He hopped off the crate and scampered into his office ahead of Shea and Walsh. Sullivan always tried to be sitting behind his desk when he encountered Meehan’s collectors. It gave him a feeling of superiority.
“Hi, Jim,” greeted Shea as he entered the office.
“Yeah,” Sullivan snorted, opening the lap drawer of his desk.
Wordlessly, he handed the envelope with the $1500—in one-hundred-dollar bills—to Shea.
“No need to count it,” Shea said, his thin lips curling up to his ears in an ingratiating smile. “The amount is always right.”
Sullivan had no doubt that Shea and Walsh knew that neither was half the man he was and that without those guns they carried they’d be nothing. He could crush the two bums with his hands, even with their rods on them. But he had no intention of going out of his way to make trouble with the men who represented the White Hand gang; it could be ruinous for his company.
“That’s it, eh, fellas,” Jimmy said. He lifted himself from his chair behind the desk.
“Yeah, that’s it,” echoed Walsh. “See ya next week, okay?”
“Okay,” Sullivan said deadpan as he strode out of the office.
An hour and a half later Jimmy Sullivan was still directing the unloading of the Italian freighter when he spotted a black Model-T Ford pulling up to the dock. He concentrated his gaze on the three husky men who climbed out of the car and strolled toward him.
“You run the dock?” asked the one with blond hair neatly combed back from his narrow forehead. He had large, cold blue eyes and thin lips that twisted into a mean-looking smile when he spoke.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Jimmy demanded, annoyed at the interruption.
“I’m Willie,” the answer came.
A squat five-foot-seven, 170-pounder, Willie “Two-Knife” Altierri carried the secret of where perhaps as many as thirty bodies were buried. None were in cemeteries. The final resting places were in weed-covered culverts, hastily-dug shallow graves along the shoulders of deserted highways, and under the concrete poured for newly-built roads. He was responsible for most of them. He was one of Brooklyn’s most feared underworld hit men.
Willie Altierri’s specialty was performed with two slivers of steel, never less than six inches long. He carried them in leather scabbards strapped to his waist by a thin leather belt. The knives were as much a part of Willie’s body as any of his vital organs. Altierri couldn’t function without the knives; it felt unnatural not to have the knives on him. He wore them when he slept.
There were times when Willie had to part with one of his knives: that was when, inadvertently or otherwise, he had plunged the blade so deeply into his victim that he couldn’t pull it out. His technique had much to do with the high replacement rate for the tools of his trade. Willie invariably went for the heart and lungs, but he was seldom satisfied to merely stick the knife in and yank it out. He had a compulsion to twist the handle while the blade was still in his prey because it gave him special delight inflicting the horrendous pain that extra turn of the wrist caused his victim to suffer. But that technique very often got the blade caught in the rib cage and no amount of pulling could extricate it. So Willie would have to inter the victim with the knife imbedded in the corpse.
Only once, it was said, did Willie lose both knives in carrying out an assignment for the Black Hand mob. That was when he knocked off Mario “Greaseball” Pignatore, one of the gang’s own. It was a very special rubout because Pignatore was suspected of squealing on the gang to save his own skin.
Detectives from Brooklyn’s Butler Street squad had grabbed him from behind the wheel of a hijacked truck loaded with Fisk whitewall tires being delivered to the Bush Terminal docks for shipment to England. Mario’s release on a piddling $500 bail by Magistrate Thomas Gibson was a dead giveaway that the Greaseball had become a pigeon for the Kings County District Attorney’s office. No hijacker caught as redhanded as Pignatore ever broke away from arraignment from less than $10,000 bail. But that wasn’t the only giveaway that the Greaseball might have become a canary.
One afternoon, one of Frankie Yale’s boys, Joe “Squats” Esposito, who worked inside keeping the books for the Mob, caught sight of Pignatore coming out of the elevator at the County Court Building in downtown Brooklyn. There was only one place that Squats figured Pignatore could have been in that building: the D.A.’s office. Perhaps even the grand jury room.
Mario Pignatore immediately became the very special referral for the honor of extinction which Altierri dispensed so professionally. And this extermination had to stand as an example to all the other members of the Mob. So Willie made it a showcase production. He not only jammed both knives into the Greaseball’s ribs and twisted them; he added a novel and ritualistic touch by breaking the handles off while the blades were still buried in Mario. These were then presented to Frankie Yale as mementoes of that significant execution.
Yale had the handles mounted on a shiny foot-square mahogany board that had been bevelled and made to look like a plaque, and it was hung on the wall of Yale’s garage office at Fourth Avenue and Second Street in the borough’s Red Hook section. A gold nameplate engraved by a local jeweler carried a simple but meaningful message to all who pilgrimaged to Yale’s office on social or business calls:
IN MEMORY OF THE GREASEBALL
The jeweler who performed this engraving, gratuitously of course, was Robert Corn, whose store was on the east side of Columbia Street, between President and Union Streets, in downtown Brooklyn. Outside his store on the sidewalk next to the curb was a fifteen-foot-tall cast iron clock that was a landmark for more than a half century.
It was under this clock that the members of the organized crime gangs conducted their public assemblages for purposes of assigning “hits” or whatever other business had to be dealt with in the protection rackets, bootlegging, and the other illegalities the Mob was engaged in. Standing there beside that sidewalk timepiece many of the roaring, raging episodes of Mob violence were masterminded or hatched by the Mob braintrusts.
“Two-Knife” was never long in getting a replacement when he lost a knife in the line of duty. For the distance between an empty scabbard on Willie’s waist and the next knife that would supplant the one abandoned in a victim’s rib cage was as far away as the truck of his shiny black Model-T Ford. The brown leather suitcase that Willie kept in the back of his car didn’t contain a wardrobe for travel, although he often took out-of-town assignments to Newark, New Jersey, Wilmington, Delaware, or Springfield, Massachusetts, among other the locales.
The suitcase kept his supply of knives near at hand. He never allowed the stock to dwindle to less than a dozen blades. When he ran that low, Atierri would put everything aside and drive to the Bowery in Lower Manhattan, where all the wholesale restaurant and hotel supply houses were situated, and replenish his store with a couple of dozen shiny paring knives used by butchers and chefs.
Jimmy Sullivan knew none of this that Monday afternoon when he first encountered the Black Hand’s chief executioner. When Willie gave his name to the pier superintendent, the impadent Sullivan barked at him, “What the hell do you want with me?”
Joe “Rackets” Capolla and Joe “Big Beef” Polusi flanked Willie in his confrontation with the pier boss. That didn’t seem to faze Sullivan. He made no attempt to size up either the short, broad-shouldered Capolla, who in his mid-thirties already had the look of middle age, or Polusi, whose beefy build on a frame almost six feet tall made him look like the dockworker he’d
