The Secret Read online

  “I’d like to keep control of my business, Mr. Lansky. I built it and…”

  “Understood,” said Costello. “And that’s how it’ll be. But like you said, they nickel-and-dime you, nickel-and-dime you. Suppose you were to turn over, let’s say twenty-five percent of Cheeks to a partner with connections. And the nickel-and-diming stops. Not only that. This partner can help you expand your business. I have a man in mind who can also help you solve a problem you’re going to have sooner or later.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “You can’t always import all your merchandise. You’re going to have to start manufacturing it here. So, what do you know about the garment district, Jerry?”

  “Nothing,” I admitted.

  “The boys that rip you off at the airports and on the waterfront are nothing compared to what you’ll meet up with in the garment district,” said Lansky. “It’s a special culture, all its own. They have their ways that have been goin’ on for all of this century and even before. It’s more subtle, but it’s more effective.”

  15

  So it happened that I met Sal Nero: Salamon Nero.

  I won’t play around with this the way he did with me. His name, really, was Solomon Schwartz. He was a nephew of Arnold Rothstein, one-time kingpin of New York rackets who was whacked out in the late twenties. He was also a cousin of Bugsy Siegel, who is credited with having opened up Las Vegas. Violence was part of his background. Rothstein was murdered in 1928, Siegel in 1947. They—and Lansky—were relics of the day when Jews controlled the rackets that came to be controlled by Cosa Nostra.

  Sal was a sort of Lansky writ small. Well … Lansky was only five feet four and a half, so of course I don’t mean physically small. What Sal had was a trigger mind and a photographic memory. Some people compared him to Abbadabba Berman, the mathematical genius behind some of Dutch Schultz’s most profitable scams. Writ small? No, he wasn’t. He was writ large, a tall, muscular, handsome man who was irresistible to women. A flashy dresser.

  I’ll add one more fact. He was hung like a horse. Like a friggin’ horse! It was amazing. I remember standing at a urinal and glancing over at Sal’s cock. Men are not supposed to do that and will deny they do, but I’ve yet to meet a man who didn’t, sometimes anyway. Sal was absolutely unbelievable!

  What is more, he was connected. Officially—if there could be such a thing as officially—he was with the Carlino family. But he had always been careful to avoid doing things that would offend the other families, and no one despised him.

  He was one year older than I was, and he had—to use words everybody will recognize but I never in my life heard seriously used—made his bones.

  In 1947, when I was learning the Plescassier Water business, Sal found out that a Carlino underboss was messing with his wife. He went to Joseph Carlino, as the story is told, and complained that the underboss was screwing his wife, the mother of his children. He humbly asked Carlino’s permission to whack the guy out. Sicilians are sensitive about that sort of thing: family relations. They have very little tolerance for guys who mess around with other guys’ marriages. It’s like the way Masons pledge on their souls never to fuck the wife or daughter of another Mason.

  “Very well, my friend,” Carlino said, as the story is told. “I will take no offense. But you must know that Vince has friends and will be well protected.”

  “I am only concerned that I do not offend you, Don Carlino,” said Sal—as the story is told; I am always skeptical of things like this.

  Carlino thought little more of it, apparently. But within a week the underboss was dead.

  As the story is told, he got out of his car one night at his home on Staten Island. Two men were with him: his protection. As the three of them walked toward his front porch, huge blasts erupted from the shrubbery near the steps.

  Vince went down first, nearly cut in two by the blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun. As the story is told, red and yellow bits of his gaudy silk necktie were found between his vertebrae. At short range, a twelve-gauge can do that.

  The second blast took off the head of the first bodyguard, and the third blast cut through the knees of the second bodyguard, leaving him crippled for life but alive to tell a cautionary tale.

  Sal had bought an automatic shotgun and cut down the barrel and the stock. He drilled a hole in the remaining wood of the stock and put in a leather strap. That way he could carry the shotgun hanging under his left arm and hidden by his raincoat. It was as dangerous as any weapon ever used.

  What was more, it was used once. No trace of it was ever found. The New York cops know how to find guns tossed in the saltwater, but they didn’t find this one.

  Nothing happened. If the cops suspected who whacked out Vince, they didn’t care. But after that Sal Nero was known as a man who could be crossed a little but not big-time.

  My partner.

  16

  The advantages of having Sal Nero for a partner made themselves apparent quickly.

  Pilferage at Idlewild did not stop, but it went down to the standard take. Nobody said a word, but the pilferage diminished. That was just one thing. What was more, the cost of having trash hauled went down a little, as did the cost of minor repairs and major remodeling.

  Things like this happened—

  A wise guy came into my West Side store one morning. “Figured you’d want to send flowers as a tribute,” he said to Giselle. “Everybody else is.”

  “Flowers?” she asked. “For what?”

  “Well … You know Paulie died. Paulie C. All the neighbors are sending floral tributes. Figured you’d want to send—What you want to send? I mean, like five hundred. Five buys a real nice tribute. Everybody’ll notice. Everybody’ll appreciate the way you’re making your business a part of the neighborhood. Be good for your business. Be very good.”

  People who didn’t know Giselle took her for an innocent because of her French accent. Giselle was as innocent as Sal. “Five hundred dollars,” she mused, frowning. “I don’t know.… Man like Paulie ought to get at least a thousand.”

  She said it, though she had not the remotest idea who Paulie C. might have been—if indeed there had been a Paulie C., and if indeed he had passed to his great reward.

  “Oh, yeah, well…”

  Giselle nodded solemnly. “All this kind of thing is handled by my husband’s partner. Yes. You speak to him, and I am sure he will do what is right.”

  “Well, lady, who is your husband’s partner, and where do I find him?”

  “My husband’s partner is Sal Nero.”

  “Uh … right. Okay. I’ll talk to Sal. Right. I’ll take it up with Sal.”

  Of course, that was the last we ever heard about sending money to buy flowers for Paulie’s funeral.

  Sal had a formidable reputation among the small-timers. They were afraid of him. They had heard the story of the twelve-gauge. He had a respectable reputation among the bigger fry, but his reputation among the small-timers served us well.

  He was like Meyer Lansky. He wasn’t a capo, and he didn’t have any soldiers. He didn’t work that way. So far as I have ever been able to find out, he never killed anyone or had anyone killed after the incident with the Carlino capo in 1947—with one very big exception. But the word on him was that he had done it, so he might do it again. He was a smart man, a wheeler and dealer who made things happen by brains and not muscle—but don’t get seriously crosswise with him.

  He drank nothing stronger than wine, and of wine he drank only the best. He cared nothing for champagne or, in fact, for any white wine, but he knew French and Italian reds and could order them by year.

  I was amused at how wise he was to the specialty waters. If he wanted fizz water, he ordered Canada Dry or Adirondack water that was just as good but even cheaper. He laughed at the people who made it a point of honor to have little green bottles on their tables.

  “Shows what you can do with the right advertising,” he said. “With the right kind of promotion we
could bottle and sell horse piss.”

  His taste in women was entertaining.

  He liked heavyset women. He explained why:

  “Y’know, when y’got a whang like mine, y’gotta do it with a big gal; I mean, one with plenty of flesh around her pussy. Hell, with a little thin woman I’d go through her and come out the backside.”

  I was already curious about his whang, of which I’d had a glimpse as we’d stood side by side at two urinals. One day we were in my office. He stepped to the door and latched it. “Go ahead and have a look,” he said, and he pulled on his penis to bring it all out of his pants.

  As God is my witness, the man had a ten-inch penis! It was formidable.

  “I’m a friggin’ freak,” he said. “But what can I do? I can’t have it cut down.”

  When I met him, his current girlfriend was a chubby twenty-five-year-old named Truda. She was not obese, but she was oversized in all dimensions. She was fascinated with the line of merchandise we stocked in our Cheeks shops, but we had almost nothing she could wear, which caused Sal to offer his first idea about our business.

  “Y’know,” he said, “there’s a lot of girls like Truda. We oughta offer a bigger choice of sizes.”

  He was right, and our next shipment from Paris included merchandise in larger sizes.

  His next idea had to do with advertising that we carried the larger sizes. We couldn’t put up signs saying “SCANTIES FOR BIG GIRLS, TOO!” We could, though, Sal suggested, feature bigger girls in some of our color photos. That would get the message across. All we needed was one or two fat models.

  “Hell,” he said, “why not my Truda? She’d be flattered. I mean flattered.”

  So we took Truda to the photographer and had her pose in bra-and-panty sets; also in skimpy nighties and bikinis. Sal bought her a blond wig, which was so conspicuously a wig that there could be no doubt that was what it was—which made her even cuter. Within two weeks at least one photo poster in each of our shops was a picture of Truda showing a lot of skin.

  This inspired her to think she could become a model. Her hair was red, so she took to calling herself Ginger. She had a portfolio of pictures taken and began to offer herself as a model. Sal and I thought it was strange, but a number of photographers hired her. She never became the fashion model she had dreamed of being, but her picture appeared from time to time in magazines given to photo art. One caption suggested a fat girl like her had to have a lot of courage to pose in the nude. That showed how much the caption writer understood about a woman like Truda. She wasn’t ashamed of herself. She was proud.

  17

  Frank Costello had suggested that Sal’s chief value to Cheeks would be his contacts in the garment district. And so it turned out. He knew his way around in that business.

  When we went to the district, I expected to meet a bald, cigar-chewing man in a soiled shirt and vest, sitting at a scarred old desk, probably with his feet up—an Uncle Harry come back to life.

  What I met instead was an emaciated Chinese named Charlie Han, dressed in fashionable faded blue jeans and a light blue flannel shirt with white buttons. Charlie was a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels, and a pack of them always stood in his shirt pocket. He did not put his feet on a desk. If he had a desk. If he had a desk, I never saw it. In fact, I never saw any room that might have been his office. If you didn’t find him in one of his shops, walking around, supervising, you would find him sitting in a booth in a coffee shop on Thirty-eighth Street. As I would learn, Charlie did business in cash and kept no records, so the tax authorities could find no way to audit him. Well … actually, they could have, but he also made it his business to be inconspicuous, and I doubt that the agencies who might have wanted to look into his operations were even aware he existed.

  Everyone has heard the word sweatshop. Few have ever seen one. Charlie’s employees were almost all Hispanic women, from a variety of Latin-American nations. Few of them were legal immigrants. They worked at sewing machines on the upper floors of district buildings, in conditions that even I—who thought of myself as reasonably knowledgeable about how things were on the streets—found unbelievable.

  For example, there was just one toilet for as many as fifty women. They had one ten-minute toilet break in the morning and one in the afternoon, at which time a line naturally formed and most of them did not return to their machines by the end of the break. When they didn’t—or if they went to the toilet at another time—they were docked an hour’s wages. An hour!

  These women were young, most of them, and many of them were conspicuously pregnant. Abused by the sweatshop all day, they went home to some hovel at night to be abused by the man who had gotten them into this country, and who took their money from them. They were slaves; there was no other way to put it.

  Charlie paid his people cash. That way there was no record of how much he paid to whom, so he paid no social security, no workers’ compensation premiums, no unemployment compensation tax. God knows what other taxes or charges he did not pay. Of course he paid nothing like the minimum wage. Very few of the women who worked for him knew there was such a thing.

  Once in a while a union organizer came around and tried to organize the women. Those fellows were in a risky business. They had a way of … disappearing. Various kinds of reformers came around from time to time, representing organizations as lofty as the United Nations. An operator like Charlie could move his sweatshop in a matter of hours, so that when inspectors came in response to a reformer complaint all they found was a bunch of empty floors.

  “That’s the garment industry,” Sal told me. “Forget you ever saw this shop. The most upscale stores in the country sell name brands that come from sweatshops like Charlie Han’s. Their buyers have no idea—or can pretend they have no idea—about the conditions in which the clothes they buy for their stores are made. Charlie is a contractor. He gets a contract—an oral contract, nothing in writing—to make a thousand dozen skirts, let’s say, for Big Store chain. That contract comes from a middleman who may have got it from another middleman, and only the middlemen deal directly with Big Store. Big Store defines design and fabric, Charlie buys the fabric and thread and zipper for, say, a dollar seventy-five per skirt, has the sewing done in his sweatshop at a cost of a dollar twenty-five per skirt, and sells the skirt to Middleman One for seven-fifty. Middleman One sells it to Middleman Two for eleven twenty-five, and Middleman Two sells wholesale to Big Store Corporation for, say twenty-one dollars—”

  “Why two middlemen?” I asked.

  “Levels of insulation,” Sal explained. “It’s illegal to sell sweatshop merchandise, so they build a barrier between Charlie and Big Store. Now, Middleman Two sells the skirt to Big Store for twenty-one dollars, and Big Store sells it to the public for seventy-five fifty. Sometimes Big Store has a sale and sells the Leigh skirt for fifty-six fifty. Customer thinks she’s got a great deal!”

  “So we…?”

  “We make a deal with Charlie Han to make stuff for us. We don’t want to get in trouble with the law, so we deal with Charlie through a guy I know by the name of Murray. That way we don’t sell stuff we know is sweatshop-made. Murray insulates us from Charlie. That’s his business. He’s an insurance broker, so to speak. He takes the risk of getting in trouble with the law for dealing in sweatshop merchandise. He takes the fall if shit happens, and we’re protected.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Hey, don’t think you can reform the garment industry. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s always been—hell, for a century at least, and more than that I imagine. And let me tell you something else: Charlie will deliver quality merchandise. Forget how it gets made. From the standpoint of quality and cleanliness, it’s made right.”

  Okay. If I didn’t take a profit out of this way of doing business, somebody else would. And, of course, if Herr Standartenführer Schultz hadn’t had his squads shoot all those Jews down there in the woods, somebody else would have. It’s a common rationalization, one
that covers a multitude of sins. The unsubtle don’t even realize they are rationalizing and soldier on with clear consciences.

  But Charlie Han would only do the sewing. We had to provide the designs, and as it turned out we would have to provide the fabrics.

  For Cheeks, design would be everything.

  In this, Sal was not at all helpful. Giselle tried to be helpful. But she knew little about American designers. Help came from an unexpected source.

  Melissa Lamb, whose hair had shown above the top of her bikini when we took the first photographs for the shops, was a professional model and modeled for many sales campaigns for my lines. I had kept in touch with her. When I mentioned to her that I was looking for a designer, she named a name. He was good, she said, and he specialized in the sort of thing I wanted.

  So, with some reservations, I contacted the designer she recommended: Larkin Albert.

  I took him for a flaming fag, a swish. God knows I’d had my fill of fairies, having had to work with a whole family of them and their cutie-boys for almost two decades. But Larkin was something else. And I was wrong about him. He was not homosexual. He was a cross-dresser. What’s more, he was damn good at it.

  Often he went on the streets as a woman, wearing a wig, falsies, and high-heeled shoes, carefully limited makeup, and a miniskirt. I hardly need say that men tried to pick him up. They could experience not just one but sometimes two most unpleasant surprises. Discovering that the woman they had the hots for was in fact a man was only the first surprise. Occasionally one of them would turn aggressive, which generated the second surprise: Larkin Albert held a black belt in karate. He had made for himself an interesting life.

  In his studio, he wore one of his many wigs, skin-tight leggings, high heels, and stuffed-bra T-shirts. He smoked cigarettes in a holder, which he brandished effeminately, even with people who knew full well that he was a man.