A Piece of the Action Read online

  “Look here, Abe, I want ya should calm yourself down a little bit,” Jake said.

  “Ya know somethin, Daddy-O, you got a way of takin’ all the fun outta life. Like, don’t be cruel, okay?”

  “Cut the crap, Abe. I don’t want them people unconscious before they tell us where the money’s hid. You don’t hit nobody. Ya wave that friggin’ forty-five and keep ya distance. Understand?”

  Jake’s temper was legendary. Abe understood that. When Jake lost his temper, it stayed lost.

  “Don’t be so nervous, Jake.” Abe’s voice was soft and soothing. “It’s gonna go all right.”

  “It better.” He took a second to look into the eyes of both men. “C’mon, let’s get it over with.”

  They made no effort to hide themselves as they crossed the street and approached the red door marking 800 Pitt Street. This was a lesson for the whole neighborhood, a lesson from the wops to any fool who believed he could operate independently. Not that there was anyone out on the street. The light rain was mixed with ice, now. It was more than enough to discourage the locals.

  Jake knocked twice, paused, then knocked twice again. The door opened immediately and the trio stepped inside. The fat man standing in the hallway, Al O’Neill, began to back up as soon as he saw them.

  “Where ya goin’, pal?” Jake asked, his .45 rising until it pointed directly at Al O’Neill’s mouth. “You got a hot date or somethin’?”

  “What, what, what …”

  “Where’s the bitch? She in the back?”

  “You want a woman?”

  “I’m talkin’ about your old lady,” Jake said. He stepped forward and jammed the barrel of his .45 into the fat man’s mouth. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  O’Neill brought his hand to his mouth. Blood ran down along his fingers, soaking into the cuff of his shirt. “Don’t kill me,” he whispered. “Please, don’t kill me.”

  “I want the bitch,” Jake repeated. “I want the bitch right now.”

  “Please, please, please.”

  “Shit.” Jake drove his foot into the fat man’s crotch. “I know the bitch is in here somewheres. Take us to her or I’ll blow ya friggin’ head off.”

  Jake knew exactly where Betty O’Neill was, but now that he’d demanded obedience, he couldn’t very well back down. He cocked the .45 and the sharp click of the hammer settling into place had a sobering effect on the retching Al O’Neill. The fat man pushed himself to his feet and led Jake down a narrow hallway to a door at the rear of the building.

  “It’s me,” he called, pushing his way inside.

  The thin, almost haggard woman sitting behind the desk was every bit as shocked by the appearance of Jake, Izzy and Abe as her husband had been. Her reaction, on the other hand, was far different.

  “You coward,” she screamed at her husband. “You just let the bastards in.”

  “I didn’t,” Al protested. “They used the signal. If you weren’t so goddamned cheap, we woulda had a peephole and I wouldn’t have to let people in without knowin’ who they are.”

  Betty O’Neill rose to her feet, her eyes riveted to her husband’s. “Ya coulda asked,” she screamed. “Ya coulda asked who it was.”

  “What’re you, a moron?” Al was spitting pieces of white enamel each time he spoke, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You wanna ask guys comin’ to a whorehouse to shout their names out? If ya didn’t squeeze every nickel until it bleeds, you woulda listened to me and paid Accacio his vig.” He suddenly turned to Jake. “Look, I tried to make her pay up. I swear. But ya can’t make this bitch do nothin’.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Jake swung the .45 in a long arc, bringing the barrel down on the pimp’s bald skull. He put so much force into it that he was sure the .45 was bent and he made a mental note to check the automatic before he fired it again. The blow, he noted with satisfaction, had split Al’s forehead, from the hairline to the bridge of his nose. The flow of blood was astonishing.

  “Where’s the money?” Jake asked calmly.

  “You talkin’ to me?” Betty said. Despite everything, she was still defiant.

  Jake nudged her unconscious husband with the toe of his shoe. There was no response. “Where’s the money?”

  “What money?”

  “Whatever you got. And it better be plenty.”

  “It’s only nine o’clock. We’re just gettin’ started. I didn’t take in more than fifty bucks the whole night.”

  “Izzy,” Jake said, “would you talk to the woman?”

  Izzy nodded solemnly. He handed his .38 to Abe and moved behind the desk. Betty, her anger suddenly transformed, put her hands up defensively.

  “Hey, look at this,” Izzy said, grabbing the woman’s left arm. “She’s a dope addict.”

  Jake looked at the dark scars running up the woman’s arms and shook his head in disgust. Now it made sense. Betty O’Neill was putting Steppy Accacio’s piece of the pie in her arm. It was pretty amazing. Before the war ended, nobody Jake knew had even heard of heroin. Sure, there were hopheads around, but they were getting opium from the chinks or morphine from the crooked doctors. The heroin had started coming into New York with the returning G.I.’s. Now, it was everywhere and the profits were unbelievable, like Prohibition all over again. Convincing the wops to give him a piece of the dope action had become Jake’s major goal in life.

  “See if ya could find her stash,” Jake said.

  “Right.”

  It didn’t take long. Most junkies couldn’t stand being more than a few feet from their scag and Betty O’Neill was no exception. Izzy pulled twenty bags of heroin out of the center desk drawer and held them up for Jake’s inspection.

  “Take ’em in the toilet,” Jake instructed. “And flush ’em down.”

  “No,” Betty said. “It’s not mine. I mean it’s not all mine. It’s for the girls, the ones that use.”

  Cute, Jake thought. The O’Neills were dealin’ dope on the side. And not givin’ Steppy his piece. Jake took the heroin from Izzy and cradled it in his palm.

  “What it is,” he said, “is that you should tell us where the money is if ya wanna keep your dope. And I’m talkin’ about all the money, not just what you got in the drawer. I want what you got under the floorboards. Or behind the wall. Or in the ceiling. Now, what you should consider is that I’m gonna find it anyway. If I can’t beat it outta you, I’ll wake up your old man and get it from him. Ya can’t protect the money, but ya could keep ya dope. I know you Irish got potatoes instead of brains between your ears, but I think even a spud-head, like yourself, could figure this one out.”

  Jake was right. Betty O’Neill, after considering his proposition for a moment, crossed the room and pulled up a section of the floorboard to reveal a small pile of banded fives, tens and twenties. Jake estimated the take at close to six hundred dollars. He put the money into his pockets, filling his jacket and his overcoat, then nodded to Izzy.

  “Do what ya gotta do,” he said.

  Izzy, perhaps to impress his boss, approached the job enthusiastically. He used his fists and the leg of a chair instead of his .38, but the only drawback to this approach was that he had to hit Betty O’Neill thirty times to produce the desired effect. Each time he drove his fist into her ribs, he received two rewards: the sharp crack of splintering cartilage and Betty O’Neill’s equally sharp scream.

  “He hits pretty hard for a little guy,” Jake observed.

  “Gotta rip it up,” Abe sang, “gotta tear it up.”

  Izzy kept at his work until Betty stopped screaming. Then he let her drop and all three men turned to leave. When they saw the small brown man standing in the doorway, they did a double-take worthy of the Three Stooges.

  “Que pasa?” Luis Melenguez asked as the three men stared at him, wide-eyed. “Que pasa,” he repeated, as Abe Weinberg pulled Little Richard out of his coat pocket. “Que pasa, que pasa, que pasa,” as the hammer drew back and the automatic exploded and a .45 caliber slug blew the back of his head
off.

  “What’d ya do that for?” Jake asked, wondering if he should be angry or not. “It was just a friggin’ spic.”

  “I hadda make my contribution, didn’t I?”

  Two

  January 2, 1958

  NYPD PATROLMAN STANLEY MOODROW sat before a full length mirror in the boys’ locker room of Robert Lehman High School and watched while his trainer, Sergeant Allen Epstein, wrapped his huge hands with a narrow strip of white gauze.

  “Tighter, Sarge,” he hissed. “A little tighter.”

  “You sure?” Epstein answered, dropping the gauze bandage to reach for a roll of white surgical tape.

  “I gotta go six tonight. I don’t wanna hurt my hands in the first round.”

  “You can’t hurt your hands punching air, Stanley. This guy’s fast.”

  Moodrow tried to frown, but found himself grinning instead. Punching air? The phrase summed up his whole career. “Punching air” and “too damned big.” It was funny, in a way. The last fight of a boxer’s career wasn’t supposed to be held in a Brooklyn high school. And it wasn’t supposed to be the most important fight of that career. The last fight was supposed to come after a career filled with main events in Madison Square Garden, with championship belts held aloft, with popping flashbulbs and crowds of reporters.

  Moodrow turned away from Epstein and curled his hands into fists. Satisfied, he studied himself in the mirror. Or, at least, he studied that portion of himself visible in the narrow glass. If he wanted to see the whole of his six foot six, 245-pound frame, he’d have to stand on the other side of the locker room. But he didn’t want to see his chest or his shoulders. Stanley Moodrow was looking into his own eyes, looking for any sign of indecision.

  “Too damned big,” he thought. That’s what his first serious trainer, Sammy Turro, had told him. “You’re too damned big, Stanley. Ya stay in the fight game, ya gonna get your ass kicked.”

  Moodrow had begun his fighting career in 1948, when he was fifteen years old. Most kids take up boxing because they’re afraid, but not Stanley Moodrow. He was always the biggest kid in his class, always a head taller than the tallest student. Maybe that was why, despite his good grades, he was cast as a dummy, a dope. The other kids made fun of him and he reacted, as kids will, by beating the crap out of them. That ended the teasing, but it hadn’t made him popular.

  No, the end result of his schoolyard victories was that the losers, the hoods and the dummies, came to admire him, while the rest of the school left him entirely alone. Stanley Moodrow knew all about losers—growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was no way to avoid them—and he wanted no part of their lives. Lost in arrogance, they hung out on every street corner, sucking on bottles of beer, dreaming of easy scores and easier sex. Right up until the day a judge sent them up the river.

  “These are bums, Stanley,” his father, Max, had explained again and again. “All of them. They don’t want to work, so they take what they need from the people. Better to be a dog than a bum. God willing, I’ll live long enough to spit on their graves.”

  God, apparently, hadn’t been willing. Max Moodrow fell off a ladder at a Bronx construction site four days before his son’s fifteenth birthday and died on the way to the hospital.

  But that didn’t end the lectures. Moodrow’s Uncle Pavlov took up the theme before his brother was in his grave. “I hear you’re fightin’ in school, Stanley,” he counseled. “It’s okay to be tough. Ya gotta be tough to survive down here. But don’t be stupid, all right? Don’t be a bum. Ya wanna fight, go in the ring where it’ll do ya some good.”

  Uncle Pavlov, a ten-year veteran of the NYPD, just happened to be in charge of the P.A.L.’s Lower East Side boxing program. He also just happened to be smart enough to act surprised when his brother’s kid turned up a month later.

  “Hey, Stanley, fancy meetin’ you here.”

  “I thought I’d give it a shot, Uncle Pavlov. I mean boxing. I wanna try it out.”

  Try it out? The truth was that fifteen-year-old Stanley Moodrow wanted to be a champion. Like every other kid who put on the gloves. And his first twenty fights did nothing to discourage him. It wasn’t just the power in his right hand. Stanley Moodrow, like all good fighters in the early stages of a career, simply refused to lose. He found a way to win, even when overmatched, to eat the pain and keep on coming. If his fists weren’t good enough, he beat his opponent into submission with the sheer force of his will. The pain—and there was plenty of pain—was a badge of honor.

  “Ya mind’s not where it belongs, Stanley.”

  “Huh?” Moodrow turned to his trainer. “What’d you say, Sarge?”

  “The fight, schmuck. The one you’re gonna have tonight. Get your mind on the goddamned fight.”

  Moodrow stood up and kicked the stool away. He set himself in front of the mirror and began to shadowbox with his reflection. Fights, he knew, don’t begin with the opening bell. They begin the day the match is made and progress through a number of stages. Training, first, then a layoff two days before the bout, then the weigh-in, the taping of the hands, the ritual of working up a sweat, the long walk to the ring, the introductions. You could lose your edge anywhere along the way. The will to win could be sucked out of you like a malted through a straw.

  “I’m gonna take this guy tonight,” he said without stopping. “It’s six rounds, not three. I’m gonna catch him and take him out.”

  The thing about it was that you could control a lot of things in your life, but you couldn’t control everything. You couldn’t control the fact that you were seventeen years old and six foot five inches tall and maybe you’d kicked the hell out of YMCA competition, but now you were in the Golden Gloves and your opponents were faster and more experienced. Very few kids are full-blown heavyweights at the tender age of seventeen.

  Moodrow made it to the semi-finals, despite the fact that his opponents were all in their twenties, but that was the end of it. Bobby Brown was a three-time Golden Gloves national champion. Four inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than Moodrow, he used his speed to every advantage, darting in to throw four-punch combinations, then moving back and away before Moodrow could respond. The blood began to flow halfway through the second round and the referee stopped it fifteen seconds into the third. Moodrow, back in the dressing room, tried to make an excuse.

  “It was a butt,” he told the doctor sewing his eyelid back together. “A butt,” he insisted to his trainer.

  Sammy Turro was kind enough to wait until the doctor finished, until there were no witnesses, before he enlightened his fighter.

  “Ya too big, Stanley. Too fuckin’ big. There ain’t no champions big as you. And don’t give me Jack Johnson, neither. Guys today are scientific. They know how to stay away. You get in against one of the good ones? Eddie Machen? Zora Folley? Cleveland Williams? I don’t care how hard ya work, they’re gonna use ya for a punching bag. Lotta guys big as you, guys with your heart, they go into boxing anyway. Fifteen years later they’re sparrin’ partners for two bucks a round. They hear bells whenever they close their eyes.”

  “Sammy,” Moodrow insisted, “he butted me.”

  “Yeah, well I didn’t see no butt, Stanley. But if he did put his head in your eye, you oughta send him a thank-you note. Another two minutes and he prob’ly would’a killed ya.”

  Moodrow, eyes riveted to his reflection in the mirror, stopped throwing punches and assumed a defensive posture, fists alongside the jaw, elbows tight against the ribs. It was the “peek-a-boo” defense used by the current champion, Floyd Patterson, who should have been quick enough to do without it. For Moodrow, on the other hand, it amounted to an acceptance of punishment. He wasn’t fast enough to slip punches, to move out of harm’s way. He was going to have to take one to give one. Or take two. Or three. Or four.

  “All right, Stanley, don’t overdo it. You’re supposed to warm up, not leave your fight in the dressing room.”

  Moodrow ignored him. Allen Epstein
didn’t know squat about the fine art of bringing a fighter to his peak on the night of a big bout. Epstein was in it for the same reason as Moodrow, though he wasn’t dumb enough actually to be the one in the ring.

  Moodrow had never seen his desire to be a world champion as simple ambition until his third week at the Police Academy. He’d looked at the freshly scrubbed faces of the other recruits, then raised a finger to the still-pink scar on his brow. He knew things they didn’t know, things you learn by going into the ring and winning your first twenty fights. He knew, for instance, that he could have turned pro and worked himself into contention for a championship. Maybe he would never be a champion, but white boxing fans were always scouting the horizon for another Rocky Marciano, another Great White Hope. Hadn’t they taken a rank amateur like Pete Rademacher and bet him down to even money against Floyd Patterson? He, Moodrow, big as he was, could have played the part, maybe even gotten a title fight against a champion looking for an easy payday. Maybe, if he’d been real lucky …

  The kids sitting alongside him didn’t understand any of it, the victories or the defeats. They couldn’t know what it felt like to give up the dream when you’d already come halfway. There were twenty-four thousand cops in the NYPD and twenty-one thousand were out there pounding a beat. Most of them would spend their entire careers on the street. Checking the backs of closed hardware stores. Directing traffic in the rain. Hoofing it from one call box to another. It would pay the rent, but it was a long way from heavyweight champion of the world.

  Thank God for civil service exams. There was a way to move up in the job without the direct approval of the brass. You pass the sergeant’s exam, you’re a sergeant, the lieutenant’s exam, you’re a lieutenant, the captain’s exam, you’re a captain. That wasn’t the way Stanley Moodrow wanted to do it, but if Plan A failed, he’d go that route. Plan A was to be appointed to the detectives, to carry the Gold Shield, to spend his workdays in a suit instead of a uniform.