Read Daughter of the King Online
Authors: Sandra Lansky
“If I had done something, darling, they would’ve gotten me, long, long ago,” he said, almost bored by the endless pursuit. “Flat feet,” he sighed, using his old Lower East Side slang for a lowly beat cop to dismiss everyone from Gabby to Kefauver to Hoover to the Supreme Court, none of whom had been able to “get” him. By the time Daddy and I left Dinty Moore’s to a ballet of bows and scrapes reserved for the true bosses of the town, I knew where I had to plight my troth. My heart belonged to Daddy. The difference between
Notorious
and real life was that Claude Rains was an evil Nazi; Meyer Lansky was a courageous Jew. The Cary Grant in my story turned out not to be Edward Patrick Hartnett, but my own father.
M
y romance with Gabby Hartnett never got back on track, if it had ever been on track to begin with. We had a few more dinners, and numerous meetings that included his “accountant” as well as other FBI agents. Coached by my father, I shared vague recollections of hotel and casino operators and assorted fellow travellers that may have made them think they had struck some sort of mother lode. The bigger the names I dropped, names like Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, the producer Ray Stark in Hollywood, the banker Charles Allen in New York, the political boss Stafford Sands in the Bahamas, the more the FBI ears would prick up, like bulldogs to a scent.
All I would say, basically, was that I had heard these names mentioned, or that there were supposed to be meetings, or there were phone messages. It was easy for me to play dumb, because I didn’t really know anything anyway. However, the FBI assumed, that as the daughter of the mastermind, I was leading them into a vast global conspiracy. Was its purpose world domination, or merely tax evasion? I had no idea. Their paydirt was fool’s gold.
Gabby remained the all-American boy that a normal girl should have married. I was not a normal girl. Besides, I could never really
trust him, and I loved my father too much. Meanwhile, I met and fell for a guy who to Daddy may have been even worse for me than an FBI undercover agent—a real gangster. My father had wanted his children to have a different, better, safer life than his own. Paul had done it. Buddy had not, nor had I. I seemed to come close, but no cigar. First I married a rich handsome guy. He turned out to be gay. Then I had found a West Point guy, but he was a secret Fed. Now I found a nice guy, but he was from a major Mafia family. Poor Daddy. He couldn’t win.
I first met Vince Lombardo on a blind date, but not with him. My date was a handsome aspiring actor named Nick, who actually was something of a gigolo. He had been the kept man of the actress-dancer Eleanor Powell, who had lit up the screen with Fred Astaire in
Broadway Melody of 1940
. She had married the actor Glenn Ford, but she had a thing for young studs, and Nick was that. Nick had worked as a bouncer at the Copa, as had Vince, who had “graduated” to managing a restaurant in Greenwich Village, a gay hangout called the Tropical Bar, on Eighth Street. Because Nick was always flat broke, he charmed his buddy Vince to “comp” his date meal with me.
Expecting someplace romantic, I had gotten all glamored up in a fancy new silk dress. I was ready for El Morocco. What I got was El Homo. The front was all lesbians. The back was all fairies. I was highly insulted. After Marvin, I had developed a knee-jerk reaction to gay dives, and this was a prime one. I left Nick at the table and holed up in the phone booth, calling friends to find something else to do. Vince came to the booth, knocked on the glass door. He was holding a sizzling platter of steak. He was also very handsome, with deep blue eyes and sandy hair. He could have doubled for Paul Newman as the boxer Rocky Graziano in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
. “You’re gonna miss the best steaks in New York,” he said with a mesmerizing smile.
“You and your gay boyfriend eat them!” I snarled, as I ran out to get a cab. It was a monsoon. There were no cabs. Eating humble pie
and nothing else, I walked back in and asked Vince to call me a cab. A total gentleman, he got drenched hailing me a cab, came back in, found an umbrella and kept me dry until I was safe inside. Two days later, he called me up to ask me out. “I don’t date gays,” I snarled. I only married them.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said with a laugh. Then he told me the story about how the night I left, Nick got his comeuppance. He hadn’t even seemed to care what happened to me. He had run into two Broadway producers at the bar whom he thought he could hustle for a part. Instead they tried to hustle him into bed. Nick, Vince said, had given him permission to call me up.
“If you’re not gay, are you married?” was my follow-up question.
“Separated,” he admitted.
Again, I almost hung up. But he hung in, convincing me his marriage was a lost cause. He had married a nice Italian girl, but when he moved with her and their young son to Greenwich Village, she had become a beatnik Frankenstein, spending all her time at peace marches and protest rallies. I felt his pain and agreed to a date. But I had such low expectations that I didn’t feel as if it would be worth the trouble to dress up. Instead, I invited him to my apartment for a TV dinner with Gary and Mommy. Maybe I just wanted to scare him away and get it over with.
Vince showed up with a box of cookies from a great old Italian bakery. Somehow he was instantly right at home with my crazy family. Gary shook his hand, then ignored him completely in favor of the television. Mommy gave him the fish eye for about ten minutes, then warmed up. They spent the rest of the evening talking about old times on the Lower East Side, where she and Aunt Esther had sowed their wild oats with Daddy and Uncle Benny. Vince had grown up in the same neighborhood, right near the Henry Street Settlement House, with all its concerts and cultural events. I hadn’t seen Mommy so animated since her happy days at the Beresford.
Vince told us how his father spoke his native Sicilian dialect, from where he had immigrated, and English and Yiddish as well. Vince’s dad had been a clothes presser in the garment industry, like Grandpa Lansky. We had more in common than I would have guessed. Like my parents, Vince’s father was a poor immigrant, his mother a rich one. In Sicily, her family, the Tranchinas, had hired the Lombardos as their bodyguards, or private police force, for generations, to protect them from kidnapping and other medieval savagery.
In America, while Vince’s dad wasn’t particularly ambitious, happy pressing coats and doing magic tricks in his spare time, his Uncle Anthony had been a crime chieftain in Chicago, very close to Al Capone, and his New York Uncle Rocco had risen to become a rich and powerful bigwig in the Unione Siciliana, the forerunner of the current Mafia. Uncle Rocco Lombardo’s front was a plumbing supply business, which eventually enabled him to live as a gentleman farmer in Connecticut, somewhat like the Citrons in New Jersey.
“I love him!” Mommy exulted when he left. Then her face turned glum. “But Italians never get divorced.” That was it. I wouldn’t go out with Vince again. He called and called, but I held the line. I couldn’t face putting myself out and then getting hurt. Six months later, while taking a walk with Gary, I ran into Vince on Broadway. He held my arm and stared straight into my eyes with his beautiful blue ones. “Sandi. I’m divorced. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you the papers.” And that was the start of something great.
My romance with Vince broke the mold of glamorous café society New York that I had previously known. Our first date was at Manganaro’s, a grocery store near the Lincoln Tunnel with rickety tables in back. And amazing grandma-style, long-cooked Italian food. It was a perfect place for Vince to share his childhood memories with me.
Things didn’t seem to have changed that much on the Lower East Side from Daddy’s generation to Vince’s. Vince’s Catholic elementary school sounded like
Blackboard Jungle
. Like Daddy he had constantly
been bullied, in his case by the tough Irish majority, endlessly taunted as
wop, guinea bastard, greaseball
.
One day when an Irish tough whacked him one time too many in the back of his head with a ruler, Vince turned around and stabbed a lead pencil in the kid’s eye. The nuns called an ambulance. Vince was taken to the office of the Mother Superior, sure to be on his way to reform school. Irish cops arrived to take him to the station, where they locked him in holding cell and gave him the “dirty wop” tirade. Then Uncle Rocco and some big guys from the Unione Siciliana showed up, winked at him, and got him out. Back at school, no one messed with him. He had a reputation as a homicidal maniac. That’s what made you a big man on campus on those mean streets.
Vince admitted that as a boy he felt about the Jews the same way his Irish tormentors felt about the Italians. His father set him straight. “Why do you hate the Jews?” he asked Vince. “Because they killed Jesus,” was Vince’s stock answer. His father slapped him hard across the face. “Who the hell do you think Jesus is?” his father asked him angrily. “An Italian God,” Vince had said. His father slapped him again. “No, you idiot. He was Jewish. And if it wasn’t for my Jewish friends, we’d be in the street.” Afterward Vince preached the gospel of tolerance to his onetime Irish enemies, who now feared him on the playgrounds. They still thought he was out of his mind, but they didn’t dare cross him.
Like Daddy’s sister Rose, Vincent’s father died of walking pneumonia, in 1943. That was the big immigrant disease. Vince was eight. Aided by his rich gangster Uncle Rocco, Vince’s mother moved the family to the relative countryside of Brooklyn, to an area called Gravesend Neck Road. She got a job in the ILGWU, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. You see, you didn’t have to be Jewish to be in the rag trade. You did pretty much have to be Italian, though, to belong to the Avenue X Gang, the toughest gang in South Brooklyn. With his reputation for insane bravery, Vince was welcomed as a member.
A lot of Vince’s gang became members of Carlo Gambino’s crime family. He guessed that 75 percent of his pals had already died bloody deaths. Most of the ones who survived were in jail. The two successes he could cite were a cop and an undertaker. Vince got the opportunity himself when, after the war, his mother remarried another Sicilian immigrant named Pete Mazzarino, who also worked in the garment district. During World War I, Pete’s job in the Italian army had been to execute soldiers who didn’t obey orders. He bragged that he had shot over 150 of them. No wonder he chose to immigrate.
Pete put Vince in a special Boy Scout troop that was a feeder for the Gambinos. He introduced Vince to the feared Carlo at his Catholic Church, and when Vince was fifteen, he gave him the offer of a lifetime: to join Gambino. But he had to know that the Mafia comes before everything else, “before your country and your God,” as Vince recalled Pete’s pitch. “If I tell you to kill your mother, your brother, what would you do?”
“I wouldn’t kill them. No way,” Vince told his stepfather.
“Then it’s not for you,” Pete concluded. However, to avoid squandering Vince’s fighting skills, Pete decided to turn him, if not into a hit man, then into a prizefighter. He signed him up with the Police Athletic League. In Lincoln High School, where he was also a champion cross-country runner, Vince fought as a semi-pro. He had seventeen wins and one loss. The resemblance to Paul Newman as Rocky Graziano was more than coincidental. Through his stepfather, via Carlo Gambino, right to the owner Frank Costello, Vince got a job as a bouncer at the Copacabana. He might have been at my sweet sixteen party, though he was surely too busy making money on the side. He supplemented, or rather multiplied, his salary by being a one-man bank, or loan shark, to waiters and busboys. He was also in the numbers business.
Vince claimed never to have heard of my father. I thought I had caught him in the one big lie. Maybe he wanted to play dumb so I
wouldn’t think he was a fortune hunter. How could he work at the Copa when one of Daddy’s closest friends was Frank Costello? “What does he do?” Vince asked me.
“Don’t you read the papers, Vince?”
“No.”
“Do you watch the news on television?”
“No. Just Ed Sullivan and Sid Caesar.”
“How about the radio?”
“Cousin Bruce. Murray the K.”
“Jesus, Vince. Did you ever hear of Frank Costello?”
“My boss.”
“And
his
boss, Charlie Luciano?”
“Hey. What is this?
$64,000 Question
?”
“Vince, where have you been? Under a rock? Those are my father’s partners.”
“How can that be? You’re father’s supposed to be Jewish. What does he do? Keep their books for them?”
At that point I gave up and realized Vince genuinely did not know. And did not care. Vince was oblivious to money. He was also, for all his tolerance, oblivious to Jews. He was of the old Moustache Pete school that didn’t believe that non-Italians could be in the Mafia. To him Jews weren’t mob material. I had to admit to myself that Daddy’s world of crime, whatever it was, seemed so different from Vince’s. The difference was between a banker and a gangster. Daddy’s world was distant, clean, business-y, straight out of Wall Street. Vince’s was straight out of Hollywood, earthy, bloody, dangerous, in your face. That made it romantic.
Eventually Vince got married, had a son, and decided to settle down, trading in the Copa loan sharking for becoming a private eye for a Mafia lawyer, with whom he branched out into the home improvement business. Always enterprising, he ran an after-hours club on 56th and Second. Although he wasn’t
in
the Mafia, or LCN, or
whatever you wanted to call it, he was perilously close. After dating exclusively for two years, Vince took me and Gary to dinner at his parents’ home in Coney Island, within earshot of the Wild Mouse roller coaster. His stepfather, Pete, was Old World, quiet, and scary as hell. Gilda was warm as Mount Vesuvius. They’d made enough food to feed the Italian Army, even after Pete had gotten through with the deserters. During the meal, Vince turned to Gilda and asked her, “Mama. Do you like Sandi?”