Cry Heaven, Cry Hell. Howard Gordon
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to be known, under Al Capone, since Johnny Torrio had vacated his position began to single out Craine for eliminating rivalry. He did not like this for two reasons. He did not like becoming a killer, and he did not like the idea of Eliot Ness becoming aware of him. Craine found him to be a dogged enemy of lawbreakers, who believed in an eye for an eye. He did not want to be one of his targets.
When he met with Bugs, he suggested getting involved with the Purple Gang, from Detroit, where an automobile industry was flourishing, and where automobile producers did not want unions cutting into their profit margins. He also thought the Americans would get sick of prohibition and vote it out of legality. He did not like prostitution because of how it demeaned the soul of a woman. He could remember the effects of nerve gas during the war and felt drugs would reduce a human being to a mass of blubbering jelly. The growing mass of government control of lives, evidenced by the legislative and executive use of power was destroying humanity enough. In years to come, the meaning of freedom and of responsibility would become obscured, if not destroyed. Craine reasoned that he didn’t want to assist the process by creating a nation of slobbering weaklings with drugs. This is the way that crime was going, the way of business, with its brutality and impersonality. Though he knew he entered a world of evil, and he had entered it voluntarily, he entered it to protect himself and his family, not to sin against God’s Law for his own greed.
Two major events occurred, that brought Bugs around to Craine’s way of thinking: St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the arrest of Al Capone. On Feb-14-1929, 5 men walked into S.M.C. Cartage Co. where six members of the Moran gang were meeting, and a mechanic was working on a car. Three men were dressed as policemen, and two were in street clothes. They ordered the seven men to line up against the wall and shot them down then walked out with the men in street clothes acting as if they were apprehended gangsters. George Moran was supposed to be one of the men shot, but he wasn’t there. The men were Capone hirelings. To dissociate himself from the murders, Capone went for a vacation at this home in Miami, Florida. The second event was a triumph for Eliot Ness. In 1931, Al Capone was sentenced to eleven years incarceration at a federal prison for income tax evasion. His gang leadership was taken over by Frank Nitty. After this Bugs and Craine considered moving their activities to other cities and began to move into legitimate areas of endeavor.
Patrick never forgot about the Jewish, Irish mixture in his heritage. He learned Hebrew, Yiddish, and some of the Gaelic/Erse poetry in his background. To help hone his skills, he wrote to Grand Da in Gaelic and to Moses in Yiddish. He also prepared for his Bar Mitzvah. Craine sent money to Da and Moses to make the trip over. This meant a temporary break from his avocation.
The reunion was one of joy and laughter. Mendel tried to arm wrestle Pat and found himself lacking. But he and Craine held themselves at the same standstill. At the moment of manhood, Pat spoke about the world in which culture and love of mankind for each of its disparate elements was rapidly being replaced by love of the dollar, no matter how its ability to purchase the goods that were translated to mean the love that it was replacing. He spoke of the ideals for which his family, for which his entire family, both Jewish and Irish had spent their blood. He spoke of a war that was to end all wars and left the world with seething hate, suppression of minorities, creation of minorities to sustain the materialism, crookedness, and closed the door to understanding the small, kicked around little guy. He said that these things would blow up, and that a more devastating war would ensue. At the end of his speech, Tyndall and Da’s brothers stood and cheered; Moses stood with them. There were tears of pride in his eyes, but no red and white handkerchief found in a field. From this day forth, Craine, Moses, Tyndall and the rest referred to him as Patrick because today he became a man.
Chapter 6
The year 1930 marked Patrick’s emerging manhood, Craine’s questioning his involvement with the criminal elements in America and Ireland, emigration of the Mikawber/Doleman clan to Boston, then to Williamsburg, Virginia. It was also a time when Craine found the capacity to love a woman again. It was also a time when men, who could not reconcile the loss of this new God, money, and began to see what people had to do to survive in reality.
After Patrick’s Bar Mitzvah, the whole clan went for a trip to Williamsburg for a gift to the young man. They saw how colonists worked, lived, ate, and became motivated to love their country. While participating in a mock battle of the Revolutionary War, Moses got carried away to the streets of Warsaw and Belfast fighting anti-Semites and British landlords at the same time. He whooped and hollered to Mendel, Tyndall, and anyone in earshot that he shot a Brit Redcoat in the arse so many times, and he wouldn’t drop; he got sick of it and clobbered him with the rifle butt. You betcha the bastid fell that time. Tyndall had to tell him it was only a game and not a war. War, he did not need to fight anymore because he lived in a free country. Moses’ last words were, “By God, if it’s that free, I’ll move here, and the hell with Boston. I like fights, but I never saw a man that could take ten bullets in the arse and keep standing. “Apparently he never learned what the concept of a blank bullet meant. Since he was so dead set on moving there, Tyndall and the rest of the Mikawbers joined him.
Craine could see that Patrick was more interested in being with his friends than in family outings by the way he was eyeing some of the teenaged females involved in the mock battles, bread making, flag sewing, and cooking activities. He also was excited about engaging in a pickup baseball game with some of the young men of the community. He decided to pursue some of his own interests, as he watched a rather interesting lady bend over to wipe a smudge off of her shoe. He smirked at her and said it would be less interesting to him, but kinder to her if she let him wipe it off for her. She stood up all startled and blushing to tell him to mind his own business and to take his rude brogue back to Dublintown, or wherever he came from. He laughed and said Dublin wouldn’t exactly appreciate his presence; he further indicated he’d take her on in a game of darts at any pub in Belfast. At this, her anger subsided, and she laughed. She told him that she was looking for a job as a mock nurse in the mock battle. He hired her for the job. She was so excited that she didn’t ask if he worked there. She asked when she could start, and he said he didn’t know, but he’d ask the personnel manager if she gave him her name. Before she could get all angered again, he asked if she’d give him and his family a tour followed by the best Irish dinner she ever ate. Her name was Molly Karhill. The anger that started in her soul was changed to laughter by the antics of Tyndall, Moses, Mendel, the rest of the Mikawber/Doleman clan, and last, but not least, Craine. What he expected to be the worst smack in the kisser turned out to be the nicest kiss he ever got.
There were picnics in the park and swimming at the beaches in Virginia, New England, Coney Island, trips on the Freedom Trail, trips to presidents’ homes, to museums. Molly accompanied Patrick to Hebrew classes and learned to read Scholem Aleichem in Yiddish. She also learned to read the poetry of the old Gaelic writers from the Protestant minister and some of the priests. He even introduced her to Bugs Moran, who was struggling, in vain to keep his empire from crumbling to dust. She was aware of his notoriety, but she enjoyed him as a person from it. Craine felt the pangs of guilt about considering another woman to take the place of Malkia until he had a talk with Patrick about it. Pat said that his leaving home was but a few years off, and though he loved him and Grand Da and Da Moses, he’d be building his own life. He said he also found Molly fun and loveable.
The following weekend, Craine took Molly to a cave in the Berkshire Mountains. She thought the woods were romantic and groaned as they ascended the peaks to the cave. She was awed by the point where a stalactite merged with a stalagmite. A tear came to Craine’s eye as he described what the merger meant to him. It meant that the righteous anger of God was joined with the unrighteous greed and lust for power that Satan sought and that Mankind would be in an eternal conflict over which could be applied to do the most good. Molly startled him with a question that asked why doing good had to be attached to anger. Couldn’t loving one’s self and one’s fellow man be a guide for seeking the good in life?
Craine considered this proposition and tried to annex this thought to his belief that he had to fight for everything he got. Molly told him the story of the friendship that developed between a lion and a mouse when the mouse pulled the thorn from the lion’s foot, and how Joseph earned the reputation of being