Shamrock Alley (21 page)

After World War I, most of Hell’s Kitchen’s traditional gangs all but fell apart under the weight of a new, more complex society. Other nationalities took up residence in the Kitchen, and the ethnicity grew more and more diverse with the passage of each year. Irish and Italians now had to make room for the inrush of Puerto Ricans, Hispanics, and blacks. There were race riots and bitter crimes committed against specific ethnic groups as the district stretched its arms and began to adjust. And despite the growing difference in culture, the residents of Hell’s Kitchen still managed to govern themselves by a strict code of personal ethics. Gangs aside (although sometimes
because
of such gangs), Hell’s Kitchen remained a reasonably safe, protected place to live. Criminals and the working class alike prided themselves on their personal beliefs which, among others, included both respect and diligence. An unspoken law dictated the way of the streets, and there would be no mercy for anyone who did not abide by such rules. Illegal drugs were kept under strict control by what street gangs remained, and they hardly ever found their way into the hands of the innocent. The penalties dealt out to anyone who tried to compromise the unspoken drug policy were swift and severe.

In the early ‘40s, a gang of blacks from Washington Heights began patrolling the streets of Hell’s Kitchen looking for trouble. One evening, after drinking too much at a local tavern on 51
^st
Street, the gang jumped and robbed an elderly Italian woman just outside her tenement. After some taunting, they cut the woman’s purse with a razor and ripped it from her arms with little struggle. Her face and arms, too, were cut, and she was beaten badly enough to have an eye knocked from her head. Though the woman survived following extensive hospitalization, the members of the Washington Heights gang did not. And in the respected tradition of Hell’s Kitchen, no one asked what had happened to them … yet everyone took comfort in knowing that the violators had been seen to and appropriately dealt with.

In 1959, roughly forty years before Paul Simon would transform the event into a tasteless and short-lived musical, two boys were brutally stabbed and killed in a gang war on Tenth Avenue. The killings, later called the Capeman Murders, garnered national attention and, for seemingly the first time, opened the country’s eyes to the terror of big-city gang violence. Yet this was nothing new to the inhabitants of Hell’s Kitchen. For them, it was a way of life.

Young children growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s were well aware of the deep-seated unrest within their own neighborhood, and of the rules of conduct their parents—as well as the streets—were quick to impress upon them. A child of ten was familiar with the names of the neighborhood’s infamous members: those jailed or sent to reform schools; those who ran numbers or delivered packages wrapped in butcher’s paper; those who had beaten or killed—or beaten
and
killed. And since it sometimes seemed the only lifestyle available to them, many of these children looked up to a slick, neighborhood thug with the same sort of wide-eyed admiration another child might grant a professional athlete. For these children, growing up in the back alleys and corner tenements of New York City’s West Side, a future at the hands of the streets was almost inevitable.

Today, senseless brutality runs the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Drugs circulate like secrets whispered behind locked doors. Shops and high-rises all suffer the mark of the graffiti artist: painted neon swirls and loops that serve no purpose other than to desecrate and humiliate. There are broken windows like sightless eyes along the string of Tenth Avenue tenements. Most shop windows have been meshed with wire or simply barred. The once-peaceful Dewitt Clinton Park is now a darkened refuge for the strung-out, the overdosed, the ruined, the hopeless; massive steel barrels blaze with fire, and a dozen dreary shapes crowd around them to keep warm. The stink of the slaughterhouses has dissipated over time, having been overpowered by the caustic reek of the curdling Hudson.

In this concrete valley, there is no law.

Here, violence reigns.

Calliope Candy was a small 1950s-style candy store on the corner of West 53
^rd
Street and Tenth Avenue. Outside, the store’s single plate-glass window was shaded by a green-and-white canvas awning. To the right of the window, a flaking wooden door stood ajar, a plastic, water-stained shade half-pulled against the door’s wire-meshed, diamond-shaped window. Inside, a small space heater whirred between a stand of gumball machines. A strip of counter ran the length of the rear wall, behind which half-empty wooden shelves displayed rolls of Life Savers, Necco Wafers, bags of M&M’s and Skittles, various brands of potato chips and candy bars, and clear plastic packages of strawberry, chocolate, and original-flavored licorice. Resting atop the counter was a large, chrome soda fountain, unpolished and pitted with age. A small, booth-like table stood against one wall beneath a large mirror etched with the logo of the New York Rangers hockey team. Beside the table was a Scooby-Doo pinball machine. With the light of midday falling on him through the plate-glass window, Mickey O’Shay administered a swift kick to one of the legs of the pinball machine. It whirred and beeped.

“The hell’d I say about kickin’ that thing?” Irish said from behind the counter, leveling his gaze on Mickey. Unshaven, his hair twisted into spirals, Irish looked about ready to spit nails. “You keep kickin’ it, you’re gonna bust it. Thing’s old.”

“You’re
old,” Mickey muttered, eyes on the little silver ball as he worked it through the machine’s course. A piece of black licorice protruded from his mouth. “Besides, it bumps up the score.”

“Who the hell you cheatin’ against?” Irish said. He was trying to piece together a cardboard lollipop display but was having no success.

“Shhh! Don’t talk to me. I’m concentrating.”

“Well, don’t start a fire.”

The silver ball rolled down the left side of the machine and was quickly batted by the left flipper before it had time to disappear into the black hole at the bottom of the course. The ball shot up under the force of the hit and ricocheted off a number of circular bumpers. Lights flashed, and buzzers buzzed; orange and yellow lights reflected in Mickey’s wide eyes. The score meter on the face of the machine rolled through a series of numbers.

“You gotta be goddamn Albert Einstein to put this thing together,” Irish mumbled to himself, giving up on the cardboard display and discarding it beneath the counter. He produced a shot of whiskey and a deck of cards, and began laying out a game of solitaire on the counter. To his right, a distorted rendition of himself began playing the same game in the reflection of the chrome soda fountain.

Five minutes later, Jimmy Kahn double-parked his Cadillac in front of the store, pulled himself from the vehicle, and shuddered at the frigid air. Walking toward Calliope Candy with his mohair sport jacket held together in one fisted hand, he plucked a piece of Juicy Fruit from his mouth and stuck it on the side of the phone booth outside Irish’s store.

“Christ,” Jimmy said, rubbing his hands together as he entered the store. “Why the hell you keeping the door open, Irish? It’s freezing out there.” He bent and held his hands above the space heater, kicking the door shut behind him with the toe of his shoe. It creaked, then slammed shut.

“It’s refreshing,” Irish said from behind the counter.

Jimmy stood, arching his back and staring lazily out the front window. At one time he’d had the natural physique of an athlete, but neglect had eventually allowed it to get away from him. Taking a seat at the table booth, Jimmy pushed his head back and rubbed the sides of his nose between two fingers. Unlike Mickey O’Shay, whose unsupervised upbringing in a fatherless household hadn’t prepared him for anything better than the lifestyle he now led, Jimmy Kahn had grown up in a decent middle-class family and had consciously chosen to immerse himself in the practicality of the criminal enterprise.

He had come to this decision at the age of nine, after witnessing a stabbing in the stairwell of his parents’ tenement. Two men had approached a young teenager, mouthed some threatening words, and concluded the event by stabbing the teenager in the throat several times with a long, curved knife. Then, after pulling out the teen’s pockets and stripping off his shoes, the two men slipped silently out of the stairwell and into the daylight of a summer afternoon. Jimmy, who’d witnessed the ordeal from between the wrought iron bars of the stairwell just outside the apartment where he lived with his parents, sat there for a long time, watching the spreading stain of blood seep out across the yellow tiled floor. He did not view this with the jaded eyes of a youngster, placing the two murderers on some sort of pedestal, reverent and exuding an almost preternatural sense of power. Rather, it simply occurred to him that what he’d witnessed was merely
survival
—that the strong walked away with a handful of pocket change and a new pair of skips, while the weak lay dying in a pool of his own blood. It was a practical concept, one that even he at such a young age was capable of grasping. The weak die, and the strong survive. The doers and the done to’s.

Such was the way in Hell’s Kitchen.

Empowered by the wisdom attained on that fateful day, Jimmy eventually dropped out of high school to run with the Hell’s Kitchen underworld. Fueled less by intelligence and more by an insatiable desire to further himself and his budding career, Jimmy committed himself to a dozen robberies and assaults the way most people commit themselves to academics. Often, the money was pathetic and hardly worth the trouble, but his aggressive nature ignited in him a certain element of intimidation that would prove invaluable in his line of work. The killing of someone who’d tried to rip him off was as commonplace and as necessary to Jimmy Kahn as mandatory layoffs were to big businesses throughout the world.

“Enough already,” Irish shouted at Mickey, who was still busy hammering away at the pinball machine. “You’re makin’ my goddamn head split down the middle!”

Mickey completed his turn, grinning and clapping his hands even when the ball rolled down into the hole and the lights began blinking GAME OVER, DAME OVER.

“New high score,” he told no one in particular. His licorice whip was down to a nub, and he sucked it between his pursed lips, still grinning. “I could play that damn thing till it runs outta numbers.”

He sat down opposite Jimmy in the booth. He looked wired. Just as Jimmy Kahn was motivated by personal success and used his brutality to attain such power, Mickey O’Shay seemed almost oblivious to his own personal violence. Mentally unstable since childhood and a one-time occupant of several psychiatric institutes throughout his twenty-six years, Mickey O’Shay was like a corked bottle of cheap champagne, ready to explode in a geyser of savagery at the smallest provocation. He ingested a cocktail of Thorazine, marijuana, and cocaine on a regular basis, which dulled to nonexistence any iota of sensitivity that might have been trapped somewhere inside him, and only strengthened his ferocity. Between the two of them and their ragtag assemblage of Irish hoodlums, they had Hell’s Kitchen locked down. Fear, force, and intimidation was their calling card. A pack of rabid dogs set loose inside the rabbit hutch that was Manhattan’s West Side.

“You bring the book?” Mickey asked Jimmy now, running his hands through the pockets of his coat for a cigarette.

“In the car. You wanna do this now?”

“No, I gotta do dinner at the governor’s mansion first.”

“Let’s go,” Jimmy said, and they both stood up and swaggered toward the little shop’s front door.

Irish watched them leave. After they piled into Jimmy’s Cadillac and pulled onto Tenth Avenue, Irish—whistling to himself and plucking a Sugar Daddy from the wall—ambled over to the front door, pulled it shut tight, and locked it with a series of bolts. Then, turning back around, he passed through a small doorway behind the counter and into the store’s back room, which smelled not of peppermint and gumdrops, but of hot grease and metal.