“Even so, we were moving in, but it was rough, as I said, and getting rougher. In the port of New York alone, there were seven different headquarters fighting over the cake, and the union old-timers would rather have police protection than us. Yes, that’s the point it had reached. They were getting quite hysterical.
“Well, it took Mike only a year to straighten things out, and he didn’t work like the other bosses in the protection racket, the Guziks, the Musicas, who paid their men to do the work. No, Mike was always the first in the front line; he always took a hand himself. The day someone gets the idea of raking the bottom of the Hudson around Hoboken, they’ll find about a hundred tons of cement down there in the slime, and Mike was always around in person when they put the guys in the cast.
“More often than not they were still alive and kicking. Mike liked it that way; he liked to give them a chance to express themselves. He liked it if they argued when they poured the cement over them—it made them look interesting when the stuff set. They would be caught in all sorts of attitudes. Mike said one day it would be like the people in Pompeii when they found them in lava 2,000 years later; he used to call it ‘working for posterity.’ When one of the guys got too noisy, Mike always tried to reason with him. ‘What have you got to bellyache about, sonny?’ he would say. ‘You’re going to be part of our cultural heritage.’
“At the end, Mike even got very fussy. He had to have special cement, more like plaster, the kind that set right away, so that he could see what he was doing, while the work was in progress. In Hoboken we usually just stick the guy in the cement when he’s ready, nail on the top of the barrel, roll it into the river, and forget about it. But not Mike. With him it was something else, something artistic. He wanted to see the expression of the face and the position of the body, and he wanted him to look like a statue.
“Sometimes, as I told you, the guy would twist and turn a little during the job, and then the results would often be quite striking. But usually he would just have one hand on his head and his mouth open, pleading and swearing that he hadn’t tried to fight the Syndicate, or split the unions, that he was all for workers’ unity and innocent as a lamb, and Mike didn’t like that, because then they all looked just the same, same faces, same gestures, and that wasn’t what he wanted. ‘Pig work,’ he called it.
“All we cared about was getting the guy into the barrel as fast as we could, drop the barrel into the river and think of something else. Not that there was much danger; the docks were covered by guys from headquarters, the police never stuck their noses into anything—they were not supposed to know about it, and it was only dog eating dog, anyway, but we didn’t like the job: a guy covered with cement from head to foot and screaming while he was already all white and turning hard, with only the black hole of the mouth still broadcasting—you really had to be artistic to like it.
“Quite frankly, none of us cared for art that much. That was long before everybody got stinking rich and became art- and culture-conscious. Yes, ‘culture’ they began to call it. You had to have it, if you wanted to prove you had gone respectable and social. But Mike has always been a pioneer in everything, and he was the first in the Syndicate to go social and to realize that culture and art made you look good. So sometimes he took a hammer and chisel and touched up a few details himself. The guy I remember best of all was Big Bill Sugar, the Greek from San Francisco who wanted to keep the West Coast independent and refused to affiliate—the same thing Lou Dybic tried the year before in Chicago, with the slot machines; you all know what happened to him.
“Only the difference between Lou and Big Bill was that Big Bill Sugar was very strong on his home ground, backed by all the grass roots. Also, he claimed he was strictly non-political. And he knew all the smart shit talk all right. He claimed he was for unity and all that. He didn’t want to split the workers, but neither did he want the movement to be dictated to by the East Coast waterfront. Oh well, you know the line. And he was very careful. Before he would come east and talk the situation over with Mike, he wanted hostages; he asked for Mike’s brother who was on the accounting side, and a couple of other Syndicate workers. They went, and Big Bill came to Hoboken. Only when they got together, it was easy to see that Mike wasn’t interested in the discussion at all. He kept looking at Big Bill Sugar like he was dreaming, and you could tell he wasn’t listening. You know, the Greek was quite a guy, over six feet tall and good-looking—the girls were all crazy about him, that’s how he got his nickname, Sugar. Even so, they talked right through for about seven hours, and they went into the whole thing—labor unity and getting rid of the political shysters who wouldn’t just defend the professional interests of the workers but were trying to make the movement into an election platform, and all that time Mike never took his eyes off Big Bill Sugar. When they had a coffee break, he came over to me and all he said was: ‘Okay, there’s no use arguing with this bastard, let’s give him a bath.’
“I was about to remind him of his brother and the other two who were being held as hostages in San Francisco, but I kept my mouth shut. Mike always knew what he was doing and besides, the higher interests of the Syndicate were at stake. You have got to forget your personal feelings sometimes. They went on arguing, for form’s sake, and after closing time, when Big Bill left the shed with his party, we shot them all—him, his lawyer and the two blokes from the Oakland headquarters. That night, Mike supervised the job in person, and when the Greek was all nicely set in concrete, instead of rolling him into the Hudson, he stopped and looked at him sort of dreamily. Then he smiled and said: ‘Leave him here for a while. He has to dry out, and that’ll take a good day.’
“I didn’t quite see why he had to be dry before going into the water, but here again I didn’t feel like saying anything. So we left Big Bill Sugar in the shed under a tarpaulin, and a day or so later we all came back, and Mike looked at him again in that dreamy way, poked at the concrete, touched it up a little more with hammer and chisel, here and there, and in the end he seemed quite pleased. He straightened up, stepped back, stared at the cast a little longer, and then he said: ‘All right, put the bastard in my car.’
“At first we didn’t know what he meant, and he said again, ‘Put the bastard in my car. Next to the driver.’ We looked at each other, but we weren’t going to argue with Mike.
“We carried Big Bill Sugar to the Cadillac and put him in next to the driver, then we all got in and waited. ‘Okay, let’s go home,’ Mike said. So we got to his house on Park Avenue, stopped the car and looked at Mike. “Take him out.’ We took Big Bill out of the car, and the doorman smiled and took off his cap. ‘Nice piece of statuary you got there, Mr. Sarfatti,’ he said, respectfully. ‘At least you can tell what it is. Not like these modern things that have three heads and seven hands.’ “That’s right,’ Mike said, and he laughed. ‘It’s real classical. Greek, in fact.’
“We stuck Big Bill Sugar in the elevator and rode on up. Mike opened the door and we carried the statue inside. ‘In the living room,’ Mike said. We went into the living room and stood Big Bill up against a wall and waited. Mike looked all around the room, thought it over, and then he pointed. ‘Up there,’ he said, ‘over the mantelpiece.’ We didn’t get it right way, but Mike moved away the painting that was there.