The Apaches of New York

“Why don’t you look into it?” I asked, turning to my friend. As a taxpayer, I yearned for some return on that $16,000,000 a year which New York City pays for its police.

That ornament of the Central Office yawned, and motioned to the waiter to bring his bill.

“That sort of thing is up to the cop on the beat,” said he.

“Whitey an’ me ‘ud get in on it,” explained Slimmy – his expression was one of half apology – “only you see we belong at th’ other end of th’ alley. We’re Five Points; Ike an’ Whitey Louie are Eastmans; an’ in a clash between Eastmans an’ Gophers, it’s up to us to stand paws-off, see!”

“That’s straight talk,” coincided Whitey.

“Suppose, seeing it’s stopped raining, we drift over there,” said my friend, adjusting his Panama at the exact Central Office angle.

As we journeyed along, I noticed Slimmy and Whitey Dutch across the street. It was already written that Whitey Dutch, himself, would be shot to death in the Stag before the year was out; but the shadow of that impending taking-off was not apparent in his face. Indeed, from that face there shone forth only pleasure in anticipation, and a lively interest.

“They’d no more miss it than they’d miss a play at the theater,” remarked my friend, who saw where my glance was directed.

About a ginmill, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, a crowd had collected. A patrol wagon was backing up.

An officer in uniform tossed a prisoner into the wagon, with no more ceremony than should attend the handling of a bag of bran.

“It’s Dubillier!” exclaimed Whitey Dutch, naming the prisoner.

The two Five Pointers had taken position on the edge of the crowd, directly in front of my friend and me.

“There’s Ike!” said Slimmy, as two policemen were seen pushing their way towards the patrol wagon, Ike the Blood between them. “Them bulls is holdin’ him up, too, an’ his face is as pale as paper! By thunder, they’ve nailed him!”

“I told you them Gophers were tough students,” was the comment of Whitey Dutch.

My friend began forcing his way forward. As he plowed through the crowd, Whitey Dutch and Slimmy, having advantage of his wake, kept close at his heels.

Slimmy threw me a whispered word: “Be th’ way th’ mob is actin’, I t’ink Ike copped one.” Slimmy, before the lapse of many minutes, was again at my side, attended by Whitey Dutch. The pair wore that manner of quick yet neutral appreciation which belongs – we’ll say – with such as English army officers visiting the battlefield of Santiago while the action between the Spaniards and the Americans is being waged. It wasn’t their fight, it was an Eastman-Gopher fight, but as fullblown Five Pointers it became them vastly to be present. Also, they might learn something.

“Ike dropped one,” nodded Whitey Dutch, answering the question in my eye. “It’s Ledwich.”

“What was the row about?” I asked.

“Whitey Louie. The Gophers was goin’ to hand it to him; but just then Ike comes through th’ door on th’ run, an’ wit’ that they outs wit’ their rods an’ goes to peggin’ at him. Then Ike gets to goin’ an’ cops Ledwich.”

“Th’ best th’ Gophers can get,” observed Slimmy – and his manner was as the manner of one balancing an account – “th’ best th’ Gophers can get is an even break; an’ to do that they’ll have to cash on Ike. Whitey Louie? He makes his get-away all right. Say, Whitey, let’s beat it round to the Tenderloin Station, an’ get th’ finish.”

The finish was soon told. Ike the Blood lay dead on the station house floor; a bullet had drilled its dull way through his lungs. An officer was just telephoning his people in Chrystie Street.

“Now do youse see?” said Whitey Dutch, correcting what he conceived to be Slimmy’s skepticism; “that fortune tellin’ skirt handed out th’ right dope. ‘One croaked! – Ike in th’ hurry-up wagon! – no trial!’ That’s th’ spiel she makes; an’ it falls true, see!”

“Ike oughter have dug down for another bone,” returned Slimmy, more than half convinced; “she’d have put him hep to that bullet in his breather, mebby.”

“W’at good ‘ud that have done?”

“Good? If he’d got th’ tip, he might have ducked – you can’t tell.”

“It’s a bad business,” I commented to my friend, who had rejoined me.

“It would be a good thing” – shrugging his cynical Central Office shoulders – “if, with a change of names, it could happen every day in the year. By the way, I forgot my umbrella; let’s go back to the Bal Tabarin.”

V. – INDIAN LOUIE

No one knew his real name, not even the police, and the police, let me tell you, know much more than they can prove. The Central Office never once had the pleasure of mugging and measuring and parading him at the morning bawling out, and the Mulberry Street records to the last were barren concerning him. For one brief space and only one did Mulberry Street nourish hopes. That was when he himself let it be thought that somewhere, sometime, somehow, he had taken some one’s life. At this, Mulberry Street fairly shook the wide earth like a tablecloth in search of proof, but got not so much as one poor crumb of confirmation.

It was at Big Jack’s in Chatham Square that local history first laid eyes on him. Big Jack is gone now; the Committee of Fourteen decided upon him virtuously as an immoralist, handed him the fatal blue paper, and he perished. Jack Sirocco – who was himself blue-papered in a Park Row hour – keeps the place now.

Starting from Big Jack’s, he soon began to be known in Flynn’s, and Nigger Mike’s, and about the Chatham Club. When his pals spoke to him they called him Louie. When they spoke of him they called him Indian Louie, or Spanish Louie, to the end that he be identified among the hosts of East Side Louies, who were and are as many as the leaves on a large tree.

Rumor made Indian Louie a native of South America, and his dark skin, black eyes, thin lips, high cheek-bones and high curved nose helped rumor out in this. Also, he was supposed to be of Spanish or Portuguese extraction.

When Louie was buried, this latter assumption received a jolt. His funeral, conducted by a rabbi, was according to strictest Hebrew ceremonial.

Two pieces of porcelain were laid upon his eyes, as intimating that he had seen enough. A feather, which a breath would have disturbed, was placed upon his upper lip. This was to evidence him as fully and conclusively dead, although on that point, in all conscience, the coroner’s finding should have been enough. The flowers, which Gangland sent to prove its grief, were put aside because too gay and pleasant. The body was laid upon straw. A would-be pallbearer, since his name was Cohen, had to be excluded from the rites, as any orthodox Jew could have told him must be the case. For death and the dead are unclean; and a Cohen, who by virtue of his name is of the high-priest caste – Aaron was a Cohen – and tends the altars, must touch nothing, approach nothing, that is unclean. The funeral was scrupulously held before the second sun went down, and had to be hurried a little, because the morgue authorities, hobbled of red tape, move as slowly as the sea itself in giving up the dead. The coffin – of poorest pine – was knocked to pieces in the grave, before the clods of earth were shoveled in and the doomsday sods laid on. The garments of him who acted as principal mourner were faithfully torn; that is to say, the rabbi cut a careful slit in the lapel of that mourner’s waistcoat where it wouldn’t show.

You will see from this, that every detail was holy by most ancient Jewish prescription. And the business led to talk. Those about Flynn’s, Nigger Mike’s and the Chatham Club, to say naught of members of the Humpty Jackson gang, and others who in his latter days had been near if not dear to him, confessed that it went far in contradiction of any Spanish or Portuguese ancestry for Louie.

Louie was a mystery, and studied to be so. And to be a mystery is as difficult as being a hypocrite. One wrong word, one moment off your guard, and lo, a flood of light! The mystery vanishes, the hypocrisy is laid bare. You are no longer a riddle. Or, if so, then a riddle that has been solved. And he who was a riddle, but has been solved, is everywhere scoffed at and despised.

Louie must have possessed a genius for mystery, since not once did he fall down in that difficult rôle. He denied nothing, confirmed nothing, of the many tales told about him. A waif-word wagged that he had been in the army, without pointing to any regiment; and that he had been in the navy, without indicating what boat. Louie, it is to be thought, somewhat fostered this confusion. It deepened him as a mystery, and made him more impressive.

Louie was careful, also, that his costume should assist. He made up all in black – black shoes, black trousers, black coat, black hat of semi-sombrero type. Even in what may be spoken of as the matter of linen – although there was no linen about it – he adhered to that funereal hue, and in lieu of a shirt wore a sweater, collar close up to the chin, and all as black as his coat. As he walked the streets, black eyes challenging, threatening, from underneath the black, wide-rimmed hat, he showed not from top to toe a fleck of white.

Among what tales went here and there concerning Louie, there was one which described him as the deadest of dead shots. This he accentuated by a brace of big Colt’s pistols, which bore him constant company, daylight and dark. There was no evidence of his having used this artillery, no word of any killing to his perilous glory. Indeed, he couldn’t have pointed to so much as one wounded man.

Only once did those pistols come into play. Valenski’s stuss house, in Third Avenue near Fourteenth Street, was put in the air. The hold-ups descended upon Valenski’s, grabbed $80 which was on the table, and sent Valenski into his safe for $300 more. While this went on, Louie stood in the door, a gun in each fist, defying the gaping, staring, pop-eyed public to interfere. He ran no risk, as everyone well knew. The East Side, while valorous, never volunteers. There was no more chance of outside interference to save Valenski from being plundered, than of outside contributions to make him up another roll.

The incident might have helped in building up for Louie a reputation, had it not been that all that was starkly heroic therein melted when, two days later, the ravished $380 was privily restored to Valenski, with the assurance that the entire business was a jest. Valenski knew nothing humorous had been intended, and that his bundle was returned in deference only to the orders of one high in politics and power. Also, it was the common feeling, a feeling no less cogent for not being put into words, that had Louie been of the wood from which champions are carved, the $380 would never have come back. To refrain from some intended stick-up upon grave orders given, might mean no more than prudence and a right discipline. But to send back money, once in actual hand and when the risk and work of which it stood the harvest had been encountered and performed, was to fly in the face of gang ethics. An order to that effect, however eminent its source, should have been met with stony refusal.

There was one tale which should go, perhaps, to the right side of the reputational ledger, as indicating that Louie had nerve. Crazy Charlie was found dead in the mouth of a passageway, which opened off Mulberry Street near the Bowery. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. No one of sense supposed Louie did that throat slashing.

Crazy Charlie was a hop-head, without a dollar in his jeans, and Louie never did anything except for money. He would no more have gone about a profitless killing, than he would have wasted time and effort by fishing in a bathtub.

For all that, on the whispered hint of the Ghost – who himself was killed finally as a snitch – two plain-clothes men from the Eldridge Street station grabbed Louie. They did not tell him the reason of the pinch. Neither did they spread it on the books. The police have a habit of protecting themselves from the consequences of a foolish collar by a specious system of concealment, and put nothing on the blotter until sure.

When searched at the desk, Louie’s guns were discovered. Also, from inside his waistcoat was taken a seven-inch knife, which, as said the police sergeant, might have slit the windpipe of Crazy Charlie or any other bug. But, as anyone with eyes might see, the knife was as purely virginal as when it came from a final emery wheel in its far-off Sheffield home. It had slit nothing.

Still, those plain-clothes dicks did not despair. They hoped to startle Louie into a confession. With a view to his moral and physical stampede, they conveyed Louie in a closed patrol wagon, at mirk midnight, to the morgue. He hadn’t been told what he was charged with; he didn’t know where he was going.

The wagon backed up to the morgue door. Louie had never visited the morgue before, though fated in the end to appear there officially. The plainclothes men, one at each shoulder, steered him inside. All was thick blackness; you couldn’t have seen your own nose. Feeling their wordless way, the painstaking plain-clothes folk manhandled Louie into position.

Then they flashed on a flood of electric light.

There, within two feet of Louie, and squarely beneath his eyes, lay the dead Crazy Charlie, posed so as to show effectively that gruesome slash across the throat. Louie neither started nor exclaimed. Gazing down on the dead Charlie, he searched forth a cigarette and turned to one of his plain-clothes escorts for a match.

“Do you see this?” demanded the plain-clothes man, slewing round the dead head until that throat-gash yawned like some horrid mouth.

The plain-clothes man was wroth to think he should have worked so hard to achieve so little.

“Yes,” retorted Louie, as cold as a wedge. “Also, I’ll tell you bulls another thing. You think to rattle me. Say, for ten cents I’d sit on this stiff all night an’ smoke a pipe.”

Those plain-clothes artists gave Louie up. They turned him loose at the morgue door.

The affair worked round, and helped Louie to a better position in the minds of all fair men. It fell in lucky, too, since it more than stood off a setback which overtook him about the same time. Louie had called upon the Irish Wop, at the latter’s poolroom in Fourth Avenue. This emigrant from Mayo was thin and slight and sickly, and Louie argued that he might bully him out of a handful of money. Putting on a darkest frown, he demanded fifty dollars, and intimated that dire indeed would be the consequences of refusal.

“Because,” said Louie, “when I go out for anything I get it, see?”

The Wop coughed timidly and made a suggestion. “Come round in half an hour,” said he, “when the last race from New Orleans is in; I’ll have the cush ready for yez.”

Louie withdrew, and the Wop shoved the poker into the blazing big-bellied stove.

An hour later, that New Orleans race having been run, Louie returned. The poker being by this time white-hot, the Wop drew it forth from the stove. There were no stage waits. Applying the poker to the shrinking rear of Louie, the Wop compelled that yearner after fifty dollars to leap screechingly from a second-storey window.

“That’s phwy I puts th’ windy up,” explained the Wop; “I didn’t want that chape skate to bre-a-ak th’ glassh. Indian Louie! Spanish Louie!” he repeated with measureless contempt. “Let me tell youse ginks wan thing.” This to a circle who had beheld the flight of Louie. “If ever that bum shows up here ag’in, I’ll put him out av business altogether. Does he think a two-cint Guinea from Sout’ Ameriky can bluff a full-blown Mick?”

Louie’s flight through the Wop’s window, as had his steadiness at the morgue, went the gossipy rounds. It didn’t injure him as much as you might think.

“For who,” said the general voice, “would face and fight a white-hot poker?”

On the whole, public sentiment was inclined to sustain Louie in that second-storey jump.

From what has been written, it will not astonish you to hear that, upon the important matter of courage, Louie’s place in society had not been absolutely fixed. Some said one thing, some another. There are game men in Gangland; and there exist others who aren’t the real thing. Sardinia Frame believes, with the Irish Wop, that Louie belonged in the latter class. Also, Sardinia Frank is entitled to an opinion. For he was born in Mulberry Bend, and has himself been tried twice on charges of murder.

It was Sardinia Frank, by the way, who smote upon Eat-’em-up Jack with that effective lead pipe, albeit, there being no proof, he was never arrested for it. No, he doesn’t admit it, even among intimates and where such admission would be respected as sacred. But when joked concerning it, he has ever worn a cheerful, satisfied look – like the pictures of the cat that ate the canary – and while careful not to accept, was equally careful not to reject, the compliment implied. Moreover, when the dead Eat-’em-up-Jack was picked up, the lead pipe used to break his skull had been tucked jocosely under his arm. It was clear to knowing ones that none except Sardinia Frank would have thought of such a jest. To him it would have come readily enough, since death always appealed to his sense of humor.

Clad in a Tuxedo and an open-face suit, Sardinia Frank, at the time I questioned him, was officiating as peace-preserver in the Normandie rathskeller. By way of opener, I spoke of his mission on the rathskeller earth.

“I’m here to keep out everybody I know,” said he simply.

There was a pathetic side to this which, in his ingenuousness, Frank failed wholly to remark.

“About Indian Louie?” I at last said.

It was within an hour after Louie had been killed.

“I’ll tell youse about Louie,” returned Frank. “Of course, he’s dead, an’ lyin’ on a slab in th’ morgue right now. They ‘phoned me woid ten minutes ago. But that don’t make no difference. He was a bluff; he wasn’t th’ goods. He went around wit’ his hat over his eyes, bulldozin’ everybody he could, an’ lettin’ on to be a hero. An’ he’s got what heroes get.”

“Did you ever get tangled up with him?” I asked.

“Let me show you,” and Frank became confidential. “This’ll give youse a line. One time he’s got two hundred bones. Mollie Squint climbs into a yap-wagon an’ touches a rube for it. Louie takes it, an’ plants it wit’ Nigger Mike. That’s about six months ago. Th’ next night, me bein’ wise to it, I chases to Mike an’ says, ‘Louie’s over to Jigger’s, pointin’ stuss, an’ he wants th’ two hundred.’ So Mike hands me th’ dough. I splits it five ways wit’ th’ gang who’s along, each of us gettin’ his little old bit of forty dollars apiece.

“Louie, when he finds out next day, makes an awful beef. He tells everybody he’s goin’ to hand it to me – goin’ to cook me on sight, see? I hears of it, an’ I hunts Louie up in Jack Sirocco’s.

“‘Say, Louie,’ I says, ‘about that cookin’ me. Th’ bully way would be to come right now over to Hoboken, an’ bump me off to-night. I’ll go wit’ youse. An’ there won’t be no hang-over, see; ‘cause no one in Joisey’ll care, an’ no one in New York’ll know.’

“Do youse think Louie’ll come? Not on your necktie! He didn’t want me game – just wanted to talk, that’s all.

“‘Not youse, Frank,’ he said; ‘I ain’t gunnin’ for youse. It’s Nigger Mike; he’s th’ guy I’m goin’ to croak. He oughtn’t to have let youse have th’ money.’ No, of course, he don’t go after Mike; that’s simply his crawl.

“Take it from me,” Frank concluded, “Louie wasn’t th’ goods. He’d run a bluff, but he never really hoited a guy in his whole life. As I says, he goes about frownin’, an’ glarin’, an’ givin’ people th’ fiery eye, an’ t’rowin’ a chest, an’ lettin’ it go broadcast that he’s a hero. An’ for a finish he’s got w’at heroes get.”

Such was the word of Sardinia Frank.

When he fell with two bullets through his brain, and two more through his body, Louie had $170 in his pocket, $700 in his shoe, and $3,000 in the Bowery Bank. This prosperity needn’t amaze. There was, for one thing, a racket reason to be hereinafter set forth. Besides, Pretty Agnes and Mollie Squint both walked the streets in Louie’s loved behalf, and brought him all in the way of riches that came to their lure. Either was sure for five dollars a day, and Mollie Squint, who could graft a little, once came in with $800. Both Pretty Agnes and Mollie Squint most fiercely adored Louie, and well did he know how to play one loving heart against the other. Some say that of the pair he preferred Pretty Agnes. If so, he wasn’t fool enough to let her find it out. She might have neglected her business to bask in his sweet society.

Besides, when it came to that, Louie’s heart was really given to a blonde burlesquer, opulent of charm. This artiste snubbed and neglected Louie for the love of a stage manager. But she took and spent Louie’s money, almost if not quite as fast as Pretty Agnes and Mollie Squint could bring it to him from the streets.

Louie never made any place his hangout long. There was no element of loyalty in him, whether for man or for woman, and he went from friend to friend and gang to gang. He would stay nowhere, remain with no one, after his supremacy had been challenged. And such hardy natures as Biff Ellison, Jimmy Kelly, Big Mike Abrams, Chick Tricker and Jack Sirocco were bound to challenge it. They had a way, too, of putting the acid on an individual, and unless his fighting heart were purest gold they’d surely find it out. And Louie never stood the test. Thus, beginning at Big Jack’s in Chatham Square, Louie went from hangout to hangout, mob to mob, until, working through Nigger Mike’s, the Chatham Club and Sharkey’s, he came at last to pal in with the Humpty Jackson guerrillas.

These worthies had a stamping ground in a graveyard between First and Second Avenue, in the block bounded north and south by Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets. There Louie was wont to meet such select company as Monahokky, Nigger Ruhl, Candy Phil, the Lobster Kid, Maxie Hahn, and the Grabber. As they lolled idly among the tombstones, he would give them his adventures by flood and by field. Louie, besides being conceited, was gifted with an imagination and liked to hear himself talk. Not that he felt obliged to accuracy in these narrations. It was enough that he made them thrilling, and in their telling shed an effulgent ray upon himself.

While he could entertain with his stories, Louie was never popular. There was that doubt about his courage. Also, he was too frugal. No one had ever caught the color of his money. Save in the avaricious instance of the big blonde burlesquer, as hungry as false, he held by the selfish theology that it is more blessed to receive than to give.

Taking one reason and another, those about Louie at the finish were mainly the Humpty Jackson bunch. His best hangout of any fashion was the Hesper Club. Had Humpty Jackson remained with his own, Louie might have been driven, in search of comradeship, to go still further afield. Humpty was no weakling, and while on the surface a whining, wheedling, complaining cripple, owned his volcanic side, and had once shot it out, gun to gun and face to face, with no less a paladin than Jimmy Kelly. Louie would have found the same fault with Humpty that he had found with those others. Only Humpty didn’t last long enough after Louie joined his forces. Some robbery came off, and a dull jury held Humpty responsible. With that, the judge sent him up for a long term of years, and there he sticks to-day. Humpty took the journey crying that he had been jobbed by the police. However that may have been, his going made it possible for Louie to remain with the Jacksons, and shine at those ghoulish, graveyard meetings, much longer than might otherwise have been the case.

While Louie had removed to the remote regions about Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue, and was seldom seen in Chatham Square or Chinatown, he was not forgotten in those latter precincts. Jew Yetta brought up his name one evening in the Chatham Club, and spoke scornfully of him in conjunction with the opulent blonde.

“That doll’s makin’ a farmer of Louie,” was the view of Jew Yetta.

“At that,” remarked the Dropper – for this was in the days of his liberty and before he had been put away – “farmer or no farmer, it’s comin’ easier for him now than when he was in the navy, eatin’ sow-belly out of a harness cask an’ drinkin’ bilge. W’at’s that ship he says he’s sailin’ in, Nailer?” continued the Dropper. “Ain’t it a tub called Atalanta?”