Exile on Bridge Street

  “In the past,” the newspaper quoted from a press release. “Companies on the Brooklyn waterfront grabbed up land as needed and made whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted without consideration of the big picture. What we propose to do is to replace the old plan of pell-mell, helter-skelter construction and oversee a larger plan for industrial growth. The future is coming, and we must prepare. New York is the biggest port in the world, but Brooklyn, one of the main points of exchange of sea-going goods, is increasingly inefficient, slow and clogged, which creates long wait times for ships that load locally manufactured goods and unload goods from abroad there, costing millions of dollars. The Waterfront Assembly’s goal is to modernize Brooklyn’s port terminals with stronger lines of communication between major stakeholders in the area and come to agreements on how all future construction can create a more efficient workspace. The board is funded by local businesses for the future of a new Brooklyn waterfront.”

  And of course, this press release was signed by the fat, monocled man Jonathan G. Wolcott himself, who was voted by the board to be president of this newly created Waterfront Assembly.

  It seems an innocuous quotation and plan, on the face of it. But knowing Wolcott as we all do down on the docks of Brooklyn gives us to thinking that the future of our neighborhoods is now in the hands of the one man who hates us more than any other. I only met the man once in his office above the Buttermilk Channel in Red Hook, but remember him I do. The man who called Dinny Meehan a “Luddite.” Who feigned an English accent. Who compared us and our ways to thieving monkeys. Who snorted and sarcastically referenced our being Roman Catholic. Who made fun of The Swede without his understanding it. Who boasted of his direct male lineage to that of the original Puritan ships that came from England in the 1600s. Who hinted at making a deal with the Italians in the south, then did make a deal with Bill Lovett. And who paid Dinny to kill the ILA recruiter Thos Carmody. Of course Carmody was never killed, but most importantly, and one of the biggest reasons Wolcott resigned was because Dinny had made a deal with both the Italians and the ILA against him. This is the man that is in charge of future contracts in our neighborhoods.

  “Ya think he won’t have a say on labor?” Beat asks. “Think about it. All these business-minded men, and they’re only thinkin’ about contracts? Nah, that’s how they do. They say one thing, but mean another. Their main goal is to break up organized labor. Ya can read, William, sure, that’s fine, but read between them words and what do ya hear?”

  “It’s true what he says,” Paddy agrees.

  In our world down here, when a man quits he never shows his face again, for his honor is stained forever. But in the world of business, apparently, there is no place for honor or sincerity, as we know it. The New York Dock Company—Wolcott’s former employer—that owns more land than any other waterfront corporation in Brooklyn, is a member of the Waterfront Assembly, of course. So we can only assume the company is complicit in Wolcott’s becoming an even larger figure in Brooklyn than he was as their vice president. But overlooking us now from the safety of Wall Street in Manhattan, forty floors up. His Anglo-American absenteeism and control reigning from above. His idea of Americanism, temperance, sedition, corporate efficiency, and anti-labor gathering strength, yet beyond reach. I’d only seen the man once before, as mentioned, but I’d never see him again. He’ll reign from above, unseen. Our greatest enemy from this point forward, yet his throne resides in a safe distance across a body of water, up high where the future will be orchestrated. I can see in the eyes of Paddy and Beat and Ragtime that the history we know is again repeating itself in the now. As it always does. Like Williamites or English civil servants or colonial administrators of the past, our fate will be decided by an untouchable enemy.

  I put the paper down after reading it a second time. The candles on the bar turn sideways and hiss when the front door of the Dock Loaders’ Club opens, the clamoring cha-chum, cha-chum, cha-chum of the Manhattan Bridge above us ringing out until the door is shut. I’d secretly hoped that with Bill Lovett under lock and key, we’d be left alone to live our lives on the waterfront the way we want it. That a great abeyance would come upon us. That all we would do is work hard in the wind and in the morning, the soldiers of the dawn. To make our money, even though we don’t need a lot of it. But to share it with the families that need help, and move on peacefully. But I begin to see the larger powers that are collecting against us. Things we can’t challenge or fight, like time. Things we can’t even see or completely understand, like change.

  In his office, Dinny knows all of this. He sees it and understands it better than any of us. That from above they attack. Their misleading, dispassionate, and banal declarations about contracts on the docks are like a predator’s hiding in the bright of the sun as it swoops from the air. Our history speaking to us, to the depths of us, we see Wolcott from the fear of our stories of men who, with an incredible indifference for humanity, starve us. Starve us and send us off the land for our not bowing to their ways. Ignore the evidence against their cleansing, exterminating us, and simply continue piling up dead mothers and children by the thousands while continuing to strictly adhere to their economic policies. Bending law to their demands. Bending law so far that its strength is that only of the will of those who live in the detached distance, beyond sight and high above us, unaccountable.

  In his own way, Dinny decides to fight back by going directly to the people that love him. Dinny Meehan has proven to me many times that he is a great leader and knows how to clear the way for us. That he has a keen sense of how to fashion and maintain our power. In April of 1916, when it was a day for legends that we fought off the many that sought our seat at the head of Brooklyn labor, it was Dinny that came up with an ingenious plan. Then a year later in the spring of 1917 after losing Red Hook, again Dinny Meehan came out on top, even if he was forced to cut a deal with the ILA and allow the Italian to cross the Gowanus. Over and over, he proves himself a leader against absurd odds. And now, seeing a new enemy, he gives his next order. Which comes in the form of boots.

  Harry Reynolds and myself are waiting on Atlantic Avenue in the middle of the night when an automobile truck driven by James Hart pulls up. He looks at us and smiles, and from the passenger seat we hear Dinny, whose face pops out, “Let’s go.”

  Harry and I jump in the back where the Simpson brothers, Baron and Whitey, as well as The Lark and Big Dick are sitting with growlers in their fists and big smiles on their faces. We pick up Chisel MaGuire and Dance Gillen too, then meet up with two other trucks filled with our like and head north as the grinding of gears and the squeaking fan belts ricochet off the night’s barren tenement streets. We drive all the way up just a block and a half from our headquarters to a building I’d seen many times on the corner of Bridge and Water Streets.

  “Hanan & Son,” Harry whispers to me.

  “I don’t want to get caught,” I whisper back.

  “We won’t.”

  “If a patrolman happens by, what are we saying? What is it we are doing, thirty men in three trucks?”

  “Won’t happen.”

  “I need to keep working and saving money, Harry. What good is fixing up the place by Prospect Park if I’m in jail? And what if the war ends and my mom and sisters can come and . . .”

  “The guys o’ Poplar Street already know. Brosnan’n Culkin’re keepin’ watch, uhright?”

  “How do we know they aren’t double dipping and plan to arrest us? Didn’t you read about Wolcott and the Waterfront Assembly?”

  “That’s a good point,” someone says.

  “We can still trust them,” Harry says. “They won’t turn on us, yet.”

  “Yet,” I repeat.

  An old man is waiting outside the shoe factory, and when he hears us, he twirls an about-face and pushes up a bay door, waves us in. He is the night security at Hanan & Son and when I see his face I recognize it as the Corkonian who regularly visits the Dock Loaders’ Club on Saturdays, sittin
g between Beat McGarry and Ragtime Howard and is friendly with Paddy Keenan too.

  As we stuff the trucks, slinging pairs of boots tied together by their laces, the old man pulls on his pipe and gives a turn.

  “Heared about that Lovett,” he says in his Cork burr. “Heared he made a deal widat Dishtrict Attorney to g’off to war with time served as his penalty. Up wit’ the 77th Infantry Division, ye know he went. And that he wants ol’ Non Connors goin’ wid’ ’em too. Wasn’til later, after signin’ the deal that the DA finds out Connors is up in the shtir, Sing Sing way, so the judge turns angrily and says to Lovett, ‘Well why don’che bend me over an’ call me Mary, why don’che?’”

  “That’s not true, is it?” I ask.

  “Beat told me it jush t’day,” the man swears with a high pitch.

  “Is that what really happened?” I ask Dinny.

  Dinny looks back to me as he is slinging boots and boxes, though he does not seem all that happy about the deal sending Lovett to the war.

  “Say ga’bye to Bill fookin’ Lovett,” The Lark turns his hat goofy and salutes with the hand that has only two fingers left on it.

  “Fookin’ asshole that one,” Big Dick mumbles.

  Within an hour all three trucks are packed so tightly that we have to run alongside them in the middle of the night east on Flushing Avenue past the Navy Yard in south Williamsburg. At a restaurant, Lumpy Gilchrist is outside standing dumbly as a man next to him directs us to an alley where we unload the shoes into the basement through a storm door. Lumpy’s brother, the owner, wipes a hand through his hair in frustration until Dinny walks up to him, reminding him of why such a thing occurred. Lumpy, though, the poor fellow, has no idea what is happening. Only gifted in life to do one thing, he is without clue on any other topic. As we unload the trucks, Lumpy stands awkwardly in our path and counts the shoes with a finger in front of his face, stopping only to push his glasses up.

  “Watch out,” Big Dick says, bumping him out of our way, though Lumpy never loses count.

  Regardless of what happens to him, he never loses concentration. Dinny stops and helps him to his feet, “Up ya go, Eddie,” but Lumpy does not thank or even take notice. Just counts with a bent finger in front of his glasses and an open, muttering gob.

  A few days after that, everyone in Irishtown and beyond has new pairs of boots with the Hanan & Sons emblem embroidered on the sides of them and the newspapers go batty over it, for no one in the neighborhoods know where they came from, even though everyone knows.

  “I couldn’t say from where they come,” said Mrs. Lonergan in the morning edition a couple days later. “But they’re Heaven-sent, surely. Whoever t’was t’ought of us after the passing of Tiny Thomas, my poor child of only six years, is certainly the most t’oughtful o’ gentlemen, even if they are stolen from that fact’ry who couldn’t t’ink of givin’ alms themselfs.”

  Dinny had asked Mrs. Lonergan not to speak with the newspapermen that showed up on Johnson Street, but she couldn’t resist the attention. Even if the papers mocked her accent, made fun of her ignorance. But in any case, the brilliance of the orchestrated move simply added to Dinny Meehan’s legend, even though he didn’t really exist in the first place, as far as anyone would admit. And Mrs. Lonergan’s publicly shaming the highly profitable factory succeeded in stifling any notion of its demanding the stolen property back. The death of a shoeless child in the neighborhood where they manufacture shoes effectively suffocating any legal action against the thousands of dollars’ worth of their stolen product covering the feet of tenement children.

  And for myself, I was finally able to retire McGowan’s boots. There was a certain connection I had with those boots, however. I had gone to McGowan’s wake and watched as the dead man’s boots were taken off him within his pine coffin in Mrs. McGowan’s tenement room. My first day out of Sadie’s nest and into the world of the Brooklyn docks, Dinny gave me those boots and I’d been wearing them ever since. Wearing them proudly, as Dinny and McGowan had been such close friends for so many years before I’d arrived.

  “Looky ’ere,” Sadie says laughing, pulling up her dress enough to show me the boots on her while L’il Dinny falls on the rug trying to carry a pair.

  But from the great beyond comes another demand on us. It is not of Wolcott’s doing, but it seems as though from up high, well past our ability to control and fight against is yet more bidding for our loyalty. The Great War is everywhere in Brooklyn now, and the weapons needed are soldered and welded in Irishtown factories. Iron forged in Navy Yard foundries for ships and vehicles. Bombs and torpedoes manufactured by the E. W. Bliss Company under the Manhattan Bridge between John and Plymouth Streets and soldiers plucked from our many households and sent right along with the war goods to the French trenches and an assured death. Men must either accept their drafting or be deemed seditious. There really aren’t many other options, and so they go, and both Simpson brothers taken from us and never again to be heard from—dead and gone the both of them. Happy Maloney too is drafted. And Johnny Mullen, as well as Fred Honeybeck and Gimpy Kafferty and Lovett’s drinking buddy from Manhattan, Joseph Flynn. And just as we are getting to know him, Thos Carmody is taken from the ILA and sent to Europe. And only a week after he’d been officially named King Joe’s treasurer of New York City, a promotion earned for his work bringing us into the ILA fold. I remember Vincent Maher shaking the man’s hand, for the two of them had killed together already. A mighty thing that brings upon fellows a great and lasting bond.

  “We’ll work together again some day,” Vincent says to a parting Carmody, though he doesn’t believe it. “At least Tanner Smith can’t get ya way over there.”

  And many others are drafted or recruited or swayed into volunteering by the bands and the propaganda—many of whom I simply don’t have the memory to name. Our ranks diminishing again.

  But others step up, like Mickey Kane, who has grown right in front of us and is named the new dockboss in Red Hook, with Dance Gillen at his side. He’d been groomed all along without our realizing it, and even though he is Dinny’s cousin, Kane had done well for him by sticking next to Lovett and reporting everything from within. Taking a ripe beating in the process. He’d earned the promotion, though, and his reputation as a brawler is known throughout, as any time his name is ever mentioned it’s immediately followed with “ready scrapper, brisk fighter.”

  It must have been Dinny’s plan from the start, making Mickey Kane the dockboss of Red Hook. Mickey is Dinny’s last surviving family member loyal to him. Tall and powerfully built in the shoulders and upper body with a big head of blond hair, Mickey follows Dinny’s orders closely and has no issue with the Italian ILA men taking over the south terminal in Red Hook. I can see by the way Dinny speaks to his cousin how proud he is. Like a son he sees him, even. The two had grown up in Greenwich Village but were separated when Dinny’s side of the family was decimated around the turning of the century. With his dying father, Dinny left for Brooklyn until he took control of the longshoreman gangs and summoned his younger cousin to his side. And Mickey Kane did not let him down. He worked hard. Went undercover and paid his dues, earned his scars and made Dinny proud. I admit to feeling a bit jealous of Mickey Kane because the attention Dinny gives him is unlike what he gives the rest of us. Mickey Kane is blood. He is from his mother’s blood, and many of us feel as though one day he will replace The Swede at his right side. His most-trusted. Dinny had raised many of us—Vincent Maher, myself, and he took in Harry Reynolds too, along with everyone else. But Mickey Kane was different. Mickey Kane would one day inherit Dinny’s waterfront.

  With Kane in charge, I am welcome to run messages in Red Hook again, and for that I am happy. Even if just south the Italians, of whom I was once so afraid, now are able to work there. It’s a fair shake they got and relations between us and the Italian are at an all-time high.

  As I turn the corner on Imlay Street one summer afternoon in 1917, I see Darby Leighton running past me at a
terrible and desperate pace.

  “Why didn’t you trip ’em?” Kane asks as he runs by me, The Swede holding his shoulder as he runs by with Dance ahead of him.

  “Sorry,” I yell after them and join the chase.

  All the others are banished too. “Eighty-sixt,” as they say. Joey Behan and his best friend James Quilty, older brothers of the Lonergan crew, volunteered for some Army infantry division, we heard. Having been a part of the gang for quite a few years, Frankie Byrne and his followers were sent away too and certainly they’d never get hired on the Italian docks. Where they went, we couldn’t know. Maybe to the war, maybe to the Jersey shore. As long as they don’t show their faces in our territories, they won’t get demolished. We never told them that, but they knew it still.

  Eventually Richie Lonergan and his boys are released after spending a few weeks’ time at Elmira’s Reformatory after their ginzo-hunting affair. Dinny helps get them released early by hiring Dead Reilly to represent them, even though no one died.

  Thankful to Dinny for his reaching out to her eldest son and his followers, Mrs. Lonergan shows her appreciation by bowing to him like a peasant anytime she sees him.

  “Oh, to the Lord above do I t’ank ye, Mr. Meehan,” she supplicates herself in front of him.

  “Stop it, Ma!” Anna scolds her mother.

  Mrs. Lonergan also thinks Dead Reilly, our attorney, is the second coming, for the man always has shiny shoes and shiny hair and pinstriped suits with a pinstripe mustache while speaking words she thinks both elegant and mysterious, though is simple legalese. Eventually though, she has her way with Richie.