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Weinberg’s loyalty – on the contrary, he was acquiring secret inside information from the rival gangs which benefited Schultz – Schultz was eventually consumed with seething resentment. Soon, Bo Weinberg went missing and was never seen again. Reportedly, like Shapiro, he had been tied up, his feet encased in a block of cement and dumped into the East River.
    Well known for his close links to New York’s Tammany Hall politicians, Schultz declined to cut deals with other mob leaders, preferring to set his own rules and keep the millions he made from the takings of the numbers games he singlehandedly controlled throughout Harlem and the Bronx. During the early 1930s, the numbers racket is estimated to have yielded an annual return of $100 million. In 1933, his street runners, responsible for collecting money from all the players, when threatened with a 50% pay cut, stopped work and organised themselves into a union. Within the first week of the strike, one of the bank’s takings from the players dropped from $9,000 a day to $186. Schultz soon backtracked on the men’s pay cut. In view of the spectacularly lucrative rewards from both the beer business and the numbers racket it was hardly surprising that rival gangsters hoped for a piece of the action. When Schultz went into the slot machine business he teamed up briefly with Frank Costello and, “Legs” Diamond and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll from Hell’s Kitchen to act as his enforcers. Unwisely, Coll and Diamond both attempted to hijack the business. Neither survived long. In October 1931, Legs Diamond was killed, reportedly by Schultz’s men: when asked by journalists about the murder, Schultz retorted: “Diamond was just another punk with his hands in my pockets.”
    Vincent Coll and his Irish gang managed for some time to reap benefits from the pickings of some of Schultz’s businesses, while attempting to wipe out his key associates. One of their chief targets was Joe Rao, who by then had become a prominent Schultz lieutenant. In May 1931, Rao narrowly escaped death when a group of men drove their car past a Harlem restaurant where he was dining and opened fire. Although Rao escaped harm, two fellow diners were blasted to death and two bystanders were injured. Months later, on a hot July evening, Rao was standing in front of a social club on 107th Street when he noticed an open car cruising down the street towards him: inside three men were holding machine guns. As they drew close and took aim, Rao ducked and, though wounded, dashed around the corner out of range. However, a group of children playing outside their stifling tenement apartments, splashing in the cool waters of a fire hydrant spray, were not so lucky. In the onslaught of non-stop machine gun fire, five year old Michael Vengali was torn apart by sixty bullets and died in hospital. Four of his playmates were also hit, including his brother: all suffered critical injuries. A baby was shot in the back as he slept in his pram.
    The tragedy was the culmination of an exceptionally bloody year of ferocious, gun battles and contract killings. An unusually high number of innocent passers-by were often the victims. The July 1931 child shooting - dubbed “New York’s child massacre” by reporters - was condemned throughout the US, as the most ruthless crime in 20th century New York gang warfare. It was also one of those atrocities which, by generating continued press condemnation and public outrage, galvanised the city’s authorities, including politicians, social reformers and anti-crime organisations, into demanding a crackdown on organised crime. One such politician, the fiery Jewish-Italian Republican New York State senator, Fiorello La Guardia, launched a series of excoriating attacks on organised crime, while denouncing the failure of the New York authorities to tackle the problem. The massacre of the innocents would eventually prove to be a turning point in the public’s attitudes towards mob