A Magical Moment In The World Of Art-The Recent “Discovery” Of 26 Painting Presumed Destroyed In The Nazi” Night Of The Long Knives Destruction Of ‘Degenerate Art’ ” Of Abstract Impressionist Raybolt Drexel Shakes The Rafters

By Laura Perkins

The reader may pardon me for having “gone dark” for the past few months and thus having avoided getting immersed in my fellow writer (and sometimes art mentor) Sam Lowell’s on-going battle, shadow boxing really, about the fate of the masterpieces that were stolen in the heist of the century (20^th) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston some thirty years ago. Sam’s main beef, no, point, no, admiration, having been nothing but a charter member corner boy in his desperately poor youth so always on the lookout for the easy score and always just a little East of Eden on the legality question, was how easy the heist had been. Certainly to his eyes and ears with plenty of inside help and he didn’t mean the silly rent-a-cops who were supposed to protect the crown jewels but probably some well-positioned curators and volunteer tour guides. You know the cubby hole knowledge of some exotic artist for which some well-placed curators have written a seamless 66 page essay on as part of some exhibition and the suburban matrons who thrill to jabber their six-sentence knowledge of say, well, Rembrandt since we are rightly commemorating his 350^th birthday of later rating. Or as likely among those “volunteer” art students from the Museum School and Mass Art who facing the prospect of garret life for the next few decades decided to find a benefactor like the old artists, like Rembrandt if I am not mistaken did in the courts and chanceries of Europe back in the day. If the reader will recall at least one curator, a Holbein the Younger expert and a couple of art students (not sure from which school) left the staff shortly after the theft never to be heard from again after a light FBI grilling. But enough of this for Sam and I have gone on endlessly about the insiders as well as the simply although beautiful plan as it was laid out.          

More importantly than who qualified as prime suspects for the job on the inside for the actual thefts though, the thirty-year question really, was how the various agencies investigating the whereabouts of the stuff have come up mainly with egg on their faces. Sam, even today has a certain amount of glee when he describes the lightweight work done by the FBI and Boston Police  to recover the masterpieces even with the so-called big rewards available (although really chump change compared to the value of the art today at half a billion maybe more today so you know that missing curator and those so-called art students are not giving up squat, Sam’s word, not playing ball with the law, also Sam’s, else find themselves in stir. What a laugh.)    

Frankly, Sam, and through Sam, me have had a few so-called theories about the fate of the works, where they are, who had them and who has them now. It did not take old Seth Garth long to figure out where such stuff would be in the Greater Boston area once He and Sam put their heads together. So it was no surprise, made perfect sense to me to have known that the works had been stored in the Edward McCormick Bathhouse, or really the shed where they keep the tools and trucks,  over on Carson Beach for years so Whitey Bulger, complete with pink wig and paper bag beer could eye them at his pleasure while he was on the run. The key link was one guy, a career criminal mostly but with a François Villon poetic heart, who claimed to be the President of Rock and Roll, Myles Connors, who did the detail work (and also did as far as we know some very good preservation work to keep the “Big 13” from the elements coming off of Dorchester Bay.

Probably had things worked out Whitey’s way the artworks would still be over in the bathhouse, still be a one-man museum exhibition. But all of that art for art’s sake that a painter named James McNeil Abbot Whistler laid on an unsuspecting world went in the trash barrel because once Whitey needed dough for his defense in a fistful of murder and mayhem charges he sold all the good stuff, sold everything I believe except those hazy sketches nobody would really want today except museum curators desperate to fill up their artist retrospectives with enough material to not leave any empty spaces. Sold the lot minus the loss-leaders to a guy, I think his name is Tom Steyers, something like that, a hedge fund guy who has some social consciousness,  who has the good stuff locked up somewhere in order to peep at them on occasion but mainly to leave his kids with some start-up dough if they too wanted to be socially conscious billionaires. The second-rate stuff for all I know may still be in the bathhouse garage but don’t quote me on that.  

Frankly though, especially now that Whitey has taken the fall, has gone to sleep with the fishes, that is all old news, speculation and macho guy talk like Sam and Seth get into when they need some hot air time and not worthy of my time. Not worthy of my time as an acknowledged and proud amateur art critic. Not against the part I played in helping to put together the clues that would get 26 works, no, masterworks by the famous Abstract Impressionist Raybolt Drexel which everybody though the Nazis had destroyed when they went on a rampage against “degenerate art,” decided to burn everything in sight that blighted their vision of an Aryan Garden of Eden back in the 1930s when they thought they had a thousand year Reich in front of them. I played a minor role in the investigation and research but I played a part recognized by those inside the art cabal, even by my usual nemesis Clarence Dewar, professional art critic for Art Today. Believe me that kudo says plenty.

A little background, my background into the case is in order to set the scene. Back when I was a college student, back in the 1960s, at Rochester I was always mesmerized by a painting that hung near the statue of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass simple entitled Steel #6 by Raybolt Drexel. The amazing thing, no, the two amazing things about this painting, were, one, that it was one of only three known Drexels to have survived the Nazi onslaught in the 1930s when these scum were burning everything in sight by guys like Max Beckmann, George Groz, Milos Drebs and Raybolt Drexel as “degenerate art,” as against the cult of the superman Aryan race noise that soon enough, well, maybe not soon enough, got bloodied by some guys from America and Russia who didn’t like their drift of a thousand years of darkness. The other, number two, was that this painting was an almost classically pure example of one of the “new wave” trends in early 20^th century art, abstract impressionism, which Drexel did a huge amount to pioneer before they, and you know who the “they” is and if you don’t think Nazi scum, grabbed him and did something vile to him which even today we don’t know exactly what it was and where he was buried except  somewhere in Poland on the way to the concentration camps.             

I was at Rochester for four years before heading to the “real world” but I would bet that I looked that that painting a hundred times, at least. The funny thing is that it always struck me in different ways when I saw it in various lights, times of days, and my own personal moods. That is what abstract impressionism was about, that is what we know Drexel was trying to do with his paintings in a world moving toward various forms of expressionism and then pure abstraction (which usually today leaves me hollow). That is what he detailed in the few writings he was able to sneak out of Germany before they grabbed him. Here’s the play on Steel #6; numerous layers (one curator, an abstract impressionist expect so I will go with her judgement, estimated at least twenty) of white in all its variations covering most of the 48” by 72” canvass frame. Then in the lower left corner maybe 12” by 18” a piece of steel. Or something that looks like steel in all its admixtures of straight-up gray, blue-gray, black-gray, green-gray, charcoal-gray, lemon-etched gray and so on. The amazing point though, the look at it one hundred plus times point during four years at Rochester point, was the essence of the piece, that is the best way I can say it, if not exactly explain it, took one from the original iron ore to the finished product in one fell swoop. Incredible, magnificent, amazing.          

Back to the main story though. Not all the details of how these glorious 26 paintings survived are known even though we pressed the issue as far as we could, talked to everybody in Germany (mostly though second-hand conversations since the generation who would have known the facts straight up had passed on or had been killed during the war) who had any information about the transit, including army officers and lower-level government officials. For, example, some tank commander’s son, his father after the war proud to say he had saved some great art whatever he did in the war heading with his division west along the transit route, would tell us how the “shipment,” cloaked as an “ironic” steel shipment for the front stopped in the Ruhr Valley on the way and that the old man had ordered four trusted NCO guards to insure its safety. Many such examples.

In the great scheme though, what had originally saved the Drexels from the faggot fires of Nuremburg and Berlin was that after Drexel was grabbed what appears to have happened is that some half- committed Nazi named Klein who had a love of art (as we have seen plenty of autocrats and cravens who would blow up the world still keep some art work in their bunkers with them so don’t be so surprised by that love business) decided that the good German name of Drexel could not produce “degenerate art.” Meaning as well as other things that a non-Jewish German could not produce such art although that did not stop Herr Klein from having his SS boys grab Drexel for the rails to Poland while taking the 26 (it may have been 29 there is speculation 3 pieces got lost or destroyed on the way west) masterworks.  The “other things” being that it would be quite a stretch to see the simple designs of Drexel’s work on the same plane as say Max Beckmann who really did try to rub noses in his productions.

The three previously known to survive Drexels had been brought to America by George Groz who consigned them to the New World Gallery in New York City where Allan Austin, a rich Rochester alum saw Steel#6 and decided to purchase it for Spring Hall as a fitting  tribute to economic progress which fit in with the mission of the college). Once the European war started this half-Nazi, apparently still half-Nazi if his rise to general meant anything decided to take the artworks west with him while the Nazi tide was rising. West to Paris where he was stationed apparently through most of the war. When things started to go south for Germany after the heroic Soviet struggle at Stalingrad this Klein made plans to get the paintings to America. Some Germans, including high level German officers like Klein when they began to see the writing on the wall were going to save their asses as best they could when the Americans came knocking at the doors. Unlike guys like Martin Blatner and Max Steiner who went down in the bunkers to fall down with the 1000-year Reich. Through some byzantine network, the “tunnel” I have heard it called, got the stuff out of Europe and into the mansion of Amos Drexel in Pennsylvania-without him or his staff being aware of what would wind up in the basement as an ordinary shipment of industrial goods. This wealthy industrialist had some family relationship with Raybolt’s and thus a perfect set-up for a delivery drop.             

The story stops there for a while for the simple reason that Herr Klein never made it out via the OSS “tunnel” which maybe tells you how bad a character he was, how dirty his hands were what with the death of Drexel and who knows how many before he hit Paris and grabbed every Resistance fighter he could get his hands on, hung then on lampposts up and down the Seine as cautionary tales. Although I found no listing for him in the Nuremburg tribunals, even in the secondary lists since the Dulles boys were grabbing whoever did not stink to high heaven in order to begin in earnest the fight against the emerging Soviet power in Europe he must have been put to sleep.

The story from my ends begins a few years ago when I read an article in a scholarly journal which referenced how methodical the Nazis were before they went on the run, say 1944 when even Max Steiner know the game was up and decided to hit the bunker early. For example, for our present example, some low-level clerk or something was in charge of, made a list of all the “degenerate art” which went to the pyres in their crazy lust to rid the world of most 20^th century art. That made me curious about the fate of the other art works of Drexel which never made it to American shores. Through various connections I was able to get the list of destroyed art. I could not stop my heart from serious fluttering when I saw that nothing of Drexel’s was officially listed as consigned to the flames. That would eventually, again due to that great German skill of organizing everything into workable systems, open up the trail of who last had access to the Drexel work and then to Herr Klein’s role. (It was well known that Klein had had Drexel in his clutches in the 1930s before he “disappeared “ attested to by half a dozen SS scum who were only too glad to speak of their role of cleansing Germany of modern filth.)

The hardest part turned out to be in Pennsylvania, although not in the way one would think. Working with a senior curator from the Met, the gal who claimed that Steel#6 had twenty layers of white on canvass before anything else was done to the surface and a Drexel expert, we worked our way to pay dirt. Along the way interviewing some relatives of an art dealer in Paris who had worked with Herr Klein to get the works out of the country before all hell broke loose I had been given information that the clandestine works had been sent to something called the Drexel Institute which would have made sense, but which subsequent to 1970 I think changed to the more generic Drexel University. We spent untold weeks checking out possible lead there, nada, nothing. Then somebody told us about the Drexel mansion about ten miles outside of Philadelphia. A few weeks work there going through many crated boxes and crates looking for something that would have disclosed the item had come through Paris as least we found the secured iron box filled with the treasures, none on frames but after many years still in good shape (that estimation from the Met curator who also helped with the question of authentication).

A book is being written about this extraordinary find, a book which I will be involved with having published by Art Press, so I have limited myself to the shell of the way the items were finally discovered which were actually worthy of a detective novel. What intrigued me, what frankly freaked me out was that the Steel#6 up in Rochester was the end-piece of a series of six paintings on the same general theme of birth and growth. So in Steel#1-5 you will see the same attention to massive layering as in #6 although fewer layers but as you put the framed works in a row (Drexel noted in pencil that this is the way they should be collectively hung on the back of #1) you start with a very small gray object and work your way up to what I have previously described in viewing Steel#6. Amazing, beautiful and perhaps the definitive work expressing what abstract impressionism was all about when it flowered alongside Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and pure abstraction.          

What Did His Father-In Law Say To Her Mother-In-Law-Nothing, Absolutely Nothing- Death To “In-Law” Jokes-Now!

By Steve Lucas, special guest commentary

I am sick unto death of “in-law” jokes, period. Moreover, sick unto death of being the butt of every “in-law” joke that has hit the Lucas-Levine family ever since my son Mark married Marie Levine some twenty-years ago under some very strange circumstances as even I must admit. But to have to every few years, as now, even in retirement, withstand the siege of the Levine devourer machine come family reunion time is beyond the pale, is something I might very well do something about this time. Maybe think something really devious up to ruffle some feathers. Especially, to keep that braggart-roaster Jerry, Jerry Levine, father to dear sweet Marie, and father-in-law to my son Mark even if it was a close thing, the becoming a father-in-law part off kilter.          

    

Let me tell the tale and even the most jaded taste, even the most “live and let live” aficionados will cry to the high heavens with me for vengeance. You might as well know at the beginning that Steve Lucas is not my real name, or at least you should not assume that it is because back about twenty years ago when Mark and Marie sprang the big news that they wanted to get married I was working, well, for the government in a very sensitive capacity. (I will not disclose which agency I worked for since I have something like a non-disclosure agreement with the agency involved some members of whom would be very happy to cut my throat for even mentioning the alphabet soup agency I actually worked for which was so hush-hush in those days only about ten, eleven people know the whole story, or what they think is the whole story.)

Everybody, my son, Jerry Levine, a couple of rogue associates who went free-lancing on their own when they saw a big payday coming up and no desire to share, sided with the bad guys and have yet to be heard from again, assumed it was the CIA and I did nothing to dissuade them from that “front.” The truth is that after the fiasco in Afghanistan, after CIA agents high and low fled like a gaggle of geese when they done supplying the mujahedeen against the Soviets and then dropped out to leave these cock-eyed Arabs or whatever they are to their own devises they have been nothing but jerkoffs and bunglers who I wouldn’t trust to go to the post office to mail a letter if there are any around anymore. They are like the Marines whose last great expedition was in Inchon in Korea around 1950 and they have been living off their respective high points ever since. The alphabet soup “deep state” although we never used that term of art agency I worked for would have had your average CIA operation done before noon with time for a nap before lunch.              

         

Since everything, all the important parts, about that caper has been exposed, been written about by I think Tom Clancy, has been made into a movie starring a guy named Mike Douglas I can fill in some of the information about what I was doing when my Mark laid that bombshell about getting married on me . That while I was on what I will call the Hotel Olga case, although it was not about any hotel (hotels were sites for various aspects of the caper however) but about some rogue ex-Soviet KGB agents grabbing a top of the line (then) Soviet submarine and preparing to sell to the highest bidder, either a state actor whose interests would not coincide with United States interests or a non-state actor who wanted to have the capacity to get, what did Johnny Rocco, the famous gangster out of 1930s Chicago call it, oh yeah, “more,” more dough and power with no heavy lifting.    

The reader does not need to know why I was in Moscow at the time, okay, although that same reader can guess that I was arranging a deal with the Russian guys, agents of the oil oligarchs as it turned out and that as part of the deal agreement was reached that it would be consummated in four days, a Sunday  (not my timetable, theirs, so I couldn’t tip my hand that I needed more time due to “personal” reasons). There is your international intrigue opener but see this mixed in with my having to be in Chicago, yeah, Johnny Rocco’s wide-open Chi town for a party that I was throwing for the young betrothed and to meet the future in-laws, or better fete them officially since I would actually meet them a day or two earlier.  

That “earlier” would set off a train of events which, as I said before I have not lived down to this day. My Mark would be considered a “catch” in today’s meat market, young, good-looking, a lawyer with great prospects and raised by a mother, my ex-wife Donna, who did a good job when I was “working” whatever caper the agency had me running around the world to do. This Marie, a doll, was also a great catch but here is where things broke down and continue to break down on the subject unto this day.  The father, this Jerry Levine, a doctor if you could call it that, a so-called cosmetic surgeon, you know giving well-heeled men and women a tuck here a pull there with no heavy lifting and no particular reason for doing it (except to hear Jerry tell it even today in his own retirement you would think his was the greatest service to build self-esteem since Freud, and cheaper). This guy, a Jewish guy, had about every phobia known to mankind, maybe more, fear of flying, heights, claustrophobia, small spaces, big spaces, guns, or any sense of adventure beyond the usual Saturday country club bullshit that has been going on at least since John O’Hara exposed the whole thing many years ago in an endless series of novels about the vacuous lives of that set. But Jerry had also worked himself up into this fetish for giving his daughter, his Marie, a big wedding, a big sent off and that is how I got bushwhacked, yes, bushwhacked is exactly right into showing up in Chi town when I really needed to be in Paris that weekend to close the deal with the third party I was acting as the middle man for the oligarchs for.     

I might as well tell you since you will find out anyway, or maybe know already if you read the Clancy book or saw the movie, that I was in such deep cover with such a crooked trail of exploits, some even true, known by a bunch of domestic intelligence agencies that during the entire Hotel Olga caper, start to finish, the “feds” were on my ass. (Again, although I have no non-disclosure agreement with this agency everybody assumed it was the FBI, and I let it go as that. Although the FBI probably hasn’t done anything except hassle some has-been Reds since J. Edgar catch John Dellinger with his pants down in some whorehouse in Kansas City and never got over it.) Wouldn’t you know that the “feds” crashed the little pre-wedding reception I had set up in the exclusive Hotel Lennox for Mark and Marie. I was too deep into the case, was too close to wrapping up a serious threat to our national security to let them get to me. So, with their guns drawn, I threw Jerry in front of me to make my escape (and I hear their leader Special Agent Pride is still scratching his head over how I was able to flee, unarmed, with a civilian stiff against his coterie of fifteen gunslingers. Keep scratching.)       

That little silly hostage incident I guess you could call it that meant nothing to me (or history when the deal went down) is really the start of the in-law hassles, the insults. See I had to take Jerry to Paris with me, despite his fear of flying, to see this guy, this hard-ass international gangster, Pierre, not his real name but what the hell, who wanted that freaking submarine to run his dope, his women, his hot cargo, and his guns without hassles via the high tech gadgetry that would be almost undetectable. Like Johnny Rocco Pierre was a “more” guy. A “more” guy with a funny twist though although I had dealt with Pierre several times before on big dope deals and money transfers when Uncle Sam needed some plausible deniability since he was a “fairy,” light on his feet, you know, a homosexual, a gay guy I guess you would call him today. He made a big play for Jerry and I encouraged it although I couldn’t really see good-looking Pierre with an overweight anxious high-end Revlon salesman. In any case nothing big came of it since Jerry was as hetero as you could get but the diversion helped since I got access to Pierre’s computer codes and his money laundering operations.           

A lot of stuff in the spook, spy business and it is usually good for business, good for cover is to have a lot of bullshit out there about how you did this, didn’t do that and so Jerry turned out to be a free ad for me when I had him, fear of heights and all, free-float with me off the tallest building in Chi town. Had him hanging around with “feds” giving them all kinds of wrong information that I had been feeding him all along. And whatever else he is throwing out to his “public” unto this day when my name and how we “met” comes up. Naturally I cleaned up the Pierre case, wrapped it up solo (it is pure bull that Jerry was “with me every step of the way” as he tells the story not in my hearing in capturing Pierre, grabbing some serious dough, 170 mil not bad, and bonking that freaking high-tech submarine to the briny deep and saving a the world from another million stone cold junkies, grifters, sifters, and midnight drifters). Naturally too around the family hearth with the old ladies and gents bored silly and looking for some goose Jerry can pull out the heart-rendering story of how he saved the wedding of Mark and his daughter Marie from a stumblebum derelict like me. A mere in-law. Enough said.   

All The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too- Let Me Count The Ways

By Fritz Taylor

I have calmed down a little, come off my high horse a little about the subject of a piece I did a couple of articles back. The article supposedly about famed crime novel (and friend of young Rav Wilson who has caught on at this publication recently) Lem Kane’s switch over to police procedurals from the previous slam bang of private detection he had built his solid no non-sense but also take no prisoners reputation on but really about the hard reality of what the public coppers in places like Fort Point Estates down in Fulton County Georgia did, or did  not do about crime and criminals. Fort Point Estates being not some arbitrary example but the place where me and my kin going back a couple of generations grew up and lived. A place where northerners like Seth Garth and Ralph Morris who grew up in the same kind of places maybe more properly call “the projects.” Not the fucking pretty picture by-the numbers- squeeze a clue a page out police procedural where the coppers actually don’t grab every freebie coffee and cruller not nailed down if you can believe that but follow the leads to their logical conclusions providing some closure to the case, and maybe to some desperate redemption seeking family. And not the pretty boy and girl television bull either where in something like forty-two minutes they are calling whatever the case is “a wrap.”

The reality. The Fort Point Estates reality was basically nothing but the public coppers from top to bottom as I found out much too late in the case of Captain Dorian who ran the police substation on site before he wound up being run into the state pen not for the high crimes he let get by, let his men get by with but for stealing some city materials like copper tubing and selling the stuff on the black market except maybe hold their grubby little hands out for whatever pocket change they can scoop up from the fixer man, grifters, and pimps. In the priority of things copper the fixer man was king, followed by the pimps and then the grifters with their ten-percent dreams and discount prices.  

I mentioned in the previous two pieces in what appears seems to be a short series brewing that the public coppers worked hand in hand with the local owner of the only variety store, the only place in the area to get provisions especially if like lots of residents including my family at times you had no automobile to get to other places. That guy, Jimmy Bob Carter (and his wife always called Lady Vivian but I am not sure why) not only sold milk and bread but ran the local “book,” ran the whores out of his upstairs space and was the fixer man for the junkies and hopeless who needed a little something for the head, a little something to get through the day, days really. (As far as I know the stuff was mainly opiums, morphines, maybe cocaine although that seemed a stretch for the time since a lot of the fathers in the Estates had been veterans from World War II and had grievous injuries for which they had been doped up with say morphine before they had been discharged ready or not and needed a little something besides corn liquor to clear their heads, to ease the fucking pain.) In any case sitting there with hands at the ready and not accepting cheapjack crap like free coffee and crullers were the local public coppers who freely placed their bets in the “book” left right out on the open counter,  grabbed a whore or two and fled upstairs and looked the other way when Jimmy Bob did up his bindles, eight balls, and grams.        

Those remembrances, seemingly forgotten memories from a time when I, and all the kids I grew up with down there, learned way too early about the hard side of life how some stuff comes up to the surface. Like the time I was standing at Carter’s Variety, at Jimmy Bob’s front really for all the overpriced provisions he actually had in the store, trying to decide on what kind of cheapjack candy I wanted when a couple of coppers came in straight from their patrol car, in uniform picked up Jimmy Bob’s “book” and put down their bets and nobody said nothing. Or the time that Captain Dorian grabbed Jimmy Bob’s lead whore, Lula, and ran her up the stairs to do what of course then I didn’t know but it wasn’t to pray to the Lord like the Captain did on Sunday morning with his wife and five children at 7^th Street Baptist. Here’s a last example, a couple of coppers sitting in their squad car when a couple of known local junkies (they were notorious even among us kids who didn’t know squat about drugs or the seamy side of life for going “on the nod” at the little beach front about fifty yards down from Carter’s) walked into Jimmy Bob’s  looking like hell and coming out like they had just found Jesus (and maybe they had). Got “well” in any case.

Once you start dredging though who knows. I have had plenty of reasons not to trust, and at times to hate the public coppers no matter how nice and pretty they make them appear to be on cop television shows (although usually not on the daily news where they get the old see-saw). As mentioned in the last piece I had almost forgotten about the most notorious case that came out of the Fort Point Estates no good copper racket, the case of Tara Lee Parker. The murder most foul of Tara Lee Parker, which was never solved, maybe they never wanted solved. Tara Lee had been a classmate of my oldest brother, Lester, so he knew more about what happened than I did as a twelve-year old boy hardly up to date on sex and sexual depravity and sheer craziness. Tara Lee was maybe sixteen when she dropped out of school, according to Lester who had her in some of his classes.

I guess Tara Lee, was never much of a student, was known to the older crowd as a girl who liked to walk on the wild side, who ran away from home who knows how many times. Got a reputation for all kinds of depraved doings but that stuff I learned later for the word around the Estates when her name came up was slut, whore, pig and cocksucker, stuff like that. Eventually she got into Jimmy Bob’s stable, his good time girls, his girls who would go to the “game room” which is what he called his upstairs operation to do whatever. It was well-known to be frequently by richer guys from the Cherokee Hills section of town, the old money cotton and textile mills money that kept that section afloat. You would see cars, American cars, expensive American cars like Cadillacs and Lincolns, definitely not Estate cars like a Nash Rambler, in front of Carter’s Variety day and night. And young stuff like Tara Lee was there to service their needs.                

Now I didn’t know, still don’t, know all the arrangements that Jimmy Bob had had with his clients, but I guess for an extra price guys could take their whores elsewhere to do what they were going to do. That turned to be the downfall for one Tara Lee Parker. One morning some early morning fisherman found her body against a sullen tree truck along the swollen Dam River cut up bad I heard, cut up in a very sexually depraved way when I understood such things better later. The last guy seen with her was Gary Lyons, the son of the major mill operator in town in those days who employed a number of Estate fathers in his works for cheap pay, who had a serious reputation as a wild boy with the women.   

Here is where I will rant, here is where even over fifty years later I cry out for some closure for Tara Lee Parker. The coppers, Captain Dorian in the lead knew that she had a few off-kilter clients, including Gary, from the Cherokee Hills. Knew she had been out with some guy from there that night of her death because she had taken off with him in a Lincoln, the Lyons favorite car. Did they ever do anything to check Gary out, to check where he had been, who he had been with. Do anything but close down the investigation after about two days. No, and I would hear from a shaken Lester once he heard what had happened to Tara Lee that some two-bit copper said that more than two days was too much time to spent on the murder of a bent whore, that she was doomed anyway so forget about it. Yeah, run that remark on cop television shows why don’t you.

On top of the indecent way that the public coppers handled the case which is worth its own rant I have been informed by a reliable source that Gary Lyons, who would take over the family mill operations before sending them off-shore to Mexico and living the life of some kind of playboy passed away a couple of years ago. According to my source among the effects found in his mansion when they cleared things out was a pair of very old, very soiled women’ underwear with the initials TLP on them, other pairs as well in various conditions and apparently from later times. Too late for some serious justice but at least my brother Lester who really was broken up about her horrible death now has an idea of what happened and who did the foul deed.   

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Give Me Headlights, Streetlights, Hell Even Gaslights, But Don’t Leave Me Here To Fend Off The Wolves And The Deadly Fishes By Myself

By Will Bradley, Junior

I don’t know if under the now couple of year old editorial management of Greg Green it is a requirement that you have to be what somebody, one of the old-timers, called a city-slicker, a denizen of the urban landscape to the exclusion of maybe heading to say the Grand Canyon for a vacation or the wiles of West Egg  in Long Island down the road. It sure looks and sounds like it though when you go around the water cooler to hear people talk about where they have been or where they are going. Plenty of talk about Paris, London, Berlin, Frisco town, LA but not a peep about say King’s Canyon or Yosemite, or even Hoboken down New Jersey way. Under normal circumstances that is fine with me since I was born and raised just a shade off of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. So I appreciate the streetlights, the safe noise of automobiles (except maybe that incessant buzzing when a car alarm goes off forever), people walking, talking, maybe loudly   to and fro at all hours and the convenience of say all-night drugstores and supermarkets (to speak nothing of gin mills open until very early in the morning).     

Others seem to share my good sense, so it was rather weird, startling to find myself being assigned by that very same editor to go report on the doings in a place called Lake Dennison located near the New Hampshire border in Massachusetts. Not just any doings but the doings of his friends Jane Rugg-Hurley and David Hurley who have been going up to that locale every summer for something like twenty-five years to camp out, to do a thing called kayaking, another thing called canoeing, some bird-watching which I have previously heard that people do, some fishing also heard of (for supper no less) and, let me put this one in quotes “communing with nature” for a couple of weeks.

The genesis of this assignment is of some interest since apparently from what Greg told Seth Garth when he turned the assignment down flat Jane and David had been putting increasing pressure on him, Greg, to both come up and do that “communing with nature” business and to write a story about the place and them. Naturally Greg claimed “conflict of interest” in that he could not possibly do justice to a story where he knew the parties so well. That led to his first asking Seth to do the deed knowing full-well that if Seth ventured these days further than 125^th Street he would get a nosebleed or some other horrible injury. Also knowing that the senior staff the way things are set up now to a person have the right of first refusal on any assignment (the privilege does not go the other way with grabbing juicy ones that is done in some totally byzantine way as far as I know). Everybody, every senior person, suddenly aware of their physical well-being if they could not see a streetlight nearby, could not run to CVS at 2 AM or order take-out after midnight exercised that right. Leaving a junior person, me, Will Bradley to carry the spear on this one.       

  

Greg, who had originally wanted me to stay a week finally settled on three days once I balked and pointed out that I had done the hatchet job on hoary legend of so-called private detective Sherlock Holmes and his in-house lover Doc Watson for him when every senior person bailed on that one. I was off one sunny August morning heading north through Connecticut and up to the borderlands (meaning where the trees outnumbered the houses by a lot). Despite all the advances in modern technology, Google Maps, GPS, travailing, concerning putting together a simple directions package when push came to shove I got lost in a place called Gardner for the very simple reason that once you get out in the boondocks all the modern technology in the world will not help if you are not satellite-connected, if you fall out of range. To start the sojourn off on the wrong foot Jane and David had to come to some location, a couple of streets I could identify to meet me in order to follow them to their campsite.

This campsite needless to say was fairly primitive meaning you had to chop and cut firewood or I guess buy some in order to cook meals or whatever else you need a campfire for when no stove or microwave is available. Meaning that your bodily function needs were addressed by some compost, environmental commode I never could figure out but which smelled to high heaven. Meaning also that despite the real-world jobs and money that the Hurleys possessed, which I found out later was considerable, they were “roughing” it in a dinky camper/jerry-rigged tent setup they had been using for years. Meaning on the latter a place where I was also set up to sleep in.

I won’t even describe the ordinary function hassles of camp life except to say I am not quite sure how the Union Army did what they did based on their camp life doings that I have read up on. I really didn’t sleep much but I don’t want to dwell on that stuff or the hardcore problems with daily hygiene since this is a “mood” piece, a piece about my reaction to that “communing with nature” noise that Greg advised me to center the article on. Meaning how the Hurleys (and their assorted brethren of the camps) spent their days. Day number one centered on this kayaking business which they were all excited about since they were so close to the lake that all they had to do was to slip the boat, ship or whatever the hell it was from the nearby lakefront and they were waterborne. Yes, they had no problem maneuvering their two-person kayak but when they showed me how to deal with this object (including the thankfully obligatory lifejacket) and I was actually in the water I flipped over, capsized they called it. Same thing the next day with the canoe which was supposed to be a little more stable but despite lifejacket at the ready was as capsize-worthy as the freaking yellow day-glo kayak.   

But that is all in a day’s work for a “city-slicker,” to be expected I guess for somebody who is woods and lake clueless. What was truly weird, what was scary to these ears were the desperate ravenous howls of the wolves who kept their noise up all night and throughout the day as well and who sounded like they were about fifty feet away (which they were not but some kids spotted a couple within the camp grounds). Here’s the real madness, the reason I am glad as hell that we are in an increasing urban country complete with those beautiful streetlights and other civilized amenities like a local Whole Foods market to buy real food. David decided on that very last day of my “imprisonment” to take me along with him as he went fishing (for supper he said). That seemed simple enough at the time but when we got to his favorite bountiful location along the lake about fifteen minutes from their campsite and he set up his and my fishing poles somehow I snagged a fish, some fearsome looking fish that I swear bit me, had teeth although David claimed it was only a Lake Dennison bass and harmless.

Fortunately I was able to get out of that locale alive without further damage but I swear despite all the good cheer of the Hurleys and how nice they must be when they get back to the city I think they have been out in the woods too long, too many years. Told Greg as much when he wanted to balk on printing this last paragraph. 

   

         The latest from Lake Woe Begone 

Down And Dirty In The Acre-North Adamsville Style-Circa 1960-When The Corner Boys Were Corner Boys For Real Back In The Day

By Bart Webber

No, by no stretch of the imagination as the ex-editor of this publication and now some kind of “of counsel” contributing editor Allan Jackson has speculated even if in some personal nightmarish dream am I sleeping with the fishes. (Contributing editor means that even hard-boiled current editor Greg Green will have a hard time reining Allan in since there is no word limit or apparently no slander or libel, depending on the source, that such special creatures can spew forth without correction, at least after reading that last piece of Allan’s which was nothing but a no-brain bunch of bullshit on a stick aimed at my head). My watery fate deemed appropriate by Mr. Jackson courtesy of the fact, if it is a fact this late in life, that after almost sixty years I have “spilled the beans,” hell snitched, finked, dropped a dime I think we used to call it on an episode where he almost drowned as a kid and I was sworn to secrecy as the sole witness to the event. At the time I believe, and I think he will agree as well, it was about keeping that knowledge from his mother who would probably have grounded him from the beaches and the ocean at least through high school.      

I won’t, no, I refuse to, bore the reader with a recap of the events which led up to Allan’s silly experiment which led him to be rescued before he went down the third time by the on-duty life guard, a young mother rather than the average muscle-bound college guy or buxom college co-ed who craved those jobs to wile away the summer days and pocket coin for nighttime expenses. The key to Allan’s anger and his strange elderly dreams is what this is all about, the so-called breaking of the Code of Omerta that we lived and died by back in the day and which made plenty of sense then when we were about some stuff that the public coppers and other authorities would not have approved of. But to get into a snit over some long-gone event (especially with his mother who passed away over a decade ago is no longer around), to “threaten” hit men and much else seems excessive at this point. So I will tell you the real point of why Allan in in a doldrums huff.

That day, that day which I think Allan is right about being somewhere when we were around eleven, possibly twelve not the eight of my original piece not only had that young mother life guard been on duty to save Allan’s ruddy ass but had brought as was her practice her young daughter Ginny along. This Ginny was a lanky kind of raw-boned tallish girl who I had a serious crush on at the time. So naturally when I saw her I went over to make “my moves,” those being some silly schoolboy talk about whatever eleven, maybe twelve- year olds would talk about. So in a way Allan is right when in his now infamous rebuttal is right that I was not observing every freaking action he was taking but I will state for the record, will swear on seven sealed Bibles that I am the guy who heard his faint cries for help and alerted that young mother life guard who saved his sorry life.      

The reader should know that the so-called crush on Ginny did not go anywhere at the time since she was a Squaw Rock girl. The Nollie Point assignment her mother drew was connected with the housing projects where Allan and I grew up (and Pete Markin and Sam Lowell too), the low rent end of town. Squaw Rock was, and I believe still is, the high-toned end of town where those who in the 1950s were living some aspect of the golden age, or at least had the wherewithal to buy the new ranch houses that were all the rage then as a sign that they had become the vaunted middle class. So no way was that young mother, for that matter was Ginny once the peer pressure was exerted if necessary, going to go for some projects boy. And she didn’t. I will admit that when Ginny and I got to high school (we went to different junior high schools) at North I tried again to see what was what but the code of the Squaw Rock girls (and maybe her mother too) was still in force.           

Here is where the rubber meets the road, the real reason that Allan has daggers in his eyes these days. Recently I went to an ad hoc class reunion (ad hoc because after the 50^th reunion all agreed that something every couple of years and less formal was more appropriate) where I ran into Ginny. We got to talking about this and that until we kind of worked our way back to the day when her mother had saved Allan down at Nollie Point. Ginny laughed when I told her that I had been sworn to secrecy by Allan not to mention the incident to anybody under our boyhood code and that speaking about it to her was the first time I had done so in that some sixty-year period. The laugh was because she was particularly aware of the incident and who was saved, had known that Allan had gone on to some kind of career in the publishing business. So, until I read his lame so-called rebuttal I thought not much about having mentioned it to Ginny.    

The reader can guess, or I hope should guess, that Ginny and I continued talking not only that class reunion night be thereafter and have had several dates (although her two marriages and my three make “date” a little passe) to see what is what. Her girlish Squaw Rock code now long gone, thankfully. If you want to really know why Allan is wishing me in the ocean depths, digging whatever in Neptune’s patch here is what Ginny told me. In high school as I was ardently pursuing her to no avail Allan also was trying to get to first base with her. Closer to the nub though, closer much closer to the truth Allan had met Ginny at a previous ad hoc class reunion I had not attended and had gotten nowhere with her. Strange doings, life.        

The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too

By Fritz Taylor

The one thing I hate, and maybe the biggest reason I only read police procedurals under duress or when hot summer comes, is how fake the scenarios are, how so very competent the coppers are, the public coppers in any case. (This will be blasphemy to guys like Rav Wilson, Seth Garth and Sam Lowell but in my book the private dicks are almost as unreal except they draw something of a pass since at least they are willing to draw some fire their way, take a fist or a slug for the employer if it comes to that wrapping it around their dailies and expense something the coffee and cruller coppers would never do, not in real life anyway.) The reason all this comes up is that after I read Rav Wilson’s review of a Lem Kane police procedural Hotel New Yorker I got tired of his belly-aching about how silly the stuff displayed was against his “heroic” private coppers like Phil Larkin and Danny Collins and early hard-boiled detectives like Miles Archer and Phil Marlowe. Like I said the private dicks aren’t anything to write home about, but the public coppers portrayed are truly unreal.

What is real is what happened every day down in Fulton County, down in Georgia where I grew up in deeply segregated Mister James Crow country in the 1950s although that factor does not really enter into my story. What does enter is the Fort Point Estates, yes, that is really what they called them which were as many older readers will almost automatically recognize were “the projects” the government subsidized housing set up after World War II for mostly veterans, white veterans exclusively so Mister James  Crow does as always at least make cameo appearance, and their young families as a spring board to better housing later but necessary then after the housing crunch caused by the war.

The Fort Point Estates were the southern version of what guys like fellow Vietnam veteran Seth Garth were talking about in growing up in the north in North Adamsville and ditto the veteran status Ralph Morris out on Tappan Street in Troy, New York. In short places where the most vulnerable and desperate denizens of society found themselves or else they would have been reduced to the really dreaded county farm or utter homelessness (which according to family legend my family was in right after World War II when we lived out of a car, a clunker car before hitting the Estates).  

Desperates, desperadoes probably are as good as any operative words to describe life in those conditions (and Seth wrote about more eloquently than I ever could, and a guy named Pete Markin who they all still venerate who had the pulse of that existence down pat before his own early death partially attributed to the emotional ravages of growing up in the projects). But to the point, the anti-belly-aching point about the public coppers and what they did or did not do in real life. In a place like the Estates which like many such projects were established on what amounted to wasteland and isolated away from the good citizens public services were minimal and private services depended on how much risk some private parties were willing to take to eke out a massive profit from the misery of the poor denizens of such places. Enter Jimmy Bob Carter, the Carter family name if you can believe it either somehow related through marriage to the famed Carter classic country music family based out of Clinch Mountain in Virginia or Judge Jacob “Death Penalty” Carter who would go on to become some high state official in Georgia spawning a political dynasty before he was through.

This Jimmy Bob had a few bucks I guess and decided that since there no serious supermarket for several miles around that he would open up what amounted to a Mom and Pop Variety Store. Would provide the unwashed with small amounts of goods, this before food stamps bailed people of few resources out of the worse of their situations, for too much money. Except and who knows what drove him, or his wife Vivian who had been some kind of degree daughter of the Confederacy in her maidenhood to some small kindnesses there would always be very, very cheap candy to keep us coming in (and probably mother in tow as well).

Of course, that was all so much bull, so much eye wash. What Jimmy Bob and Lady Vivian (she picked that moniker up somewhere along the line but don’t ask me how or why) really were up to was using that funny little storefront at the entrance to the Estates (everybody with or without an automobile had to pass the place on the way in or out) to “make book,” illegal betting, to run a bunch of the neighborhood girls (some young mothers under duress too with say a husband who spent the weekly paycheck on liquor maybe some other woman having to put out to keep the bill collector wolves from the door) out of the upstairs rooms, called the game rooms, Vivian’s operation from what I later came to understand when I stopped thinking candy was all that was sweet in the world. Worse of all in the long haul I guess was Jimmy Bob proved to be the “fixer man,” the drug dealer of choice with whatever drugs could heal some broken down spirits.

Like I said most of this stuff I had no clue about until I was maybe ten, way too young to know about the seamy side of life but we knew it, and in the end probably just assumed that bookies, whores, pimps, fixers, and junkies were an ordinary part of every town. Here is where the stuff gets sick though, the copper stuff. The guys who ran and operated out of the police substation were “on the take” from Jimmy Bob and nobody thought anything of it. I remember a few incidents. Once Jimmy Bob had his “book” laying right out on the counter and Officers Hamilton and Dixon came in saw the book and proceeded to write  down their bets in that leather-bound book. Another time Captain Dorian laughed when Vivian said she had a nice piece (of ass) for him and to head upstairs. Naturally the coppers grabbed their fair share of free drugs (then mainly opium and morphine, not heroin as far as I know) for their little parties, or for their honeys. Yeah, so lay off me about coppers and solving crimes and if anybody asks just point them to the still standing Fort Point Estates filled to this day with junkies, whores, fixer men… and coppers who look the other way.