Thomas Adcock - Brooklyn Noir 3 - Nothing but the Truth

“It’s not Lulu,” he would snarl, spelling it out. “It’s Loo-Loo, you stupid moron.” This was the big put-down of 1953, the gilded age of “moron” jokes on the tube.

Anyhow, Loo-Loo’s skin was thick. He had tons of friends. He was a first-class punch-ball player. He could fire a pink Spalding — duly pronounced spal deen — the whole length between a pair of sewer covers in a neat trajectory. Automatic homer. On President Street, this was status.

The other thing about Loo-Loo’s popularity was that Al Scharfsky owned the Creamflake. When your father sells chocolate cookies, jelly doughnuts, and charlotte russe, there is no shortage of kids who will gladly accompany you to the bakery for the sweet possibility of a handout.

Jack Horn was Al’s partner. Jack was in charge of cakes. Al himself took care of the breads and rolls. Everything was baked in old stone ovens with piles of coal that glowed eternally in the corners.

Loo-Loo hung around sometimes. Jack and his father would let him squeeze jelly into the doughnuts, using a metal contraption with a lever and a long spout. Sometimes, the Russian help baked alligator-shaped bread with raisin eyes, especially for Loo-Loo. Ten o’clock at night or so, the cops drove by to collect bags of “stale,” leftover breads and rolls which they took back to the 71st Precinct station house on Empire Boulevard.

Along Loo-Loo’s stretch of Utica was the usual constellation of neighborhood shops — fruits and vegetables, butcher, freshly slaughtered chickens, fish, dresses, radio repair, barbers, and a candy store with a soda fountain. Two blocks further up, the retail pattern repeated, including a bakery just like the Creamflake, only it was called the Union because it was near Union Street.

Although people preferred shopping as few steps as possible from where they lived, they would sometimes cross the continent into the next block. Which is why Al Scharfsky considered the Union Bakery his arch competitor, especially in the summer of ’53 with the place under mysterious new management.

Trolley cars once clanged their way up and down Utica, their motormen wearing neckties. Kids put pennies on the tracks and they got flattened out when the cars rattled past. Now there were buses, though the old tracks remained on the cobblestones as parallel reminders of the past, beyond Eastern Parkway into the unknown and ominous infinity of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

This was Loo-Loo’s universe. President Street terminated at the enormous Lincoln Terrace Park, which separated the Andy Hardy tranquility of Crown Heights from the mean and dangerous Brownsville, birthplace of Murder Incorporated. While the park had plenty of green spaces for a game, the kids preferred the “gutter,” a.k.a. the street. Two grand maple trees on either side were markers for first and third. The sewer cover in the middle was second.

Crown Heights was not at all like the fabled and dangerous Brooklyn of Cagney movies. It was more like some small town in middle America, at least the small-town America image perpetrated by Hollywood’s immigrant studio heads.

Very innocent. Very tranquil. There were rows of one-and two-family houses, some of them in the Renaissance Revival, Georgian, and Romanesque styles, sometimes bookended by five-story apartment houses on each corner. Looming shade trees, elms and sycamores, lined the sidewalks like protective uncles.

But for some, danger seemed near at all times. Something in the air, obviously lurking yet inexplicable; a conventional notion that someone was coming to get you if you didn’t watch your ass. One minute, everything seemed safe in the neighborhood. Then a cop car would come tearing down Utica on the way to a murder or a holdup someplace, its siren splitting the June air like heat lightning.

At the supper table, to make matters even more unsettling, Loo-Loo would sit staring into the dry chicken on his plate — chicken cooked to within an inch of its taste — exchanging looks with Rita, his little sister, while Al Scharfsky sang disturbing arias.

“It’s changing, you know. The whole neighborhood. They’re coming in.”

“Who’s coming, Pop?” Loo-Loo asked.

“People. The Immigrants. Coloreds. Spanish. People from Aruba.”

“Where’s Aruba, Pop?”

“It’s down there. The rich people go there for gambling and ha-cha-cha and the criminals from there come to Crown Heights.”

“What’s wrong if they want to come here, Pop? Maybe you’ll sell more rye bread.”

“They don’t eat rye bread, Loo-Loo. They eat their own food. Things with fish in it.”

“Maybe they’ll like your rye bread.”

“Maybe,” Al said, then changed the subject. “No sooner we got rid of Murder Incorporated, we got to deal with this element.”

“What’s an element?” Rita asked.

“A criminal element. Criminals are attracted to this neighborhood, honey.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rita, nodding her head, dimly satisfied.

Loo-Loo’s mother raised her hand to say, “They’re just poor people, Al. Besides, Murder Inc. around here, that was ten, twenty years ago.”

“Oh, they’re still around,” said Al. “Believe me, Dotty. And nearby — just over into Brownsville.” He lowered his voice, so as not to scare the kids, which scared the kids. “You saw on the Senator Kefauver hearings a couple years ago — those mobsters. Albert Anastasia. Frank Erickson. Frank Costello. They’re still around assassinating each other left and right. Some of them live right around here, probably.”

“I never saw Frank Costello on President Street,” said Dotty.

Al leaned closer to his wife.

“You know those people who just bought the Union Bakery?” Al paused. “They could be connected to the mob.”

Dotty snickered, which did nothing to soothe the frightened kids. “You’re crazy, Al. What would the mob want with a bakery? And why are you whispering?”

“I’m just saying, the criminal element’s all around and we have to be careful. Furthermore, look what happened to that shoe salesman last year — what’s-his-name, Arnold Schuster. A Brooklyn guy. One of us. An innocent citizen.”

Loo-Loo, an inveterate reader of the tabloids his father brought home every day and likewise an ardent viewer of the Kefauver hearings, enlightened his mother: “Anastasia had him bumped off. Schuster snitched to the cops about Willie Sutton the bank robber.”

“Where’d you get that?” Al asked his boy.

“From Kefauver. Remember, Pop?”

Al, grumpily attempting to keep control of the conversation, replied quickly. “Arnold Schuster had nothing to do with Murder Inc., which was before you were born, Loo-Loo. What you say we change the subject?”

“Murder Incorporated were the ones who threw Abe Reles out the window,” Loo-Loo now informed his goggle-eyed sister.

“Where’d you hear that?” Al barked.

“I dunno,” said Loo-Loo. Not wishing to be forbidden access to tabs, he lied, “The schoolyard.”

“Ah-hah! Schoolyard University,” Al said with disgust.

“They said this guy Abe Reles gave names of gangsters to the G-men,” continued Loo-Loo in a rush, “and the detectives were supposed to be guarding him, but then he fell out of the window at the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island and it’s a big mystery because they don’t know if he was pushed out of the window of room 623 or if he was trying to escape.”

Al eyed his son despairingly. “You know the room number, I see?”

The boy was on a roll. “They called Abe Reles ‘the canary who sang but couldn’t fly.’”

Al pushed away his plate. “Who’s feeding you this trash?”

“I’m interested in crime. Just like you, Pop.”

I’d prefer you to be interested in long division,” Al said, after which he grumped into the living room where he could read the Post and maybe the Brooklyn Eagle — and certainly the Journal-American and the World and the Daily Mirror , these three being the reading mainstays of the bathroom — after which he would probably doze off, having begun his day at the bakery at the usual starting time of 5 o’clock in the a.m.