Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (55 page)

Gambino tried to bargain, offering them only $50,000. Soon after, the body of Manny Gambino was found in a sitting position in a New Jersey dump near the Earle Naval Ammunition Depot. On June 1, 1973, degenerate gambler
, Robert Senter, pled guilty to the manslaughter of Manny Gambino. Senter was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Apparently, Senter had fallen into debt to Gambino, and he felt it was easier to kill Gambino than to repay the debt.

After the death of his nephew compounded the agony of the death of his wife, Carlo Gambino became a recluse in his house on Ocean Parkway. He surrounded himself with family members, most notably his cousin Paul Castellano.

By 1975, it was clear Gambino's heart condition would not allow him to live much longer. Wanting to keep power in his own family blood, Gambino anointed his cousin Paul Castellano to succeed him.

This did not go over well with the rest of the
Gambinos, who expected longtime Mafioso, Aniello Dellacroce, to be the natural successor to Gambino. To appease Dellacroce, Gambino gave him all the Manhattan rackets controlled by the Gambino Family.

On
October 15, 1976, Carlo Gambino‘s heart finally gave out. Gambino's funeral was one of the most elaborate ever to take place in the borough of Brooklyn. More than 100 cars took part in the funeral procession, which ended at the Saint John's Cemetery in Queens; the same cemetery where his lifelong friend, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, had been buried .

In the 1985 film
Prizzi's Honor
, directed by John Huston and starring Jack Nicholson, actor William Hickey played Don Corrado Prizzi, a character based on Don Carlo Gambino.

G
eneral Slocum Disaster

If you ask New
Yorkers, besides the bombing of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001, what was the biggest disaster in New York City history, most would say the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, which killed 141 people, mostly women. However, by far the worst tragedy ever to take place in New York City besides 9/11 was the now-forgotten 1904
General Slocum
paddle boat disaster, in which more than 1000 German people, mostly woman and children, perished in an accident that certainly could have been prevented.

Starting in the 1840s, tens of thousands of German immigrants began flooding the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which is now called Alphabet City, but what was then called the
Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany. Just in the 1850s alone over 800,000 Germans came to America, and by 1855, New York City had the third-largest German population of any city in the world.

The German immigrants were different than the Irish immigrants who, due to the Irish potato famine in Ireland, were also
emigrating to New York City at a fast pace during the middle part of the 19
th
century. Whereas the Irish were mostly lower-class laborers, the Germans were better educated and possessed skills that made them obtain a higher rung on the economic ladder than did the Irish. More than half the bakers in New York City were of German descent, and most cabinet makers in New York City were either German, or of German descent. Germans were also very active in the construction business, which at the time was very profitable because of all the large buildings being built in New York City during the mid-to-late 1800s.

Joseph
Wedemeyer, Oswald Ottendorfer, and Friedrich Sorge were New York City German-Americans who were extremely active in the creation and growth of trade unions. In New York City, German-American clubs, which were called Vereins, were highly involved in politics. Ottendorfer owned and edited the
Staats-Zeitung,
the largest German-American newspaper in town. He became such a force in politics, that in 1861, he was instrumental, through his German Democracy political club, in getting New York City Mayor Fernando Wood elected for his second term. In 1863, Ottendorfer propelled another German, Godfrey Gunther, to succeed Wood as mayor.

Little Germany reached its peak in the 1870s. It then encompassed over 400 blocks, comprised of six avenues and 40 streets, running south from 14
th
Street to Houston Street and from the Bowery east to the East River. Tompkins Square, and its park, was considered the epicenter of Little Germany. The park itself was called
the
Weisse Garten
, where Germans congregated daily to discuss what was important to their lives and livelihoods.

Avenue B was called the German Broadway, where almost e
very building contained a first-floor store or a workshop marketing every sort of commodity that was desired by the German populace. Avenue A was known for its beer gardens, oyster saloons, and assorted grocery stores. In Little Germany there were also sporting clubs, libraries, choirs, shooting clubs, factories, department stores, German theaters, German schools, German churches, and German synagogues for the German Jews.

Starting around 1880, the wealthier Germans began moving out of New York City to the suburbs. And by the turn of the 20
th
Century, the German population in Little Germany had shrunk to around 50,000 people, still a sizable amount for any ethnic group in New York City.

On June 15, 1904, St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church on 6
th
Street charted the paddle boat
General Slocum,
for the sum of $350, to take members of its congregation to its yearly picnic celebrating the end of the school year. At a few minutes after 9 a.m., more than 1,300 people boarded the
General Slocum
. Their destination was the Locust Grove on Long Island Sound, where they expected to enjoy a day of swimming, games, and the best of German food.

The
General Slocum,
owned by the Knickerbocker Steamship Company, was named for Civil War officer and New York Congressman Henry Warner Slocum. It was built by the W. & A. Fletcher Company of Hoboken, New Jersey, and was a side-wheel paddle boat powered by a single-cylinder, surface-condensing, vertical-beam steam engine, with 53-inch bore and 12-foot stroke. Each wheel had 26 paddles and was 31 feet in diameter. Her maximum speed was about 16 knots.

Almost from the day of its launching in 1891, the
General Slocum
suffered one mishap after another. Four months after her launching, the
General Slocum
ran aground near the Rockaways. Several tugboats were needed to drag the
General Slocum
back into the water.

It was an exceptionally bad year for the
General Slocum
in 1894. On June 29, the
General Slocum
was returning from the Rockaways with 4,700 passengers. Suddenly, it struck a sandbar so hard her electrical generator blew out. In August, during a terrible rain storm, the
General Slocum
ran aground a second time, this time near Coney Island. The passengers had to be transferred to another boat in order to make their way back home. The next month the
General Slocum
hit the trifecta when it collided with the tug boat
R. T. Sayre
in the middle of the East River. In this incident, the
General Slocum's
steering was severely damaged, and it had to be repaired. The
General Slocum
was accident-free until July of 1898, when the
General Slocum
collided with the
Amelia
near Battery Park.

On August 17, 1901,
the
General Slocum
was carrying, what was described as “900 intoxicated Patterson Anarchists.” Suddenly, some of the passengers started to riot, and others tried to physically take control of the boat by storming the bridge. However, the crew fought off the rioters and were able to keep control of the boat. When the captain docked at the police pier, 17 “anarchists” were arrested.

Finally, in June of 1902, the
General Slocum
ran aground again. The boat was unable to be freed, so its passengers had to camp out the entire night until reinforcements could arrive the following morning. The captain of the boat in that incident was none other than William H. Van Schaick, the same man who would be the chief officer of the
General Slocum
on its fateful voyage.

On June 15, 1904, about 15 minutes after the
General Slocum
left the pier at East Third Street, it was even with East 125
th
Street. At this point, Captain Van Schaick was notified by one of his crew that a fire had started in the Lamp Room, in the forward section of the boat. The fire was probably ignited by a discarded cigarette or a match, and it had been obviously fueled by the straw, oily rags, and lamp oil strewn around the room. The Captain had also been told there was a fire on board a few minutes earlier by a 12-year-old boy, but Captain Van Schaick did not believe the boy. Other people on board said the fire had started almost simultaneously in several locations, including a paint locker filled with flammable fluids and a cabin filled with gasoline.

This is where Captain Van Schaick made a terrible mistake in judgment.

Since land was close by, all the Captain had to do was run his ship aground before the flames spread any further. Then he could unload his passengers, mostly woman and children, quickly, before there were any fatalities. But for some reason Captain Van Schaick decided to head straight into a headwind and try to land his boat at North Brother Island, just off the southern shore of the Bronx. Captain Van Schaick would later say the reason for his decision was that
he was trying to prevent the fire from spreading on land to riverside buildings and oil tanks. But by going into heavy headwinds, he was actually fanning the fire.

Captain Van Schaick later said at his trial, “I started to head to 134
th
Street, but was warned off by the captain of a tugboat, who shouted to me that the boat would set fire to the lumber yards and oil tanks there. Besides, I knew that the shore was lined with rocks and the boat would founder if I put in there. I then fixed upon North Brother Island.”

As the boat chugged onward, passengers ran in panic around the deck. Mothers were looking for their children. Fathers were looking for their families. Young boys and girls scrambled onto the deck chairs, waving frantically for help at the crowds who had assembled on the shore. The flames increased by the second, accelerated by the boat's fresh coat of highly flammable paint.

At this point, overcome by smoke inhalation and with the flames flickering at their torsos, feet and faces, people began jumping into the water. Some were rescued by boats which had rushed near the fiery
General Slocum
. But most of the woman and girls who jumped, because of the bulky woman's clothing of that era, quickly drowned. Some people died when the floors of the boat collapsed. Others were beaten to death by the still-churning paddles, as they flung themselves over the sides of the boat towards the water.

People who tried to use the life jackets on board were in for a horrible surprise.

Although there were 3,000 life jackets available, they were all but useless. The vast majority were rotted out, with the cork inside the jackets used for buoyancy almost entirely disintegrated. The people who donned the life jackets and plunged into the water, immediately sank like rocks. Some people tried to dislodge the emergency lifeboats, but they failed to do so because the lifeboats were firmly wired in place.

People on the shore saw a girl in a blue dress jump off the side of the boat. They watched in horror as the girl hit the wooden paddle wheel. The wheel churned violently, dragging the girl under it. The people on shore could hear the screaming girl's frail body being
thrashed about like a rag doll by the paddle wheel, before her screaming stopped, and she disappeared into the murky waters. A little boy, clutching his stuffed toy dog, was thrown into the river by his weeping mother. The boy was fished from the river alive, still squeezing his precious toy dog.

Sixteen-year-old Albert Frese was one of the lucky ones who survived the
General Slocum
disaster. Frese, at the time, was a mail clerk in the Funk and Wagnalls publishing house. As horrified people scampered all around him, Frese hurried to the stern of the burning boat.

According to Edward Ross Ellis'
s
The Epic of New York City
, “Frese jumped feet first, with his ankles together and his arms rigid at his side. He was able to swim safely to shore, and later he became treasurer of his firm.”

As Captain Van Schaick resolutely and pigheadedly steered his boat onward, people on Manhattan's
east shore were now running frantically along the riverbank trying to keep pace with the burning boat. Others were mobilized in wagons and carts, and screaming for the Captain to run his boat ashore. Some people flung barrels into the river for the people floundering in the water to use as makeshift life preservers. Small boats tried to chase down the
General Slocum
from behind, but they were unable to do so. However, some of these boats were able to fish the better swimmers out of the water and bring them safely to shore.

Despite this utter mayhem
and the pleading of the people on the shore to run his boat aground, Captain Van Schaick, his own clothes on fire, ignored them and continued toward North Brother Island. When Captain Van Schaick finally beached his boat at North Brother Island, the boat was one huge fireball.