WHERE TO BEGIN THIS STORY OF A FATHER THAT I ONLY CAME TO UNDERSTAND BY READING HIS FBI FILES, BOOKS ABOUT MOB HISTORY WRITTEN BY LAW ENFORCEMENT AND COLLEGE PROFESSORS, AND DOCUMENTARIES PRODUCED BY FOES OF MY FATHER.
My last year with Dad was 1981. Naive, and unconcerned with where I was headed, or how I’d get there if I figured it out, I was spinning around in an executive chair; waiting for the big hand on the black and white office clock to set me free. Time didn’t pass; I hauled it over my head, in my bland windowless office, under florescent glare. I was trouble shooting for an ambitious group of USC guys as they gobbled up all of Los Angeles real estate. Without any real sense of survival or independence, my life was in the hands of my father.
“Meyer’s coming to see me; haven’t seen the little guy in twenty-five years.” Dad said during a commercial break.
“Meyer Lansky?” I asked as casually as he’d spoken.
“Who else?”
“Why did you two wait so long?”
“It’s no concern of yours; he’s my friend, not yours.” I was twenty-nine years old and still verbally handcuffed.
The three of us went out to dinner, and while the two of them spoke in clipped short wave syndicate code, I
noticed that neither one of them looked at all happy. It was rare to catch my father in public with a friend, without raucous laughter, and storytelling. My attempt to revive the dinner conversation with my own humor,returned two sets of silent eyeball commands to resist speaking.
Several months later I received a call from Dad asking me to come over to his apartment, he had collapsed on the bathroom floor. When I arrived, he pleaded for me to stay close by. “I’ll be all right in a few minutes; I just need to catch my breath. ” I sat outside the bathroom door biting my nails, and waited, like our dog Spice, for my orders. For the first time in my life, he was weaker than I, and my turmoil centered on that unfamiliar reversal of roles.
I have to turn the clock back to 1996, to the days of peeling back the first layer of family history. I was sitting at a dining room table in a casita in Taos, NM. It was winter, the first time I’d lived in snow outside a few teenage weekends in Arrowhead. Snow silence that sucks up every imaginable sound, and the absence of any neighbors, I was the only resident in the compound, left me to unravel a secret life, the one my father guarded with irreproachable tenacity.
The first layer came off from the Immigration and Naturalization (INS) files on Allen smiley, birth name Aaron Smehoff, tagged “Armed and Dangerous.”
Allen married, Irene on January 16, 1926, (my father’s nineteenth birthday), in San Francisco. On July 18, 1926 Allen was arrested for robbery in a drug store on Geary Street with another unidentified boy who fled the scene. On September 17, 1926, Allen was convicted of first degree robbery and confined to Preston Reformatory for boys in Ione, California. On November 23, 1926 Irene, who remained in Oakland, gave birth to a baby girl, named Loretta. Allen was released from Preston Reformatory in December of 1927. He returned to Oakland to reunite with his wife and child; but they had vanished. This is what the INS gathered from Dad in an INS hearing. I read from the court transcripts of that hearing, about 300 pages of interrogation and the answers’ in my Dad’s own voice.
The snow sedated the choppy feeling in my stomach, the jaggedness of suddenly discovering, why my father was wired with anxiety. His whole life was occupy Allen Smiley; arrest him, convict him, send him to Russia, and never pull the tap from his apartment, or the FBI guys from his tail.
When I ordered all those government files I had no idea that the government probed into personal lives as much as criminal activities. They recorded all the household conversations, arguments with my mother, his betting on the phone, his visitors, discussions with his housekeeper about the ashtrays, and his hatred for the government, “I wish somebody would drop a bomb, just to get rid of some of these guys.”
What would I say to this daughter now in her eighties, about the father she never knew?
It was a one of a kind experience, to pick up the phone and speak with Chris, the granddaughter, who discovered me from my columns. She went looking for the other Smiley daughter, and confronted her own family secret. The tension cross-circuited our conversation, both of us heaving with questions, anxious for an answer to the family puzzle, the answers we could not wait to get, that I cannot share, even though the names are changed, I do honor the right to privacy.
I paced the room moving unconsciously from one place to another, reaching for my father’s voice to soothe her, rewrite history in between dusk and making dinner. Then the unveiling of the tragedy; the loss and the family shame, surrounding a marriage to a gangster, a father whom they never got to know, as I did. In the passing of an hour or less, my voice resonated the stories of her grandfather; his health and humor, his disciplinary regulations, and his life long battle to remain anonymous, in the public eye of organized crime.
Chris asked if I wanted to speak with Loretta, my half-sister, and I said of course I would. She set up a phone call for the following Sunday,
with a forewarning that her grandmother did not encourage the communication, or the research, she was beyond asking for a resurgence of truth or pain. How does one retrace seventy or eighty years of believing the color red may be the color blue or least a bluish tint. Loretta was not proud of what she read about Allen Smiley.
In the days before the arranged phone call I sifted through my internal index of Dad’s history, and what might console her. I could tell her about the time, he sat me down in the living room, to discuss sex with a gentle sternness;
“ Once you get pregnant your whole life changes, and you’re not even close to being ready for that. It happened to a gal I loved, when I was a young man.”
Was that Loretta’s mother he was speaking about? When this young love of his said she was pregnant, he tried to persuade her against it, because he wasn’t “properly financed.” So I asked him what happened.
“We’re not talking about my life; I’m trying to get you to understand the consequences of sex. You see God made the act beautiful so we would procreate, and if you ignore the consequences, you’re not fulfilling God’s wishes.”
I waited by the phone until it was time to accept that the call wasn’t coming. During that time of waiting, I tried to walk in Loretta’s shoes. I only had to take a few steps to comprehend the combustion of emotions she’d face by having a Sunday evening chat with me.
I made the choice to be public, to be viewed by strangers all over the world, and to receive their rage as well as their rewards.
It wasn’t a year ago that I received an email from the most distant of childhood memories. The email came from Inga, our first Nanny. The last time she saw me I was six years old. She sent me photos of us in the backyard at Bel Air, photos of her watching over me on the swings. She told me by letter, that my father was so good to her, so generous, and she loved being a part of our family. “I had no idea he was involved in anything criminal, and even if he was, it wouldn’t have mattered because he was such a kind man.” The color red is also the color blue, and because of my Dad, I learned to accept the contradictions in all of us.
Our interior life is uncensored, unsuitable to guidance from our parents, our husbands and wives, our lovers; it is uniquely you, red and blue.
A LITERARY AGENT I know emphasized the importance of rounding up readers. That’s not so easy when you’re exposing your own guarded family secret.
My mother married my father two years after Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was murdered. Sitting beside Ben the night of the murder provoked an immediate response from my father; it was time to get the hell out. He promised to reform, and she agreed to marry him. One of her compromises was her religious faith. She was Irish Catholic. She stopped going to church, and she didn’t convert. It was a bitter irritation between them. My father raised us Jewish, we attended Hebrew School and went to Synagogue every Saturday morning. The complexity of being half Jewish and half Catholic surfaced, when some classmate told me I wasn’t really Jewish. I told this to my father. I still remember his answer coming at me like a round of bullets.
” That’s an idiot! It doesn’t matter if you’re half Jewish or a quarter, you’re a Jew! Don’t you ever forget it, and don’t let anyone tell you different. DO YOU HEAR ME?” To this day when people remind me that I’m not really Jewish I say,” For my father, God made an exception.”
Friends are different for men in the Mafia, and for their wives. Real friends have to be connected. You cannot trust anyone else. My mother had three friends. Marianne was married to Gus Alex a powerful political fixer in the Chicago syndicate. She had been a model like my mother. She was the stunning Grace Kelly sort of beauty with coolness much like my mother. She and my mother whispered when I was in the room.
More than any other person, Aunt Bess was beholden to my mother. She wasn’t really an aunt. Bess was Benjamin Siegel’s little sister. The one he favored over the others. I suppose Bess met my mother way before I was born, when Benjamin was alive. She had the same bedroom eyes of her brother, big hound dog eyes that swept sentiment in every glance. She had a heart too big for the turmoil in her life, and she cried about everything. She squeezed my face, and forever referred to me as her gorgeous baby. Bess was as content crying as she was laughing. There wasn’t any in between. She dressed in high heels, tailored suits and carried a hand bag with lots of tissue. She and my Nana, my mother’s mother were very close friends. Bess, her husband, and daughter lived in a house on Doheny Drive that Ben Siegel bought for her. Bess’s husband Solly never uttered a word, and worked for Ben doing odd jobs.
In later years I would live across the street from them, but by then my father had distanced Bess’s family for reasons never revealed.
How I loved to watch Miriam; a saucy brassy Italian from Brooklyn. She propped up her bosom like two statues, waved a long red lacquered nail, and smoked one cigarette after another without ever taking a breath. She shopped everyday, charged everything, and when we were in the room she did not change her act, she let us see what it was really like to be a gangsters wife. Beneath all the enamel and cosmetics she loved my mother unconditionally. Although their characters were strikingly different, they shared that bond. Miriam was married to Doc Stacher, who rose in the ranks to become enforcer for Abner “Longy” Zwillman, the boss of New Jersey. Doc walked with his hands clasped behind, a cigar stub lived on his lip, and he was bald and heavy lidded. He lived in short pants and little white sneakers. Beneath his somewhat harsh and metallic skin was a wreath of worship for Joanne. He didn’t restrict her humor, appetite, or spirit. The more outrageous her behavior the more he approved.
Mafia men make the most outrageously entertaining hosts; nothing is ever out of the question. All they have to do is pick up the phone, and someone in the network will make it happen.
Mafia men don’t get up and go to work. Not one day in his life did my father ever report to an office. When I wasn’t in school, he took me with him in the powder blue Cadillac and we drove the streets of Hollywood visiting friends in delicatessens. We sat in big leather booths while my father and the owners talked. I didn’t know what work was all about. No doubt the conversation was the rackets, the races, or Vegas. I was a very good decoy. What kind of a man takes his daughter to mob meetings? The kind that doesn’t want to look like a mob guy. My father didn’t think I was listening, but I heard a lot.
Rory Calhoun was one of the characters that stood out. He was a western movie star; the Clint Eastwood of his day. Rory was also in the same reformatory as my father as a teen. The Calhoun family and ours spent a lot of time together. They had two daughters and lived in an exotic Spanish villa on a corner of Sunset Boulevard. Inside it was like a movie set, with animal rugs, oil paintings of Spanish Troubadours and Moorish decorations. Rita, Rory’s wife, wore tiny stacked high heels and she clicked across the Spanish tiles like a flamenco dancer. The whole family was blessed with dreamy looks. I remember looking at my reflection in the mirror as Rita combed my hair, and discovering I was not at all pretty. I didn’t realize that I was surrounded with extraordinary beauty; everyone had these exceptional vogue looks. The importance placed on that kind of beauty was just as distorted.
Rita exhumed a stern feminine demeanor, extremely seductive but not without a battle. I learned my first lessons about temptation just by watching her. She fanned the room with perfume and laughter, and men just succumbed like drugged animals. I felt my first tingle of sexuality in the arms of Rory. He was a treasure of natural emotion, conversation, and jokes. They both gambled, borrowed money from the other, and bet on everything.
FLAMINGO HOTEL WEDDING 1949.
My mother was raised in East Orange, New Jersey, before the neighborhood changed. My grandmother always said that East Orange used to be a very nice place to live. There is a photograph of my mother at age seven or eight posing in the garden with her German Shepard. She is holding a ruffled parasol, and dressed like a doll. Her face is a bud of innocence, but with a hint of pained modesty. She didn’t flaunt her beauty; it was more of an embarrassment. When her father died suddenly, she elected to help her family financially, and entered her photograph in a Redbook magazine contest. At seventeen years old she won a modeling contract with John Robert Powers in New York City. My mother ascended to an identity that suited her in some ways and restricted her in others. The Powers girls were invited to grand openings of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. She appeared on stage at New York’s Copacabana Night Club in 1943. On one of those nights my father was in the audience, and that was where the Smiley Casey bridge from East Orange to Hollywood began.
Sixty-four years have passed since Ben Siegel was murdered, and my father stood in the Beverly Hills police station defending his innocence. I am the link to his truth.
Last week, I received an unrecognized e-mail. It was from a relative of Mr. Robert’s; who was a friend of my father’s in Houston. I met Mr. Roberts on a business trip to Houston back in the 70’s, he pulled a royal flush in the oil business.
This relative discovered one of the Smiley’s Dice memoir columns. He wanted to share some stories with me, and so I responded I would love to hear them. A few weeks later, Susan, a former classmate from Emerson Junior High, sent me a link to a New York Times feature, “Looking For My Father in Las Vegas.” Susan suggested I read it, get inspired, and go back to my own memoir. A week later, I received two DVD’s in the mail from a man I never met. A friend had informed me this man was on a synagogue lecture circuit, and that his subject was Jews in Sing Sing Prison. He was using Ben Siegel and Meyer Lansky as models in his presentation on genealogical research.
The DVD’s went into the drawer, and only recently, I pulled one out and played it. Ben and Meyer were used as subjects to add humor to his presentation. Everyone in the audience laughed at his Siegel/Lansky anecdotes. I ejected the disk, relieved Allen Smiley was not part of the presentation.
In the middle of reinventing a new life, having placed my memoir in a trunk in a storage unit, so it will not be visible or even accessible, the memoir haunts me. A story that has to be written cannot be hidden. About a month ago, a pastor wrote to me, and related this story:
“I am pastor of a church in L. A. I have studied the mob for years. I ran across your name as I studied about your father that night on Linden Drive. I have been approached by a man who claims to have knowledge about who killed Mr. Siegel. The guy was a right-hand man of Mickey Cohen.(and claims Mickey told him). Well, I wondered if you had any preference on the theories that have been put forth. What stories you must have to tell. God Bless you and yours.”
What am I supposed to think? Did the killer confess in his church? This brings to memory another letter I received about a year ago. The name mentioned in the letter was one I had hunted for many years. Harry Freedlander was discovered back in 1995 in the pages of my father’s testimony before the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Harry was a friend to my father back home in Winnipeg. They were childhood chums. When my father stowed away to Detroit, he wrote letters to Harry who informed my grandmother of my father’s travels. A few years later, Harry joined my father in Detroit and began working in the automobile industry. I remember Harry stating to the INS officer that he was very close to Allen’s family.
When an e-mail arrived from the grandson of Harry, the letter remained on the screen for a long time. Truths revealed by government documents, informants, and books are harsh on my father. The companions, friends, and associates are the ones who give me introspection. The grandson remembered hearing stories about my dad, and he wanted to know more about his grandfather. I told him that his grandfather had testified in court to their early friendship. Harry said my father stopped corresponding after he was in Los Angeles.
Several books were released this year with references to dad. The first book arrived compliments of the author, who interviewed me in 2003. I’d forgotten all about it. In Gus Russo’s “Supermob: The Story of Sidney Korshak,” Russo referred to my father in an incident in 1988, with attorney Robert Shapiro, and a lesser know Las Vegas club owner, Gianni Russo, no relation. According to Gus, Korshack told Gianni to see my father in his penthouse apartment on Doheny Drive, after Korshack shot someone in his Vegas nightclub. This is highly impossible, since my father passed away in 1982, and had moved out of the Doheny Towers several years prior.
Throughout the year, I am jabbed, teased, and taunted by the ruminations of strangers on my dad. I feel protective of his legacy. I feel protective of Ben Siegel too. It is part of growing up with gangsters.
Last month, a man who had given me the very first insight into my father passed away. I never met Ed Becker in person. We corresponded regularly. I found my journal marking the first entry of our correspondence. Ed guided me through the labyrinth of half-truths and myths. Without his perspective, the story was all trumped-up headlines. Ed Becker was the one man I could always turn to when I was tangled up in truth. It appears growing up with gangsters is still a work-in-progress.
How could I have known 15 years ago? Back then I had but a fingerbowl of resources, a blue chair, a desk, and a typewriter. Everyday I wrote into the flame of discovery looking for my mother. My notebooks were sketches of a woman I never knew. The absence of the most ordinary information, like where she grew up in Newark, what sort of neighborhood, what her father did for a living, what schools, she attended, and later on, what experiences she had modeling in New York.
The closest I got was by reading John Robert Powers, The Powers Girls, about the modeling agency he started in 1923. He assigned unemployed Broadway talent to his advertising agency to promote American products. According to John he was the innovator of the modeling agency concept- beautiful women and men will sell products, the public never would have thought of buying.
I found her name in the index, Lucille Casey, and she joined the agency when she was 16 years old. John groomed the models; they were assigned disciplinary perfection in dialect, manners, appearance, character, and intellect. Powers Girls married anyone they wanted. They were invited to all the important society events, they were given card blanche at the Stork Club, and the Morocco and they were transported to celebratory city functions. They met men of all means, character, and class.
After I read the book, I thought about what my father used to say, ‘Your mother could have had any man in the world, but she picked me. Don’t you make the same mistake. “ That is a complex summons for a teenager to understand.
I sat in the blue chair and waited for flares of information to come down to earth. After two years, I had very little to fill one page. My mother’s history was lost, her friends had vanished, or would not talk to me. She did not leave a diary. Her photo album as a model was all I had. What could I see in those eyes, and smile? I gave up the search, and switched over to my father. The government documented his daily activities, and what they didn’t hear or see, was exploited in newspapers, documentaries, and books.
There was one woman who was alive, that knew intimate details of my mother, because I had met her, and she made it known to me she knew. That was Meyer Lansky’s wife, who went by the name Teddy. Women have a distinctive look when they are withholding secrets. Teddy always had that look when she brought up my mother. I told her I was writing about my father and mother and she said, “Let them rest in peace.” I didn’t take her advice.
ADVENTURERS IN SINGLE LIVINGNESS 