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Chapter One
DAY ONE—Friday, July 21, 1950
MIDAFTERNOON
You know what a witch hunt is? It’s when a big lie declaring someone anathema to the prevailing orthodoxy gets a head of steam—think back to Salem, Massachusetts, 250 years ago and the prevailing orthodoxy then, Calvinism. In a nutshell, Calvinists believed all humans, except for them, were depraved sinners. A guy in the neighborhood would see someone—a woman—not following the orthodoxy. She might have walked differently; she might have dressed differently; she might have talked differently. First one person noticed; then, someone backed him up. Next thing, the church sexton said he saw her riding by on a broom.
Pretty soon, everyone agreed that—say her name was Sadie—everyone agreed, knew for a fact, that Sadie was a witch. Some of the accusers might have believed they saw what they said they saw; other accusers decided it must be true because folks said it was true; the rest of the folks went along because Sadie being a witch was now part of the orthodoxy. So the whole town got together and stoned Sadie to death.
And pity the poor bastard, too, who dared to question the orthodoxy. “Maybe it wasn’t a witch you saw, Sam,” the guy might have said. “The moonlight can play tricks on you. You see a weather vane silhouetted against the moon and it looks like someone flying by on a broom . . .”
“Don’t listen to that son of a bitch,” the keepers of the orthodoxy would have said. “He’s one of ’em, too. Hang the bastard along with the rest.”
Well, that was what was going on around me—had been going on since soon after we came home from the war. It wasn’t witches run afoul of the orthodoxy this time. It was Communists—and anyone who looked like a Communist or might be friends with a Communist or might have a friend who had a friend who might be a Communist. Anti-Communism was the new orthodoxy, spearheaded by J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and their fellow travelers.
I was thinking about these goings-on because I’d gotten a call from Larry Dennis that morning. He’d been calling me every other day—each time more desperate—since about a month ago, when a pamphlet from a right-wing scandal sheet hit the street. Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television named him and 150 other poor souls in the radio and TV business as Communists. Larry, whom I’d known from my Hollywood days and who’d been an actor on a radio comedy show here in New York since the war ended, was fired a week after the report came out.
The first time he called he wanted me to tell him it was okay to name names. Before I could tell him anything, he said, “I can’t give them any fucking names . . . I don’t know who’s a Communist and who isn’t. I never paid attention to that shit. Trotskyites, Shachtmanites, Browderites, Communists, Socialists, who cares? I wanted to stop the Fascists in Spain. That made me a Communist?”
What he wanted me to do the next time he called, since I was a private eye, was track down some Reds the witch hunters didn’t know about, so he could give the FBI a couple of names to prove he was loyal. “I’ll give them the names, sign the fucking loyalty oath. I don’t care if I can’t live with myself; my kids gotta eat; they gotta have a roof over their heads.”
Since I nixed that, his latest plan was for me to find Party members who were informers so he could turn them in. That way he could prove he was loyal and he wouldn’t hurt anyone except for double-crossing rats.
When I told him I didn’t know any, he said it was okay; he couldn’t afford to pay me anyway. I knew he didn’t call about hiring me for any job. His life had gone down the drain because he’d run afoul of the orthodoxy. He was bewildered and scared and needed someone to talk to who understood. That was me.
This morning he’d called to tell me he’d been fired again, this time from a job as a waiter in a joint the network crowd frequented. “The owner got a message from the purity police at the network that if he continued to employ a Communist, freedom-loving Americans would boycott the place. The owner took pity on me—I got kids to feed—so he’s letting me work in the back of the house as a dishwasher. Minimum wage. No tips. Last month, I was making three hundred bucks a week. Now I’m making thirty.” He screamed like a mad man. “I can’t take it, Mick. What am I gonna do? . . . Mick, can I give them your name?”
“Sure,” I said. “What else can they do to me?”
This was the state of things—the country awash in patriotic jingoism like The Red Menace, Better Dead than Red, America: Love It or Leave It . . . and a guy who only wanted to make people laugh and to feed his kids was coming apart at the seams, losing his grip over whether he should ruin some innocent people’s lives so he could try to salvage his own—when the phone rang.
“Mick Mulligan, private eye,” I said.
“I have a job for you,” Duke Rogowski, president of the United Taxi and Limousine Drivers, said in return. “Be at my office in an hour.”
Duke wasn’t as big a deal labor leader as he thought he was. He wasn’t John L. Lewis or Sidney Hillman. He wasn’t even Mike Quill or Joe Curran, and certainly not Harry Bridges. But he liked to act like a commander of the working class and give orders.
“I’ll take a look at my calendar,” I said.
Duke chuckled and hung up.
Fuck him. He knew damn well I didn’t have anything on my calendar.
I chucked the newspaper I’d been reading into the waste basket. I’d already worked my way through the Daily News and the Daily Worker as I did most days and was glancing through the World-Telegram when Duke’s call interrupted me.
The news of the day, as it was on most days that summer, consisted of stories about the Korean War, the Atomic Bomb—should the US use it in Korea, as some bright-eyed proponents of mass murder would have it? Was the Soviet Union going to drop one on us if we didn’t drop one on them first?—the perfidy of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, Russian spies in the US, Communist traitors, striking workers, and rising prices.
The orthodoxy, including the newspapers, by and large, supported the Korean War, were willing to give serious thought to dropping the A-bomb on North Korea or Russia, were outraged by the Red Army enslaving the nations of Eastern Europe, foursquare in favor of the Marshall Plan, and on the lookout for Reds under every bed.
On this particular day, the papers complained about Harry Bridges, head of the west coast longshoremen’s union. The defenders of freedom were out to get Bridges because J. Edgar Hoover said he was a Communist. Bridges said he wasn’t a Communist. He liked the Soviet Union, opposed the Korean War, and didn’t throw the Commies out of the union when the CIO told him to. He walked like a Red and quacked like a Red, so for the newspapers he was a Red.
Interestingly enough, this was the reasoning—I went to meetings with Communists, I ate lunch with Communists, I agreed with Communists on certain things—that got me fired from my job as a cartoonist (we liked to call ourselves animators) at the Disney studio, won me a place on the Hollywood blacklist, and brought me back to New York City, where I hung out my shingle as a private investigator.
Well, bygones were bygones and the news of the day didn’t care what I thought of it, so, weathering the hot and muggy afternoon, I hoofed it down to Duke’s office. Mine was on Ninth Avenue at Forty-Ninth Street above a floor-tile shop. To be honest, it was more of a storage space than a real office, but it had its own door from the street, a plate glass window in front, and a window in back big enough that a small dog might fit through.
As I was leaving, my landlord stopped me. Herb was a former college professor who ran afoul of the thought police and now laid tile for a living in the new apartment buildings being built on the east side.
“Two men wearing suits came by looking for you yesterday. They didn’t say who they were but you can be sure they were the you-know-whos looking for you to rat on someone. I told them you were in church. I imagine they’ll be back.”
“Fuck ’em.” Usually, the FBI agents would whisper in the landlord’s ear that he has a Red for a tenant hoping he’d evict you. Since Herb and I were of the same ilk, they didn’t try it with him.
On my walk downtown, I stopped at the newsstand at Thirty-Fourth Street. Irv, the newsie, was a vet who got the stand from the city by virtue of leaving most of his right leg behind in the war. He carried the Daily Worker, so I threw him a couple of nickels twice a day. I got Stalin’s view of the world in the morning from the Daily Worker and William Randolph Hearst’s recap in the evening from the Journal-American.
The taxi drivers’ union hall on Twenty-Third Street was across from the Chelsea Hotel above a greengrocer. On this lazy, late afternoon, the curb in front was lined with cabs, mostly Checkers and a few DeSotos. A sign above the door next to the grocery read, THE AMALGAMATED UNION OF TAXI, LIVERY, LIMOUSINE DRIVERS, AND ALLIED WORKERS, LOCAL 1299.
The lengthy moniker was more a wish than a reality. The AUTLD wasn’t fully a union yet because they hadn’t won recognition from the fleet owners. The most interesting piece of the name, though, was “Amalgamated,” which meant Local 1299 was put together by combining a few other unions into one larger and, they hoped, more powerful entity. Therein, as they say, lay the rub.
Labor unions had tried more than once since the ’30s to organize cab drivers and struck out each time. Hackies were a maverick breed: stubborn and cynical, mistrustful of everyone including each other; they were also angry—always and at everyone. I was reminded of this by the two drivers blowing their horns and leaning out their windows cursing at each other while they tried to get into the same parking spot in front of the union hall.
As I started up the stairs, a couple of drivers came trudging down. Their grim expressions and hollow stares put me in mind of a pair of worn-out, angry, and depressed GIs coming in after a night on patrol. Maybe these guys remembered battles that lay behind them; more likely they were gearing up for the one that lay in front of them. Duke was drawing up plans for a citywide cab strike to win recognition for the union. The last time the cabbies struck, it was war on the streets and sidewalks of New York.
The door to Duke’s office was open and he sat behind his scarred wooden desk. Behind him, two tall, skinny loft-type windows looked down at Twenty-Third Street and across at the red bricks and black railings of the Chelsea Hotel. The union’s two vice presidents—who’d come on as part of the package with two of the unions amalgamated into Local 1299—sat glowering at Duke. They headed up two factions: Sol Rosen from the Communists; Vincent Forlini from the Mob. There was a chair for me.
“Grab a beer out of the icebox, one for me too,” Duke bellowed loud enough I could have heard him back in my office. “It’s Friday afternoon.”
Duke was a bombastic, bear-like guy and had a voice that went with his build. He’d been anointed to keep the warring factions of the amalgamated union from each other’s throats. The first time I’d met him, the man introducing us said, “Duke, I don’t think you know Mick Mulligan.” “Of course, I do,” said Duke, reaching out with his outfielder’s-mitt-size hand to pump mine. “How you been, pal?” And then onto the next guy. I’d never seen Duke before in my life.
I grabbed the beers, opened them with the church key hanging on a string next to the icebox, and handed Duke his. The two VPs—one tall and slim, the other short and dumpy, both in shirtsleeves, ties loosened, top shirt buttons undone—weren’t invited to join us.
Duke glanced at the VPs before focusing on me. “Gil said you could take a look at Harold’s case and maybe come up with something to get him off. His bozo lawyer screwed up the trial. Anybody with half a brain knows Harold was framed.” He paused to glance at each of us again, one at a time. The dumpy guy made a noise like he might say something until Duke glared him into silence.
I, however, did say something—blurted out something would be more like it. “You want me to take on Harold’s case now?! I might come up with something!? Two weeks, Duke! Two fucking weeks! What am I supposed to come up with in two fucking weeks? You and Gil are both nuts.”
