Two automatics emptied themselves in a single prolonged crash. Swarms of people vanished from the sidewalk like an optical illusion, leaving a dead man lying face downward. The first detective to arrive turned him over and saw the thick, raised scar extending from ear to chin on the right side of the face.
“Why, it’s Little Augie,” he exclaimed.
“It’s Little Augie,” ran the news through the crowd which was trickling back from the hallways and basements again as the street filled up with bluecoats.
“They got Little Augie,” the detective telephoned to Police Headquarters.
“Well, well,” replied Headquarters cheerfully, “so they got Little Augie.”
It was a festive evening at the East Side police station. The killing was a matter of relief and congratulation. Twenty murders were credited to Little Augie since he became emperor of the underworld on the assassination of Kid Dropper in 1923. Good cases were built up against Little Augie, but he and his followers could frown witnesses into sudden loss of memory. It was almost impossible to keep him in jail overnight. Little Augie always had bail ready and legal talent ready and alibi testimony warming up. It was even said that he usually had a judge warming up.
The police did not capture the slayers of Little Augie. The best thought on the subject seemed to be that his death was a civic betterment; but there was one regret. Little Augie’s twenty murders were also regarded as so many windfalls for the community. It was doubtful whether his successor would furnish so many commendable tragedies. The great dream of the police has always been the solution of the gang problem by the mutual extermination of the gangsters.
The public took no interest. Other gangsters were potted on the sidewalk, in speakeasies, and in taxicabs. The rococo-casket industry boomed. Still the public took no interest. But one day there was a gang killing on Broadway.
It was 3 P.M. on Sunday, June 17, 1928. Edwin J. Jerge, a dope peddler and blackmailer of other dope peddlers, was driving north on Broadway. The red traffic signal halted him. A blue car stopped beside him, and a man got out, walked forward, and took two shots through the automobile window at Jerge. Then the gunman opened the door of the car, careful fellow that he was, and fired four more shots at closer range, after which he drove off.
This episode caused public interest and indignation. As long as the gangsters despatched each other unobtrusively in humble neighborhoods, it was quite all right with their six million fellow townsmen. But this was another matter. What? Assassinate a man on Broadway? Riddle him in Herald Square? And on a Sunday afternoon at that?
There was violent activity at Police Headquarters. Men were thrown on the case in masses. Detectives were demoted. This was all very perplexing to men who regarded the passing of a gangster as a boon to any commonwealth. Why should the city turn ungrateful and resent its good luck? Any community ought to be glad to have its population diminished by a Jerge.
The argument also ran as follows: “If you prosecute gangsters for killing one another, they may stop killing one another; this would interfere with nature’s method of keeping down their numbers and they might grow to such a multitude as to become a grave menace to the rest of the population.”
Before the Jerge sensation could die down, machine-guns roared in Brooklyn. Frankie Yale, one of the biggest gang leaders, fell in front of one of his own homes. Under ordinary circumstances the city would have borne this loss without a pang. But times had changed. The public had suddenly become murder-conscious. The use of machine-guns was an added annoyance, for machine-guns had given Chicago the name of being the world centre of assassination and massacre. Civic bodies adopted resolutions against the introduction of six-hundred-bullet-a-minute guns in New York. The result of the uproar was to cause the police to take up in a serious way the neglected subject of gangs.
The police investigation established at once that the new gangs are vastly different from the old gangs. The gang today is engaged almost exclusively in policing. Its chief mission is protective, the guarding of the traffic in alcohol and dope. It is organized to prevent abuses, governmental interference, and unfair competition.
Another fact became immediately apparent. New York’s supremacy, unchallenged for a century, is gone. Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world, and New York a remote provincial place governed by a proconsul. Even Philadelphia has passed New York in importance in the gunman’s universe. New York gangsters have not degenerated, but those of other cities have come on. Conditions have forced the change. It takes a vastly greater gang organization to guard the beer supply of other cities than to police the traffic in concentrated spirits in New York.
The gangster today is one who maintains order and discipline for those who drive ten-ton trucks through the Volstead Act. This pays so well that many of the old gangster activities are nearly extinct. Wrecking laundries and small stores for not paying blackmail, adjusting labor disputes with blackjacks, general contracting in simple or felonious assault and homicide, guarding crap games and gambling houses, shooting up West Side truck thieves and loft burglars who poach on East Side jurisdiction—these and similar activities have ceased to attract ambitious young fellows.
Industrial alcohol has modernized the New York gang, but beer has created the super-gang of the Middle West. Beer has lifted the gangster from a local leader of roughs and gunmen to a great executive controlling a big interstate and international organization. Beer, real beer, like the water supply or the telephone, is a natural monopoly. Whiskey is not a natural monopoly, but beer is. The question is one of bulk. Individuals may smuggle in diamonds, for example, but it would take an extensive organization to smuggle in elephants.
Beer is an obvious thing like the weather. There is nothing clandestine about a brewery. Beer cannot flow under present conditions without gang protection extending all the way from the hop poles to the throats of the masses. To ignore beer requires a conspiracy of the whole population. There must be hearty coöperation between the moral element of the community and the immoral element of the community. The mighty organization to control beer was gradually built up at Chicago. During its formative period it was found necessary to murder federal agents and local officials and to wipe out several hundred people who sought to introduce competition into what nature had made a monopoly.
After Dion O’Banion, Hymie Weiss, and other Chicago independents had perished in a hopeless struggle against economic law, one man stood out as the greatest gang leader in history—Alphonse Capone, sometimes known as Big-hearted Al because of his extravagance in buying floral pieces, but usually called Scarface Al because of a pretentious scar down the left side of his face. Otherwise he has soft, fat, sentimental features, large red lips with exaggerated curves of sympathy, large eyes with active tear ducts, black eyebrows which contract rather fiercely when certain ideas strike him.
Al travels in a bullet-proof car. He surrounds himself with eight men selected for thickness of torso who form an inner and outer ring about him when he appears in public. They are tall and he is short, a precaution against any attempt to aim at him through the spaces between their necks. For Al’s protection, the eight men wear bullet-proof vests. Nothing smaller than a fieldpiece could penetrate his double-walled fortress of meat.
Once fully organized, the colossal beer organization has been able to take on several sidelines, including a trade in other liquors, industrial alcohol, dope, and some little running of Poles, Russians, Chinese, and others past the immigration officials. Especially in the handling of industrial alcohol has the Chicago headquarters been in close touch with New York gang leaders. Frankie Yale is said to have been murdered as a faithless proconsul. He is alleged to have “knocked down” on the home office in Chicago, accepting large sums for industrial alcohol and failing to deliver it.
New York can’t have everything. Physical conditions make the super-gang here impossible. Street traffic alone prevents it. There isn’t room for beer. A psychological factor also prevents proper arrangements being made with the authorities to flood New York with beer. The enforcement people feel that they must make a show of activity in New York to make the drys of other sections happy. Because New York is the headquarters of so many syndicates, news agencies, and special correspondents, thousands of wires begin to twitter when anything happens here. When the United States wins another action in its great war against Texas Guinan, bulletins flash to every remote hamlet. The whole continent dangles from New York telegraph wires.
This news situation is the reason the authorities deny beer to the martyred city. To provide New York with beer would require convoys of motor trucks amounting to a moving beer aqueduct. Empty barrels would be piled up like the Woolworth Building. Ships at sea could navigate by the smell of hops. With the attention of the country focused on New York, this would not do. New Yorkers must stick to whiskey, brandy, gin, and other concentrated substances.
In consequence of this, New York gangsters have no chance to achieve the imperial organization which beer has effected in the West. They have copied certain technical effects, such as the use of the machine-gun and the sawed-off double-barrelled buckshot pistol, from the progressive Westerners, but they have made no headway in the direction of welding all gang interests into one big combination. The field is still in the hands of wastefully competing independents.
Crime waves, consisting of hold-ups and burglaries, arouse the public because the business man says to himself, “I may be next.” Gang crimes, consisting mainly of the sale of rum and dope and murdering among themselves, do not ordinarily cause this apprehension. But shootings and machine-gun actions on Broadway endanger the innocent bystanders and create the stimulating I-may-be-next attitude. So the New York police have become very energetic about the matter and threaten to make things embarrassing even for the great Capone himself. ♦
