large numbers of them agreed to switch their business to the White Hand suppliers.
Even though the Irish innkeepers were sympathetic to Lovett and his brigade of Irishmen, the hootch the White Hand began to deliver to the bars couldn’t maintain the bond. Scores of saloons stopped buying Lovett’s booze and went back to the Black Hand’s suppliers.
It was easy to understand: the White Hand’s bootleg was of the local variety, brewed in cellars, warehouses, and garages. It had none of the body, bouquet, or potency of the product trucked from Detroit. The drastic loss of clientele grated Lovett until mid-November, when he finally struck upon a course of action destined to have extensive ramifications on the White Hand gang’s simmering feud with the Black Hand.
Thursday night, November 18, 1920. Ten men arrived separately at Prospect Hall on 17th Street and gathered in one of the meeting rooms that Lovett had reserved for the occasion. They were Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan, Danny and Petey Bean, Pug McCarthy, Ash Can Smitty, Jack “Needles” Ferry, Charleston Eddie McFarland, Aaron Harms, and Irish Eyes Duggan. The tenth man was Wild Bill.
“I called you here tonight to tell you about bootlegging,” Lovett rasped. “I have been hearing that we should make our own liquor because the stuff we’re buying is so lousy. But let me tell you that isn’t the way to make a profit. And we can’t get anywhere selling the bathtub booze we’re pushing now…”
Lovett looked at his “sales managers” who’d been supervising the White Hand’s booze peddlers, studying their faces for reaction. What he saw pleased him. “I can see you agree with me,” he smiled. “Now let me tell you what I want to do…”
His next words had the effect of a bombshell.
“We’re going to sell the stuff that the fuckin’ ginzo Yale has been supplying to the speaks.”
There was a stunned silence. Then Lovett detected a derisive murmur.
“All right, I know what you’re thinking—that we can’t buy the Purple’s booze because they won’t deal with us,” Wild Bill speculated. The Detroit mob was predominantly Jewish and they’d sooner pour their Old Grandad into Lake Michigan than sell it to the micks.
“But who’s talking about buying it?” Lovett asked with a meaningful grin. Then some of his “salesmen” began smiling. They had gotten the drift of Wild Bill’s pitch.
“All I’m saying is we’re gonna get involved in something we’re old hands at doing,” he went on. “We’re going to hijack the wops’ liquor, just like we do the stuff that’s going and coming from the docks.”
A wild spontaneous burst of applause and rousing cheers welcomed Lovett’s plans.
“Good,” Wild Bill said, pleased at the quick endorsement. “We start the hits with the next delivery.”
“You mean tonight?” Charleston Eddie asked, pointing to the clock on the meeting hall wall. All were aware that the truck delivering the Black Hand’s liquor always rolled into Yale’s garage on Fourth Avenue and Second Street.
It was now 11:30 p.m., just about the time the shipments arrived. Yale had instructed Detroit never to make deliveries before 11:30 p.m. or after 12:10 a.m. Frankie considered that forty-minute period the safest for hauling the illegal cargo into the garage. Any other time might attract the cop on the beat.
Frankie knew that patrolmen who pounded the pavement in that sector invariably abandoned their posts at 11:30 and shuffled to the Fifth Avenue police station in slow time so they’d get there just a minute or so before midnight. That enabled them to go off duty just as soon as the lieutenant had read their orders to the 12:00-to-8:00 a.m. shift and turned them out. And since it took the flatfoot on the lobster shift about ten minutes to reach the post on Fourth Avenue, the time span between 11:30 and 12:10 was the safest to open the garage doors and let the truck with its cargo in.
Lovett gave McFarland a quick answer.
“No, not tonight,” he said flatly. “We have to do a little planning on how we’re going to pull the caper. Next week is plenty soon enough.”
Shortly before 11:00 p.m. the following Thursday—Thanksgiving—a gray LaSalle sedan pulled out of a small garage on Baltic Street and cruised north. In the car were four men wearing dark lumber jackets and armed with enough artillery to equip a regiment.
Lovett had a desk and phone in that garage, which was a storage depot for the domestically-brewed bootleg hootch and the kegs of beer being supplied by Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer up in the Bronx for distribution in Brooklyn’s speakeasies.
Ten minutes before the LaSalle bearing Petey Bean, Charleston Eddie, Ash Can Smitty, and Needles Ferry left the garage, Lovett had received a call from Irish Eyes Duggan, who was in a speakeasy phone booth on Manhattan’s West Street, where he and Aaron Harms had been staked out in their car near the West Street Ferry to spot the truck from Detroit.
There was no George Washington Bridge, no Lincoln Tunnel, nor such other gateways to or from the West as the New York State Thruway or the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge then. Construction had just begun on the Holland Tunnel, and it was seven years from completion.
While a number of ferry lines were carrying cars, trucks, and commuters across the Hudson in 1920, the principal crossing—because it was the most convenient—for the traffic of the Lincoln Highway was the boats that trudged between Jersey City and Wall Street. So there was no doubt that the truck from Detroit would come by that ferry route.
The truck had no signs to alert Duggan and Harms that it was loaded with the Purple Gang’s liquor. The Michigan license plates were a dead giveaway.
After he phoned Lovett, Duggan hurried out to the car, got in beside Harms, who was behind the wheel, and said, “Bill wants us to be sure and stay on their asses.”
Harms caught up with the truck on Canal Street in less than two minutes. He tailed it over the Manhattan Bridge onto Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, then stalked it until it turned into Fourth Avenue.
Duggan’s and Harms’s roles as bloodhounds came to an end as the gray LaSalle bearing Petey Bean, Charleston Eddie, Ash Can Smitty, and Needles Ferry pulled out from the curb and made a wide sweeping turn just after the truck had passed the stopped car. In a matter of seconds, the car cut in front of the truck, forcing the driver to jam on the brakes to avoid a collision.
Petey Bean and Charleston Eddie leaped out of the sedan with sawed-off shotguns pointed menacingly at the cab of the truck.
“Out! Get the fuck out!” screamed Eddie.
The driver and his helper scampered out of the cab meek as mice.
“Scram!” commanded Eddie. “Get your asses on the run!”
The two men sped up Fourth Avenue.
“Get in there and start driving!” Eddie commanded. Bean climbed into the cab and gave the gas pedal a heavy foot. The truck roared off. He steered it around the corner into Smith Street, then turned into Baltic and drove the rig into the White Hand’s garage. It was a minute before midnight.
It was a considerable haul: $30,000 worth of Prohibition Era Old Granddad. Charleston Eddie was ecstatic as the gang unloaded the cases from the truck.
“Jesus, Bill,
