The only pictures available of mystery man Lucks — who correctly judged the best way of staying out of the reach of investigating committees was to stay out of the public limelight — are those he took with his female companions, of whom there were many.
One of the many was Diane (Golden Girl) Harris, a young roundheels with a penchant for soft money and running down hotel corridors sans clothing. Lucks was quoted as saying:
“I’ve never seen a finer lady than Diane. If you can’t say nice things about a lady, don’t say anything. Diane is a full lady. I don’t believe anything else that is said about her.”
Which is a nice bit of philosophy from the guy who was about to be sued in 1954 on charges of paternity. Ex-chorine Harriette Levi wound up with a juicy out-of-court settlement in that case — after Allen admitted the siring — and disappeared from sight with her ten-year-old son.
The women came and went like the autumn breezes, an endless stream of easy-virtue gals, marching in and out of Fast-Bucks Lucks’ fabulous George V suite.
At the height of his fantastic career, Lucks met and dealt with such notorious fortune-hunters as Washington’s top influence-peddler John Maragon, English ex-con George Dawson who made over $100,000,000 in a deal where he sold the U.S. Army 14,000 of their own trucks, and even the late Senator Kenneth McKellar, big boy in the infamous Crump machine of Tennessee.
All these men, and more — from junk dealers to cabinet members — were intimates of Lucks and his lovely entourage. All of them were ready to dance when he pulled their strings. For all of them made fortunes as Lucks’ career progressed.
By 1950 Al Lucks was operating almost full-time out of Paris, and showing a great deal of reluctance to go back to the U.S. Probably because there were half a dozen men back there, waiting to either sue or stab.
At this time, the rumors had it that Lucks had made a fantastic killing in Argentina. The rumors told of a vast supply of automobile parts, assembled in Canada, and sold to the Argentine government, with profits being split by Lucks, dictator Juan Peron, and Peron’s economics minister.
The beauty of the whole transaction was that the parts were never delivered!
Then came 1951, a bad year for Lucks. Newspaper stories began appearing about him. First there was the New York Supreme Court suit by Alvin Reiss of the Lehigh Trading Co. Reiss claimed to have bought $1,109,760 worth of surplus trucks and shipped them to Lucks in Europe for a promised 15 % commission — which he never got paid. The case dragged on and on, never resolving itself, because Lucks was too shy to return to the Land of the Free.
When he did enter the country, his trips were infrequent and secretive. He would stop at New York’s Essex House or the Mayflower in Washington, transact his business hurriedly, drop in on his relatives in Scranton, and be back in Europe before anyone realized he’d even been around.
But from there on out, Lucks’ star began to wane. First the Reiss suit, then charges from other American agencies, then the Jelke trial investigations where the Lucks name figured prominently. Then the suit by Harriette Levi.
As if he didn’t have enough burdens to shoulder, Lucks was being blackmailed by several parties and for several different reasons. Things were starting to turn. His fortunes were decreasing. He was still living at his $100,000 a year clip, still treating the girlies to the best, and still maintaining his exclusive apartments.
But it was the beginning of the end for Allen Lucks.
On November 25, 1955, late, late in the wee hours, the switchboard of the George V buzzed alarmingly. The operator picked up her phones and heard a girl’s frantic voice from the Lucks suite moaning that “Monsieur Lucks, ’ee eez dead!”
It wasn’t quite true, but when they raced upstairs, they found Al Lucks on the way out as the result of a stroke. He was raced to the French Clinic in Paris, and two days later he died. The medical report stated he had died from a cerebral hemorrhage — induced by overexertion.
The two girls who were found in his apartment with him were turned back onto the streets, where they quickly disappeared, with the awed stares of police following them.
Then began the crazy game of “bucks, bucks, who’s got the Lucks bucks?” The scramble was on, and in the ensuing hustle, the whole sordid story of Lucks’s influence-selling, his procuring, his shady dealings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, came out.
Where his money now reposes, how much he had cached away — all these are mysteries... just a few more mysteries surrounding a man who clothed himself for years in secrecy.
Even so, all of Al Lucks’s deals pale into insignificance at his latest, current transaction. No matter how much money he has hidden away in the bank vaults of Europe, what Al is doing now is his biggest business deal.
He’s handling the Lucks concession in Eternity, trying to buy his way into Heaven! You can lay your bets with Pete, the angel on the gate. The odds are Terrific!
Robert Faherty
To call Robert Faherty “a master of detective fiction” might be stretching things just a bit. He left behind only one novel, Swamp Babe. In 1958, Crest Books, a Fawcett imprint, published this backwoods crime adventure about “a teenage temptress wild and beautiful as the untamed swamp that spawned her.” It is enjoyable, and eminently readable, yet it would be hard to make a case that it rises above scores of other paperbacks that clamored for attention on bookstore shelves during the 1950s. Faherty’s true crime output was considerably more substantial and, for my money, more satisfying. He had a knack for spotting odd crimes with outrageous characters and bizarre motives. He knew how to plot, and he had an eye for the incongruous detail, just the right detail to capture time and place. Such is the case with the story you are about to read, one of my favorites, about a turn-of-the-century dance fan who paid the ultimate price because he was “unable to resist the lure of the fascinating rhythm of the seductive tango.”
The Dancing Beauty and the Fatal Trap
The diffused glare of the locomotive’s headlight illumined vaguely the clumps of small trees and the shadowy forms of bushes in the lowland.
Engineer Robert Rohel, guiding the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern freight train west from Chicago, saw the two straight-line gleams of the rails as he peered out from the cab. Then — one of the lines was broken. Too late to stop, the horrified engineer saw a dark object on one rail.
As Rohel set the brakes and threw over the throttle, the great wheels of the engine passed over the object. The train jolted to a stop and he rushed back.
“A woman on the tracks!” he exclaimed to his fireman as they held their lanterns over a crumpled form beside the rail. “I couldn’t save her. This is awful... the first time it’s happened to me.”
Rohel gently touched the body, turned it over. There was nothing he could do.
Stars shone in a clear sky. The lonely area was dark except for the distant glow of the train’s lamp, and, farther ahead, little points of light marking a station in the town of Wayne, Illinois. It was a warm night — September 26th.
In the morning, Coroner William A. Hopf examined the body in a morgue in West Chicago.
“Might have been an accident,” he said. “She may have fainted or fallen there and struck her head. Although it is strange that she should be walking in that lonely spot. Then,” he continued, “there’s a possibility she committed suicide. Might have picked that spot purposely.”