***With James Cagney’s Public Enemy In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The old man was, frankly,  eaves-dropping on the conversation of the two young men standing, standing like ancient times standing, standing like he and his own set of corner boys now scattered to the winds or scattered to ashes, in front of Mom’s Pizza Parlor (Mom of the sign long since gone but the establishment still thriving through her son ,and now it looked like his son as well) and discussing, as corner boys have done since they invented corner boys, or maybe corners, this and that. They were wearing the obligatory baggie pants (two pairs overlapping as is the fashion these days), doubled-down and low-rider, identical baseball caps with the Oakland A’s insignia (signifying, well, signifying their allegiance, not to the ball club, hell, no, they might not even know where Oakland is, or whether they had a baseball club there, allegiance to the corner was the old man’s guess, if he remembered his own corner boy etiquette), tee-shirts with Bob Marley’s righteous face on them (these were white boys but no matter Bob Marley does stand the test of time, place and color), and sneakers, some Nikes brand, black, with black and white shoe laces (that last detail important and symbolic although the old man would not venture to guess  why, he had been told that today’s corner boys identify friend and foes, who is in and who is out, in such ways). He remembered his own uniform, or better, uniforms since he had had two corner boy corners. The first, the hard, real, jack-roller corner boy scene, over at Harry’s Pool  Hall was strictly white tee-shirts, hatless, jeans, tight, engineer boots (his with buckles), and a snarl. The second at Doc's Drugstore after he decided that the criminal life was too much work and that he was not particularly good at it, plaid shirt, chinos, black, un-cuffed (that was the shoe lace equivalent of that day), sneakers and midnight 24/7  sunglasses in that cool breeze early 1960s night.                     

The this and that between the two young men  that day entailed a discussion about the vagaries of the drug trade, about how Lenny from down on Atlantic Avenue  had just been nabbed with a kilo of coke and was a sure bet to do a nickel or a dime up in Shawshank for his efforts, about how the cops had seemed to be pushing extra hard  lately on the drug, front in their never-ending “war on drugs” and how it was hard, hard indeed, for a man, a young man, to make a living these days trying to do a little of this and a little of that.

The old man laughed to himself , laughed  a knowing laugh, about how each generation, each corner boy generation thought the cops of their times were tough,  that it was tougher than ever to make a living outside the law and that these kids didn’t know what it was like when cops really pushed down on you, really wanted you off the streets. Strangely the old man had the feeling that the two talkers, Larry and Louie, would crumble if a cop even looked sideways at them to show how the corner boy talent had diminished with time. In his own time he had seen things, done things, heard about things that would have had these kids shaking in their boots, have them going back to some sweet mother house promising, pretty promising to live a saintly life if dear mother would let them back in, or some to some cribbed girlfriend's place  all warm and cozy. The latter more probable since they were good-looking young men who would draw a certain kind of careless woman, or a restless one,  who was just then looking for kicks, maybe a headful of drugs to break the monotony of her days, before heading down some aisle all in white, with some future salesman of the year, a white picket fence complete with house, dog, and a couple of fretful kids.       

The stuff that the old man had heard about (he was divulging  nothing about his own capers , not for print anyway, since the statute of limitations might not have run out yet) about how Whitey did his this and that without blinking an eye, how Howie had a guy wasted just because he looked at a cop like maybe he knew him, knew him too well, like maybe he had called his “uncle,” about how Bernie snagged a guy, having him dragged by rope on the back end of a car just because he said something off-color to his girlfriend, Gladys. But those guys tough as they were couldn’t stand up to, couldn’t take the heat, couldn’t kiss the hem of Jimmy, James Cagney (yah, just like the movie star except this guy was rough tough tough not film pansy tough), from the old neighborhood, the old Olde Saco neighborhood, back before the Great Depression in the days when they had Prohibition and the only way for corner boys to make money then was to transport liquor, and plenty of it. And to insure that plenty of it, to insure that plenty of dough was made, the guns came out, came out blazing, against rival corner boys, and against the cops. Especially the cops because they  were a drag on commerce and some had it coming to them anyhow.   

In fact Jimmy Cagney, his gun, and his reputation blossomed in the beginning by being nothing but a hired gun, and to prove his hired gun worthiness he put three straight up in a pursuing copper and laughed about it. Laughed even better when they could never put two and two together on the case, and you know cops, whether they loved their brother officer or hated him they felt honor bound to avenge that type murder anyway they could. So, and here the old man spoke of rumor more than actual knowledge, the scuttlebud was that they knew Jimmy wasted the brother but they were scared, afraid okay, to nab him since they did not want to share that fellow officer’s fate. Yah, Jimmy was tough, tough on his women too (except his Ma of course), had belted more than one around for looking in another guy's direction or had asked him for pocket change to make herself look beautiful for him. (According to legend, one of his dolls, the old man’s childhood best friend’s mother had asked for beautiful dough, got slammed in the face a couple of times for it with the remark that all he care about beauty was their rustling the bed sheets in the dark of night and so she didn’t need any such day light works. She thereafter shot him with his own gun in the foot and she lived to tell about it. Something about her being crazier than him got her a reprieve. But that stuff was a rumor so who knows)      

Jimmy got tired of that aimless hired gun rooty-toot-toot work quickly and as the Prohibition cop heat was turned up he became an armed outrider for illegal liquor coming in from Canada down through New Hampshire. And here is where Jimmy built his legend, built it solid. One night, maybe when the moon was down, Jimmy single-handedly ambushed a huge whiskey load that his bosses, the Mariano brothers, were shipping down to the thirsty Boston market, ambushed it easily and then drove down though the back roads of New Hampshire with. Simple work.  But that was not the end of the story. No, see the coppers were looking for that load and had a stake-out ready around Nashua, maybe a little north of there, Jimmy spotted it and just rammed through sending a police car with at least one copper (although he always claimed two) home to his maker. Beautiful. The old man mused once again as he moved along that those two kids at the pizza parlor would have wet their pants, or worse, even thinking about the hell rain hell that would come down on them , if they wasted a cop, even a silly rent-a-cop private cop.

Yes Jimmy Cagney was a piece of work. He came out of the old Pond Street slums when they were the dead-end, dead-ass, dead- hope and maybe even just dead- dead places that have not changed with the turn of the centuries. Mother and father, as to be expected when a wild child is born, a child of the moon, hard-working, god-fearing, god-praising, god-damning people from the old country, the old sod, Ireland and thankful for the Pond Street cold-water flats, and a roof over their heads (not always true in the old sod, many a night they slept under the stars, or better under the mists and fogs). But Jimmy caught on early, got street smart early, and because he was just a little bit smarter than the Pond Street corner boys that he ganged up with he became their leader, not with brawn, not with big book brains, but with street smarts, street smarts that made the others ride the wave with him. And for a while that gang thing, the nickel and dime heists, the midnight grifts, the small penny ante jack-rolls, got them by. But such small beer is not for everybody and so Jimmy drifted away, drifted into the "hit man" racket mentioned above for a minute, found that he liked being a stone-cold killer, killing without remorse, killing without motive if it came right down to it, killing for pay and so killing coolly and once a man got that feeling, that invincible feeling in his blood then he had to, hear this one and all, had to play his hand to the end. And that high-jacked whiskey heist was the beginning of playing that hand out.                              

Needless to say, at least for the old man’s generation, if not for those hombres hanging in front of Mom’s that day the trajectory of Jimmy Cagney’s life was a source of wonder, of emulation, and, for a few maybe a cautionary tale. Let’s let the old man finish up with what he knew, and he knew a lot because in his generation, his corner boy generation, such facts were important, important for some career path out of the slums (or as put in his day “the projects”). Jimmy parlayed that first whiskey heist into another big haul, a haul that everybody watched to see which way the winds would blow. Who, if anybody, was going to play king of the hill with Jimmy. So, naturally, as even criminal enterprises abhor a vacuum, need a leader, those guys, the Mariano brothers and so Italian which fit part of the ethnic configuration in that grey underworld, that Jimmy shafted once they heard that he was going to take a run from the border on his own hired some muscle, hired some tough boys, and were ready to ambush Jimmy’s cargo just short of the Massachusetts border, up around Salem, New Hampshire. But Jimmy prevailed for one simple reason, or really two, one he had sent well-disguised outriders  well in advance of the shipment and knew, knew exactly where he was going to be hit, and two, he had more fire-power, more hard guys, and, frankly, more ruthless guys that the brothers. Nobody ever really got a count on the dead that night (some dead were carried away to throw off the cops, others maybe died later) but a police report of the scene later released spoke of a bloodbath and of the broken bodies of known underworld figures, the Mariano brother, RIP…

And so Jimmy reigned, reigned for a long time, brought some of the smaller brotherhoods under his wing, expanded his operations to prostitution, gambling, midnight art and jewelry heists and finally drugs when they became the object of desire for a world weary of the red scare cold war reality in the 1950s. But see, like in Jimmy’s time, there are always hungry guys ready to take serious risks, take serious murder and mayhem risks, to take the huge profits from easy street. And so Jimmy, thinking that drugs were not different from the old illegal liquor market, played his hand the old way. Dared anybody to mess with him, to mix it up with him with some gun play if they wanted to take his action. The problem was that he had maybe grown soft, maybe didn’t see how far hungry fellahin guys who lived on faraway garbage heaps were willing to go for the easy street dream, and maybe too had just lost a step or two in that hard world. So one night, one moonless night, Jimmy Cagney’s body was found riddled along the river near Boston, the Mystic River for anybody asking, with about fourteen bullets from an automatic, with a note written in Spanish proclaiming a new jefe, a new patron. Yes, the old man thought those Mom’s Pizza Parlor corner boys would not understand that world, did not want to understand that world, and had better just find whatever place assigned to them that they could find in that world because if Jimmy Cagney, a king hell king born and bred, could tumble, what chance did they have…