Time to Be a Big Brother Again
Hester Street, an office at the end of an alley.
Pacifico, who ran the gambling den, looked on with something like pity at his battered subordinates.
"Get jumped out of nowhere and there's nothing you can do. So what's the name again?"
"...The Union."
"Union punks? Labor unions?"
It was an era when trade unions were everywhere. Every labor outfit ended with the word Union. An easy mistake to make.
"Shit, why the hell would union boys hit us? Don't just stand there like idiots—help me understand."
"...They all had black scarves wrapped around their faces. We couldn't make out a single one of them."
"Yeah. That happens."
Pacifico nodded as if he understood perfectly. Then he rose from his chair and picked up the iron pipe leaning beside him.
"I get all of that. But you still should've protected the pizzo."
Pizzo was Sicilian and Neapolitan slang for protection money.
And these idiots had let a hundred and fifty dollars of pizzo walk right out the door.
"...We're sorry."
"You worthless sons of bitches."
Thud! Thud!
Pacifico swung the iron pipe without mercy. Even when it landed on the same spots already bruised and broken, his men offered no resistance.
"I told you times are tight, didn't I? Every single dollar matters—and you let the pizzo get snatched? By some rootless union trash?!"
When the frenzied swings finally stopped, blood dripped steadily from the end of the pipe. His men lay on the floor, swallowing their groans.
"Get the hell out of my sight. Now."
Pacifico propped the pipe against the wall and sank back into his chair. The subordinates filed out. One man remained, sitting silently on the sofa.
Pacifico's right hand and oldest friend.
"You don't like it? Did I get too worked up?"
"No. It'd be weirder if you were calm right now. One goddamn snitch turned the whole outfit into a wasteland."
The betrayal of Ralph Daniello. The tip-off that had sent the Neapolitan gang's entire leadership to jail one after another, ripping the foundation out from under them.
Businesses everywhere had started shaking like loose branches, leaves dropping off one by one.
The biggest cause was the sudden about-face by the cops and Tammany Hall—the same people who had been sucking the gang dry for years. The protectors had turned into the ones tightening the noose. Bribes no longer worked. Gambling dens, narcotics, brothels, and smuggling operations across Manhattan had ground to a halt.
Pacifico, a satellite crew of the Navy Street Gang, was living that reality.
"Damn it, the whole board flipped. How the hell did it come to this?"
"It smelled wrong from the second the Newtown Creek warehouse got hit. That's when everything started going sideways."
The warehouse on Newtown Creek—stocked with tens of thousands of dollars in contraband—had been cleaned out, and from that moment the entire operation had begun to unravel.
Pacifico ground his teeth, thinking of the faceless bastard behind it all.
"Still no word on that sniper son of a bitch?"
"If they'd caught him, they would've called us. It would have been the ugliest execution this city has ever seen."
"True enough. An iron pipe would be too good for that one."
Pacifico drummed his fingers on the desk, trying to bleed off the anxiety.
"This Union or whatever they call themselves. Any chance they're Sicilian?"
"If they were, they wouldn't have stopped at the cash. They would've tried to take the gambling house outright."
"So that leaves the Jews or the Irish..."
The Jewish gangs had barely shown their faces since the Eastman Gang collapsed. The Irish were in the same boat. After the Gopher Gang in Hell's Kitchen fell apart, the leftovers had splintered in every direction.
"Whatever they are. Even the nobodies are looking down on us now."
That was the Neapolitan reality. Morale had cratered, and while the Sicilians quietly ate into their territory, the Navy Street Gang in Brooklyn was still obsessed with hunting the sniper.
"Future looks real bright."
Pacifico lit a cigar and exhaled a long, smoke-filled sigh.
Rooftop of a tenement house on Forsyth Street.
Gavin was swinging his arms in wide circles when he suddenly let out a sound and broke into a grin.
"I think I'm hurt. My arm doesn't want to rotate right here. That enough for a medical exemption?"
"Doctors aren't that stupid. It's got to be broken. Like mine."
"Whoa, look at this guy's forearm. It's swollen like a balloon."
"I closed my eyes and blocked the iron pipe with my arm. Clean break, looks like."
Envying a broken arm. Were these even human?
I was still clicking my tongue when Drew Williams, stocky as ever, spoke up.
"Hey, Boss. You heard that Italian ask if we were a union, right? I told you. Call ourselves the Union and everybody gets the wrong idea."
"That's exactly what I was going for."
Union meant alliance, solidarity. Gangsters would hear it and think labor union. Working men would hear it and feel a flicker of kinship.
"It's still new, so yeah, people say 'union.' Give it time and the gangs will start thinking we're some kind of syndicate alliance."
An optical illusion of size. Of course the name carried a deeper meaning as well.
"Right now it's only the Irish who've gathered, but our Union doesn't care about nationality. Doesn't care about race either. That's why the name is Union—so we never forget it."
"Leader sure knows how to talk."
"Yeah, Union, Unicorn, whatever. Who cares what the gang's called."
Even after all that explanation, they still didn't grasp the real point. I must have looked frustrated, because Gavin suddenly asked,
"So what are we doing about the gambling house?"
"We take our time with that one. They're hot right now. No reason to poke them."
They might even start packing guns in broad daylight. No need to walk into that kind of risk just to hit a gambling den.
"Anyway, is this our hideout for a while? What happens when it rains—we move somewhere else?"
"We're a gang. We just get wet."
At Gavin's words everyone nodded with grim determination. It only made them look more pathetic.
Most of them lived in Chelsea or Hell's Kitchen, a few miles away. The commute wasted time and would hurt mobility when it counted.
They tossed out suggestions, thinking of me in their own way.
"Leader, let's stack some cash and get a real base soon."
"What we took today won't even come close, right? We should hit ten more places just like this."
"Or we could knock over a truck?"
"Enough. Everybody gather up."
We had shaken the Italians down for a hundred and seventy-five dollars. A hundred and fifty of it was protection money; the rest was pocket change.
I pulled out the bills and coins, and they flocked to me like magnets.
"I'll handle the hideout. Take these."
Someone else's blood-and-sweat protection money.
Was it right to handle my mother's company's protection money this way?
The thought never even crossed my mind.
So I split it thirteen dollars each.
Sharing the take was only natural, but not like this. You divided according to contribution, and the boss usually kept thirty to fifty percent.
That was why they kept glancing between me and the money with complicated eyes.
"Today everybody contributed the same. It won't always be like this, but rewards should be fair. That's how I see it."
"..."
Part of it was that we were still early days, but solid rewards also bound them tighter. And these were men who, when cash ran short, would pick pockets, steal, or rob without a second thought the moment they were alone.
Blow it all and we were finished. Better to keep their pockets full so they stayed out of freelancing.
"The leftover six dollars goes toward a team dinner."
"Ooooh. Team dinner!"
I was still fluttering the six-dollar bill when someone said,
"Someone's coming up."
Every head snapped toward the stairwell.
Two heads rose into view.
One jerked back in panic. The other froze, eyes going round as saucers.
It was Roa. Tears welled in those big eyes almost instantly, and she shouted,
"Don't take Big Brother's money! That's the money for Roa's meat!"
Everyone blinked, then waved me off at once.
"What team dinner. Just keep it."
"Buy your little sister some meat, Boss."
The whole mood flipped. Voices went soft and thick.
"Guess it's time I played big brother for a change."
"We made money today. Time to treat the family."
"Comeback home!"
A sudden surge of family feeling. Thanks to Roa, the gang's hearts had turned warm and damp.
We broke up right away. I soothed Roa and took her home.
That evening.
Roa's mouth never stopped the entire time we ate meat.
"Mom and Little Brother, you have to thank Roa every time you chew. Without me you wouldn't be eating this. You wouldn't, right?"
"What are you talking about?"
Roa dropped her voice as if sharing a secret.
"On the roof they almost took Big Brother's money, but Roa protected it."
"Somebody tried to take your brother's money? How many?"
"So many. Roa ran out of fingers. Right, Big Brother?"
I rubbed my face and nodded. Mother asked quietly,
"Those people... they're all right, aren't they?"
"Yes."
Still too early to mention the founding of the Union Gang. Tonight we would just eat meat in peace.
Still, I needed to find a proper hideout soon.
I walked more than ten places across the Lower East Side and still couldn't find anything that felt right.
Today I was out looking at properties with another real-estate man. We ended up back on Allen Street, standing in front of the problem building.
"Don't even glance at the left side. The building on the right came in at a decent price."
But my eyes kept drifting left.
Just then a customer headed down into the basement—the one that was supposed to be a brothel. A middle-aged man in a neat suit.
Watching his back, I kept hearing the sound of something knocking against the basement wall from the other day.
Should I go look myself?
I shook my head a moment later.
What would change if I did? The owner might not even be there. Or they might just tell me to go to Chinatown and kick me out.
"That basement goes two floors deep. Pretty rare for the Lower East Side—"
I stopped hearing the real-estate man. After we parted ways, my feet carried me toward Chelsea Pier, where Tanner Smith was.
Pier 60 on the east bank of the Hudson.
Tanner Smith, rope coiled around his waist, stood on a crate whipping up the union strikers.
"The company brass aren't oiling the ships sitting right here—they're oiling the ships hanging between their own legs! And while they're at it, what about our kids? How long are we supposed to keep feeding them nothing but potatoes? How long do we have to live like this?!"
"This goddamn world!"
"Higher wages! Shorter hours! Guaranteed days off!"
Tanner, who wasn't even married, was using family as a rallying cry today.
After the speech I met him among the stacked crates.
Out of habit he spun the end of the rope around his waist, then immediately took a shot at the gang's name.
"Looking at me, don't I seem more like Union material than you? Perfect fit for a real union."
"So come join."
"I'll think about it. But what brings you out here?"
I told him about the building on Allen Street.
"Rosie Hertz—the Queen of the Lower East Side prostitutes—owns that building. And you're telling me the basement tenant running a brothel has nothing to do with her?"
"The real-estate guy said she's getting older and winding the business down."
Tanner snorted as if the idea were ridiculous.
"You have no idea what a piece of trash Rosie Hertz really is. I could talk all day and never finish."
I had already heard enough of Rosie Hertz's endless list of crimes. Even so, listening to Tanner made my fists clench hard enough to ache.
"Last October they caught her running a brothel on Broadway. She didn't retire—she just had a falling-out with the tenant there."
"What happens if I smash that basement to pieces?"
"Anything that touches Rosie Hertz automatically involves the Jewish gangs. You already don't have enough Italians to fight, and now you want the Jews too?"
Rosie Hertz was a Hungarian Jew who had ruled the Lower East Side red-light district for decades. That kind of longevity meant deep ties to the Jewish underworld.
"You start something and then buy the building, the buyer becomes the prime suspect. You want to avoid that. And do you really need to hand money to a woman like her for a building?"
"Then we take it?"
Tanner froze for a second. His eyes filled with cold killing intent and naked greed, then the corner of his mouth slowly curved up.
"That woman has a lot of money."
Rosie Hertz had lured poor Jewish immigrant girls into prostitution and driven more than a few of them to suicide. She had run nine brothels and raked in over a million dollars.
Did trash like that really deserve a fair purchase price?
"If we play this right, it could pay better than knocking over the Newtown Creek warehouse."
"We'll see."
After putting our heads together, Tanner and I decided to start by gathering information.