No Word for Days
If a crew was gathered in an alley, or a pack strolling as if they owned the sidewalk, those were our targets.
The ones shaking down shops for protection money were targets too. We rolled the ones who collected protection money.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Get lost, you bastards…!”
Thwack!
Crack!
Clubs, steel pipes, knives, chains, sledgehammers, screwdrivers, saws, wrenches, brass knuckles—every close-combat weapon imaginable came out as the brawls erupted.
This was a chicken game of taking and being taken.
What is a chicken game?
The term itself first appeared in mid-twentieth-century America. Two drivers race straight at each other; the one who swerves is the chicken. The game does not end until one of them flinches.
I preferred to dress the situation up a little more elegantly by comparing it to Korea’s Ppepero game. It was a contest over who could devour more of the long stretch of Allen and Orchard Streets, and the final prize—erotic skinship—was, for the members, simply the accumulation of combat experience. For us, practice was real combat.
When the long day ended, the men who had thrown themselves into the free-for-alls gathered in the basement of the Allen Street twin buildings.
Blood had soaked into the scarves around their necks. A fair number of them had cracked skulls or broken limbs.
Their reactions split into two clear camps.
Those who puffed out their chests, proud of how hard they had fought.
Those whose faces burned red with the simple shame of having been beaten.
It was fine. First times were like that.
They would get better.
“Teams that got wrecked today, step up and reenact the whole thing in detail.”
With the rest of the men watching, we broke down exactly why they had been pushed around like idiots and what had to change. That was the only way anyone improved.
“You can’t raise personal combat power overnight, so let’s lock in a few simple rules.”
First: count the enemy before you commit.
Second: decide whether the terrain favors you.
Third: maximize your own formation and the efficiency of every weapon you carry.
Fourth: always keep a last-resort tool ready for the escape route.
I spent a long time drilling those four points. Scatter, fight, reassemble—every night closed the same way.
Before long, Orchard and Allen Streets had slipped back into a kind of primitive age, violence running wild through every block.
The only mercy was that civilians never got caught in it.
The police paid little attention either; they wrote it off as ordinary street-unit gang scrapes.
NYPD 7th Precinct, Lower East Side jurisdiction.
A detective tracking stolen goods from the garment factories let out a long sigh.
“Autumn hits and the whole lot of them act like they swallowed a pharmacy.”
The street fights never stopped.
Days of midday free-for-alls left no time to sit at a desk.
Upstairs kept demanding more patrols, but there were never enough men, so everyone just went through the motions.
“Bastards. Why can’t they fight at night like normal people?”
“Be grateful no one’s dead yet. By the way, word is a new gang’s moved in. You check it out?”
“I dug around. Word is they’re Hell’s Kitchen boys.”
“Think they’re the same ones who cleaned out Barney’s underwear factory on Orchard?”
Michael nodded; he had been thinking the same thing.
“The way they just popped up is fishy. And starting a few days ago, the fence who runs the pawnshop on Eleventh Street in Hell’s Kitchen went dark. We had solid intel he moved dozens of sewing machines.”
“So?”
“Their precinct’s chasing it.”
“If they really are Hell’s Kitchen, the whole picture gets weird.”
It was the usual mess that followed when the big outfits that had carved up the turf finally cracked.
Hell’s Kitchen had the Gophers and the Hudson Dusters.
The Lower East Side had the Eastmans and the Five Points.
Once the strong rulers fell and split, the scavengers swarmed in to claim every scrap. That was the reality now.
What mattered was the shift in the criminal map.
Hell’s Kitchen—the West Side—had always been Irish turf; the Lower East Side had been split between Jewish and Italian crews.
Now Hell’s Kitchen boys were eyeing this side?
Blood ran thicker than water. For Irish cops, the development was more than a little interesting.
Michael and George, trading the conversation, were both Irish immigrants themselves.
With the IRA already organized for Irish independence, the rise of fellow-feeling and solidarity was only natural.
Better to look after your own and take the envelope from them than keep taking money from Jewish and Italian crooks.
Of course, if the fighting grew too loud the non-Irish inside the department would push back—but that was getting ahead of things.
“They’ll make a little noise for a few days and fade. They haven’t even locked down Hell’s Kitchen. Why bother coming here?”
If they were strong enough they would have unified Hell’s Kitchen first. Instead that side was still ripped to pieces, crews fighting each other.
“If they got pushed out and washed up here, they won’t last. I give them a month.”
“A month’s generous. I say two weeks.”
“Dollar bet?”
“You’re on.”
Michael and George were still grinning when the rookie returned with the Italian cop.
Michael smoothed his expression fast.
“Rookie, what’s it look like out there?”
“Another free-for-all on Allen Street near 178. We got the call and ran, but they vanished like smoke.”
“The ones who got hit?”
“Three statements. All the same. Guys in scarves charged them, yelled ‘Why you standing around? This is our turf,’ and opened up.”
“Cute. Just standing in a group makes you the enemy?”
The simplest sorting method in the world.
Then the sharp-eyed rookie offered a brilliant idea—actually, the Italian cop’s idea.
“We go plainclothes and bait them. How about it, seniors?”
“……”
It was a good idea.
Neither of them liked it.
Michael and George lowered their voices, faces sour.
“Ambition’s fine. Just keep it as a thought.”
“Don’t breathe a word upstairs.”
The rookie had enough sense to paste on an awkward smile and nod.
Outside for a smoke, Michael and George whispered.
“Roberto suddenly playing chess like that… you think these really are Irish kids?”
“Same thought. He was always passive, now he’s talking undercover ops to bag gangs.”
“Shit. Italian boys been catching heat lately—maybe it stings.”
They snickered softly, lit their cigarettes, and headed for the back of the building.
Orchard Street Gang.
A Five Points unit working the street that shared its name. Boss Chuck Luger let his voice drop into a cold rage.
“Rat bastards. Think they can just eat this place?”
Orchard was famous garment territory.
How much blood had been spilled over the years just to hold the commerce here?
Men arrested, others left cooling in alleys that became their graves.
Planting a flag on Orchard, land of milk and honey, was a fight no one could hear without tears.
And now, after only six months, they were about to lose the street to rootless nobodies.
In his gut he already suspected these were the same crew that had cleaned out Herman Kalman’s factory.
Chuck swallowed the fury and gave the order.
“Tell Pioji and Lombardi I want a three-way sit-down.”
The two men were the bosses who split Orchard and Allen with him.
Chuck called the meeting at a Hester Street salon to find a way out.
“Look at their pattern—Allen and Orchard are the only targets. They can thrash all they want; they won’t last.”
“Agreed. How long can they keep the hit-and-run, then vanish?”
“So we just hand them the turf for a while?”
Even a short stretch of street pulled in more than a thousand dollars a week from the shops and factories.
Gangs bled each other over territory for one reason: protection money.
“They’ll start collecting soon enough. That’s when we grab the tail and rip them all the way back to the nest.”
“We all pile on and crush them.”
That night the three crews agreed to a temporary alliance until the reckless newcomers were erased.
Allen Street twin buildings.
“See? I told you it works.”
Today every man returned to the second basement without a scratch—the first clean day in two full weeks.
Hit-and-run skill and teamwork had finally clicked; they had learned the rhythm of the mass brawl. Or else…
“Don’t tell me you sat on your hands today.”
“……There weren’t any groups standing around, Boss.”
“Looks like someone passed new orders down to them.”
A sudden change like this meant they had either found a counter or were cooking something else. The point was sound.
I had never planned to run this game forever, so I shifted course right there.
“You’ve all worked hard. Long tails get caught, so we stop here. Starting tomorrow, whenever you spot any of the ones we’ve already hit, shadow them quiet and find their nests.”
To plant a real flag in this district you had to remove the rival bosses. Broadcasting our existence—or whatever temporary name the gang carried—would come after that.
Separate from that, the mass brawls were over, so it was time for a new curriculum to sharpen the men’s edge. Real-combat sense faded fast; we had to strike while it was still hot.
“Now we look at personal combat power.”
Conditioning could never be overstated, but that was everyday work. I wanted techniques that translated straight into a street fight.
There wasn’t enough time to teach Systema, Krav Maga, or Arnis.
Better to act like a star instructor and hand them only the moves that mattered.
“Oliver, front and center.”
Oliver flinched, then ambled out with a wary look.
“Hug me.”
“……?”
“Wrap both arms around me and squeeze.”
“No take-backs later, right?”
I let the corner of my mouth lift; his followed.
The kid still carried a grudge.
“Just pretend. Do it for real and you might die.”
“……”
Oliver’s face fell. He stretched both arms out like a ghost and wrapped me up.
“All of you watching? When someone grabs you like this, stomp hard on his foot and at the same time drive the top of your head up into his chin.”
Once the clinch broke, knee straight into the groin.
“Then knife-hand the chin again. Three-hit combo and the fight’s already over.”
“Ooooh.”
I paired them off to drill it, then moved on to counters for a grabbed wrist and a one-arm choke.
They looked like the self-defense moves you might teach women, but every one of them came straight out of the manuals real soldiers studied.
The author was an old-school type, yet he had spent a lifetime refining offense and defense; the pages were pure practical gold.
Come to think of it, the man who wrote those manuals—William Fairbairn—was alive right now, in the same era as me.
A former British soldier, he would be serving with the Shanghai Municipal Police about now, learning his craft in the red-light alleys through hundreds of life-or-death fights, polishing every attack and every defense.
While the men trained, I unfolded an organization chart in a corner of the second basement and talked it over with Patrick.
In mafia ranks there is a Soldier—basically an action man.
I had not assigned any ranks inside the Marginals yet, so every man here counted as a Soldier.
I planned to promote a few and start building a real structure.
Separately, nearly seventy members had never made it to these sessions. They held regular jobs and could not simply drop everything for training.
“Not everyone has to fight. We just need to match each man to what he can actually do. We also need someone to handle purchases. Remember the fence who unloaded the swag we dropped a while back and turned it into dough?”
Swag meant stolen goods.
Drop was the place you stashed the swag.
Unload was the quick sale that turned swag into cash.
The underworld slang was endless; it changed from crew to crew and from city to city.
Sometimes a conversation left my head spinning, but we all had to master it so outsiders never caught a word.
Anyway, one of the Marginals had been a fence. He had moved the goods taken from the Neapolitan warehouse on the Newtown Creek and the sewing machines and fabric we had cleaned out of the factory more recently.
The moment I brought the fence up, Patrick’s brow furrowed.
“No word for a few days. I was going to raise it with you anyway.”
Fifty-odd machines still sat unsold.
He wouldn’t have run off with the money—not that kind of man.
According to Patrick this sort of silence happened from time to time.
“The people who move stolen goods are all crooks like us. One bad deal and you’ve got three different outfits hunting you.”
The original owner, the thief, and the buyer.
“Any chance our goods caused the trouble?”
“……He’d have handled it. He’s used to this.”
Patrick added one more thing.
“By nature a fence isn’t fully Marginals property. He keeps security tight by never planting roots in just one place. Too dangerous otherwise.”
“So he’s more of a neutral player?”
“Every district has its own fence network. He’s really one of them.”
Had the fence simply gone to ground inside that network?
The answer arrived two days later.
Isaac Rosenthal.
The Hell’s Kitchen fence came to me asking for help.
With a bullet in him.