I went down to Florida recently to visit my grandfather in the VA nursing home/hospital there. I must say that the government takes care of the old veterans well down there. But it still made me sad to see a man who had once been so strong and mentally sharp being wheeled around in a chair and mostly incoherent. <READMORE>I sat with him for the better part of a day and two very interesting things happened. The first was when he had to take his morning pills. The nurse who hands out the medication is a little on the large side and old Hy was talking up a storm when she came around. When he does talk he talks loudly and without and restraint. As the nurse turned her back to leave, Hy grabbed my arm and said so that everyone could hear, “That woman has the biggest ass in Florida”.
The second interesting thing actually had something to do with poker. Hy was dozing for a while and I was alternating between reading my book and writing in my journal when he woke up. “David,” he said in a surprisingly low and normal voice, “did I ever tell you about the time we hustled the Brooklyn Superior court?”
I shook my head side to side and grabbed my pen. “Now, don’t tell you grandmother about this,” he began. Since Nana Tillie has been dead for many years I knew this wouldn’t be a problem. But there was something different about his eyes as he spoke that told me he was really with me for a while and I wrote furiously so that I would remember.
It seems that Hy, known in those days as Hyman “Ironsides” Schiffman, and a couple of his cronies from the Jewish mob had come upon some extra money at the track. What had happened was that Lewis “Two Cracks” Shapiro had overheard there was a “fix in” in the third race. This meant that the outcome was assured through whatever combination of bribery/force/intimidation/etc. and that all a smart fella needed to do was put down a few dollars on the right horse. So Benny the Bear, Lewis and Hy had made almost ten thousand dollars on that race.
Now, in those days, ten thousand was a lot of money. Ten G’s would keep a man, or even three men, in thick steaks, good booze, and imported cigars for a long time. But these particular men were ambitious and greedy and they were soon down at Katz’s deli discussing their plans for the money over a few pastrami sandwiches and knishes.
The one idea that they kept coming back to was setting up a rigged poker game. There was this one judge who was always giving all the mobsters a hard time. Most of the judges were easily bribed or otherwise influenced, but this guy was a tough nut to crack. He was however, an excellent poker player, and he was a regular at a few local house games, especially the one hosted by the crooked chief of police.
The problem was that this game was straight up. The only dealer was this guy from Chicago who was untouchable. Not only was he a guy nobody could mess with, but he was fairly rich and you couldn’t even bribe him. Well, they say that every man has his price, and it took all of our newly won 10k to find his.
We set him up good too. He was a small winner for the long part of the night when the time was right. Our judge had been trying to get rid of the police chief for a long time so we had the chief talking a lot of garbage to the judge all night about everything. Finally it all came to a head during one big hand of lowball.
The judge got dealt a pat 76432, the second best hand you can get in 2-7 Kansas City lowball. The chief was dealt a 95432 and the betting was soon heads up between them. Once they got all their money in the pot, the chief asked the judge if he wanted to really make it interesting. He proposed a final solution to their problem. The loser of the hand would move out of New York forever.
Each guy wanted the other out so badly that they stopped the hand right there and drew up and signed papers making it as legal as they could. Since all the bets were off, they also agreed to turn the cards face up before the draw. The chief wasn’t a bad actor and really looked mad when he saw the judge’s hand. Of course the smug judge stood pat and the chief discarded the nine to draw to one of the three remaining sevens, his only outs. I can still remember thinking the judge looked like one of those cartoon characters with the steam comin out of his ears when the dealer peeled off a beautiful seven of clubs
Now, one of us wiseguys may have just reneged and said that piece of paper didn’t mean a thing and that’s that. But the judge was a man of his word and by the next week he was gone. And that was the start of more than ten years of mob rule in Brooklyn. I remember we even got a nice basket of flowers from the Italians too. Woulda been nicer if they gave us back half our money, but we were all happy so who cares.
Then, after this whole amazing story, the light left my grandfather’s eyes and he fell asleep. I wheeled him up to his room, covered him with a light blanket and kissed him on his forehead before I left. As I drove away I hoped he was dreaming of the old days when steaks cost a nickel and nobody on the streets was tougher than Ironsides Schiffman.
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