Just a Walk Around the Neighborhood
A gang’s weight class turns on the reach of its territory.
The smallest unit is the street crew.
Usually teenagers, they peddle opium on the corners, pick pockets, and work petty thefts.
Gary and Irving—the ones who’d beaten me half to death—and the Italian punks standing right in front of me belonged to that breed. The Italians, though, ran thicker and mixed in grown men; they were a different quality of animal from Gary’s worthless lot. That was why I’d regretted blocking the punch the second it landed.
While I was still cursing my useless defensive instinct, the air in the alley went cold. The Italian punks set their faces and sealed the mouth of the alley so I couldn’t run. Meyer held his breath and watched. Irving, eyes round with shock, stared at me.
The man who’d thrown the punch suddenly shrugged off his coat and rolled up his sleeves.
“Looks like you can handle yourself. You must think I’m a joke.”
Wounded pride, dressed up as swagger. The man full of that swagger drove a fist at me with real intent. This time I didn’t catch it—I simply leaned back and let it whistle past.
“You little rat!”
When I kept slipping his punches, the bastard lost his head completely and threw his whole body at me. He put his weight into my collar, slammed me into the wall—
Thud!
The impact hit my back at the same instant he tried to bury a fist in my gut. The punch was telegraphed. To leave him no space I yanked him in tight against me, locked him up like a hug.
“You crazy—!”
He was still scrambling for distance when a voice cut in from the mouth of the alley.
“Salvatore! The billy-club boys are here!”
So the bastard’s name was Salvatore. I let go; he scrambled back. I fixed his face in my memory and brushed off my collar just as two cops appeared.
Navy uniforms, nightsticks in hand, they planted themselves at the head of the alley and swept the scene with the same look they’d give a nest of cockroaches.
“What the hell are you lot doing gathered up first thing in the morning?”
“You again.”
Their eyes locked on Salvatore.
“Barely out of the can and you’re already dragging a pack around? Keep it up and you’ll end up in a real hole this time. You don’t feel the weather changing? Gangs that used to be somebody are vanishing, and you still haven’t woken up.”
Salvatore smacked his lips and gave them nothing. Whatever the cops said went in one ear and out the other.
After the lecture the cops scanned the alley again and pointed at the ten-year-old standing next to Irving and Meyer.
“Hey, kid. What school you go to?”
The boy’s eyes held more defiance than any ten-year-old ought to carry.
“P.S. 188. Island School.”
“So why aren’t you there? School’s the other direction.”
“I was just heading over.”
“Grab my hand and I’ll walk you myself if you don’t clear out.”
The boy collected his bag and strolled out of the alley as if he had all the time in the world.
Ever since the New York State education law passed, nearly every state except Mississippi ran compulsory schooling for ages eight to fourteen. In city slums or the far West it was honored more in the breach, but once you landed in a cop’s sight you at least had to pretend.
I watched the boy’s back disappear and remembered the partner who, in the books I’d read in my last life, had spent his teens with Meyer—the legendary gangster.
With the kid gone, the cops’ attention swung to me. Anyone with eyes would have noticed the odd one out: the East Asian kid stuck among them like a peacock among crows. Or an ugly duckling.
“You, boy. Lose the road to Chinatown?”
“...Father was from the Korean Empire. Mother’s Irish.”
Mentioning bloodlines did me no favors. Irish cops didn’t know Joseon or the Korean Empire, and they hated the idea of one of their own women marrying an Oriental. The only mercy was that the scale in their heads still tipped a little toward me—toward the boy who at least carried a drop of Irish blood—over the Italians.
“They take your money?”
Every Italian eye snapped to me. Salvatore, the one who’d just been swinging, narrowed his eyes and watched my mouth.
A good chunk of the New York police were Irish, and a good chunk of those were racists down to the bone. They hated Africans and Asians, and they hated Italians just as hard. Especially the singsong rise and fall of the accent, the loud festivals, the garish food—Italians had been the target of that contempt since the day they set foot in America.
Anyway, for someone whose identity was as blurry as mine, picking a fight with any group was still a bad idea. For now.
“I came to see a friend. Nobody took any money.”
Irving caught my glance and nodded in relief. The wrong words could have flipped the whole scene.
The cops still looked unconvinced. They lifted their nightsticks and waved them at the Italian punks—more for the pleasure of it than anything else.
“Damn Dago sons of bitches, stop loitering in the alley and break it up!”
“Move, or I’ll move you!”
Dago came from the common Spanish name Diego, but it had long since become a slur for southern European immigrants, especially Italians. The funny part was that the Irish themselves got called Paddy—from the overused Patrick—and that word packed its own freight of violent, ignorant drunk.
Under the cops’ threats the Italians filed out of the alley with faces like they’d bitten into something rotten. Salvatore shot me one last strange look and vanished with his crew. If I wasn’t imagining it, the hostility had thinned a fraction.
“You three—don’t hang around either. Clear out!”
To keep from catching a blind nightstick, Irving, Meyer, and I left the alley as well.
“Kieran, what the hell was that back there?”
The second we hit open street Irving glued himself to my side.
“You’ve got that kind of guts and skill—why’ve you been taking beatings like a useless cripple all this time?”
No reason to answer that one carefully.
“Take enough hits and you learn how to duck. You’ll get there soon enough.”
“Yeah?”
Irving took my throwaway line dead serious, chewing on it like he’d just been handed some great truth.
Meyer Lansky, walking beside us, turned his interest on me as well.
“You said you didn’t know what ten cents meant.”
“I’m not exactly dying to know now.”
“You’ll regret that the next time you run into that crew. Put simply, that ten cents is protection money.”
A gang paying protection to another gang?
Meyer saw my face and gave a bitter little smile.
“Sounds funny, I know. But we’re still weak. So we take protection from a bigger Italian outfit—against the Irish gangs that would otherwise eat us alive.”
I’d read about it. Big crews grew by collecting protection from the small fry. So Meyer Lansky, future giant of the Mafia, was still just small fry himself.
“By the way, Kieran—you’re not actually under the delusion that you’re Irish, are you?”
A sly little curl of mockery sat at the corner of Meyer’s mouth. Cocky little runt.
“Say what you mean.”
“It’s a fantasy. You’ve lived it—you know. Shout ‘Irish’ all you want on your own; that group still won’t let you in.”
“In or out, it’s none of your business.”
I snorted. Meyer looked at me with a meaningful glint—exactly the expression of a hungry, ambitious teenager looking for a fight.
“Why not come in with us instead? Race, origin—what does any of that matter? If the idea’s the same, that’s enough. I don’t care about that stuff.”
“You’re telling me to join a gang?”
I’d started life number two as a seventeen-year-old with infinite possibilities. A gang? Please.
In this era even the word “Mafia” barely existed, and “gangster” was almost unused. Americans just called the toughs gangs, hoodlums, ruffians. The Korean word for thug, kkangpae, actually came from American “gang members.” Whatever the etymology, the real problem was that the thugs themselves kept clustering around me. No army officers, no tycoons—just hoodlums as far as the eye could see.
I gave Meyer a cool look for the line about not caring about race or origin.
“If you’d had a Black kid standing next to you, I might have believed it. Make the offer then and I’ll think about it.”
“...The Black kids are up in Harlem, north end of Manhattan. Different pond from us.”
Irving slipped in to cover for Meyer. He clearly wanted me in the crew too.
Time to draw a hard line.
“I’ve got no interest in gangs. What I need right now is your shoe-shine kit.”
“That’s why you came looking for me? You should’ve said so.”
Naturally the kit was at Irving’s place. Luckily it wasn’t far; we headed there. Meyer tagged along, still talking, still trying to hook me.
“Why not take an interest in gangs while you’re at it? You already know shining shoes doesn’t lead anywhere.”
“You never know with people. Start with that and maybe you end up Rockefeller-rich. Who can say?”
Meyer and Irving both barked out laughs. They shook their heads at me like I was pitiful; then Meyer’s mouth crooked up again.
“Want me to show you the fastest road?”
Who was teaching whom—this kid still wet behind the ears.
“You might be thinking the same as everybody else—what kind of time is this for gangs? But once you hear how the Manhattan crews actually stand right now, you’ll change your mind.”
The details might be thin, but I was certain I knew the future of the gangs better than Meyer did. In my last life I’d read a solid ten books on the Mafia—real genealogies, real histories among them.
Even with my lukewarm reaction, Meyer’s eyes burned with a strange light.
“Everybody knows the last ten years have been a season of suffering for the Manhattan gangs. And it started—”
In 1895, when Theodore Roosevelt took the dual posts of NYPD commissioner and member of the New York State board. Roosevelt pushed sweeping reform against police corruption; that in turn birthed the strong-arm crime squads. Around 1911 the NYPD’s strong-arm units hit the key men of the Gang Squad and ran full-scale clean-up operations. In the last two years gang after gang had gone to trial; a great many Manhattan crews had shrunk at high speed and started to dissolve.
“People call this the end of the gangs, the dark age. I see it different. I see opportunity.”
Meyer’s story tracked with startling closeness the books I’d read in my previous life. Comparing the two as I listened was its own quiet entertainment, but Meyer himself had a real gift for spinning a tale. He took raw information and laid it out with logic and heat. Even Irving, who’d clearly heard the pitch more than once, was still drawn in deep.
They say a tree that will grow tall shows it in the sapling; Meyer, the future “Accountant of the Mafia,” was that kind of kid.
And there was one more.
The figure who had spent his teens with Meyer Lansky and left a heavy mark on Mafia history.
The kid who’d claimed he was headed to school came strolling out of a narrow side alley. Meyer and Irving already knew; they didn’t even flinch. I stopped walking and looked the boy up and down. That seemed to get under his skin.
“What’re you looking at?”
The cocky little punk looked me up and down right back.
“What’s your name?”
“Benjamin Siegel. Why.”
Of course. I should have known he wouldn’t be ordinary.
If you listed the most notorious names in American crime history, this child would be on it. The man who would plant the first modern casino in the middle of the Mojave Desert and light the fuse under the Las Vegas casino industry.
I had just walked straight into the childhood of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
And all I’d done was take a walk around the neighborhood.