Toughs. Ed Falco

      Summer

       · 1931 ·

       Tuesday July 28, 1931

      6:28 p.m.

      A New York City summer evening and Loretto Jones looked sharp in a dark blue and white pinstriped double breasted suit as he waited on the corner of East 107th Street, between 2nd and 3rd: Loretto, the house where the Blessed Virgin was born and where she ascended into heaven, a name pinned on him by the nuns at Mount Loretto Orphanage on Staten Island where he had been abandoned sometime before dawn twenty-one years earlier to the day, July 28, 1910. Sister Mary Catherine Randolph liked to say she'd found him newborn, wrinkled and red as a peach, wrapped in swaddling and left in a cardboard box inside the door to the chapel, where Sister Aloise in long black habit tripped over him and yelped in the predawn light.

      Loretto on 107th Street had already sweat through his undershirt, staining the armpits of a white dress shirt he'd bought at Saks for eight bucks the day before, an expensive birthday present to himself. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the collar, and pulled down the brim of his fedora to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was waiting for Dominic Caporinno to pick him up in his battered 1926 Packard, Dom's pride and his heartache, a once fine automobile with leather interior and dark green carpeting that had been used hard ferrying whiskey out of Canada and now ran or didn't according to its own whims. It was almost 6:30. The temperature midafternoon was 94, making it the hottest day of the year.

      Loretto leaned against a lamppost as kids swarmed over the streets escaping the heat of cold-water flats. In this Italian neighborhood of red brick and dull khaki run-down five-story tenements laced with a black stitch work of fire escape railings and ladders, children shouted and called to each other in English while their mothers and fathers, their aunts and uncles and grandparents sitting on stoops, congregating in doorways, leaning out of windows or over fire escapes, spoke among themselves in Italian. Up the block, a few of the older kids had just opened a johnny pump. One boy waved a black monkey wrench in triumph while another straddled the pump from behind and used a soup can to send a spray of glistening water across the street and onto the plate glass window of Ettore's Drogheria. Shirtless boys ran through the spray and a teenage girl pulled away from a younger girl trying to drag her into the bubbling white cascade of water.

      Though Loretto had grown up among Italians, could speak the language a little himself and make out the gist of a conversation, his own ethnic heritage was indeterminate. By the time he was thirteen, the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, and the Poles had all claimed him. His skin was neither the olive dark hue typical of Italians nor the fair pale of the Irish. In his dark blue eyes every ethnic population saw its most handsome relatives and ancestors. At five eleven he wasn't too tall or too short for any ethnicity, though the Irish argued he was too tall to be Italian.

      Loretto glanced down the avenue, over the throngs of kids running the streets. He was looking for Dom and his beloved Packard but noticed instead a pale green sedan cruising slowly toward him, hugging the center line as if looking for something or someone on the left side of the street. Loretto scanned the sidewalk and spotted Richie Cabo and two of his torpedoes outside his club, a few feet from where Frank Scaletta, a neighborhood kid, had set up a lemonade stand and was selling drinks for a penny to a bunch of little girls crowded around him. Approaching Frankie, a girl of about ten or twelve in an ill-fitting yellow sundress maneuvered a black baby carriage along the crowded sidewalk. Loretto took a step back and positioned himself behind the lamppost. Across the street, Richie Cabo's men went back into the club, apparently having forgotten something. Cabo worked for Dutch Schultz now. He drove around in a bulletproof Pierce Arrow. Once his men were out of sight, he looked up and down the street, and Loretto saw in his eyes the moment when he spotted the sedan rolling toward him. His short, heavy body locked up still as a monument while he watched the faded green sedan roll to a stop in front of his club. A heartbeat later, under a downpour of gunfre, he dove into a doorway and rolled out of sight.

      In the confusion of the instant when the shooting started, the shouting kids, the cacophony of voices, came to a halt. The only sounds were the rush of water from the johnny pump and the loud clatter of gunfire as the commotion drew all eyes toward the green sedan and Richie Cabo's club, where the crudely made wooden lemonade stand splintered and collapsed to the sidewalk. A pitcher of water and bright yellow lemons shattered and spilled to the curb. Once the neighborhood grasped what was happening, the screaming and shouting from windows and the street and fire escapes and doorways almost drowned out the shooting. The girl in the yellow dress pushing the baby carriage howled and pulled a bloody infant out of the pram as she herself was shot and knocked sideways. Still, she held the infant and ran for a doorway, calling to her aunt. A boy of seven or eight lay bleeding on the sidewalk, his head on the blue slate curb. An even younger boy, maybe four or five years old, lay on his belly in the street. A woman ran to the older boy and cradled him in her arms. The younger boy in the street lay by himself trailing a wide stain of blood.

      When