Читать книгу Crime Incorporated - William Balsamo - Страница 10
ОглавлениеJanuary 5, 1920 was a Monday. A chill winter day.
The wind swirled in twenty-five-mile-an-hour gusts.
The leaden gray skies threatened to disgorge the season’s first heavy snowfall.
On the Brooklyn waterfront, crews of longshoremen were busily shifting crates and bales, loading freighters bound for foreign ports, unloading cargoes shipped across the Atlantic.
PIER 2. The new sign had just been hung over the long, rectangular, narrow-fronted warehouse jutting out over the East River from the foot of Furman Street. Bright red block letters against a white background heralded the proprietorship of the Gowanus Stevedoring Company, a proud firm that had been doing business on the Brooklyn docks for more than fifty years.
Gowanus had just expanded its dock operations by taking over the Pier 2 warehouse. The new foreman, Jimmy Sullivan, was a monstrous man with huge forearms etched with gaudy tattoos of exploding bombshells—reminders of his hell as a doughboy in the trenches of the Marne and Belleau Woods during World War I. He was put into the job because he’d given honest sweat as a dockhand for Gowanus since 1902. When he’d come back from two years in the army the company needed a tough thumper to hustle the crews on the new pier. Jimmy was their boy. From his first day on the job, Sullivan showed who was boss. His thick, cracked lips and his squinting blue eyes never smiled. His flat face and the nose busted from countless pier brawls carried a message to the men: they’d better not mess with him.
At forty-eight, Jimmy Sullivan did know what had to be done on the wharf. The respect he commanded from the dockers made him a good man to run Pier 2.
One of his duties as pier superintendent was paying the weekly extortion to Denny Meehan’s White Hand collectors. Shelling out protection money was a way of life on the waterfront. It prevented the wholesale theft of cargo from the company’s warehouses and spared their merchandise-laden trucks from hijackings.
The handful of companies that had balked at coming under Meehan’s thumb were paying through the nose now. Cargoes were constantly pilfered from their piers and their trucks were constantly waylaid in the middle of the night.
Jimmy Sullivan liked everything about his job except handing over the weekly envelope to Meehan’s torpedoes. Although it wasn’t his money, Jimmy felt it was wrong. So did his boss, John O’Hara, the president of Gowanus. Jimmy’s salary as pier superintendent was a respectable $150 a week, fifty percent more than he’d been making as a dock laborer. In a sense, then, the extortion O’Hara was paying to the White Hand gang was money coming out of his pocket—and the dockworkers’.
Jimmy never let on how he felt to Meehan’s ambassadors. Generally he received them in his warehouse office—and always tried to get them out of his sight in as little time as it took to hand over the envelope containing the $1500 in cash which O’Hara sent over early every Monday morning.
Pleasantries, if exchanged, were as short as Jimmy could cut them. He felt like taking Ernie “Skinny” Shea and Wally “The Squint” Walsh, Meehan’s regular collectors, and pulverizing them with his bare hands. He often wondered how two scrawny punks like these could fit into a group with such an awesome reputation as Denny Meehan’s organized mob.
Shea got his nickname for a very apparent reason—he was five-foot-four and weighed in at under 120 pounds. He looked even skinnier: his high cheekbones and hollowed cheeks gave him the appearance of someone who routinely siphoned gasoline out of a car and drank it.
Jimmy Sullivan could swear he never got a glimpse of Wally Walsh’s eyes. His gaunt, pale face didn’t differ much from Shea’s. But it had a distinctive feature: his eyeballs never showed. Even in Sullivan’s drab office, where the forty-watt light bulb couldn’t even make a bat blink, Walsh squinted as though the high-noon sun were blazing into his eyes.
It was eleven o’clock on that Monday morning of January 5, 1920, when Shea and Walsh arrived at Pier 2. Sullivan was standing on a crate which contained religious plaster of Paris statues of St. Anthony shipped from Milan which had just been unloaded from a freighter.
As he shouted orders to the longshoremen to guide the boom lowering cargo from the freighter’s hold, a corner of his eye caught the black LaSalle that had just pulled to a stop outside his office door.
“All right, keep the jig moving,” he shouted. He hopped off the crate and scampered into his office ahead of Shea and Walsh. Sullivan always tried to be sitting behind his desk when he encountered Meehan’s collectors. It gave him a feeling of superiority.
“Hi, Jim,” greeted Shea as he entered the office.
“Yeah,” Sullivan snorted, opening the lap drawer of his desk.
Wordlessly, he handed the envelope with the $1500—in one-hundred-dollar bills—to Shea.
“No need to count it,” Shea said, his thin lips curling up to his ears in an ingratiating smile. “The amount is always right.”
Sullivan had no doubt that Shea and Walsh knew that neither was half the man he was and that without those guns they carried they’d be nothing. He could crush the two bums with his hands, even with their rods on them. But he had no intention of going out of his way to make trouble with the men who represented the White Hand gang; it could be ruinous for his company.
“That’s it, eh, fellas,” Jimmy said. He lifted himself from his chair behind the desk.
“Yeah, that’s it,” echoed Walsh. “See ya next week, okay?”
“Okay,” Sullivan said deadpan as he strode out of the office.
An hour and a half later Jimmy Sullivan was still directing the unloading of the Italian freighter when he spotted a black Model-T Ford pulling up to the dock. He concentrated his gaze on the three husky men who climbed out of the car and strolled toward him.
“You run the dock?” asked the one with blond hair neatly combed back from his narrow forehead. He had large, cold blue eyes and thin lips that twisted into a mean-looking smile when he spoke.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Jimmy demanded, annoyed at the interruption.
“I’m Willie,” the answer came.
A squat five-foot-seven, 170-pounder, Willie “Two-Knife” Altierri carried the secret of where perhaps as many as thirty bodies were buried. None were in cemeteries. The final resting places were in weed-covered culverts, hastily-dug shallow graves along the shoulders of deserted highways, and under the concrete poured for newly-built roads. He was responsible for most of them. He was one of Brooklyn’s most feared underworld hit men.
Willie Altierri’s specialty was performed with two slivers of steel, never less than six inches long. He carried them in leather scabbards strapped to his waist by a thin leather belt. The knives were as much a part of Willie’s body as any of his vital organs. Altierri couldn’t function without the knives; it felt unnatural not to have the knives on him. He wore them when he slept.
There were times when Willie had to part with one of his knives: that was when, inadvertently or otherwise, he had plunged the blade so deeply into his victim that he couldn’t pull it out. His technique had much to do with the high replacement rate for the tools of his trade. Willie invariably went for the heart and lungs, but he was seldom satisfied to merely stick the knife in and yank it out. He had a compulsion to twist the handle while the blade was still in his prey because it gave him special delight inflicting the horrendous pain that extra turn of the wrist caused his victim to suffer. But that technique very often got the blade caught in the rib cage and no amount of pulling could extricate it. So Willie would have to inter the victim with the knife imbedded in the corpse.
Only once, it was said, did Willie lose both knives in carrying out an assignment for the Black Hand mob. That was when he knocked off Mario “Greaseball” Pignatore, one of the gang’s own. It was a very special rubout because Pignatore was suspected of squealing on the gang to save his own skin.
Detectives from Brooklyn’s Butler Street squad had grabbed him from behind the wheel of a hijacked truck loaded with Fisk whitewall tires being delivered to the Bush Terminal docks for shipment to England. Mario’s release on a piddling $500 bail by Magistrate Thomas Gibson was a dead giveaway that the Greaseball had become a pigeon for the Kings County District Attorney’s office. No hijacker caught as redhanded as Pignatore ever broke away from arraignment from less than $10,000 bail. But that wasn’t the only giveaway that the Greaseball might have become a canary.
One afternoon, one of Frankie Yale’s boys, Joe “Squats” Esposito, who worked inside keeping the books for the Mob, caught sight of Pignatore coming out of the elevator at the County Court Building in downtown Brooklyn. There was only one place that Squats figured Pignatore could have been in that building: the D.A.’s office. Perhaps even the grand jury room.
Mario Pignatore immediately became the very special referral for the honor of extinction which Altierri dispensed so professionally. And this extermination had to stand as an example to all the other members of the Mob. So Willie made it a showcase production. He not only jammed both knives into the Greaseball’s ribs and twisted them; he added a novel and ritualistic touch by breaking the handles off while the blades were still buried in Mario. These were then presented to Frankie Yale as mementoes of that significant execution.
Yale had the handles mounted on a shiny foot-square mahogany board that had been bevelled and made to look like a plaque, and it was hung on the wall of Yale’s garage office at Fourth Avenue and Second Street in the borough’s Red Hook section. A gold nameplate engraved by a local jeweler carried a simple but meaningful message to all who pilgrimaged to Yale’s office on social or business calls:
IN MEMORY OF THE GREASEBALL
The jeweler who performed this engraving, gratuitously of course, was Robert Corn, whose store was on the east side of Columbia Street, between President and Union Streets, in downtown Brooklyn. Outside his store on the sidewalk next to the curb was a fifteen-foot-tall cast iron clock that was a landmark for more than a half century.
It was under this clock that the members of the organized crime gangs conducted their public assemblages for purposes of assigning “hits” or whatever other business had to be dealt with in the protection rackets, bootlegging, and the other illegalities the Mob was engaged in. Standing there beside that sidewalk timepiece many of the roaring, raging episodes of Mob violence were masterminded or hatched by the Mob braintrusts.
“Two-Knife” was never long in getting a replacement when he lost a knife in the line of duty. For the distance between an empty scabbard on Willie’s waist and the next knife that would supplant the one abandoned in a victim’s rib cage was as far away as the truck of his shiny black Model-T Ford. The brown leather suitcase that Willie kept in the back of his car didn’t contain a wardrobe for travel, although he often took out-of-town assignments to Newark, New Jersey, Wilmington, Delaware, or Springfield, Massachusetts, among other the locales.
The suitcase kept his supply of knives near at hand. He never allowed the stock to dwindle to less than a dozen blades. When he ran that low, Atierri would put everything aside and drive to the Bowery in Lower Manhattan, where all the wholesale restaurant and hotel supply houses were situated, and replenish his store with a couple of dozen shiny paring knives used by butchers and chefs.
Jimmy Sullivan knew none of this that Monday afternoon when he first encountered the Black Hand’s chief executioner. When Willie gave his name to the pier superintendent, the impadent Sullivan barked at him, “What the hell do you want with me?”
Joe “Rackets” Capolla and Joe “Big Beef” Polusi flanked Willie in his confrontation with the pier boss. That didn’t seem to faze Sullivan. He made no attempt to size up either the short, broad-shouldered Capolla, who in his mid-thirties already had the look of middle age, or Polusi, whose beefy build on a frame almost six feet tall made him look like the dockworker he’d been until the Black Hand recruited him as an enforcer.
Irritation burned in Jimmy Sullivan’s intolerant stomach. He had a built-in prejudice against anyone Italian, and a mere glance at the trio that had interrupted his work routine grated him into an attitude of total belligerence.
“Get it over with, Mac,” Sullivan said raspily. “I got too much work to do. Tell me what business you got coming to this dock.”
Altierri’s hands fidgeted. He unbuttoned his heavy black overcoat, slipped his hands underneath, and placed them over his suit jacket around his waist. Sullivan could not know why Two-Knife’s fingers were drumming nervously. Nor had he any awareness of the scabbards and the deadly instruments hidden under Willie’s jacket.
“We come to ask you something,” Willie finally said slowly, every word measured and uttered with restraint. It was the way he spoke when his anger was aroused. Sullivan’s gruff attitude didn’t endear him to his visitors.
“Whaddaya want to ask me?” he snapped. “I’m waiting. Ask me.”
Willie pointed toward the door of Sullivan’s office.
“In there, if you’ll be so kind,” Willie said. “This is private.” His voice was commanding now. Sullivan wasn’t frightened, but he sensed the authority that Willie carried. This guy and his pals were after something. Maybe it was a good idea to listen to why the hell they were there.
“All right,” the superintendent submitted. “Haul your asses in there and I’ll be with you. I got a couple things to do so my schedule doesn’t get fucked up.”
Altierri, Polusi, and Capolla made their way into the office. Sullivan went back to the dock and checked on the progress his longshoremen were making. He glanced up at the sky and shook his head in disgust. It was starting to snow. He shouted commands. “Hey, let’s move it! We got to get these crates into the warehouse before we get buried under! Hurry it up!”
The forecast was for six to eight inches. The snow had not been expected until nightfall. But it had already begun, and Sullivan was afraid it would be a bigger storm. It would take at least another three hours to clear the freighter’s hold, and the only way that could be done was by riding the men relentlessly.
Now he had an interruption. Those three Italians in his office, waiting to talk with him. About what? Well, he told himself resignedly, he’d go in and get it over with.
As they reached the office entrance, he turned for one last look at the dock. The crews were hustling, just as he wanted them to. Okay. The instant he slammed the door shut, Big Beef Polusi slipped behind him and turned the lock.
“What the hell you doing that for?” Sullivan demanded, whirling around and reaching to unlock the door. Before he could touch the lock, a piece of cold steel was slapped against the back of his hand.
“You want to lose some fingers, you put your fuckin’ hand on that lock,” Altierri scowled.
Sullivan was courageous but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t survive the Marne and Belleau Woods battles by scrambling out of the trenches and charging blindly into the Krauts’ machine-gun nests. A well-aimed grenade was a much more sensible way to destroy the enemy than stupid bravery. The situation right now didn’t differ from the battlefront. Sullivan was surrounded by the enemy.
Capolla, Polusi, and Altierri hadn’t yet told the superintendent their business, but Jimmy had a good idea what he was up against. Big Beef and Rackets hadn’t even introduced themselves by name to Sullivan, but the .38-caliber automatics they were pointing at him announced their occupations more clearly than the fanciest calling cards they could have presented.
Altierri had told Sullivan his first name was Willie; but no one had to tell him Willie’s nickname after that introduction. The whack of steel against his hand followed instantly by the thrust of another sharply-pointed blade against the side of his thick neck signalled to Sullivan in the clearest terms that he was up against a two-knife killer.
“Okay, tell me what you want,” Sullivan said. His voice was more respectful, meeker.
“We gonna give you protection because we hear somebody is gonna put the torch to this warehouse tonight,” Altierri said through clenched teeth. “You catch?”
“What kind of protection?” Sullivan asked, not really surprised. “We already have protection from Denny Meehan—”
Altierri, who had been holding the flat side of his knife against Sullivan’s neck, suddenly turned the blade and pressed its razor-sharp cutting edge into the skin. The dock boss was gripped by palpable terror.
“Meehan can’t protect you no more,” Altierri wheezed. “That’s why Frankie Yale sent me to see you. He wants you to buy insurance from him from now on.”
Altierri dug the edge of the knife deeper into the fold of Sullivan’s neck. Jimmy knew that the slightest movement on his part would slit his throat down to his jugular.
“Look, gimme a break,” Sullivan pleaded, his voice almost a whisper. “Take that knife away and let’s talk this out…”
“No talk!” Altierri bellowed. “We here to make deal. We make deal right away. You ready?”
“Yeah, yeah,” stammered Sullivan. “But there’s something I got to tell you first.”
Two-Knife relaxed the pressure. He turned the flat side of the blade against Sullivan’s neck again.
“What you wanna say?” Altierri pressed.
“I gotta get the okay from my boss,” Sullivan said.
“Where is he?” demanded Altierri.
“At the home office—over on Pier 9.”
“You know the number or you want me to give you it?” Altierri asked snidely.
“Sure—sure I know it.”
“Then you call right away, eh?”
“Okay, okay…”
Altierri took the knife away from Sullivan’s neck and let him walk to his desk. Jimmy sat in the chair and picked up the phone.
“Operator, gimme President 0321,” he said nervously.
When O’Hara got on the line Sullivan explained what was going on.
“They’re gonna kill me, John,” he said. “They’re also gonna burn the warehouse tonight…”
O’Hara was reluctant to capitulate but he could sense that his pier superintendent’s life was in imminent peril. He asked what the “insurance policy” would cost, a detail Sullivan had neglected to learn in his fright.
“The boss wants to know how much?” Sullivan said to Altierri.
“Two thousand a week,” Willie replied without looking up. He had holstered one of the knives by now and was cleaning his fingernails with the point of the other one.
Sullivan relayed the information to O’Hara. O’Hara hit the ceiling.
“Mr. O’Hara says Denny Meehan is only getting fifteen hundred right now,” Sullivan told Altierri.
Willie stopped picking his nails. He edged over to Sullivan, wiped the point of the knife on the shoulder of Jimmy’s red plaid lumber jacket, then stuck the knife against the flesh of his neck.
“Tell Mr. O’Hara Meehan’s policy doesn’t cover death and fire,” Altierri said with a laugh that was joined in by Polusi and Capolla, who were standing in front of the desk with their guns still pointed at Sullivan.
The pier boss relayed Altierri’s answer to O’Hara.
There was a long pause. Suddenly Sullivan’s face brightened.
“He said okay,” Sullivan told Altierri. “The money will be here tomorrow.”
“Smart man, that Mr. O’Hara,” Willie smiled, taking the knife away from Sullivan’s neck and slipping it into the empty scabbard at his waist.
“All right, all right!” He turned scoldingly to Capolla and Polusi, who had their gun barrels still trained on Sullivan. “Dinja hear? They bought the policy. Put those heaters away, goddamn ya!”
Altierri stuck his hand out to Sullivan. “We shake,” he said. “We make a good deal and now we be friends, right?”
Sullivan’s stomach turned as he shook Altierri’s hand, which felt soft and delicate, almost like a woman’s.
Sullivan unlocked the door and led the pack of Black Handers out of the office. The snow was falling so heavily now that the booms and cranes were oblitered from view.
“Somebody come tomorrow for the first premium,” Altierri said before walking off with Polusi and Capolla to the parked Ford. “Two o’clock sharp…”
“Yeah,” grumbled Sullivan as he headed out on the dock. More than anything now he wanted to speed up the unloading before the storm crippled operations.
At two o’clock the next afternoon, activity on Pier 2 was at a standstill. The snow had stopped falling several hours ago, but the eleven-inch white blanket had wrought total paralysis. While Sullivan had managed to get the freighter unloaded and the last of the cargo stacked in the warehouse early the previous evening, none of the cargo was on its way to the consignee. The storm had played havoc with traffic and not a single truck rolled onto Pier 2 that day.
The depth of the snow on the city’s streets did not deter Benjamin “Crazy Benny” Pazzo, Frankie Yale’s ace “collector,” from reaching Gowanus Stevedoring’s pier at two o’clock sharp. Nothing less was expected since Joe “Frenchy” Carlino was driving the car. The number one wheelman in the Black Hand’s ranks, Frenchy could be trusted to tool passengers to their destinations through fog and rain and sleet and driving snow. No element of nature could prevent Frenchy from making his appointed rounds.
His vehicle on this particular afternoon was a black Cadillac limousine, Frankie Yale’s personal car. Frankie had put it at his henchmens’ disposal because of the significance of their mission.
This was the Black Hand’s first important breakthrough against Denny Meehan’s gang in the brief war for control of Brooklyn’s waterfront rackets. Although Frankie Yale had made progress in his attempt to break up the Irish underworld’s hold on the docks, none of his gang’s advances had achieved as dramatic a turn as the coup scored against Gowanus Stevedoring.
This, Yale felt, was to be a turning point in his drive to seize power on the lucrative waterfront from the White Hand gang. A $2000-a-week payoff from Gowanus Stevedoring certainly was a signal step.
There was a hush on Pier 2 as Crazy Benny left the Cadillac and made his way to Sullivan’s office. Even Denny Meehan and his two executioners in their somber black coats and black fedoras acted as though they didn’t wish to disturb his tracks, for they walked alongside him, leaving their own impressions in the snow of their ripple-soled snap-buckle galoshes.
Three hundred and twenty-five feet: that was the distance to the end of the pier where the oil-slick East River rushes by in a seeming hurry to carry into Upper New York Bay tin cans, bottles, broken crates, and the rest of the garbage people dump into the water. Crazy Benny’s last walk ended at the very ledge overlooking the water.
It is believed the expression, “Why don’t you take a long walk off a short pier,” evolved from this episode.
Crazy Benny made no attempt to postpone his death. He didn’t want to die. He was afraid to die. But he also must have known how useless any plea would be. He faced his death with a grim look as Denny Meehan’s executioners opened fire. The first .45 slugs tore through his overcoat and plowed into his chest. Benny slumped into the snow, his face expressionless. His eyelids closed. He was a man who seemed to have gone to sleep in the snow.
Few seconds were wasted. With a practiced motion the two executioners holstered their revolvers that had pumped fourteen bullets into Benny’s body, then bent over, picked up Crazy Benny’s limp body, and hurled it into the river with the deftness of longshoremen pitching a bale of fertilizer into an unloading net.
Benny’s body floated several seconds on the surface amid the whitecaps. Its buoyancy lasted only as long as it took the water to soak into his heavy woolen overcoat. And then it disappeared into the murky surf. His body would not rise again until the gases that inevitably form by fermentation after death filled it like a balloon and brought it bobbing up to the surface once more.
“Very neat work, boys,” Denny Meehan praised his lieutenants of death. They were two of the most reliable gats in the White Hand organization, William “Wild Bill” Lovett and Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan.
Lovett cast a curious eye on the flattened snow where Benny had lain.
“Funny,” he said, “there isn’t a drop of blood. Do you think the guy ever bled…?
As they walked back toward Furman Street, Meehan, Lovett, and Lonergan sloshed over the footsteps they’d made in the snow bringing “Crazy Benny” out to the end of the dock. They didn’t disturb Benny’s tracks. When they returned to the street, Meehan called Jimmy Sullivan out of his office.
“Com’ere, Jimmy,” Denny said. “I wanna show you something.”
He took the pier boss to the dock and pointed at the only pair of footsteps that were still clearly visible in the snow.
Sullivan glanced at the impressions of what must have been a size ten snowboot making one-way tracks the length of the pier.
“Crazy Benny ain’t coming back this way,” Meehan said, slapping Sullivan on the back.
“I’ll light a candle for him,” the superintendent remarked, and walked back to his office. He despised Meehan and the whole White Hand, but he was grateful for the service they had performed for Gowanus Stevedoring.
Frankie Yale was fit to be tied. He banged his fist savagely on the desktop in his garage office. Frenchy Carlino expected this reaction. The big coup that Willie Altierri had accomplished only the day before at Gowanus Stevedoring had been wiped out by Denny Meehan’s swift, stunning reprisal.
Frenchy had been able to get back to the boss alive and well because of the head start Crazy Benny had gotten in leaving the car. That sixty-second delay gave Frenchy just the time needed to spot Denny Meehan and the two torpedoes approaching Benny. In fact, Frenchy saw the White Hand leader and his confederates even before they had turned the corner of the warehouse, which was when Benny first became aware of them. But it had been too late to shout a warning to Benny. So Frenchy took the only sensible turn under the circumstances: he drove away as quickly as he could, leaving Benny to his fate.
If Frankie Yale had any doubt as to what became of Crazy Benny, it was erased by the headlines of the morning newspapers of Saturday, January 10:
Benny’s body had been trawled out of the Lower Bay off Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge section, about ten miles from where the corpse was dumped.
The autopsy showed Benny had been struck by fourteen bullets, six of them had gone through the heart.
The newspaper accounts of Crazy Benny’s demise were also read over at Denny Meehan’s second-floor offices in a garage on Baltic Street. Denny Meehan and his boys grinned from ear to ear.
“I always said Crazy Benny had a stout heart,” Meehan laughed uproariously. “With six bullets in it…hey, that gotta be a very stout heart.”
Levity had no place at Frankie Yale’s office. Frankie mouthed maledictions at Denny Meehan for almost an hour, helped by a chorus of curses uttered by Two-Knife, Big Beef, Rackets, and some of his other boys.
Finally, Yale walked over to the plaque with the two broken knife handles.
“I swear on this fuckin’ squealer’s grave,” Yale snarled, slamming his fist into the wall. “If Denny Meehan wants war, that’s what the fuck he’ll get!”
