Family Day at the Dormitory. Mothers brought in baked cassroles and hot plates, promising,

"Dont worry, I've never squealed on your father and I won't squeal on you."

Inside the Dormitory, Gallos were getting fat off Umberto's pasta, growing weaker by the day. All the while, Profacis encircled the Red Hook backwaters like sharks in Cadillacs, hungry to break throught the police cordon.

"Let's get our guns and go after them," snapped Kid Blast, but Joey, wouldn't budge.

Cooped up in the Dormitory behind his chicken wire, Kid played his arias on his violin while Joey choked on the bad air, needing to breathe free.

At his wit's end about how to wipe out the Gallos, protected 24-7 by the best security force in the city, Junior slid a dress on his wild, curly-haired sidekick and send him off in a red sports car with a trunkload of weapons. The plan was to slip past the Pizza Squad with a wink and a smile, then blast the Dormitory, but somebody tipped off Inspector Martin. He doubled the manpower around President Street, leaveing the gunman all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Soon a fleet of what Inspector Martin called "shotgun riders" roamed through the neighborhood, perfectly legal as the weapons weren't concealed. Cruising along Court Street in a white oldsmobile, a rider found a sitting duck on a afternoon, Gallo man Big Lollypop, coming out of Pintchik's with a can of paint in each hand for the Dormitory. Bullets sprayed from the backseat, hitting Lollypop in the ankle. Paint poured out a pierced can.

Old Man Profaci was not happy. The botched Lollypop hit was the lastest headline in the Gallo-Profaci war, s spectacle of vanisging bodies, fish wrapped in clothes, cross-dressing kamikaze raids, and now, drive-bys on paint stores in broad daylight in the middle of the most crowded thoroughfares of the borough.

According to a Profaci Family informant, there were to be no more attempts on the Gallos unless there were no witnesses, near impossible considering the NYPD encampment on President Street. Cops made the job tougher upon arresting a shotgun rider on account of the state conservation law, claiming that the loaded weapons endangered the exotic birds and frogs in the Prospect Park Zoo.

Three in the Gallo gang stood on a barren street corner in black fedoras, hands stuffed into the pockets of their overcoats. A cigargette jutted straight from a lip. Inside the Longshore Rest Room, a pack of Gallos stood around Kid Blast, Who was barking out orders at the table. Big Lollypop leaned on crutches with an ankle cast on his left leg. Umberto reheated the stale cooking oil and warmed one of the remaining cans of tomatoes on the shelf. Gallos slouched in freshly painted Dormitory and littered the floor with cigarette butts. They froze in unmade beds with unchanged sheets. Day ran into each other until the afternoon of January 31, 1962.

Smoke poured from the third-story window above Mrs.Gatto's luncheonette down the block.

"Come on!" shouted Joey.

Joey rushed up the stairs. Shrieks of childen pierced the heavy black smoke. Punchy grabbed a five-year-old girl with her hair on fire. He snuffed the flames with a couple of whacks of his hand, then snatched a naked baby, wrapped the infant in his jacket and passed him out the door. The Gallo bucket brigade shuttled all six childen down the steps and into the thick arms of Mrs.Gatto. Three fire engines roared onto President Street, but the fire was out. Joey and Punchy had already tossed the burning mattress out of the window. Back from a trip to buy milk at the grocery store, Sista Biaz, seeing all six of her childen safe and sound, dropped her brown bags and wept.

"They save my childen," she cried in Spanish. "They are wonderful boys. God bless them."

Kid Blast made the gang empty out their pockets.

"We were going to go out solicting some more," he told reporters, "but then we would have got pinched for extortion."

Mrs.Biaz got fifty dollars. She hugged the Gallos, posing for pictures in Mrs.Gatto's luncheonette. Blast leaned down to put his arm around her. She kissed him on the cheek. The shutter clicked.

"Dont try to make heroes out of us," Blast told the news cameras. "We're not heroes. We only dont what any red-blooded American boys would do. Do you see any horns here? I got no horns. We're not animals. We're just human beings trying to get along."

Please wait for Part 4.