Chapter X
Orders from the Grave
Peg Leg and the survivors of the Lovett dynasty were not satisfied with the course of the law in Fiddler Byrnes’ case. They felt certain that he or Martin, or both of them, had worked out the old grudge on Wild Bill by slaying him. When they left the cemetery they went in search of both men. They stalked the streets for weeks looking for Byrnes and Martin.
Finally they ran across Byrnes’ trail in the Adonis Club, a dingy meeting place for Navy Street thugs. When they reached the place Byrnes had just left in the custody of a detective. The Fiddler, realizing that he was doomed, had phoned the detectives to pick him up.
The next day he pleaded guilty to an old robbery, and in prison he found safe refuge from the guns of Lovett’s pals.
The next day Anna Lonergan married Frank Martin.
Raycraft went into a furious rage and parted from his pals. A day later Anna and her new husband were walking arm-in-arm along the sidewalk when shots blazed from a doorway. Martin and his bride raced across the street, each with a bullet in the arm. This occurred on New Year’s Day, 1925. On the day following a wreath of fresh flowers was found on Wild Bill’s grave in which was woven the following:
We haven’t forgotten, Bill.
If this floral offering was intended, to record the death of Frank Martin it was premature, for both Martin and his bride quickly recovered from their gunshot wounds.
On January 10, Bill Raycraft’s bullet-ridden body was found in an apartment. Reprisal.
Peg Leg and Cute Charley were left to carry on the hunt. For some reason they did not molest Martin, but they had added to their forces two young gunmen, Needles Ferry and Aaron Harms, former members of the Navy Street gang once ruled by Capone and now members in good standing of the Adonis Club where former Navy Street gangsters hung out.
Peg Leg, Donnelly, and the two new additions to their manhunting mob, spent much time in the Adonis Club, properly gatted and exceedingly alert and curious-eyed. For almost a year they haunted the club, when they were not hanging out at the Loaders’ Club, over which Peg Leg and Donnelly exercised joint rule.
On Christmas morning, 1925, Patrolman Richard Morano saw the body of a man lying in the gutter in front of the Adonis Club. Observing that a trail of fresh blood led from the body to the door of the club, he followed it. He found the club deserted. Propped against a piano in the front room he saw still another body, and near it a .45 automatic fully loaded with steel-nosed bullets. He picked up the gun and turned. Under a window he saw another body upon the floor.
The body in the gutter was that of Needles Ferry. The corpse on the floor under the window was that of Aaron Harms; while the body propped against the piano was Peg Leg Lonergan. The automatic weapon, loaded to full capacity with steel jacketed man killers, was the weapon which had been Wild Bill’s!
Before nightfall the police dragnet had hauled in twelve dark-skinned members of the Adonis Club. A stout, pompous-aired man, with an eleven carat diamond ring sparkling on his finger, took upon himself the role of spokesmen for the other eleven, who, with himself, were accused of the triple murder. He told a story purporting to be a true account of the killing. He said that Lonergan, Ferry and Harms had stormed into the club with blood in their eyes and guns in their hands and called for the “guy from Chicago.”
Someone had ordered the gatted visitors out. They refused to go. Peg Leg fired his automatic at the piano; then someone back in the club opened fire, and Peg Leg, Ferry, and Harms fell, and another someone carried Ferry’s body out and dumped it in the gutter.
All twelve suspects agreed that that was what had happened, but they were unable to explain how if Lonergan had fired his gun, it was still fully loaded with undischarged shells!
Detectives asked the pompous spokesman for his name and business.
“I’m the doorman of the club,” he grinned. “My name’s Al Capone.”
The sleuths displayed no concern at mention of this name. Al Capone was not yet the keyman in Chicago’s underworld, though he was getting there fast. Nor did it matter about the discrepancy between Capone’s explanation of the shootings in the Adonis Club and the circumstance that Lonergan could not have fired the automatic. Capone and his fellow Adonis clubmen were finally discharged and Al hastened back to his easy money empire on the lake. This was Capone’s first visit to Brooklyn since he had been muscled off the coffee docks near Navy Street, and he has not returned since.
One man remained of the Lovett dynasty — Cute Charley. Alone he took up the hunt. On the morning of January 19, 1930, he was found dead with two bullets in his flame-topped head in a pier shanty near Bridge Street. Frank Martin, the police said, was the last man seen to come out of the shanty. He was arrested, but evidence was lacking to hold him for the crime and he was released.
And so the Lovett dynasty seemed to have been wiped out as the Meehan dynasty before it had been broken up. The docks of Shantytown were left free for whoever might risk the job of running them. Whole dynasties had been wiped out trying to rule. The job had always brought fatal consequences. Yet one man was willing to take the risk. His name was Eddie McGuire.
He had been a sort of parasite around the Loaders’ Club, toadying to Meehan and trying to get the fat boss to let him in on a little of the graft. Meehan had barked him out of the club. Now, with Meehan gone, and Lovett and his crowd in their graves, leadership of the dock wallopers looked to McGuire like a sporting proposition. But five other men also wanted the job themselves. McGuire proposed that they all shake dice for the job and the bones went capering across the floor in a deserted pier shanty.
McGuire won the game but not the Loaders’ Club. His body was found just outside the pier shanty with five bullets in it — five different-sized bullets from five different guns!
On this occasion a large bunch of red roses found their way to Lovett’s grave. The card attached to them bore this brief message:
For Old Times’ Sake
For a time no man ventured to claim the empty high-backed throne in the Loaders’ Club. Not only had the job spelled death for every man who had tried to claim it, but altered conditions in the world of commerce and a great crash on Wall Street had greatly reduced the amount of work on the docks. The rich pickings which. Dinny Meehan had gathered were no more. Only a handful of dock wallopers could find work. Still, however, there was an attraction in the job for one man — Frank Martin, now known to his friends as Matty the Smart, second husband of Anna.
A week before Christmas, 1931, Martin was on his way to the old green-fronted Loaders’ Club when two bullets were winged at him. Both took effect, one in his chest, the other in his right temple. He was carried to a hospital. Soon Anna Lovett Martin was at his bedside.
“Matt, you ought to tell who shot you,” she pleaded.
“If I knew I wouldn’t tell you,” he snarled. Something had turned him against the woman he had fought with Wild Bill to possess.
Martin never told who shot him, and Anna was in widow’s weeds again; during the night, Frank Martin — Matty The Smart — had paid the price many another ambitious man had paid to gain the Loaders’ Club throne.
Again Wild Bill’s hillside grave bloomed with a bouquet of fresh and fragrant posies with a little card:
We remember you, Bill.
Martin was gone. Only one man remained of the original crew of roof gypsies whom Bill Lovett had met years before on a rooftop and had welded into the nucleus for his infamous White Hands. The sole survivor was Fiddler Byrnes. But he was safe from the guns of the unknown assassins who, on the one hand were killing off Lovett’s old enemies, and on the other decorating his grave each time an enemy fell. Byrnes was languishing in prison. But now, with all the old Lovett crowd gone, he asked for a parole.