Whiskey River by Loren D. Estleman Page A

1930—THAT TERRIBLE, blood-and-shit-splattered July in the City of Detroit—Jack Dance no longer had to pretend he was notorious. His name flew around the exclusive Detroit Club and opened the doors of blind pigs from Outer Drive to Cadillac Square, and his unruly curls and screw-you grin were as famous as Father Coughlin’s voice of doom.
    In May, while Jack was holed up in a rented house on Howard Street with Bass Springfield and little Andy Kramm and Austin Camarillo, the former air ace whose wasted features gave him an unlucky resemblance to the Phantom of the Opera, I “braved hails of lead” (my words, from the Banner) to interview the rebel chief in a room filled with pistols and rifles and enough hand grenades to open a hole in the Siegfried line. His name appeared in print for the first time and he coined a statement that’s become part of the language. “We didn’t start this fight,” I quoted him, “but we’re sure as shooting going to finish it.”
    The column contained three lies. The hails of lead presented no obstacle because there weren’t any, the interview having taken place during one of the frequent lulls that occur in a protracted gang war; Jack said “sure as hell,” not “sure as shooting”; and there was no fight until he started it. For some time Jack and his little band had been embezzling liquor from the Machine stock and selling it to neighborhood dealers who couldn’t afford Joey’s prices. In many cases the shipments never made it to the warehouse, one or two carloads having been diverted to a blockhouse Jack had arranged for the purpose with a caretaker at historic Fort Wayne. Off the record, the young gangster was astonishingly candid about the details. For the first time I understood Andy Kramm’s slip in Leamington when he had referred to Joey’s liquor as Jack’s.
    Joey, who knew every nickel he had ever earned or stolen by serial number and date and where it had gone, was not long in discovering the leak and who was responsible. He had sent Dom Polacki, his hulking bodyguard, around to Jack’s room at the Book-Cadillac Hotel with a friendly warning to return the spoils by way of breaking Jack’s kneecaps. But Jack was ready for him, and twenty-four hours later a private messenger service delivered Dom’s oversize hat to the Acme Garage, along with a note demanding a thousand dollars for his safe return.
    The word around was that Sal Borneo, in the interest of public relations, had restrained Joey from sending a convoy of gunners down Michigan Avenue where the hotel stood, and chipped in half the ransom from Unione Siciliana funds as a gesture of good faith. The money was left in a telephone booth in the Union Depot on Fort Street and Dom reported to the garage that afternoon, bareheaded but unharmed. Joey was quiet for a week. Then, as Baldy Hannion, a known Dance associate, was driving up Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main stem, to spend the night with his wife, a gunmetal-gray Pontiac sedan drew abreast of his Plymouth coupe and a man in the backseat poked a sawed-off shotgun through the open window and blew off the top of Hannion’s head. His car sideswiped a Model T truck, spun completely around, bucked up over the sidewalk, and came to rest against the base of the marble steps leading up to the Detroit Public Library.
    Joey had had his blood, but was enraged the next day by news that the two men he had sent to the Black Bottom to make a similar example of Bass Springfield had been severely beaten by Springfield’s Negro associates. Jack’s room at the Book-Cadillac was broken into and ransacked, but no evidence of his present whereabouts was found, and the storm abated. It was during that quiet spell that I conducted my interview.
    “Just don’t tell ’em where we are.”
    Jack, in vest and shirtsleeves, had one of his Lugers knocked down on top of a folding card table and was wiping the parts with an oily rag. He had rented the place furnished in loud