Getting down to brassy tacts
Mob Rule: Part 39
Jack and Lyndon sit back on the campaign trail with a bottle of bourbon and dig at the roots of each other's deep beliefs
By John Armstrong
We had more than several over the next few hours. There were twin beds in his room and I sat on one with Vanessa beside me and him on the other, facing each other. I took a long drink of bourbon and smoked half a cigarette trying to figure out how to start and then finally just began at the beginning, with Frank and I diving for cover on a New York sidewalk, only a few months ago. Back when the world made sense.
If I left anything out it was because I’d forgotten it, not because I was being cagey. I’d had enough of subterfuge and lying to last me a lifetime and I trusted Lyndon implicitly, no matter what side we wound up on in the end.
Over the last few weeks and especially during our early stops in the South he’d gone off-script regularly, hitting on poverty and race equality whether he was in front of ...
From the frying pan to the panhandle
Mob Rule: Part 38
Jack learns that brokering political deals in Florida means biting into fat slabs of bad meat
By John Armstrong
So that’s what we did. When we got to Florida Bobby called Wallace and arranged a conference in Albany, Georgia for the following day, the closest reasonably sized city to both camps.
I didn’t go along with them and I confess I didn’t argue hard for the privilege. I’d seen enough of Wallace, Conner, and the "superior white race” and so far as I was concerned, I’d be just as pleased if the next time I saw them it was to identify the bodies. Our two diplomats left with a driver around 10 a.m. and expected to be back for supper. While they were gone I thought I’d take Vanessa to the beach and let the sun bake the stress away. It was already over 80 degrees.
I found Sydney drinking coffee and asked if he knew how to get to the beach and he looked at me like I’d already been in the sun too long. I was in my shorts and sandals, a towel ...
The Man Who Mistook his Life for a Notebook
Books
A cartoonist confesses to an Oliver Sacks obsession that has him flexing his mental muscles in way he never thought possible
By Alan King
I have a confession to make. I’ve read just about every word Oliver Sacks ever wrote and, God knows, the man wrote a lot. Yes, I know it sounds like an unhealthy interest in medical literature — borderline OCD. But it’s not like I’ve read all of Sherwin Nolan or Jerome Groopman or Atul Gawande — just Sacks. I read him endlessly, page after fascinating page.
You could think of it as a mental disorder or a ‘cerebral deficit’ if you like. My doctor certainly does. In fact he has a name for it: florid non-sackistic verbo-dysplasia. It’s a rare, somewhat disabling affliction. There are maybe 50 people on the planet who have it and sufferers typically live only on beautiful, faraway tropical islands, hilltop Tuscan villages or have been institutionalized for decades without ever seeing the outside world.
I’m one ...
Messin’ with the Texan
Mob Rule: Part 32
Jack drinks in acres of bluebells and the sight of expansive ranch lands as he chows down with Lyndon and Ladybird
By John Armstrong
The trip from Kansas to meet Lyndon in Texas was a long, dusty one. We’d done Missouri just before and I had to admire the way Sydney’s staff had finessed the speech writing. A Missourian who heard me talk in St. Louis, Independence, or Joplin would have had heart stoppage if he’d been at the fundraiser a few nights later in Kansas.
Missouri was a border state during the Civil War, never actually seceding but not quite supporting the federals either, and Missourians fought on both sides of the war or sat it out as best they could, as their consciences dictated. I danced around the state’s complex allegiances as much as the writers could manage, but in Kansas, firmly in the union, we made no bones about glorifying their forefather’s brave stand for truth, liberty, and freedom in the Great Conflict and exalting the ...
Jack be nimble, or be dead
Mob Rule: Part 24
They’d been playing me, but why they bothered I didn’t understand. If they knew I was working both sides why all this subterfuge, pretending they wanted me in their conspiracy. President? The only thing I was going to have in common with Lincoln and Washington was being dead.
By John Armstrong
Vanessa must have been waiting right outside the door. She came in and sat down, looking a little bit wary, or maybe cautious is the better word, like someone investigating noises in the basement. If she expected some kind of eruption from me she’d have to wait. I was still trying to find a way to grab hold of reality and climb back on as it went whirling past me.
I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach without warning. I couldn’t breathe and my sense of time went screwy, everything gone into a sort of dreamy, slow motion but at the same time my brain was racing, a hundred miles an hour. It was the exact same feeling I remembered from the only ...
Mob Rule: Part 22
The Noblesse Oblige
Jack learns the financial details of the family business, but he can't shake the feeling he's being groomed for something bigger
By John Armstrong
We didn’t go boating the next day after all. Bobby wanted me to go over some things with him and by late morning we’d been through a forest’s worth of paper; reports, earnings sheets, cost analysis breakdowns and just about everything else you can use to give a man headache and eyestrain. It was more of what I’d gone over the day before and it all added up to what I already knew, but I said nothing. I needed to see what it led to and we’d get there when Bobby decided we would.
When we finished with that he wanted me to come downtown with him and we ended up on a tour of developments the family already had underway and these were all of a kind, too; the family hadn’t kept all the loot they’d taken in, by any stretch. They’d done many good things with it and were doing more – hospitals and schools ...
Mob Rule: Part 19
Route 1 to the heart of darkness
Jack settles back into the Kennedy cottage where he gets a warm welcome from Bobby and gets a good look at The Grandfather: Joseph P. Sr.
By John Armstrong
It was as quiet as New York ever gets on the way out of the city and traffic was light when we got onto US 1 headed south. The freeway runs over top of what was the original Boston Post Road, three hundred years old under its modern surface and ironically, that cement and tarmac was poured and paid for by the Kennedys at their end and the New York Families at ours, our respective crews meeting in the middle somewhere. I remember that because it was one of the illustrations of how a closed economic system works, back in college. We collect our tribute from the people and in return, we have to keep things working, such as roads. Plus, it’s a basic cost of business. Where would we be without transportation? Or sewers, or whatever.
Say we have a contract to let for 100 miles of freeway ...
Mob Rule: Part 8
Dinner at Number 4 Patchin Place
Voltaire said ‘the finest system would be democracy with the occasional assassination,’ and New York's established mob families couldn't agree more
By John Armstrong
Don’t ever get Joe started on his apartment, if you can still call it that.
Every time he buys a few more paintings or sculptures he ends up buying the next unit over and knocking out a few non-essential walls. It’s more art gallery and warehouse now than it is living space. It’s beautiful though, don’t get me wrong; just that I wouldn’t want to dust it.
Number 4 Patchin Place is in a gated cul de sac in the Village just off West 10th between Sixth and Greenwich, 10 or so three-story row houses in red brick and black wrought iron in close proximity to the coffee bars and galleries of the bohemian district. That would have been enough for Joey to buy it but it’s who lived there before him that sunk the hook. The poet e.e. cummings lived at No. 5, long ...
Mob Rule: Part 7 – continued
We met the Goombah
The date with the lovely Vanessa continues, but after surveying a history of violence, she asks her suitor some tough questions
By John Armstrong
I’ll leave out the details of our trip to the Museum of American History. Everyone’s seen the wing devoted to the Big Takeover a thousand times anyway, either in person or onscreen. That said, I still get choked up when I stand before the towering statues of the Great Outlaws – Dillinger gleefully burning the mortgage records after emptying a bank vault, or Pretty Boy Floyd delivering Christmas dinner to a starving family on welfare - and then the massive 20-foot painting that summarizes the Second Revolution, starting with the Bank Crash and Depression and then the breadlines, the Hooverville riots, and the government troops firing into hungry, unemployed, desperate crowds.
I’m always drawn to one section that shows union busters clubbing men and women on a picket line while fat, cigar-smoking politicians ...
Mob Rule: Part 3
Going to the mattresses
John Armstrong's novel continues with a quick lesson in mob warfare and an ancient saying that prophecies a turbulent tomorrow
By John Armstrong
Vito Genovese is, like my uncle, one of the last of the originals, the men who founded the organization and saved the country when it was ready to go up in flames. Maranzano, Lansky, Siegel, Costello, Anastasia – they were giants, let’s face it. And a good thing they were there, too, or we might all be speaking Russian or Chinese. Personally, I find English hard enough.
I found Frank in his office, on the phone, with a dozen soldiers scattered throughout the foyer and gunmen posted around the mezzanine. There were more outside the front doors, young, tight-jawed men with black eyes, hard as stones from the river bottom. For them, this was an opportunity to shine, to be noticed by the higher-ups. It’s hard for a gunsel to make an impression when there’s no shooting going on. Frank ...
