The Man Who Spoke Out-of-Turn

I never thought he’d have the cojones to show his bare face in print again. I was wrong, he did and bad-mouthed the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, as he did in 2011, the last time the Circus came to Albany.

He’s Steve Barnes, the former restaurant reviewer for the Albany Times-Union newspaper, a man whose sharp tongue earned him a pasting in a restaurant parking lot by two men allegedly hired by the owner of another restaurant he’d been unkind to in print. The men were arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault in Albany Police Court but acquitted at a trial. Apparently, the jury thought Barnes had deserved his ‘review’ in the parking lot.

At the Times-Union Center show most recently, Barnes reaffirmed being bored by the nine tigers: “…much less fun than even the laziest house cat; they sit on trapezoidal platforms, snarling and swatting at the trainer’s stick before rolling over on their backs or putting paws the size of snowshoes onto a pylon. One of them defecated in the middle of the act. That was my verdict, too.

“The sad fact is,” Barnes continues, “that tigers and elephants and their wild brethren simply aren’t entertaining. The elephants—big, sad lumberers—are as placid as a pond and about as interesting to watch. Ponies, donkeys and llamas trot in circles. Some jump over things. It’s stupefyingly retro.”

Sadly, this man doesn’t get that it’s a wonder, a delight, to simply witness these magnificent creatures close-up—the tigers as they leap, snarl and slap their great paws in the air; the elephants as they trumpet loudly, lumber and queue up in a Conga line, front legs up on the backs of their sisters. The poet nailed it:

“Breathes there the man,
With soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said:
“Look, daddy, the tigers!!!
Mommy, the elephants!!!”

In a spirit of Reconciliation (Mr. Barnes does write a decent theatre review and he said he likes dogs), a word of caution, friend. Elephants have historically long memories so if you notice a big lumbering one in your parking lot, stay indoors.

Robert Knightly

The Tale of Two Jacks: The Gangster and the President II

Denis Foley, a forensic anthropologist and historical archeologist, is author of the true crime thriller Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill (NK Burns Pub., 2006). He has a passion for researching the Irish in America whether they be gangsters, martyrs or rebels; most recently “On Tour and Exiled; James Connolly in America 1902-1905” in the 2013 issue of Saothar, the Journal of the Irish Labor History Society. He is working on his debut novel, Murder Most Irish, set in the Bronx and the Inwood Section of Manhattan. This is part two of his Tale of Two Jacks.

Robert Knightly

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Part 2: A President Killed by Gangsters?

The Joe Kennedy-Dan O’Connell connection was cemented again in early 1960 when Joe called Dan to get his endorsement of his son’s run for the presidency during the Democratic Primaries. The two business partners came to an agreement and John F. Kennedy got Albany’s delegates. Later, JFK himself telephoned Dan at his home to say thanks. Robert Kennedy visited Dan O’Connell to get his blessing for his run for Senator from New York in 1968. In a lighter moment, Erastus Corning 2nd’s campaign manager once described the Albany Machine as an organization that would be prosecuted today under the RICO Act. Another Irish-American, Joe Kennedy, might also fall under the statute. Franklin Roosevelt when challenged on his appointment of Joseph Kennedy to the Securities & Exchange Commission reportedly said, “Sometimes it takes a crook to catch a crook.”

Although Joe Kennedy Sr. himself had been mentioned as a presidential contender, the business practices on Wall Street of Roosevelt’s former Ambassador to Great Britain and his isolationist leanings prior to WW II tarred his candidacy as not to be taken seriously. Yet, the senior Kennedy’s illicit contacts with alcohol distributors such as Dan O’Connell and the underworld lords in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic States served his son’s Presidential ambitions.

In his 2007 memoir Point to Point Navigation, published by Random house, Gore Vidal, Jacqueline Kennedy’s distant relative and Kennedy White House insider, repeats the idea of a Mafia conspiracy surrounding the death of JFK. Among the first to embrace this tale was Thomas Hartmann and Lamar Waldron in Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, The Plan For a Coup in Cuba and the Murder of JFK. Hartmann and Waldron tell how three Mafia godfathers, Carlos Marcello (New Orleans), Santo Trafficante (Tampa, Fla. and Havana, Cuba) and Johnny Roselli (Chicago), while in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, organized a plot to kill Fidel Castro, called Plan for a Coup in Cuba, code-named the C Day Plan. The three gangsters thought themselves immune from federal prosecution because they were working for the CIA.

During the 1960 elections, Joseph Kennedy reputedly paid off mobsters in Chicago and Philadelphia to deliver inner city wards to his son. Afterward, the gang leaders anticipated an unofficial truce between the new Democratic Administration and themselves. Attorney General Robert Kennedy broke that truce, as Gore Vidal saw it, to seek glory and self-aggrandizement; others believe Robert Kennedy had become genuinely outraged by the extent of mob corruption in American life when he was Chief Counsel to the McClellan Committee’s Investigation of Organized Crime. Naively, perhaps, Robert Kennedy decided to expose and prosecute the underworld as well as labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa who had Mafia links. When he did this, he put himself and his elder brother in harm’s way. In retaliation, the mobsters initially decided to kill Robert Kennedy, but Carlos Marcello reportedly told Santo Trafficante: “When a dog bothers you, you don’t cut off its tail.” Thus, the murder plot against the Thirty-Fifth President of the United States was hatched. As early as 1962, Trafficante predicted the assassination during a meeting about a Teamster’s loan. Trafficante also told wealthy Cuban exile, Jose Aleman: “Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.” When Aleman suggested Kennedy would be re-elected, Trafficante allegedly said, “No, Jose, he is going to be hit.”

The trio reputedly targeted the President twice before Dallas. Once on November 2,1963, in Chicago but the motorcade was called off, and again aborted in Tampa on November 18,1963, just four days before Dallas. The gangsters’ plot to murder Kennedy was incompletely investigated and subsequently discounted by the Warren Commission, the conspiracy theorists believe. They point to Commission member Allen Welsh Dulles, longest-serving director of the CIA (1953–1961), who had to be aware of the unsavory Mafia-CIA link, having orchestrated earlier assassination plots against Castro. According to biographer Evan Thomas, in Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon and Schuster, 2002), Robert Kennedy reportedly told his closest aide that Carlos Marcello had ordered his brother’s death. The future Senator from New York and Presidential candidate himself could not reveal publicly the nature of The C Day Plan and Mafia involvement for fear that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind. This is the substance of the claims of the conspiracy theorists.

America loves its presidents and gangsters. The Irish American community worshiped John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, and vicariously enjoyed Legs Diamond’s exploits. Legs’ parents were born in Ireland. Gentleman Jack dated gorgeous showgirls and defied authority. He appeared immortal. The poor Irish exiles, experiencing the endless toil and low status of immigrants, arguably yearned for the independence, glamour and recklessness of the gangster and the legitimacy conferred upon themselves by having one of their own as President.

The deaths of the two Jacks, one shot at close range and the other from a distance of 531 feet, illustrate how America’s illusions can suppress the truth. Legs Diamond died in Albany, shot by the Albany police. Evidence that Dan O’Connell ordered the hit wasn’t revealed, although many in Albany knew, until Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy published O Albany in 1983, and confirmed at length in a filmed interview in the WMHT documentary Prohibition Story: All Over Albany, in 2011. A dying Detective McElveney reportedly told his daughter Betty, when she questioned him as to the circumstances of the Legs Diamond murder: “Fitz knows and he ain’t talkin’, God knows and he ain’t talkin’, and I ain’t talkin’.” But he did talk, they say, when drunk and in the company of his friends at Albany’s Fire Engine Company Four.

Legs’ Watervliet policeman-bodyguard was tactful enough to be absent the night Dets. McElveney and Fitzpatrick executed Legs in his bed. Those who swear by the truism What Goes Around Comes Around wouldn’t blink an eye on hearing that, in 1945, McElveney shot to death his former partner Fitzpatrick, then the Albany Chief of Police, in his office on Eagle Street, over a long-simmering grievance. He pled guilty to Murder 2nd Degree and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but only served eleven, pardoned by Gov. Averill Harriman in 1957. John McElveney died of cancer in 1968.
In 1977, the Congress set up the Select Committee on Assassinations to reexamine JFK’s murder in Dallas. The New York City Medical Examiner, Michael Baden, was picked to head a team of eight other vastly experienced pathologists. After months of reviewing the forensic evidence, the Committee issued a “hybrid report” (from which Baden dissented): three shots were fired by Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository and a single shot by an unidentified shooter from the grassy knoll above Dealy Plaza. Dr. Baden’s verdict: “People will go on believing what they want to believe.”

© 2015 Denis Foley, PhD, Curator, Lewis Henry Morgan Institute, SUNY-IT, Utica-Rome

Sources:

Baden, Michael, M.D., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner (Random House, 1989).
Hartman, Thomas and Waldron, Lamar, Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, The Plan For a Coup in Cuba and the Murder of JFK (Counterpoint Press, 2008).
Kennedy, William: Legs (Penguin Books, 1975); O Albany (Viking Press, 1983).
Leamer, Laurence, The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (Harper Collins, 2001).
Levine, Gary, Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond: Anatomy of a Gangster (Purple Mountain Press, 1995).
Robinson, Frank S., Machine Politics: A Study of Albany’s O’Connells (Transaction Press, 1977);
Robinson, Frank S., Albany’s O’Connell Machine (The Washington Park Spirit, Inc., 1973).
Thomas, Evan, Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon and Schuster, 2002).
Vidal, Gore, Point-to-Point Navigation (Doubleday, 2006).
Foley, Denis: Field Notes (1981-2015).

The Tale of Two Jacks: The Gangster and the President

Denis Foley, a forensic anthropologist and historical archeologist, is author of the true crime thriller Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill (NK Burns Pub., 2006). He has a passion for researching the Irish in America whether they be gangsters, martyrs or rebels; most recently “On Tour and Exiled; James Connolly in America 1902-1905” in the 2013 issue of Saothar, the Journal of the Irish Labor History Society. He is working on his debut novel, Murder Most Irish, set in the Bronx and the Inwood Section of Manhattan.

Robert Knightly

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The Gangster Killed by a Politician

Former City of Watervliet Police Chief Francis Landrigan claimed that in order to understand who killed Jack Legs Diamond, aged 34, in a Dove Street rooming house in Albany on December 18, 1931, you had to go to the City of Watervliet next door and look into the affairs of the Hess brothers, Seymour known as ‘Big Mouth’ and Eugene. The brothers were Legs Diamond’s lieutenants in Watervliet, a small industrial city just north of Albany on the Hudson River. It was known as the Barbary Coast in the late Nineteenth Century because of its many bars and lawlessness. Eugene Hess was a clerk in the Troy Law Offices of Dan Pryor, Legs Diamond’s attorney. Seymour Hess, a member of the upstate Poka-Dot gang, guarded Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Kiki Roberts on Legs’s orders during his trial in Troy for kidnapping. Seymour was charged with keeping Kiki, the girlfriend, and Mrs. Alice Diamond, the wife, apart. Legs’s bodyguard, Watervliet Police Sgt. Frederick M. Broderick, and Legs were inseparable during the trial. Yet, Broderick was mysteriously absent the night Diamond died.

Legs routinely frequented Watervliet and the Village of Menands to gamble and drink in the Hess speakeasies. In Menands, he visited a ‘safe house’ and his vehicle fleet garaged at Tillinghast and Broadway. He owned garages in Watervliet as well and would bring booze in from Chestertown to Watervliet in funeral hearses. The Watervliet bootleggers as well as those from the City of Troy across the Hudson from Albany threw in with Diamond for access to his liquor distribution network. Diamond also operated a distillery in the Town of Halfmoon in adjacent Saratoga County. Dan O’Connell, the Democratic Machine Boss in Albany, also supplied the area with beer and liquor. He owned Hedrick’s Brewery. Dan and his brother Solly ran numbers, the baseball pool and prostitution in Albany and its environs. City-slicker Legs Diamond was not welcome in Dan’s City.

Dan O’Connell concentrated on the local baseball pool and bootlegging and politics. He sent his Albany Night Squad detectives, Sgt. William Fitzpatrick and Det. John McElveney, to warn Legs to stay out of Albany. O’Connell owned the Albany Police. Their squad cars accompanied caravans of liquor, transported from Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s warehouses in Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River and through the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation (still today the preferred route for contraband), to O’Connell’s warehouses in Albany. Dan and Joseph Kennedy, the millionaire father of JFK, were business partners. Kennedy had set up shop downtown in the Standard Building at 112 State Street, occupying the penthouse.

Legs Diamond, the young interloper from the streets of Manhattan, owner of the fashionable HotsyTotsy Club in Harlem, exiled himself from NYC to Acra, 130 miles away in the Catskills, after shooting to death two Club patrons. He’d stayed one step ahead of the NYPD. A hijacker of fellow bootleggers, Legs survived assassination attempts by the likes of Dutch Schultz and Vannie Higgins. The Higgins gang shot him five times; as a result, Legs, once known as ‘Gentleman Jack’, became ‘The Clay Pigeon.’ He retreated Upstate to recoup, and by all accounts was prospering.

Legs Diamond was one of the most successful of Prohibition Era gangsters, a shrewd businessman who accumulated millions. He was successor to Arnold Rothstein, whose bodyguard he’d been. Legs followed Rothstein’s example, branching out from booze to the more lucrative heroin and cocaine trade, traveling to London and Brussels on that business. Rothstein, labeled the ‘Gangster of Gangsters’, at his death was the richest of the Organized Crime tycoons and the leading illicit drug importer. Diamond reputedly killed Rothstein for putting the Feds onto his drug business. Darling of the national press and symbol of the Prohibition Era, Diamond mistakenly believed he didn’t have to play the Albany game of sharing the spoils with the Political Machine.

Pulitzer Prize-novelist and Albany newspaperman, William Kennedy, in a 2011 lecture at Freedom Hall in Troy, told a spellbound audience that as a reporter for the Albany Times Union he’d interviewed Dan O’Connell who admitted that he’d ordered his Night Squad detectives to eliminate Diamond. The details of the plot are pure Albany.

Legs had made a fatal error when he picked the rooming house at 67 Dove St., Albany, for his lodgings.

Sixty-seven is adjacent to 65 Dove, owned then by Charles Loftus, Democratic Committeeman for the Sixteenth Ward. Loftus informed Ward Leader Harry Wands of Legs’ presence as well as the times that he came and went. Legs was known to frequent the Kenmore Hotel, a jazz scene hotspot in Downtown Albany, speakeasies like the Parody Club on Hudson Avenue, and Kiki’s apartment on upscale Ten Broeck Street. Arriving home drunk in the early hours of December 18, 1931, he was passed out on the bed when Dets. Fitzpatrick and McElveney entered his room and fired three bullets into his head. A passing newsboy claimed he saw the killers in their fedoras speed away in a red Packard. A female witness reported seeing the detectives as they left the Dove St. address. The Albany Times Union’s presses on Sheridan Avenue were typesetting the story of Diamond’s murder before it had occurred; Police Reporters Joe O’Heaney and Ray O’Connor had been tipped by the Night Squad. As Robert Coleman, former Albany Assistant Police Chief, noted, in pithy understatement, “The Night Squad visited Legs that night.”

Back at Police Headquarters on Eagle Street, Det. Sgt. Fitzpatrick announced that he alone had shot Diamond. Det. McElveney let his superior take the credit. Edward O’Connell, Chairman of the Albany Democratic Party, thought that his younger brother Dan should have just roughed up Legs and escorted him out of town over the Dunn Memorial Bridge to the City of Rensselaer. Edward O’Connell, senior partner in the law firm of O’Connell and Aronowitz, hated bad publicity like the firestorm that erupted around Legs’ murder. But he needn’t have been overly concerned. Albany’s worst-kept secret was never revealed in the press. The Albany County District Attorney John T. Delaney did travel to Boston to interview Kiki Roberts, who’d fled to her mother’s house in New England, but no indictments were forthcoming. The police were reported by Hearst’s Times Union to be of the opinion that New York City gangsters Dutch Schultz or Fats McCarthy or the local Oley brothers killed Legs. A stolen car recovered on the Bethlehem and Albany Line on Route 9 was described as the killers’, abandoned and pointed south towards New York City.

Lawyer Edward O’Connell bridged the two sub-cultures in Albany. His brothers, Solly and Dan, ran the streets and the rackets. The patrician Anglican and Dutch Reformed elite—powerbrokers since the Civil War Reconstruction Period—were entrenched in the professions and business, as represented by Lt. Governor Edwin Corning. His son, Erastus Corning the 2nd, was to become Albany’s longest sitting Mayor, a 42-year-tenure, and Dan O’Connell’s successor as head of the Democratic Machine.

The Hon. Eugene Devine, a former Justice of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, demurred, nostalgically characterizing the Organization as more like a family, a clan, than a machine. Clergy, cops, wardmen, newspapers, big business and mom-and-pops had ties to the ‘family’ and Dan, the paterfamilias, saw to all receiving a piece of the pie. Judges, the Police Chief, the Mayor, all made pilgrimages to Democratic Party Headquarters at 75 State Street, or Dan’s home on Whitehall Road. Two former associates, an Albany Alderman and a Ward leader, remembered that O’Connell kept $250,000 in his safe at home while another insider recalled that Congressman Lee O’Brien carried $10,000 with him in a satchel at the Elks Club, “in case Dan called and money had to be immediately distributed.” Loyalty to the ‘family’ had its rewards, and, conversely, what was seen as disloyal, punished. An oft-repeated story has it that when Dan was told of a Democrat job-holder being seen at a Republican candidate’s fund-raiser, a phone call lost the man his employment with the State.

Legs Diamond didn’t stand a chance in Albany.

© 2015 Denis Foley, PhD, Curator, Lewis Henry Morgan Institute, SUNY-IT, Utica-Rome

(Next: JFK and the Albany Connection)

The March 17th Blues

It’s Saturday and it’s raining but if I were back in the City, it wouldn’t matter; it’d roll off my back. But I’m in Albany, where I live now. Don’t say anything, like “How can you call that cesspool of corruption home??”, as a friend indelicately put it when I announced my plan to move. Come to think of it, Rose’s response when I first broached the subject: “What??? Where!!!” fell short of unalloyed joy. This depression I feel in my bones on March 17th is only for today. ‘Buck up, boyo,’ the Irish spirits whisper, ‘the Thruway is a two-way street.’

Modern Albany was practically invented by the Irish, after they’d ousted their Dutch Protestant ‘betters’ who’d held power since the Civil War. Dan O’Connell won at the polls in 1921 and his Democratic Machine ran the City forever after, today still. Dan came from the Irish South End where his father owned a Bar. He cannily persuaded Erastus Corning the Younger, a Brahmin scion, to throw in with him, and the rest was history. Corning was Mayor of Albany for 42 years till his death in 1983, but if you wanted a big enough favor, you visited Boss Dan O’Connell, hat-in-hand, at home, up until he died in 1977. These were the days of the Ward Men whom you met on the street or in a Bar on Election Day to receive $5 for your vote. An Irish version of The Godfather.

Two things I know about St. Patrick’s Day in Albany: Go to the Ancient Order of Hibernians Hall on Ontario Street for the corned-beef-and-cabbage, boiled potatoes, carrots and two kinds of Irish Soda bread; and skip the Parade. The Parade actually occurs on the Saturday before the 17th. How un-New York is that! I went to it once, and was appalled. The Albany cops couldn’t control the corners at the intersections along Washington Avenue (or didn’t know how). On Parade Day, The NYPD would post officers on foot and horse on both sides of Fifth Avenue from East 45th St. to 86th St., then down 86th to Second Avenue, the last stop. (Of course, the APD has 350 cops while we had 35,000.) There were
Pipe Bands in the Albany Parade, but their leaders did not look like Detective Finbar Devine. Truly, no other human ever did. Six-feet-five inches, broad-shouldered and bull-chested, perennial Drum Major of the NYPD’s Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Corps; in kilts and the high Black Bear Hat, he strode up Fifth Avenue, marking cadence for his men with swings of his shillelagh-sized baton, like Finn MacCool straight out of the mists of Irish Myth. Finbar has been gone from us a good while now, doing his thing in the celestial Precincts, I like to think.

In The Day, it was a mix of pride and wild joy I felt marching up Fifth in the first rank of a uniformed column as a Sergeant of Police. We were hundreds but the crowds lining the route were thousands. Past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Cardinal, Mayor, et al preening in the grandstands on its steps, we moved past smartly to the wail of the pipes. New York loved us That Day and told us loudly. At the end of the march, we’d hit all the Irish Bars along Second Avenue, from 86th to 22nd Sts. Still in uniform, the drinks were free as were the women. Our destination was Molly Malone’s Pub, around the corner from the Police Academy on East 20th St. You’d have to shout over the din to be heard, the pipers competing with the juke box blaring out Danny Boy and The Wild Colonial Boy. I was in my 30s then and pronounced it good.

The world moves on; me, too. I know Albany cannot have the number and magical élan of those New York Irish bars I knew so well, now long gone. The world is drearier for it.

© 2015 Robert Knightly

The Pipes, the Pipes are Callin'…

The best plate of corned beef and cabbage to be had in Albany on St. Patrick’s Day is at the Hall of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) on Ontario Street downtown. Actually, I’m there on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day because that’s when the City of Albany celebrates The Day with two Parades. The regulation one is a Downtown event that attracts the politicians and ends in front of City Hall (first erected in the late 1600s by the Dutch, commonly referred to as The Orangemen, but not on this day). The other occurs in North Albany, historical seat of the Irish and their political power from the First World War to today. The North Albany Limericks run it on their turf and no outlander pols show their faces, I’m told.

Back at the AOH post-parade, the steam table is manned by six elderly Irishwomen in aprons, ladling out slabs of corned beef, steaming cabbage, carrots, and bread and butter to the throng on line (overwhelmingly male); the Irish soda bread (two kinds—white and brown) is already in baskets at the tables. Four other grandmotherly types circulate, working the lineup of the hungry, handing out pieces of soda bread like nurses tending to weary warriors as they stumble in from the battlefield. Two even older ladies—beatifically smiling, wrinkled faces—take your money at the entrance to the Hall, and push the raffle tickets: 3 for $5, you win a Basket of Cheer (what else?). The twelve of them—a Band of Good Faeries.

There’s entertainment. A kilted bagpiper is on a dais upfront. I pay attention as he describes his instrument, a two-drone bagpipe. A drone is the bag and he has to blow it up to play and as he demonstrates you realize what a perfect name is “drone”—pure onomatopoeia! Its range is merely nine notes but an experienced piper can “whiffle” to enhance the tune. Then, for the next twenty-five minutes, he plays—The Galway Piper, The Rakes of Clonmel, The Minstrel Boy, The Garry Owen, ending with the only one I can name, Amazing Grace. Marvelous! Stirring! And very loud! As the pipers played when the Irish faced the English down the Centuries. Queen Elizabeth I, when told that the Irish fought more fiercely on hearing the pipes, decreed death for their playing. Later, Cromwell would let you live but minus your fingers. In 1745, after the Battlle of Culloden, any Scot caught with a bagpipe was hung. The bagpiper, who led the Celtic armies into battle, was honored as the bravest of men, with the shortest of life expectancies.

Makes me wonder if there were English pipers?

© 2014 Robert Knightly

Pity the Poor Crows!

An Albany Eye On Crime

One day last winter at dusk I left my recliner in front of the TV (and a ‘Law & Order’ I had a nagging suspicion I’d seen before, more than once) to put on the ‘porch light’ to scare off muggers and make my neighbors feel unjustifiably secure. Truth is, I don’t have a porch, hence no ‘porch light’, since I live in a brick row house on Elm Street in beautiful Downtown Albany. I like my block because it lives up to its name: tall, stately, thick-bodied leafy trees sheltering up and down both sides of the street: Elms, Ficus, and Pears that don’t, however, bear fruit. It’s their look that comforts me. So, I turned on the outside light (one of those new bulbs that cost $35.00 and burn for all eternity) in the areaway (what we called it in Brooklyn) where you store the garbage cans a couple, three steps below street level. And then I saw the crows. By the thousands, in the trees, on telephone wires, atop streetlights, making a din of CAW! CAW! CAWS! Stunning, it filled me with awe of the marvelous world.

Then I read in the Times-Union, the local rag, that the City of Albany had brought in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency to drive the crows out of town. ‘Crow Dispersal’ by means of pyrotechnics and sound devices: fireworks and shooting off fake guns, I presume. In a Letter to the Editor, a reader, obviously a crow-lover, asked: ‘What is it that the crows are doing? Why is it they need to be killed?’ As if on cue, another reader replied: ‘They poop all over everything, cars, sidewalks, backyard, roofs. When I was a kid my mother and grandmother always warned me about bird droppings being real bad. I think we have the making here of a Public Health Crisis!’

And so began the annual Crow War! I don’t recall seeing many crows in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens where we lived before leaving the City. What I do remember is walking out of my apartment building each morning and being altered, electrified by the swell of music from the legion of small birds living in the trees and on the outcroppings of buildings. Instantly and forever, I became a bird-lover. Curious about the crow, I Googled him.

Crows are large, perching birds with glossy black plumage and a raucous voice. They rise early and make a lot of noise. Crows are very social and live in large extended family groups. A bunch of crows is called a flock or a ‘murder of crows’ A ‘murder’ because the flock will sometimes kill a dying or injured crow, it’s thought. Crows appear to be monogamous and can live 20 years or more. They’ve been congregating in large roosts in the fall and winter for as long as there have been crows. Roosts of tens of thousands of birds are common. But their arrival in cities is relatively recent. Since 1993, upwards of 50,000 crows have taken to roosting in large trees in the center of small Auburn, New York. Like Albany, Auburn declared war on the crows and has had as much success: Nada. Crows are considered to be among the world’s most intelligent animals, capable of both tool use and tool-making. If you have the good fortune to see a crow burying food in your backyard, you might see him cover it over with a leaf or plucked grass, then look at it several times and use different coverings before being satisfied with his efforts.

Why are tens of thousands of crows roosting in the trees on Albany streets? It’s speculated that crows have figured out that you can’t shoot at them in cities where there are ordinances against discharging firearms, unlike in the country. There is a crow-hunting season in New York State. Another hypothesis is that they seek safety in numbers against their nemesis, the Great Horned Owl. Crows don’t see well at night but the Owl does. Therefore, crows roost near sources of bright illumination such as streetlights so they can see the Owl coming.

The most remarkable talent of the crow, according to researchers, is the ability to recognize individuals by facial features, especially if the person has done them wrong in the past. I saw a demonstration of this on TV. A person wearing an outsized Nixon mask approached a roost of crows in a tree that, upon sighting him, sounded a loud alarm and swooped to the attack. A year earlier, the researcher, wearing the mask, had threatened those crows.

The moral here, Albanians: Don’t piss off the crows. They have memories like elephants.

Robert Knightly

Do As I Say, Dummies!

Ever since I moved from NYC to Albany, I’ve been trying to tell the Albany Police Department how to do The Job — I mean, the way we did it when I was a cop in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I guess they heard me, at least in the beginning, because I wrote the directions down in an Op-Ed piece the local paper, The Albany Times-Union, published, and TV interviewed me on the street in front of my house. The spokesman for the police duly made an official response: That I was an OLD cop and things were no longer done that way in a modern police department. Yeah, right.

I then attended a few public meetings of Albany’s Gun Violence Commission — formed in the aftermath of the death of a 10-year-old playing in front of her house, killed by a stray bullet fired by a young gang mope at another rival gang mope. Again, I voiced my concern that the Albany Police Department was failing do the kind of aggressive policing that had been working in NYC for the past forty years. This was in late 2007, Rose and I were still unpacking the house, and I didn’t yet have a handle on how Albany worked. My ideas fell on deaf ears at the Hearings.

Can’t say I was really surprised. “The Commission” was the usual gathering of mopes from academia, a couple of black Reverends from local churches whose primary loyalty was to Albany’s Mayor-for-Life, Jerry Jennings, who obviously has them in his pocket for some reason — makes me want to get Al Sharpton up here to get folks up on their feet shouting — and some civilians, including a handful of mothers whose children had been gunned down on the streets like 10-year-old Kathina Thomas. Months later, the Commission published its Grand Plan to study The Problem, bring in SNUG, fund a Gun Buyback Program. What’s new?

My advice, though nobody asked? Skip the study. Create a mobile roving patrol now, staff it with three smart, aggressive cops supervised by an experienced, savvy sergeant: their primary function to spot and intercept the gunmen on our streets. Create a second unit similarly staffed and schedule it to work shifts opposite the first: that way there is always a Street Crime Unit (that’s what the NYPD calls them) on Patrol. Being a retired cop, I’m a keen observer of crime in my new hometown (and in Troy and Schenectady as well). I know four young cops who’d be perfect for the job: the partners who grabbed NahCream Moore out of that car on Grand Street and spotted the gun in his belt before he could use it on them, and the pair who stopped the parolee who tried to run them down last year, the loaded semiautomatic pistol on the car seat beside him.

The police are empowered to stop “suspicious” persons on the street and detain them to ask questions such as Where are you going? What’s your name and address? New York State’s Criminal Procedure Law Section 140.50, commonly referred to as the Stop, Question & Frisk law authorizes this.

To illustrate, here’s the play-by-play: A group is tooling along on the street (it’s always multiple mopes, never just one) looking for targets of opportunity. The Street Crime cops follow along, unconcerned at being seen since it makes the boys nervous. The cops hail the group ordering them to stop, the four officers pile out of the car and surround them. Four officers, acting in concert, has proved an adequate force to effect such stops. The questioning begins, and if the officer feels his safety threatened he may pat down the outer clothing of the suspect for a weapon. It is a commonplace of police experience that if a man is carrying a gun, he will walk in a somewhat tentative fashion, favoring the side of his body where the gun is concealed (guns are typically heavy). Faced with a barrage of questions, the gun-toter often takes off running, or occasionally the loaded gun will slip down a pant leg and clunk at the cop’s feet.

Stop & Frisk is the best friend a cop has, the primary tool he employs on the street. Last year, New York City police conducted in excess of 600,000 stops. That is why the City’s streets are safer that they’ve been in decades.

So, Chief Krokoff, what are you waiting for? The shootings did not stop with Kathina Thomas. This month, over an eight-day period, there were five separate shootings on the streets of Albany resulting in one dead, one on life-support and three wounded. All these incidents occurred in the South End, Arbor Hill or West Hill — communities that are worlds away from the gentrified precincts of Center Square and Hudson Park in the heart of Downtown Albany. Is that why no one cares?

Robert Knightly

Shine, Mister?

Last month I went down to the City for MWA’s Editors & Agents Party and the Edgar Awards Dinner the next night. Mostly, to see old friends and familiar faces. A good time. But the real reason I drove to the City and back – that’s 162 miles each way – is to get my shoes shined. I take my going-to-court best, one pair of brown and one pair of black – as Aunt May prescribed for me the day I started college in Brooklyn – and hunt up a Shoe Shine Emporium in Manhattan, relying on memory. You can’t get a decent shine, you see – actually, you can’t get a shine, period – anywhere in the City of Albany. I moved to Albany in 2007 (for The Small City Experience since I’d never in my life resided anywhere but NYC). I might have reconsidered if I’d know what the shoeshine situation was in the State Capital, but you wouldn’t think, would you?

When you’re accustomed to getting a shine from a bootblack, the first place you head for is the Railway Station, right? Grand Central Station. Albany had its Grand Central once, the imposing Beaux Arts Union Station, but it moved across the River to the City of Rensselaer in 1968, a sadly-reduced presence among the 9,392 folks who live in Rensselaer. The Big Hotels? That’s the Crown Plaza on State Street (not such a great street) in Albany. Nada. In fact, I suspect if you left your shoes in the hallway outside your hotel room overnight, you might not see them again. A lawyer I know (whose shoes I noticed were on the dull side) advised me to try the State Office Building, he remembered seeing an old shoeshine man there in times past. I hightailed it over there, but too late. Word was the old guy’d taken advantage of one of those State Buyout Pension Plans, was now just a memory.

In the interest of a complete record, I confess to having gotten a shine once, that first year I was in Albany, from a hulking fellow I found lurking in one of the subterranean passageways under the Empire Plaza (the monument Rockefeller built to himself in the spirit of the Egyptian Pyramids). The shoeshine guy was a no-frills operation: he handed me up to a wooden folding chair set atop a three-foot-high platform, then set to work “with all deliberate speed” (which is a phrase judges use to describe the glacial pace of justice in their courts). All the while I’m looking down for Sweeney Todd’s trap door. Charged me $7, which is twice what a good shine man gets in the City. I tipped him a dollar out of relief at being let off the platform.

If you go downtown at noon on a weekday in the vicinity of the Capital, you can see why shoe-shining is a lost art. Watch the swarm of government workers emerge from the nether regions of the office buildings. No suits. They’re in jeans, running shoes, and, here and there, jacketless in shirtsleeves and tie. You know they’re State workers because you see the 3-by-5-inch plastic ids dangling from a lanyard around their necks (Think Hester Prynne with a pension). They’re exposed, out in the open only long enough to buy lunch from the score of food vendors lining State Street. Then the swarm recedes into the basements. (Remember ‘The Mummy’ movie with hottie Rachel Weiss? The army of flesh-eating scarab beetles flows out of The Tomb, eats the bad guy, then retreats like low tide.)

Yeah, I’m being hard on the civil servants, but they are cheapskates – never spend a dime in Albany except for that sandwich – reside in the sticks, and take all the parking spots on my block.

So I was in the City for two days and nights. The first day I wore the black pair and went to the shoemaker on East 33rd St. between Park and Madison, who’s been there forever. He has four chairs and two young Mexicans doing shines who communicate by hand signals. I don’t know names, we don’t use names. I mount the platform, sit in the leather chair with the marble armrests, put both feet in the brass stirrups and pretend to read the paper. Surreptitiously, I’m watching the boy work my shoes. He’s quick, good hands, polish-and-buff, buff-and-polish, the snapping sound of the rag comforting. Three-dollars-fifty-cents for the store, two-dollar-tip for the boy. I go back next day wearing the brown shoes. You must have on your feet the shoes as they’re being shined. Otherwise, what’s the point?

You might think to ask why doesn’t he shine his own shoes? If you did, I might answer that I shined enough shoes in the Army and the NYPD. Truth is: because it’s just not the same.

Robert Knightly

Mi Casa, Su Casa

Last Thursday evening between five and eight p.m., 350 nice people paid $25 a head to tramp through our ‘historic’ residence in downtown Albany. We bought this house in 2006 and moved up from the City in October, 2007 (I’ve bored you with the reasons why before so not again). My 3-story red brick row house was built in 1871.

Rose and I have belonged to the Hudson Park Neighborhood Association since taking up residence in our house on Elm Street so, like good neighbors, when asked to open our home to the 2011 Hidden City House & Garden Tour, Rose readily consented and I stayed mum. In the City, we lived in a co-op apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens; in fact, in 60-plus years in NYC, I’d lived in apartments in three different boroughs so it was a mind-numbing idea for me to ‘buy’ the apartment I’d already been living in for five years. I still have trouble with the concept, obviously the invention of real estate lawyers.

The inciting incident for our move to Albany was being shown the house on Elm Street while tooling around upstate in search of a smaller city to grow old in. (NYC natives know in their marrows that as they age the odds they will become prey grow apace, unless they reside in upper-class Manhattan enclaves).

Our house is three stories: at street-level is what the realtors call ‘the garden floor’ because you walk through a country kitchen out the back into the garden. Rose found her green thumb up here and has transformed it into the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. But what really got me about the garden were two trees: upfront, a towering pear tree that didn’t give pears but whose foliage gave enough shade that you could shelter a good-sized dinner party on the deck beneath (We have); in the back, a wide, stunted tree, so ancient it looked to have turned to stone, bringing to mind good associations like seeing the movie, “One Million Years B.C.” when I was a kid in Brooklyn. I’d never owned any trees before.

In the middle, ‘the Parlor Floor’, is two rooms with original moldings, connected by ‘pocket doors’ which appear to cause orgasms in the cognoscenti. The top floor has a master bedroom with a walk-in, room-sized closet (Rose likes it), a guest room, and built-in walnut bookshelves that cover the wall separating guest room from a large enough area in the hall to accommodate desk, computer and files. I barred the tourists from the top floor.

I was curious so I stuck around as a fifth wheel. The Historic Albany Foundation sent shock troops to funnel the gawkers in and out, giving them a spiel on what’s-what in each room. They were eight ‘docents’ in two shifts spaced throughout the premises, including the garden. Nice enough folks (I’d never met a docent before), especially when they’d point to me and call me ‘the owner’ and I’d smile and recount the provenance of the art on the walls (Rose and I have been collecting art, separately and together, forever). Rose had laid down lengths of plastic sheeting over our outrageously expensive Pakistani carpet purchased at Bloomingdale’s in the City—sort of a ‘yellow-brick road’ to guide their 650 feet through the parlour. As they began to stumble on the bunched-up plastic, however, a bossy lady docent ordered it taken up. As a former police officer, I recognize a command voice when I hear it. The plastic sheets were taken up with all deliberate speed.

A funny thing: I enjoyed meeting and chatting up my 350 paying guests. At the end, one of the docents whispered to me that all the visitors said our house and garden were the most beautiful on the tour. . . Guess we’ll have to have them over again sometime soon.

Robert Knightly

Kick-Ass Women On the Case

I participated as a panelist at my first ever Book Festival/Conference/Convention two Saturdays ago, and I liked it. It was called the Second Annual Empire State Book Festival and, as you might guess, it was held in Albany, my new hometown. According to the press release, 2,000 people crowded into the underground caverns beneath the Empire Plaza (the space is called ‘the Convention Center, but in no danger of competing for business with the Jacob Javits Center in my former hometown). But enough caviling; I was grateful to be picked as a panelist.

Our subject was “Kick-Ass Women On the Case: Female Detectives in Fiction” and the room was packed. We were: the always-witty, best-selling, globe-trotting S. J. Rozan (just off a plane from Tokyo where she was honored with the Japanese version of our Edgar); popular Chatham novelist, Julia Pomeroy; the well-reviewed Kinderhook author and UAlbany Professor Hollis Seamon; our Moderator, the Woodstock Editor/Anthologist Michele Slung who over the years has handled all the greats in the mystery field; and myself (new to Albany, late of the City). I once told a Judge up here that I was from The City, and you know his next question: what city? Duh!

I had the distinction of being the only male appearing with these estimable women authors. Although, to be candid, that had more to do with my having invented the panel and chosen the panelists and, with the indispensable help of Hollis Seamon, sold the idea to the Librarian-in-Charge. The Festival, like last year’s, was the brainchild of the New York Library Association, and the participants, I assume, selected by librarians.

Now, I love libraries and librarians, but their choice of marquee names as Keynote speakers to draw the crowds left me a bit cold. I don’t doubt that Roseanne Cash (Johnny’s daughter) has written a fine memoir, and Ann M. Martin, best-selling Children’s Book author, is equally good. In fact, Ms. Martin’s recent novel, “A Dog’s Life: The Autobiography of a Stray” won the ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award. Last May 2nd, however, the keynoters were the novelist/memoirist Mary Gordon and the fantasy writer Gregory Maguire, the author of ‘Wicked”, the runaway best-seller described by John Updike as ‘an amazing novel’. A bigger crowd as I remember. But maybe the librarians are trying to level the playing field: they don’t advertise in advance of the Event . . . ever.

Yet, I really have no cause to complain. I sold books. My friends at Blackwood & Brouwer Booksellers, Kinderhook, had brought along the twelve hardcover copies of my out-of-print novel that had been a drug on their market.

Robert Knightly