Amuse Me

What I like about writing is the words.

I was passing the exotic cheese shop the other day and I noticed a sign for, I think it was, salami made from wild boar meat. The sign said, "Feral swine."

Feral swine. How cool is that for an expression? It calls up all sorts of images, from Wonder Wart-Hog to a rag-tag cadre of old Nazis living off the land in a remote area of Bavaria, the Feral Swine Brigade. Or a motorcycle gang. The Feral Swine. I can see their jackets now. You wouldn't dare wear one in certain bars.

One morning last week I fell ill with chills and fever, which is a story for another day, and sooner than run off to the ER and give everybody whatever the hell it was I had I decided to take a hot water bottle and a book and go to bed. After awhile I got better, as planned, but in the meantime I read the book. It was Green Hazard by Manning Coles, two writers who liked words. Cyril Coles fought in the trenches and then was a spy in Germany during World War I. He knew how bad things can get, probably knew it better than many of us, and yet managed to dance around the edge of the pit with the most elegant and amusing language imaginable.

This is the opposite of the way things are done today. Nowadays the Knowing Ones will tell you, there isn't enough conflict here. Create conflict. I've tried to read a couple of books by people who took this advice, injecting bogus conflict into a limp manuscript. "Oh, why did I say that to my boyfriend? Now he's mad at me. Well, I'm mad at him." As the murderer creeps closer. Fling! Another book goes crashing against the wall. Unless it's a Kindle. Then it just gets soundly cursed.

Where are the amusing writers? That's what I want to know. I've run out of Manning Coles novels, I've read everything by Terry Pratchett, and I need something else to read. History books are good, if the writer doesn't have some unpleasant axe to grind. Some history books I have to feel terrible about, since they chronicle the bestial sins of my ancestors. Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick, for instance—My God! How horrible we were to the Indians!—and A Great and Noble Scheme by John Mack Faragher. I was all set to read A Great and Noble Scheme when I realized that my ancestors who "settled" Nova Scotia in 1760 did so a scant five years after the area had been ethnically cleansed of Frenchmen.

Right now I'm waiting for a delivery from the Naval Institute of a book about German spies in Baltimore in the years before we entered World War I. This should be diverting. I don't have to assume any personal guilt for whatever happened. I might write an amusing piece of spy fiction based on that book, and on the memoir of Franz von Rintalen, The Dark Invader, who was a saboteur in those times. Maybe I'll call it Feral Swine.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

The Tale of Two Jacks: The Gangster and the President

Denis Foley, a forensic anthropologist and historical archeologist, is author of the true crime thriller Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill (NK Burns Pub., 2006). He has a passion for researching the Irish in America whether they be gangsters, martyrs or rebels; most recently “On Tour and Exiled; James Connolly in America 1902-1905” in the 2013 issue of Saothar, the Journal of the Irish Labor History Society. He is working on his debut novel, Murder Most Irish, set in the Bronx and the Inwood Section of Manhattan.

Robert Knightly

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The Gangster Killed by a Politician

Former City of Watervliet Police Chief Francis Landrigan claimed that in order to understand who killed Jack Legs Diamond, aged 34, in a Dove Street rooming house in Albany on December 18, 1931, you had to go to the City of Watervliet next door and look into the affairs of the Hess brothers, Seymour known as ‘Big Mouth’ and Eugene. The brothers were Legs Diamond’s lieutenants in Watervliet, a small industrial city just north of Albany on the Hudson River. It was known as the Barbary Coast in the late Nineteenth Century because of its many bars and lawlessness. Eugene Hess was a clerk in the Troy Law Offices of Dan Pryor, Legs Diamond’s attorney. Seymour Hess, a member of the upstate Poka-Dot gang, guarded Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Kiki Roberts on Legs’s orders during his trial in Troy for kidnapping. Seymour was charged with keeping Kiki, the girlfriend, and Mrs. Alice Diamond, the wife, apart. Legs’s bodyguard, Watervliet Police Sgt. Frederick M. Broderick, and Legs were inseparable during the trial. Yet, Broderick was mysteriously absent the night Diamond died.

Legs routinely frequented Watervliet and the Village of Menands to gamble and drink in the Hess speakeasies. In Menands, he visited a ‘safe house’ and his vehicle fleet garaged at Tillinghast and Broadway. He owned garages in Watervliet as well and would bring booze in from Chestertown to Watervliet in funeral hearses. The Watervliet bootleggers as well as those from the City of Troy across the Hudson from Albany threw in with Diamond for access to his liquor distribution network. Diamond also operated a distillery in the Town of Halfmoon in adjacent Saratoga County. Dan O’Connell, the Democratic Machine Boss in Albany, also supplied the area with beer and liquor. He owned Hedrick’s Brewery. Dan and his brother Solly ran numbers, the baseball pool and prostitution in Albany and its environs. City-slicker Legs Diamond was not welcome in Dan’s City.

Dan O’Connell concentrated on the local baseball pool and bootlegging and politics. He sent his Albany Night Squad detectives, Sgt. William Fitzpatrick and Det. John McElveney, to warn Legs to stay out of Albany. O’Connell owned the Albany Police. Their squad cars accompanied caravans of liquor, transported from Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s warehouses in Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River and through the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation (still today the preferred route for contraband), to O’Connell’s warehouses in Albany. Dan and Joseph Kennedy, the millionaire father of JFK, were business partners. Kennedy had set up shop downtown in the Standard Building at 112 State Street, occupying the penthouse.

Legs Diamond, the young interloper from the streets of Manhattan, owner of the fashionable HotsyTotsy Club in Harlem, exiled himself from NYC to Acra, 130 miles away in the Catskills, after shooting to death two Club patrons. He’d stayed one step ahead of the NYPD. A hijacker of fellow bootleggers, Legs survived assassination attempts by the likes of Dutch Schultz and Vannie Higgins. The Higgins gang shot him five times; as a result, Legs, once known as ‘Gentleman Jack’, became ‘The Clay Pigeon.’ He retreated Upstate to recoup, and by all accounts was prospering.

Legs Diamond was one of the most successful of Prohibition Era gangsters, a shrewd businessman who accumulated millions. He was successor to Arnold Rothstein, whose bodyguard he’d been. Legs followed Rothstein’s example, branching out from booze to the more lucrative heroin and cocaine trade, traveling to London and Brussels on that business. Rothstein, labeled the ‘Gangster of Gangsters’, at his death was the richest of the Organized Crime tycoons and the leading illicit drug importer. Diamond reputedly killed Rothstein for putting the Feds onto his drug business. Darling of the national press and symbol of the Prohibition Era, Diamond mistakenly believed he didn’t have to play the Albany game of sharing the spoils with the Political Machine.

Pulitzer Prize-novelist and Albany newspaperman, William Kennedy, in a 2011 lecture at Freedom Hall in Troy, told a spellbound audience that as a reporter for the Albany Times Union he’d interviewed Dan O’Connell who admitted that he’d ordered his Night Squad detectives to eliminate Diamond. The details of the plot are pure Albany.

Legs had made a fatal error when he picked the rooming house at 67 Dove St., Albany, for his lodgings.

Sixty-seven is adjacent to 65 Dove, owned then by Charles Loftus, Democratic Committeeman for the Sixteenth Ward. Loftus informed Ward Leader Harry Wands of Legs’ presence as well as the times that he came and went. Legs was known to frequent the Kenmore Hotel, a jazz scene hotspot in Downtown Albany, speakeasies like the Parody Club on Hudson Avenue, and Kiki’s apartment on upscale Ten Broeck Street. Arriving home drunk in the early hours of December 18, 1931, he was passed out on the bed when Dets. Fitzpatrick and McElveney entered his room and fired three bullets into his head. A passing newsboy claimed he saw the killers in their fedoras speed away in a red Packard. A female witness reported seeing the detectives as they left the Dove St. address. The Albany Times Union’s presses on Sheridan Avenue were typesetting the story of Diamond’s murder before it had occurred; Police Reporters Joe O’Heaney and Ray O’Connor had been tipped by the Night Squad. As Robert Coleman, former Albany Assistant Police Chief, noted, in pithy understatement, “The Night Squad visited Legs that night.”

Back at Police Headquarters on Eagle Street, Det. Sgt. Fitzpatrick announced that he alone had shot Diamond. Det. McElveney let his superior take the credit. Edward O’Connell, Chairman of the Albany Democratic Party, thought that his younger brother Dan should have just roughed up Legs and escorted him out of town over the Dunn Memorial Bridge to the City of Rensselaer. Edward O’Connell, senior partner in the law firm of O’Connell and Aronowitz, hated bad publicity like the firestorm that erupted around Legs’ murder. But he needn’t have been overly concerned. Albany’s worst-kept secret was never revealed in the press. The Albany County District Attorney John T. Delaney did travel to Boston to interview Kiki Roberts, who’d fled to her mother’s house in New England, but no indictments were forthcoming. The police were reported by Hearst’s Times Union to be of the opinion that New York City gangsters Dutch Schultz or Fats McCarthy or the local Oley brothers killed Legs. A stolen car recovered on the Bethlehem and Albany Line on Route 9 was described as the killers’, abandoned and pointed south towards New York City.

Lawyer Edward O’Connell bridged the two sub-cultures in Albany. His brothers, Solly and Dan, ran the streets and the rackets. The patrician Anglican and Dutch Reformed elite—powerbrokers since the Civil War Reconstruction Period—were entrenched in the professions and business, as represented by Lt. Governor Edwin Corning. His son, Erastus Corning the 2nd, was to become Albany’s longest sitting Mayor, a 42-year-tenure, and Dan O’Connell’s successor as head of the Democratic Machine.

The Hon. Eugene Devine, a former Justice of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, demurred, nostalgically characterizing the Organization as more like a family, a clan, than a machine. Clergy, cops, wardmen, newspapers, big business and mom-and-pops had ties to the ‘family’ and Dan, the paterfamilias, saw to all receiving a piece of the pie. Judges, the Police Chief, the Mayor, all made pilgrimages to Democratic Party Headquarters at 75 State Street, or Dan’s home on Whitehall Road. Two former associates, an Albany Alderman and a Ward leader, remembered that O’Connell kept $250,000 in his safe at home while another insider recalled that Congressman Lee O’Brien carried $10,000 with him in a satchel at the Elks Club, “in case Dan called and money had to be immediately distributed.” Loyalty to the ‘family’ had its rewards, and, conversely, what was seen as disloyal, punished. An oft-repeated story has it that when Dan was told of a Democrat job-holder being seen at a Republican candidate’s fund-raiser, a phone call lost the man his employment with the State.

Legs Diamond didn’t stand a chance in Albany.

© 2015 Denis Foley, PhD, Curator, Lewis Henry Morgan Institute, SUNY-IT, Utica-Rome

(Next: JFK and the Albany Connection)

The King of Historical Mysteries: The Instruments, the Ideas, the Product

Erik Larson has been described as a writer “gripped by historical mysteries.” This prize-winning author is my better twin. He also writes on yellow legal pads, only he uses a Ticonderoga Number Two pencil—soft. I use a Pilot G-Knock or PaperMate Flair pen.

“Using a computer is great,” says Larson. “You can spew and rewrite a paragraph ten times. But there are passages that are too important, too complex, to do that. When you write longhand, you've got to think about it before you write, because the manual effort is significant. It matters. That really helps.”

I'm often as interested in a writer’s personal writing routine/schedule as the products of his/her pen.

Larson, Brooklyn-born, grew up in Freeport, L.I., graduated from the U. of Penn in Russian history, then the Columbia School of Journalism. Had news jobs in Bucks County, PA, then the Wall Street Journal and Time.

He has written several non-fiction books, including In the Garden of Beasts, about the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany. His latest is Dead Wake, about the last voyage of the Lusitania.

In the Garden of Beasts, an enthralling work of novelistic history, has all the pleasures of a political thriller. And reads like a thriller—utterly compelling. Larson is a master at writing true tales as riveting as fiction. This book with much suspense has the feel of a John le Carre novel.

Larson's book The Devil in the White City won an Edgar for nonfiction crime writing and stayed on the NYT bestseller lists for over three years!

He admits he was influenced by the brilliant crime novelist P.D. James, as well as Truman Capote’s masterpieces of true crime.

In the bestselling Thunderstruck he mapped Marconi’s invention of the wireless with the exploits of the notorious British murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen.

As a boy Larson read the Tom Swift series, Nancy Drew, Dumas and Dickens.

He learned to be a great “detail writer” and at the WSJ found that “little details make a scene come to life… sometimes just one sentence can really do it.”

But what he really wanted to do was “write narrative nonfiction in order to tell true stories from the past.” He was heavily influenced by The Alienist by Caleb Carr—about a serial killer in New York in the 1890s.

Larson says, “I don't necessarily hunt for dark subjects. It just happens that the darker events of history are often the most compelling.”

At one point, Larson intended to work on novels. “I don't think I have the sensibility to be a novelist. To be a novelist, you've got to do really rotten things to your character; you've got to give them cancer—all these awful things. I don't have it in me. But it’s not to say I won't do it sometime in the future.”

“People will always want a good story. As long as there are people around who will produce them, there will be a market for them.”

On his work days… “My day starts very early. I make some coffee, half decaf, half black, and I have one Oreo cookie. A bad day is two Oreo cookies.”

Larson loves The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett's noir classic. “It is the ultimate detective novel, and frankly not just detective novel… Here's this writer, here's Hammett, who in 217 pages creates this world with four of the absolutely most vivid characters that literature, I think, has ever come up with. He created a genre—the whole school of hard-boiled detective novels. And that in turn led to cinema noir. It's a tremendous accomplishment.

“I have been influenced by Hammett, but mostly, though, by Hemingway and Chandler. But they all share the same sense of what’s important in actually constructing a sentence—very spare, very clear, almost devoid of commas and adjectives. That’s what I try to do when I write… Hammett is expert in conjuring suspense and he does it so many clever ways.

“First, there’s the overarching suspenseful theme, which is the bird… What is the Maltese Falcon? Where is it? Who's got it? Which by itself would be enough to drive a narrative… Then you have all these people with their secret agendas… Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who is obviously lying at every turn, and suddenly this guy Joel Cairo appears, and where the hell did this guy come from? And what does he want?

“And then we have Casper Gutman. And he is such a compelling character. All if that adds up. You've got to finish this book because you've got to find out what's up with this bird!”

More by Erik Larson:

“I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up.”

“I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I’m constantly disinclined to do so.”

“I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself—kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape the mood.”

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

Spellbound

I don’t know how well Alfred Hitchcock’s murder mystery and psychological thriller SPELLBOUND (1945) portrays psychoanalysis, homicide and the detection of both murder and the motivation for it, but even if its ideas about all three are as nutty as a fruitcake, I had a great time watching it. The movie also explores the nature of love, but doesn’t realty solve that mystery, except perhaps to say that the heart wants what the heart wants and, in the words of psychoanalyst Constance Peterson (played by Ingrid Berman), “the heart can see sometimes better than the mind.”

Peterson is a well-respected psychoanalyst whose stated motivation for being one is to “drive away the devils of unreason from the human soul.” I say “stated motivation” because psychoanalysis assumes that we are not aware of what really motivates us. We have all kinds of forbidden desires that we must repress (like, for men, killing your father and marrying your mother—what unconscious things motivate women was more confusing to Freud, and to me) in order to function in society, in order for society itself to function, for if everyone let loose with their Dionysian selves, baying at the moon, copulating and killing and perhaps even neglecting to cough into their elbows, this rickety thing we call civilization would come tumbling down around our id-driven, libidinous ears. We manage to repress these things, but they force their way back to our consciousness in the form of dreams and guilt complexes and God knows what else. Exactly how and why this happens eludes me (maybe it did for Freud and Hitchcock too).

The idea that we are driven by what we are not aware of leads to some unexpected conclusions. One is that we may not really be responsible for what we do, being prisoners of our repressed desires. The other is that psychoanalysis becomes a kind of secular confession, whereby you confess to the priest/analyst that you always wanted to do such and such bad thing, and you are either told to say ten Hail Marys or that you couldn’t help but have those nasty impulses because we are first and foremost creatures of unreason, and it is OK to want really bad things as long as we don’t do really bad things.

So far, so good. Peterson is cool and detached, and sees love not as something to celebrate so much as to be investigated, not as the highest thing to which we can aspire, but as a symptom of the irrational self. For all her reserve, though, she can’t help but feel her heart go pitter patter when the new head of the hospital, Dr Edwardes (Gregory Peck) comes walking into the room. She denies it, but we know that she protests too much. Is Gregory Peck that adorable? I don’t know, but Bergman would make any man not a statue (and maybe even a statue) start spouting love sonnets and strumming his guitar outside her window.

But of course there has to be a block to their love, or we wouldn’t even get to act II. The small problem that crops up is that Edwardes is an impostor who may or may not have killed the real Dr Edwardes (who apparently was a pain in the ass). Peterson won’t believe that Edwardes is guilty, even though her mentor, Dr Brulov, points out that he very well could be, and then goes on to say “women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love, and then they make the best patients.” Brulov, by the way, is priceless as a little Viennese fellow with a Hamburg and a van dyke who speaks endearingly broken English.

Is Peterson right to trust Edwardes, whose real identity is a mystery? Does the heart know better than the head? If he didn’t do it, what is the source of his delusion that he did? Don’t worry, Dr Peterson is on the case. She vows to analyze the living crap out of Edwardes until she has the answers, in between bouts of smooching with him on the therapeutic couch, thereby violating the first rule psychoanalysis: don’t fall in love with the patient. We can assume, we students of psychoanalysis, that in addition to the hanky panky there is a lot of transference going on. Transference happens in analysis when you transfer the forbidden desire for, or rage against, the parent or someone else to the analyst. The analyst is supposed to recognize this as part of the process, and to never commit the sin of counter-transference, of falling in love with the patient (and it is actually against the law to consummate that love if the analyst does).

Edwardes runs away, filled with guilt and wanting to protect Peterson from his crazy self. What a hot fantasy—your analyst not only looks like Ingrid Bergman, she is willing to travel to the ends of the earth (or at least Rochester NY, which is almost the same thing—see the movie for an explanation) to save you, to be your savior and your lover all at once. It’s great stuff, and there is great tension too, as you really don’t know whether Bergman should trust him or not. If you are in therapy with a sexy therapist, you should not watch this movie—it’s just a tease.

I won’t reveal all the details. I just want to point out that Hitchcock, who has been accused of not liking women, portrays Peterson as a competent and courageous heroine. While the men around her accuse women of not being able to conquer their irrational selves, she outsmarts them all, and solves all the mysteries: of the death of the real Edwardes, of the identity of the faux Edwardes, and of the origin of John Ballantine’s (the real identity of the Peck character) guilt complex.

In one superb scene, she even cons a house detective into finding Ballantine for her in a NYC Hotel by playing the damsel in distress, letting him think he is the psychologically astute one, puffing himself up in that way men have while she is just so grateful, always having relied on the kindness of (male) strangers.

And what are the clues she uses to solve all the puzzles? Dreams, of course. The movie treats Ballantine’s recurrent dream like it is a treasure map written in a code that, once deciphered, will reveal all. I don’t think dreams in real life point to any definitive psychological answers, any more than clues to a crime might. Still, the way that Hitchcock utilizes the dream is ingenious. If this isn’t how dreams work, it should be.

The final scene is classic. Peterson confronts the real murderer and, having psychoanalyzed him to a “t” and in so doing solved the crime, goes on to tell him how and why he did it. He comes clean, then threatens to kill her, but she understands him so well that she knows he won’t. And he doesn’t. He kills himself instead. And Ballantine and Peterson live happily ever after, perhaps following the advice of Brulov, who tells them to “make babies, not phobias.”

© 2015 Mike Welch

Out of the Closet

We moved a lot when I was growing up. Every four years. I think that’s a lot. The third place I remember living is Crystal Lake, Illinois, where I started out in third grade.

The elementary school in Crystal Lake predated World War II. (Possibly also World War I.) It was a hulking great brick behemoth with a tower. They blew it up the next year to build a new school; I remember seeing the tower come down. Miss Olson was the third grade teacher, and also the fourth, all of us sharing a classroom on the second floor, just off a cavernous hallway whose walls were lined with lockers. Nobody locked the lockers. To the best of my knowledge there were no thieves in Crystal Lake.

Although we moved to Crystal Lake from New Jersey in the summertime, I hadn’t managed to make very many friends by the opening of school. Recess was dismal. I had no skill at jumping rope or playing jacks and nobody talked to me. Fifteen minutes was a lot longer in those days than it is now, have you noticed? An entire dramatic radio show could be consummated in fifteen minutes. In a freezing cold play yard with no friends fifteen minutes was an eternity. One day I realized I didn’t have to go out. While the other children were getting their coats out of their lockers I found that I could slip into my locker all unseen and latch the door shut behind me.

The slits in the locker door came just about to where my eyes were, so that I could look out and see when the hallway was empty. Then I could get out, lounge around, and jump back in if I heard anybody coming.

This worked great for about a week. But one day I failed to complete the maneuver fast enough. The elderly Miss Stevenson—a twin! The other Miss Stevenson was also a teacher there—made so little noise in her approach that she was inside the hallway by the time I clicked the latch shut. Her hearing was acute. “Who's there?”

I tried lying doggo, but she was insistent. “Come out! Come out right now!”

So I came out.

I thought I was in a lot of trouble. Clearly I had given the old lady a bad fright. But as it happened she was fascinated. “Show me how you did that.”

“You can work the latch from inside,” I said, and did it again. She called the other Miss Stevenson to show her what I had done. Then Miss Olson. The other kids came in from recess, and they wanted to see the trick. Before I knew it I was the school celebrity, fifteen-minutes famous. So you just never know.

© 2015 Kate Gallison