Whose that Author?

[Johnny Torrio] liked my ideas, like setting up a legitimate front to keep the reform crowd from asking embarrassing questions, some easy thing to maintain, like a second-hand furniture store. This was the beginning of Al Brown, Antique Dealer. It wouldn't fool a baby, but it wasn't busting the law in their face, so there wasn't any public show of disrespect, which when you come down to it is the only thing they really care about, the church committees and politicians. Johnny said I had too good a head on my shoulders to make thirty-five bucks a week slugging drunks.
Sometimes, I have to admit, I lost that head. In the fall of 1919 I was drinking in a harbor saloon when this character Artie Finnegan comes in. I didn't know him. Short, squat, face like a cheese. He sees me and starts cussing me out, greasy nigger wop this, greasy nigger wop that, stinking up the place. I'm thinking, what's your problem, Paddy, you got piles or what? Stranger minding his own business, you want to start something over nothing? That's kid stuff. After Five Points I never in my life went looking for a fight. In Chicago I never hit back but that they hit me first. Well, he keeps on, and now he's dragging my family into it, my mother, my father, my wife if I've got one, bastards and whores all of them. He's dotting i's, crossing t's. He didn't come here to lift a pint and sing "Danny Boy."
I beat the Irish clean out of him. My hands still ache when I think about it. They had to drag me off him. Now he's on the floor leaking blood from everywhere, even his ears; I think, well, there you are, you cocksucker, you wanted to dance, now you're dead. I really thought he was.
I wasn't worried about the cops. I'd been pulled in before over a couple of scraps and questioned, roughed around, turned loose with the charges dropped, and when the doctors said they figured they could put Artie Finnegan back together after all, minus a few pieces, I knew the cops wouldn't waste their time looking for an eyewitness that wouldn't say Finnegan slipped on a puddle of beer and fell down a couple dozen times. It was the White Handers I was concerned about. Finnegan was one, and Dinny Meehan didn't like his boys being abused any more than Frankie Yale did his. Dinny sicced Wild Bill Lovett on me.

Lovett put the fear of God on the waterfront. He wasn't any bigger than little Frank Gallucio, but he had these big cow eyes and teensy ears that poked out like an elf's. But he'd kill you as soon as shake your hand. He'd fought abroad with the 77th Regiment and been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for valor under fire. He carried his old service .45 everywhere and never packed a bodyguard, not even after Frankie put Meehan on the spot months later and Wild Bill took over the White Hand. He walked alone.
A lot can change in a short time. A year earlier I'd have waited for him, or more likely gone out looking for him myself with the rod I used to pop bottles in the basement of the Adonis Social Club. But I had a family now. If anything was to happen to me, Mae and Sonny would be on their own. I went to Frankie for advice. He shook his head. Even Joe the Boss couldn't get me out of this jam. There's no sitting down with the Irish. What he did, he called Johnny in Chicago. Johnny said he could use an extra man who wasn't a mug and sent first-class tickets for me, Mae, and Sonny. Lovett could go on turning over every rock in Brooklyn looking for the scar-faced punk who beat up Artie Finnegan. What's a White Hander's time worth, anyway?
So we got on the train at Grand Central Station, and on January 17, 1920, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday with Johnny at Colosimo's Café in Chicago. That same day, the Volstead Act kicked in and the whole country went on the wagon. Who says God doesn't appreciate a joke?