Crime Incorporated. William Balsamo
pick the blacks go with Dick on this job…”
The luck of the draw went to Irish Eyes Duggan, Danny Bean, and Charleston Eddie McFarland, who were cheered lustily and pounded on their backs by their less fortunate brethren.
“Don’t worry you guys who lost out,” Lovett consoled his boys. “There is still gonna be action for a lot of you men. I’m sending at least another six of you as a backup, just in case Dick and his, orchestra’ don’t read their music too good.”
The concerto for murder was scheduled to be played at Stauch’s one week hence. Curtain time was eight o’clock on Saturday, February 26th, by which point some fifty-five members of the Black Hand gang would have been seated at the tables around the dance floor with their wives or dates, and when some of the crowd might very well indeed begin wondering why the orchestra had not yet taken the stage and struck up the strains of “Santa Lucia,” Frankie Yale’s favorite number. The gang’s “entertainment committee” had planned it that way because they wanted Frankie and his missus to lead the dancing. It was their way of paying homage to Yale for his brilliant direction of the Sagaman’s Hall ambush.
Not in his wildest dreams did Pegleg Lonergan imagine that things would go the way they did when he and his sidekicks in slaughter went to Stauch’s Dance Hall. As confident as he’d been in presenting his plan, first to Wild Bill Lovett, then to the White Hand’s rank and file, all sorts of anxieties burned inside him.
Pegleg’s overriding concern was the very apprehension advanced by Charleston Eddie. Since Tuesday morning, when the artificial leg was strapped on, Lonergan had spent hour after hour trying to master a walk that would look natural. But as Saturday night approached, he hadn’t mastered that miserable artificial limb. While for the first time since the accident he wore trousers with both legs down to his ankles and two shoes, he still hadn’t managed to walk without a limp. Yet the improvement was so dramatic that Lovett assured Pegleg no Black Hand lookout could ever recognize him.
At six o’clock on Saturday night the men appointed for the hit rallied in the White Hand’s garage on Baltic Street. Wild Bill Lovett personally checked each of the weapons packed into the violin cases to be toted to the Coney Island dance hall by Pegleg Lonergan, Irish Eyes Duggan, Danny Bean, and Charleston Eddie.
Lovett also checked each of the revolvers, automatics, and shotguns the backup team was taking to the scene. Picked for that assignment were Joey Bean, Ernie Shea, Wally Walsh, Eddie Lynch and Jack “Squareface” Finnegan. Their driver was Ernie “The Scarecrow” Monaghan. Danny Bean’s brother, Petey, had been singled out for the honor of driving the black 1920 Chevrolet sedan that would carry the second team of hit men to the hall.
“All right, you guys,” Lovett said after he had satisfied himself that his executioners were prepared to move out. “Go get ’em!”
A whoop and cry exploded from the gathering, but Lovett quickly muffled it.
“Nobody’s celebrating yet!” he scolded his boys. “You do the job first and then we’ll have something to cheer. Now get the hell out and get it done!”
Lonergan led the way out, followed by Charleston Eddie and Danny and Petey Bean, with Duggan trailing behind them. The backup team then left the garage and got into the second car, a black 1919 Packard sedan. The two cars roared off toward Coney Island.
A powdery snow began falling just as the White Handers started toward their destination.
“Shit!” Petey Bean shouted as he spotted the small white flakes buffeting the windshield. “I hope this goddam snow doesn’t screw us up.”
“Take it easy, Petey,” Lonergan pampered the hot-headed wheelman. “It’s all gonna be over and done with before the streets even get slippery.”
Had it been the middle of July, a half-million persons or more would have been wandering around Coney Island’s beaches, boardwalks, and amusement grounds. But on that windswept, snowy night of February 26th, the only visible activity in America’s famed bathing and amusement resort was in Stauch’s Dance Hall, where fifty-five celebrants had gathered for their revelry. Elsewhere, the streets were deserted.
As Petey Bean cruised along Surf Avenue he kept a sharp eye out for any movement outside Stauch’s which might indicate that too many lookouts were guarding the hall. But as he drew nearer, Petey blurted, “There ain’t nobody at the doors! Jesus, this is gonna be a snap!”
As a matter of fact, Frankie Yale and his bunch had been lulled into believing a report that had been planted for their benefit that afternoon. Lovett had sent Needles Ferry to O’Brien’s Saloon, one of South Brooklyn’s hotbeds of scuttlebutt, to drop a word or two, “inadvertantly, of course,” that the White Hand was planning to sack one of the waterfront warehouses that night. Figuring that such shenanigans would command considerable manpower, Yale reasoned it would be highly unlikely that Lovett would divert any of his boys for an escapade in Coney Island.
So only one guard, Joe “Rackets” Capolla, had been conscripted for sentry duty at the doors. But, as fate ordained it, not even Joe was at the doors as Petey Bean pulled the Chevy to a stop in front of the dance hall.
Capolla wasn’t at his post because he had come down with a sudden case of diarrhea. And without calling for a replacement, he left to answer that peevishly demanding call of nature. The men’s room was a mere five steps from the entrance, which may have been why Joe didn’t ask for a stand-in. At any rate, his presence in the men’s room was registered by one Antonio Sisciliato, who himself was straddling one of the thrones when Capolla barged in, his trousers at half-mast even before he had reached the john. Had Joe not managed to expedite the evacuation of his loose bowels as quickly as he had, history might have recorded a different ending for the chapter in the war between the ginzos and the micks. Certainly it would have been a different outcome for Joe Capolla. For he came back the very instant Pegleg Lonergan and his three henchmen burst through the main outside doors and into the entrance foyer of the dance palace.
Capolla made an heroic effort in the face of the awesome artillery that by now had been drawn from the violin cases and suddenly levelled at him. Joe lived just long enough to hurl his body against the double swinging doors of the main hall and cry, “Look out…!”
His words were drowned out by the deafening blast of bullets that almost sliced his torso in two.
He didn’t fall as quickly as one might be expected to after the heart and pulse have stopped functioning. Instead, he stood erect, like a statue, for the longest time, framed by the swinging doors which had caught him in a vice!ike hold. All the while blood from his back, chest, and stomach cascaded out of him like Niagara, and formed a large pool on the floor.
When Capolla’s massive body finally toppled and hit the floor, it was with a sickening splash that spattered his gore over his assassins. Lonergan and his team of killers merely stepped over Joe’s dying hulk and surged into the hall, guns blazing.
The revelers—the cream of the Black Hand’s crop of aristocratic extortionists, loan sharks, bootleggers, hijackers, and hit men-—catapulted from their chairs and dove under the tables for protection. Many of them gallantly dragged their wives and sweethearts with them.
But whoever had escorted Anna Balestro to the dance that night was rated a poor score for chivalry. Anna, the buxom, angel-faced sister of Albert Balestro, a funeral director who fronted for Frankie Yale in his chain of parlors was struck by a .45-caliber slug on the left side of her head. The bullet tore through her brain. Her body, toppled from the chair in which she’d been sitting, crunched on the floor with thunderous impact. After all, she weighed two hundred and forty pounds.
Lonergan, Charleston Eddie, Danny Bean, and Irish Eyes Duggan sprayed their lead at random into the crowd, making it a simple case of pot luck for those who stopped the bullets and for the more fortunate ones who didn’t.
Giovanni Capone (no relation to Scarface Al) was one of the unlucky ones. Giovanni, who worked as a tombstone engraver when he wasn’t busy breaking into warehouses for the Black Hand, was struck with a charge of buckshot exploding from the muzzle of