Christmas Slay Ride: Most Mysterious and Horrific Christmas Day Murders by Jack Smith

Author:Jack Smith [Smith, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Specific Groups, Crime & Criminals, True Crime, Murder & Mayhem, Criminals
ISBN: 1511402091
Amazon: B00REXTCFU
Goodreads: 24107812
Published: 2014-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

Eastman's former followers identifying him at the morgue.

Photo from Author's Collection.

On January 4, Eastman’s killer finally turned himself in.

Jerry W. Bohan was a Prohibition agent who had been tried for murder before. In 1911, he had shot one Joseph Faulkner, alias “Joe the Bear,” but a Brooklyn jury acquitted him. During the war, Bohan got a job along the Brooklyn waterfront representing the stevedores’ union, which at the time was battling its employers. Monk Eastman was also involved in that conflict, but as an agent of the employers.

“It was thus,” wrote the New York Times, “that the two met and became friendly enemies.”

Bohan explained that the killing of Eastman had been spontaneous self-defense. On Christmas night, he, Eastman and a group of friends went to the Blue Bird Café, a basement cabaret two doors west of the station entrance where Eastman’s body was later found, and spent hours drinking.

All was rowdy but well until around 4:00 a.m., when a dispute arose over how the staff were to be tipped. Eastman wanted to give something to everyone while others thought that the piano player, who had stayed overtime to entertain them, deserved most of the money. In the end, only the waiter who had handled their table was tipped, a fact that apparently did not sit well with Eastman.

Bohan told the police that he was leaving the Blue Bird alone when Eastman grabbed him from behind and accused him of having been a “rat” ever since he got his Prohibition agent job. He saw the gangster reach into his right coat pocket, and reacted by pulling his gun and emptying it into his assailant. When Eastman fell, Bohan threw away the weapon, jumped onto the running board of a taxi heading north on Fourth Avenue, and escaped.

Rumors hinted that the fatal confrontation had been caused by a disagreement over the split of drug or liquor money. Special Deputy Police Commissioner Simon said that he had it on good authority that Eastman had been involved in the drug trade and had over twenty agents in his employ.

On January 5, Representative Lester B. Volk of Brooklyn used the Eastman murder as the basis for demanding a thorough investigation of Prohibition and its shoddy enforcement. He criticized Jerry Bohan’s appointment as a dry agent despite Bohan’s criminal record, and insisted that strong improvements in the enforcement corps hiring practices were needed.

Bohan stood trial for killing Eastman. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter and the judge sentenced him to three to 10 years for manslaughter. On June 23, 1922, his minimum term reduced thanks to good behavior, he was paroled and disappeared into obscurity.

*****

Monk Eastman’s death before the first year of Prohibition had ended was eerily symbolic. The old time hoodlum that he embodied had long since become a city myth, gone except for a few grizzled survivors and the odd bullet-pocked building that hadn’t been repaired in twenty years. Now the gangsters lived in penthouse suites paid for by bootleg riches, rode around

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