Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins

by Richard Sullivan

“They aren’t rumors. You must keep my confidence, JP. Do you hear me? You cannot reveal that you heard any of this from me, nor reveal any of the names I might tell you about.”

  “Ruth McGowan again?” he scoffed sarcastically.

  “No, Mary Sweeney.”

  Mary Sweeney was a rock solid woman of honesty and high moral character well known to JP. He encountered her often since she lived directly across the street from the church. He took a more serious tone.

  “Alright. Go on.”

  “Father McGill has been forcing himself on some of the children. I had heard that little Georgie Shaw had been assaulted by him, but Mary Sweeney has seen another boy taken into the rectory by Father McGill a number of times recently as well.”

  “And who is this other boy?”

  With no hesitation Hannah said, “Johnny.”

  “Johnny?” At first he thought she was a bit confused, as Hannah’s son Johnny had drowned some years before.

  “Johnny? Johnny who?”

  “Your Johnny, JP. He’s been forcing himself on your own poor lovely son.

  James Kennedy

  ◆◆◆

  Fingy Conners’ old friend and only rival on the docks, Contractor James Kennedy, was dead. Born in 1844 in County Clare, Ireland, Kennedy had found his fortunes right there in the New World’s great grain city, Buffalo.

  Kind, generous, loyal, universally loved, if one was to believe the florid eulogy, he apparently seemed everything Conners was not, when in fact they were more like two peas in a pod. He had been Conners’ infamous co-election fixer in the shameful 1893 election, supplying thugs from his 19th ward docks to knock uncooperative voters senseless. The uncle of Alderman John J. Kennedy, the elder James Kennedy was the original grain contractor on the Buffalo docks. He managed to remain friendly to Conners lifelong while at the same time being disheartened at times by his fiendish methods. He watched as Conners usurped all his own core techniques and habits, utilizing them to accumulate extraordinary wealth whilst rejecting his mentor’s more charitable ways. It was James Kennedy to whom Fingy Conners looked to emulate and copy and follow into the contracting business, which proved the seed of Fingy Conners’ great riches.

  Fingy sat in the jam-packed Bishop’s Chapel, Blessed Sacrament Church on Delaware Avenue. He was an honorary pall bearer, meaning he was not required to physically exert himself carting his old friend to his grave. With him sat the other honoraries: Mayor John P. Hopkins of Chicago, Democratic Boss Roger Sullivan of Chicago, Buffalo Alderman John P. Sullivan with half dozen other aldermen, Police Captain Michael Regan, Chief of Detectives Patrick Cusak, acting Buffalo Mayor John J. Smith and many others, all grieving.

  The casket containing the remains was exclusively carried by the decedent’s many Kennedy nephews, including Alderman Kennedy. The coffin was an exact duplicate of that in which the remains of the late President McKinley were laid to rest just three blocks north and two years previous from this very spot. Kennedy’s coffin was covered with a wealth of beautiful flowers including a floral boat from the men who worked for him at the Anchor Line dock.

  Younger men might well be able to regather their wits soon after a tragic loss, then resolutely continue moving forward. But for aging men the toll just mounts and climbs, year after year, loss upon loss.

  Fingy’s general sense of privation was heightened by his being closer now to his fiftieth birthday than his fortieth. Time was marching doggedly forward. He sat there in the subdued light of the chapel feeling quite alone in spite of the surrounding crowd. The priests passed up the aisle chanting. As they swung the clicking contraption with its belching smoke almost into his face, the smell of incense made him nauseous. The solemn high funeral Mass dragged on interminably. His thoughts drifted. He recalled his lost boyhood chums.

  Frank O’Brien had jumped off the old Dart grain elevator in 1865 to celebrate the end of the Civil War when they were barely eight years old. Frank miscalculated. His little body slammed into the edge of the wharf, ripping in two, the bottom half remaining on the boards while the top half sunk into the intended river. Other acquaintances had preceded Frank in death, including babies conceived by his dear mother, born dead or succumbing soon thereafter. But Frank. Frank was his chosen lad. Together they found much mischief together. Frank was a leader by nature. They forged brotherly bonds, paramount for a boy with a father distracted and no male sibling. He had yet to get over Frank, even now after all these many decades.

  Then too there was Finian Fahey, who along with then nine-year-old Fingy, Grady Harp, Sloak Slattery, and Corky Connors, no apparent relation, had decided to outrace the Erie Railroad trains traversing Louisiana Street one day. Finian tripped and lost his left leg right below his groin. Fingy and Grady and Corky screamed as blood spurted from the exposed artery of what was left of Finn’s thigh. Sloak ran away home, terrified. Finn shrieked in pain and terror, “Mama! Mama! Help me! Somebody go get my mother! Please!” Corky grabbed the red-spurting faucet with his bare hands and squeezed hard, turning his dripping face away in a vain attempt to avoid the blinding, gushing stream of crimson ejecta spattering his eyes with each beat of Finn’s slowing heart. Fingy and Grady stood horrified and transfixed, unable to move.

  “Go get a doctor!” screamed Corky. “Run!”

  “It’s too late,” responded young Fingy calmly.

  Finn lay dead in a giant pool of blood after less than three minutes’ time, his femoral artery having literally emptied the life right out of the boy. The friends carried his body home to his mother. Corky’s face, hair, and shirt were bathed in his friend’s gore as they laid Finn at the entrance. His mother dropped to the ground like a sack of rocks, shrieking. They left Finn’s leg behind right there between the Erie tracks. “Don’t know what ever became of it,” Fingy whispered aloud to himself. The odd interruption elicited glances from a few of those seated around him. Father Walsh approached the podium—it was he, the decedent’s boyhood chum, who was to eulogize the deeply mourned James Kennedy.

  There were more deaths thereafter, of course. Many more. School chums. Neighbors. The innocent and the erring. Until the most calamitous of all, the loss of his own son and heir at the very cusp of his manhood. He’d groomed the boy from birth, laying out a plan for him to follow after his graduation from the Michigan Military Academy: Yale. Then, editorship of Fingy’s newspapers. Peter Newell Conners’ premature death at age eighteen, alternately and confusingly attributed in official documents to either a football injury or heart problems or pneumonia, led to Fingy Conners’ ultimate crash.

  Fingy couldn’t shake it off. He had sailed though life batting away obstacles in his path or bulldozing right through them. He had met with little resistance; his fearful reputation for pugilistic violence preceded him. He welcomed the physical pain of a good brawl. In fact he reveled in it, sought it out, even. His fists served as a foreboding calling card to any and all who might consider standing in his way. But Peter’s death—that was a tragedy unlike anything he’d experienced previously. The death of Peter’s mother in the handsome house at the corner of Tifft Street and South Park in 1893 had thrown him, certainly. He hadn’t quite realized how much he’d depended on his Kate until she was actually gone. But then, all too soon, their only son Peter was gone as well, and along with him all the dreams Fingy had envisioned for his boy, his legacy.

  Fingy questioned his own mortality. He recalled the furious shouts of the men he employed, chorused by their wives, blaming him for their children dying from a great lacking. “Them people took no responsibility fer theirselves!” he argued. Fingy would not entertain their nonsense, believing the poor were just that because they were equipped for nothing better. Such was their lot. Fingy may have had scant formal education but that did not deter him from quoting the doctrines of Darwin and Galton.

  His son’s death weighed mightily upon him. Fingy rededicated himself to his business endeavors in an attempt to keep himself from sinking into the enormous black hole that
had materialized at the center of his life. No distraction potent enough could be conjured. It was advised he seek out a spiritual counselor. Fingy had burned the bridges between himself and Bishop Quigley and Father Patrick Cronin during the great Grain Scoopers Strike; he would find no comfort there. And so he paid a visit to Fr. Richard O’Connell, the Pastor of Our Lady Of Perpetual Help Church, in the old neighborhood. Fr. O’Connell had assumed his status as parish authority in 1897, and leading up to the Scoopers Strike of 1899 had endured the disconsolate wailings and sobbings of the men, women and children who came to him for solace and resolution, neither of which he was equipped to provide. Fingy Conners had the entire First Ward by the throat, including O’Connell, with no one able to catch their breath. But then it came time for Fingy Conners to be the one struggling for air. Fr. O’Connell hinted that in the taking of Fingy’s son, God might have been punishing him for his monumental sins against humanity. Crimes against the humanity and goodness of the men, women and children who were ravaged, suffered and died due to his boundless greed. O’Connell took advantage of the opportunity, of Conners’ great vulnerability in his time of grief, to insert himself into Fingy’s life as his spiritual advisor. O’Connell warned Fingy that, in the eyes of God, any confession he made would be worthless without the accompaniment of profound change in Fingy’s ways. That his entry to heaven would be denied regardless of confessing his sins if he proved insincere is those confessions and if he insisted on continuing down the same corrupt path.

  “You have made your millions now, Mr. Conners. You have made them off the backs of thousands of families who live within a mile or two of where we now sit, sir, who still to this day live in poverty and illness and want, their surviving children cold in winter and hungry all through the year. You must repent. And the way for you to earn the Almighty’s forgiveness is to return the money you have accumulated from the sufferings of others. To relieve their misery by establishing a great charity. God’s absolution is based on authentic, genuine, absolute repentance, Mr. Conners. You must demonstrate your contrition by amending your ways.”

  “But I been givin’ thousands to the Church already!” he spat, feeling cornered and put-upon.

  “Yes, but you’ve made millions off the backs of our own people. You have spent those millions on luxuries for yourself just as quickly as you accumulated them, and then went out looking for more. Your next million you must give back to the people.”

  ◆◆◆

  Father Walsh at long last wrapped up his splendid remembrance of the late James Kennedy. Fingy hadn’t heard a word of it. After the ceremony all in attendance rose. The meandering funeral train was the longest that had ever been seen on the city’s streets with the exception of President Abraham Lincoln’s forty years previous. It made its way south to Limestone Hill and Holy Cross Cemetery.

  As he entered the burial grounds in his carriage, Fingy looked longingly to the left where his son, his prodigy, lay buried in the family plot. Tears filled his eyes.

  The Chaplain Of Canal Street

  ◆◆◆

  JP’s intestines had cramped and roiled from stress all throughout the lengthy funeral service for James Kennedy. He was devastated by the news Hannah had brought him, that his own son was being made a victim of and by Father McGill.

  He had brought Johnny into his den a short while after Hannah left. Johnny wouldn’t say a word. JP could charm and cajole friends and enemies alike with the best of them, but when it came to his own children he was awkward and out of his element. It was at times like this that there was no refuting how little he knew them. At first he was angry that Junior refused to say a word. The boy just sat there under a dark cloud refusing to acknowledge what others already knew. At first this gave the alderman hope that the rumor might truly be only that. But something off kilter in Johnny’s expressions, his calmness in the face of such a troubling situation, his far off look, made JP deduce that something was indeed awry.

  “What happened to your neck?” he asked. “Were you fighting again?”

  No response. Silence.

  “I will take care of this, Junior, once and for all,” he promised.

  Johnny shrugged indifferently as if it were nothing, because in his experience that’s exactly what his father’s pledges were: nothing. His father always broke his promises. Always. He promised last winter that the family would go on an exciting adventure the following summer. Then it was postponed until next Christmas. Then over Easter vacation. Yet somehow the Sullivan tribe stayed firmly anchored to the dreary gray house at No. 12 Hamburg Street. Something always came up to defer their plans. His father had somehow missed all his older children’s eighth grade graduations. Every single one. Enduring his school friends’ boastings about their summer trip by rail or a cottage stay by the lake or a Christmas trip to New York City on the train to see the holiday lights with their attentive fathers only shined a brighter light on his own disappointments.

  “What I like about being from such a big family and having a father who’s never around is that I can do pretty much what I please whenever I want,” he legitimized to his lads. “I can be gone all day long and they don’t even notice.” And so he became determined to continue doing exactly as he pleased. He’d show them good and all, just you wait and see.

  He wandered far and wide in the city. He visited the east side Polish-German neighborhood stockyards teeming with cattle, horses and sheep. There he fantasized about pursuing the cowboy life Out West. He’d often lost himself for hours on the vast Union Furnace property across the street from his home, climbing the massive stone blocks that constituted the ancient abandoned furnace structures. He spied through windows and openings where molten rivulets swiftly flowed and foreboding machinery loomed dangerously over frail humans in constant peril. He explored the abandoned ramshackle frame cottages on stilts built off Katherine Street that were once the Uniontown homes of the previous Furnace’s indentured workers. In winter he imitated the Japanese gymnasts he’d been awed by at the Pan American Exposition by taking on the mountains of snow cleared from streets and sidewalks piled high in the vacant lots, jumping over chasms, rolling down the slopes to land on his feet, and creating little avalanches from which to escape with gymnastic agility. He especially relished exploring forbidden Water and Peacock and Fly Streets. These were the nastiest avenues in all the world, from what he’d been told. He’d stood outside the whorehouses watching intently as scoundrels and scalawags and weaving drunks entered, trying to imagine what went on in there behind the drawn shades of the upper story windows.

  His mother and father knew none of this about him.

  It was on Canal Street that he first encountered Father McGill.

  He didn’t recognize him at first as being the new priest from his church because he was dressed like a longshoreman. But McGill recognized Johnny, for from the moment the priest had first seen him he thought Junior quite a handsome boy. Smelling of liquor he grabbed Johnny by the scruff of the neck and throttled him, asking what do you think you’re doing here in such a disreputable place? The priest threatened to tell his parents, primarily the Alderman. He boasted of himself as the Pastor of the Docks. Slyly he dressed as they did and drank with them in their saloons and music halls and played poker and dice for money in order to gain their confidence so that he might bring them back to God, an exculpation Johnny accepted, for he was a priest after all. McGill lectured Johnny about all the dangers to be encountered by the innocent and the ignorant in the Canal District including children being kidnapped by feral Canadians and sold into white slavery in that foreign land across the river. The plain-clothes cleric convinced him that he would find himself in a dreadful predicament with his parents and the Church if he were discovered loitering amidst such a morass of mortal sin, contemplating whorehouses and shooting dice with disreputable orphan trash in dark alleys which Johnny did not do but McGill dared to claim he had witnessed him doing. Father McGill promised that he could be persuaded to keep quiet
about Johnny’s barely forgivable transgressions if only Johnny would do a few special things for the amenable priest. Overwhelmed by his authority as an ordained man of God and fearful of his parents’ reprisals upon hearing what he had and had not in truth been up to, Johnny did what Father McGill required of him. At first it was all right. It felt good, at first.

  Then it no longer did.

  ◆◆◆

  Kennedy’s ceremony at Holy Cross Cemetery was taking too long. The alderman checked his pocketwatch surreptitiously so as not to appear disrespectful. He was anxious to get over to the church to speak with Father O’Connell about the charges leveled against the pastor’s younger assistant. O’Connell was not present, not here at the graveside nor in the church beforehand. That was odd. Perhaps he was ill. At long last the final prayers were said and men and women shook hands, stopping to greet friends and acquaintances and all agreeing that James Kennedy had died far too young. Normally the alderman would revel in such an abundance of cohorts gathered advantageously together in one place, but all he could think of now was getting back to the Ward. It was a straight shot up South Park Avenue past the Botanical Garden’s tropical greenhouses, then through the eye-burning stench of the steel mills’ and the chemical plants’ forest of smokestacks. He drove straight to the church and knocked on the rectory door. Father O’Connell himself answered, rather than the housekeeper.

  “Finally, you’re here!” the priest exclaimed, awkwardly giving JP a big hug. Never before had O’Connell been so physical toward him. “I have some new ideas for the lawn fête! Are you ready? Motion pictures! Yes! I spoke with that nice man downtown at the Edisonia Theater and he told me he could bring his machine here and project moving pictures onto the wall outside so that everyone could see! Isn’t that a grand idea? It’s so...so 20th Century!”