Gang Pulp

The Gangster never wins. In the long run, he is caught, either by the law, or by another Gangster — and his end is swift, sudden and terrible. This department is a resume of the news of the Underworld to-day, taken from the leading newspapers of the country, and as you read it over, one fact will strike you about each story: The Gangster never dies of old age!

A Department Gathered from the News

The fight for the leader’s seat over the Dock Gang, in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, has long been a much coveted position, although a dangerous one. The fight for the control of dock loading privileges has cost many a man his life. Among the ranks was the famous old racketeer Wild Bill Lovett, who was the first leader.

Red Donnelly was an old hand in the game. He was fifty years old, which is pretty old for a gangster, and he had old-fashioned ways, which didn’t please some of the new members of his gang. They wanted him to go in for liquor and dope running — a much better paying racket.

But Red refused. He was satisfied with the stevedore racket, and he could control it entirely, so why butt in on booze and junk peddling, when he would have to share with every other gang leader in Brooklyn?

Red began to hear rumors floating around with the wash of the water against the slimy piles that unless he got a bit more modern, his gang wanted a new boss. And everyone knows what happens to the old boss when a new one steps in! But that didn’t bother Donnelly. He just laughed; a short contemptuous laugh. He was used to this sort of thing. Held five times for murder, and he laughed himself out of the court house.

Things were quiet for a while after that, with only one or two minor shootings along the waterfront. But then one night, while Red was watching the stevedore at work, a man came up to him and said:

“You’re wanted down on the pier, in the checker’s booth.”

With a gruff “Okey,” Red walked down the pier towards the booth.

The workers, who were left on the dock, saw him enter the booth; almost at once they heard two shots.

Quickly dropping their work, they ran toward the booth, grabbing anything they could use for weapons. When they got to the booth, they found Red sprawled across the sill, with his head sprayed full of lead. Blood was slowly seeping into his hair, turning the grey back to the flaming red color it once used to be.

That left the gang without a leader. Naturally, there were plenty who wanted the seat, but there’s a difference between wanting it, and getting it. Who was going to get it?

Jimmy Murray, old timer, and former lieutenant of Wild Bill Lovett, finished a ten year rap the other day. He was a high man in the gang when it first started, and there was never a doubt in his mind that he would be the leader now that Red was out. So he stepped in.

This didn’t please the gang any too much, because Murray, like Red Donnelly, refused to peddle dope and booze. And he had another quarrel with the gang; they had neglected to keep him supplied with his cigarette and chewing gum money while he was in stir.

They were all sitting together in the Dock Loaders Rest Room. Murray got up to lay out the plans for the gang in the future. He said he would not only take over his old leadership in the Smoky Hollow district, which is the waterfront extending from Joralemon Street south to the Erie Basin, but also would step into Red’s place as controller of the dock area from Joralemon Street north to Dock Street.

Six shots cracked out, glass was broken, chairs and tables were overturned, and about a dozen men dashed into the street and scattered in various directions.

When the bulls arrived, the Dock Loaders Rest Room was in darkness, the windows shattered, as a cold wind sweeping through the room. One of the flatties put on his flash, and lying on the floor, mixed up with chairs and overturned tables, was Jimmy Murray, shot through the head, but still alive. The radio was still playing. One of the cops turned it off, and began to question Murray, trying to find out who shot him. But Jimmy just shook his head.

Later on, a priest was called in to give Murray the last rites. The priest tried as hard as he could to get Murray to say something about his killers, but Jimmy only shook his head.

Later on, the police rounded up nine men of the gang, some of whom had been held in the Red Donnelly murder.

“Can’t you make it sooner, Judge?” sneered the Jersey Kid, with a hard laugh.

There had been a long silence after the jury had risen and given the verdict of “Guilty.”

The Kid’s three pals took their death notice without a word.

Then the quiet was broken by the screams of the women relatives and the friends of the condemned men. Order was finally restored, and the judge, pale with suppressed rage immediately denied the customary plea for a new trial.

The jury had deliberated for six hours before finding the four men guilty of first degree murder. The men had held up a motor bus garage on October 1928, and killed the cashier. The men, admitting they were guilty, pled that they had not intended to kill the cashier, but that the gun had gone off accidentally. Then they said that before leaving the garage, they telephoned for an ambulance for the wounded man, thus showing that they had not intended to harm him.

The other day, over in East Orange, a kid, dressed up to the hilt with derby, spats, and a carefully folded muffler, sauntered into a filling station, and calmly lit a cigarette. He sure was a cool customer! That is, he looked cool enough, but his voice shook like the base of a Tommy when he spoke.

“High as they’ll go!” he ordered.

A grin spread over his face when he saw how easy it was. The proprietor offered neither fight nor chin music. He simply stepped to the nearest exit, hands higher than he ever thought he could lift them and stood there.

The kid walked over to the cash register, and removed some twenty iron men with a deft scoop.

At that moment a car drove up to the filling station, and a woman blew her horn. The kid looked out, and grinned when he saw who it was.

“Only a broad.” Then he turned, to face Patrolman Thomas Carrigan who had just sauntered in. The kid backed and filled for a moment, but the cop was just as surprised as the kid was, as he had just come in for a chat with his friend the proprietor. He wasn’t used to seeing his friend scratching the ceiling, but then, in these days of fads, you never can tell from one hour to another what the latest wrinkle in reducing will be. He was just about to ask what it was all about when the kid said:

“You play that game, too!”

Then the kid ran out, tipped his derby to the lady, and got into her car.

“Sorry to put you out like this, madam, but I must ask you to start the car at once!”

The woman gave him one look, and let out a scream. Then she bolted.

The kid moved over to the driver’s seat, and started the car, but before it moved two feet, Patrolman Walter Laird, who was on duty on the corner, ran up and smashed his fist into the window of the car, breaking the glass. He saw the youngster tugging for his gat, his derby slightly askew, his face dead white over his natty muffler. Before the kid could draw, Laird fired six shots. The kid slumped over the wheel, blood pouring over his muffler, his derby falling back on his shoulders.

As far as the police could learn, it was the kid’s, Lawrence Russel by name, first job. He had done two jobs in one: his first and his last.

“Put those two men in the same cell for five minutes and the state would only have one man to kill to-night,” said a keeper the day before they were executed. The two men were consumed by a deadly hatred for each other — more deadly than their fear of the chair. For weeks they had blamed each other for the murder of Sorro Graziano and his wife — the crime for which they both died.

Plaia was the first to go to death. He swaggered to the chair, and died smiling, his cigarette still smoking on the floor beside him.

Scalfoni was the next. As he walked over to the chair he asked for a towel.

“The least you could do would be to give me a clean chair!”

To the amazement of the witnesses, he began to dust off the death-chair with a look of disgust on his face, as if the idea of sitting on a chair that Plaia had sat on nauseated him.

“Pardon me.” He swept the room with his eyes, pointing at each of the witnesses; then slowly shook his head.

The Grey Ghost, the fastest rum runner between Canada and Cleveland, which streaked back and forth across Lake Erie, carrying fortunes for her owners in expensive liquor, was caught at last.

But it wasn’t the law this time.

Gripped fast in a tortuous ice jam off Pelee Island lies the low, streamlined craft, with a dead man sitting stiff and straight at her wheel, staring ahead into the whirling snow.

Paddy King was a king all right. He was boss of a large mob, who played as many games as the weeks had days, and then some. Booze and dope peddler, burglar, gambler and hold-up man were some of his pastimes. But he laughed his scornful laugh once too often.

On December third he was found in a dusty dismantled gambling house on the second floor of a building which recently housed the Club Royale.

The plaster of the walls was spattered with holes from bullets. Empty shells were strewn on the floor, and Paddy’s revolver lay by his clenched hand, two chambers empty.

The tailor’s mark on his coat first balked identification. Then the police learned that he was Paddy King, a name that had marked up the police blotters many a time. He was the brother-in-law of Frank and Peter Gusenberg, two brothers murdered with five others of the Bugs Moran push in the gang massacre last February. Paddy was wearing Peter’s coat.

Paddy himself was held at the time of the St. Valentine’s day shoot-up but he was released. Also he had been held for a series of theater holdups, but in each case was released.

“A killing a day” is the motto of the Chicago Underworld. If a day should pass without a killing they would feel that their manhood was at stake; that the rest of the underworld, from Frisco to Hell’s Kitchen would think of them as milch cows.

On February second Joseph Cada, a twenty-nine year old racketeer, was taken for a ride. Cada was shot to death at the wheel of his high powered sedan by two companions, who then stopped the car, got out, dusted themselves off, and ambled leisurely away, chatting.

Early Thursday morning Barney J. Mitchell, treasurer of the Checker Cab Company, and his driver, were shot to death not many blocks from where Cada met his death.

On Saturday, a stool pigeon, named Julius Rosenheim, was shot and killed because someone knew that he knew something about someone. And a lot less than that is needed for a man to die in the underworld.

Black Tony lived at a fashionable uptown hotel in San Francisco. He dressed about as well as a man can be dressed; he went from party to party, and had about as good a time as a man could have.

But Tony, whose real name is Antonio Parmagini, did a great deal of telephoning, and the telephone company notified the police that in the course of two months, three hundred and sixty seven calls were made to the same address — and the company seemed to know a great deal about that particular address.

And dope had been coming in as easily as it ever did. This is the way it works. Practically all the opium that comes into the country, enters along the Pacific coast. It comes in mainly at the ports of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and it is sent from Macao, a Portuguese possession near Hong Kong.

Through agents, the big dealer (in this case Black Tony) sells the dope to inland towns in California. The consignments are shipped up and down the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys before they reach San Francisco again for distribution.

Black Tony has the control of all the coast, except for the section around Los Angeles and Hollywood. This is held by a man named Murphy.

Well, there were many men who wanted Tony’s job. Naturally it paid good money. But there were few who had the nerve to try for it, much less work it when they got it.

However, there was one man who did try. He thought up scheme after scheme, but Tony was with him every trick, and one ahead at that. And he didn’t even have this man put on the spot, such was his feeling for the feeble gestures the man was making for Tony’s throne. He just laughed.

When the man finally saw that it was hopeless, he gave up. But he hadn’t been planning against Tony without picking up one or two little things — and these items he took to the police.

This information, coupled with Tony’s telephone bill and a slick Eastern dick soon had Tony in the clutches of the law.

Since Tony’s incarceration, there has been what amounts to a dope famine in California, and as one tenth of the dope users in the United States are Californians, this is quite a step in the progress of dope elimination.