It was about this time that the reinforcements arrived, motorcars with sirens, tires screeching, whistles blasting. More cops than I ever want to see come pourin’ out of the vehicles and go charging down into the yards, clubbing my mates from hell to breakfast.
The sun dropped out of sight behind Jersey, a big ball of orange flame. “I guess this means you’re the big cheese now,” May said.
That realization was just then sinking in on the rest. I could see the looks in their eyes, congratulating themselves on being so wise as to have thrown in their lots with me. Tammany had taught me well: the only thing that counted was power, and it didn’t matter how you got it, as long as you kept it.
“As a great man says: I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” I said grandly, turning my back on the rail yards and the carnage and the North River and directing my attention east, where it now belonged.
Chapter Nineteen
So many myths have attached themselves to the deaths of Luigi Mollinucci and Willie Henshaw that it’s past high time to set the record straight. The same goes for what happened to me at the Arbor Dance Hall and for what happened to Little Patsy at Nash’s Cafe. There are times in your life when nothing happens forever, wish otherwise as you might. And then there are times like these, when half of everything that’s ever going to happen to you gets decided in a few short seconds, and no goin’ back. I guess God only has a certain amount of time for each individual; I only wish I had a little advance warning of the moment I had His complete and undivided attention.
I was over at the Tiger a few days after the Gophers got themselves mashed by the Centrals. There was smiles all ’round the Wigwam as I entered, and in my brain them smiles was for me, on account of what I’d done. By the time I got up to G.W.’s lair, the smiles was for real.
“Mr. Madden,” says himself, “let me congratulate on you, for sure isn’t Tammany a happy and grateful outfit this fine morning.”
I looked around the room and there was Jimmy, naturally, and another big mug I didn’t recognize. He was dressed in the same outfit everybody at Tammany wore, only he was sportin’ a bow tie—not too swell, but none too shabby either. Normally I don’t like conducting my business in front of strangers, but this wasn’t my bailiwick, and so I took the compliments like a man.
“’Tis a grand thing when a number of problems can be solved with a single bold stroke,” Plunkitt was saying when I started listening again. “There’s a new wind blowin’ down from Albany these days, and even we of the Wigwam sometimes have to bend along with it unless we want to get blown away. And that wind says the lawless days of the gangs is over. I seen it coming myself, back in the days of Monk and Kelly, but now it’s well and truly here, and make no mistake.” He cast a beneficent glance around the room.
One of the strangers spoke up. Shows you how dumb I was back then, it was only then that I recognized him as Big Tim Sullivan his own self.
“The gangs is gone because the conditions that bred ’em is going,” says Tim. “Tammany’s doing its work well. Why be a shtarker when you can just as easily hold elected office? The Irish don’t need crime anymore—we got the law on our side.”
G.W. took over. “Think of the law like it was a box o’ tools,” he said. “Some of ’em you use a lot; some of ’em you ain’t used in dog’s years, although they’re right there should you need ’em. Some of ’em, like a hammer, you can use for all sorts of things: to pry open a jar, or smash a window, or tamp down a tack. Well, the law ain’t no different. That’s why we make laws but hardly ever repeal ’em—you never know when one’s gonna come in handy.”
“Which brings me to my point,” says Big Tim, who really was big, especially when he was standing up, as he was now. “We’re after passing a law upstate that makes it a crime to carry a firearm in the State of New York.”
“Why would you want to go and do a screwy thing like that?” I asked, polite as I could.
“Because we can,” said Big Tim, which after all is the First Law of Politics.
“Because we want the mugs to understand who’s rulin’ this roost,” said Jimmy, and at that moment I knew he was really going places. “Because we want to show the goo-goos that we mean business. Because—”
“Because bangers is okay for some canary bird fresh from the jug,” says G.W., “but not for a newly minted Tammany man.” He paused so I could take his meaning. “Such as your own good self.”
I thought I was going to fall over right then and there, like I was shot.
“Oh sure, we’ll still need the services of some hard gees from time to time,” says Tim. “An election is a war and the polling place is a battlefield. To my way of thinking, people will always need a bit of persuading to vote often and to vote right each and every time. And we’ll be there to help. But we don’t need sluggers anymore—we need thinkers.”
In my brain I agreed with Big Tim, but in my heart I wasn’t so sure, and I certainly wasn’t about to forsake the heater that Monk gave me in order to make a man out of me. Which rod was stashed where it always lived, in the waistband of my trousers, snuggled up to me even tighter and more private than Freda, Margaret or Loretta.
Plunkitt wedged his seegar between his teeth and clamped his jaw tight. Then he opened his arms, motioning to me and Jimmy to step inside them, which we did. He hugged us both close, and I had to admit it felt good since I hadn’t been embraced by a man since my own dear Da departed, if you don’t count Monk’s pounding me on the back from time to time, and I guess my friendships with G.W. and Monk mighta been a way to compensate for Da’s loss, as them headshrinkers nowadays say, but I don’t hold to none of that, which if you ask me is for sissies.
Himself smothered us for a while, then let us out for air. “Tammany needs fine young specimens like the two of you,” he said. “Therefore, I want you both to promise me now, on the graves of the Irishmen who fought and died back home, and right here in front of Big Tim Sullivan the workingman’s friend, that you’ll always work together, never double-cross each other, and that you’ll split the take fair and square.”
It was an easy promise to make and we both made it.
“Jimmy here will be runnin’ for—and winnin’—the leadership of the eleventh district next year, against Jimmy Ahearn, a tough sonofabitch if there ever was one who’s beaten him twice, but I have a feeling three’s going to be a charm. You know where the eleventh is, Owen?”
I shook my head no. It was the first time Plunkitt had even been familiar with me, and I glowed.
“That would be uptown, Morningside Heights and a piece of Harlem. Sure, our colored brothers are movin’ in like Noah’s flood, but that don’t signify. Jimmy’ll represent the darkies same as the whites. As for you—”
I pricked up my ears.
“You’ll continue about your business in the twentieth ward, same as always. Except that allowin’ as how you’re operatin’ under the personal protection of meself and the Tiger, there are a few things I’d like you to attend to. To show your good faith and capabilities, about which I have no doubts.”
I asked what those few things might be.
“Really only one, when you get right down to it,” said G.W. He stubbed out his cigar on his desk and tossed the butt into the spittoon. “I want the Hudson Dusters eliminated from the body politic, and I don’t care how you do it. Big Tim’s law ain’t going to take effect until next year, so the way I see it, you’ve got six months or so to…reorganize the West Side right and proper. Jimmy will see to the finances: salary, expenses and whatnot.”
I allowed as how I was happy and honored to do so.
“Just keep your name out of the papers and your fingerprints off the evidence. Keep any unpleasantness to a minimum, cut yourself in on any business dealings generously but not greedily”—he directed his gaze toward Jimmy—“and always remember who your friends are.”
I wasn’t sure but I thought I’d just been invited to marry what was left of the Gophers to Tammany Hall,
a marriage made in Heaven. “Don’t you worry about a thing, sir,” I said, trying not to sound too eager, but probably failing.
Plunkitt looked at me all avuncular. “One more thing, Owen,” he said. “A word about combat, be it political or otherwise.”
I was listening hard.
“No matter how tough you are, you can always lose. The question is not how you handle victory. It’s what you make of defeat.”
We shook hands all around and I left as close to the top of the world as I’d ever been, but with the summit still firm in my sights.
Chapter Twenty
Things went fine enough at first. Me and the boys took charge of the Kitchen right quick, and soon enough wasn’t some folks referring to me as the Duke of the West Side. Without resorting to too much violence, we made it plain to the merchants and voters of the ward that from now on we’d be giving the orders and that if they had trouble whatsoever with any stray or rogue punk, they should come to us. The best part was the fairy story that the terrible Gophers had been destroyed by the Centrals, which meant that we officially didn’t exist, which meant there was no public outcry from the goo-goos to clean up the city, which meant I was in the enviable position of eating my cake and having it too.
We also made it clear to the Dusters that they was expected to stay in the Village, and not roam north of 14th Street if they knew what was good for them; penning them in I had figured for the first step. With my chum Tanner Smith in place, I could keep pretty good tabs on the Dusters, who were destroying themselves with the white powder anyhow and therefore weren’t much of a threat to anyone except themselves.
I was starting to pile up some real money too, except that I couldn’t very well show much of it to Ma. I gave her a lot of malarkey about working for Tammany in a minor organizing capacity, but with real prospects for advancement, and she seemed pleased as she nodded off after a glass of cordial or two. May by this time was working as a domestic, for a family of six kids over on 36th Street, with a sober mother and a crippled father—a sandhog who’d lost both his legs in an accident digging the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskills—so I didn’t feel uneasy about her being in service, although just in case, I had some of the boys keep an eye on things. Marty was Marty, running up a modest rap sheet of petty burglary busts in a sad-sack imitation of my own good self. He did three months in the Tombs and came back not a bit wiser.
Some of my swag I plowed into a proper clubhouse I rented from a horseshoer named Keating and which I called the Winona Club after a lass in the neighborhood I had taken a brief fancy to in between my visits with Loretta. My youthful fumblings with Freda had long since turned into more accomplished amorous artistry, and I liked to think I knew my way around the more piquant parts of a woman’s body the same way I could get from Rector Street to the upper precincts of the Kitchen without giving the route a minute’s thought.
The Winona Club sat on the second floor of Keating’s building. It had its own private entrance, and in short order we had fixed up another in the rear, so that if trouble came calling, there were a couple of ways out. I outfitted my first club with a big bar and a little Steinway, and there was always plenty of local gals who could be persuaded to come up and keep the gang company, some several of whom I was carrying on with more or less regularly. There was always music, as well as a bottle of whiskey on my table, because in them days I was under the influence of thinking that thinkin’ went easier if not better with booze.
Every now and then things could get a bit rowdy, what with the girls squealin’ that Georgie or somebody had pinched their bottoms, or a couple of the lads in particularly high spirits whalin’ away at each other, which I let them do so long as they didn’t break nothing of value.
One night when we was having some particularly boisterous discussions, Keating came bangin’ on the door, beefin’ about the noise. I guess you could say I’d had a few, because my inclination was to laugh in his face, which I did.
“You’ll have to be quiet up here,” says he, “or I’ll put you out of my house.” He looked the very picture of indignation, Keating did, his big blacksmith’s arms all pumped up with righteous wrath.
“You’ll put me out of your house?” I could hear the laughter from the gang in the background. I drew closer to him, knowing that if he was to take a swing at me, he’d be dead on the floor in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. “Mister, did you ever hear of Owney Madden?”
His mouth was workin’ but sayin’ nothing, which indicated to me that his brain was workin’ as well. There was a look in his eyes at my name that I’d seen on the face of the sergeant when he beheld the great Monk Eastman.
I backed away a little, letting my coat fall open just a little so that he could get a good look at my arsenal: my Bessie, the knucks and the .38.
“Well, mister—I am Owney Madden!”
I thought he was going to soil himself then and there. “It weren’t me that was complaining, mind you,” he sputtered. “It was one of them nosy neighbors next door.”
I looked over at some of the boys. I didn’t have to say nothing.
“Why don’t you let me have a word with ’em,” he continued, backpedaling. “They’s reasonable folks, I’ll warrant.”
“They’d better be,” says I, showing him the door we reserved for strangers and trouble.
Every now and then a bull got it into his thick skull that he ought to trump me in for some imagined malfeasance or other, shinin’ his buzzer, as it were, all of which the Tiger quashed faster than you could say Jimmy Hines.
One day while I was in temporary custody, clipping my nails, a bull came up to me. “Newspaper fella outside says he want to talk to you. Says he’d like to know how a big shot like you spends his time.”
“I don’t talk to no newspaper fellas.” Talk about rats.
“Could be good for you, Madden.”
“Could be better if you’d let me at your sister, copper.”
I thought he was going to slug me for a minute there, but he just laughed, which I hated even more than a slugging. “You mugs are all alike,” he said. “Cheap punks with smart mouths and chips on your shoulders.”
Well, that got my Irish up. “Gimme a piece of paper,” I growled, and he did. Here’s what I wrote:
Thursday—Went to a dance in the afternoon. Went to a dance at night and then to a cabaret. Took some girls home. Went to a restaurant and stayed there until seven o’clock Friday morning.
Friday—Spent the day with Freda Horner. Looked at some fancy pigeons. Met some friends in a saloon early in the evening and stayed with them until five o’clock in the morning.
Saturday—Slept all day. Went to a dance in the Bronx late in the afternoon and to a dance on Park Avenue at night.
Sunday—Slept until three o’clock. Went to a dance in the afternoon and to another in the same place at night. After that I went to a cabaret and stayed there almost all night.
All of which was true. It was a grand life and as I look back on it now, I didn’t realize how good it was. Which of course is true of all of us in our youth.
Everything woulda been swell except that I had to run into Luigi Mollinucci ’round about September of 1911, a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. You remember him, the fruit stand owner’s kid. Well, that was then and this is now: in the interim since I first met Mr. Mike and thus indirectly Mr. Monk, the little wop had growed up and, wouldn’t you know it, was after seein’ my sister, May, and her not yet eighteen.
What’s worse, by my lights, was that he was pals with Fats Moore, the yegg what had mugged my mother way back when. Fats was still in the neighborhood, hangin’ around the fringes of some of the gangs, making a small name for himself as a slugger, newsstand-burner and lush-roller. Some of the kids were starting to look up to him as a big man, but to me he was the pure phonus balonus and always would be.
Luigi, on the other hand, had graduated to running his dad’s fruit stand. I didn’t think much about this one way or anot
her, until it gradually dawned on me that I was seeing more and more fresh fruit in our household, even with nobody dead, which Ma could certainly not afford on Bridey’s wages. I knew enough about figures to put two and two together and come up with Mollinucci. With which evidence I confronted May one early autumn evening when a pear suddenly appeared on our table.
“Are they growing pears on 30th Street now?”
She laughed, real innocent, like I was making some kind of a joke. “Ain’t it nice?”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Got it from the vendor’s.”
“Which vendor?”
“Over Ninth way.”
“Never liked that fella.”
“Well, it was free, if that makes you feel any better.”
That made me feel worse. “You know you shouldn’t ought to go over Ninth by yourself. Not a good element there.”
May laughed again, not knowing how much she was agitating me. “I didn’t. He came here.”
It was all I could do to keep from jumping out of my chair. “What do you mean, he came here?”
“What I said. He brought this ’round just before you come home. I wasn’t here so he give it to Ma, just before she gone out to work.”
“I think I’ll take a walk,” I said, picking up the pear.
“Hey!” said May, but I was already out the door and striding toward Ninth.
Don’t get the idea that I was jealous of May’s havin’ a suitor or anything, when she was old enough. Such things were a natural part of life. But being already experienced in the ways of women, I knew what was on the sonofabitch’s mind, and I was going to be damned to Hell for all eternity if I was going to let him put his greasy mitts on my sister.
Which is what I was going to explain to him when, what do you know, I spotted the guinea in question with Fats, toddling down 30th Street toward Eleventh Avenue. They’d both already had a couple and it was about that moment when I wished I’d brought Billy or Chick with me. I trailed them west down the long block, past the rail yards, but as luck would have it, just about at the corner Fats and Luigi stopped and then Fats turned around and looked right at me.
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