Meyer Lansky by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey [Lacey, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apostrophe Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-18T13:34:52+00:00

14

“I Crapped Out”

AT 10:12 on the morning of October 25, 1957, Detectives William Graff and Edward O’Connor of the New York City Police Department were tidying their desks at the Eighteenth Detective Squad office on Fifty-fourth Street. They had just completed a successful, yearlong investigation of racketeering on the waterfront, and they were filing away the loose papers when the telephone rang. It was the switchboard sergeant who handled emergency calls.

“You have a shooting in the barbershop at the Park Sheraton Hotel,” he said.

The two detectives drove at top speed the few blocks from their office to the Park Sheraton on Fifty-fifth Street, and while O’Connor parked the car, Graff strode in through the lobby. As he walked through the double glass doors, he saw a small handgun lying on the ground. He knew at once that he was dealing with a professional hit.

The professional hit man discards his weapon as he leaves the scene of the crime so that, if he is stopped, there is nothing incriminating about him. It is his less-exposed partner, following watchfully behind, who retains a weapon, so that he can, if necessary, shoot the two men out of trouble — and, indeed, an hour or two after Graff had spotted the first weapon, a second revolver was discovered thrust into a trash can in the subway through which the killers had escaped.

The body was lying blood-stained and riddled with bullets on the floor of the Park Sheraton barber’s shop, and when William Graff heard the name of the victim — Umberto, or Albert, Anastasia — his first thought was of a possible connection with the waterfront inquiry that he and O’Connor had just completed. The dead man’s brother, Tony, was a power in the longshoremen’s union, and it was not long before Tony — who spelled his surname Anastasio — was at the Sheraton, kneeling distraught on the floor, weeping and hugging the inert form.

Albert Anastasia’s grisly demise in the Midtown Manhattan barbershop was to lift him immediately into American gangsterdom’s hall of fame. Erratic and psychopathic, Anastasia was a Bugsy Siegel without the charm. He had hurt and threatened so many people that, once it had happened, his violent end had a certain inevitability — even a certain justice — about it. By odd coincidence, the Park Sheraton, where Anastasia died, had previously been the Park Central Hotel, where Arnold Rothstein had been shot dead twenty-nine years earlier.

Feverishly searching for fingerprints, organizing photographs, and trying to marshal and protect their evidence, the two detectives faced more present-day concerns.

“At least we’ve got eyewitnesses,” said Graff to O’Connor, as they looked around the shop at the seven Italian barbers, who were still transfixed by the carnage that had occurred in their very midst.

“Don Umberto! Don Umberto!” the chief barber was moaning.

In fact, all seven barbers swore that they had seen nothing — nothing of any practical use, at least. They could give the police no help at all in identifying the killers. But as

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