When Johnny Rocco Was King Of The Whole Wide World-With Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart’s “Key Largo” In Mind

By Fritz Taylor 

[Johnny Rocco will always be with us, or at least for the foreseeable future as far as I can tell. Yeah, the Johnny Roccos of the world, the guys who always want “more” and are bad enough, ruthless enough and just smart enough to figure out how to organize to get those wants fulfilled are a scourge to the rest of us. Hey you know Johnny Rocco, not maybe the guy who rose to the heavens in the 1920s on a highway of bones or the guy who went they cut him down a bit tried to make a big comeback out of summer Batista Cuba in the 1940s but you know somebody like him, maybe even this minute he has his thumb on your neck for some reason but we already figured it out as “more.” Maybe names like Johnny Too Bad, Death Rizzo, Toeless Tony DeMarco are more familiar, but they are all Johnnys.

Around our neighborhood, a tough very tough neighborhood in hardass segregated Fulton County down in Georgia his name was Johnny Blade. 

That “Blade” earned from his niftiness with a long Bowie knife. Fortunately Johnny Blade lived on my street and covered my ass a few times, brought me under his way for a while. A classic poor but kind of street bright guy who started out extorting milk money from his elementary school fellow students, rich or poor. Worked his way up the food chain to Jimmy Jack Lord’s second tier doing “this and that” but always with the idea of getting to be top dog, getting that “more” he always talked about. But Johnny Blade was a funny guy, a passive patriot I guess you would call him so when the Vietnam War got fiery he answered the call. I am not sure whether he was drafted or volunteered or “volunteered” through some judge’s ultimatum to go in the military or to jail since he had dropped out of school, had started living in Atlanta by then.

What I do know is that Johnny Blade laid his head down, got himself mowed down in some godforsaken ambush in the Central Highlands near Pleiku and never got further up the food chain. Here’s the kicker though, the thing that makes my little statement above make sense once Johnny left Jimmy Jack’s ranks Whitey Blake moved in and eventually had one of his boys put two slugs in the head of one Jimmy Jack Lord just because Whitey wanted that elusive “more.”

A guy named I think Humphrey Bogart once said to some Johnny Rocco he was dealing with that one Johnny Rocco more or less in the world was not enough to get your feathers up about. Maybe he had heard about the Whitey Blake story. But he was also the guy who tricked one Eddie Mars, the big-time Los Angeles gangster who ran the rackets there before the big boys from the East were looking for cover and sunshine  into an ambush which got him killed by his own men in the crossfire. Also this cynical Bogart took the real Johnny Rocco down when Johnny decided to mess with his woman, took him down hard out in some rickety boat when Johnny was trying to hightail it for Cuba with a bag full of dough and dope for his big comeback. So maybe just maybe cutting a few Johnnys down does make a difference. You can tell everybody Fritz Taylor tipped you to that possible truth.

You can also tell everybody I am not talking about guys like Pretty James Preston, a loner, a motorcycle king, who robbed banks around Massachusetts according to Sam Lowell in broad daylight by himself and as far as Sam knew just because he could do it and probably except for expenses and buying Minnie Murphy things could have cared less about “more” or working some food chain madness. Yeah, tell them about Pretty James too, okay.]  

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“Hey Curly one of guys, one of the old cons Smiley if you know him, who works with me in the laundry told me that you used to be the mouth piece for the legendary Johnny Rocco out of Chi town back in the day,” Johnny “Fingers” softly mentioned from his lower bunk to “Curly” Hoff in the upper bunk as the call for lights out was running through the cell-block. That cell-block in sweet home Joliet where Fingers had just come for his first “vacation” after grabbing a dime’s worth for an armed robbery of a liquor store off of Division Street in sweet home Chicago and had been assigned the lower bunk (the upper one gotten based on seniority or toughness) in the old time hood’s cell where he had been sitting on his hands for murder and about six other crimes and given a full jolt since he had been nabbed and extradited down in Florida in 1948.

 “Sure I knew Johnny Rocco, the larger than life Johnny Rocco, king of the streets, when he was riding high in Chi town in the old days and later before he met his end down in Florida where I got nabbed as a result when he worked out of Cuba, out of Havana when that town was wild and wide open after the “Feds” busted him and shipped him out, deported him as an undesirable alien. Johnny always took a certain pride in the fact that no local or state coppers could lay a hand on him, he owned them one way or another and it took the “Feds” to close down his operations. But kid you are wrong when you say your understanding is that I was a “mouthpiece” for Johnny Rocco. First off in those days a mouthpiece was a lawyer, the “fix it” man when things got hot and you needed him. Anyway, nobody was a mouthpiece for Johnny Rocco he was loud enough and hard enough to make his own news. What I was if you want to know was his go-to guy, the guy that held the operation together, maybe too his advisor on this and that although in the end, at the end he didn’t listen to me a damn nickel’s worth. So, no kid, I wasn’t his mouthpiece. If you keep quiet since lights just went out I will tell you about how the great Johnny Rocco met his end, fell down and tomorrow you can ask me questions about stuff if you are still interested.         

“Johnny came over from Italy back around World War I, maybe he was trying to avoid the war over there like a lot of guys were maybe he just heard that there were easy pickings in America and grabbed a ticket for the next tub. Johnny wasn’t much for going into the details of early life and I knew him for thirty years so don’t ask me about that. He hit Division Street running pulling an armed robbery of Jimmy’s Gas Station in broad daylight a couple of days after he landed in Chi town from New York. The fucking gas jockey was so scared of Johnny that he told the coppers he couldn’t identify the guy who had robbed him. Made it plain from jump street he was the new guy in town and if you didn’t like it well you would like it. I ran into him one night at Stan’s Tavern deep in Division Street where he made his headquarters then before he moved up to the Club Nana. I was looking for the guy who made the news with his unmasked armed robbery in daylight. I wanted in on a guy who was that tough on day one. One thing about Johnny Rocco he wasn’t like a lot of those wops who just stayed with each other-you know Cosa Nostra-our thing- which meant everybody not Italian stay away. Johnny looked for guys as tough and mean as him that was all that counted. Guys like the guys who went down to Cuba with him and back to Florida. Me, an old German, Toots, a limey, Angel a spic, Feeney a Mick.

"Had his choice of women too but usually went with Irish girls (said he liked the way they had the rosary in one hand and their hand down your pants with the other). Went big for Mary Maloney, stage name Crystal Dawn, Johnny gave her that name when he bought the Club Nana for her to sing at, she was pretty good too until the booze got to her-and Johnny started grabbing whatever ass he could elsewhere. Johnny would have killed me if he had ever found out but I had banged Mary when she was about fourteen and I didn’t have to coax her one little bit. Yeah funny when Johnny cashed his check in America, had to leave he wanted Crystal there with him.

“The twenties were a good time, a great time for guys whose motto was “more,” and more is what Johnny and the rest of us wanted. We started to make a little name for ourselves for running liquor, then the numbers, then women, any women you wanted, any age, Johnny would let me take the young ones and break them in since I always liked the young pussy, the younger the better. Down in Cuba, Jesus, they get ripe about twelve and most of the times you didn’t have to do a lot to coax them out of their dresses. But the thing that made Johnny, made him a little ahead of his time in rackets was the dope, marijuana, opium, cocaine, heroin, you name it. Most of the battles among us was over dope forget booze, even illegal booze, there was a ton of money in dope if you knew how to control the product. And a mountain of dead bodies followed that struggle. Funny because that is what would do Johnny in, a chicken shit rap by some young punk Assistant Attorney-General, a Fed, thirty years as an upstanding member of the community and Johnny had to go bye-bye to Havana.                 

 “Cuba was okay as a place to stay for a week or two but after you got tired of getting your ashes hauled or had enough of pina coladas Johnny and the rest of us got restless. The way the story went later was that Johnny had gotten a ton of counterfeit money and was going to head back to Florida and make a deal with some guys who wanted to buy it in Miami and Johnny would use that as seed money on the road back to being king of the rackets again. That is how legends get started and go wrong though. The stuff Johnny had was dope in case you heard otherwise, the stuff that had made him king. He couldn’t very well go to a wide-open town like Miami so he decided to lam out for Key Largo further south and quieter on his big yacht to make the deal. I told him that the Keys in the summer were too hot and he would wind up sweating his ass off (me too) but he wouldn’t listen, wanted to make the deal on the QT.                

“We needed a place once we got there and the only place that was open or wasn’t closed for season once the winter trade drifted back North was this Hotel Largo, kind of rundown and kind of too open. So I negotiated with this old guy in a wheelchair who owned the place, Lionel something, no, James Temple, and his daughter, Nora, a looker for an older dame if that was your thing, who I found out later was not his daughter but daughter-in-law who had come down after her husband, James’s son George had been killed in action over in Europe during the Second World War.  I gave this Temple enough money to make sure he kept the place open and enough so that he had better not ask questions. So the six of us (remember Crystal Dawn was along for the ride too, a mistake since she couldn’t keep her hands off the booze, or off a couple of Indian boys who she snuck out back with when Johnny was sleeping)    

“Then this Frank McCloud came in, came in on the bus so I figured him at first for just a cheapskate tourist looking for cheap lodging on the off-season. It turned out that Frank had been this Temple son’s commanding officer over in Italy I think it was and he had decided to come down and tell Temple and Nora how brave their guy had been. I didn’t like the look of him and told Johnny that this guy would be nothing but trouble. This guy knew who Johnny was since he had been some kind of newspaper guy before the war. I had that right. Johnny always quick to show anybody at all who was king of the hill challenged this McCloud to duel it out with him, threw him a gun, see what he was made of. This guy backed down, backed down saying ‘what difference did one Johnny Rocco more or less make in this sorry old world.’

"After that Johnny would always bait him with the term ‘soldier’ and say it in such a way that made the word seem like dog shit. I tried to tell Johnny to cool his heels this guy was more than he looked like, was made of something to back down when he was being watched by this Temple and that Nora who seemed to have eyes for him right off. I was right about that worry. Later when I came up for my trial this Frank showed up to testify against me for some reason and the news came out that he had won a Bronze Star and a couple of other medals, so he was no coward. Little good that did Johnny R.                        

“Maybe if the weather, the hurricane that was brewing after we arrived, hadn’t been so drastic we would have made the deal, gone back to Cuba for a while to figure out the next step and Johnny would be back in Chi town and me with him. But the weather had everybody off especially when the winds started to blow hard. Trouble was some nosey copper had been around looking for that pair of Indians that Crystal had given a tumble-they were wanted for some crumb bum crime. Here is where Johnny let the heat get to him but also showed that when the deal went down he was still the best stone-cold killer around even if he did farm out most of his work when he was on top. This copper who we had to cold-cock but when he got up all groggy he was all gung-ho, this was after Johnny had humiliated Frank, he took the gun off the floor where Frank had thrown it and tried to take Johnny in, arrest Johnny. Johnny shot him where he stood without blinking an eye. See that gun was unloaded. Beautiful play- a Johnny special.

“That was his last smart play though. After the guys from Miami came, gave the dough, and left Johnny found out that the captain of his yacht had moved the boat to safer harbors, so we needed to get the hell out to the boat some way. This Frank had helped Nora with the hotel boat earlier so I told Johnny that this guy could take us out in that craft. We made him agree to do so. The five of us, Crystal was excess baggage with her booze problem then, so Johnny was dumping her, and this Frank got into the hotel boat and started heading out. The seas were rough but we were doing okay until I noticed that Frank had made a strange move with the boat and Feeney had gone overboard. I took a shot at Frank, wounding him, and he shot at me wounding me. I fell down on my face. Everybody later thought I was dead but when we got to port, back to the hotel Frank noticed I was still breathing and they took me to the fucking hospital and then extradited me back to Illinois. Toots took a shot at Frank too and Frank felled him as well. That left Angel and Johnny to figure out how Frank got a gun. Johnny no hero when things were even told Angel to go up against Frank. He said no. Mistake for Angel-Johnny shot him like a mangy stray dog. It is now Johnny against Frank with Johnny trying to bargain with him. No go. Johnny then goes off his wheels-goes after Frank. Bang-Johnny boy is a goner. Frank, wounded twice, still gets us back to the hotel port.                  

"How did Frank get a gun? Crystal when Johnny turned her over had grabbed the thing from Johnny’s pocket when she was kissing him good-bye. The drunken bitch. Yeah, but the important thing to remember is that for a long time Johnny, Johnny Rocco and no other was king of the hill, maybe the last of his kind.”

Finished Curly could hear Johnny Fingers breathing softly in the bunk below. Fingers would certainly have questions in the morning for him.