Crime Incorporated. William Balsamo
his neck, for he had neither lips nor mouth through which his voice could have come.
Another of Yale’s more valuable underlings, Giuseppe “Momo” Municharo, a soldier in the protection rackets, also had the misfortune of catching a volley from Duggan’s shotgun. A gaping hole was opened in his abdomen, giving the stricken crowd a cutaway view of Momo’s intestines, which were still bulging with the spaghetti â la Milanese that he’d feasted on before coming to the dance.
The piercing screams and cries of the women, and many of the men as well, were like a replay of a sound track from the earlier carnage visited by the Black Hand on the Irishmen at Sagaman’s Hall.
Several of the more alert Italian mobsters had managed to unlimber their guns from their holsters and fire back at the four assassins. But the shots were pegged so carefully in order to avoid hitting their own people that they missed their intended targets as well. Only after Lonergan was satisfied that enough blood had been spilled and had commanded his accomplices to retreat from the hall were the beleaguered Black Handers offered a clear field of fire.
Then one of Yale’s boys made a quick score. Augie the Wop Pisano earned a notch on his automatic when he drilled a .45 bullet into the fleeing Danny Bean. It caught Danny in the back of the head. He crumpled in a heap on the vestibule floor, inches from the outer doors—and from Joe Capolla’s corpse. Another second and he’d have been breathing the fresh, snow-filled, sea-scented air of Coney Island.
Pegleg, Charleston Eddie, and Duggan made it out of the hall unscathed and leaped into the getaway car.
“Roll it, roll it!” screamed Pegleg.
“Where’s Danny?” cried Petey Bean, frantically searching the dance hall entrance for a sign of his brother.
“They hit him, Petey,” Duggan said crisply. “He ain’t gonna be commin’ out. You’d better step on it before we all get it.”
Suddenly the Packard with the backup team roared alongside the Chevrolet.
“Hey, what the hell you waiting for?” Eddie Lynch shouted from the window. “It’s over, get your ass going, Petey!”
Then, turning to Ernie the Scarecrow, who was at the wheel beside him, Lynch barked, “Fuck ’em. We ain’t waiting. Step on it!” The Packard roared along Surf Avenue like a frontrunner in the Indianapolis 500. But it wasn’t alone for much of its flight. For, at Lonergan’s urging—he had put the barrel of his gun against the driver’s head—Petey Bean at last pulled away from the dance hall. And not a second too soon. Just as the car began skidding around the corner into Stillwell Avenue on pavement made slippery by the falling snow, the crackle of gunfire was heard. The Italians were shooting from the windows and steps of the dance hall. But the bullets flying at the fleeing vehicle went wide of their mark and the White Handers got safely out of range.
But Petey Bean didn’t remain behind the wheel for long. He was too absorbed by the concern for his brother’s uncertain fate. “What did they do, shoot him?” his voice choked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Pegleg replied. “He was too goddamn slow running out. They dropped him right inside the door—”
“Why the fuck didn’t you carry him out?” Bean screamed, all at once breaking into convulsive sobs.
“No way we coulda done that, Petey,” Charleston Eddie said from the back seat. “I saw what happened. They got him in the back of the head…”
Bean began weeping so hard that when the speeding car almost mounted the sidewalk as Petey was making a turn, Lonergan decided it was time for a change of drivers.
“Stop the fuckin’ car!” he bellowed. “I ain’t gonna let you drive no more.”
Lonergan turned his head as the car stopped. “Get your ass behind the wheel,” he said to Charleston Eddie. The doors were flung open and the change of drivers quickly took place. The ride the rest of the way back to the Baltic Street Garage was smooth.
“A hell of a score!” cried Pegleg as he limped into Wild Bill Lovett’s office. “We really gave it to them.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured you boys would,” Lovett said softly. “But you lost one, didn’t ya?”
The information had come from the backup team, which had watched the White Hand assassins fleeing the dance hall and had beaten them back to the garage. Wally Walsh had told Lovett that only three of the gang came out of Stauch’s.
No one had to identify the casualty for Wild Bill after Pegleg, Charlèston Eddie, and Irish Eyes Duggan walked into the office trailed by a sobbing Petey Bean.
“Okay, okay,” Lovett said awkwardly, giving the bereaved Petey a sidelong glance. “It hurts me very much that they knocked out Danny, but that’s the kind of chances we’re all taking in this friggin’ business.”
Lovett took a deep breath. “Now give it to me straight and no bullshit. I want to know what the score was.”
“High—very high,” Duggan replied in a self-contained voice. “We left a whole lot of them bleeding like pigs…”
“Yeah,” interrupted Charleston Eddie with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “we really tore them apart. They had nobody at the door and we got in with no trouble. But then guess who we saw?” Eddie looked at Lovett, anticipating that he’d ask “who?” Instead, the White Hand’s chieftain snarled, “Cut out the fuckin’ questions and give me straight answers on the rundown!”
“Okay, okay, Bill,” Eddie cowered. “It was Rackets Capolla. You shoulda seen the look on his face when we hit him. You shoulda seen him standing up after we blasted him in the gut…”
Duggan and Lonergan described the rest of the massacre to Lovett, but Lovett’s reaction was subdued. He was pleased, but he didn’t want to stage a celebration because Petey Bean was there. Danny Bean didn’t mean a hell of a lot to Wild Bill Lovett—Danny was just another hand as far as he was concerned— yet in Petey Bean’s presence Lovett felt he should display a modicum of sorrow for the man who was left behind.
By 8:15 p.m. Surf Avenue was suddenly alive with traffic. Ambulances and police cars streamed toward Stauch’s Dance Hall, where nine people had caught the bullets and shotgun pellets in flight and were in need of medical attention.
Remarkably unlike the Sagaman’s Hall ambush, none of the six men and three women wounded by the gunfire was seriously injured; their wounds were uniformly minor ones. Fury Argolia, the restaurateur, had caught a slug in his right shoulder, but the bullet merely tore through the flesh without touching the bone.
Others were either grazed by bullets or hit with the spray of the shotguns at such great distances that the pellets merely pierced their skins. All nine of the wounded were extremely lucky. They were taken to Coney Island Hospital for emergency treatment, but not one of them was kept overnight as a patient. They were sent home after their wounds were patched.
Rackets Capolla, Anna Balestro, Giovanni Capone, and Momo Municharo were morgue cases. They were all given exquisite funerals. That was the least Frankie Yale could do for them. In fact, he charged the families only half price for the send-offs.
The fifth fatality of the shootout, Danny Bean, went to his requiem in a plain pine coffin because his gang boss, Wild Bill Lovett, didn’t have Frankie Yale’s connections with the undertaking industry. The White Hand always had to pay going retail rates for its funerals.
But the tears and eulogizing for Danny Bean were no less profound than the sobs and exaltations for Anna Balestro and the three Black Hand banditi who were laid out in their stately brass-handled mahogany caskets.
Emotions at the Italian funerals ran much higher, not only because their toll at Stauch’s was so much greater than the casualties the Irish had suffered, but also because one of their dead, Anna Balestro, was an innocent victim. Her death had been as unwarranted and cold-blooded as Mary Reilly’s. And it aroused as much outrage in Frankie Yale as Mary’s killing had stirred in Wild Bill Lovett.