Free Operation Underworld by Paddy Kelly Page A

don’t look so good,” one of the men behind Danny and the kid whispered. The kid looked at Danny.
    “Joey’s connected on the Jersey side,” the former paratrooper narrated, without turning away from the action. “He’s took some real beatin’s in his life. His father was on the docks during the depression when all dem blacks come down from Harlem with weapons, wanting to take over the waterfront.”
    “What happened?” the kid asked as Danny gave the history lesson.
    “Game ended Mott Street 50, Harlem 0,” Danny answered.
    Watching his own blood dripping onto the concrete floor, Joey thought about his father’s description of the bloody battle when the two factions met in Greenwich Village, and how the blacks were beaten back in an all-day battle with bailing hooks and Johnson bars. That was why he hadn’t gone for the hook, even though he had seen it first. He knew better. With over a dozen witnesses, Morretti knew he was home free.
    Having taken the bait, the infuriated foreman held the ten inch iron hook menacingly at his side as he walked towards his intended victim. Morretti, now up on one knee, fragments of glass embedded in the side of his baby face and blood flowing from his forehead, smiled as he watched the big man hesitate.
    Three rounds in rapid succession fired from Morretti’s .38 buried themselves in the foreman’s chest, and it was his turn to lie face down in the broken glass and blood.
    The kid jumped at the sharp crack of the weapon, and instinctively started towards the ex-foreman. Danny threw out an arm and blocked him. “Forget it! You wuz in the back wit’me. All you heard was some shots. Got it?” The kid couldn’t avert his stare. “Come on, we got a flatbed to load.”
    An hour and a half later, the last of the police squad cars drove through the terminal gate, and right behind it was a flat-bed loaded with olive oil. The squad car turned south towards the Battery, but the truck headed straight across town to Fulton Street.
    The overweight truck driver finished his coffee and threw the paper cup out of the window, but left the cherry cheese Danish hanging from his mouth as he manoeuvered his vehicle up to the loading docks, in front of the Fulton Street Fish Market. After turning off the engine, he lifted his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and his dirty hair stood straight up, matted together from grease and dirt.
    Theoretically, this huge complex of bins and stalls, stocked with every species of fish imaginable, was municipally owned. However, like the adjoining retail outlets, the cannery and nearly the entire distribution network, it was controlled by one man: Joseph ’Socks’ Lanza.
    Socks Lanza was the undisputed number one power in the American fishing industry. Period. He had gained and maintained control of this empire with a very logical technique. A stranglehold on union labour. Socks simply established his own unions, extorted funds for membership, and after filing some papers with the AFL, was in business.
    For example, the Sea Food Workers Union, which was only one of a handful of unions run by Socks, dominated the Fulton Street Fish Market. In classic mob fashion, he covered all the bases with a separate union for each labour force. It was a trick learned from the DA’s office, where they would file up to half a dozen charges for one alleged offence, and try to get one to stick. A charge to cover all the bases, so to speak.
    The market, which supplied seafood from Maine to the Carolinas and as far west as the Mississippi, was teeming with activity that Wednesday morning. Unlike the bitter-sweet aromas of the wharfs across town, there was only one smell here. The smell of fish. Acrid, pungent and overwhelming. The smell of fish which engulfed and permeated everything and everybody, from the workers in their blood-stained aprons, to the handful of clerks and typists encased in glass boxes which appeared to be stuck to the ceilings as they overlooked the