BEFORE CHARLIE WORKMAN WENT INTO TRENTON STATE Prison, he put aside his classic no-comment stance for a few words in the Newark County Jail with Stephen P. Flarity; a Newark News reporter.
"Charlie," Flarity said, "will you tell what you had intended to say if you took the witness stand?"
"Ask Kessler," Workman replied.
"Did Reles and Tannenbaum tell the truth on the witness stand?"
"Why not ask them?"
"Charlie, were you in Newark on the night of October 23, 1935?"
"Steve," Workman replied, "it's all over now. If you come to see me in 15 years I might talk to you."
Time would not bear out the Bug's rosy assessment of what his life sentence really meant. While he was a model prisoner from the start, minding his own business, doing his work, he had no chance of coming out quite that fast. He would put in his first bid for freedom in 1956, as the law permitted after the first 15 years of a life term, but New Jersey had no charity in its heart for the outlander. Indeed, the annual Workman parole pleas were going to be turned down with much regularity from that point on. It was apparent that the Garden State, so badly sullied in the massacre at Newark two decades before, was intent on extracting the last full measure of punishment from the one man convicted in the murder of Dutch Schultz and his three cohorts.
Workman did his first eleven years in the maximum security prison at Trenton. His name turned up only casually during this stretch, but he wasn't quite going to be forgotten. He was only on the inside six months or so, in fact, when he was in the public prints again, and once more it was the fault of his primary nemesis--Abe Reles.
On November 12, 1941, still chirping along and supposedly the man who was going to enable Bill O'Dwyer to nail the untouchable Albert Anastasia in a murder case, Reles departed this vale of tears in a most mysterious plunge from his sixth-floor suite in Coney Island's Half Moon Hotel. The police said he died in an attempt to escape, and all the necessary accoutrements for that kind of foolhardy venture were produced. There were the usual strung-together bed sheets, secured with wire. And there was another length of wire enfolding the torso and attached to the radiator below the window sill out of which the bird had flown. When the wire snapped, the star witness of Murder Inc. fell five stories to an extension roof over the oceanfront hotel's kitchen.
It was all clear as the murky Atlantic itself, because Frank Bals, later boosted all the way to Seventh Deputy Police Commissioner when Bill O'Dwyer became Mayor, had no less than five of his aces on round-the-clock duty in the Half Moon with the long-memoried chatterbox who was going to stick Murder Inc.'s Lord High Executioner in the electric chair in the 1939 slaying of a party named Morris (Moish) Diamond. Was it conceivable that the handpicked cops on the Reles detail, more men than there were guarding the President in the White House on that November day, all fell asleep at once? Was it conceivable that some master operative of the sorely beset hoodlum empire had made his way into Reles' room past the guard detail? Finally, was it even remotely conceivable that there was nothing suspicious about the whole thing and that Reles really was trying to shake off the comforts of the songbird's life and make his way back into a world that had to be unfriendly toward him at best? Considering all the quiet
gangland lives the guy had messed up while turning pleasantly plump on the side of law enforcement, one might have concluded then that the only man in the world who had more enemies at the time was Adolf Hitler.
Burt Turkus, for one, did not believe that Reles had died in an attempt to escape. He still doesn't. "Abe Reles was thrown out of that window," he says today. "I never knew who did it but I know he was thrown out. I know he wasn't risking his life on a piece of bedsheet and some wire."
Joe Valachi, the next best underworld baritone after Reles, was more explicit. He said the police tossed the O'Dwyer informant out the window and "the boys" all knew about it at the time. "The boys," in the Valachi frame of reference, had to mean the Sicilian branch of the mobs, the ones who would have fretted the most over the specter of an Albert Anastasia caught up in the toils at long last.
Revived ten years later when Senator Kefauver and his colleagues started to poke around in the muck and mire of New York, Reles' strange exit finally received the attention of a special Kings County Grand Jury. The panel examined 86 witnesses and came up empty, finding no evidence of foul play when, in Bill O'Dwyer's words, "the perfect case" against Anastasia "went out the window with Abe Reles." But the jury nevertheless did come to a rather devastating conclusion in the matter of Mr. A., who eventually would meet his maker in the form of enemy Cosa Nostra guns in the street-floor barber shop of Manhattan's Park Sheraton Hotel on October 25, 1957. The presentment said, unequivocally, that the case against Mr. A. in the Diamond murder had not rested upon the broad Reles shoulders at all. "On the contrary, as a matter of law," the jury said, "he was only one of several accomplices. In view of the availability of the other accomplices, it follows that Reles was not even an essential witness. The prosecution of Anastasia required corroboration and Reles could not have supplied it."
Well, Reles was around to supply the corroboration they needed in Newark to make their case against Charlie Workman, and this was duly noted by the newspapers when the Coney Island swan dive occurred. No recorded paeans of joy issued from the Bug's cell in Trenton, of course, and he receded from the public prints again. He was back early the next year, however, when he wrote to Sam Kessler and instructed him to offer his services to the United States Navy. The prisoner said he wanted to enlist in a suicide fleet to hit Japan and avenge Pearl Harbor. He said he could bring along some fellow inmates who had served a total of 400 years and, like him, were willing to lay down their lives to wipe off the rest of their debt to society. While the brass hats turned it down, it was an engaging idea. One had to wonder what would have happened if this country had ever turned a band of hard-nosed cons led by the paramilitary Murder Inc.'s most decorated veteran against the Japanese. Probably a beef from Tokyo
about how we weren't fighting fair.
Workman did not come in for any published notices again until 1944--once more as a point of historical reference in the saga of the New York underworld. This time the spark--watch that word--was the death in Sing Sing's electric chair of Mendy Weiss, his Newark helpmate. On the lam for two years because he was one of those who came up in Tom Dewey's massive Lepke-Gurrah racket indictment, Weiss had been picked up by federal men in Kansas City in the spring of 1941 while Workman was awaiting trial. There was no move to ring him into the Schultz case, of course, since Dewey now had him locked into the Rosen murder with Lepke Buchalter and Louis Capone. When Weiss, 38, was put to death, the newspapers recalled what a fibber he had been back in 1935. How could he have said he had put six slugs into the Dutchman in the back room of the Palace Chop House when Arthur was in the toilet relieving himself at the time and Charlie Workman had to go in there and get him? It was a rather distasteful sidelight but worth noting when the State of New York finally pulled the switch on Mendy Weiss.
Three more years passed before the Bug made the papers again--this time in a 1947 medical bulletin announcing that he was dying from complications which had set in after an operation for gallstones. Catherine Workman rushed to the prison hospital with her brother-in-law, Abe, but the doctors had failed to take into account the patient's strong will and fine body, kept trim with regular handball workouts. Workman rallied and recovered nicely. Now he had some prison hemstitching to complement his only other scar, a remnant of a shoulder wound carelessly picked up somewhere along the high-tension road on the outside.
The Bug earned himself a transfer to the Rahway State Prison Farm, a more leisurely bastille, in 1952, and the question was asked, would a guy like that be safe in there? No problem. "Nobody is going to bother him in here," said Acting Superintendent Stephen Francsak. "It is just like on the outside. The men look up to a man with his background." And so it was. No. 33334 handled his assigned tasks--on the yard gang, in the commissary, in the library--not only without incident but with so much diligence that toward the end he had become a trusty delegated to Rahway's truck entrance. He could have walked away but preferred to wait out the stonehearted Parole Board. "If I had a thousand inmates like him I wouldn't have to worry with this job," said Warden Warren Pinto. "He's just like an ordinary guy, not one of the 'big shots' who try to gain special favors. He never asks for anything." The prison psychologist had Workman listed as "a reasonably stable individual," and it turned out that he was a thrifty
sort as well. The Warden said he had built up a handful of U.S. Savings Bonds out of his 18-cents-a-day prison pay.
The year 1964 rolled around before the Bug finally won his parole and was transferred back to Trenton to be processed out.
On March 10, he was up at 6:20 A.M., shaved, had oatmeal and coffee in the mess hall, and then turned in his prison grays for a Continental sharkskin suit--also gray--which had been sent in for him. The rest of the paperwork took another couple of hours and then, having picked up his savings and the $10 bill most state prisons lavish on their departing guests, he was led to the reception room into the waiting arms of his wife, who hadn't missed more than one or two Sunday visits in all those years.
A moment later, the couple emerged into a driving rain from the little prison door fronting on Trenton's Third Street, patrolled at the moment by four armed guards, one of them carrying a shotgun. Catherine Workman, wearing dark glasses, had a kerchief over her streaked gray hair. Her husband, hatless, was tanned and fit but looked nothing like the sleek and dark-visaged hoodlum who had come into that prison back in 1941. Now he was a stocky 54-year-old grandfather with steel gray hair who could have been mistaken for the corner grocer.
Plainly angry because there was a swarm of reporters and photographers on the sidewalk and he had hoped to slip out unnoticed, Workman helped his wife to a blue Thunderbird parked at the curb. His brother Abe, at the wheel, had a towel draped over the window on his side so that he could not be photographed close-up. Mrs. Workman got in alongside him and the Bug climbed into the back seat. The T-bird whisked away from the curb even before the rear door was closed, grazing a Sheriff's car as it headed for the New Jersey Turnpike.
Charlie Workman was going home at last--22 years and 9 months, or 8,307 days, after his dramatic courtroom turnabout. He would go to the offices of the New York State Parole Commission on lower Broadway in Manhattan. He would check himself in that day and thereafter report in periodically for the rest of his life--every week at first, then every month, now four times a year. After a while, this would represent a minimal inconvenience; the Parole Board moved in time to the very fringe of the Garment Center itself, and it was there, in his old stamping ground, that Charlie Workman would go to work, carrying a sample case instead of a shoulder holster. He would become a salesman, purveying notions--zippers and the like--to dress manufacturers. Mild-mannered and gentle, working beyond his years, he would do well. If you knew him and dared to ask about the old days, Charlie Workman would duck it. He would light a cigarette and tell you that if he knew then what he knew now he would have stayed away from that other life. He would tell you that he was a pretty lucky guy after all, because in the time of his long travail he was sustained by a pretty wonderful woman, Catherine Workman, still at his side. And now there were the grandchildren too. Charlie Workman would tell you that he had no complaints about the way things had turned out. He had something to savor at the end.
But he would never really be a free man again. He would always be the man who, in his own words, went into the shithouse and killed the Dutchman.
And paid the price.
