By Ed Staskus

   Uncle Ernie worked for Danny Greene and nobody else. He didn’t have to work at all, if he didn’t want to, but he liked staying busy. He was busy sniffing around looking for who had blown up Lorcan Sullivan. He put on the wig and fake glasses he always wore when sniffing around. He tried to catch the drift in both Lakewood and Cleveland. It didn’t do him any good. Nobody he knew, who would talk to him, knew anything, while nobody in the know would talk to him. They told him to get lost. None of the working stiffs from the Cleveland Press and Cleveland Plain Dealer who he drank with occasionally could fill him in on anything solid.

   He always told anybody who asked that he was a pipefitter. He wasn’t a full-time fitter but did belong to the Pipefitters Union. He occasionally worked for Blanton Pipe Valves and Fittings. It was more for show than not. It was so he could show income to the IRS. His real earnings were always in cash. He was a private contractor. He was a bomb maker. 

   He was sure the Italians had done it, but the boss wanted to know exactly which one of them had done it. When he found out, the Irishman would expect him to take care of business. Uncle Ernie was an expert at what he did. When he took care of business it stayed taken care of. He never made a mistake, especially never the mistake of blowing himself up, like Art Sneperger had done four years ago. 

   Art Sneperger had been standing outside the back door of Swan’s Auto Service on the corner of Mayfield Rd. and Coventry Rd. four years ago. He was holding a bomb he had assembled when it suddenly went off in his hands. There was the flash of a falling star and a sonic boom. Swan’s Auto Service collapsed in a heap. All the cars in the lot waiting to be repaired were laid to waste. Every window in every house adjacent to the building was  broken by the blast. The Bomb Unit found what little was left of Art under a pile of bricks the next day. His ex-wife withdrew what there was of his savings account and moved out of town.

   Mike Frato, with whom Danny Greene was having a dispute, was part-owner of Swan’s Auto Service. He and the Irishman were going to have it out sooner or later. Everybody on the wrong side of the tracks knew one of the two was going to go belly up.  When Danny Greene was questioned about the bombing at Swan’s he said he didn’t know anything about any dispute or any explosion. Both of the police detectives interviewing him knew they were being lied to, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

   “You weren’t sending a message?” they asked.

   “What message would that be?” he asked, grinning like a leprechaun.

   What the police detectives and Uncle Ernie didn’t know was that Danny Greene had been around the corner and detonated the bomb by remote control. Art and Danny had grown up together and worked together as longshoremen, but Art had ratted Danny out. He was in the hole to loan sharks and bookmakers. He couldn’t pick a nag to save his life. He was rewarded by officialdom when he turned canary. He knew he was fixing to die, but what could he do? The squeeze was on.

    “I’m coming out of work one day,” said Skip Ponikvar, a longshoreman’s union vice president. “A car pulls right up. It’s Danny Greene. He jumps out of the car. The other guy, a Hells Angel, jumps out of the car. Danny says, ‘He’s going in there to pay his water bill. How you doing?’ I say, ‘I’m good.’ He says, ‘I heard that Snep is making statements about me!’ I say, ‘Oh, Danny, I don’t know nothing about that.’ Then he starts talking about something else for five or ten minutes. All of a sudden he says, ‘You know that Snep said I killed so and so’  I say, ‘Aw, he never said that.’ He says, ‘I got ya! You told me you didn’t know about that statement!’”

   Uncle Ernie drove up to Lorcan Sullivan’s house on Ethel Ave. and parked across the street. Everything was a mess and other than the mess there wasn’t much to see. All the broken windows on the back side of the house had been boarded up with sheets of plywood. What was left of the garage was being torn down. A small tree in the back yard lay on its side and shrubs that had stood in a line at the rear of the driveway didn’t exist anymore. 

   Tommy Monk rode slowly past on his bicycle as Uncle Ernie flicked his cigarette butt out of his open car window. Tommy looked as the butt, what his dad called coffin nails, fly out the open window. Sparks scattered when it hit the asphalt. He looked at the man behind the wheel. What he saw was a big beak and a funny looking hat. The man’s face looked like it was made of putty. He took a good look at the license plate and turned it into a Plain Dealer banner headline. It was what he did whenever he absolutely had to remember something. He rode home. He would tell his father about the man in the car after dinner. 

   Whoever it was he must have made a dent in the armory to cinch the job, Uncle Ernie thought, and knew in a flash who it was who set the bomb. Only Joey Bag of Donuts doubled down on his targets. He started the car, turned around, got on Clifton Blvd., took Rt. 2 through downtown, and merged onto I-90 to Collinwood. Neither Danny Greene nor his girl Denise were at the Celtic Club.  He had been wanting to have some fun with Denise, but she didn’t seem to want to give him the skin off a plum. He parked and waited. When school let out and students filled the street, he noticed all of them walked on the side of the street across the street from the trailer home.

   After the sidewalks had cleared of school kids and a half hour passed, Uncle Ernie got out of his car and went for a walk, stretching his legs. He walked around the block and another block. When he got back there still wasn’t any sign of life at the Celtic Club. He didn’t want to sit in the car. It was a hot humid afternoon. He took a few steps backwards into a dim space between two storefronts, leaning on a shadow and smoking a cigarette. He was quiet and unnoticeable, except for the glow of the tip of his Pall Mall every time he sucked on it.

   Uncle Ernie was bald and wore a black bucket hat all the time. Most people never saw his pate. He didn’t sleep well, tossing and turning, and had bags under his eyes. He wheezed going up and down stairs. He knew the Pall Malls were killing him but couldn’t stop. His fingertips were yellow from nicotine. Whenever he tried to stop smoking he lit up another one to mull over whether to stop. 

   When the Irishman pulled up, parked, and went inside the trailer home, Uncle Ernie waited for five minutes. When nothing happened he crossed the street, walked up to the only door, and knocked. He always tried to never surprise Danny Greene, who didn’t like surprises. The Irishman let him in. Denise was nowhere in sight. They sat down in what passed for a living room. Even though Danny Greene dressed well, and was always neat as a pin, the trailer home was disordered.

   “What have you got for me?” he asked.

   “I think I know who did the job,” Uncle Ernie said.

   “Do you think or do you know?”

   “I’d be surprised if I was wrong.”

   “All right, spill it.”

   “It may not be the God’s truth, but I don’t think it could have been anybody else other than Joey Bag of Donuts.”

   “All right, now that you know, take care of that fucking Dago.”

   “You want it done right away?”

   “What the hell do you think?”

   “Got it,” Uncle Ernie said.

   It didn’t take him long to get home. He lived in Collinwood just like Danny Greene did. He lived on Midland Ave. south of I-90 and the Collinwood Railroad Yard. There were one hundred and twenty miles of track in the yard and two locomotive repair roundhouses. The sound of trains was always in the background. His house was a two-story single home with a garage and a deep backyard. His bomb-making workshop was in the basement.

   Uncle Ernie had been married three times and three times his wives left him. Even though he was responsible enough, always paying his taxes and never running a red light, he had several bad habits that no woman could put up with for long. His non-stop smoking was one of them. His hardly ever talking was another one of them. When it came to women he only talked to the buttons on their blouses. His watching cops and robbers reruns on TV every night was another one. All three marriages were over within two years. One of them ended less than a year in. After the last one left he gave up. That had been twenty years ago. He knew no woman would have him anymore and had stopped trying to find one.

   His house had been shipshape twenty years ago when the last of his Zsa Zsa’s left. He was convinced all three of them had read the real Zsa Zsa Gabor’s book “How to Get Rid of a Man.” Twenty years later his house was a pigsty. He never opened the fridge for fear of what he might find. He had started cleaning his bathroom a couple of years ago but then gave up. He hadn’t made his bed for more than a decade, although he changed the sheets every couple of months. Every ashtray in every room was overflowing with butts. Old newspapers were stacked in corners. He meant to tie them up and put them on the tree lawn someday.

   He put his bucket hat away and made coffee. He lit a cigarette. He took his coffee black and took the mug down to the basement with him. He had a workroom there. It was as unlike the rest of the house as it could be. The cement floor was smooth as a baby’s bottom. He had painted it an industrial gray which had sealed it. The paint kept the dust down, too. The floor supported two heavy workbenches and a fixed saw. One pegboard was on the wall at the back of his main workbench while another bigger peg board covered most of another wall. He had two sets of freestanding shelves. Everything was close to hand, including ash trays and fire extinguishers.

   Dampness was a problem he had solved partly with a dehumidifier. He solved the rest of the problem by installing an exhaust fan high up on a wall. It was next to the egress window he had put in, if ever he had to get out fast. He had more than enough tools to build anything, even a dining room set, although all he ever built were bombs. He had spares in a cabinet of all the tools he used the most. He was like an old maid when it came to his job of work.

   He put his mug where he could reach it easily and stubbed his cigarette out. The bomb he was going to make was a simple one of a few sticks of dynamite and a detonator. That would take care of Joey Bag of Donuts. He bought his explosives in New Hampshire. Everything else he bought in Valley View on the south side of town. He would have to set the bomb off by remote control rather than a timer or tilt fuse. 

   Nobody knew where Joey Bag of Donuts lived, although everybody knew he didn’t own a car. He went to where his targets were by city bus. He carried schedules in his pocket. He never worked outside the city. Uncle Ernie had heard he frequented the cemetery next to Little Italy. He had heard the greasy turnip liked to take naps at the base of Haserot’s Angel. He would hide the bomb in the weeds there and wait nearby. When the greasy turnip showed up and was napping he would set the bomb off and send the little man to the big sleep he deserved.

   Uncle Ernie was a professional. He hated amateurs like the Weather Underground and their wacky friends. They had gone from throwing Molotov cocktails now and then in the late 1960s to a steady campaign of protest bombings that stretched from New York City to San Francisco. The FBI had gotten to calling San Francisco the “Belfast of North America.” From 1971 through 1972 there were more than two thousand terrorist bombings on American soil. Most of them happened at night, targeting buildings, and most of them didn’t cause any serious injuries. What Uncle Ernie hated about the radicals was their sincerity. They had a boatload of fervor, too, which he hated almost as much. He had no use for true believers throwing bombs for the sake of a better world. He believed in the kind of bomb throwing that put cold cash into his wallet. 

   Making bombs was his cash cow. “I’m not a goddamned anarchist,” he said to himself. No one heard him say it. He didn’t have any friends. Both of his next door neighbors and the immediate neighbors across the street avoided him. “I’m a businessman, no bullshit,” he reminded himself.

   When he was done he put the bomb in a lunch pail. The pail was a Black Dome. It had been his father’s when his father had been a coal miner in West Virginia. “The devil put the coal in the ground,” his father always said. He kept a lump of it on the mantle in their living room. “That is gonna be a diamond someday, son, even though I ain’t gonna see that day.” He carried his lunch underground with him every day until the day black lung stopped him in his tracks. He coughed himself to death the rest of the year. When he died he didn’t have a diamond to buy his way into paradise, where they don’t take lumps of coal.

   Uncle Ernie put the lunch pail on the floor under his workbench. He did it carefully. He went upstairs and put his hat back on. Blowing up Joey Bag of Donuts was going to take some time, most of it waiting for the weasel to show up. In the meantime, he would do some dining and drinking at the Flat Iron Café. The place was an Irish watering hole. They had meat loaf and mashed potatoes, corned beef and cabbage, and Pride of Cleveland on tap. It. They had Lake Erie Yellow Perch every Friday. It was Friday, so he was going to have fish with his beer. He would go fishing for donuts on the weekend.

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

   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