Shamrock Alley (44 page)

“I thought we told you not to come around here no more,” Jimmy had said. They were leaning against Green’s car, refusing to move.

“And now he’s drinking at our bars,” he added.

Jimmy was relentless. “How much you collect tonight?”

Green said it was none of their business. But he looked frightened.

“Taking money from my neighborhood,” Jimmy said, “looks
very much
like my business. What do ya think, Mickey?”

“I think we should check his book, see how much he collected.”

There’d been a brief struggle to retrieve Green’s book, but the bookie was quickly defeated. Jimmy had flipped through it and then passed it along to Mickey. Smiling to himself, Mickey had said, “Looks like you do pretty good for yourself, Green.” Then he’d slipped Green’s book into the waistband of his pants.

“Give it to me,” Green said, his voice shaking, his body trembling against the trunk of his car.

“You don’t need it no more,” Jimmy said, pulling a .22 from his jacket and pointing it at Horace Green’s chest. They were separated by only a few feet. “We’re taking over your business.”

Jimmy fired twice, and Green’s body collapsed against the trunk of his car, folded at the waist, then toppled to the street. They snatched his car keys, stuffed Green’s body in the trunk, and headed out to a warehouse down by the piers. Once there, in the seclusion of the warehouse, they popped the trunk to examine what other goodies Green might have been carrying … and noticed Green was still alive.

Mickey immediately burst out laughing. “Jimmy, Jimmy,
Jesus!
This fucker hangs in there!”

Jerking a thumb over one shoulder, Jimmy muttered, “Drag ‘im out.”

They’d used the warehouse before and had stocked it with implements for just such an occasion. Jimmy went to one corner and pulled back a burlap cloth from a pile of tools. With little emotion, he selected an ax and carried it back over to Green’s car. By this time, Mickey had managed to pull the bookie out and drop him to the cement floor. At their feet, Horace Green struggled on his back, blood soaking his shirt and tie and bubbling out of his throat. He looked like a worm that had been stabbed with a sharp stick.

“Good,” Jimmy said, kneeling over Green. “Give you one last chance to cut us in for a percentage, Mr. Green. Whattaya say?”

Green coughed up a gout of blood. His face was the color of dead fish, his eyes wide and blind and staring.

Jimmy leaned over Green’s face, turned an ear to Green’s mouth. In a high-pitched, cartoon voice, Jimmy muttered through the corner of his mouth,
“Just take the book, Jimmy! Just take the book!”

Mickey started laughing.

“Very nice of you, Mr. Green,” Jimmy said, back to his own voice. He stood and raised the ax over one shoulder. “Seein’ how you’re out of commission and everything …”

The ax came down, and Mickey broke out in another gale of laughter. Again, and he began to sober up and watch Jimmy work. Jimmy swung like a madman, his teeth gritted, his pale skin and cropped hair flecked with blood. Once he tired, he handed the blood-slicked ax to Mickey and told him to finish. “Keep going,” Jimmy told him, “until nothing’s left.”

Blood spreads quickly on a concrete floor. Mickey got it under his shoes, in his hair, on his clothes. Yet he worked like a professional, his eyes never off his target, his hands blistering and muscles cramping but never slowing down.

Once Green had been adequately dismembered, Mickey dropped the ax to the floor, walked past Jimmy, who sat smoking on an overturned plastic bucket, and vomited in the corner. Beside him, Jimmy didn’t say a word. And when he’d finished emptying his stomach, Mickey wiped his mouth with his sleeve, staggered over to Jimmy Kahn, and bummed a smoke from him.

In the end, the only items they wound up keeping from Green’s car were the plates and negatives used to print counterfeit money. At first, they didn’t even know what they were exactly—they’d never gotten involved with the counterfeit racket before, and they had no knowledge of printing. But then it quickly dawned on them.

“Keep ‘em,” Jimmy said.

“For what? To sell?”

“To hold onto,” Jimmy said.

“How do these things work, anyway? Like … whattaya do?”

Jimmy just shrugged. He was unrolling a length of plastic bags.

“Why you think he had ‘em in his trunk?” Mickey asked.

“What am I, his mother? The hell should I know? Here—help me wrap him up.”

They didn’t find a use for the plates until roughly one month later, when Douglas Clifton, one of their sidekicks, appeared on the scene with some news.

For some time, Clifton had been bleeding the bank account of some ritzy old broad from the Upper East Side. In only a short amount of time, Clifton had managed to work his way behind the wheel of the old woman’s car, and was given a key to the house, his own bedroom and closet (complete with wardrobe), and spending money.

“How old is this broad?” Mickey had asked him once.

With little interest, Clifton had said, “I don’t know. Maybe like sixty.”

“
Sixty?
Jesus Christ, that’s like my grandmother! You
gotta fuck
that?”

After some time, Clifton had gotten wind of an old shop-turned-storage warehouse in the Bowery the old woman owned. Swiping a set of keys, he headed down there one day to check the place out. It was like a museum of crap, but Clifton didn’t know shit from sugar cubes and figured Mickey and Jimmy might be interested in cleaning the place out and seeing what they could move. Mickey headed down to the warehouse with him one afternoon to take a look around. Unimpressed, he told Clifton there was nothing worth a dime in the place … and then he spotted the two printing presses, and the bent and rusted wheels in his head began turning.

“What’re these?”

“Beats me,” Clifton said.

“They look like printing tables—presses—like where—you—”

Clifton did not understand the importance of the presses until Jimmy Kahn took a trip to the warehouse with Mickey and,
yes
, they agreed they
were
printing presses. They explained to Clifton about the plates and the negatives, and about killing Horace Green. Clifton seemed both amused and chagrined by the story and, at one point, the gun used to shoot Green twice in the chest was stashed in the trunk of the Lincoln Towncar Clifton drove around in.

Enter Harold Corcoran.

Corcoran was a small-time hustler who, at one time, had been employed as a printer’s assistant for a printing press in the Bronx. When he found the time, and if the money was right, he would forge documents for some of the neighborhood crews. Over time, however, his predisposition toward cocaine and marijuana cost him that job and eventually landed him in a rehabilitation facility somewhere upstate. He served three months and was back on the street the same day of his release, getting his feet wet all over again.

Having worked some paltry jobs in Hell’s Kitchen in the past, Corcoran had become friends with Jimmy Kahn, and Corcoran’s father had even known Jimmy’s parents. One October evening, Jimmy, along with a sharp-faced Greek named Moonie Curik and a nineteen-year-old runner named Gavin “Duster” O’Toole, drove out to Long Island to knock over a liquor store. There was a scuffle, and Jimmy shot the guy behind the counter twice in the face, killing him. It had been Harold Corcoran who’d holed Jimmy, Curik, and O’Toole up at his place in Long Island until everything had cooled down.

Corcoran was a difficult guy to get in touch with. It took Jimmy a few days to track him down, but when he finally did, Corcoran nearly began salivating at the prospect of hooking into a counterfeit operation. When he requested to examine the printing presses, Jimmy and Mickey drove him out to the Bowery warehouse that same day. There, Corcoran looked the machines over and nodded once, impressed.

“You can do this?” Jimmy said.

“Sure,” Corcoran replied. “I mean, its gonna take some money to get things started—there’re supplies and everything—but you got the presses, the plates and negatives, and that’s the hardest part.”

“How much money we talkin’?” Mickey wanted to know. He didn’t approve of laying out cash to guys like Harold Corcoran. He’d even been tempted to suggest he and Jimmy try and work the presses by themselves and screw everybody else. But Jimmy had been negotiating with the Italians for some time, and some of their business savvy had rubbed off on him. Whereas Mickey had always been a believer in the quick buck, Jimmy was actually beginning to
organize
things, set things up. It had been Jimmy’s idea to break into the unions, the clubs, the construction outfits as well. Jimmy Kahn had lofty aspirations.

“I’ll have to figure it out,” Corcoran said. “There’s paper, ink …”

“Figure it out,” Jimmy said, “then let us know.”

Meanwhile, Jimmy busied himself with contacting potential buyers. His plans were to run off a couple million dollars and sell the money in lump sums to four or five different customers, who would in turn move it on their own. Both he and Mickey could get more for the counterfeit, Jimmy knew, if the bills had not been previously circulated. By selling to all his customers at the same time, he’d ensure he and Mickey made a healthy profit. Needless to say, his intentions were on the mark but his connections were lacking. Neither Jimmy nor Mickey knew the first thing about moving counterfeit bills and found it difficult to make suitable connections. Francis Deveneau was one connection—he could move the bills through his club via a network of operatives. But it turned out to be more difficult than they’d thought.

Mickey and Jimmy would occasionally drop in at the warehouse and oversee the operation, but they new very little about the printing of counterfeit money. One evening, while creeping around the warehouse after hours, Jimmy discovered a trash can full of wadded sheets of paper, each with hundred-dollar bills printed on them. When he later confronted Corcoran about the trash, Corcoran assured Jimmy that there was a lot of throwaway involved in printing phony bills, and that he’d just have to trust him. Problem was, Jimmy
did
trust him.

It seemed that the production of the phony bills was running smoothly since Jimmy and Mickey had set the project in motion, up until about four months ago. Before they sold a single counterfeit note to anyone, Jimmy was approached one evening in McGinty’s tavern by an Irish guy in a suit and tie named Danny Monahan. After a few lines of conversation, Monahan produced a crisp hundred-dollar bill from his shirt pocket and laid it on the bar in front of Jimmy.

“Take a look at that,” Monahan said, an impetuous grin breaking across his face. “What do ya think?”

“This?” Jimmy said, picking up the hundred and examining it. “This a fake?”

“Looks good, don’t it?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Some fella. Figured maybe you’d be interested.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, fingering the bill. “Can I take this one?”

“I can sell you a whole stack,” Monahan offered. He was older than Jimmy and the rest of the West Side gang, holding down a tolerable job at an accounting firm. Yet Jimmy knew him from his dealings throughout the West Side. Not a permanent fixture in Hell’s Kitchen, Monahan was a late bloomer who, in his middle age, was still trying to cut himself a piece of the underground pie. To Jimmy Kahn and Mickey O’Shay, guys like Danny Monahan were a joke—somebody to harry when there was time to kill—but the counterfeit note caught Jimmy’s eye. The following evening, he showed it to Mickey.

“I been goin’ down to the warehouse, watching what’s goin’ on,” Jimmy told him. “This bill … this is one of ours.”

“Huh?” Mickey held it up to the light, examined it. It looked real enough to him.

“I been watching everything,” Jimmy continued. “At night, after Corcoran leaves, I take some of the papers out of the trash and bring ‘em back to my apartment.” He plucked the note from Mickey’s hand and slammed it on the bar. They were at the Cloverleaf that evening, and patrons of the ‘Leaf knew better than to look up at the slamming of fists. “This is one of ours,” Jimmy continued. “The serial numbers match.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means,” Jimmy went on, “that Corcoran ain’t happy with five percent and he’s selling this shit out from under us.”

Jimmy had negotiated a 5 percent cut for both Harold Corcoran and Douglas Clifton on any batch of counterfeit they were able to sell. Now, according to Jimmy, one or both of the bastards was fucking them in the ass and selling the shit throughout the city.

The idea seemed implausible to Mickey. “You sure?” He could not fathom why someone would think they’d be able to rip them off.

“The fucking
numbers
are the same,” Jimmy repeated.

“Those shits,” Mickey growled. “I told you we gave them too much room, that we shoulda watched them closer. Now what?”

There was a pause as Jimmy considered their options. There was over a million dollars of counterfeit printed already. If they used their heads, they could start moving what they had before the bills sold by Corcoran or Clifton or whoever, made much of a circulation.

Jimmy and Mickey had approached Corcoran one night at the warehouse, playing it cool, and asked him about the money. As expected, Corcoran denied selling the counterfeit under their noses.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “You’re spending a lot of money printing this shit, Harold …”

Almost frustrated at their intrusion, Corcoran said, “Jimmy, man, there’s a lotta fucking waste that goes into the production. You see the trash? You see what we’re throwin’ away? It costs money to print this shit, man.”

They let it go at that, though neither Mickey nor Jimmy believed Harold Corcoran had told them the truth. And some time later, after spotting Corcoran in a club, Mickey approached the printer and demanded to know just what the hell was going on.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Corcoran said, the palm of one hand up in defense.

He was sitting at a bar with some friend of his, a black guy named Fee Williams. “What’d I tell you before, Mickey? I don’t know nothin’ about this. I ain’t sellin’ your money, man. Think I’m crazy? Now chill out. Let me buy you a drink.”