Back to 1910: Building America's Greatest Mafia

Marek sat with his mouth still full of the hot beef sandwich, his eyes bright with energy. He swallowed hard, wiping a smear of grease from his cheek with his sleeve.

"So we have our own business now?" he asked, his voice rising in an enthusiastic squeak. "Should we like register then? Like go down to the city hall on Chambers Street, pay for licenses and stuff? Get a proper name painted on a board?"

Ricky’s sharp, business-minded grin faded into a dry, sheepish half-smile. He rested his elbows on his knees, spinning his lead pencil between his fingers.

"Well... about that," Ricky said, his voice dropping into a quiet, careful register.

Marek’s enthusiasm sputtered. He lowered the remaining half of his sandwich, his brow furrowing as he leaned forward. "What? What do you mean ’about that’? What’s wrong with it?"

"The products that come out of my shop," Ricky said, tilting his head toward the clean sheet of dresser paper where the wrapper sat, "in technical terms, they’re smuggled."

Marek blinked, looking entirely confused. "Smuggled? What do you mean? Smuggled products only go through the docks illegally. You know, bypassed by the customs agents or brought in under the coal on a Belgian freighter. We aren’t docking a boat, Ricky."

"It’s much more complicated than that," Ricky explained, his modern understanding of corporate structures and government compliance coming to the forefront. "Think about how a normal business works in this city. Every roll of fabric, every keg of iron nails, and every sack of flour has to come from somewhere. It has to go through manufacturing, right? And to manufacture it, you need a supplier. If it comes from out of state or across the ocean, it goes through trade inspections. Then you have to pay the applicable taxes. Income taxes, corporate taxes, tariffs... everything has to have a paper trail. Right?"

Marek nodded slowly, his street-honed survival instincts starting to catch up with Ricky’s math. "Right. The customs house at the Battery... they examine the manifests. If you don’t have the stamp, the coppers seize the dray."

"Exactly," Ricky said, pointing his pencil at Marek. "And what if the public knows I can materialize things out of thin air without a single factory, a single railcar, or a single shipping invoice? What would happen if the authorities—or any of the big syndicates—find out I can do these things?"

Marek stared at him, the half-eaten sandwich completely forgotten in his hand. The color slowly drained from his soot-smeared face as the reality of Ricky’s "invisible bank" took on a much darker, heavier shape.

"Oh," Marek whispered, his throat tightening. "Oh... that’s... that’s bad. Imprisoning you would be the least they would do. The government... the big trusts... they’d put you in a cellar and cut you open just to see how the coins come out."

"Yeah," Ricky said dryly. "I figured it would be a lot worse than a cell."

Marek’s fingers began to twitch against the wool of his trousers. He looked toward the small window, where the pale yellow glow of the gas lamps on Commerce Street was just beginning to slice through the dark. "Then what should we do? Is proceeding with this even a good idea? Selling illegal goods... well, they aren’t illegal, they’re just... it’s still concerning. Ricky, we could go to jail. Or worse."

"There’s no need to worry about that," Ricky said, his voice calm, steady, and thoroughly grounded. "We haven’t even started yet. We’re still too small for anyone to notice. Nobody cares about two teenagers selling a dozen steel files or a keg of wire nails on Bleecker Street. Besides, if we do this, we could earn a lot of money. We’ll split the profits fifty-fifty. You’ll be able to send more money order certificates back to Galicia. Real money. Enough to buy your sister Sofie the medicine she needs and get your folks out from under the land-agent’s thumb."

Marek looked down at his silver change, still tucked in his palm, then at the warm, savory sandwich. He thought of his little sister’s dry, whistling cough in the cold Polish winters, and the desperate letters his mother sent that took three weeks to cross the Atlantic. He swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded slowly.

"Yeah," Marek said quietly, his jaw setting with a small spark of determination. "I suppose you’re right. The risk is... it’s worth the coin. But how are we gonna do it? How are you gonna convince the shop owners to change their suppliers? They’ve been buying from the same wholesale houses in Brooklyn and Soho for years."

Ricky smiled, his gray eyes catching the dim light. "Only prices will convince them."

"But won’t they be suspicious about how long we can keep selling?" Marek asked. "They’ll want to know where a couple of kids got a steady run of high-grade carbon steel or clean white sugar."

"Sure, they’ll be curious at first," Ricky said, leaning back against the wall. "But they won’t complain if the legitimate suppliers or wholesalers have shitty service, delayed deliveries, high minimum orders, and inflated prices. If Whitaker can get a hundred-weight of clean, rust-free nails delivered to his back door tomorrow morning for twenty percent less than the Brooklyn house charges him, he’s not going to ask for a shipping manifest. He’s just going to count his extra profit. Besides, I don’t think any local inspectors are going to track where a hardware store’s nails came from, as long as the store itself pays its local business taxes."

Marek chewed on that, his analytical mind testing the seams of the plan. "I guess you’re right. But what if the coppers notice us when we’re delivering? A couple of boys carrying heavy crates through the streets at midday... that attracts eyes."

"We’re gonna have to do our deliveries at the earliest," Ricky said. "Before the sun’s fully up. Before the street sweeps start and the patrolmen change their shifts."

"We don’t even have a wagon and a horse yet," Marek pointed out, counting the obstacles on his fingers. "How are we gonna do that? Even a used horse at the livery stables costs sixty dollars. A decent spring-wagon is forty. A leather harness is fifteen. We only have about sixty dollars total if we tally our money together right now, and that’s not even counting the capital we need to buy the goods from your shop."

Ricky let out a soft chuckle. "You don’t have to worry too much about the money, Marek. I can take a... let’s call it a loan, from my vault. Up to a hundred and fifty dollars."

It was a lie, of course. There was no loan function in the Founder’s Ledger. But Ricky couldn’t tell him that he got twenty dollars in clean gold certificates deposited directly into his treasury every single day just for running five miles and doing push-ups in the dark. To a kid who had spent three years hauling pig iron for pennies, a "system-locked daily discipline quest" sounded like fairy tales. A bank loan was something Marek understood.

Marek’s eyes widened anyway. "A loan? Really? From the invisible bank?"

"Yeah," Ricky said, nodding. "We’ve got the capital. The problem is where do we buy the drayage? We can’t exactly go to the big auction houses on 24th Street without people asking questions."

Marek leaned his head back against the wooden bunk post, his mind scanning his mental map of the West Side. "I don’t know much about the carriage trade, but you can buy cheap horses at the livery stables near the timber slips. There are always auctions for draft horses that have minor splints or are too slow for the fire companies, but are still strong enough to haul a wagon. As for wagons... there are builders nearby, especially used ones. The blacksmiths down near Gansevoort Street usually repair abandoned, broken ones and sell them for scrap prices just to clear their yards. But they’re all around the Hudson docks. We can go near there, as long as we stay off the actual commercial piers where the Gopher lookouts sit."

"Alright," Ricky said, his pencil scratching a quick note. "Livery stables. Blacksmith yards. We’ll check them tomorrow. But once we start getting more than two or three stores on our route, we’re going to need help. We’ll need new guys—proper boys who can take orders and handle the deliveries while we run the warehouse."

Marek paused, his hand hovering over his pocket. "Are you planning to make a gang, Ricky? I mean... our business is technically illegal under the city’s tax codes. But... if you say it like that..."

Ricky thought of the Gophers and Doyle with his silver-plated .32 pocket revolver. He thought of the casual, brutal violence that defined every square inch of the 1910 Manhattan underworld.

"I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have some insurance," Ricky said, a cold, hard edge returning to his voice. "And some protection just in case we run into another gang that wants to tax our route."

Marek rubbed his temples, looking thoroughly stressed as he tried to fit the massive, mind-boggling scale of Ricky’s ambition into his head. "The business itself is already enough to make my brain spin, Ricky. But running a gang... that’s a different thing entirely. The Five Points, the Dusters... they split heads for fun."

Ricky smiled, reaching over to pat Marek’s shoulder. "It’s not a gang, per se, Marek. Just some proper naughty boys. We’ll pay them regular money out of a fixed percentage of our profits. Maybe a dollar and fifty cents a day to start, but it won’t be heavy, bone-crushing labor like the docks. They’ll just load the cargo, deliver it, go back, take another order, and load the cargo again. Some of them might have to take orders from other shops regularly. But unlike the other gangs in this city... we aren’t extorting anyone. We’re doing real business."

Marek stared at him for a long, quiet second. The worry in his eyes slowly resolved into a deep, calculating respect. He knew the boys on the docks—the hungry, desperate Irish and Polish kids who would gladly break a window or haul a trunk for a quarter. If Ricky was offering a steady, clean wage of a dollar-fifty just to drive a cart and ask shopkeepers what they needed... they’d have a hundred loyal scouts by Tuesday.

"No stealing?" Marek asked, wanting to be absolutely sure. "No shaking down the vegetable carts?"

"No," Ricky said firmly. "We’re suppliers, Marek. We’re the foundation. We don’t tear down the neighborhood; we own it."

Marek let out a long breath, a slow, genuine grin splitting his face as he took another bite of his sandwich. "Alright, fine. Let’s do it."

Ricky chuckled, closing his notebook with a soft, clean snap. "I knew you would."