putting it on. I don’t even smell liquor on his breath.”
Lovett turned to Foley.
“You dirty double-crossing bastard,” he snarled. “Do you think you can fool me, you scumbag? You’re not drunk. I don’t smell any alcohol on your breath. You’re putting on an act for a reason. Now, come out with it—you set up Denny, didn’t you?”
Suddenly Foley was wide awake.
“Bill, you’re crazy,” he protested. “How can you think of such a thing?”
Lovett grabbed Foley by the lapels of his jacket and shook him.
“Listen, you punk,” Lovett screamed, “I know you’re the Judas. I know all about your romance with Willie Altierri’s sister!”
Foley extricated himself from Lovett’s grip and slid to the floor. A moment later he struggled to his knees.
“Bill, you got to believe me,” he pleaded. “I swear to you on everything that’s holy I had nothing to do with Denny’s killing.”
“I don’t believe you,” Lovett growled. “But I’m going to give you a chance to get away. If you can make it, you’re a free man. Now, haul your ass out—fast!”
Foley fled through the warehouse and bolted out the door. He must have believed he was on his way to freedom as he raced down the pier toward the street. Then he spotted Pug McCarthy, one of the White Hand’s executioners. His bouncy steps leadened and he froze.
“Easy, Pug,” Foley pleaded as he faced the menacing twin barrels of McCarthy’s .12-gauge shotgun. “Bill just told me to take off…I’m in the clear…”
There was a deafening explosion. The pellets ripped into Foley’s face so that even the medical examiner couldn’t rely on the victim’s dental records to help in the identification of the body. The only way they were able to figure out that the corpse was Foley’s was from the tattoo of a swan that had been etched on his right calf when he was in the navy during World War I.
For Frankie Yale, the superbly planned execution of Denny Meehan had only one flaw. The April Fool’s postcard he had sent to the White Hand leader apparently had been delayed in the mail. It didn’t get into the postal carrier’s bag until late in the morning of April 1st.
By then, word was out that Danny Meehan had been killed. So when the postman, Benvenuto Itaglia, reached Denny’s apartment, he was very aware that Meehan was dead. Itaglia looked at the postcard, read its message, “Buona sera, signore,” and decided not to deliver it.
Itaglia was very superstitious about bringing greetings to any house where there was a death. He decided to do what he always did in such cases—destroy the postcard.
And that left Frankie Yale completely clear with the authorities. Had the postcard been delivered, the history of the five-year Ginzo-Mick War might have been far different. And far shorter.
His hatred for Danny Meehan was so passionate that Frankie Yale had written the April Fool’s card himself. And if it had been delivered to Meehan’s mailbox after his murder, police could have easily identified Yale’s handwriting, since he was suspected of setting up the killing.
But when Benvenuto Itaglia destroyed Yale’s postcard, he obliterated the only evidence against Frankie Yale. So the murder of Denny Meehan was fated to remain one of New York’s biggest underworld mysteries in the years that followed.
When Wild Bill Lovett was crowned overlord of the White Hand gang’s empire on the Gowanus dock that early April day in 1920, the Roaring Twenties had just begun their riotous, raucous ascendancy.
Yet his predecessor, Denny Meehan, had not even begun to hone the mob’s greedy claws for a piece of the action in the lucrative new racket foaled by the Volstead Act, which for the fourteen years of its loosely enforced existence was more popularly known as Prohibition.
There are historians of that underworld era who are convinced Meehan was so thick-headed and deficient in imagination that, had he lived, the Irish mobsters probably never would have ventured into the Klondike spawned by the bootleg booze business; they might have been content to keep their franchises on the waterfront extortion, loan-shark, and hijacking rackets, while letting others in the underworld mine the rich nuggets bubbling up from the sea of illegal hootch that was inundating America.
Not since the abolition of slavery in the middle of the nineteenth century had any issue been so widely debated, so bitterly contested, or pursued with so much determination and idealism as Prohibition. The ban against liquor became the law of the land on January 16, 1920.
In the ten weeks between the beginning of Prohibition and the demise of Denny Meehan, the man who did Denny in had already demonstrated the alertness and innovativeness that a mob leader must possess to stay up front. No sooner had the last drink been served in Brooklyn on January 16th than Frankie Yale, inordinately endowed with the sense of when to retool for change, led his Black Hand troops almost overnight into bootlegging.
Although Prohibition hit the whole of America with stunning force, some citizens, alert to the forthcoming ban, had prepared for it. In Brooklyn, as elsewhere, many liquor lovers—and opportunists—readied themselves for the cut-off of supplies by building their own distilleries.
Stills sprang up in cellars of private homes, in warehouses, in garages. But the distillation of hootch was a time-consuming, often risky venture. Some underworld groups of no particular significance in Brooklyn undertook the manufacture of illicit booze for sale to speakeasies and private consumers, but Frankie Yale disdained the idea. Aware of the bother and dangers of operating a still, Frankie preferred to leave the brewing to others and stick to a sophisticated, trouble-free bootlegging operation. That was why he decided the Black Hand would only peddle booze.
To start, Frankie sent out about thirty members of his mob in the roles of “salesmen” to solicit business from the hundreds of saloons condemned by the new law to sell drinks containing no more than one-half of one percent alcohol—which meant only the weakest-tasting. Every hair tonic had a higher alcohol content in those days.
The orders poured in. And Yale, flushed by the initial success of his sales force, searched for a source that could supply him with the large quantities of alky being demanded in his territory. He found a willing supplier in Detroit: the Purple Gang. The Michigan mob had begun the manufacture of hootch on a grand scale and was marketing a whiskey that was generally regarded as the best illicit booze produced in the United States. Connoisseurs of that era who sampled the product say the legitimate pre-Prohibition whiskey was virtually indistinguishable from the contents of the bottles shipped by the Purple Gang with their fraudulent labels: Old Granddad.
Yale’s coup with the Michigan mob and his ability to supply Brooklyn’s speakeasies with that hootch was the envy of Wild Bill Lovett who, unlike his predecessor, had a full awareness of the great potential in bootlegging.
Despite the late start, Lovett was unable to establish a quick, big market of his own in bootlegging. Many of the old gin mills in South Brooklyn were operated by sons of the
