Bulldog’s New York headquarters was on Ninety-fifth and First Ave. Uncle Rich had a finger, a phone-company lineman who’d helped set up their main switchboard. The company’s web extended uptown and down through the telephone cables. Trip one of those wires, Bulldog dispatched a team and rang you up. Next call after that was the cops if you didn’t have the code word for the account. If the switchboard itself—and the men who manned it—was removed from play, what treasure awaited an enterprising burglar before the heat came down?
Uncle Rich knew, and felt no need to elaborate on that or how he was going to engineer such a feat. Bulldog HQ was his end. Pepper and Big Mike’s concern was the target he’d chosen for them: Fabrizio’s on 125th. Once Uncle Rich neutralized the security company’s magic box, they’d get the signal and take it down. In and out. “Can you handle that?”
Big Mike said, “Shit.” Pepper shrugged.
At nine P.M. on the first Monday in August, Pepper and Big Mike entered 24 East 125th and walked up to the second floor, the home of Liberia Insurance. From afar, their worn gray uniforms and black cases identified them as workmen; up close one made out the Rogers Plumbing patches on their backs. They bypassed the insurance firm and accessed the roof at the top of the stairwell. They traversed three rooftops, and set up on the black tar beach over 18 East 125th. The doorknob to 18’s stairwell had been punched out two days prior. They waited for the signal.
Three months later Liberia Insurance vanished, along with tens of thousands of dollars in premiums. This was unrelated to the Bulldog job, but indicative of the slippery nature of Harlem at that time: Here today, gone tomorrow with your money.
Out on the tar and looking down 125th Street. Pepper thought about the heat, and how it pushed folks into funky behavior. Pent up all day, sweating out, then a trigger sets you off. The ’43 riots had been August events, and the rooftops had been full of men and boys throwing bottles and bricks and bits of ripped-off mortar down at the cops. Giving them the Blitz.
But Pepper was on the roof for business, not pleasure. He said, “Pull this setup downtown, you make a killing.”
“Yeah,” Big Mike said. Meaning, this was a waste of a good scheme, as Harlem’s jewelry vendors didn’t carry the same volume of high-quality stones as a Madison or Lexington joint like Spears Winthrop or Edgeworth Jewels.
“But,” Pepper added, which was all he had to say to communicate that working downtown had its own complications. Dispatching three—four? they didn’t know how many places Uncle Rich was hitting tonight—black crews below the Ninety-sixth Street Mason-Dixon Line increased the possibility of police interference.
“Though,” Big Mike said, to indicate that Bulldog’s response to a Harlem client was not the same they’d give to a downtown client. Anytime racism helped the rip-off logistics, it was like God was giving His blessing.
“Sure,” Pepper said. As in, tonight’s setup was tonight’s setup and they’d take what they could get.
On the street below, someone walked down Lenox singing along to a transistor radio.
Pepper asked Big Mike how his kid was doing.
He said, “He minds himself.”
At eleven-thirty, Pepper and Mike directed their attention across the street to the northwest corner of Madison. The human traffic had quieted once the liquor store turned off its lights and rolled down the security gate. Then eleven-forty-five—time. A minute passed. Pepper imagined the chorus of cussing going on in his partner’s head. A skinny man in a white T-shirt turned the corner—it wasn’t him. Two minutes late. Pepper inhaled. Then he appeared—Mose. At the corner he lit a cigarette, tossed the match into the gutter, and kept walking. Pepper and Mike hit the stairs.
The third floor was the home of Jackpot Printing, which produced the pink numerology sheets for Big Top Lottery twice a week. PISCES! PLAY 280 FOR HOT RETURNS!! BIRTHDAY BOYS AND GIRLS ARE ADVISED TO HIT 478. Closed Monday. Below Jackpot was the showroom and office of Fabrizio’s, an Italian holdout. They’d sold overpriced wedding and engagement rings to a generation of Harlem Negroes, for some the first in a lifetime of special-occasion purchases at the store. The Italian jewelers stayed put when many of their competitors relocated downtown after the neighborhood “changed over.” Fabrizio’s had paid protection to the Lombardi brothers for many years, but the deterioration of that crime family’s fortunes made for uncertain status. Retaining electronic protection was a smart investment.
It was a silent alarm. Pepper and Big Mike had to trust Uncle Rich and his downtown team had done their bit. They’d know toot sweet if things had gone south.
Big Mike took out the three locks on the front door—more loudly than Pepper liked—and they were inside. They looked at each other. Nothing happened, and nothing was supposed to happen. During the daytime, the jeweler’s was splendidly lit, charging the gemstones and jewelry in the display cases. How many scores of young, broke Romeos had been snared by that glittering array and been impelled to payment plans? At the end of the day Fabrizio’s salesmen transferred the velvet racks to the wide Aitkens lockboxes beneath. Pepper and Big Mike knew their way around this model Aitkens, which had been designed to delay access until security or the law arrived. Tonight that was not going to happen.
Eleven minutes later, they had emptied the front room’s wares. In the office there was a big safe with the really nice stuff, but Uncle Rich had tempered his ambitions. It remained to be seen if the other crews stuck to his outline once they were inside their targets. Pepper and Big Mike nodded at each other, tested the heft of their black cases, and entered the stairwell, almost colliding into the man coming down from the printing office.
Per his own protocols, Pepper had staked out the building himself the last two Monday nights. There had been no activity above the first floor. The man shouldn’t have been there. He was a chunky man in his late thirties, in a nice black suit and a bright red tie. Forgot something in the office and returned after a night out. He realized what he’d stumbled into. Big Mike commenced to strike him in the face with the butt of his flashlight. The third blow sent the man to the landing, the fourth sprayed a fan of blood on the wall, and the fifth terminated his movement.
Big Mike didn’t have to do it. They would’ve been gone before the man got to a phone. But Mike Carney was like that. Five minutes here, five minutes there, and the encounter never occurs. It wasn’t Mike’s fault. Wasn’t the printer’s fault. That’s just how it went down that night. Thousand other nights it comes out different. Like the kid in the building that got torched. Thousand other times he’s nowhere to be seen, but that day he is.
After that night, Big Mike’s dented flashlight blinked out sometimes, and he’d look at Pepper and shrug.
The two thieves rendezvoused with Uncle Rich at seven A.M. in a parlor-floor apartment on 139th off Broadway. Uncle Rich declined to brag about how it had gone on his end, rare modesty in their profession. “It’s the wires,” he said. “You control the wires, you control the game.” Big Mike told him about the witness. Uncle Rich nodded and returned to the Fabrizio haul, holding a diamond brooch up to the table lamp. Once the fence came through, he’d pay them off.