Crime Incorporated. William Balsamo
Wild Bill said, pleased at the quick endorsement. “We start the hits with the next delivery.”
“You mean tonight?” Charleston Eddie asked, pointing to the clock on the meeting hall wall. All were aware that the truck delivering the Black Hand’s liquor always rolled into Yale’s garage on Fourth Avenue and Second Street.
It was now 11:30 p.m., just about the time the shipments arrived. Yale had instructed Detroit never to make deliveries before 11:30 p.m. or after 12:10 a.m. Frankie considered that forty-minute period the safest for hauling the illegal cargo into the garage. Any other time might attract the cop on the beat.
Frankie knew that patrolmen who pounded the pavement in that sector invariably abandoned their posts at 11:30 and shuffled to the Fifth Avenue police station in slow time so they’d get there just a minute or so before midnight. That enabled them to go off duty just as soon as the lieutenant had read their orders to the 12:00-to-8:00 a.m. shift and turned them out. And since it took the flatfoot on the lobster shift about ten minutes to reach the post on Fourth Avenue, the time span between 11:30 and 12:10 was the safest to open the garage doors and let the truck with its cargo in.
Lovett gave McFarland a quick answer.
“No, not tonight,” he said flatly. “We have to do a little planning on how we’re going to pull the caper. Next week is plenty soon enough.”
Shortly before 11:00 p.m. the following Thursday—Thanksgiving—a gray LaSalle sedan pulled out of a small garage on Baltic Street and cruised north. In the car were four men wearing dark lumber jackets and armed with enough artillery to equip a regiment.
Lovett had a desk and phone in that garage, which was a storage depot for the domestically-brewed bootleg hootch and the kegs of beer being supplied by Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer up in the Bronx for distribution in Brooklyn’s speakeasies.
Ten minutes before the LaSalle bearing Petey Bean, Charleston Eddie, Ash Can Smitty, and Needles Ferry left the garage, Lovett had received a call from Irish Eyes Duggan, who was in a speakeasy phone booth on Manhattan’s West Street, where he and Aaron Harms had been staked out in their car near the West Street Ferry to spot the truck from Detroit.
There was no George Washington Bridge, no Lincoln Tunnel, nor such other gateways to or from the West as the New York State Thruway or the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge then. Construction had just begun on the Holland Tunnel, and it was seven years from completion.
While a number of ferry lines were carrying cars, trucks, and commuters across the Hudson in 1920, the principal crossing—because it was the most convenient—for the traffic of the Lincoln Highway was the boats that trudged between Jersey City and Wall Street. So there was no doubt that the truck from Detroit would come by that ferry route.
The truck had no signs to alert Duggan and Harms that it was loaded with the Purple Gang’s liquor. The Michigan license plates were a dead giveaway.
After he phoned Lovett, Duggan hurried out to the car, got in beside Harms, who was behind the wheel, and said, “Bill wants us to be sure and stay on their asses.”
Harms caught up with the truck on Canal Street in less than two minutes. He tailed it over the Manhattan Bridge onto Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, then stalked it until it turned into Fourth Avenue.
Duggan’s and Harms’s roles as bloodhounds came to an end as the gray LaSalle bearing Petey Bean, Charleston Eddie, Ash Can Smitty, and Needles Ferry pulled out from the curb and made a wide sweeping turn just after the truck had passed the stopped car. In a matter of seconds, the car cut in front of the truck, forcing the driver to jam on the brakes to avoid a collision.
Petey Bean and Charleston Eddie leaped out of the sedan with sawed-off shotguns pointed menacingly at the cab of the truck.
“Out! Get the fuck out!” screamed Eddie.
The driver and his helper scampered out of the cab meek as mice.
“Scram!” commanded Eddie. “Get your asses on the run!”
The two men sped up Fourth Avenue.
“Get in there and start driving!” Eddie commanded. Bean climbed into the cab and gave the gas pedal a heavy foot. The truck roared off. He steered it around the corner into Smith Street, then turned into Baltic and drove the rig into the White Hand’s garage. It was a minute before midnight.
It was a considerable haul: $30,000 worth of Prohibition Era Old Granddad. Charleston Eddie was ecstatic as the gang unloaded the cases from the truck.
“Jesus, Bill, what a hell of an idea you had,” he bubbled. “This is the goddamnedest way I see to beat buying the shit we’ve been scrounging around for here in Brooklyn.”
Eddie had already cracked open one of the bottles and taken a swig.
“This is great stuff, maybe better than what Old Granddad himself used to make before Prohibition,” he raved.
Lovett yanked the bottle out of Charleston’s hands and sampled its contents himself.
“By Christ, this is fantastic!” he echoed with a racking cough. “This fuckin’ booze can burn a guy’s throat.”
When the truck had been emptied, Lovett directed Needles Ferry and Ash Can Smitty to “dump it.” According to prearranged plan, Ferry and Smitty were to drive the rig to Fourth Avenue and Second Street and abandon it at the curb in front of Yale’s garage. That was Lovett’s idea—the ultimate “kick in the ass to the ginzo bastard.”
Lovett had it all plotted in his mind. He was as much aware as Yale of the foot patrolmen’s habits of goofing off on their last half-hour of duty, and that it took the cop on the next shift some ten minutes to reach his beat after he was turned out at the station house.
Lovett also reasoned that the hijacked truck’s driver and helper would head straight to Frankie Yale’s garage after they’d been bushwhacked by Charleston Eddie and Petey Bean. And after the bad news about the heist had been broken to Yale, there’d be no reason to stick around the garage. Lovett had plotted it ingeniously.
As Charleston and Petey rolled along Fourth Avenue in the empty truck, they kept a sharp eye rivetted on the gray LaSalle cruising some fifty feet ahead of them. Irish Eyes Duggan and Aaron Harms, in the car, were the scouting party. Harms was in the back seat, and his job was to flick a flashlight on through the rear window to let Charleston and Petey know that there were no lights or activity at the garage and it was okay to carry out Wild Bill’s little joke. But if there was no signal from the rear window of the car, Petey was to drive on past the garage and discard the truck wherever it was convenient.
As the LaSalle approached the garage, a light from the rear window flashed on.
“The coast is clear,” Eddie said to Bean. “Let’s dump it.”
Petey gave the steering wheel a slight jerk to the right and braked the truck to a stop directly in front of the garage entrance.
“Scram, Petey,” Charleston rasped as he jumped out of the cab and ran to get into the LaSalle. As Bean followed Charleston into the car, Duggan Hit the accelerator so hard that the car lurched forward for an instant then went dead.
“The fuckin’ car stalled!” Irish Eyes screamed in a rage.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, you asshole?” Charleston thundered. “Don’t you even know how to drive?”
Duggan flicked the ignition key and the motor coughed to a hesitant start.
“Easy does it,” yelled Eddie. “Less choke! Less choke!”
Duggan threw the car into first gear, and this time the car responded to his urging. They were on their way back to tell Bill Lovett that their mission was accomplished.
“Don’t tell me nuthin’. I seen it,” Frankie Yale bellowed at Augie Pisano the next morning. The gang chieftain was now in the burnout stage of his hour-long rage. Sixty minutes ago