A Cup of Joe with Sam and the Hand

A Cup of Joe with Sam and the Hand

           The sleepy bedroom community in northeastern Ohio, just across the border from Pennsylvania, resembles a ghost town without the tumbleweed strolling down an uninhabited Main Street on any nondescript Saturday at noon. The coke ovens have fallen into disrepair, the blast furnaces disappeared at the beginning of the Great Depression, and the Italian Club is the only reminder of the boomtown that it once was in the first decades of the twentieth century. It had been a town ripe with an explosive mix of Protestant-Catholic strife, increased xenophobia, teetotalers, drunkards, and an organized crime syndicate that would prosper and eventually vanish as quickly as the steel mills of nearby Youngstown.

The warm summer night before the town folks first laid eyes on him, the Presbyterian Church was dynamited. Of course, it could have all been coincidence. Several townsfolk recalled meeting him at Frankie’s Deli counter that afternoon. A dark “cup of Joe and a chipped chop sammich” was his exact order, as legend has it. He removed the precious bowler he had purchased two days earlier at the Rich Clothing Store to display his thick, black hair parted perfectly on the right side. His dark three-piece suit appeared to have been on its initial journey as the newness of the fabric filled the air with a strange aroma. The regulars remembered the man for his impeccable wardrobe and the curious manner in which he folded the sandwich and dunked it neatly into his steaming cup of coffee.

           “New in town?” Frankie tried to start up a conversation while the outsider continued to chew on the coffee-soaked bread seemingly in no hurry to respond to the perfunctory inquiry.

           “Just passing through,” he eventually grunted, purposely economizing his words to reveal the bare minimum.

           Frankie, who had become accustomed to the evasiveness of strangers at his deli counter, would ask no more questions and our mysterious stranger offered not a sound as he concentrated all his efforts on the ham sandwich.

           “Those bastards blew up the church last night!” Albert McMann, steelworker and spreader of daily news informed anyone in earshot. “Those damn Italians!” (The 21^st century telling of this story has removed the derogatory term that Mr. McMann employed a hundred years earlier.)

           The news was fresh and nobody had definitively connected the Black Hand Society to the explosion that had partially destroyed the Presbyterian house of worship. Nonetheless, the local consensus had already assigned the blame on the secretive society comprised of Italian immigrants in that corner of Ohio.

           “I heard they shot a man in Alliance last weekend,” Frankie added fuel to the conspiracy, “Had a letter in his pocket from the Black Hand. Said they’d kill him. That poor son of a gun.”

           The stranger clanked his cup down on the saucer as a means of announcing his exit. Without a word, he lifted the rectangular leather case he carried with him with his left hand, smoothed his Brilliantine-covered cut with his right, arranged his stiff bowler, and walked out onto Main Street.

           “What’s the lowdown on that guy?” Albert did not wait until the man’s second foot could reach the uneven sidewalk before asking about him. No one in the shop provided an answer other than a mention of his odd eating habits. “And what’s with the case?”

           Without a decent response, Frankie changed the subject to baseball. The Pittsburgh club was doing well, at least that’s what he’d read in The Evening Journal the night before. “I think they’re playing better now that city got the “H” back in its name,” he quipped and smiled nervously.  

           The following afternoon, Albert arrived and informed everyone within earshot about what he’d unearthed concerning the new addition to the small town.

“He’s staying at the Hotel.” There wasn’t a need for him to specify which hotel for there was only one such establishment in the entire village. The bigger question was the person to whom Albert was referring.

           “Who? The guy lugging around that weird case?” asked Peter Ryan, a regular at the deli counter.

           “I saw him at the Hotel,” Albert continued. “He was drinking rye as if it was going out of style.”

           “You don’t say,” Frankie added as he instinctively poured a cup of coffee for Albert.

           “Lucky with the ladies, too. I’d say he had a pick of two or three of them.”

           The tales that Albert liked to spin had always seemed exaggerated, but the small lunchtime crowd at Frankie’s Deli bought into the narrative.

           “Says his name is Sam Ferguson.”

           The guy’s appearance and his name seemed to be disconnected from the stereotypical notions of the period. The dark complexion to go with the burly mustache and that thick hair defined him as an Italian. The name Sam Ferguson did not fit him at all.  

           “He’s not Italian?” Frankie, son of an Italian immigrant himself, questioned Albert’s information. “I thought I recognized an Italian accent.”

           Albert agreed. It all added up in the conspiracy that he had cooked up, seeing through Mr. Ferguson’s disguise. A strange Italian-looking chap shows up in town and the church gets dynamited. The tension between the “drys” and the “wets” had been simmering all summer long. The “drys” protested outside the Hotel, demanding the bar cease providing alcohol for the increasingly drunken hoards. The “wets” defended their right as law-abiding residents to spend their hard-earned money in the manner in which they pleased.

“He’s obviously a ‘wet,’ sitting there at the bar drinking all night. I bet if we got a peek inside that leather case, you’d find a revolver and an assortment of stilettos. Maybe even a stick of leftover dynamite.”

“Come on, Albert, you’re jumping to too many conclusions.”

           “I talked to the mayor. He’s got his eye on him,” Albert explained that the German Lutheran mayor had been alerted of the presence of a potential thug in town.

           Frankie waited until after he closed up the shop to make his way to the Hotel. He picked out a heavily starched shirt and a freshly-ironed pair of trousers to look the part at the town’s premier watering hole. Exactly as Albert had described, Frankie found Sam Ferguson at the bar, sipping a glass of rye—no ice.

           “Hey, buddy, remember me?”

           “No,” he answered, “I don’t believe I do. Should I?”

           His words hid a slight accent, but Frankie could not make out his ethnicity with any degree of certainty.

           “Are you here looking for work?”

           “What’s it to you,” he quickly jabbed back defensively, “You a cop or sumpin’?”

           Frankie chuckled to answer this absurd accusation.

           “Just asking, pal. I think they’re looking for young guys over at McKeefrey’s.”

           “Thanks, but I’m not looking for work. Just passing by, on my way to Youngstown.”

           “I see. Just passing by, okay.”

           “I’ll be on my way tomorrow morning.” He downed his drink, paid his tab, and left while only barely acknowledging his conversation partner’s continued presence at the bar. He swayed slightly as his form disappeared.

           “What do you make of that guy?” Frankie asked Carl, the barkeep that he had known since their days in grammar school. “What can you tell me ‘bout this Sam Ferguson?”

           “Lady’s man for sure,” Carl replied, “I seen him with a different girl every night.”

           “Do you hear an accent?”

           “Italian.”

           “You sure?”

           “Absolutely.”

           “Thanks, Carl,” Frankie placed what he owed for the drink on the bar and added in a little more for his old pal. “There’s a little extra in there, my friend, to keep an eye out for that guy. I don’t trust him.”

Before he could turn toward the door, Albert’s booming voice shattered the Thursday night at the Hotel.

“They offed that Guido kid!”

“Which one?”

“Mickey.”

“Black Hand got him,” Albert declared straight away with impassioned vigor, “They found a letter in his pocket.”

Little Mickey was just 21 and the last anyone saw him he had been walking down by the Y&OR tracks with two other young men described by eyewitnesses as Italians.

“Where’s that new guy?”

“He went up to his room,” Frankie explained, “he was just drinking right here next to me. Ain’t it so, Carl?”

The barkeep agreed silently as Frankie attempted to contain the anti-Italian rage being spewed by Albert. The south side Irish and the west end Italians shared a religion but the spat between the two prevalent immigrant groups had heated up recently. Although the Black Hand mainly extorted members of their own ethnic group, the church bombing had demonstrated that the Italian mafia had begun to branch out, threatening the community as a whole.

“I’ll kill that son of a bitch!” Albert exclaimed as he left the bar in the direction of Sam Ferguson’s hotel room.

“Ferguson!” he clamored as his right fist pounded the door. “Open up this blasted door!”

“Albert! Leave the guy alone. You’ve got no proof of anything.”

“Ferguson,” he raised his voice in defiance, “or whatever your name is. Open up! I know you’re in there.”

The latch was thrown quickly and the desperate face of Sam Ferguson greeted the rosy and inflamed cheeks of the Irish immigrant.”

“What do you…”

Sam Ferguson failed to complete the question, leaving the missing verb and question mark trapped in his throat for eternity. Albert McMann had inserted his tiny but deadly penknife into the stranger’s abdomen. Sam’s eyes widened and a steady stream of blood began to flow from beneath that thick shrubbery playing the part of a mustache.

Albert’s hefty arms pushed the dying man back onto the hard wooden hotel floor where his head banged in one solid thud. An insane rage accompanied the laborer’s grip as he repeatedly pounded the smaller man’s head against the floor until the last ounce of life had been drained from him.

Frankie turned away in horror, understanding that he had witnessed a murder despite his attempt to close his eyes. The image had already penetrated his memory.

“Albert,” he attempted to lower his voice. “What have you done?”

The murderer stood extremely erect, his head reaching a height that it had never before experienced.

“It’s over,” he responded quickly without proper explanation for his deadly reaction. The late summer heat coupled with the intensity of his lethal emotions produced enough perspiration that Albert needed his right forearm to wipe his face. His respiration slowed as his new identity as a killer sank into his consciousness.

Carl joined the two living and one deceased occupant of room 15, saying nothing as he closed the door behind him. The three breathing members in that room looked at each other and devised a telepathic communication system in which they worked in harmony without uttering as much as one single word. Carl checked the dead man for a pulse while Frankie began mopping up the pool of blood with any available garments he could find. The Irish assassin shuffled around the room frantically. At any moment, the crazed lunatic could retrieve his mortal weapon from Sam’s abdomen and slice open his accomplices. Instead of continuing his murderous rampage, he began rummaging through the deceased tenant’s belongings. He popped open a small bag, spilling its contents onto the unmade bed—nothing more than a pair of skivvies. Frankie quickly snatched them up to aid in his removal of the bloodstain from the wooden floor.

Albert seized the odd, rectangular case that had caught everyone’s attention at Frankie’s Deli and hoisted it above the bed. The weight of the case puzzled him at first. Both latches popped open in unison to expose Sam Ferguson’s instrument of choice—a shiny brass trumpet. Surprised by its contents, Albert angrily dumped the music machine onto the bed and searched the velvet-lined compartments for more dangerous instruments. Finding nothing more threatening than a spare mouthpiece and a single photograph, he slammed the innocent trumpet to the floor, irreparably damaging the bell and the third valve slide.

“Albert,” Frankie broke the silence, knowing the madness must stop, “we need a good story.”

Both he and Carl agreed immediately. Albert reached into the corpse’s suit pocket and retrieved two pieces of paper. Ah-ha! He had been hiding something. His name was Samuel Ferraiolo, an Italian who had been living under a false last name. The second folio linked him to the Black Hand Society, but in a way contrary to their original suspicions. The letter threatened him. Sam was the one being extorted and threatened by the mafia. His hiding out in the small town between Youngstown and Pittsburgh had been intended to lower the heat, perhaps throw the Black Hand off his trail as he made his way to Y-town to join his band. The photograph that had fallen from his case to the floor portrayed the proud trumpet player with his band—The Midland Melody.

“I’ll go get Woodsie,” Frankie directed, “He’ll know what to do with the body.”

“It was self-defense, right fellows?” Albert laid out the official justification for his actions.

Carl excused himself to return to his duties at the bar. Normal life would have to continue inside the Hotel and the missing provider of drinks was needed behind the bar. Frankie handed the Black Hand letter to Albert and proceeded to leave room 15 in search of the town’s only undertaker. Albert sat on the edge of the bed that Sam Ferguson would no longer need, re-read the threatening scribblings on the paper that had been folded into a neat square. The writer of the letter directly stated that $500 was the price for Mr. Ferguson’s life. Although the letter was signed with a doodle of a hand holding a bloody knife, there was no explicit recipient anywhere on the scrap of paper. Albert had discovered the ticket to his alibi. All of it was carefully spelled out in the next day’s Salem News.

BLACK HANDER SNUFFED OUT. An Italian from Midland, Pennsylvania thought he could extort a local Irishman. Albert McMann would have none of it. When the Black Hander arrived in town to collect the $500 from Mr. McMann, the wise man refused to pay up, defending himself keenly, and killing the suspected aggressor with his own weapon, a three-inch penknife. The deceased man who had been seen around town recently going by the last name Ferguson was an Italian immigrant from Calabria named Ferraiolo. No next of kin have been identified.

The Midland Melody replaced their trumpet player without recognizing publicly that they had ever known Sam Ferguson. Fearing that the Black Hand would track them down, the surviving members of the quintet changed their name to The Shippingport Sound. Frankie continued to work the counter at his deli not worried a bit that his fellow Italian immigrants might come to extort him. “What would they ask for?” he joked, “Five hundred pounds of chipped ham? A gross of ice cream bars?” Carl worked at the Hotel for a few more years until Prohibition eliminated his means of employment. Although the circumstances were never clear, his corpse was recovered by a pair of teenage fishermen in the Little Beaver Creek in late May 1920.

Albert McMann carried the heavy burden of his declared self-defense killing of that mysterious stranger. While laboring away at the McKeefrey Iron Company, his mind continually replayed the final moments of Samuel Ferraiolo’s life. The noise of the factory work failed to drown out the memories of the grunting and subsequent gurgling that escaped the soon-to-be-dead man. Frequently, he would startle his wife in the dark of the Ohio night with blood-curdling screams as his large body would fling itself forward in their bed. His eyes would widen and in a somnambulant stare he would scream two words—“I’m sorry!”

This behavior would haunt Albert for nearly six months before the authentic author of the Black Hand letter would catch up with him. Annoyed by the usurping of their name for his personal alibi, they found no need to warn the unsuspecting target with a preemptive letter for extortion was not the issue. It was all about knowing who ruled the town. Clearly, it was the Black Hand. Albert took one bullet to the forehead in broad daylight just outside Frankie’s Deli on Main Street. There were no eyewitnesses to his murder. As the single bullet pierced Albert’s brain that Saturday afternoon, Frankie heard the shot but did not flinch. As the ringleader of the Black Hand, he knew it was coming.