Free Sons and Princes by James Lepore Page A

violently backward against the door and pinning him there for a split second that seemed like an eternity to the three men in the room. Joe Black’s sternum was broken, but he did not know it at the time. He flung the table back toward Dolan and crumpled to the floor, spinning quickly as he did behind the table where he had laid his coat. Dolan picked up a chair, lifted it over his head and advanced toward Joe, who rose to one knee and drew his gun. When Dolan was three feet away and the chair was at the top of its arc, Joe fired, the bullet taking Dolan in the chest and stopping him dead in his tracks, literally. As Dolan’s body slumped to the floor, Joe turned the gun on Logan, who had not moved from his now almost comically exposed seat at the vanished table.
    “Do you have a gun?” Joe asked.
    Logan nodded.
    “Put it on the floor, slowly.”
    Logan did as he was told, his limited imagination never having offered up a scene such as the one he had just witnessed. Joe picked up the gun, a cheap, .22 caliber revolver – a throwaway – and checked the cylinder, which was full. He then shot Logan once in the stomach with it. Joe wiped his Magnum clean with his sweater, then bent over and placed it firmly in Logan’s right hand, placing his free hand gently, almost, it seemed, respectfully, on Logan’s chest as he did, to prevent him from toppling over. Placing his hand over Logan’s hand, his trigger finger over Logan’s, he fired the gun into the opposite wall, ensuring a positive paraffin test, if the police were inclined to do one. He let the Magnum fall to the floor. Dolan was lying on his side, the blood from his chest wound soaking into his flannel shirt and thick wool sweater.
    Joe wiped Logan’s revolver clean, and, kneeling beside Dolan, placed it firmly into a grip he formed with the former longshoreman’s right thumb and fingers and fired it past Logan’s left shoulder. Hoping that both Dolan and young Logan were in fact right-handed, Joe rose and surveyed the carnage. Logan was still sitting in his chair, blood oozing through his fingers where he clutched his stomach, his face drained of its color, his eyes fast losing their connection to the world. He was still breathing. Ed Dolan was not. As Joe was putting on his coat, the door creaked open about twelve inches and Andy O’Brien first looked, then sidled into the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
    “Is anybody out there?” Joe asked.
    “No.”
    “Call the police,” Joe said, quietly, looking around the room one last time. “Leave everything as it is. I wasn’t here.”
    O’Brien was staring at the two bodies, his eyes grimly accepting the heavy price of Richie The Boot’s protective services.
    “Did you hear me?” said Joe. “I wasn’t here.”
    “Yes. I heard you.”
    “The kid’s still alive. Give me a minute, then call. He might get lucky.”

    There were fifty thousand longshoremen on the New York and New Jersey waterfronts in 1950, and fifteen thousand in 1970. By the end of the century, there would be only a few thousand. Containerization, not corruption, killed the union – and the trade – that Ed Dolan had, as a strapping and courageous young man newly arrived from County Armagh, fought so hard and so long to save. This he might have been able to accept, since it applied across the board, but the post-Ryan, governmentrun daily shape-ups, where work was not necessarily or automatically based on seniority, were a bitter blow. The very fairness he fought to impose on the system operated to exclude him from the steady work he needed to maintain his dignity and feed his family.
    By the early seventies, he was working one or two days a week, at most, unloading ships. The rest of the time, he was mostly idle, unable to find work in a city whose economy was in a free fall, and where almost any job he could do was controlled by unions who would be loathe to admit a middle-aged newcomer even in good times. When his young