Toscari, a confidant of both families, to settle the differences between the one-time friends, the Lombardis and the Torellos. The Torello barbershop had been agreed upon as a meeting place, because it was widely accepted that one does not shit where one eats. Therefore, violence was unlikely to break out.
Big Tony and Ralph were unarmed and had no bodyguards with them. They would play some cards with their old friends, work their out their differences like gentlemen.
They walked to the rear of the shop, toward the card room, greeting acquaintances as they went, filling the air with friendly chatter. Then the two men entered the card room and the air filled with unfriendly chatter, from a crossfire of automatics.
Big Tony was dead when he hit the floor, seven bullets in him, two in the head. Uncle Ralph took a slug in the left leg and another in the stomach, but he was a younger man than papa, and he chased one of the gunmen through the barber shop, out onto Woodland Avenue.
'I got you now, you bastard,' Uncle Ralph said, cornering the gunman in front of the butcher shop next door, charging him, and as he did, the gunman whapped Uncle Ralph in the forehead with the butt of the now-empty gun, driving it into his head like he was pounding a nail.
Uncle Ralph smiled, in a silly stunned way, and then fell on the pavement and died.
There were a number of witnesses, and the murder story in some detail was widely known in the Italian community. But no one talked to the police-not after the butcher, who got a good look at the killer who pistol- whipped Uncle Ralph, was shot in front of his shop, inches from where Uncle Ralph had fallen.
Cleveland had never seen a funeral like Papa's and Uncle Ralph's-silver caskets and brass bands and thousands of mourners lining Woodland Avenue, seven hundred autos winding their way to Calvary Cemetery. Big Tony Lombardi was beloved in his world, a man generous to a fault, free with his money and his favors to less fortunate Italian families on the east side.
It was important that Sal rise to his father's legend. To be a great man, a generous man.
And so, two years later, the eighteen-year-old Sal instructed his mama to drive him and cousin Angelo to East 110th Street, just south of Woodland, less than one hundred feet from the Torello barber shop where papa had died. Portly Mama, still in widow-black, her gray-touched black hair in a bun, her tiny kind eyes behind round black- framed glasses, called out to a man in the front of the barber shop. She was behind the wheel and the man had to lean in the passenger's side window. With a small, sweet smile she asked him to fetch Dominic Toscari at the nearby Torello sugar warehouse.
'Tell him Mrs. Lombardi wishes a word with him,' she said.
Dominic-a swarthy, stocky, cocky fellow-obediently complied, swaggering up to the black Cadillac limo with a smile and a ready, 'Hello, Mrs. Lombardi-what can I do for you on this fine day?'
'You can die, bastard,' Sal said from the back seat, and he leaned out his window and began firing his revolver. Dominic's smile barely had time to leave his face as he twitched and danced and died.
Little Angelo jumped out of the car, on the street side, and came around and put a few bullets into the corpse, just so he wouldn't feel left out. Then, in a touch one of the papers referred to as 'the melodramatic gangland calling card of death,' Angelo dropped an ace of spades on the body of Big Tony's betrayer.
And the big car roared away, with Mama at the wheel.
The aftermath was long and hard on the family. Sal and Angelo fled to San Francisco and hid out. Mama was arrested on a first-degree murder charge. The prosecutor made it clear to Mama that she would be released if her son and nephew gave themselves up. The Lombardis, old Black Hand family that they were, understood this tactic; their fortune had been built on extortion, after all.
Mama was tried and acquitted of the murder charge, and in February of 1930, Sal and Angelo returned to Cleveland and gave themselves up. It seemed the state's star witness, another cousin of theirs, had decided to move to Italy; the climate was healthier there and, besides, their cousin had come into some unexpected money.
The Torellos had fallen like leaves in the coming months: Sam was gunned down in Frank Milano's Venetian Cafe on Mayfield Road. Vincent Torello went for a ride in the country, the one-way variety.
The five remaining Torellos gathered in January of 1932 at the corner of Woodland Avenue and East 11Oth.
'What the hell is this about?' Octavio Torello demanded of his brothers.
They looked at him curiously. The wind was blowing snow around from flurries of the day before.
'We got your message to meet you here,' Pasquale Torello said, shrugging.
In moments the men realized they'd been summoned by phone messages that none of the others had sent.
'It's a fucking set-up,' Octavio said. 'Get the fuck outa here, you guys…'
But the black limo was already pulling up, the snout of a machine gun already pointing its about-to-scold finger at them. The Torellos had time to go for their guns, but not to draw them, before the fusillade ripped into them, shook the life from them, dropped them rudely to the pavement, corpses overlapping, blood of one running into the other.
Bloody Corner, they called it now. That corner where the Lombardi-Torello feud had begun and finally ended. It started as business-the Torellos wresting away Big Tony's corn-sugar empire-and ended in sheer revenge. The massacre at Bloody Corner came at a time when corn sugar and bootlegging were fading into the past.
And the policy and clearing-house racket was beckoning to the future.
Those early strong-arm years-the Torello war, the muscling-in on the Big Four policy kings, the executions of various independent policy operators-had earned respect for Black Sal Lombardi and his formidable second-in- command, Little Angelo Scalise. Their well-earned reputation for violence had allowed Sal to maintain a comparatively peaceful reign of power.
As for the niggers on the east side, there had been no bloody uprisings, or even strikes by policy writers (like Dutch Schultz ran into).
As for the police, Ness had been so tied up fighting crooked cops and labor racketeers since he got in office, the policy racket had been benignly neglected.
Only now, word was, the safety director had Black Sal's favorite, fattest source of income targeted for special attention. Seemed fucking up Sal's bookie operations wasn't enough to satisfy that goddamn Boy Scout.
And to top it all off, there was this Pittsburgh problem that Angelo wanted to talk about. Sal sighed, sipped his milk, and waited for his cousin. The sound of a strike in the lanes made Sal jump a little and then the sound of a yelp, a painful yelp at that, really unnerved him. So much so that it almost showed.
Angelo strutted into the small, sparsely populated bar, laughing; it was a sharp, hacking laugh. Angelo's thick lips were spread to reveal large white teeth; his dark eyes were glowing with amusement. Wearing a gray bowling shirt with Angelo sewn cursively over one pocket, he was a thin, monkey-like man who stood five-foot-five. He strode up to the booth and clapped his hands once and said, 'That kills me.'
'You got to stop doing that,' Sal said.
'What?' Angelo said, innocently, his smile dropping away.
'Hitting the pin boy like that. I heard him yelp.'
Angelo slid into the booth, laughing again, but softly. 'That kills me. Little bastards should move faster. I ain't got all day.'
Angelo waved to the bartender. There was no waitress and no booth service, but in Angelo's case, that didn't matter. The bartender brought him a beer.
'So what's the story?'
Angelo shrugged, sipping his beer, wiping off a foam mustache. 'Ness is heating up. He's gonna try to make the niggers talk.'
'It won't work.'
'It sure as hell won't. I'm spreading the word that any black bastard who talks to the cops is a dead black bastard.'
Sal shook his head wearily. 'How many times I got to tell you? You got to treat 'em right. They're people too.'
Angelo made a guttural noise deep in his throat. 'They're fucking monkeys,' the monkey man said.
Sal's cheek twitched with disapproval. 'I'm not saying you don't get tough with 'em when they deserve it. But you got to treat niggers with respect like anybody else.'
