Those pieces of the city, it’s just like this town here. You understand what I’m telling you? Red Schoolfield, he’s in a bigger city than this one, sure. But only a little piece of it belongs to him. What we got here, it’s all ours. Not just some slice—the whole thing.”
The man in the wheelchair paused, individually eye-contacting each man in the room before he went on:
“You all know how it works. Remember when we were kids? You got yourself a candy bar, what happened? Some guys, they’d want a little piece for themselves, right? And if they were your pals, well, you were supposed to cut them in. But there was always this one guy, what he wanted was the whole thing. Am I right?”
Nods from around the room. The broad-faced man added a grunt of assent.
“Now, if this guy is bigger than you, or tougher, what do you do then? Well, you got choices. You can stand and fight, make him take it, but all that gets you is a beating.
“So the thing you do, if you’re like us, you give up the candy, and you wait for your chance. Then you ambush the guy, maybe bust up his head with a brick. And next time he sees you with candy, well, he keeps walking. Or, even better, you get a few of your pals—the same guys you would share with—and you mob the motherfucker, pound him so bad he don’t want any more, ever.
“You can’t change a bully. The best you can ever do is make him work, make it cost him something. They don’t like that, so they go and pick on someone else. That’s where all this started, boys, what we have now.
“And the first rule is, always, you make sure you control your own territory. Maybe it’s only a tiny little piece, but it’s yours. Now, once you got land, a piece of ground that’s really yours, you can’t just let it sit there, you got to do something with it, am I right?”
More nods.
“Sure, I’m right! And I’m not talking about naming it after yourself, the way Old Man Locke did back when he opened the first mill, before any of us were born. I’m talking about making your living from it. Land is money. You can farm it, or you can brew mash on it, or you can open a little roadhouse, or . . . well, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you get something going.”
Beaumont’s iron eyes swept the room, a seismograph, searching for the slightest tremor of inattention. Satisfied, he went on:
“You can see it happening, everywhere you look. The Irish, the Italians, they can run a whole city, but not by themselves. When they want to do business with people outside their tribe—and you know, they have to do that—they need . . . branch managers, I guess you’d call them. And, sooner or later, those managers, they see how things work, how much money there is to be made, they want to go into the business for themselves.
“That’s what we did. That’s how we got started here. We built up a beautiful thing for ourselves. We got the gambling, we got the girls—not just the houses, the strip joints too—we got the jukeboxes, we got the punch cards, we got the liquor, we got money out on the street, working for us. . . . And when dope hits this area hard—the way it has up in the big cities—we’ll have that, too.
“But, remember, every time you got that candy, here comes some big guy who wants it all for himself. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Those wop bastards don’t have a chance,” the broad-faced man said, with the calm assurance of a man stating a known fact.
“It depends on what they want to put into it, Sammy,” the man in the wheelchair said. “They know we’ve got the cops and the judges, but they also know those people aren’t with us—they’re just whores, charging us for every trick. When this jumps off, they’ll stand on the sidelines, and climb into bed with the winners.”
Beaumont looked around the room, using his eyes to lock and hold each man individually before he continued:
“Now, you know, they’ve already been around, the Italians. Sat down with me. Very nice, polite. They just want a little taste, is what they say. But it would never stop there. When they come for us, they’re going to come hard.”