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VI

Shootout at Stauch’s Dance Hall

In February 1920 Frankie Yale had no idea Battista Balsamo was planning to retire and turn the leadership over to Vincenzo Mangano and his brother Phillipo. All Frankie knew was that he had to protect his flanks against the almost certain retaliation from the White Hand after the Sagaman’s Hall number he did on Wild Bill Lovett and his gang.

After a respectable interlude for mourning their dead and laying them to rest, the White Hand gang was summoned to a conclave called by Wild Bill Lovett. They met in the warehouse office of Calendonia Shipping Lines at 25 Bridge Street, hard by the limestone base tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. The agenda consisted of a single topic: how to effectively pay back the Black Hand for the outrage at Sagaman’s Hall.

Twenty-five of the Irish Mafia’s most notorious enforcers pilgrimaged to the ramshackle warehouse that Saturday afternoon, February 21st. A noxious, musty odor of manure hung heavy in the bleak, sparsely-furnished office at the northeast corner of the building. The stench, so thick the men could hardly breathe, was wafting into the office from the warehouse itself, where some six hundred bales of bulk potassium fertilizer had been stored for the weekend. The shipment, from Galveston, Texas, had been unloaded from the freighter “Miguel Sorcos” the day before and was to be trucked Monday to a feed and grain distributor in upstate Tonawanda.

“Couldn’t you find another place to talk with us?” complained crosseyed Jimmy “The Bug” Callaghan, contorting his face in disgust. Jimmy’s expression made his deformity seem more pronounced: his pupils now appeared to be looking at each other across the bridge of his nose. But if anyone was inclined to mock Callaghan’s somewhat comical appearance, it would not be done in his presence. The blond-haired Callaghan was a small, frail-looking man, but his violent temper more than compensated for his lack of size.

Lovett himself was sick of the stink, and he sensed that the others were as annoyed as Jimmy the Bug about having to meet in such unpleasant surroundings. Wild Bill had no idea things would turn out the way they had when he made arrangements a few days earlier to muster his troops in Caledonia’s warehouse.

But he had no other choice. He didn’t want all those men showing up at the Baltic Street Garage on a Saturday afternoon—or any afternoon: a rally of that size would surely tip off the Black Hand that something big was going on. And though no one had to alert Frankie Yale to guard against retaliation by Wild Bill and his minions for the bloodletting at Sagaman’s Hall, a gathering of so many Irish mobsters would be like sending a telegram to their rivals that Lovett and his band were preparing to strike back.

A meeting hall or restaurant was just as inappropriate, for the gang could be spotted almost as readily there. It had to be someplace more secluded. The search narrowed to the Caledonia’s warehouse after Needles Ferry and Charleston Eddie discovered that no one would be working on that Gowanus waterfront pier over the weekend. Wild Bill had asked Ferry and Eddie, while on their extortion collection rounds, to check pier superintendents for such a spot. Frank McCarthy, the Caledonia Lines’ pier boss, told the boys that his company’s facility at 25 Bridge Street would be available. McCarthy had failed to tell Ferry and Eddie about the fertilizer shipment that would be stored in the warehouse over the weekend.

“How stupid can you guys be?” Lovett scolded Needles and Charleston before the meeting got underway. “What are you trying to pull, setting us up in this horsehit place?”

“I swear to you, Bill,” Ferry pleaded. “McCarthy never told us anything about the crap he put in here. It wasn’t in the warehouse when we came here a couple days ago. He only told us that nobody was gonna be here, that we could use the office, and he gave us the key.”

Lovett shook his head disgustedly. He walked to a chair and stood on it.

“Fellas,” he said raspily, “I can’t stand this smell any more than you can. But there’s no choice. So hold your breaths and listen to what I have to say. It won’t take long.”

“I called you here because of what happened to Jimmy O’Toole, to Kevin Donovan, and to Mary Reilly,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “They were killed by those dirty ginzos who didn’t even have the guts to pull the job themselves. They hired out-of-town hit men to do their dirty work. That’s because their own people don’t have the balls to handle their problems: they’ve got to bring in outsiders when they want to spill our blood.”

Lovett slammed his clenched right fist into the palm of his left hand.

“We aren’t like that, no sir,” he shouted, his face knotting with rage. “At least when we have problems we take care of them ourselves!”

He let a moment pass. As he sensed that his words had sunk in, he went on: “You better believe it that we Irishmen aren’t going to let those lousy wops get away with what they did at Sagaman’s Hall because—”

He was interrupted by a wave of applause, whistles, and shouts. The gathering approved of what he was saying.

“Tell us how we’re going to get those lousy ginzos!” a voice sounded as the tumult died down. That call was echoed a half-dozen times by others in the room.

“Okay,” Lovett said tensely. “I think there’s one man among us who’s got a right to speak his mind and tell us how he’d like to get back at those murdering Black Handers. I’m speaking about Dick Lonergan.”

Wild Bill struck an emotional note which all at once precipitated another outburst. As the applause and cheers subsided, Lonergan limped his way to the chair on which Lovett stood. Wild Bill relinquished it to Pegleg. All eyes were on Lonergan. He was the sympathetic hero; one of those who died in the ambush at Sagaman’s Hall was his girlfriend, Mary Reilly. And there was also what the gang knew about his early suffering wrought by the loss of his left leg.

When he was twelve years old, Lonergan, while playing with friends in the Long Island Rail Road’s yards on Sixty-ninth Street in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, had hitched a ride aboard a freight car. He fell from his perch between an oil tanker and a lumber car and hit the ground alongside the tracks. But his left leg did not clear the rail completely.

The wheels of the lumber car passed over his leg and severed it about six inches above the ankle. His playmates summoned help and young Richard was rushed to Victory Memorial Hospital, where doctors amputated the stub below the knee. It saved his life. But Dick Lonergan was fated to live as a cripple.

In the months following the accident, the youngster was outfitted with a wooden stump which enabled him to walk—and which inevitably inspired the kids in his neighborhood to call him “Pegleg.” The name stuck for the twenty years since that accident, although his friends seldom called him that.

Because of his physical handicap, Lonergan had never made it with the opposite sex. Girls politely turned him down for dates during his teenage years; as he grew into manhood, women rejected his advances. It wasn’t until he met Mary Reilly that Lonergan finally found acceptance by a woman. Their friendship grew into romance and finally into a proposal of marriage—which Mary accepted. They were to have been wed that coming June. Mary’s death left Pegleg shattered beyond description. His only ambition now was to avenge her death by taking as many Black Hand lives as he could. He had already told Lovett that any plan to retaliate against the Italians must include him.

“If you don’t pick me,” Pegleg had said to Wild Bill, “I’ll take things into my own hands. I’m gonna even the score whether you decide to cut me in for the hit or not.”

With Lonergan’s passion for revenge so intense, Lovett knew he’d be a damned fool not to put the man in the lineup of annihilators dispatched against the Black Hand. After all, Lonergan had approached Lovett the previous Wednesday with the scheme of how to strike back at the Italians. He had laid it on the table for Wild Bill after they’d returned from Mary’s funeral. Lovett had been astounded not only by the uniqueness of Lonergan’s plan but by the infinite thought and attention to detail that had gone into it. Lovett decided then and there that Pegleg himself should be granted the privilege of getting up before the gang and giving the rendition of his brilliant blueprint for death.

Pegleg shifted restlessly as he stood on the chair now, his balance seemingly precarious as he tapped his wooden leg around on the seat searching for a comfortable stance. When he finally found a position that pleased him, he glanced at the faces staring up at him. Searching eyes peered from beneath the wide-brimmed hats, pinched lips drew together in anticipation of what he was about to say. Pegleg drew in a long nervous breath.

“I hear,” Lonergan began at last, the words coming softly and slowly, “the wops are going to hold a victory celebration for the score they made on us. It’s gonna be next Saturday night in Stauch’s Dance Hall on Surf Avenue. I say that’s when we should rap them, really lay it into ’em.”

It was a sweet plan. Lonergan proposed that he and three cohorts pose as the four-piece orchestra hired to play the affair. Pegleg and the three other executioners would present themselves at the door as a string ensemble. But instead of Stradivariuses or Cremonas, their violin cases would hold sawed-off shotguns, .45-caliber automatics, and, yes, even a tommy gun or two.

“How are you gonna play music when Frankie Yale’s boys see they got one orchestra there already?” hulking Eddie Lynch, the enforcer for the gang’s loansharking operations, challenged from the back of the room. “They’ll stuff you in your own violin cases before you get past the door.”

Lonergan smiled wryly at his detractor. “That’s where you come in, Eddie,” he quickly responded, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket and handing it to Jimmy the Bug, who was standing directly in front of Pegleg. “Pass it back to Eddie,” Lonergan said. A hand reached out and the paper was relayed to Lynch. As he read the writing, Eddie’s round, nervous face screwed up with frowning suspicion.

“What the hell is this?” he growled.

“That’s the names and addresses of the musicians,” Lonergan said firmly. “What you and some of the other boys are gonna do is stop them from showing up—” Pegleg took another deep breath. “No rough stuff, you understand. Just make sure they stay home awhile. And when me and the other violinists are finished with our numbers, you can let them go to Stauch’s. They’ll be needed then to play a funeral march.”

A sudden shifting of feet accompanied by an undercurrent of murmurs was a signal to Pegleg that the gang was duly impressed with the scenario so far. The smile on Wild Bill Lovett’s face and some others inspired Lonergan to unveil the rest of the plot with even greater enthusiasm.

It was a simple plan, much less complicated than Pegleg had led the gang to believe at the outset. Their initial impression was that the “orchestra” would mount the stage before breaking out its “pieces” and begin playing the cadenza of hot lead.

“What are you guys gonna do after you shoot up the place, walk through the crowd of ginzos saying, ‘Excuse me, please.’ and go out the front door?” Joe “The Boozer” Bean yelled derisively.

“No, no, no!” Lonergan shouted.

“You got it all wrong, Joe,” Lovett interrupted Pegleg’s response to Bean, the brother of Petey and Danny. “Dick didn’t say they’d shoot from the stage, although maybe he left that impression. The way it’s really gonna be, Dick and whoever goes on this one will jump out of the car on Surf Avenue, walk into Stauch’s right through the main doors, and start blasting.”

“Hey, that’s real great,” rasped Ernie “Skinny” Shea, one of the White Hands’ waterfront extortion collectors. “Our guys’ll be in and outta the joint before them Sicilian scum know what hit em!

But the plan didn’t sit right with Shea’s sidekick in shakedowns, Wally “The Squint” Walsh.

“Why don’t you just go in with the rods showing?” he asked in his gravelly voice, his eyelids shuttered. “What the hell for do you need to get fancy with violin cases and all that shit?”

“Because,” Lovett said slowly, his patience running out fast at the thickheads who apparently hadn’t listened closely when Pegleg was covering that ground. “You see, Wally, there are gonna be maybe one or two wops at the door who’ll be watching who goes in. So if our guys hop out of the car with their artillery showing, they’ll bo wiped out before they even put their feet on the sidewalk.”

Charleston Eddie then raised a very good point when he asked how Lonergan expected even to reach the door of the dance hall without being recognized.

“I know what you’re saying,” Pegleg grinned in spite of the oblique reference to his wooden leg. But he was prepared with an answer. “That’s all gonna be taken care of,” he assured them. “Bill’s gonna buy me one of them new artificial legs. You can wear a shoe with it and it looks like the real thing. I was measured this morning for one, and it’ll be ready for me first thing Tuesday.”

The boys began clapping for Lonergan. And buoyed by the seeming acceptance of his plan, Pegleg began doing a jig on the chair.

With no further questions, Lonergan asked for three volunteers to accompany him on his mission. Nearly every hand in the warehouse office was flung in the air.

“No good,” Lovett said. “We gotta make this fair.” He took off his gray fedora and placed the crown in the palm of his left hand. Then, urging Lonergan off the chair, Wild Bill stepped up so everyone could see what he was doing. He stuffed his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a fistful of white marbles, which he began dropping into the hat. “One, two, three…”

The count went to fourteen and his hand was empty. Lovett then pulled another handful of white marbles and continued dropping them, one at a time, into his chapeau… twenty, twenty-one.” He stopped and returned the remaining marbles to his pocket. Then he went to his jacket pocket and pulled out three black marbles. “One, two, three,” he counted as he let them fall into the hat.

Then, holding the fedora above everyone’s head, Lovett ordered, “Everybody come up and take a marble. The ones who pick the blacks go with Dick on this job…”

The luck of the draw went to Irish Eyes Duggan, Danny Bean, and Charleston Eddie McFarland, who were cheered lustily and pounded on their backs by their less fortunate brethren.

“Don’t worry you guys who lost out,” Lovett consoled his boys. “There is still gonna be action for a lot of you men. I’m sending at least another six of you as a backup, just in case Dick and his, orchestra’ don’t read their music too good.”

The concerto for murder was scheduled to be played at Stauch’s one week hence. Curtain time was eight o’clock on Saturday, February 26th, by which point some fifty-five members of the Black Hand gang would have been seated at the tables around the dance floor with their wives or dates, and when some of the crowd might very well indeed begin wondering why the orchestra had not yet taken the stage and struck up the strains of “Santa Lucia,” Frankie Yale’s favorite number. The gang’s “entertainment committee” had planned it that way because they wanted Frankie and his missus to lead the dancing. It was their way of paying homage to Yale for his brilliant direction of the Sagaman’s Hall ambush.

Not in his wildest dreams did Pegleg Lonergan imagine that things would go the way they did when he and his sidekicks in slaughter went to Stauch’s Dance Hall. As confident as he’d been in presenting his plan, first to Wild Bill Lovett, then to the White Hand’s rank and file, all sorts of anxieties burned inside him.

Pegleg’s overriding concern was the very apprehension advanced by Charleston Eddie. Since Tuesday morning, when the artificial leg was strapped on, Lonergan had spent hour after hour trying to master a walk that would look natural. But as Saturday night approached, he hadn’t mastered that miserable artificial limb. While for the first time since the accident he wore trousers with both legs down to his ankles and two shoes, he still hadn’t managed to walk without a limp. Yet the improvement was so dramatic that Lovett assured Pegleg no Black Hand lookout could ever recognize him.

At six o’clock on Saturday night the men appointed for the hit rallied in the White Hand’s garage on Baltic Street. Wild Bill Lovett personally checked each of the weapons packed into the violin cases to be toted to the Coney Island dance hall by Pegleg Lonergan, Irish Eyes Duggan, Danny Bean, and Charleston Eddie.

Lovett also checked each of the revolvers, automatics, and shotguns the backup team was taking to the scene. Picked for that assignment were Joey Bean, Ernie Shea, Wally Walsh, Eddie Lynch and Jack “Squareface” Finnegan. Their driver was Ernie “The Scarecrow” Monaghan. Danny Bean’s brother, Petey, had been singled out for the honor of driving the black 1920 Chevrolet sedan that would carry the second team of hit men to the hall.

“All right, you guys,” Lovett said after he had satisfied himself that his executioners were prepared to move out. “Go get ’em!”

A whoop and cry exploded from the gathering, but Lovett quickly muffled it.

“Nobody’s celebrating yet!” he scolded his boys. “You do the job first and then we’ll have something to cheer. Now get the hell out and get it done!”

Lonergan led the way out, followed by Charleston Eddie and Danny and Petey Bean, with Duggan trailing behind them. The backup team then left the garage and got into the second car, a black 1919 Packard sedan. The two cars roared off toward Coney Island.

A powdery snow began falling just as the White Handers started toward their destination.

“Shit!” Petey Bean shouted as he spotted the small white flakes buffeting the windshield. “I hope this goddam snow doesn’t screw us up.”

“Take it easy, Petey,” Lonergan pampered the hot-headed wheelman. “It’s all gonna be over and done with before the streets even get slippery.”

Had it been the middle of July, a half-million persons or more would have been wandering around Coney Island’s beaches, boardwalks, and amusement grounds. But on that windswept, snowy night of February 26th, the only visible activity in America’s famed bathing and amusement resort was in Stauch’s Dance Hall, where fifty-five celebrants had gathered for their revelry. Elsewhere, the streets were deserted.

As Petey Bean cruised along Surf Avenue he kept a sharp eye out for any movement outside Stauch’s which might indicate that too many lookouts were guarding the hall. But as he drew nearer, Petey blurted, “There ain’t nobody at the doors! Jesus, this is gonna be a snap!”

As a matter of fact, Frankie Yale and his bunch had been lulled into believing a report that had been planted for their benefit that afternoon. Lovett had sent Needles Ferry to O’Brien’s Saloon, one of South Brooklyn’s hotbeds of scuttlebutt, to drop a word or two, “inadvertantly, of course,” that the White Hand was planning to sack one of the waterfront warehouses that night. Figuring that such shenanigans would command considerable manpower, Yale reasoned it would be highly unlikely that Lovett would divert any of his boys for an escapade in Coney Island.

So only one guard, Joe “Rackets” Capolla, had been conscripted for sentry duty at the doors. But, as fate ordained it, not even Joe was at the doors as Petey Bean pulled the Chevy to a stop in front of the dance hall.

Capolla wasn’t at his post because he had come down with a sudden case of diarrhea. And without calling for a replacement, he left to answer that peevishly demanding call of nature. The men’s room was a mere five steps from the entrance, which may have been why Joe didn’t ask for a stand-in. At any rate, his presence in the men’s room was registered by one Antonio Sisciliato, who himself was straddling one of the thrones when Capolla barged in, his trousers at half-mast even before he had reached the john. Had Joe not managed to expedite the evacuation of his loose bowels as quickly as he had, history might have recorded a different ending for the chapter in the war between the ginzos and the micks. Certainly it would have been a different outcome for Joe Capolla. For he came back the very instant Pegleg Lonergan and his three henchmen burst through the main outside doors and into the entrance foyer of the dance palace.

Capolla made an heroic effort in the face of the awesome artillery that by now had been drawn from the violin cases and suddenly levelled at him. Joe lived just long enough to hurl his body against the double swinging doors of the main hall and cry, “Look out…!”

His words were drowned out by the deafening blast of bullets that almost sliced his torso in two.

He didn’t fall as quickly as one might be expected to after the heart and pulse have stopped functioning. Instead, he stood erect, like a statue, for the longest time, framed by the swinging doors which had caught him in a vice!ike hold. All the while blood from his back, chest, and stomach cascaded out of him like Niagara, and formed a large pool on the floor.

When Capolla’s massive body finally toppled and hit the floor, it was with a sickening splash that spattered his gore over his assassins. Lonergan and his team of killers merely stepped over Joe’s dying hulk and surged into the hall, guns blazing.

The revelers—the cream of the Black Hand’s crop of aristocratic extortionists, loan sharks, bootleggers, hijackers, and hit men-—catapulted from their chairs and dove under the tables for protection. Many of them gallantly dragged their wives and sweethearts with them.

But whoever had escorted Anna Balestro to the dance that night was rated a poor score for chivalry. Anna, the buxom, angel-faced sister of Albert Balestro, a funeral director who fronted for Frankie Yale in his chain of parlors was struck by a .45-caliber slug on the left side of her head. The bullet tore through her brain. Her body, toppled from the chair in which she’d been sitting, crunched on the floor with thunderous impact. After all, she weighed two hundred and forty pounds.

Lonergan, Charleston Eddie, Danny Bean, and Irish Eyes Duggan sprayed their lead at random into the crowd, making it a simple case of pot luck for those who stopped the bullets and for the more fortunate ones who didn’t.

Giovanni Capone (no relation to Scarface Al) was one of the unlucky ones. Giovanni, who worked as a tombstone engraver when he wasn’t busy breaking into warehouses for the Black Hand, was struck with a charge of buckshot exploding from the muzzle of the sawed-off shotgun wielded by Irish Eyes. Though the whole front of his face was blown away, Capone was heard blurting profanities in a voice that carried for several long minutes. Witnesses swear Giovanni’s words were leaping out of his neck, for he had neither lips nor mouth through which his voice could have come.

Another of Yale’s more valuable underlings, Giuseppe “Momo” Municharo, a soldier in the protection rackets, also had the misfortune of catching a volley from Duggan’s shotgun. A gaping hole was opened in his abdomen, giving the stricken crowd a cutaway view of Momo’s intestines, which were still bulging with the spaghetti â la Milanese that he’d feasted on before coming to the dance.

The piercing screams and cries of the women, and many of the men as well, were like a replay of a sound track from the earlier carnage visited by the Black Hand on the Irishmen at Sagaman’s Hall.

Several of the more alert Italian mobsters had managed to unlimber their guns from their holsters and fire back at the four assassins. But the shots were pegged so carefully in order to avoid hitting their own people that they missed their intended targets as well. Only after Lonergan was satisfied that enough blood had been spilled and had commanded his accomplices to retreat from the hall were the beleaguered Black Handers offered a clear field of fire.

Then one of Yale’s boys made a quick score. Augie the Wop Pisano earned a notch on his automatic when he drilled a .45 bullet into the fleeing Danny Bean. It caught Danny in the back of the head. He crumpled in a heap on the vestibule floor, inches from the outer doors—and from Joe Capolla’s corpse. Another second and he’d have been breathing the fresh, snow-filled, sea-scented air of Coney Island.

Pegleg, Charleston Eddie, and Duggan made it out of the hall unscathed and leaped into the getaway car.

“Roll it, roll it!” screamed Pegleg.

“Where’s Danny?” cried Petey Bean, frantically searching the dance hall entrance for a sign of his brother.

“They hit him, Petey,” Duggan said crisply. “He ain’t gonna be commin’ out. You’d better step on it before we all get it.”

Suddenly the Packard with the backup team roared alongside the Chevrolet.

“Hey, what the hell you waiting for?” Eddie Lynch shouted from the window. “It’s over, get your ass going, Petey!”

Then, turning to Ernie the Scarecrow, who was at the wheel beside him, Lynch barked, “Fuck ’em. We ain’t waiting. Step on it!” The Packard roared along Surf Avenue like a frontrunner in the Indianapolis 500. But it wasn’t alone for much of its flight. For, at Lonergan’s urging—he had put the barrel of his gun against the driver’s head—Petey Bean at last pulled away from the dance hall. And not a second too soon. Just as the car began skidding around the corner into Stillwell Avenue on pavement made slippery by the falling snow, the crackle of gunfire was heard. The Italians were shooting from the windows and steps of the dance hall. But the bullets flying at the fleeing vehicle went wide of their mark and the White Handers got safely out of range.

But Petey Bean didn’t remain behind the wheel for long. He was too absorbed by the concern for his brother’s uncertain fate. “What did they do, shoot him?” his voice choked.

“Yeah, yeah,” Pegleg replied. “He was too goddamn slow running out. They dropped him right inside the door—”

“Why the fuck didn’t you carry him out?” Bean screamed, all at once breaking into convulsive sobs.

“No way we coulda done that, Petey,” Charleston Eddie said from the back seat. “I saw what happened. They got him in the back of the head…”

Bean began weeping so hard that when the speeding car almost mounted the sidewalk as Petey was making a turn, Lonergan decided it was time for a change of drivers.

“Stop the fuckin’ car!” he bellowed. “I ain’t gonna let you drive no more.”

Lonergan turned his head as the car stopped. “Get your ass behind the wheel,” he said to Charleston Eddie. The doors were flung open and the change of drivers quickly took place. The ride the rest of the way back to the Baltic Street Garage was smooth.

“A hell of a score!” cried Pegleg as he limped into Wild Bill Lovett’s office. “We really gave it to them.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured you boys would,” Lovett said softly. “But you lost one, didn’t ya?”

The information had come from the backup team, which had watched the White Hand assassins fleeing the dance hall and had beaten them back to the garage. Wally Walsh had told Lovett that only three of the gang came out of Stauch’s.

No one had to identify the casualty for Wild Bill after Pegleg, Charlèston Eddie, and Irish Eyes Duggan walked into the office trailed by a sobbing Petey Bean.

“Okay, okay,” Lovett said awkwardly, giving the bereaved Petey a sidelong glance. “It hurts me very much that they knocked out Danny, but that’s the kind of chances we’re all taking in this friggin’ business.”

Lovett took a deep breath. “Now give it to me straight and no bullshit. I want to know what the score was.”

“High—very high,” Duggan replied in a self-contained voice. “We left a whole lot of them bleeding like pigs…”

“Yeah,” interrupted Charleston Eddie with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “we really tore them apart. They had nobody at the door and we got in with no trouble. But then guess who we saw?” Eddie looked at Lovett, anticipating that he’d ask “who?” Instead, the White Hand’s chieftain snarled, “Cut out the fuckin’ questions and give me straight answers on the rundown!”

“Okay, okay, Bill,” Eddie cowered. “It was Rackets Capolla. You shoulda seen the look on his face when we hit him. You shoulda seen him standing up after we blasted him in the gut…”

Duggan and Lonergan described the rest of the massacre to Lovett, but Lovett’s reaction was subdued. He was pleased, but he didn’t want to stage a celebration because Petey Bean was there. Danny Bean didn’t mean a hell of a lot to Wild Bill Lovett—Danny was just another hand as far as he was concerned— yet in Petey Bean’s presence Lovett felt he should display a modicum of sorrow for the man who was left behind.

By 8:15 p.m. Surf Avenue was suddenly alive with traffic. Ambulances and police cars streamed toward Stauch’s Dance Hall, where nine people had caught the bullets and shotgun pellets in flight and were in need of medical attention.

Remarkably unlike the Sagaman’s Hall ambush, none of the six men and three women wounded by the gunfire was seriously injured; their wounds were uniformly minor ones. Fury Argolia, the restaurateur, had caught a slug in his right shoulder, but the bullet merely tore through the flesh without touching the bone.

Others were either grazed by bullets or hit with the spray of the shotguns at such great distances that the pellets merely pierced their skins. All nine of the wounded were extremely lucky. They were taken to Coney Island Hospital for emergency treatment, but not one of them was kept overnight as a patient. They were sent home after their wounds were patched.

Rackets Capolla, Anna Balestro, Giovanni Capone, and Momo Municharo were morgue cases. They were all given exquisite funerals. That was the least Frankie Yale could do for them. In fact, he charged the families only half price for the send-offs.

The fifth fatality of the shootout, Danny Bean, went to his requiem in a plain pine coffin because his gang boss, Wild Bill Lovett, didn’t have Frankie Yale’s connections with the undertaking industry. The White Hand always had to pay going retail rates for its funerals.

But the tears and eulogizing for Danny Bean were no less profound than the sobs and exaltations for Anna Balestro and the three Black Hand banditi who were laid out in their stately brass-handled mahogany caskets.

Emotions at the Italian funerals ran much higher, not only because their toll at Stauch’s was so much greater than the casualties the Irish had suffered, but also because one of their dead, Anna Balestro, was an innocent victim. Her death had been as unwarranted and cold-blooded as Mary Reilly’s. And it aroused as much outrage in Frankie Yale as Mary’s killing had stirred in Wild Bill Lovett.

While standing at Anna’s graveside beside her brother, Albert, Frankie wept unashamedly. With tears running down his cheeks, he whispered to Albert, “So help me, God, I’m gonna make those Irish sons of bitches pay through their noses for taking this girl’s life…”

Frankie put the palm of his right hand slowly up to his face, covering his lips. Then, just as slowly, he moved the hand outward, blowing a kiss.

It was a meaningful sign that had originated with the code of the so-called omerta traditions established during the rise of the Maffia in Sicily more than a century before.

It was the kiss of death.