Crime Incorporated. William Balsamo
only one flaw. The April Fool’s postcard he had sent to the White Hand leader apparently had been delayed in the mail. It didn’t get into the postal carrier’s bag until late in the morning of April 1st.
By then, word was out that Danny Meehan had been killed. So when the postman, Benvenuto Itaglia, reached Denny’s apartment, he was very aware that Meehan was dead. Itaglia looked at the postcard, read its message, “Buona sera, signore,” and decided not to deliver it.
Itaglia was very superstitious about bringing greetings to any house where there was a death. He decided to do what he always did in such cases—destroy the postcard.
And that left Frankie Yale completely clear with the authorities. Had the postcard been delivered, the history of the five-year Ginzo-Mick War might have been far different. And far shorter.
His hatred for Danny Meehan was so passionate that Frankie Yale had written the April Fool’s card himself. And if it had been delivered to Meehan’s mailbox after his murder, police could have easily identified Yale’s handwriting, since he was suspected of setting up the killing.
But when Benvenuto Itaglia destroyed Yale’s postcard, he obliterated the only evidence against Frankie Yale. So the murder of Denny Meehan was fated to remain one of New York’s biggest underworld mysteries in the years that followed.
When Wild Bill Lovett was crowned overlord of the White Hand gang’s empire on the Gowanus dock that early April day in 1920, the Roaring Twenties had just begun their riotous, raucous ascendancy.
Yet his predecessor, Denny Meehan, had not even begun to hone the mob’s greedy claws for a piece of the action in the lucrative new racket foaled by the Volstead Act, which for the fourteen years of its loosely enforced existence was more popularly known as Prohibition.
There are historians of that underworld era who are convinced Meehan was so thick-headed and deficient in imagination that, had he lived, the Irish mobsters probably never would have ventured into the Klondike spawned by the bootleg booze business; they might have been content to keep their franchises on the waterfront extortion, loan-shark, and hijacking rackets, while letting others in the underworld mine the rich nuggets bubbling up from the sea of illegal hootch that was inundating America.
Not since the abolition of slavery in the middle of the nineteenth century had any issue been so widely debated, so bitterly contested, or pursued with so much determination and idealism as Prohibition. The ban against liquor became the law of the land on January 16, 1920.
In the ten weeks between the beginning of Prohibition and the demise of Denny Meehan, the man who did Denny in had already demonstrated the alertness and innovativeness that a mob leader must possess to stay up front. No sooner had the last drink been served in Brooklyn on January 16th than Frankie Yale, inordinately endowed with the sense of when to retool for change, led his Black Hand troops almost overnight into bootlegging.
Although Prohibition hit the whole of America with stunning force, some citizens, alert to the forthcoming ban, had prepared for it. In Brooklyn, as elsewhere, many liquor lovers—and opportunists—readied themselves for the cut-off of supplies by building their own distilleries.
Stills sprang up in cellars of private homes, in warehouses, in garages. But the distillation of hootch was a time-consuming, often risky venture. Some underworld groups of no particular significance in Brooklyn undertook the manufacture of illicit booze for sale to speakeasies and private consumers, but Frankie Yale disdained the idea. Aware of the bother and dangers of operating a still, Frankie preferred to leave the brewing to others and stick to a sophisticated, trouble-free bootlegging operation. That was why he decided the Black Hand would only peddle booze.
To start, Frankie sent out about thirty members of his mob in the roles of “salesmen” to solicit business from the hundreds of saloons condemned by the new law to sell drinks containing no more than one-half of one percent alcohol—which meant only the weakest-tasting. Every hair tonic had a higher alcohol content in those days.
The orders poured in. And Yale, flushed by the initial success of his sales force, searched for a source that could supply him with the large quantities of alky being demanded in his territory. He found a willing supplier in Detroit: the Purple Gang. The Michigan mob had begun the manufacture of hootch on a grand scale and was marketing a whiskey that was generally regarded as the best illicit booze produced in the United States. Connoisseurs of that era who sampled the product say the legitimate pre-Prohibition whiskey was virtually indistinguishable from the contents of the bottles shipped by the Purple Gang with their fraudulent labels: Old Granddad.
Yale’s coup with the Michigan mob and his ability to supply Brooklyn’s speakeasies with that hootch was the envy of Wild Bill Lovett who, unlike his predecessor, had a full awareness of the great potential in bootlegging.
Despite the late start, Lovett was unable to establish a quick, big market of his own in bootlegging. Many of the old gin mills in South Brooklyn were operated by sons of the auld sod. Though many of them already had begun to receive bootleg hootch from Yale’s Black Hand suppliers, when Wild Bill Lovett’s emissaries finally came around and solicited their business, large numbers of them agreed to switch their business to the White Hand suppliers.
Even though the Irish innkeepers were sympathetic to Lovett and his brigade of Irishmen, the hootch the White Hand began to deliver to the bars couldn’t maintain the bond. Scores of saloons stopped buying Lovett’s booze and went back to the Black Hand’s suppliers.
It was easy to understand: the White Hand’s bootleg was of the local variety, brewed in cellars, warehouses, and garages. It had none of the body, bouquet, or potency of the product trucked from Detroit. The drastic loss of clientele grated Lovett until mid-November, when he finally struck upon a course of action destined to have extensive ramifications on the White Hand gang’s simmering feud with the Black Hand.
Thursday night, November 18, 1920. Ten men arrived separately at Prospect Hall on 17th Street and gathered in one of the meeting rooms that Lovett had reserved for the occasion. They were Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan, Danny and Petey Bean, Pug McCarthy, Ash Can Smitty, Jack “Needles” Ferry, Charleston Eddie McFarland, Aaron Harms, and Irish Eyes Duggan. The tenth man was Wild Bill.
“I called you here tonight to tell you about bootlegging,” Lovett rasped. “I have been hearing that we should make our own liquor because the stuff we’re buying is so lousy. But let me tell you that isn’t the way to make a profit. And we can’t get anywhere selling the bathtub booze we’re pushing now…”
Lovett looked at his “sales managers” who’d been supervising the White Hand’s booze peddlers, studying their faces for reaction. What he saw pleased him. “I can see you agree with me,” he smiled. “Now let me tell you what I want to do…”
His next words had the effect of a bombshell.
“We’re going to sell the stuff that the fuckin’ ginzo Yale has been supplying to the speaks.”
There was a stunned silence. Then Lovett detected a derisive murmur.
“All right, I know what you’re thinking—that we can’t buy the Purple’s booze because they won’t deal with us,” Wild Bill speculated. The Detroit mob was predominantly Jewish and they’d sooner pour their Old Grandad into Lake Michigan than sell it to the micks.
“But who’s talking about buying it?” Lovett asked with a meaningful grin. Then some of his “salesmen” began smiling. They had gotten the drift of Wild Bill’s pitch.
“All I’m saying is we’re gonna get involved in something we’re old hands at doing,” he went on. “We’re going to hijack the wops’ liquor, just like we do the stuff that’s going