HALLOWEENS COMING!
Even in death, Edgar Allan Poe
remains a mystery
Tracy Mumford
Every week, The Thread tackles
your book questions, big and small. Ask a question now.
This week's question: What killed
Edgar Allan Poe?
Oct. 7 marks the 166th
anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's death. How he died, however, remains a
mystery.
On Oct. 3, 1849, the poet was
found lying in the gutter outside of a Baltimore pub. The pub also served as a
polling place for local elections, and people were streaming in and out past
the collapsed literary legend, without any idea who he was.
Edgar Allan Poe Public domain via
Wikipedia
Poe was incoherent, unable to
move and wearing someone else's dirty clothes. The last time he'd been seen was
a week earlier in Richmond, Va., on his way to Philadelphia.
Something led him off his path to
Baltimore, however — and what it was may never be known.
A typesetter for The Baltimore
Sun recognized Poe in the gutter. He was once a famous face in town, having
lived there for several years a decade before. The typesetter, at Poe's
rambling request, wrote to a local magazine editor for assistance.
There is a gentleman, rather the
worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar
A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with
you, he is in need of immediate assistance.
After being rescued from the
gutter, Poe spent four days in a delirious haze, wracked by hallucinations. He
was unable to explain how he'd come to Baltimore, or what had happened to his
belongings.
In his last hours, he called out
for "Reynolds" — no such person has even been identified. On the
fourth day, Oct. 7, Poe died.
Poe's death certificate lists the
cause of death as swelling of the brain — phrenitis — but many scholars have
not been content with that explanation. While "The Raven," "The
Tell-Tale Heart" and other eerie tales from Poe continue to delight
readers, some fans keep circling around the morbid question of his death.
A portrait of Edgar Allan Poe
hangs on the wall of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, located in the
writer's former home in Baltimore. Saul Loeb | Getty Images 2011
One theory holds that Poe was
caught up in a voting scheme. In the 19th century, men would be kidnapped and
forced to vote multiple times in disguise in a practice known as cooping. That
would explain Poe's disheveled clothing and his resting place outside the
polling station. Other theories of his death include a street mugging, murder —
or even rabies.
Dr. R. Michael Benitez put forth
the rabies theories 20 years ago after reviewing the notes of the doctor who
attended to Poe in his last days. At first, Benitez didn't know he was
reviewing Poe's file, he thought he was simply reviewing the symptoms of an
anonymous patient — "a writer from Richmond."
According to the Smithsonian
Magazine, Benitez connected the patient's symptoms — delirium, hallucinations,
rapid pulse — with rabies before he realized who he was studying: Edgar Allan
Poe.
Without DNA evidence and an
examination of Poe's body, Benitez's theory is impossible to confirm.
So what about the body?
Poe was buried in an unmarked
grave in Baltimore. It took another 26 years for the city to decide to honor
its local literary legend with a proper funeral. (They've now fully embraced
him; see their NFL team, The Ravens, for proof.)
Workers dug up the coffin to move
Poe's remains to a new location, but decomposition had left little to move.
What the workers did find, however, led to still another theory of Poe's death.
One worker remarked on "a mass
rolling around inside" Poe's skull, according to the Smithsonian. It could
not have been his brain, which would have decomposed immediately, but it could
have been a calcified brain tumor.
A brain tumor could explain Poe's
erratic behavior and final decline, but again, it's still just a theory.
Poe's poetry and mystery stories
continue to be widely read, and modern-day visitors to Baltimore can visit the
writer's grave and the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum.
Fittingly, his grave comes with
another mystery entirely: For more than half a century, an unknown person
placed three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at the grave every Jan. 19
— Poe's birthday.
In 2010, however, the Poe Toaster
did not show up. Poe fans have kept watch in the years since, but the cognac
and rose have not appeared again.
What happened to the generous
graveside visitor — and to Poe himself — remains unknown.
Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe
Museum in Richmond, Va., told the Smithsonian: "Maybe it's fitting that
since he invented the detective story, he left us with a real-life
mystery."
Incidence \IN-suh-dunss\ 1 a: angle of incidence b: the
arrival of something (such as a projectile or a ray of light) at a surface 2 A:
n act or the fact or manner of falling upon or affecting: occurrence B: rate of
occurrence or influence. The words incident, incidence, and instance may seem
similar (and, in fact, incident and incidence are closely related), but they
are not used identically. In current use, incidence usually means "rate of
occurrence" and is often qualified in some way ("a high incidence of
diabetes"). Incident usually refers to a particular event, often something
unusual or unpleasant ("many such incidents go unreported"). Instance
suggests a particular occurrence that is offered as an example ("another
instance of bureaucratic bumbling"); it can also be synonymous with case
("many instances in which the wrong form was submitted"). The plural
incidences sometimes occurs in such contexts as "several recent incidences
of crime," but this use is often criticized as incorrect.
HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!
Claes Oldenburg, “Glass Case with Pies (Assorted Pies in a Case),” 1962, burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel, with pie tins, in glass-and-metal case, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Leo Castelli, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1991.54.1
Claes Oldenburg, for instance,
wanted to demolish conventional boundaries between art and life, collapsing one
into the other while insisting on the aesthetic autonomy of both. Look at his
work of art, “Glass Case with Pies (Assorted Pies in a Case).” What is the
first thing you notice about this object?
The work consists of six
life-size pies made from plaster-soaked burlap and cheap commercial oil enamel.
They are displayed in real pie tins and a metal vitrine that the artist had
purchased from a restaurant supplier. “Glass Case with Pies” suspends the
intangible division between reality and art, belief and disbelief, humor and
irony. What do you think seems artificial about Olderburg’s pies? What seems
real? #ArtAtoZ
HERE'S MY LATEST BOOK.....
This is a book of
short stories taken from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the
factory town of Ansonia in southwestern Connecticut.
Most of these
stories, or as true as I recall them because I witnessed these events many years
ago through the eyes of child and are retold to you now with the pen and
hindsight of an older man. The only exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew
Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his
from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a
mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot
it.
The collected stories
are loosely modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners
(I also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my
character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted
to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in small
town America and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a result
the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working poor, the
middle class, the lost and the found, the contented and the discontented.
Conversely many of the
stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result of suicide
(The Hanging Party, Small Town Tragedy,
Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer)
and natural occurring death. (The Best
Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With the exception of
Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story
there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is reported as having died of
pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal, the desperate
and depressed divorcee in Things Change,
changes his life in Lunch Hour when
asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time,
the last story in the book) In The
Arranged Time, Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes
it or, we don’t know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner and into the waiting arms
of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.
Although the book is
based on three sets of time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is
opened in the early morning and closed at night, time stands still inside the
Diner. The hour on the big clock on the wall never changes time and much like
my memories of that place, everything remains the same.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/1517270456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444164878&sr=1-1&keywords=short+stories+from+a+small+town
In 1962, six year old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered Connecticut’s foster care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next ten years, John would live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state schools, from his native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep River and Hartford. In the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the same home and the same parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny compelling story will make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to overcome the obstacles of the foster care system and find his dreams.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/
http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/
Excerpt from my book "No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care.
I used to be Irish
Catholic.
I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I’m an American—you
grow. George Carlin
The single greatest influence in our lives was the church. The Catholic
Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today, especially in the Naugatuck
Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly conservative Catholic place.
I was part of what might have been the last generation of American
Catholic children who completely and unquestioningly accepted the supernatural
as real. Miracles happened. Virgin birth and transubstantiation made perfect
sense. Mere humans did in fact, become saints. There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian
angels walked beside us and our patron saints really did put in a good word for
us every now and then.
Church was at the center of our lives.
Being a Roman Catholic back then was no small chore. In fact, it was a
lot of work. The Mass was in Latin, conducted with the priest’s back to the
flock. (We were a flock. Protestant were the more democratically named
“congregation.”)
Aside from Sunday Mass there were also eleven Holy Days of Obligation
that we had to attend, and then there were the all-important sacraments of
First Confession, First Communion, and Confirmation, all ornate and dramatic
affairs that happened within a few years of each other.
We dressed properly in a suit coat and tie for Sunday mass. Fridays were
meatless as a means of penance. At school, there was prayer in the morning
before classes began, prayer before lunch, prayer after lunch and prayer before
we went home. There was also a half-hour of religion class every day. And there
was fasting. In those days, Catholics fasted eight hours before receiving
communion.
Then there was confession on Saturday, mandatory because Sunday Mass was
also mandatory and so was taking Holy Communion, which could not be accepted
without first going to confession. We
had to go to confession twice in a week: once on Fridays, since the nuns were
convinced none of us would go on our own over the weekend, and then once again
on Saturday afternoons when Helen made us go.
When I made my first confession at age seven, we were taught that there
were two types of sin: mortal sins, which were serious sins, and venial sins,
which were lesser sins, lying and
disobedience. The nuns said that we would have to narrow our selection to
venial sins since we were far too young to have any mortal sins against our
soul.
One of little girls in the group raised her hand and asked, “What’s
adultery?”
“Nothing to worry yourself over, dear,” the
nun answered, “It’s for adults, and it is a most grievous offense against God.”
I liked the sound of that, “most grievous offense against God.” Sounded
serious.
Confession was a big deal and involved a lot of formality—kneeling in
darkness, foreign languages, and solemnity—and I didn’t waste all that
somberness with unworthy sins, so when the priest slid open the little wooden
door that separated us in the dark I began my prayer.
“Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium
meorum peccatorum—” In full, the words meant “O my God, I am heartily sorry for
having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I fear the loss of
heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God,
Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help
of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
Then the sins were confessed. I told the priest I had committed
adultery.
“Adultery, huh?” the priest said.
“Yes, Father,” I answered as solemnly as I could. “Adultery.”
“So, how’d that work out for you?” he asked.
“Ah,” I answered, “you know.”
“No,” he said, “actually I don’t. So how many times did you do this,
this adultery?”
“Like, I think, three times, Father.”
“I see,” he said. “And during those times,
were you alone or with others?”
“No, Father, I was alone.”
“And do you think you’ll be committing this sin again in the near
future?”
“Naw, Father,” I answered. “I’m pretty much
over it.”
As the years went and I became more confessional-savvy, I learned that
the dumber the sin, the lighter the penance, the prayer for forgiveness that
one was required to say up at the altar after the confession had ended.
So in the name of efficiency, I developed a pre-packaged list of dumb
sins, like “I disobeyed my mother,” or “I fought with my brother,” or “I failed
to say my nightly prayer.”
Through trial and error, I learned that every now and then I would have
to toss a more serious sin into the mix or the priests might get testy and tax
me with a big penance. So I tossed in the fail-safe sex sin, “I had evil
thoughts about _____” and would fill in the name of the girl who struck me at
the moment. I rotated the sins and the priests, and, overall, the system worked.
One Saturday, Denny and his gang of desperadoes showed up for confession
and slid into the pew with me and waited for our turn at the confessional.
Denny turned to me and said, “Johnny, you got any good sins?”
Feeling magnanimous, I shared my formula for a hassle-free confession,
and in closing said, “And then you say ‘I had evil thoughts about Mary
Puravich,’ or whatever,’” using the name of a pretty girl from my class.
Denny shared my sin system with his friends, who were always in a hurry
to cut their way to the front of the line, have their confessions heard, and
leave without saying their penance. I went in to the confessional and said my
piece, ending with, “and I had evil thoughts about Mary Puravich.”
“You know,” said the priest, “I gotta meet this Mary Puravich. She must
be some kind of knockout, because the last four guys in here said the same
thing about her.”
For all purposes, school was an extension of church, and unlike the way
we lived in Waterbury, school was no longer optional. We were to be at Our Lady
of the Assumption Catholic School, in uniform, Monday through Friday from eight
a.m. until three p.m. No excuses.
Because I lacked almost any formal education at that point, I couldn’t
read or write, so it was decided that I should start school from the
beginning—first grade—making me roughly two years older than my classmates.
Assumption was already over fifty years old. Walter and his sisters had
been schooled there in the 1930s and the building , basically unchanged, had nothing
sleek or new. It had sixteen classrooms for two hundred and fifty students, no
gymnasium or cafeteria, highly polished wooden floors, and enormously large
windows that each had to be opened and closed with a long pole with a hook on
the end of it.
Our teachers were members of the Sisters of Mercy, an order formed in
Ireland in 1831 to aid the poor, arriving in America in 1843 to minister to the
famished Irish flocking to the states. Several of the nuns who had taught
Walter were still living at the convent and filling in as substitute teachers,
and one or two of them were still teaching full-time.
Classes began with the ringing of an enormous brass handbell by a nun
who was strong enough to pick it up and move it around. Boys and girls played
apart from each other on different sides of the school yard. The boys were clad
in white shirts and green ties with the letter A sewn into the middle of them,
black slacks, black socks, and black lace-up shoes. Loafers and pointed-toe
shoes, then all the rage because of the Beatles, were forbidden. The girls were
required to wear black Mary Janes, white or green knee socks, and a green dress
uniform with an under slip, and a white, button-down shirt. They were also
issued green beanies to wear in church, although I can’t recall that any of the
girls ever wore one.
Just beneath the schoolyard was Farrell’s Foundry. At different times of
the day, the mill released its afterburn from the enormous smokestacks that
dotted the skyline. Tens of thousands of black specks shot into the air, making
it look like a black-snow blizzard had hit our little town. The specks rained
down on our white shirts, ruining them forever with ink-black spots of burned
iron.
Every school day started with a prayer,
followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and then religion class. Sometimes one of
the priests stopped by during religion class and opened the floor to
discussions, wrongly assuming the questions would be deep and theological. What
he got was, “Father, all right, look, if the Russians fired an atomic bomb at
us and Jesus flies out of heaven and swallows it and it explodes in his
stomach—will he be dead?”
The best one came from Peggy Sullivan, who asked, “If Jesus shaves off
his beard, will he lose all his magical powers?” and then, pausing to catch her
breath, “and if so, how screwed are we?”
One kid in the class, Patsy Sheehan, resented having to learn certain
things about our religion the difference between venial sins and mortal sins,
the Act of Contrition and so on. When the priest told us we that we had to
choose a middle name for our confirmation, Patsy complained, “I got enough on
my plate already.”
The priest insisted she pick a new middle name. Patsy asked, “What’s
Jesus’s middle name?”
“He’s Jesus. He doesn’t have one,” the priest
answered.
“So, what’s he, special?” Patsy asked.
Then there was Martin O’Toole, a wonderful, magnificent liar. He lied in
such awesome, Herculean fashion that his tales were artful, Homeric. Our nun
once asked, “Mr. O’Toole, why have you not turned in your homework?”
Martin waited until he had everyone’s attention and then stood slowly
and dramatically from his desk, put his hands on his tiny waist and said,
“Sister, last night I was in my back yard playing when I picked up a rock from
the ground.” He then recounted the scene of him picking up what must have been
a boulder the size of Rhode Island, “and as soon as I picked it up, oil!
Bubbling crude came bursting out of the ground, millions of gallons of it! I
was soaked in oil.” He paused and looked around the room and added, in hushed
tones, “It took me hours to put that rock back on that oil and save this entire
city.”
He returned to his seat and said, “And that’s why I didn’t time to do my
homework, Sister.”
The nun’s jaw had dropped, and the silence of the moment was broken only
when Micky Sullivan, a dense and gullible child, asked, “What kind of oil was
it, Martin?”
“Esso,” he replied. “It was Esso oil.”
Many years later, Johnny became mayor of a small town in the Valley. An
investigation of the town’s finances showed fifty thousand dollars missing from
the treasury and all the evidence pointed to Martin. When asked to produce the
town’s books, Martin said, that “The books are gone. Mice ate them.” He served
two years in federal prison.
Then there was Ilene Flynn, a little red-haired, freckled-faced,
fair-skinned girl who was more pious than the Pope. I knew a lot about her
because the nuns thought we looked alike and paired me with her for all
religious functions.
At our First Holy Communion, Ilene was so nervous her mouth went dry.
Unable to swallow the host and forbidden to touch it—only a priest could do
that—she ran around in circles crying hysterically, “Jesus is stuck in my
mouth! Jesus is stuck in my mouth!” while the nuns flocked around her shouting
instructions about swallowing, “Go like this, Ilene, go like this!” and then
they did a swallowing demonstration that made them look a lot like penguins
eating long fish.
Ilene’s Friday afternoon confessions were epic. She confessed to
everything, I mean absolutely everything, and she actually said all of her
penance, unlike the rest of us who negotiated a lighter-sentence deal with God
before we got to the rail. My policy on penance was one for five. If I were
given thirty Hail Marys as penance, in the deal God and I worked out, I said
six.
Once, Ilene came out of the confessional in tears, wailing loud enough
to wake the dead.
“What is it, Ilene?” Sister asked. “What happened?”
“Father O’Leary told me I’m going to hell on a lying rap,” she wailed,
“and I don’t know what a rap is!”
Excerpt from my book “On the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film”
CHAPTER
12
THE
ROLE OF EDIE DOYLE
“The
world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of
those who look on and do nothing.” Albert Einstein
Edie
Doyle, the films leading lady is Kazan’s primary vehicle to propel the story
through by her determination to find her brothers killers. She is the films catalyst for action.
Edie,
although her poverty was near equal to Terry Malloy’s, comes from a protective
and nurturing environment. Her
dockworker father and his deceased wife struggled to collect coins for their
daughter’s education. As a result of that nurturing Edie character is not the
brainless one-dimensional female character role women were so often relegated
to in the 1950’s and her part flirts with creating a strong feminist
character. She is college educated with
professional aspirations. She speaks out. She demands to know who killed her brother
why they killed him. She demands action
from the Priest and the community. She
is as forceful as she is brave and confronts Terry’s moral ambivalence by
demanding he take a stand in his life.
Conversely,
Kazan does not allow the character to go too far. She wants to run away after Terry’s brother
is killed leaving the impression of the standard Hollywood female
character, a powerless woman who will
run from confrontation rather than face it.
However Edie’s doesn’t want to flee because she is frightened. Rather,
her character sees the hopelessness of the situation on the docks that the
docks will never change. Instead of being weaker than Terry, she simply smarter
than he is.
Terry is a far less complicated character then
Edie Doyle. He is a likable, ageless
Neanderthal, a man-child completely uneducated and from a tough
poverty-stricken childhood. It is
evident he sees more in her then a beautiful face, he sees in her a morally
clean soul, a way out. Edie has class,
which is what he wants.
Edie
Doyle’s innocence and purity helps Terry to reclaim his conscience and her
acceptance of him for what he is, opens his heart to a flurry of new emotions
and thoughts. Her devotion to her dead
brother’s memory, which is the driving force behind all of her actions
is
actually her own demand for respect of human life, is a new world to Terry.
At
first, for Terry, Edie offers a way out of the docks, a new life somewhere else
but it becomes apparent to him that his moral cowardice will always be what it
is and her moral strength will always be what it is, unless he takes a stand in
the here and now. Before Terry decides
to finally cross the moral and take a stand, he decides to test Edie’s faith of
good will in others by telling her the truth about his role in her brother’s
murder. Although disturbed by the
information about Terry’s part in the murder, Edie eventually holds true to her
ideals, her faith in humanity. The story
line elevates her moral grounding above everyone else in the film and it is
only fitting then,
in
the bar scene, that when Terry pours out his feeling for Edie, she turns the
conversation to conscience. At that
point, the films cinematographer Boris
Kaufman, shots an angelic close up of her face in the upper right hand corner
of the screen, lowering Terry to the center of the screen, a guardian angel
dangling slightly above him.
The
idea that Edie offers more than just physical beauty is told again in the
playground scene when it appears as if Terry is actually speaking more to
himself then to Edie when he reminds her that she was once “A real mess” He is not teasing her, he admires that she
is now beautiful. Although it is
obviously the remark of a man in love, it is, equally, the remark of a man who
admires the will power and determination it takes to transform one-self into a
person of dignity. She is no longer “a
real mess” Edie has self-respect, Terry had no self- respect. Things have changed since the schoolyard. Now he is the one who is “a real mess.” Terry feels he gave up his self-respect when
he allowed himself to take the dive in the title contender fight. Terry wants what Edie has, dignity and self-respect,
something he is trying to reclaim but does not know where to start.
The
crucial role of Edie Doyle was for Kazan, signifying "The deepest of human
needs, redemption” and logically, the sympathetic Edie Doyle is Terry Malloy's
father confessor unlike the films priest who refuses to hear Terry’s confession
and is almost completely unsympathetic to Terry throughout the film.
Schulberg
denied that the role of Edie Doyle was as the redeemer, for him the character
was little more than the films required love sequence, however, he was shrewd
enough to insist that the relationship between Edie and Terry take center stage
in the film.
If
Edie and Father Barry are the films religious authority, the Tweedy, waspy
Crime Commission investigators are the secular moral authority and the roles
are played with an evenhanded, even icy delivery by actors Martin Balsam and
Leif Erikson. The Crime Commission
investigators are truth seekers. Like
Edie and Father Barry, it is their job to push Terry closer to the light of
truth.
HERE IS AN EXCEPT FROM MY BOOK "THE BOOK OF AMERICAN-JEWISH GANGSTERS"
(Max Zellner is a pen name, it was my grandfather's born name. During World War 1 he changed it to the less German sounding Paul Selner)
TIME LINE
1882
Arnold Rothstein, Max “Kid Twist” Zwerbach of
the Eastman gang and Johnny Torrio are born.
1873
Monk
Eastman is born in Brooklyn, NY.
1882
January
17, Arnold Rothstein is born in NYC
1884
Max
"Kid Twist" Zwerbach is born.
1888
May
13, Big Jack Zelig is born on the Lower East Side.
1890
Jacob
Riis publishes, How the Other Half Lives, exposing the wretched living
conditions of people in the slums of New York City.
Mobster Joey Zucker, a mob
Liaison, is born
1891
Abe
Zwillman is born in New York
1895
Eddie
Vogel, future Chicago mobster and gambler is born in Illinois
1898
Jake Guzik
Jack Guzik's father was naturalized on
November 5, 1898. His sons Jake and Harry would go on to become Chicago’s
leading pimps for four decades.
1900
Willie Bioff is born. Monk Eastman, of the East Gang, claims all
of the East Side of Manhattan as his territory. This eventually causes a war
between the Eastman’s and Paul Kelly’s Five Pointers
The Eastman’s claim their membership at 1,100
1902
Joseph “Doc” Stacher is born. Meyer Lansky is
born on July 4th
1903
Backed up by the might of the Monk Eastman
gang, the Cherry Hill gang and the Whyos, now under the command of Billy The
Brute Sanger, begin armed warfare. Hundreds take part in pitched battles in the
middle of the city. Petty crime increases 50%
In
August, a gun battle erupts between the Eastman’s and the Five Pointers after
the Five Points try to take over a struss (card) game. Over 100 thugs take part
in the battle that follows. Tammany is forced to step in and demand that
Eastman and Paul Kelly (of the Five Pointers) make peace. The truce ends after a barroom brawl breaks
out in a Bowery bar. Tammany has to step in again and threatens to withdraw
police protection from the gangs of they don’t cooperate.
Future
mobsters Sam Levine (of Brooklyn) and David Berman (of the Las Vegas syndicate)
are born
September
16, The Eastman Gang goes on a shooting
and stabbing rampage through the Lower East Side over a five hour period, leaving
one man dead and dozens injured. Eastman is arrested but charges are dropped
due to "lack of witnesses".
September
17, The Rivington Street Gun Battle took place between the 5 Points Gang and
the Eastman Gang.
September
19, The "Paul Kelly Association" headquarters on Stanton Street are
raided by police. Evidence is confiscated, and several men are arrested.
1904
Gustave
Marks, (Sometimes spelled Marcks) age 21, of 306 Belmont Avenue, co-leader of
the Car Barn Bandits in Chicago, dies on April 22
February
2, 1904 Monk Eastman and an associate are arrested for felonious assault and
intent to kill, after they rob an beat a man on the West Side who police were
secretly tailing.
April
14 Monk Eastman is sentenced to Sing- Sing prison where he will serve a 5 year
sentence. This is Eastman's first conviction after dozens of arrests largely
because Tammany has pulled its protection from him and his gang
November
1 While negotiating who will take control of the Eastman Gang, Ritchie
Fitzpatrick is gunned down by a Max Zwerbach associate, giving Zwerbach full
reign of the Gang.
1905
Richie FitzPatrick is killed by Kid Twist
Zwerbach during peace negotiations between the two rival factions of the
Eastman’s. Several weeks later, the remainder of Fitzpatrick’s men are killed
off by Vach Lewis
Benny
Fein arrested for Grand Larceny; sentenced to work detail.
1906
Feb
28.Benjamin Hyman Seigel AKA Bugsy, is born, probably in Brownsville, Brooklyn
1907
Kid
Twist Reles is born on the Lower East Side of New York
1908
The
Eastman’s and the Five Pointers go to war on the streets of New York. The
Eastman’s are now run by Max Kid Twist Zwerbach
Harry
Maione of Murder Inc. is born
May
14, 1908 Max Zwerbach and Cyclone Louie are gunned down in Coney Island by
Louis Pioggi.
May
19, Benny Fein arrested for disorderly conduct; Pays $3 fine.
July
2, Benny Fein arrested for assault;
paroled.
July
30, Benny Fein arrested for assault; paroled.
October
29, Benny Fein arrested for burglary;
sentenced to 3 years and 6 months in Sing-Sing prison.
1909
June. Monk Eastman is released
from prison and finds that his gangs no longer exists and what parts of it that
do go on are locked in civil war.
June Monk Eastman is released from prison on good
behavior after serving a 5-year term. Local authorities are caught off-guard,
because the State did not notify local police of Eastman's early release
August
12 Arnold Rothstein marries Carolyn Green at Saratoga Springs; pawns her
jewelry. That same month, he borrows $2,000 from father-in-law to open his West
46th Street gambling house.
October
8, Paul Kelly is arrested, along with several other men, for committing voter
fraud in Hoboken, NJ.
On
November 18, Rothstein wins $4,000 against Jack Conaway at John McGraw’s pool
hall on Herald Square
July
28, Harry Strauss AKA Pittsburgh Phil is born
The
Chicago American and the Chicago Tribune newspapers contract Moses Annenberg to
hire armies of street thugs to intimidate newspaper dealers to carry their
newspapers. Annenberg hires Ragen’s Colt, a fierce group of mostly
American-Irish street thugs. A circulation war begins that lasts for three
years.
The
City of New York closes The Park Row Saloon owned by Eastman gang leader Chick
Tricker. He simply reopens in the vice district known as Satan’s Circus and
buys the San the Dude’s Stag Café on West 28th Street (Later renamed
the Café Maryland)
1911
December
2, Jack Zelig shoots and kills Jules Morello on a dance floor on 2nd Ave.
1912
Ed Weiss AKA Jew Kid A levee pimp and partner
with Big Jim Colosimo is active in Chicago. His nephew, Louis, was also a pimp
in the Levee.
June
3, Jack Zelig is shot in the neck d by Charles Torti on the steps of the
Criminal Courts building downtown.
June
8, Lt. Charles Becker leads a series of
raids on known gang-hang outs; 19 men are arrested for weapons and drug
possession. Becker will later be executed on murder charges related to Jack
Zelig.
July
16 Murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal at the Metropole Hotel on W. 43rd
Street
Street
July
15: Members of the Lennox Avenue gang, including its leaders Harry Horowitz,
(AKA Gyp the blood) Jacob Seidenscher and Lou Rosenberg murder gambler and
police informant Herman Rosenthal.
August
1, Benny Fein arrested for grand larceny; case dismissed.
August
3, "Lefty Louie" Rosenberg, a Zelig gang member, is tracked down and
captured in upstate New York, and arrested for the murder of Herman Rosenthal.
August
15, "Big" Jack Zelig is arrested in Rhode Island for robbing $65 from
a man who was "stepping off an electric car".
August
21, "Big" Jack Zelig slips out of Rhode Island police custody by
giving a fake name and posting bail, while he was being sought for the murder
of Herman Rosenthal.
October 5, Jack Zelig is shot and killed by Phil Davidson while riding a street car.
October
6, Jack Zelig's body is identified by his wife and sister, then moved to his
home on Broome St.
October
7, Trial begins for Lt. Charles Becker;
accused of hiring Jack Zelig's gang to kill businessman Herman Rosenthal. The
trial goes on despite the key witness in the case, Jack Zelig, murdered two
days prior.
October
15: Jake Zelig, leader of the Eastman gang is murdered by Red Davidson.
November
6, Phil Davidson is sentenced to a minimum of 20 years for the murder of Jack
Zelig on October 5.
November
7: Dave Yaras is born in Chicago
1913
November. Dopey Benny Fein and his labor goons
are attacked by a combination of smaller street gang on Greenwich Street in
Manhattan. This is the first of the so-called Labor’s slugger’s war.
March
26: Victor Riesel, organized crime reporter, is born
October
6: Lenny Patrick is born in Chicago
Timothy
Sullivan, a former member of the Eastman gang and Tammany Hall politician dies.
February
27, Jack Zelig's widowed wife of ten years, Henrietta Zelig, wins a $600
settlement from the courts. She contended that she posted bail for her husband
that was never returned, months before he was killed.
July
10, Abe Reich, a small time criminal better known as "Moshe the Strong
Man" is shot and stabbed to death by two men in the middle of the street
on Avenue B
July
21, Benny Fein arrested for Interfering with an officer; case suspended.
September
19, Benny Fein arrested for felonious assault; released on $2000 bail.
August
29, Merchants and residents of the Lower East Side who are fed up with being
extorted and bullied meet at a Synagogue on Rivington Street to discuss the
formation of an anti-gang Vigilance Committee.
October
9, Benny Fein arrested for assault; case dismissed.
October
16, Benny Fein arrested for violation of
the Sullivan Law; released on $5000 bail
1914
Dopey Benny Fein, indicted for attempted
murder aggress to testify
against
several gangsters and union leaders. In exchange for a reduced sentence, Fein
reveals details of labor slugging operations from over five-year period
resulting in the indictment of eleven gangsters and twenty-two union officials.
January
9, 1914 Jack Sirocco and his gang
survive an ambush by the Benny Fein gang at 21-25 St. Marks Place
April
13 Dago Frank Cirofici, Whitey Lewis
(Jacob Seidenschner), Lefty Louie (Louis
Rosenberg), and Harry "Gyp the Blood" Horowitz executed for murder of Herman
Rosenthal
Rosenberg), and Harry "Gyp the Blood" Horowitz executed for murder of Herman
Rosenthal
November
29, 1914 Benny Fein's gang meets Jack Sirocco's gang during a labor dispute at
a hat factory on Greene Street. Max Green is killed in the gun fire.
Micky
Cohen is born in New York City
1915
Police
Lieutenant Becker executed at Sing-Sing for ordering murder of Herman Rosenthal
Benny
Snyder, a partner with gangster Greasy Joe Rosenzweig is convicted of murder
and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Police
Captain Charles Becker is convicted of planning the murder of police informant
Herman Rosenthal and is executed in Sing-Sing prison.
July
1, Monk Eastman is sentenced to 2 years in prison on grand larceny charges.
1917
Monk
Eastman volunteers for service in the US Army during WWII.
1919
July 19, Johnny "Spanish" is gunned
down in front of his headquarters at 19 2nd Avenue by rival Nathan Kaplan gang.
Arnold
Rothstein faces a Grand Jury on charges that he paid the Chicago White Sox to
throw the 1919 World Series.
Monk
Eastman is discharged from the US Army after WWI where he fought with the 106th
Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 27th Division in Europe.
Nathan
Kaplan and two others are probably responsible for the murder of street
gangster Johnny Spanish on July 29
1919-20
Arnold
Rothstein intervenes in garment industry labor disputes; places Little Augie
Orgen in charge.
1920
Monk
Eastman is murdered by a prohibition agent on December 26.
October
26 Arnold Rothstein testifies before Chicago grand jury investigating World
Series
December
26, Monk Eastman is shot and killed on 14th Street by business partner Jerry
Bohan
Waxey
Gordon and Arnold Rothstein form a bootlegging partnership which will last for
about a year before Gordon makes enough money and connections to branch out on
his own.
1921
Max
Podolsky, Chicago hood is arrested. In 1952, just before the Kefauver committee
requested it, Podolsky’s extensive police record would disappear. His boss, Red
Dorfman, would also make his record disappear as well.
1922
Moses Annenberg buys the Daily Racing Form
gaining a virtual monopoly over the distribution of racetrack information in
the US.
Louis
Buchalter, later of Murder Inc., is sent to prison for burglary
December
5: New York hood Benny Levinski is murdered by William Lipshitz.
1923
Harry and Alma Guzik, both pimps and white
slavers in Chicago’s Levee, are pardoned by Governor Len Small for white
slavery conviction as favor to Torrio
August:
The labors slugger war is in full swing after Jacob Little Augie Orgen and his
gang, the Little Augies and his alley Solomon Shapiro line up against Nat “Kid
Dropper” Kaplan and his Rough Riders Gang. They meet in a massive battle on
Essex Street in which tow innocent bystanders are killed.
August
23: Hat Kaplan is murdered by Louis Cohen
1925
Al
Capone probably contacted the strain of gonorrhea that would eventually kill
him, at the Roemer Inn, which is under the direction of Harry Guzik, the
brother of Levee super pimp Jake Guzik.
April
10, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby is published,
featuring a character (Meyer Wolfsheim) based on Arnold Rothstein.
November
18: Edward Zion, Samuzzo Amatuna
associate and former bodyguard is born
November
20: Former Amatuna bodyguard, Abe Goldstein is shot and killed by unidentified
gunmen while in a drug store.
1926
Arnold
Rothstein’s partner Irving Sobel arrested on charge of selling heroin.
1927
Lou Elfman, a former lieutenant of
Philadelphia bootlegger Max Hoff, turns state's evidence.
Mobster
Sam Stein is charged with murdering Kansas City policeman Happy Smith
Arnold
Rothstein in virtual control of U.S. drug trade.
1928
November
4, Arnold Rothstein was shot at Park Centre Hotel and died 2 days later.
1929
March 14. The New York State Appellate Court
orders the removal of Magistrate Albert Vitale due to his ties to organized
crime figures Arnold Rothstein (and an unexplained $10,000 deposited in his
bank account.)
Chicago
Levee gangsters Ike Bloom and Julius Rosenheim die
1930s
Costello
and Kastel open the firm Alliance Distributors, monopolizing the “legal” whisky
market.
1931
Joe Peskin (Resided at 1506 East 67th Street.)
AKA Sugar (A nickname meaning a pimp) A
hood who started in the mob under Johnny Torrio. In 1931, he was indicted for
selling more than $1 million worth of corn sugar to alky cookers on the south
side from his wholesale grocery business at 4446 South State Street. He was a
leading jukebox distributor in Chicago with outlets in Kansas City and Detroit,
which he ran through a front company called The Universal Automatic Music
Corporation.
September:
Meyer Shapiro is murdered in Brooklyn
Lucky
Luciano and Meyer Lansky feed information to the IRS, which leads to the arrest
and conviction of rival, "Waxey" Gordon.
April
15, Joe "The Boss" Masseria is gunned down by Bugsy Siegel, Vito
Genovese, and Joe Adonis, as orchestrated by Lucky Luciano, on the orders of
Sal Maranzano.
1932
April 20:
Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano were arrested in Chicago with Paul Ricca
(The residing at 901 South Halstead Street, Harry Brown, former Genna hood
Sylvester Agoglia and former Bugs Moran gangster John Senna, (2300 South
Michigan). Police found a gambling slip in Luciano’s pockets (“accounts receivable
$46,655.00”)
1933
September.
Meyer Lansky gets permission from Batista, President of Cuba, to open up casinos in Cuba. Also getting
permission to run the already operational Hotel Nacional.
November.
Lansky gets the Molaska Corporation up and running.
December
1, Waxey Gordon is sent to prison for tax evasion. This is the first high
profile case for Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey.
1934
January
1, Fiorello H. LaGuardia was sworn in as Mayor of New York City and immediately
declared war on organized crime. Between February and May, more than 2,000 slot
machines controlled by LCN member Frank Costello and his partner, "Dandy
Phil" Kastel, were seized by local police, with LaGuardia serving as a
committing magistrate. Costello and Kastel decided to move the center of their
slot machine operations and, in August, 1935, founded the Bayou Novelty Company
in New Orleans.
Ed
Fletcher leader of the Purple gang dies, Water Sage , Brooklyn mobster and
associate of Abe Reles-Harry Maione gang and on
January 24, Charles King Solomon dies in Boston.
In
Chicago, Max Podolsky takes over the Poultry Handlers union
1935
March:
Willie Bioff, the Chicago mob behind him, was almost in control of the
Hollywood studios.
Davie
Berman gets arrested for kidnapping Abe Scharlin. Sharlin was a known
bootlegger and Berman gets a twelve-year sentence of which he would serve seven
years in Sing-Sing penitentiary. Later Berman would become the gambling king of
Minneapolis.
The
Cleveland mob opens The Plantation casino in Miami.
September
9: Abe Weinberg, a lieutenant of Dutch Schultz, disappears and is presumed
murdered.
October
23: Dutch Schultz is killed. Marty Krompier, Dutch Schultz’s man in the Harlem
policy operations is severely wounded by rival gunmen. This attack comes just
hours after Schultz and his other associates are gunned down in Newark.
Krompier ultimately survives the attack.
1936
Gurrah
Shapiro is successfully prosecuted by DA Dewey for violating the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act. Shapiro receives a two-year sentence.
September:
Joe Rosen is murdered by Lepke Buchalter, Harry Strauss and Mendy Weiss
1937
Jack Ruby returned to Chicago, having grown
tired of the west and at this point become involved with the Scrap iron and
Junk Handlers Union, local 20467, working as an organizer.
January 8, The Cuban Cabinet approved plans to
place certain gambling operations under control of the army, headed by Colonel
(later President) Fulgencio Batista. Shortly thereafter, New York City gambling
czar Meyer Lansky led a vanguard of American hoodlums imported to help operate
the major Cuban casinos. Although World War II and Batista's removal from
office during the latter part of the beginning to blossom in the Nevada
desert), Batista returned to power in March, 1952, and soon asked Lansky to
come back and "add a touch of class" to the Cuban operations.
1938
August
1 Hyman Yuran, a former associate of Lepke Buchalter is killed, the body will be found in a lime
pit in Loch Sheldrake New York.
1939
Micky
McBride buys the Continental Press, a racing wire service from Moses Annenberg
January 28: Louis Cohen and Isadore Friedman, (AKA
Danny Field) witnesses scheduled to
testify against Lepke Buchalter, are murdered
January
29: George Weinberg of the Dutch Schultz gang commits suicide while under
police protection.
April
28: Abe ‘Whitey’ Freidman is killed by Murder Inc.
May
10: Irving Tootsie Feinstein, a one-time partner with Lepke Buchalter, is
murdered
May
25: New York Teamster boss Morris Diamond is murdered on orders of Lepke
Buchalter
August
24: Buchalter turns himself in to federal authorities
September
6: Irving ‘Puggy’ Feinstein is killed
1940
Seymour
Magoon agrees to cooperate with the government
as does Max Rubin, (Born 1888) a New Jersey gangster and union official.
Sam Gappel, another union official was killed as he walked into home.
Feburary
2: Kid Twist Reles is arrested on robbery, assault, possession of narcotics,
burglary, disorderly conduct, and eight charges of murder. Reles agrees to
cooperate with the government.
July
31: Whitey Krakower is killed in New York
Red
Dorfman is suspected of murdering Leon R. Cooke and attorney who organized the
Material Waste Handlers Union. His organizer is Jack Ruby. Ruby will stay on in
the union after Dorfman takes over. The union was expelled from the AFL-CIO in
1957 because it was run for the benefit of mobsters
Waxey
Gordon is released from prison. He moves to California
James
J. Hines, the leader of Tammany Hall, the New York City Democratic
organization, goes to prison for arranging political protection for Dutch
Schultz's policy and numbers rackets in Harlem, New York.
After a failed attempt on his life, New Jersey
racketeer Max Rubin agrees to cooperate with law enforcement.
Blue
eyed, curly haired, Abe “Pretty” Levine, who had killed at least 15 men before
he was 23 years old, was one of the first members of Murder Inc. to agree to
cooperate with the DA’s office. Newly married, he and his wife Helen had tried
to break away form the underworld. Levine took a job driving a truck but when
their first child was born, he could not muster the payment for his hospital.
He went to Pittsburgh Phil Strauss for help, but Strauss charged him “ 6 for 5”
interest, meaning a one dollar charge for every five dollars borrowed. It was
an insult. After he testified, Levine
was granted a suspended sentence, released and disappeared from public view
forever.
1941
On September 23, in Chicago, Joe Peskin was
indicted for severely beating (with a baseball bat) Lionel Nathan, one of his
former employees, in front of Nathan’s home at 2737 Clyde Ave. The attackers
also fired a shot at Nathan’s father as he ran to help his son. Nathan and
another of Peskin’s former employees, Albert Chapman, opened their own Juke Box
distribution company and took away several of Peskin’s customers. Nathan was in a comma for three months
because of the beating. Peskin denied he had anything to do with the beating
telling the court “Look Judge, if I had anything to do with this I would tell
you. This thing is bad publicity for the industry and for me. However, I want
you to know these men took fifty spots away from me and I got them all back”
Max
Caldwell AKA Max Pollack. An ex-convict and former Capone organization thug, in
1943 he helped Frank Nitti loot the treasury of the Retail Clerks International
Protective Association, Local 1248. Caldwell was the union treasurer. He was
thought to have stolen $910,000 in funds although Caldwell claimed the treasury
never held more than $62.00. On August
21, 1941, the State's attorney's office in Chicago charged that Caldwell, Rocco
De Stefano, Harry V. Russell, Peter Tremont, Patrick Manno, Milton Schwartz,
and others looted the treasury. However, no legal action was taken. At the same time Caldwell also provided free
airline tickets for Ralph Buglio, Harry Russell, Rocco De Stefano, Peter
Tremont, Pat Manno, and others, from Chicago to Miami, police allege the money
came from the union tills. Caldwell
moved to Miami in the 1950s.
Charles
The Bug Workman is sent to prison for murdering Dutch Schultz
February:
Emil Nizich (Born 1915) a labor racketeer (Of 426 West Forty Eight Street)
was
shot three times from behind and left in a gutter in front of 410 West Forty
Eight Street, while on his way home form the gym.
Feburary
6: Benny Tannenbaum is killed
June
12: Harry Strauss and Marty Goldstein are executed by the state of New York.
November
12: Abe Reles dies on Coney Island.
December
7: Pearl Harbor Day. While temporarily interrupting American gambling
operations in Cuba and forcing certain hoodlums into military service, World
War II also opened up new areas of illicit profits through black-marketeering
and the theft and counterfeiting of Government ration stamps.
Chicago
mobster Lenny Yaras (jr) is born
1942
In Chicago, Red Dorfman (7347 Sheridan Road)
was indicted after he had a telephone argument with the chairman of the Waste
Handlers Union Employees association.
Dorfman, a one time prize fighter, quietly put down the phone, took his
brass knuckles out of his desk walked the several blocks to the mans office and
beat him senseless with the brass knuckles. The victim walked to the police
station with his two eyes beaten shut but refused to press charges.
May
9 In Chicago, Arthur Gold was arrested for rigging the phone wires at mob
casinos in the Blum Building at 624 South Michigan to avoid paying a monthly
bill
Jake Guzik, Capone former business manager
in the mob, visited the dying Capone at his Florida estate. The effects of
untreated syphilis had worn away at him. Guzik, who had not seen Capone since
his heydays as Boss of the Chicago mob, was appalled at Capone’s condition. On
his way out of the estate, when asked how Capone was, Guzik replied, in terms
harsher then he intended “Al is nuttier then a fruitcake”
Moses
Annenberg, no longer an associate of gangsters, dies
Murder
Inc. killers Harry Maione and Frank Abbandando are executed by the state of New
York. Frank Abbandando AKA Dasher, was born on July 11, 1910 Died
February 19, 1942. The nickname, Dasher, was gotten when he chased a victim
around a house several times before gunning him down. Abbandando, a rapist and pervert, was a
member of Murder Incorporated. As a teen, he worked as an extortionist and
gambler for Harry Maione in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn. He was also instrumental in
the 1932 Maione gang war against the Shapiro Brothers in 1932 for ownership
over the Brownsville, Brooklyn, rackets. Abe Reles informed on Abbandando for
the May 25, 1937 murder of loan shark George Rudnick.
While
the country was rationing during WWII, Waxey Gordon is arrested and convicted
of selling sugar illegally. He spends one year in prison.
Zwillman
sells his share of the Reinfeld importing company
1943
April
Sam Giancana kidnapped Jake Guzik and held him in an empty building and gave
him a choice. The 42’s would give Guzik and the high command a gift of
$250,000.00 in exchange for support and acceptance from the outfit. Otherwise
they would kill Guzik then and there. Guzik accepted the offer for the money,
vowed his support and was driven to West Roosevelt Road and released. Right
after he was kidnapped, the ageing Jake Guzik brought in Gus Alex, a Greek
American was brought into the organization. Originally, Guzik was hired as a
bodyguard, but soon Alex became Guzik’s driver, confident and top lieutenant.
Siegel’s
“hit squad” goes to the Bahamas to murder Sir Harry Oakes for botching a casino
deal.
The
Wofford Hotel opens in Miami, where Frank Costello and Lansky often meet. Al
Polizzi (mob boss of Cleveland) and Tatum Wofford are the owners.
March
18 Chicago mob bosses Frank Nitti, Paul Ricca, Phil D’Andrea, Charlie Gioe, Lou Kaufman, Louis Campagna and
Johnny Roselli are indicted for their role in the Bioff scandal.
1944
In
Chicago, Gus Alex, Hymie Levin, Gus Liebe, and others were connected with the
Dome casino at 7466 West Irving Park Road.
Siegel
starts to build The Flamingo in Las Vegas; Lansky, Luciano and others gave
money.
Emmanuel
Mendy Weiss is executed by the state of New York for his role in Murder Inc.
Benjamin
Zookie the Bookie Zuckerman a member of the Chicago syndicate involved in
illegal gambling, is killed.
March
4 Louis Buchalter is executed by the
state of New York.
1945
From 1945 until 1950, Joe Corngold was a
partner with gangsters Willie Heeney, a former Capone gunman, Joey Auippa and
Louis Campagna, a former Capone bodyguard, and Claude Moore, also a former
Capone gunner, in a series of large and very profitable casinos, including the
Turf Club on Cermak Road, the El Patio and the Austin Club. Pressures brought
on from the Kefauver Committee closed the clubs. Campagna admitted before the
Kefauver Committee that between 1937 and 1940 that his share of the profits
from El Patio and the Austin Club casinos in Chicago amounted to $204,000 which
allowed him to purchase an 800 acre estate near Fowler Indiana which federal
investigators valued at $175,000. A second estate near Berrien Springs was
valued at about $75,000. The Committee also found out that Paul Ricca owned
2200 acres near Kendall County Ill. about 25 miles outside Chicago, an estate
in River Forrest and another estate in Long Beach Indiana, which burned down
under questionable circumstances shortly after the Kefauver Committee
discovered Ricca’s ownership
Willie
Tarsch, AKA Wilie Kolatch. Born 1900. Residence 1855 South Kominsky Once a mob insider and one of Chicago’s
biggest gamblers and a partner to Zuckie the Bookie, Tarsch refused to knuckle
under when the Chicago mob decided to control all gambling in the city in the
mid 1940s. Tarsch was gunned down in the rear of a vacant building at 3710 West
Roosevelt Road on April 7, 1945. he was shot through the head by a shotgun
blast and died immediately. He had been lured to a nearby restaurant by an
unidentified man who strolled with him to the gear of the building where the
gunman was waiting.
December.
The Beverly County Club casino opens in New Orleans. The owners are Frank
Costello and Meyer Lansky
1946
December 22: Havana convention of the U.S.
crime Syndicate is held at Havana's Hotel Nacional
April
Chicago hood Sam Hare died. (Lived at 415 Aldine Avenue.) Manager of the
Victoria, A Colosimo brothel where girls were brought in from St. Louis and
broken in. He later managed the Dells, a massive casino in Morton Grove in
partnership with Lou Silversmith.(2797 North Pine Grove). Silversmith was the
owner of the high-powered rifle that killed Red Barker in 1932. The Touhy gang
was said to have taken over the Dells in 1931 and took credit for killing
Barker. The Dells (Named for a waiter named Dell Jones) was robbed several
times and fire bombed twice, the last bombing coming on October 8, 1934.
Another of Hare’s clubs, the Moulin Rouge on 511 Diversey Highway had
mysteriously caught fire earlier in the year. Hare held a $25,000 policy on the
property. In 1931, the Touhy gang tracked Capone killer Fred Pacelli to the
Dells and killed him. That same year, while at least 300 people watch, Touhy
gunmen marched into the Dells and shot and killed Fred DiGiovanni, a suspected
Barker spy within the Touhy organization. Hare was rumored to paid reporter
Jake Lingle as much as $20,000 in bribes to keep him from writing stories on
his gambling dens/night spots.
Feburary
24 : Nathan "Nate" Weisenberg was called the "King of the
Slots" of Northeastern Ohio although others assumed that he was nothing
more than a figurehead for member of the Mayfield Road Mob. Weisenberg had been
called to his slot machine warehouse just after 1:00 am that morning because of
a break in. On his way home and was shot to death in his car just before
midnight. Mafia member James Licavoli was the prime suspect but was never
charged.
June
24: Race-wire operator James M. Ragen was shot from a truck while driving in
rush-hour traffic on a Chicago street. Reportedly attacked for refusing to sell
out to the hoodlum element, he died of his wounds on August 14, 1946. Lenny
Patrick and Lenny Yaras are accused of the crime.
October
Lucky Luciano flies to Cuba to meet with Meyer Lansky to discuss casinos
and other interests.
Dec. 22, The "Havana Conference" takes
place in Cuba; Luciano invites major mobsters from America and Italy, who
attend this historic meeting.
December
26: The formal opening of the Flamingo
Hotel Casino in Las Vegas--backed by such hoodlum figures as Benjamin (Bugsy)
Siegel, Meyer Lanky, Frank Costello, and Joe Adonis-- marked the infiltration
of Nevada gambling by the organized criminal element. The formal opening of the
hotel itself took place on March 1, 1947.
The
Flamingo opens under heavy expectations by the mob investors.
El
Cortez in Las Vegas is purchased by Charles Berman and his partners are Siegel,
Moe Sedway, Gus Greenbaum, and Lansky.
In
Chicago, Lenny Patrick and two others were implicated in a sensational murder
case, the shotgun shooting of James Ragen, the owner of a racing news service
who opposed mob efforts to take over his business.
William Goldstein was Chicago gangster Billy Skidmore’s partner and lawyer, but turned witness against him when he faced perjury charges in an income tax case
When
the mob kidnapped Chicago’s black rackets boss Edward P. Jones in May, it was
widely assumed that Joe Peskin was a major factor behind the crime. Jones had
just invested $100,000 in Juke Boxes that he intended to distribute across
Bronzeville, an area controlled by Peskin’s Juke Box rackets.
1947
Jacob Gurrah Shapiro dies in prison while
serving a life sentence. Shapiro had been a leader of the Murder Inc. organization
in New York.
Louis
Lipschultz, Jake Guzik’s brother in law, according to the chief of police of
Cicero, Ill., contacted him and offered him $100,000 to permit gambling to
operate in Cicero. The offer was turned down. Lipschultz at that time said he
was merely a spokesman for friends.
June
20: Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel was shot to death through a living-room
window while sitting in the Beverly Hills mansion of his paramour, Virginia
Hill.
Jack
Entratter, the one time doorman-bouncer at the Stork Club in Manhattan before
moving over to the Copacabana. Myer Lansky’s Mafia protector, Jimmy “Blue Eyes”
Alo offered him a job in Vegas overlooking the Sands Casino with a 12- point
interest in the place, or at least on the books. In all probability Entratter
was a placeholder for Mafia bosses.
It
was estimated that Joe Peskin of Universal Automatic Music Corp. had about 900
jukeboxes placed on location across the city. He also controlled locations in
Cicero, Argo, Calumet City, in Illinois, Hammond, Indiana Harbor, and Whiting
Illinois. Peskin fronted for the Chicago
Automatic Music Co and later for the Automatic Music Instruments Co. in
California, Nevada, and Washington
1948
The
Thunderbird casino opens in Las Vegas. Jake Lansky would run this casino under
his brother Meyer’s watch.
May
26, 1950: The Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in
Interstate Commerce (popularly known as the Kefauver Committee, even though
Senator Estes Kefauver resigned his chairmanship on May 1, 1951) opened
hearings in Miami, Florida. Subsequent hearings were held in various cities
throughout the country until August 17, 1951.
1949
Longy
Zwillman’s political contributions to Ne Jersey politicians are examined by the
federal government
1950
The
Kefauver hearings on Organized Crime begin. Hearings were held from May 10
1950, the day that the Attorney General of the United States declared that the
committee had no reason to exist, until May 1 1951.
The
Dessert Inn casino was opened in Las Vegas and Wilbur Clark was the owner.
1951
Joey
Glimco takes the fifth 80 times before the Kefauver committee
March
21 Kefauver committee concluded in New York. Kefauver declares that “there are
two major crime syndicates in this country the Accardo Guzik Fischetti syndicate whose headquarters are Chicago and the
Costello Adonis Lansky syndicate based in New York” it pointed out that Accardo
influence went to Chicago, Kansas City
Dallas Miami Las Vegas Minneapolis Des
Moines and Los Angles”
Mickey
Cohen is convicted of income tax evasion.
August
Waxey" Gordon is arrested for drug trafficking (heroin) in an FBI sting
and sentenced to 25 years to life in Sing-Sing, then Attica, then Alcatraz.
September: Meyer Lansky is charged with illegal
gambling in Saratoga Springs NY
1952
The New York Crime commission interviews
Alfred Topliz
the Democratic leader of Manhattan's First Assembly and supposed associate of
New York hood Trigger Mike Coppola
March: Fulgencio Batista, who was financed by
Lansky, took over Cuba’s government with a coup.
The
casinos The Strip and Sands open up in Las Vegas.
Waxey
Gordon dies of a heart attack while locked up for life in Alcatraz
Michael
Brodkin was a major mob lawyer in the early 1950s who was brought into the
organization by gambler Billy Skidmore. Working through the notorious law firm
of Bieber & Brodkin, Brodkin assisted the mob in dividing up the millions
skimmed form the Las Vegas casino in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The cash
was delivered to Brodkin’s office on a monthly basis by a mobster’s wife who
traveled from Chicago to Vegas and back again via railroad. Upon her arrival to
Chicago, Brodkin’s firm would book her a her room at the expensive Ambassador
East Hotel. The next day she would deliver the cash to Brodkin’s office where
Chicago portion was taken and held for a representative from the bosses.
1953
David Kind, a major stockholder and probably a
mob front man, was listed as one of the
owners of the mob operated Miami Beach Kennel Club. In 1929, Kind, Lew Shumway
and Eddie O’Hara were indicted for conspiracy.
May
2” Meyer Lansky is convicted of illegal gambling, after pleading guilty to five
of the total twenty one charges, and serves three months in a New York prison.
April
5: Victor Riesel, a nationally known labor columnist, was blinded in an
acid attack while leaving a New York City restaurant. LCN member John Dioguardi
was indicted but never tried.
June
18: Girolomo (Momo) Adamo, underboss of the Los Angeles Family, committed
suicide in San Diego after seriously wounding his wife over an affair she
allegedly was having with the then head of the Family, Frank Desimone.
July
18: The Narcotics Control Act of 1956 was signed into law, drastically
increasing penalties for engaging in the illicit-drug trade.
David
Kind was a major stockholder and probably a mob front man, in 1953 he was
listed as one of the owners of the mob operated Miami Beach Kennel Club. In
1929, Kind, Lew Shumway and Eddie O’Hara were indicted for conspiracy.
On
record, Sam Taran was the head of the Taran Distributing Co., records and
appliance division in Miami, Fla. Taran was an ex-bootlegger with a long record
for violations of the internal revenue laws. A one-time prize-fighter, he
served two years in Illinois state prisons in 1934. Taran distributing was
widely known as the Chicago mobs front company in Florida in the juke box
business.
1955
The
casinos Riviera and Dunes open in Las Vegas
Nov.4
Willie Bioff is blown up after getting in the driver's seat of his car, in his
garage, in Arizona.
Moe
Dalitz and Sam Tucker take over Meyer Lansky’s Havana casino, The International
1956
The
Chicago mob fix it man, Jake Guzik, dies of a heart attack
1957
Max Podolsky, (Born 1900) Known for decades as
an enforcer for Joey Glimco in the jukebox racket. Officially, Podolsky was an
organizer for the egg handlers union local 663. He was indicted for attempted
extortion in 1957 of Kraft foods, but the federal government later dropped the
case for lack of evidence after their witnesses refused to appear in court.
Podolsky had a police record dating back to 1921. However, that record
disappeared from police files several days after it was requested by the
Kefauver Committee.
February
26: The Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or
Management Field (popularly known as the "Senate Rackets Committee"
and chaired by Senator John L. McClellan) opened hearings in Washington, D.C.
Subsequent hearings lasted until December 3, 1958, and included an intensive
probe into the hoodlum meeting held at Apalachin, New York.
David
Berman dies in Las Vegas.
The
Tropicana casino opens in Las Vegas. Built by Phil Kastel, who had previous
involvement in the Beverly County Club.
1958
Edward Vogel AKA Eddie. Vogel, known as the
“Slot machine king of Cook County” started with the Outfit under Jim Colosimo
and stayed with it until the 1960’s. On October 1, 1926, he was indicted,
together with Al Capone, the mayor and chief of police of Cicero, and others
for conspiring to violate the prohibition laws. Vogel worked with George
"Babe" Tottenelli, who was the trouble-shooter for Vogel. In 1949,
Vogel and his partner’s mobsters Gus Alex and Ross Prio ran the biggest bookie
joint in the city, perhaps in the country, across from the United States Post
office on Canal and Van Buren. The place brought in over $100,000.00 a month.
The outfits average large hand book, and there about 15 of them across Cook
County was taking in $5,150,000 a year. In the 1960s, Vogel was officially
employed by the Apex Cigarette Service, Inc., (A cigarette-vending machine
company. At the time, a package of cigarettes cost 20 cents)
at 1010 George Street., Chicago. Sam Giancana was also employed there.
The company was started in n December of 1937. In 1958, the company paid Vogel
$1000,000 a year in salary.
December
3: Gus Greenbaum, Las Vegas casino operator, and his wife were found murdered
in their Phoenix, Arizona, home.
1959
Cuban
Revolution. Eight days after Cuba fell, Chicagoan Jack Ruby, the man who would
kill Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, made contact with Robert McKeown,
a Texas gunrunner who had been supplying weapons to Castro. Ruby never gave a
full explanation of why he contacted McKeown
Feburary
26: Abner Zwillman is killed or committed suicide
1961
August, the Chicago mob decided it wanted Joe
Peskin, the juke box king, out of the way and made three attempts to kill him
with bombs (each failed to go off) and sent a crew to his home beat him with
baseball bats.
September 8 Frank Rosenthal (1929-2008),
friend of Chicago mobsters, appeared before a Senate hearing on gambling and
organized crime. He invoked the Fifth Amendment 38 times.
December
Bernard Glickman assured Sam Giancana that sonny Liston would do anything that
he was asked to do in the fight between sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson
1963
Ruby
Kolad and "Icepick Wille" Alderman, executives at the Desert Inn are
convicted with Milwaukee Phil Aldersio for extortion of a Denver businessman.
May
6: Irving Vine (Born Fein in 1905) a South Side Chicago gambler ‘A walking
bookie’ who had agreed to testify before an IRS hearing on gangster Murray
Humpreys income, is strangled to death in his hotel room at the Del Prado Hotel
at 5307 Hyde Park Blvd. Bernard “Pipi” Posner (Born 1920) was suspected in the
murder. Vine’s ankles were tied to his wrists, effectively choking himself to
death. His ribs were fractured and his nose was broken. He was in his boxer
shorts, covered by a sheet when the cleaning maid found him. Vine had been a
heavy bookie since 1943 when he operated a casino at 1318 East 47th
Street in Chicago
September
25: The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (popularly known as the
McClellan Committee) opened hearings in Washington, D.C., regarding
"Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics." Featuring the
testimony of LCN member Joe Valachi, the hearings lasted periodically until
August 5, 1964.
The
Bahamas become a new location for casinos. Several people become interested in
financing casinos there.
1965
September 11, Manny Skar, a Chicago Outfit member
and nightclub owner involved in illegal gambling dies
1966
Bernard
Glickman, Chicago mob gambler active from the 1930 until at least the 1980s.
Officially, Glickman was a fight promoter. He was partners with Accardo in the
Cool Vent and Storm Window corporation as well as Howard Gardens, an apartment
complex that he managed. In 1966, he
was said to have been badly beaten by Milwaukee Phil Aldersio. According to
rumor, Glickman had been warned to stay away from Chicago based fighter Ernie
Terrell a promising heavyweight fighter who was scheduled to take on Muhammad
Ali. The mobsters felt that Glickman’s known association with the mob,
especially with Tony Accardo, could ruin Terrell’s career. Instead, on November
1, 1961, Glickman flew to New York and was seen publicly with Terrell around
the city. Shortly afterwards the state of New York refused to grant Terrell a
boxing license because of his known association with Glickman. When Glickman
returned to Chicago, Aldersio beat him senseless, breaking Glickman’s arm. In
1969, Glickman was reported to be living under an assumed name in California
where he sold hearing aides.
New
Jersey loan shark Harold Konigsberg is sent to prison.
May
23 Chicago mobster Benny Stein is sent to prison for 18 months for labor
racketeering
Frederick P. Ackerman, a lawyer and business partner
with Mad Sam DeStefano of Chicago, enters the witness protection program
1967
Ruby Kolad, once with the Mayfield Road Boys
and the Desert Inn, died at age 57 of a heart attack
1968
Lansky,
Cohen, and partners are indicted by the American Government for skimming thirty
million dollars from the Flamingo casino
1970
Lansky
flees to Israel
1971
March
13 Paul Red Dorfman dies at age 69.
1972
Chicago’s
Lenny Patrick was still running Rogers Park with his banker Joe Epstein
November
5: Meyer Lansky, American hoodlum and gambling figure, departed Israel after
the Israeli Supreme Court denied his appeal for the continuance of his tourist
visa or his application for immigrant status (previously rejected in September
1971, by the Minister of the Interior). Although Lansky's airplane traveled
through Switzerland, Africa, and several countries in South and Central America
he was unable to gain entry to any other country and was arrested by FBI Agents
at the Miami airport, November 7, 1972, on contempt of Federal grand jury
charges.
1974
April 18, Ronnie Yaras (Born 1938)
a massage palor operator in Miami Beach was shot dead by person’s unknown n his
house. Three months before, their father, Dave Yaras, suffered a heart attack
while playing golf and died in Miami.
1976
September:
Paul Gonsky Chicago porn pimp found dead next to his car, shot six times in the
head with a .22. Tony Spilotro is suspected
Lefty
Rosenthal is charged with skimming seven million a year from the Stardust
Casino.
Bernard
“Pipi” Posner, a Chicago strongman, is shaking down pornography dealers in
Chicago
1977
Lenny
Patrick is sent to jail to for criminal contempt of court. He will serve four
years on the charge
1980
The
New Jersey Gaming Commission banned Alvin Malnik, Meyer Lansky’s former
attorney, from the state's casinos, citing links to organized crime figures
that dates back half a century. He had been linked to Sam Cohen, who was
indicted along with Lansky on charges of skimming $30 million in profits from
the Flamingo Hotel Casino in Las Vegas.
In 1971, Malnik and Cohen bought 325 acres of undeveloped land that
belonged to a Dade County country club and earned $14.7 million profit from the
sale of the land.
1982
October
4. Frank Rosenthal Las Vegas casino operator, survived a car bomb when his
Cadillac exploded as he turned the key. He ran the mob-owned Stardust, Fremont,
Hacienda and Marina casinos
1983
Meyer
Lansky dies
January 20, Allen Dorfman, whose
company handles the Teamsters loans to Las Vegas, is killed in a Chicago
parking lot
1985
January 10 In Chicago, Lenny Yaras, the son of legendary
hoodlum Dave Yaras was murdered as he made his usual rounds collecting street
tax from bookies in the Rogers Park neighborhood, the same area his father had
worked in fifty years before.
1992
Lenny Patrick would turn states evidence on
Chicago’s acting boss, Gus Alex
1999
Donald
Schemel (Born 1951) ran a Chicago water taxi service, Schemel Marine
Services. Since Schemel docked his boats
on the Chicago River, which is controlled by the mobbed up 1st Ward, police
suspect that pressures were put on him to pay a shake down fee for using the
river. Apparently he refused. City inspectors cracked down on his company and
cited him with a series of petty complaints.
Finally on August 14, 1999, he
was shot and killed at 1900 South Lumber
St. by persons unknown who fired several shots into Schemel as he sat in his
truck.
Excerpt from my book "When Capone’s Mob Murdered Touhy.”
“Ten
Percent Tony"
"Tony Cermak was an example of the lowest type of machine
politics that the corrupt political life of Chicago had yet produced. He was
uncouth, gruff, insolent and inarticulate ... he could engage in no more
intelligent discussion of the larger political issues of the day than he could
of the Einstein theory of relativity. He appeared to take pride in his lack of
polish."-Judge Lyle
Like Matt Kolb, Roger Touhy was a cautious man. He was not prone to
mistakes or leaps injudgement, especially when it came to defying a man as
dangerous as Al Capone. In fact, the only reason he would have entered a
shooting war against Capone and his massive criminal organization was based on
his absolute certainty that hewould win. That, and his little known agreement with
Chicago's powerful mayor, Anton Cermak, made the bootlegger positive that he
could pull Capone from his throne.
"Ten Percent" Tony
Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, would lead the Touhys into a war with the Capone
syndicate. Tony Cermak was, as Judge Lyle noted, "not a nice man."
Instead he was an intim- idator and a bully with a violent temper, who would
never walk away from a confrontation. He liked very few people and trusted no
one. As his power grew, so did his paranoia. In the state house, as president
of Cook County and later as mayor, Cermak used wiretaps, stolen mail, secret
surveillance and informants to get intelligence on the weaknesses of his
enemies.
Cermak was born on May 7, 1873 in a Bohemian village about fifty miles
from Prague. The family immigrated to America in 1884, settling in a Chicago
slum. In 1900, the Cermak family moved to Braidwood, in southern Illinois,
where the elder Cermak worked as a coal miner. At age sixteen Tony returned to
Chicago alone and saw his opportunity in the rough and tumble world of ethnic
politics. He organized the Bohemian community into a powerful voting machine
and before he was old enough to vote himself, Tony Cermak was a political power
in the Windy City.
In addition to his unquenchable thirst for power, Cermak was also a
greedy man who used his power and position to grow wealthy. While still a ward
politician, he formed the United Societies, a high- sounding name for what was
nothing more then a shakedown operation to collect money from the hundreds of
pimps and saloon owners who worked along the notoriously wicked 22nd Street
(which was later, oddly enough, renamed Cermak Road).
In 1902, at age twenty-six, Cermak went to the State Capitol as a member
of the House of Representatives. He eventually worked his way up to Speaker of
the House. This position allowed him, if he wished, to block every piece of
banking reform legislation before the House. It was a position for which the
state's bankers paid him richly. After three terms in the capitol, Cermak's net
worth was more than one million dollars. By the time he became mayor of Chicago
at age fifty-six, Tony Cermak, the nearly illiterate immigrant, boasted a net
worth of seven million dollars, although he never had a job that paid him more
then $12,000 a year.
In 1931, Cermak was the undisputed boss of the most powerful political
machine in the country, and declared himself a candidate for Mayor of Chicago.
The syndicate, sensing the federal government might step in to restore order to
the streets of Chicago if the hopelessly corrupt "Big Bill" Thompson
was re-elected, stood solidly behind Cermak's candidacy. Ten Percent Tony
Cermak the syndicate figured, was one of them. They could live and prosper with
Cermak at the helm. On election day, April 7, 1931, Cermak trounced Thompson by
the largest margin ever recorded in a Chicago may- oral election. He promised
the people of Chicago that he would rid their city of gangsters before the
Century of Progress Exhibition opened at the World's Fair in the summer of 1933.
But Cermak wouldn't rid Chicago of organized crime. Instead he would try to
corral it, dominate it, and grow rich from it. All he had to do was give it
another face, a plot the federal government had unknowingly aided by putting
Capone in prison on a shaky tax charge. Capone's imprisonment left a void in
Chicago's crime syndicate. Cermak intended to fill that void with Roger Touhy.
Touhy had told Saul Alinsky, a sociologist, writer and former member of
the Joliet State Prison parole board, that in 1932 he entered a partnership
with Cermak to run Chicago's underworld. The middle man in the deal was Teddy
Newberry, a thug who at one time or another had been associated with every
major gang in the city and acted as Cermak's bag man on the street.
In a meeting at the mayor's office, Cermak and Newberry urged Touhy to
wage a war with Capone's mob. Roger was reluctant. A defensive position against
the mob was one thing, but an all out war was entirely different. The syndicate
could, Touhy pointed out, muster at least 500 gunmen in a few days. Cermak
responded, 'You can have the entire police department."
Eventually, Roger agreed to go along, and Cermak sent word to his police
commanders that the Touhys were to be cooperated with in the war against the
syndicate.
Wars cost money. Before the shooting started Roger had to be positive
that the cash he needed to support a street war was in place. Anton Cermak
could help with that.
At 6:56 A.M., on December 6, 1932, Tommy Touhy led a gang of five masked
men into the United States Post Office in the heart of Chicago's Loop. They
overpowered the guard and stole $500,000 in securities and cash. The getaway
was easy. Two hours earlier, Cermak called the police shift commander and
ordered him to pull all of his men out of the area. A month later the Touhys,
armed with machine guns, robbed a Minneapolis postal truck of $78,417 in bonds,
cash, certificates and jewelry. Several days later they struck again, robbing a
Colorado mail truck of $520,000 in cash.
During that time Cermak increased his raids on syndicate gambling dens.
In one afternoon alone, Chicago police acting on Cermak's orders impounded 200
syndicate slot machines plus another 300 machines stored at Gottleib and
Company warehouses. This was the same Gottleib that would later provide slots
to mob-owned Las Vegas casinos. As soon as the police took the syndicate's
machines, Touhy's men replaced them with their own one armed bandits. The
moment a Mob handbook was closed Touhy's operators were moved in to fill the
gap. As always, Cermak had an ulterior motive. The raids were a calculated move
to cut the syndicate's cash flow in half so that they wouldn't have the funding
to carry on a drawn out street war.
It didn't take the mob's leadership a long time to figure out they had
been double-crossed by Cermak, who, along with Touhy, was now putting on the
double squeeze. The quick solution for the syndicate was to kill Roger and
Tommy Touhy. However killing them wouldn't prove easy, especially now that they
were surrounded by a small army of enforcers including George "Baby
Face" Nelson, a proven tough guy.
Still, the syndicate's bosses were determined to stop the flow of union
treasuries to Touhy. To do that, they would have to send out a message; they had
to throw a scare into the union bosses. It had to be loud and violent and it
had to be someone close to Touhy.
Bill Rooney was just the right person.
William James Rooney was a labor goon who had done his first prison time
back in 1907. In the years that followed Rooney would face dozens of arrests
including one in 1910 for the suspected murder of Joseph Patrick Shea. Shea had
been the business agent for the Chicago sheet metal workers' union, a local
which Rooney was trying to muscle his way into. He was acquitted of the murder,
even though he had shot Shea dead in the middle of the union hall in front of
at least 150 witnesses. No one testified against him and Rooney was released to
continue his takeover of the union. By 1928, he not only controlled the sheet
metal workers', but the flat janitors' and the meat cutters' unions as well.
Capone sent word that he wanted half of Rooney's labor empire. Rooney refused
and Capone threatened his life. Unfazed, Rooney made his own threats and then
started to move his operation and his family out to Des Plains to live under
Touhy's protection.
On the night they killed him, Rooney was still moving his belongings
from his home in Chicago to a rented house in Des Plains. His wife and two
children had already driven to the country.
Rooney waited outside his home while his chauffeur sprinted down the
street to retrieve his car from a rented garage about five minutes away. Draped
in a heavy grey top coat and dress hat, Rooney paced back and forth on the lawn
as a blue sedan pulled up to the curb. One of the men in the back seat,
believed to be Paul Ricca, rolled down a window and said, "Hi Billy.
"
When Rooney stepped up to the car and bent down to look inside, a
shotgun appeared in the window and three blasts ripped into Rooney's head,
chest and stomach. Remarkably, the blast didn't knock him down. Instead, Rooney
grabbed the car as it sped away, but then slid slowly to his knees. He was
dragged twenty-five feet before releasing his grip.
With Rooney dead, Red Barker and Murray Humpreys took over the sheet
metal and the building service employees' union and looted its treasury.
Rooney's murder was one of the last bright moments for the syndicate.
For the next two years, the Touhy-Cermak-Newberry combination pounded the mob
mercilessly. In fact, within three days of Rooney's murder, the Touhys
responded by killing Johnny Genaro, Capone's new acting chief of staff, and his
driver, Joey Vince, by pulling up along the side of Genaro's car and drilling a
dozen rounds of machine gun fire into both of them.
Genero died immediately but Vince managed to live until the cops
arrived. A patrolman lifted the hood's head out of a pool of blood and
whispered "Who shot you? Who did this?"
For a man full of bullet holes on the threshold of death, Vince was
remarkably lucid. He sat upright for a second and said '1 can't describe the
men. I was too confused at the moment it happened...and I would never tell you
anyway, you piece of shit. "
Then he fell back into the gutter and died.
A few days later, Roger Touhy, armed with a machine gun, walked into a
meeting at the Teamsters Headquarters in Chicago. With him was his top
enforcer, Willie Sharkey, and two other men. Each of them carried a machine gun
and a pistol as they herded the union officials and lined them up against the
wall. As more members entered the building for a special emergency meeting,
they too were lined up against the wall until there were over one hundred
members held hostage.
After two hours, Roger stood before the crowd and spoke.
"Listen up you mugs, we've come here today to clean the dago
syndicate out of the Teamsters Union."
A cheer went up across the room from the membership. Roger looked over
the faces in the hall and spotted a half dozen of Murray Humpreys' enforcers including
Artie Barrett whom Touhy had known from the Valley. "We thought you were a
right guy" he said to Barrett. 'What are you doing hanging around these
rats for?"
'Well, hell, I gotta eat Rog, " Barrett said.
He let Barrett leave but pulled two of the syndicate's union leaders
named Goldberg and Sass into an office and told them to call Murray Humpreys
and tell him to come to the building as soon as he could. When they said they
couldn't remember the number, Roger said, 'Well, get together and think it up
or we'll give it to you right outside the door. None of you other mugs have to
be afraid, we're after Klondike O'Donnell, Camel Humpreys and Jack White and we
won't hurt anybody else."
Out of ignorance or fear Goldberg and Sass didn't place the call.
Roger rounded up his men and left the building at 11:30 in the morning,
three full hours after they had arrived, taking Goldberg and Sass with him. His
last words to the membership were, 'These two are going to get theirs. "
Once again the membership exploded in cheers.
Sass and Goldberg were released two days later. They were not harmed or
abused. "Actually," said Goldberg, "they treated us well. The
food was excellent. The conversation was good."
Touhy's brazen daylight raid on the heart of the syndicate's union
operation was a slap in the face for Red Barker and Murray Humpreys. The
syndicate, less than several hundred in number, had ruled over Chicago's
massive unions by fear and the threat of violence. Touhy's raid had temporarily
taken away that edge and they needed to get it back.
Barker and Humpreys retaliated with a daylight drive-by shooting at
Wall's Bar-B-Que and Rib. Wall's was a restaurant frequented by the Touhys
because Roger had developed a friendship with a waitress, Peggy Carey. In the
middle of a sun-filled Saturday afternoon, four carloads of syndicate gunmen
sped by the restaurant while Roger and several of his men lounged around in the
parking lot. They sprayed the lot and the restaurant with machine gun fire. The
Touhys returned fire but remarkably, no one was injured in the melee.
In retaliation for the shooting the Touhys struck The Dells, a large
syndicate speakeasy and casino operating just inside Touhy's territory. It was
under the protection of a hood named Fred Pacelli, younger brother of future
United States Congressman Bill Pacelli. Three of Roger's best men, Willie
Sharkey, Roy Marshalk and George Wilke arrived at The Dells driving Roger
Touhy's new Chrysler sedan. They walked into the casino, surrounded Pacelli and
fired one round into his face and one into the small of his back. After the
hood's girlfriend, Maryanne Bruce, tried to wrestle the pistol out of
Marshalk's hand they fired a round into her head as well.
A few days later, the Touhys gunned down Red Barker. It was a damaging
blow to the syndicate. Willie Sharkey, Roger's most reliable killer, had rented
an apartment overlooking Barker's office and waited there patiently, perched in
a window, with a water-cooled, tripod set machine gun. Sharkey killed Barker by
firing thirty-six bullets into him in a matter of seconds as he walked down the
street.
At almost exactly the same time across town, Touhy's gunners, dressed as
Chicago police and riding in a borrowed police cruiser, killed a syndicate
enforcer named "Fat Tony" Jerfitar, and his partner, Nicky
Provenzano. The drive by shooting occurred as the two hoods sat in front of a
store with their eyes closed, sun bathing their faces. They never knew what hit
them.
Next, Touhy's gang killed a beer peddler named James J. Kenny. He was
found in an alley dead, having had the back of his head blown off. A few weeks
before the murder the Touhys had taken the unusual step of warning Kenny not to
push the syndicate's booze inside their kingdom. He did it anyway, so they
killed him.
Four days later an unknown hood, believed to be a professional killer
imported from New York by Frank Nitti, was found dead on a Chicago sidewalk.
His face was blown off by shotgun pellets. His frozen body was planted,
literally, in a snow bank on a dead end street.
A week later, Joe Provenzo, a syndicate soldier, was killed when two men
wearing police uniforms asked him his name. When he answered, they thanked him,
shot him through the head and calmly walked away. Five minutes later and
several blocks away, John Liberto, another Nitti hood, was shot in the head at
close range by the same two men.
After that the syndicate took two more hard hits. At the crack of dawn
Cermak was in his office, surrounded by his special squad and the Chicago chief
of police, planning the day's raids against the mob's most lucrative casinos.
Over the remainder of the morning, working on information provided by Roger
Touhy and Teddy Newberry, twelve mob casinos were closed down. Sixteen Chicago
detectives were demoted, reassigned or fired for allowing a rising syndicate
hood named "Tough Tony" Capezio to operate in their districts. The
loss of sixteen cops, all bought and paid for, hurt the syndicate badly,
leaving them with very few officers on the take.
Cermak's pressure on the police
department had scared most officers off the syndicate's pad, while the others
waited on the sidelines to see who would come out on top in this war.
The next blow came when two of the syndicate's best gunners, Nicholas
Maggio, and his partner in crime, Anthony Persico, were targeted in a
retaliation killing for the murder of Bill Rooney. John Rooney, the business
agent for the billposters' union and brother to Bill Rooney, ambushed and
killed the two men on a back stretch of road deep inside Touhy's territory.
The syndicate was taking a pounding. Their ranks were already thinned
from assaults by the federal government, not to mention the beating they were
taking at the hands of the Touhy organization. To bolster their numbers the
outfit's leaders recruited members of the 42s, a gang of crazy kids from an
Italian neighborhood called the Patch. This same gang would produce the
syndicate's next ruling body in the form of Sam Giancana, Marshal Ciafano,
Teets Battaglia and others.
Reinforced with the 42s, the syndicate tracked down a top Touhy enforcer
named Frank Schaeffler, once a contender for the world's light heavy-weight
crown. They shot him as he entered an all-night speakeasy called The Advance.
The Touhy forces struck back by killing a major syndicate pimp named
Nicky Renelli and in a separate incident gunning down Elmer Russel, a bouncer
at a syndicate bar called the Alaskan Forum Road House.
The next mob hood to die was Maurice Barrett. He was shot through the
head and arm, then dropped at the front door of a neighborhood hospital where
he bled to death.
Three days later the Touhys lined up three of Nitti's men and shot them
through the knees with machine guns after they tried to muscle into a meeting
at the Chicago house painters' union.
The Touhys scored another big hit when they killed Danny Cain, the
thirty-two-year-old president of the Chicago Coal Teamsters and brother-in-law
of George Red Barker. Several men in a car followed Cain home as he left a
nightclub. They pulled up alongside his car and drowned it in machine gun fire.
On a freezing Wednesday night, Willie O'Brien, a slugger employed by the
Touhys, walked into a popular speakeasy called the Garage. There he was jumped
by three men who tried to force him outside to the rear alley where a car was
waiting. O'Brien managed to fight them all off until one of the men pulled a
pistol and fired a shot into O'Brien's back. Unarmed, O'Brien was running
toward the front door when another shot caught him in the leg and a third shot
went into the palm of his right hand as he used it to cover his spine. A half
an hour later O'Brien staggered into the waiting room of the Augustana
hospital.
Officer Martin O'Malley, who grew up with Touhy and O'Brien in the
Valley, arrived and interviewed the hood on his death bed.
'Who shot you Billy?"
"I known them. Known them for ten years, but I won't tell you who
they are. "
"You're going to die Billy. Who killed you? I'll have your
revenge."
O'Brien just shook his head and died.
Seven days later, the Touhys struck back. It was fifteen degrees below
zero and snowing when a car pulled up to the curb. Several men in long coats climbed
out, walked into a pool room and poured five shots into a syndicate hood named
Fred Petilli who was leaning against a pool table, his back to the door. A few
moments later the same car pulled up in front of The Garage nightclub where
Jimmy O'Brien had been killed. A tall man, probably Basil Banghart, opened the
front door to the club, tossed in a bomb and said "This is for Jimmy, you
bastards!"
The bomb blew the place to bits but remarkably, no one was killed.
After that, Charlie O'Neill, a very young Touhy gunman, was kidnapped
off the street, shot twice in the head and dumped in the middle of traffic on a
busy intersection.
The Touhys responded by killing a labor goon named Nichols Razes. They
shot him five times during a running gun battle in the Green Hut restaurant
owned by Razes' brother. Charles McKenna, a Touhy labor enforcer and president
of the truck painters' union, was shot in the arm during the gun battle. He was
arrested for murder as he straggled down the street, murder weapon still in
hand. He was held, booked and then released for "lack of evidence."
That same month, the syndicate tried to kidnap Roger Touhy's two sons as
they waited for their mother to pick them up from school in Des Plains.
Somebody had to pay for that and Roger chose Eddie Gambino, a dope peddler and
union goon. They caught Gambino as he was about to step out of his car. Two
gunmen, stepped up to the driver's window and opened fire. Before he bled to
death, Gambino was able to pull his own pistol but dropped it before he could
fire at his killers. One of the two killers, enraged at Gambino's defiance,
stepped back over to the hood's blood-smeared face and fired at his temple.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. He is the author of numerous non-fiction on the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."
His non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.
His play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
DON’T WORRY-BE HAPPY
New
research says that increasing personal happiness produces easier weight loss
Many people believe that if they
lose weight they will be happier about themselves, but new research by the
University of Adelaide is suggesting people take the opposite approach.
School of Psychology PhD candidate and
clinical psychologist, Sharon Robertson, has found a direct correlation between
obesity and a lack of mental well-being, and believes that if people focus on
improving their happiness, rather than solely on losing weight, weight loss may
come easier.
"Our preliminary research
looked at happiness and well-being in people who are obese," says Ms
Robertson.
"We used a national sample
of 260 adults, separated into five categories according to their body mass
index (BMI): normal weight, overweight, and obese classes one, two and three.
"We found that those who
were obese were more likely to be depressed and experience less positive emotions
than the normal and overweight groups, and this lack of well-being may be
contributing to weight loss failure," she says.
Ms Robertson's research has also
been looking at the impact of positive psychology techniques on weight loss.
"Positive psychology
techniques promote positive thinking and positive feelings, and this 'feel
good' effect may lead to an increase in motivation. In the case of weight loss
specifically, it can promote weight loss behaviour," says Ms Robertson.
"We recently trialled this
approach on women in a small pilot study. Over a four-week period we worked to
improve their hope, personal strengths, gratitude and general happiness.
"The psychology sessions did
not focus on weight loss, however, half of the participants lost weight over
the course of the intervention. And at 12-week follow up, three quarters of the
participants had lost additional weight," she says.
While in the early stages, Ms
Robertson believes her findings support the idea of promoting positive
psychological health in weight loss programs.
"There is no joy in focusing
on weight loss, particularly if someone is constantly failing to lose
weight," says Ms Robertson.
"I'm not saying that
traditional programs are ineffective, but for those who have had little success
with weight loss, perhaps focusing on their psychological health first will
lead to better outcomes.
"Traditional weight loss
programs may benefit from including a positive psychological approach to
improve happiness and motivation, and to facilitate weight loss goals,"
she says.
Ms Robertson is hoping to
continue researching psychological well-being and weight loss upon completion
of her PhD, and test her approach more rigorously.
Arts & CultureColin Dwyer ·
NPR · Oct 8, 2015
Investigative journalist Svetlana
Alexievich has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish
Academy announced Thursday. Alexievich is the first writer from Belarus to win
the prize.
Alexievich won "for her
polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,"
according to the citation for the award.
On her personal website,
Alexievich explains her pursuit of journalism: "I chose a genre where
human voices speak for themselves." Fittingly, Alexievich prefers to leave
the stories to her many interviewees, letting eyewitness accounts shed an
unsettling light on tragedies like World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War and the
disaster at Chernobyl — an investigation that has been read aloud in excerpts
on All Things Considered.
For that work, Voices from
Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Alexievich interviewed
hundreds of people touched by the massive 1986 nuclear meltdown, which spread
radioactivity on the wind across much of Eastern Europe.
"All of my books consist of
witnesses' evidence, people's living voices," she told the Dalkey Archive
Press. "I usually spend three to four years writing a book, but this time
it took me more than ten years."
In an interview following the
announcement, the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius,
elaborated on the decision.
"For the past 30 or 40
years, she has been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual,"
Danius said. "But it's not really about a history of events; it's about a
history of emotions."
If you're new to Alexievich's
work, Danius added, she recommends beginning with War's Unwomanly Face -- a
history the Soviet women who fought as soldiers in the Second World War.
It has been quite a long time
since a nonfiction writer won the Nobel. Not since the heady days of Bertrand
Russell and Winston Churchill, over half a century ago, has an author won for a
career of work primarily in nonfiction. Alexievich's prize breaks that long dry
spell.
The 67-year-old is the 112th
writer — and 14th woman — to win the prize. She will receive her medal at a
ceremony on Dec. 10.
Excerpts:
'Voices From Chernobyl'
Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of
deceased fireman Vasily Ignatenko
I'm sitting on my little chair
next to him at night. At eight I say: "Vasenka, I'm going for a little
walk." He opens his eyes and closes them, lets me go. I just walk to the
dorm, go up to my room, lie down on the floor, I couldn't lie on the bed,
everything hurt too much, when already the cleaning lady is knocking. "Go!
Run to him! He's calling for you like mad!" That morning Tanya Kibenok
pleaded with me: "Come to the cemetery, I can't go there alone." They
were burying Vitya Kibenok and Volodya Pravik. They were friends of my Vasya.
Our families were friends. There's a photo of us all in the building the day
before the explosion. Our husbands are so handsome! And happy! It was the last
day of that life. We were all so happy!
I came back from the cemetery and
called the nurse's post right away. "How is he?" "He died
fifteen minutes ago." What? I was there all night. I was gone for three
hours! I came up to the window and started shouting: "Why? Why?" I
looked up at the sky and yelled. The whole building could hear me. They were
afraid to come up to me. Then I came to: I'll see him one more time! Once more!
I run down the stairs. He was still in his bio-chamber, they hadn't taken him
away yet. His last words were "Lyusya! Lyusenka!" "She's just
stepped away for a bit, she'll be right back," the nurse told him. He
sighed and went quiet. I didn't leave him anymore after that. I escorted him
all the way to the grave site. Although the thing I remember isn't the grave,
it's the plastic bag. That bag.
At the morgue they said,
"Want to see what we'll dress him in?" I do! They dressed him up in
formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn't get shoes on him because his
feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they
couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all —
wounds. The last two days in the hospital — I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the
bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces
of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his
internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take
out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write
about. And even to live through. It was all mine.
My love. They couldn't get a
single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.
Right before my eyes — in his
formal wear — they put him in that cellophane bag of theirs and tied it up. And
then they put this bag in the wooden coffin. And they tied the coffin with
another bag. The plastic is transparent, but thick, like a tablecloth. And then
they put all that into a zinc coffin. They squeezed it in. Only the cap didn't
fit.
Everyone came — his parents, my
parents. They bought black handkerchiefs in Moscow. The Extraordinary
Commission met with us. They told everyone the same thing: it's impossible for
us to give you the bodies of your husbands, your sons, they are very
radioactive and will be buried in a Moscow cemetery in a special way. In sealed
zinc caskets, under cement tiles. And you need to sign this document here.
If anyone got indignant and
wanted to take the coffin back home, they were told that the dead were now
heroes, you see, and that they no longer belonged to their families. They were
heroes of the State. They belonged to the State.
We sat in the hearse. The
relatives and some military people. A colonel and his regiment. They tell the
regiment: "Await your orders!" We drive around Moscow for two or
three hours, around the beltway. We're going back to Moscow again. They tell
the regiment: "We're not allowing anyone into the cemetery. The cemetery's
being attacked by foreign correspondents. Wait some more." The parents
don't say anything. Mom has a black handkerchief. I sense I'm about to black
out. "Why are they hiding my husband? He's — what? A murderer? A criminal?
Who are we burying?" My mom: "Quiet. Quiet, daughter." She's
petting me on the head. The colonel calls in: "Let's enter the cemetery.
The wife is getting hysterical." At the cemetery we were surrounded by
soldiers. We had a convoy. And they were carrying the coffin. No one was
allowed in. It was just us. They covered him with earth in a minute.
"Faster! Faster!" the officer was yelling. They didn't even let me
hug the coffin. And — onto the bus. Everything on the sly.
Right away they bought us plane
tickets back home. For the next day. The whole time there was someone with us.
He wouldn't even let us out of the dorm to buy some food for the trip. God
forbid we might talk with someone — especially me. As if I could talk by then.
I couldn't even cry. When we were leaving, the woman on duty counted all the
towels and all the sheets. She folded them right away and placed them in a
polyethylene bag. They probably burnt them. We paid for the dormitory
ourselves. For fourteen nights. It was a hospital for radiation poisoning.
Fourteen nights. That's how long it takes a person to die.
Monologue About Lies and Truths
Sergei Sobolev, deputy head of
the Executive Committee of the Shield of Chernobyl Association
They've written dozens of books.
Fat volumes, with commentaries. But the event is still beyond any philosophical
description. Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of
Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self-understanding.
That seemed right. I keep waiting
for someone intelligent to explain it to me. The way they enlighten me about
Stalin, Lenin, Bolshevism. Or the way they keep hammering away at their
"Market! Market! Free market!" But we — we who were raised in a world
without Chernobyl, now live with Chernobyl.
I'm actually a professional
rocketeer, I specialize in rocket fuel. I served at Baikonur [a space launch
center]. The programs, Kosmos, Interkosmos, those took up a large part of my
life. It was a miraculous time! You give people the sky, the Arctic, the whole
thing! You give them space! Every person in the Soviet Union went into space
with Yuri Gagarin, they tore away from the earth with him. We all did! I'm
still in love with him — he was a wonderful Russian man, with that wonderful
smile. Even his death seemed well-rehearsed.
It was a miraculous time! For
family reasons I moved to Belarus, finished my career here. When I came, I
immersed myself into this Chernobylized space, it was a corrective to my sense
of things. It was impossible to imagine anything like it, even though I'd
always dealt with the most advanced technologies, with outer space
technologies. It's hard even to explain — it doesn't fit into the imagination —
it's — [He thinks.] You know, a second ago I thought I'd caught it, a second
ago — it makes you want to philosophize. No matter who you talk to about
Chernobyl, they all want to philosophize. But I'd rather tell you about my own
work. What don't we do! We're building a church — a Chernobyl church, in honor
of the Icon of the Mother of God, we're dedicating it to
"Punishment." We collect donations, visit the sick and dying. We
write chronicles. We're creating a museum. I used to think that I, with my heart
in the condition it's in, wouldn't be able to work at such a job. My first
instructions were: "Here is money, divide it between thirty-five families,
that is, between thirty-five widows." All the men had been liquidators. So
you need to be fair. But how? One widow has a little girl who's sick, another
widow has two children, and a third is sick herself, and she's renting her
apartment, and yet another has four children. At night I'd wake up thinking,
"How do I not cheat anyone?" I thought and calculated, calculated and
thought. And I couldn't do it. We ended up just giving out the money equally,
according to the list.
But my real child is the museum:
the Chernobyl Museum. [He is silent.] Sometimes I think that we'll have a
funeral parlor here, not a museum. I serve on the funeral committee. This
morning I haven't even taken off my coat when a woman comes in, she's crying,
not even crying but yelling: "Take his medals and his certificates! Take
all the benefits! Give me my husband!" She yelled a long time. And left
his medals, his certificates. Well, they'll be in the museum, on display.
People can look at them. But her cry, no one heard her cry but me, and when I
put these certificates on display I'll remember it.
Colonel Yaroshuk is dying now.
He's a chemist-dosimetrist. He was healthy as a bull, now he's lying paralyzed.
His wife turns him over like a pillow. She feeds him from a spoon. He has
stones in his kidneys, they need to be shattered, but we don't have the money
to pay for that kind of operation. We're paupers, we survive on what people
give us. And the government behaves like a money lender, it's forgotten these
people. When he dies, they'll name a street after him, or a school, or a
military unit, but that's only after he dies. Colonel Yaroshuk. He walked through
the Zone and marked the points of maximum radiation — they exploited him in the
fullest sense of the term, like he was a robot. And he understood this, but he
went, he walked from the reactor itself and then out through all the sectors
around the radius of radioactivity. On foot. With a dosimeter in his hand. He'd
feel a "spot" and then walk around its borders, so he could put it on
his map accurately.
And what about the soldiers who
worked on the roof of the reactor? Two hundred and ten military units were
thrown at the liquidation of the fallout of the catastrophe, which equals about
340,000 military personnel. The ones cleaning the roof got it the worst. They
had lead vests, but the radiation was coming from below, and they weren't
protected there. They were wearing ordinary cheap imitation-leather boots. They
spent about a minute and a half, two minutes on the roof each day, and then
they were discharged, given a certificate and an award — one hundred rubles.
And then they disappeared to the vast peripheries of our motherland. On the
roof they gathered fuel and graphite from the reactor, shards of concrete and
metal. It took about twenty to thirty seconds to fill a wheelbarrow, and then
another thirty seconds to throw the "garbage" off the roof. These
special wheelbarrows weighed forty kilos just by themselves. So you can picture
it: a lead vest, masks, the wheelbarrows, and insane speed.
In the museum in Kiev they have a
mold of graphite the size of a soldier's cap, they say that if it were real, it
would weigh 16 kilos, that's how dense and heavy graphite is. The
radio-controlled machines they used often failed to carry out commands or did
the opposite of what they were supposed to do, because their electronics were
disrupted by the high radiation. The most reliable "robots" were the
soldiers. They were christened the "green robots" (by the color of
their uniforms). Three thousand six hundred soldiers worked on the roof of the
ruined reactor. They slept on the ground, they all tell of how in the beginning
they were throwing straw on the ground in the tents — and the straw was coming
from stacks near the reactor.
They were young guys. They're
dying now too, but they understand that if it wasn't for them... These are
people who came from a certain culture, the culture of the great achievement.
They were a sacrifice. There was a moment when there existed the danger of a
nuclear explosion, and they had to get the water out from under the reactor, so
that a mixture of uranium and graphite wouldn't get into it — with the water
they would have formed a critical mass. The explosion would have been between
three and five megatons. This would have meant that not only Kiev and Minsk,
but a large part of Europe would have been uninhabitable. Can you imagine it? A
European catastrophe. So here was the task: who would dive in there and open
the bolt on the safety valve? They promised them a car, an apartment, a dacha,
aid for their families until the end of time. They searched for volunteers. And
they found them! The boys dove, many times, and they opened that bolt, and the
unit was given 7000 rubles. They forgot about the cars and apartments they
promised — but that's not why they dove! Not for the material, least of all for
the material promises. [Becomes upset.] Those people don't exist anymore, just
the documents in our museum, with their names. But what if they hadn't done it?
In terms of our readiness for self-sacrifice, we have no equals.
Now do you understand how I see
our museum? In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful. And
there's a miner's helmet. Also from there. Some farmer's equipment from the
Zone. We can't let the dosimeters in here — we're glowing! But everything here
needs to be real. No plaster casts. People need to believe us. And they'll only
believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl. There
were and there are still. They've even grown funds and commercial structures...
Since you're writing this book,
you need to have a look at some unique video footage. We're gathering it little
by little. It's not a chronicle of Chernobyl, no, they wouldn't let anyone film
that, it was forbidden. If anyone did manage to record any of it, the
authorities immediately took the film and returned it ruined. We don't have a
chronicle of how they evacuated people, how they moved out the livestock. They
didn't allow anyone to fi lm the tragedy, only the heroics. There are some
Chernobyl photo albums now, but how many video and photo cameras were broken!
People were dragged through the bureaucracy. It required a lot of courage to
tell the truth about Chernobyl. It still does. Believe me! But you need to see
this footage: the blackened faces of the firemen, like graphite. And their
eyes? These are the eyes of people who already know that they're leaving us.
There's one fragment showing the legs of a woman who the morning after the
catastrophe went to work on her plot of land next to the atomic station. She's
walking on grass covered with dew. Her legs remind you of a grate, everything's
with holes up to the knees. You need to see this if you're writing this book.
Monologue About What We Didn't
Know: Death Can Be So Beautiful
Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya,
evacuee from the town of Pripyat
At first, the question was, Who's
to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we
do?
How do we save ourselves? After
coming to terms with the fact that this would not be for one year or for two,
but for many generations, we began to look back, turning the pages.
It happened late Friday night.
That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband
went to the barber's. I'm preparing lunch when my husband comes back.
"There's some sort of fire at the nuclear plant," he says.
"They're saying we are not to turn off the radio." I forgot to say
that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson
glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn't any ordinary fire, it
was some sort of shining. It was pretty. I'd never seen anything like it in the
movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who
didn't have them went to friends' houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a
great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, "Look!
Remember!" And these were people who worked at the reactor — engineers,
workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing,
wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to
have a look. We didn't know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn't
say that it had no smell — it wasn't a spring or an autumn smell, but something
else, and it wasn't the smell of earth. My throat tickled, and tears came to my
eyes.
I didn't sleep all night, and I
heard the neighbors walking around upstairs, also not sleeping. They were
carrying stuff around, banging things, maybe they were packing their
belongings. I fought off my headache with Citramon tablets. In the morning I
woke up and looked around and I remember feeling — this isn't something I made
up later, I thought it right then — something isn't right, something has
changed forever. At eight that morning there were already military people on
the streets in gas masks. When we saw them on the streets, with all the military
vehicles, we didn't grow frightened — on the contrary, it calmed us down. Since
the army has come to our aid, everything will be fine. We didn't understand
then that the peaceful atom could kill, that man is helpless before the laws of
physics.
All day on the radio they were
telling people to prepare for an evacuation: they'd take us away for three
days, wash everything, check it over. The kids were told to take their school
books. Still, my husband put our documents and our wedding photos into his briefcase.
The only thing I took was a gauze kerchief in case the weather turned bad.
From the very first I felt that
we were Chernobylites, that we were already a separate people. Our bus stopped
overnight in a village; people slept on the floor in a school, others in a
club. There was nowhere to go. One woman invited us to sleep at her house.
"Come," she said, "I'll put down some linen for you. I feel bad
for your boy." Her friend started dragging her away from us. "Are you
crazy? They're contaminated!" When we settled in Mogilev and our son
started school, he came back the very first day in tears. They put him next to
a girl who said she didn't want to sit with him, he was radioactive. Our son
was in the fourth grade, and he was the only one from Chernobyl in the class.
The other kids were afraid of him, they called him "Shiny." His
childhood had ended so early.
As we were leaving Pripyat there
was an army column heading back in the other direction. There were so many
military vehicles, that's when I grew frightened. But I couldn't shake the
feeling that this was all happening to someone else. I was crying, looking for
food, sleeping, hugging my son, calming him down, but inside, this constant
sense that I was just an observer. In Kiev they gave us some money, but we
couldn't buy anything: hundreds of thousands of people had been uprooted and
they'd bought everything up and eaten everything. Many had heart attacks and
strokes, right there at the train stations, on the buses. I was saved by my
mother. She'd lived a long time and had lost everything more than once. The
first time was in the 1930s, they took her cow, her horse, her house. The
second time, there'd been a fi re, the only thing she'd saved was me. Now she
said, "We have to get through it. After all, we're alive."
I remember one thing: we're on
the bus, everyone's crying. A man up front is yelling at his wife. "I
can't believe you'd be so stupid! Everyone else brought their things, and all
we've got are these three-liter bottles!" The wife had decided that since
they were taking the bus, she might as well bring some empty pickling bottles
for her mother, who was on the way. They had these big bulging sacks next to
their seats, we kept tripping over them the whole way to Kiev, and that's what
they came to Kiev with.
Now I sing in the church choir. I
read the Bible. I go to church — it's the only place they talk about eternal
life. They comfort a person. You won't hear those words anywhere else, and you
so want to hear them.
I often dream that I'm riding
through sunny Pripyat with my son. It's a ghost town now. But we're riding
through and looking at the roses, there were many roses in Pripyat, large
bushes with roses. I was young. My son was little. I loved him. And in the
dream I've forgotten all the fears, as if I were just a spectator the whole
time.
Monologue About Taking
Measurements
Marat Filippovich Kokhanov,
former chief engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarussian
Academy of Sciences
Already by the end of May, about
a month after the accident, we began receiving, for testing, products from the
thirty-kilometer zone. The institute worked round the clock, like it was a
military institute. At the time we were the only ones in Belarus with the
specialists and the equipment for the job.
They brought us the insides of
domestic and undomesticated animals. We checked the milk. After the first tests
it became clear that what we were receiving couldn't properly be called meat —
it was radioactive byproducts. Within the zone the herds were taken care of in
shifts — the shepherds would come and go, the milkmaids were brought in for
milking only. The milk factories carried out the government plan. We checked
the milk. It wasn't milk, it was a radioactive byproduct.
For a long time after that we
used dry milk powder and cans of condensed and concentrated milk from the
Rogachev milk factory in our lectures as examples of a standard radiation
source. And in the meantime, they were being sold in the stores. When people
saw that the milk was from Rogachev and stopped buying it, there suddenly
appeared cans of milk without labels. I don't think it was because they ran out
of paper.
On my first trip to the Zone I
measured a background radiation level of five to six times higher in the forest
than on the roads or the fields. But high doses were everywhere. The tractors
were running, the farmers were digging on their plots. In a few villages we
measured the thyroid activity for adults and children. It was one hundred,
sometimes two and three hundred times the allowable dosage. There was a woman
in our group, a radiologist. She became hysterical when she saw that children
were sitting in a sandbox and playing. We checked breast milk — it was
radioactive. We went into the stores — as in a lot of village stores, they had
the clothes and the food right next to each other: suits and dresses, and
nearby salami and margarine. They're lying there in the open, they're not even
covered with cellophane. We take the salami, we take an egg — we make a
roentgen image — this isn't food, it's a radioactive byproduct.
We see a woman on a bench near
her house, breastfeeding her child — her milk has cesium in it — she's the
Chernobyl Madonna.
We asked our supervisors, What do
we do? How should we be? They said: "Take your measurements. Watch
television."
On television Gorbachev was
calming people: "We've taken immediate measures." I believed it. I'd
worked as an engineer for twenty years, I was well-acquainted with the laws of
physics. I knew that everything living should leave that place, if only for a
while. But we conscientiously took our measurements and watched the television.
We were used to believing. I'm from the postwar generation, I grew up with this
belief, this faith. Where did it come from? We'd won that terrible war. The
whole world was grateful to us then.
So here's the answer to your
question: why did we keep silent knowing what we knew? Why didn't we go out
onto the square and yell the truth? We compiled our reports, we put together
explanatory notes. But we kept quiet and carried out our orders without a
murmur because of Party discipline. I was a Communist. I don't remember that
any of our colleagues refused to go work in the Zone. Not because they were
afraid of losing their Party membership, but because they had faith. They had
faith that we lived well and fairly, that for us man was the highest thing, the
measure of all things. The collapse of this faith in a lot of people eventually
led to heart attacks and suicides. A bullet to the heart, as in the case of
Professor [Valery] Legasov [head of the commissioned Chernobyl investigation
who actually hanged himself in 1988, on the two-year anniversary of the
explosion], because when you lose that faith, you are no longer a participant,
you're an also-ran, you have no reason to exist. That's how I understood his
suicide, as a sort of sign.
Monologue About a Damaged Child
Nadezhda Afanasyevna Burakova,
resident of the village of Khoyniki
The other day my daughter said to
me: "Mom, if I give birth to a damaged child, I'm still going to love
him." Can you imagine that? She's in the tenth grade, and she already has
such thoughts. Her friends, too, they all think about it. Some acquaintances of
ours recently gave birth to a son, their first. They're a young, handsome pair.
And their boy has a mouth that stretches to his ears and no ears. I don't visit
them like I used to, but my daughter doesn't mind, she looks in on them all the
time. She wants to go there, maybe just to see, or maybe to try it on.
We could have left, but my husband
and I thought about it and decided not to. We're afraid to. Here, we're all
Chernobylites. We're not afraid of one another, and if someone gives you an
apple or a cucumber from their garden, you take it and eat it, you don't hide
it shamefully in your pocket, your purse, and then throw it out. We all share
the same memories. We have the same fate. Anywhere else, we're foreign, we're
lepers. Everyone is used to the words, "Chernobylites,"
"Chernobyl children," "Chernobyl refugees." But you don't
know anything about us. You're afraid of us. You probably wouldn't let us out
of here if you had your way, you'd put up a police cordon, that would calm you
down. [Stops.] Don't try to tell me it's not like that. I lived through it. In
those first days... I took my daughter and ran off to Minsk, to my sister. My
own sister didn't let us into her home, she had a little baby she was
breast-feeding. Can you imagine that? We slept at the train station.
I had crazy thoughts. Where
should we go? Maybe we should kill ourselves so as not to suffer? That was just
in the first days. Everyone started imagining horrible diseases, unimaginable
diseases. And I'm a doctor. I can only guess at what other people were
thinking. Now I look at my kids: wherever they go, they'll feel like strangers.
My daughter spent a summer at pioneer camp, the other kids were afraid to touch
her. "She's a Chernobyl rabbit. She glows in the dark." They made her
go into the yard at night so they could see if she was glowing.
People talk about the war, the
war generation, they compare us to them. But those people were happy! They won
the war! It gave them a very strong life-energy, as we say now, it gave them a
really strong motivation to survive and keep going. They weren't afraid of
anything, they wanted to live, learn, have kids. Whereas us? We're afraid of
everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't
exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they
sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the
forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone's
depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's
changed our everyday life, and our thinking.
Sometimes I think it'd be better
if you didn't write about us. Then people wouldn't be so afraid. No one talks
about cancer in the home of a person who's sick with it. And if someone is in
jail with a life sentence, no one mentions that, either.
Excerpted from Voices from Chernobyl
by Svetlana Alexievich. Copyright (c) 1997, 2006 by Svetlana Alexievich.
Preface and translation copyright (c) 2005 by Keith Gessen. Published in 2006
by Picador, LLC. All rights reserved. Visitors to this website are warned that
this work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly
prohibited. Permission to reproduce this material in any manner or medium must
be secured from Picador, LLC
Connecticut
Supreme Court Won't Reconsider Abolishing Death Penalty
Connecticut Supreme Court won't
reconsider death penalty decision
HARTFORD — The Connecticut
Supreme Court on Thursday stood by its decision to eliminate the state's death
penalty, but the fate of capital punishment in the Constitution State
technically remains unsettled.
The state's highest court
rejected a request by prosecutors to reconsider its landmark August ruling, but
prosecutors have filed a motion in another case to make the arguments they
would have made if the court had granted the reconsideration motion.
Lawyers who have argued before
the court say it would be highly unusual and surprising for the court to
reverse itself on such an important issue in a short period of time, but they
say it is possible because the makeup of the court is different. Justice
Flemming Norcott Jr., who was in the 4-3 majority to abolish the death penalty,
reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 and was succeeded by Justice Richard
Robinson.
In the August decision, the court
ruled that a 2012 state law abolishing capital punishment for future crimes
must be applied to the 11 men who still faced execution for killings committed
before the law took effect. The decision came in the case of Eduardo Santiago,
who was facing the possibility of lethal injection for a 2000 murder-for-hire
killing in West Hartford.
The 2012 ban had been passed
prospectively because many lawmakers refused to vote for a bill that would
spare the death penalty for Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, who were
convicted of killing a mother and her two daughters in a highly publicized 2007
home invasion in Cheshire.
The state's high court said the
death penalty violated the state constitution, "no longer comports with
contemporary standards of decency," and didn't serve any "legitimate
penological purpose." The majority included Norcott and Justices Richard
Palmer, Dennis Eveleigh and Andrew McDonald, the same four justices that
rejected the prosecution's reconsideration request Thursday.
Chief Justice Chase Rogers and
Justices Peter Zarella and Carmen Espinosa bashed the majority in the Santiago
case, accusing the other four justices of tailoring their ruling based on
personal beliefs. The three dissenting justices also were in favor of the
prosecution's motion to reconsider.
Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane
had said the majority justices unfairly considered concerns that had not been
raised during Santiago's appeal and denied prosecutors the chance to address
those concerns. He said prosecutors have filed briefs in the still-pending
death penalty appeal of Russell Peeler Jr., raising the same issues they did in
the motion for reconsideration in the Santiago case.
Peeler was sentenced to death for
ordering the 1999 killings of 8-year-old Leroy "B.J." Brown Jr. and
his mother, Karen Clarke, in their Bridgeport duplex. The boy was expected to
be the key witness against Peeler in the fatal shooting of Clarke's boyfriend.
The court heard arguments last
year in Peeler's appeal, which claims the state's death penalty amounted to
unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. Peeler's appeal appeared to be
moot because of the Santiago ruling, but the new prosecution motions changed
that.
Mark Rademacher, a public defender
for both Peeler and Santiago, believes prosecutors have little chance of
succeeding in the Peeler case.
"No court has ever reversed
themselves in a matter of months on an issue of such importance,"
Rademacher said.
Proloy Das, an attorney with
Murtha Cullina in Hartford who wasn't involved in the death penalty cases, said
it is possible that the court could reinstate the death penalty for Peeler, but
it would be surprising given how important the issue is and how recently the
Santiago decision was made.
BY JOSH SIDOROWICZ
LANSING, Mich. — Reforms aimed at
increasing police reporting and the burden of proof in civil court for
individuals who have property seized by police are now on the fast track to
final approval from the governor.
The package of reform bills
introduced by the House in April were unanimously approved Wednesday by
lawmakers in the Senate.
Lawmakers at both the state and
federal level have been working to reform civil asset forfeiture laws to make
it more difficult for police agencies to seize property from individuals
believed to be involved in criminal activity, even if they have not been
charged with a crime.
The reforms passed Wednesday will
raise the evidentiary standards to “clear and convincing” rather than the
current “preponderance of evidence.” The reform bills passed will also change
disclosure rules, requiring local law enforcement to file detailed annual
reports to the state when property is forfeited.
“We’re not looking to do away
with the tool, just looking to provide protections,” Rep. Kevin Cotter, the
Republican House Speaker from Mt. Pleasant, told FOX 17 in May.
The most recent asset forfeiture
report available from Michigan State Police shows more than $24 million in cash
and assets were seized from Michiganders in 2013. Since 2000, more than $250 million in
forfeiture revenue has been collected.
Nationally, civil asset net
forfeitures rose to $4.2 billion in 2012, which was up from $1.7 billion in the
preceding year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Michigan,
introduced reform legislation of his own in Congress earlier this year dubbed
the FAIR Act, that would restore the Fifth Amendment’s role in civil forfeiture
proceedings.
“It’s guilty until proven
innocent in the (current) case, and that’s not the way we should work it,”
Walberg told FOX 17 in April.
In May, Sgt. Amy Dehner, an 11
year veteran and legislative liaison with the Michigan State Police, testified
before a House Judiciary Committee hearing saying the practice is critical in
the process to stop drug trafficking.
“As long as that cash and those
assets continue to flow, whether they can sell a car, a house, stolen TVs, if
they can turn that into cash, they continue to allow that illegal business to
flourish,” she said. “Our ability to intercede in that process is critical.
Involved in efforts both locally
and nationally, the bi-partisan advocacy group Fix Forfeiture was formed in
June to pursue reform efforts. Groups involved with Fix Forfeiture include the
American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, FreedomWorks, the
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Center for American
Progress, and the Faith & Freedom Coalition.
Fix Forfeiture claimed to be the
first organization in the country to bring together progressive and
conservative partners in an effort to pass sweeping civil asset forfeiture
reforms. Michigan is one of three states included in the group’s national push
for reform.
“It is said that sunshine is the
best disinfectant and today the Michigan Senate put a bright light on their
state’s civil asset forfeiture procedure, which will go a long way in
protecting innocent property owners,” Holly Harris, Fix Forfeiture’s executive
director, said in a Wednesday release.
The Mackinac Center for Public
Policy applauded Wednesday’s vote, calling it “a good first step.”
“The state should not be able to
take ownership of someone’s property unless they have been convicted of a crime
through the criminal system,” Jarrett Skorup, a policy analyst and co-author of
a recent report on forfeiture in Michigan, said in a news release.
“These bills are a great first
step towards improving Michigan’s forfeiture regime, but to fully protect
Michigan residents, the state should eliminate civil forfeiture altogether.”
Lawmakers in the House will have
to provide a concurrence vote on the bills before they can be signed by
Governor Snyder.
D.C.’s amazing paid family leave
proposal: Generous and long overdue
By Petula Dvorak
After years of pretending people
who give birth, adopt children or care for ailing family don’t need and deserve
paid time off, something is finally changing in America.
Can you feel it?
First it was Netflix declaring
that it’s giving a year of paid family leave to some of its employees. Then the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced the same deal.
And now, Washington — the city,
not the federal behemoth the rest of the country curses about — is proposing
the boldest move yet.
Sixteen weeks off. Paid. Whether
you’re part time or full time, a minimum-wage worker or a lawyer, whether
you’re the mom, the other mom, or one of the dads, you get the time off. If
you’ve adopted a child — no matter how old — you get it. If you’re caring for a
sick relative, you get it. If you need time to recover from a military
deployment, you get it. As long as you live or work in D.C. (other than for the
federal government), you get it.
Legislated humanity.
Paid family leave is not a luxury
or socialism; it’s the norm across the globe — except in the United States.
The last time it was really
addressed was 22 years ago, when the Family and Medical Leave Act was passed to
allow people to take time off and keep their jobs. But, unlike the way the rest
of the world does it, you don’t get paid during that time.
Maybe this issue is like same-sex
marriage was five years ago. It’s about to have its moment — at last.
“Sixteen weeks is wonderful, that
would be terrific,” said Sonya Shaw, 51, with a look of wistfulness.
“It’s too late for me. I had to
abandon my babies after 2 1/2 weeks at home because that’s all the time I could
take,” she said, still pained by the memory of leaving her newborns at day care
20 years ago. “I couldn’t afford to stay home any longer.”
That’s the sad thing about our
country. We love to say we love families, but we put little muscle behind that
ethos when it comes to actually helping families.
The changes — just as they have
with same-sex marriage and raising the minimum wage — are coming at the state
and city levels.
California, New Jersey and Rhode
Island each have some kind of paid leave laws. But none of them offers more
than six weeks off, and none offers full salaries.
In that sense, the District’s
proposal is magnanimous.
But hold on, don’t get wigged out
that we’re going all Karl Marx on you.
If the District passes this law
and gives people 16 weeks of paid leave, it’s still not as generous as the
policy in Serbia. Or Vietnam. Or the United Kingdom.
It will put the nation’s capital
on par with Bangladesh.
The United States is the only
country in the industrialized world — besides Papua New Guinea — that doesn’t
require some kind of plan to keep its people afloat while they tend to major
life events in their families.
If you live in Swaziland,
Lesotho, Oman, Argentina and almost 200 other countries and you’re part of a
family? You’re covered!
In our country, only the affluent
can afford to take extended time off for birth, death or illness.
But the innovative bill
introduced by seven council members — led by Elissa Silverman and David Grosso
(both I-At Large) — may be the first step toward equality.
Employees would get paid from a
government fund fed by employers. Every business that operates in the city
would contribute between 0.6 and 1 percent of every worker’s salary.
As long as you live or work in
the District and make less than $52,000, you will get 100 percent of your pay
while you tend to your family. If you make more than a $1,000 a week, you will
receive that and half of your additional pay.
The District can’t force the feds
or employers outside the District to buy into the program. But there is a
loophole that allows employees themselves to contribute to the fund with a
small fee, then get the leave when they need it.
The legislation is a way to keep
people afloat during some of the most vulnerable times of their adult lives.
“I’ve been talking to other women
in the field, and we just don’t know how we’re going to do it,” said Kelly
Rickard, 33, a university teacher and grad student in systems engineering and
operations research whose son surprised her by coming two months early.
She was due in June and thought
she would have the summer to stay home with her new baby. But her son’s
premature arrival would have meant the end of a salary if she didn’t finish her
teaching gig. So back to work she went, still groggy, two days after a
C-section.
“Something like that paid leave
would have been such a help,” she said.
Some companies, of course,
already offer paid leave. I talked to campus security guards, nurses and
administrators who got some time paid when they needed the leave. But the truth
is, only 12 percent of American workers are lucky enough to get that kind of
help. And mostly, those folks are already pretty well paid.
Lamont Clark, 44, would have
loved to have four months at home to bond with his sons after they were born.
He works for the D.C. government,
but he couldn’t afford to take time off when his first son came eight years
ago. When they had son No. 2 four years later, Clark had stored up four weeks
of leave so he could be there.
“It’s a family thing, it’s
important to bond with your children,” Clark said. “I want to be that dad who
is around, who’s helping and who is part of everything.”
State by state, city by city,
company by company, change is finally coming. So we can finally leave Papua New
Guinea in the dust on this one.
THE ART OF WAR...............................
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS FROM FILM
HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................
Bonnard's Nudes
by Raymond Carver
His wife. Forty years he painted her.
Again and again. The nude in the last painting
the same young nude as the the first. His wife
As he remembered her young. As she was young.
His wife in her bath. At her dressing table
in front of the mirror. Undressed.
His wife with her hands under her breasts
looking out on the garden.
The sun bestowing warmth and color.
Every living thing in bloom there.
She young and tremulous and most desirable.
When she died, he painted a while longer.
A few landscapes. Then died.
And was put down next to her.
His young wife.
Visit
our Shakespeare Blog at the address below
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/
DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?
THE ART OF PULP
WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................
AND NOW A WORD FROM EMERSON..........................
"Trust
men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show
themselves great."
“Perhaps
the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we
demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to
him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.” ―Milan Kundera
“For
my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic
within the crack.” ―D.H. Lawrence
“They
say a good love is one that sits you down, gives you a drink of water, and pats
you on top of the head. But I say a good love is one that casts you into the
wind, sets you ablaze, makes you burn through the skies and ignite the night
like a phoenix; the kind that cuts you loose like a wildfire and you can’t stop
running simply because you keep on burning everything that you touch! I say
that’s a good love; one that burns and flies, and you run with it!” ―C. JoyBell
C.
Love
is a friendship set to music. Joseph Campbell
The
most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness
embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. Thich Nhat Hanh
Love
takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live
within. James Baldwin
Love
is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce — which is called
passion. Clarice Lispector
Photographs I’ve taken
Along the Chicago River
Along the Chicago River
DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE THE ENTIRE WORLD? I DO
Barrio de Santa Cruz, Sevilla Spain (by Nacho Coca)
Basalt Columns, Vík í Mýrdal, Iceland
Bath England
Beaufort, France
Capote’s
Holly Golightly: An All-Bermudian Girl
Holly Golightly — the cheerfully
non-conformist heroine of Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” —
was witty, naive, achingly beautiful and part Bermudian, at least in spirit.
Oona O’Neill — sitting — with her
mother, brother and half-sister on a Bermuda fishing expedition
A composite of Bermuda-born Oona
O’Neill [pictured] and her girls-about-town friends Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol
Marcus, the part of New York café society fixture Holly was played by Audrey
Hepburn in the classic 1961 film adaptation.
Now Mr. Capote’s 1958 typed
manuscript of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — rife with the author’s handwritten
edits — is being offered for sale by a New Hampshire auction house which
expects it to fetch at least $250,000 later this month.
“It’s obviously quite a treasure,
quite a find for us,” RR Auctions vice president Bobby Livingston said of the
Capote manuscript. He said the source of the manuscript wants to remain
anonymous.
Mr. Livingston said the auction
was not timed to a new Broadway adaption of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” now
playing at New York City’s Cort Theater, saying that was just “serendipitous.”
Author Capote — in creating his
“American geisha” Holly Golightly character — is said to have found inspiration
in his close friendships with heiress and future designer Gloria Vanderbilt and
the vivacious, poised and stylish Oona O’Neill.
Carol Marcus — who went on to
marry novelist William Saroyan twice and, later, the actor Walter Matthau — had
fallen in with a teenage Truman Capote in the early 1940s and introduced the
aspiring writer to a circle of friends which included Oona O’Neill ands Gloria
Vanderbilt. The group prowled such celebrated nightclubs as El Morocco and the
Stork Club.
The friendship of the three women
and their association with Truman Capote is chronicled in Aram Saroyan’s “Trio”
and also in Carol Marcus Matthau’s bestselling memoir, “Among the Porcupines.”
Oona O’Neill was born in Bermuda
in 1925. Her mother, Agnes Boulton, wrote short stories; her father Eugene
O’Neill, a chronic alcoholic, was the only American playwright to receive the
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Eugene O’Neill — whose plays
include “Mourning Becomes Electra”, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “Moon
For the Misbegotten” — had settled his family in Bermuda in 1925 to try and
find peace of mind and to overcome his drinking problem.
But Oona O’Neill was barely a
toddler when her father ran off with another woman. She and her older brother,
Shane, were raised by their mother at the family home “Spithead” on Harbour
Road in Warwick until they later moved to the US.
Her formal education ended at
Brearley, an exclusive girls’ school in New York City. Accepted by Vassar
College, she chose instead to seek an acting career, and following a fleeting
appearance in summer stock, went to Hollywood and met her future husband, the
British-born comic genius Charle Chaplin.
Although he He was 36 years her
senior and thrice divorced, they married when she turned 18 in 1943.
Immediately, her fater disowned and disinherited her. The marriage, however,
endured; she had eight children, and remained with her husband for 34 years
until his death in 1977.
The couple and some of their
children famously spent time on the island in 1972 when Charles Chaplin —
effectively exiled from the US for his political views in 1952 — made a
triumphant return to America to accept the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &
Sciences’lifetime achievement Oscar.
The family broke the trip from
Europe to California with an extended stop-over in Bermuda.
It was something of a bittersweet
homecoming for Oona: “Spithead” had been sold in the early 1950s so her dying
mother could afford to pay for medical care and her brother, Shane, raised and
educated in Bermuda like her, had left the island to live in New York years
earlier.
But nevertheless, she seemed to
enjoy introducing her family to her childhood home: the Chaplins took in the
major tourism sights, dined at the Henry VIII restaurant on South Shore and
visited such out-of-the-way spots as the old Astor Estate on Ferry Reach where
Oona had played as child.
Oona O’Neill remained a close friend
of Truman Capote’s until his death in 1984. He visited the Chaplin family at
their home in Switzerland on a number of occasions; she was reportedly
delighted by the fact she was widely considered to be Holly Golightly — or at
least some aspects of her — by another name following the extraordinary success
of both the book and film versions of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s.”
While “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
was not Truman Capote’s debut novel — he had received critical acclaim for his
book “Other Voices, Other Rooms” a decade earlier — the novella sealed his
fame, fortune and future.
When “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was
published, Norman Mailer said that Truman Capote was “the most perfect writer
of my generation … I would not have changed two words in ‘Breakfast at
Tiffany’s’.”
Oona O’Neill died in 1991 at the
age of 66. She is buried alongside her husband at a cemetery in Vevey,
Switzerland.