1923
NEW YORK
Oh Boy took over the day-to-day running of the shooting gallery. Spence and I stole cars. We used Mother Moon’s connections with the police to figure out which neighborhoods were safe and worked out payoffs with beat cops, desk sergeants, and party bosses. They told us which cars were good for us to take. I assumed that the owners had done something to piss them off, but I never really knew.
As Lansky and Lucania’s booze business prospered, they accepted every car and truck Spence and I could provide. Things changed in the fall of 1923. We’d just brought in another Ford half-ton and found Lansky, Siegel, and Lucania looking grim in the garage. Charlie brightened when he saw us. “Jimmy, Walter, you come at the right time. Meyer, what do you think, should we let them in on this deal?”
That was Charlie Lucky, always trying to charm you.
Meyer said, “No need for the soft soap. This is the situation, boys. We know that two trucks full of scotch will be leaving Atlantic City late tonight heading for Philly. We’re going to take them.”
Lucky muttered, “We gotta.”
Lansky glared at him. “Yeah, because of Mr. Bigshot here, we’re low on cash and product.”
I knew what he was talking about. Charlie was in hot water with a lot of people, including the high-society golf buddies he’d been hanging out with. Since he became one of the city’s better-known bootleggers, he was a popular guy for the muckety-mucks to be seen with. But he was also one of the city’s better-known dope dealers, and the cops had caught him with a dozen packs of heroin. To keep his ass out of jail, Charlie made a deal. He told them where Chink Sherman’s stash was hidden, in a closet in a Mulberry Street basement. This turned into a double good move. The cops let him go while he screwed his biggest competitor. But when word got out about the double-cross, he had to buy two hundred ringside tickets at top dollar for the Dempsey-Firpo fight, and he passed them out to anybody who could help rebuild his reputation.
“Hey, you agreed we had to do it,” he protested now, unembarrassed, still smiling. “And those tickets worked, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, they did, and now Charlie’s so popular that both Masseria and Maranzano want him.”
Joe “The Boss” Masseria, the guy I’d seen dodging bullets years before, and Salvatore Maranzano both wanted to be the boss of all the Italians in New York. They’d been fighting each other for years and both of them wanted Charlie and his booze business as part of their operation. He had held them off so far, but they wouldn’t wait any longer.
“So now he’s got both goddamn old bastards mad at us,” Lansky complained, “and it’s no coincidence that three of our liquor shipments were hijacked in New Jersey.”
“Four,” said Charlie.
“Four shipments of scotch,” Lansky repeated. “And two of our warehouses were raided by the goddamn feds. We need more whiskey right away.”
“And we know where to get it. It’s coming in to Atlantic City tonight.”
They were like an old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences. Lansky said they already paid two thousand dollars for the route that two trucks would take to Philadelphia, where the booze would be cut. He and Charlie meant to knock over the shipment before it got there.
Spence piped up, “I know Philly.”
Lansky looked doubtful. “You know the best roads, both to Atlantic City and to Philadelphia?”
Spence said he did. So Lansky handed over a hand-drawn map that showed an unnamed road that ran between Washington Avenue and Cape May Avenue, on the way to Egg Harbor City.
He gave me a notepad, the first one I ever had, actually, and said, “Drive down there. Write down the landmarks and turns, and find a good place where we can stop the trucks. We’ll be taking three cars, and we have to drive the trucks back here. I don’t want anybody getting lost.”
Lansky gave Spence the keys to a Dodge roadster. We took the Weehawken Ferry into Jersey and he made two wrong turns right away. As Spence got us straightened out, I figured what he was up to and said, “You don’t know how to get to Atlantic City.”
“Sure I do,” Spence said. “You go south. There’s signs everywhere. We’ll figure it out. You just write it down and we’ll be fine.” That was Spence for you, never more confident than when he didn’t know a damn thing about what he was doing. At least, that’s the way he was then.
As it turned out, he was right . . . well, right enough, anyway. There were signs to Atlantic City, but everything changed once we were past Newark. It was the first time I had crossed the Hudson River. The air was hot, still, and dusty, and it looked to me like all of New Jersey was flat and empty. We drove through little towns—West Keyport, Wickatunk Station, Tuckerton—with mostly empty fields between them. I couldn’t imagine what people did there. I wrote down careful directions, remembering that we’d be driving back at night, assuming Lansky invited us along. “Go around horse fountain in middle of town square and straight,” I noted. And then, “Turn hard left 1/4 mile past New Gretna church.”
Not counting all the wrong turns and time spent backtracking, it took us almost four hours, mostly on unpaved roads, to find the road on Lansky’s map. It was marked with a hand-painted wooden sign that read EGG HARBOR CITY—3 MILES, and it wasn’t much more than two rutted tracks through a sandy pine forest, so narrow that when two cars approached each other, you had to slow down and pull to the right.
We drove it all the way, then I told Spence to turn around and go back the way we’d just come. That pissed him off. “The hell you say. It’s hot, we’ve seen what Lansky wanted us to see. It’ll add another goddamn hour to the trip back.”
“Look, we need to find exactly the right spot. I think I saw it, but we’ve got to be sure and we’ve got to mark it. We can’t screw this up, Spence, it could be our big break.”
He grumbled, but he knew I was right and turned the Dodge around.
Five hours later, with wheels still turning in our heads, we made it back to Lansky’s garage. Lucky and Siegel were still there, with a bunch of other guys I didn’t know at the time. One was the flaming needledick Vincent Coll, and another was his watery-shit friend, Sammy Spats Spatola. Coll was a redhead and Spatola had greasy black hair. Except for that, they could’ve been brothers, both tall, lanky, and rough-featured.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened but as we were walking past them, I bumped into Spatola and he said something like, “Watch where you’re going, shorty,” and slapped my hat off. Instead of ignoring him, or telling him to fuck off like I should’ve done, I got mad and belted him in the kisser with my knucks. He fell flat on his ass, and I was about to split his head open when Coll laid into me. Then Spence waded in and went off on Coll and we all mixed it up until Siegel and Lansky broke things up. They didn’t want anybody fighting there with a big deal in the works. When we finally shook hands as Lansky demanded, we knew it didn’t mean a damn thing.
Lansky told me to show him what we’d found. I opened the notebook and explained how the road turned at this one place. “They won’t be able to see us, and it won’t be hard to make them stop.”
Lansky thought it over for a second and said, “Do you want to be in on this?”
Spence and I said yes together.
“We could use another gun. Know anybody who’d like to earn half a yard?”
“How about Oh Boy? He knows how to shoot. He’ll be scared but he won’t run.”
“All right. Be here at nine tonight. Bring masks.”
“You got pieces or should we bring our own?”
“We got guns.”
That night, Spence took a short-barreled pump, and I gave Oh Boy a sawed-off double-barreled like the one he carried at the shooting gallery. He was sweating when he took it. I said, “Don’t worry. This’ll be easy.”
Oh Boy didn’t believe me for a second.
Around ten o’clock, Lansky said to Siegel, “OK, these guys”—he jerked a thumb toward Spence and me—“know where we’re going. Stay close but not so close that any cops should think we’re together. Don’t speed. Don’t give them any reason to look at us.”
We loaded guns, bats, clubs, and flashlights into the trunks of our cars and left. I remember how I could hardly contain my excitement during that second drive through Jersey. This was the greatest thing I’d ever done. At least, I hoped it would be. I was thrilled to be in on it and scared that I’d screw up.
It took three hours, with no wrong turns this time, to get to the place I’d marked with two branches that I’d leaned against the base of a tree in an X shape.
The autumn night was windy, thick with the smell of pine. There was some nervous laughter when we got out of the cars, and several guys went straight into the woods to piss, loud and long.
Lansky handed me a flashlight and said, “OK, kid, show me.”
I shined the light on the dogleg turn in front of us, where the sandy road curved around a briar thicket.
“They’ll be coming the other way and they’ve got to slow down for this. If we cut down a tree or a big branch and put it across the road, they’ll stop to move it. They won’t try to drive around it.”
Lansky nodded. “Yeah, that’s smart. But pull off more of these little branches and put them in the road on the other side of the curve, like they got blown down by the wind. Then they won’t think it’s a trap.”
He pulled out a pocket watch and said, “We’ve got time, but be fast anyway.”
I got sticky sap all over my hands pulling the boughs off and I was still trying to rub it off an hour later. Oh Boy, Spence, and I stayed beside the Dodge on one side of the road. One of the touring cars, the one with Coll and Spatola, was parked on the other side, angled toward the dogleg. Lansky’s car stood in the middle of the road, pointed at the curve. Oh Boy was shivering, he was that scared. So was I, truth be told. Spence’s hands were steady as he lit a tailor-made cigarette.
Oh Boy said, “I guess you saw worse stuff in the war.”
“Yeah.” Spence spit a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. “You know, it’s funny, but the reason I met you guys is because I thought it’d help me over there to know how to shoot a pistol. Well, that was wrong. You can be the best shot in the world and it won’t do you a damn bit of good when they’re shooting cannon shells and mustard gas at you. Compared to that, this’ll be easy as pie.”
Oh Boy muttered, “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.” Then we saw a flicker of headlights from the oncoming trucks and heard the groaning engines.
I said to Oh Boy, “Just stay here. When the shooting starts, point the gun up and pull the trigger.”
He nodded, still shivering.
The sound of approaching engines became louder, with the lights brightening behind the briars as the trucks entered the turn. Lansky had ordered everyone to stay still until he hit his lights and fired the first shot. Spence tapped me on the arm and said, “Put on your mask.”
I hurriedly pulled the bandana over my nose and it stuck to my sweaty skin. I tried to force my breathing and heartbeat to normal and ordered myself not to act too fast. Make every movement smooth. See what you’re shooting at. Don’t hurry, don’t hesitate.
Then we saw the first truck, a dark mass behind the headlights, as it rounded the turn and stopped. The lights of the second truck were behind it.
Lansky waited until the second vehicle came into view and skidded on the sand, nearly rear-ending the first as it stopped. The driver and his guard jumped out. Then somebody yelled, and fired a shot, and started running. It sounded like Siegel. Lansky hit his car’s lights, and everything went crazy.
It was too dark to see where to shoot. I rested the pistol on the hood of our Dodge, trying to find something to aim at. I got a moving figure in my sights, fired, and missed. To my left, I could hear the sharp crack of pistols and the deeper boom of shotguns, and I caught muzzle flashes in the corner of my eye. I sensed movement close by and realized that Spence was running across the road where the other guys were. Without thinking about what I was doing, I edged around to the front of the Dodge and stepped forward slowly. I wanted to run but knew that was wrong. I couldn’t run and shoot with any accuracy. I held my pistol in both hands as I watched guys fighting by the glare of headlights.
Clubs and bats were swinging, with men from the trucks on the ground as three others ran from the back. They had shotguns and clubs. A man in a derby raised his club, and I shot him in the chest. He crumpled to the ground. Still without thinking, I shot the guy behind him.
But he did not fall. Even as his white shirt turned red, he aimed his pistol at me. A full load of buckshot knocked him off his feet. He disappeared in the harsh light and shadows. Then Oh Boy stood by my right shoulder, and Siegel was showing why they called him Bugsy, going bat-shit crazy with fists and a short club.
As we got closer, the scene became clearer. There were half a dozen guys on the ground, some sprawled, others kneeling. Men still standing all wore masks. Except for Oh Boy. I grabbed his bandana and pulled it over his face. But he pushed it down and turned away to heave.
We were on the road when I sensed something beside me and turned to see Spats Spatola leveling a nickel-plated automatic at my face, and in the same moment, Spence jumped between us and smashed the butt of his shotgun into Spatola’s jaw. The greasy-headed bastard went down like a tenpin. Spence turned and sprinted toward the trucks.
By then, things began to settle down. Lansky made sure everyone on our side was accounted for. None of our guys was seriously hurt, but two of the others were dead or dying and the rest were bleeding. I couldn’t tell if the fellow in the derby I had shot was dead. There weren’t any derbies on the ground. I probably should’ve been more upset than I was.
Spence climbed into the cab of the closest truck and yelled, “This one’s ready to go!” He started the engine and was the first one to leave. Oh Boy and I followed in the Dodge.
We rode in silence for a long time as the adrenaline rush settled down. I savored the night, the wild wind blowing in through the open windows, the feel of the car on the road. I’d wanted to drive it ever since we saw it in Lansky’s garage.
Oh Boy said, “This was bad, Jimmy. I feel sick.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I didn’t do what you said. After Spence ran off, I followed you. When you shot that guy, I shot the guy behind him. I didn’t mean to do it, I swear, but I did. I think I’m gonna puke again.”
“You’re not gonna puke. Spence was looking out for us. I think he figured that Coll and Spatola would maybe shoot the wrong guys in the dark, he made sure they didn’t hit us. I owe him one, and I guess I owe you, too. Thanks, man.”
In the dim light, I could see Oh Boy smiling weakly as he sat up a little straighter.
After that night, things changed. Lansky and Lucania knew they could trust us. Spence and I started delivering booze to speaks and parties, and we made pickups from the boats from time to time. Then when they partnered up with Longy Zwillman, we worked for him, too. In the years that followed, we all made a lot of money.