Crown Heights was not at all like the fabled and dangerous Brooklyn of Cagney movies. It was more like some small town in middle America, at least the small-town America image perpetrated by Hollywood’s immigrant studio heads.
Very innocent. Very tranquil. There were rows of one-and two-family houses, some of them in the Renaissance Revival, Georgian, and Romanesque styles, sometimes bookended by five-story apartment houses on each corner. Looming shade trees, elms and sycamores, lined the sidewalks like protective uncles.
But for some, danger seemed near at all times. Something in the air, obviously lurking yet inexplicable; a conventional notion that someone was coming to get you if you didn’t watch your ass. One minute, everything seemed safe in the neighborhood. Then a cop car would come tearing down Utica on the way to a murder or a holdup someplace, its siren splitting the June air like heat lightning.
At the supper table, to make matters even more unsettling, Loo-Loo would sit staring into the dry chicken on his plate — chicken cooked to within an inch of its taste — exchanging looks with Rita, his little sister, while Al Scharfsky sang disturbing arias.
“It’s changing, you know. The whole neighborhood. They’re coming in.”
“Who’s coming, Pop?” Loo-Loo asked.
“People. The Immigrants. Coloreds. Spanish. People from Aruba.”
“Where’s Aruba, Pop?”
“It’s down there. The rich people go there for gambling and ha-cha-cha and the criminals from there come to Crown Heights.”
“What’s wrong if they want to come here, Pop? Maybe you’ll sell more rye bread.”
“They don’t eat rye bread, Loo-Loo. They eat their own food. Things with fish in it.”
“Maybe they’ll like your rye bread.”
“Maybe,” Al said, then changed the subject. “No sooner we got rid of Murder Incorporated, we got to deal with this element.”
“What’s an element?” Rita asked.
“A criminal element. Criminals are attracted to this neighborhood, honey.”
“Uh-huh,” said Rita, nodding her head, dimly satisfied.
Loo-Loo’s mother raised her hand to say, “They’re just poor people, Al. Besides, Murder Inc. around here, that was ten, twenty years ago.”
“Oh, they’re still around,” said Al. “Believe me, Dotty. And nearby — just over into Brownsville.” He lowered his voice, so as not to scare the kids, which scared the kids. “You saw on the Senator Kefauver hearings a couple years ago — those mobsters. Albert Anastasia. Frank Erickson. Frank Costello. They’re still around assassinating each other left and right. Some of them live right around here, probably.”
“I never saw Frank Costello on President Street,” said Dotty.
Al leaned closer to his wife.
“You know those people who just bought the Union Bakery?” Al paused. “They could be connected to the mob.”
Dotty snickered, which did nothing to soothe the frightened kids. “You’re crazy, Al. What would the mob want with a bakery? And why are you whispering?”
“I’m just saying, the criminal element’s all around and we have to be careful. Furthermore, look what happened to that shoe salesman last year — what’s-his-name, Arnold Schuster. A Brooklyn guy. One of us. An innocent citizen.”
Loo-Loo, an inveterate reader of the tabloids his father brought home every day and likewise an ardent viewer of the Kefauver hearings, enlightened his mother: “Anastasia had him bumped off. Schuster snitched to the cops about Willie Sutton the bank robber.”
“Where’d you get that?” Al asked his boy.
“From Kefauver. Remember, Pop?”
Al, grumpily attempting to keep control of the conversation, replied quickly. “Arnold Schuster had nothing to do with Murder Inc., which was before you were born, Loo-Loo. What you say we change the subject?”
“Murder Incorporated were the ones who threw Abe Reles out the window,” Loo-Loo now informed his goggle-eyed sister.
“Where’d you hear that?” Al barked.
“I dunno,” said Loo-Loo. Not wishing to be forbidden access to tabs, he lied, “The schoolyard.”
“Ah-hah! Schoolyard University,” Al said with disgust.
“They said this guy Abe Reles gave names of gangsters to the G-men,” continued Loo-Loo in a rush, “and the detectives were supposed to be guarding him, but then he fell out of the window at the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island and it’s a big mystery because they don’t know if he was pushed out of the window of room 623 or if he was trying to escape.”
Al eyed his son despairingly. “You know the room number, I see?”
The boy was on a roll. “They called Abe Reles ‘the canary who sang but couldn’t fly.’”
Al pushed away his plate. “Who’s feeding you this trash?”
“I’m interested in crime. Just like you, Pop.”
I’d prefer you to be interested in long division,” Al said, after which he grumped into the living room where he could read the Post and maybe the Brooklyn Eagle — and certainly the Journal-American and the World and the Daily Mirror, these three being the reading mainstays of the bathroom — after which he would probably doze off, having begun his day at the bakery at the usual starting time of 5 o’clock in the a.m.
Gangsters were just the half of it. Spies also fascinated Loo-Loo, especially the Rosenbergs.
Convicted of being in league with the Reds a couple of years back, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent up the river. Loo-Loo hadn’t thought much about it at the time; he was only eight, after all. But he knew Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were parents, like his own, and that they had two sons about Loo-Loo’s own age. This made the case seem closer to home than the business about the racket guys Senator Kefauver talked about, guys like Joe Adonis and Frank Erickson.
But the thing that kept the spy case hot for Loo-Loo was Al Scharfsky’s supper-table lament that it was an awful shame that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were Jewish.
Weren’t they guilty?
Al summarized the case. “Guilty? They’re Jewish. We got enough troubles.”
One warm night in that June of ’53, Loo-Loo went out to Utica Avenue after supper for an ice-cream cone. Then he strolled to Chudow’s radio repair store, across the street from the Creamflake, to watch television. Very few people owned TV sets, and a small crowd had gathered, as usual, to watch a flickering black-and-white DuMont screen in the store window. This was evening recreation in Crown Heights.
The news was on. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing at sundown.
Loo-Loo worked his way through the onlookers, his cone dripping. There was no sound from the TV set, just the ghostly screen, with mugshots of the recently departed spies. A man in an Adam Hat and a business suit stood watching.
“What’s goin’ on?” Loo-Loo asked the man.
“They stole atomic bomb secrets, Sonny. Gave ’em to the Russians.”
Loo-Loo was silent. He already knew that.
“Yep. Espionage. They fried ’em both for espionage.”
“Jeez,” was all Loo-Loo could say, wondering what espionage was.
“Yeah, and they said that Julius went just like that after the juice was turned on,” said the man, snapping his fingers. “But they had trouble with the missus. Electrodes weren’t working right. A witness said he saw smoke coming out of her head.”
“Thanks, mister,” Loo-Loo said to the man in the Adam Hat.
Then his knees went soft, and Loo-Loo felt as if he’d be reviewing his supper in about a minute. Still, he managed to finish the cone. When he got home, he consulted his dictionary: