The weapons era, the dawn of which coincided with Carmine dropping out of school, spring 1949, lessened the frequency of rumbles because the potential consequences were increased so dramatically.
When a rumble was called now, the first thing Carmine’s Garfields did was pick up the heavier weapons: baseball bats, chains, lead pipes, packaged in a beat-up old golf bag and hidden atop a movie-theater marquee. Two would climb up and then hand the stuff down to two guys on the sidewalk.
Not all gang members dropped out on their sixteenth birthday. Some remained in school, not for reading, writing, and ’rith-matic, but rather for access to the metal and automotive shops, where weapons could be made behind the teacher’s back, including zip guns modified from cap guns with enough power to imbed a projectile two-inches deep in a plaster wall. Another ingenious form of zip gun was a .22 made of wood and part of a screen door, held together with adhesive tape and powerful enough to kill. One kid converted a gun used at a Coney Island arcade into a deadly weapon and used it to shoot up the house of a math teacher he hated.
Little wonder that the ranks of mob hitmen in the 1950s were bursting with former juvenile delinquents. Early on, they were desensitized to violence and indoctrinated into functioning within a criminal organization.
While the gangs waged their mini-wars, mob crews used gang members for cheap labor. It was common for a gang member to also have a side job working for the policy bank, off-track betting, or the sports book, mostly football parlays.
Unlike a lot of young punks, Carmine wasn’t afraid of adults. He spoke well and appeared relaxed as he shook them down: “Hey Mister, you don’t want to park there. Probably something could happen to your beautiful automobile if you park there. The kids these days. Of course, my friends and I could keep an eye on it for you until you get back—for a price.”
Sometimes the Garfields raided a rival’s turf and kicked ass. One autumn night, Carmine and his gang hopped turnstiles and rode the BMT to the end of the line. The rumbled with the Hamiltons at the corner of 92nd Street and Third Avenue. The fight was broken up by Patrolman Joseph Ragusa of the Fort Hamilton Precinct. The combatants dispersed on slapping sneakers. Three Garfields were arrested. Cops confiscated a few sawed-off billiard cues, weighted with lead.
* * *
Summers were when the kids in Brooklyn got in the most trouble. No air-conditioning back then except in the movies. You had to use God’s A.C., and that meant the cool ocean breezes of Coney Island. If you were a tough kid, you paraded the boardwalk in a sleeveless T-shirt and got into a fight, which is what Alphonse and Carmine Persico did on the evening of July 24, 1949.
Visually, Alphonse was clearly the big brother, the older one—the protector. He stood six-foot and weighed two-hundred pounds. He had a tattoo, a scar on his left cheek, and a scowl of world-weariness. He looked dangerous. It was all in sharp contrast to the precociously jaded but fresh smirk on little Carmine’s face.
Versus them was a guy from around the corner on Third Avenue, an older guy in his twenties, named Steve Bove. When cops tried to squelch the melee, the young men threw punches in the wrong directions and everyone got popped for assaulting police officers.
The Persico brothers and Jove bargained down to simple assault and received suspended sentences.
You’d think an event like that would bind guys together for life, but the beef between Bove and the Persico brothers festered.
* * *
The Garfield Boys’ fights became legendary on Friday night, May 12, 1950. The rumble in the park was a tragic scene that contained several aspects later found in the climactic scenes of the movie West Side Story. It was a real-life incident that, because of the location and political climate had a disproportionate effect on 1950s life in America. One fight in one park on one night influenced public opinion nationally. It got to the point where the average American thought juvenile delinquents were a bigger threat to a foundering America than Communism. Back then, that was saying something.
The Tigers hung out at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street in the South Slope. They had a rep as a gang that drank a lot, but laid off dope. One of them admitted to having marijuana cigarettes smuggled in to him at reform school in a peanut butter jar, but that was it for drugs. Tigers drank booze. Come fight time, that meant they’d all be into it.
At 8:30 P.M. more than forty gang members met in Prospect Park near the Swan Lake Boathouse.
Under clear skies and a waning crescent moon, it was an elegant scene for a gathering tempest of street toughs. They would wage war not under a rusty basketball rim, on broken glass and cracked pavement, but rather at a breathtaking natural and man-made setting, a Beaux Arts structure built in 1905 overlooking the Lullwater Bridge, a colorful flotilla of tied-together rowboats, and a lake that had actual swans; not in an ambiance of crumbled brick and peeling fire escapes, but rather in what was in the sunshine certainly one of the most beautiful settings in all of Brooklyn. At night though it was very dark, and the majesty of the boathouse blackened into a shadowy monolithic menace.
According to the Garfields, trouble started when one of their guys, Dominick LaBua, traveled into Tigers’ territory to visit a girl, an invasion of turf to which the Tigers took exception. Most agreed the fight was over a girl. That was often the case. Sometimes it was because one guy hit on (or insulted) another guy’s girl, and that was legit. Sometimes it was bogus: just deb shit. Debs were the loud-mouthed girls who hung out and were into drama and instigating. The papers sometimes called them molls, which made them sound as if they looked like Bonnie Parker, which they did not. The debs had their own gangs—the Shangri-Las (thus, the biker-chick singing group of the 1960s), the Chandeliers, the Robinettes. When it was convenient, guys used the debs to hide their weapons. Cops were very slow to search debs as they would scream they were being touched in the wrong way and get the flatfoot in trouble. You needed a police matron to do a search, and there usually wasn’t one handy. The debs were also useful as alibi-givers. A guy in trouble could always get a deb to vouch for him, that he was with her at a dance or a movie.
The rumble had main-event style preparation, a formal sit-down, Carmine doing the talking for the Garfields. Ground rules were agreed upon—rules designed to prevent all-out war. One fighter and two seconds from each side would meet at the spot. No one else allowed close.
Carmine ended the meeting with a stern warning: “No double-crosses.”
One of the advantages of the boathouse turned out to be that it was like a stage, and the action could be watched from a variety of vantage points, from the grassy slope just north of the building, to the picturesque arched bridge that crossed the pond.
Why fight all the way over on the east side of the park? The site, best guess, was the idea of one of the neighborhood hoodlums. Teen gang fights bring cops into the neighborhood—not a good thing for a grown-up guy playing an angle on that same block. Don’t draw heat. The Ocean Avenue side of the park, not far from Ebbets Field, couldn’t have seemed farther from Red Hook.
The rules prohibited the two fighters and their seconds to bear arms, but there was no controlling the Garfields and Tigers who were supposed to watch from afar. Some of them were armed to the teeth “just in case.” Guys were itchy to “ruin somebody.”
At the boathouse, the fair fight broke down right away when the seconds went at it. Then, boom, all hands on deck. Kids came running from all directions, down the hills, around the pond. It became a pitched battle, weapons came out. Bats. Tire chains. A brandished knife, a scream of pain, and then two .22 pistol shots.
In the movie version, a rumble may protract with choreography and eloquent verbiage. In reality, gang fights were short and sweet, and almost always a draw. Often the ending note was a paranoid shout—“cheese it!”—(or a distant siren) that caused everyone to disperse.
On the night of Garfields vs. Tigers at the boathouse, it was the gunshots that caused everyone to run. Not the flat crack of a zip gun, eit
her—sharp reports, real gun.
The Garfields—including Carmine, Mush, Gerry Lang, and Anthony “Scappi” Scarpati—ran westward through the park, taking surreptitious paths over Breeze Hill, the Terrace Bridge, and Lookout Hill, where George Washington fought during the Revolution, toward Prospect Park West and the streets of the Slope. They slowed to a fast walk all the way down to the canal, to the Carroll Street bridge where one of them tossed a gun into the “water” of the Gowanus. They half expected it to bounce, but there was a thick splash and the gun was gone.
* * *
Back at the park, the gunshots caught the attention of Patrolman Frank Mantegari of the Park Slope Station, who came running toward the boathouse and found two boys down. Left behind were two Park Slope kids, eighteen-year-old James “Jamesie” Fortunato, a Tiger who was shot twice in the belly, and was lying up the grassy incline north of the boathouse, and Alfred Vento, who was knifed in the abdomen, down and bleeding directly in front of the boathouse, center stage.
By the time Officer Mantegari got to Fortunato, he was almost gone. The kid was rushed by ambulance to Jewish Hospital where he died a short time later. An ambulance also came for Vento and rushed him to Methodist Hospital where he made a complete recovery.
* * *
The day after the rumble, the Brooklyn Eagle ran a banner headline, “BOY SLAIN IN PARK GANG WAR,” in a size type usually reserved for things like V-J Day or FDR’s death. That got the publicity ball rolling.
In the papers, Jamesie came off as a great kid, the youngest of eight children, the baby, clean cut and hard-working, only weeks from graduating from vocational school and beginning his first job. Fortunato’s older brother Nick, thirty-three years old and the father of three at the time of his brother’s death, told the Brooklyn Eagle, “I tried to form a club with the co-operation of storekeepers in the neighborhood. I thought a couple of able-bodied men could get together and do something for these boys. Jamesie and his pals were chased all the time by the Garfield Boys who outnumbered them twenty to one. At least I tried, but it takes cooperation. Most of all, it takes money.”
Jamesie, he added, joined the Tigers to play football. They were going to rumble only on the gridiron. But the organized sports thing fell through, and the gang regressed to its old ways.
Emotion overcame ballistics as Nick added, “He was going to work as a packer at Bush Terminal. Instead of that he got a bullet in the back. I kissed him as he lay on his slab in the morgue and held him in my arms. I don’t think he had a chance.”
The cop said that Carmine and his Garfields were the terror of Brooklyn, that they would surround isolated boys and beat them, even in schoolyards and classrooms. The average Tiger was only sixteen or so years old, and they lived in fear of the Garfields, some of whom had already done prison time. Tigers couldn’t even walk to and from school.
Alfred Vento was in the prison ward at Kings County Hospital with his gut bandaged up. His mom, a widow, had seven kids to support. She’d just gotten home from a double shift when one of Al’s friends knocked on her door and told her about the Prospect Park bloodbath. She said the rumble had been misreported in the papers and was eager to tell the Eagle the real story: “This boy LaBua had challenged my Al to a fist fight. Al refused and LaBua called him chicken. So they agreed to a fair fight and then they were to shake hands and be friends. That’s all there was to it.” Jamesie, she said, had been Alfred’s friend since they were little and went along to second. She said the Tigers was a football team, not a gang, and that Jamesie and her Al had won two championships, back to back, in games played at Park Circle.
* * *
Following the Prospect Park rumble, the police youth squad rounded up all of the gang members they could find, more than fifty of them, including Carmine Persico. Police hauled their belligerent asses down to the Fifth Avenue station.
At the police station, cops told Carmine that, because he was the leader of the Garfields, he was being arrested as a material witness to murder, a legal process that allowed police to hold someone who has info about a crime. If he didn’t give it up, he was going down, taking the rap for everyone. Carmine smirked and said nothing. Carmine did not talk, but others did, and a story emerged.
At dawn of May 13, police arrested sixteen-year-old Anthony “Scappi” Scarpati, a Garfield and one of fifteen kids in his family that lived on Third Street. He’d confessed to the shooting. Said he fired two shots, one in the air and one wild. Just to break it up after he saw the knife. The gun was a .22 caliber revolver. Gone. Long gone, he said. He threw it into the Gowanus off the Carroll Street Bridge. (Police went as far as to drag the Gowanus in search of the weapon. No luck. Perhaps the gun dissolved.) He told the police Vento and LaBua—a baby-faced kid with a protruding upper lip, they called him LaBoo—were scheduled to have a fistfight over a girl. But LaBoo pulled a knife and chaos erupted. The rumble was the culmination of a long-standing feud between the two gangs, which until then had been limited to skirmishes.
Carmine’s murder charges were dropped, but he and six others were charged with lesser crimes such as disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly.
* * *
The story was big and went a long way toward creating the “juvenile delinquent” gestalt that overwhelmed America in the 1950s, evident in the media of the time in everything from bad B-style drive-in movies to classics like Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, and the previously mentioned West Side Story.
The piece of show biz that struck closest to home was a 1956 picture that was set in Red Hook and called Rumble on the Docks. It was cheaply made and cornier than hell—actor James Darren’s first picture, also starring Robert Blake, Diggers versus Stompers, Freddie Bell and His Bell Boys rocking the gymnasium dance with “Giddy Up A Ding Dong”—but it dignified the idea that teenaged gang members might be stars, that the gangs were a path to being somebody. Rumble on the Docks was based on the 1953 paperback bestseller of the same name by Brooklyn’s Frank Palescandolo (writing as Frank Paley).
* * *
Scarpati’s murder trial began in November 1950. Carmine Persico had never been to a Broadway show, so this was as close to theater as he was going to get. And, in a weird way, it was love at first sight. Perhaps the part of Carmine that should have gone to law school was bubbling to the surface, but he was a human sponge, learning, absorbing, whenever in a courtroom. He observed the players, the formality of the ceremony, the oratory—some of it powerful, even magnificent. Some of the language might take some time getting used to—sidebar, objection, voir dire—but he was pretty sure he could be a great lawyer if he put his mind to it. And Scappi’s trial, Carmine’s first show, had moments of amazing drama worthy of the Great White Way.
The hard-nosed and merciless Judge Samuel S. Leibowitz was presiding. As a young man Judge Leibowitz defended Al Capone and Capone walked. He’d defended 140 murderers and only one was executed. After a while though he declined requests to defend hoods. Lucky Luciano, and several of the Murder Inc. guys wanted Leibowitz defending them but the future judge declined. Now, in his eleventh year as a Kings County court judge, he had no patience for killers. He said they were all scum—the organized guys, the lone wolves, all of them. Asked how he could defend gangsters and then sit in harsh judgment over them, Judge Leibowitz would say that he might’ve defended them but he never consorted with them. Capone did not slap his back and call him Sam. It wasn’t like that. He was a lawyer, doing his job. This junior version of gangland he was looking at in the Prospect Park murder needed to be treated harshly as well. It was clearly the farm system, to use a baseball term, for organized crime.
Everyone, including Carmine Persico, looked up at the judge. The judge was in charge, like a god, literally above everyone else up on his bench. This was his court, he was the court, and everything that occurred there was done only with his permission.
A panel was drawn from 150 blue-ribbon jurors. It was unusually tense in the courtroom. Members of both the Gar
fields and Tigers were in the gallery, having been subjected to a patting down in the hallway before being allowed inside, and the guards, usually charged only with preventing escape attempts by the defendant, had additional worries with the warring factions in the room.
But there was no trouble. The boys sat politely, in awe. Tigers behind the prosecution, Garfields behind the defense. Carmine sat in the front row, so he could watch the mouthpieces work, and lend Scappi maximum support.
* * *
The highlight of the trial came at the end, when while giving Scarpati a verbal dressing down, the judge said, “There isn’t a kid in this court today who would get up and say anything nice about you. You’re a big wheel. Nobody will say anything on your behalf.”
At that moment, the stony silence that the judge had been hoping for was broken by a voice from the Garfield side in the back: “I’m a friend of his and I have something to say for him.”
You could have heard a pin drop into a cotton ball. Mouths agape, the gallery gasped in unison as it turned to look at the painfully thin young man who had risen from his seat in the back.
The voice continued: “You think he’s bad? Well, all the people—teachers, police—who helped make him bad are bad, too.”
The speaker was a Garfield, an underfed twenty-year-old meatpacker named Joseph Senatore, who ignored the judge’s disciplinary gavel.
“Look, judge, you’re not going to reform him by sending him to jail for a long time. You’re just going to make him bitter. Just as bitter as I am. I was in jail. I know what they did to me there. You can’t stop this trouble. It’s the neighborhood, the environment. We’ve got no place to go, nothing to do. If the cops had more understanding, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. They come out of their cars swinging their sticks, instead of asking us to move. What can we do? We can’t stay home seven days a week. Look, we go into a poolroom or someplace and the cops break in on us. Judge, we’ve got no place to go.”
Finally Judge Leibowitz decided to engage the man who was already in contempt of court: “Young man, you mentioned the police, what have you to say about them?”
Carmine the Snake Page 3