Six shots cracked out, glass was broken, chairs and tables were overturned, and about a dozen men dashed into the street and scattered in various directions.
When the bulls arrived, the Dock Loaders Rest Room was in darkness, the windows shattered, as a cold wind sweeping through the room. One of the flatties put on his flash, and lying on the floor, mixed up with chairs and overturned tables, was Jimmy Murray, shot through the head, but still alive. The radio was still playing. One of the cops turned it off, and began to question Murray, trying to find out who shot him. But Jimmy just shook his head.
Later on, a priest was called in to give Murray the last rites. The priest tried as hard as he could to get Murray to say something about his killers, but Jimmy only shook his head.
Later on, the police rounded up nine men of the gang, some of whom had been held in the Red Donnelly murder.
“Can’t you make it sooner, Judge?” sneered the Jersey Kid, with a hard laugh.
There had been a long silence after the jury had risen and given the verdict of “Guilty.”
The Kid’s three pals took their death notice without a word.
Then the quiet was broken by the screams of the women relatives and the friends of the condemned men. Order was finally restored, and the judge, pale with suppressed rage immediately denied the customary plea for a new trial.
The jury had deliberated for six hours before finding the four men guilty of first degree murder. The men had held up a motor bus garage on October 1928, and killed the cashier. The men, admitting they were guilty, pled that they had not intended to kill the cashier, but that the gun had gone off accidentally. Then they said that before leaving the garage, they telephoned for an ambulance for the wounded man, thus showing that they had not intended to harm him.
The other day, over in East Orange, a kid, dressed up to the hilt with derby, spats, and a carefully folded muffler, sauntered into a filling station, and calmly lit a cigarette. He sure was a cool customer! That is, he looked cool enough, but his voice shook like the base of a Tommy when he spoke.
“High as they’ll go!” he ordered.
A grin spread over his face when he saw how easy it was. The proprietor offered neither fight nor chin music. He simply stepped to the nearest exit, hands higher than he ever thought he could lift them and stood there.
The kid walked over to the cash register, and removed some twenty iron men with a deft scoop.
At that moment a car drove up to the filling station, and a woman blew her horn. The kid looked out, and grinned when he saw who it was.
“Only a broad.” Then he turned, to face Patrolman Thomas Carrigan who had just sauntered in. The kid backed and filled for a moment, but the cop was just as surprised as the kid was, as he had just come in for a chat with his friend the proprietor. He wasn’t used to seeing his friend scratching the ceiling, but then, in these days of fads, you never can tell from one hour to another what the latest wrinkle in reducing will be. He was just about to ask what it was all about when the kid said:
“You play that game, too!”
Then the kid ran out, tipped his derby to the lady, and got into her car.
“Sorry to put you out like this, madam, but I must ask you to start the car at once!”
The woman gave him one look, and let out a scream. Then she bolted.
The kid moved over to the driver’s seat, and started the car, but before it moved two feet, Patrolman Walter Laird, who was on duty on the corner, ran up and smashed his fist into the window of the car, breaking the glass. He saw the youngster tugging for his gat, his derby slightly askew, his face dead white over his natty muffler. Before the kid could draw, Laird fired six shots. The kid slumped over the wheel, blood pouring over his muffler, his derby falling back on his shoulders.
As far as the police could learn, it was the kid’s, Lawrence Russel by name, first job. He had done two jobs in one: his first and his last.
“Put those two men in the same cell for five minutes and the state would only have one man to kill to-night,” said a keeper the day before they were executed. The two men were consumed by a deadly hatred for each other — more deadly than their fear of the chair. For weeks they had blamed each other for the murder of Sorro Graziano and his wife — the crime for which they both died.
Plaia was the first to go to death. He swaggered to the chair, and died smiling, his cigarette still smoking on the floor beside him.
Scalfoni was the next. As he walked over to the chair he asked for a towel.
“The least you could do would be to give me a clean chair!”
To the amazement of the witnesses, he began to dust off the death-chair with a look of disgust on his face, as if the idea of sitting on a chair that Plaia had sat on nauseated him.
“Pardon me.” He swept the room with his eyes, pointing at each of the witnesses; then slowly shook his head.
The Grey Ghost, the fastest rum runner between Canada and Cleveland, which streaked back and forth across Lake Erie, carrying fortunes for her owners in expensive liquor, was caught at last.
But it wasn’t the law this time.
Gripped fast in a tortuous ice jam off Pelee Island lies the low, streamlined craft, with a dead man sitting stiff and straight at her wheel, staring ahead into the whirling snow.
Paddy King was a king all right. He was boss of a large mob, who played as many games as the weeks had days, and then some. Booze and dope peddler, burglar, gambler and hold-up man were some of his pastimes. But he laughed his scornful laugh once too often.
On December third he was found in a dusty dismantled gambling house on the second floor of a building which recently housed the Club Royale.
The plaster of the walls was spattered with holes from bullets. Empty shells were strewn on the floor, and Paddy’s revolver lay by his clenched hand, two chambers empty.
The tailor’s mark on his coat first balked identification. Then the police learned that he was Paddy King, a name that had marked up the police blotters many a time. He was the brother-in-law of Frank and Peter Gusenberg, two brothers murdered with five others of the Bugs Moran push in the gang massacre last February. Paddy was wearing Peter’s coat.
Paddy himself was held at the time of the St. Valentine’s day shoot-up but he was released. Also he had been held for a series of theater holdups, but in each case was released.
“A killing a day” is the motto of the Chicago Underworld. If a day should pass without a killing they would feel that their manhood was at stake; that the rest of the underworld, from Frisco to Hell’s Kitchen would think of them as milch cows.
On February second Joseph Cada, a twenty-nine year old racketeer, was taken for a ride. Cada was shot to death at the wheel of his high powered sedan by two companions, who then stopped the car, got out, dusted themselves off, and ambled leisurely away, chatting.
Early Thursday morning Barney J. Mitchell, treasurer of the Checker Cab Company, and his driver, were shot to death not many blocks from where Cada met his death.
On Saturday, a stool pigeon, named Julius Rosenheim, was shot and killed because someone knew that he knew something about someone. And a lot less than that is needed for a man to die in the underworld.
Black Tony lived at a fashionable uptown hotel in San Francisco. He dressed about as well as a man can be dressed; he went from party to party, and had about as good a time as a man could have.