“Owney,” says Eddie Egan, “didja see it?” Eddie lived on Tenth across 30th Street from us and was becoming my best friend. He was a tall, strong kid who was already wearing one of his Da’s hand-me-down felt hats, although he never went to school; instead he hung around the rail yards on the west side of Tenth, trying to snatch what he could and either eat it, use it or sell it, and lately he had been taking me along with him because Eddie liked to have some help deciding which was which.
“Wha’ happened?” says I, innocent as hell.
“Somebody conked Moore,” pipes up Billy Tammany, whose father had a political job downtown, just like his name promised; I never did find out if he was related to Tammany Hall in any meaningful way other than through nomenclature, but everybody figured he was, which was just as good. Every time I saw him, no matter the season, he was wearing the same clothes, which was a gabardine suit with a real collar and long pants; they made me ashamed of my mean knee pants, although my cap was always the best one I could steal. I was just starting to get friendly with Billy, and if he played his cards right, I would probably make him part of my gang, because already back then I knew I would need mugs like him, who were all heart and no head. “Said his name was the Killer.” I could feel a shiver of pride run down my spine.
“About time somebody took care of that Moore punk, him what’s always stealing from the old ladies, the fook,” said Chick Hyland. Chick lived in the same building as Eddie, but Chick was a couple of years older than the rest of us and didn’t seem either to work or go to school, so I had him pegged for a gangster for sure. Hyland was almost as big as Branagan although he hadn’t yet filled out, the way he did later. I heard Chick hung around with the Gophers, and I was hoping I heard right.
“We’ve had our eye on him,” continued Chick, which I took to mean that they was scouting Moore for membership, but any yertz who would let himself get clobbered like that was obviously not much of a candidate for the gang and so I figured that I had just killed two birds with one pipe: Fats out of the Madden family’s hair and out of the Gophers—and me, if I played my cards right, in like Flynn. “But if there’s any stealin’ going to be going on around here, it’s us what’ll do it, not this oaf.” Chick whistled softly. “A nice piece of work, whoever done this. Could use a fella like him.”
Branagan was making his way through the crowd, trying to shoo the people back onto the sidewalks to let the fire wagon with Moore on it get past and on to hospital.
“How is he?” I asks, my mouth full of butter.
“He’ll live,” says Branagan, brushing past us, “but he’ll have a hell of a shiner. Which is nothing compared to what that punk what did it’ll get when I catch up with him.”
“You and who else?” says I behind his back.
Branagan stopped and turned back to glare at us. “Who said that?” He walked over to us, big as life, waving his nightstick. “Who among you little girls would have the guts to say that to my face? You, Hyland? I hear you’re pretty tough.” But Chick didn’t say nothing, which disappointed me a little, especially with Branagan’s booze breath blowing in his pan. Neither did Eddie or Billy, which I guess left it up to me.
“That’s for us to know and you to find out, bull,” says I.
“Oh, a tough guy,” laughed Branagan. I think he was relieved that it wasn’t Chick who was giving him the back talk, but me, the littlest fella present; I was so small he didn’t even bother to ask my name. “A banty little rooster, aren’t you, boyo?” says Branagan, whisking off my cap and ruffling my hair. The whiff of tiger sweat on his breath was so strong I wouldn’t need a drink for a month. “Why don’t you go home to your milk and cookies, sonny boy?”
“Why don’t you go to hell?” says I quietly.
That did it. Branagan straightened up, his eyes flashing above his dirty mustache. He swatted me on the bum with his billy club, hard. “Let me tell you something, buster,” he said, but before he could get another word out of his gob and across his food-flecked handlebar, Chick pipes up.
“Hey, watch it, why don’t ya, ya big lug, go pick on somebody your own size, fer cryin’ out loud.”
There they stood, Hyland and Branagan, toe-to-toe, nose-to-paddy-nose, and I guess I was half expectin’ the rounder to bring his billy down on Chick’s bean, and I’ll bet Chick was betting even more than I was. But maybe in some dim recess of his idea-pot Branagan realized that was exactly what Chick wanted, and the rest of us too, and he wasn’t about to give any of us the satisfaction.
He jammed his stick back into his belt. “The next time I lay me eyes on you, if you’re up to no good, why then you’re going to get what’s coming to ya.” He glared at all of us and then stalked away.
I could feel the lads staring at me, particularly Chick. “That’s tellin’ that copper,” he said, and kicked some dirt my way.
“It was you what told him,” I replied.
“I was just backin’ you up. You’da done the same.”
“Thanks.”
“Wasn’t you scared?” asks Billy.
“Nah,” says I. “Coppers is nothin’.”
“Who’re you anyway?” asks Chick.
“That’s Owney,” says helpful Eddie.
“Owney Madden,” I said, offering my hand.
“Pleased to meet ya,” says Chick, looking me over like I was a full-fledged rooster instead of a peahen. I wasn’t no cock of the walk then, but I played bigger than my size, which was the way we did things. “And what have you got to say for yourself, Mr. Owney Madden?”
The crowd was dispersing now, and I could see Mrs. Moore sitting on the stoop, still keening, although it wasn’t like her boy was dead or nothing, just learning a little lesson, courtesy of me.
I made up my mind fast and I acted on it. I was going to be twelve at Christmastime. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen now, and me I always believed in making things happen rather than waiting around. “My friends call me the Killer.” I jerked my head over to where Fats had fallen. “So will he when he gets back, but he won’t be no friend.” The pat on the back I got from Chick was the biggest thrill of my life up to that point.
As I gave Ma back most of her money, I told her I had been saving it up for a month by working after school at Ginsberg’s store, and what choice did she have except to believe me? May was looking at me with her Sphinx-like gaze, while Marty kept his mouth shut, which was a good thing for him, because what he knowed coulda killed him. Ma’s eyes were filling with tears, and I only wished she could have been as proud of me at that moment as I was of myself the next day when Chick asked, real casual-like, if I was after meeting a few of the Gophers.
Chapter Three
Naturally my brother, Marty, tried to beat me to the punch as far as the gangster life was concerned.
The dumb cluck had got himself arrested the day after April Fool’s Day, 1903, which was the spring after we’d arrived in New York, on the charge of bein’ an “incorrigible,” which got him remanded for a couple of months to the New York Catholic Protectory, Holy Mother Church’s alternative to a juvy pen like Elmira upstate. It was a minor attempted half-arsed lush roll of some toff that merited Marty this distinction. Under ordinary circumstances it wouldn’ta got more than a passing nod or mere mention in our neighborhood, but for Ma you woulda thought he had desecrated the Holy Sepulchre itself. So Marty was sent away for a short stretch, which meant I had to look after my sister.
“Is Marty bad?” she asked me one afternoon. We were up on the roof, as usual, her bein’ after school and me having played my favorite sport of hooky.
“No worse than the rest of us.”
“How’s he gonna turn out?” she asked.
“Fair to middlin’,” I replied.
“How come?”
“He’s dumb.”
“That’s cruel.”
“That’s the truth.”
About that point old Wagner came up to take the air and that was the end of our conversa
tion. Wagner was the landlord, who’d made a small pile as the master brewer at Bernheimer and Schwartz, way up on Amsterdam Avenue, and had more or less retired to keep an eye on his real estate investment.
“You schildren should be at your homework,” he said. Like most Germans, Wagner hated kids.
“Ah, shaddup,” I said.
“You’re right, Mr. Wagner,” said May, pulling me away.
The Kitchen wasn’t exclusively a paddy province. There was plenty of Italians, Germans and what have yous there as well: the Reillys, the Brancusis and the landlord Wagners all lived in our building, in various states of familial disrepair. Wagner’s German accent was as thick as a piece of the sausage he was always chewing on. Mr. Brancusi appeared to be deceased, because none of us had ever laid eyes on him and Mrs. Brancusi went around wearing mourning black all the day long; there was rumors that the Black Hand had disappeared him for something or other, but there was always rumors about the Mano Nero whenever a wop vanished. Most likely he just got sick of the sight of his fat signora and either hightailed it back to Sicily or took up with one of the flashing-eyed girls he could have met at the Haymarket in Satan’s Circus, over on Sixth. As for Mr. Reilly, he was that rarity in our neighborhood, a good, hardworking man—a day laborer who always seemed busy either tearing something down or building something up, oftentimes on the same spot, and that’s New York for you.
But if you wanted to be a real gangster, there was only one choice, and that was to be a Gopher, if they’d have you. There’d been gangs in the city since before the riots of ’63 and God knows there’d been plenty of them after, most of them Irish, but of all the gangs of New York, it was the Gophers who were the most feared, the most envied and the most desired.
The Gophers were so called because their hideouts were to be found in basements and cellars across the Kitchen, but everybody pronounced the name “Goofers,” which they certainly were not. The Gophers were the meanest gang in New York, meaner even than the Five Pointers and the Eastmans, and they could put five hundred lads on the street inside of an hour, every one of them expert in the use of the pipe, the blackjack (which we called a Bessie) and the slungshot, which the old-timers called a Neddy and what the kids today call a slingshot. If you were Irish and were living in the Kitchen, or even on the fringes of the Kitchen, the Gophers was what you wanted to be when either you hadn’t quite grown up or weren’t quite expecting to, since it was the rare Gopher who managed to attain his twenty-fifth birthday in the vertical position.
Even the Gopher girls was tough. They called themselves the Battle Row Ladies’ Social and Athletic Club because their clubhouse was on 39th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, which was known to all and sundry as Battle Row, but everybody else called them the Lady Gophers, and they’d go into action with the boys, just as good at hurling a brick or a bottle from a rooftop as any man. There was an abattoir at the end of the street, which added to the pungency.
I’d been hearing about the Gophers from the day we got off the boat. Unless you was deaf, dumb and blind, you couldn’t help but hear about the Gophers, for they was feared by everybody and that went double for the bulls. The Gophers were the lords of the Kitchen in those days, from 14th Street all the way up to 42nd and beyond, and as I lay in bed and thought about how life would improve when I became one of them, I dreamed of the day when I would not only be chief of the Gophers but the duke of the whole damn West Side, which to me was pretty much the whole world. For already then I was planning how I was going to take over the gang, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s you have to start planning early for anything you really want. With a little luck and a lot of plans, a man can go far and I was sure I had both.
The Gophers was loosely allied to a number of smaller gangs in the area, including the Gorillas, the Rhodes Gang and the Parlor Mob, who lurked to our south, down around 17th Street, where Thirteenth Avenue split off from Eleventh, until somebody got superstitious and the city just made it part of Twelfth. Reinforcements came in handy whenever we were doing battle with the Hudson Dusters, who controlled the turf down the Village way, south of 14th. The Dusters didn’t get their name for any bravery or suchlike, but because they were dusted off their noggins with white powder when they went into battle, which as far as us in the Kitchen were concerned was the chicken’s way, since in our estimation beer was both a faster and cheaper way to achieve the same effect, which was to smash the noodle of whichever sonofabitch was opposing you, man-to-man, across the field of battle.
The Jewish and Italian gangs was mostly on the East Side, so we didn’t see much of them, although about them we heard plenty. Especially about Monk Eastman, the toughest Jew in New York and the leader of the Eastmans, and about his enemy, Paul Kelly, the king of the Five Pointers, who took a mick name but was really an Italian named Paolo Vacarelli who could spout Dante at the drop of a skimmer.
As I’ve said, the Gophers and the Dusters was mostly Irish, but I don’t want you to get the idea that the Irish had a monopoly on criminality. Just about every group but the Germans had its own gang, including the Negroes, the Italians and the Jews. There were still colored gangs in the Kitchen then, mostly up Little Africa way, over on Eighth and on up to San Juan Hill in the 50s, but they were never the same after the big dustup of 1900, when the Irish gangs and the cops teamed up to beat every woolly head silly, after which the blacks started moving up to Harlem, where they ran into the Irish all over again, only this time they licked them good.
The Jews in our neighborhood were quiet types like Ginsberg whose kids would scoot home as quick as they could after school so as not to get clobbered for killing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, while the Italians still lacked the numbers to cause trouble. Why the Germans didn’t have a gang of their own was a mystery to everybody, except that back then the Germans were a peaceable sort who talked funny, went to church regular, kept their windows washed and fresh flowers in the flower boxes nine months of the year. You could push them around easy then, not like later.
Now, what the Gophers did mostly was two things: steal and fight with the cops, both of which suited me just fine. There wasn’t a peddler, horse cart or New York Central Railroad car on the West Side that was safe from the Gophers, and if and when any of the Metropolitans tried to stop them, a battle royal would ensue, in which the Gophers were usually victorious. You should have seen it back then: bottles, flowerpots, bricks and pipes raining from every rooftop down on the heads of the police, while down on the street the two sides were exchanging body blows and, occasionally, gunshots. Even after Teddy Roosevelt had come and gone, the cops were still as much criminals as any Gopher, and so the fights between them could really be seen as just another gang war, fought as usual over boodle, turf and women. Frankly I couldn’t think of anything worth fighting for more.
The other principal occupation of the gangs involved politics, something lost on me at first, but which I came to see later in life as the primary object of all worthy gangland activity. For it seemed that there couldn’t be no election without the services of various gangs across the city being enlisted, in order to make sure that the voting men in their district voted in correct and orderly fashion, that is to say for the candidate they were told or paid to vote for. The element of surprise was always unwelcome in a municipal election, since political fortunes rose and fell on predictability.
Chick took me round the summer clubhouse. By summer clubhouse I mean a place under the West Side docks overlooking the North River, which is where the Gophers conducted their business during clement weather. This being a time of relative peace and tranquillity among the various chieftains and subchiefs of both the Gophers and the Dusters, whose shifting alliances were harder to follow than the comings and goings of Democrats and goo-goos down at City Hall, most everybody was in attendance on the day I was presented at court.
The names I’m about to reel off may be hard to believe. It seems impossible that there could be so much
talent gathered in one place at the same moment, but so it was during the glorious Indian summer of ought-three. It seemed to my young mind that every famous gangster on the West Side was there, surrounded by henchmen, drabs, mabs, molls, gonophs and what have you. But if you want to know the truth, the first thing that caught my eye wasn’t One Lung Curran, sitting like a pasha in his harem, nor the spooky mug of Happy Jack Mulraney, nor even the fearsome Razor Riley, but—a dame. She was a little older than me, but not by so much as would make a difference, and she had just about the prettiest set of ankles I’d seen on a West Side girl yet, not counting my own sister of course.
I gave Chick a shot in the ribs and a stage whisper. “Who’s the tomato?”
He looked and saw the object of my interest. “Forget it. She’s already been plucked. More than once, if I ain’t losing my hearing.”
“Yeah but—”
“Yeah but nothin’,” said Chick. “Owney Madden—say hi to Mr. Curran.”
I’d been so struck by the dame that I’d barely noticed we was standing, Chick and I, right in front of the great man his own good self, setting there amid what looked at first glance to be a sea of New York City coppers.
Uniforms were everywhere. Roundsman’s tunics, caps, belts, daysticks, even a pair of shoes or two. All of which adorned not the beefy bodies of the bulls who sometimes patrolled our neighborhood when they were dutch enough to screw up the courage to walk our streets, but the lissome bodies of young lasses, or lasses who were still trying to pretend they were young, each of them sporting some item of a copper’s costume, and I must say it did look fetching on them.
And All the Saints Page 3
