The train went to New Lots Avenue station in the East New York section, which is close to Kennedy Airport. Angela wedged into the car and rode with a musty-smelling workman’s jacket pushing into her face. The train made every stop and people wedged their shoulders to get out each time. Some of them got stuck in the doors while the doors were closing, and the conductor had to reopen the doors and try to close them again. At Kingston Throop Station a man stood with his shoulder blocking the doors. He wouldn’t move. The train did not move while the door was still partially open. After what seemed like five minutes, the conductor walked down and pushed the man’s shoulder into the car so the doors would close. The conductor walked back to his position between cars and pressed a buzzer. The train started slowly.
Angela came up onto the street at New Lots Avenue at 6:40 p.m. There were three cabs sitting at the corner. The drive to Kennedy took twenty minutes.
“What airline?” the driver said as he came into the maze of purple and blue and winking yellow lights of the terminal section.
The first terminal building handling overseas flights was the Pan American. Angela got out into the glare of lights and uniformed baggage-handlers and trim blond passenger aides. She ran into the crowded terminal and started one way and she saw the information sign and doubled back. A man in line in front of her wanted information on a flight to Karachi. The girl behind the counter patiently went through folders. Another girl was free and she nodded to Angela.
“Rome?” the girl said. “Flight 101 departing at 8:30 p.m.”
Angela gave her the name. She picked up a white telephone and dialed a number.
“Hello, on flight 101. Passenger Trantino, Mario. Is he on the list? Hmmmmm. All right.”
She put down the phone. “No, he isn’t. Are you sure he was on this flight?”
“No, I’m not,” Angela said.
“Alitalia has a 7:40.”
Angela ran out of the terminal and down the circular driveway. She ran over a plot of dead grass and onto the driveway of the next terminal and then onto the long, crowded, brightly lit sidewalk running in front of the international terminal. The Alitalia terminal was halfway down the long building.
“Trantino?” the clerk said. He looked at a typewritten sheet. He looked up at Angela.
“Just a moment,” he said. The clerk stepped away from the counter and went through a door.
One of the United States Naturalization and Immigration agents sitting with Mario got up and answered the knocking on the door to the cinderblock office.
“Yeah?” he said to the clerk.
The clerk whispered to the agent.
The agent shook his head. “Fuck that,” he said. “No.”
The door shut and the clerk came back into the space behind the counters. He was walking over to Angela when a man at a desk reached for his arm and handed him the phone. The clerk took the phone and began talking over it. He talked for minutes. People were pushing into the lobby, and a family escorting a priest wedged past Angela to the counter. When the clerk got off the phone and came back to the counter he had his head down and he was looking for something and a man in the family was pushing the priest’s airline ticket at the clerk and the pink pages were flapping in the light and the loudspeaker called for boarding and people were pushing and Angela was trying to step through and now she spat out a word and slashed at the crowd with her hands. People looked at her in surprise and stepped away.
The clerk bent over the counter. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I got so busy all of a sudden.” He paused. “Why don’t you go up to the observation deck? It is straight up the stairs here.” He glanced up at the clock. “Don’t say I said anything.”
The observation deck at Kennedy Airport is one flight over the planes. There is a railing on it and you can lean over the railing and look down at the people walking onto the plane and call to them and wave to them. It is crowded in the summer, but few people stand on it in the winter. They say good-by inside the terminals.
Angela was the only person on the observation deck over the green-striped Alitalia plane. She stood with her hands gripping the railing and her eyes burning on the foot of the staircase leading to the plane. A mechanic in white coveralls and a blue baseball cap walked down the staircase. An airlines official in a navy-blue uniform and white hat stood at the foot of the ramp. A slow whine came from one of the engines. A blue tractor drove away from the nose of the plane, pulling empty baggage carts with it. Another whine started in another engine. The sound was very loud now.
Very quickly, with two men flanking him, Mario walked out into the whine. The two men held him by the elbows. Mario trotted up the steps and he was at the top and through the doorway and into the lighted cabin. The two men with him stood in the doorway for a moment. They stepped back and the airlines man in the uniform came up the steps and tugged on the plane door and slammed it shut.
The plane was parked at an angle to the observation deck so that when your eye tried to sweep along the egg-shaped lighted windows, the windows seemed to run together. Angela was trying to see into each window, and her eyes were smarting and she could not see Mario, and the whine of all four engines became loud and stabbed into her ears. Her hair began to blow in the kerosene fumes of the jet exhaust. The engines made more noise and her hair was whipping and the bottom of her coat was blowing and the plane was moving and Angela Palumbo put her hands over her ears and screamed into the noise of the plane and the fumes whipping into her and the lights and the night beyond them.
Two months later, after considerable legal maneuvering, the Kid Sally Palumbo mob, in toto, agreed to plead guilty to charges of conspiring to kill approximately every citizen in the borough of Brooklyn. For this chance to get sixty hoodlums off the street without the expense of a trial, the state agreed to one-year sentences for all. A year does not sound like a lot in print, but it is a very long time in jail. All authorities agreed it would be long enough to end the great gang war and take much of the ambition for any future trouble out of nearly all the Palumbo gang members.
There was only one small hitch to the deal. Just before sentencing, with all sixty crowded in front of the bench, Kid Sally Palumbo looked around and saw his sister and grandmother. He whispered to the lawyer. The lawyer asked for a very short recess before sentencing. Kid Sally waved to his sister and she came up to the railing and he called out something to her. She looked up at the ceiling. Her lips moved in a short prayer. She ducked out of the courtroom. She returned in five minutes, holding a paper bag from the chain drugstore down the block from the court building.
“What’s that you got there?” a court attendant said.
“He forgot a toothbrush,” she said.
At 11:30 a.m., out in Beachhaven, Long Island, Mrs. Baccala started the car. When the car did not blow up from a bomb, Baccala got up from the kitchen floor and walked out into the driveway, patted Mrs. Baccala on the head as she came out of the car, got in, and backed down the driveway to start another day as a major American organized-crime overlord.
____________________________
[1] “You look like you have sex with your mother.”
[2] “Your sister must be afraid of you at night.”
[3] “You fat pig.”
A Biography of Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and one of the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the New York Daily News and Newsday.
Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the Long Island Press. He got his first column in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point o
f view of the President’s gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.
In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailer’s mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed,” referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.
In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published Sunny Jim (1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.
Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the New York Daily News, then at Newsday. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 1970s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.
Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin’s years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his exposé on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin continued writing books, producing nearly two dozen throughout his life. These include collections of his best columns titled The World of Jimmy Breslin (1969) and The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1988). He passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight.
Breslin as a young man with his sister Diedre.
Breslin writing at home in Forest Hills, Queens.
Breslin chats with Robert F. Kennedy, who was campaigning in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential race.
Breslin (right) and columnist Red Smith both writing for the New York Herald Tribune during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.
Breslin in Ireland in 1971, while writing World Without End, Amen.
Breslin with Bella Abzug, a New York congresswoman and social activist.
Letters from David Berkowitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, delivered to Breslin at the New York Daily News offices. Son of Sam sent letters to Breslin during his killing spree in New York City in the summer of 1977. These letters were later used in the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam (2008).
Breslin with grandson Dillon Breslin in June 1980.
Breslin in the New York Daily News offices with publisher Jim Hogue (left) and editor Gil Spencer (right) after the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.
Breslin (far left) with the crew of his television show, Jimmy Breslin’s People, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill (fourth from right) in 1986.
The Breslin family in 1989.
Breslin with columnists David Anderson (left) and Murray Kempton (right) at a book party for Damon Runyon: A Life in New York City, 1991.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1969, renewed 1997 by Jimmy Breslin
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-4534-7
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
JIMMY BRESLIN
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Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight Page 23
