Monk Eastman

by Neil Hanson

  The Five Pointers were the first to suffer Commissioner Greene’s wrath. They had assembled the night after the battle to raise funds to pay the hospital expenses of badly wounded John Carroll/Smith, and wore black badges, printed in silver letters with the words we mourn our loss.18 Inspector Schmittberger sought no warrants but simply turned up at the gang hangout with a force of twenty-five detectives a few minutes before midnight. “There was no ceremony about entering,” but the detective who led the way was greeted by chairs thrown at his head, one of which felled him. As more police poured into the room, the gang members made a rush for the windows but were beaten back by police clubs. Schmittberger then jumped onto a table and shouted, “This meeting is adjourned and it is the last meeting you’ll ever hold here.19 The Paul Kelly Association is dead from now on.” Three men who had drawn pistols were arrested and the rest were told to get out, and as each man passed through the doorway, he took a punch in the face or a kick from the detectives. Any Five Pointers who tried to fight back were brutally beaten.

  After the room had been cleared, the contents were wrecked. Offering a dangerous hostage to fortune, Inspector Schmittberger said afterward, “I think we have succeeded in putting the Paul Kelly Association out of business. If they ever try to hold another meeting, they will get a worse deal than they did tonight. You cannot deal too severely with these men. We will attend to the other gangs in a similar way.” His words were made to look a little hollow when, in a defiant show of strength and despite a huge police presence, Paul Kelly then paraded an estimated two thousand gang members at the Brooklyn funeral of Michael Donovan, who had been shot and killed during the battle.

  The Eastmans were next to be targeted in another brutal police roundup. To avoid being spotted prematurely by lookouts for the gang, a score of policemen wore disguises.20 Some only removed their collars, scarves, and cuffs and put on a slouch hat; others dressed as trolley conductors, motormen, butchers, bakers, printers, and street cleaners; and a few wore false mustaches and whiskers. The effectiveness of the subterfuge was questionable, but more than thirty Eastmans, including Joseph Brown, were arrested.

  The arrests were accompanied by considerable police violence. Commissioner Greene had earlier claimed that he did not believe that liberal use of the nightstick was the proper method for wiping out the East Side gangs. The police, he said, would use their nightsticks only in self-defense or in making an arrest; the fact that a man was an ex-convict or a reputed member of a gang would not justify using a club on him. However, newspaper reports quoting unnamed police sources said the East Side gangs were “to get a dose of their own medicine—they are to be beaten within an inch of their lives by the police whenever the slightest excuse is offered.”21 Suspicions that the commissioner’s statement was primarily for public consumption hardened when the Eastmans appeared in court, bearing fresh bruises and scars from police nightsticks. Despite police claims that almost all of them had been carrying concealed weapons, all but three were released without charge, and one of the three escaped with a ten-dollar fine.

  The magistrate’s hands were tied by the terms of the Sullivan Law, which carried a maximum penalty of a ten-dollar fine for carrying a concealed weapon. It was not without irony that the law had been promulgated by Big Tim Sullivan to mollify constituents outraged by gang gunplay on the streets, though, weak as it was, the law did enable police to plant a gun on any suspected criminal and then charge him with carrying a concealed weapon. It led some gangsters to sew up their pockets while their moll or one of the junior gang members paced alongside them, carrying their weapons for them.

  The next Eastman gang member to face trial was a surprising one, a fifteen-year-old girl named Driga, aka “Bridget” or “The Bride,” Colonna. Despite her Sicilian roots, Bridget had thrown in her lot with Monk’s predominantly Jewish gang, rather than with Paul Kelly’s Italians. She had graduated rapidly through the ranks of the Junior Eastmans and notwithstanding her youth and sex was now a much-feared—and much-admired—member of the adult gang, “as reckless and desperate as any of the young men who compose those notorious bands.”22 Whenever the Eastman gang was out on one of its raids, “this bright faced, wild-eyed young girl was prominent in the melee and … could be seen flourishing a revolver and joining in the furious rushes of the gang with all the abandon of a young brigand.” She was involved so often that police began to look upon her as one of the leaders in the battles that terrorized Cherry Hill.

  She was arrested after her mother reported her missing, “testified that she was incorrigible,” and told police that she carried a revolver concealed in her stocking or under her short skirt.23 Police hunted for several days before they found Driga, and it took two men to restrain her and get her to the police station. When her mother arrived, Driga “abused her in such terms that even the hardened policemen in the station house were shocked at her depravity.” She then scratched and swore at her captors throughout the ride to the courthouse. Although she was a member of the Eastmans, such were her reputation and her powers of attraction among the rival gangs that members of the Kelly gang, the Yakey Yakes, and several other gangs also flocked to the courtroom to watch her trial. She stood in the dock, “barely five feet high, slender, delicately formed, with an exceedingly pretty face, from which flashed a pair of great big black eyes, hurling forth a torrent of Billingsgate that would have put a truck driver to the blush.”24

  Her mother testified that Driga had been absolutely unmanageable since she was ten years old, and that she spent her time on the streets day and night with the most undesirable acquaintances she could have made in the entire East Side, including young men and women twice her age. She now “gloried in her wickedness … saluted her parents with frightful oaths whenever they met her among her evil companions” and was a central figure at the Paradise Social Club, made up of members of the Eastman gang and women of equal notoriety.25 The club held all-night dances, which often degenerated into orgies and sometimes brawls.

  “She carries a gun, Judge,” one of her captors said, “and orders Eastman and Kelly and the others about.”26

  “That’s not so,” Driga said. “I don’t know ‘The Monk.’ I’m not a Dick Turpin in petticoats. I’ve had a gun, maybe I’ve shot it off too, but that don’t make me a girl bandit. I never stole or smoked cigarettes. I’ve stayed out nights and that’s about the worst thing you can say about me.” However, Judge Olmstead remained immune to her charms and sent her to the reformatory.

  Driga was an archetypal tough girl who, with the Bowery boy, were caricatured on the stage in a series of wildly popular productions; they were recognizable and—by some—much-admired Lower East Side types. The tough girl was “a kind of sparrow that nobody would mistake for a blue jay.27 It said ‘Hully gee’ [an abbreviation of “Holy Jesus”], and ‘dis mug’ and ‘chase y’self,’ ” and wore “a skirt to the toes, a close-bodiced jacket and a hat with a broken feather.” Her consort, the Bowery boy, wore “a derby hat over one ear, a light-colored check coat pulled tight, a shirt with horizontal stripes,” and practiced a walk with his elbows out, so that none could pass him on a narrow sidewalk. The Bowery dance halls sometimes gave a prize for the best “hard walk.”

  The toughest tough girl of them all, Driga was committed to the care of the Gerry Society until she was sixteen, and then transferred to the Bedford Reformatory for Women.28 29 What happened to her after that is unknown; if she ever again came before the courts it was not under any of her previous names.

  After their success with one Junior Eastman, the police of the Madison Street station next took on a poolroom full of them a couple of days later, in a cellar at 103 East Broadway. A passing streetcar had previously been attacked in front of the place and the passengers robbed, and many other thefts had also been attributed to the gang, who used the poolroom as their headquarters. When a man strolled by with his coat open, showing his watch and double chain, he was asking for trouble and immediately got it. He was hit in the
face, knocked down, and robbed of his watch. As he got groggily to his feet, he saw two men run into the poolroom. He tried to follow them but was stopped at the door by a beer glass aimed at his head and warned that if he didn’t go away, he would be killed. When he summoned the police, the poolroom doors were slammed in their faces and they were also told that if they didn’t go about their business, they would get hurt, and “big fellows in politics” would make their lives a misery.30

  The police forced the doors but were greeted with a volley of beer glasses and were then attacked with chairs, pool cues, and any other weapons that came to hand. They laid about them with their nightsticks, and the fierce battle continued for a few minutes, until the superior numbers and power of the police began to tell. The watch and chain were found under a pool table, along with several pistols dropped by their owners when they saw that they could not avoid arrest.

  As he was led away, the Junior Eastmans’ deputy leader “Klondyke” Abrams turned to a policeman and said, “You’se go to entirely too much trouble.31 The politicians’ll bail us out. They don’t want no-one away at registration and election time.” He had to wait only a few hours for confirmation of that. The next morning, all of them, even the man identified as the one who had punched the victim and stolen his watch, were released on bail. However, Magistrate Ommen bound them all over on one thousand dollars’ bail to keep the peace for six months. It was “a surprise to the group of roughs and their anger was stirred to the fighting point,” their threats against Ommen becoming “so violent that the police had to stand over them, with drawn clubs.”

  Despite the raids and arrests, few believed Greene’s public statements that the gangs were on the run. The elections were due in November, and as Klondyke had predicted, Monk, Kelly, and their gangs of sluggers and repeaters were too important to Tammany Hall. However, the truce between the gangs that Big Tom Foley had brokered was soon looking fragile. The Eastmans were still smarting over a recent fight between Paul Kelly and Jake Shimsky, “the heavyweight right bower [right-hand man] of the redoubtable King Eastman.”32 33 Fistfights between individual members of the rival gangs were frequent, and huge sums in bets often changed hands on the result. Some were savage brawls where kicking, biting, gouging, and even knives were tolerated, but even those fought under a simulacrum of the Queensberry rules that regulated “respectable” boxing—with a marked-out ring, seconds, timekeepers, and a referee—had to be staged in secret to avoid police raids; at one time boxing was banned in every state except Louisiana.

  At a fight between Jack Hirsh of the Eastmans and Ike Fadinsky of the Kellys, Shimsky had taken a blow on the nose from Kelly that he did not return for fear of provoking a mass brawl, preferring to bide his time before seeking revenge. Kelly was only five foot two, whereas Shimsky was more than six feet tall and 230 pounds, with a fearsome reputation as a strong-arm man. A couple of weeks later, looking to settle the score, he turned up with three other Eastmans at Tom Sharkey’s bar, where Kelly was drinking.

  “Hello you runt,” Shimsky said.34 “If you were a full-grown man, I’d knock the block off you.”

  “Go chase yourself,” Kelly said. That ended the preliminaries, and Shimsky and his three friends rushed him. Kelly’s bodyguard, a heavyweight fighter who claimed to have trained Jack Fitzsimmons, ran in from the back, handed out a few punches, and then persuaded them to go down into the cellar and settle their differences “accordin’ to [Queensberry] rules.”

  Word traveled fast, and before the two men had even stripped to their waists, a dozen East Side “sports” had turned up and started laying bets. It was a bantamweight against a heavyweight, and the odds reflected the unequal contest, with eighteen hundred dollars wagered on the outcome. A twelve-foot ring was paced out, with beer kegs to mark the corners, and the two men wore skintight gloves. “Shimsky opened with a savage rush, Kelly dodged and got in one.35 Then the blows came thick and fast.” In the third round “Kelly shot out a left that landed, and then followed it with a right that sent Shimsky to the floor.” His seconds picked up the unconscious Shimsky and carried him out of the ring. By now the policeman on post had got wind of what was going on and was pounding on the door, but the fighters, their seconds, the referee, and the spectators all got out up the airshaft, and the cellar was deserted by the time the police eventually broke in.

  Swallowing his humiliation at his defeat by a much smaller man, Shimsky sought out Kelly in Tom Sharkey’s bar after the fight and told him, “You done me fair, an’ I wanter shake. What’ll y’have?” Despite that conciliatory gesture and the Foley-imposed outbreak of peace between the gangs, the Eastmans had suffered a grievous blow to their prestige, and there was a suspicion in high places that they might only be stalling until they could take their revenge.

  Monk duly kept his part of the bargain with Tammany by helping to get out the vote in the elections, but the truce between the Eastmans and the Five Pointers did not hold for long after that. In that same month, November 1903, an Eastman gang member named Hurst got into an argument with a Five Pointer named Ford in a Bowery dive. It developed into a vicious brawl in which Hurst’s nose was broken in two places, and one of his ears was bitten off. Monk immediately told Kelly that if he did not exact retribution on Ford himself, Monk and his gang would come to the Five Points and “wipe up de earth wit youse guys.”36

  Kelly replied in similarly forthright and unconciliatory terms, and a fresh outbreak of gang warfare was averted only when Tammany politicians again intervened, forcing the two leaders to hold fresh peace talks at The Palm. Monk and Kelly faced each other across a table, each with one hand holding a cigar and the other resting on the butt of a pistol. After much wrangling, they agreed to resolve their differences by a bare-knuckle fistfight between the two of them. The winner would take the disputed territory; the loser would confine himself and his gang to his own turf from then on.

  The prospect of a prizefight between two of New York’s most notorious gangsters electrified the Lower East Side. On the appointed night Monk and Kelly, each accompanied by fifty handpicked men, and a crowd of spectators and gamblers—“toughs in cocked derby hats and women in ‘Mikado tuck-ups,’ the high piled, delicate hair-dos of the day”—met in an abandoned barn on the outskirts of the Bronx.37 The once rural Bronx was undergoing a dramatic transformation. The areas east of the Bronx River had only been annexed to New York in 1895, but the extension of the Third Avenue El through the Bronx in 1891 had already begun a building boom that saw the population more than double, from 88,000 to 200,000 people, in the course of that decade. It was in the process of doubling again during the following ten years as more and more Bronx farmland was bought up and developed, but in the outlying districts there were still large tracts of rural land and woods, where even a prizefight between New York’s two most notorious gangsters might take place without police interference.

  The venue for the fight was made known by word of mouth, and more than two hundred made the journey out to the Bronx. As well as gang members, there were a number of sports who “could face the searchlight of respectability without flinching.”38 Tickets were sold for a nominal fifty cents, but the purchasers had to produce rather more money than that before the fight. Those who had already bought tickets were told to meet at a hotel on East Fourteenth Street at nine o’clock on the night of the fight. Those without tickets were told to wait at the foot of the El station at 161st Street in the Bronx an hour later. The fighters and ticketholders boarded the El at Fourteenth Street, and at every station along the line newcomers with the tip joined them. They were at least a hundred strong by the time they reached 161st Street, where a hundred more were waiting. In order to avoid rousing police suspicions, the crowd broke up into groups of four or six and made off in different directions before heading for the next rendezvous, a roadhouse on Jerome Avenue, about two miles away. It was a bitter night with no trolley cars in sight; they had to walk.

  By the time they arrived at the roadhouse, the w
alk had “whetted their appetites and thirst, and they got away with all the sandwiches in sight and a few other articles that they did not pay for … Everybody seemed to be smoking good Havana cigars, and the air seemed laden with the fumes of recently opened wine.”39 The proprietor of the roadhouse then locked the doors and told them if they did not pay for what they had stolen, the police would be called. The crowd produced enough money between them to satisfy him, whereupon the doors were unlocked and they streamed out into the night.

  The trek continued, deeper into the country, over roads covered with new-fallen snow, until about fifty of them got tired of walking and boarded a Jerome Avenue streetcar. The first thing some of them then did was to steal about $2.50 in nickels and dimes from the conductor’s pockets. A sport also stole one of the trolley car’s lamps, placing it beneath his overcoat and telling his friend, “We may need this later on.” It was past midnight when they reached an old barn on the deserted Berkeley Oval. The only person in the barn was the watchman, who was dead drunk or had been slipped knockout drops. A guard kept watch over him, and another was posted to look out for the police. The rest of them gathered around the ring, lit by the feeble light of a lantern and the stolen lamp.

  The winter wind whistling through chinks in the decrepit walls cut the smell of the moldering straw, black with damp, still piled in the corners of the barn. The ring, roughly swept clear of loose straw and animal dung, was paced out and marked by straw bales and a single strand of old rope, sagging from four fence posts driven into the dirt. There were no seats or bleachers, and the crowd stood elbow to elbow around the ring, with those at the back precariously balanced on boxes, straw bales, and rotting barrels for a better view. Armed gang members were close-packed around the ring, but they left Monk and Kelly to fight it out without interference.40 The referee, from a rival gang with no close affiliation to either side, brought the two men together in the center of the ring. Monk was stockier and five inches taller than Kelly, but Kelly had fought professionally and, as he had demonstrated against Shimsky, his skill as a fighter could be enough to offset the greater weight, strength, and ferocity of a bigger man.