The Gangster

Harry Warren went back to the free lunch for another look at the street. Bell divided his attention between customers going into Banco LaCava and toughs in the saloon who might be preparing an attack. Harry came back with a hard-boiled egg. “Let me guess,” he joked. “She’s the fat lady selling artichokes?”

“I sent Helen down to Park Row to get a line on where the Black Hand buys their stationery… Harry, why did you ask what I think of Branco?”

“He’s a strange one. Wholesale grocers tend to extort the smaller shops, force them to buy only from them and charge top dollar for cheap goods.”

“How do they force them to buy?”

“Run the gamut from getting them deep in hock to bombing their store. But I’ve never heard a breath of any of that about Antonio Branco.”

“Honest as the Lottery?” Bell asked with a thin smile.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Harry, “about anybody making a business in New York. And he’s also a labor padrone. Stone masons and laborers for the Catskill Aqueduct.”

“There’s a business ripe for abuse.”

“They tend not to be choirboys,” Harry agreed. “On the other hand, he’s worked his way into the union’s good graces. Slick.”

“But not the first,” said Bell. “D’Allesandro, with the subway excavators, started out a padrone.”

“And now that Branco’s joined the White Hands, he’s a Van Dorn client.”

“Unless he steps out of line,” said Bell, eye still locked on Banco LaCava.

* * *

“They’re remarkable,” David LaCava told Antonio Branco over a glass of wine in Ghiottone’s Café, a saloon across Prince Street from Branco’s Grocery that served as one of Tammany Hall’s outposts in the Italian colony. Ghiottone—“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone, a popular bantamweight boxer in his youth — delivered voters, and Tammany paid off with city jobs in the Department of Street Cleaning and immunity from the police. Which allowed the saloon keeper to lord it over the neighborhood.

LaCava told Branco how Isaac Bell’s Black Hand Squad was guarding his bank with men in disguise. “You would not look twice at them.”

Branco said, “So our White Hand Society has chosen well.”

“I’m convinced we’ve hired the best.”

“But how long can they stand guard?”

LaCava looked around the café, leaned closer, and whispered, “Guarding is only the first stage. Meanwhile, they observe and collect information. When they attack, the Black Hand won’t know what hit them.” He lowered his voice further. “I was talking to a New York Police Department detective—”

“Petrosino?”

“How did you know?”

Branco shrugged. “Who else?”

“Of course,” said LaCava, chastened by the subtle reminder that he was not the only business operator cultivating men with pull. “Petrosino says this is how the Van Dorns dismantled railroad gangs.”

“What did Lieutenant Petrosino say about the White Hand hiring Van Dorns?”

LaCava hesitated. “He says he understands. He knows he’s got plenty on his plate already. To be honest, I think he would have preferred we go to the police. But since we hired private detectives, he respects that we chose the Van Dorns.”

“Valuable men,” said Branco. “We’re lucky to have them.”

* * *

The next morning, Isaac Bell stationed all but two of his Black Hand shadows on Elizabeth Street before David LaCava filled his display window and opened his door for business. The exceptions were Wish Clarke, who still hadn’t shown up from nearby Philadelphia, and Helen Mills, whom Bell had sent back downtown to the printing district.

She was a tall, slim brunette who looked older than her eighteen years, and despite their rigorous schedules and merciless deadlines, every printer, typesetter, and paper supplier she spoke to found time to inspect her samples and offer advice. Several, old enough to be her father, discovered they were free for lunch. She turned them down — inventing a Van Dorn Detective Agency rule that forbade it — and kept moving from shop to shop, pausing between each to write notes in the memo book Isaac had given her. The sooner she learned all there was to know about the paper, the sooner she could convince Isaac to let her join the rest of the squad undercover in the field.

Then, out of the blue all of a sudden, after an ink salesman left her alone with a pimply office boy to answer a telephone call, the boy said, “Money.”

“I beg your pardon?”

The boy was even younger than she and barely came to her shoulder.

“You could almost print two-dollar bills on that paper. If you had plates and ink.”

“Have you seen this paper before?”

“Not that same paper. But I’ve seen the type when they come for ink. The Boss sends them packing.”

“Who?”

“Fellows making green goods.”

“‘Green goods’? What are you talking about?”

“Passing the queer.”

“Queer what?” asked Helen.

The office boy stared at her like she was the biggest nincompoop in the city.

* * *

Richie Cirillo swore he was sixteen, but he looked twelve.

Isaac Bell tried to get a handle on how old the kid really was. “Why’d you leave school?”

“They stuck me in steamer class.”

“What is ‘steamer class’?”

“For the dummies.”