Gangster

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “I don’t need these books to tell me this war is cutting into the money we take in,” Angelo said. “And that’s making a lot of the guys on the crew nervous. They don’t seem to care much about losing their lives, but being twenty dollars off on their weekly take hits a raw nerve.”

  “Face it, if you’re not making big money, what the hell’s the point of being in the rackets,” Pudge said with a shrug. “They’ll get over their snit soon as the war ends.”

  “You think they even care who wins it?” Angelo placed the empty milk glass to the left of a black ledger.

  “A few do, I guess. The ones who came up with Angus and knew Ida back when this place was new. The rest just want to work for whoever’s out there willing to pay them. The only loyalty they know is buried inside their wallets.”

  “It’s not what I thought it’d be like,” Angelo said. “When I was a kid, being in here, around Ida and Angus and the people they knew, made me feel safe. It was where I belonged and I wanted nothing more than to be just like them.”

  “And you got your wish,” Pudge said. “What’d you expect after all this time? You are just like them.”

  “I’m not,” Angelo said, looking over at Pudge. “And neither are you. They wouldn’t have pulled the moves on Garrett and Ballister the way we did. They had more heart than to think up something that cold.”

  “We did what needed to be done.”

  “Killing people comes too easy to us and that scares me a little. And that what I do doesn’t bother me after it’s all over scares me even more.”

  “This ain’t like pumping gas or working behind a counter,” Pudge said. “You can’t just punch out and walk away from it. This is who we are, Angelo, and this is what we do. And now that you’re giving it so much thought, let me give you something else to think about.”

  “What?”

  “That if we’re lucky and we stay around the rackets long enough, then we’re only going to get better at it,” Pudge said. “And I can’t believe that any of it gets any easier to live with.”

  “This is the part Angus and Ida forgot to tell us about,” Angelo said.

  “I think this is the part they couldn’t tell us about,” Pudge said, leaning across the table for the coffeepot. “Maybe it’s just because they didn’t know how. Maybe it’s something you have to live through and figure out on your own.”

  • • •

  THE FRONT DOOR to the Café swung open and a boy in a wool cap and knickers stood in the shadows of the entryway, his right hand still clutching the knob. “A man down the block asked me to come in here and give you a message,” the boy said in a confident, out-of-breath voice.

  “The man have a name?” Pudge asked, looking past the boy to see if anyone else was lurking.

  “Jack Wells,” the boy said.

  “Come in and close the door behind you,” Angelo instructed.

  The boy did as he was told and then walked toward them, his eyes scanning the empty tables, his brown lace-ups echoing on the hardwood floor. He stopped in front of Angelo and Pudge, folded his arms across his waist, looked down at the table and stared at the half-empty bottle of milk.

  “What’s your name?” Angelo reached behind him and pulled a clean glass off a shelf.

  “George Martinelli,” the boy said, his eyes still focused on the milk.

  “Have a glass if you’re thirsty,” Angelo said. “And then let’s hear what Wells asked you to tell us.”

  George poured the contents of the bottle into the glass and drank it down in three long swallows. “He wants to set a meeting with the both of you. You pick the place and the time, just so long as it’s off-limits to both crews. He’ll be alone and he expects you to do the same.”

  “He say anything else?” Pudge asked, pushing his chair back and clasping his hands behind his head.

  “The sooner it happens, the better, was the last of it,” George said.

  “You live here, in the neighborhood?” Angelo asked the boy.

  “Around the corner, the apartment just over the butcher shop,” George said with a nod. “My dad works there in the back, slicing up hindquarters.”

  “Go home now, but I’d like to see you back here tomorrow morning.”

  “What for?” George asked.

  Angelo pushed his chair back and stood, looking down at the boy with empty eyes. “I’ll let you know when I see you again,” he said.

  Angelo walked away, his head bowed, toward the back room behind the bar. Pudge stood and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “How much did Wells pay you to deliver his message?” he asked.

  “He didn’t pay me,” George said. “And I didn’t ask him to.”

  “So why do it at all?” Pudge asked. “You don’t look the type that scares.”

  “I’m not,” George said, turning away from the table to face Pudge. “I just always wanted to come into this place, but I never had a reason.”

  “Is it like what you thought it would be?” Pudge asked as he slid his chair back into its slot.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not even close to what I thought.”

  “Nothing ever is.” Pudge moved toward the back room to join Angelo. “If you’re as smart as you act, you might do yourself a favor and learn that lesson now. It’ll end up saving you a lot of grief down the road.”

  • • •

  ANGELO CRACKED OPEN a peanut shell and stood staring up at a bearded lady sitting on a large throne, a midget in blue tights on her lap. He was next to Pudge, both of them squeezed in among the crowd filling the basement of the St. Nicholas Arena, all there to gaze at the Carbone Brothers Circus’s traveling freak show.

  Pudge shoved a hand into Angelo’s large bag of peanuts and pointed up to the bearded lady. “You think somebody like her ever gets laid?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Angelo said. “You take it past the beard, she’s not that bad-looking.”

  Pudge tossed the peanuts into his mouth. “It would be worth the dough just to see a naked woman with a beard. I mean, you don’t even need to take it any further than that, unless she’s hiding something we haven’t seen before.”

  “You can worry about her later; she’ll be here all week,” Angelo told him. “Let’s deal with Wells first.”

  “He’s running late.” Pudge glanced at his pocket watch. “For a guy who likes to have meetings, he doesn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to get this one started.”

  Angelo looked beyond Pudge’s shoulders, past the faces packed tight in front of each booth, and saw Jack Wells hand a ticket stub to a young man in a red jacket and black top hat. “He just came in,” Angelo said. “I told the kid to have Wells meet us over by the sword swallower. That’s where he’s heading now.”

  Pudge turned and caught a glimpse of Wells, walking with his hands in his pockets, toward the booth in the farthest corner of the basement. He nudged an elbow in Angelo’s side and the two of them began to edge their way slowly through the crowd. “You think that guy’s got himself a gimmick going?” Pudge asked over his back. “Or does he really jam those blades down his throat?”

  “Everybody’s got a gimmick going,” Angelo said, tossing his bag of peanuts into a packed garbage bin. “Why would sword swallowers be any different from the rest of us.”

  • • •

  JACK WELLS WAS dressed in a rumpled blue suit, the jacket stained with coffee drops and cigar burns, the wrinkled pants desperate for a pressing and the shoes scruffy enough to be thrown out with the morning trash. “He looks more like a rummy than a gang boss,” Pudge said to Angelo.

  “That’s his gimmick,” Angelo said. “He gets your attention by the way he dresses. Wants you to take him for a soft push. But we’ve already seen his other side. And no matter how this meeting goes, we’ll probably see it again before one of us dies.”

  “This is where you guys decide to hold a meeting?” Wells asked, frowning, as both Angelo and Pudge walked up to him. They stood by an iron rail separating them from
a thin, long-haired sword swallower. “Every other place in town taken up?”

  “We wanted you to feel at home,” Pudge said. He ignored Wells’s outstretched hand, staring instead at the man in the red leotards as he reached into a brown canvas bag for a handful of swords, each one a different shape and size. “Besides, the circus kicks back a cut to our crew. This gives us a chance to see how good the business is doing.”

  “From the size of the crowd in here, there must be a lot of money to be had in freak shows,” Wells said, putting his hand back down by his side. “But there’s no money at all to be had in a gang war.”

  “You should remember that the next time you go ahead and start one,” Angelo said.

  “The move had to be made.” Anger and defiance filled Wells’s voice. “I did all I could to avoid it. But Angus refused to listen, refused to admit that he couldn’t go it alone anymore, that he needed to bring in fresh partners.”

  Angelo stepped close enough to smell the cheap cologne splashed across Wells’s unshaven face. “What do you want?”

  “Let’s bring it to an end,” Wells said. “We both lost people we didn’t want to see die. There’s no need to go through it anymore. There’s no profit in it and there’s no win in it.”

  “I don’t think you want to walk away from it empty-handed,” Pudge said. “How big a cut are you looking for?”

  “Before the war started I expected to take over all of Angus’s action.” Wells stared up as the swallower gulped down two blades.

  “And now?” Angelo kept his eyes only on Wells.

  “Twenty-five percent the first year,” Wells said. “It goes up five percent a year after that with a forty cap. You get to take over Angus’s crew and I keep what’s left of mine. I can’t make you a fairer offer than that.”

  “You’ll pay your end of the protection payroll?” Angelo asked.

  “Take it out of my weekly cut.” Wells turned to face Angelo. “I’ll trust you not to take more than you need.”

  “And what do we get from you?” Pudge now turned his back on the swallower to lean against the rail.

  “Ten percent off the top on all my beer and policy business in the Bronx. I’ll kick it up to fifteen after two years. That should add between eight hundred and a thousand dollars a week to you and your crew, ballpark figure. Maybe a little higher around the holidays.”

  “What if we say no?” Angelo asked. He hid his disdain of Wells with professional care, burying it behind a relaxed, indifferent pose. He had learned enough to know that the business and personal ends of his life, though always linked, needed to be dealt with as if they were separate entities.

  “Why would you?” Wells shrugged. “You come out of this running a top-level crew and with a lot more money in your pockets. I walk away with a bigger cut of what I had before this all started. I don’t see any losers standing here.”

  “What about the ones not left standing?” Pudge asked, his anger just barely below the surface.

  “If it was them instead of us here, the same deal would be cut,” Wells said. “Now I didn’t come all the way down here just to see a dwarf get shoved inside a lion’s mouth. I came looking to walk away with a peace deal. So before I start munching on peanuts and popcorn, I need to know if we’re putting away the guns.”

  “Enough people have died, on both sides,” Angelo said, giving Pudge a quick glance and a nod. “The war’s over. At least from our end.”

  Jack Wells took several long seconds to look at their faces. “That’s good,” he finally said, reaching out his arms to both of them. “Now, instead of enemies, we’re partners. Which is the way it should have been from the very start.”

  When Wells turned and disappeared into the crowd, Pudge looked at Angelo. “I don’t like the bastard,” he said. “And I trust him even less. I should have pulled one of those swords outta that guy’s mouth and shoved it in his heart.”

  “He doesn’t give you much to like or trust,” Angelo agreed.

  “So how long do you suppose this peace treaty is gonna last?”

  “I hope forever,” Angelo said. He slipped his hands into his pants pockets and looked up at the sword swallower bowing dramatically as all those around him cheered and applauded. “Or at least until it’s time for one of us to die.”

  • • •

  GANGSTERS USE THE months or years between gang wars to prepare for the next big battle to come. In their business the only way to further a career or strengthen a position is through death. Gang bosses decide to wage a fight for any number of reasons—the love of another mobster’s wife, the desire to take over a rival’s turf, the need for more money for their crew, anger over a perceived insult. The reasons usually are slight, providing scant cover for a visible greed. Like many executives in the corporate world, a gangster is consumed with an insatiable desire to possess what belongs to someone else. Unlike legitimate power brokers, however, mobsters are not satisfied with a mere Wall Street–backed takeover, no matter how lucrative. They will not rest until they live to see their opponent buried.

  “It’s been a truth about us from day one,” Angelo told me, many years after his meeting with Jack Wells. “No gangster is ever happy when he’s at peace. The main reason he’s in the business is to eliminate his enemies. I’ve read stories about some of the great gangsters and I read where people say that they were so smart, they could have run big corporations instead of being criminals. Maybe some of that’s true. But no gangster, great or not, would ever give up what he has to go into the business world. He wouldn’t be able to follow the same set of rules. If I’m in charge of General Motors, then that means I want the guy who runs the Ford Motor Company dead, no matter how long it takes. And then once I see him put in the ground, I take over that company and make it part of mine. That’s the biggest difference between a gangster and an executive. They may think about killing the guy they’re up against. We go right out there, in the middle of the day if we have to, and we do it.”

  10

  * * *

  Summer, 1931

  THE PEACE BETWEEN Angelo, Pudge and Jack Wells lasted more than three years. In that time, both squads secured enormous profits and were placed in strong positions to reap even more. The underworld was thriving while the rest of the country was in the grips of the Great Depression, with more than eight million Americans out of work and in desperate need of cash. While 2,294 banks were closing nationwide, New York gang bosses increased the interest they charged on cash loans to three percent a week. The labor force was losing, on average, three workers a day, and movie theaters were showing daily double features to provide a fantasy refuge for those without jobs. Meanwhile, the country’s most powerful gangsters had mapped out a plan that would eventually broaden their enterprise into a national crime syndicate that would be structured in such a way as to maximize profits from every possible venue, legal or not. As Dick Tracy made his first appearance in the Chicago Tribune, eager to do battle with the underworld, real gangsters were lording over a democratic kingdom whose very foundation seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

  “It was our time,” Pudge liked to say of those years. “Maybe the greatest time ever to be in the rackets. Everywhere we turned, there was money to be made. That’s why we all made the move to take our business national. It gave what we did a structure and made it all the easier to take money that we earned illegally from gambling or booze and spread it out to legal setups like transportation and banking. Back in those years, even as young as we were, anybody in the rackets who had himself any kind of a brain knew that if we kept it all going the way it was, sooner or later the whole country would belong to us. But for that to work, you needed a lot of patience. And there were too many gangsters who didn’t have that. I guess that’s true wherever you go, no matter what sort of racket you’re in. There’s always somebody in the middle of the pack who just can’t wait.”

  • • •

  ANGELO AND ISABELLA walked down lower Broadway, holding hands
, stopping every few feet to look at the displays in the store windows. The last three years had been good ones for Angelo. He and Pudge had solidified their hold on Angus’s crew, expanding the core group to where it now numbered more than one thousand salaried members. Unlike the other gang leaders, Angelo and Pudge were not exclusionary gangsters. They were the first to accept Jews in their ranks and ventured out to upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs to recruit selected members from the more organized of the black gangs. Both actions were done solely for business, not social, reasons. “Black gangsters wanted a piece of the action at a time when no one wanted a piece of them,” Angelo said. “To get in, they were willing to handle twice the work with a smaller cut of the profits coming their way, which meant more in our pockets. We brought in the Jews for an even better reason. They were prime-time killers. They would go anywhere, at any time, and didn’t care who they had to shoot. And like the blacks, they did it more to get the attention, knowing that, in our business, it’s reputation not race or religion that eventually brings in the big haul. A lot of those Jewish shooters we first hired later went out on their own and formed Murder, Inc. That’s when their price went up, but even then, they were still more than worth it.”

  Angelo and Pudge were both quick to embrace the notion of a national crime commission and drew up and sent out an array of proposals as to how it could best be implemented. They were part of a new generation of American gangster, moving to the faster pace of a money-driven century and taking full advantage of every opportunity. Where past gangsters were once content to bribe a wide array of police officials, they now were in a position to run their own candidates for political office and have their own judges appointed to the bench. The underworld ran the wards, secured the banks and controlled the import and export of all goods that crossed the ocean and passed state lines.

  “It was like the industrial revolution for crooks,” Pudge would tell me. “For whatever the reasons, during those years, we were left on our own. The feds were just starting out and couldn’t find their ass with either hand. The local badges were just looking for a bigger payoff. And John Q. had his hand out for anything we could give him. We had it all and we ran it all and it didn’t look like anybody would ever be able to touch us.”