by Tim Sultan
“Now, Josephine. I thank you for what you’ve done, you hear? You’ve given me this gift of yourself, but I think you should cover yourself up again. Okay?”
Sunny approached her and Josephine swiveled to face him. Her cane, which had been leaning against her barstool, fell to the floor with a crack. Like a guileless doe approaching a mound of corn left by a hunter now perched in a nearby tree, Sunny bent over to pick up Josephine’s cane and at that instant Josephine seized him by both ears and yanked his head toward her crotch. “Oh, Sunny!” she shouted. Off balance, Sunny stumbled forward with a grunt and caught himself on her knees but for an interminable moment, he was bent at the waist, his head buried in her lap. With a lurch he righted himself and she let out a triumphant howl. He looked around unsteadily and said sternly, though not entirely unhappily, “Josephine! You really have to get dressed now. Okay? And I’ll call you a car. I love you, kid.”
“Okay, Sunny,” she wailed. “I loooove you, Sunny!”
“That was a close one, Timmy,” Sunny said after we had seen off the two sisters, the man in the zoot suit, and the other remaining people and locked the door. “I tell you what. Those are the kind of people, you never know what they’re going to do next. They’re cuckoo. The Bimbo Sisters. We used to have a lot of people like them around here and thank goodness we don’t anymore. That guy sitting in the booth with Jacqueline—I was going to speak with him, to deter him from extending himself to her, only because I didn’t want to give them any impetus to come back. But he’s the kind of guy whose head is in his prick. Pensa col cazzo. He’s not seeing, he’s not thinking, it’s just there and he wants it. Reminds me of myself during various periods in my life, to tell the truth. When I was young, I spent a considerable amount of time in the hospital recovering from gangrene and the nurses there were so beautiful and I was often so horny, I would have to stick my prick in my belt to keep it locked in. Pour me a shot.”
Sunny sipped his Jameson. I would never develop the thirst for whiskey that Sunny always seemed to be trying to slake and I rarely drank late at night. But watching someone drink alone feels like bad manners and I poured myself just enough to wet my lips and began sweeping up cigarette butts. After closing time, the wooden floor would look like a small town ticker-tape parade had passed through earlier.
“Ha! The night of Josephine’s tits. Two tits. Have I ever told you about the night of the six tits, Timmy?”
“The night of the six tits? I don’t think so, Sunny. It sounds like a creature feature.”
“It was, Timmy, only…I was the creature!” Sunny exclaimed, his eyes glistening.
“What happened was, this was well before I met Tone and when I was living not next door but in this house over on Dikeman Street when I first moved back to the neighborhood. It was wintertime and I had locked up the store and I was walking toward this club, an unlicensed bar that some friends of mine had opened on the corner of Coffey and Dwight Streets. I think there may be a church there now. Anyways, I get to the other end of that block, the corner of Richards and Coffey, and I’m walking along and I hear Blam! Blam! Gunfire coming from the direction of this bar. I look down the street and there are these guys running out of the door and scattering in every direction and some of them are running right toward me. To get away, you see. A lot of guys. And I’m still hearing shots. So this pack of men reaches the spot where I’m standing and they keep running past me and I turn and join them and we’re all running together back toward Richards Street! There was snow on the ground and I must have gotten to within about twenty feet of the corner when I hear more shots—Blam! Blam!—and I just dove. I dove, Timmy, and I used my body like a fuckin’ sled to get to the corner. I lay there for just a moment and then I ducked around a building and when I stood up, wouldn’t you know it, these three women are there and they ask me if I’m all right. I say, ‘I am’ and they ask me where I was going. I say, ‘I’m going home now.’ And they ask whether they could come with me, have a drink, like that.
“Well, we go to my house and we pour some drinks and it’s not too long before they get to talking as to which one was going to have her way with me, aye? Eventually, well, one of them did have her way with me. It was pretty debauched when you consider it. The other two were hooting and slapping me on the ass and when we were done, well, those other two felt left out. They wanted a bit of me, too. I said, ‘Thank you, but you see I don’t think I’m physically able to do what it is that it is you want me to do.’ So one of them had this idea that what I needed was to soak my balls in ice water. This was pre-Viagra, you understand. And that’s what we did—she filled a bowl with ice water and she had me squat over this bowl in the kitchen. It didn’t work, of course, but I can still hear those ice cubes clinking against the side of the bowl!”
“Thank you for that image,” I said.
Sunny giggled until he coughed, and as he regained his composure, I poured him another shot.
“I don’t think The Night of the Six Tits will be showing at the Saturday matinee anytime soon.”
“Timmy, let me tell you—it would be unsuitable for viewers of any age. And I can say that ’cause I was there!”
“Next time someone orders a double highball, I’ll let you take care of it.”
Sunny smoked in the dark while I took up sweeping again, pondering the night’s contradictions. At most other bars, when a customer acted up, they were thrown out. Here, they were paid compliments. The outcome was the same but the distinction being, I decided, that at Sunny’s a person wasn’t aware that they were being kicked out and they might leave feeling better about themselves than when they first arrived. I had a lot to learn from this man. “Sunny, you’re one part psychologist, one part explosives expert,” I mused aloud. “Many people wouldn’t have the right touch to defuse a time bomb like Josephine.”
“Well, certainly, that’s my way. Understand, Timmy, it wasn’t always like that here at the bar. My family could be tough when it was required. When I was a boy, my father and my uncle used to cash checks for the workers out of the back room, taking a small fee. One night some gangsters, some real heavy hitters from Coney Island, showed up and tried to shake down some of that money from my father. Like they probably did with all the bars down here. Well, just at that moment my father’s brother, Uncle Louis, who worked on the harbor patrol, shows up with his partners. We actually called him Gigch. Uncle Gigch, so as to tell him apart from my other uncle Louis, the whistler. They used to tie up at the end of the street and when they’d come in, they’d stash their hats and their guns behind the bar next to the front door. Anyway, my uncle hears what’s going on in the back room and he goes back there and says to one of these gangsters, ‘You go tell your boss that if we ever see you come into this bar again, trying to strong-arm my family, we’re coming down to Coney Island and we’re going to wipe out your whole fuckin’ family!’ He meant it, too. My uncle, what a sweet guy—but he was tough. He worked on the docks for a while and he was one of those men who broke through the Irish hold on the piers down here. And my father…fuhgeddaboudit! I remember another time when I was a boy. My father and Uncle John, they would give the guys who worked around here tabs. You know, you don’t have any money, you gonna eat, like that. There was one thing they hated most, though, and that was when you didn’t have any money and you came to the bar and ate and they put you on a tab and then, when you had money, you ate somewhere else. That was an insult. There was this one guy, a professional fighter. Spanish. It was lunchtime and he came in and he ordered food even though he hadn’t paid his bill from the last time. And my father said to him, ‘You got some pair of balls. You come here and you want food and you want to put it on the tab. When you got money, you go down the street. I don’t mind you going down the street, but you go down the street when you got money and you come here when you got no money?’
“The fighter, he challenged my father. ‘Come outside and I’ll kick your fuckin’ ass!’ Something to that degree. Like all of my u
ncles, my father was small but strong, aye? Nevertheless, I’m watching this take place and I was scared for him. He goes outside and who follows him but my uncle. And they were on that prizefighter like pit bulls. I’m telling you, Timmy, this guy was like a sheep at bay with a couple of pit bulls. My father would give him a shot and he’d turn around and my uncle would give him a shot. I mean, they beat him to the ground. They could have killed him but they taught him a lesson. I was so proud of my father because this guy had always had an attitude and he sort of bragged about it, and the two of them had shown him that no one got away with anything here. And the guy came back later and he paid his bill and nothing was ever said about it again. But people in the neighborhood knew by that, you don’t fuck around when you come to this bar. And if you did, well, my father always had the bats. That’s the way it was around here.”
* * *
12
Enrico
I was a man living two lives. I had taken a job at a magazine on Madison Avenue that was nine miles but many worlds removed from the society of Jacqueline and Josephine, Jersey wannabe wise guys, and the Balzano clan (not to mention nude nighttime swims in the river). At the end of my workweek, when I boarded the subway on Friday evenings, I may as well have been boarding a ship destined for the Ottoman Empire.
Mine was a job that, day to day, resembled many jobs. There were paper jams, ink shortages, frozen screens, and frequent coffee breaks. The work could be engaging, but was often tedious. An eye for detail was required, while a degree of tolerance for manure was helpful. There was a great deal of concern with being ahead of the times. People took pride in knowing the latest. Like all offices, mine had its share of ruthless strivers, shameless self-champions, flagrant narcissists, as well as chronic skirt chasers and serial trouser burglars. Happily, there were also a good many genuine, agreeable, and admirable souls. I divided my days, in roughly equal parts, between the counter of the Grand Central Oyster Bar (for lunch), the pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (for reading), the aisles of Gotham Book Mart (to pass the time), and my cubicle. I was the obverse of a ruthless striver.
There were several social strata as well as several layers of bosses in this office, and a semi-strict observance of workplace etiquette and hierarchy was expected. At the top, the boss of bosses was a brash, clumsy, and artless man whose principal hobby was collecting skull-and-bone cuff links, which he wore whenever conducting contract negotiations. His locales were Sutton Place, the Royalton Hotel bar, several European capitals where he vacationed every year, and the Four Seasons, where he lunched each afternoon. He was highly set in his ways, and the staff often privately made fun of the narrowness of his habits. He could, after all, afford nearly any whim and yet he returned to the same places—and in the case of the Four Seasons, the same table—day after day. We mocked his lack of imagination to try something new. But in reality, I, too, preferred to go where I was known. I had my own Four Seasons.
Each Friday evening before going to the bar, I unfailingly drove to the opposite end of Red Hook from Sunny’s and ate dinner at the same restaurant, Ferdinando’s, a Sicilian place a century old. Ferdinando’s closed at six o’clock except on Fridays and Saturdays when the owner, Frank Buffa, stayed open till nine. A restaurant that liked to close at six P.M. had a certain kinship to a bar that stayed closed six nights a week. Ferdinando’s was the vanishing Brooklyn that is by turns sentimentalized, caricatured, and spoken of in wistful reverie by its émigrés who were now living in the sunshine states. A statue of St. Francis stood high on a shelf, garlands of garlic dangled around a cast-iron stove, and the walls were hung with yellowed Palermo newspapers, a map of Sicily, daguerreotypes of Italian cities, as well as snapshots of a younger Mr. Buffa diving to block a soccer ball and posing with bombshell Maria Grazia Cucinotta.
Although there were many other restaurants between my house and Sunny’s, I had always been a person of loyalty and custom once I found a place I liked. So each Friday I would meet with the same several friends at Ferdinando’s. Mr. Buffa soon asked us to call him Frank. We were so dependable that he would hold the center table for us.
Frank was a slightly melancholy, if restless-looking, man with an unfeigned sense of hospitality. He spoke heavily accented English although he had been in America since 1971. One evening while I was waiting for my friends to arrive, he settled into the chair across from me and casually mentioned that earlier that day Luciano Pavarotti had had two servings of his tripe.
“Pavarotti was here? At Ferdinando’s?” I asked, incredulous.
“No, no, Teem. He send his driver. His driver, he pick up the tripe,” Frank replied.
This interested me very much and Frank very little. Although his restaurant looked like the kind of place one might expect to hear the death scene aria from La Traviata upon entering, the last time Frank had voluntarily listened to opera was the year before he left Italy, when a beautiful American took him to see The Flying Dutchman in Rome. After ten minutes he decided that Wagner was more unbearable than any woman was desirable, and he stood up and left her forever. He had only mentioned the Pavarotti incident to me because it made him proud that a famous person had eaten his tripe that day. A famous Italian, no less.
By this point, I was a lay historian in all matters Red Hook and I told Frank that Luciano Pavarotti was not the first tenor of the Metropolitan Opera to send an emissary rather than come to Red Hook himself. He shrugged as if to say, “So? What’s the big deal?” but I ignored his indifference—being his most regular customer has some privileges.
The Black Hand first appeared in America in 1903 when a wealthy Red Hook dock builder named Nicolo Cappiello received a series of extortion letters. Such letters were not especially unusual, as blackmail was widely practiced in Italian districts. What made these particular letters notable were their signatures: “La Mano Nera.” The Black Hand. In Italy, there had been rumors of a criminal society with that name for years but this was the first instance of it appearing in connection with a crime in America.
When Cappiello didn’t comply with the letters’ demands, he was visited by several men who introduced themselves as representatives of the Order of the Black Hand. Cappiello didn’t yield to this more ominous, face-to-face approach either, and instead went to the police, who would eventually succeed in entrapping the blackmailers.
The newspaper accounts of the trial were sensationalistic and made other would-be blackmailers realize how effective the idea of a secret criminal society could be in evoking menace. Soon immigrants in other Italian quarters such as East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side were receiving letters from the Black Hand.
Often written in a florid style, the letters would begin politely enough, with, say, “Honorable Sir,” but end with threats such as, “Pay up or we will blow you to atoms.” They were signed variously by the Society, the Order, or the Company of the Black Hand and they were typically illustrated with skulls, daggers, crosses, and…black hands. But unlike those in the Cappiello case, many of these letters were not empty threats. Dynamite was easily stolen from construction sites, and bombings became the preferred method of coercion of the early Black Handers. Newspapers regularly and alarmingly reported on storefronts and homes and occasionally their inhabitants being blown up.
Soon the press began to credit all violent crimes committed by Italians to the Black Hand and imply that Southern Italians, who comprised nearly all Italian immigration to America, were a criminal race of people. The extortion letters and the uncertainty of whether the Black Hand really existed inspired a degree of hysteria that is hard to fathom today. While some investigators concluded that all one needed to be a Black Hand conspirator was a fountain pen and paper, others believed in a vast fraternity of criminals whose tentacles stretched from Calabria to Chicago.
It would be a dozen years before it became clear that the Black Hand had never been a codified and hierarchical organization such as the Mafia in Sicily, that it had not even been an alliance of cr
iminals but instead simply a criminal technique, and the use of the name and symbol faded by the time the First World War began and disappeared almost entirely by 1920.
Red Hook would only have been a footnote in the history of the Black Hand, as the place where the phenomenon first appeared in America, in the way the Ed Sullivan Theater is a footnote in the story of the Beatles, were it not for the fact that it was also in Red Hook that the most notorious, and entertaining, Black Hand extortion attempt was made.
In 1910, several days before Metropolitan Opera tenor Enrico Caruso, then the preeminent Italian in America, was to appear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to sing in La Gioconda, he received a letter that read, “Senor Caruso. You tomorrow at the hour of two will be stopped by a boy and you must deliver $15,000. You think right to not say anything to nobody. C.D.M. †” The initials stood for Compagnia della Morte, the Company of Death, and the black cross was a known symbol of the Black Hand.
The next day Caruso took his customary afternoon walk outside his home in the Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street, shadowed by detectives. Soon, the tenor received a second letter that read, “Senor Caruso: You yesterday went in the company of two policemen. The boy could not make salute. Tonight, just at the hour of six, you must leave in one bag the sum of $15,000 under the stairs where the factory is on the corner of Sackett and Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn. You think good and don’t fail. If you fail, Saturday night will not pass that you will pay.” Leaving no doubt to their identity, the blackmailers signed this letter with the more formal La Mano Nera Compagnia della Morte—the Black Hand Company of Death.