Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  The side of Baccala’s head burned. He could feel the huge hole in his head. He closed his eyes tighter. He was afraid to open them and have to look at the Sacred Heart. His heart pounded so hard that he heard nothing else. Then his leg began to ache from being doubled under him. Baccala’s heart slowed. Why should his leg hurt him when he was dead? Baccala opened his eyes. He saw the floor of the Della Palma and Dominic Laviano’s ass. Slowly Baccala’s hand reached for the hole in the side of his head. There was no hole. His fingers touched the hair over his ear, which had been singed by the powder burn. His fingers ran over the entire side of his face. There wasn’t even blood.

  Baccala got up from the floor. He looked into Mario’s eyes. Baccala bowed his head. He clasped his hands.

  “Mirac’,” Baccala said softly.

  He looked up into Mario’s eyes. “Mirac’,” he said to Mario.

  Baccala looked up at the ceiling and shouted it. “Mirac’.” Baccala came around the table and jumped into Mario’s arms and began licking Mario’s face with his tongue. “Mirac’,” he kept slobbering.

  Chapter 19

  THE WATER BUFFALO TURNED the corner slowly and came back onto Queens Boulevard. As he was thinking quite hard about women’s underwear, the full impact of what was happening did not reach him all at once. First his eyes focused, and, three-quarters of a second later, his mind registered on Beppo the Dwarf tumbling out of the back of the panel truck in front of the restaurant. “Germ!” the Water Buffalo’s mind shouted. His foot came down on the gas. The car shot toward the dwarf. Beppo darted for the sidewalk. The Water Buffalo had to swerve the car and hit the brakes. The Water Buffalo’s head nearly went through the windshield. When the Water Buffalo righted himself, he saw Kid Sally Palumbo, hands pressed to his midsection, hopping around in front of the restaurant like a chicken. The Water Buffalo did not see Big Jelly, who was pounding both his hands on top of Roz’s head. This was being done in order to force her teeth to slip loose from their tight grip on Big Jelly’s left ear. Big Jelly was also bleeding from the nose. Roz had bitten him there first.

  So the Water Buffalo jackknifed over the car seat and began fishing for the shotgun on the floor in the back and he was figuring only on Kid Sally Palumbo and he never saw Big Jelly reel up to the car. Big Jelly reached through the driver’s window and put his pistol into the back of the Water Buffalo’s neck. Beppo the Dwarf opened the back door, grabbed the shotgun away from the Water Buffalo, and pressed an automatic into the Water Buffalo’s cheek. Kid Sally Palumbo, trying to wring the pain from his bleeding hand, pushed into the back seat. He was closing the door with his good hand while Big Jelly got the car going. Big Jelly had Baccala’s limousine up to 65 by the time it hit the corner. The Water Buffalo sat in a daze in the back seat. Kid Sally Palumbo, giggling through the pain, held the shotgun muzzle right under the Water Buffalo’s chin.

  There was so much traffic on the parkway going to Brooklyn that Kid Sally and Big Jelly agreed it would be foolish to kill the Water Buffalo and throw him out of the car. “Besides, I want to have some fun with this punk,” Kid Sally said. He slapped the Water Buffalo in the mouth with the shotgun muzzle. At Marshall Street, they pushed the Water Buffalo into the vending-machine office. Beppo went into the desk and came out with a pair of handcuffs and a roll of his Johnson and Johnson five-inch tape. They handcuffed the Water Buffalo’s hands behind his back, slapped tape over his mouth, and used most of the roll to bind his ankles. Beppo opened the cellar door, and Big Jelly half lifted and half kicked the Water Buffalo down the stairs.

  “Get me some rope,” Kid Sally said to Beppo.

  Beppo clapped his hands. “Geez, a garrote!”

  “I’m gonna get somethin’ out of this freakin’ day,” Kid Sally said.

  The Water Buffalo tumbled down the cellar stairs in the darkness. Right away, his nostrils flared in the urine smell. The Water Buffalo rolled onto his stomach on the floor at the foot of the cellar stairs. He heard a rustle off to one side. His eyes darted around. Five or six steps away, framed in the half-light from a cellar window, was an apparition, a tousle-haired lion. The Water Buffalo slipped into mild shock. He exploded out of the shock when the apparition began moving. The Water Buffalo started rolling to get away from the lion. This had the same effect on the lion that a rolling spool of thread does on a cat. The lion leaped. The lion then pounced on the Water Buffalo. The Water Buffalo was in the facedown section of his roll when the lion landed. As the Water Buffalo came face up, he was looking straight up into the lion’s face. It was the last thing the Water Buffalo ever saw. He did not go into mild shock this time. He went into straight heart failure and was dead in a moment.

  “Come on, come on,” Kid Sally Palumbo was saying a few minutes later. He pinched the Water Buffalo’s cheek. There was no response. He began twisting the cheek. Nothing happened. Kid Sally bent over and looked closely.

  “The freakin’ rat lion killed him!” he shouted. He jumped up and went for the lion. The lion scuttled into a hole in the piles of junk in the cellar.

  “Just when we were going to say somethin’,” Big Jelly said.

  “This rat bastard,” Beppo said. He kicked the Water Buffalo. “This guy never was no fun in his whole life. He just proved it.”

  “We got to split out of here right away,” Kid Sally said. “When the cops get here they’ll stay for breakfast they’ll be here so long.”

  Big Jelly slapped the cinderblock wall. He went to the toolbox under the stairs and pulled out a sledgehammer and chisel.

  At 5:45 the three of them came out into the early winter darkness with the Water Buffalo’s body, which had a cinder-block tied to the ankles and another tied to the neck. The vending-machine office was crowded.

  “What you hang here for?” Kid Sally said as he struggled out the door. “You know how many cops is going to make it here?”

  “Will the cops shoot us?” one of the crowd said.

  “No, but—”

  “Then we stay here,” the guy cut in.

  They threw the body into the back of Baccala’s car. Big Jelly drove. They had hours to kill before the street emptied and they could get rid of a body without having an audience. Big Jelly drove to Dr. Lambert’s office. Lambert was trembling. He had received rumors, and now, looking at Kid Sally’s hand, he knew he was seeing direct evidence. He cleaned the hand and put in seven stitches. With each stitch, he shook a bit more. By the time he got to Big Jelly, Lambert was an epileptic. Roz the Meter Maid’s worst bite had been on Big Jelly’s nose. Lambert slipped, bit his tongue, tried again, and, accompanied by a long wolf howl from Big Jelly, succeeded in stitching Big Jelly’s nostrils together. Big Jelly came out of the office with his nose covered with tape and his mouth hanging open so he could breathe. Kid Sally’s hand was wrapped in bandages, but the trigger finger was usable. Beppo the Dwarf opened the car door for them and they drove off.

  A mile away, in the Brooklyn Municipal Building, Benjamin Goodman was sitting in his office with Inspector Gallagher and a detective from the 103rd Squad in Queens, which had caught the trouble at the Della Palma.

  “All right now, let me see if I have this,” Goodman said. “Inside there was Baccala, a man named Laviano, and a priest.”

  “That’s as far as we know. Plus the help.”

  “All right. And outside there was who, now?”

  “Catalano…”

  “Is he the fat slob?” Goodman asked.

  “Yes. And the dwarf, and we’re pretty sure there was one or two others in a getaway car some place but they never showed. They must of panicked.”

  “And Kid Sally, of course,” Goodman said.

  “What else?” Gallagher said.

  “And you have Baccala, Laviano, and the priest here now?”

  “Well, they just come with me,” Gallagher said. “I mean, we got no reason to, you know …”

  Goodman smiled. “I know all about it. You can tell Mr. Baccala he can take his priest with him and go hom
e and pray that he’s still alive. We’re not interested in him. Then come back here and let’s sit down and we’ll give this Mr. Palumbo something to think about for a couple of years.”

  Gallagher had one of his people take Baccala out the back way so he wouldn’t have to pass the news people in the outer lobby. Baccala held tightly onto Mario’s arm. Dominic Laviano walked behind them.

  “Is this your first mirac’?” Baccala whispered.

  “It is the first time I have been this blessed,” Mario said.

  Detective Donald Jenkins was sitting on a wooden bench by the door leading to the staircase. The floor around his feet was littered with cigarette butts. For three hours now, Jenkins had been waiting for Inspector Gallagher to come out and tell him what to do.

  Jenkins decided to throw the stare at Baccala. It’s the most they’ll ever do to this freakin’ old guinea, Jenkins told himself. Jenkins clenched his teeth on his cigarette. His eyes flashed steadily at Baccala. When Baccala wouldn’t look at him, and kept talking to this fellow walking down the hall alongside him, Jenkins became irritated. He glanced at the one Baccala was with. Jenkins’ hand went right away to the cigarette gripped in his teeth. He pulled the cigarette out and held it away from his face so there would be no smoke in his eyes while he looked at this priest. The same priest he had seen in civilian clothes taking Angela Palumbo in the subway over to 11th Street in Manhattan.

  Jenkins came off the bench and walked very quickly down to Benjamin Goodman’s office and knocked on the door.

  Big Jelly and Kid Sally drove through the streets of Brooklyn, listening to the radio. Big Jelly drove with his right hand on the wheel and his head hanging out the window like a police dog’s, so the wind would rush up any tiny passageway in his nose left by the stitches. At midnight, there still was no news of the Della Palma incident. The police were keeping the lid on it. There was no news of Red D’Orio yet, either. This was not because of any official reluctance. The delay was merely the result of slow typing in Brooklyn South Homicide.

  Early in the evening Red D’Orio had become bored hanging around the vending-machine office. He decided to go out for a drink. “I’ll be a moving target,” he said. Which he was. He had four scotches in Esposito’s on Carroll Street. He promptly swung over to Busceglia’s in Williamsburg. He had four scotches in Busceglia’s and whisked across town to the Caprice on Fourth Avenue. An hour later he was in the Showboat Bar on Atlantic Avenue. “Beautiful,” Red D’Orio complimented himself. “How could they get me when they never see me? Just keep walkin’ and talkin’.” He held his glass out for another drink. Nothing happened. Blearily, Red D’Orio looked down the bar. There was no bartender. This was because the bartender had just received a phone call telling him to get into the men’s room or stand a chance of getting shot too. The rest of the place was empty. “Where did all the guys go?” Red said. The door to the Showboat opened. Red D’Orio brightened. He needed company. He turned to the door. “Hi, guys,” he said. “Hi,” one of them said. The other two did not talk. They were too busy shooting.

  Rain began to fall at midnight. It rapidly turned into heavy rain, with the cold wind blowing it in sheets. The rain emptied the streets. Kid Sally, sitting in the front seat of the car, began hitting himself on the forehead. It was time to think of a good place to dump the body. He decided on the weed-fringed industrial slop of the bay on the far side of Staten Island. No human being would be in the vicinity on a night like this. Big Jelly drove onto the parkway that goes to the Verrazano Bridge. The bridge runs across the Narrows of New York Harbor to Staten Island. As they came up the approach ramp, the rain was so heavy that Big Jelly had to drive slowly. The windshield was covered with running water. The reflection of the bridge lights on the running water made Big Jelly blink. The car crept onto the wide, brilliantly lit bridge runway. Kid Sally was staring moodily out the window on his side. He rolled the window down and put his head out into the rain. He looked ahead. He turned his head and squinted to see behind the car.

  “Nobody’s on the whole bridge,” he said.

  “Everybody must of got smart and pulled off the road,” Big Jelly said.

  Kid Sally giggled. “Stop the car in the middle,” he said.

  “The middle?” Big Jelly said.

  “Just stop the car in the middle,” Kid Sally said. His lip curled into a sneer. He began giggling.

  Big Jelly pulled the car to the side of the bridge and rolled to a stop.

  “The greatest.” Kid Sally giggled.

  “What greatest?” Big Jelly said.

  “Just let’s go,” Kid Sally said. He opened the car door.

  “Go what?” Beppo said.

  “Go to watch the first man ever to come off of the bridge,” Kid Sally said.

  “Wow!” Beppo said.

  “That’s different,” Big Jelly said. “Whyn’t you tell me?” He pushed his door open.

  Kid Sally stood in the rain, tugging the Water Buffalo by the shoulders out of the back seat. Beppo stood in the back and kicked the body. Big Jelly reached for the legs. Grunting against the weight of the body and the cinderblocks, the rain washing their hair into their faces and soaking through their clothes, the three of them staggered with the body to the low battleship-gray wall on the side of the roadway. High above them, on the towers and cables, the bridge lights were strung out in a burning necklace that can be seen for thirty miles. Straight out, and below them, there was only blackness with rain whipping out of it. They heaved the Water Buffalo’s body on top of the wall. The three of them went back a couple of steps. “Now!” Kid Sally said. They rushed forward, arms straight out in what football people refer to as a forearm shiver. They hit the Water Buffalo’s body and sent it out into the blackness. Under the roadway, a great steel beam protrudes. The cinderblocks hit the lip of the beam and bounced off into the black air. The Water Buffalo’s body followed. The bridge is 228 feet in the air. The rushing water below it is 180 feet deep. The initial airdrafts caused the cinderblocks and the body to wiggle a bit, as bombs do when they begin falling. The wiggling stopped, and the Water Buffalo and cinderblocks fell straight and true through the black air.

  The three of them dove back into the car. They were laughing and hitting themselves while Big Jelly got the car going.

  In the harbor water under the bridge at this time was the tugboat Grace Moran, pushing against the tide on its way to a scow-hauling job at Erie Basin. Also, the Greek freighter Olympic Zenith, which was sliding on the tide to the ocean. The Olympic Zenith, Theodore Kritzalis commanding, was carrying a cargo of steam turbines for Athens and also letter mail and printed matter for Lisbon, Naples, Piraeus, and Cyprus. The entire ship seemed to shake when the Water Buffalo hit the front hatch.

  One crewman on duty at the bow, Peter Chingos, fainted. Captain Kritzalis, brought up under German dive bombing, instinctively fell to the bridge deck. When there was no immediate explosion, Captain Kritzalis crawled to the intercom and ordered the crew to run to the stern of the ship. Captain Kritzalis had seen these delayed fuses before. The American harbor pilot, George Edmundson, tried to speak, but his voice failed to come out. He scribbled on a sheet of paper, “Raise Coast Guard!” A mate rushed the paper to the radio shack.

  Within minutes the Coast Guard cutter Lawson was streaming down the harbor toward the Olympic Zenith. Also converging on the freighter were the New York City Fire Department boat John F. Kennedy and New York City Police Department Harbor Launch No. 7. The Olympic Zenith lay dead in the water and searchlights poked through rain and fell on the bow. The searchlights intensified the light cast by the worklights on the winches over the front hatch. And now, through the heavy rain and blackness, the damage could be seen. Sticking up from the hatch cover, which had been smashed almost completely through, were the Water Buffalo’s still magnificent $110 alligator Bostonians. The rest of the Water Buffalo was dangling in the air in the front hold.

  Preliminary reports reached all responsible parties.

&n
bsp; Louis Samuels, night man in the Mayor’s office at City Hall, scribbled quickly on a yellow legal pad while the communications man from Police Headquarters read off the report.

  “Uhuh,” Samuels said. He flicked the call off and then pressed down another key on the small monitor board and began to flick it up and down rapidly.

  “What?” The Mayor’s voice was husky with sleep.

  “Mr. Mayor, the police say that a gangster was thrown off the Verrazano Bridge and the body landed on a Greek freighter.”

  Samuels’ ear was filled with the hollow sound of the Mayor’s phone falling from the night table and dangling in the air. He could hear a rustle and the phone being picked up again.

  “Hello,” the Mayor’s wife said. “I don’t know what it is, but he’ll have to call you back. He just had to go to the bathroom.”

  In Brooklyn, Benjamin Goodman leaned over a sink in one corner of his crowded office. Goodman ran cold water and slapped it over his red-rimmed eyes. He took a paper towel and dried himself. His face felt a little better now.

  “All right,” he called out to the crowd of detectives. “Now let’s go over this again. I want the timing checked out step by step. I want to have this thing come off smooth, and I don’t want to miss one of these animals.”

  It was eight a.m. in London. Georges Pappajohn, a silk robe wrapped around his 5-foot-4, 265-pound body, stood at the living-room window of his suite in the Dorchester. He looked down at the morning traffic in Hyde Park and muttered impatiently while the overseas operator put his call through to Washington. Pappajohn, seventy-one, is known as the Floating Greek because of all the ships he owns.

  “Come on, come on,” Georges Pappajohn snarled at the operator. “I buy your company and fire you.”

  “What’s the matter, Georgie?” His wife, Rona, almost eighteen, stood in the doorway in a Baby Doll nightgown.