The Curriculum Has Changed
Protection money was the traditional lifeblood of any street gang.
Irish immigrants had first organized into vigilante crews to push back against the discrimination of the native-born. In truth that was the birth of American gangland. Those crews fattened themselves on the pocket change of their fellow newcomers, and the arrangement soon twisted into the racket called protection. Anyone who refused got a beating for his trouble, and once the Irish learned how cleanly the money came, gangs sprouted like weeds.
From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, Manhattan filled with them—the Bowery Boys, the Daybreak Boys, the Dead Rabbits, the Forty Thieves, the Gas House Gang—nearly all Irish. Then the end of the century brought a change. Jewish and Italian immigrants poured into the country, and the multi-ethnic gang era began in earnest. They practiced the same protection, threats, and extortion, but only inside their own communities. No one crossed ethnic lines for the take.
Until now.
“Italians?”
“Yeah. Half the workers come from that side.”
Every clothing factory in the neighborhood was the same—Jewish and Italian hands on the sewing machines, while Mother herself was pure Irish. You would think an Irish boss would earn a free pass. I wanted to know how the Italian collectors had reacted.
“Didn’t they flinch when they saw Mother?”
“Looked a little thrown, sure. But in the end…” She sighed and shook her head. “They just said pay the ten dollars a week and nothing happens.”
“Do they throw in a lucky charm? Easy living.”
“I was furious at first, then I decided peace was cheaper. Every other shop and factory on the block is paying.”
So she had handed over the ten dollars and watched them leave. From the way she kept glancing at me I knew she had chosen cash peace over letting me step in and set the street on fire.
“You did the right thing.”
“I did?”
“If you’d refused they would have come back every day until you paid.”
“Th-that’s what I thought. So I handled it okay?”
“You did fine.”
But those bastards should never have come at all, Mother. I should have flattened their hole so thoroughly they never again set foot in the district. Ten dollars a week was more than enough to hire another cutter and still have change left over. And she just gave it away?
I sent Marcus and Leo to map the collectors’ hangout and pin down which crew they belonged to—street unit, local Five Points, or something heavier out of Sicily or Naples. The real problem was simple: smash one outfit and another crawls into the vacancy. This time I intended to fill the vacancy myself.
Alone has limits.
Gunsmith had been right. I needed soldiers.
Two days later Gavin showed up to give me the new training site.
“Abandoned factory in Chelsea. Checked it yesterday—decent street noise, plenty of floor space.”
“Exact address. And something else.” I asked him which Italian outfits worked Hester Street.
He scratched his head and shrugged. “Units come and go by the handful. Climb the ladder and God knows who’s sitting on top. But those pricks actually hit your mother’s place?”
“Walked out with ten dollars in protection.”
“Sounds about right. I mean, same rates as everywhere else.”
He laid it out fast. Protection scales with the size of the shop—five to ten for a corner store, ten to twenty for a mid-size business, twenty-five and up for anything larger.
“Marginals take their cut too?”
“How else we eat?”
I stared. How else you eat is you work, you bastards. Then again, for a gang that is the work.
“Where’s Tanner these days?”
“Chelsea docks. Strike ended at the last place, so he’s back there. Still runs out to Coney Island now and then.”
The Marginals owned the stretch from Chelsea through Hell’s Kitchen; that was why Tanner, fresh out of prison three years earlier, had taken a dock-worker’s card on the Chelsea waterfront. Ever since, whenever a strike flared he stuck his straw into the union till—east side, west side, south side, no difference—and drank deep.
“I want to see him. Make the call.”
“No need. He’s coming to you tonight.”
We sorted the training schedule, and true to Gavin’s word Tanner climbed the tenement stairs after dark.
Rooftop of the tenement house.
“Sicilians and Neapolitans are tearing the city upside down looking for a sniper.”
“I almost walked into something myself going to see Gunsmith.”
“They hit him too?”
I nodded. Tanner clicked his tongue.
“Used to be cleaner when we just cracked skulls. Truth is, they’re not hunting only you.”
“Tracking the merchandise as well.”
“That’s why I’m sitting on the stuff. White Hand’s doing the same.”
He had met Dini Meehan in Brooklyn a few days earlier. Meehan had owned up to the smuggling snag and the broken manpower promise, even offered a straight apology.
“Why do you figure a prideful ice-block like Dini Meehan would swallow that?”
“No idea.”
“You. He wants more work with you down the road.”
The Newtown Creek warehouse job had fattened White Hand’s pockets and, better still, gutted their rivals on Navy Street.
“Leadership locked up, goods gone. Navy Street’s cash flow is dry as dust, so they’re shaking every tree for protection money.”
“Protection?”
I wanted every detail. My eyes did the asking and Tanner kept talking.
“Brooklyn and right here on the Lower East Side—they’re sweeping anything that moves. They run a few gambling houses, but it’s not enough.”
Navy Street had always been a Brooklyn outfit, yet a year ago they had pushed into the Lower East Side. That was the same year the Sicilians and the Neapolitans went to war over the gambling rackets right here.
Everything Tanner said lined up with the history I still carried from another life.
“Italian gambling used to belong to the Del Gaudio brothers and Joe DeMarco. Then the Sicilian boss Morello got hungry and the whole thing blew open. Sicilians hit Nicolo Del Gaudio first. Next target was DeMarco, but they botched it twice like amateurs.”
Joe DeMarco ran a restaurant and half a dozen gambling dens on Mulberry Street; he had cash and soldiers to match.
“After the second failure, where do you think Giuseppe Morello went looking for help? Straight to the Neapolitan crews in Brooklyn. Sicilians uptown on the Upper East Side, Neapolitans—Navy Street and Coney Island—down in Brooklyn. Two outfits that had nothing to do with the Lower East Side suddenly teamed up to erase DeMarco.”
“They finally got him on the third try. That’s when the real trouble started.”
A kingless district. The alliance shattered the moment both sides reached for the empty throne.
“Sicilians got greedy—wanted the whole pie. Neapolitans saw it coming, so they set a trap. Called a meeting to ‘divide the rackets fair.’ Sicilians walk into the restaurant—bang, bang. Only the Neapolitans were so fucking stupid they dropped one bodyguard and missed the boss.”
Morello’s answer was pure rage. Assassins answered assassins, and the streets ran red. That bloodbath became the opening chapter of the Mafia-Camorra War that would rewrite the underworld map. The killings, thanks to a Navy Street snitch, also put most of the Neapolitan leadership behind bars. Trials were still pending, but I already knew the verdicts better than any judge.
“Anyway, Navy Street walked away with a nice slice of Lower East Side gambling.”
“Including Hester Street?”
“Probably.”
Now it made sense—why an Italian crew had walked into an Irish shop. Butterfly effect.
“We cleaned out their warehouse, so they came for protection money.”
“What?”
I laid the whole story out. Tanner’s shoulders started shaking; he threw his head back and laughed.
“This isn’t funny.”
“How am I supposed to keep a straight face? Those poor bastards must be scraping the bottom. We really left them nothing.”
The laughter died. He fixed me with a look that already knew the answer.
“So what now? Even if you bury these particular collectors, another set will show up next week.”
“That’s exactly why I wanted to talk.”
I asked for men—Gavin, Corey, anyone else who might vanish into the draft any day.
“Building a unit.”
“That’s how it starts.”
“Scale’s still small. Training’s in Chelsea—when?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I hear the class got bigger. Take all of them if you can.”
Was he serious? I had planned as much, yet I had never even seen most of their faces.
“You’ll understand once you walk in. And if you’re going to own a piece of turf you need a base nobody else knows about.”
“Is that why you settled the books so fast?”
“······ Yeah. That’s me.”
I hadn’t realized. I had simply taken the money. Tanner answered without shame, and I didn’t care. He always scratched the itch before I even felt it—the perfect partner, the one man I trusted without reservation.
“For the record, I never once doubted you.”
“Out of nowhere. You totally doubted me.”
“I did not. You are trust.”
The Marginals were a local power, a federation of street units. Working with Tanner these past months had made me, in practice, one of those units. Peeling off a few men would not dent the whole machine; it only added the burden of feeding them with jobs I planned myself.
“By the way, I closed on that Coney Island bar yesterday. You’ll shit when you see it—right by the Harvard Inn.”
Al Capone’s face from the Harvard Inn flickered across my mind for half a second.
“Opening when?”
“Previous owner left it a wreck. Month of work at least.”
“Rooms upstairs?”
“Of course. Opening night’s on me—bring the family.”
Once the date was set I would tell Roa. She needed to grow up remembering the big brother who took her to Coney Island twice in one year.
The training ground for the draft-eligible men was Chelsea—west Midtown Manhattan, east bank of the Hudson. Docks and warehouses lined the waterfront; immigrant neighborhoods filled the blocks inland. Seventh Avenue and West Twentieth.
The moment I stepped into the abandoned factory a roar went up.
“Instructor’s heeeere!”
“Ohhh, Dead-Eye Knox!”
“Woo! Woo!”
No outsiders. Only Gavin, Corey, and ten fresh faces—every last one of them Marginals who had hit the Newtown Creek warehouse with me.
You’ll understand when you walk in.
Reception complete. Tanner had hand-picked the warehouse crew for exactly this day. Ages twenty to twenty-two, every one of them already knew the name Knox. The message was clear: keep them close and keep them sharp.
Twelve men total. Five of them living under the shadow of the draft. One had just finished his physical that morning.
“Want to hear something amazing, Instructor? Guess who I ran into at the induction center.”
Monk Eastman. The old Jewish boss who once split the Lower East Side with the Five Points Gang. After five years in prison he walked out in 1909 to find his outfit gone and no one left who wanted him. Petty theft and opium followed; he bounced in and out of jail ever since.
“Shows up wanting to enlist. Man’s forty-two. Best part—he strips for the exam and the docs nearly faint. Knife scars and bullet holes all over him. So they ask, ‘What fucking war did you fight in?’ And Monk Eastman looks them dead in the eye and says—”
New York’s always been at war.
The quiet end of a once-great boss. I would not go out the same way.
Training opened with the same drill I had run the first time. The difference came after theory: live combat.
“Everybody search the place. Bring back one tool each.”
“······ Anything?”
“Trainee Eight—got something already?”
“Yeah, I do.”
They produced what they always carried—clubs, knives, brass knuckles, lengths of iron pipe. I looked them over and raised my voice.
“From this moment we train for survival in a group brawl—no. Close-quarters combat!”
“Ohhh, the curriculum’s changed.”
Gavin and Corey had been yawning through the second helping of theory; now their eyes lit up. No time for endurance work. These men needed killing skills they could use tomorrow.
By late afternoon the session was finished and I walked back into Mother’s office.
“My son’s suddenly a very busy man. Company work can wait, I suppose?”
“Something came up. Mother—”
I asked her to make thirteen thick scarves. She flinched; I sketched the exact cut and told her the color was black.
“······ We’re not hitting banks, are we?”
“What kind of son do you think you raised?”
“I trust you. Of course I do. When do you need them?”
By next week—before the collectors come back for their ten dollars.
That day, Mother, would be the day the gang was born.