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  EXILE ON BRIDGE STREET

  A NOVEL BY

  EAMON LOINGSIGH

  VOLUME TWO OF THE AULD IRISHTOWN TRILOGY

  THREE ROOMS PRESS

  NEW YORK

  *Best when read with J. S. Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello no. 2 in D Minor, BMV 1008 Sarabande

  Lyrics from song “Haul Away Joe” (traditional) used in this book.

  Lyrics from song “Old Fenian Gun” by P. O’Neill used in this book.

  Lyrics from song “Dear Old Skibbereen” by Patrick Carpenter used in this book.

  Words from medieval Requiem Mass hymn “Dies Irae” used in this book.

  This book is fiction. Although many characters retain their original names and many events are historically accurate, the story as a whole is fiction.

  Exile on Bridge Street

  A NOVEL BY

  Eamon Loingsigh

  “Volume two of the Auld Irishtown Trilogy”

  Copyright © 2016 by Eamon Loingsigh.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For permissions, please write to address below or email [email protected]. Any members of education institutions wishing to photocopy or electronically reproduce part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Three Rooms Press, 561 Hudson Street, #33, New York NY 10014

  ISBN 978-1-941110-42-3 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-941110-43-0 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936894

  COVER AND INTERIOR DESIGN:

  KG Design International

  www.katgeorges.com

  DISTRIBUTED BY:

  PGW/Ingram

  www.pgw.com

  Three Rooms Press

  New York, NY

  www.threeroomspress.com

  [email protected]

  FOR UNCLE JIMMY “MAC”

  A kind soul, unfairly treated

  AULD IRISHTOWN CHARACTERS:

  NARRATOR

  William Garrity—Teenage Irish immigrant

  THE WHITE HAND:

  Dinny Meehan—Gang leader

  The Swede—Enforcer

  Vincent Maher—Enforcer

  Tommy Tuohey—Irish traveler, enforcer

  Lumpy Gilchrist—Accountant

  Mickey Kane—Dinny’s cousin

  DOCKBOSSES:

  Wild Bill Lovett—Red Hook, old Jay Street Gang leader

  Cinders Connolly—Jay & Fulton street terminals

  Harry “The Shiv” Reynolds—Atlantic Avenue Terminal

  Cute Charlie Red Donnolly—Navy Yard

  John Gibney “The Lark”—Baltic Street Terminal

  LONERGAN CREW:

  Richie Lonergan—Leader

  Abe Harms—German Jew, Richie’s right-hand

  Petey Behan—Feuds with Liam Garrity

  Matty Martin—Follower

  Timothy Quilty—Follower

  THE BLACK HAND:

  Frankie Yale—Leader in Brooklyn

  Jack & Sixto Stabile—Father & son owners of Adonis Social Club

  Paul Vaccarelli—Old Five Points leader, ILA VP

  INTERNATIONAL LONGSHOREMAN’S ASSOCIATION:

  Thos Carmody—Recruiter

  King Joe—VP, New York City

  T. V. O’Connor—President

  Henry Browne—ILA leader in the Navy Yard

  Police:

  William Brosnan—Detective

  Daniel Culkin—Patrolman, son-in-law of Brosnan

  Ferris—Patrolman

  WATERFRONT ASSEMBLY:

  Jonathan G. Wolcott—President

  Silverman—Muscle

  Wisniewski—Muscle

  Vandeleurs—Landlord

  OTHER GANG MEMBERS:

  Big Dick Morissey—Gibney’s right-hand, muscle

  Philip Large—Connolly’s right-hand, fool-mute

  Paddy Keenan—Bartender, Minister of Education

  Dance Gillen—Half black, half Irish, King of the Pan Dance

  Chisel McGuire—Craps King of Ballyhoo

  Needles Ferry—Drug addict

  Ragtime Howard—Dock Loaders’ Club stalwart

  Dago Tom Montague—Half Italian, half Irish

  Non Connors—Lovett’s right-hand

  Darby Leighton—Banished from The White Hand, Lovett follower

  Pickles Leighton—In Sing Sing, framed by Dinny Meehan in 1913

  Frankie Byrne—Lovett follower, old Frankie Byrne Gang leader

  Jidge Seaman—Frankie Byrne/Lovett follower

  Sean Healy—Frankie Byrne/Lovett follower

  Garry Barry—Old Red Onion Gang leader, psychotic

  James Hart—Truck driver

  McGowan—Former right-hand of Dinny Meehan, killed in Sing Sing by Pickles Leighton

  Beat McGarry—Old timer, storyteller before William, after The Gas Drip Bard

  OTHERS:

  Sadie Meehan—Wife of Dinny Meehan

  Mary Lonergan—Mother of Richie Lonergan

  Anna Lonergan—Sister of Richie Lonergan

  Tanner Smith—Greenwich Village dockboss, Meehan associate

  Joey Behan—Older brother of Petey Behan

  James Quilty—Older brother of Tim Quilty, best friend of Joey Behan

  The Gas Drip Bard—Irishtown storyteller, old timer

  Dead Reilly—Gang lawyer

  Thomas Burke—Lives below Liam

  Christie Maroney—Bartender, gang leader of many gangs circa 1900–1912

  Coohoo Cosgrave—Original leader of The White Hand Gang

  Father Larkin—Priest at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church

  OTHER GANG MEMBERS:

  Mick Gilligan—Low-end White Hand follower

  Eddie Hughes—White Hand Gang member

  Freddie Cuneen—White Hand Gang member

  The Simpson brothers, Whitey & Baron—White Hand Gang members, WWI soldiers

  Joseph Flynn—Drunkard, childhood friend of Lovett’s, WWI soldier

  Johnny Mullen—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier

  Happy Maloney—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier

  Quiet Higgins—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier

  Gimpy Kafferty—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier

  Fred Honeybeck—White Hand Gang member, WWI soldier

  OBSCURES AND EXTRAS:

  Mr. Lynch—Greenwich Village saloon owner, Hibernian societies

  Mrs. McGowan—Mother of McGowan

  Emma McGowan—Sister of McGowan

  Rose Leighton—Sadie’s mother

  Frank Leighton—Oldest Leighton brother, manager at Kirkman Soap Factory

  Tiny Thomas Lonergan—Lonergan child

  Ms. Gilligan—Wife of Mick Gilligan

  Sammy de Angelo—Italian hit man

  Seamus “Red Shay” Meehan—Dinny’s uncle

  Lefty & Costello—Two followers of Tanner Smith

  James Cleary—Garry Barry follower

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue: T’was a Day for Legends

  Chapter 1: The Butcher’s Apron

  Chapter 2: Pulcinella

  Chapter 3: The Old Protective

  Chapter 4: Faction Fight

  Chapter 5: Abattoir and Exodus

  Chapter 6: Black Tom’s

  Chapter 7: Mother of Caution

  Chapter 8: Miscarried Betrothal

  Chapter 9: The Dead Coming

  Chapter 10: A Mute Fury

  Chapter 11: The
Old Wall

  Chapter 12: Always Closing In

  Chapter 13: Scalpeen Memories

  Chapter 14: Hope for Summer

  Chapter 15: The Black Bottle

  Chapter 16: Two White Men

  Chapter 17: Four Guys, One Black

  Chapter 18: Against All I Know

  Chapter 19: The Ritual

  Chapter 20: Save Our Souls

  Chapter 21: Lonergans’ Tumult

  Chapter 22: Work ’til Holes Are Filled

  Chapter 23: Long Shadows

  Chapter 24: Dinosaurs and Fire

  Chapter 25: Gale Day and the Grippe

  Chapter 26: Lace Curtains

  Chapter 27: Everyone Knows

  Chapter 28: Deliberation

  Chapter 29: Tunic and a Big Man

  Chapter 30: Vin

  Chapter 31: Treasurer, New York

  Chapter 32: Cinched by Blood

  PROLOGUE

  T’was a Day for Legends

  “HER EXILED CHILDREN IN AMERICA ARE not hatched of the city’s womb,” Paddy Keenan once said, his back to me as he tapped a barrel of ale in the daybreak darkness, only amber beginnings of light under the bridges rising and reaching up toward the coal-soot windows outside the Dock Loaders’ Club. Always there at first of light. Fixed on that constant position of change, the passing through of poles and the inequitable polemic between the remembrance of night and the unknown day, we lived. Do we always live hovering, be sure.

  I was but a stripling back then. A slight teenage soldier of the dawn in Brooklyn’s Irishtown, up and ready for the day’s labor with the many of us. Wool caps donned, and ties and coats and boots and tools aplenty in the saloon corner.

  I think back now on what Paddy’d meant, the inner eye of an old man having the gift of vision, and seeing now as I can that he was alluding to our people’s age-old struggle to survive in this ever-changing darkness to day. To be free to live as we, ourselves. An exiled and migrated people under demand again of assimilation.

  Many Irish were berthed by ship here in Brooklyn two and three generations before I arrived in 1915. They’d been sent ’way by starvation and by British law, yet still retained the ways of their forebears by insulating themselves against the waterfront in their neighborhoods where, just like home, the oceanic winds and the brine in the unsettled sea air create a sense of timelessness again. The aura of the past felt to be within our grasp and endlessly repeating itself in the now.

  Back when, our mother’s land and her milk was still fresh on our lips here in America, and the egg of our discontent a great hunger thriving. In his off-handed way, Paddy was right, this timeless and unsettled air and the sorrowful poetry of our past gave us to thinking that we were not of New York City’s womb at all. We were still but children having crossed the Atlantic, exiled from the mother. Long without her, but never forgetting. Never forgiving.

  Oh, the police and the papers called us many things in our day during the Great War. Always had, of course. But it was as a gang we became known. The term originally came about because as longshore laborers of the busiest port in the world, we had pier gangs, deck gangs, hull gangs, hatch gangs, and many others. They all served a purpose in the loading and unloading of ships. But collectively we were known as “The White Hand,” in opposition to the Italian longshoremen of South Brooklyn and their leaders, “The Black Hand,” that sought to take over the tribute money we’d always imposed in the north on waterfront businesses and immigrant laborers. But it was ours from the start, and although the Italians played hard, in those days we played harder still.

  They called us these things to degrade and disparage us. To change us. But our deeply held ideas, the ways of our people remembered, were inherited over many, many generations. The unified disbelief in foreign law and the rejection of the overarching establishment of organized logic that’d been bequeathed us were universally present in each individual in Irishtown and along the waterfront. And it’s that cynicism that kept us alive too, for we could not trust in their ways. Ask any Irish woman or man why we bear such great distrust in law and they’ll tell you, that the foreigners’ ways had never benefitted our like and repeatedly proved itself our greatest enemy, endlessly throughout our history. The culmination coming in the 1840s that sent us to roadside graves, coffin ships, and if we were lucky, to the shores of Brooklyn and elsewhere. No no, we could only believe in the ways of our own. The endless past endlessly being relived and seen in everything, everywhere.

  And only from the womb of this collective psyche is our type of hero born. The martyr! Sweet and fatal. The martyr forever relegated to breaking his body against a greater power. In America or Ireland, the weight of organized logic pressing down on us, an Irish chieftain bulbs out of the crush. Made a leader for his flouting their power with a reckless courage. Creates and enforces our own law by the old codes. And finally, after having his people divided by the greater power, is murdered by one of his own. Another Irish leader martyred for the bogland of our history.

  I am William Garrity and it’s me who tells this story you now, many years on. Although I come from a long line of oral storytellers, I became known in Brooklyn as a thief of pencils. An old man now I am, and I slowly stand from my writings and hobble to the kitchen with an empty teacup. It shakes in my straining. I have the mind of an able youngster, I’ll have you know, but it’s true my body is that of a tin-can old man. Bockety and stiff. In the kitchen I steep the next cup and lean on the blackthorn. The same kind of cane my father took out of the chimney the day I left with him for the country train and the Atlantic steamer that took me across, steerage class. The same weapon used in the faction fights of lore, I lean on now.

  Shuffling with it, I wobble back to my typewriter, pencil and papers and look out the window over the harbor where I spent the breadth of my life. And I think of the man who taught me about that great harbor. And taught me to be a man too. His name was Dinny Meehan. The leader and the spirit of all us who ran with him back in our day. A great ghost of our past, was he, there always to remind us that to create is to truly rule. In him, there was always that sense of timelessness that stood erect in the unsettled air and, as if by some imagining, the streets of Brooklyn were paths in open fields, the buildings ancient Irish mountain shields.

  By the time Dinny was eleven years old, two older brothers, two younger sisters, his mother, and his uncle “Red Shay” had all died or been killed. Two other girls married off to Albany to a Phelan family. The last son of the once great Meehan clan of Hudson Street in Manhattan, he was forced to cross the East River to Brooklyn at the turning of the century with his Irish-born, sick father. On a windy day he landed on Bridge Street in old Irishtown, and started as a no one. His father soon dead, he an orphan. A gypsy boy. The son of an exiled child and a hallowed apparition of our past rising up. Taking power by force and violence. Killing Christie Maroney, a gang leader who sought to sell Irishtown to outsiders. Dinny Meehan, he who spited law by being found innocent of murder charges and brought together an army of early rising soldiers with whom I fell in with, joined. It is for Dinny Meehan this story is told by myself, a thief of pencils in a place where the written word was seen as dangerous, and evidence.

  Back in our day, the territories were held down by dockbosses and went from the Navy Yard down to Red Hook where our people had controlled labor for many years. All of the dockbosses had followers, but each and every one reported to Dinny Meehan at 25 Bridge Street, a saloon underneath the Manhattan Bridge that we called the Dock Loaders’ Club, though there was no sign outside stating such a thing. All orders emanated from it where Dinny Meehan held power, and down through the terminals where the dockbosses held sway in his name. It was a system that had worked for many years before my arrival when my father sent me, the youngest son to New York just months ahead of the Easter Rising in Ireland to secure passage for my mother and sisters. I’d been sent to work with my uncle, who was well established himself in Brooklyn with the International Longsho
remen’s Association—another of the gang’s enemies. Soon enough though, my uncle and I had a falling-out that left me homeless in an Irishtown winter. It was then I was picked up off the street and taken to Dinny, surrounded by his bodyguards and rowdies. He put me to work on the docks and running messages from one terminal to the next. And with the work I saved every dime earned to get my mother and sisters out of the Great War’s way, and out of the way of the Brits too, our ancient enemy who would come to clean the Easter Rising up as they’d done throughout history, with our own blood.

  My mother and sisters facing the hoary tradition of British reprisals, Dinny vowed to help me get them out. The price was high though. He wanted my uncle, for uncle Joseph was a union recruiter in Brooklyn. I paid that price in full too. A heavy one. It’s too hard for me to openly say what I had done to him. But done, it was.

  “Do you know what done means?” Dinny had asked me, his wide, muscular jaw flexing as he stared at me with stone-green eyes. “Done means done.”

  My own uncle, stabbed and left to the flames we’d relit in Brooklyn. The Irish once again taking hold of power and claiming the inherited land where the waterfront zephyrs timelessly blew in our ears and in the poetry of our pained remembrances. All this happening at the same time bold Irish rebels stormed Dublin on Easter Monday in 1916 to declare their independence from the British Empire. And I took my uncle’s life to begin my own journey into manhood. Rising up and out from the child in me.

  Just like the rebelpoets of Dublin, we in Brooklyn had so much against us. So many elements; dock and shipping companies wanting to control their profits, unions vying for power over labor, Italians groping to the northern piers, American law demanding our subservience and the threat of revolt within our own gang. Alone, Dinny Meehan put an ingenious plan in place and our gang made a violent declaration on the waterfront. The White Hand took power back on the lucrative Brooklyn docks when three hundred and fifty angry Irish went from pier to pier and beat any man refusing to pay us tribute. Burned down their strongholds too. I was there. And although we had many battles in those times, t’was a day for legends, that one.

  In Ireland, the Easter rebels were executed right off. In Brooklyn we were jailed. We ruled the marine terminals here, where the riches of hard labor fed the tenements that lined the waterfront among the factories and storing houses. Young men on the streets and docks of Brooklyn bound together by old codes and who were not hatched of the city’s womb at all, but by the mother of our discontent.