Jericho by George Fetherling

WAR CLIMAXED BY MURDER. The papers were all sensational in those days, not that there wasn’t stuffto get sensational about. Aside from the fellows involved, I was probably one of the last couple dozen people to see Cappy alive. I really got scared I was going to be dragged into it somehow.
    Cappy lived right here where we’re talking now, at the Dempster. Needless to say it was quite the place in those days. Big lobby with a humidor and all the out-of-town papers. It was owned by Harry Hourmouzis, long dead, who already had another hotel not far away. He was a well-known Lebanese all-round athlete. Not a professional, but he’d played baseball in an amateur league—that kind of thing. You were always reading his name in the sports pages of the
Border Cities Star.
His other place, the Royal, which still had an old sign on it that said YOUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME , was a centre of betting activity. By this I mean playing the ponies. The numbers racket was pretty much confined to certain segments of the population, but people all over the city, hell, all over the country, were nuts about betting on the horses in those days, even more than people are now about pro sports and lotteries put together. Besides the two tracks here, there were the four tracks in Toronto—the original Woodbine, Thorncliffe, Long Branch and Dufferin—plus of course Fort Erie and Hamilton. But this wasn’t enough to satisfy folks back then, and they bet on races at all the American tracks too. There was even one betting shop in downtown Windsor that broadcast the radio results over loudspeakers outside. The cop walking the beat would hear all this stuff about the fourth at Narragansett and he’d have to just carry on like he was hard of hearing. The rumour—that’s what we called the truth in those days—was that the Lebanese was paying some of the people at the station house to play deaf.
    Of course there would be raids from time to time. Usually they fell on a Tuesday. That’s because a certain Protestant minister would preach a sermon on Sunday about the evils of gambling and the
Star
would publish it the following day. But the raids never seemed to surprise anybody. Least of all the Lebanese, who had long since expanded into fancy gambling clubs where there were crap tables and roulette and so on, in addition to bookmaking. Later someone set up a rival spot, the St. Clair Sporting Club. In these places outside the city limits, the rumours were about the politicians and the provincial cops instead of certain people on the Windsor force.
    Remember, this was in the forties, before you could buy a legal drink of liquor in a cocktail bar in this province, despite the way it had supplied booze to half of America all during the twenties and into the thirties. Once in the late thirties a friend of mine, a grown man, actually got pinched for buying tobacco on a Sunday. It wasn’t the tobacco that was illegal; it was doing business on a Sunday. Of course he was a nobody like me. Rules like that didn’t apply to the Mayor of Snaketown or the Lebanese, who, everybody said, were friends of the working man, real square dealers. But this reputation took a quick tumble when, after one of the newspaper “crusades,” the cops raided the Lebanese’s permanent suite at the Prince Edward (the Lebanese didn’t live in his own hotel). They missed him—he got away through a back door—but he dropped a key that turned out to fit one of the security boxes in the hotel safe. They got a court order to open it. What they found was a box full of loaded dice. They looked and felt like regular dice, but no matter how long you rolled them you got nothing but sevens and elevens.
    Besides the gambling there was the prostitution. A carryover from the horse-and-buggy days was the rule that to get a beer parlour licence you needed to qualify as a hotel and have sleeping rooms upstairs. Even the smallest beer parlour had at least three of these rooms. This was a great