I pointed across the avenue, at the Central Yards, as I outlined my plan. Over the past few months I had noticed the Centrals taking on extra men as guards. As I mentioned before, these men was mostly poor drunks, fathers of some of the lads in the neighborhood to be exact, probably even the paters of some of the members of the gang, although the lads would be ashamed to admit it, and first I had figured this was simply the Tiger’s way of finding jobs for the poor harps who voted right but drank wrong. But when more and more of them kept coming—not just Das now, but young men full of fight—I figured something else was up. So I’d sent my little pal Georgie Ranft over to investigate.
Georgie was half-pretzel, half-spaghetti, about four years younger than me, who lived with his family on 41st between Ninth and Tenth. There were ten kids in the Ranft family, nine boys and one girl. I never did learn the rest of their names. Georgie was the oldest. His father was one of those stern krauts who liked to use a strap, so Georgie spent most of his time hanging out with me. Maybe it was because we were both about the same size, maybe it was because he liked me. Whatever the case, whatever I did, so did little Georgie.
I gotta say one thing for Georgie. He wasn’t much of a gangster, but that boy had a way with dames that had to be seen to be believed. There wasn’t a female of age between Eighth and Tenth Avenues who wouldn’t have willingly dropped her drawers for little Georgie. It was like some kind of magic spell or somethin’, the effect he had on women. As I was no slouch in the broads department myself, I made a mental note that perhaps little Georgie could be helpful if, during a run of bad luck or a disfigurin’ accident or something, I was in need of some assistance.
Georgie also had one advantage that I didn’t have, namely, no juvenile arrest record and no reputation in the neighborhood as an incorrigible. Everybody knew that George Ranft wanted to be a gangster in the worst way, but for some reason this was looked upon as a charming foible rather than a lust for a pact with the devil, and so Georgie was able to have it both ways, except at home, where his father beat him unmercifully whenever he returned late from one of our gang meetings, which was often.
It seems that the Centrals had had it up to their keisters with the depredations of us Gophers and had decided to smash our gang once and for all. For the bait, they was countin’ on our being interested in a particularly peachy shipment that was coming into the city from some rich fella’s estate upstate. To hear Georgie tell it, there’d be riches that woulda made a king blush, and every one of them, I knew, ill gotten and thus fair game for the likes of us. Packed up neat and ready to ship out.
The bait set, the Centrals were planning to meet the next Gopher raid with a force three times as large as ever before, and for the gang to stage a raid would be the height of folly. So here was my plan…
“You bet I do, Goo Goo. Let’s take a walk over the rail yards. Somethin’ there I wants to show ya.”
Chapter Seventeen
Before I get to describing what happened, it’s incumbent upon my own good self to tell you what transpired a little earlier, and that would be my little visit to G. W. Plunkitt down the Wigwam. I know I shoulda told you this before, but you have to be in the dark, like Goo Goo, to fully appreciate what I was up to.
I’d gone looking for Plunkitt down at City Hall. Hiram was long gone from the shoeshine stand but other colored boys had taken his place, well mannered and eager to please. I grabbed a shine from one of them and tipped him plenty, because if there was one way I had already parted company from the shanty Irish, it was that I was a damn good tipper, even when I didn’t have to be. A man what stiffs a shine or a serving girl, at least if they’re tryin’ and even if they ain’t very good, why he ain’t much of a man in my book.
Inside, they told me GWP was up at the Wigwam. There was plenty of ways to get uptown back then, more than today: You could go by streetcar or el or horse or horseless carriage. You could also go by the new Interborough Rapid Transit, if it was going where you was going. The only problem was, with all the competition in the streets, you couldn’t go anywhere very quickly by conveyance, which is why I was aboard shank’s mare.
I picked my way carefully through what was left of the Five Points. Nothing had been the same here since the big fight between Kelly’s gang and the forces of Monk; so close to City Hall it was that whenever one of the damn reform mayors got in, they was always after making noise about cleanin’ it up or tearin’ it down or simply removing the whole bloody thing out, root and branch. Paradise Square had turned into a little park where the few decent people in the neighborhood could go (I think they called it Mulberry Bend Park, or maybe Columbus), and many of the old tenements had been torn down.
I jigged my way up the Bowery and cut over to Chrystie Street heading north and admiring the storefronts along the way. But it wasn’t only the storefronts that tempted you; everywhere you looked, there was advertisements for this, that and the other thing. I sometimes almost wished Ma hadn’t taught me to read, because every time you turned around there was a big sign trying to sell you something, until it got so’s you’d feel guilty about not having any interest in having the good people at Floyd Grant & Co. buying and selling your furniture, or drinking C&C ginger ale for fifteen cents the split, or staying at the Hotel Cadillac, or admiring the wares of E. Booss and Bros. Furriers. It was still something of a wonderland to me, this great City of New York, and I loved it the way I loved my mother and my brother and my sister. It was the place I shoulda been born in, to do the things I was born to do.
I made Houston Street in less than half an hour. The el went rumbling over my head as I crossed into Kleindeutschland, or what was left of it after the General Slocum disaster and a thousand people went down the drain. A lot of the kraut families had lost a relative or two when the steamboat burned and sank in the East River a few years earlier, and many of them had already moved out. As I passed what had been a Lutheran church, I noticed some Jews in their payes and their beanies scooting in and out of the building, and some heebie-jeebie writing on the wall. That was the thing about New York neighborhoods: the neighbors was always changing. Church today, shul tomorrow, and the Tiger standing there with a great big grin on its face, ready to greet and eat every one.
A few minutes later I was in front of the Wigwam. Braves in cloth caps and sachems in high-button waistcoats and bowler hats came and went, bustling, for sure somebody had to run the city, and it wasn’t going to happen with a dope like Gaynor in City Hall, so it fell to Charlie Murphy and his boy, Big Tim Sullivan, who although in his dotage was even then collecting a paycheck from the suckers as a state senator, the better to keep an eye on the mischief in Albany.
Monk may have been on the outs with the Tiger, but himself still had a soft spot for me. And so the next thing you knew, there was I, face-to-face with the great man. As I hoped, Jimmy Hines was there with him.
“They’ll jig tomorrow sunset, after the lockdown,” I was saying.
“Sure about that?” asked Hines, pursing his lips and landing one square in a brass spittoon. I always admired the way that lad could spit.
“As a bishop layin’ a bet at Belmont.”
P. and Hines looked at each other, real pleased. “So how come you’re rattin’?” said Jimmy.
Now, if there’s one word that’s sure to provoke the cutting off of an ear, or the gouging out of a eyeball, it’s “rat.” Words don’t come no dirtier than that. The way most of the gangsters saw it, we had enough rats around us as it was, crawling through our clubhouses and scurrying across our floors while we slept, so the last thing we needed was the two-legged variety.
But what’s worse, a rat meant you couldn’t trust nobody. And how was New York supposed to function without trust? The way I saw it, the entire town was perched like a million angels on the head of a pin, and the pinhead was trust. New York City in them days was a magical place, where barbers and bootblacks could become specialists in roadwork, and sure didn’t everyone think the better of them if the
y did their road inspectin’ from the comfort of their parlor chairs and a couple of pints to the good already. Where a lad whose only professional interest in oysters and shellfish came in the eating of ’em could become head of the Fisheries Department of New York State. Where every man, no matter how humble his trade, could be a political scientist of the first order so long as he was a Democrat.
“It ain’t rattin’ to rat on a rat.” I looked G.W. right in the kisser. “Didn’t you tell me that yourself?”
Plunkitt picked up a seegar. “Too-shay,” says he. “Indeed I did. But I do believe that was in the general context of an electoral contest, when the livelihood of many a man is riding on the outcome. Ain’t that right, Mr. Hines?”
Jimmy had already struck tinder and was proffering same to G.W., who sucked in the flame through his weed like it was the breath of life itself. Himself took a few puffs. “But this is different. This ain’t politics.”
I stood up on my hind legs. “That’s where you’re wrong, sir,” says I. “Unless the theft of Boss Croker’s own personal goods ain’t political.”
The magic name of Croker got everyone’s attention toot-sweet. Richard Croker, a Dublin man, had been the grand sachem of all sachems, until the meddling Lexow Committee queered the pitch for everybody by criminalizing the honest graft that had made men like the Boss and G.W. exemplary success stories. Tammany’s man lost the election in ’95, and then again in ’01, at which point the Boss quit the ungrateful town and returned to Ireland to enjoy the fruits of his public service. Even at a distance of some several thousand miles, however, it wasn’t good for life nor limb to be stealin’ from Boss Croker, as any fool could plainly see, although not Goo Goo Knox, thank God.
“I mean, after all the Boss done for the Gophers, it just don’t seem fair that a bunch of glorified gonophs like Goo Goo Knox and Newburgh Gallagher should swipe it,” I pointed out.
Hines quit spitting and spoke up. “The Boss is expecting a shipment of…furnishings…from his place in the Adirondacks over to Glencairn.” Hines looked at me to see if I understood. “His horse farm in Ireland.”
“And should they somehow go missing…,” muttered G.W. He wandered over to one of his windows and smoked for a while in silence. Most of his windows commanded 14th, from Third Avenue all the way west, but this group looked both north and west, toward the river and, in the distance, Central Park.
“The Boss always said Charter’d be the ruination of New York,” he mused. “That once we let them hayseeds from Brooklyn into the workings of our fair city, well, then, I got two words for you: Seth Low. A Brooklyn Republican become mayor of the consolidated City of New York, if you please. Come here, Mr. Madden.”
Still in his mouth, the seegar pointed the way north. “Ever been to Central Park?”
I couldn’t say as how I had been, not properly, and so I didn’t.
“You got just as much right to be there as any of Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. Nice place now. Grass, trees and such. Not when G.W. was born. Nothing but pigs and Irishmen in a shantytown of shite, and it was damn hard to distinguish between ’em.”
He glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was following. “Pigs and Irishmen, sir,” I said.
“Porkers and paddies indeed, and make no mistake—there wasn’t a one of them high-and-mighty episcopals and presbyters who bothered to make the distinction. We thought we was coming to a new land, and we was, except that they got here first.”
“We’re here now,” said Hines. “Whether they fookin’ like it or not.”
Plunkitt turned on Jimmy. “Watch yer mout’, boy,” says he. “It don’t prove nothin’ when a man what ain’t no stevedore starts into talkin’ like one.”
I shot Jimmy a glance but he was too embarrassed to look my way.
“Along come Tammany,” continued Plunkitt like there’d been no interruption. “Tweed, Honest John Kelly, the Boss. To give the little fella a chance, when no one else would even give ’im the time of day. Went to their christenings and their funerals and their bar mitzvahs, celebrated with ’em, married ’em, buried ’em without regard to whether they was dago or sheeny or chink, spic, mick or even nigger.”
“Didn’t matter a bit,” said Jimmy, learning.
“Nor a whit, jot or tittle,” continues Plunkitt, fully declamatory. “Sure, there’s no crime so great as ingratitude in politics, and don’t the great unwashed know it. Them morning-glory goos-goos and reformers always forget that, and aren’t they surprised when, after a term’s flirtation or two, the voters throwed ’em out on their arse and put a good solid Tammany man back in City Hall, the way God in His wisdom’s ordained it. Why? Because we care about people here at the Wigwam—and the people care about us. And if one or two of us sees an advantage to do well here or there by doin’ good—well, I ask you, where’s the harm?”
That was a question I sure didn’t have an answer to then, and still don’t.
“It’s a dunkel day when rats like the Gophers stoop so low as to take from him what give ’em everything they got,” Plunkitt perorated, turning to Jimmy. “Lad, inform the Centrals this very hour. Have ’em throw enough coppers around them cars to discourage the Turks from the sack of Constantinople.”
Hines jumped up and headed out, leaving me alone with the great man. Plunkitt looked me up and down, cap to buttons. He seemed to like what he saw because he snapped open his humidor and produced two big fat stogies, one of which he handed over to my own good self.
“What are you expecting from all this mischief, in the way of emolument?” he asked, offering me a light.
“A chance to pick up the pieces,” I said.
Chapter Eighteen
So we set out, the whole brain trust, me and Goo Goo, Newburgh Gallagher and Marty Brennan and twenty or so Gophers, plus my lads Art Biedler and Hoppo McArdle and Billy Tammany and Eddie Egan and Chick Hyland, all strolling over to the rail yards west of Tenth just as pretty as you please, like tourists on a sight-seein’ expedition, except that I would estimate that the amount of weaponry we was carrying that day was nigh enough to fight a small European conflict or two.
The sun was heading down over the Palisades as we made the yards. Imagine if you will a feast spread out before a starving prisoner. That was the Central Yards to us. I gesticulated in the direction of a handful of railroad cars, hooked up to an engine. “Ain’t that a Jew’s eye, lads,” I said. “Riches beyond compare. Just sittin’ there waitin’ for us to take it.”
Goo Goo looked around suspicious. “Where’s the bulls?”
“Shorthanded tonight,” I replied. “Go on, Georgie—show ’em.”
Little Ranft scooted out from behind me, tossed a glance over his shoulder and then vanished down into the yards. It wasn’t easy—to get near the cars you had to climb down halfway to perdition, exposed as a baby’s bum, which was why we generally staged our raids in the pitch-dark. But Georgie could move like nobody’s business and in a trice there he was, down below. He picked the first lock he saw so sweet it made your mouth water, dashed inside the car, and the next thing we knew there he was, standing back on solid Tenth Avenue ground with a fur coat in his hand.
Goo Goo was impressed. “Nice work, Raft,” he said.
“The name’s Ranft,” said Georgie, trying to sound like a tough guy.
“Too hard to say,” says Goo Goo.
“Go to it, lads,” says I, gesturing. I didn’t have to say nothing. The Gophers was already clambering over the fences and down the drops and heading for the cars with lockpicks and bolt cutters. Goo Goo’s eyes were ablaze and even Happy Jack had a genuine smile on his face for once.
Billy and the lads could hardly believe I was dawdling. “Hey, hurry up, there won’t be nothin’ left for us,” etc., they more or less chimed. But I just stood there, waving encouragement to the troops below until every last man jack of ’em had vanished into the booty.
Weren’t my lads even more astounded when I led them across the street and right bac
k over to good old 352. Them mugs was wonderin’ pretty good by this time, but they was well trained and, even better, loyal as death, and so up the stairs we went on the double, right to the roof, where May was waiting, like I told her to do.
“Hurry up,” she said. “It’s startin’.”
We could hear the sounds of gunfire even before we reached the railing. The muzzle flashes down below looked like lightning bolts in the gloaming, followed quick enough by the pop pop pop sounds of the .38s and .45s and the shrill sound of the police whistles and once in a while the thunk of a club on skull. I could hear our lads firing back, but the resultant return fusillade was something to behold, and I made a mental note to try and never be caught against odds like that and if I was, then at least to give as good an account of myself as I could before they finally got me.
In the twilight, the last of the sun still visible behind the Jersey hill, it was hard to see, but see we could, or at least imagine. Maybe it’s memory and maybe it’s just fantasy, but to this day I have a vivid picture of Happy Jack, the smile finally wiped off his face at last as he falls with a couple of slugs in him; of Newburgh and Brennan dying twin deaths; of the rest of the gang beat up, head-busted and collared in a way that would have made old Monk proud, and if you tell me that I couldn’t have seen it from where I was, why then I’ll tell you you’re a liar, because what’s bein’ there got to do with it?
The Centrals was waiting in the cars of course, just like I suggested, and I wish I could have been close enough to see the look on Goo Goo’s puss when he hammered open a lock and found a gat sticking in his ribs.
And All the Saints Page 13
