This poster was tailored to bankers. It warned them to be on the lookout for Harry Frost, or someone who looked like Harry Frost, drawing from his account. Frost acknowledged the banker’s loyalty with a brusque nod. They both knew that it was the least the banker could do. If Frost hadn’t covered his losses on an ill-advised scheme involving other men’s money, the banker would be serving time in Sing Sing.

A trolley took him to the waterfront.

He walked to a Pennsylvania Railroad stockyard pier. Tugboats were shoving car floats alongside. Trainloads of cows, sheep, and pigs were herded from the freight cars into cattle pens. Frost headed for the pier building and pushed through a door that said “No Admittance.” Thugs masquerading as railroad police tried to stop him. Frost knocked both men down with his open hand and pushed through another door at the back of the building into a stable. A dozen beef cattle, each with a distinctive Mexican brand burned on its flank, were tethered to posts set in the floor.

There were two men with the cows. One was seated at a table on which were scattered cow horns. The other was removing a horn from one of the tethered animals by turning it in his hands, unscrewing it from a threaded rod that had been drilled in the base of the horn. Rod Sweets, the man at the table, didn’t recognize Harry Frost in his beard. He pulled a pocket pistol.

“Don’t,” said Frost. “It’s me.”

Sweets stared. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“You will be if you don’t put that gun away.”

Sweets shoved it hastily back his vest. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a taste for dope.”

The cow horns—sawn from the steers in Mexico, hollowed out, and fitted with threads—had been stuffed with Hong Kong opium before being screwed back on. Sweets smuggled hundreds of pounds of raw opium yearly into New York in this manner and presided over a vast refining and distribution network that supplied morphine to thousands of druggists and physicians. Protecting such an enterprise took an army.

“No dope,” said Frost. “I want to hire a crew.”

Rod Sweets’s men would not care that he hated Josephine for buncoing him nor that he hated Preston Whiteway for seducing her. Money was all they cared for. And money, he had plenty of.

Frost made arrangements with Sweets quickly. Then he hurried to the Red Hook saloon where could be found the brothers George and Peter Jonas, who specialized in tampering with the brakes and gasoline tanks of newspaper-delivery trucks. Again, money was all that was needed, and the saboteurs were falling all over themselves trying to persuade him that it was even easier to smash a flying machine than a motortruck.