“What’s it like knowing your father is a gangster? Did you know when you were a teenager? Did you meet Bugsy Siegel? Did your father kill anyone? You know the Mafia kill people.” 

               Childhood  1955-1961 

      I called him Daddy. His friends called him Al, or Smiley, the Department of Justice tagged him “armed and dangerous” and his mother named him Aaron. He was born January 10, 1907, in Kiev Russia, one of three sons born to Ann and Hymen Smehoff

      He had salty sea blue eyes blurred by all the storms he’d seen.  When I say something funny, his eyes crystallize and flatten like glass. Smoothing out the bad memories.  He’s always a different color. Dressed in coordinates matched perfectly as nature.  My small child’s eyes rest cheerfully on his silk ties, a collage of jewel tones. The silver and blue tie matches the shirt underneath.  The feel of his fabric is soft like blankets.  He is very interesting to look at when I am a child and open to all this detail. 

     I cling to his neck in the back seat of his long Cadillac. My mother doesn’t ride with us during the day.  She comes along if we are dressed up and going out to dinner.  I enjoy the car rides most.  He sings songs and his hand flutters about, catching me by surprise behind the ears, and  I shriek.  Daddy’s laughter echoes inside my ears.

     We visit friends in Hollywood who own delicatessens, restaurants, and clothing stores. We go to Paramount Studios and I ride around on a pony or get kissed by cowboys in a Western scene.  We go to Beverly Park almost every day to ride the ponies.  I am only two years old when Daddy slings me over this big stinky pony, and insists that I go around the ring one more time so he can watch.  I meet Hoppalong Cassidy and we visit his booth at Pacific Ocean Park.  When my father was a film producer he worked with Hoppalong on a western film.

     Our home in Bel Air was where I lived before I knew how fortunate we were.  My room was at the end of a long hallway, and I was afraid to leave the room when it was dark because it seemed such a long distance to my parents. The wallpaper danced around my eyes, a collage of flowers illuminated the black background, and I was wrapped in a blue satin comforter.  My room was cluttered with dolls.  As a young child, I preferred staying in my room and imagining characters for my dolls. 

      My father showed us, and really paraded us around as if we were exceptionally talented.   I never understood why these people fussed over me. I sort of distrusted them, before I understood what that meant. There were exceptions, the ones I knew to be real family people earned my affection.  I dreaded the routine of being placed in front of a group of men and women who stared at me as I curtsied or mumbled “Hello.”   George Raft came to all my birthday parties, Nick the Greek showed me card tricks and Swifty Morgan told stories all night.  Damon Runyon characterized him in his stories as the “Lemon Drop Kid.”  I was surrounded by men with FBI files and notorious reputations for being dangerous gangsters. Some of them had been arrested for murder. Others were old-time bootleggers from Cleveland and Detroit.  I knew them as Uncle Lou,  Doc, or Uncle Johnny.  Years later I would discover they were Lou Rhody of the Cleveland Jewish Syndicate in Cleveland, Doc Stacher, the tough New Jersey underboss to Longy Zwillman, (the guy who discovered Jean Harlow in a speakeasy in New Jersey), and Johnny Rosselli, the king of Las Vegas in its heyday.  I was enchanted by these men, they were family friends, and they never followed the rules.

      This home was my father’s showplace.  He bought the house in 1955, and that was a bad year for him. I was two years old.. That was the year that a number of his friends and associates died or were murdered.  Like Little Willie Moretti from New Jersey, who was killed by rival gangs, and Tony Canero, who died at the blackjack table of the Stardust Hotel. 

     Willie had a problem keeping his mouth shut.  Frank Costello, the leader of the syndicate group most closely associated with my father, sent Willie out to California where he’d be safe from harm. Willie was unstable, taking bets on losing horses and talking to people he shouldn’t. Frank asked my father to keep an eye on Willie, to become a confidant.  He was told to dress up as a Doctor and pay visits to Willie.  My father obliged and Willie took a liking to my father.  Willie suggested to Frank that the boys should build this doctor a hospital.  Frank told the story to some of the other fellows and they must have had a good laugh.  Frank had another idea,  giving Allen the job of promoting Willie’s good friend, Frank Sinatra.  My father declined the offer.  Eventually, Willie returned to New York and was found dead stuffed in the trunk of his car. The second tragedy was the suicide of Louis  Rothkopf, “Lou Rhody” they called him, or “Uncle Louie.”  He was one of four bosses of the Jewish Cleveland syndicate, (the Mayfield Road Gang), and one of my father’s closest friends. I heard that Louie would cross to the other side of the street if he saw a guy that owed him money. He had a big heart. With his wife Blanche, the Rothkopf’s were respectable business owners in the Chagrin Falls area of Cleveland.  When Senator Estes Kefauver launched a federal investigation on organized crime, he exposed and ruthlessly slandered Lou and his partners.  Not just as bootleggers, and distillery owners, but murderous syndicate men with ties to the Italian Mafia. By this time, Lou and his partners were operating legitimate business enterprises all over Cleveland. Blanche commit suicide two years before Lou also took his own life.  I have been told that my father brought Lou in to save the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas, when the first owner,Wilbur Clark, went busted.    

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      The house in Bel Air brings back the best memories of my childhood, but few visions remain. The front yard was a blanket of pink and white geraniums.  They were tended to by our gardener, and though I wished to sit in their path, and smell their fragrance, I was told not to play in the geraniums. The flowers were my first contact with nature. It wasn’t enough to just look at them, I wanted to lay with them and watch their breathing.

      Our house was perched at the top center of Thurston Circle, a sort of distant cousin to the discreet upper Bel Air locked behind black iron gates. There was no gate at our entrance, and the neighborhood homes were a mixture of two-story colonial and ranch style. The view of Los Angeles from the living room and my parent’s room was an electric and absorbing scene for a small child who hadn’t known anything beyond her house. At night lights glittered against a black sky, and I could sit by the window and dream of what the lights were all about.  Entangled bougainvillea grew wildly behind our house. We picked figs and avocados from trees in the yard. There I learned my first lesson about family values. One day my father showed me a nest of small birds perched on a branch of a spruce tree.  He pointed out the mother bird hovering over her babies in the nest, and then he drew my attention to the father bird perched on our television antenna. “You see, that’s what the father bird must do, is guard his little family, just like I do.”  I asked a few questions, and he just kept telling me that it was so remarkable how animals take care of their families and I should watch them and learn something.

   My parents gave me extravagant toys. I was about four when my father installed a roller coaster in our backyard. He sat me in the cart and I rode up and down the bumpy track, screeching with laughter.  My mother was always there, watching from a distance. Daddy was the one that loads me up with surprises and Mommy was the one to feed me, clean me up, and tuck me in at night. I could tell her everything, she listened to me and watched over me. She doesn’t interfere with me when I am playing with my dolls.

TO BE CONTINUED