Senatore accused the cops for all to hear of taking a cut of corner crap games and beating kids when they didn’t like the way they were dressed. He admitted that he’d been in trouble, did three years for burglary, and since then his luck was all bad.
“Nobody trusts an ex-jailbird,” he said, and sat down a little embarrassed, but jazzed by the moment. He’d been a true Garfield, a true brother to the accused. That was all that really mattered.
And his message, perhaps surprisingly, came through loud and clear. His conclusion was that crooked cops and lack of understanding by law enforcement was responsible for the dilemma of youth in his neighborhood.
Interestingly, Judge Leibowitz would in the next couple of years supervise a grand jury that returned indictments against eighteen NYPD officers that took bribes from pro gamblers.
A photographer captured Scappi moments after Senatore’s speech, overcome with emotion, holding a handkerchief over his eyes as he held hands with his sobbing, bespectacled mother.
Of course, for Senatore, there was hell to pay. He was subjected by police to an ordeal, hounded by men in blue overheard saying they were looking for an opportunity to “kill that bastard.” The cops sent mixed messages when they offered him an opportunity to look at a line-up of cops so he could pick out the ones who were cutting into the dice games. Senatore took a pass.
The trial was never completed as the sides dealt and seventeen-year-old Scarpati pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Soon thereafter, Senatore became the successful pet project of the Rev. Edward O’Connor from Aquinas who, trusting a jailbird, offered Senatore a position as an offertory collector at mass and usher at a church dance.
On December 8, 1950, Scarpati was sentenced to fifteen to thirty years in prison. Hearing the judge, his mother collapsed into her daughter’s arms in a dead faint. Police had to restrain the crowd. There was a “near-riot.” (By the time Scappi got out, Carmine was in a position to give him a key place in his crew shylocking and running numbers.)
With Scappi’s time in court wrapping up, police received an anonymous tip. The Tigers were out to avenge Fortunato, and had even picked which Garfield they were going to hit. (We have to guess.) Police and the Brooklyn Youth Board tried to get between the gangs and get them to make nice. The Brooklyn Youth Board was financed by the State and was hired to teach kids how to have fun in wholesome ways, like boxing, basketball, and dancing with girls. One official said that he was hesitant to organize a dance for these guys. The Tigers in particular were a problem. They showed up to dances drunk and once, when they had no one to fight, they “tore the dance hall apart.” He added, “They are going to have to learn to act like gentlemen.”
The Youth Board had a lot of takers, but not always the gang members. They saw such efforts as strictly squaresville, man.
Each gang sent representatives to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting at the precinct headquarters with the police and a couple of priests, members of the decent element who were there to dish the guilt onto the Catholic boys. It worked to a point. Carmine and Mush were on their best behavior in front of the “fadduh.” During the meeting, outside the spell of the Lord, close to a hundred gang members filled the room like a French watercolor. It was the peak of the relatively short zoot suit fad, and they were a sea of purple trousers and sharply cut green jackets, and they roamed the halls putting their cigarettes out on the floor. Knowledge of the police station’s layout might come in handy some day, in case you needed to bust a guy out, so they wandered. If a cop called to them, they said they were just looking for the john.
The meeting broke up, and the parties had come up with an agreement to disarm. Further disputes, if absolutely necessary, were to be settled with the fists. Like men. Gang members were to turn in their weapons, switchblades, zip guns, no-questions-asked. Weekly meetings between gang reps and cops were scheduled.
The numbers of weapons turned in voluntarily was a disappointment—a slingshot that looked like it might’ve come out of Dennis the Menace’s back pocket, a sawed-off pool cue handle, and a bent carpenter’s level—and by the following spring the whole peace talks thing was a distant memory.
By that time, Carmine Persico would have outgrown his rumbling days. He’d be nursing bullet wounds and plotting to whack guys.
CHAPTER THREE
The Murder of Stephen Bove
On February 23, 1951, gunshots echoed along the bricked streets of Gowanus. A body, its head ruined by an up-close and personal pumping of lead, was rolled like a sack of garbage into a frozen gutter near the Carroll Street Bridge.
ON JANUARY 9, 1951, Carmine Persico, now seventeen years old, was returning on foot from the movies to his home on Carroll Street, walking with his twenty-year-old brother Alphonse. They walked on icy sidewalks, and later said they had just seen a double feature on Court Street—Where Danger Lives with Robert Mitchum, and Mr. Lucky with Cary Grant.
The brothers had almost made it home when three young men sprang from a nearby parked car.
One said, “There they are.”
Another pulled a gun and fired twice, striking Carmine once in each leg.
The hit team scrambled back into the car and laid rubber out of there—but they didn’t get far. The driver careened wildly down the street, and crashed into a parked car less than a block away. With the getaway car disabled, the shooter and his pals ran for it and disappeared into the night. The entire incident had been well-contained in a small area. The attackers stole the car from a woman who lived just a few blocks up, also on Carroll Street.
An ambulance was called, and Carmine went to the hospital. Alphonse was questioned by police. He explained that he was just trying to be a good older brother. He knew that Carmine— just a kid really, look at him—was in that bad, bad gang. Garfield Boys. And he needed to stay on the straight and narrow if he was ever going to make something of himself. There’d already been trouble that led to tragedy. Alphonse said he was trying to talk Carmine into quitting the street life and spending more time on his studies. That was why they went to the movies. It was all part of Carmine’s “rehabilitation program.” He said it with a straight face, too. Cops had to admire him for that.
No worries. Carmine saw who shot him. It was Steve Bove, the guy from the 1949 Coney Island arrest, already in his mid-twenties but still hanging out. He lived over on Third Avenue, worked for the Maritime Commission as a dock sweeper, currently assigned to a Staten Island pier. He also had a record of three arrests and had twice been sent up by the state, once to Sing Sing, once Elmira.
Cops went to the hospital to talk to the victim. They recognized the kid with the mug on him from the Prospect Park thing. You couldn’t forget the face or the attitude. And Carmine never said a word to the police. He merely gazed upon his interrogators with an expression of mild distaste.
Carmine’s silence didn’t completely stifle the investigation, however. The beef between the Persico brothers and Stephen Bove was well known. As doctors were still yanking lead from Carmine’s lower extremities, cops brought Bove in, questioned him, and let him go. Not enough evidence, blah blah, blah—but it made no difference. Steve Bove didn’t have long to live.
Carmine had been in the papers before, of course, but with a bullet in each leg, Carmine made the headlines for the first time, his shooting sharing the banner of the Eagle with news of the Korean War battle at Wonju Gates, a plan to draft eighteen-year-old boys into the military, and the death of novelist Sinclair Lewis.
* * *
On February 22, 1951, as Brooklyn buzzed over the L.I.U. basketball point-shaving scandal, only a few feet from the scene of the previous year’s rumble, winter maintenance guys in Prospect Park were in front of the boathouse draining Swan Lake to repair a faulty valve. As the noisy machinery cranked away, sucking the water from the lake, it became apparent that there was something in there that didn’t belong. The thing turned out to be the body of seventeen-year-old Thomas Mongiove, who had lived at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street next
to Green-Wood Cemetery—all the way on the other side of Prospect Park and then some—and had been missing for about one month. The body had managed to avoid discovery because it had been trapped beneath the ice. The kid delivered telegrams for Western Union, had disappeared on Sunday morning on his way to mass at St. Xavier, and had no known gang affiliation—but still, police didn’t like the proximity.
The story of the body in the lake made the papers in the New York area, of course, but it also went national because—coincidentally, we are told—the boy’s kid sister was “picnicking at the lake” with relatives (in the mud and blustery February wind) when the body was discovered. She reportedly screamed, “That’s my brother!” It was the boathouse’s second death in less than a year. Post-mortem said death was by drowning, no evidence of foul play, the kid probably fell through the ice. Cops closed the case.
The family screamed. Tommy was an excellent swimmer. “How can we be sure Tom wasn’t slugged?” his older brother Frank said. Frank looked it up, the lake hadn’t even been frozen when Tom disappeared. He’d seen the body. The face was all bruised. Significantly, he said, Tommy always carried money and none was found on his body.
* * *
The night after Mongiove’s body was discovered, February 23, 1951, Carmine and Alphonse Persico were riding in a car with Steve Bove, who was very inebriated following copious drinks in a Red Hook saloon. Driving the car was a well-known thoroughbred-racehorse jockey named Albert “The Blue Beetle” Grillo.
We don’t know how the evening got started, or at what stage in the drinking the Persico brothers showed up. It’s hard to imagine Bove agreeing to sit down with Alphonse and Carmine for a cocktail or twelve. He must’ve known they were not his friends. Perhaps Bove had been drinking with Grillo and the Persicos’ arrived at the last moment, just in time for the car ride. Maybe Bove had been drinking with others and his state of extreme inebriation struck the Persicos as an excellent opportunity to get the job done without much fuss.
The jockey at the wheel, Grillo, worked at all of the top tracks, including Belmont Park and Aqueduct Racecourse in New York City, and Monmouth Park in New Jersey. Who sat where in the car is a matter of speculation, as there have been intimations that the official version of the night’s events were altered. According to the official story, Carmine sat shotgun and kept a close eye on the diminutive driver. Allie Boy was in the backseat with Bove. There was one other passenger, presumably also in the back, who has never been publicly identified. The car worked its way through the sooty dark streets near the Gowanus Canal. They drove slowly through the industrial lowlands, deserted at that hour, the only sound was the car’s tires singing over the bricked street. At one point, Alphonse calmly pulled a snub-nosed police special from his pocket, pointed it at Bove’s head and shot him five times.
Grillo jumped so high his head almost hit the roof. Allie Boy ordered the terrified jockey to pull to the curb and stop the car. Carmine gave the Beetle a look that said everything: Do as you’re told or you’re next.
The jockey did as he was told, and Alphonse rolled Bove’s body into the gutter only yards from the Carroll Street Bridge, crossing the fetid canal. Bove’s gruesome remains were found later that morning by an unfortunate pedestrian.
Cops tried to reconstruct the victim’s last hours. As far as they could tell, Bove had last been seen in a neighborhood “ginmill” engaging in a “drinking bout” with some friends. It was unclear who the friends were, but the guy Bove left with was on the puny side.
The body was autopsied by Dr. George W. Ruger, Assistant Kings County Medical Examiner, in the county morgue. The bullets that killed Bove came from a .38. Four shots had entered the back of Bove’s head and a fifth bullet struck Bove a glancing blow in the back. All five slugs were recovered, four still inside the body, and a fifth in the gutter under his body where it was found. Toxicology tests confirmed that the deceased had been drinking heavily at the time of his death.
Of special interest to investigators was the twenty-eight-year-old jockey, Anthony “Blue Beetle” Grillo, who was suspected of being the small fellow seen exiting the bar with Bove.
Investigators struck paydirt when they took a quick look at Grillo’s car—which was a mess. A search warrant was quickly obtained, and the evidence, much of it once part of Bove’s head, was confiscated, bagged and sealed. They had Grillo red-handed.
Cops made like they would pin the murder on Grillo if he didn’t spill, and eventually the jockey gave up the Persicos. Police went in search of Alphonse and Carmine, only to discover that all of their friends and loved ones shrugged their shoulders and said they had no idea where they were. Everyone was deaf and dumb.
But the Law had its ways. People close to the brothers were tailed. Places they frequented were staked out. During the early hours of March 2, 1951, Carmine was found, arrested, and charged with Bove’s murder—his second arrest in connection with a murder.
Carmine clamped his lips together and asked for a lawyer.
The lawyer subsequently explained to prosecutors that there was an outside chance that Carmine might have seen a murder, but no one—not even the investigation’s key witness—said that Carmine hurt anybody that night.
The murder charge against Carmine was dismissed by Magistrate James A. Blanchfield in Felony Court on March 9, but Carmine continued to be held as a material witness in County Court, bail set at $50,000—a big number for a seventeen-year-old. As of March 10, Alphonse was still missing.
The police went to the public. It was announced in the papers that they were on the lookout for Alphonse Persico, suspected of being the gunman in the death of Steve Bove. Alphonse, they explained, had “disappeared.”
Carmine kept mum. Cops poured over Alphonse’s car, which they found in a Carroll Street parking lot. Alphonse, investigators said, was the killer. Carmine, as far as they knew, was just “tagging along.”
Details of Alphonse Persico’s arrest are lost in the mists of time. When we next see Allie Boy he has been captured, charged with Bove’s murder, and thrown into a septic tank called the Raymond Street Jail. Carmine, in turn, was released.
* * *
As was true during the Prospect Park murder trial, Carmine haunted the Kings County courtroom during his brother’s trial—and again paid rapt attention to the figures that made the theater of so-called justice so compelling.
His attention was even more focused than it had been at the Prospect Park trial. His active mind dug past the showmanship to the inner workings behind the scenes. It seemed to Carmine like the fate of the defendant hinged largely on the tenacity of his defense attorney. Allie Boy’s guy was good, fought hard, but came off as tepid. Defenders should fight for their clients’ lives as if they were their own, but that wasn’t how it was. Carmine had seen the prosecutor and defense attorney standing in the hall, on the stairs, smoking together, complaining about the goddamned heat, talking about what they were going to have for lunch. It was just a job to them. Carmine felt that, should he ever get the opportunity, he could outduel any lawyer—not with smarts but with heart.
The Prospect Park trial had been intensely dramatic. Carmine would never forget the way the room felt when Senatore began to drill into the causes of juvenile delinquency. But there was something small about that trial when compared to Allie Boy’s. Now, up on that lofty bench was the Honorable Nathan R. Sobel, a forty-five-year-old legal scholar. Judge Sobel was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but grew up in the Borough Park and Brownsville sections of Brooklyn, went to Boys High School, boxed for a while in the 1920s, and put himself through Brooklyn Law School by working as a telephone operator at a Wall Street firm for four bucks an hour. Before WWII, he counseled New York’s Governor Herbert H. Lehman regarding a new workman’s compensation bill, and at the time of Alphonse’s trial, had been a Kings County Court Judge for seven and a half years. But all of that understates his public persona. He was society, the equivalent of a rock star, and had many show-biz
friends like actor Edward G. Robinson and the song-writing team of Rodgers & Hart. In his robe he radiated pure Brooklyn.
Sitting beside Alphonse was fifty-seven-year-old Leo H. Healy, who in 1911 had held the title of World Champion Intercollegiate Orator, defeating the German Carl Guggenheim in the finals. It’s hard to gauge the size of the talent pool for a competition like that, but it’s safe to say that Healy could speak with great articulation. He was the valedictorian of his class at Fordham Law in the Bronx. Healy, back when he was a young man in the early 1920s, earned fame for combatting the Black-Star Line, African-American leader Marcus Garvey’s attempt to set up a pan-African economy. Healy started out as a kid from Boston but married a Brooklyn girl and had lived there for decades. It was a bit of a fall for him that he now defended gangsters for a living, but his career had not been without hiccups. In 1930, when he was a judge, he was charged with a “job buying” scheme. He was cleared of the charges, but resigned for “health reasons.” Despite the scandal that seemed to have derailed him as a judge, the fact that Sobel was presiding—and that Healy was defending—indicated to the press that this murder-one case was special.
The people were represented by Assistant District Attorney John E. Cone, chief of the homicide division and in charge of the county court division of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. He was born in Brooklyn and received his law degree at St. John’s.
As with Anthony Scarpati’s trial, a blue-ribbon jury was to be selected, a jury consisting of “highly-qualified persons.” It was code for “no women.” Bored reporters doodled in their note pads during several days of voir dire. There was no air-conditioning in the county courtroom, and the air was close with the sour scent of men in soggy suits. Out of an initial panel of seventy-five veniremen summoned on Monday, July 16, many felt Red Hook hoods deserved what they got. Others had misgivings about standing in judgment of someone who might have connections. Only a few felt they could be impartial. As fans blew the steamy air around, eight men were empaneled in the first week. A fresh batch of seventy-five were brought in on July 23, and jury selection was completed.
Carmine the Snake Page 4