Shamrock Alley Read online

  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 51st 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 53rd 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 budd
ing 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.

  Alphabet City, poisoned by the alkaline stink of the East River, embraced an accumulation of filthy, destitute tenements and squalid, fire-ravaged shops. A few of the buildings had been bought and sold and bought again over the years, traded like cards in a Vegas poker game, casualties of the gradual decline of the East Village. It wasn’t uncommon for police to pull a bullet-riddled body from Tompkins Square Park, the victim already gray with rot and age. Likewise, there was always a pusher to be found—whatever you wanted you could have … for a price. In certain areas of the city, drugs were controlled by the authorities to the best of their ability. But drugs were still rampant here, as they were in Hell’s Kitchen, their distribution fueled by budding entrepreneurs straight from the neighborhood public schools. It was not unusual to find a frozen, malnourished corpse in the lot behind one of the tenements, the corpse’s arms black from shooting up, the face frozen in a rigor of perpetual agony.

  There was little traffic along the back streets as Jimmy and Mickey drove through the neighborhood. Children of Hell’s Kitchen, neither man traveled outside the safety of his neighborhood often, and they could probably count on one hand between them the number of times they’d been to Alphabet City. Hell’s Kitchen was a microcosm of the entire city—the entire world, really—and one needn’t go beyond that sphere for the length of a lifetime. In fact, if someone left Hell’s Kitchen for an extended period, nine times out of ten it was usually to do time upstate.

  On the seat between them was a small ledger bound in dark brown vinyl. The name H. GREEN, embossed in gold letters, was centered on the front cover of the book. It was bound with metal curls of wire.

  “How’d the meeting go with that guy John?” Jimmy asked as he drove. Though several days had passed since Mickey and John’s meeting Thanksgiving morning, Jimmy was only now bringing it up. That was how he operated: questions were asked when he felt the time was right. Period.

  “Pissed him off having to come out for nothing.”

  “He smell funny to you?”

  “No—but it’s early.”

  “Just the same,” Jimmy said, “I only want you dealin’ with him for now. No sense both of us gettin’ fronted. When you meeting again?”

  “I said I’d give him a couple days to get his money together,” Mickey said. Smoking a cigarette and gazing disinterestedly out the passenger window, he rubbed a hand along the nape of his neck. A group of kids were playing ball in the street up ahead, and Jimmy slowed to a cool fifty-five before barreling through. “So what’s this guy’s name?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy.” Mickey tapped the ledger with two fingers. “This guy.”

  “Tony Marscolotti,” Jimmy said. “We got him for five grand. Let me do the talking. You just keep quiet—and don’t say nothin’ about the book. Anybody asks about the book, you tell ‘em we bought it.”

  Mickey snorted—a sound which conveyed his mild irritation at Jimmy for even having to bring such a thing up: Mickey O’Shay talked to nobody about nothing.

  They pulled up before a row of small shops—a dry cleaner, a bakery, a barber shop, a camera shop—and stepped out into the cold. Mickey followed Jimmy across the street to a small Italian delicatessen.

  Two young kids in knitted caps sat on a bench outside the deli, splitting a messy-looking meatball hero. As Jimmy and Mickey entered the shop, both boys glanced up in their direction without moving their heads.

  There were a few customers milling about inside, all women. The place smelled strongly of provolone cheese and freshly baked bread. The walls buckled with shelves. Behind the counter slicing ham, a teenage boy in a paper hat watched them swagger around the store but said nothing. Mickey, his hands in his coat pockets, his head down as if to keep an eye on his feet, ambled over to a rack of jarred goods. With little interest, he reached out, unscrewed ajar of green olives, and systematically sucked the pimentos from a handful of them, discarding the little green husks onto the floor.

  Jimmy happened to glance up and spot the tortoiseshell bulb of a theft prevention mirror hanging above a restroom door. In it, the entire store was distorted but visible. Directly above him, a lethargic ceiling fan worked in dizzying rotations. A metal chain hung from the center of the fan, remarkably still.

  When a thick, ruddy-faced man in his forties shuffled out of the back room, Jimmy moved up against the front counter, his chest nearly leaning on the glass display case. He rolled his eyes down to the assortment of meats and cheeses behind the glass, then brought his eyes back up. Again, he caught the teenager in the paper hat stare in his direction. Then the kid swung his gaze over to Mickey. Mickey had sidled up to the other end of the counter and was standing with one foot over the line that prohibited customers from stepping behind the service counter. He was chewing the inside of his cheek, having finished with the pimentos.

  “Tony Marscolotti,” Jimmy said as the ruddy-faced man swept by behind the counter. It was not a question—hardly ever did Jimmy Kahn sound like he was unsure about anything, even a person’s name. His questions always sounded more like statements, his statements like accusations, and his accusations like death threats.

  The ruddy-faced man slowed but did not look up. He was busy carrying a tray of freshly baked rolls. “What can I do for you?” Marscolotti said.

  “We’re here to collect your vig for Horace Green,” Jimmy said.

  At the mention of G
reen’s name, Marscolotti paused, setting the tray of rolls on the counter. He brought his round face up and looked at Jimmy Kahn first with an air of anxiety, then derision. “You ain’t Green.”

  “We’re collecting for him now.”

  Marscolotti’s tiny black eyes migrated to where Mickey stood at the far end of the counter. Marscolotti didn’t stare at him long, however, and was quick to return his gaze to Jimmy Kahn. “I didn’t borrow no money from you,” Marscolotti said.

  “You owe five grand?”

  “Green wants his money,” Marscolotti said, “tell him to come down and get it himself. Or call me and tell me you’re pickin’ it up.”

  Mickey materialized behind Jimmy Kahn, the muscles of his face relaxed, a look of indifference in his eyes. Marscolotti caught that look, and something in its casualness frightened him.

  “You want him to call ya?” Jimmy almost laughed. He cocked his head in Mickey’s direction and he, too, nearly cracked a smile. “He wants Green to call him so he knows who we are.”

  “I want you outta my store,” Marscolotti said.

  “Tell ‘im who we are, Jimmy,” Mickey said. “Let him know we’re okay.”

  “Couple Irish kids from Hell’s Kitchen here to pick up their money,” Jimmy said, his eyes on Marscolotti. “Maybe you heard of us—Jimmy Kahn and Mickey O’Shay …”