Gowanus had just expanded its dock operations by taking over the Pier 2 warehouse. The new foreman, Jimmy Sullivan, was a monstrous man with huge forearms etched with gaudy tattoos of exploding bombshells—reminders of his hell as a doughboy in the trenches of the Marne and Belleau Woods during World War I. He was put into the job because he’d given honest sweat as a dockhand for Gowanus since 1902. When he’d come back from two years in the army the company needed a tough thumper to hustle the crews on the new pier. Jimmy was their boy. From his first day on the job, Sullivan showed who was boss. His thick, cracked lips and his squinting blue eyes never smiled. His flat face and the nose busted from countless pier brawls carried a message to the men: they’d better not mess with him.
At forty-eight, Jimmy Sullivan did know what had to be done on the wharf. The respect he commanded from the dockers made him a good man to run Pier 2.
One of his duties as pier superintendent was paying the weekly extortion to Denny Meehan’s White Hand collectors. Shelling out protection money was a way of life on the waterfront. It prevented the wholesale theft of cargo from the company’s warehouses and spared their merchandise-laden trucks from hijackings.
The handful of companies that had balked at coming under Meehan’s thumb were paying through the nose now. Cargoes were constantly pilfered from their piers and their trucks were constantly waylaid in the middle of the night.
Jimmy Sullivan liked everything about his job except handing over the weekly envelope to Meehan’s torpedoes. Although it wasn’t his money, Jimmy felt it was wrong. So did his boss, John O’Hara, the president of Gowanus. Jimmy’s salary as pier superintendent was a respectable $150 a week, fifty percent more than he’d been making as a dock laborer. In a sense, then, the extortion O’Hara was paying to the White Hand gang was money coming out of his pocket—and the dockworkers’.
Jimmy never let on how he felt to Meehan’s ambassadors. Generally he received them in his warehouse office—and always tried to get them out of his sight in as little time as it took to hand over the envelope containing the $1500 in cash which O’Hara sent over early every Monday morning.
Pleasantries, if exchanged, were as short as Jimmy could cut them. He felt like taking Ernie “Skinny” Shea and Wally “The Squint” Walsh, Meehan’s regular collectors, and pulverizing them with his bare hands. He often wondered how two scrawny punks like these could fit into a group with such an awesome reputation as Denny Meehan’s organized mob.
Shea got his nickname for a very apparent reason—he was five-foot-four and weighed in at under 120 pounds. He looked even skinnier: his high cheekbones and hollowed cheeks gave him the appearance of someone who routinely siphoned gasoline out of a car and drank it.
Jimmy Sullivan could swear he never got a glimpse of Wally Walsh’s eyes. His gaunt, pale face didn’t differ much from Shea’s. But it had a distinctive feature: his eyeballs never showed. Even in Sullivan’s drab office, where the forty-watt light bulb couldn’t even make a bat blink, Walsh squinted as though the high-noon sun were blazing into his eyes.
It was eleven o’clock on that Monday morning of January 5, 1920, when Shea and Walsh arrived at Pier 2. Sullivan was standing on a crate which contained religious plaster of Paris statues of St. Anthony shipped from Milan which had just been unloaded from a freighter.
As he shouted orders to the longshoremen to guide the boom lowering cargo from the freighter’s hold, a corner of his eye caught the black LaSalle that had just pulled to a stop outside his office door.
“All right, keep the jig moving,” he shouted. 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