Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (26 page)

Terry Druggan
—Druggan got his start as a member of the Valley gang, a mostly Irish gang based in a now-defunct, notorious turn-of-the-century Chicago slum known as the Valley that was located on the other side of the Chicago River from the Levee district. The Valley gang was comprised mostly of sons of policemen and low-level politicos, as well as such renowned brawlers as “Paddy the Bear” Ryan and Walter “the Runt” Quinlan. At the onset of Prohibition, Terry Druggan, a former burglar and hijacker with the gang, formed a partnership with Frankie Lake, a former Chicago fireman. Druggan-Lake made millions peddling beer on the West Side, buying their product from Dean O’Banion until they built their own brewery. Druggan and Lake wore identical horn-rimmed spectacles and dressed like dandies. They were not known as men of violence. As the war between Capone and the Irish kicked into high gear, they drifted from the scene until, by the end of the decade, the Druggan-Lake organization was no more.

The South Side O’Donnells
—The O’Donnell brothers, Edward, Steve, Walter, and Tommy, had been known criminals since boyhood. Edward, better known as “Spike,” served as the gang’s leader until 1917, when he was incarcerated at Joliet State Prison for his role in the daylight holdup of the Stockyards Trust and Savings Bank. An established pickpocket, burglar, labor slugger, and killer (he was twice tried for murder and accused of several others), Spike was also a religious man who rarely missed Sunday mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church. Upon release from prison in 1923, O’Donnell led his brothers in a mini-war with the Torrio-Capone syndicate that became known as the Chicago Beer Wars and resulted in at least two dozen gangland deaths.

In photographs from the era, Spike O’Donnell, a jaunty gangster who favored polka-dot ties and a felt fedora, is rarely seen without a smile on his face—which is remarkable, given that there were at least ten attempts on his life, two of which left him wounded. “Life with me is just one bullet after another,” Spike once said. “I’ve been shot at and missed so often, I’ve a notion to hire myself out as a professional target.”

One attempted hit on O’Donnell that was of particular historical importance occurred on September 25, 1925, when Spike and a police officer were conversing in front of a drug store at Sixty-third Street and Western Avenue. A car containing four men suddenly appeared, and one of the occupants called out, “Hey, Spike,” followed by the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. Spike and the cop hit the pavement; the bullets passed overhead into the window of the drug store. During the Prohibition era, this shooting was the first known use of the World War I Thompson submachine gun, or tommy gun, which would become more commonly known in the press as “the Chicago typewriter.”
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Frank McErlane
—The man who used the tommy gun against Spike O’Donnell was Frank McErlane, possibly the most ruthlessly violent gunman in Chicago during the Roaring Twenties. He was often referred to as gat goofy because of the orgasmic joy he exhibited when firing his gat. Handsome in his youth, with wavy black hair and bedroom eyes, McErlane became bloated and pasty in later years due to severe alcoholism. He often managed to get beer smuggled into prison and sometimes appeared drunk in court. His gang (including his brother Vince and a hulking, slow-witted Pole named Joe Saltis) was based on the city’s Southwest Side, which put them in direct conflict with the South Side O’Donnells. When gangland Chicago erupted in the mid-1920s, McErlane was the most significant Irish American gangster to side with Capone. (The others were Ralph Sheldon, formerly of Ragen’s Colts, and the Guilfoyle gang, led by Martin Guilfoyle.) A professional hitman who seemed to relish killing, McErlane murdered at least nine people, including his common law wife whom he shot to death along with her two dogs.

One person McErlane thought he killed was William “Shorty” Egan, a truck driver for the South Side O’Donnell gang. Egan and a fellow trucker, Morrie Keane, were kidnapped and taken for a ride by McErlane and an accomplice. Shorty Egan miraculously survived and gave this harrowing account to the police:

Pretty soon the driver asks the guy with the shotgun, “Where you gonna get rid of these guys?” The fat fellow [McErlane] laughs and says, “I’ll take care of that in a minute.” He was monkeying with his shotgun all the time. Pretty soon he turns around and points the gun at Keane. He didn’t say a word but just let go straight at him. Keane got it square on the left side. The guy loads up his gun and gives it to Keane again. Then he turns around to me and says, “I guess you might as well get yours, too.” With that he shoots me in the side. It hurt like hell so when I seen him loading up again, I twist around so it won’t hit me in the same place. This time he got me in the leg. Then he gives me the other barrel right on the puss. I slide off the seat. But I guess the fat guy wasn’t sure we was through. He let Morrie have it twice more and then he let me have it again in the other side. The fat guy scrambled into the rear seat and grabbed Keane. He opens the door and kicks Morrie out into the road. We was doing about fifty from the sound. I figure I’m next so when he drags me over to the door I set myself to jump. He shoves and I light in the ditch by the road. I hit the ground on my shoulders and I thought I’d never stop rolling. I lost consciousness. When my senses came back, I was lying in a pool of water and ice had formed around me. The sky was red and it was breaking day. I staggered along a road until I saw a light in a farmhouse….

In later years, Frank McErlane’s life became a succession of court proceedings, attempts on his life, and extended periods in hiding from killers or the law. One dark, rainy night he was found drunk in the middle of the street firing his tommy gun into the sky. “They were trying to get me, but I drove ’em off,” he told a cop. McErlane was sent to the drunk tank, but his problems were more serious than that. “Gangland Years Make Wreck of Frank McErlane” wrote the
Tribune
after a psychiatric evaluation suggested that the gangster was quite possibly insane. Crazy or not, McErlane was so loathed in the underworld that when he finally died from alcohol-related pneumonia on October 8, 1932, police had to guard the ambulance that held his body so that no one would try to break in and mutilate the remains.

The West Side O’Donnells
(no relation to the South Side O’Donnells)—Myles, Klondike, and Bernard O’Donnell were the first bootleggers to establish a beachhead in Cicero, which would prove to be a primary battleground in the war between the dagos and the micks. In the early years of the decade, they operated under a treaty with Johnny Torrio that was beneficial to all. The O’Donnells controlled the beer concessions along Roosevelt Road, the town’s main drag, while Torrio was allowed to sell beer elsewhere, as well as operate various cabarets and the Ship, a massive gambling house.

After Papa John fled the city, Al Capone commenced bullying his way into Cicero. The West Side O’Donnells violently resisted especially since they were dead set against the brothel business, which Capone intended to introduce to the town in a big way. Between 1925 and early 1929, Cicero would become ground zero in the war between the exclusively Irish O’Donnell Mob and the Capone syndicate. The battle would eventually result in nearly two hundred gang-style murders.

The Terrible Touhys
—Born in the Valley (the same fetid turn-of-the-century Irish slum that produced Terry Druggan and many other aspiring gangsters), Roger, Johnny, Eddie, Tommy, and Joe Touhy underscored the fact that not all bootleggers were bad men. Sons of a Chicago cop and a mother who died when the boys were still young, a couple of the brothers became burglars and low-level criminals. The smartest of the bunch, Roger, became a union organizer, a Morse Code wireless operator, and eventually owner of a fleet of trucks based in Des Plaines, a sleepy Chicago suburb in northwestern Cook County. With the onset of Prohibition, Roger Touhy’s trucking business became a bootlegging operation. Soon Touhy was making his own product, brewed with spring water, which became known as the best beer in the entire county. By 1926, Roger and his brothers were selling one thousand barrels a week at $55 a barrel, with a production cost to them of $4.50 a barrel. The profits were enormous.

Only five foot six, with curly hair and a big beak for a nose, Roger Touhy was intelligent and well-liked. Initially, he eschewed violence, preferring to win over customers with the superior nature of his product. But that changed when Al Capone got wind of Touhy’s profitable Des Plaines operation. Capone moved his own product into Des Plaines and began terrorizing Touhy’s customers. The result was a sporadic shooting war that took place first on the empty back roads of Cook County, then—after Roger secretly obtained the backing of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermack and the city’s police department—erupted inside the city limits as well.
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The Terrible Touhys and all of the Irish gangs that took on Capone did so with the knowledge that it was a battle to the death. Unlike Torrio, Capone had no interest in negotiation or appeasement. His bluntly stated goal was to take over not only the entire city, but also the county, the state, and the entire midwestern region of the United States. There would be no partners, only subsidiaries.

But the Irish were not his only competitors. The Sicilian Genna brothers hated Capone and would remain his sworn enemy until he had two of them killed (another Genna was murdered by Bugs Moran and Hymie Weiss in May 1925). The Chicago chapter of the Unione Siciliane resented Capone, who was not Sicilian and therefore never actually a member of the Mafia. When Big Al succeeded in installing his own handpicked choice as president of the Unione, it touched off a bloody, corpse-laden war within the organization dubbed by the press “The War of Sicilian Succession.”

With Scarface Al turning up the heat, things were getting out of hand. During the three-year period from 1924 to 1927, there were, according to the recently formed Chicago Crime Commission, 150 Prohibition-related killings. The crisis became so bad that it brought about the formation of yet one more gang, this one in the police department.

With much fanfare, newly appointed Chief of Detectives William O’Connor announced the formation of an elite unit that became known as O’Connor’s Gunners. Comprised of volunteers from the police force who had fought in the war in Europe and could therefore handle a machine gun, O’Connor’s Gunners were further equipped with steel-plated police cars. O’Connor himself gave the unit their marching orders, in a blustery speech at police headquarters that was widely quoted in the city’s newspapers.

“Men,” he announced, “the war is on. We’ve got to show that society and the police department, and not a bunch of dirty rats, are running this town. It is the wish of the people of Chicago that you hunt these criminals down and kill them without mercy. Your cars are equipped with machine guns, and you will meet the enemies of society on equal terms. See to it that they don’t have you pushing up daisies. Make them push up daisies. Shoot first, and shoot to kill. If you kill a notorious fuedist [a reference to the internal Sicilian feud], you will get a handsome reward and win a promotion. If you meet a car containing bandits, pursue them and fire. When I arrive on the scene, my hopes will be fulfilled if you have shot off the top of their car and killed every criminal inside.”

O’Connor’s red meat rhetoric was typical of the times, portraying cops and gangsters as players in a drama. When Capone was told about the Chief’s new unit, he had a good laugh. “Whaddya know,” he said. “Another bunch of Irish bastards with guns.”
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Big Al’s Better Half

Among the more curious aspects of Capone’s contentious relationship with the Irish American underworld was the fact that he was married to the enemy. Mae Coughlin Capone, Al’s wife, was born in Brooklyn, New York to Michael Coughlin, a construction laborer, and Bridget Gorman. Mae had four sisters and two brothers. The Coughlin family lived in a small two-story home at 117 Third Place and were respected in the local Irish community for their rectitude and religious devotion.

Mae was tall and slim, with a face that many thought would one day make her an actress or a model. Those aspirations were scuttled forever after she met Al Capone, in 1918, at a party in a Carroll Street cellar club. Capone, who already had the four-inch scar on his cheek that earned him his nickname, was rough around the edges, with thinning hair and a manner of speech commensurate with someone who never made it past elementary school. Somehow it worked, and the courtship was quick.

The man Capone worked for in Brooklyn, Johnny Torrio, had already married an Irish girl, Ann McCarthy. For Italians at the time, marrying Irish girls was a sign of upward mobility. There was also the fact that Italian men generally did not hesitate to marry and start a family early in life, whereas Irishmen tended to wait until they were financially stable—or until “ma” said it was okay. And so, Mae Coughlin and Al Capone were married on December 18, 1918, in a ceremony presided over by the Reverend James J. Delaney, pastor of St. Mary Star of the Sea Church, where the Coughlins worshipped. The following year, Mae bore her first and only child, Albert Francis, nicknamed Sonny. The child’s godfather was Papa John Torrio.

In 1919, Torrio, having already moved to Chicago, summoned Capone. Al packed up his wife and son and moved to the Windy City, where they lived in a shack. In public, Capone went by the name “Al Brown” and passed himself off as a used furniture salesman. In truth, he was a pimp and strong-arm man who roughed up people on behalf of his boss. Then Prohibition came and changed everything.

Throughout Al Capone’s reign as the overlord of Chicago, Mae Coughlin remained a mysterious figure. She rarely shared her husband’s suite at the Metropole Hotel, where he conducted his affairs (business and otherwise). She did not accompany him to the theatre, nightclubs, or the racetrack. Few members of the gang and even fewer outsiders ever knew her. On those rare occasions when Mae was seen in public, usually at one of Capone’s many court appearances, she was the bane of press photographers; she always partially covered her face, never spoke to the newshounds, and tried to keep her son out of the limelight. In the tradition of the old country Italian dons, Capone kept his wife confined to the home. Mae would eventually spend most of her time in Miami at the lavish Palm Island estate that Capone purchased in 1927.