Father Divine's Bikes Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Steve Bassett

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-54392-336-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-54392-337-7

  By inspiration, information will come. The thing we vividly visualize, we tend to materialize … and that which we materialize we will also personify.

  Rev. Major Jealous Divine

  a.k.a. Father Divine

  a.k.a. George Baker Jr.

  c. 1876–1965

  Founder of the International Peace Mission Movement

  November 15, 1936

  When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and author

  1868 to 1963

  For my wife, Darlene, without whom this book would have never been completed.

  Contents

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  54

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  61

  Biography

  It was almost nine o’clock on a Monday morning when Police Lieutenant Nick Cisco and Sergeant Kevin McClosky pulled up in their unmarked cruiser in front of the Broome Street tenement. The meat wagon from the morgue was already there, its rear doors wide open to accept the latest human jetsam to be scraped from the Ward’s streets.

  The stiff, a Negro man probably no more than twenty-five, was sprawled across the pavement, feet on the lower tenement step, his head a few feet from the gutter. The killing was not high profile enough for Coroner Walter Tomokai to handle so an assistant was given the thankless task of collecting the necessary forensic evidence.

  A brown wooden handle above the man’s chest stood strong against the midmorning breeze indicating where an ice pick had skewered his heart. Blood that had pooled around the body had already begun to harden at the edges. About a dozen onlookers, young and old alike, displayed the indifferent curiosity common to those who have seen it all before. A uniformed cop stood between them and the body.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s Frank Gazzi. So this is where they buried him,” McClosky said as he switched off the ignition and stepped out to the street.

  “He’s still got his badge,” Cisco said. “Come on, let’s get started.”

  The two homicide detectives examined the body while the ghouls from the morgue snapped their pictures. McClosky turned to Gazzi, “Frank, you the first one at the scene?”

  “Yeah. I was around the corner when I heard a woman scream, so I came running. Took about thirty seconds. When I got here he was still breathing, coughing up blood, but breathing. Two uniforms got here a few minutes later,” Gazzi said nodding over his shoulder to the police cruiser. “They’re upstairs now.”

  “Good luck with that,” Cisco said. “Doubt if they’ll get much. Whatever it is, we’ll want it.”

  “You heard a woman scream, so there’s a witness,” McClosky said. “Where the hell is she?”

  “What you see is what I found,” Gazzi said. “Beats hell out of me how quick these people can run and hide.”

  It took Cisco and McClosky less than an hour to wrap it all up. Nobody heard a scream. Nobody saw anything. And nobody knew the victim’s name or where he came from. That was remedied when they emptied his pockets. There was forty-seven dollars in his wallet along with a U.S. Army ID card stating that Staff Sergeant Wilbert Locklee was honorably discharged at Camp Kilmer only two weeks earlier. A 1942 driver’s license had been issued to Locklee in Clarkdale, Mississippi. There was an unopened pack of Camels, eighty cents in change, and a Zippo lighter emblazoned with the crest of the 92nd Infantry Division.

  “I’ll be damned,” Cisco said. “This guy was a Buffalo Soldier.”

  “Buffalo Soldier?”

  “Yeah there was a big article in LIFE magazine, how the 92nd , an all Negro division, went all the way back to the frontier Indian wars. Did pretty damn well this time around in Italy. Quite a history.”

  “So what do you think?” McClosky said.

  “Hunting for poontang,” Cisco said. “What else would get him up here on the hill. He had plenty of green, just picked the wrong pussy.”

  “My guess, it was her pimp,” McClosky said. “They love the ice pick. When his whore screamed, they panicked and hauled ass. Left behind a stuffed wallet and wristwatch.”

  “We’ll contact the cops in Mississippi, see if there’s a Locklee family still living in Clarkdale.”

  “Poor son of a bitch. Put his ass on the line for Uncle Sam and ends up this way.”

  They watched the meat wagon pull away with Locklee’s body, then turned to Gazzi and the other two uniforms.

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” Cisco turned to the two patrolmen. “Your names….”

  “James DeAngelo,” the older one, probably about thirty and clearly in charge, said. “My partner’s Dave Hurley.”

  “Come up with anything worthwhile?” Cisco was aware of a common t
endency of street cops to embellish their reports in order to put themselves in the center of homicide investigations. He had been there himself.

  “The same old shit,” Hurley said. “Everyone was deaf, dumb and blind.”

  “How long have you had a badge?” McClosky said. “Got it all figured out, do you.”

  “Long enough to know there aren’t any niggers in this Ward talking to cops,” Hurley said.

  “Hell, we almost had to kick-in some doors to get them out in the hall to talk at all,” DeAngelo said.

  “Life can be a bitch,” Cisco responded sarcastically. “Just let us know, do you have anything?”

  “Just names.” DeAngelo said. “Had to pry one of them out of the landlord. Seems a gal named Ruby West was nowhere to be seen this morning. He unlocked her first floor flat to give us a look-see.”

  “And….” McClosky said, his impatience evident. “Is this Ruby West a whore or not?”

  “With all the trappings,” Hurley said. “Big fancy bed, velvet sofa, big pillows all around and even carpets on the floor. Beer in the ice box, gin and rye. Not the best, but pretty good stuff. Fancy duds, his and hers in the two closets.”

  “This bitch looks like a real moneymaker with a live-in pimp,” DeAngelo said.

  “Whatever you’ve got put it in writing, then get it down to homicide by tomorrow,” Cisco said.

  “Frank, it’s good to see that you’re still kicking,” McClosky said. “Hang in there.”

  The two detectives drove away. Their first stop would be the Tenderloin to see if Ruby and her pimp also worked the downtown streets. Their curbside space was taken by a Fire Department truck. Two firemen had already begun unwinding a high pressure hose to flush blood off the sidewalk and down a storm drain with other gutter debris.

  They were waiting for the light to change on Waverly when Cisco broke open a fresh pack of Chesterfields, tapped one out for McClosky and lit up for both of them. Cisco took a deep drag and exhaled. “You know, I’ve just been thinking about Gazzi, from wop golden boy to rousting voodoo scam artists along the black belt.”

  “He’s been around a long time, longer than me, and just as long as you,” McClosky said. “Clue me in. How was it that he fucked up?”

  “Goes back to when the goombahs started flexing their muscles downtown,” Cisco said. “Gazzi linked up with Tony Gordo’s bunch from Messina. He saw how Richie the Boot and Longy had divided the city. Learned real fast how the game is played, and when to put the blinders on. It seems he took his blinders off at the wrong time and the wrong place.”

  “I heard it was a simple vice bust,” McClosky said. “That he had picked up a whore. Jesus Christ, if that’s all it was, he’s really paying big time for it.”

  “It didn’t end there,” Cisco said as the squad car pulled to the curb in front of the Picadilly. “In fact, there was a second bimbo, the same thing, wrong time, wrong place.”

  That morning Officer Francis Gazzi had just completed his swing through his Third Ward beat. After a few seconds at the call box, he was on his way to Bloom’s Deli for a cup of coffee when he heard a woman scream from around the corner. Not knowing what to expect and fearing the worst, he felt for his Smith & Wesson, but left it holstered. He poked cautiously around the corner entrance to the Zanzibar Lounge. Four of the bar’s patrons ducked back inside as he brushed past them. He found the sidewalks and tenement stoops, generally teeming with Negroes of all ages, completely empty.

  Gazzi spotted a man’s body on the sidewalk, and broke into a cautious trot. He realized, when he was within fifteen feet of the body and saw the spreading pool of blood, that this was going to be his first homicide. He turned his gaze back to the corner just as a Negro couple was leaving the Zanzibar. “Call the police! Do it now!”

  The man stopped in his tracks, and turned towards Gazzi. But the woman kept going as fast as her tight skirt and heels would let her. “They’s already on the phone inside,” he shouted back, then turned and followed his lady already a half-block up the street.

  Five minutes later the patrol car arrived, followed in short order by the meat wagon, and Cisco and McClosky.

  Gazzi was only the second gentile cop to work a beat that included the heart of Newark’s Jewish immigrant community, adjacent to the “nigger belt” with its stabbings, shootings, fire-trap tenements, voodoo parlors, numbers banks and staggering infant mortality rate.

  The beat was the latest price he was paying for screw-ups dating back to his years as a rookie. His best friend, Lt. Tony Gordo, got him into the department. Tony was like an older brother to him. Their families had shared steerage from Messina. He was the best man at his wedding. Tony had joined the force just before the war, and worked his way up. Since the force was fifty percent Italian, it had been easy for him to pull Frank along with him. He showed him the ropes and told him to keep his nose clean, not to rock the boat. He even convinced his uniform boss to give Frank a soft, downtown cruiser beat even though it would mean screwing over cops with more seniority.

  All he wanted was to do a good job, be a good cop back then. That was his first mistake. It all turned to shit toward the end of his first year in the squad car.

  He would never forget the morning in Tony’s office. “Buon giorno, Francis,” Lt. Anthony Gordo said “Comé sta? E Maria?”

  “Bene, grazie. E tu?”

  “Molto bene, stiamo tutti bene,” replied Gordo, motioning Gazzi to a battered chair in front of his desk.

  “Let’s talk about the arrest outside the Paradise Club last night,” Gordo said.

  “A whore and her pimp rolled a guy in an alley,” replied Gazzi.

  “Remember her name?”

  “A broad named Golpe, Sublime Golpe. Her boyfriend got away. There’s a pickup out for him. I took her in.”

  “Good piece of police work, huh?”

  “Nothing special. We were cruising down Broad when this guy staggers out of the alley and stops us. He was bleeding real bad over the eye.”

  “How’d you find the slut?”

  “He described her. She was sitting inside the Paradise, just like nothing happened, working another sucker at the bar.”

  “When was the last time a whore was picked up along that section of Broad?”

  Frank shrugged. “Why, what’s the problem?”

  “You’re the fucking problem! When you took over Dirk’s cruiser, I told you that all vice complaints go directly through me to Captain Orsini, right?”

  “But Tony…it was just a simple pickup.”

  Gordo got up from behind his desk. He was a big man. Swarthy. He stalked about the room trying to control his temper.

  “But the guy was bleeding real bad. It was my duty to…”

  “Your duty is to protect your ass and mine. Orsini’s got his balls in an uproar. Golpe belongs to Zwillman.” He moved closer to Frank and whispered. “So does Orsini.”

  Frank never saw his friend so mad. “Shit. How was I supposed to know.”

  “Stupido! Thought you got the message. Everyone else does.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothin’ at this point. I got to go and see if I can fix it. Orsini’s out for your badge.”

  “I can’t lose the job, Tony. Maria’ll kill me.”

  Gordo’s features softened. “Yeah, I know. I’ll see what I can do. You’re on desk duty until further notice.”

  The following week, Gordo broke the news to Gazzi.

  “You still have a job, Francis. That’s the good news.”

  Frank crossed himself. “Thanks, Tony. You saved my ass. So what’s the bad news?”

  The following week, Gazzi was reassigned to a walking beat near Rupert Stadium, only yards from the stinking city dumps. Smoke from the burning garbage thickened the air but never blurred his belief that he was in the right.

  He was shifted to his downtown beat eighteen months later. Gordo, now commander of the night uniform division, had pulled some strings. It could have been worse. />
  For fifteen years, he smiled a lot with that tight little smile of a public servant adrift among the Philistines. He checked store doors, directed traffic, handed out tickets, and gave street directions. There were plenty of Christmas presents for Gazzi, and he was on a first-name basis with many of the city’s business leaders. He had it made. Even his wife, Maria, agreed with him. These perks reinforced his mediocrity, willingly accepted and nurtured.

  With the exception of a handful of robberies, the most serious crime Gazzi was called upon to handle was shoplifting. It was, in fact, a shoplifting case that had provided him with his most memorable day. It also provided him with the hate he could envelop and cherish with his whole being. It drove him to his confessor.

  One afternoon, Gazzi had been standing idly on a street corner when a salesgirl from Bamberger’s summoned him. He followed her to the entrance on Bank Street where a floorwalker waited with a pretty colored girl, no more than a teenager. She gazed squarely at Gazzi as he approached.

  The girl, who had none of the docility usually found in teenagers caught stealing, looked pissed. When she saw him coming, she immediately lashed out.

  “Hey, I didn’t do nothing. That bitch’s tryin’ to pin it on me.”

  “Settle down, Miss,” Frank said, and turned to the salesgirl. “What’s the problem here?”

  “We caught her with her hand in the costume jewelry case, already had some earrings and a necklace in her purse.” She showed them to Frank.

  “What’s your name?” Frank said.

  “Cherry.”

  “Okay, Cherry. Here’s how it works. We go upstairs and file a formal complaint. Then you and Miss…”