had already cracked open one of the bottles and taken a swig.
“This is great stuff, maybe better than what Old Granddad himself used to make before Prohibition,” he raved.
Lovett yanked the bottle out of Charleston’s hands and sampled its contents himself.
“By Christ, this is fantastic!” he echoed with a racking cough. “This fuckin’ booze can burn a guy’s throat.”
When the truck had been emptied, Lovett directed Needles Ferry and Ash Can Smitty to “dump it.” According to prearranged plan, Ferry and Smitty were to drive the rig to Fourth Avenue and Second Street and abandon it at the curb in front of Yale’s garage. That was Lovett’s idea—the ultimate “kick in the ass to the ginzo bastard.”
Lovett had it all plotted in his mind. He was as much aware as Yale of the foot patrolmen’s habits of goofing off on their last half-hour of duty, and that it took the cop on the next shift some ten minutes to reach his beat after he was turned out at the station house.
Lovett also reasoned that the hijacked truck’s driver and helper would head straight to Frankie Yale’s garage after they’d been bushwhacked by Charleston Eddie and Petey Bean. And after the bad news about the heist had been broken to Yale, there’d be no reason to stick around the garage. Lovett had plotted it ingeniously.
As Charleston and Petey rolled along Fourth Avenue in the empty truck, they kept a sharp eye rivetted on the gray LaSalle cruising some fifty feet ahead of them. Irish Eyes Duggan and Aaron Harms, in the car, were the scouting party. Harms was in the back seat, and his job was to flick a flashlight on through the rear window to let Charleston and Petey know that there were no lights or activity at the garage and it was okay to carry out Wild Bill’s little joke. But if there was no signal from the rear window of the car, Petey was to drive on past the garage and discard the truck wherever it was convenient.
As the LaSalle approached the garage, a light from the rear window flashed on.
“The coast is clear,” Eddie said to Bean. “Let’s dump it.”
Petey gave the steering wheel a slight jerk to the right and braked the truck to a stop directly in front of the garage entrance.
“Scram, Petey,” Charleston rasped as he jumped out of the cab and ran to get into the LaSalle. As Bean followed Charleston into the car, Duggan Hit the accelerator so hard that the car lurched forward for an instant then went dead.
“The fuckin’ car stalled!” Irish Eyes screamed in a rage.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, you asshole?” Charleston thundered. “Don’t you even know how to drive?”
Duggan flicked the ignition key and the motor coughed to a hesitant start.
“Easy does it,” yelled Eddie. “Less choke! Less choke!”
Duggan threw the car into first gear, and this time the car responded to his urging. They were on their way back to tell Bill Lovett that their mission was accomplished.
“Don’t tell me nuthin’. I seen it,” Frankie Yale bellowed at Augie Pisano the next morning. The gang chieftain was now in the burnout stage of his hour-long rage. Sixty minutes ago he had arrived at the garage and seen the empty truck out front, and his fury had hit heights never before witnessed by his associates. He hurled every epithet in the book and then some Yale originals, at his rival.
His lieutenants grieved with Frankie over the lost liquor, but their anguish over the humiliation inflicted on them by the White Handers was far greater.
“Parked the fuckin’ truck outside here,” Yale said for the fifteenth time, his voice now reduced to a mere roar. “Well, I’m gonna fix them micks good. I know what I gotta do.”
He grabbed the phone on his desk and leaned back in his swivel chair. Suddenly he was calm again. His mood was almost mellow as he lifted the receiver and placed it against his ear, waiting for the operator. Several seconds went by.
“Come on, what the hell ya waiting for?” he snapped edgily. “The goddamn telephone people,” he complained, “they charge you an arm and a leg and they don’t give you no service.”
Augie the Wop was sitting in the chair beside Yale’s desk. Two-Knife Altierri was standing with his back to the window overlooking the alley, cleaning his nails with one of his knives. Don Giuseppe Balsamo, who only came to Frankie’s office in dire emergencies, was ensconced in the plush maroon cut-velvet armchair in a corner of the office. The expensive, ornate chair was totally out of place amid the plain, scratched wooden furniture. It had played a dominant role in the decor of Frankie’s living room until his father-in-law had suffered a heart attack and died while sitting in it. Frankie’s wife was superstitious, and she had him remove it from the house. Rather than leave it on the sidewalk for the junkman, Frankie toted the chair to the garage and installed in in his office.
At first he derived sadistic satisfaction out of using the chair as a prop to unnerve his boys. When one of them had sat in it a while, Yale would say, “Hey, how you like that chair? Comfortable?”
Nothing but compliments for the chair. Then after a few minutes Yale would say, “You remember my father-in-law, eh? Well, the poor fella, he died in that chair.”
Some of the Black Hand’s toughest cutthroats squirmed, fidgeted, and looked around for any excuse to evacuate the chair.
“Oh, you back from lunch so soon?” Frankie said sarcastically when the operator finally came on the line and asked for the number.
“I wanna talk to somebody in Chicago,” Yale continued, “but I want to ask you which is quicker, if I take the train or if I use the phone?”
Yale generated a crescendo of laughter in his office, but only silence came through the receiver. He gave the operator the number and waited with characteristic impatience for the two minutes or so it took to route the call. Finally he said quietly, “This is Frankie Yale in Brooklyn. Is the big guy there?”
Another wait. Then, “Hello, Al, it’s good to hear your voice. How’s your mama and the rest of the family?” Yale’s voice was mellow, undeniably humble. He was talking with an old friend from earlier Brooklyn days who had followed Horace Greeley’s advice and gone west and who was now well on his way to becoming the nation’s most feared underworld boss.
To what did he owe the pleasure of this call from Frankie Yale, Big Al wanted to know. Frankie told him in the briefest terms, what had happened the night before. Yale was aware that Scarface Al was a man of few words and demanded that others follow his example. He had no patience for windy explanations.
Yale got to the point. He wanted to know if Capone could spare a couple of his executioners from their busy Chicago practices to perform a little extracurricular work in Brooklyn.
No sweat, Big Al told his old buddy. He’d put two of his best triggermen aboard the next Twentieth Century Limited leaving Chicago. These were, he said, two Sicilians from Cicero named Albert Anselmi and John Scalise. These Sicilians never played out-of-town engagements for anything less than $15,000 apiece.
“But, good brother,” Yale protested in his mildest, most polite voice. “Cleveland charged only ten big ones for the compito on Denny Mee—”
Capone cut off
