By Ed Staskus

   Everybody called Danny Greene the Irishman. He was almost forty two 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 grew 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 Lorcan 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 right away.

   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 Schmidt knelt over him and massaged his back. It had been tightening up every night the past two months. He was stiff as a board most mornings. He felt like an old man sometimes. Denise was a senior at Collinwood High School. She was on the young side of more than half his age. She made him feel younger. The bomb blast hadn’t slowed her down. 

   Two months earlier at four in the morning while they were sleeping on the second floor of their two-story storefront home on Waterloo Rd. somebody had thrown two bombs through the ground floor windows. The storefront was where Danny Greene had a phony consulting firm on the ground floor that went by the name of ‘Emerald Enterprises.’ The enterprise was mainly in the business of extortion. The Irishman’s other enterprises were gambling, embezzlement, loansharking, and leg breaking. Murder was taken for granted in his line of work.

   When the sound of glass breaking woke him up, he slipped out of bed and into the kitchen. He had a gun in his hand. When the first bomb that came through the window 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. The bed ended up halfway down from the second floor, tilted and dangling from a beam. She hung on until she couldn’t hang on anymore.

   “I felt the floor give out,” the Irishman said. “The next thing I knew I was in a heap of rubble. A busted icebox was beside me. Denise fell on top of me. I dug the two of us out. I heard dogs barking. I couldn’t hear my cats.”

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

   The Bomb Unit got to work before dawn after the blast. Across the street a disheveled hippie 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 Danny Greene set up shop in the same place, parking a trailer home there. A TV news crew interviewed him outside his new headquarters. He announced his new address and invited any other would-be bombers to try again. “I’m in between both worlds, the square world and the street world,” he said. “I think I have trust on both sides, but I have no ax to grind. If somebody wants to come after me, we’re over here at the Celtic Club. I’m not hard to find.” He was shirtless, bare-chested, and spilling over with contempt. 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 the neighborhood warned their children not to go near the trailer with the Irish flag flying 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 Greene’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 the boy back, but the first grader 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 became an altar boy and all-star basketball player. He joined the Boy Scouts. After graduating from grade school he went to St. Ignatius High School. After that things started to go south. He was thrown out of the Boy Scouts for fighting with other scouts. He was expelled from St. Ignatius for fighting with the Italian pupils and everybody else. He transferred to Collinwood High School but was expelled for “excessive tardiness.” He explained he had to fight his way into the 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, and slightly mean.” Hardly anybody stayed friends with the Irishman for too long. The nuns put him in their prayers, to no great effect.

   He enlisted in the Marine Corps. They liked his fighting spirit. He became an expert marksman. Before long he was training other marksmen on Sniper Garand rifles. 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 began embezzling union funds. He was living large and needed the money. Trouble picked up the pace when he started leaning on his 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 some guys work the grain boats on the side and sign the checks over to the union. The guys started bitching and moaning about it. Well, if you worked on the grain boats, when it came to the hiring hall later on, those guys were given the better job, which is illegal.”

   Longshoremen started shaking down 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 Department sent Ed Kovacic and his partner to set Danny Greene straight. It wasn’t a far drive to the union hall. They stopped for coffee and a smoke. Refreshed, they walked into the union hall quietly, looking for the back office. They didn’t mean it to be a pow wow. They hadn’t brought a peace pipe.

   “When we walked in, I felt like I’d fallen in the Atlantic Ocean, because it was all green,” Ed Kovacic said. “Even the walls were green.” The only thing not green was the Irishman, at least 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 Italians 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? Your goons 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.’” 

   The policemen were done, too. “When 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 Kovacic 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 had tried to teach him the difference between angels and demons, 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 ten 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, all kinds of bad things.”

   Danny Greene was in shape but couldn’t fight everybody in the union. He was outnumbered. Everybody finally wanted him gone. “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 can’t do it.’ That was it. We never talked after that.”

   The national union suspended him. He was done running Cleveland’s docks. Somebody drove past his house and pumped five bullets into the clapboard, just to make sure he got the message. When a TV reporter showed up the next morning the Irishman 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. He never spent a day in jail 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 with his rubdown, 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 down a lawn chair in the dirt front yard in front of his trailer home. Two empty cans of Stroh’s lay at the feet 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 had started jogging, gulping vitamins, and steaming vegetables for dinner.

   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 Continental and enjoyed driving it. What he didn’t enjoy was checking it from front to back and underneath it for anything that might blow its top. Denise wouldn’t go near the car until he was done.

   He was going to make somebody pay for blowing up his building and killing his cats, never mind the car. He was going to make somebody pay for Lorca Sullivan’s death, too. 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 did. He was nothing if not a man of his word, no matter how many twists and turns his words might take.

Excerpted from there crime novel “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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 the Negro ghetto and Case Western Reserve University. The run-down near east side 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 where the school kids believe in cross walks,” Frank said.

   They walked to Corbo’s Dolceria on Mayfield Rd. where it stood on the corner of Murray Hill Rd. After sitting down at one of a handful of small tables at the front window, 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-some years ago?” Frank asked Tyrone.

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

   “It’s kind of like an Italian hill town, like in the Middle Ages” Frank said. “Cleveland is down there and Cleveland Hts. is up there at the top of Mayfield Rd. Little Italy has been here in the middle of the hill nearly a hundred years. Most of the first immigrants, who were from around Naples, worked at nearby marble works. They were stone masons. 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 down in Collinwood.”

   “I’ve been boning up on the files,” Tyrone said. “It seems like a bitter thing they’re up to, like a blood feud.”

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

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

   “Don’t call them Guido’s,” 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.”

   “Whatever you say,” Tyrone said under his breath.

   “Where was I?”

   “Christian charity,” Tyrone said.

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

   “All right,” Tyrone said under his breath again. Frank was his partner but partner or not, narrow-minded 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 of the church. There were two outsize 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 that was administered 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 complaining and explaining from their children about their misbehavior in school.

   “Since all the Italians back in the day here were stone masons, 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, I am, Baptist, not Roman. How about you?”

   “Not anymore of any kind.”

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

   “This is where the Italians 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 in this life, 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. Besides, 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.”   

   Returning to Mayfield Rd. they went back across the street again. Frank slipped back into Corbo’s and came out with a cold bottle of San Pellegrino. He looked down at the church. “They have a weekend here called the Feast of the Assumption every summer. It’s a 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 in the crowd 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 sign on the sidewalk announced. “It’s some bookworm 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.” 

   It was dawning on Tyrone that Frank was less a bigot and more pig-headed than not. He wasn’t a babe in the woods by any means, but for a big city policeman he was somehow more small town than big city. He was like white men in Alabama who couldn’t help themselves, although Frank didn’t seem to have intolerant opinions so much as he resorted to blinkered shorthand. White men in Alabama had many intolerant opinions, most of them gotten without having to get the facts.

   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. He had never seen any movies like “La Strada” down south.

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

   “Who’s that?” Tyrone asked. 

   “That’s Jim Licavoli, one of the Mob bosses here, probably going to be the next top guy. They had lunch together and he finally gave the bookworm his blessing to lease the Mayfield, even though Blackie doesn’t have any ownership in it. His word is more law here than ours. It used to be a vaudeville theater that closed six or seven years ago. The way Blackie sees it, strippers are OK but foreign movies might be 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 that 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 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 his way 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 back then. They said only Europeans did that. So, he didn’t die of the gunshot wound. He died of infection. It took him almost three months to die. He had only been president four months.”

   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 on, but not John D. He was a mean 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 behind the statue of 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 service weapon 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 staggered 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. He smelled like the Middle Ages.

   “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 Italians,” Frank said to Tyrone, pointing to the man. “Does Danny Greene know you’re here? He might show up with a pick and shovel.”

    “It takes an earlier bird than that dumb-ass paddy to get the better of a worm like me,” Joey said, pursing his lips and purring.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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 the crime novel “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   Frank Gwozdz kept his eyes fixed on the middle of nothing. He wasn’t minding his own business even though it looked that way. 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 enough, although he was near-sighted. The closer something was to him the better he saw it. When he had to, he wore glasses to see far away. He read the Cleveland Plain Dealer every morning except Sundays when there was too much of it. There was hardly anything about him likely to draw anybody’s attention, even though he kept his hair not-too-neat and didn’t shave too often. When he was in a bar, at the bar with a beer in front of him, a Lucky Strike smoking itself at his elbow, nobody gave him a second glance. 

   He  was a Cleveland Police Department detective. He worked out of the third floor of Cleveland’s Central Station at E. 21 St. and Payne Ave. The Central Station had been in business for fifty years. It had replaced the Champlain Street Headquarters long ago. When it did the Cleveland 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 looked at the bottle of beer in front of him. He took a short pull. It was getting lukewarm. It didn’t matter to him. It was only there so he could sit beside it. He loosened his already loose tie and the top button of his shirt. Mitzi Jerman was working the bar. She asked if he wanted fresh peanuts. “Thanks, but no,” he said. He hadn’t touched the bowl at his elbow. It was still full of old peanuts. The bar didn’t serve food, just peanuts, pretzels, and pickled eggs. He hadn’t touched anything, yet, although he might if the two men he was watching stayed long enough. He was getting hungry. He knew the man with jug ears doing all the talking had worked the numbers game for Shondor Birns before his boss was blown up. He thought the other one had probably 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 at this time of night. 

   Jerman’s Café was on E. 39 St. and St. Clair Ave., although it wasn’t actually on any street. It wasn’t 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 during those years, making the run across Lake Erie in a speedboat by himself. Mitzi’s mother and father hid the rum and whiskey with neighbors whenever Elliot Ness was on the rampage.

   After cleaning a table with a wet rag Mitzi came back to where Frank was sitting and parked herself in front of him. “Working tonight, young and handsome?” she asked, drying freshly washed glasses with a bar towel. Frank wasn’t exactly young anymore, just like he wasn’t exactly handsome anymore. He took her sweet talk in stride.

   “I’m working right now,” Frank 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 room she had been born in. There was a piano and a juke box in the bar. A pool table was at the rear, ignored and lonely. Mitzi watched baseball games in living color on a TV set placed high up on a wall. She was a born and bred Tribe fan. Her dog Rosco slept at her feet. The bar Frank was sitting at was oak. The ceiling above him was zinc. Mitzi served Pabst, Stroh’s, and Budweiser on tap.  Everything else came in a bottle. Frank fiddled with his bottle of Anchor Liberty Ale.

   One of the men at the back table snapped his fingers. Mitzi threw them a look. They were looking at Betty, the neighborhood girl who worked nights for Mitzi. She was an eye-catcher. Many men wanted to hang their hats on her. Mitzi sent Betty 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.

   “Are they the Jew’s men?”

   “Yeah, Shondor ran them, at least until lately. They’re not pulling any Dutch act about what happened to him. Those two are on the go.”

   Shondor Birns had run the numbers game for years, until he was blown up a few months earlier on Easter Saturday outside of his favorite strip club. “SHONDOR BIRNS IS BOMB VICTIM” the Cleveland Plain Dealer headline trumpeted the news. The strip club was Christie’s Lounge, where Shondor Birns spent the evening drinking and ogling naked girls bumping and grinding. When he was good and drunk, he staggered out to his Lincoln Continental parked in a lot across from St. Malachi’s Catholic Church. As soon as he turned the key in the ignition a package of dynamite wired to the ignition came to life. He was blown in half, his upper body catapulted through the roof of his car. Some of him landed in the parking lot. Some of him was sling shotted into the webbing of the surrounding chain link fence. The rest of him disappeared. Celebrants at the Easter Vigil rushed out of the church when the explosion rattled the stained-glass windows.

   The numbers man 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 game. He became Cleveland’s “Public Enemy No. 1.” When he got into the protection racket 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.”

   Shondor Birns was always blowing up about something. After he was blown up what little was left of him was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery on April Fool’s Day. When the last shovelful of dirt topped him off he was officially gone. Nobody promised to keep his grave clean. Everybody forgot about him. His mug shot was taken down from the top row of the big board at the Central Station. Somebody else was going to take his place, although the new man’s picture wasn’t on the board, yet. The squeeze wasn’t going to stop with Shondor Birns gone. The next boss was already taking care of business. Frank would find out who that was soon enough.

   When the two men at the back table got up and left, Frank got up and left, too. They got into a red Plymouth Duster. He wasn’t going to have any trouble following it. He got into his 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 E. 55 St. and turned on Euclid Ave, When it got to Mayfield Rd. it 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 boy but didn’t want to see his wife. Sandra had been getting unhappier by the day since the day she had stopped nursing their son. That was three years ago. She was miserable at home and had taken to drinking. Frank threw away every bottle he found hidden 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 marrying her was a mistake but at the time he hadn’t been able to control himself. She had become spiteful 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 a plainclothes man, she was snotty about it, calling him “you poor dear man.” 

   They didn’t kiss anymore, much less talk. 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 when she went to the Hippodrome Theater.

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

   “The movies,” she said.

   “What’s showing today?”

   “I’ll find out when I get there.”

   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, at least until the movies took over. After that it was all movies. 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 followed her there one day on the sly. 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?” Frank 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,” the man said. “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 fifteen 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. Sandra 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. It was looking like she was a wife and mother gone wrong, gone over to monkey business. She had promised him at the altar far more than he was getting. He wasn’t getting any of her love. There was no mistake about that. He could kill her for what she was doing, except for the boy. Stanley deserved better than a whore for a mother. He might kill her for that reason alone. There was more than enough room in the backyard for an unmarked grave. He could plant poison ivy to memorialize the spot.

   Frank’s stomach grumbled. He was dog hungry at the end of a long day. He hadn’t popped even one peanut into his mouth at Jerman’s Café. He could eat at the trattoria and keep an eye on the two collectors at the same time. He got out of the Crown Victoria, locked it, and walking across the brick 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 leastways the food was good. 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 relief and drank it slowly. His thoughts were dark as the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication