Well, you can dream, as long as you don’t start dreaming in the middle of traffic on the BQE. What you want to avoid are the premonitions. Nothing is as bad as a cabdriver premonition. Sometimes a driver would not show up at Dover shape-up for a couple of days and when he came in he’d say, “I didn’t drive because I had a premonition.” A premonition is knowing that the Manhattan Bridge is going to fall in the next time you drive over it and thinking about whether it would be better to hit the river with the windows rolled up or down.
On a job where there are so many different ways to die, premonitions are not to be discounted. Of course, a smile would lighten everything, but since the installation of the partition that’s supposed to protect you and your money from a nuclear attack, cabdriving has become a morose job. The partition locks you in the front seat with all the Fears. You know the only reason the thing is there is because you have to be suspicious of everyone on the other side of it. It also makes it hard to hear what people are saying to you, so it cuts down on the wisecracking. The partition has killed the lippy cabby. Then again, you can always talk to yourself, and most Dover drivers do.
When I first started driving, cabbies who wanted to put a little kink into their evening would line up at a juice bar where they gave Seconals along with the Tropicana. The hope was that some Queens cutie would be just messed up enough to make “the trade.” But the girl usually wound up passing out somewhere around Francis Lewis Boulevard, and the driver would have to wake her parents up to get the fare. Right now the hot line is at the Eagle’s Nest underneath the West Side Highway. The Nest and other nearby bars like Spike’s and the Nine Plus Club are the hub of New York’s flourishing leather scene. On a good night, dozens of men dressed from hat to boots in black leather and rivets walk up and down the two-block strip and come tumbling out of the “Tunnels,” holes in the highway embankment, with their belts off. Cabdrivers with M.A.s in history will note a resemblance to the Weimar Republic, another well-known Depression society.
Dover drivers meet in the Eagle’s Nest line after 2 a.m. almost every night. The Nest gives free coffee, and many of the leather boys live on the Upper East Side or in Jersey, both good fares, so why not? After the South Bronx, this stuff seems tame. Besides, it’s fun to meet the other stiffs. Who else can you explain the insanity of the past nine hours of your life to? It cuts away some of the layers of alienation that have been accumulating all night.
Big Fear cabdrivers try to treat each other tenderly. It’s a rare moment of cab compassion when you’re deadheading it back from Avenue R and you hear someone from the garage shouting “Do-ver! Do-ver!” as he limps out to Coney Island. It’s nice, because you know he’s probably another outof-work actor-writer stiff like you, lost in the dregs.
So it figures that there is a strong feeling of “solidarity forever” in the air at Dover. The Taxi Rank and File Coalition, the “alternative” cab union in town (alternative to Harry Van Arsdale’s all-powerful and generally despised Local 3036), has been trying to organize the Dover drivers. Ever since I started cabbing, Rank and Filers have been snickered at by most drivers as Commies, crazy radical hippies, and worse. A lot of this was brought on by the Rank and File people themselves, who used to go around accusing old-timers of being part of the capitalist plot to starve babies in Vietnam. This type of talk does not go over too big at the Bellmore.
Now Rank and File has toned down its shrill and is talking about more tangible things like the plight of drivers in the face of the coming Depression. Dover, naturally, is their stronghold; Van Arsdale’s people have just about given the garage up for lost. Suzanne Gagnes wears a Rank and File button. Suzanne says, “It’s not that I’m a left-wing radical or anything. I just think it’s good that we stick together in a situation like this.”
Last winter a bitter dispute arose over an incident in which a Dover driver returned a lost camera and the garage allegedly pocketed the forthcoming reward money. The Rank and File leaders put pressure on the company to admit thievery. The garage replied by firing the shop chairman, Tom Robbins, and threatening the rest of the committee. Tempers grew very hot; petitions to “Save the Dover 6” were circulated. Robbins appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, but no action was taken. There was much talk of a general strike, but Rank and File, surveying the strength of their hardcore membership, decided against it. Now they have another NLRB suit against Dover and the Van Arsdale union for what they claim is a blacklist against Robbins, who has been turned down in attempts to get a job at twenty different garages in the city.
Gerry Cunningham, who is the boss at Dover, says Rank and File doesn’t bother him. “You’d figure there would be a lot of those types here, the way I see it. Big unions represent the median sort of guy, so you’d figure that with the general type of driver we have here, there would be a lot of Rank and File. Look, though, I’m not particularly interested in someone’s religion as long as he produces a day’s work. If the drivers feel a little togetherness, that’s fine with me.”
Gerry, a well-groomed guy with a big Irish face, is sifting through a pile of accident reports and insurance claims in his trailer-office facing Hudson Street. It seems like all cab offices are in trailers or temporary buildings; it’s a transient business. This is the first time, after a year of driving for Dover, that I’ve ever seen Gerry Cunningham. I used to cash the checks too fast to notice that he signed them. Cunningham smiles when he hears the term “hippie garage.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that,” he says. “We have very conscientious drivers here. We have more college graduates here than any other group…. I assume they’re having trouble finding other work.” Gerry is used to all the actors and writers pushing around Dover hacks and thinks some of them make good drivers and some don’t. “But I’ll tell you,” he says, “of all the actors we’ve ever had here, I really can’t think of one who ever made it.”
Well, thanks for the support, Gerry, baby! Not that Cunningham should care. He says he’s got his own problems. “Owning taxis used to be a great business,” he says. “But now we’re getting devoured. In January of 1973, I was paying thirty-one cents for gas, now I’m paying sixty. Sixty cents! I’m barely breaking even here. It costs me twelve dollars and fifty cents just to keep a car on the streets for twenty-four hours. Gas is costing almost as much as it costs to pay the drivers.”
Fleets like Dover are in trouble. They were the ones who pressed for the 17.5 percent fare rise and still say it’s not enough to offset spiraling gas costs, car depreciation, and corporate taxes. Some big fleets like Scull’s Angels and Ike-Stan, which employ hundreds of drivers, are selling out; many more are expected to follow. There is a lot of pressure for change. The New York Times has run editorials advocating a major reshaping of the industry, possibly with all cabs being individually owned.
According to Cunningham, president of the MTBOT (the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents the fleets), the future is “leasing,” a practice the gypsy cab companies have always used. “Leasing means,” Cunningham says, “I lease my cars out to drivers for about two hundred dollars a week. That way only one man drives the car instead of the six or seven, the car lasts much longer, and you cut away a good deal of the maintenance and things like that.”
One thing that Cunningham does not mention is while “leasing” will be great for the owners, who will be pocketing their $200 up front (and leaving all the financial risk to the drivers), it will spell disaster for the bohemian cabdriver. Cunningham says the “part-time driver” can always “sublet” taxis if they can’t come up with the $200.
Every driver who ever had the Big Fear knows the lie in that. The Dover-style drivers, people who don’t work when the painting is going well or a premonition sets in, are not going to sublet. Subletting an apartment is commitment enough. The whole idea of driving for places like Dover, driving a cab at all, is the flex, the shiftlessness option. The topic is much in the air, and a couple days later some drivers who are really ac
tors and musicians are talking about leasing while waiting in line at the La Guardia lot.
“What a drag leasing would be,” says an actor who has only twelve dollars on the meter after four hours out of the garage. “If that happens, I don’t know, I’ll try to get a waiter’s job, I guess.”
“Yeah man, that’ll be a bitch all right,” says the musician. “I hate this goddamn job. Hey, I’d rather be playing, but right now I’m making a living in this cab. I won’t dig it if they take it away from me. Damn, if the city had any jobs I’d be taking the civil service test.” He sits there a moment amid the garage clatter and shouts, “Then I can be a sanitation guy like my dad. And how great will that be?”
13
The Last Irish Cowboy
The annals of crime and rascality are never-ending in the Big City. Every neighborhood has their Robin Hoods who take from the rich and the poor alike, and keep everything for themselves. Here’s one case that never made it to Law and Order. From the Village Voice, 1978.
In the bars of Sunnyside, Queens, the remaining white men drink fifty-cent drafts and grouse about how when the jukebox guy came in, all he had were Spanish records.
“Who listens to that Puerto Rican shit?” they bitch.
They also grumble about how the Jews don’t run the newspaper stands anymore. Now it’s Indians. From India. And what happened to the Italians at the fruit stands? What’s a Korean know about an eggplant? Nowadays, you look at the mailboxes in the apartment lobbies on Queens Boulevard and its only the old, flattened-down name tags that say Doyle and O’Sullivan. The shiny new ones say Ramirez and Wong. It’s the United Nations in Sunnyside these days, for chrissakes.
The complaints stop when you bring out mug shots of Patty Huston. In the bars on Queens Boulevard and Forty-eighth Avenue, they know Patty Huston. They know his big bellow after he hits the double at the trotters. They know the way he slams C-notes on the bar and puts up drinks for everyone. So what if he robbed a few banks? Everyone’s got to make a living. Fine fella, that Patty. He’s top mutt in Sunnyside—Woodside too—a 225-pound lug of a gunman.
“He’s the Last Irish Cowboy, he is,” says a big-chinned man clutching a tiny shot glass, “the Last Irish Cowboy from Sunnyside.”
When you ask for specifics, everyone clams up. After all, Patty’s on the lam. It’s like half the precincts in Queens got nothing to do but look for him. The FBI just made him a Top-10 crook. Top-10 crook from the neighborhood, not bad! That’s as much as anyone says. Loose lips sink ships. No one around here is going to let on anything to get the Last Irish Cowboy caught.
Not that it’s hard to get a look at Patty Huston. Just go to the bank—pretty much any bank—and glance at the New York Clearing House WANTED poster. It features images of alleged felons, some furtive, some tough and defiant, many pictured in the act of robbing a bank. Many of the photos are obscured by pieces of red and white tape pasted across the supposed bad man’s face. The tape says APPREHENDED. This supposed to make the federally insured depositor feel secure, to let you know Dick Tracy is out there, rounding the vermin who take things that don’t belong to them.
Patty Huston, however, is never APPREHENDED. Month after month, as other wiseguys get pinched, Patty’s thick-necked, beady-eyed mug stares from the upper left-hand corner of the poster, balefully UNAPPREHENDED.
After a year of so of standing in line at the Chemical Bank looking at his merciless mug, you begin to wonder about Patrick James Huston, who, says the poster, robbed a bank at 95–46 Roosevelt Avenue, Queens, on September 6, 1974, at 9:14 in the morning. You begin to think, this is one scary-looking guy. Maybe that’s why he’s never APPREHENDED—the cops just don’t want to catch him. Call up the FBI, which has jurisdiction over all federal bank robbery cases, and say you’re interested in Patty Huston and the agent on the line, momentarily dropping Bureau decorum, says, “He’s a goddamn legend in his own time.”
Agents will tell you that Patty is “one of the most vicious men in America” and a “real menace.” But even if Patty’s poster has some juicy tidbits like: “tattoo: ‘In memory of Mom,’ upper right arm,” it doesn’t begin to tell the story of how the Last Irish Cowboy became a “goddamn legend in his own time” and made the Top 10.
When Patty was growing up in the Woodside-Sunnyside area the place was called Irishtown. Much of it looked the way it does today: red-brick apartment buildings, colorful bedspreads on the clotheslines, young girls in plaid skirts getting off the bus from St. Mary’s. From the start, however, Patty Huston stood out from the civil-servant-to-be crowd. After his first bust—in 1946, at age sixteen—a police psychiatrist (according to the feds) diagnosed Patty as the “hardened-criminal type, the kind of individual who will likely spend at least half his life in prison.” The shrink was on the money, with change. With a record of thirty arrests in thirty years, Patty, now forty-seven, has already logged twenty-five years in stir.
He made his first newspaper splash back in 1953. That was when, according to the July 30 edition of the Daily News, Patty was nabbed as a member of the notorious “3-D Mob.” The gang got its name, says the musty clipping, due to their “penchant for robbing movie theatres showing three-dimensional films.” Patty’s guys knocked over the Sunnyside Theatre, the Bliss Theatre, and the Fortway Theatre within a span of fifteen days, the News reporting that “the gang used the fact that everyone was wearing 3-D glasses to cover their brazen actions.” The spree, however, came to an end as the cops, acting on a tip, staked out the Dover Theatre in Brooklyn, which was then showing the Vincent Price 3-D classic, The House of Wax. Nabbed by the popcorn counter, Patty got sent up for a few years.
He came back big during the early ’60s as a member of the Long Island City–based “Dummy Brain” Taylor gang. “Dummy Brain,” a seventy-three-year-old vet of the crimeways, got the “Brain” half of his nickname for his intricately planned bank and payroll jobs. The “Dummy” part referred to how, whenever the coppers pinched him, he would always say, “I don’t know nuthin’, I’m a dummy.”
In November of 1962, Dummy Brain focused his talents on the Franklin Simon warehouse at 560 Washington Street in Greenwich Village. It figured to be a big score, but there were problems. According to classic crime reporter Mike Pearl, writing in the New York Mirror, Patty, “growing impatient and demanding to know when the job would come off,” thought the Dummy Brain was slipping. Spreading dissension in the gang, Patty turned Dummy Brain’s own son and grandson against the old man.
Unbeknownst to the Dummy Brainers, however, when they arrived at the payroll office disguised as window washers in their 1950 black sedan, the NYPD Safe and Loft detail were waiting. The gangsters broke into the office as planned and grabbed the payroll. But when they left the building they were looking down the barrels of a dozen police .38s. Patty, according to a New York Times report, opened fire with a shotgun. A siege ensued. Police estimated that at least forty shots were fired, twenty of which lodged in the getaway car.
“Hundreds of persons in the area, drivers and workmen on the loading platforms, fell flat to escape the bullets,” said the newspaper story. In the murderous crossfire, both Dummy Brain’s son and grandson were killed. Patty “was wounded early in the battle, but managed to drag himself through the police bullets across the intersection of West Houston and Washington streets, more than 100 yards away, where he finally slumped in the gutter.”
They took Patty to St. Vincent’s, where he had seven shells dug out of him. That must have hurt but probably not as much as the fact that the payroll consisted, according to the Times, “of $54,000 in non-negotiable checks and 34 cents in nickels, dimes, and pennies.” Dummy Brain, who said he didn’t make the job because he “had a cold,” took the news of his son’s and grandson’s deaths in stride. He refused to talk, a dummy to the end.
Patty had a few more years in the slams to mull that one over. But he was far from finished. If the payroll caper proved Patty was no common criminal, the Roosevelt Avenue bank job
(the one that got his picture around) showed exactly how uncommon he is. Events started sanely enough. Patty and two guys from the Bronx broke into the First National Bank branch brandishing submachine guns, swiping $31,000. But then, driving off, the three decided to change cars. Waving his gun as persuasion, Patty commandeered the first automobile he saw. It was a late-model station wagon. The problem was the wagon was owned by Patrick Deignan, who happened to be running for Democratic district leader in Jackson Heights. The car was plastered with PATRICK DEIGNAN FOR DISTRICT LEADER posters. This made the getaway vehicle somewhat easy to spot as the cops chased Patty and his buddies across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Manhattan. Patty and the boys led the cops on a high-speed chase before the would-be district leader’s car ran out of gas in the middle of Times Square.
A recent visit to the First National Bank in question, now a Citibank, reveals that Patty Huston is well remembered. Asked about the robbery, Mr. Garcia, the dapper bank manager, shrugged and said, “I don’t know, this bank get robbed many times.” But shown a picture of Patty Huston, Garcia’s eyes widened. “Oh … him. He’s the reason we have this,” he says. And points to the bulletproof glass between the tellers and the customers.
By rights, the bank bust should have been all she wrote for Patty. But not quite. Patty soon jumped four flights out of an open window at the Old West Detention House near Sheridan Square. He broke his ankle in the fall, yet still he managed to escape, on St. Paddy’s Day, no less. This was in 1975 and he hasn’t been seen or heard from by the blueshirts since.
Nowadays, the FBI has at least one agent in each of its fifty-nine regional office trying to nail Patty Huston, who’s stayed in the Top 10 of escaped federal prisoners for twenty-four straight months. The feds have chased leads to Texas, Florida, Canada, and even Ireland. This pisses the FBI off because as most agents will tell you, the Top 10 list doesn’t necessarily about how dangerous a person is, but rather how famous he is—or how hard he, or she, is to catch. In other words, the fugitive’s capacity to embarrass the bureau by staying at large.
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