Light of the Diddicoy

by Eamon Loingsigh

  Dinny is surrounded ahead of us by Vincent Maher and The Swede who have apparently been up since even earlier apprising Dinny of the situation ahead of us. When we get to Tillary Street and take a right toward 25 Bridge Street instead of a left toward the water, I start hearing a strange sound. A big, rumbling sound. The sound of many men speaking at the same time in the distance. A clamoring of voices and as we come upon the Sands Street station and cross Adams, then Jay Street, it becomes apparent that there is something very large on the agenda for the morning.

  Between the yells of the many, I hear Chisel MaGuire with his shrill voice barking at the heels of the crowd until it again booms in the distance. As we near the corner to Bridge Street, I see Dinny look back to me among the shoulders of The Swede and Vincent Maher. There is sadness in the look of Dinny as he glances back at me. I know that. But that was Dinny. A man smarter than all the rest, yet haunted by all the responsibility behind it. But now that I’m old and knowing, I recognize that in his look was a hope for help from me. Sure I was young. Too young to help much, but there was a powerful need in him, Dinny Meehan. It was too much for one man to hold down an entire gang and long stretches of territory with multiple enemies. Too much. But I had young thoughts then. But not too young to see the sadness in his glance. Then he is gone around a brick-faced corner while Petey and Matty follow up ahead. As Tim and I round the corner behind the rest, I can’t believe what I am seeing. The voices cheer so loud it sounds like a stadium of fanatics. Chisel MaGuire has pointed at us as we come around the corner and announces, “There’s Dinny Meehan! There he is!”

  The rain comes down in a mist on the Dock Loaders’ Club which is flooded with men waving fists and sticks and hooks and shovels in the morning air for the leader of the White Hand Gang’s arrival. It must be below thirty degrees, but that doesn’t stop three hundred, maybe three hundred fifty men from jumping up and down wildly, ready to go to war. Their breathing smokes in the cool air as they scream. With the misty rain, they receive the best cleaning they’ve had in months. Red Donnelly, Gibney the Lark, Big Dick Morissey, Harry Reynolds, Philip Large, Dance Gillen, and a few others wait at the edge of the mass of men to help Dinny wend through the revelers to get to the makeshift podium where Chisel has been antagonizing the crowd into a blood-thirsting fervor. But the podium is nothing more than a couple crates stacked in front of the saloon.

  Cinders Connolly emerges from the excited men and stops us before we follow Dinny and his protectors into the crowd and tells us to wait at the periphery and before long Richie Lonergan and Abe Harms appear to stand among us. Cinders gives me the firm shake that men give each other and pats me on the shoulder with a smile.

  “All is well witcha den? It ain’t nothin’, doin’ what ya did, ya know? Things like what ya did ain’t easy gettin’ over.”

  I nod to him and yell in his ear, “This is my family now!”

  As he smiles at me, I see behind him Bill Lovett and Non Connors smoking big fat cigars. Frankie Byrne and his old gang too, Jidge Seaman and Sean Healy. There are so many faces of men I have worked with in the past month, yet I never realized they are part of the overall gang. Some of their commitments to it so loose that I hadn’t thought them loyal to Dinny. Many of them are nothing more than laborers and longshoremen, or truck drivers, warehousemen or pier house superintendents, factory managers, and the like, but they all report eventually to Dinny Meehan. All jump at the chance to repay him for his helping them get jobs in the neighborhood. It takes me a long while to understand the web Dinny spins in Brooklyn quietly from the center of the waterfront here at 25 Bridge Street underneath the Manhattan Bridge.

  Cinders takes a moment to point a few of the men for the younger ones, though I’ve met most of them already. There is the brothers Whitey and Baron Simpson among the crowd, the drug addict Needles Ferry, the truck driver from Cleveland James Hart, and men that stand in the background waiting for Dinny to call upon them like Quiet Higgins, Happy Maloney, and Gimpy Kafferty, Fred Honeybeck, Johnny Mullen, Eddie Hughes, and best friend Freddie Cuneen, Dago Tom Montague, Timothy Quilty’s big brother James who stands next to Petey’s big brother Joey Behan, Joseph Flynn before his arm got blown off in the Great War, and Mr. Leighton the manager of the Kirkman Soap factory. Tanner Smith too has come from Greenwich Village with six or seven of his men including Lefty and Costello. I even see the Dock Loaders’ Club patron tender Paddy Keenan among the crowd and of course Lovett and Connors and the rest along with Mickey Kane, Dinny’s cousin, tagging along as their new helper.

  “You see that guy over there?” Cinders whispers in my ear, pointing. “That’s Garry fookin’ Barry and his lone crony James Cleary. Don’t ever trust ’em. He’s a fookin’ psychopath, that one. He used to run the Red Onion Gang. Trouble, nothin’ but. If he comes up on ya, just play dumb.”

  “Right.”

  “Listen, William.” He bends down to whisper as Petey Behan looks over at me with a jealous smirk. “Dinny likes ya. That’s all. Just stick it out wit’ the youngsters here for a while. That’s what Dinny wants. Stick it out for a bit. He knows ya ain’t no murderer, but runnin’ things ain’t always killin’, right? It just ain’t. It’s a small part o’ things, right? Just stick it out and don’t say nothin’ to no one?”

  I nod.

  “Keep ya gob shut, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Got it?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. So, for the time bein’, you need to understand that Richie is the leader of the young ones. Richie?” Cinders calls him over.

  “Richie, this here is yours.” He points at me. “You do what he tells ya, William. Dinny gives an order, it goes through Richie. So whatever Richie tells ya, treat it like its Dinny sayin’ it. That goes for all o’ yas. So whatever Richie tells yas, that’s the word then, got it?”

  “Yeah,” we all agree.

  “Right then, here comes Dinny, listen up,” Cinders said looking toward the Dock Loaders’ Club through the mist.

  The crowd cheers as Dinny Meehan steps up on the crates. The Swede, Maher, Gibney, Big Dick, Tommy Tuohey, and a few others stand next to him waving their palms toward the ground to dull the cheers. After a few minutes the crowd calms a bit, argues with itself for a moment, stammers for balance in the tight-shouldered pushing, a few more laughs and then quiet. It becomes so quiet I can hear the clacking of old draft horses again clopping on the wet Belgian brick streets and even a tugboat hoo-hooing in the East River distance. Under Dinny’s patient stare, a man would cough here and there and a train slows for the big loop at the Sands Street station beyond. Then there is a single laugh until finally, nothing.

  “Who’s gonna tell us how to work?” Dinny yells at the top of his lungs.

  The crowd answers with a booming roar, waving their fists and crowbars in the air. The pitch is so great and so sudden that it scares me half to heaven and Cinders laughs as my knees buckle.

  “Who’s gonna tell us where we’re gonna work?”

  “No one,” they answer.

  “They’ve been tryin’ to tell us what to do since before Cromwell even.”

  Grumblings are returned.

  “Outsiders!”

  Grumblings again.

  “Foreigners’ laws!”

  A cold silence is returned.

  “Do they care if ya live or die?”

  “Nah,” a couple men reply close to me. “They don’ care. Nah.”

  “Do they care if ya children got food on a plate?”

  “Nah.”

  “Do they care if ya mother’s got a proper grave to settle in? Do they?”

  Silence again.

  “The green grass stains around her mouth during the Great Hunger!” Dinny turned his face away to avoid the tears, which did more to motivate these men than anything he could ever think to say to them. “We don’t forget!”

  “Nah.”

  “We don’t!”

  Again, a brooding silence.

 
“Our blood’s on the Constitution! Antietam too!”

  The crowd surges in pride like a giant wave. Men shift in the sea of bodies and fall to the ground, punching one another to give themselves some space, fighting the current. Before they can turn their anger upon one another, Dinny breaks in again.

  “We built these bridges! These buildings! These rail tracks and these roads!”

  “Yeah!”

  “We even built the canal that made this city what it is today! Are we gonna let Joe Ryan and their I-talian cronies tell us how the game is played?”

  “Hell no!” some shouted.

  “We work for the ILA pencil pushers?”

  “No!” We all shouted.

  “We gonna work for Frankie Yale an’ the Black Hand?”

  “No!”

  “The Dock companies an’ the shippin’ companies givin’ us orders?”

  “No!”

  “Remember what they told us back in black ‘47 when the blight doubled back?”

  The crowd became quiet again.

  “Remember!” Dinny said, pointing his finger at all of them, reminding them in their bones and in their blood. “Let the Irish prosper by their own exertions, they said!”

  Mouths and eyes opened, shoulders hunched with weapons lying across them. The men listened. All of them. In them.

  “Now that we are livin’ by our own exertions . . . they don’t like that either! From Dock Street down to Imlay, any man waiting to unload ships this morning is either workin’ for Frankie Yale or waitin’ for Joe Garrity and the ILA to give them direction!”

  A few men in the crowd laugh. I scratched my neck, look up.

  “What are we waitin’ for fellers!” Dinny yells, the veins in his neck turning blue. “Those boys need direction, let’s go and give’m some!”

  The crowd bellows and surges toward the waterfront in hysterics. Some men are overcome by the crowd and fall at full speed on their faces, trampled by the rush. Petey Behan starts running wildly and immediately separates himself from Richie, Abe, Tim and Matty, and myself. We look at each other and start running too.

  The waterfront tenements came alive, opening their second-and third-floor windows at the early morning ranting. Old men, young boys, and their mothers and grandmothers wipe the sleep from their faces to see through the cool misty rain as the dockmen run below and through the concrete avenues with their bale hooks and picks searching for union sympathizers. Reminding the old-timing men of the days back in old Irishtown when law was enforced by the gangs. Below windows, the cacophonous mob sweeps along the John Street piers between the Navy Yard and the Vinegar Hill docks to once again attack the Italians and the union followers. The hordes of enraptured men filled with war, deep in them, are pushed and crowded to the edge of the street and sidewalks. Scraping their weapons along the tenement skin and the shining cobblestones slick with rain and bursting with orange sparks, the mob becomes ravenous with the pride and the sense of honor.

  In the Bridge District there aren’t many union men, so not a victim is to be had. Underneath the Manhattan Bridge the crazed wash into the heavily industrialized Fulton Ferry Landing between the bridges like a rushing wave between the buildings. Traveling below the Brooklyn Bridge in their throng, snaking between Front and Water Streets, we continue our surge north of the Sands Street station and below the elevated tracks. Looking back down Poplar Street where the police station is housed, I notice the building stands quiet and aloof, almost lonely. Its windows closed and doors shut tight as if it is sleeping with its back turned. A vacant confederate, it too has made way for the law of the White Hand in the Bridge District.

  As we rush through Brooklyn Heights and reach the docks at the Baltic Terminal, I can see ahead fifteen men speaking with a ship captain under a docked barge in the background. The ship lies deep in the water with its heavy load awaiting its berth. The men are shrugging shoulders trying to figure out what has happened with the gangs that organize the labor lines. When they hear the mob running in their direction, they drop their newspapers and whatever they have in their hands and run for cover. Finding labor sympathizers is a simple equation for us since they weren’t informed of the gang’s meeting that morning at 25 Bridge Street. And since they aren’t made aware of the gang’s meeting, they are assumed to be in with the ILA. This marks them, and when the crowd overturns every garbage can and searches every alley to uncover hiding places, their beatings are received with the full energy and force of the hungry crowd.

  From there we travel down Columbia Street from pier to pier searching out victims. Still hungry for blood, the running band of angry men moves quickly toward the south. There it finds more men to beat. Everyone wants a turn, so the ILA men who make their home in these areas receive the worst of it.

  Our main destination is Red Hook, though, where there are many Italians found on this rainy morning wondering where Wild Bill Lovett and the undercover ILA boys are and where they also cannot find Strickland, the pier house super and the men who work with Il Maschio. When the rumors circulate that McAlpine’s saloon had been torched and Joe Garrity had been hung on the bar to dry himself out, their faces turn from olive colored to a pale white.

  And when they hear the rumor of Il Maschio’s being shot nine times, they wonder what next to do. Standing in front of the New York Dock Company’s large facade as three ships await their unloading, one hundred or more Italians speak among themselves fearfully, angrily. Some want to run when they hear the White Hand is on its way. Others are filled with the pride and want to make a stand to defend their neighborhood with pipes in their hands and brassies too.

  Then come a few crazed, sprinting men from the alleys around Antonio Calandra’s blacksmith shop screaming for the bloody murder. Behind them is a rumbling crowd of wild Irishmen come to claim their territory like ancient clansmen carrying cudgels in the air and screaming with the force of hurricane winds to enforce their shillelagh law once again. The rain coming down on us gently like the mists of the Old Country, we overwhelm the Red Hook pier fronts. Though there is no green grass to be found and no heathers or bogs, the White Hand clan runs like Irishmen once again. Through the cobbled streets and the docks just inside the Brooklyn anchorage we rush with excitement blooming on our faces like the oncome of spring yet again.

  And here is where the hunger of the crowd would be satiated. Prideful Italians and a hundred unwitting immigrants of many stripes stand around almost unfazed. As I come around the corner, Richie Lonergan skipping to keep up with the rest of us, I see our boys rushing with violence in their voice at the dumb crowd of Red Hook natives who somehow seem unaware of the gathering current rushing toward them. Like a tsunami smashing into a seawall the Whitehanders blast into the longshoremen who barely attempt to defend themselves. For the first time ever, I see Philip Large with a smile on his dumb face as he sprints headlong into a gaggle of Italians. I can see the ripple of men affected by his puncturing them, like a bowling ball blasting pins in every direction. Screaming like a train’s whistle, Dance Gillen runs into the crowd with nothing more than his closed fists and his wool hat in his back pocket. He picks out a victim, punches him twice, pulls the man’s jacket over his head and keeps at the wailing on his upper body. Done with this one, he takes the man by his jacket and slings him around in a circle, letting him loose so that the man is flung with a great momentum, rolling right over the pier and into the water where a ship stands silently, two bearded Russian sailors standing on the deck above laugh and point into the crowd while they pull from their pipes.

  Big Dick Morissey goes through the crowd picking men up over his head and slamming them to the ground like a bag of bony rag dolls. Gibney the Lark drags a man from the crowd by his collar while smoke from his stubby cigar plumes above his head in the cold rain. Letting him loose at the edge, he kicks the man with a boot on his shoulder into the Buttermilk Channel Harry Reynolds referees the brawling and any time he sees one of ours getting beat, he jumps in with an elbow and a knee, pu
nching with the butt of his knife down into the round eyes, then slashing across their faces for a lifetime’s remembrance of the day. Chisel MaGuire fares well in the chaos too, rummaging through the pockets of wounded men; he makes a small fortune in pickings. As he bends over, the patch on his broken-bottomed trousers revealed, leaves of dollar bills fall out of the pockets of his old-styled coattailed suit as he shoves more in one by one, top hat pushed down hard over his eyes so it isn’t knocked off of him.

  Striding through the crowd is Dinny Meehan who is amazingly athletic with his fists and feet. I can see that he has had training in the art of boxing and outclasses any opponent he faces. A simple jab from him and men flop to the ground as if shot with a bullet in the brain. The Swede follows him along and distributes punishment accordingly, yanking men to the ground by the backs of their collars and stomping them with his giant booted feet. Tommy Tuohey too, he has his fists covering his face and punches men at the length of his arm, catching heads with a blow hard enough to make a man’s hat fly in the air. Also among Dinny’s henchmen is Vincent Maher, who doesn’t much enjoy the donnybrook as the others, being that his nature is more of a shooter and a masher. Though that doesn’t stop his fun, throwing elbow bones in whipping circles and ripping the pants down off men and stepping on them so they can’t run away.

  Richie Lonergan hops after a man he just punched while Abe Harms chases the victim down and tackles him from behind. When Richie catches up to them, he pounds the Italian with hammer fists across the side of the face until the victim stops moving. He challenges others to a one-on-one fight, but none are game for it as they know it’s not a fair fight these Irishers wish for. Thwarted, Richie yells and stomps his stump on the ground in anger with his teeth gritting and lips folded back like a rabid hound.

  Bill Lovett too, he kicks a man with his boots and then throws five, six, seven punches in a row without a response. For a moment he becomes winded, then the energy from his outrage gushes up and out of him like combustive explosions again. He’s lost his hat somewhere and so his ears bend out from his small head. With all the excitement, they have turned a deep red. He and Non Connors tag-team one man after another, beating them with their fists and kicking them into relaxation.