Max Collins - Bye bye,baby

Roger and I didn’t have to discuss why Jimmy Hoffa and Sam Giancana might want incriminating tapes on JFK, although their real mutual enemy was brother Bobby, who had made a hobby out of targeting organized crime, and was an old, hated adversary of both men.

Finally, with a glance at the wall of recorders, I asked, “Why so many tapes rolling, Roger? One little blonde woman, one little bed, one little microphone?”

He looked mildly surprised that I’d figured out the significance of that. “Well, you know, with these electronics, you need a backup.”

“Right. What, six, eight backups? What’s this about, anyway?”

“Like I said, I… got a couple other clients.”

“Wanting the same… commodity?”

“Same sort of stuff, yeah.”

“Are they really good clients? The kind of clients who give you maybe half the work your agency does, that type client?”

“Nobody gives me more business than the A-1, Nate, you know that. You and Fred are good to me. You’re great.” He shook his head, his expression ominous. “But this is not shit that you need to know.”

Interesting-he’d already told me Hoffa and Giancana were involved. This was something or somebody more dangerous?

“Roger, I’ll just find out myself, other ways-you mentioned I was a detective, remember? But that will waste time and piss me off and, by the way, cost you your favorite meal ticket. Like we used to say downstairs at the PD in Chicago, when we got the goldfish out… the rubber hose? Spill.”

He spilled. One set of tapes, he said, was for the LAPD’s notorious Intelligence Division.

That was a surprise. “Don’t they have their own surveillance experts?”

“Yeah, but this they don’t want traced back to them. Frankly, I think it’s a job they’re doing for Fox. The movie studio?”

“I know what Fox is. Why wouldn’t Fox go directly to you?”

“Everybody’s got layers of protection, these days, Nate. Nobody wants anything coming back on them.”

“I’ll remember that. Who else?”

“Who else what?”

“Who else are you making goddamn tapes for?”

“You really don’t want-”

I grabbed him by the front of his coveralls, fists full of cloth. “You shouldn’t give a girl a beer, Roger. We lose all sense of propriety. Now, when I toss you into those fucking tape recorders, you won’t get hurt that bad, probably. But your toys might get broken. Wouldn’t that be sad?”

“Nate! Stop it!” He pulled away from my grasp and flopped back on the couch. “Come on. We’re friends. Business associates.”

“Is that rack of shit screwed in? Or will it tip over?”

“I do certain sub-rosa jobs.”

“All your jobs are sub-rosa.”

“Not this sub-rosa.”

“What are we talking about, Roger?”

“… Spooks.”

I blinked. I admit it-I blinked.

“Roger, you’re not talking about ghosts.”

“No.”

The Company. CIA. Christ, why would they care who Marilyn was fucking? The FBI I could understand-everybody knew J. Edgar Hoover and the Kennedy brothers were not each other’s biggest fans. That Hoover kept a legendary cache of dirt on the rich, famous, and powerful.

“And… that’s it? That’s the client list?”

The shaggy eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Jesus, Nate, isn’t it enough?”

“That’s a lot of tapes you got spooling.”

“Well, of course, one set’s for me. For the safe-deposit vault. You never know when you, uh, you know… you need to know?”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, and wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“Sorry about getting rough,” I said.

“It was the beer.”

“No. It’s Marilyn. I like her. And I don’t like seeing all these dark clouds gathering around her. So this conversation, Roger, it never happened. I will call you tomorrow at your office-you’ll be in? Good. And we’ll set up you going over to her place, and putting the tap on for her.”

“Okay. You mind if I check on my other stuff, while I’m there, if she isn’t looking?”

I belched. The beer.

“Let your conscience be your guide, Roger,” I said, and climbed out of the van.

At first blush, Roger Pryor’s assertion that the president of the USA and the reigning sex goddess of Hollywood were having a torrid affair sounded crazy to me.

But Pryor’s seemingly outrageous claim did have a certain credibility. The beach mansion of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Lawford (or was that Mr. and Mrs. Patricia Kennedy?) would make the ideal love nest-after all, Marilyn was friendly with the Lawfords and lived maybe fifteen minutes away. You had to accept that the president’s own sister would look the other way, but the men in that family did whatever they wanted, so that didn’t necessarily ring false. Nor did Roger’s apt if indelicate description of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a “poon hound.”

Not that I was a close pal of Jack Kennedy’s. I knew his brother Robert pretty well, and my dealings with the family went back to Chicago in the mid-1940s, around when old Joe Kennedy bought the mammoth Merchandise Mart. Either an incorrigible rascal or a flaming asshole (depending on who you asked), the Kennedy patriarch was still in the liquor business at the time.

That Joe Kennedy had been a bootlegger starting in the mid-twenties, with a fleet of trucks and an armada of boats, was no secret in my circles; his specialty had been shipping liquor into the U.S. from abroad. Such connections allowed him to make legal distribution agreements immediately after Prohibition for Gordon’s gin and other brand-name liquor and spirits. Even as ambassador to Britain, before the war, he’d used his position to further his booze-importing interests, when he wasn’t busy pitching isolationism.

His cronies in the booze game included such underworld luminaries as Owney Madden and Frank Costello, and his Prohibition-era mistress had been the widow of late gangster Larry Fay, the guy F. Scott Fitzgerald based Gatsby on. When money-magnet Joe finally sold his liquor business in ’46, the major buyer was New Jersey gangster Abner “Longie” Zwillman.

It was said that Old Joe only got out of the liquor business because of the pending congressional race of his son Jack, who had become the clan’s golden boy after Joe Jr. bought it in the war. Others said the decision grew out of a Chicago mobster with Kennedy ties getting shot in the head in January of ’46 in front of the Tradewinds on Rush Street.

That Joe’s middle son Bobby had made a name as a racket buster on the McClellan Committee was a source of amusement to cops and disgust to crooks. In fact, Zwillman’s 1959 suicide (or was it a mob rubout?) happened in the shadow of a Bobby Kennedy subpoena-ironic coincidence, or cause and effect?

Anyway, I knew Jack only slightly, although a job I did had made me popular with him-I was the guy Old Joe chose to “take care of” the president’s first marriage.

In ’47, the first-term congressman wed a Palm Beach socialite named Dulcie Something, a quickie justice-of-the-peace deal that was probably one part impulse and two parts gin, Gordon’s or otherwise. Within days, the marriage disintegrated, and Old Joe hired me to handle it. I found a local Palm Beach attorney with the right (wrong) reputation, and together-with money and matches-we gave Dulcie amnesia and made the wedding documents in the local courthouse disappear.

Shortly after, I got a nice phone call from Jack, thanking me, and he expressed his gratitude in person a few times, once in Chicago at a Palmer House event, again in Vegas when we were both guests of Sinatra at a show at the Sands. Later, Jack was on the Rackets Committee, too, but not involved to the extent Bobby was, and in that capacity never mentioned or even vaguely referred to what I’d done for him. And for two grand.