So the Wolf unreeled certain information from the film of his memory with the result that the river pirates passed into history ere a month went by.
Quite an unusual man, this Kerrigan, you’re thinking. Well, let’s take a look at him: Five feet ten and the aforementioned one hundred and twenty pounds. Skinny as a rail.
“No flesh, but lots of nerve,” is the way he put it.
Lines all over his face. Dark, burning eyes that looked right through you. (You wouldn’t lie to Kerrigan.) A big forehead. Forty-two.
Tobacco and booze were taboo. His wife and two children rarely saw him. He slept wherever his work took him — when he did sleep.
Arnold Rothstein, notorious gambler, racketeer and dope lord, who was recently slain, was one of the many who would have given anything for the Wolf’s good will. Rothstein tried hard enough, Heaven knows, but got nowhere.
Rothstein used to sip coffee by the hour in a well-known restaurant on upper Broadway. Kerrigan often passed the place. But he seldom passed without being approached by Rothstein
“Hello there, Wolf,” Rothstein would say as he rushed into the street, bareheaded. “Come on in and have something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry; go on and sell your papers, Arnold,” the Wolf would answer. “I don’t want to be seen in your company.”
But despite the fact that he detested racketeers and dope runners, the Wolf was often seen in their company. On such occasions, however, he was usually busy turning down bribes, notwithstanding the truth that his pay was small and his family more or less in want. It is estimated that he turned a deaf ear to a cool million in bribes during his service with the Government.
Only a few weeks before his untimely demise the Wolf was passing the restaurant frequented by Rothstein and his gang when a pale-faced fellow ran out of the eating place and accosted the narcotic agent with this remark:
“Say, Wolf, I understand you’re after me.”
“That’s right, egg,” answered Kerrigan, who was truthful to the point of painfulness.
“Well, lookit! I got twenty-five grand for you if you lay off, see?”
“Listen, bozo,” he snapped. “Who ever told you I went in for petty larceny?”
Kerrigan’s icy stare was famous. His eyes would start at your shoes and wander upward, in a despising, withering manner, to your face. Then he would stare hard, looking right through you. That stare was most irritating and disconcerting. Therefore, it produced results.
At noons the Wolf, when in New York, frequented a cheap eating house patronized by characters of the underworld. When entering the place he was in the habit of giving every one in the joint the once over. One day he let his glance fall on a man and a woman. He didn’t know them; he hadn’t, in fact, ever laid eyes on them before. But they apparently knew him, for when his gaze roved from their shoes to their heads they nudged one another, left their meals unfinished, paid their bill and hurried into the street.
“Oh, boy,” said Kerrigan to Agent Kelley, “they’ve done something. Notice how fast they blew when I looked ’em over?”
So the Wolf bounded through the door and shadowed the couple — for two weeks.
They wound up in jail, having been underlings connected with a big dope ring. Before taking the rap they spilled information to Kerrigan which resulted in the demolition of the ring in question.
For more than a year preceding his death the Wolf concentrated on an international narcotic network which had for years mystified the best minds of the Government. Kerrigan loved big jobs — and he knew that to get to the core of that ring was a big job. He had an idea that Arnold Rothstein was in back of the organization, but he couldn’t get the goods on him.
The Wolf’s labors, however, began to bear fruit just after Rothstein’s death. It seems that the police had gone to the offices of the Rothmere Realty Company, one of the slain gambler’s many “smoke screens,” in an effort to unearth a clew which would lead them to Rothstein’s murderer. But the police came to the conclusion that there was nothing of value in the offices.
The Wolf, however, had a hunch that a search of the “realty” company’s premises might reveal something of moment. So the place was gone over with a fine tooth comb, and certain data — the Government won’t reveal the details — was obtained. The upshot of the whole thing was this:
One fine day, a few weeks after Rothstein’s murder, Joseph Ungar, a suave and dapper crony of the slain man, strolled into the Grand Central Terminal in New York. He was leaving for Chicago on the crack Twentieth Century Limited, the first section of which pulls out every day at two forty-five. It was then two thirty, and Ungar occupied himself with the task of seeing that his two expensive-looking trunks were properly placed in one of the baggage cars.
Meanwhile, the Wolf sat in the office of Assistant United States Attorney John M. Blake, in the Federal Building, his long, nervous fingers beating a tattoo on the desk. He was waiting for the word from Grand Central Terminal.
Shortly after three o’clock Ungar’s two trunks, which had been removed from the train without the knowledge of their owner, were brought in to Kerrigan.
“Now we’ll see if I’ve worked a year for nothing,” said the Wolf to Blake. With that Kerrigan took an oversized hatchet and began to smash one of the trunks open. When his task had been completed he was confronted with a sight he had long anticipated — narcotics valued in excess of a million dollars.
The wires began to buzz, with the result that the Twentieth Century was flagged outside of Buffalo that night. Ungar was unceremoniously hustled from his berth, forced to complete his toilet in the railroad yards, brought back to New York and sent up for a long stretch.
But I’m a trifle ahead of my story. When Kerrigan was smashing open the second trunk, which also contained more than a million dollars’ worth of “hop,” his hatchet slipped and he struck himself in the stomach.
“Dammit,” he said, a sly smile playing about his lips, “I’ve killed myself.”
And the Wolf had killed himself. He was taken to Misericordia Hospital, where he succumbed to an operation for a twisted intestine, brought on by the blow from the hatchet. He didn’t have a chance. His constitution had been undermined by seventy-two consecutive hours of work preceding Ungar’s arrest and the Wolf died a martyr to his country, the same as a soldier on the battlefield.
And so the arrest of Ungar marked the beginning of what promises to be the end of the Rothstein dope ring — the crowning achievement in the fictionlike and hair-raising career of the peer of all narcotic agents. Little was published about the Wolf’s exploits when he was alive. The Government was rather touchy about that. It didn’t want people to know how clever he was. But his death changed all that, so I sought out the man with whom he had worked on so many cases and who knew Kerrigan as well as anybody — Assistant United States Attorney Blake. And from Mr. Blake I obtained the inside stories on three of the Wolf’s most thrilling exploits, many of the facts being set clown here for the first time.
II
Beyond a shadow of doubt, the intrepid Kerrigan had his closest call during his encounter with “Linky” Mitchell, generally recognized as one of the most fearless and desperate of the bad men, and the scourge of New York’s halfway world. Linky and the scrappy agent met head on one night in a glorified speakeasy just off the street called gay, and only a miracle — in the form of Wolf’s dominating personality — prevented the loss of several lives. In order that the reader will thoroughly appreciate the pure grit displayed by Kerrigan on the night in question, it will be best, perhaps, to unfold some of the more important details of Linky Mitchell’s life and habits.