Mile High Read Free Page B

presented to him at the White House. The Number Six Company did a lot for Paddy West.
    Paddy didn’t drink or whore and now he gave up smoking because it cut his wind. He was the industry’s model crimp. He could bring in more sailors with a stern stare than another crimp could with a bottle of booze. If any woman in any of the three saloons the Casker owned ever spoke to him, Paddy would knock her down. Soon all the top whores on the waterfront came to show him doglike devotion. He organized the best of them in his own little band and took over the organization of their sales and promotion. But he spoke to them only through his helper, Jiggs Tobin, a Roscommon man who was saving to buy his own horse and hack.
    Working for Ma, running the girls and cashing bets on the Big Six weren’t the only sources of income for young Paddy. He taught himself to be an accomplished pickpocket, no mean feat for a farm boy with hands like a cow’s udders. Ma Steinet would watch him watching the runners roll the drunk sailors and then get drunk themselves. She’d admire the way Paddy would walk among them, lifting the money out of their pockets. In that way he was an honest thief. He never stole from strangers or the sober. She was pleased with his steady ambition and the no-nonsense, teetotal way about him. She jumped him over the ranks of runners into the first vacancy as boardinghouse master when he was only twenty-two years old—six feet, two inches tall, one hundred and ninety pounds, without a smile or a frown, but never stupid-looking for any of that.
    Until a crew was ordered by a shipping company, the Casker’s boarders were housed warmly and fed well for two dollars a week from each man. She ran saloons in each doss and specialized in seafaring men. Whatever it was she offered, it was so right for sailors that even though men knew they had been shanghaied before from one of Casker Steinet’s places, most of them returned again and again.
    The boardinghouse Paddy ran was close to the river and had a trapdoor for lowering the drugged men into small boats to be run out to the big ships that waited impatiently for their crews in the harbor. For supplying crews Ma got the advance notes issued by the shipping companies against two or three months’ pay for each man she dropped aboard. The runners got five dollars a head per man, the boardinghouse master got 10 percent of Ma’s estimated gross, which was about 2 percent of true earnings, but Ma never objected to Paddy running the whores or picking the runners’ pockets.
    Any boy’s ambition modifies as he grows older. The year Paddy landed was the year of the appointment of the first American representative to the Vatican, and he dreamed of parading past the Swiss Guards in silk knickerbockers. However, by 1856, after fighting in the forces of Mayor Fernando Wood, Paddy had worked himself along in the party councils at least far enough so that he made seventeen hundred dollars out of securing, but not serving, writs of condemnation of the new Elevated Railway Company, and six hundred and fifteen dollars as the professional friend of the workers in the shoe industry. He was among the first one hundred members of the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, formed to protect the seniority rights of shoemakers against cheap competition from beginners. Paddy opened his first saloon in the sixties (which, in 1878, became the first saloon in the nation to install electric light). When George Leslie robbed the Manhattan Savings Bank of $3,000,000 in broad daylight, although two of Leslie’s men went to jail for it, Paddy West saw to it that Leslie was not brought to trial, because of “lack of evidence.” Paddy was becoming one of the men to see in New York government.
    But when Ma Steinet died in 1860 Paddy was just getting started. He was twenty-eight years old. He was managing all three of the Steinet boardinghouses, all fourteen runners,