“How can it be?” Joe’s uncertainty showed plainly.
“We gave it a trial run three weeks ago, Joe. Sent another packing case exactly like this one — except you weren’t in it — on this same flight to Atlanta, and it went through slick as grease. This one will too, I guarantee it.”
Which made it all the more shocking when Joe Hadley emerged from his packing case next day in Atlanta, to find himself greeted not by Mr. Carr with twenty-five thousand dollars in hand for work well done, but by a circle of policemen.
Blinking helplessly in the bright daylight Joe allowed them to snap handcuffs on his wrists without a single word of protest. When they put him into a police car, he noted without much surprise that the man seated beside him, also handcuffed, was Mr. Carr. Joe had no doubt that Mr. Stacey and the mysterious Man with the Information would soon join them in custody.
On the way to the police station, Joe went to sleep.
That evening Lucas Harmon, the freight agent at Hartsfield Airport, was interviewed on the local TV news program. The reporter asked him what had made him suspicious of the large packing case unloaded from flight 393.
Lucas Harmon, delighted by his sudden fame, replied with the relish of a man who has never before appeared on television, “Well, that packing case was supposed to have a computer in it, see? That’s what the label said. And I know that computers can do a lot of things. But I never heard of one that could snore the way this one did when I off-loaded it!”
As for Joe Hadley, he kept dropping off to sleep at irregular intervals during his trial. This odd behavior led to a physical examination by a police doctor, who came up with the diagnosis that Joe Hadley was suffering from narcolepsy — a strange disease, the doctor explained, that causes deep sleep to overcome its victims at unexpected moments.
So Joe embarked on his prison term almost cheerfully, buoyed by the hope of early parole and by the gratifying knowledge that he hadn’t, after all, pulled those horses. He had merely happened to fall asleep.
And he hadn’t, after all, been guilty of the robbery for which he spent a year in jail. For now he understood that the real thief, hotly pursued by the police, perhaps, must have rid himself of his incriminating loot by slipping it into the pockets of an innocent ex-jockey named Joe Hadley, who happened to be leaning against a lamppost nearby, fast asleep.
Death of a Don
by David Mazroff
Salvatore Giancana lived the good life for many years as a Mafia big shot. He was mean, he was ugly, but his attraction for women was fantastic. In Miami and in Las Vegas, he had his pick of the crop. But in time his usefulness ran out and he wound up on a morgue slab.
It is doubtful that Salvatore “Momo” Giancana ever knew the real flow of friendship and companionship. By measurement of the human equation in which man’s virtues are weighed, Gianacana rated zero-minus. He was an abysmal and amoral outlaw, an enemy of society and the social order from his early teens. The surging, soaring kind kind of violent acts he practiced were frightening.
He killed without qualm or compunction. He killed on orders of Capone himself or of those who came into power after Capone was jailed for income tax evasion. On occasion he killed because he didn’t like the way some hood looked at him. Ferret-faced, balding, short of stature, he wore a perpetual frown, hatred against all mankind alive in his eyes.
Life was running out for him in the next few minutes, something he least expected as he regarded the sausages that were cooking in the pan, inhaling the aroma of the seasoning that floated to his senses.
The frayed and violent death that awaited him was something he had experienced many times — but only as the assassin, not as the victim. How would he react to it? With defiant rage exploding in a stream of curses? Pleading for his life? Trying to make a deal with a large sum of money? Or would he face the gun turned on him with a paralyzing fear, quivering, his face ashen-white, an avalanche of regret washing over him for all the things that had brought him to this moment?
There were many who said and believed that Giancana got what he deserved. Yet in our society the rules say that all violators of law and order must be given a fair and just trial before a jury of their peers. Who were, in truth, the peers of Sam Giancana? Not anyone in the vast stream of men and women who were honest and law-abiding, legitimate, socialized human beings.
No, his peers were the hoodlums and gangsters, the hitmen, the vengeful assassins, the paid killers of organized crime. The contract goes out — hit Anastasia, Dutch Schultz, Mad Dog Coll, Willie Moretti, Buggsy Siegel, dozens, hundreds of others. The deed is done, efficiently and in cold blood. Pole-axe a steer, shoot a game animal in its haunts, butcher lambs — it’s all the same.
The crime bosses condemn one of their own for one reason or another, for a violation of the Code of Omerta, the Law of Silence, for a double-cross, for holding out a part of the proceeds of a robbery, a burglary, a deal in stolen securities — or for attempting to muscle in on forbidden territory.
There are other reasons — some valid, as the mobsters regard them, some merely to destroy competition as in the case of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre or the murders of Big Jim Colosimo and Dion O’Bannion, who stood in the way of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone in their rise to the top of the Chicago underworld. Why was Sam Giancana murdered?
There were several angles that needed inspection. He was in a plot to murder Fidel Castro as an agent for the CIA? Bizarre? The CIA record is filled with bizarre incidents. Again, Giancana was getting too hot for the mob to handle. There was reason to believe he might testify before a Senate Investigating Committee and spill his guts. Still another angle, he stood in the way of the young hoods who wanted to take over. One of those could fit the puzzle — or none.
How did Sam Giancana come to this moment in his life and the fury of jarring death? His life story follows closely that of many other notorious gangsters. The pattern is the same in almost every way. He was born 67 years before in the Little Italy section of Chicago’s West Side. His parents were poor but honest folks in the tradition of the old movie melodramas, eking out a living in a small grocery store.
Basically, it had the theme of an Horatio Alger story. In an Alger story, the hero is a poor boy who shines shoes, peddles newspapers, runs errands and does other odd jobs, saves his money and, by dint of hard work and adherence to the principles of honesty and ethics, becomes successful.
In Giancana’s case, the fates rewrote the script. He was a thief in his youth. He stole anything and everything he could get his hands on. He was a burglar, an auto thief and, before he was twenty-one, was a prime suspect in three murders.
During the days when Al Capone was in power, Giancana, astute in his way, was able to get a job as a wheelman, the driver of a getaway car from a heist or a murder contract. He was good at it. He also knew how to keep his mouth shut. Detectives who tried to get any information from him any time he was taken into custody wound up talking to themselves and bursting with frustration.
Detective Austin Young, who had Giancana in custody several times said, “That guy wouldn’t give you the time of day if he owned Big Ben. Further, he was just about the nastiest, surliest bastard I ever put cuffs on. Ask him a question and he would spit on your shoes. I knew even then he was headed for a lot of trouble but not until he gave us more trouble than we ever had from anyone in any of the mobs in Chicago.”
Before the Escobeda and Miranda cases, when the Supreme Court ruled that a suspect had to be read his rights and have an attorney present before he could be interrogated, detectives would beat some suspects insensible in order to wring a confession from them. They succeeded in a great many instances. Detective Austin Young and Lieutenant of Detectives Charles Lavan said that beating Giancana would be useless.