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| Monk Eastman |
The shooting happened outside the Blue
Bird Restaurant at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue. Sunset
was still a few hours away, but that didn’t matter to the boys. They’d come
over from Brooklyn to visit Bradley, a waiter at the Blue Bird.
Monk Eastman (aka William Delaney) and
Jeremiah W. Bohan left the restaurant together at about 4 a.m.
They talked as they walked. Monk felt
Bohan out, trying to see if the rumors were true.
“Jerry,” said the Monk, “you have become a
rat since you got that Prohibition job.” He was working for the Feds, enforcing
the Volstead Act, and Monk supposedly was running booze.
A minute later, Monk Eastman lay dead on
the ground with five bullets in his body. Two slugs struck his right forearm,
and another the left forearm, just above the wrist. The fourth bullet ripped a
path through his hand, and the fifth one smashed through Monk’s chest and into
his heart. Bohan insisted it was self-defense—Monk was getting ready to shoot
him. But the evidence was against him. Monk didn’t have a gun. They found him
with his arms up as if he were trying to shield himself.
Bohan made a clean getaway. He dropped his weapon outside the entrance to the subway, took a taxi for three blocks, and then grabbed another one for the last dash to his home at 276 South Third Street.
Sidney Levine, a stationmaster at the
Fourteenth Street Station, heard five shots at precisely five minutes after 4
a.m. “The shots came as fast as you could clap your hands,” said Levine. He
followed the killer up the kiosk stairs, where he found a nickeled .32 caliber
revolver on the pavement. “The weapon was warm—almost hot. The pungent
odor of the explosive was fresh.”
Bohan got apprehended a few days later.
The judge sentenced him to Sing Sing for a minimum of three years and a maximum
of ten. The funny thing was, Bohan had just been paroled from Sing Sing Prison
on June 22, after serving eighteen months for manslaughter. Now he was back in
the joint for the same offense with another sentence that amounted to nothing
more than a slap on the wrist.
William Delaney, the man with the
“arms and shoulders of a gorilla,” transformed himself into Monk Eastman in 1902,
after he became a bouncer for the Silver Dollar resort run by the indomitable
Silver Dollar Smith.
The next year, the bouncer turned into a
thug and administered a beating here, a murder there, whatever the situation
called for.
The paper described the typical gangster
as “about 25-years-old, often less, a neat dresser, usually sporting a striped
silk shirt, with a large diamond stickpin in his tie, pale, anemic looking,
short in stature, shifty-eyed, and soft handed.
“He isn’t brave and rarely fights with his
fists. His weapon is a revolver. And he usually travels in packs.”
The Monk would have agreed with the dress
code of pinstriped shirts and silk coats, but he would have strenuously
objected to the cowardly part. He enjoyed toying with his victims and pummeling
them with his fists.
Early in his career, David Lamar, the Wolf
of Wall Street, engaged Monk to take down his chauffeur, James McMahon, who’d
beaten him senseless for firing him. Monk trounced McMahon within an inch of
his life.
The typical New York gangster was 25, wore a pinstripe suit,
and fought with a pistol, not his fists. (picture and info from
The Buffalo Courier. April 11, 1912)
In 1903, Monk Eastman’s gang ruled all of New York, not just the East Side. “They have a regularly employed counsel, just as a big corporation does,” explained the New York Tribune. “They set aside a certain percentage of their earnings to pay court expenses of their gang. They have a regular fence to dispose of their plunder.”
What the paper tried to show was that the
gangs were no small-time nuisance. They were an organized menace that prayed on
the city, and Monk Eastman led the city’s toughest gang.
Monk got arrested in February 1904 over a
scuffle with a young man whose rich and over-protective father had him guarded
by some Pinkerton men. The boy was counting a big wad of bills on the street in
front of Sig Cohen’s saloon when the gang got the idea to grab his cash. A
shootout with the Pinkertons ensued. Most of the gang got away. Monk hung back
to help Christopher Wallace. The next moment both men were lying on the
sidewalk after police officer John Healey knocked them on the head with his
nightstick. Monk got sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing. Five years later, he
was back on the street.
After that, the Feds picked him up for
smoking and selling opium. He got an eleven-month sentence on Blackwell’s
Island. Monk spent some more time in prison when he stole $1500 in silver from
a house in Albany. The New York Police picked him up at Westchester and hauled
him back to Albany.
Monk enlisted in the army in 1917, then
fought in France as part of the 106th Infantry, Forty-seventh Division. At
first, the military had a few concerns about his “moral turpitude” and whether
he was “Godly” enough to serve in the army, but his proficiency with firearms
soon convinced them he might be a good fit.
Christopher Wallace was a member of Monk Eastman's Gang.
Monk’s enlistment made quite a splash in the papers, coming just weeks after his release from the Clinton Prison, where he’d spent the last two-plus years for burglary.
War was nothing compared to his time on
the streets of New York. Monk Eastman had been shot twelve times in gang fights
and cut just as many more. Soldiering was a walk in the park compared to his
previous life.
One story said he knocked out a
particularly annoying German machine gun nest single-handedly. “Monk crawled
forward on his stomach and blew them up with a Mills bomb. The hail of lead
that swept over him shredded away the heavy marching order pack he carried on
his back.”
Another time, when his regiment fell back,
Monk volunteered to stay at the front and carry wounded men off the
battlefield.
When he came back from the war, Monk went
straight, or as straight as a former gangster could.
Fat Jones, who served in the Forty-Seventh
Regiment with Monk, hired him to repair cars at fifty dollars a week. “I don’t
care what they say,” exclaimed Fat, “the Monk had gone straight since he come
back from France.”
Most recently, the Monk gave up working on
cars and opened a bird shop over on Broadway in Brooklyn.
The cops weren’t so sure. They were
working on another angle. They believed he’d gone back to his old ways and was
busy trafficking drugs and booze, with an occasional break-in here and there
thrown in for good measure.
That’s the thing about the East End. No
one knew for sure which side you’re on—allegiances were fluid and changed from
day to day like a man’s name. How could it be any different when you hung out
in Bowery dives with names like—the Flea Bag, Suicide Hall, the Bucket of
Blood, and Last Man’s Lunch?
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