ABRAHAM RELES AND Martin Goldstein were just coming home. The light was already on the eastern horizon, so it had to be something like four-thirty, five A.M. They were coming back from East New York, a nighttime world of young Italians in sheeny suits and old Italians in ribbed T-shirts, foreign accents, and fire escapes. They drove down Van Sicklen Avenue to Livonia, left the car at a garage, and made their way on foot. Walking through downtown Brownsville in 1931, the height of the Depression, they would have seen an occasional ice wagon and only those men who worked the first shift at the mills and packing houses. In the early morning, such men must have seemed like apparitions, the ghosts of lives Abraham and Martin would have led had they followed the rules and done as they were told.
Reles was known on the block as “Kid Twist,” a name he gave himself, partly in tribute to an East Side gangster of an ancient era, partly in acknowledgment of his style, which was to get his enemy around the neck and twist the life out of him. To friends he was simply “the Kid,” a short man with long arms and huge hands and fingers a cop once described as “spatulate.” Reles had just turned twenty-five but looked half that age, with the soft, unlined features of a prize pupil or, worse still, a mama’s boy. He looked young the way the most vicious criminals look young—like something in his development had been arrested or thwarted or turned into something else. Goldstein, who was known to everyone as Buggsy, must have found it comforting to have a friend like Abe.
As Reles and Goldstein walked along the steel-shuttered, early morning street, their words must have been end-of-the-day weary. They probably talked about the last few months, the bad things that had happened, the bad things that were to happen still, and how they would make up their losses.
In those days, the power in Brownsville was the Shapiro brothers. The oldest brother, Meyer, was born in the neighborhood, a fat kid who had grown into a fat man. Everything about him was fat: fat eyes, fat nose, fat ears, fat mouth. His kid brothers (Irving, William) were like cheap knockoffs of the original; not quite as fat, not quite as dangerous, not quite as smart, they mostly helped Meyer with his loan-sharking, bullying, pimping. The brothers ran fifteen bordellos in the slum. They were like the nineteenth-century Jewish bosses of Odessa, Russia, terrorizing shopkeepers and merchants who, like them, were confined to the Pale.
The big money, their future, was in slot and vending machines. Any store or restaurant owner who wanted to buy or rent a slot machine in Brooklyn in the early thirties had to go to the Shapiros, who, in addition to taking a percentage of the earnings, got five dollars for each machine. And if the Shapiros don’t get paid? If you get your jukebox or cigarette machine or pinball machine somewhere else? Well, then something unfortunate might happen—your store might burn down or get robbed or who knows what else? These things happen.
If you were a young neighborhood tough wanting to steal, intimidate, raise hell, then you too went to the Shapiros. In Brownsville the brothers were the only way into crime, the only ramp onto that particular expressway.
Abraham Reles and Martin Goldstein—neither made it past the seventh grade—went to work for the Shapiros in the late twenties. By the time the boys were fifteen, Meyer had them stink-bombing restaurants, beating up strikers, collecting loans. And does Meyer show any appreciation? Does he give the boys a sign of thanks? Promote them? Pay them? Of course not. Mostly he just taunts and teases Abe, who really was funny looking. The Kid was near the end of his patience the night the cops caught him at Meyer’s dirty work. And do the Shapiros come through with a lawyer or bail? No. Not even a visit. This is probably all the Kid thought of as the cops handed him to the lawyers who handed him to the judge who handed him to the guards who put him on a bus that ran north to the Elmira Reformatory. Reles got two years upstate. He must have sworn that if ever he made it back to Brownsville, he’d pay back the Shapiros.
On April 1, 1930, the New York Department of Corrections played a prank on Brooklyn—they let Abe Reles out of prison. While the Kid was away, Buggsy bought a pool hall, a run-down joint beneath the Sutter Avenue elevated. Reles spent much of his time at the pool hall, hustling whoever happened through the door. One night in comes this handsome kid looking for a game. The kid takes almost a hundred dollars off Reles. After that, Reles and the kid were friends.
It did not take Abe long to figure out just who this kid was—George Defeo, kid brother of William Defeo, who was tight with Meyer Lansky and Ben Siegel. Even out in Brownsville, the edge of the map, the names “Lansky” and “Siegel” were magic: they conjured up the whole story, the rise of two Jewish kids from the Lower East Side slums to the heights of the underworld. “So your brother’s William Defeo,” Reles must have said. “Not a bad brother to have.”
A few weeks later, in the middle of a casual afternoon pool game, Reles said something like “Hey, George, your brother’s gang, they do some work with slot machines, right?”
“Sure,” said Defeo. “What about it?”
“Tell him, if he can supply us with machines, we can put them in Brownsville and East New York.”
“You can’t do that,” said Goldstein. “That’s still the Shapiros’ territory.”
“To hell with the Shapiros,” Reles said. “If we’re backed by Lansky and Siegel, what can they do about it?”
Defeo said he would look into it.
A few weeks later Reles and Goldstein were in business with Defeo. They had a supply of slot machines, which they leased to bars and restaurants. Though they kept a percentage of each machine’s earnings, there was no five-dollar per-machine charge. What’s more, since Lansky and Siegel saw this as a way into Brownsville, virgin territory, they gave the Reles gang the machines on credit. When the Shapiros threatened bar and restaurant owners, the Kid laughed it off. “Don’t worry,” he told customers. “We’ve got real power behind us.”
Reles soon moved in on other Shapiro strongholds: bookmaking, shylocking. Less than six months out of prison, the Kid had gotten Meyer Shapiro’s attention. After deals and threats failed to deter Reles, Shapiro took the next step: around Brownsville, people who knew, knew that Abe Reles, Martin Goldstein, and George Defeo did not have long to live.
Jews of my father’s generation and mind-set have a favorite gangster the way Catholics have a patron saint: a mythic figure who has left them a life lived, a style, a way of doing things. There was a kid on my father’s block who would not fight on the Sabbath, who would rather let himself be whipped by a man half his size than fight on Friday night, because that’s how Red Levine did it. For my dad, who tried and rejected several gangsters as either too brutal or not brutal enough, the greatest of all the old hoods was Abe Reles. “I once saw the Kid come out of hiding to buy a newspaper,” my father told me. “The paper cost a nickel, but he gave the lady a fifty. That’s how you get to be a hero. Lay green on everyone you meet. When you overtip, you’re not throwing money away. You’re investing in your legend.”
The Reles legend was handed down from my father to me. I have learned each detail, each step, each misstep, each act of bravery. I have also learned to generalize, to see beyond the details to the poetry inherent in the timeline of every man’s life.
Reles grew up on Pitkin Avenue and Watkins Street in Brownsville. He grew up in the years just before the First World War, before America plunged headlong into the twentieth century. At night the streets were full of faces, dark scowls and sly smiles, babies crying. There were people on the street at night in Brownsville, and they were all trying to get out, move on, get going, keep on, get settled, get rich, get home.
Like most adults in the neighborhood, Abe’s father, Sol Reles, came from Europe, Galicia, a desolate part of eastern Austria. Fleeing pogroms, Sol left his village. By the time he reached Ellis Island in the first year of this century, he had nothing. A few years later he met a woman who had also come from Austria, and she too had nothing. They were married and had nothing together. In 1905 they had a child and for the first time did not have nothing. They had a son, and someday that son would have everything. But even as Abraham made his way in the underworld, Sol continued to struggle. “My Abie was always a good boy,” Mrs. Reles told a reporter when the Kid was arrested for the forty-third time. “If he is such a big man, would his papa have to sell neckties and suspenders from a pushcart?”
Abraham Reles was raised a Jew. He was told of Abraham and Isaac; he was told of the binding of Isaac and must have pictured the blade Abraham held to Isaac’s throat. He was told of the Flood, the plagues, the Exodus, the Commandments. But the life around him, the hum of the streets, must have been infinitely more vivid than those old stories. The time of Abe’s youth was an in-between time for Jews in America. Like many others, Kid Twist was born in the course of a long voyage, knowing neither from where he came nor to where he was going; he was expected to finish a journey his parents began the day they fled the villages and shtetls of Eastern Europe, a trip that would eventually lead to Nate ’n’ Al’s in Beverly Hills.
As they became adults, men like Abraham Reles set out to conquer the new world. They took the dream of America and turned it into their own personal dream. They made fortunes. They rode in fancy cars. They walked in the street without fear. In the end, however, it was they who would be conquered, hunted and hounded and sent to jail. Some of them, the most murderous, the most daring, would die in the electric chair. Later, all that was left were bits of stories and colorful names, amusing anecdotes used to adorn the conversation of men like my father. Later still, their great-grandchildren would intermarry and lose their way. Their traditions and their past would evaporate like water on a hot plate. But this was far in the future, and by then there was no longer an old world to dream of returning to.
As a boy in Brownsville, Abe surely heard stories of the old country. Of the flat horizon and the high, white sky. Of horses and mules and chickens. And about land and how it’s the only thing worth a damn. And about America, a beautiful nation of beautiful people. The way the kids of immigrants heard about America, you would think it was not down the stairs and out the door but still across the ocean, a distant place where everything is promised and, for hard work, everything is given. From the day he left his parents’ house, Abe had to know his father was right, that America promises everything, but he also had to know his father was wrong—America gives nothing. Those things that are promised, they cannot be worked for but must be taken, conned away with good looks, obsequiousness, mimicry; or traded for with bits of your soul or the morals of the stories your parents told; or tricked away with lies; or wrested away with brute force. In Brooklyn, home was the old country, the land of the shul and shtetl, but the street, that was where the deals went down, where Rockefeller struck oil, where all roads led to Tammany Hall, where Jimmy Walker was king. In Brooklyn, the street was the new world.
Back then the borough was in a state of flux. Every day more immigrants poured into the narrow streets. Things broke down. Strife was the order of the season. Strikes and threats of strikes. In the middle of a crowded market, a young man would be attacked, beaten, and left bleeding. It was all over in a minute, the assailants disappearing down alleyways. And each day, all over the borough, brothers and sisters woke to another day of school, a useless exercise conducted in alien tongues. The wildest among them ran off, passing the hours however they could—hustling bums, playing cards, picking fights, unloading crates, pitching coins.
On blocks just like the one where Abraham grew up there was already a generation of accomplished Jewish gangsters. Veterans. They ran all kinds of penny-ante scams, and they too had dreams. They would be stronger than their fathers, stronger than the cops. They would be their own nation, with their own laws, loyalties, and justice. The most notorious of these kids were named Buchalter (Louis Lepke), Flegenheimer (Dutch Schultz), and, of course, Lansky and Siegel. Some of them were rumored to have done killings. Reles tried to emulate these older men. They showed what was possible. So even in the early days, before Meyer Shapiro was even a cloud on the horizon, the Kid was on the lookout for other kids, Jewish kids mostly, who took the lessons of their parents seriously, but not too seriously. Mostly he was looking for kids who weren’t afraid—of the Italians, the Irish, the cops, the consequences. From the beginning, Reles knew that where you end up is the thing, not how you get there. How you get there, that’s just something to be debated by the suckers who never make it out.
Over time, Reles emerged as a leader. Though he was just over five feet tall, something in him demanded respect. The smallest provocation, something only he knew the meaning of, could throw him into a rage. One day in the early twenties, he felt a group of older kids were giving him the high hat and so jumped a curb with his motorbike and rode them into a wall. This side of him, this wild, cowboy side, was usually hidden by an easy, laid-back, just-off-the-boat demeanor. He spoke in a slow, guttural lisp. He had a funny way of walking; going down the street, he looked like a man trying to kick off his shoes. Whenever booked for a crime, he listed his occupation as soda jerk.
When Reles was growing up, Brownsville was a hothouse of criminal talent. Just across the way, on Alabama and Dumont Avenues, Harry Strauss was coming of age. The Kid knew Strauss from school. He was one of those kids you admired but stayed away from, who ate alone in a corner of the playground. They called him Big Harry—he really was very big. Or Pep—he could be the kind of friendly that demanded a cute diminutive. Or Pittsburgh Phil—it sounded tougher and more interesting than Big Harry or Pep. As he grew into a man, Pep was often enlisted by the desperate to even the odds. He was big, strong, reckless. He had a sense of fair play, of right and wrong, of justice. Still, he was a head case. Violence was something he liked too much. Violence is something you can’t fear, but you can’t love it, either. One vice is as bad as the other. Excess is the beginning of the end of any ambitious youngster. Big Harry was good to have in reserve, like mustard gas, but he wasn’t the first person you went to.
The first person the Kid went to was Martin Goldstein, who lived a few doors from the Releses. Marty was timid, but the Kid saw something in him. If his timidity was challenged, he could be thrown into a psychotic fit. That’s why he was called Buggsy—because he was a little buggsy, a little crazy, a quality that’s always recognized in some gangsters and is always called Buggsy.
Everyone familiar with the Brooklyn boys was convinced Edward G. Robinson based his film persona on Buggsy Goldstein, who had the same side-talking, duck-walking, tough-guy attitude as the movie star. And this, too: Buggsy had a real sense of style, a wise-guy sharpness. If you were in the underworld in the thirties and your first name was Buggsy but your last name wasn’t Siegel, you’d better have a sense of style. A cop once asked Goldstein what name he went by.
“Buggsy,” he said.
“Known by any other name?”
“Not that I know of,” said Buggsy. Of course, this was a kind of joke. He was known by lots of other names: jerk, Jew, asshole, schmuck.
Over the years, Buggsy and the Kid pushed each other into crime the way friends always push each other from one dare to the next. He was there at the beginning, and Abe would make sure he was there at the end.
When they were twelve, Reles and Goldstein stopped going to school. What could it teach them? They instead took part-time jobs, Abe working for an engraver, Marty for a plumber. And they robbed: stores, cars, apartments. They were arrested. They were released. Their stock rose. On the block their friendship was admired as a partnership.
There were other guys around, too. Hundreds of them. You would see them on the corner, say hello, good-bye, that’s it. Some were named for old gangsters, or for daring acts, or for no intelligible reason at all. Others were named for their physical deformities: Fatty, Big Head, Little Ears. Some would be your best friend for a day, a week, a month, then again fall into the background. Others you tried to help, like Joey Silver, a neighborhood kid who was always tagging after Reles and Goldstein. When Abe spoke about the future, the things he would do, Joey hung on every word. Joey was a cheering section, and the Kid liked having him around.
Just before he was sent up to Elmira, Reles got Joey a job with the Shapiro brothers. Three years later, when Abe started his own gang, Joey stayed with the Shapiros. But that was okay. It was expected. A job is a job. Besides, Joey was only running nickel-and-dime errands for the Shapiros. And if things ever got really bad, the Kid knew he could always turn to his old protégé for help. And things were bad now. A death sentence had been passed. So Abe asked Joey for a favor. “Tell me when Meyer and the other Shapiros go out together,” he said. This way, the Kid would know when the hit was coming; he would also know when the Shapiro headquarters was unguarded, when he could stage his own guerrilla raids.
One night, as Reles, Goldstein, and George Defeo were hanging around the pool hall, the phone rang. Maybe Buggsy took it in the back room. As Defeo racked the balls, the Kid could hear Marty talking in low tones. He heard Marty say thank you, hang up. “That was Joey Silver,” said Buggsy, reaching for his coat. “The Shapiros just went out.”
Abe, Buggsy, and George parked a distance from the Shapiros’ clubhouse. They walked to the Shapiros’ parking lot. Beyond the trucks and sedans, the clubhouse, a squat building, sat in the dark, not a light anywhere. A car went by in the distance. Abe crept alongside one of the sedans. After taking a knife from his pocket, he drove the blade into a tire, releasing a sharp hiss of air, like the disapproving sigh of a parent, the Kid’s mother, say, wearing a housedress, holding a brisket, shaking her head. “Why, Abie? Why?”
Across the lot, as Defeo watched the street, Buggsy tossed a rock at a truck. In the windshield, shattering into a thousand tiny images, Buggsy might have seen the men spilling from the clubhouse behind him. He must have heard the gunshots and seen the sparks dancing off the pavement where the bullets hit. Buggsy made it to the corner, his face bloody, the tip of his nose shot off. Defeo was shaken but untouched. Reles was the last to get away. He had been shot in the back, a bullet he would carry until the day he died.
As he ran, the Kid must have been thinking, Shit. Joey. Joey Silver. Cocksucker. Kike. Fucking bastard. Set us up. Chose the wrong gang. Better hope we don’t live.
In the distance, Abe could hear an engine turning over, followed by the crunch of tires on broken glass as the Shapiros drove off. Meyer Shapiro went around Brownsville that night, looking for the Kid’s girl. At last, spotting her, he called her to the car. He flashed a gun. “Get in,” he said. The men in back slid over. Meyer drove to a deserted street. He dragged the girl from the car, beat her, raped her, beat her again. He left her in a field.
It was a bad night for the Kid—his own personal Night of Broken Glass. Still, the Shapiros had made a mistake. They had hurt Reles in every way possible, and still he was alive. The Kid spent the next several weeks, first in the hospital, then at Buggsy’s, fighting to recover. When he again stepped into the street, he was thin, pale. If he was not a killer before, the Shapiros had made him into one. He went to see his old friend, Big Harry Strauss.
Harry lived in a brick house fronted by a narrow wood porch. “Come in,” he said to Abe.
Abe told the story, his problems with the Shapiros, how he wanted to pay them back. “We’ll run Brownsville and you can be a part of it,” he said.
Though Pep normally stayed out of this kind of thing, what Meyer Shapiro had done to the girl—what had she ever done to him?—offended his sensibility. “Sure, I’ll help,” said Pep. “Just tell me what we do.”
Reles and Buggsy then drove to East New York, where the sky opened and the air filled with garlic. After parking on Pacific Street, just off Eastern Parkway, they went into a pasticceria, a tiny shop where men drank cups of thick black coffee and studied race results in Italian-language papers. From behind the counter came a man, forty-five, maybe fifty, gray-haired, heavyset, a blue shirt with bone white buttons. He took the Kid’s hand.
Louis Capone broke his nose years before, so now, when he looked at you, his nose seemed to be looking elsewhere. He had watery blue eyes. Very sympathetic. And the way he stood—back on his heels, stomach out—he looked like some old advice-giving chef. Capone’s shop, over the years, had become a hangout for local thugs. They first came when they were kids. Louis fed them and they came back. Now, when Capone needed a favor, he called one of his tamed thugs. If he saw an especially promising kid, he would pass word to one of the more established gangsters in his circle—Albert Anastasia, Louis Lepke.
After feeding Reles and Goldstein—food is always of some comfort—Capone sent them to Sally’s Bar and Grill. “Frank Abbandando and Happy Maione are down there,” he said. “They’re good kids. They have no love for the Shapiros. See them.”
Of course, the Kid knew all about Maione and Abbandando—they ran the Ocean Hill Hooligans, the toughest gang in East New York. Yet even here, on their own streets, they were second to the Shapiros. The Kid had actually met Abbandando once before, up at Elmira, where Frank was doing time for robbery. The Kid used to watch Frank play baseball in the prison yard—shortstop. People said Frank was a very good ball player, that with a little dedication, he could probably make the Yankees or Giants. Some even said he got his nickname—the Dasher—on the base paths at Elmira. Others said he got the name early one morning in Brooklyn, when he was trying to shoot an enemy. When Frank’s gun jammed, he was chased by his victim. Having lost him, Frank ran around the block, caught the man from behind, and shot him in back of the head. Hence: the Dasher. These men were different than the Brownsville Boys. They were the real thing. Gangsters. Killers. But what choice did the Kid have?
Sally’s was a jukeboxy little bar on Euclid Avenue. Coming through the door, the Kid spotted the Dasher in back. He had small eyes, a high forehead, dark hair with a part as sharp as the spine of a book. He was thick necked. When he raised his head, a roll of skin gathered above his collar in back. Even in mug shots, his head is held high. And always that same smug, go-fuck-yourself smile. His biggest smile was saved for the worst times. When things got especially bad, when the cops came around asking questions, he would appear on the street with a suitcase, shake hands, look in windows, then gone, one week, two weeks, a month; then, when the heat was off, he would reappear—“The Dasher is back!” That night he would again be at Sally’s, buying drinks, blowing money. “Hey, Frank,” someone would say. “Where’ve you been?”
“On adventures,” he might say, raising a glass.
“Hey, Frank,” someone else would say. “Where’d ya get all the cash?”
“More adventures,” he might add, looking at Happy.
Frank was always looking at Happy, seeing when he should and should not talk. Happy could give such instruction with his eyes alone. He was a little guy—five feet four—but charismatic as hell. He wore a size five shoe, the size of Chinese feet after binding. He was well dressed, wearing custom-made suits on even the most trivial errands. His black hair was slicked back—a dramatic backdrop for his dark, melancholy face. He was arrested thirty-one times before he was thirty-one. He knew everyone in the neighborhood and helped everyone he did not have to hurt. He loved to be out among them, spending, talking, boasting, laughing. People came to him with stories. He was the best audience in Ocean Hill.
Happy listened carefully as the Kid told him about the Shapiros, what they had done to his girl, how they shot him and Buggsy, and also about his plans: shylocking, slot machines. “If we teamed up, we can run the Shapiros out for good,” he said. Several drinks later, Buggsy and the Kid stumbled off, with a promise from Happy and the Dasher to meet the following night at a diner in Brownsville.
As Kid Twist and Buggsy made their way home in the early morning, they must have been satisfied with their progress; from the edge of defeat they had rallied, cobbling together a kind of army. As they turned to say good night, it’s hard not to imagine Buggsy grabbing Abe’s sleeve and saying, “Hey, Kid, nine P.M. at the diner tomorrow. Last one through the door pays. Agreed?”
One of the diners frequented by the Reles gang was on Livonia just off Pitkin. The restaurant occupied the ground floor of a four-story brick building. There was a long lunch counter, fronted by stools. The counter was polished to a shine. Behind the counter was a grill, which the cook scraped clean with a spatula. Beyond the counter were booths and tables. It always looked as though a rush had just ended in the diner, or else as if something were about to happen. The place was never more than half-full. For years it was owned by a family of Irish immigrants. Then, around 1927, this family, deciding to move on, put the place up for sale. My mother’s grandfather pulled together some cash and bought the restaurant. Why he did this, I don’t know. Owning a diner doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to the American dream. Still, it did a decent business and still occupies a mythic place in our story, recalling a more jaunty, experimental period in family history. At one time the place must have had a name, but everyone, even my great-grandfather, just called it “the diner.”
Soon after my mother’s grandparents bought the place, they discovered it was a hangout for Jewish gangsters. In the future, these gangsters would come to be known as Murder Incorporated, and the diner would become a sort of shrine to their bravado. The gangsters had a regular booth in back. Often there were many people in this group, and another table had to be added. Louis Lepke himself once sat in the corner of the booth, his back to the wall.
When he was old enough, my mother’s uncle Abraham went to work in the diner. One night, before closing, Pittsburgh Phil came up behind my great-uncle, who was stacking dishes. “A big husky kid like you?” said Strauss. “Why you wasting your time doing ladies’ work? You could make a nice penny running errands for me and the boys.”
My uncle did not answer and instead went on stacking dishes. This upset my grandmother, who thought this might be taken by Strauss as a sign of disrespect. “That man would kill you as soon as look at you,” she told me recently. “I was positive Abraham was going to wind up dead.”
She was right. Several years later Abraham was killed in combat in the Second World War, the same result in a larger cause. The men in Murder Incorporated, they too were willing to die for a cause. They were just selfish enough to know what their cause was—themselves. They were not fool-sucker enough to die for something as vague and abstract as freedom or liberty. Of course, after V-E Day, when the particulars of Hitler’s war became clear, these feelings would change.
Around this time, my mother’s mother married Benjamin Eisenstadt, my grandfather. Though he had passed the bar exam, work did not come easily for lawyers, especially Jewish lawyers, during the Depression. After trying just about everything else, Ben took a job as a counterman at the diner. If you go to the house in Flatbush where my grandmother still lives, you will see on the wall a newspaper clip from that time: the photo, Ben in apron with coffeepot, is accompanied by text that reads, “If you want a cup of joe and a legal brief, come see Benjamin Eisenstadt.” After several years in the diner, my grandfather, tired of countertop sugar dispensers and how they crusted over (he found this unsanitary), invented the sugar packet, which finally freed him from the service industry. Much later he came up with Sweet’n Low, but that was far in the future, when my grandfather had already become a very different kind of man.
My mother’s recollections of the diner are vague, but my grandmother still dreams about the place. When I told her of my interest in writing about the restaurant and also about the gangsters and their table in back, her face clouded over. “They’ll kill you,” she said. “These men, they’re not like you. They’ll kill a boy like you.”
When I pointed out that these men—Reles, Strauss, Goldstein, Maione, Abbandando—were long dead, she shook her head and said, “They’ll kill you.” That’s when I realized that to my grandmother, and to a lot of other people, too, the Jewish gangsters who came to power in the twenties and thirties were less like men than weather systems, wild and unpredictable and unstoppable by a small thing like death. “I beg you not to ask any questions about these men,” she went on. “They hear everything and will enjoy killing you.”
One night in 1931, at nine P.M. all the men whom Abe had called were seated at a booth in back of the diner, all but George Defeo and the Dasher. There was Pittsburgh Phil, who would soon be known as the most efficient killer in Brooklyn; Happy Maione, who sneered long before Elvis; Buggsy Goldstein, whose mother called him Mot’l; Walter Sage, who said he stole to support his study of the Talmud; and Gangy Cohen, a huge tank of a man who talked fast and clear, as though his words were connected by hyphens. Now, when I think of these men and their nicknames, each carefully chosen and solemnly given, I imagine them as colorful, gun-toting action figures.
“Would-somebody-please-tell-me-please-where-is-this-fellow-they-call-the-Dasher?” asked Gangy Cohen. “Where-the-hell-is-this-fellow?”
A window near the table was open, and through the window came the sound of the street: cars, kids on stoops, mothers calling sons home. “Look, I’ve been thinking about this and decided we need to kill everyone associated with the Shapiros,” said the Kid. “If we don’t kill them all, they kill us. And listen: Meyer and Joey Silver. Those are special. I want to be there for those.”
Pep, who was seated next to the Kid, nodded. Strauss was tall and well built, with wide-set eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones, a long nose, thin lips, and small teeth. When the waitress came over, he ordered first. He always ordered first, and always sturgeon, the most expensive item on the menu. “Gimme a plate of sturgeon,” he would say proudly. Though Strauss was not yet rich, sturgeon was something he had to have, something his parents could never afford. The meat of the sturgeon was white and soft and came apart on his fork. For Strauss, one bite of sturgeon took the place of all his father’s morality. The other men ordered coffee, hamburgers, brisket sandwiches, doughnuts.
“Hey, fellas,” said the Dasher, coming through the door. “Did you get the news?” When the men looked up, Dasher could probably tell they had not heard and must have felt the thrill of delivering bad news. “I heard it coming over,” he said, stripping off his coat. “George Defeo caught it.”
And that was all. Abe and Marty had spent much of the last few months with George, but in the end it must have been like hearing about a stranger. All they got was the one cold fact: George is dead. But they did not see him fall. They did not see him backed against a wall on Atlantic Avenue. They did not see the pattern the exit wounds made on the bricks. The cops would be all over this one, so they would not even attend the funeral. “We’ll have to look for someone to take his place,” said the Kid.
A long time later, Reles and Goldstein probably went to see the tombstone at Mount Zion Cemetery. George Defeo. Born 1910; Died 1930. And that was it. Nowhere in there was there any hint of the real George, how well he played pool, how he wore his hat.
The men sat in the back booth until closing. They talked in hushed tones. Sometimes there was a long silence, somebody mumbling, followed by an explosion of laughter. At such moments the back of the diner seemed to fill with teeth. Those moments made my great-grandmother nervous, but the men in the back tipped well, and they made the idea of the diner ever being robbed a kind of joke.
At the end of the meal, the Kid went over assignments, sending men like soldiers across the neighborhood. He was preparing for war; he wanted to fight the Shapiros in the street, so everyone could see the corpses. George Defeo was the first casualty of that war, but the real fighting would not come until the summer, and it would be the first test of Kid Twist and his gang.