"Yeah, that's a swell idea."
The coroner was Jack's doctor, and they got him out of bed. He bandaged her hand and said she'd have to have a cast made at the hospital next day, and he gave her pills for her pain. She told him she'd been rehearsing her dance steps and had fallen down. He didn't seem to believe that, but Jack didn't care what he believed, so she didn't either. After the doctor's they went back home. Jack said he was too tired to make love and that they'd do it in the morning. Kiki tossed and turned for a while and then went down to the kitchen and checked the fudge again, felt it with the fingers of her good hand. It was still goo, so she put it out on the back porch for the cat.
Clem Streeter told his story around Catskill for years. He was a celebrity because of it, stopped often by people and asked for another rendition. I was being shaved in a Catskill barber chair the year beer came back, and Jack was, of course, long gone. But Clem was telling the story yet again for half a dozen locals.
"The jedge in Catskill axed me what I wanted the pistol permit for," he said, "and I told him 'bout how that Legs Diamond feller burned my feet and hung me from a sugar maple th'other night up at his garage. 'That so?' axed the jedge. 'I jes told you it were,' I said. People standin' 'round the courthouse heard what we was sayin' and they come over to listen better. 'You made a complaint yet against this Diamond person?' the jedge axes me. But I tell him, only complaint I made so far was to the wife. That jedge he don't know what to do with hisself he's so took out by what I'm sayin'. I didn't mean to upset the jedge. But he says, 'I guess we better get the sheriff on this one and maybe the DA,' and they both of 'em come in after a little bit and I tell 'em my story, how they poked guns outen the winders of their car and we stopped the truck, me and Dickie Bartlett. They made us git down, but I didn't git fast enough for Diamond, so he hit me with his fist and said, 'Put up your hands or I'll split your efiin' head.' Then they hauled us up to Diamond's place with our caps pulled down so we wouldn't know where we was goin', but I see the road anyway out under the side of the cap and I know that place of his with the lights real well. Am I sure it was Diamond, the jedge axes. 'Acourse I'm sure. I seen him plenty over at the garage in Cairo. He had a woman in the car with him, and I recognized the other feller who did the drivin' 'cause he stopped my truck another night I was haulin' empty barrels 'bout a month back.' 'So this here's Streeter, the wise guy from Cairo,' Diamond says to me and he cuffs me on the jaw with his fist, just like that, afore I said a word. Then up in the garage they tried to burn me up. 'What'd they do that for?' the jedge axes me, and I says,"Cause he wants to know where there's a still I'm s'posed to know about. But I told Diamond I don't know nothin' 'bout no still.' And the jedge says, 'Why'd he think you did?' And I says, "Cause I'm haulin' twenty-four barrels of hard cider I'd picked up down at Post's Cider Mill.' 'Who for?' says the jedge. 'For me,' I says. 'I like cider. Drink a bunch of it.' 'Cause I ain't about to tell no jedge or nobody else 'bout the still me and old Cy Bartlett got between us. We do right nice business with that old still. Make up to a hundred, hundred and thirty dollars apiece some weeks off the fellers who ain't got no stills and need a little 'jack to keep the blood pumpin'. That Diamond feller, he surely did want to get our still away from us. I knew that right off. Did me a lot of damage, I'll say. But sheeeeee. Them fellers with guns is all talk. Hell, they don't never kill nobody. They just like to throw a scare into folks so's they can get their own way. Son of a bee if I was gonna give up a hundred and thirty dollars a week for some New York feller."
JACK AMONG THE MAIDS
The Streeter incident took place in mid-April, 1931. Eight days later, the following document was released in the Capitol at Albany:
Pursuant to section 62 of the Executive Law, I hereby require that you, the Attorney General of this state, attend in person or by your assistants or deputies, a regular special and trial term of the Supreme Court appointed to be held in and for the County of Greene for the month of April, 1931, and as such term as may hereafter be continued, and that you in person or by said assistants or deputies appear before the grand jury or grand juries which shall be drawn and sit for any later term or terms of said court for the purpose of managing and conducting in said court and before said grand jury and said other grand juries, any and all proceedings, examinations and inquiries, and any and all criminal actions and proceedings which may be taken by or before said grand jury concerning any and all kinds and-or-criminal offences, alleged to have been committed by John Diamond, also known as Jack (Legs) Diamond and-or-any person or persons acting in concert with him, and further to manage, prosecute and conduct the trial of any indictments found by said grand jury or grand juries at said term or terms of said court or of any other court at which any and all such indictments may hereafter be tried, and that in person or by your assistants or deputies you supersede the district attorney of the County of Greene in all matters herein specified and you exercise all the powers and perform all the duties conferred upon you by Section 62 of the Executive Law and this requirement thereunder; and that in such proceedings and actions the District Attorney of Greene County shall only exercise such powers and perform such duties as are required of him by you or by the assistants or deputies attorney general so attending.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Governor of the State of New York
Jack thus became the first gangster of the Prohibition Era to have the official weight of an entire state, plus the gobble of its officialese, directed at him. I find this notable. I did what little I could to throw a counterweight when the time came. I cited the whole affair as a cynical political response to the harsh spotlight that Judge Seabury, his reformers, and the Republican jackals were, at the moment, shining on the gangsterism and corruption so prevalent in New York City's Tammany Hall, with Democratic Gentleman Jimmy Walker the chief illuminated goat. FDR, I argued when I pleaded Jack's case in the press, was making my client the goat in a Republican stronghold. I voiced particular outrage at superseding the Greene County District Attorney.
But my counterweight didn't weigh much. Jack went to jail and I understood the spadework done in Albany by Van Deusen's vigilantes. FDR even sent his personal bodyguard to Catskill as an observer when the swarm of state police and state attorneys moved toward Jack's jugular.
Knute Rockne told his men: "Don't be a bad loser, but don't lose. "
Fogarty got me out of bed to tell me Jack had been arrested and that he himself was going into hiding. Jack and Kiki were in the parlor at Acra, and Fogarty was playing pool in the cottage when the trooper rang the bell under the second step. Three times. Jack's straight neighbors thought three was the insider's ring, but it was the ring only for straights.
Jack tried to talk the trooper into letting him surrender in the morning by himself, avoid the ignominy of it, but the trooper said nix, and so Jack wound up on a hard cot in a white-washed third-floor cell of the county jail. Tidy and warm, not quite durance vile, as one journalist wrote, but vile enough for the King Cobra of the Catskills, as he was now known in the press.
I worked on the bail, which was a formidable twenty-five thousand dollars: ten each for assaulting Streeter and Bartlett, five for the kidnapping. Uh-oh, I said, when I heard the news, heard especially how young Bartlett was. What we now are dealing with, I told Fogarty, and Jack too, is not a bootleggers' feud, which is what it was in a left-handed way, but the abduction of children in the dead of night. Not a necessary social misdemeanor, as most bootlegging was contemporaneously regarded, but a high crime in any age.