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framing women who weren’t in the business. They went after single women—landladies and nurses mostly—whose work put them in situations where they were alone with men. The cops and their stoolies would say that they were propositioned, and then they hauled the gals down to the Magistrate’s.
    I guess most New Yorkers didn’t get too upset when the bulls were shaking down fallen women. But once word got out about how they were screwing over widows and Florence Nightingale, people took it seriously. And that’s exactly what the Seabury Commission did. For months, it was all you saw in the papers. Then the Commission Report really stuck it to the mayor, and the governor made it clear that if he didn’t resign, he’d be kicked out.
    Mayor Walker and his girlfriend decided it was a good time to visit Europe. The rest of the Tammany mob shut up and kept their heads down.
    Truth is, I got along well enough with most cops, but that was easy for me to say. I mean, as long as I was running a respectable speak, they were happy enough to leave me to my business and to accept a free drink from time to time. I made sure that the patrolmen who worked my block got a little something extra every week. If there was an honest upright police officer who believed in enforcing every letter of every law, well, I never met him. Sure, there was the occasional cop who’d take your money and turn on you as soon as it suited him. Those you had to deal with.
    But I had no respect for the goddamn vice cops, and I didn’t know anybody who did, and that included their brother officers.
    Lansky said, “You know with this book, you ought to check it with Al Marinelli.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked. Al Marinelli was what you might call the accountant for Tammany. If you were paying off any of their guys, the money went through Al. He and I had been associates for a long time.
    â€œLook, chances are that whoever put this book together is also working with the dirty books you find in Times Square,” Lansky said. “So somebody’s making sure the cops leave them alone, and it’s not coming cheap, considering how the monsignor gets so tight-assed about ‘art magazines.’ Marinelli could tell you who that is.”
    I said that was a good idea, and Lansky said that if I was going to see Marinelli, I could go ahead and take something downtown for him. “You’d be doing me a little favor, that’s all,” he said. “It’s right here.”
    He got up and went through a desk drawer. It only took him a few seconds to find what he was looking for and to seal something, probably money, in an envelope.
    He handed it to me and said, “Give this to Marinelli. This time of night, you’ll probably find him at that chop-suey place by his office. If you can’t find him tonight, Monday is fine. Tell him it’s for this week and next. Got that? This week and next week. Make sure he repeats those words back to you. Things have been confused down there since the mayor left, and I need to be sure this is handled properly.”
    He didn’t expect a receipt. Fact is, Lansky almost never wrote anything down. Anything on paper in his handwriting could come back to bite him if the wrong people got their hands on it. As they said, he kept his business under his hat.
    I tucked the envelope into my pocket with the book and told him I’d see him later.
    Out on the street, the Majestic doorman had a knot of people gathered at the curb. Looked like he needed more than one taxi, so I headed toward the next corner to hail one for myself.
    I hadn’t got far when a car pulled up to the curb next to me. It was a big brown Olds Deluxe with four lights up front and big wooden spoke wheels. The passenger door opened. A guy in a suit stepped out and said, “Get in the car, Quinn.”
    He had a little automatic in his mitt.
    â€œFuck off,” I explained and kept