“Why, yes. Yes it is, Father. Sounds wonderful. I didn’t see you at the funeral and I was afraid you might be ill, so I stopped by.”
“What funeral?” the pastor asked cluelessly.
“Why, James Kennedy’s funeral, Father. I’m sure you knew.”
Father Richard O’Connell just stared at him with a blank look. Of course he’d surely been told by many people that his friend had died. It was front page news in all the papers. Yet O’Connell’s face was inscrutable. JP thought it mysterious, but he had more important matters to discuss.
“I’ll get right to the point, Pastor. Your Father McGill has been the subject of some serious accusations and...”
“Oh yes, that. Yes. He’s gone now.”
“Gone? Gone to where?”
“St. Louis. He was keen to visit the World’s Fair. I arranged his transfer with the Cardinal.”
“He is accused of terrible things, Pastor. Including making young children his victims. Will that man still be a priest in St. Louis?”
“Why of course. Once a priest, a priest forever.”
“Father O’Connell, this man should not be allowed contact of any sort with innocent children. Why was he provided a new position? Why wasn’t he summarily and deservedly dismissed?”
“My son, it was up to the Cardinal. I have no say in such things.”
“Of course you have a say, with all due respect, Pastor. You should have recommended he be fired. You can’t just send him off elsewhere to repeat himself and become someone else’s problem. He assaulted my own son!”
“Alderman, I am prevented from revealing what was discussed between the Cardinal and myself except to say the problem has been resolved and you need not concern yourself about it any longer. Now, can we get down to planning further in regards to the lawn fête?”
It was clear that something was seriously amiss with the pastor. His normal sense of decency and his dedication to the resolution of wrongs was inexplicably absent. JP was upset. He felt his son required final resolution so that he might trust again, so that the Church did not lose him as a follower due to its indifference to the improprieties he’d suffered at the hands of a trusted priest. Johnny needed a satisfactory conclusion. But now, with McGill having been provided speedy deliverance from the law and a safe haven from which to reengage by the very clergy who should have ended his transgressions entirely, the alderman himself was dispossessed of a measure of his own faith.
The Streetcar
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The Alderman’s namesake Johnny Sullivan leaned on the porch post reading a pile of old newspapers that had collected for use in the starting fires in the old wood burning stove. His mother had asked him to get rid of the excess. He was searching for oddities with which to entertain himself and his friends at school. In between he raised his eyes to observe the busy goings-on along Hamburg Street.
Shirtless, He Shot Himself
Albert P. Koehler, brother of William P. Koehler, Supervisor from the 18th Ward, committed suicide by shooting himself in the bathroom of the barber shop on the seventh floor of the Prudential Building at 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon. Stripped to his waist, Koehler seated himself in front of a mirror so as to observe the act and, placing a revolver against his left temple, sent a bullet crashing through his brain. He died instantly.
The streetcar came to a halt. It was a shiny new one enclosed against the weather, but all the windows were open. Junior watched the driver disembark with the last passengers. The driver walked a few steps to the river’s edge, unbuttoned his fly, looked around to make sure no females could see him, and urinated into the water. Then he removed his uniform coat and his cap and shook them out. A wispy little cloud of soot drifted off with the breeze. While this was going on new riders lined up and waited to board. He returned to the car and proceeded down the center aisle expertly grasping one seat with his right hand and another with his left and with one strong jerk, reversed the seats as he went along. Then he welcomed the waiting riders among whom were a horde of men just off their shift at the Union Ironworks. The car, so crowded that no standing room remained, proceeded to labor, lumber and creak under its passengers’ burdensome weight back up Hamburg Street.
Eaten By Wolves
Bomidji, Minn., June 14—Jene Cain, a trapper living six miles north of the village of Little Forks, has been killed by wolves. His body was completely destroyed. His jawbones, shoes and part of his clothing were found near the spot. Cain lives alone and it is supposed he was looking after his traps when set upon by the pack.
Johnny looked up at the sooty sky. The mammoth hoists used to offload the oreships loomed menacingly above, squeaking and swaying off balance in the constant wind off the lake, seemingly a danger to any and all below. Junior fully expected one or all of them to topple over and kill a bunch of people. Maybe someday, he thought hopefully as his father’s Pierce Arrow pulled up.
Hacked Until Dead
Lafayette, La. Nov. 29. — Arrested on the charge of the murder of six persons, Clementine Barnabel, a young Negress, only laughed at the police when confronted with bloodstained articles of her clothing found near the home of Norbert Randall, whose family of six persons were all found dead in bed, their bodies horribly hacked. They were Negroes.
The alderman opened the car door, lifted his bad leg with his hand, pivoted sideways in his seat, then stood on the running board to assess the situation. This was his kingdom. As First Ward Alderman he ruled, all five-foot-five of him. He liked to survey the scene from there, showing off his beautiful automobile and making sure all was well and in essential running order.
Bicycling In The Clouds
Acclaimed aeronaut, Professor Edward Jewell, at Woodlawn Beach yesterday did a trick out of the ordinary by taking a bicycle up with him in his balloon ascension and coming down on it with his parachute. On the way down he amused the spectators by performing antics on the wheel, and when he struck ground a half-mile back in the country he folded up his parachute, tucked it under his arm and rode back to camp on the Columbus bicycle. This was followed by a performance of a high wire act and precision rifle shooting demonstration by John and Anna Cassells. The feats will be repeated at Woodlawn beach today and tomorrow at 4 o’clock.
Kids played stick ball, the change in shifts at the Ironworks filled the street with morose workers coming and going, the goddamned work whistle shrieked at an eardrum-busting level, a giant grain ship cast a massive shadow as it labored upstream, Mrs. O’Brien called for her kids from an upstairs window, a delivery truck unloaded canned goods at the old Zeller’s Grocery, and a bicycle cop hollered angrily at someone over something inconsequential. All was in its proper alignment. Only after taking all this in did the Alderman see his son. He put on a smile, hoisted his briefcase, shut the car door, limped up the front steps and said, “Hello there, Junior!”
“Hiya Pop.”
“Listen,” JP said looking around to make sure no one could overhear,” I took care of it for ye. I got rid of that priest, Johnny. You don’t have to worry no more. I took care of everything myself. Just put it out of your mind now. He’s gone. Gone for good.”
He patted Johnny patronizingly on the back.
“If you say so, Pop.”
Junior went back to his reading. JP waited in place for a few moments expecting a heart-felt “thank you” that didn’t come. The Alderman turned and went into the house and closed the door behind him. Johnny, still leaning on the post, scoffed in disgust, examining his shoes as he shifted his weight between reads.
Junior knew his father had nothing to do with ridding the parish of Father McGill. It was Mary Sweeney who’d lit the fire under the pervert and laid down the law to the pastor. “There’ll be plenty hell t’ pay—literally, Father O’Connell—if ye don’t get rid of that McGill demon!” she had threatened through gnashing teeth.
The Flood
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For decades it had been the dream of John P. Sullivan to alter the
course of the Buffalo River. The idea first occurred to him while president of the Mutual Rowing Club back in the eighties, and again as the city’s most powerful alderman during the nineties and early naughts.
Just a couple dozen quick paces from his family’s front steps at the foot of Hamburg Street brought one to river’s edge at one of its most extreme of many extreme bends in its course. It is an impossibly tight hairpin hook wrenching from northeast to southwest. Directly upstream from this turn the river flows along a 1600-foot straightway providing an ideal course for the Mutual Rowing Club’s scull races. This extraordinary hairpin river bend historically proved a nightmare to negotiate for the giant ocean-going ships transporting their golden lading upstream to the awaiting grain elevators.
In the heat of summer, riverfront homemakers fling windows open wide to catch any relieving breeze coming off Lake Erie to the west. Laboring tugboats nudging giant ships around this bend send great dense clouds of black smoke through these open windows directly inside the unassuming family structures, including the alderman’s. Between the heat and the heavy smoke it was the babies who suffered most.
Then too there was the horrific stench infecting the neighborhood from the opposite direction. Dalton’s Pond imprisoned its immediate environs in a cloud of fetor and peril. It was a fertile nursery for millions of flies and mosquitoes. It covered two acres and more in size, extending from Hamburg to Vincennes Streets on the river side of the Erie Railroad tracks. It was nicknamed Cholera Pond by those who were habitually awakened by the racket of city sanitation officer Bynes’s garbage trucks. These came in the dead of night to illegally dump the worst kinds of effluent, from horse shit to dead animals to hospital waste and everything in between. Local children in the suffocating heat of midsummer could be seen cooling off in the infectious soup.
Any map would reveal the Buffalo River’s convoluted course as being wildly snake-like. Encircling as it does the Farmer’s Point property on three sides, it creates out of that acreage a sort of peninsula. The various occupiers of the land, currently the Union Ironworks, didn’t take too kindly to the idea of having their essential acreage bisected as an accommodation to the Alderman’s river-straightening pipe dream.
But doing so, the city’s engineers argued, would help keep the river cleaner and deeper, as a straighter aqueduct would allow pollutants, debris and silt to more expediently get swept along in the stronger current created by an unobstructed course and flushed more efficiently into Lake Erie, down the Niagara River, and over Niagara Falls. Also it was firmly believed that the straightening would abate the annual flooding caused by winter thaw that South Buffalo residents had historically been compelled to contend with. In its present course the multiple extreme curves along its route aided the river’s obstruction by their impeding of ice floes in winter. These ice dams backed up and diverted the river’s obstructed flow into residential neighborhoods causing great property damage and sometimes death.
Currently at the city hall a renewed debate was taken up in the Common Council over the dredging and widening of the river as an overall less costly strategy to diminish the threat of flooding. Dead set against this widening project were the railroads, who were told they would have to convert from fixed bridges spanning the river to the swing-type so as to allow river traffic to proceed further upstream. Predictably, they were not at all happy.
At the most recent Common Council meeting there was some dispute as to whether the hearing given by the aldermanic committee on wharves and harbors on South Buffalo abatement plans was the 169th or the 170th. “I know this much about it,” said Sullivan. “I have been sitting on this same committee and listening to this same story for ten years and we are no nearer abating the floods than we were back in 1895!”
The infamous William B. Hoyt, longtime attorney and busy defender of Fingy Conners and his army of thugs and enforcers, made a stunning claim on behalf of his client, the Lake Shore Railway. “The Buffalo River above the Lake Shore Railway’s bridge is not a public highway. It belongs to my client,” he alleged.
Corporation Counsel Charlie Feldman laughed out loud at the ludicrous claim, only to have Hoyt reiterate it.
It had never been questioned before in anyone’s memory that any entity other than the city and her taxpaying citizens owned the river, and that navigating it was a public right. Upon reading his statement in the newspapers, the audacity of the shameless attorney to declare that the despised railroads held the rightful claim to it came as a surprise to the hundred thousand-plus individuals and businesses who daily lived, relied, worked and operated upon and alongside the river.
A small platoon of attorneys representing the railroads—the Buffalo Creek, the Pennsylvania, the Lake Shore and the Lackawanna—were present in the Council Chamber. They tried to pick apart the engineering studies by the respected firm of Hering, Herschel and Symone, asserting that the findings by their own so-called “experts” took precedence.
Charlie Feldman laughed that there was nothing but hot air in Hoyt’s contention. “There must be some common sense put into this thing. I will discuss engineering propositions with the railroad’s engineers if they will produce them, but not from this backfire committee you’ve jerry-rigged together from the railroads who wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a canal and a water pipe!”
The pretentious representatives gasped out loud in exaggerated offense.
“As to the engineering features of this plan authored by agents of the railroads themselves, since this is the first I am hearing about it, I know nothing at present,” stated Feldman. “But I do wish to say this, and that is, if this Council adopts the plans that the railroads want you to adopt, you will forever abandon Buffalo River as a public highway.”
As far as Charley Feldman was concerned, this issue was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Disgusted with the Common Council, and especially the Board of Aldermen and their relentless kowtowing to the corporations, the seed was firmly planted in his head on this day that he might seek the office of Mayor for himself. His number one goal: to abolish the corrupt Board of Aldermen altogether. To fire them all. Especially, slimy John P. Sullivan.
What was not stated but fully evident in the Council proceedings was that it was Fingy Conners who initiated this brazen idea to wrestle the Buffalo River away from the very taxpayers who had always shouldered the burden of maintaining it. Fingy’s plan was that his own corporations might vastly enrich themselves by attaching fees to any and all who plied the river, everyone from the owners of the Great Lakes’ steamship vessels to the scores of grain elevators lining the course to the common laborers who made up the memberships of the local rowing clubs.
Detective Jim Sullivan sat by the potbelly stove in the parlor of the Mutual Rowing Club boathouse on South Street warming his feet and enjoying an after-work schuper with Driscoll, Bennett, and Shea. A discussion of plans for the M.R.C.’s upcoming silver anniversary celebration was quickly overtaken by the heated matter of the river’s attempted kidnapping and Fingy Conners’ part in it.
Jim had many times during his more quiet thoughts envisioned luring Conners into a clandestine meeting, taking his pistol and firing a bullet into Fingy Conners’ forehead just to put an end everyone’s suffering. He pictured vividly the bullet entering Conners’ bloated face, the face expanding outward in every direction and exploding the inner workings, such as they were, in a red cloud of expanding debris. Life would be so much more tranquil for everybody if Conners was cold under the ground. He imagined that he himself, his fellow officers, his superiors Mike Regan and Pat Cusak, would at long last be unburdened and free to pursue unencumbered police work rather than spending fifty percent of their time attending to Fingy’s demands and the fallout from his alliances, schemes and feuds. Jim wished to believe too that his own brother JP’s endeavors as First Ward alderman might be simplified and cleansed with Conners out of the picture, despite acknowledging JP’s many transgressions not at all related to Fingy’s
influence.
Jim’s Hannah liked to fantasize a similar fate for Conners, for with Fingy dead her brother David Nugent would finally be set free—not that he ever indicated he wanted to be. She clung to her stubborn belief that she knew him better than he knew himself no matter how egregious his newest crime. She predicted in the case of Fingy’s death that David would magically reject his lawless ways and return to the family fold renewed.
It was no secret either that JP’s wife Annie seethed as hotly against Conners today as she did the night of JP’s winning his first election when Conners had grabbed her breast, or in the waning days of 1899 when Fingy’s stooge John Nevels fired his pistol into a crowd of children taunting him for his being a scab, a crowd which included her eldest son Thomas.
Fingy Conners had succeeded in alienating and exhausting everyone. His ambitions were as boundless as they were breathtaking. Each new conquest provided additional fuel for his snowballing appetites. Each new victory swelled his narcissism and inspired him to venture further, deeper, broader in his pursuit of domination over other men. As a detective, Jim Sullivan was increasingly interested in why criminals do what they do. Previously the school of thought concluded simply that these people are born with a criminal mind, but Jim had seen too many good people inexplicably go bad. There seemed to be no explanation for why such a change could take place among those with no previous criminal behavior. New York City detectives had become increasingly invested in the opinions of alienists as a way of identifying future criminals before they could act on their motivations, and thus prevent crime. The term newly coined by German alienists fit Conners to a “T”: Fingy Conners was a psychopath.
Jim Sullivan took another gulp. The men discussed the situation. Jim stated his opinions about the new alienists who offered that this sort of insatiable pursuit of extreme power and wealth was rooted in childhood trauma and deprivations both physical and emotional, and was being considered by them for categorization as a distinct type of mental malaise. Fingy’s heroes Carnegie, JP Morgan, the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts provided him validation that his personal ideology of ruthless aggrandization was both correct and necessary. Conners was stridently influenced and emboldened by the famed American oligarchs’ passionate belief in their natural superiority, not just over all other individuals, but over long-established national governments as well.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 13