“Giuseppe Vella launched it. He’s been getting Black Hand letters. David LaCava joined him. And some of their well-heeled friends. Banking, property, construction, a wine importer, and a wholesaler grocer.”
“Branco?”
“Antonio.”
“What did you think of him?”
“He wasn’t there. But Vella told me he put up the seed money that got the others into it. The Boss authorizes up to ten men—if you count apprentices.”
“How many speak Italian?”
“Just you, Harry.”
The Van Dorn New York City street gang expert had changed his name from Salvatore Guaragna, following the example of New York Italian gangsters like Five Points Gang chief “Paul Kelly,” who took Irish names. He said, “I got an apprentice candidate who’s Italian. Little Eddie Tobin’s father found him living on a hay barge. Orphan. The Tobins took him in. Richie Cirillo. Sharp kid.”
“Glad to have him,” said Bell.
“Who’s the rest of your lineup?”
“Weber and Fields are parked down the street on a coal wagon.” Middle-aged Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were the agency comedians. Nicknamed after the vaudevillians Weber and Fields, Kisley was Van Dorn’s explosives expert, Fulton a walking encyclopedia of safecrackers and their modi operandi.
Harry Warren grinned. “Helluva disguise. I couldn’t figure out if they were guarding the bank or fixing to rob it. Who else?”
“I’ve got Eddie Edwards coming in from Kansas City.”
“Valuable man. Though I’m not sure what a rail yard specialist can do on Elizabeth Street.”
“Archie Abbott is selling used clothes from that pushcart next to the bank.”
“You’re kidding!” Archibald Angell Abbott IV was the only Van Dorn listed in the New York Social Register. Warren wandered casually toward the free lunch, shot a glance out the window at a different angle, and came back with a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread. “I didn’t make him.”
“He didn’t want you to.”
“I’ve also got Wish Clarke and—”
“Forget Wish,” Harry interrupted. “Mr. Van Dorn is one step from firing him.”
“I know. We’ll see how he’s doing.” Aloysius Clarke, the sharpest detective in the agency—and the partner from whom Isaac Bell had learned the most—was a drinking man, and it was beginning to get the better of him.
“Who else?”
“Your Eddie Tobin.”
Harry nodded gloomily. Another apprentice. The Boss wasn’t exactly going all out.
“And Helen Mills.”
“The college girl?” Mills was a Bryn Mawr coed whom Bell had offered a summer job with the prospect of becoming a full-fledged apprentice when she graduated.
“Helen’s plenty sharp.”
“Is it true what the boys say? She decked Archie last year down in Washington?”
“Archie started it.”
Harry Warren went back to the free lunch for another look at the street. Bell divided his attention between customers going into Banco LaCava and toughs in the saloon who might be preparing an attack. Harry came back with a hard-boiled egg. “Let me guess,” he joked. “She’s the fat lady selling artichokes?”
“I sent Helen down to Park Row to get a line on where the Black Hand buys their stationery . . . Harry, why did you ask what I think of Branco?”
“He’s a strange one. Wholesale grocers tend to extort the smaller shops, force them to buy only from them and charge top dollar for cheap goods.”
“How do they force them to buy?”
“Run the gamut from getting them deep in hock to bombing their store. But I’ve never heard a breath of any of that about Antonio Branco.”
“Honest as the Lottery?” Bell asked with a thin smile.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Harry, “about anybody making a business in New York. And he’s also a labor padrone. Stone masons and laborers for the Catskill Aqueduct.”
“There’s a business ripe for abuse.”
“They tend not to be choirboys,” Harry agreed. “On the other hand, he’s worked his way into the union’s good graces. Slick.”
“But not the first,” said Bell. “D’Allesandro, with the subway excavators, started out a padrone.”
“And now that Branco’s joined the White Hands, he’s a Van Dorn client.”
“Unless he steps out of line,” said Bell, eye still locked on Banco LaCava.
“They’re remarkable,” David LaCava told Antonio Branco over a glass of wine in Ghiottone’s Café, a saloon across Prince Street from Branco’s Grocery that served as one of Tammany Hall’s outposts in the Italian colony. Ghiottone—“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone, a popular bantamweight boxer in his youth—delivered voters, and Tammany paid off with city jobs in the Department of Street Cleaning and immunity from the police. Which allowed the saloon keeper to lord it over the neighborhood.
LaCava told Branco how Isaac Bell’s Black Hand Squad was guarding his bank with men in disguise. “You would not look twice at them.”
Branco said, “So our White Hand Society has chosen well.”
“I’m convinced we’ve hired the best.”
“But how long can they stand guard?”
LaCava looked around the café, leaned closer, and whispered, “Guarding is only the first stage. Meanwhile, they observe and collect information. When they attack, the Black Hand won’t know what hit them.” He lowered his voice further. “I was talking to a New York Police Department detective—”
“Petrosino?”
“How did you know?”
Branco shrugged. “Who else?”
“Of course,” said LaCava, chastened by the subtle reminder that he was not the only business operator cultivating men with pull. “Petrosino says this is how the Van Dorns dismantled railroad gangs.”
“What did Lieutenant Petrosino say about the White Hand hiring Van Dorns?”
LaCava hesitated. “He says he understands. He knows he’s got plenty on his plate already. To be honest, I think he would have preferred we go to the police. But since we hired private detectives, he respects that we chose the Van Dorns.”
“Valuable men,” said Branco. “We’re lucky to have them.”
The next morning, Isaac Bell stationed all but two of his Black Hand shadows on Elizabeth Street before David LaCava filled his display window and opened his door for business. The exceptions were Wish Clarke, who still hadn’t shown up from nearby Philadelphia, and Helen Mills, whom Bell had sent back downtown to the printing district.
She was a tall, slim brunette who
