Max Collins - Blood and Thunder

And I hardly expected, calling upon Kastel, to encounter such a big pro-Long cheerleader.

I’m not talking about Kastel himself, but rather his second-in-command, one “Diamond Jim” Moran.

Short, paunchy, beetle-browed, mustached, with the slightly battered puss of an ex-pug, Moran rolled across the lobby toward me like a tank, his wardrobe making the Kingfish seem, by comparison, a man of the finest sartorial taste: sky blue double-breasted suit; pink silk shirt; wide red tie; white flourish of handkerchief pluming from a breast pocket. A jaunty homburg matched the light blue color of the suit, as did the round tinted lenses of his gold-frame glasses.

I’d never met the man, but I knew him at once. Why? First, I am a trained detective. Second, the words “Jim Moran” were spelled out in glittering stones-presumably diamonds-on a pin on his tie.

He confirmed the pin with an introduction, and I gave him my name-my real one-as we shook hands. Then he said, “Didn’t mean to keep you waitin’, Nate-phone started ringin’. Okay I call ya Nate? You call me Jim. Mister Moran? That’s my old man, rest his soul.”

He spoke a peculiar mixture of Italian immigrant (Moran was apparently an alias) and Southern gentleman.

Ten minutes ago I had called up to Kastel’s business suite in the Roosevelt, and Moran had asked me to wait here in the lobby. Maybe his phone really had started ringing, but I figured it was more likely he was calling around, checking up on my story.

He was moving; he waved for me to fall in step. “Dandy Phil’s at our warehouse, over on the French side. He’s expectin’ us.”

He walked me out onto Canal Street, and we crossed the wide thoroughfare with the light, skirting a trolley car as we went.

“Ever been to the Vieux Carre?” Moran asked.

“First time.”

“I prac’ly grew up there. First job I ever had was a barber shop over on Chartres.”

“Boxed some, didn’t you?”

His already jovial countenance brightened even more “Why, you see me fight?”

“No. I see your nose.”

His laugh was immediate and infectious. He was a pleasant enough lunatic to be around.

“So you’re pals with Frank Nitti, huh?” he asked, as we strolled down Dauphine into the French Quarter. We had crossed a street into another country: tall brick buildings with wrought-iron balconies hugged the sidewalks of the narrow street, ranging from shabby dilapidated affairs with sagging doors and rusted ironwork, often standing empty and in ruins, to structures painstakingly restored as private residences. Others, taken over by shopkeepers, were somewhere in between.

“I do the occasional job for Frank,” I admitted.

“But you’re workin’ for the Kingfish now?”

“That’s right.”

Going into the den of gangsters required leaving my newspaperman masquerade behind: I needed to stick as close to the truth as possible. I had told Moran, on the phone, that I was a Chicago private op who had just gone to work as a bodyguard for the Kingfish; and that Frank Nitti had asked me to pay my respects to Phil Kastel.

The latter wasn’t true, of course, and the Outfit connections I’d implied were an exaggeration; but I did have a friendly relationship with Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti. In fact, he considered himself in my debt, to some degree.

So if Moran had checked up on me with his Chicago sources, my story would seem confirmed.

“I used to work for him myself,” Moran said.

“You worked for Nitti?”

“No! Somebody hit you in the head real hard, boy? The Kingfish! I was one of his first bodyguards, sure ’nuff.”

We strolled along past an unconventional conglomeration of shops and residences: a tea room next to a flophouse, an art studio next to a corner grocery, a nightclub beside a curio shop. Like Greenwich Village in New York, and Tower Town in Chicago, the French Quarter catered to local eccentrics and slumming tourists.

And I was ambling along with a one-man tourist attraction, in the form of Diamond Jim Moran with his light blue suit and matching tinted spectacles. The locals, whether bohemian types (poets, artists, models) or street denizens (gamblers, winos, beggars), or even ordinary working folk (icemen, shopkeepers, hookers), paid this walking advertisement for Technicolor little heed. But the out-of-towners, from debutantes to bank presidents, from sailors to nuns, took in Diamond Jim, in wide-eyed wonder.

I was stunned by him, too-but it wasn’t his wardrobe. It was the notion that one of the mobsters I was investigating as a possible Huey Long murder plotter was one of the Kingfish’s former bodyguards.

And, apparently, a loyal one.

“Yeah, I love the Kingfish, and the Kingfish, he loves me,” Moran was boasting good-naturedly.

“When was this?” I asked.

“When was what?”

“You working for the Kingfish.”

“Six, seven years back…. I worked weekends, mostly-’cause of my other business in’tr’sts.” He touched a bejeweled finger to his pink-shirted chest. “ I’m the one intr’duced the Kingfish to Bourbon Street! Singin’, dancin’, drinkin’ fools we was, back in them days.”

“He’s on the wagon now.”

“Yeah, and I hear he slimmed down, some. Gotta be in fightin’ trim to take on the president.” He let out a single loud laugh. “The boss is sure ’nuff lucky I ain’t around!”

“Oh?”

His smile pretended to be modest. “I used to cook for him. He’s a fiend for my spaghetti and meatballs.”

Told you he was Italian.

“Why’d you stop working for him, Jim?”

“Well, Uncle Sam sorta stopped me. They nailed me on a bootleggin’ rap, in ’30…did a year inside….”

In case you were wondering what his other “business in’tr’sts” were….

“So now you work for Kastel.”

His beetle brow furrowed; it was almost a frown. “I don’t work for him, Nate…I work with him.”

“I see.”

We passed a restaurant oozing the scent of tomato sauce; the neighborhood was Italian, too-French Quarter or not.

“Phil’s a right guy. Been around. Smart sumbitch. One of Arnold Rothstein’s fair-haired boys, way back when.”

“Impressive company.”

“You’re tellin’ me! High-class operator. Phil was only inside once, and that was on a securities scam.”

High class.

“But working with Kastel,” I said, “it’s not like working for the Kingfish, I guess.”

“Not hardly.” He gestured to the world around him. “I’m tellin’ ya, that Kingfish is the best damn thing that ever happened to this state.”

Never mind that we had turned down a shabby side street where unkempt children scurried in and out of gloomy alleyways, and overflowing trash cans decorated the sidewalk, attracting flies and vermin. The lovely wrought-iron balconies on slender iron pillars, adorning buildings that were shabby shadows of their former splendor, looked down on the scruffy ragamuffins in mocking reminder of the wealth Huey Long promised he would one day share with them.

“Take this bizness we’re in, now,” Moran was saying.

“Which business is that?”

“The slot-machine bizness! You know why the Kingfish cut that deal with the Politician, to bring the machines down from New York?”

The Politician was Frank Costello, also known as the “Prime Minister”-the biggest big shot of the New York mob.

“Because Fiorello LaGuardia threw Costello’s slots in the East River?”

He smirked disgustedly. “I’m not talkin’ ’bout why the Politician made the deal; I’m talkin’ about why Huey made it.”

“Oh. Well. For the money?”

He shook his head, as if disappointed in me. We had paused at a modest-looking church called St. Mary’s; a raggedy man with one leg sat on the stone steps trading pencils for contributions. Moran put a dollar in the man’s hat and took a pencil.