In early 1909, Joe Petrosino underwent a secret mission to Italy to hunt down Lupo the Wolf, the crime lord who had left a trail of bodies behind him in the boroughs. But the New York papers leaked his whereabouts, and Petrosino was shot dead on the beautiful streets of Palermo, leaving a wife and family behind. When his body returned to New York City, over 250,000 people attended his funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Police Commissioner Woods, his friend, was among them.
The remaining Italian Squad vowed to avenge their leader by catching Lupo. While Petrosino’s lieutenants followed more traditional means—using newly passed laws against guns and kidnapping—the youngest member of the squad, an ex–pro baseball player named Thomas McDonough, was still involved in Petrosino’s last plan. McDonough crafted a perfect disguise as a fruit grocer in Little Italy and held character for a year, waiting for Lupo to slip up and reveal his whereabouts. When Lupo finally appeared on the street, the Irish kid, with the help of the Secret Service, caught the Wolf on a counterfeiting ring, finally ending his long campaign of murder.
What happened to Petrosino wasn’t the only black mark on Woods’s record. A year earlier, on July 30, explosions lit up the early-morning sky on Black Tom Island off Jersey City. The explosion was so massive that the Brooklyn Bridge began to sway back and forth in the sky. The island was an ammunitions dump, blown to smithereens by German agents seeking to keep the munitions from being supplied to the Allies. Woods did his best to clean it up and find out who did it. But it had happened under his watch.
The papers said that Woods was the kind of man who stayed in the shadows. But that wasn’t true. Standing over that map, watching his own long shadow engulf Harlem, he knew how this missing-girl case would go. Before joining the force, Woods had been a reporter for the Evening Sun. He still had friends there. That’s how he knew how fast this story would light up and go. He knew he was sitting on a firecracker. So a day later, Woods assumed personal charge of the Ruth Cruger case.
Unbeknownst to Woods, other armies stood ready to help him. At Wadleigh High School, one hundred girls volunteered to help in the search for their onetime classmate. Like the church, they decided to conduct a mail and telephone investigation of all surrounding towns. They reached out as far as Saint Louis and Atlanta. When the girls called these places on the phone, they said they were searching for their missing sister.
The neighborhood around Wadleigh was not without its own controversies. Located on 114th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the school enrolled around 2,700 students, who were taught by eighty or so teachers. The morning session met from morning until two; the afternoon from one to five. The teachers and students knew those times well. They weren’t the only ones. When school was dismissed, long arms of departing students reached out from every side of the school and out into the frontier that was Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Just three blocks away, between 110th and 112th, a string of vaudeville joints and places called merry-go-rounds started to get going just about the same time that school let out. The girls, walking home, could hear pianos banging away on Dixieland jazz music. Women in dried-up makeup smiled at the children from dark doorways. But worse—much worse—was the group of boys who appeared from these pleasure palaces every day at exactly five o’clock to watch the girls walk home. Parents complained to the police when these boys started to brush elbows with the girls, giving them insults, mashing on them, and engaging in “low talk.”
“Our responsibility ends when the children pass into the streets,” said Wadleigh assistant principal Miss Speirs when confronted with the problem. “What happens there is the affair of the parents. We have a police officer in the building … but he cannot watch each pupil all the way home.
“Let us hope they make the trip in safety,” she added.
“It is enough to watch the girls in school,” said Miss Goodrich, another teacher. “How funny!” added another teacher, Miss Conant. “No one ever insulted me in the street.”
The police were privately calling this area the New Tenderloin, a wellborn successor to the old red-light district in the heart of Manhattan. The cops said the gang who was bothering the girls got together four years ago. The police didn’t know what they were calling themselves yet, only that they had come up from the dumps of the east side and spoke a coded jargon and used secret hand signs.
*
The people huddled on the subway platform stared up at the flickering terra-cotta ceiling. The lights lit the mosaic tiles on the wall that spelled out 157th Street. The crowd, bundled up in coats and hats, pressed back against the wall. They had come in down the slate stairs under the rotunda, passing the white tiled columns. When the subways opened, Mayor McClellan said that “without rapid transit Greater New York would be little more than a geographical expression.” Everyone was intrigued by the labyrinth.
A young woman, her motion stopped in frames of interrupted light, staggered out past the line of people. She was moving toward the electrified rail line. A man in a suit saw her. He raced toward her and grabbed her hand. The train was getting louder and the overhead lamps began to rattle. As the train sped out of the black tunnel, the woman pitched and began to fall off the platform itself, just as the man pulled her back. The man yelled for help, and the ticket man ran over to help her back up. As the train washed them all in light, sound, and force, they all held her back. She struggled, then screamed.
A couple, older and calm, stooped over to comfort her. The lights dimmed again.
“I’ve been away from home two nights,” the girl cried. “Something terrible has happened, and I’m afraid to go home.” The couple offered to take her to their apartment to calm her down.
When they had gone, it struck the man that the girl was the one from the papers, so he hurried to tell the cops. Detectives began a slow house-to-house search near the subway station, looking for the couple who had rescued her. When she was finally found, the girl was positively identified. She wasn’t Ruth; she was a married woman who had angered her husband.