The Gangster Read online

  “I didn’t,” said Isaac Bell without shifting his gaze from the mirror behind the bar, which reflected the view through the saloon’s window of the Banco LaCava storefront across the street. He had tricked out his workman’s costume with an electrician’s cylindrical leather tool case slung over his shoulder. In it were extra manacles for bomb planters who surrendered and a sawed-off shotgun for those who didn’t.

  “A bunch of Italian business men did it for me. Marched in with a bag of money to hire the agency for protection, and Mr. Van Dorn decided it was about time.”

  Warren asked, “Would they happen to call themselves the White Hand Society?”

  No one knew the streets of New York better than Harry Warren. He had probably heard of the new outfit ten minutes after its founding. Which meant, Bell was painfully aware, so had the Black Hand.

  “Giuseppe Vella launched it. He’s been getting Black Hand letters. David LaCava joined him. And some of their well-heeled friends. Banking, property, construction, a wine importer, and a wholesaler grocer.”

  “Branco?”

  “Antonio.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  “He wasn’t there. But Vella told me he put up the seed money that got the others into it. The Boss authorizes up to ten men—if you count apprentices.”

  “How many speak Italian?”

  “Just you, Harry.”

  The Van Dorn New York City street gang expert had changed his name from Salvatore Guaragna, following the example of New York Italian gangsters like Five Points Gang chief “Paul Kelly,” who took Irish names. He said, “I got an apprentice candidate who’s Italian. Little Eddie Tobin’s father found him living on a hay barge. Orphan. The Tobins took him in. Richie Cirillo. Sharp kid.”

  “Glad to have him,” said Bell.

  “Who’s the rest of your lineup?”

  “Weber and Fields are parked down the street on a coal wagon.” Middle-aged Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were the agency comedians. Nicknamed after the vaudevillians Weber and Fields, Kisley was Van Dorn’s explosives expert, Fulton a walking encyclopedia of safecrackers and their modi operandi.

  Harry Warren grinned. “Helluva disguise. I couldn’t figure out if they were guarding the bank or fixing to rob it. Who else?”

  “I’ve got Eddie Edwards coming in from Kansas City.”

  “Valuable man. Though I’m not sure what a rail yard specialist can do on Elizabeth Street.”

  “Archie Abbott is selling used clothes from that pushcart next to the bank.”

  “You’re kidding!” Archibald Angell Abbott IV was the only Van Dorn listed in the New York Social Register. Warren wandered casually toward the free lunch, shot a glance out the window at a different angle, and came back with a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread. “I didn’t make him.”

  “He didn’t want you to.”

  “I’ve also got Wish Clarke and—”

  “Forget Wish,” Harry interrupted. “Mr. Van Dorn is one step from firing him.”

  “I know. We’ll see how he’s doing.” Aloysius Clarke, the sharpest detective in the agency—and the partner from whom Isaac Bell had learned the most—was a drinking man, and it was beginning to get the better of him.

  “Who else?”

  “Your Eddie Tobin.”

  Harry nodded gloomily. Another apprentice. The Boss wasn’t exactly going all out.

  “And Helen Mills.”

  “The college girl?” Mills was a Bryn Mawr coed whom Bell had offered a summer job with the prospect of becoming a full-fledged apprentice when she graduated.

  “Helen’s plenty sharp.”

  “Is it true what the boys say? She decked Archie last year down in Washington?”

  “Archie started it.”

  Harry Warren went back to the free lunch for another look at the street. Bell divided his attention between customers going into Banco LaCava and toughs in the saloon who might be preparing an attack. Harry came back with a hard-boiled egg. “Let me guess,” he joked. “She’s the fat lady selling artichokes?”

  “I sent Helen down to Park Row to get a line on where the Black Hand buys their stationery . . . Harry, why did you ask what I think of Branco?”

  “He’s a strange one. Wholesale grocers tend to extort the smaller shops, force them to buy only from them and charge top dollar for cheap goods.”

  “How do they force them to buy?”

  “Run the gamut from getting them deep in hock to bombing their store. But I’ve never heard a breath of any of that about Antonio Branco.”

  “Honest as the Lottery?” Bell asked with a thin smile.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Harry, “about anybody making a business in New York. And he’s also a labor padrone. Stone masons and laborers for the Catskill Aqueduct.”

  “There’s a business ripe for abuse.”

  “They tend not to be choirboys,” Harry agreed. “On the other hand, he’s worked his way into the union’s good graces. Slick.”

  “But not the first,” said Bell. “D’Allesandro, with the subway excavators, started out a padrone.”

  “And now that Branco’s joined the White Hands, he’s a Van Dorn client.”

  “Unless he steps out of line,” said Bell, eye still locked on Banco LaCava.

  “They’re remarkable,” David LaCava told Antonio Branco over a glass of wine in Ghiottone’s Café, a saloon across Prince Street from Branco’s Grocery that served as one of Tammany Hall’s outposts in the Italian colony. Ghiottone—“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone, a popular bantamweight boxer in his youth—delivered voters, and Tammany paid off with city jobs in the Department of Street Cleaning and immunity from the police. Which allowed the saloon keeper to lord it over the neighborhood.

  LaCava told Branco how Isaac Bell’s Black Hand Squad was guarding his bank with men in disguise. “You would not look twice at them.”

  Branco said, “So our White Hand Society has chosen well.”

  “I’m convinced we’ve hired the best.”

  “But how long can they stand guard?”

  LaCava looked around the café, leaned closer, and whispered, “Guarding is only the first stage. Meanwhile, they observe and collect information. When they attack, the Black Hand won’t know what hit them.” He lowered his voice further. “I was talking to a New York Police Department detective—”

  “Petrosino?”

  “How did you know?”

  Branco shrugged. “Who else?”

  “Of course,” said LaCava, chastened by the subtle reminder that he was not the only business operator cultivating men with pull. “Petrosino says this is how the Van Dorns dismantled railroad gangs.”

  “What did Lieutenant Petrosino say about the White Hand hiring Van Dorns?”

  LaCava hesitated. “He says he understands. He knows he’s got plenty on his plate already. To be honest, I think he would have preferred we go to the police. But since we hired private detectives, he respects that we chose the Van Dorns.”

  “Valuable men,” said Branco. “We’re lucky to have them.”

  The next morning, Isaac Bell stationed all but two of his Black Hand shadows on Elizabeth Street before David LaCava filled his display window and opened his door for business. The exceptions were Wish Clarke, who still hadn’t shown up from nearby Philadelphia, and Helen Mills, whom Bell had sent back downtown to the printing district.

  She was a tall, slim brunette who looked older than her eighteen years, and despite their rigorous schedules and merciless deadlines, every printer, typesetter, and paper supplier she spoke to found time to inspect her samples and offer advice. Several, old enough to be her father, discovered they were free for lunch. She turned them down—inventing a Van Dorn Detective Agency rule that forbade it—and kept moving from shop to shop, pausing between each to write notes in th
e memo book Isaac had given her. The sooner she learned all there was to know about the paper, the sooner she could convince Isaac to let her join the rest of the squad undercover in the field.

  Then, out of the blue all of a sudden, after an ink salesman left her alone with a pimply office boy to answer a telephone call, the boy said, “Money.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The boy was even younger than she and barely came to her shoulder.

  “You could almost print two-dollar bills on that paper. If you had plates and ink.”

  “Have you seen this paper before?”

  “Not that same paper. But I’ve seen the type when they come for ink. The Boss sends them packing.”

  “Who?”

  “Fellows making green goods.”

  “‘Green goods’? What are you talking about?”

  “Passing the queer.”

  “Queer what?” asked Helen.

  The office boy stared at her like she was the biggest nincompoop in the city.

  Richie Cirillo swore he was sixteen, but he looked twelve.

  Isaac Bell tried to get a handle on how old the kid really was. “Why’d you leave school?”

  “They stuck me in steamer class.”

  “What is ‘steamer class’?”

  “For the dummies.”

  Harry Warren interpreted. “The teachers put Italian kids in the slow class. Their mothers work at home, finishing garments. The kids have to help. Sewing buttons and felling seams to midnight, then up at six for school—they’re not slow, they’re sleepy.”

  “I was told you’re an orphan, Richie.”

  “My mother got diphtheria. My father went back to Italy. But I really am sixteen, Mr. Bell.”

  “What is this disguise you came up with?” In the business districts, a youthful Van Dorn apprentice would masquerade, typically, as a newsboy. But there were no boys hawking the Sun, the Times, the Herald, or the American on Elizabeth Street, where those who were literate only read Italian. Instead of newspapers, Richie Cirillo had a sack of cloth slung over his skinny shoulder.

  “I’m a runner. Like I’m delivering dresses to be finished in the tenements and bringing them back to the factory when they’re done.”

  “O.K. You’ll do.”

  “Wow! Thank you, Mr. Bell.”

  “Keep your eyes open. One eye on the bank, the other on one of us, so you know who to run to if you get in trouble.”

  6

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  Francesca Kennedy was a dark-haired, blue-eyed Irish-Italian beauty. Her pale white face shone like a splash of sunlight through the confessional lattice that hid the priest. She knelt in a good coat with a fur collar and a modest scarf to cover her head.

  “How did you sin, my child?”

  “I stabbed a man to death.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “No, Father.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “One hundred percent. It was just me and him in the bed.”

  “Well done!”

  A rolled-up silver certificate passed through the lattice. Francesca Kennedy unrolled it and examined it closely.

  “It is not counterfeit,” the priest assured her.

  “You want we should hit the Van Dorn captain?” whispered Charlie Salata.

  Salata’s gang ran Black Hand letters, kidnapping, and protection, and he hadn’t gone to confession since he was a boy in Palermo, but kneeling in church still made him whisper. “Gold Head . . . Right? Show the Van Dorns who owns Elizabeth Street.”

  Silence. He ventured a glance at the lattice. It was dark inside the priest’s booth. All he could see through the perforations in the crisscross wooden screen were Stiletto Man eyes, empty as night, clouds mobbing the stars. Still silent, but for a staccato click-click-click-click-click. Was he spooked or did he really hear the man behind the screen opening and shutting a knife again and again and again?

  Salata tried again. “You prefer we hit the old dicks on the coal wagon? Spook their horse so he gallops into people and Van Dorns get blamed.” Again, Salata waited for a reaction. Precisely how his men should attack the Van Dorns guarding Banco LaCava would not ordinarily be worth troubling the Boss, but Salata recognized a delicate situation. The trick was to distract the Van Dorns so they could bomb Banco LaCava and get away with the money and at the same time scare the White Hand Society out of existence.

  “Maybe we hit the red-haired one, show they can’t trick us.”

  “Hit the kid.”

  “The mick?”

  “Not the mick. The Italian.”

  “But he’s—”

  “He’s what?”

  “Nothing.” Salata backpedaled instantly. The stiletto was not a pistol. You didn’t wave it around, making threats. You only pulled it to kill. And to be sure to kill, you had to pull it without warning. The narrow blade could fit through the grid and right in his eye.

  “Hit Richie Cirillo.”

  That the Boss had discovered, somehow, the Van Dorn apprentice’s name was a stark reminder that Charlie Salata’s weren’t his only eyes and ears on the street. “The kid is Italian. He will be an example for the neighborhood. Teach them never go to police. Never go to Van Dorns.”

  “How hard?”

  “So hard, people don’t forget.”

  Salata jumped from the kneeler and hurried out of the church.

  Ten minutes later, right on schedule, his place was taken by Ernesto Leone, a counterfeiter.

  “The plates are O.K.,” Leone reported. “The ink is better than before, but still so-so. The paper is the big problem. Like always.”

  “Have you tried to pass any?”

  “It’s not ready. Not good enough.”

  “Tell Salata to send someone to Pennsylvania. Buy stuff in general stores.”

  “I don’t think it will pass.”

  “And Ferri. Tell Ferri send someone upstate.”

  “It’s not good enough.”

  “It is costing money and earning none.”

  Leone said, “If there is trouble, Salata and Ferri will blame me.”

  “My patience is not endless, Ernesto Leone.”

  Leone scuttled from the church.

  Roberto Ferri, a smuggler, confessed next. “My men caught wind of a heroin shipment. The Irish.”

  “How big?”

  “Very big, I am told. From Mexico.”

  “Which Irish?”

  “West Side Wallopers. Hunt and McBean.”

  “Well done, Roberto!” Hunt and McBean were up and coming “graduates” of the Gopher Gang.

  Ferri said, “I hear there is a market for cocaine on the aqueduct job. The Negroes use it. But no market for heroin . . . If you know anyone on the aqueduct, maybe we could trade heroin for cocaine.”

  “You just get your hands on it. I’ll worry about the market.”

  “You know someone to sell it to?”

  “Good-bye, Ferri.”

  Ferri lit his customary candle on his way out of the church.

  Antonio Branco waited in the priest’s side of the confessional, his fingers busy as a clockwork as he practiced opening and closing his pocket knife. His knee had stiffened up, cramped in the booth. After Ferri left, he limped to the poor box and stuffed fifty dollars into it, “confessional rent” for the priests he had tamed. A flight of stone steps led down to the catacomb. Before he hit the bottom step, he had worked out the kink.

  A low-ceilinged passage ran between the mortuary vaults under the church. He used a key to enter the crypt at the end. He locked the heavy door behind him, squeezed between stacks of caskets, unlocked a door hidden in the back, and stepped through a massive masonry foundation wall into a damp tunnel. The tunnel led under the church’s graveyard a
nd through another door into the musty basement of a tenement. Repeatedly unlocking and relocking doors, he crossed under three similar buildings, cellar to cellar to cellar. The last door was concealed in the back of a walk-in safe, heaped with cash and weapons. Closing it behind him, he exited the safe into a clean, dry cellar, passed by a room with an empty iron cell that looked like a police lockup but for the soundproof walls and ceiling, unlocked a final oak door, and climbed the stairs into the kitchen in the back of his grocery.

  “Where’s Gold Head?”

  “I don’t see him.”

  The detective’s spot at the Kips Bay bar was empty.

  “Where’s the coal dicks?”

  Their wagon was gone. So was Red-haired’s pushcart of old clothes.

  “Who’s that?” A drunk was sprawled beside the Kips Bay stoop.

  Charlie Salata crossed the street and kicked him in the ribs. The drunk groaned and threw up, just missing Salata’s shoes. Salata jumped back, and looked up and down the street for the twentieth time. Where in hell were the Van Dorns? Elizabeth between Houston and Prince was the most crowded block in the city. Five thousand people lived in the tenements and today it looked like most were on the sidewalk.

  “No Van Dorns? Let’s do it.”

  But still Salata hesitated. It felt like a setup.

  “False money,” Helen Mills reported to Isaac Bell.

  The tall detective was combing black shoe polish through his hair in the back of a horse-drawn silver-vault van parked at Washington Square nine blocks from Elizabeth Street. Helen had helped him and Archie on the Assassin case last year, and Bell regarded both her and her father as friends. Raised as an Army child, she had a refined sense of rank and protocol and had concluded she would address him as “Mr. Bell” on the job.

  “Counterfeiters passing the queer?”

  Her eyes were bright with excitement, which Bell did not want to damp down even as he explained why it was unlikely. “Good job, Helen. If the extortionists are also counterfeiters, we’ll have stumbled upon something rather unusual.”