The Gangster

Isaac Bell flashed his Van Dorn badge and slapped five dollars into the hand of a Pennsylvania Railroad detective who tried to stop him. He ran to the end of the railcar float pier that thrust hundreds of feet into the river and climbed the gantry that raised and lowered the dock to align the rails with the barges. Twenty feet up in the air, he scanned the smoky river for the steam lighter that Leone and the Salata gorillas had boarded. It was gone, lost in the heavy traffic of tugs and barges, steamers and sailing ships.

He started to climb back down when he suddenly realized he was looking in the wrong direction. The lighter was nearby, almost at his feet, tied to a cattle boat that was moored alongside the railroad pier. Apparently, it had steamed out of the slip, turned around in the river, and steamed back into the next. Just as he spotted it, a dozen men with bulging sacks slung over their shoulders squeezed through the slats of the cattle boat and jumped onto the lighter. Ernesto Leone was the last aboard. The lighter cast off and steamed into the river, leaving Bell in the same position he had been moments ago, stuck on the gantry while the counterfeiter escaped.

Not quite, he thought to himself. He could see in the distance a New York Police Harbor Squad launch churning up the river at twelve knots. Roundsman O’Riordan, full speed ahead! The Italians spotted the water cops. They turned the lighter on a nickel and raced back into the slip. By the time the Harbor Squad churned into the mouth of the slip, the last of the gangsters were stumbling ashore.

* * *

Hunt and McBean’s van driver rapped on the roof with the butt of his carter’s whip.

McBean put down the Black Hand letter and peered through a spy hole. “Here come the cows.”

Hunt watched from an adjacent spy hole. Their laughter died.

“Where’s their horns?” asked McBean.

Of the beef cattle shambling down the gangway to the livestock pens, many had no horns. Some had only one.

“Somebody stole our horns.”

The Irishmen jumped out of the van, faces reddening, fists clenched, and ran to the pens. Hunt vaulted the fence and threw a headlock on the nearest one-horned steer. It tried to buck him off. McBean piled on, too. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Where its horn should have stuck out of its head was a neatly sawn base with a threaded hole in the middle.

“Sons of bitches unscrewed them.”

Their wagon driver ran up.

“Guy says a bunch of Italians just jumped off a lighter.”

“Yeah? So?”

“One of ’em dropped his sack. It was full of cow horns.”

“Where’d they go?”

“Across 36th Street.”

* * *

Charlie Salata and his top gorillas found their escape blocked by a long, slow New York Central freight train creeping up Eleventh Avenue at the pace of the city-mandated railroad cop escorting it on a horse. Salata was beside himself. Anything that could go wrong had gone wrong: Harbor Squad cops where they weren’t expected, one of his men gored by a cow, and the boat trapped. At least they had the dope, including the sack that the worthless Ernesto Leone had managed to drop in plain sight of half the waterfront. But they were stuck on foot in Walloper territory, and it was a long way home to Little Italy.

All of a sudden, pounding up 36th Street, came the Wallopers.

15

Isaac Bell stuck close to the Italians he had spotted scrambling off the lighter. Only twenty yards behind when the freight train stopped them, he pressed into a shallow doorway.

There were nine men carrying sacks. Leone had dropped his while jumping ashore, spilling what looked like the horns of cows, before the rest of the gang scooped them up. The counterfeiter was a hapless sight, shooting frightened glances over his shoulder, bumping into the other gangsters, and generally getting in the way. The rest were cool customers, spoiling for a fight.

Bell recognized their leader, Charlie Salata, who had failed to ferret out the disguised detectives on Elizabeth, then sicced a stiletto man on apprentice Richie Cirillo. Running with him was the thug himself, Vito Rizzo, sporting the flattened nose Wish Clarke had smashed on the steps of the Kips Bay Saloon.

Whatever the Italians had stolen or smuggled had caught the attention of the local Irish — West Side Wallopers, Bell surmised by their gaudy costumes, a poisonous outgrowth of the Gopher Gang. A glimpse of their leaders’ scarred faces revealed that Tammany Hall had sprung Ed Hunt and Tommy McBean from prison again.

More Wallopers were joining the pursuit, streaming out of saloons and ten-cent lodging houses. The gang stopped several doorways behind where Bell had taken cover. A sharp, two-finger whistle split the air.

Elaborately coiffed and behatted women ran to them. Shapely as Lillian Russell, hard-eyed as statues, they stood still when the men groped into their bustles and bodices for the revolvers that would get the men arrested when cops patted them down.

The Italians pulled their own guns, all but counterfeiter Leone.