Mob Rule: Part 16

War breaks out in the borough

Jack can’t believe his eyes as the mattresses come out before the hail of bullets begins, but as newly appointed battle commander, he needs to hatch a strategy that will flush the bad guys from their Flushing stronghold before his men are picked off by sniper fire.

By John Armstrong

From 7th Avenue looking down 33rd towards the Luciano-Costello Building you would have thought you were on the set of a movie: cars and trucks had been parked sideways across the street at both ends, forcing any attack to come though the narrow bottlenecks they left open, a bad idea as there were gunmen stationed everywhere. And I’m only talking about the ones you could see; who knows how many more were watching from sniper posts? The driver delivered us to the front door and I mean, right to the doors themselves, up on the sidewalk with barely room to open them so that we were exposed to any enemy shooters for the shortest possible amount of time.

Inside it was still something from Hollywood, the air thick with smoke and chatter, dozens of men in groups in the foyer and – there they were – mattresses, spread out on the tiles and against the walls, men laying on them smoking and reading the papers, or playing cards, guns beside them. There was a strange feeling to it, equal parts anticipation, eagerness, and boredom. No one wanted to die but everyone wanted the fighting to start, anyway. Go figure. I can’t make sense of it, and I felt the same way. Maybe I picked it up from the guys on the plane.

Meyer was at a desk writing something and I went straight to him.

“Any luck getting that truck un-rigged?”

He looked up and smiled. “Hey kid, welcome back. Some guy in one of the patrols took a look, said it was wired wrong and the best thing to do was put it where it couldn’t hurt anyone. He hotwired the engine and drove it off the end of a pier.” I looked at him and he said, “Yeah, he jumped out before it went over.”

I thought about driving a “safe” truck full of explosives from midtown to the East River while people in buildings along the route were throwing gasoline bombs and shooting at anything that moved and I decided whoever he was, he was braver than me.

Inside it was still something from Hollywood, the air thick with smoke and chatter, dozens of men in groups in the foyer and – there they were – mattresses, spread out on the tiles and against the walls, men laying on them smoking and reading the papers, or playing cards, guns beside them. There was a strange feeling to it, equal parts anticipation, eagerness, and boredom. No one wanted to die but everyone wanted the fighting to start, anyway.

“What about the street fighting – who’s organizing the …” I couldn’t think of the word for minute – “deployment of these guys I brought back?”

He looked at me the same way he had when we were in the lobby of the Waldorf. “You are. Who else is gonna – your uncle? I love him like a brother but he’s an administrator, even back when we were kids, getting started. What he’s good at, he’s the best. This is not what he’s good at.”

“And I am?”

“You better be – you’re who we got. I’ll help what I can, but I’m too damn old to be out there. And I must be finally losing my marbles, because I kind of want to.”

I had to think about that for a minute. Who else did we have? Joey? Brilliant man in many ways but did I trust him more than I did me, when it came to making decisions that affected the safety of this skin I’ve gotten so fond of over the years? In fact, did I trust anyone that much? Maybe Meyer, but like he said, we needed someone who could direct action in the field if needed.

“So I’m appointed general, whether I want to be or not? Fine, I accept. I just have one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Do I get a special hat?”

“Feather or no feather?” Meyer answered.

“No feather.”

Meyer said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

As Supreme Commander of the Luciano Family Armed Forces my first order of business was finding someone who knew what the hell he was doing. I asked the capos to solicit their crews and find me anyone who had studied military history and tactics. Less than half an hour later they produced Beppe Benedetto, PhD. I found us an office and closed the door.

“Congratulations, Beppe. Have a seat. You’re now the Chief Tactical Officer of my army.”

He was older than me, mid-thirties, with glasses and the pale white pallor of someone who could tell you what hours the library was open without looking it up. He looked even whiter after I informed him of his promotion.

“Mr. Kennedy, I’m just a payroll clerk with a degree. I don’t have any kind of practical knowledge – I’m a historian. The only tactics I know is what happened in some battle 2,000 years ago. ”

“Good enough,” I said. “The Romans must have dealt with uprisings among conquered tribes – in this case, the rebellious provinces are Queens and Brooklyn. There’s fighting in the streets and I have to regain control of the boroughs. What should I do?”

Despite his protests, I could see him starting to really think about it and after a minute he said, “I think I can tell you what not to do. In 9 AD, in Germany, the Roman General Varus was lured into the Teutoburg Forest to put down an uprising and went in in proper Roman formation, as a line. Once they were in the forest they couldn’t maneuver. They were wiped out to the last man. Three legions of veterans and six cohorts of auxiliaries, almost 20,000 men. That happened many times to Roman troops – they were very, very hard to beat if they could dictate formal terms of battle, and almost always lost any engagement with guerilla fighters.”

I thought about that. “So the lesson would be, don’t march into the streets with an army of men and the rebels in the buildings and alleys, under cover. That makes sense.”

“And don’t fight from one point of entry,” Benedetto said, sounding more enthusiastic. “If you have the men I’d go in from four sides and press them to the center. Turn the tables – they’d be the ones under attack from all sides. And you have one thing Varus didn’t have.”

“What’s that – surprise?”

He looked at me disappointedly. I had been doing so well.

“Air support.”

Three hours of ruined maps covered in crossed-out, smudged planning later, I was in the vanguard of a troop convoy heading east into the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. There were seven big rigs behind me, each with 100 armed men – a century, as Beppe called them – and two passenger vans with orders to split off and head for LaGuardia and Idlewild.

Across town Joey was heading for Brooklyn with his own troops. We mustered our forces in the parking lot by the office and the last I’d seen him he was hanging out the window of the big diesel and shouting, “Bring me my bow of burning gold and my arrows of desire, bring me my spear and my chariot of fire.” Then he whipped his old hat like a cavalry officer and the trucks pulled out. He’s a strange man and I hoped he would be okay. It’s hard to imagine the world without him in it.

I reached for the truck’s radio mike and made sure I was on the right channel.

“Lucky One to all units. Do you read?” I suppose I could have just said, “This is Kennedy in truck one – you guys there?” But what can I say? After a lifetime of TV and movies, it just wouldn’t have felt right.

“Here, boss – Lucky Two, right behind you.” The rest acknowledged and I checked the map again and warned them of the upcoming turn onto Francis Lewis Boulevard. We were heading for what our scouts said was the heart of the fighting, at Main Street and Roosevelt, but we were going to do it in staggered fashion along the streets bordering the intersection. We were native beaters driving the game towards the hunters. I called out the turns for each truck as we approached and hoped their navigators could follow directions.

The air brakes squealed and we rocked to a stop at our own coordinates. I jumped down from the cab and ran to pull out the trailer’s loading ramp, then reefed up on the rolling door. Hands grabbed at the lip of the door and pushed as soon as it cleared the deck and out they came at a dogtrot, centurions with guns held high and ready.

“Squad A – two blocks East then in. Clear the area before moving on. Squad B – same thing, to the West. Check your communications.”

The radio officers from both squads pulled out their clunky field walkie-talkies and ran the check. The transmission was full of static and intermittent dropouts and frankly the things were crap, sold for hunters to use in the deep woods, not here where the signal was crushed by mountains of concrete and steel and iron. Still, half a loaf is better than none, as my other would say, and it might just be enough to make the difference if things went bad.

Each squad had as many grease-guns –M3 automatics, recommended by Meyer who talked about them the way most men his age would show pictures of the grandchildren – Tommyguns, and 12-gauge pump shotguns as the armory could supply. I took almost everything we had in the way of ordnance and men, on the theory that if we didn’t win this battle, the war would probably be lost anyway. I don’t know if it was the right call but it was what I came up with at the time and I didn’t stop to worry about it.

Each squad had as many grease-guns –M3 automatics, recommended by Meyer who talked about them the way most men his age would show pictures of the grandchildren – Tommyguns, and 12-gauge pump shotguns as the armory could supply. I took almost everything we had in the way of ordnance and men, on the theory that if we didn’t win this battle, the war would probably be lost anyway. I don’t know if it was the right call but it was what I came up with at the time and I didn’t stop to worry about it.

I followed squad A down Union Street. We’d only gone twenty feet before the first shots spanged off the pavement and I jumped for cover behind a big Chrysler. I saw the squad leader motion a half dozen men into the building where the shots had come from, almost directly above us on the roof of a tenement.

We heard shots from inside, then nothing for a few long minutes, followed suddenly by shouts and noise on the roof. More shots and a body came over the edge, landing with a wet thud on the roof of a delivery truck at the curb. We moved on down the street and the men from the building fell in behind us.

You might be wondering how we could tell each other apart, a problem at the best of times and made worse considering how many of our guys were new hires. It’s a very good question and one I almost forgot about. Frank caught it, thank god.

Each of our men was wearing a flower pinned to his jacket or shirt, from the florist shop down the street from the office, the same one where Joey got my boutonniere. They didn’t all match and it didn’t matter – no one else was likely to be wearing any. Handkerchiefs or bandanas tied on our arms would have done the same job but we didn’t have a store full of them a few doors down.

Two men ran out of a storefront with rifles but they were cut down before they even got a shot off. It’s one thing to watch a man being stitched by automatic weapons when you know he’s squirting fake blood from a packet the special effects man rigged before the shot, when you know that after he does that ghastly, jerking dance of death as the bullets tear through him, his arms thrown back and head to the sky, that he’ll dust himself off and get ready for the next scene. It’s another thing to walk past the body and know that he shit himself and died with his pants full.

Do you know what hot blood smells like as it settles in pools on asphalt on a spring afternoon? It smells like plumbing work, copper that’s been freshly soldered.

At 41st I split the squad and sent half the men down it, then took the rest further on Union to Roosevelt and cut in to meet up with Squad Two. If things had worked the way we wanted them to there would be angry, armed men heading towards the intersection at Main and I wanted to be sure we had the manpower to herd them along.

“Mr. Kennedy!”

I saw him even as our centurion called my name, a man running up Union toward us, down the middle of the road, holding his rifle above his head. There was no flower. When he got closer I could hear him yelling, “Don’t shoot! Paisano!”

I held my hand up and he ran up to me and dropped his gun on the ground, bent over gasping. When he had his breath he said, “Squad five and six, they’re trapped. They’re under the overhangs on Main Street but they’re pinned down. The roofs are full of guns. I made it out down an alley and saw you coming.” His jacket was torn and dirty and I saw the little pin that had held his flower.

The men around me were ready to charge in but I held my hand up again.

“Listen, we’re ready for this. We’ll get our men out and you go in to mop up after. First we call in the air force.”

I took the walkie-talkie from the radioman and pressed the thumb switch down.

“Kennedy to — “damn it, I hadn’t given them any call-signs or names. How do real generals remember all this stuff? – “Kennedy to helicopters. How many are you?”

It took a moment but I got an answer.

“Sorry boss, I don’t know how to work this thing and the pilot is busy. This is Vezzoni, from LaGuardia. We had two pilots of our own and there were six copters ready to fly, but we could only find three more pilots. That’s five. Fiorito told us they got another six at Idlewild. Makes 11 of us in the air right now. A couple of them are big, too. They’re all carrying multiple shooters.

“So where do you want us?”

“Roosevelt and Main. Clean out the rooftops – anything that moves. And be careful – don’t crash into each other.” I could picture fireballs exploding over Flushing and dead bodies falling out of the sky. That would do a lot to restore consumer confidence.

“You got it.” I heard half of a war whoop as I cut the connection and in a few seconds there was the thwup-thwup of rotors coming our way, then they zipped past us overhead.

“You – get on the radio and tell your guys not to move a muscle. It’s going to get very hot in their neighborhood for a while.

“Everyone else, let’s get down there. Take both sides of the street and stay close to the buildings.” We could hear the gunfire now, like hail on a tin roof. We advanced carefully and by the time we got to the end of the block most of the copters had landed on rooftops and the men who’d been in them were waving ‘all clear’ to us.

That left the nastiest job for last. Those who stayed on the roofs to fight, died. Others fled back down to street level and joined their mates in what looked like the only way out. As we’d pressed them to the center of the battlefield and they saw how badly they were losing, they ran for the main subway entrance, hoping to escape down the tracks into the darkness. We let them go, but not very far. There were probably several hundred down there.

I radioed to Ricco, waiting in a 7 train down the line from the terminal station at Roosevelt and Main. Then we entered from our end and he started towards us from his end, driving them back toward us.

When I was a boy my father took me to a building they were tearing down and he and the other men waited in the street, smoking and passing a bottle as the wrecking ball began to turn the brick walls into powder. Suddenly hundreds of rats ran through the dust, trying to escape the demolition, and my father and his friends laughed as they shot the panicked creatures.

That’s how they came towards us, backlit by the lights of the train and the complement of gunmen advancing on either side with it down the tunnel, with no escape in any direction. We offered terms of surrender but few took it; maybe they still believed we would kill them anyway. After the fiasco at the Waldorf, I couldn’t blame them. As they came toward us they shot out the overhead lights and when they were about a hundred feet from us, they stopped, silhouettes in the train’s big headlight.

I shouted once more for them to throw down their guns and one of them fired back his answer. Then both sides cut loose and the sound inside the tiled subway tunnel was deafening, gunshots and screams echoing crazily in the shadows and fractured light. Hell might look and sound something like it, and then it stopped, as if by agreement. It had lasted only a minute but when the smoke and sound faded, they were all dead.

The Battle of Flushing was over. I detailed men to secure our few prisoners and get them into the trucks and sent many more to bring the bodies out onto the street where they could be identified. Many had died from head shots; for them, the detail covered the face with a hanky or jacket, then looked in their wallets and put driver’s licenses or whatever identification they had in their hands for the relatives to find. It was something I’d never considered before, that after the shooting someone would have to deal with hundreds of corpses. They don’t show that in the movies.

Then I climbed up on the roof of a parked car and gave a little speech about how brave they were and how proud I was to have led them into battle. It wasn’t until we were on the way home that I realized I hadn’t even fired a shot.

Mob Rule continues regularly in The Ex-Press. To read past instalments, click here.