Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933

Once the Sissy of Catharine Street, Wild Bill Lovett Became the Chief of the White Handers and Chased Al Capone to Chicago

Chapter I The Sissy of Catharine Street

William Joseph Lovett was one of the paradoxical figures in the modern underworld of a great city. He began life as a timid, chicken-hearted lad who could not bear to see a fly swatted. Before he reached manhood he was a reckless killer and gang chieftain.

A weak, pasty-faced man, he brazenly muscled Al Capone out of the underworld of the East into Chicago, and then, after building himself a reputation as the worst bad man of his time, he came at last to rest in a hero’s grave on the lawnswept hillside of a Brooklyn, N. Y., cemetery, a patriot, and yet a lawbeater and killer of the worst type.

He has been dead almost a decade but pistols still crack in the streets he once terrorized and men die trying to impose his ruthless kill upon the gang world where once he was supreme, Wild Bill Lovett.

Life poured strange fluid into Lovett’s veins. He gave the diabolical worst in him to the underworld; the best in him to his country. But, whatever he did, good or bad, was done in a big and reckless way.

For an infant he had an extraordinarily large head and great blue eyes which glared wonderingly at the little circle of relatives and neighbors who trooped into the modest East Side tenement to have their first look at the Lovetts’ newborn.

In striking contrast to his enormous, well-shaped head was the infant’s limbs and body. His legs were short and spindly, his body thin to the point of emaciation, his chest abnormally flat, while his tiny fingers were a dead white, almost as thin as matches and icy cold.

The Lovett tenement looked out upon ancient Catharine Street, overshadowed by a gaunt bookbindery. The district was known as the Deadly Fourth Precinct. It was infested by gangs and included New York’s Chinatown. A few blocks from the tenement, the Brooklyn Bridge, then one of the new wonders of the world, lowered into The Swamp, a damp and desolate hiding-place for river pirates and wharf rats. Yet the neighborhood had been the birthplace of illustrious Americans including Theodore Roosevelt, who, in 1894, the year Lovett was born, was fast rising to fame. The most popular young man in the section was a smiling chap who sported a brown derby. He was Al Smith. Good men and bad first saw the light of day in that section.

The district also sheltered three brothers of whom it did not boast. The Caponi boys — Ralph, sometimes called “Bottles,” and his younger brothers, Alphonse, and Jim, who later changed the final “i” on their name to “e” and made it one of the most sinister names in modern crime. They were members of the notorious Five Points Gang, led by their kinsman, Johnny Torrio. It was a vicious gang, allied to Black Hand killers, blackmailers, counterfeiters and early, types of racketeers who preyed upon Italian residents in the section.

As he grew, young Lovett was untouched by the gang life all about him. He attended parochial school, and displayed an intense interest in religious studies.

His manner was soft and mild; his voice hardly ever arose above a drawling whisper. At home he couldn’t bear to see his mother swat flies and spiders. To save these pests from the annihilating crack of her swatter he caught them and liberated them through an open window.

This tender side of the boy was bound to bring him into harsh conflict with the rough life on the teeming East Side, and physically he was unprepared for the encounters. While attending high school he spent his early evenings on the doorstep of the Lonergan house near his own tenement. There was Anna Lonergan, oldest of the Lonergan brood of fourteen. A brother, Peg Leg, was younger than Bill. The girl was a self-willed, dark-eyed madcap of the Ghetto.

On a hot summer’s evening Bill Lovett and Anna were sitting side-by-side with Peg Leg looking on, when the three Capone brothers came swaggering along the sidewalk and up to Bill.

“Aw, you sissy,” sneered Al Capone. “Why don’t you leave the skirts alone and get out with the boys?”

“You’re not boys, you’re thieves,” Lovett retorted.

Capone pointed at Bill’s white hands. “You ought to put on an apron and take a job as a waitress. You couldn’t possibly do a man’s work with them hands.”

Bill sprang to his feet. He made a lunge at the taunting Capone, but Anna held him back. Capone laughed, flung a final taunt that Bill was hiding behind skirts, and went on with his brothers.

“Why didn’t you let me at him?” Bill demanded of the girl.

“You wouldn’t have a chance against those bullies,” she answered.

Bill’s blue eyes followed the trio as they marched off. “Some day,” he finally reflected, aloud, “I’ll maybe get a chance at them.”

Peg Leg broke in. “And I’ll be right wid youse,” he piped.

The girl looked at Bill, eyed his large head and his thin white hands. “Don’t ever be foolish and go after them, Bill,” she cautioned. “You’re not built to fight.”

Taunted by this advice, the jibes of Capone and the fact that boys along the street were calling him “White Hands,” Bill quit high school in a week and took a man’s job, tooling fine books in the bindery which adjoined his home. In record time he became an ex-pert, and some of the fine books he tooled adorn the private libraries of several fashionable New York families. It was the kind of delicate work which fitted his thin, weak hands.

Then, quite suddenly, the Lonergan family moved across Brooklyn Bridge and settled in Brooklyn. Finally the Capone brothers vanished from Catharine Street and went to Navy Street, Brooklyn, and joined up with a mob of Sicilian cut-throats known as the Death Tavern Gang. They had their headquarters in an eating place known as Death Tavern, which huddled against the great sheds of the coffee docks along the East River north of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Almost at the same moment that Bill heard that the Capones were procuring girls and selling them to the keeper of Death Tavern, who, in turn, sold them into lives of shame, he heard that Al Capone had accosted Anna Lonergan on the street and had invited her to the tavern.

Bill had never crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. When he received this news from Peg Leg he went across and straight to the Lonergan home. There he discovered that Capone had accosted the girl, but that she had taken after Capone with a hat-pin and had driven him away. She had no need of her young cavalier’s protection against Capone or any hoodlum.

However, she did complain that life was getting miserable in her home. Peg Leg had joined a gang which was known as the Roof Birds, and the police were always after him. Moreover, she told Bill, her mother and father were constantly bickering and life was miserable in the same house with them.

She suggested that Bill might make her happy by marrying her and taking her away. She minced no words about it. She was blunt. Though young in years, Anna Lonergan was as old as the hills.

“Why, I couldn’t support a cat on what I make!” Bill exclaimed. “And anyway I’m quitting my job. I’ve been too soft for my own good. A fellow’s got to fight his way in this world. I’m going out to find something hard to do that’ll toughen me up.”

Anna may or may not have loved Bill, but this much is certain, she did not get him for a meal ticket; nor, did he ever return to Catharine Street, the scene of his youth. He started back, but fate met him on the bridge.

Chapter II “Grab Some Muscle”

Halting on the bridge where it ascends from the Brooklyn side of the East River, Lovett looked down onto the roofs of squalid buildings shadowed by the arched steelwork. On the narrow, damp streets below he saw massive, square-shouldered men lumbering to and from the docks. Over their broad shoulders were slung rolled jumpers. From the hip pockets of their overalls hung gleaming hooks, sharp as marlin spikes. He marveled at their size; at the muscles bulging on their bronzed arms and the coarse hair showing where their blue flannel work shirts were open on broad chests. Some of them staggered as if drunk. All of them seemed to be of one huge size, picked apparently for jobs which required great brawn and gleaming hooks.

They seemed to have a common meeting place within the doors of a green front shack tottering towards the nearest dock at the water end of the narrow street. He saw the number on its door — 25 — and, making his way from the bridge into the street, discovered at a lamp post that he was in Bridge Street. He was in a little dark world of hard, rough men who both mystified and fascinated him. It was a sunless world, for the wide bridge above kept it dark. One thing about the men and the place lured him. In such a world, and among such giants a lad could grow hard and tough. North of him lay the coffee docks and Navy Street, and Death Tavern where the taunting Capones hung out and where murder and traffic in girls were the joint occupations of those who made their headquarters in the inn of murder.

Bill was not aware, of course, that the section he had dropped into was notorious Shantytown, the domain of dock wallopers, great hulks who had fought bloody battles to keep Shantytown for themselves and to insure themselves and their male progeny the exclusive right to labor on the docks. They were not longshoremen or stevedores. They resented being called by either classification, for they could fight harder and do heavier work than longshoremen or stevedores. And the tottering, squalid green front shack with 25 over its door was the Loaders’ Club, their headquarters, and the throne room of their despotic boss.

It was their official hangout and drinking place, and in the years of bloody fighting more than one dock walloper had been shot or clubbed to death in the squalid, dim-lit premises. And many a walloper, in the fury of drunkenness, had been done to death in brawls, clawed atrociously by the sharp, gleaming hooks which were both the badge of their hard calling and their weapons of offense and defense.

For the privilege of hanging about the club and getting work on the docks they gave a large share of their hard-earned, daily pay to a barrel-shaped, grunting czar, Dinny Meehan, who seldom moved from his high-backed chair in the club. As worn men came in from the heavy work on the docks they dropped their tribute into the fat palm of Dinny Meehan and then spent the remainder of their earnings over the long plank where Meehan’s barkeep served them beer and liquor and further enriched the greedy Meehan’s purse.

Meehan was a pioneer in the labor racket — a padrone extorting cash from men for the privilege of doing a day’s hard and honest toil.

Presently the large-headed newcomer in Bridge Street was peering in at the Loaders’ Club through a soot-streaked front window. Suddenly a thick, gruff voice churned the air.

“What’s the big idea, kid?”

Bill turned and faced a giant walloper. “Oh, I’m looking for work,” said Lovett.

The big fellow grunted derisively. “You, you looking for work in Shantytown? You better clear out before somebody puts a heavy heel into you and flattens you.” Then he eyed Bill’s white hands. “You’re up to trouble,” he went on. “You’re lying about wanting work around here. You couldn’t do a quarter of a man’s work with them hands. Where you belong? Who are you?” He moved closer to Bill, with a menacing scowl on his face.

“My name’s Lovett,” said Bill.

“You’re not a wop then?”

“I’m Irish.”

The giant scratched his shaggy head. “Irish, eh? Well, that ain’t so bad. But if it’s work you’re really after you’ll have to see the boss, Dinny Meehan. He’s inside, plunked in his big chair. But look out for the blatherskite. He’s a murderin’ sneak.”

Bill ventured into the club, while the shaggy-haired walloper stood outside awaiting the result of the encounter within. Lovett went straight up to the ogrish Meehan, but he got no chance to make his plea for a job. Meehan eyed him up and down, lifted himself out of his high-backed throne, seized the youth by the throat with both hands, carried him out and dumped him on the sidewalk.

“He wouldn’t let me get in a word,” Bill complained to the big dock walloper.

“He’s afraid of his life,” the giant explained. “The pig knows he’s hated from one end of the town to the other. He figured you was a stool pigeon. That’s why he threw you out. He’s a bloody coward. If you were a fighter he’d have shivered in his boots. He’s afraid of any man with a reputation.”

“He nearly pulled the head off me,” said Bill, twisting his lame neck. “I’d like to show him—”

“We’d all like to show him,” the walloper cut in. “But we dassn’t. He’d sick his guerillas on us. But he’s a coward in his black heart. If you want to get hunk with him go out and make yourself a reputation and then come back at him. Grab yourself some muscle, kid, then you can make him crawl.”

No doubt this advice was given in a kindly spirit tinged with the hatred which the big dock walloper felt against the murdering grafter who bossed him and took a major share of his daily pay. Bill took it deeply to heart. His hate for Meehan flamed. There was slight chance that he might squeeze himself in with the wallopers while he remained puny and white-handed. What he needed was to mingle with youths of his own age who were hard and tough; to be knocked about, roughened, put up against life in the raw where he could build himself a reputation. So his thoughts drifted to Peg Leg Lonergan. Peg Leg had developed into a skillful thief. He ranged with the Roof Birds, gangsters who lived in packing box shanties on rooftops and who thrived on pillage and mischief, terrorizing shopkeepers and battling the police.

Anna Lonergan had told Bill about Peg Leg’s pals — Cute Charley, whose real name was Charles Donnelly and who had gotten a reputation by biting off two of a cop’s fingers; Bill Raycraft — Battering Bill — who had once pushed over a brick chimney which buried and bruised a cop; Fiddler Frank Byrnes, who escaped from pursuers by tight-roping it on wires from roof to roof; and Frank Martin, a young heavyweight with prize ring aspirations who, as soon as the Lonergans moved into Brooklyn, began to pay court to the dark-eyed Anna. The members of this gang already had reputations, although the oldest one in the mob — Martin — was only twenty.

Bill was just past seventeen. He had no brawn, no reputation. But, in addition to his desire to acquire brawn and a ferocious name for himself, he had dreamed in his capacious head of making himself a ruler of other men.

When he sauntered out of Shantytown, after his first unhappy encounter with Dinny Meehan, he was on his way to find the Roof Birds.

Chapter III Exit the Roof Birds

In the gathering dusk Lovett climbed a fire escape to the roof of the Lonergan tenement. Surveying the sweep of housetops in the block he saw smoke issuing from a blazing fire on a roof three houses away. He saw Peg Leg and his gang huddled about a tin bucket warming their hands.

He scrambled over the copings, but the instant Lonergan and his pals spotted him they leaped to their feet, alert to battle the newcomer whose face was obscured by the thickening darkness. Presently, however, Peg Leg recognized the ragged straw hat cocked on one side of Bill’s large head and he shouted him a rousing welcome and an invitation to join the gang at a supper of fried pork chops and baked potatoes which were already on the fire. Cute Charley and Raycraft joined in the welcome, but Fiddler Byrnes and Frank Martin were cool and sullen.

Bill asked Peg Leg about the Capones and was told that the three brothers had opened a dive in Coney Island, a combination dance hall and saloon which they were using as a lure to attract girls into their hands.

In a rattle of words Peg Leg told of the operations of the Roof Birds; how they robbed wagons and shops in the streets below and hoisted their plunder to the rooftops by means of ropes. They had just hauled up a quarter of pork and half a bag of potatoes which explained how they had come by the pork chops and spuds for supper. They had also hoisted a case of bottled beer and a jug of whiskey which they would put away after the meal; and, Peg Leg boasted, they would have a dozen bottles of milk for breakfast after the early morning milk man had been around to the doorsteps in the street below.

It wasn’t an impressive showing to Bill. His mind was on big things. Each of the four men around the fire was twice as heavy and far more robust than he, yet all they did was steal stuff to eat and drink. He remarked that he thought they were all pikers.

“Yeah,” Raycraft agreed. “We’re a bunch of punks. We take big chances just to grab a few pork chops and some spuds and enough booze to get drunk and fall asleep on. What we fellows need is a chief. A guy that can make us go out and do big stuff.”

“You’re talking a mouthful,” Peg Leg put in. “We need a boss.” His big mouth widened into a grin. “A guy like you, Bill.”

“What’s zat?” demanded Martin. “Me take orders from a lizzie-handed guy like Lovett? You’re crazy, Lonergan.”

Bill looked at Martin. “Lissen, you,” he said, “you been running with the boys a long time, but I don’t see you been leading them. It takes a little brains to lead any bunch of fellows. I guess you ain’t got any or you’d been the boss long ago.”

Martin shot up. “You punk,” he bellowed. “Who’d you ever lick?”

With little effort the giant Martin might have doubled the puny Lovett into a knot.

Bill’s voice came in a calm retort. “I haven’t licked anybody, up to now,” he said. “But, I could try out on you.”

Martin lunged at Lovett. The latter backed away a pace. “Just a second, Martin,” he called out. “Let’s make this battle worth something. If you lick me I’ll drag out of here and never show face around these parts. But, if I make you call quit, then I’m boss. How’s that?”

“Fair enough,” yelled Peg Leg. There was a chorus of approval from Cute Charley and Raycraft. Fiddler Byrnes cocked his small eyes at Lovett and felt sorry for the puny fool.

Martin’s big fist went up in the darkness and came down like a sledge on Bill’s shoulder. The blow sent Bill to his knees on the tin roof. He didn’t come up at once. But, what he lacked in brawn he possessed in gray matter. He dived between Martin’s knees, and fastening both arms about the giant’s legs, he arose and lifted Martin off his feet. The big body fell over Lovett’s back like a bag of flour. In the fall Martin’s head struck the roof, slightly dazing him. The spindly-legged Bill hauled him across the roof. When he reached the coping around the edge of the roof Martin had a gorilla-like grip on the calves of his puny legs. Lovett fell across the coping, Martin still on his back.

The weight of the big load pressed Bill’s stomach against the stone ledge and squeezed the breath out of him. The two figures were locked together, both half over the coping, dangling four stories above the street.

The four other roof gypsies looked on, open-mouthed, amazed. At any instant both youths might go hurtling down into the street. Bill was choking under the pressure of Martin’s big body, but he held grimly on and wriggled forward a foot or two. Both bodies were slipping. Finally Martin let go Bill’s shanks and caught hold of the coping but, as he did so, Lovett raised himself on the ledge and pried his adversary’s hands loose.

“Do you say quits?” Lovett asked.

“You bloody fool,” cried Martin, “we’ll both go down.”

“That’ll be all right with me,” said Bill. “Quick. Say what it is, or, down we go.”

“Lemme up and I’ll—”

“Say quit or—” The two bodies slipped further over the coping.

“Quit!” bawled Martin. Lovett let go of his legs and caught his white hands on the cross piece of a window frame. Martin clambered back onto the roof. Presently Bill raised himself to a sitting position on the coping and caught his breath. He watched Martin slouch away in the darkness.

Still perched on the coping Lovett took steps to make absolute his dominion over the Roof Birds. He had vanquished the one man who openly challenged him. He had not done it with brawn, but by strategy. Perhaps it was this cunning which cowed the four men into subjection. Lovett took pains to warn Fiddler Byrnes that if he ever raised his voice or hand to question his leadership he would be battered out of the gang. Then, to clinch his rule, he ordered all four to raise their hands and vow to take orders only from him; to follow him wherever he went, and if anything should happen to him, to carry on as though he were still around and in command. Byrnes was the only one who faltered, but when Peg Leg and Raycroft nudged him, up went his hand.

This sudden, speedy ascension to power instantly transformed Bill Lovett. His mild manner and soft speech were gone. The desperate encounter with Martin had hardened him. The taunts flung at him by the Capones, the rough treatment accorded him by Dinny Meehan had embittered him. As he sat nibbling his browned pork chops under the star-lit sky he was sullenly silent. Finally he gave voice to the thoughts that were churning in the brain within his enormous head.

“There ain’t nothing to this life except when fellows stick together,” he announced. “They say a good guy goes to heaven with wings on his shoulders, but until I see them going up through the sky with my own eyes I’ll figure it’s a lot of bunk. A guy’s heaven or hell is what he makes it right here.”

He had not only put Catharine Street out of his life but he had turned his back on his religion. In a single night he had demonstrated that he could best men of superior fighting powers by outwitting them. In his first attempt to “grab himself some muscle” he had succeeded without brawn, and the triumph had fired him with a lust to rule men by the might of a new kind, of “muscle.” He had the four Roof Birds under his thumb though any one of them could have toppled him with a slap.

He might go far with this kind of muscle. He might extend his power over many men, and thus extend his dominion, and, incidentally, pay his respects to Al Capone and Dinny Meehan, for whom he had a hate equal in its ferocity to his lust for power.

He had been taunted so often about his white hands that he decided to turn this sign of weakness into a symbol of power, too.

“No more of this Roof Birds stuff,” he announced. “And no more of this stealing pork chops and little stuff like that. From now on we’re the White Hands. We’ll go after big stuff. We’ll make everybody sit up and take notice, so, when they hear the White Hands are coming, they’ll shake in their shoes.”

Peg Leg passed around a demijohn of whiskey. All drank to the White Hands. It was the first liquor to pass Bill Lovett’s lips, but he downed his drink as if he was an old timer at swigging the strong stuff. Peg Leg wondered aloud if Bill had a gun and knew how to use it. Peg Leg and his pals had long carried gats.

“Naw,” Bill replied. “I don’t want to pack a gun. I hate to think of a bullet cutting into a guy. You fellows can pack guns, but I won’t. I don’t need one, but that don’t mean I couldn’t use one if I had to. I’ll show you.”

Peg Leg handed him a .45. Bill raised it and shot a clothes-pin from a wire wash line, and handed the gun back to Lonergan. He had never shot a gun before.

“I guess I was made to do anything in a pinch,” he explained.

His four vassals eyed him in amazement. He was cocksure of himself and he could do anything he said he could. Doubtless this quality drew at least three of the men closer to him. Byrnes was the only one to show a lack of interest in the self-appointed leader.

Lovett lost no time in looking up a job for them to do. He had a score to settle with the Capones and the next night he led his men in a flying attack on the Capone dive in Coney Island. They swept into the resort in wedgelike formation, tipped over tables, wrecked the bar, drove out patrons, barkeeps and bouncers, and turned the place upside down. The Capones were not in evidence. When the damage had been done to their joint Bill took a piece of soap from under the bar and with it printed upon the back bar mirror, in the fine lettering he had often used on books in the old Catharine Street bindery, this message for the Capones:

Al Capone, viewing next day the skillfully printed defi, and looking over the wreckage, was unaware that it was the handiwork of the puny Catharine Street boy he had insulted and taunted on the Lonergan steps. In Coney Island shady resort keepers wondered fearfully about the White Hands without knowing who they were or from what motive they had attacked the Capones.

The worried keepers suspected that the White Hands were an off-shoot of the secret, white-capped raiders who called themselves Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They were frightened.

Lovett, meanwhile, had high hopes that Dinny Meehan had caught an earful of the damage done to the Capone dive in Coney Island.

Chapter IV The Dock Raiders

Dinny Meehan’s control of the docks of Shantytown was not wholly based on his ability to supply labor to load and unload ships. For years before his rule there had been systematic looting of both docks and ships. Meehan had promised ship owners and dock operators that the pillage would end with his rule if the owners would permit him to run the dock laborers and collect his tribute from them. He put an end to pillage and the ship and dock masters gave him the run of the docks.

Suddenly one morning, a few weeks after the attack upon the Capone dive, Meehan was amazed by the news that one of the largest docks under his control had been robbed of nearly every article on it that could be carried away and the watchman either clubbed into insensibility or thrown into the river. The thieves had tacked a message, expertly lettered, on the dock gate. It read:

Meehan was puzzled and frightened and also in total ignorance of the identity of the White Hands. Likewise he couldn’t comprehend why he was being attacked in this underground fashion. No one had ever openly challenged his rule.

He was not long in the dark as to why he was being attacked, and by whom. He was sunk in his high-backed throne in the Loaders’ Club when the figure of a slight young man stood before him.

“Remember me?” the visitor asked.

“You gutter rat,” Meehan roared. “I told you once to get out of here and stay out.”

“Things were different then,” the visitor snarled. “I was just a kid. Now they call me Wild Bill Lovett, boss of the White Hands.”

Meehan’s fat body became suddenly rigid. “Aw!” he cried. “It was you that boosted all that stuff off the dock and left that notice for me to quit these docks.” His blubbery face flashed red.

“It was me and my White Hands,” said Lovett. “Now I’m here to give you warning. Your own men hate you, I hate you, and it’s time you were quitting this big graft.”

Meehan sprang from the chair. Giant wallopers, drinking at the bar, turned around. They saw Meehan raise his hands and make a lunge at Lovett. He dropped his hands and stepped back when Lovett spoke.

“Touch me,” said Bill, “and you won’t live ten days. You kicked me out of here once without listening to what I wanted to say. This time you’ll listen. I’m giving you a chance to get out quietly. If you don’t, me and my White Hands’ll boost you out and chuck you in the street. That’s all I want to say. Now think it over, and you better do something quick.”

Lovett turned on his heel and walked out, leaving Meehan standing in a daze.

That night Wild Bill — for his gang had now tied that monicker to him — went to the Lonergan home to visit Anna. Only Fiddler Byrnes knew he was visiting Anna, for he had seen Wild Bill enter the house. An hour later four plainclothes men pushed into the house when Anna opened the door. They found Wild Bill in the parlor and pounced on him. After a struggle Bill was hauled out and taken to the station house in the Black Maria.

He was charged with robbing the dock and assaulting Dinny Meehan, but the news that Meehan was in back of his arrest was of less importance than the discovery that Fiddler Byrnes had tipped the police as to where Wild Bill could be found.

In the police court Lovett was no longer the rough and tumble gang leader. For the moment he strategically abandoned the slangy lingo of dock pirates and thieves and was again the mild-mannered, soft-tongued youth of Catharine Street. In the charge against him Meehan had declared that Wild Bill had pulled a gun on him.

“Gun?” said Bill on the witness stand. “I never carried one in my life. Do I look like a gunman? And as for robbing the dock as I’m charged, do I look like a thief?”

The magistrate was favorably impressed. Moreover the police had no evidence against Lovett on the robbery score and he walked out of the courtroom completely exonerated. The judge couldn’t believe that the meek-mannered, well-spoken youth on the witness stand was the thief and ruffian the police had described.

Meehan was nowhere in evidence around the court. He let the police do all the work while he remained at safe vantage in the Loaders’ Club, flanked by a bodyguard of stalwarts consisting of four of the toughest and biggest wallopers on the docks. Meehan feared retaliation from Wild Bill, but the leader of the White Hands was more concerned with Fiddler Byrnes. Directly from court Lovett went to a saloon, where he found Byrnes. The instant Lovett showed his face, Byrnes pulled a gun.

“Aw, put that away,” Bill sneered. “You rat, you know I never pack a gun. And if you did use it on me you know damned well Peg Leg or one of the boys’d get you for it. All I want to do is tell you something. Never show up again around where I am, and don’t ever poke your nose in the affairs of the White Hands. Understand?”

Apparently Byrnes understood. He knew what was meant by White Hand muscle. He dropped the gun into his pocket and Wild Bill walked off.

Bill was making his way along the docks towards a boathouse where his gang gathered when an automatic pumped five times and Wild Bill staggered to a doorstep, two bullets in his chest. He was rushed to a hospital. Detectives tried to force him to name his assailant. “I didn’t see who it was, man or woman,” he insisted. “I could guess who it was, but I’m not guessing anybody into your hands.”

He left the hospital with one bullet in his chest. He had not seen the man who had tried to pick him off. It might have been Byrnes or Frank Martin who had fired at him, but the man back of the shooting was Dinny Meehan. Lovett was certain it must-have been Meehan.

The shooting had an instantaneous effect upon the fortunes of the White Hands. It helped to magnify Lovett’s importance as a gang chief. When Wild Bill got out of the hospital, thugs from all over Brooklyn and from across the East River crowded into his gang. The White Hand grew to impressive proportions, pillaged right and left, attacked other gangs and broke them up, swept into dance halls, saloons and clubs, wrecked the places and played havoc at will. Men and women were held up, cops were beaten. Newspapers and preachers began to demand the extermination of the gang.

The police centered their attention upon Wild Bill, the brains of the mob. They had no trouble picking him up. He seemed to take a special delight in being yanked in. He actually invited the police to arrest him, but, when he was hauled into court, he managed, either by a pose of innocence, or an alibi, to escape conviction. During 1914 he was picked up twenty-one times, but each time he walked out of court with the rap beaten.

Cute Charley Donnelly was also singled out for special police attention. He was arrested fourteen times and succeeded in beating each rap. He boasted openly that, although cops had hauled him in more than 100 times in four years and had third degreed him on each occasion, they had never gotten a word out of him.

When a major robbery was reported to the police or a gangster was found murdered, the police asserted that Wild Bill was responsible. He made no remonstrance against the free and easy way all crimes were credited to him. He merely grinned slyly, raised no howl, and quietly explained to his men that all the pick-ups recorded against him, and all the crimes credited to him by the police, built up his reputation. What he had acquired was muscle; not brawn but a reputation for savagery which was sufficient to make men fear him.

Suddenly war flamed in Europe. Allied ships crowded Brooklyn docks to load ammunition and food for Allied forces. A great demand for dock wallopers arose and Meehan met it. Wages went skyrocketing. But the increase meant little to the dock wallopers. Meehan took a lion’s share of the higher wages, leaving his men little better off than they had been before. Moreover, the pot-bellied despot admitted Italians into the docks and imported Sicilian guerillas from Navy Street to keep both Irish and Italian workers in line. The Irish wallopers complained; some became rebellious. But Meehan sent his imported guerillas against them and beat them into submission. Disgruntled wallopers carried their tales of woe to Wild Bill and implored him to go in and drive out Meehan and assume leadership of the dock workers.

Bill sent Meehan an ultimatum to quit. He believed that he and his mob had acquired sufficient muscle to frighten Meehan from his throne and end his rule without bloodshed. Meehan sent back word that Wild Bill and his mob could “go plumb to Hell.” Lovett took the retort calmly, although his hate for Meehan was at white heat. Day by day the United States was being drawn into the great conflict raging across the water. Meehan was growingrich on the graft extorted from his men. Finally the United States declared war against Germany and its allies. In this news Wild Bill glimpsed his opportunity.

The reckless thinking machine in his capacious head spurred by a burning hate had worked fast and furiously.

He leisurely sauntered out of the gang’s boathouse quarters, went downtown and visited a department store. He made several purchases — two small silk American flags, a lithograph of Abraham Lincoln, and an enlarged facsimile of the famous longhand letter which Lincoln wrote to the widow Bixby who had given five sons to the Union cause in the Civil War. He carried these to the Lonergan home, spent half an hour with Anna Lonergan, and, on taking leave, bade her good-bye “Perhaps for good.”

Several hours later he turned up at the boathouse. The gang was waiting for him.

“Get yourselves together,” Lovett announced. “Follow me and ask no questions. Just stick outside Dinny Meehan’s Loaders’ Club when I go in. Ditch your guns here. There won’t be any need of shooting.” He opened a drawer in a long table, but it was too small to hold all the guns. Some were thrown in a heap on the floor.

Wild Bill started for the Loaders’ Club, his vassals following him half a block behind, deployed in groups. Under his arm he carried the package — the two flags, Lincoln’s portrait, and the Bixby letter.

Chapter V Fight or Fade

Alone and unarmed, Wild Bill walked into the presence of Dinny Meehan. The four burly bodyguards were ranged along the wall in chairs. The bar was crowded with dock wallopers guzzling their beer and whiskey. Lovett threw his package on a table, and casting a surly glance at Meehan, proceeded to undo the bundle. He drew out the flags, unfurled them, and standing on a chair, draped them over a dust-streaked lithograph of playing cards fanned out in a royal flush. Meehan and his bodyguard looked on with startled eyes. Wild Bill tacked the Lincoln portrait to the wall; then the Bixby letter.

The legs of Meehan’s high-backed chair scraped on the sanded floor as he pushed it back and sprang to his feet. His protectors arose, en masse.

“Pull that stuff down off there,” Meehan bellowed.

Wild Bill glared at him. “Whoever touches these things won’t live to tell what happened,” he snapped. The bodyguards reached for their gun pockets. Lovett eyed them. “Aw, don’t waste your time and bullets shooting at me,” he said. “If you want to do any shooting there’s a war on. Go out and join the army.”

“Chuck the rat out,” yelled Meehan.

Lovett touched two fingers to his lips and whistled shrilly. His shock troops, waiting outside, for his command, stormed in, led by Peg Leg and Cute Charley. Meehan’s stalwarts crouched back and stood dazed. Meehan sank into his chair. Bill was still on the chair. His men were crouching, alert for a further command. The wallopers at the bar, twenty or more giants, turned away from their drinks and stood staring at Lovett.

“I suppose all you guys think I’m trying to drive Meehan out so I can be your boss,” he cried. “You’re all wrong. I couldn’t be your boss because I won’t be around here long. There’s a war on and I’m going into it. This afternoon I enlisted. I’ll get my uniform tomorrow.”

At first his listeners were struck dumb by the announcement, then they broke into cheers, the dock wallopers as well as his own followers.

“That’s great stuff,” Bill went on. “You’re all glad to hear I’ve enlisted. You’re strong for a guy that wants to fight for his country, eh? Well... if that’s the case, then what about you guys climbing into uniforms, too?”

The men eyed each other gravely.

“You’re all big huskies, just the kind of fighting gents the country needs,” Bill cried. “And you’re not taking orders from Meehan now. I’m giving orders, see? If you’re the kind of fighters you crack yourselves up to be, let’s see. How many of you have got wives and kids?”

Only a few shot their hands into the air.

“You guys,” said Wild Bill, “haven’t got any business going to war. But the rest of you — how about digging out of here and enlisting?”

There was a solemn silence. The men eyed each other again.

“Any guy can load ships and make money out of the war,” Bill continued, “but not every guy can make the kind of a soldier you big fellows should make.” He waved a hand at Meehan. “This fat grafter,” he went on, “couldn’t get into any man’s army. They wouldn’t have him. Come on now, whose gonna hop into a uniform and join me?”

There was a roar from the crowd. “Let’s go, Bill, let’s go.”

“That’s the stuff,” yelled Bill. He jumped down from the chair. “Follow me.”

They piled out after him, dock wallopers and White Hands. There were some forty men in the crowd.

Not all of them could make the Army standard for enlistment, but a sufficient number of Meehan’s brawniest dock wallopers joined the colors to sadly deplete his ranks. Those who remained behind were Meehan himself, his bodyguard, and older men with families. Peg Leg was a cripple and couldn’t enlist; Cute Charley had a prison record and was barred, while Raycraft was flatfooted and had one bad eye. Wild Bill left them behind to complete the break-up of Meehan’s empire. What the spindle-legged, flatchested boy from Catharine Street had failed to do with muscle, he had accomplished by a stroke of strategy which almost emptied the Loaders’ Club and at the same time put a lot of brawny giants into army uniforms for the duration of the war.

The next day he donned his own uniform and became Private William Joseph Lovett, machine gunner, Company I, 11th U. S. Infantry. Among his buddies in the same outfit were several White Hands and dock wallopers. There wasn’t room in the same outfit for all those who tried to get into the same regiment to be near him.

When Wild Bill was on a transport, bound overseas, Dinny Meehan found the nerve to tear down the two silk flags, the Lincoln portrait and the Bixby letter. Then he opened wide the gates of Shantytown and called in Italians from Navy Street to take the places of the giants who had followed Wild Bill into the army.

In the army Bill Lovett, for the first time in his life, touched a machine gun. He had always avoided the gun. Now it was his duty to man the wickedest and deadliest of all automatic man killers.

Chapter VI The Marks of War

If Meehan thought that the rigors of war would end the career of the weak-kneed, flat-chested demon of the White Hands — with a bullet already lodged in his chest — he cherished a futile hope.

On a sultry afternoon, late in July, 1919, Private William J. Lovett lay squirming and twisting on a cot in a Brooklyn hospital. For him the war had ended two months before the armistice in November, 1918. A jagged chunk of shrapnel had been taken from his right shoulder, deadly mustard gas had eaten his throat raw and was ravaging his lungs. His emaciated body also held two machine gun bullets which the surgeons dared not probe for. Thus Wild Bill carried around three bullets and yet lived.

He had gone through the battle of Château-Thierry. In a later battle he had plunged into annihilating barrages laid down by the enemy to rescue and bring back to the lines wounded buddies trapped in a shell crater. He had dragged back three men, then, returning to the shell hole he had mowed down the enemy with his machine gun. Shrapnel, a creeping wave of mustard gas, and machine gun fire had put an end to his deadly work. He had been found bleeding and insensible in the shell crater.

And he had won the Distinguished Service Cross. The man who had started life hating to see a fly swatted brought back from France a reputation not only as a hero, but as a machine gunner who had taken savage delight in mowing down the enemy.

It wasn’t until July, 1919, that he was permitted to have visitors at the hospital. When the doors were opened to them they streamed in, Peg Leg Lonergan, Donnelly and Raycraft among the first. They were followed by dock wallopers who hailed the man who had given Dinny Meehan his only licking. They did not bring cheerful news from the docks. They told the bed-ridden patient that Meehan had not only torn down the flags and Lincoln mementoes, but he was back in full power at the Loaders’ Club. But the worst news was that Meehan had joined hands with the hated Al Capone; that he had given Capone control of the coffee docks; and that the former Five Pointer had taken up his post at the gates of the coffee docks and was extorting half a day’s pay from every walloper who did a day’s work unloading coffee. The Irishmen had protested to Meehan against this alliance with Capone, and Meehan’s answer had been to set Navy Street guerillas upon them.

Nor was that all Meehan had done. He had given over to Capone the job of keeping the wallopers tamed and Capone had discovered that the most effective way to subjugate rebellious wallopers was to threaten to steal their wives, daughters and sweethearts and force them into lives of shame.

Wild Bill had been within the shadow of death in France and even now he was not certain that he had passed the danger point. The surgeons doubted that he would live two years even though he had the best attention in hospital. His wounds gave him great pain. He had not given much thought to Meehan or to the affairs of the White Hands. Mention of Al Capone’s name rekindled his old hate.

In spite of the surgeons’ pronouncement that he wouldn’t live a year if he left the hospital, Wild Bill went. Unarmed and clad in a fleece-lined trench coat, he turned up at the gates of the coffee docks and faced Capone.

“It’s a swell day for you to be taking a walk, Capone,” he said.

“Yeah?” grinned Capone.

“Yeah,” Bill repeated. “You better walk while you can.”

Capone’s eyes narrowed. He stood meditating.

“When you start walking,” Bill added, “you better walk far.”

Capone started away.

“Never show your mug around these parts again,” Bill called after him.

“Aw, you won’t always be around here,” Capone snarled back. Yet he kept on walking and finally vanished.

There is only one reasonable explanation of Capone’s willingness to quit Brooklyn at Lovett’s command; he feared Wild Bill, not alone because of the ferocious reputation the weakling had built up, but also because of Lovett’s record of slaughter in the army and the unquestioned sway he held over the men in his gang; his power to command obedience from all men as had been demonstrated by his ability to lead them into the army. Besides, he was a full-fledged hero, decorated by his country.

From the coffee docks Wild Bill hastened to the Lonergan home and paid his respects to Anna. She poured a tale of woe into his ears. Her parents were always at war in the house. If he cared anything for her he ought to marry her and get her away from the constant fighting around her. She intimated that Frank Martin would marry her if he didn’t. She was still eager to find a meal ticket.

But Bill had to start life over and the future was uncertain.

“We’ll see how I turn out with Meehan,” he explained.

“Meehan?” the girl exclaimed.

“Yep, Meehan,” said Bill. “We’ve got a few things to settle.” If Lovett had any deep love for Anna Lonergan he had subordinated it to his hate for his enemies and his desire for power in gangdom.

He left the Lonergan home and went straightaway to the Loaders’ Club. He found Dinny Meehan plunked solidly in his high-backed chair, his four bodyguards in vigilant attendance. Wild Bill glanced up at the dust-streaked picture of the playing cards, then scowled at Meehan.

“You tore down the flags and things, didn’t you?” he said. “You let Capone in on your graft too. I’ve taken care of Capone and now I’m here to take care of you.”

Neither Meehan nor his bodyguards stirred. Perhaps they too felt about Lovett as Capone felt. They knew, of course, that he commanded the loyalty of members of his old gang and that he could win as many more supporters as he needed. And Meehan courted no bloody conflict, when, with a little strategy, he might easily best the returned White Hander.

After a moment of reflection Meehan addressed Wild Bill.

“Tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “This Saturday night coming I’ll clear out of here and leave it all to you.”

Lovett agreed to this.

On the Friday night following this quiet encounter, Wild Bill went to a party given in his honor by Owney Manley, an old pal, who had gathered in his home all the men he could find who had given their allegiance to Wild Bill. It was a merry affair. There was much dancing and much grog, and Bill forgot the pain of his wounds after a few drinks of liquor. He became quite hilarious. Toward the end of the night he drew out an automatic .45 and with one well-aimed shot cracked a whisky glass held at the lips of a merrymaker. The crowd was surprised and entertained. It was expert marksmanship, but, more important, Wild Bill now carried a gun. Lovett took pains to explain that he was used to a gun after what he’d seen in France, but he shot only steel-nosed bullets.

“I don’t forget,” he grinned, “that I’ve had soft-nosed bullets thrown into my chest and some of them’s still there. If I’ve gotta shoot anybody I’ll be as easy on ’em as I can.”

The party broke up in the wee hours. Bill started down the front steps. Suddenly he halted. At the bottom of the stairway he saw a man crouching with a knife in his hands. Bill whipped out his automatic and fired. The knife clattered to the sidewalk. Lovett pounced on the figure of a gangster known as Dago Red.

“Cripes, Bill,” Dago Red pleaded, “I was only fooling.”

“Swell way of fooling,” said Bill. “Now go back and tell Meehan what happened. And tell him too he better be out of the Loaders’ Club and out of this town by tomorrow night.”

The submissive attitude of Meehan and his bodyguards was now clear to Wild Bill. Meehan didn’t intend to get out — not if he could put Lovett out of the way. Lovett had beaten the knife-wielder to it, but Meehan was not daunted by this failure.

At noon Saturday plainclothesmen pounced on Lovett and yanked him into court to face a charge of carrying a weapon and feloniously assaulting Dago Red. Unable to reach Lovett with a knife, Meehan was trying to put him in jail. Anything to keep Wild Bill from taking over the Loaders’ Club. A dozen witnesses swore upon the witness stand that Lovett had no gun and added that the only weapon in evidence was the knife carried by Dago Red. Lovett was discharged. With Peg Leg and Donnelly he left the courtroom. They had gone along three blocks when a motor car swung into the curb just ahead of them. Suddenly, from its partly open door, gunfire flashed. Wild Bill dropped to the pavement with six bullets in his emaciated body.

As the car sped away a voice came bellowing out of it — “That’s for what happened at the coffee docks.”

Lovett was rushed to a hospital. Three of the bullets were removed from his side and three remained, leaving six leaden pellets imbedded in his body. The surgeons wanted to probe for all of them, but the patient insisted that “the more bullets I carry around in me the safer I seem to be.” Almost a month later he left the hospital. Police questioned him about the shooting.

“Aw, I know who did it all right,” he said. “But say a word about them? Not me. I’m deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to that.” As a matter of truth, Lovett did not know who had shot him, but the message that was spouted to him from the fleeing car was sufficient to remind him that although Capone had left Brooklyn he still had proxies in Brooklyn to do his deadly bidding. And the Saturday night on which Dinny Meehan was to have abdicated was four weeks in the background. He still held forth in the Loaders’ Club.

With the help of Peg Leg, Donnelly and Raycraft, Lovett rounded up former members of the White Hands and they assembled in a speakeasy to meet their old chief and make plans to drive out Dinny Meehan. The speakeasy was not far from the Loaders’ Club and Lovett had visited it often. Now they had beers all around. After the first glass Wild Bill gripped his stomach and writhed in pain. The beer had been poisoned. Meehan was reaching out for him again, this time with poison. Lovett made short work of the speakeasy. He whipped out his automatic and emptied it into the back bar, smashed all the bottles, and finally fired a shot into a copper boiler steaming with a fresh mess of home brew. When he left the place it was to have his stomach pumped.

This happened on a cold night in March, 1921.

The next morning Dinny Meehan failed to show up in the Loaders’ Club. He had been shot through the heart as he lay asleep in his bed with his wife and infant daughter at his side. As near as the police could gather, the killer had fired through a transom over the bedroom door. He had fired twice, hitting Mrs. Meehan in the shoulder with his first shot, then ending Dinny Meehan’s career with the second.

Both bullets were soft-nosed.

That night Wild Bill was in jail charged with suspicion of having killed Meehan.

Chapter VII An Old Enemy Back Again

The police faced their old enemy with a certain feeling that he would end in the electric chair or go to the Big House for life. For twenty-four hours they grilled Wild Bill.

The nearest they got to an admission from him was this:

“I’m sorry to say I didn’t get Dinny Meehan. If I had I’d be telling you about it. But, in the first place, I never shot a soft-nosed bullet in my life. In the second place, I’m not such a poor shot that I’d hit a woman in the shoulder.”

“Then it was one of your gang that got Meehan,” a detective shouted at him.

“That might be,” grinned Lovett. “They’d do almost anything I ask them to do. There’s a hundred of my friends that might have done it, but it’s up to you to pick out the one that did.”

Bill once more walked out of jail into the free air. He went direct to the Loaders’ Club. At his appearance three of Meehan’s old bodyguard skulked out. Only Terror McTague remained. Openly he accused Lovett of having killed Meehan, and he swore to get the White Hander before the week was out.

“Meehan left this place to Gillen, Barry, Tim Quilty and myself,” said McTague, “and we’ll drive you out.” He stamped out of the Loaders’ Club. Slouching along the docks, three bullets were pumped into him, and though he recovered he never again set foot in Bridge Street.

The arm of the law reached out for Wild Bill again, but he had a shatterproof alibi to meet the charge that he had wounded McTague. When he left Raymond Street jail Peg Leg was with him. The latter wanted to call a taxi for Bill, for his old wounds were causing him great pain.

“Never mind the cab,” said Lovett. “Walking’s good for me, and. I’m not running away from any bullets. I’ve got six in me now. A few more won’t hurt.”

They walked on a block and halted at a cross-street to let a large touring car pass. The machine slowed and the blue muzzle of an automatic poked out through the side curtains. Bill made a leap for it. It blazed three times and he fell with two bullets in the right shoulder, opening up the old shrapnel wound.

Though he was in great pain, Lovett got up on his knees and said to Peg Leg: “It was Garry Barry’s finger that pulled that trigger. I got a good look at his hand. He was wearing a silver horseshoe nail ring that Dinny Meehan gave him.”

Lovett refused to be taken to a hospital. The wounds were superficial, and a private surgeon extracted the two bullets. Detectives called on Lovett.

“You fellows might as well ask a can of peaches to talk as to ask me to spill,” Lovett said to them. “Whoever pumped that lead into me will be taken care of as he expects to be taken care of.”

Garry Barry’s body was found riddled with two steel-nosed bullets.

In two hours Lovett was back in Raymond Street jail, but, lacking evidence to connect him with the killing of Barry, the detectives turned him loose. It was true that Barry was killed with steel-nosed bullets, but Wild Bill produced a score of dock wallopers who swore that at the moment Barry was killed Wild Bill was in the Loaders’ Club.

Wild Bill went back to the club. His men greeted him with a bellowing welcome. And yet Bill hadn’t up to this time been able actually to rule the domain which he had wrung from Meehan. He had been too busy exterminating his enemies and going to and from jail and courts. And he had broken up the succession planned by Meehan for Gillen, Barry, Quilty and McTague. He had wiped out Barry and McTague, but Gillen and Quilty remained, ready, the moment Wild Bill was unseated, to step into Meehan’s shoes. Lovett was aware that the fortunes of battle might at any moment turn against him. He had arranged, in the event of a sudden taking off, that Peg Leg, Donnelly and Raycraft should succeed him in the order named, unless one of them happened to be bumped off before his time.

Gillen, who had a reputation as a killer and an unquenchable thirst for liquor, was a close and ever-present enemy. He openly vowed to kill Lovett. He was standing at a bar lifting a glass of whisky to his lips when he announced that before he took his next drink Wild Bill would be dead. A weasel-faced henchman of Gillen’s, known as Sammy the Angel, stood at Gillen’s side. A flash of blue fire came through a window in the rear of the speakeasy and the glass in Gillen’s hand flew into splinters. The gun barked a second time and Gillen slumped to the floor with a bullet through his heart.

Sammy the Angel drew his gun and dashed to the window, crying, “Lovett got Gilly. I’ll get Lovett.” Whether Sammy had actually seen Wild Bill at the window no one ever has been able to say, for when Sammy stood on a chair and peered through the rear window a bullet pierced his skull and he fell back dead.

The bullets which ended the careers of Gillen and Sammy were both steel-jacketed. Lovett was hauled in again on suspicion. He put up a mild protest.

“For the love of Mike,” he said. “If the king of Siam was bumped off you dicks’d pick me up for the job. Can’t somebody else do the bumping off that’s being done around here besides me?”

The steel-nosed bullets in Gillen and Sammy were not enough to cinch the murders on Wild Bill. Once more he made a triumphant exit from Raymond Street jail.-

For a year affairs ran a comparatively quiet course in Shantytown. On New Year’s day 1922 Wild Bill awoke to the realization that he was living beyond the brief span hospital surgeons had mapped out for him. The dock wallopers offered no rebellion to his rule. He kept the Loaders’ Club going, and in spite of prohibition kept them supplied with beer and booze.

The day of high wages on the docks had ended with the war. Earnings were down to their old level. Lovett assessed each man fifty cents a day when he worked, as dues in the club, and, in addition, he made a profit on the sale of home brew and moonshine to them. He had rid Shantytown docks of Italian guerillas from Navy Street, and he had piloted his men through two strikes. Dock owners claimed that Bill extorted protection money from them under the threat of more strikes. If he did so the men under him were not offended, for Meehan had extorted heavy tribute from dock owners during the war, and whatever graft the dockmen were forced to contribute was the business of the boss and not theirs.

Slowly Wild Bill extended his rule to all the docks in Brooklyn. At his whim ships loading and unloading could be tied up for weeks by his power to call strikes. The large-headed boy had gone far in his world of terror. At his will a great part of the commerce in the world’s busiest seaport could be tied up; he had vanquished enemies by murdering them, and he had not served a day in jail on a sentence!

Yet he was slighter, paler and a more emaciated figure than he had ever been. His hands were still white and thin and he carried around in his puny body the bullets of gang war as well as those pumped into him in the course of his heroic exploits on the battle fronts of the World War. He was the master muscle-man of the docks; the czar of the dock wallopers and undisputed monarch of the gang world. By evil means he had achieved big things in his hate-inspired lust for power and bigness. And it had come to pass among gunman and cops that to offend or oppose Wild Lovett was to court certain death.

In this era of peace along the clocks he had time to see Anna Lonergan. She pleaded with him to take her out of the wretched home where her parents were always fighting and settle down to a quiet existence. She always brought up Frank Martin’s name as one of the urgent reasons why Bill should wed her. Bill told her that if he was alive, July 26, which would be the anniversary of his discharge from the army, he would marry her on that day.

On the night of January 3, 1923, Anna Lonergan sat in her home waiting for Wild Bill to call. Midnight came. Bill had not appeared. She began to bite her finger nails and show other evidence of restless apprehension. She called up the Loaders’ Club. Bill was not there. Whoever answered the phone told her that Bill was in a beer joint at 289 Front Street. She called up the joint. There was no answer.

Two hours later a patrolman looked into the Front Street hangout. It was a wreck. Chairs were overturned, mirrors smashed, and the floor strewn with empty bottles. In a dark corner the cop saw something move. He investigated. The object that had moved was Wild Bill’s leg. He lay face down in a pool of blood. Two bullets had torn through his flat chest. One had entered his lung. He was unconscious. An ambulance carried him away. One bullet was taken from the chest; the other was too deeply imbedded in his already afflicted lung to be probed for without fatal consequences. Slowly he came to. The police demanded to know who shot him.

“Aw,” he said, “somebody popped-at me and chucked me in a corner for dead. But what difference does it make who did the popping? Bullets can’t kill me.”

But to his slavish henchmen, Peg Leg, Cute Charley and Raycraft, he opened up. “I don’t say that Tim Quilty actually pulled the trigger on me,” he said, “but he was the brain back of the gun. Eddie Hughes is the guy that got me.”

Peg Leg looked at his two companions. “Quilty and Hughes,” he cried. “The finger’s on ’em now.”

“You fellows never mind getting Quilty and Hughes,” said Bill. “All I want you to do is to find out where Quilty and Hughes hang out. Then leave the rest to me.”

Cute Charley went to a telephone and returned to Bill with the news that both men were in a speakeasy at Jay and Yorke Streets.

Chapter VIII The Last of the Line Drops

Alone, Wild Bill poked his way into the speakeasy. Twelve men were guzzling booze at the bar. Two of them were Quilty and Hughes.

Quilty was the first to spot the visitor. He reached for his gun, but a steel-nosed bullet ripped into his chest and he toppled back, dead. Hughes’ hand went for his gun, but, instead of drawing it, he hesitated for an instant, then fled out the rear. Hughes was a big bruiser and not a man to run from a gun fight. Apparently he thought it wisest to run and save his bullets for another day.

That day never came. Hughes’ body was found in a Shantytown gutter, his jugular vein severed by a steel-nosed bullet. He had been dead less than half an hour when the police found him. In a speakeasy, half down the block they found Lovett. They seized him, but not until he had covertly ditched his automatic by throwing it into a closet. The police found the gun where he had tossed it. They led him away to the Raymond Street jail, where he was held on suspicion of having murdered Quilty and Hughes.

He was languishing in this familiar bastille when Anna Lonergan brought him news that her father had been shot to death the night before and that her mother had been arrested, accused of the murder. John Lonergan had been shot in the night of the thirtieth anniversary of his marriage to the mother of Anna and Peg Leg.

“I knew it was going to happen some day,” Anna sobbed. “That’s why I wanted you to take me away.”

“I will, if I’m living July 26,” said Bill. Then he scrawled a note to a lawyer and handed it to Anna. “He’s the best mouthpiece in town and he’ll take good care of your mother,” Bill explained.

Early in July Mrs. Lonergan was acquitted. Bill was still in jail. The police were unable to find witnesses who could pin the Quilty and Hughes murder on him, but they had his gun and a charge of carrying a weapon was lodged against him, which meant that if he were convicted he would draw a seven-year sentence in the Big House. And in his sorry physical condition Bill would not live through half the term. The case against him was strong and his defense was phony. He insisted that he had been framed. The police laughed at this claim.

When his trial was called Bill was cool and confident. The police told about finding his gun in the speakeasy. A pal of the dead Hughes said he had seen Wild Bill toss it into the closet. The prosecution’s case looked complete, fool-proof.

Then Anna Lonergan was called to the stand. She was still clad in mourning for her father. She was shown the automatic. Had she ever seen the weapon before? Sure she had, many times. It was the gun which had belonged to her father and he had told her that he had thrown it into the closet in the speakeasy because he was afraid if he brought it home he might use it. Her father was dead. The prosecution had no way of refuting her story. Lovett’s lawyer, in his address to the jury, stressed his war service, his heroism and his winning of a medal. The jury deliberated twenty-four hours and finally reported it could not agree. Wild Bill was admitted to bail to await a re-trial. That was on July 25.

Next day he married Anna Lonergan.

The two honeymooners turned their backs on Brooklyn and the East River. In the quiet little village of Little Ferry, N. J., among utter strangers, they settled down as Mr. and Mrs. William La Vett. Wild Bill had pledged his bride that he was through with the old life and would begin anew. He spoke like he meant it. Perhaps he felt that since he had wiped out the Meehan dynasty, the big job he had mapped out for himself was finished. Doubtless he was also convinced that he had not long to live with seven bullets in him and one lung completely gone; and he longed to spend what time was left to him with the only woman who had come into his life and whom he had courted in an undemonstrative way in the days of his childhood in Catharine Street. Before leaving Brooklyn, Bill and Anna promised the district attorney that when Bill’s second trial on the guncarrying charge was called he would be on hand.

In his new surroundings, Bill gave every evidence of an honest attempt to “take the level” and reform. He worked in the garden, sawed and split wood, and, in the cool Fall days, went for long hikes in the woods with Anna at his side and their cocker spaniel trailing. He called his bride “The Sheriff” because wherever he went she went too. She was bound that Wild Bill would not carry out a sudden notion to go back to Brooklyn and look over the old battleground.

He began to put on flesh and acquire a ruddy complexion. By winter he had a job in a nearby silk mill staked out for himself. He had heard nothing from Brooklyn. Letters came to the house for him from Peg Leg, Cute Charley and Raycraft, advising him that they were running the Loaders’ Club and everything was jake, except that a lot of tough muggs were always asking, “Where’s Wild Bill?” These letters got no further than Anna La Vett’s hands and she tossed them into the fire.

“The Sheriff” kept newspapers from him, too, so that he had no way of learning that Al Capone, the first enemy he had led his White Hands against, and whom he had driven from the docks, lone-handed; was laying the foundation of his underworld empire in Chicago, killing men and muscling into the booze, gambling, vice, and cleaning and dyeing rackets in the Windy City.

Wild Bill had almost forgotten Capone in the stress of violent events which had followed his driving of Capone from the coffee docks. But Capone had left proxies in Brooklyn, pals and henchmen in the Navy Street gang.

On Columbus Day, 1923, Bill was splitting wood in the back yard of the Little Ferry home when “The Sheriff” snapped some pictures of him. He was surprised at the change in himself when he saw them. He actually appeared robust.

“It would be a swell idea to send them to the district attorney in Brooklyn,” said Bill. “He might wash out the old gun charge against me if he saw I was on the level now. And what about sending a set to my mother for her birthday, November first? It would certainly-tickle her to see the change.”

“That’s a swell idea,” Anna agreed.

“And wait a second,” Bill exploded with enthusiasm. “I ought to be able to take out a life insurance policy now, in your favor.”

When Anna wrote to a New York insurance company, asking that an agent be sent to see her husband about taking out a policy, she gave Wild Bill’s full name and mentioned his army service, for that would show the one commendable high light in his career. There was considerable delay in getting an answer from the company. When it came a pall of gloom fell over the household. Under no circumstances, said the company, would it take a risk on a man as notorious and uncertain of life as William Joseph Lovett! The reputation he had built up had carried its ferocious import into quarters far remote from the bloody streets of Shantytown.

But “The Sheriff” and Wild Bill had the snapshots. On the last day of October, 1923, they got into a taxicab outside their new home and were driven to Brooklyn, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and speeding past and above Shantytown. They had the snapshots with them for the district attorney, and an extra set for Bill’s mother. The taxicab bore a New Jersey license plate. Anna Lovett did not propose to let her reformed man run the risk of traveling in dangerous country in a Brooklyn taxi. As the taxi neared the Lonergan home Bill spoke about getting some flowers for his mother’s birthday the next day.

Chapter IX Missing

It was dark when they reached the Lonergan house. “The Sheriff” wouldn’t let Bill out of the taxi until she made sure that Peg Leg was not around. She wanted to avoid the risk of the two pals meeting. Therefore she got out and went into the house, leaving Bill in the taxi.

When she came out to call in Bill, the taxi had gone with Lovett. For an instant she thought that he had gone for the flowers he had spoken about. At the end of half an-hour she was frantic. Bill had not shown up and had not phoned. It grew late, then past midnight. Terror-stricken, Anna called a taxi and went out in search of her man. She drove straight to the Loaders’ Club. It was closed and in darkness. She phoned everyone who knew Bill. None had seen him, nor did they know he was in town.

It was almost daybreak when she reached home. Bill was not there and had sent no message. She sat up, waiting for him.

Shortly after daybreak, a policeman, passing the Loaders’ Club, halted at its dirty window and peered in. It was dark within. He flashed his lamp into the place. It touched a pile of lumber standing against a rear wall. Then he played it on the floor. Its bright beam touched the feet of a man lying face down on the floor. The cop broke down the door and rushed in. He turned the body over on its back and noted that the head was enormously large; the thin face was smeared with gore and bashed in. In its right temple were two bullet wounds. Wild Bill was dead. Detectives were summoned. It was plain that whoever had fired the bullets into the temple knew that Wild Bill had survived many a bullet and had crashed in his large head to make certain he would die.

One of the detectives observed that, although Bill wore his own coat, there was a man’s coat under his head. He pulled it out. On a cloth label on the inner pocket was written the name Fiddler Byrnes, the man Wild Bill had driven out of the White Hands for double-crossing him.

The police net was spread for Byrnes and Frank Martin, both known to the police as old time enemies of the slain Bill.

“Me kill Wild Bill?” Byrnes protested. “You dicks are crazy. Sure, I was with him last night and we had drinks and patched up all our troubles.”

“But how did your coat happen to get under his head?” the detective demanded.

“Well, Bill got aboard more liquor than he could stand,” said Byrnes, “and he passed out on the floor. I took off me coat and made a pillow for his head. Then I beat it home. What happened after I left I don’t know.”

Fiddler Byrnes was released.

Martin had a shatterproof alibi and was eliminated.

In the uniform he had worn in France, Wild Bill was buried in the National Cemetery at Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. His Distinguished Service Cross gleamed on his breast. There were no burial services at the grave for the all-sufficient reason that the cemetery authorities did not desire to have a battle, and word had reached them that guns would be sure to blaze if a ceremony were permitted in the open.

Quietly, the funeral services took place in a chapel in Ridgefield, N. J., not far from the Little Ferry home where Bill and his “Sheriff” had settled down. The chapel was crowded. Among the mourners were Peg Leg, Cute Charley, and Raycraft, heavily gatted, alert-eyed and tensely solemn. Chaplain Allan McNeil of the Veterans of Foreign Wars was reading the service — extolling the one heroic chapter in Wild Bill’s life — when the tense atmosphere caused him to falter.

“It’s all right,” a voice whispered into his ear. “Go ahead. Do your best by Bill. If trouble starts you can count on us.”

The chaplain concluded. The crowd was tense. The chapel was heaped with flowers. As vicious as he was in his ganging days Bill Lovett was admired by scores of respectable persons for the one act in his life that merited him a decent burial in a hero’s grave.

Two hours later the flag-draped coffin was lowered into the earth. Rifles cracked over the grave in a last military salute, a Boy Scout blew taps and grumbling sod thumped against the coffin in the pit.

Anna Lonergan, her brother Peg Leg, Cute Charley Donnelly, and Bill Raycraft stood at the grave for some time, in silence.

It was Peg Leg who broke the spell. He looked at Cute Charley.

“Remember on the roof that night,” he said. “The pork chops... the jug of whiskey... and Byrnes and Martin?”

Cute Charley and Raycraft nodded.

“We raised our hands when Bill told us to, and we swore to stick even if something happened to him,” Peg Leg went on. “Well, it’s happened. Byrnes and Martin are still alive.”

“Yeah and don’t we know it,” snarled Donnelly.

They left the cemetery. Anna Lovett parted from them at the grave. She seemed to want to avoid them. Though her grief seemed to be genuine, her thoughts at the grave were more concerned with her immediate and now widowed future.

Chapter X Orders from the Grave

Peg Leg and the survivors of the Lovett dynasty were not satisfied with the course of the law in Fiddler Byrnes’ case. They felt certain that he or Martin, or both of them, had worked out the old grudge on Wild Bill by slaying him. When they left the cemetery they went in search of both men. They stalked the streets for weeks looking for Byrnes and Martin.

Finally they ran across Byrnes’ trail in the Adonis Club, a dingy meeting place for Navy Street thugs. When they reached the place Byrnes had just left in the custody of a detective. The Fiddler, realizing that he was doomed, had phoned the detectives to pick him up.

The next day he pleaded guilty to an old robbery, and in prison he found safe refuge from the guns of Lovett’s pals.

The next day Anna Lonergan married Frank Martin.

Raycraft went into a furious rage and parted from his pals. A day later Anna and her new husband were walking arm-in-arm along the sidewalk when shots blazed from a doorway. Martin and his bride raced across the street, each with a bullet in the arm. This occurred on New Year’s Day, 1925. On the day following a wreath of fresh flowers was found on Wild Bill’s grave in which was woven the following:

If this floral offering was intended, to record the death of Frank Martin it was premature, for both Martin and his bride quickly recovered from their gunshot wounds.

On January 10, Bill Raycraft’s bullet-ridden body was found in an apartment. Reprisal.

Peg Leg and Cute Charley were left to carry on the hunt. For some reason they did not molest Martin, but they had added to their forces two young gunmen, Needles Ferry and Aaron Harms, former members of the Navy Street gang once ruled by Capone and now members in good standing of the Adonis Club where former Navy Street gangsters hung out.

Peg Leg, Donnelly, and the two new additions to their manhunting mob, spent much time in the Adonis Club, properly gatted and exceedingly alert and curious-eyed. For almost a year they haunted the club, when they were not hanging out at the Loaders’ Club, over which Peg Leg and Donnelly exercised joint rule.

On Christmas morning, 1925, Patrolman Richard Morano saw the body of a man lying in the gutter in front of the Adonis Club. Observing that a trail of fresh blood led from the body to the door of the club, he followed it. He found the club deserted. Propped against a piano in the front room he saw still another body, and near it a .45 automatic fully loaded with steel-nosed bullets. He picked up the gun and turned. Under a window he saw another body upon the floor.

The body in the gutter was that of Needles Ferry. The corpse on the floor under the window was that of Aaron Harms; while the body propped against the piano was Peg Leg Lonergan. The automatic weapon, loaded to full capacity with steel jacketed man killers, was the weapon which had been Wild Bill’s!

Before nightfall the police dragnet had hauled in twelve dark-skinned members of the Adonis Club. A stout, pompous-aired man, with an eleven carat diamond ring sparkling on his finger, took upon himself the role of spokesmen for the other eleven, who, with himself, were accused of the triple murder. He told a story purporting to be a true account of the killing. He said that Lonergan, Ferry and Harms had stormed into the club with blood in their eyes and guns in their hands and called for the “guy from Chicago.”

Someone had ordered the gatted visitors out. They refused to go. Peg Leg fired his automatic at the piano; then someone back in the club opened fire, and Peg Leg, Ferry, and Harms fell, and another someone carried Ferry’s body out and dumped it in the gutter.

All twelve suspects agreed that that was what had happened, but they were unable to explain how if Lonergan had fired his gun, it was still fully loaded with undischarged shells!

Detectives asked the pompous spokesman for his name and business.

“I’m the doorman of the club,” he grinned. “My name’s Al Capone.”

The sleuths displayed no concern at mention of this name. Al Capone was not yet the keyman in Chicago’s underworld, though he was getting there fast. Nor did it matter about the discrepancy between Capone’s explanation of the shootings in the Adonis Club and the circumstance that Lonergan could not have fired the automatic. Capone and his fellow Adonis clubmen were finally discharged and Al hastened back to his easy money empire on the lake. This was Capone’s first visit to Brooklyn since he had been muscled off the coffee docks near Navy Street, and he has not returned since.

One man remained of the Lovett dynasty — Cute Charley. Alone he took up the hunt. On the morning of January 19, 1930, he was found dead with two bullets in his flame-topped head in a pier shanty near Bridge Street. Frank Martin, the police said, was the last man seen to come out of the shanty. He was arrested, but evidence was lacking to hold him for the crime and he was released.

And so the Lovett dynasty seemed to have been wiped out as the Meehan dynasty before it had been broken up. The docks of Shantytown were left free for whoever might risk the job of running them. Whole dynasties had been wiped out trying to rule. The job had always brought fatal consequences. Yet one man was willing to take the risk. His name was Eddie McGuire.

He had been a sort of parasite around the Loaders’ Club, toadying to Meehan and trying to get the fat boss to let him in on a little of the graft. Meehan had barked him out of the club. Now, with Meehan gone, and Lovett and his crowd in their graves, leadership of the dock wallopers looked to McGuire like a sporting proposition. But five other men also wanted the job themselves. McGuire proposed that they all shake dice for the job and the bones went capering across the floor in a deserted pier shanty.

McGuire won the game but not the Loaders’ Club. His body was found just outside the pier shanty with five bullets in it — five different-sized bullets from five different guns!

On this occasion a large bunch of red roses found their way to Lovett’s grave. The card attached to them bore this brief message:

For a time no man ventured to claim the empty high-backed throne in the Loaders’ Club. Not only had the job spelled death for every man who had tried to claim it, but altered conditions in the world of commerce and a great crash on Wall Street had greatly reduced the amount of work on the docks. The rich pickings which. Dinny Meehan had gathered were no more. Only a handful of dock wallopers could find work. Still, however, there was an attraction in the job for one man — Frank Martin, now known to his friends as Matty the Smart, second husband of Anna.

A week before Christmas, 1931, Martin was on his way to the old green-fronted Loaders’ Club when two bullets were winged at him. Both took effect, one in his chest, the other in his right temple. He was carried to a hospital. Soon Anna Lovett Martin was at his bedside.

“Matt, you ought to tell who shot you,” she pleaded.

“If I knew I wouldn’t tell you,” he snarled. Something had turned him against the woman he had fought with Wild Bill to possess.

Martin never told who shot him, and Anna was in widow’s weeds again; during the night, Frank Martin — Matty The Smart — had paid the price many another ambitious man had paid to gain the Loaders’ Club throne.

Again Wild Bill’s hillside grave bloomed with a bouquet of fresh and fragrant posies with a little card:

Martin was gone. Only one man remained of the original crew of roof gypsies whom Bill Lovett had met years before on a rooftop and had welded into the nucleus for his infamous White Hands. The sole survivor was Fiddler Byrnes. But he was safe from the guns of the unknown assassins who, on the one hand were killing off Lovett’s old enemies, and on the other decorating his grave each time an enemy fell. Byrnes was languishing in prison. But now, with all the old Lovett crowd gone, he asked for a parole.

It is September 19, 1932, a clear, brisk Fall day. There is peace along the docks of Shantytown and Alphonse Capone is under lock and key in Atlanta Federal prison for cheating the government out of his ill-gotten income tax. Anna Lonergan still wears her weeds of widowhood. On the hillside grave in which Wild Bill rests no fresh flowers have appeared since Martin went the way of others who hated Lovett.

In a score of police stations scattered throughout New York City the fingers of teletypes are clicking out this message:

It is a long time since the name of Fiddler Frank Byrnes has been on the tongues of men in Brooklyn.

He was safe in prison, but not forgotten.

Overnight someone paid another stealthy visit to the grave of Wild Bill. There is a bunch of fresh red roses on the lawn-covered mound... and a little card:

Fiddler Byrnes was choked to death, according to the code of outlaw men. It was with his tongue that he betrayed Wild Bill Lovett into the hands of the police for the first time and gave impetus to Bill’s plunging descent from a mild-mannered, religiously inclined youth who couldn’t bear to see a fly swatted, to a ruthless muscle-man who killed and directed killers in a lust for power which grew out of an insensate hate for two men who had taunted him about his white hands, his puny body. Though he is nearly a decade in the grave, the muscle he built still possesses its ferocious quality. Men still kill in his name. Men still kill in memory of Wild Bill Lovett.