Monk Eastman was the bravest and most violent fellow I ever met. Oh, you can talk about your Legs Diamond and the Dutchman, but in his day, when it came to the rough stuff, Monk had no equal, and that went not only for his tough predecessor Mose the Bowery Boy, homicidal Chinamen like Mock Duck and Gophers like One Lung and Goo Goo but for Paul Kelly most especially as well. It was from Monk that I learned pretty much all the skills that was to stand me in such good stead in my youth, and when I think how close I came to missing the great man entirely, well, no doubt my life would have turned out wholly different.
I was spending a lot of time over on the Lower East Side that late summer and early fall of 1903, so much that the boys back on the West Side had begun to think I had gone over to the other side or something. Now, they knew as well as I did that there was no way I could ever have become an Eastman, much less a Five Pointer, but after all I owed my freedom to Monk, and as tough as the Gophers was, there wasn’t a man of them, not Goo Goo, One Lung nor Happy Jack—who later killed his friend Paddy the Priest in a bar because the man, drunk, asked him why he didn’t laugh out of the other side of his face for a change—was as tough as Monk.
And did he ever have the scars to show for it. Once, when he was shaving, which he did religiously, every day, although he seldom washed his hair or the rest of his body, I counted the knife tracks on his torso: at least a dozen from his neck to his belly button, and probably an equal number below the belt. There was also half a dozen or so bullet wounds, some of them with the bullets still inside him, so that when he climbed on the scales for one of his infrequent medical exams (for Monk swore that the doctors killed more innocent men than the gangsters ever had) or when the cops was weighing him for their records, he used to joke that they had to take off a few pounds for the lead. Not once did I ever hear him complain about this pain or that, although sure some of them slugs must have still been causing him anguish. This was another lesson I learned well from Monk, and it stood me in good stead a few years later.
I’ve said that Monk was ugly, which he was. Monk—or Edward Osterman, to give him his real, although obviously not his Christian, name—came from a respectable Jewish family over Williamsburg way, where his father owned a delicatessen. Monk had a lifelong love for cats and birds, so much so that his Da bought him a pet shop in the hopes that he’d settle down, except that Monk loved his kits and boids so much that he couldn’t bear to part with any of them, and so he usually had a number of the former trailing along after him, and at least one of the latter, a big blue-breasted Utility King named Hilda who perched on his shoulder as he went about making his daily rounds.
Physically, Monk may have been the spitting image of Piltdown man, but by God was he useful in all the areas which politicians deem important, although and of course in the end he was betrayed by the brass hats and feathered headdresses down the Wigwam he thought were his friends. And it was perhaps this lesson which Monk taught me that turned out to be the most important one of all: that no matter what they say, no matter how sweetly they name the prizes and no matter the promises they make, the men behind the desks are never really your friends, any more than a cheap whore giving you the come-on from her crib window is. Many was the man I seen in our line of work what fell for their worthless assurances, and many the man who lived to regret it, right up to the moment when he took his seat in Old Sparky and some screw threw the switch.
At the time I met Monk, though, he was the Prince of the Gangsters, the undisputed boss of the East Side from Nigger Mike Salter’s Pelham Cafe in Pell Street to Paradise Square, all along the waterfront and as far south as you cared to go before you fell into the harbor. Even the Gophers generally gave the Eastmans a wide berth, although we weren’t averse to mixing it up with them now and then, just for the sport of it. As the Sheriff of the New Irving dance hall, Monk clobbered so many men that the ambulance drivers at Bellevue took to calling the hospital’s accident ward the Eastman Pavilion.
Monk was a master of all manner of mayhem. He could wield a beer bottle, a lead pipe, a shiv, the knucks, a black Bessie and a barking iron with equal aplomb, and generally patrolled his turf armed with a big club, upon which he had notched a tally of his victims. They say that once, lacking a single notch to bring his total to an even fifty, he turned to the fella sitting next to him on a barstool and laid him out stiff.
Being himself impervious to pain, Monk assumed everybody else was as well and treated them accordingly. One of his favorite fighting tactics, as I soon witnessed, was to break a beer or wine bottle over a man’s head and then, while he was still staggering from the force of the blow, gouge one of his eyes out with the shattered neck. Or, if they fell quickly, to stomp out their teeth with one of his heavy steel-toed boots. Monk’s handiwork could be viewed on almost any block in the vicinity of the New Irving. “It don’t hoit dem none,” he explained, “for they’s already half-dead when it happens. It only hoits later, when and if dey wakes up.” One thing you had to give Monk, though, was that he would never club a mab; oh, he might knock her down, but never in such a way that would mark her, for Monk had the respect for the ladies, he did, whether they deserved it or not, which in his milieu most of them didn’t.
Monk’s most recent exploit was the Battle of Rivington Street, in August 1903, the year after we arrived in New York, back when gangsters had names like Kid Jigger and Johnny Spanish, Nigger Ruhl, the Lobster Kid and Yakey Yake Brady. There had been trouble brewing between the Eastmans and Kelly’s Five Pointers for a long time, mostly over turf, which meant making money, and not, as was so often the case, over dames, which meant spending money.
As I look back on it, and note the confluence of days and dates, I suppose I would say that Rivington Street, and its aftermath in the Bronx, marked the end of old New York as most of the gangsters knew it, and the beginning of a new era, one that offered me the chance that I both seen and took. No matter that the boroughs had only recently been dragged into the municipal fold: the only part of town that mattered was Manhattan, and the part of Manhattan that mattered was still mostly south of 42nd Street. The subways were just getting started then, numbering the days of the els, and the days of the kind of mischief one could get into beneath them, in the city of shadows that belonged to the gangs.
I missed Rivington Street, but a number of the Gopher brethren happened to be passing by the intersection of Rivington and Allen, under the Second Avenue el, on that fateful day and of course Monk later told me all about it, and thus I’ve heard the tales pretty much straight from the various horse’s mouths or arses, as the case may be. There had been trouble brewing between the Eastmans and the Five Pointers for a couple of years, but this particular fight started when some Pointers decided to stick up one of Monk’s stuss games. Stuss was a card game, a variation of faro. Nobody plays faro anymore, but back then it was so popular that half its terms joined up with the English language, like keeping tabs, being a piker or a stool pigeon, breaking even, landing in hock, stringing somebody along, getting a square deal and so forth.
Faro was also a betting game, a kind of cross between blackjack, roulette and craps, in which the players laid wagers on which card or combination of cards would turn up as the dealer dealt them two at a time and placed them on a big layout. It was supposed to be fair, with the house having only a slight advantage over the players, except that it wasn’t the way they played it in the brace houses down around the Bowery. There was different versions of faro, like skin faro, short faro and rolling faro, but east of the Bowery the one most people played was stuss, or Jewish faro, which was a simplified version that gave the bank a huge advantage, and of course the stuss games were often fixed too, which gave the bank an even bigger advantage. There’s nothing as sure as a sure thing, which is the only kind of thing to wager on.
On the night in question, this particular stuss game was taking place under the arch of the el when some Eastmans and some Pointers got into it and gats got drawn and all of a sudden a full-scale donnybrook was under way. The boys was blasting away at each other, and soon others came running, and before you knew it there was more than a hundred gangsters mixing it up, including some Gophers who just happened to be passing by and decided to join in the fun. Which continued until the cops showed up, firing, and three guys was killed and a bunch was arrested, including Monk, who gave his name as Joseph Morris and was released the next day, as usual.
The boys from Tammany decided they’d had enough and so they forced both sides to smoke the peace pipe, although everyone agreed that the Eastmans had gotten the better of it, and I think that must have rankled Kelly, who for all his book learning and his airs was after all a hot-blooded Italian and just how hot his blood was we would all discover soon enough.
What the politicians said was this fighting stuff was bad for business and, worse, it was bad for politics. The damn reformers, Republicans mostly, was always holding up the gangs as an example of all that was wrong with New York in general and Tammany in particular, and truth to tell they had a point, for in them days the politicians owned the gangs lock, stock and barrel, which meant there wasn’t a hell of a lot of difference between the goose and gander. Meanwhile, the newspapers were sounding the alarm about crime in the streets and how the young folks in the rum wards was nothing but affectless animals who’d kill a man for three cents, then buy a glass of whiskey. So Tom Foley, a Tammany man to his toenails and the fella that they always sent when a diplomatic hand was needed, got into the act and personally made the peace between Monk and Kelly at a dive called the Palm Cafe.
But in this lull between two storms, as it were, I had Monk all to myself, and I put it to good advantage. The man had a positive genius for avoiding arrest, which was due to his Tammany connections, for Monk was an extremely useful field commander in the Tammany Tiger’s ongoing wars against the toffs and swells, because who was less swell than Monk? This of course was how he managed to get McDougal to give me the air on just his say-so, which was Tammany big shots like Tim Sullivan’s and George Washington Plunkitt’s say-so as well. It was the gangster Monk Eastman who introduced me to politics and right from the start I knew which group I preferred.
Monk’s minions were among the most effective sluggers—shtarkers, Monk called them in his Hebrew way—the Tiger had, and nobody could take out a pesky poll watcher like Monk; he regulated Tammany elections on the East Side like Theodore Thomas waving his wand in front of an orchestra. There wasn’t hardly a soul who would admit to even thinking about voting the wrong way when Monk and his boys showed up, and them that did succumb to error soon found themselves sleeping it off under a park bench somewhere.
“Ya needs guys wit’ whiskers,” Monk explained to me one afternoon. “Them’s da guys what you vote t’ree or four times and nobody da wiser.” You could always tell when an election was coming up, because beards sprouted like weeds in sandlots. Men with beards were ideal Tammany voters, because you could vote them once, then shave off part of their whiskers and vote them again, and then shave off everything but the mustache and vote ’em again, and finally shave them clean and vote them once more and there you had it, four votes for the price of one. After which everybody repaired to one of Monk’s blind pigs or tigers because defending democracy is thirsty work.
I don’t want you to get the notion that during my apprenticeship I was neglecting my duties on the home front. I reported in to Tenth Avenue most every night, and when Ma went off to work each day, I was always sober enough to assure her that I would be in school later that day. The way I had worked out the school problem was by simply having a couple of Monk’s lieutenants named Kid Twist and Richie Fitzpatrick show up there one day and explain to the padre in charge that young Master Madden would henceforth be pursuing his studies informally across town, and that all concerned would be very grateful if the school might carry me as active on its rolls, from time to time indicating the exemplary nature of my attendance, academic achievement and so forth, in exchange for which a certain personage of import was prepared to offer financial emoluments to the parish, which I do believe came from some of Kelly’s stuss games that Monk’s gang held up, which meant that the poor Jews were indirectly supporting the poor Catholics, at least in my case.
God love her, May would always cover for me, even if she frowned at sleeping until almost noon or even one in the P.M. each day and then leisurely rising and going about my ablutions as best one could in our flat. I kept Marty in line by virtue of my standing in the gang, so that he never dared squeal on me. By the time she got home each night Ma would be too tired to inquire how our days had gone and even if on the off chance she had been alert, I was hardly ever there anyway, so my activities were pretty much a mystery to her, although she must have deep in her heart known, because mothers are rarely as dumb as they pretend to be.
On the afternoons I didn’t spend with Monk I was usually to be found over at one or the other of the Gopher clubhouses, where despite my conquest of Branagan and my obvious professional ability, I would still often be set to such menial tasks as fetching the beer growlers from the nearby saloons to slake the fearsome thirsts of the gang. There may have been laws against underage drinking back then, but if there were, we didn’t know about them, and no self-respecting barkeep would have paid them any mind, so it was not uncommon in the slightest to see children aged six or seven making the hourly treks from home to pub, passing through the family entrance on their way to fetch Da another beer or, late in the day, to fetch Da himself.
The gangsters were basically no different than your average Da. They too lay about all afternoon drinking beer, but unlike your Da, who drank to get drunk and forget all about his fat wife and his cruel foreman, the gangsters was busy fortifying themselves for their next job or battle with the cops. I would not care to impute any degree of cowardice to them in this respect, but the fact remains that for more than a few of them a little dutch courage was no bad thing when it came to punching, eye-blackening, jaw-breaking, blackjacking, ear-chawing, arm-shattering, limb-winging, back-stabbing or even the Big Job itself.
But calculating the profits thereof, that was something about which you needed to be sober as a judge. Since the time of the sainted Whyos there had been a more or less fixed rate for various services, ranging from two dollars for a simple punch-out to a hundred simoleons and up for murder. There was another racket that in my eyes held out even grander possibilities, namely, protection, for sure weren’t the streets of New York overrun with criminals looking to take advantage of the helplessness of a businessman? Hadn’t the Branagan–Mr. Mike dustup proved that? Why let the police have all the action and all the profit when you could take care of your own? The beauty of protection was that everybody needed it, even when they didn’t, and it was during this period that the Gophers got into the taxi-stand protection game, chasing off other drivers with bottles, bricks and pipes, in favor of one or two local companies.
There was even more money to be made from simple robbing and stealing, and the Gophers were the acknowledged masters of being able to heist your aunt Sally off the back of your cart or out of her railroad car and yourself never the wiser. Said heisting mostly had to do with thieving from the New York Central Railroad, whose yards—and here was our gang’s stroke of geographic genius—lay conveniently across Tenth Avenue, tantalizing in their proximity and lightly defended by a corps of flatfoots who were mostly the bedraggled and drunken Das about whom I spoke above, who couldn’t get no other kind of work. In our poor Kitchen the wealth of nations lay just out of reach for most of the citizenry, locked in rail cars that stood parked and idle within sight of the most miserable widows and orphans. And yet the goods they contained may as well have been in Jerusalem for all the chance the average honest John had to get at them.
We had the keys to the kingdom, though, and made use of them whenever we could. Our problem, in my opinion, was that we didn’t make use of them enough. As tough as the Gophers was, when sober they most preferred the easy target, like clobbering a peddler wearily pushing his cart up one of our streets, instead of planning how to take the big prizes. That was something I intended to work on, once I had fully learned my trade.
Monk and I exchanged all manner of confidences that late summer and into the fall and winter. “Own,” he would say as we stood together on the roof of his pet shop on Broome Street, where his roost was. He always called me Own, as if he couldn’t decide between “Owen” and “Owney” and didn’t care to.
“Own, sufferin’s a terr’ble t’ing.” Monk had a nasty habit of swallowing hard then belching after almost every sentence, the eructation punctuating his sentences like a cymbal crash at a band concert. I think this was because talking was so difficult for him, that it took the cooperation of practically his whole body in order for him to communicate in a nonviolent way. “Tha’s why I’s tries to end da sufferin’ quicklike, and so should you. When you kills a man,” and here he looked at me with those blackpool eyes of his, “make sure ya kills him dead right then and there, for ya don’t wan’ him ta come back ta haunt ya or, worse, kill ya.”
Monk took it upon himself to drill me in the arts of war, and I quickly became an ambidextrous virtuoso of the Bessie, the pipe and the slungshot. My tactical mistakes with Moore and Branagan were made clear as the dawn over the East River to me, and I resolved not to repeat them. Monk taught me the proper technique of lush-rolling: how you spotted the toper from his distinctive weaving walk, like a sailor without his land legs; how you cased him for backup, in case he was being followed by a police decoy; the words you used to lure him into an alleyway or blind pig; the way you brained him with a pipe or rock; and how you slipped your hand into his pockets in order to relieve him of his purse and other valuables.
Already, though, I could see other possibilities. The automobile was just beginning to come into popular use, and it seemed to me that when we combined larceny with motion, a whole new way of doing business would suddenly be opened up to us.
I think it was the gangster who made the motorcar really popular, for very quickly we realized that the auto enabled us to strike at our enemies without much fear of getting struck back, at least right away. Whereas before one had to step up to one’s enemy and confront him, with all the risk that entailed, with the auto you could simply drive on by and shoot him right there in the street. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if statistics showed that half the cars that was bought in the first decade of this century was bought by gangsters.
All at once, I felt glad to be as young as I was, for as much as I loved Monk, even then I knew that he was a man of the nineteenth century while I was fated to be a man of the twentieth and I intended to take full advantage of it.
And then one fine day he reached into his pocket and presented me with a splendid .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol that I would henceforth be proud to call me own. “Own,” he says, “I wants ya ta have dis.”
Now, granted I was just a kid in them days, but kids is people too, and I had certainly been around enough by then to know the difference between a fine piece of armament and a piece of junk and this was most certainly the former.
“Folla me, kid,” says he, and with that off we go, ambling along a path under the Second Avenue el that looks like all the life that had ever been beneath it had withered up and died. It is true we had a wide variety of els to choose from, for back then there was els practically everywhere you looked: the Gilbert lines on Second and Sixth Avenues, the New York Elevated lines on Third and Ninth, running in various spurs and addenda every which way from there.
What the el did was smooth the flow of traffic up and down the avenues, more or less, although there was always jams on the el the same way there is today on the streets, but what the el also did was cast the streets into permanent shadow, blighting the ground floors and affording the passengers the added sport of spying on the intimate doings of the folks living on the third floors of every building the el passed by. You don’t hear much about it today, but this afforded the traveling public a good deal of edification and entertainment, and many’s the youngster who first learned the facts of life from the simple act of riding the el.
If I was to have gone off banging away indiscriminately at any old target on the West Side, the coppers would have had me in the calaboose sure as shooting. But under the Second Avenue el I was in Monk’s territory, as safe as if I was in the Wigwam itself.
We ended up in the dirty backyard of a tenement on DeLancey Street whose owner, wouldn’t you know it, was an Irishman named O’Donnell from Connemara. The Irish still had a presence on the Lower East Side then, although most of the boat paddies were heading for the West Side. But this O’Donnell had bought the Old Law tenement back when the micks still had some say in those wards, and damn me if he wasn’t gouging them Jews for dear life. He knew they would pay it too, for what choice did they have? It was pay, work, beggar your neighbor by selling your goods cheaper than he could sell his, and either get up and out or fail and die. Life was simple in our neighborhoods.
We were firing at beer bottles that had been collecting in the yard, and I had just put down fourteen bottles in a row, seven with each hand, which Monk had set up for me on the top of the backyard fence. “Own,” says Monk to me, “you knows I thinks you got talent.” That was the nicest thing Monk had ever said to me, and I accepted the compliment with the dignity and gravity it warranted. “There ain’t a one of my boys what can shoot like you.”
I squeezed off a couple more shots, shattering the last of the bottles and scaring the bejesus out of an old lady who’d peeked her head out a back window to see which Gentile was disturbing the peace of the Sabbath. “Thanks, Monk,” says I. “But it ain’t really nothing.”
Monk belched and farted simultaneously. “Yeah, well,” he says, “just be glad them coppers can’t do the same.”
“No copper’s ever going to put any lead into me,” I promised him.
That got a laugh from the expert. “It ain’t the coppers you got to worry about, Own,” he said. “They couldn’t hit ya if there was a dozen of them, got ya surrounded point-blank. No, it’s your fellow gangster what’s dangerous, them guys what have a reason to learn to shoot straight. Watch out fa dem.”
I said I would. Monk had been around for a lot longer than I had, and I always assumed he knew what he was talking about. Already I trusted my life to Monk and would do anything he asked me.
Which he was about to do. “Own,” he said, “dis t’ing wit’ Kelly, it ain’t gonna last.”
I had learned Monkspeak well enough by now to know what he was talking about. Kelly, as I’ve said, was the wop leader of the Five Pointers. Both Monk and Kelly had the protection of Tammany, but latterly the uneasy truce between the gangs that had followed the Battle of Rivington Street and the Peace of the Palm had begun to break down. As a Gopher, I was officially neutral, but my love for Monk was such that if and when the shooting again started, I had already determined to be there, and damn Paul Kelly’s dago hide to hell.
“What’s up, Monk?” Tasked, toying with my .38. I already loved this gun so much that I would rather sleep with it than with Freda.
“Big fight comin’, ” said Monk, puffing on his pipe and stroking one of his cats. “Him and me. Inna Bronx.”
“I want in.” At that point in my life, I still wasn’t quite sure where the Bronx was, but I already knew I didn’t like it. I waited for some response, but he just pulled his bowler down over his eyes and began petting two cats at once, and didn’t say nothing for a while.
When Monk got like this, I knew better than to interrupt him. Once we were in the New Irving of an evening when a couple of his boys came along with their frails. Generally the boys would tip their hats to their chief and mutter something respectful, but on this occasion one of them got an attack of fool’s courage and said something out of the side of his mouth to his girl about Monk’s toilet that I didn’t quite catch, but Monk sure did. Nobody had quicker ears than Monk when he wanted to.
He up and felled that bravo, just laid him out there in the saloon, right in front of his girl. First a beer bottle over the head, brought down with such force that pieces of the fella’s scalp went flying, followed closely by a couple of the guy’s choppers when Monk caught him right in the jaw with one brass-knuckled fist; how he had slipped the knucks on I never quite saw, for Monk was quick as lightning when he felt like it. Monk hustled the bum through the doors of the saloon and right straight into the street. And then he was lying in the gutter, looking up at the stars and not seein’ a thing.
The cats was meowing prettily, so content that they didn’t give a damn about Hilda perched on Monk’s shoulder, nor she them. I had never seen the man sleep, but I would swear before a magistrate that that’s the way he probably lay abed, with a seegar in his mouth, his hands calming his pussies and his birds rooking somewhere between his neck and his shoulders or maybe in his hat; and God knows there was enough food specks on Monk’s shirtwaist to keep a pride of lions well fed for a month.
“Okay, Own,” he said, his voice issuing from somewhere deep in his belly, though his eyes never opened and his lips never moved. “You can come. But if youse gets in da way, I’ll kill yas.” As much as he loved me, I knew he would too.