“The job was incredibly stressful. Anything could happen if you weren’t careful, and guys knew that. You could be extremely careful and still get fucked up. I was bruting a door one time and nearly got my head blown off. We were on the road and found a house that looked pretty inviting. We started to check the place out. We had certain tricks to determine if anybody was home. We’d always go through a series of things to be sure we weren’t breaking into an occupied house. Once in a great while we’d be surprised and find someone home after we entered the place, but it was rare. Well, on this particular occasion, we checked the place out, decided nobody’s home, and started to go to work on the front door with the brute. I’m leaning on it, and all of a sudden there’s this incredible explosion. For a second or two I thought my head had been blown off. I jumped like a kangaroo. My ears were ringing and my head felt like it was on fire it was burning so much. I saw things like they were in slow motion. I looked behind me, and there was this huge hole about the size of a softball in the front door, and that was a heavy damn door. The hole was right where my head would have been if I had been standing straight up, but I was leaning on the brute at the time and slightly bent over when the shotgun blast hit the door.
“I was picking splinters out of my head for a year. Guys began calling me ‘Wooden Head’ because of all the lumber stuck in my head. And I got gray hair overnight. All of a sudden I went from dark to white hair. It was incredible, but I went to work the next night. Just like a paratrooper, you got to go out.
“It was fascinating how many supposed tough guys couldn’t handle the work because of incidents like that. Going in somebody else’s house unarmed scared the hell out of guys. They’d freeze up. Charlie Devlin was a perfect example. He did one job with us and we never heard from him again. He had had enough. That’s why so many guys went into stickups or walk-ins. It took less intelligence, preparation, and regimentation. They were cowboys. Just walk in, put a gun to somebody’s head, and take the money. But who wants to put another person’s life in danger? Sooner or later you’re going to pull the trigger and kill somebody. The guys who were part of Effie’s crew weren’t out to hurt anybody. We never carried guns; it was a rule. We didn’t look at it as an assault on people. We always justified it by saying we weren’t hurting them physically. And we specialized in rich fuckin’ people, people who were insured. Yeah, we were taking their valuables, but they were getting repaid by the insurance companies. What’s the big deal? So who were we robbing? The insurance companies.”
The ability to rationalize away the thought that he might be harming someone was central to Dolan’s ability to carry out his job. Occasionally, however, the rationalizations and psychic protections were dramatically swept away. During the course of one burglary, the façade of indifference was revealed for what it was—a convenient lie. He was burglarizing a mansion in upstate New York when the homeowners unexpectedly returned. Hearing them pull into the driveway, Dolan and his crew fled out a back door, quickly circled around to the street, and were promptly picked up by their waiting driver. They hadn’t traveled more than a few feet when a woman came running out of the house screaming. She was calling for help, asking for someone, anyone, to come to her aid and call the police.
“The woman came out screaming,” recalls Dolan, “and she wouldn’t stop. She just went on and on. You would have thought she had been raped or something. I thought to myself, ‘Did I cause all this screaming?’ That was bad. We talked about it in the car driving away from the place. It had an effect on me. I was never the same after that. It really shook me up.”
Not enough, however, for Dolan to give up his line of work. The money, the excitement, the lifestyle, and the camaraderie of fearless burglars and other ballsy underworld figures had seduced Dolan, like all the others. It was too good to give up. The women alone were reason enough to stay active. “Girls were all over the place,” says Dolan. “They were all over us. They were in it for the money and the excitement. I had a different girl every day of the week. There were so many I finally had to name them according to the day of the week just to keep them straight in my head. That worked out fine until one of ’em would get out of line and show up early. If it was Wednesday and Sunday came up to me in a bar, I’d get all confused. I’d get angry as hell and tell her, ‘Hey, this is Wednesday. I’m not supposed to be seeing you until Sunday.”
It wasn’t all Budweiser and roses, however. There were definite downsides to the profession. Paydays weren’t guaranteed; looting a house wasn’t to be confused with a relaxing stroll through the park; and police harassment was a constant source of irritation. The last of these sometimes became so bad that Dolan felt as if he was wearing a bullseye on his back.
“The cops were always on us. For example, I’m in a bar downtown one night and everything is going good, no problems at all. All of a sudden a few guys from Ferguson’s squad come in, spot me, and pull me out of there. They arrest me and take me over to Ferguson’s office in City Hall. They take me in this room, and in the middle of the room is a big wooden chair that’s bolted to the floor. It looks like the electric chair. All that’s missing is the skullcap.
“Well, they put me in the chair and place my hands in these handcuffs that are fastened to the arms of the chair. Now I’m in this chair for hours and starting to get pissed off, ’cause they’ve basically kidnapped me. I start yelling at them, ‘What the hell is going on here? I wasn’t arrested; I was kidnapped. I want to see my lawyer; I want to see Eddie Rieff. You can’t keep me locked up like this. It’s not me who did anything wrong; it’s you guys who are breaking the law.’
“This goes on for hours. It’s nearly four in the morning now and I’m still demanding to be cut loose. They keep telling me to pipe down. They tell me the captain is coming in. I’ve had about all of this I can take, and next time they tell me to shut up, the captain will soon be in, I tell them, ‘Oh, yeah, the captain is coming in. What’s he gonna do when he gets here, blow me?’
“You should have seen their faces. For an instant they were dumbstruck; they couldn’t believe anybody would say something like that about their beloved Clarence Ferguson, the most famous cop in the city. They then rushed me and began pummeling me. I’m gettin’ hit all over and I can’t protect myself ’cause I’m handcuffed. All of a sudden they stop. Ferguson had finally shown up.
“He says, ‘What’s going on here?’
“One of the detectives says, ‘You should have heard what he said, Captain. You should have heard what he said.’
“‘Well, what did he say?’ asks Ferguson.
“‘Well... well,’ stammers the detective, ‘I can’t... I can’t repeat it, Captain.’
“Ferguson looks at him and says, ‘What do you mean you can’t repeat it? What did he say?’
“The detectives all look at each other and then look at me. ‘Okay, Dolan,’ says one of them, ‘tell the captain what you said.’
“‘I didn’t say a thing, Captain. I don’t know what they’re talking about. And besides that, they’ve kidnapped me. I don’t know what I’m doing here and they won’t let me talk to my lawyer.’”
Dolan was eventually cut loose, but the experience wasn’t unusual. Felons were considered fair game by frustrated and overly aggressive law enforcement officers, and the lumps that were dished out never sat well with the recipients. As bad as the pummelings were, however, they paled beside the burglars’ chief fear and constant concern: informants. There was nothing lower or more deserving of community scorn (not to mention retribution) than a rat. The Blaney brothers’ ugly demise may have offended the sensibilities of some in the neighborhood, but to others the outcome was well deserved. Justice had been served. Jimmy Dolan not only bought into this dogma; he was a high priest.
“You always had to be on the lookout for a rat,” says Dolan. “Rats were around, but not on a wholesale basis. You constantly had to be on guard. Most burglars had standup reputations and the right values. Jackie Johnson, for example,
would never, never rat on you. If you put him on the electric chair, he still wouldn’t rat on you. There was no such thing as taking that principle too far. No way you bend the rule. It would be a breach of honor. You gotta take the blows, and sometimes it’s very hard. You get the reputation of not cooperating, and the government will bury you with long prison bits. And long prison terms are killers. If you do over 10 years, you’re gonna be kind of wrecked after that.
“Effie schooled me early on as to who was a rat and who had the habit of going south on his partners. He said, ‘Willie Sears was a rat and robbed his partners.’ It wasn’t public knowledge, but guys eventually put two and two together. No matter how good you were, if you’re in this life you’re gonna go to prison and do some time. When a guy is working like crazy and getting pinched as often as Willie did, but doesn’t do any time or just short bits, you start to get suspicious. The really good burglars stayed away from him, but the young ones were impressed by his reputation and accomplishments. Joey Cooper Smith was the same way. The burglar gentry never accepted him. He may have been a hell of a fighter, but no self-respecting burglar would work with him. You didn’t want to associate with those kinds of people. They were scumbags.”
Dolan’s visceral distaste for informers occasionally got the better of him. Once he found himself in the company of Sylvan Scolnick, a larger-than-life grifter and so-called criminal mastermind who had engineered numerous phony bankruptcies and con games and was widely known to be spilling his guts to law enforcement authorities in the mid-1960s. Though Dolan had never had any dealings with Scolnick, just being in close proximity to such a high-profile snitch was too much to bear. At the time of their meeting, both men were under lock and key at the Philadelphia Detention Center. Even there, their paths should never have crossed, since the grossly overweight Scolnick, also known as Cherry Hill Fats, was sequestered from the general population and housed in a special wing of the prison hospital. Dolan, however, had been informed that a shadow had appeared on a chest x-ray during his intake examination. He required a followup. Guards escorted him off the cellblock and over to the prison hospital, where he met the man the Daily News.alled the “Titanic trickster.”
“They bring me up to the hospital ward and there’s about 10 beds in there,” recalls Dolan, “but what immediately caught your eye was this incredible mound of stinkin’ flesh that’s sprawled out over two beds. The beds had been lashed together and propped up on a dozen steel milk cans so that it wouldn’t cave in. It was the strangest sight in the world. After the initial shock of seeing such an obese thing as this, I realized who it was. Sylvan Scolnick.
“I didn’t want any parts of him. I didn’t even want to be in the same room as him, but I went to my bed and waited for the doctors to call me in for another x-ray. After a while I got a little bored and got up to get a newspaper that was laying on a chair. That’s when he opens up.
“‘Hey, kid,’ he says, ‘hand me one of those magazines over there.’
“I look around and realize there’s no one there but me and him.
“‘Yeah, you,’ he says, ‘just get me a magazine over there.’
“Now I’m thinking to myself, that fuckin’ rat is talking to me. Telling me to get him something. I’ll give him a magazine all right. So I go over and pick up a couple of Time.agazines, roll ’em up real tight, walk back over to Scolnick, and start hitting that fat rat with them. I’m beating the hell out of him, hitting him on the head and shoulders, and he begins screaming like a gigantic stuck pig. He’s yelling for the guards, and all the other guys in the ward are wondering what’s going on. After the magazines fall apart in my hand, I tried to strangle the motherfucker but his neck was bigger than my waist. It was like trying to grip a horse’s ass. I couldn’t get my hands around that obese thing. It was impossible. The guards finally showed up and pulled me off him. They asked Scolnick what he had done to provoke me, but he said I must have been in the hospital because I was a psych case or something, ’cause he hadn’t done a thing.
“All I knew is that he was an informer and he asked me to do something for him. The newspapers played up his credentials and made him out to be a criminal mastermind, but he was a rat. That’s all he was to me, a big fuckin’ rat.”
Dolan practiced what he preached; the principle of noncooperation was never to be broken, even when he was the victim. A dispute with a business associate at a local restaurant got out of hand, and Dolan ended up being shot in the groin. As he lay on the restaurant floor in great pain, he looked up at his assailant and said, “Keep your mouth shut when the cops get here. Let me do the talking.” When police and hospital emergency units arrived at the scene, Dolan told them he couldn’t identify the shooter. Police pressure proved ineffective. Dolan remained unable to name or describe his assailant, just as a standup K&A man was expected to.
SIXTH AND PIKE, 11th and Ontario, Front and Allegheny, and 22nd and Clearfield were all prominent corners that became asphalt and concrete incubators for tough-talking, street-wise Kensington kids eager to earn a reputation. Charles “Chick” Goodroe grew up at Fifth and Lehigh, just a few short blocks from Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. He knew the corners and the various characters well. His own corner was “D” and Westmoreland Streets, and he quickly became one of the regulars. Chickie was no tough guy like Nails Mancini, Billy Crocker, George Monday, and Eddie Lucas, young, established brawlers who thrived on the corner rivalries and periodic gang wars. His father was Jewish, although Chick wasn’t brought up Jewish, and he was certainly no goody two shoes “A” student or jock. As a youngster he was drawn to Kensington’s dark side and its many illegal diversions.
A good 15 to 20 years younger than the neighborhood old heads like Willie Sears and Effie Burke, Chickie knew the names and the stories but showed little interest in emulating their exploits. “The guys I hung with,” says Chickie, “were doing burglaries on Kensington Avenue, and I stole like crazy on the avenue too, but it was a younger crowd and it wasn’t with the intention of making a career out of it.” Everybody did it, it was part of growing up, and he was just another one of the guys trying to get over.
“We were just having fun, bullshitting with friends, hanging on the corner,” Chick fondly recalls. He quit Stetson Junior High in ninth grade and began to spend even more time with his friends on the corner. The scheming and the actual practice of pulling off illegal capers were definitely amateurish, but also fun and exciting. He now realizes that those youthful misadventures were shaping a career path. As Chickie says, “I was graduating into a criminal lifestyle.”
Chick’s first serious contact with the criminal justice system took place on the West Coast. He went to Los Angeles in 1959 to live with his stepfather (his biological father was Irv Morrow, a New Jersey restaurant owner) and immediately found himself running with different crowds in Glendale, Hollywood, West L.A., and Santa Monica. Hooking up with the “Valley guys” led to a series of burglaries. “Cars were everything back then,” recalls Goodroe. “We robbed a garage in Santa Monica and I got caught. I was 18 years old.” Chick was lucky; he copped a deal with the prosecutors. “I got nonreporting probation with the understanding I’d leave L.A. and go back East to Philly.”
When he returned, Chickie started to hang out with Mitch Prinski, John Bosak, George Foerster, and a few other Kensington guys. Fun and games were still the order of the day. “Mitchell and I went down to Wildwood in the summer of ’61 and got a place on Second Street,” says Chick. “We stole everything on the Boardwalk and sometimes had to sleep on people’s porches when we got too drunk to make it home or didn’t have a place of our own. We burgled the homes of little old ladies and stole whatever we could get our hands on. We didn’t hurt anybody. Sometimes we’d just go in a house and grab a shirt for the night.”
Back in Philly, Chick started to hang with some older guys at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Kellis’s Bar and Horn & Hardart’s restaurant became his new clubhouses. Even the steps of the First Pen
nsylvania Bank became an attractive hangout. He had “graduated” once again and was now associating with serious practitioners of “production work,” men who had made theft their profession.
“If you were growing up in Kensington,” says Goodroe, “you eventually had to make a choice. You could either become a burglar, a fireman, a policeman, or a roofer. The people who became burglars were basically lazy and didn’t want to work. They wanted to hang at bars all day and have a good time.” Chick enjoyed the lifestyle, the action, the camaraderie, and, of course, the princely wage scale. “I liked what I did. I liked the benefits.”
Within a short time, Chick was following in the footsteps of his predecessors, tailing Kensington Avenue’s Jewish businessmen back to their homes in Northeast Philadelphia and suburban Cheltenham. In no time at all, Chick and his friends were leaving the city for richer stakes on the Main Line, in New Jersey, and in upstate Pennsylvania. “Let’s go do a piece of work” became a common refrain.
“We’d be hanging out,” recalls Chick, “and somebody would say, ‘Let’s take a ride. Let’s take a ride up the turnpike on Friday.’ I don’t know how many times we drove up to Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton. We used to call Hazleton ‘the bank’ because we always came back with money. Guys would say ‘Let’s go to the bank tonight’ or ‘Let’s take a ride up to the bank.’ There was a lot of Jewish money up there. Allentown had a lot of Jewish money as well. Everything was nonchalant. The burglaries were rarely a planned deal. We’d be riding down the street and somebody would say, ‘Let’s go grab that.’”
Confessions of a Second Story Man Page 14