Crash Out The True Tale Of A Hell's Kitchen Kid And The Bloodiest Escape In Sing Sing History

Chapter One:Robbers. Monday, May 15, 1939 Joseph "Whitey" Riordan, convicted thief, strong-arm, and current hiring boss on New York's waterfront, stepped outside his family's Isham Street apartment at dawn like it was any other workday. The Monday morning sky was clear, turning blue, with the night still close to the pavement. On spring days like this, Whitey could smell the new leaves in the breeze drifting down from Inwood Hill Park up the streetdamp woods skirting the tidal flats on Manhattan's northern tip. The city's wildest park remained almost unchanged since the time of the American Revolution. You could still catch sight of deer, even fox, in the deeper groves. But now the year-old, gleaming steel Henry Hudson Bridge, spearing out of that wilderness into pricey Riverdale, gave New Yorkers another way outan escape route north to the suburbs. Whitey Riordan saw limitless possibility, too. But right here in Manhattan. By six that evening, he could be richer by a thousand dollars, maybe two thousand. Across Isham Street, Good Shepherd Church rose in thick granite blocks, lights from an early Mass sparkling through the stained-glass windows. When the Riordans moved uptown, Whitey's mother, Elizabeth, loved the thought of living across from the church. A lifelong Catholic, she must have hoped the cross and steeple right outside the front door would influence her wayward sons. Whitey probably shrugged it offhis money had helped their move, and his mother hadn't kicked then. To the east, radio antennas on apartment rooftops etched the sky above Broadway. A few blocks beyond those buildings, on the Harlem River shore at 212th Street, Manhattan's last working farm prepared fields for the produce they'd send down to markets on Ninth Avenue, in Whitey's old neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen. A city boy at heart, the thought would have made him smileInwood seemed a continent, a whole lifetime away from the brick tenements and back alleys of his childhood. Whitey often caught a car ride down to the docks with some other longshoremen from the neighborhood. Today, though, he preferred the IND subway. He could easily afford the nickel fare, and the fewer people with knowledge of his routine that Monday, the better. Only recently had the A train tunneled this far north, following the crowds of mostly Irish New Yorkers like the Riordans, escaping Hell's Kitchen's trash-strewn confines for Inwood's leafy air. For Whitey, though, the future was still rooted downtown on the West Side waterfront. As hiring boss, or stevedore, Whitey shaped crews at Pier 90 on the North River, as the Hudson was then called, at the end of West Fiftieth Street. The job was one of the best on the docks. Out of the hundreds of men who gathered at the pier gates for the shape-up at 7:55 every morning and 12:55 every afternoon, Whitey chose crews of twenty or so to load and unload the passenger liners that steamed into port. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon playing cards or shooting the breeze in the dock office or union hall on Twelfth Avenue. Today, though, he'd have to hotfoot it right after the noon shape. His partner, John "Patches" Waters, and the gang were meeting at Little Joe's around two thirty, and Whitey didn't want to be late. The boys were on a roll. In the past seven months, they had pulled half a dozen armed heists and swiped riches far beyond their imaginations. Just the thought could make a thief's adrenaline surge. But the gangWhitey, Patches, Willie the Greek, Lulu, Rusty, and Macall understood by now that precGoewey, David is the author of 'Crash Out The True Tale Of A Hell's Kitchen Kid And The Bloodiest Escape In Sing Sing History', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400054695 and ISBN 1400054699.