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except for the penitentiary. Ever hear of Dutch Schultz?"
"Sure," Mike answered. "Arthur Flegenheimer. Legendary mobster. Controlled a
lot of business in the city."
Orlyn Lockhart zoned out on me. He had found a responsive audience in Mike and
was playing to him. "I put his right-hand man away." He was tapping his
forefinger against his chest. "I tried the case myself. Joseph Reggio. Know
that name, too?"
"Harlem racketeer. Probably the number two guy in the mob at the time."
"Convicted him of extortion, ran the beer and soda water trade. Word got back
to us, down at the district attorney's office, that Reggio had set himself up
in prison like a king. He'd bribed all the authorities to get the inmates in
the jail's clinic moved out to the general population. Reggio took over and
made that infirmary his home. Dressed in silk robes and used lavender cologne.
Cultivated a nice garden, kept a pet cow to get his own milk. Dined on the
finest steaks and wines in his own apartment."
"In the penitentiary?"
"Two of them, there were, took over the prison hospital. Reggio ran his men,
and the Irish hoodlums were led by a guy called Edward Cleary. That's the guy
who kept his German shepherd with him in his room. Named it Screw Hater.
'Screws' are what they used to call the guards. Both of these toughs kept
homing pigeons with them. Actual cotes of birds that carried notes and
probably narcotics in and out of the jail.
"These two mobsters swaggered around while the regular crooks waited on them
like slaves. Sad part is that the men who really needed medical treatment were
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just dumped into the general population. All the boys with social
diseases that's what we used to call it back then they were mixing freely with
the healthy ones. The whole place was a sea of misery. Full of degenerates.
Faded tigers." "Excuse me?"
"Didn't you ever read Dickens, young lady? When he visited New York, he asked
to be taken to see old Blackwells."
I thought I had plowed through most of him in my undergraduate days, but the
phrase didn't sound at all familiar. Perhaps that explained why Dickens's
sketch was on Lola Dakota's bulletin board. Just one more notable figure who
had connected with this island that so fascinated her. Now what we still
needed to know was why Charlotte Voight's picture was there.
Lockhart was mumbling on about Dickens's visit to the prison, inmates dressed
in the black-and-buff garb that the Englishman likened to faded tigers.
"Tell me about the raid," Mike said. Skip came back into the room with
chamomile tea for his grandfather and mugs of coffee for us. He put them on
the table, smiling at Mike's enthusiasm for the tales he had heard so many
times and walking back to the kitchen. "Did you actually go along?"
"Go along, sir? MacCormick and I led the whole thing ourselves. I handpicked
the detectives and wardens to come with us, but we led the very charge into
the pens. First one to fall was a deputy warden who'd been on the take the
whole time. Placed him right under arrest."
"I'd like to have been at your side," Mike said, egging him on. "MacCormick
had this planned to the minute. Closed down the prison switchboard so no one
could call out while the raid was on. He dispatched the first men to the
hospital ward to drag out Reggio and Cleary." Lockhart was chortling as he
sipped his tea. "Guess he was afraid to let us get at each other. So he had
them taken out of their luxurious quarters and thrown into solitary
confinement." "But you, did you go into the prison itself?"
"My boy, I can still smell it today. Most of the prisoners had been turned
into dope fiends."
"After they went inside the walls?"
"Reggio and Cleary were running a drug smuggling business in the jailhouse.
That's how they got all their lackeys to keep them in style, and segregated.
First thing I saw were rows of men, shivering on benches, pleading with us to
let them take their drugs. Most of them were covered with needle scars, all up
and down their arms. Word spread that Commissioner MacCormick was walking
through the three-tiered cell block himself."
"Never happen today. They'd just show for the photo op." "All of a sudden we
heard lots of clanging and things being thrown about. I went running to see
what it was. Turns out prisoners were throwing their weapons, and their drug
paraphernalia, out from between their bars. Nobody wanted to be caught with
contraband in their cells. I leaned over and picked up some blackened spoons,
what they cooked the drugs in. Spikes they used to shoot up. Whole sets of
hypodermics. Cloths soaked in a heroin solution."
"Did you find what you expected?"
"Worse than that. Far worse. Drugs of every sort. And then the weapons started
coming. We took out meat cleavers, hatchets, stilettos, butcher knives. I've
got pictures, missy, front page of every newspaper in the country. Skip'll
show you my scrapbooks. "These gorillas had a real pecking order. The two at
the top had their henchmen. There were at least twenty-five of them who kept
the lowlifes in line, living in the worst conditions, waiting on Reggio and
Cleary, and doing it all to get narcotics. Meanwhile, the goon squad who
helped the bosses lived off the fat of the land. Taken off by van every day to
work at the warden's home and eat pretty well themselves."
"Did you actually see where Reggio lived?"
"You wouldn't believe the sight. Hell, I wouldn't have, unless I'd been there
in the flesh. After he'd been taken out, MacCormick and I went up to see his
lavish digs, just to find out whether the reports we'd gotten had been
exaggerated. Hah! Not a bit. He had a large suite of rooms in the old hospital
wing, all laid out with his finery. A maroon cashmere lounging robe was spread
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across the foot of his bed, with two pairs of shoes, shoe trees neatly in
them, lined up underneath."
Lockhart was shaking his head and wringing his hands as though he were right
in the middle of the scene he was describing.
"There was a locker below the window and I got one of the boys to break it
open. Inside there were a dozen boxes of expensive cigars, bars of perfumed
soap, monogrammed stationery, face cream, kid gloves, linen handkerchiefs." He
shook his head. "Here I thought I'd condemned him to purgatory when he was
sentenced to jail, and he was living far better than most folks I knew. That
was before I saw his kitchen and his garden."
"His own kitchen?"
"Well, Reggio and Cleary shared a private one. The men downstairs were eating
slop and gruel, just like the old days. These guys had gallons of fresh milk,
crates of cranberries, fresh meat, pickled herrings, bags of potatoes. They
had a pretty nice stash of liquor, too.
"Cleary, his room was a little less refined. Where Reggio had a crucifix over
the bed and rosary beads beside it, Cleary had a dagger stuck in the wall over
his head. I guess we'd interrupted him. There was an unplayed hand of pinochle
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