Brett Halliday: Win Some, Lose Some

When the big highways came through downtown Miami, the old neighborhoods were ripped apart. Whole blocks were abandoned to the squatters and looters. Businesses failed or moved elsewhere.

Eddie Maye’s saloon, in the shadow of the Interstate, no longer pumped enough beer to break even. Eddie kept it open because he needed the location. He had the loan-shark concession between North Miami Avenue and the waterfront, including the docks and warehouses of the Port of Miami. This end of his business, too, had been hurt by the changes. Few of the tenants in the new high-rises needed Eddie; in fact, they thought there was something demeaning and socially wrong about using a Shylock. Eddie was beginning to think there was an unfairness about the old territorial structure. He wanted to be allowed to pursue business, wherever it was.

Eddie was a popular man in a profession where it is easy to make enemies. Of course, there is no use pretending a Shylock is Santa Claus. People came to him only if they were sure they would be turned down everywhere else. The vigorish was higher than at a bank or a loan office, but the nature of the transaction was exactly the same. He loaned money expecting to get it back. Being a pretty fair judge of human nature, he generally managed to recover. Every lender, from the trap-mouthed, tight-assed personal-loan officer in the First National Bank, to Eddie Maye, the affable proprietor of a Northeast Miami saloon, wants to see certain collateral. If the borrower defaults to a shark, however, the borrower himself knows that the boys are going to put him through a wringer. The basic truth about illegal contracts is that they are unenforceable in the courts. To turn the idea around, the borrower is in no position to claim the protection of the bankruptcy statutes. There are many wild tales about the ways a loan shark collects. In the folklore, the delinquent is visited by a couple of burly young men carrying hockey sticks. In real life, this rarely happens. It doesn’t produce money, and the deterrent effect is zero. Anybody willing to pay Shylock interest is already desperate enough not to be deterred by the thought of a beating, unless he belongs to that quirky tribe of people who don’t want the money-they want to be beaten for failing to pay back the money. The usury laws are seldom enforced. From a cop’s point of view, assault is much better. There the evidence is, in the form of the blood and the broken bones. Eddie would first attempt to foreclose on the collateral, whether it was real property, a relative with an income, a piece of some deal. If worst came to worst, like all lenders who make a mistake, he wrote it off. He couldn’t take it as a tax loss because he didn’t operate within the income tax system. But he didn’t pay taxes on his wins, either.

At this time he had less than $75,000 on the street. And yet he had the usual payments, to cops, politicians, a political law firm. He finished doing his books one evening, on the back of an envelope-again this month his expenses were running ahead of his income-and a man named Lou DeLuca slid onto the stool beside him.

Eddie showed him a big smile. DeLuca gave off a dim glow in return. He had started at about the same time as Eddie. He had either worked harder or connived harder, and he had become a fairly big man in town. He was a specialty accountant, and with all the paperwork these days everybody needs an accountant. He had actually studied for the exam and had the certificate. He was also a gym nut. He worked out four times a week-really worked. Eddie had a hard time trusting any city man in that good shape because you had to ask yourself, what was pushing him to be so perfect?

“Hey, Eddie,” DeLuca said lightly, “I’ve got a friend outside wants to borrow a few bills. Take a ride with us and talk about it.”

Eddie said sure. DeLuca drove a new cream-and-tan Continental without a fingerprint on it, a powerful piece of machinery. With DeLuca at the wheel, there was no doubt who was master. No friend was waiting in the car. Eddie knew instantly that this was either a threat or an opportunity. They went up on 95 and out to the Palmetto, merely cruising. DeLuca started by sounding Eddie out about his own situation. The questions showed that he was working from a scouting report and knew Eddie was restless and the regular payments were hurting.

“The thing of it is,” Eddie said, wishing he hadn’t had two drinks after dinner, “everything’s thinned out in the neighborhood. If I have to stay in my old territory, I might as well give up. Even most of the longshoremen have their own houses now, two cars in the family, a mortgage. Good credit risks. So they go to the bank.”

And he explained his idea. Loan sharking wasn’t a science exactly, but there was more to it than most people realized. What Eddie seemed to be good at was sizing up the prospects of those marginal little businesses that were constantly mushrooming up around town, using mostly Cuban labor, on very small capital. The banks were leery of helping, and the businesses often went under for a want of rainy-day money. But for Eddie to make a loan outside his assigned territory, he had to cut the deal so many ways it was uneconomic. The grease could be awful. A whole lot of that was unnecessary. It had grown up bit by bit over the years. What was needed now was a fresh look at the whole picture.

DeLuca, his eyes sliding between the mirror and the highway, nodded gravely. “It could be I agree with you, Eddie. Where is this fresh look coming from?”

“That’s the point.”

“It’s beginning to seem to me,” DeLuca continued, “that a lot of us have been taking the wrong things for granted. We’ve been drifting, and when you drift, you end up in places you have no business to be. You’ve been reading those highway articles in the News.”

Eddie certainly had because there were some major names involved, and he had a feeling that one of the names was going to be mentioned here in a minute. Big Larry Canada, generally conceded to be top man in illicit gambling when that was where the money was-the mob, they called it then, a word Eddie had never cared for-switched to highway construction at the start of the Interstate program. He had taken a lot of criticism, but his firm had built something like six hundred miles of highway at an average profit of $25,000 a mile. That multiplied out to $15 million in something like five years. You have to book a terrible lot of two dollar bets to get near that figure. In the opinion of DeLuca and a few others, however, not enough of this wealth had filtered back to the people who gave Canada the power base from which he had moved.

“For instance,” DeLuca said, “this bind you’re in, did it occur to you to take it to Larry and get his advice on it?”

“It occurred to me, Lou, but nowadays-”

“Exactly. He’s got more important things, he’s busy having dinner with the politicians. I’ve gone to him time and again, and I’ve said to him, ‘Frankly, you’re making a big mistake. Loyalty is a two-way street. You’re not just in business to make money. You’re a leader, an influence. Sure, it’s a new day in a lot of ways, and as far as you personally go, Larry,’ I said to him, ‘no doubt you’ve cleaned up. But there are dangers in it. A time may come when you’ll wish you stuck more with your friends.’ He doesn’t thank me for pointing it out.”

“Dangers?” Eddie said, picking out that one word, looking away.

“Eddie, do you mind if I give you my ideas? I want to be totally frank.”

“God, no, go ahead. I’m interested.”

“The way we had it set up before the reorganization,” DeLuca said, “and I’m not saying I didn’t go along with that and support it, everybody knew where everybody else stood. When something came up, you knew where to go. I don’t want to be nostalgic or anything. What the hell, we all had our little angles on the side if it didn’t interfere. There was a lot of jockeying always going on, you’ll remember that.”