Christmas Slay Ride: Most Mysterious and Horrific Christmas Day Murders (4 page)

During the 1890s, Eastman got a job as a bouncer at Silver Dollar Smith’s rowdy saloon on Essex Street. He beat up so many unruly customers that the accident ward at Bellevue Hospital was supposedly nicknamed the Eastman Pavilion. One of his favorite weapons was a huge club that he marked with a notch every time he bashed a man’s head in.

Prominent social historian Herbert Asbury said Eastman looked like the typical “moving picture gangster.” Razor and knife scars covered his face and body. His nose had been broken, and his ears had been misshapen from frequent blows. He was the epitome of toughness. In 1901, two rival gangsters ambushed him in a saloon and gut-shot him, but he plugged the wounds with his fingers and walked to a hospital unassisted.“(Eastman) seemed to always need a haircut,” Asbury wrote, “and he accentuated his ferocious and unusual appearance by affecting a derby hat several sizes too small, which perched atop his shock of bristly, unruly hair. He could generally be found strutting about his kingdom very indifferently dressed, or lounging at his ease in the Chrystie Street rendezvous without shirt, collar, or coat.”

The nickname Monk came from his fondness for hanging out in Chinatown opium dens. (A slang term for a Chinese person was “monkey.”) He was also known as William Delaney and Joe Morris, aliases he had adopted to calm the hostilities from Irish-born police officers. However, it was as Monk Eastman that he became infamous.

For a time, Eastman also ran a pet store on Broome Street and described himself as a pigeon breeder. Although he genuinely loved animals, the business was a front for his other activities, which included fencing stolen merchandise and shaking down business owners for protection money.

His craziness in combat brought him to the attention of Tammany Hall, the New York face of the Democratic Party, which paid him well to terrorize Republican voters at election time. Tammany politicians also protected Eastman when he and his thugs picked pockets, held up stores, and accepted beating and killing assignments from anyone who could meet their price. (In 1903, the wife of a prominent dentist paid Eastman $300 to murder her husband, but the victim was alerted in time and escaped.)

For years, political protection allowed Monk Eastman to literally get away with murder. Then, in February, 1904, he and an accomplice tried to rob a well-dressed young drunk. Unfortunately for them, the man’s wealthy father had hired two Pinkerton detectives to keep an eye on him. The detectives opened fire on the two gangsters, who shot back but were captured when three policemen joined in.

The Tammany politicians, now embarrassed by the bloody headlines Eastman was generating, withdrew their support. After a brief trial, the gang boss was sentenced to 10 years in Sing Sing prison.

As he prepared to board the train that would take him upstate to the correctional facility, the handcuffed Eastman chomped on a cigar and told reporters, “Well, I’m goin’ now. This is the last you’ll hear of Monk for a while.”

“Awhile” turned out to be five years. Paroled in June, 1909, he returned to Manhattan, but his territory had been absorbed by younger hoodlums who refused to let him back in. For some reason, the former gang lord did not attempt to fight his way back in. Perhaps he was wary of the publicity that such a war would bring, and did not want to be sent back to prison.

Instead, Eastman was more subversive. He organized an opium smuggling and sales ring, which did well until the police arrested him for selling in 1912.  While serving an eight-month sentence on Blackwell’s Island, he told a lady newspaper reporter that he wanted to kick the opium habit that was driving him to commit criminal acts in order to support it.

Upon his discharge he moved to Albany, where he escaped detection until May 1915, when police departments between Albany and New York City were requested to keep an eye out for a seven-passenger sedan containing men who were suspected of stealing a $1000 worth of silver and jewelry.

When the car was spotted on May 17 outside New York City, a squad of policemen surrounded the vehicle and its passengers, one of which was Monk Eastman.

Eastman smiled when a search of the car revealed the stolen merchandise. “Well, you have the silver,” he said. “So go as far as you can, but don’t expect any help from me.”

A judge sent him to Dannemora for two years and 11 months. Upon his release, he returned to New York City, where he was arrested yet again, this time for fighting. To escape another prison sentence, Eastman did something no one could have anticipated. He walked into a recruitment office, joined the army, and was sent overseas with the 106th Infantry, 27th Division.

Eastman’s military career was exemplary. He served with valor and was decorated for heroism. Once, when wounded by shrapnel, he was sent to a field hospital. The moment he collected his wits, Eastman slipped out, salvaged a uniform from a dump, and rejoined his company at the front.

Deeds like this won praise even from those who would have declared him fit only for the electric chair during his pre-military days. When the war ended, his supervising officers petitioned New York’s governor to restore Eastman’s citizenship, which he had lost as a convict. This was done in May, 1919, and Monk came home a decorated war hero.

It didn’t take long for the glow of heroism to subside, and for Monk Eastman to face the harsh reality that he was nearing fifty and was an ex-convict with no real record of honest employment. He went back to the only life he knew, and it caught up with him on December 26, 1920.

******

The only witnesses to the shooting were taxi drivers a block away at Broadway and Fourteenth Street. Upon hearing five shots, they ran to the subway entrance and found the dying man lying on the pavement. They had barely completed their examination when the two officers showed up. The subway ticket agent, who had also heard the shots, joined them, bringing the discarded weapon he had found on the step.

Charley Jones, who had been one of Eastman’s toughest henchmen many years before, told the police and reporters that as far as he knew, Eastman had not resumed his criminal career after getting his citizenship back. Although he denied that Monk had been trying to make a comeback, Jones did suggest that “young squirt gunmen” might have tried to make a name for themselves by shooting down a legend in cold blood.

Eastman's former followers identifying him at the morgue.

Photo from Author's Collection.

On January 4, Eastman’s killer finally turned himself in.

Jerry W. Bohan was a Prohibition agent who had been tried for murder before. In 1911, he had shot one Joseph Faulkner, alias “Joe the Bear,” but a Brooklyn jury acquitted him. During the war, Bohan got a job along the Brooklyn waterfront representing the stevedores’ union, which at the time was battling its employers. Monk Eastman was also involved in that conflict, but as an agent of the employers.

“It was thus,” wrote the New York Times, “that the two met and became friendly enemies.”

Bohan explained that the killing of Eastman had been spontaneous self-defense. On Christmas night, he, Eastman and a group of friends went to the Blue Bird Café, a basement cabaret two doors west of the station entrance where Eastman’s body was later found, and spent hours drinking.

All was rowdy but well until around 4:00 a.m., when a dispute arose over how the staff were to be tipped. Eastman wanted to give something to everyone while others thought that the piano player, who had stayed overtime to entertain them, deserved most of the money. In the end, only the waiter who had handled their table was tipped, a fact that apparently did not sit well with Eastman.

Bohan told the police that he was leaving the Blue Bird alone when Eastman grabbed him from behind and accused him of having been a “rat” ever since he got his Prohibition agent job. He saw the gangster reach into his right coat pocket, and reacted by pulling his gun and emptying it into his assailant. When Eastman fell, Bohan threw away the weapon, jumped onto the running board of a taxi heading north on Fourth Avenue, and escaped.

Rumors hinted that the fatal confrontation had been caused by a disagreement over the split of drug or liquor money. Special Deputy Police Commissioner Simon said that he had it on good authority that Eastman had been involved in the drug trade and had over twenty agents in his employ.

On January 5, Representative Lester B. Volk of Brooklyn used the Eastman murder as the basis for demanding a thorough investigation of Prohibition and its shoddy enforcement. He criticized Jerry Bohan’s appointment as a dry agent despite Bohan’s criminal record, and insisted that strong improvements in the enforcement corps hiring practices were needed.

Bohan stood trial for killing Eastman. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter and the judge sentenced him to three to 10 years for manslaughter. On June 23, 1922, his minimum term reduced thanks to good behavior, he was paroled and disappeared into obscurity.

*****

Monk Eastman’s death before the first year of Prohibition had ended was eerily symbolic. The old time hoodlum that he embodied had long since become a city myth, gone except for a few grizzled survivors and the odd bullet-pocked building that hadn’t been repaired in twenty years. Now the gangsters lived in penthouse suites paid for by bootleg riches, rode around in chauffeured limousines, and used a Thompson submachine gun when they bothered to do their own killing.

It was a new era that Eastman did not live to see, which was just as well. There would have been no place for him.

It was 3:30 a.m. on December 26, 1925, and Patrolman Richard Morano of the Fifth Avenue Police Station in Brooklyn was cold. The frigid temperatures and dampness, courtesy of a brief rainfall, had left him chilled to the bone.

Fortunately, it was a quiet night on his beat so far. As he neared the ramshackle two-story wooden building at 154 Twentieth Street, however, he thought it was
too
quiet. The place was a cabaret called the Adonis Social Club, and it should have been alive with bright lights and loud music even at this hour. Instead, it was cold and silent, like a corpse.

Seeing something in the gutter almost directly in front of the club, Morano shone his light on it. A man was lying there, the back of his head shot off. Drawing his weapon, the policeman followed a trail of blood through the club doorway into the cabaret area.

Judging by the chaos he found inside, something violent had happened not long before his arrival. All the tables were overturned except for one, and shattered glass from the drinking glasses and window panes coated the floor, making a mockery of the festive orange bunting and the MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR message pinned to it. All the revelers-turned-combatants appeared to have fled.

As he surveyed the room, Morano’s light fell upon found two men sprawled near the piano, bodies ripped apart by bullets. Realizing that he was beholding the aftermath of a gang fight, the policeman retreated and summoned assistance.

Detectives surveying the crime scene. Blood from the bodies of Pegleg Longergan and Aaron Harms is clearly visible.

Photo courtesy of Mario Gomes / Al Capone Museum.

The three dead men were soon identified as members of South Brooklyn’s notorious Irish White Hand gang. Suddenly it wasn’t so hard to figure out who had murdered them, and why.

One of the two in front of the piano was 24-year-old Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan, the mob’s leader. He had been shot in the head and chest so suddenly that a fresh toothpick was still clenched in his teeth. The other was Aaron Harms, Lonergan’s best friend and advisor. The man found outside was Cornelius “Needles” Ferry, a drug addict and another one of Lonergan’s closest aides.

The White Hand Gang had originally been formed to oppose the Italian Black Hand, whose power and influence had been growing in New York since the 1890s. They were mostly Irish and had family connections to the rough-and-tumble Irish mobs on the pre-1890 era. When they weren’t insulting and attacking Italians, they were preying on the Brooklyn waterfront, controlling dock labor, and taking a cut of every longshoreman’s pay. 

White Hand boss Richard “Peg Leg” Lonergan and Cornelius “Needles” Ferry were both casualties of the Adonis Club Massacre. Ferry's blood is visible on the sidewalk. Photo courtesy of Mario Gomes / Al Capone Museum.

Dennis “Dinny” Meehan, one of the earliest leaders, had a contract to unload the cargo of all incoming ships. If anyone else tried to compete, they got their heads broken. Meehan was the terror of the waterfront until 1920, when he pushed another Irish gangster “Wild Bill” Lovett, too far. On March 31, five Lovett gunmen walked right into Meehan’s apartment, entered the bedroom where he lay napping, and shot him in the head.

Lovett merged his own gang with the White Handers, and imposed a dictator-like rule until October 30, 1923. That night, he was sleeping off a drinking binge when two men crept into the room, bashed his skull in with a heavy object, and shot him twice in the neck. He was succeeded by his brother-in-law, “Pegleg” Lonergan, who strengthened the White Hand gang’s control over the waterfront and directed them into bootlegging, which added to their coffers.

Lonergan, whose sister had been married to Wild Bill, was said to have killed 20 men in his rise to the top of the Irish underworld circles. He had been born into New York’s gangster royalty. His father and uncle were leaders of the infamous Yakey Yakes, who terrorized their district until around 1910. A childhood accident involving a streetcar caused his left leg to be amputated below the knee and forced him to wear a prosthesis, but the handicap did not limit his murderous urges or ability to act on them.

When he was a teenager, Lonergan stole a bicycle and made money renting it to other kids in the neighborhood. Soon he had earned enough to buy more bikes, and eventually opened his own shop. One day an Italian hoodlum named Bonanzio tried to talk the Irish youth into letting him sell narcotics from the store. Lonergan’s response was to beat him up and kick him out. Bonanzio got even by sending a friend into the shop to sell Lonergan a stolen bike, and then telling the police that the business was handling stolen merchandise. When the youthful proprietor was found with the stolen property, he was charged and sent to a work farm, where he met his future boss and brother-in-law, “Wild Bill” Lovett.

While the police were searching the Adonis Social Club for clues, a patrolman from the Clymer Street Station found another White Hander, James Hart, crawling on the sidewalk a few blocks away from the club. He had been shot in both legs, and collapsed from shock and blood loss as the officer approached. When he regained consciousness at Cumberland Street Hospital, he told the authorities that Christmas revelers had shot him from a speeding automobile.

Incredibly, a family occupying the apartment on the second floor of the club building said that they had heard nothing unusual. The police didn’t believe them, as the gunfire, screams, and shattering glass that accompanied the chaos must have been deafening, but were unable to prove otherwise.

It took a while, but the truth emerged. Early on the evening of December 25, Lonergan met five of his men at a speakeasy on Skrillman Street; Aaron Harms, Needles Ferry, James Hart,  Joe Howard, and Patrick “Happy” Maloney. The more they drank, the more they cursed the Italians, until around midnight they finally hailed a taxi and ordered the driver to take them to the Adonis Social Club, which was an Italian-owned hangout.

Once inside, they commandeered a table in the cabaret area, which contained a bar and small dance floor. Other patrons became uneasy when one of the White Handers exclaimed that his brother could “lick the bunch of” Italians in the bar. Sensing what was coming, the female singer took a break with the cigarette girl, so White Hander Joe Howard got up on the small platform and began to sing.

One account states that Lonergan and his crew started berating Irish girls who came in with Italian escorts, yelling at them to start seeing “white men.” They peppered their loud conversation with words like “dagos” and “ginzos.”