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The two-lane, all-weather road was dark. The towns it passed through were small, consisting of little more than a white church and a shuttered general store or filling station. They drove fast with their lights off, trusting to a starry sky and a sliver-thin moon.
A town constable and two Prohibition officers spotted the convoy and gave chase in a Ford. The bootleggers in the Buick that was protecting the rear of the convoy saw their headlights.
“Cops?”
“Hijackers?”
Either way, they weren’t stopping.
The Prohibition officers started shooting their revolvers.
“Hijackers!” shouted the bootleggers.
“Hold on!” The driver stomped hard on the Buick’s four-wheel brakes. The car stopped abruptly. The Ford, equipped only with two-wheel brakes, skidded past, the officers shooting. The Buick’s occupants, convinced that the cops were hijackers, opened fire with automatic pistols, wounding the constable.
Ahead lay Patchogue, a fair-size town, with a lace mill, streetlamps, and a business district along the highway, which was renamed Main Street as it passed through. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had called an emergency meeting to denounce the Suffolk County sheriff for failing to arrest the bootleggers who were racing across Long Island nightly. The meeting was running late. The guest speaker—a wealthy duck farmer and a leading light in the Ku Klux Klan, which had declared war on rumrunners and bootleggers—was likening the sheriff to “an un-American Bolshevik,” when he was interrupted by a telephone report that an auto chase had resulted in the murder of a constable.
“Men!” bellowed the duck farmer. “If the sheriff won’t stop ’em, we will!”
He led a citizens’ posse into the street to ambush the bootleggers’ autos. The volunteer fire department stretched their hook and ladder across the highway.
• • •
THE BOOTLEGGERS, fearing more trouble in a larger, better-lit town, and still fifty long miles from the city, pulled their cars to the side of the road and sent a scout ahead. He reported that the fire department had blocked the highway and citi
zens were arming themselves with squirrel guns. The drivers turned to the boss—a former stickup man from Brooklyn who had put up the cash on behalf of associates there to buy the Haig & Haig from the fishermen—and hoped he had a plan.
His name was Steven Smith. But his men and the New York police called him Professor Smith, because he was always thinking and could usually be counted upon to come up with some way out of a fix like this one.
“Does the town have a church?” the Professor asked.
“A whole bunch,” said the scout.
Professor Smith chose one a distance from Main Street and sent two of his cousins to splash gasoline on the front steps and set it afire. Flames leaped to the steeple. When the fire department ran to put it out, and the citizens followed to watch, three Buicks, a Cadillac, and a Packard raced on toward New York with their Haig & Haig.
Hours later, the Brooklyn bootleggers finally felt close enough to New York to sigh in relief. Almost home. Less than a mile to the garage that the Professor had rented under the Fulton Street Elevated.
• • •
MARAT ZOLNER had a five-ton Army truck that had been modified with a bigger motor and pneumatic tires. When fully loaded, it still wouldn’t top thirty-five miles an hour, but whoever chased it would have to contend with five armed men wearing blue uniforms in the Oldsmobile behind it.
“What’s taking them so long?” asked Zolner’s driver, a member of a once powerful, now rapidly fading West Side gang called the Gophers. The driver knew the tall, lean Marat Zolner only as Matt, who hired him often for high-paying jobs.
They had parked under the El and had been sitting there for hours. The driver was jumpy. Marat Zolner was patient, an icy presence in the shadows, unmoving, yet taut as a steel spring.
“They might have broken down. They might have run into cops. They might have run into someone who wanted to take it away from them.”
“Like us,” the driver snickered.
“Here they come.”
Five big town cars weighted down with heavy loads were pulling up, drivers blinking headlights for their garage to open its door, unaware that the man inside was tied up with a gag in his mouth. Zolner waved to his men in the Oldsmobile and they piled out with guns drawn.
• • •
THE DRIVER of the Cadillac stopped short. “This don’t look good.”
“Relax,” said Professor Smith. “It’s only cops.”
