Mob Rule: Part 34
As the sweat pours down like a late summer thunderstorm, Jack realizes the South makes its own rules that may, or may not, be entirely legal
By John Armstrong
We got back to the ranchhouse in the early afternoon, already so hot you could feel drops of sweat pop up on your body, run down your skin and evaporate before they got to the bottom. Lyndon had lent us cowboy hats for the ride, and I felt a little silly wearing mine until I learned your brains would literally bake without one. I did try fanning myself with it but it was like trying to cool yourself off with the air from a blast furnace and no real relief at all. I fully understood the idea of the siesta now and all I wanted was to lie somewhere in front of a fan with as little clothing as possible. I didn’t even care if Vanessa joined me or not; the idea of anything more strenuous than a nap seemed preposterous.
Mob Rule – Photo Illustrations by Victor Bonderoff
But it was not to be. Bobby, Sydney, and Otis wanted Lyndon and I for a general brainstorming about securing the Southern and Negro votes. Not that I would be much use there. I knew only a handful of colored people, and that included Otis.
We met in the formal dining room around a big wooden table, electric fans working hard at strategic locations here and there in the room. Sydney and Bobby had to use coffee cups and ashtrays to keep the ever-present piles of paper from flying around the room.
Otis had had little to do on the campaign trail so far as I’d seen but now he was at the head of the table. Bobby called us to order and turned things over to him immediately.
He took a drink of water, wiped his lips, and started in on a lengthy summation of who we wanted, who we had, and who still needed to be wooed. There were many, many names in the last group.
The gist of what he had to say was, we had diverse constituencies to court in what was now called the Sovereign South: Republicans, or those who would have been Republican under the old order; the Democrats, which included both moderate blacks and whites; blacks who wanted as little to do with whites as possible, and the Dixie League, an association with whites-only membership that drew from all economic classes. This last was the Old pre-war South in new clothes. They believed in strict segregation, just the way it specified in the Bible. I don’t recall reading that passage in my Bible but their edition apparently had it in bold print, underlined.
Personally, I could care less what color someone is or where he came from and I suppose I get that from Frank. Back then, when Charley recruited him and Meyer it was a scandal, Meyer being a Jew and Frank Napolitano, which was almost as disreputable; in those days it was still strictly Sicilian-only membership. Joey explained it to me once.
“All Luciano cared about was, are you good, are you smart and are you loyal? Beyond that – phffffft. So he got the best men around, Vito Genovese, Tommy Three-Fingers (Lucchese), Lansky, Benny Siegel, and when they went into bootlegging, Arnold Rothstein came in and they made more money than God.”
That’s how we operate to this day: if you can earn, we want you on the payroll: we don’t care what name we make the paycheck out to, despite all the silliness of giving kids Sicilian sounding names hoping they’ll go further as Giovanni than if they were Johnny or Juanito. Really, unless you get crazy about it, how can you even tell who’s Italian or not, after all these years? Except for cases like Vittorio Wong, which, let’s be honest, isn’t fooling anyone.
And besides, I have some experience with racism from the other side of the fence. Joe Kennedy didn’t just hate my father because he was a mere soldier; while he could stand to make money from the guineas, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let one in his family.
(Now, that said about the Lucianos open-door hiring, in New York and many other cities the Negro population generally has their own section of town. That’s partly because of the philosophical differences between their bosses and our Commission, primarily the selling of narcotics, which makes for hard boundaries – such as, “above, but not below 110th Street” – but mostly because that’s what people do naturally. You speak the same language, eat the same kind of food, shops open up to sell it to you – why wouldn’t you live in the same neighborhood? From what I see, people are basically clannish, no matter who or where they are. The difference is, we don’t tell anyone they can’t live somewhere else.)
In the South, Otis said, we already had the moderates. Southerners don’t like being told what to do and if you crave verification ask any of them about what they sometimes call the War of Northern Aggression, or if they’re being polite, and they’re rarely otherwise, “The Late Unpleasantness.”
That’s how we operate to this day: if you can earn, we want you on the payroll: we don’t care what name we make the paycheck out to, despite all the silliness of giving kids Sicilian sounding names hoping they’ll go further as Giovanni than if they were Johnny or Juanito. Really, unless you get crazy about it, how can you even tell who’s Italian or not, after all these years? Except for cases like Vittorio Wong, which, let’s be honest, isn’t fooling anyone.
If they were to be ruled, they greatly preferred it be by their own, not some Northerner from the Outfit – the Chicago successor to Big Al’s mob, inheritors of much of the South, or worse, a Jew from Miami, Rothstein’s Florida empire, which included all the southeastern seaboard states. All throughout the South regional underbosses were assigned by the ruling family to these foreign territories, much like the old Roman governors were sent out to Judaea and other conquered regions. They were just about as well loved, too.
Our big problem was the latter two groups in his list, the blacks who wanted to be left alone, and the League, which had consolidated the Klan and what Otis called the Dixiecrats, remnants of a splinter faction of the old Democratic party.
I’d kept silent during Otis’ presentation but I had to put my two cents in here.
“Well, why didn’t they just join the Republicans, then? If they didn’t want to be Democrats?”
Lyndon got bourbon up his nose at that and so did Otis.
“Son, the way we do things down here is, if you’re a Baptist and you don’t like something about your church, you don’t go join the Lutherans. You start a Baptist church of your own and from then on, you consider all the other Baptists are heretics bound for the fiery pit.” Lyndon had to wipe his eyes and shake his head and he chuckled again when he thought of it.
Otis said, “In the South you don’t choose a political party any more than you choose your religion. You’re born into it and you stay there until you die. We’re just banking on the Republicans and the League to hate the Bosses enough to see a Democrat as the lesser of the evils. And it’s going to be a tough sell.”
How he proposed to do it was much the same as I’d seen in Missouri and Kansas, and even earlier with the doling out of government appointments, but now it was going to be ramped up all the way. We – or more accurately Lyndon and I – would say what they wanted to hear and promise them whatever they wanted, so long as we got their support. If what we told one group contradicted what we told the other, that was all in a day’s work. We just had to keep our stories straight and remember who we were talking to. It wouldn’t do to give the wrong pitch to someone. A lot of it was memory work for me, studying sheets with names, key points and sometimes pictures of the targets, and suggested answers to questions they’d likely ask.
We – or more accurately Lyndon and I – would say what they wanted to hear and promise them whatever they wanted, so long as we got their support. If what we told one group contradicted what we told the other, that was all in a day’s work. We just had to keep our stories straight and remember who we were talking to.
Beyond ethical concerns, I saw a problem with this and decided that since I’d already proved my ignorance I had nothing further to lose.
“That’s fine but how do you know who’s in the audience? If you’ve got one person from one group, and one from another, how are you going to promise them both what they want?”
This time the question wasn’t met with laughter.
Otis looked around the table and then answered it in three words: “Very carefully, Jack.”
Then they got into an argument about state’s rights, which Lyndon was strongly opposed to, and I decided I’d had enough politics for one day. I went out to see if I could find someone to introduce me to a cow. I still hadn’t got to pet one.
Mob Rule is a work of fiction, serialized exclusively in The Ex-Press. To read past instalments, click here.
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