Hoods: a Gotham story

[Andy C.]

This is the first fanfic I've done in a really long time, and the first one based around DC characters. I'm sure this sort of thing has been done before, but I wanted to try and write a Goodfellas style gangster story set in Gotham City, right around the same time as Batman: Year One and featuring another side to one of DC's most infamous origin stories. Please forgive any continuity errors that may occur, and feel free to offer any criticism.

So without any further ado, here's the opener for 'Hoods.'

PROLOGUE:

The guy stumbled through the doorway and hit the floor. Mike and Ralphie looked up from their poker game for a second to see who it was, then went right back to playing. Just as the guy was getting back to his feet, Jimmy and Lou both came in, huffing and puffing so hard you’d think they just ran the Gotham Marathon. I didn’t see any one of them carrying the diamonds with them, so that meant…

“It…it all went to hell, Boss,” Lou said in between gasps. “Someone….tripped the alarm before we….before we could stop ‘em, and before we knew it, the goddamn cops were everywhere. Just all over…and not the easy ones neither, I’m talkin’ that hard-ass Gordon and his buddies. We were shootin’ at ‘em up an down three blocks till we could reach the getaway car, and Mickie….Mickie didn’t make it. Took a bullet to the chest right as we were leavin.’”

I took a drag from my cigarette, and kept my back turned on them; didn’t want them to see me losing my temper just yet. When you’ve just stepped up as a leader, the guys expect things from you. And one of those things is to keep cool when everyone else panics.

“Boys, this is a problem,” I said, doing everything I could to keep my voice level. “Any of ‘em see your faces?”

“Naw,” Jimmy said, pulling the bandana off his face, “they didn’t see nothing, they were all shootin’ at this goofy bastard right here.”

It was right then that I noticed that the third guy was bleeding; he got hit in the arm during the shoot-out. That big red hood over his head was muffling his voice, so we didn’t really hear him moaning. That was really the whole point of dressing the poor slob up like that in the first place; the cops were starting to go after the guys with gimmicks now, and left the regular guys alone.

“So we didn’t get the diamonds,” I said, plopping back in my chair.

“No, Boss.”

“And we didn’t get away without losing one of our guys.”

“No, Boss.”

“And we didn’t even get to take out that hard-ass Gordon.”

“No, Boss.”

“So,” I said, looking at the guy in the hood, “what did you get?”

Mike and Ralphie finally get up from their damn poker game, once they realize what I want them to do. They grab the guy by the arms, lift him up to his feet, and yank off his hood.

“I didn’t get nothin’ outta this, I swear to God,” he said. This guy was just a kid, couldn’t have been older than twenty or so. Real scraggly hair, looked halfway outta his mind. ‘Course, when it’s your first time getting shot at, everyone goes a little crazy. “I didn’t get nothing, I didn’t get nothing!”

“Yeah, you did,” I said, taking another drag from my cigarette, “you got our names. And we didn’t spend this long in the business by having people know our names.” I blew smoke into his face, then pulled the trigger of the .38 Special I had hidden in my jacket. There was a splatter of red, and the kid slumped back down to the floor. Mike and Ralphie went back to their poker game, and Lou and Jimmy both started walking towards the bathroom to clean themselves up. For about an hour after that, nobody said anything.

I didn’t have to shoot the kid; he didn’t have a family or friends or anyone he would’ve squealed to. ‘sides, he was a known burglar himself, so if he went to the cops, they’d just lock him up anyway. I shot him because, like I said, the guys expect things from you. You’ve gotta show them that you’re ready to do some real ugly stuff to get to the top and stay there.

That’s just one of the real nasty bits of my life, and believe it or not, that one was from before everything in Gotham City started getting really weird. My name’s Artie Stamp, and I was a gangster.

 

[The_Dark_Knight]

hey man that wasnt half bad! pretty good

 

[Andy C.]

PART ONE:

I’ll have to go back some years to really begin my story. Like I said, my name’s Artie. I’ve spent pretty much my whole life here in Gotham City, bouncing around from one gang to the next. Now, I should probably clear something up. When people think of “gangs,” they usually only think of one or two things: either fat old goombas in pinstriped suits -the kinda gangs they make movies about- or a bunch of misfit kids rumbling with ball bats and zip-guns -the kinda gangs they make musical plays about. Sure, we had plenty of both kinds in this city. And sure, I ended up being part of both kinds along the way. But those kinds of stories have been told a million times, so I’ll just lay out the basics.

I was the youngest of three kids, growing up in the Narrows. Dad was a drunk, my older brother ran off and joined the Army the day he was old enough to enlist, and my kid sister ended up being the only one of us to go off to college; I hear she works for Wayne Enterprises now, but I ain’t seen her in years. Anyway, I always used to sneak out of the window at night and cause all sorts of trouble. Just kid stuff, really: throwing rocks at the neighborhood dogs, spray painting walls in the back alleys, trying to peek through windows to watch Mrs. Sanderson changing her clothes. All sorts of kid stuff like that.

It wasn’t till I was twelve that I stole my first wallet -I wanted the money to take some girl to a movie. I made my way downtown till I saw some guy in a fancy suit, talking on the phone, yelling at whoever was on the other line. He was so busy yelling that he never even noticed me sneak up behind him and yank the thing right out of his back pocket. I can’t remember the movie we saw, or even what the girl’s name was, but I’ll never forget the look on that old man’s face when he realized his wallet was gone.

I was in high school when I joined my first gang. They were the Jasper Street Boys, and again, these were the kinda guys they write musical plays about. Every one of them thought he was a wise guy, and put on these ridiculous fake accents so they’d sound like real gangsters. It was just more kid stuff now that I’m looking back at it, but more important than anything we actually did was that was when I met Joey C., the guy who I’d end up working with for almost twenty years.

Joey C. was the leader of the Jasper Street Boys after Big Kevin got his arm broken, moving furniture for his mom, of all things. Joey was a couple of years older than me, but for whatever reason took it upon himself to teach me everything he knew. ‘Course, sometimes he’d tell me stuff that was all wrong just for the sake of screwin’ with me, and I was never really sure when he was telling me the truth or when he was just yankin’ my chain until he’d bust out laughing. Funny guy, most of the time. He never said that much about himself. Hell, the entire time I knew the guy, I never even found out what his last name was. Just “Joey C.”

Everyone else in that little gang I don’t really remember. Most of them either went straight or went to jail after a few years, so I more or less became Joey’s second-in-command. That didn’t really mean much when the people you “commanded” were a bunch of snotty little high school dropouts, but I made the most of it. I planned all the raids we would do on the other street gangs, trying to run them off of our turf. That didn’t mean a whole lot either, since that just meant your little group of tough guys ended up running errands for one of the real gangs. This was back in the days when the Falcone and Maroni families were really going at each other, and every block of territory was fought for viciously. One week, our street would be doing favors for one Maroni, the next week, Falcone. If we were a little older, we probably woulda had to choose sides and get killed. Instead, we switched sides all the time, and nobody noticed. We made some quick money off of it, but more importantly, it made us feel like we were really part of the criminal world.

“Man,” I used to say to Joey, “you ever think they’ll catch on? Ever think they’ll come after us?”

Joey would laugh, and then say, “They’d have already caught on if they cared enough to notice. Guys like us are nobodies, and it’s a damn good thing we stayed that way.”

By the time I turned twenty, the Jasper Street Boys were long gone, me and Joey C. and ran this little poker game outta Joey’s apartment. The money was good, but the security wasn’t. Just like when we were rumbling for turf, the big families kept coming in for a piece of the action. So Falcone’s boys would run things for a while, then Maroni’s boys would come in, shoot up the place, and take over, then some more of Falcone’s boys would come in, and so on. I’m still amazed that Joey and me never got hit ourselves, because it seemed like every other week, the place would get shot to hell.

Even with all this going on, we always had these two guys who’d come in every night to play. There was Ralphie Bonamico, who was a soldier for Falcone, and Mike Enzo, a numbers guy for Maroni. The first few months, they’d get into fights all the time when one guy had a hand better than the other and they’d call each other cheaters and start knocking furniture over till someone (me) broke it up. But as time went by, they stopped caring about all the fighting between their families and just came to play against each other. And the thing was, between the two of them, they must’ve known every single card game ever made, and probably made some up themselves, ‘cause I don’t think I ever saw them play the same game twice.

So Mike and Ralphie became mainstays at the place, and pretty soon everyone started knowing everyone else by name. There was Lou Brock, an arms dealer who hated his name because it sounded like that old baseball player, and would always try to pick fights with anyone who mentioned it. Always struck me as funny, because the guy was skinny as a rail. There was Mickie O’Riley, a pick-pocket who’d never shut up about his lousy wife. It wasn’t till years later that we found out that he wasn’t really even married, and was just a little sick in the head. There was Jimmy Nicks, an ex-con who’d done five years for pushing dope. There were plenty of other people who’d come and go depending on which family was taking cuts from our profit at the moment, but they weren’t really worth remembering. For about three years, our poker game turned itself into a tight little group, and we had a ball.

Then one summer, some wise-ass from Maroni’s gang decided that we were costing them, because at the time we were working under Falcone again. Instead of doing the usual take-over stuff, he hired a crew to burn the place to the ground. We made it out of there alive, but we were out on the street again. Our money was gone, none of us had real jobs, and none of us could really get into one of the big families. So we started a gang of our own. Once again, Joey C. was the leader, and I was second-in-command.

We called ourselves the Nobodies. And that’s where my story really begins.

 

[Colossus24]

Nice job...I really like it so far.

 

[Andy C.]

Now comes the hard part: thinking of some stuff for these guys to do. I've got ideas for how it's all going to play out (like how the Nobodies eventually become the you-know-what Gang), but coming up with just some starting jobs for them is harder than I thought.

Curse this writer's block!

 

[Andy C.]

Jeez, it's been 9 months since I left this thing? Might as well get it going again:

-----

The Nobodies started out real quiet-like, which is just what we wanted. After all, there were only seven of us: Ralphie and Mike, who kept us informed about what the big families were doing; Mickie, who'd get us whatever guns we needed for the job; Lou and Jimmy, who weren't much good for anything but dumb muscle; and the two leader, Joey C. and myself. We'd meet in the back of Trocino's Diner, because Joey was seeing the lady who ran the place and got her to leave us alone while we did our business.

It wasn't that much to begin with, like I said. For the most part, most of our money came in from minor burglaries or the occasional small-time bank job. Nothing gimmicky like the stuff that happens in Gotham nowadays; just three or four of us with guns in our hands and bandanas over our faces. We always made sure not to talk too much or give any sort of calling card. That way, the GCPD never had much to go by. The cops just figured we were working for one of the bigger families, so they'd just crack down on them while we'd sink back into our little whole in the wall. Since we didn't really need that much to keep the seven of us going, we could live off of only doing three or four jobs a year.

Then, the big job came in.

Ralphie was still working for Falcone at the time, and the Roman had decided to bring the hammer down on Maroni for good. He needed to bring in some outside guns for a major attack on Maroni's operations at the docks. Ralphie said he could bring in a couple of old buddies from New York, and that the attack would never be traced back to Falcone. Of course, there weren't any New Yorkers to be found-- he just added that in because it would sound a little more convincing. Local fellas all had records with the GCPD, and could incriminate a guy like Falcone who had his fingerprints on every element of the criminal world. But a couple of out-of-towners whose names nobody knew...

Ralphie was pretty stupid most of the time, but if there's one thing the Nobodies were smart about, it was how to keep a low profile.

Everything was set up, and the plans were laid out. Still, Joey C. and I had to think long and hard about whether or not we were gonna do this thing. With this hit, we weren't going to be just petty bank robbers. After this, we'd be killers.

And even a Nobody can't stay nobody when they've got blood on their hands.

 

[Fenwick]

Thats pretty good man.

 

[Andy C.]

Two nights before we were supposed to do the big job, Joey C. called me up around 2 in the morning.

"We've got a problem," is all he said.

I got dressed and headed down the street to Trocino's Diner. Came in through the back door, with my gun out in case it was a setup of some kind. Wasn't really sure what to expect, y'know.

I opened the door to the private room, and there was Joey C., sitting there with Mike Enzo. Poor Mikey was sweating bullets, and Joey C. was slouching in his chair, with that look on his face that meant there was big trouble.

"What's going on?" I asked him.

"I think we're gonna have to scrub the job," he said. "Maroni just put Enzo in on the rotation for the docks. They're bringing in a big shipment of some kind or another the night we're supposed to hit 'em, and Mikey here is being brought in to punch the numbers on everything coming in."

"Well, can't we just stay clear of where Mikey's gonna be?"

"No good; Ralphie says Falcone wants no survivors. And it'd look awfully suspicious if everybody gets killed except for one scrawny numbers guy. Falcone will come after us for screwing up the job, and Maroni won't take long to put two and two together to come after us either."

"Yeah, but if we just scrub the whole thing, won't Falcone be mad at Ralphie? He was the one who got us the job in the first place."

"Yeah....so that's why I brought you here, kid. The three of us, we gotta figure out how to make this work."

-------

Two nights later, Enzo was down at the docks, a pencil and a clipboard in his hands as he wrote down the serial numbers on the pile of crates that were being unloaded from a freighter. All through the area, Maroni's enforcers patrolled back and forth, keeping an eye out for trouble. They had shown up in three black sedans, and had parked them around a semi-truck where the crates would be loaded. The whole operation was concentrated in one small area, where they could avoid suspicion, and could fight off any oncoming attack from the other families.

Enzo checked his watch for one last time, then made his way quietly to the end of the pier, to check on some crates that he had saved for last.

A minute later, the sedans exploded.

The blasts destroyed the semi, and killed a good dozen of the gunmen surrounding it. Everybody who was left started panicking, looking around for someone to shoot. Before they had a chance to get organized, machine-gun fire from the rooftops started cutting down the survivors.

The whole thing lasted less than a minute. After that, Joey C. and I came running out from an alley with shotguns. The idea was to finish off anyone who wasn't already dead, but the bombs and the snipers up top (Lou and Mickie) did their job.

"Allright," Joey shouted, "looks clear. Someone pull up the fishing line, and then let's get the hell outta here."

With that, Ralphie and Jimmy Nicks went to the edge of the pier, and grabbed hold of a rope that had been hanging over the edge. At the end of it was Enzo, who'd rigged the bombs under Maroni's cars the night before, and who jumped off the edge of the pier before we hit.

The plan had gone off without a hitch. According to the GCPD's reports the next day, Falcone was the primary suspect, and Maroni was out for blood. There wasn't any mention of us, and that's just what we were hoping for.

Over the next few months, the feud between Falcone and Maroni grew into an outright war. And the Nobodies didn't have to worry about finding work for a long, long time.