Things went fine enough at first. Me and the boys took charge of the Kitchen right quick, and soon enough wasn’t some folks referring to me as the Duke of the West Side. Without resorting to too much violence, we made it plain to the merchants and voters of the ward that from now on we’d be giving the orders and that if they had trouble whatsoever with any stray or rogue punk, they should come to us. The best part was the fairy story that the terrible Gophers had been destroyed by the Centrals, which meant that we officially didn’t exist, which meant there was no public outcry from the goo-goos to clean up the city, which meant I was in the enviable position of eating my cake and having it too.
We also made it clear to the Dusters that they was expected to stay in the Village, and not roam north of 14th Street if they knew what was good for them; penning them in I had figured for the first step. With my chum Tanner Smith in place, I could keep pretty good tabs on the Dusters, who were destroying themselves with the white powder anyhow and therefore weren’t much of a threat to anyone except themselves.
I was starting to pile up some real money too, except that I couldn’t very well show much of it to Ma. I gave her a lot of malarkey about working for Tammany in a minor organizing capacity, but with real prospects for advancement, and she seemed pleased as she nodded off after a glass of cordial or two. May by this time was working as a domestic, for a family of six kids over on 36th Street, with a sober mother and a crippled father—a sandhog who’d lost both his legs in an accident digging the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskills—so I didn’t feel uneasy about her being in service, although just in case, I had some of the boys keep an eye on things. Marty was Marty, running up a modest rap sheet of petty burglary busts in a sad-sack imitation of my own good self. He did three months in the Tombs and came back not a bit wiser.
Some of my swag I plowed into a proper clubhouse I rented from a horseshoer named Keating and which I called the Winona Club after a lass in the neighborhood I had taken a brief fancy to in between my visits with Loretta. My youthful fumblings with Freda had long since turned into more accomplished amorous artistry, and I liked to think I knew my way around the more piquant parts of a woman’s body the same way I could get from Rector Street to the upper precincts of the Kitchen without giving the route a minute’s thought.
The Winona Club sat on the second floor of Keating’s building. It had its own private entrance, and in short order we had fixed up another in the rear, so that if trouble came calling, there were a couple of ways out. I outfitted my first club with a big bar and a little Steinway, and there was always plenty of local gals who could be persuaded to come up and keep the gang company, some several of whom I was carrying on with more or less regularly. There was always music, as well as a bottle of whiskey on my table, because in them days I was under the influence of thinking that thinkin’ went easier if not better with booze.
Every now and then things could get a bit rowdy, what with the girls squealin’ that Georgie or somebody had pinched their bottoms, or a couple of the lads in particularly high spirits whalin’ away at each other, which I let them do so long as they didn’t break nothing of value.
One night when we was having some particularly boisterous discussions, Keating came bangin’ on the door, beefin’ about the noise. I guess you could say I’d had a few, because my inclination was to laugh in his face, which I did.
“You’ll have to be quiet up here,” says he, “or I’ll put you out of my house.” He looked the very picture of indignation, Keating did, his big blacksmith’s arms all pumped up with righteous wrath.
“You’ll put me out of your house?” I could hear the laughter from the gang in the background. I drew closer to him, knowing that if he was to take a swing at me, he’d be dead on the floor in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. “Mister, did you ever hear of Owney Madden?”
His mouth was workin’ but sayin’ nothing, which indicated to me that his brain was workin’ as well. There was a look in his eyes at my name that I’d seen on the face of the sergeant when he beheld the great Monk Eastman.
I backed away a little, letting my coat fall open just a little so that he could get a good look at my arsenal: my Bessie, the knucks and the .38.
“Well, mister—I am Owney Madden!”
I thought he was going to soil himself then and there. “It weren’t me that was complaining, mind you,” he sputtered. “It was one of them nosy neighbors next door.”
I looked over at some of the boys. I didn’t have to say nothing.
“Why don’t you let me have a word with ’em,” he continued, backpedaling. “They’s reasonable folks, I’ll warrant.”
“They’d better be,” says I, showing him the door we reserved for strangers and trouble.
Every now and then a bull got it into his thick skull that he ought to trump me in for some imagined malfeasance or other, shinin’ his buzzer, as it were, all of which the Tiger quashed faster than you could say Jimmy Hines.
One day while I was in temporary custody, clipping my nails, a bull came up to me. “Newspaper fella outside says he want to talk to you. Says he’d like to know how a big shot like you spends his time.”
“I don’t talk to no newspaper fellas.” Talk about rats.
“Could be good for you, Madden.”
“Could be better if you’d let me at your sister, copper.”
I thought he was going to slug me for a minute there, but he just laughed, which I hated even more than a slugging. “You mugs are all alike,” he said. “Cheap punks with smart mouths and chips on your shoulders.”
Well, that got my Irish up. “Gimme a piece of paper,” I growled, and he did. Here’s what I wrote:
Thursday—Went to a dance in the afternoon. Went to a dance at night and then to a cabaret. Took some girls home. Went to a restaurant and stayed there until seven o’clock Friday morning.
Friday—Spent the day with Freda Horner. Looked at some fancy pigeons. Met some friends in a saloon early in the evening and stayed with them until five o’clock in the morning.
Saturday—Slept all day. Went to a dance in the Bronx late in the afternoon and to a dance on Park Avenue at night.
Sunday—Slept until three o’clock. Went to a dance in the afternoon and to another in the same place at night. After that I went to a cabaret and stayed there almost all night.
All of which was true. It was a grand life and as I look back on it now, I didn’t realize how good it was. Which of course is true of all of us in our youth.
Everything woulda been swell except that I had to run into Luigi Mollinucci ’round about September of 1911, a few months shy of my twenty-first birthday. You remember him, the fruit stand owner’s kid. Well, that was then and this is now: in the interim since I first met Mr. Mike and thus indirectly Mr. Monk, the little wop had growed up and, wouldn’t you know it, was after seein’ my sister, May, and her not yet eighteen.
What’s worse, by my lights, was that he was pals with Fats Moore, the yegg what had mugged my mother way back when. Fats was still in the neighborhood, hangin’ around the fringes of some of the gangs, making a small name for himself as a slugger, newsstand-burner and lush-roller. Some of the kids were starting to look up to him as a big man, but to me he was the pure phonus balonus and always would be.
Luigi, on the other hand, had graduated to running his dad’s fruit stand. I didn’t think much about this one way or another, until it gradually dawned on me that I was seeing more and more fresh fruit in our household, even with nobody dead, which Ma could certainly not afford on Bridey’s wages. I knew enough about figures to put two and two together and come up with Mollinucci. With which evidence I confronted May one early autumn evening when a pear suddenly appeared on our table.
“Are they growing pears on 30th Street now?”
She laughed, real innocent, like I was making some kind of a joke. “Ain’t it nice?”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Got it from the vendor’s.”
“Which vendor?”
“Over Ninth way.”
“Never liked that fella.”
“Well, it was free, if that makes you feel any better.”
That made me feel worse. “You know you shouldn’t ought to go over Ninth by yourself. Not a good element there.”
May laughed again, not knowing how much she was agitating me. “I didn’t. He came here.”
It was all I could do to keep from jumping out of my chair. “What do you mean, he came here?”
“What I said. He brought this ’round just before you come home. I wasn’t here so he give it to Ma, just before she gone out to work.”
“I think I’ll take a walk,” I said, picking up the pear.
“Hey!” said May, but I was already out the door and striding toward Ninth.
Don’t get the idea that I was jealous of May’s havin’ a suitor or anything, when she was old enough. Such things were a natural part of life. But being already experienced in the ways of women, I knew what was on the sonofabitch’s mind, and I was going to be damned to Hell for all eternity if I was going to let him put his greasy mitts on my sister.
Which is what I was going to explain to him when, what do you know, I spotted the guinea in question with Fats, toddling down 30th Street toward Eleventh Avenue. They’d both already had a couple and it was about that moment when I wished I’d brought Billy or Chick with me. I trailed them west down the long block, past the rail yards, but as luck would have it, just about at the corner Fats and Luigi stopped and then Fats turned around and looked right at me.
“Hey, lookit if it ain’t the banty little rooster from Hell.” He leered a little, or at least I thought he did. He was bigger and fatter than when last I’d seen him, neither of which development favored him particularly. “Gettin’ any, Madden?”
“Not unless you count your mother, Fats, and I don’t, even if everybody else does,” I said. My quarrel wasn’t with him at this moment, and I didn’t want him interposing his fat Irish gob between me and Luigi.
Even Fats was smart enough to spot this for an insult. He stuck out one big mitt and tried to clobber me with it, but I dodged around him to get face-to-face with Luigi. I thrust the pear right in his puss. “You forgot something.”
He stood there real cool. “Take it easy, Fats,” he said to Moore. “Madden didn’t mean that nasty crack about your mother…”
I could feel Fats relax a little behind me, but just in case, my left hand was sneaking into my back pocket and coming out with a fine blackjack Loretta had given me for a present.
“…because everybody knows that Madden don’t have to leave home to get his.”
From this point on, as far as I’m concerned, whatever happened, happened in self-defense. One of the things you may recall the great Eastman teaching me was how to fight with both hands, and had that ever come in handy on more than one occasion.
I wheeled and caught Fats behind his right ear with the Bessie and he went where he belonged, down at my feet. I think Fats puked as he fell, and so now I was even madder when his meal landed on my shirtwaist. Which incident gave Luigi a chance to scoot, for sure didn’t he see the Reaper in the aggrieved person of me coming for him at that very moment.
He barreled across Eleventh, heading for what he thought might be the safety of the North River, but I was too quick for him, and tackled him in a few steps. He came up begging but I came up swinging and I caught him a glancer just to the right of his jaw, which dazed him a bit so that he stumbled back and his heel hit the curb and down he went again.
“I didn’t mean nothin’, honest I didn’t.” The same dreary excuse mugs always have when they know you’ve got ’em dead to rights.
I had to make sure he didn’t get up. I couldn’t let that kind of talk float through the neighborhood, in and out of the mouths of every layabout, mort and mab and so pulled my Smithie and put a hell of a shanty on his glimmer, to wit: I shot him in the head. Luigi died right there on the spot, on the street, blood oozing out one of his ears, where my bullet had gone in, and a big gaping hole on the other side of his head, where the slug had gone out, and it served him right.
I was still breathin’ easy as I looked around. Luckily for me, Eleventh didn’t have a lot of people on it, not like. Tenth, but there were still a few passersby, drunks mostly, and one or two of the more incautious had actually stopped to watch my dance with Luigi and were standing there gaping at me like fish flopping on a pier.
We looked at each other for a nonce, me with my gat still in my hand, them with their parcels and packages. God only knows what I woulda done next except that Art and Johnny miraculously appeared at my side.
“Beat it, everybody,” said Art.
“You didn’t see nothin’,” added Hoppo. “All of youse.”
“Sure they did,” I said, still in a daze. “They saw everything. They saw this punk die, which is what’ll happen to any mug crosses me on my turf. Which is what’ll happen to them if they so much as open their gobs. They saw me: Owney Madden of Tenth Avenue.” I was shouting now, full of inseparable rage and pride. “Owney the Killer!”
Police whistles brought me to. I have a dim recollection of Art or Johnny or both of ’em dragging me away quick time, of ducking down into the stairwell of one of our cribs and into the railroad tunnel that ran over to Pennsylvania Station from Death Avenue and finally poking my head aboveground a block or so from 352, the coast clear.
I heard later that the bulls showed up and grilled everybody who’d thought he mighta seen something. I heard later that one or two of ’em might have mentioned my name in a temporary fit of civic rectitude. I heard later that one or two of ’em vanished to Hell or Connaught before they could give any evidence. I heard later that nobody else said a word. I heard later that I’d retrieved the pear as we ran. I heard later that I ate the whole thing.