Read The First Family for Free Online

deal cleverer than his bland looks and sausage body might suggest. In the six years since he had joined the service, Chief Flynn had blazed such a trail through New Orleans, Washington, and Pittsburgh that John Wilkie, the agency’s director, had personally selected him to tackle the toughest posting that the service had to offer. Now here he was on Wall Street, the U.S. government’s most senior detective.
    Flynn’s job was to keep the biggest city in the country free from counterfeiters and forged bills. Although best known today for guarding the president, the Secret Service was, and remains, a department of the Treasury. It had been founded after the Civil War, at a time when nearly half of all the cash in circulation was counterfeit, and its first duty has always been to maintain robust public confidence in the value of the dollar. The agency came by its close protection role by accident—one of Flynn’s predecessors in the New York office had actually been demoted for informally assigning men to guard President Cleveland—and even in 1903, after the assassination of William McKinley had forced Washington to take that problem much more seriously, nine-tenths of Secret Service manpower, and practically all its budget, was devoted to the war on counterfeiting. The work demanded men of unusual ability; forgers rarely committed messy, headline-grabbing crimes, they could work from almost anywhere and were noted for their brains. Tracking them down and procuring evidence against them called for patience, thoroughness, and cunning. In all these qualities, Flynn excelled.
    The counterfeiting problem in New York was particularly bad. Large quantities of fake notes and bad coins were in circulation. A few of these were first-rate forgeries; most counterfeit currency, though, consisted of badly printed notes on poor-quality paper and crudely struck half-dollar coins and quarters. These unskillful fakes were never intended to fool bankers or Treasury men; they were put into circulation by small-time crooks known as “queer-pushers,” who bought them at a discount from the men who forged them and took their chances palming them off on harassed bartenders and shopkeepers. Queer-pushing was far easierwhen practiced in poor immigrant districts, where crowds were dense and the locals unsophisticated. It was for this reason that counterfeiting was especially common in the Jewish and Italian enclaves of New York—and for this reason, too, that Flynn had spent the evening, a day earlier, loitering outside a butcher’s shop on Stanton Street in Little Italy.
    The Secret Service had been aware ever since the spring of 1899 that Sicilian forgers were passing bad money in New York, and over the years its agents had arrested a number of queer-pushers who were agents of the gang. Half a dozen of these small fish had been convicted and given sentences of as much as six years; most recently, on New Year’s Eve 1902, a group of Italians had been caught in Yonkers passing counterfeit five-dollar bills drawn on the Iron Bank of Morristown, New Jersey. Three of the members of this gang had been convicted a month before the Barrel Murder. They had gone to jail tight-lipped—much to Flynn’s frustration—refusing to reveal either the names of their suppliers or the location of their printing works.
    It had taken the Secret Service twelve weeks, and a large expenditure of effort, to solve the mystery of the Morristown fives. In the end, however, long hours of covert observation and the careful cultivation of informants drew agents to a dingy butcher’s shop at 16 Stanton Street, a two-minute walk from the spaghetti restaurant where Madonia would meet his death. The store, Flynn learned, had changed hands in early April. Its new owner was a large and powerful Sicilian named Vito Laduca.
    The trail that had led Flynn to Stanton Street worried the Secret Service chief considerably. For one thing, the previous owner of the butcher’s shop, the