Stephen Solomita - A Piece of the Action

Better to step right up and take your medicine. Better to pound on some officer, do a year in the joint and get back to work. The wops were being drafted, too. If he got out before they did, there’d be plenty of action.

By the time the bus had arrived at Fort Dix, Jake was too crazy to wait for an officer. Which was just as well, because they ended up giving him eighteen months for what he’d done to the sergeant, six months more than he expected. If he’d beaten an officer, they probably would have given him five years.

But even the extra six months would have been okay. As long as he behaved himself, he’d be out in a little over a year. He was going to a joint called Leavenworth, in Kansas. How bad could a joint in Kansas be?

“Leeeeee-bow-witz,” Deputy Warden Blackstone had drawled. “What kind of name is that, boy? Is that a Jewish name? Are you a Jewwwww-boy?”

Standing in front of the Dep, flanked by a pair of massive, blond, crewcut sergeants, Jake finally understood that the earth did not end at the far side of the Hudson River.

“Yessir,” he answered.

“Leeeeee-bow-witz, are you from Newwww Yawk City?”

“Yessir.”

His fellow convicts had been no more accepting than Dep Blackstone. They thought all Jews were soft, flabby tailors. Hiding behind thick glasses, cringing over their prayers. Jake had had to prove himself again and again. Each time he did, a court-martial added a few years to his sentence. The end result was the opposite of what he’d intended. By the time he’d gotten out, WWII and the Korean War were over. The wops didn’t even remember him.

On the other hand, twelve years in the slammer had given him a confidence and maturity he might otherwise have never achieved. After a time, somewhere in the spring of ’45, the names had stopped. No more “kike” or “sheeny.” But that didn’t mean his fellow cons had seen him as one of the boys. They’d held their tongues because they were afraid of him, not because they’d liked him.

Jake had begun to talk to himself on the day he’d realized that he couldn’t fight his way to acceptance. He would never be one of them. It was like the Italians, in a way. A Jew could work with the Italians, but he would never be equal to the lowest Sicilian. Meyer Lansky, whose name was in the papers almost every day, was a good example. He’d created his own gang because he could never get in with the wops, could never become an ordinary soldier, much less a Don.

“Them old Jews was tough,” Jake said. “Hymie Weiss? Bugsy Siegel? Louis Lepke? Hell, Arnold Rothstein was king of New York when Al Capone was still suckin’ on his mother’s tit.” Stepping into his bedroom, Jake began to dress. “But they musta not had kids or somethin’. The kids I come up with’re movin’ outta the neighborhood. Goin’ ta bullshit Queens or Brooklyn. Can’t wait to get away.”

He pulled a silk undershirt over his head, then stepped into silk boxer shorts. It was kind of depressing-the only luxury he could afford went on the inside where no one could see it. But that was all going to change. He’d put a lot of effort into attracting the wops’ attention. Doing a warehouse here, hijacking a truck there-fencing the loot to a Jew with a loose mouth. He and the only two pals he could dredge up-Izzy Stein and Abe Weinberg.

One day, two gorillas had arrived on his doorstep. He’d known them right away. They worked for Antonio “Steppy” Accacio. Steppy Accacio, if he wasn’t exactly Sam Trafficante, was an up-and-comer, a connected man with a finger in half a dozen Lower East Side pies.

“We only just heard about ya,” one of the gorillas, Joe Faci, had said politely.

“I understand,” Jake had responded, just as politely. “Whatta ya gotta get?”

“Ten percent. And it would be good if you would fence ya merchandise with our guy on West Street.”

“I got the money upstairs.”

“We’ll go with ya.”

“Nah, it’s my mother’s apartment. She’s home.”

Faci had thought about it for a minute, searching Jake’s face. “That would be all right,” he’d responded. “Ya won’t be long, I hope?”

“Two minutes.”

Jake had made it in one and a half, emerging with a stuffed envelope he’d been saving for months.

“How come we didn’t know about ya before this?” Faci had asked, accepting the envelope. “You ain’t such a young guy.”

Jake had explained about the army and Leavenworth and Faci had listened with respect. He would go back to his boss and pass the information over with the envelope. Jake Leibowitz had done twelve years of very hard time. He was a man you could work with. A man you could trust. He wouldn’t open up the first time the cops slapped him around.

Fifteen minutes later, his mustache as good as he was going to get it, Jake Leibowitz sat in the front seat of his mother’s 1951 Packard Clipper and studied his two companions intently. The both of them, Izzy Stein and Abe Weinberg, were top-notch in his book. Loyal and bright, they were everything good Jewish boys were supposed to be. Except, he had to admit, for the “good” part. And they weren’t boys, either, but hardened ex-cons who’d somehow failed to take advantage of the G.I. Bill.

“Ya know what to do, right ?” Jake looked hard at Izzy who looked away. “Ya know who I’m talkin’ to, right ?”

Izzy shrugged. “Whatta ya worried about, Jake? Ain’t I been doin’ it all along?”

What bothered Jake was that Izzy, though he’d done two short bits up in Elmira, had never worked with a gun before Jake recruited him. Not that Izzy was soft. Izzy’s prior criminal career had been characterized by a very practical truth: you could get yourself pinned for a hundred burglaries and not do as much time as an eighteen-year-old kid who ripped off the local gas station with his father’s.38.

“It’s one thing to hold a piece on some truck driver who’s crappin’ his pants,” Jake said calmly. “What we’re gonna do here is entirely different.”

The set-up was pretty simple, really. The whorehouse was run by a married couple, Al and Betty O’Neill, who’d fallen behind on their payments to Steppy Accacio. Al and Betty were making noises like they didn’t see any reason why they should pay the cops and the mob. Accacio wanted to teach the loving couple a lesson they should have learned before they went into the whore business. Namely, he wanted Jake and his boys to pistol-whip the crap out of the pair of them. Jake could keep whatever he found on the premises for his trouble.

“What it is, Jake,” Faci had explained, “is Steppy wants that you should put ya hearts inta ya work.”

“I get too enthusiastic,” Jake had replied, “it might be they won’t wake up. I ain’t a doctor, Mr. Faci. I can’t tell the difference between almost and dead.”

“Findin’ that line,” Faci had flatly declared, “is the difference between being an artist and a mug.”

Izzy finally raised his head. He met Jake’s eyes and held them. “You got nothin’ to worry about, Jake. I already decided to do it. I ain’t some fairy who’s gonna chicken out at the last minute.”

“How ’bout you, Abe? You hot to trot?” Jake turned his attention to a grinning Abe Weinberg.

“Ready, ready, Teddy, to rock and roll.” Abe held up a six-inch sap. “I brought my pal, Elvis, along for the ride.” He dumped the sap in his coat pocket and dragged out his.45, the one he’d taken off an MP in 1944. “I don’t wanna mess up Little Richard doin’ balop-bam-boom on some pimp’s head.”

Jake, unable to keep a straight face, broke into a smile. He wanted to ruffle Abe’s hair the way you’d rub the head of a smartass kid, but he was afraid that he’d never get his hand back out. Abe was crazy into rock music-Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ricky Nelson and, of course, the King, Elvis Presley. To Jake, they looked like a bunch of greasy-haired punks, the kind that hung out on the corner and never went anywhere, but Abe worshiped them, even the niggers. He sang all day (except when Jake told him to shut up) and combed his long straight hair into a greasy four-inch pompadour. His favorite outfit was a black leather jacket, black denim trousers and black motorcycle boots. He would have been wearing them right now, if Jake hadn’t ordered him to put on an overcoat.