The Fate Of Eddie “Fingers”-With The Film Adaptation Of George V. Higgins’ “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” In Mind                 

By Fritz Taylor

[One night a few weeks back “Boyo” Connor and I along with “Pet”  Hughes were sitting in Jimmy and Jakes Lounge over in Lancaster when the name Eddie Mars came up in conversation I think from Pet. Eddie for those not in the know was the main fixer man, enforcer of the Los Angeles rackets in the 1930s and 1940s before the big ethnic boys from the East decided that the sunshine and the heat from the coppers in the East would make the West Coast easy pickings. Guys like Bugsy and Meyer, Gino, Lorenzo, you know the bad boys who ran things tightly until they didn’t. Eddie Mars though didn’t get to be king of the hill in LA by being a creampuff despite his Hollywood leading man good looks. Had killed his fair share of guys and later had others do his work as he worked his way up the rackets food chain. In the end though Eddie Mars fell down just like a lot of other guys when one of his boys turned on him, a guy named Humphrey Bogart who was sweet on Eddie’s wife wasted him and went to work for Gino, Gino Leone who had ordered the hit.     

That reference to Eddie Mars got me thinking that drunken night about a few other guys who went big and then fell down like some silly house of cards. A guy like Johnny Rocco who used to run the rackets in Chi town before the Feds decided to deport him as an unwanted alien. Had him hit the bricks to the friendly shores of Batista’s Cuba where he planned night and day to get back to the “bigs” and that quest for “more” that every gangster, every two-bit hood has in his blood. Johnny too fell down when some rum-brave soldier boy who got miffed when Johnny went smelling around his woman laid him low and without a tear in the house. Of course everybody knows that Johnny Rocco will forever be associated with this expression made by some guy who had been shaken down by one of Johnny’s boys and did squat about it- “One Johnny Rocco, more or less, in the world is no skin off my nose.” That woman-hungry  soldier boy though different.     

The part the Johnny Rocco patsy had right though was that guys like Johnny Rocco, Eddie Mars always want more, more of whatever they don’t have what keeps them up at night. Inevitably I knew as the whisky flowed and the conversation got more slurred that Boyo would bring up the name Eddie “Fingers,” Eddie Coyle from the old neighborhood who certainly wanted more but never got beyond being somebody’s shield-bearer and go-fer before he too fell down long before he could even get half way up the food chain.

See Eddie Fingers was part of our gang hanging around Doc’s Drugstore when we were teenagers with wet dreams and more illegal plans that we knew how to consummate. Most of us would move on but Eddie hitched up with Whitey Devine and that kind of sealed his fate. Eddie started out fast, did a couple of quick armed robberies and a couple of shootings although let’s keep that under our hats. Looked promising but Eddie wasn’t any too bright, was made for heavy lifting and not much else. Took a couple of falls and made a couple of wrong turn enemies. One fall in the right direction for his employer who would have hung sheets for many years and one where he was essentially set up by a guy named Pete who ran a barroom under another name over in City Square. This Pete, a piece of work, was a stoolie for some hyper-active fed Assistant DA who was looking yo move up his own ladder and had this Pete by the balls since he had him cold for the Winters gang killings. But he was also the hit man for “Long-Arm” La Russo who was worried that Fingers would fold up on a nickel beef for transporting, oh who knows, transporting something illegal. So Eddie “Fingers” Coyle fell down fell down hard.  

One night the coppers acting on some anonymous tip found his slug-filled body in a late model Chevy in some bowling alley parking lot over in the Acre. End of story, except when he was young Eddie looked like he was a world-beater. Christ at one point we all wanted to be Fingers, wanted to wear some naked girl tattoo, wanted to shoot and ask questions later. Like I said most of us moved one, or guys like Rick Rizzo and Donny White fell down in some hellhole in Vietnam and stopped thinking of Fingers as our role model, especially when he started collecting time. Yeah, but at one time he looked like a world-beater.]       

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“Did yah hear about Eddie “Fingers,” Eddie Coyle who used to come in here all the time to do his drinking and his business if you know what I mean. That found him, his body, in some Impala, a damn Chevy for Christ sakes, over in Dorchester, over at that all- night bowling alley, Timmy’s Lanes I think it is called off of Gallivan Boulevard. Found him the cops did on a routine run when they saw the car there for a few hours just before dawn with two slugs to the head, to his brains it probably was not a pretty sight,” Dillon, John Dillon but everybody called him Dillon, yelled to Joe Ricco, Joey “Bangs” who was approaching the far end of the bar to do his drinking-and his business if anybody was asking (and nobody should except the parties involved or you were as likely as not  to find out why Joe Ricco was called Joey “Bangs” by friend and foe alike).      

Joey “Bangs” took the news with something less than full blown interest since Eddie “Fingers” and he worked different sides of the street in their various “transactions” although he looked at Dillon with a little side glance when he told the story since Eddie had obviously been taken out for some indiscretion, got on somebody’s wrong gee list, somebody high up in the food chain and had paid the price. The funny thing was that Dillon who gave the appearance to the world of being a chatty kind of hare-brained bartender, of being a guy who had taken a couple of rides to stir when he was young and so had an undisclosed interest in the bar since he was a convicted felon, was a “hit” man for hire, for hire mostly by the Rizzo mob out of Providence. Knew that about Dillon since one of the guys who he had “scragged” had been a guy that he was supposed to “hit” himself except he was on another “job” and the guy who wanted to hire him let it out that he would get Dillon to do what needed to be done. Since they found the guy who was supposed to be “hit,” Johnny Shine, washed up on the banks of the Neponset River he knew Dillon had taken the job.             

Joey, as a matter of professional interest despite given no fucking consideration to Eddie’s fate, Eddie was a guy pretty low in the his organization, “Butter” Carney’s tribe, the Irish tribe, over in Southie, decided to pump the talkative bartender to see which way he would go with his story, see what lies he could make up since Dillon always was most talkative when he had something on his mind, when he talked the talk about some guy being scragged. “Hey, Dillon while you are getting me a Jack Daniels Red neat what is your take on Eddie “Fingers” going down. He was so low in Butter’s organization I figure that he would not be worth offing, would maybe just get his other hand put in a drawer and slammed like the last time he fucked up when he said a guy was okay and he wasn’t and Jimmy “Scrambles” got a ticket for a dime at Walpole.”           

Dillon, sweating a little by the heat of the day even though the air conditioning was on, came up to Joey’s end of the bar with his finger glass of Jack’s Red for Joey and whispered, although at that time of day Joey and a couple of others sitting at far corner tables were the only ones in the place, “I heard that Eddie had turned “stoolie,” had gone to work for “Uncle” in order to get out from under some federal stolen goods charge he was facing up in New Hampshire. I know for a fact that he was scared to do any more time, said he was too old for that, and what would happen to his wife and kids. Said some shit about how his kids would get laughed at because their father was in stir. Like that was a reason to cry to “Uncle.”

I heard he was the guy who set Jimmy “Scags” up for the fall when they had that rash of robberies a few weeks ago and one of the jobs got botched up and some bank employee got killed in a crossfire. Heard too that he set some other guy up, a young kid who was selling guys to anybody who wanted them as long as they had the dough. Heard that this kid, Jacko something was selling machine guns and Eddie had brought him down to save his ass from doing time. How do you figure a stand- up guy, stand-up because he had to who took the fall a couple of times and caught a couple of years a couple of times and didn’t cry about it went ‘soft.’”      

Joey, usually pretty stone-faced especially when he knew a guy was lying or at least was skirting the truth, just sat there with that same expression waiting for Dillon to go on. The fact that he knew as much as he did convinced Joey that he had been part of Eddie’s execution for whatever reason. Dillon continued, “ Yeah, Eddie was in here the last several weeks like this was his home using the back room telephone I had put in for guys, hell, for you to take care of your business without a lot of daytime drunks listening in to your private conversations. Always asking if this guy or that guy had left a message for him here like I was some fucking answering service. Drinking hard too a few shots in a row just for warm-ups so I knew he was feeling some kind of pressure like when guys have something serious in front of them. Asking if Jimmy “Scags” had called so I knew there was some connection. What I heard was that Jimmy had asked Eddie to get him some guys for some job and somehow Eddie had found the kid who had a source for weapons as they were coming off the line, unused, and not traceable. Heard that some Army kids were grabbing half the weapons up at Devens and selling them to the kid to feed their cocaine habit, or their girlfriends’ habits something like that.”       

“I suppose you heard about that bunch of robberies down on the South Shore, a bunch of banks?” Joey nodded in the affirmative since everybody had heard about them at some point if not the first few then the last two where a bank employees was killed and the next one where Jimmy “Scags” and his boys were jolted by the Feds in some banker’s house as they were going for one last score. “You know Jimmy was master at robbing banks, no fooling, he would have the job cased out to perfection. The beautiful thing about these robberies was that it was like taking candy from a baby, see he knew who was vulnerable, who had something to lose, and he would take himself and the boys and grab the guy at his house and leave “Jerry The Lid” to keep watch over whatever hostages they had taken. Beautiful work. Except that one where “Fats” Malzone, probably full of dope, went crazy when he thought that bank employee had pulled the alarm. Then the last caper where the Feds were tipped off. Tipped off by Eddie the more you think about the matter since he was the “missing link,” the guy who provided the guns from what Lou Reilly told me since he had seen a grocery bag full of them one afternoon when Eddie had given him a ride to the supermarket and he saw the bags when Eddie opened the trunk of his car.”              

Joey, still sitting there stone-faced, knew that Dillon had been somehow involved in Eddie’s death since he knew far too much for a guy who was supposed to be on the outside on this stuff. In the closed-mouth world of doing this and that not always legal he just knew too much. Maybe he had “tipped” the coppers himself who knows, maybe he had something hanging over him and he needed to do something for “Uncle” to get well. “You know they, the Feds, grabbed that kid, that Jacko out at the Sharon commuter rail stop with a lot of machine guns in shopping bags so you know Eddie must have “snitched” trying to do himself some good since the kid was not connected, was a free-lancer from what Dougie the Dope told me after the kid was pinched and taken to the police station downtown to be held for arraignment before a federal judge. The kid was screaming bloody murder that somebody had turned him over. Yeah, Eddie fits the bill.”           

Joey sat there and ordered another drink, another Jack’s Red and thought hard about what Dillon had said and made certain conclusions about what he was to make his report about. Then Dillon, still sweating from his bald head said out loud that he wondered how Eddie had cashed his check. Joey had already pieced together that Dillon had probably got Eddie drunk, probably at some other place than this bar, probably had, since Dillon was notorious for not having a car, not having a driver’s license, his driver drive someplace and then dumped the body over at the fucking bowling alley. Yeah, this had Dillon’s fingerprints all over it.      

Joey figured out his report in his head as he got up from the bar, paid his bill and left a tip on the counter. As he exited the door he thought that Butter would be hiring him for a job pretty soon. See Joey Bangs knew, knew as well as he knew anything in his world that no matter how low the late Eddie Fingers was in Butter’s organization you had to take care of your own, avenge what needed to be avenged. Just another job for Joey though.