By Ed Staskus

   Everybody both friend and foe called Danny Greene the Irishman. He was almost 42 years old the summer of 1975 and somehow still alive. He had never looked his age, but that had changed, although he still didn’t look his age. He looked older. Water under the bridge hadn’t done him any favors. He had grown a mustache to take attention away from his thinning hair. On top of that, at the moment, he felt bad. He didn’t feel bad about Bill O’Sullivan being blown up in Lakewood two days earlier. He was in a rage about that. That was different. His mouth hurt bad. A bum tooth was a different kind of misery. He called his dentist, who knew well enough to get him in no later than today.

   He lay down with his face on a pillow on the floor of the trailer home in Collinwood that had become the Celtic Club. His live-in girlfriend Denise knelt over him and massaged his back. It had been tightening up every night the past two months and he was stiff as hell every morning. Denise was a student at Collinwood High School. She was on the teenage side of half his age. The bomb blast hadn’t slowed her down. Two months earlier at 4 in the morning while they were sleeping on the second floor of their two-story storefront home on Waterloo Rd. somebody threw two bombs through the ground floor windows. It was where he had a phony consulting firm that went by the name of ‘Emerald Enterprises.’ The enterprise was in the business of extortion.

   When he heard glass breaking, he slipped out of bed and into the kitchen. He had a gun in his hand. When the first bomb exploded, he was crouching between the sink and the refrigerator. A cabinet was above him. He was safe in his improvised nook when timbers and bricks started to fall, but when the floor caved in he went down with it. Denise was still in bed. She and the bed went down, too, like a runaway elevator.

   “Greene got out like a cat,” Ed Kovacic, the Central Station police lieutenant investigating organized crime, told Frank Gwozdz and Tyrone Walker. “He was luckier than his own cats.” Danny Greene had two street cats who nightly slept inside on the first floor. They were both killed. His new 1975 Lincoln Continental was destroyed. The second bomb was connected to a two-gallon can of gasoline. That bomb didn’t go off and the gasoline didn’t ignite. Danny had more lives than a clowder of cats.

   The Bomb Unit got to work before dawn. Across the street a hippie bum sat on the curb waving a bottle of Boone’s Farm at anybody who gave him a glance. “You should a heard just what I seen,” he said to anybody who came within earshot. Nobody paid any attention to him. Even he had a hard time paying attention to himself.

   When the rubble was cleared away the Irishman set up shop in the same place, parking a trailer home there. The evening news interviewed him outside his new Celtic Club headquarters. He announced his address and invited any other would-be bombers to try again. “If they want me they know where to find me.” He was shirtless bare-chested. He pointed to the medal of St. Jude he was wearing around his neck. “This is why nobody is going to get me.” Parents in all directions warned their children not to go near the trailer with the big Irish flag in front of it. They told them it was best to stay away from that whole block, St. Jude medal or no St. Jude medal.

   Danny’s mother died when he was three days old. His father got drunk and stayed drunk after she was buried. He lost his job with Fuller Brush. When he did he dropped the baby boy off at the Parmadale Orphanage. Six years later, back on his feet, newly married, he took Danny back, but the boy argued long and loud with his stepmother and ran away again and again. One night he ran away to his grandfather’s house in neighboring Collinwood and never went back.

   His grandfather put him into St. Jerome’s Catholic School where he was an altar boy and all-star basketball player. After he graduated he went to St. Ignatius High School. He joined the Boy Scouts. After that things started to go south. He was thrown out of the Boy Scouts for fighting. He was expelled from St. Ignatius for fighting with the Italian pupils, freshmen, seniors, and everybody in between. He transferred to Collinwood High School but was expelled for “excessive tardiness.” He explained he had to fight his way in to school, fighting the bullies blocking his way, but the principal didn’t believe a word of it and told him, “Leave, and don’t ever come back.”

   “He grew up hustling,” said his one-time friend Aggie who ran with Danny Greene when they were kids. “It’s hard to take the hustle and larceny out of somebody who grew up with nothing. Being an orphan and growing up with the nuns, you tend to grow up edgy, tough, slightly mean.”

   He enlisted in the Marine Corps. They liked his fighting spirit. He became an expert marksman. Before long he was training other marksmen. When he was discharged he was honorably discharged. He went home to Cleveland to be his own man. He was done with running away. He had a brand-new plan.

   He started working on the waterfront. He was elected president of Cleveland’s Local 1317 International Longshoreman’s Association, the dock workers union, in 1962. The trouble started right away when he started embezzling union funds. He was living large and needed the money. More trouble started when he started leaning on longshoremen for more money.

   “Danny was spending money hand over fist,” said Skip Ponikvar, vice president of the union. “His trips to the Theatrical Grill downtown, trips to Chicago, trips to New York. And he was picking the tabs up. There was only so much a few hundred men could support with dues. He got the idea to have these guys work the grain boats and sign the checks over to the union. The guys started bitching and moaning about it. Well, if you worked a lot of hours on the grain boats, then when it came to the hiring hall, those guys were given the better job, which is illegal.”

   Longshoremen started shaking down and beating up employers for payoffs. One of them threatened to kill the children of a businessman who wouldn’t cooperate. His house had to be put under police protection and his children escorted to school by an armed guard. After one too many complaints, the Cleveland Police sent Ed Kovacic and his partner. It wasn’t a far drive to the union hall. They stopped for coffee and a smoke. They walked into the union hall quietly, looking for the boss’s office.

   “When we walked in, I felt like I’d fallen in the Atlantic Ocean, because it was all green,” said Ed Kovacic. “Even the walls were green.” The only thing not green was Danny Greene from the neck up. “Everything was green except his hair and face. He handed us a pen, which had green ink in it. Everything was pleasant until he asked why we were there.” They told him why they were there. “He got up and started walking around the room. As he did, he got louder and louder. He started talking about how the dagos thought they ran Collinwood, and this was just a bunch of tough Irish and Slovenian kids who were going out there and telling them they didn’t run Collinwood anymore. I handed him our crime report and said, ‘How about this man? They blinded a Chinese American man.’ Boy, that really set him off like a rocket! Finally, he said, ‘Get out. That’s enough. We’re done.’ We got in the car. I said, ‘That was like a scene from that waterfront movie. He was acting like Marlon Brando.’ My partner said, ‘Yeah, I was waiting for him to start hollering, ‘Stella! Stella!’” Ed didn’t bother telling his partner he was getting his movies mixed up.

   Danny Greene didn’t want or need anybody like Stella. Blanche was more his speed, at least if she had been half her age. He knew how to get what he wanted. He liked blondes who were blonde as sunlight. The nuns at St. Jerome’s tried to teach him the difference between angels and whores, but he never learned his lesson.

   “He was dynamic,” Skip said. “Dressed to the nines. You never saw him in jeans or street clothes. Suit and tie all the time. He negotiated a hiring hall for the union. It allowed us control. Total control. If you were my friend, I’d send you on a boat that’s going to work 10 hours. And if you weren’t my friend, or just an average guy, I’d send you on a boat that’s going to work four hours. He had ‘Don’t fuck with me’ written all over him. You didn’t want to even challenge him. He was always in shape. He didn’t smoke. But when he drank, that was his weakness. He drank to excess, and when he drank to excess, bad things would happen, arguments, fights.”

   He was in shape but couldn’t fight everybody in the union. He was outnumbered. Everybody finally wanted him gone sooner than later. “The men wanted him out,” said John Baker, one of the dock workers. “They didn’t want to work the boats for nothing. When he got into his jam, he asked me for a vote of confidence, and I said, ‘Danny, I couldn’t do it.’ That was it. We never talked after that.”

   The national inion suspended him. He was done running Cleveland’s docks. Somebody drove past his house and pumped five bullets into it, just to make sure he got the message. When a TV reporter showed up the next morning Danny read from a scrap of paper, “Effective immediately, I have resigned as a member and officer of Local 1317. After nearly four years of devoting all my energies to get the dock workers in Cleveland a fair shake, I found that my only compensation is headlines in the newspaper and bullets through my window.”

   When push came to shove he pled guilty to falsifying union records and was fined $10,000.00. He never spent a day in jail for it and never paid a penny of the fine. By that time, he was a part-time FBI informant and the FBI didn’t care whether he paid his fine, or not. They had bigger fish to fry.

   Danny Greene stayed on the floor for ten minutes after Denise was done, rolling over on his back, grasping his knees, and pulling them into his chest. He rocked forward and back. When he stood up he felt like his old self. He went outside and sat in a lawn chair in the dirt front yard in front of his trailer home. Two cans of Stroh’s beer lay at the base of a plaster leprechaun beside the chair. He used to do next week’s drinking every day of the week but had put a stop to most of it. He started jogging and started gulping vitamins and steaming vegetables. His dentist’s appointment wasn’t for two more hours. The tooth yanker was in Lyndhurst, twenty some minutes away, so there was plenty of time to think things over between now and then. He had gotten a new Lincoln and enjoyed driving it. What he didn’t enjoy was checking it from front to back and all underneath it for anything that might go boom in the night. Denise wouldn’t go near it until he was done.

   He was going to make somebody pay for Bill O’Sullivan’s death. He was going to make somebody pay for blowing up his building and killing his cats, never mind the car. He knew more about revenge than any man alive. He was going to make somebody pay for something, if it was the last thing he ever did. He was nothing if not a man of his word, no matter how bent and broken his word might be.

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

   Little Italy was a fifteen-minute drive from the Central Station. Frank Gwozdz drove slightly under the speed limit and didn’t try to time the lights. It took them twenty minutes. He parked at the intersection of Euclid Ave. and Ford Dr. on the border of city life and Case Western Reserve University. Downtown was its own world. The school was its own world. Little Italy was up Mayfield Rd. It was its own world, too.

   “We’ll leave the car here,” Frank said. “We can walk the rest of the way.”

   “No respect for the law where we’re going?” Tyrone Walker asked.

   “Let’s just say it’s better to leave the car here where the school kids are,” Frank said.

   They walked to Corbo’s Dolceria on Mayfield Rd. at the corner of Murray Hill Rd. After sitting down at one of a handful of small tables in the front, Frank ordered a caffe normale and Tyrone ordered a coffee with cream and sugar.

   “Do you want to try a cappuccino instead?” Frank asked.

   “Whatever that is, no,” Tyrone said.

   Frank ordered a cassata for himself and another one for Tyrone.

   “Do you want it the Sicilian way or the American way?”

   “What’s the difference?”

   “The Sicilian way is with cannoli filling and maraschino cherries. The American way is with fresh strawberries and custard.”

   “I’ll take mine the American way.”

   “Suit yourself,” Frank said, ordering the Sicilian way for himself. Antoinette Corbo, who owned the bakery with her husband Joe, brought them their coffees and cassata cakes. She gave Tyrone a sidelong glance. 

   “Did you know the macaroni machine was invented in this neighborhood 70 years ago?” Frank asked Tyrone.

   “No, I didn’t know. I don’t know anything about this neighborhood.” 

   “It’s kind of like an Italian hill town,” Frank said. “Cleveland is down there and Cleveland Hts. is up there at the top of Mayfield Rd. It’s been here nearly a hundred years. Most of the first immigrants, who were from around Naples, worked at nearby marble works. They were stone cutters. Their women went into the garment trades, mostly lacework and embroidery.”

   “Why are we here?” Tyrone asked.

   “We’re here for you to see the neighborhood,” Frank said.

   “Is this the hot bed of dynamite?”

   “This is one side of the bed. The other side of the bed is the Celtic Club.”

   “I’ve been boning up on the files.”

   “Not here, not now,” Frank said. “After we finish our drinks we can take in the sights and sounds and then walk up to the cemetery. We can talk there. The walls have ears here. The dead don’t care there.”

   “What cemetery?”

   “Lakeview Cemetery. You can’t see it from here, but we’re sitting right next to it. That why all the Italian stone masons came here in the first place.”

   After finishing their cups of coffee Frank and Tyrone walked two blocks down the hill to the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church. It was a Baroque-style building. The house of worship stood four-square on the incline of the street.

   “The dagos weren’t here but a few years before they started building this church,” Frank said.

   “Don’t call them dagos,” Tyrone said.

   “I agreed to not call you a Negro,” Frank said. “That’s all the agreeing I’m going to do for one day.”

   “All right then,” Tyrone said under his breath.

   “Where was I?”

   “Christian charity,” Tyrone said.

   “I didn’t agree to listen to wisecracks, either.” 

   “All right,” Tyrone said under his breath again. Frank was his partner but partner or not, he was still his superior officer. There was no point in making an enemy of him his first day on the job. That could wait for later. He followed Frank up one of the flights of concrete stairs to the double front doors. There were two large arched windows above the doors. There were statues of saints at the top of the façade. A domed bell and clock tower anchored the eastern corner of the church. There was a parochial school in the back run by nuns of Maestre Pie Filippini. Boys and girls were forbidden giving them any lip. The nuns were not above giving them a hard crack. Their parents did worse than that whenever they heard excuses from their children about their misbehavior in school.

   “Since all the Italians back in the day here were stone cutters, like you said, how come this church is built of brick?” Tyrone asked.

   “The foundation is stone,” Frank said.

   “I guess that’s good enough,” Tyrone said.

   “Are you a church-goer?” Frank asked as they stepped inside.

   “Yes, but Baptist, not Roman,” Tyrone said. “How about you?”

   “Not anymore.”

   They went inside. It was quiet as a moonbeam. The church was empty. The sanctuary was brightly colored, but the nave was musty. It felt like a tomb. The police detectives looked around. Frank spoke low and slow.

   “This where the dagos get baptized, get married, and get buried,” he said. “We are always here for the funerals, to make sure whoever is in the casket is the man we won’t miss seeing, making sure he’s really dead, and check out what other hoodlums are in the crowd.”   

   “Do you take pictures of them?”

   “No, we show some respect when we’re here. Beside, we know who’s who.”

   “It sounds like routine enough work.”

   “It’s not the kind of work you’re going to be doing anytime soon, not with your face.”

   “My badge is the same color as everybody else’s,” Tyrone said.

   “The men we’re talking about don’t have any respect for badges, no matter what color they are. They have even less respect for black men carrying badges.”   

   Back on Mayfield Rd. they went across the street again. Frank slipped back into Corbo’s and came out with a cold bottle of San Pellegrino. He looked  back at the church. “They have a weekend here called the ‘The Feast of the Assumption’ every summer. It’s some kind of fundraiser. They hoist the Virgin Mary up on a platform, march her around, and everybody pins dollar bills on her. There are so many people nobody can move.”

   They went up the hill. They stopped when they got to the New Mayfield Repertory Cinema. “Opening Soon – Classic and Foreign Films” an a-frame sidewalk sign announced. “It’s some Jew who lost his job teaching English out in the suburbs,” Frank said pointing at the sign. “He got a year’s pay in the downsize and is re-opening this place. He thinks between the arty college crowd down on Euclid Ave. and the grab bag hippies up on Coventry Rd. he can turn a hobby into a business.” 

   Tyrone wanted to say something about calling Jews Jews but wasn’t sure what to say. It was dawning on him that Frank was less mean mouthed than missing a sense of properness. He wasn’t a babe in the woods by any means but for a big city cop he was somehow more country than big city. He was like white men in Alabama who couldn’t help themselves. A glass encased poster for the opening movie said “La Strada.” It was an Italian movie with Anthony Quin and Richard Basehart in it. Anthony Quinn looked musclebound. Richard Basehart was wearing angel wings and walking a tightrope. The love interest was somebody by the name of Giulietta Masina. She wore a bowler hat and had a clown’s dot on the tip of her nose. She didn’t look like any leading lady Tyrone had ever seen. The director was somebody by the name of Federico Fellini. Tyrone had never heard of him.

   “The funny thing about it is, he had to talk to Blackie first about getting this place,” Frank said.

   “Who’s that?” Tyrone asked. 

   “That’s Jim Licavoli, one of the mob bosses here. They had lunch together and he finally gave the Jew his blessing to lease the Mayfield, even though he didn’t have any ownership in it. It used to be a vaudeville theater that closed six or seven years ago. The way Blackie looked at it, strippers were OK but foreign movies were immoral.”

   “Why do you call him Blackie? His name came up in a file, but it said he’s called Jack White.”

   “He’s almost as dark as you, which is why we call him Blackie. He calls himself Jack White, God knows why. We never call him by that name.”

   “How do you know they had lunch together?”

   “We were nearby and heard the whole thing, although it was more a waste of time than anything else. The Jew had curly hair and was sincere as Shirley Temple. He wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved movies. We thought he was a faggot. I think Blackie gave him his blessing just to get rid of him.”

   “You go to the movies?” Tyrone asked.

   “Not since I was in the academy,” Frank said. “’The Music Man’ might have been the last movie I saw.”

   “What do you do to relax?”

   “Fight with my wife,” Frank said.

   “She can’t be all bad.”

   “She comes the closest.”

   “That’s too bad.” 

   “Yeah, it’s too bad.”

   They continued walking up Mayfield Rd. When they got to E. 126^th St. they turned left. At a dead-end past half-a-dozen houses they walked through a line of trees into the cemetery. Frank led the way, zig zagging to the James Garfield Monument.

   “It’s a tragedy what happened to him,” Frank said.

   “It’s a tragedy any time somebody gets shot, president or no president” Tyrone said.

   “No, I mean it’s too bad about how he died. He had the best doctors in the country, but they didn’t believe in disinfecting their hands and instruments. So, he didn’t die of the gunshot wound. He died of infection. He had only been president four months. He was six feet tall and had been a two-star general. It took him almost three months to die.”

   They stopped to look at John D. Rockefeller’s grave, but Tyrone didn’t want to stay. “He was the richest man in the world, selling his black gold, but he wouldn’t give the black man a chance. His kids did better later, but not John D. He was a son-of-a-bitch.”

   They crossed the cemetery’s Hillside Rd. before coming to the Haserot Angel.

   “What is that?” Tyrone asked looking at it. It was a life-sized bronze angel sitting on a marble gravestone. She held an extinguished torch upside down. Her wings were outstretched. She seemed to be crying black tears.

   “They call it ‘The Angel of Death Victorious’ because of the torch that is out,” Frank said. “Some people call it the weeping angel because it looks like she’s crying. It was put up about fifty years ago by a local man who made his fortune in canned goods.” The name ‘Haserot’ was chiseled into the base of the gravestone. “The man who sculpted it is buried in this same boneyard. Lots of people say this place is haunted, especially this spot right here.”

   They heard a cough and rustling behind the angel. There was a bad smell in the air. Frank put a finger to his lips and signaled Tyrone to step back. Tyrone slipped his Colt into his hand with the barrel pointing to the ground. Frank stepped to the side of the monument. The angel stayed where it was, looking deadpan.

   “All right, come out of there, with your hands where we can see them.”

   What stumbled out from behind the marble angel was a small swarthy man who reeked of booze. There was a pint bottle of it peeking out from his back pocket. It was emptier than fuller. He slapped dirt off his hands and shrugged loose grass off his shoulders. One of his shoes was untied. His shirt was checked, and his eyes were fly belly blue. His zipper sagged at the crotch of his pants. All of him smelled worse the closer he got to them.

   “That’s close enough,” Frank said. “What are you doing here?”

   “Visiting old friends,” the man said.

   “Let me introduce you to Joey Bag of Donuts, one of the bomb makers for the dagos,” Frank said to Tyrone, pointing to the man. “Does Danny Greene know you’re here? He might show up with a shovel.”

    “It takes an earlier bird than that dumb-ass paddy to get the better of a worm like me,” Joey said smiling slyly.

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

   The Police Department’s Central Station was the end of the line for many criminals. It was also the end of the line for some policemen. The police force had been created in 1866 by the Metropolitan Police Act. Before that there were a few constables and night watchmen. Cleveland wasn’t a safe place even with them doing the best they could. The Cleveland Grays, a private military-style company, took over in 1837 but they couldn’t keep suspicions and arrests in the right order. In the 110 years since the police became official one hundred and eight of them had died in the line of duty. Seventy-five of them were gunned down by handguns, rifles, and shotguns. The rest died of assault and battery. All the policemen who were killed were men.

   When Frank Gwozdz’s partner was shot and killed his badge was retired, like the badges of all the other policemen who had been killed. Patrolmen wear numbered silver-colored badges. Detectives carry numbered gold-colored badges on their person. The rest of the force, Sergeant and higher, wear unnumbered gold-colored badges. The Badge Case was on the wall of a landing between the first and second floors. Frank never took the elevator to the third floor where the desks of the General Duty Detective Squad were. He always took the stairs. He saw his partner’s badge every day.

   Frank had been on the landing with other detectives when his partner’s badge was put in the case. The Police Chief, his partner’s wife, and partner’s son had been there. too. The boy wore a little boy’s man suit, bow tie, and a fresh haircut. He frowned through the ceremony and frowned when Frank told him his father was a brave man who died protecting Cleveland’s citizens. He was the first detective on the force to be shot and killed since 1960, fifteen years earlier.

   “Did you catch the bad man?”

   “Not yet, son, but we will.”

   The boy frowned more than ever. He looked like he wanted to kill the man who had murdered his father. Frank wanted to nail the man who had murdered his partner. There will be blood. Frank knew that and the man who killed his partner knew that.

   His partner’s bloated body had been found floating in Lake Erie with a bullet in his face near the White Beach City Park. Two days earlier Danny Greene had shot and killed Mike Frato, with whom he had been disagreeing about garbage collecting, at the same place. Danny Greene, who ran the Celtic Club, had set up a sham union. He meant to strong-arm garbagemen for their dues and anything else he could get. Mike Frato didn’t want to join any mob union. He had ten children and meant to keep the family money in the family. Danny Greene sent his personal bomber, Art Sneperger, to plant a bomb underneath  Mike Frato’s car. Something went wrong and the bomber blew himself to kingdom come. Two months later Mike Frato drove into the park and shot at Danny Greene, who was walking his dog, shooting through the open passenger window of his car. He emptied his gun, shooting wildly. The Irishman dropped to the ground. He shot back. His aim was true. He killed Mike Frato with a single shot. He was later acquitted of all charges after pleading self-defense.

   Not a day went by that Frank didn’t think about it. He was still standing on the landing looking at the Badge Case when another plainclothes man walking past said, “The captain is looking for you,” he said. “He’s in the dep’s office.”

   “OK, thanks” Frank said, turning to go down the stairs to the Deputy Commander’s office. It was on the first floor. He stopped at the snack stand run by the Society for the Blind and bought a pack of Beech-Nut chewing gum. There were five sticks in the pack. He unwrapped two sticks and pulled them into his mouth with his tongue. Chewing gum kept his blood pressure under control and raised the blood pressure of his superior officer. It helped keep their meetings short and sweet.

   The Central Station was built of white limestone with pinkish pillars fronting the main entrance. It was five floors of command and control. On the first floor were the information bureau, traffic division, chief’s office, inspector’s office, record room, property room, and newspaper reporters’ room. One floor up were the municipal courts and rooms for prosecutors and probation officers. Several holding cells serviced the four courtrooms. Bondsmen, lawyers, and private dicks did their dirty work in the bathrooms at the back end of the second floor. The third floor housed the detectives, with offices for the inspector, superintendent of criminal identification, and lieutenants. There were rooms for photographic equipment and record keeping. There were seven small airless rooms for detectives to interview their prisoners. The fourth floor was the jail. The fifth floor housed the radio department and battery rooms. 

   There was a line up room on the fourth floor. It was divided by a screened wall and bright lights. Suspects couldn’t see into the other side. Detectives were supposed to attend lineups before roll call three days a week. Newly arrested men and women were marched behind the screen. Detectives and witnesses sat in the dark less than three feet away. Many run-of-the-mill street crimes were solved this way. 

   When Frank walked into the Deputy Commander’s office his captain was there, as well as a black man dressed like a detective. It wasn’t a uniform but any detective could sniff the suit out.

   “Have a seat,” the Deputy Commander said.

   “Thanks, I’ll stand,” Frank said.

   “I said have a seat.”

   Frank sat down and waited. His captain had on a poker face. The black man had on a poker face. He put one on, too.

   “You’ve been doing a good job running down the numbers, but we are going to reassign you,” the Deputy Commander said. “There are too many bombings in this city. It’s gotten so the papers are calling us ‘Bomb City USA.’ I want you to get up to speed on it and then find out where the bombings are coming from. When you find names that can be prosecuted report to me first before filing your report. Is that clear?”

   “It’s clear enough, but everybody knows it’s the micks and dagos killing each other.”

   “Don’t tell me what I know and don’t know,” the Deputy Commander said. “And while we’re at it, this new assignment is not shoot first and ask questions later. Put the bounty hunter attitude away. We want answers, not DOA’s piling up.”

   “Yes, sir.”

   “You’ve been working alone, but there’s an element of more danger involved in your new assignment, so we are assigning you a partner.” He nodded at the black man.

    Frank looked the man up and down, looked at his hands, and shook his head from side to side.

   “That’s not going to work,” he said.

   “What’s not going to work?”

   “The Negro is not going to work,” Frank said pointing at the baby-faced man sitting next to him. “First, I don’t need a partner. I work better alone. Second, he’s too young. I’m not a babysitter. The last thing is, he’s the wrong color. He’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

   “We determine whether you need a partner, or not,” the Deputy Commander said. “It’s not up to you. Second, he’s old enough to be a police detective, which is what he is. And the last thing, I don’t like his color any better than you do, but orders are to get him out in the field. There’s no other Negro we can pair him with. You drew the short straw because nobody else is champing at the bit to work with you.”

   “Yes, sir,” Frank said.

   “You and you partner will be running a parallel investigation with the Bomb Unit. When you’ve got something to report, report it to Ed Kovacic, and me personally. Is that understood?”

   “Loud and clear, sir.”

  “Whatever extra you need for this assignment, go to your captain. He’ll make sure you get it.”

   The short and sweet conference was over. Frank stood in the hallway with his new partner. He tossed the wad of now tasteless Beech-Nut gum in the trash. It disappeared without a trace, sticking to a court summons somebody had thrown away.

   “Don’t call me Negro again,” Tyrone said.

   “What should I call you?” Frank asked.

   “Call me partner or call me by my name, which is Tyrone Walker. Drop the Negro thing. You’re behind the times. We’re called black now.”

   “Like in black and white?”

   “That’s right, like in black and white.”

   They took the stairs to the third floor. When they walked into the bullpen, Frank saw that an old unused desk had been pushed in place, its back butting up to the back of Frank’s desk.

   “It looks like we’re joined at the hip, brother,” Frank said.

   “I don’t think so,” Tyrone said. “This desk looks like a shack. And don’t call me brother.”

   “Don’t call you Negro and don’t call you brother?”

   “That’s right.”

   “Anything else?”

   “I’ll let you know.”

   “Let’s stop right there,” Frank said. “We need to get off the wrong foot and on the right foot. I’ll call you whatever you want to be called. I’ve got no problem with that. What I said downstairs stays downstairs. We are going to be working together. When we are on the street we have to trust one another. Most of the time it won’t matter, but sometimes it will. If we can’t or won’t watch one another’s backs, whether it matters or not, it will come back to bite us.”

   Tyrone sat at his new beat-up desk, leaning forward.

   “All right,” he said. “I can live with that. We don’t have to be friends. I get that. I’ll watch your back if you’ll watch mine.”

   “All right,” Frank said.

   “One thing you should know,” Tyrone said.

   “What’s that?”

    “I don’t like being called nigger. I hate it. It riles me up. I see red.”

   “Somebody calls you that, I will remind them you are servant of the law and deserve respect. If they disagree, we can try convincing them in other ways.”

   “What ways?”

   “Talking some sense into them might be one way. Getting in their face might be another way. Threatening them with thirty days in the hole on a trumped up charge might be the best way.”

   “It looks like I’m going to get the hang of big city police work my new partner’s way,” Tyrone laughed.

   “Where are you from?”

   “Montgomery, Alabama.”

   “That’s a big enough city.”

   “It’s small like a fishbowl when you’re one of the few black men on the city police force,” Tyrone said. “The first sheriff in Alabama was only elected nine years ago. Until D. C. imposed hiring quotas there weren’t any black uniformed state policemen. Now it’s all the way up to 5% of the force in a state where we are almost 30% of the population. In our state the governor says, ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.’ He says D. C. can go to hell.”

   What Tyrone didn’t know was that Governor George Wallace had also said, “I look like a white man but my heart is as black as anyone’s.” He meant what he said, everything he said.

   “All right, let’s take a drive up to Little Italy,” Frank said.

   “That’s the launching pad, right?”

   “That’s right, but more like a shooting gallery,” Frank said. “Make sure you bring your peacemaker with you.”

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

   The police detective kept his eyes fixed on nothing. He wasn’t tall or short. He wasn’t thin or chunky, either, except when he wore a bulletproof vest, which made him look chunky. He was able-bodied, although he was near-sighted. The closer something was to him the better he saw it. When he had to, he wore brow line glasses to see far away. He kept his hair not-too-neat and didn’t shave too often. He read the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper every morning except Sunday when there was too much of it. There was hardly anything about him likely to draw anybody’s attention. When he was in some bar at the bar with a beer in front of him, a Lucky Strike smoking itself at his elbow, nobody ever gave him a second look. 

   He worked out of the third floor of the Cleveland Police Department’s Central Station at East 21^st St. and Payne Ave. The Central Station had been in business for fifty years. It replaced the Champlain Street Headquarters. When it did the Plain Dealer reported, “The minute the new station opens, the ancient Champlain Avenue mausoleum of crime and rats which has been functioning as a police headquarters for perhaps twenty-five years too long will start to crumble before the wrecking engines.” Fifty years later the Central Station was in the same boat, overflowing with crime and rats.

   Frank Gwozdz looked at his bottle of beer. He took a short pull. It was getting lukewarm. It didn’t matter to him. It was only in front of him so he could hide behind it. He loosened his tie and the top button of his shirt. Mitzi Jerman was working the bar. She asked if he wanted more peanuts. “Thanks, but no,” he said. He hadn’t touched the bowl. The bar didn’t serve food, just peanuts, pretzels, and pickled eggs. He hadn’t touched anything, yet, although he might if the two gangsters stayed long enough. He was getting hungry. He knew the goon with jug ears doing all the talking had worked the numbers for Shondor Birns. He was sure enough the other one had been up to the same thing. He wondered why they were near downtown and not the near east side where the Negroes lived. That’s where their bread and butter was this time of night. 

   Jerman’s Café was on East 39^th St. and St. Clair Ave., although it wasn’t actually on any street. It wasn’t in a storefront like most corner bars, and it wasn’t on a corner, either. It was on the ground floor of a house. It was set back from St. Clair Ave. with a parking lot on the side. If a drinker didn’t know the bar was there he might end up high and dry. It opened in 1908 when a Slovenian immigrant and his wife opened it. It had lived through World War One, the New Deal, World War Two,  and the 1956 Cleveland Indians World Series win, when the celebrating didn’t stop for days. It stayed open as a speakeasy during Prohibition, not missing a beat. Mitzi’s uncle smuggled booze from Canada those years, making the run across Lake Erie in a speedboat by himself. Mitzi’s mom and dad hid the rum and whiskey with neighbors whenever Elliot Ness was on the loose.

   Mitzi came back to where Frank was sitting and parked herself in front of him. “Working tonight, handsome?” she asked, drying freshly washed glasses with a bar towel. Frank wasn’t exactly handsome anymore, just like he wasn’t exactly young anymore.

   “I’m working right now,” the police detective said in a quiet voice.

   Mitzi had been born upstairs in the apartment above the bar. It was where her parents lived all their working lives. She slept in the same room she had been born in. There was a piano and a juke box in the bar. A pool table squatted near the rear. She watched Tribe games in living color on a TV set placed high up on a wall. Her pooch Rosco slept at her feet. The bar Frank was sitting at was oak, and the ceiling above him was zinc. Mitzi served Pabst, Stroh’s, and Budweiser on tap.  Everything else came in a bottle and cost more. Frank fiddled with his bottle of Schlitz.

   One of the men at the back table snapped his fingers. Mitzi looked at them. They were looking at the neighborhood girl who worked nights with Mitzi. She was a looker. Some men wanted to hang their hats on her. Mitzi sent her to their table. They ordered two more glasses of Pabst and gave her a pat on the behind for her trouble.

   “Are you working those two bums?” Mitzi asked.

   “I only work bums, and it looks like they are the only two of their kind in this place right now.”

   “Is anything going to happen in my place tonight?”

   “Not if I can help it,” he reassured her.

   Shondor Birns had run the numbers racket for years, until he was blown up on Easter Saturday outside of his favorite strip club three and a half months ago. “SHONDOR BIRNS IS BOMB VICTIM” the Cleveland Plain Dealer headline in block letters blared on March 30, 1975. The big news out of Vietnam that day was below the local lead story. “Communists capture Da Nang.” The strip club was Christie’s Lounge, where Shondor Birns spent the evening drinking and ogling the naked girls bumping and grinding. When he was good and drunk, he staggered to his Lincoln Continental parked in a lot across from St. Malachi’s Catholic Church. When he turned the key in the ignition the dynamite wired to the ignition blew up. He was blown in half, his upper body catapulted through the roof of the car. Some of him landed in the parking lot. Some of him was sling shot into the webbing of the surrounding chain link fence. Celebrants at the Easter Vigil rushed out of the church when the explosion made the stained-glass windows shake and rattle.

   The racketeer had been arrested more than fifty times since 1925 but was hardly ever convicted. He had killed several men, but no charges ever stuck. He ran a theft ring. He ran the vice resorts. He became one of Cleveland’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1.’ When he got into the protection business many small businessmen discovered they needed protection. “He was a muscleman whose specialty was controlling numbers gambling on the east side, keeping the peace among rival operators and getting a cut from each of them,” was how the Cleveland Press, the city’s afternoon newspaper, put it. “He was a feared man because of his violent reaction to any adversary.”

  What little was left of Shondor Birns was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery on April Fool’s Day. He was officially gone. They had taken his picture down from the top row of the big board at the Central Station. Somebody had taken his place, even though the mystery man’s picture wasn’t on the board, yet. The policy games weren’t going to stop with Shondor Birns gone. His fast fists hadn’t been fast enough to save him. The next boss was taking care of business. Frank wanted to know who that was.

   When the two men at the back table got up and left, Frank got up and left, too. They got into a green Plymouth Duster. He wasn’t going to have any trouble following it. He got into his unmarked Ford Crown Victoria. The dark blue car wasn’t much to look at, since it looked like every other unmarked police car in the country, but no other car was going to outrun it if it came to a chase. The Duster drove to East 55^th St,, turned on Euclid Ave, and at Mayfield Rd. turned again going up the hill to Little Italy. They parked behind Guarino’s Restaurant and went in the back door. Frank parked five spaces away, near the entrance to the lot.

   He turned the car off. He was hungry but didn’t go inside right away. He thought about going home. Nobody had assigned him this shadow job. He had taken it upon himself. He could go home anytime he wanted to but he didn’t want to go home. He wanted to see his kid but didn’t want to see his wife. She had been getting unhappier by the day since the day she stopped nursing their boy. That was three years ago. She was miserable at home and had taken to drinking. Frank threw away every bottle he found hidden away somewhere, but he never found the last bottle. He could smell it on her breath every day when he got home.

   She was eleven years younger than Frank. He knew it was a mistake but at the time he hadn’t been able to control himself. She had gotten to be sneaky and patronizing. She complained about him being a policeman. She complained about his unpredictable hours. She complained about his pay and how he dressed. When he tried to explain the dress code behind being an undercover man, she was condescending about it, calling him “you poor dear man.” They didn’t kiss anymore, much less talk much. She complained about the housework, even though she did less and less of it. She had started to neglect their child, leaving the boy with a teenaged babysitter those afternoons she went to the Hippodrome.

   “What’s at the Hippodrome?” he asked.

   “Movies,” she said.

   The Hippodrome had the second largest stage in the world when it was built in 1907. It was in an eleven-story office building with theater marquees and entrances on both Prospect Ave. and Euclid Ave. in the heart of downtown. It hosted plays, operas, and vaudeville until the movies took over. After that it was all celluloid. It became the country’s biggest theater showing exclusively big screen fare. A new air conditioning system pumped in cold water from Lake Erie, keeping everybody cool on sweltering summer nights.

   Frank tailed her there one day. She went to the Hippodrome but didn’t go to the movies. She went downstairs to the lower-level pool hall. She walked to the back and through a door marked “Private.”

   “What’s behind that door?” he asked one of the pool players.

   “The boss is behind that door,” the pool player said.

   “Would that be Danny Vegh?”

   “Naw, this is Danny’s joint, but Vince runs the place. Why all the questions?”

   “No reason, just curious.”

   “If you want to see Vince, you don’t want to right now. He’s got a woman in there and it’s going to be some time before they finish up their business.”

   “Thanks pal,” Frank said. “How about a game of nine ball?”

   An hour later and twenty dollars the worse for wear, Frank gave up. His wife was still in Vince’s office. The door was still shut tight. He walked out and up the stairs to Euclid Ave. He crossed the street, leaned against a light pole, and lit a Lucky Strike. His wife walked into broad daylight a half hour later. A car pulled up to the curb and she got into the front seat. Frank followed the car to their home in North Collinwood. The car pulled into the driveway. His wife got out and went in the front door. The car drove away.

   “Son of a bitch,” Frank muttered to himself. It was looking to him like she was a gal gone over to monkey business. She had promised him at the altar more than he was getting. He wasn’t getting any of her love, for sure. He could kill her for what she was doing, except for the kid. He might kill her anyway. There was more than enough room in the backyard for an unmarked grave. He would plant poison ivy to mark the spot.

   Frank’s stomach grumbled. He was hungry as a flatfoot at the end of a long day. He hadn’t popped even a single peanut into his mouth at Jerman’s Café. He could eat at the trattoria and keep an eye on the two goons at the same time. He got out of the Crown Victoria, locked it, and walking through the vineyard patio went into Guarino’s. The restaurant had been around since before the 1920s. A Sicilian family ran it then and the same Sicilian family ran it now. It had been redecorated in a Victorian style in 1963, but the décor didn’t affect the food. Mama Guarino led him to a two-top table. He ordered veal saltimbocca. The waitress brought him half a carafe of chianti. He took his time eating, making sure his wife would be asleep when he got home.

   He had always thought there was nothing more romantic than Italian food. He wasn’t feeling romantic tonight, but at least the food was delicious. He took a bite of veal and gulped down a forkful of angel hair. No man could love a cheater and not pay the price for it. Things fall apart when they’re held together by lies. His thoughts grew dark. He filled his wine glass with red relief and drank it slowly thoughtfully.

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

   Tommy Monk had an alarm clock on the stand next to his bed, but except for Saturdays and Sundays he never set it. When 5:30 in the morning happened, he knew his dad would be coming through the door making him get up. He was more commanding than the clock. It was Sunday July 6, 1975, and since it was, he had set his alarm clock the night before. His dad always slept in on weekends, snoring his head off, reading the newspaper the rest of the morning, catching up on that week’s news, and drinking a pot of coffee. His mom was up at the crack of dawn making meat pies and casseroles for the rest of the week.

   His mom was from the Baltics. She grew up on a family farm. His dad was from Finland. He grew up in a city. They met in Espoo after she escaped her Russian overlords. She got away across the East Sea in a stolen rowboat. When they got their green cards after the new American immigration law came into effect in 1964, they emigrated to the United States, to Lakewood, Ohio. Tommy was a blue-eyed one-year-old when he was followed by a brother and soon after that by a sister. His dad changed the family name from Muukkonen to Monk when he went to work as a bookkeeper for TRW. He was still working for TRW, except he had moved up to accountant and gotten a raise. When he did, he bought a Pontiac Grand Safari station wagon.

   “You’re the best dad ever,” his kids said a month later driving to the Pymatuning State Park in their new car for camping and campfires. Tommy and his brother sat in the rear-facing seat telling each other scary stories. Their sister had the back seat to herself. She liked it that way since she considered both her brothers to be nitwits. Her father was the strong silent type. Only her mother was worth talking to.

   Tommy was called Tommy by everybody except his mom and dad and friends. His mom called him Tomas. His dad called him Bud. His friends called him One Shoe because one day, getting on the CTS bus that took him to grade school at the West Park Lutheran School, he discovered he was wearing only one shoe. It was too late to get off the bus and go home for it. He spent the rest of the day shuffling to class, to lunch, back to class, and back home. He became Tommy One Shoe. When he got home there was a hole in his shoeless sock. A blister was peeking red-faced through the hole.

   After Tommy got the alarm clock calmed down, got dressed, and got himself to the garage, he started inserting the front page and sports page sections into the Sunday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He had already gotten the comics and classifieds and the rest of the newspaper on Friday when his route manager threw the bundles out the back of his truck onto their driveway. He put those parts together on Saturday afternoon, after which he went collecting.

   He collected the week’s payments once a week. Most people left the payments in an envelope under their doormat or taped to the front door. Some old folks liked handing it to him personally and liked hearing him say thank you. He kept the money in a cigar box in his mom’s dining room cabinet. The route manager stopped by early every Monday morning, counted the money, and left him a receipt. Tommy lost the receipts as soon as possible. He worked hard but wasn’t a meticulous businessman. He delivered the newspapers seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, on foot, as fast as he could. The houses in his neighborhood were close together, which helped plenty. He had to be done in time to catch the bus to school. 

  His paper route was all of Ethel Ave. between Clifton Blvd. and Detroit Rd. There were 97 houses. He lived on the north end of the street, making his life easier than it might have been. He walked a loop, first north to Clifton Blvd., then south to Detroit Rd., and finally north again. He crossed the Conrail tracks twice. When he was done with the next-to-last newspaper he was home, back where he started. His dad’s newspaper was the only paper he white glove delivered. The rest got delivered airborne flying from his hand to a front porch. He never looked back to see whether anything unpredictable had happened, like a paper rolling off a porch into flower beds in a rainstorm.

   Monday through Saturday he stuffed the newspapers into his shoulder slung bag. Every time he threw one on to a porch the bag got a little lighter. He left it in the garage on Sundays. The paper was too big that day to carry in his bag. He pulled a Radio Flyer with removable side panels. The panels kept the stacks of newspaper in place. The wheels were rubber. They were slick as baloney skins. They gripped the sidewalk well enough three seasons out of the year. They slid every which way in snow and ice.

   The last home on the corner of Ethel Ave. and Clifton Blvd. was one of the first houses on his route. It was a two-story brick house with a detached garage to the side, unlike all the other houses whose garages were in the back. The front door of the residence faced Clifton Blvd. The driveway was a short slab of concrete. An Irish man lived in the house with a good-looking young woman who nobody ever saw. He had grown up in Lakewood after his mother married an American soldier in the 50^th Field Artillery Battalion. The newlyweds left Belfast for the United States the minute World War Two was over.

   Tommy knew to throw the paper at the base of the back door which he could do without even looking. That Sunday, however, he didn’t have to throw the paper. Bill O’Sullivan came out the back door as Tommy was rolling up with his Radio Flyer. The man unlocked his car and got in. He never parked in the garage. He always parked in the driveway, the nose of the car facing the street. The car was an Imperial LeBaron, the heaviest and most expensive car in the Chrysler line-up.

   “Hey kid, over here,” Bill O’Sullivan called out, waving for him to bring the paper to him. Tommy knew the man’s name. He didn’t know everybody’s names on his route, but he knew who the man in the black pinstripe suit was. He gave him better tips than anybody else. There was always an extra dollar in the envelope inside the back screen door. He gave him twenty dollars on Christmas. Tommy was his unofficial look-out on the street.

   “You see anybody funny hanging around, you tell me right away.”

   “What do you mean funny?” 

   “Funny like they look like they don’t live around here. It will be a man, probably one man, sitting in a car looking like he’s just wasting his time. He might be wearing a hat, maybe an old-fashioned kind of hat. He might be pretending to be reading the paper. He’ll be smoking, for sure, and throwing the butts in the street.”

   “All right, I’m on it, “Tommy said.

   “You’re jake, kid.”

   He hadn’t spotted anybody suspicious the whole year nor the year before. Ethel Ave. was a quiet street. Their mid-town neighborhood was a quiet neighborhood. Lakewood was a quiet suburb, not like Cleveland, where bad things happened day in and day out. He handed Bill O’Sullivan his copy of the Plain Dealer. The front page was full of the world’s bad news

   Tommy walked to the crosswalk, crossed the street, and turned left. It was getting on 6:30, a half-hour after sunrise. It wasn’t light but it wasn’t dark, either. A man and a woman pushing a sleeping baby in a stroller went by on their way to Lakewood Park. Lake Erie was only two blocks away. He was just about to throw a newspaper at the first house on the corner, the first house starting up the west side of Ethel Ave., when a sudden walloping noise and shock wave from an explosion knocked him down. He fell face first, barely able to break his fall with his hands. When he landed he cupped them over the back of his head. He did it without thinking. Something landed with a thud beside him. The noise of the explosion became an intense silence. He stayed on the ground for a minute.

   He could hardly hear a thing. All he could hear were his ears ringing. He looked back across the street. The big Chrysler LeBaron was a fireball. He stood up, unsteady, staying where he was. People were looking out their windows. A dog was barking like a nut case. A fat man in a bathrobe ran out of a white house. “Don’t move, stay there,” he shouted, gesturing with his hands, inching toward the fireball before turning around and coming back. They both stayed on their side of the street watching the smoke and flames. It wasn’t a minute before they heard sirens coming from two different directions.

   Tommy looked down at what had landed beside him. It was a hand. There was a silver ring on the pinkie finger. It was Bill O’Sullivan’s hand. It was a charred fist clutching a part of the newspaper. The paper was smoking, tiny flames licking at the edges trying to become bigger flames. Section four of the Cleveland Plain Dealer was in the fist, a section called ‘The Spotlight.’ The headline of the full-page lead feature read in large letters, “Bombing Business Booming Here.”

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”