Fausti (The Fist) Dellacava runs the mob from his clubhouse in Greenwich Village. The Fist's needs are simple - he wants everything. And for a while, he succeeds; even his bookmaker, growing gaunt from the strain of it, makes sure that The Fist never loses a bet, even if the team he's wagered on doesn't win the game. His young nephew and namesake has a far more modest agenda - he wants to marry his longtime girlfriend, Concetta, and get a "real" job unconnected to the mob. Unlike his uncle, however, young Fausti finds the going tough from the beginning - he can't seem to escape the family name and its connections.
Despite their differences, on one point uncle and nephew are in total agreement: "I don't want to go to jail!" When it appears that the law is rapidly closing in on The Fist, he undertakes a bizarre scheme to avoid that fate.

Chapter One

You would never think that Greenwich Village, whose streets are famed for palette and pen, would be the home of the nation's biggest and most dangerous Mafia outfit. The Village daylight is an artist's assistant. Perhaps it is the metallic content of the old buildings that causes a reflection seen nowhere else in the city. Unlike so many other parts of New York, the Village sky has not yet been stolen. Stand on a Greenwich Village street in the early morning and see the night sky lighten and break into streaks of rose, and you envision life with an unclouded eye. The light and the artists using it made the Village famous, and deflected attention from a criminal mob that was started by Lucky Luciano and went through homicidal maniacs like Albert Anastasia and Caesar De Francisi and into the hands of the silent, deadly Fausti Dellacava, or The Fist.

The tenement streets of the Dellacavas' end at Washington Square park, where the sun glistens on the park's white marble arch -- 77 feet high, 30 feet wide, and built in 1895 at a cost of $128.000, which at the time was enough to buy the Ukraine. Rosetta Dellacava and Gina Lauretano used to take their infants in carriages to the park and sit on benches alongside the arch as the children slept. Little Fausti was in one carriage. In the other was Concetta Lauretano. The two were never to get much farther apart.

The arch stands over the first signpost of Fifth Avenue, which begins its long stroll northward through the city's splendor. In the park around the monument, sunlight splashing onto lawns between walks turned the grass blinding green.

This glory is tarnished immediately by the history of the pin oaks, oriental planes, yellow locusts, ash, and American elm trees in the park that once were used as gallows, and people thronged to the park to see men swing for such heinous crimes as burglary, pickpocketing, and skin color.

The Village that became famous to America was formed by three migrations, the Italians first, then a second from the west of Ireland, and the third, Americans calling themselves bohemians. Into the narrow crooked streets of Greenwich Village, alleys really, came artists, philosophers, poets, writers, loungers, and air inspectors.

Washington Square is lined by buildings of New York University, many of them two-story Greek Revivals. The Greek Revivals form the north side of the park. On the east side is a bronze statue of Garibaldi, donated by the Italians of New York in 1888. On the ground floor of 100 Washington Square East is the Museum of Living Art, with Picasso's The Three Musicians, Léger's The City, and Mondrian's Composition in White and Red.

And there is a large, ugly NYU building, with a painful history: Sing Sing Prison convicts were used to cut the stones. On the east side of the square, number 22 Washington Place, now college buildings, was the address of a building that was hailed as completely fireproof in 1911. It housed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on the eighth through tenth floors. One Saturday, thin paper hanging over blouse-making machines caught fire on the eighth floor. One hundred and twenty-six women and twenty men between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one were locked inside the factory to prevent them from leaving during the day's work. A sign on the wall read "If you don't come to work on Sunday, don't come on Monday." The fire then moved to the ninth-floor workroom, and the lint in the air exploded. Women in flames began jumping from the windows.

Some leaped into the elevator shaft and landed on the roofs of two small elevators. The bodies of young women slammed with the force of steel atop the elevators, driving the elevators into the basement, where they remained immobile.

As the fire engines had no ladder that could go over seven stories, all the young women on the higher floors jumped from the windows. Three held hands and leaped into the sky together. All these young women hitting the sidewalk caused a famous lead in the World newspaper:

Thud, Dead.

Thud, Dead.

Thud, Dead.

At Madame Blanchard's Rooming House, number 61 Washington Square South, the roomers at various times included Theodore Dreiser, Adelina Patti, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, James Oppenheim, Henri Matisse, René Dubos, and Alan Seeger. The Village is where Henry James wrote Washington Square, Washington Irving wrote "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Fall of the House of Usher." Around at 133 MacDougal Street, there were Eugene O'Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay. John Masefield scrubbed floors in Luke O'Connor's barroom up on Greenwich Avenue.

Once, in the NYU buildings, faculty member Morse experimented with telegraphy. Walt Whitman was in an upstairs room. This was more than well balanced by another faculty member, Samuel Colt, who perfected a revolver to shoot people. They call it the gun that won the West, but it came from two blocks off the West 4th Street subway.

When The Fist took over the streets only yards away from Colt's old housing, he decreed, which is the right word, that anybody caught with a gun on the block would be summarily executed. "A gun proves you got bad intentions." One of which could be to shoot The Fist. Anybody leaving his gun in his car, under the seat or in the glove compartment, also dies.

In other places they talk of gun control. On The Fist's street at all times there is nothing to control because there is no gun or there is no you.

The streets of Dellacava began as a black neighborhood. In 1860, number 218 Sullivan Street was the First African ME church. By 1879, it became the Colored Bethel church. The buildings were called tenements, with rooms no larger than packing cases. There were six and seven people in two small bedrooms, with a bathroom for the floor in the hall and a tub in the kitchen. The blacks held the buildings for only so long. In the annals of the city, blacks arrive, whites flee. Except in this succession, Italian immigrants took Sullivan and Thompson streets, with Lutherans slipping into two buildings, and the Italians said they were theirs forever. If you don't like it, then watch out. Exit Lutherans.

The Village, however, was worthy of its beginnings by the way bohemians were able to live and grow famous amidst Irish and Italians, the breeds most suspicious of outsiders, and capable at any odd moment of exploding into uncommon violence. Italians were comfortable with bohemians because they had less money and did not protest. Poor people rise in fury at any worthwhile protest. Always, the striker is despised.

The Irish living along the West Side docks were too naïve to believe that two men would share a room for any reason except to save rent. As for two middle-aged women living together, it was unthinkable, it was desperately sinful, for anybody to have a trace of suspicion of them being lesbians, about which the Irish knew nothing.

Copyright © 2001 Jimmy Breslin. All rights reserved.