthirsty?”
“Yes. Perhaps I allowed myself to take too seriously the, well, stories about you that one hears. About the bad people who sometimes disappear when they come into your sphere of influence.”
“Some of that’s exaggeration, sure.”
“But, Nate, I just would like to know... that Costello character. When he had a gun to his temple — wanting to die... why not let him pull the trigger?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t do that, sir.”
“In heaven’s name, why?”
“He hadn’t suffered enough.”
In 1959 Joe Costello tried to kill himself with pills before being sent to prison for two years on gun charges. He ultimately self-destructed in a more imaginative way. After selling out to his ex-partner at the Tic Toc Club, a drunken Costello lost his head when the new owner refused to give Ace cabs exclusive loading privileges at what had been Joe’s own club. He shot and killed the ex-partner outside Tic Toc there on the DeBaliviere Strip. Facing trial on a murder charge, Costello — seeing a psychiatrist regularly and suffering from hypertension, liver trouble, and diabetes — died in July 1962 at age 53 of a heart attack at home. A Cadillac was parked out front.
A bitter, depressed Lou Shoulders, 63, had a fatal heart attack a little more than a month earlier. This freed Dolan up that same year to finally make a statement echoing what he’d told me in 1958; but the ex-patrolman still did not identify Barney Baker, though his description of the fourth man counting money in Costello’s rec room fit the big, tiny-headed Teamster thug perfectly.
Elmer Dolan never returned to law enforcement, instead working for a building materials firm and then a liquor distributor, both in St. Louis. In July 1965, with the FBI acknowledging his perjury had been out of concern for his family’s lives, Dolan received a full pardon from President Lyndon B. Johnson. Dolan died of a heart attack at 45 in 1973.
I had no idea what became of Johnny Hagan, but in preparing this memoir, I asked my son Sam — who runs the A-1 now — to do a full search. In 1972, John Oscar Hagan died in the gutter in Los Angeles — Central City East, Skid Row.
Murray Humphreys’ lieutenant, Fred Evans — Dutch Downey’s insider at the Outfit, who aided in laundering the Greenlease money — was heading for his Cadillac outside his West Lake Street office when two men approached and riddled him with slugs. I knew him a little — just starting out, he ran a popcorn stand for Capone at the 1933-’34 Chicago World’s Fair. Asked about the murder of his second-in-command, Murray Humphreys said, “He was no friend of mine.”
Jack Carr died of a heart attack on April 21, 1984, the year Route 66 was decommissioned and removed from road maps. He had been obsessively attentive to the Coral Court even after its fortunes began to fade. His wife, however, a former prostitute with a potential new husband in the wings, had no such sentimentality, selling out eight years later. She even had the iconic neon sign destroyed. Though preservationists worked to save the Art Deco motel, it was torn down and replaced by a subdivision of single-family homes. The distinctive low-slung front gates are now all that survive at Oak Knoll Manor.
But at least the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis includes a Coral Court Motel exhibit: the exterior of a bungalow built from salvaged 1946 glazed brick and glass blocks. It’s part of an exhibit of car culture in the USA with a vintage Fleetwood Cadillac ready to pull into the unit’s garage. Bobby Darin’s Dream Car, a space-age fantasy from the year Lou Shoulders died, perches close by.