Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (29 page)

When informed of the details of the massacre, Bugs Moran’s assessment proved to be more trenchant. “Only Capone kills like that,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the Behemoth had an airtight alibi; he was at his Palm Island estate in Miami at the time of the shooting, though phone records showed that he was in constant contact with key underlings back in Chicago in the days leading up to the killings.

Like most mob-hit investigations, numerous rumors and details came to the forefront, but few that could be bolstered by evidence or testimony. Within days, newly appointed Chief of Detectives John Egan and his investigators had identified one of the gunmen, a professional killer out of St. Louis who went by the name Fred “Killer” Burke. Despite the Hibernian surname, Burke was not an Irishman. His real name was Thomas Camp; he was an Okie by way of Kansas, though he was associated with Egan’s Rats, a mostly Irish gang based in St. Louis that Capone sometimes drew from when contracting professional hits. Burke/Camp was known for using the policeman ruse when conducting his assassinations.

Eventually, the full details of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre would be revealed; the event stands as perhaps the most thoroughly discussed and written about gangland hit in the history of organized crime. One person who didn’t need to wait around for the slow drip of history to reveal to him what had gone down that day was Bugs Moran. With virtually his entire gang wiped out in one shooting, his standing in the Chicago underworld never recovered. Although he stayed in the area a few more years, his power waned. Eventually, he fled Chicago and was never again a major player in the underworld.
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The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre changed everything. The event was not only front page news in Chicago; it dominated the newspapers for days in every big city in the United States, including New York. People had grown accustomed to bootleggers killing bootleggers, but this was something different—a cold-blooded execution of seven people carried out by fake policemen. It seemed to capture the full flavor of an era that had become so corrupt and violent that only a shocking event like this could jar the public back to reality.

The press and the public weren’t the only ones who sensed a shift in the zeitgeist. For some time now, prominent rum runners and bootleggers following the broiling gangland wars in Chicago had sensed the changing attitudes. The violence and general air of lawlessness brought about by Prohibition had gradually turned nearly everyone against the Volstead Act. Politicians and law enforcement people routinely condemned the act, acknowledging that it was unenforceable. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had precipitated a crisis. Nationwide, discerning underworld leaders realized that disaster was imminent; something needed to be done to stem such flagrant acts of carnage. Otherwise, the public and the press were going to turn so strongly against the gangs that they would be unable to operate, or, even worse, political pressure would lead to the repeal of Prohibition—where-upon the party would really be over.

The war between the dagos and the micks was about to enter a new phase.

CHAPTER
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Six

6. requiem for a mad dog

T
he briny shores of Atlantic City were a fitting locale for an unprecedented meeting-of-the-minds among the country’s most distinguished masters of Prohibition. Through guile and brutality, these men had redefined the American Dream and catapulted the gangster beyond the urban slum into the realm of the corporate robber baron. In times of turmoil, corporate chieftains held summit meetings in which profits were assessed, roles reassigned, projections made, and the concerns of investors discussed. Likewise, the nation’s top mobsters met to discuss the widespread concern that the level of violence associated with the booze business had gotten out of hand. Something needed to be done. What that something would be was the reason the country’s mobster elite arrived in the resort town of Atlantic City for a three-day conference, which would be cited in later years as the dawn of an organized crime commission in the United States.

The conference was the brain-child of Papa John Torrio, who had left Chicago four years earlier, moved to New York, and become a mobster diplomat without portfolio. Luciano, Costello, Lansky, and other leading lights of the underworld frequently consulted the older and wiser Torrio, mostly to discuss Scarface Al Capone—whom Torrio had snatched from the docks of Brooklyn, moved to Chicago, and ceded an enormous amount of power and profit (newspaper assessments of Capone’s holdings in 1929 put his wealth at forty million dollars, with an annual income of six million).

Luciano, who fancied himself a leader in the Torrio mold, asked Papa John, “What the fuck are we gonna do ’bout Al? That fat bastard is gonna take us all down with his tommy gun hysterics.”

Torrio agreed, but cautioned, “I know Al. If you make it seem like you’re coming down on him and him alone, he’ll go off in a snit. You gotta frame it just right.”

The conference took place over the weekend of May 13–16, just two months after the scandalous slaughter on St. Valentine’s Day. Checking into two Atlantic City Boardwalk hotels for the event was a gathering unparalleled in modern history: thirty top-ranking mobsters representing virtually every region of the United States. New York represented the largest contingent, with Luciano, Costello, Lansky, Dutch Schultz, and Owney Madden in attendance. Chicago had Capone. Nig Rosen and Boo-Boo Hoff came from Philadelphia, Moe Dalitz from Cleveland, King Soloman from Boston, and Waxey Gordon from New Jersey. From Kansas City came Johnny Lazia, who was said to represent the interests of the Pendergast Machine, an Irish American consortium that had turned Kansas City into an unlikely underworld haven during the years of Prohibition. Representatives from South Florida, New Orleans, Detroit, and other localities were also in attendance.

The conference was no great secret. Local newspapers carried pictures of Capone and some of the other mobster celebrities as they cruised the world famous boardwalk and dipped their toes in the ocean. When it came to conducting more serious business, the men convened privately in conference rooms atop the Ritz and Ambassador hotels.

Along with the untoward level of gangland violence in Chicago that had become a concern to all, there were numerous other items on the agenda, not the least of which was the recent murder of Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein. The former protégé of Big Tim Sullivan and primary financier of the mob’s gambling rackets had been shot in a Manhattan hotel room six months earlier. His death left a huge vacuum; among other things, Rothstein’s role in the organization necessitated the designation of a successor.
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More long-term matters that needed to be discussed were the likely repeal of Prohibition and the country’s general financial uncertainty (the Wall Street crash of ’29 and Great Depression were on the horizon), which would have profound consequences for the country’s black market economy.

Among historians and organized crime folklorists, the Atlantic City conference is often noted as the beginning of a representative multiethnic governing body, or commission, designed to guide the Syndicate into the future. While it may be true that the conference had a major impact on the future direction of the underworld, the notion that the gathering was an ethnically representative accounting of organized crime in America is pure fiction. After all, there were only two Irishmen in attendance.

One of those Irishmen was Chicago’s Frank McErlane, a glorified gunman and degenerate alcoholic whose gang never numbered more than six or seven members. The idea that McErlane was a representative leader of the Irish mob in Chicago is laughable. Frank was there for one reason only: He was “Al’s boy,” the only significant Irish American gang boss to side with Capone during the city’s bloody Beer Wars.

The other Irishman in attendance was Owney Madden, who was a special case. Although he was a gangster with an impressive early resume—five murders and over forty arrests as leader of the Gopher Gang—Owney was no longer connected to the streets. In creating the Combine and rising to the pinnacle of underworld success, he had become Duke of the West Side, a self-made man in the Jay Gatsby mold. And like Fitzgerald’s mysterious and mythical Roaring Twenties protagonist, he’d paid a price, which was an estrangement from the people and places he once knew. Owney Madden may have represented the Combine and those business interests that he helped to mold and sustain, but he no longer represented the Irish. He represented Owney Madden.

Which begs the question: Where were the South Side O’Donnells, the West Side O’Donnells, Bugs Moran, and the Terrible Touhys? Where was Danny Walsh of Providence? Brooklyn’s Vannie Higgins? Legs Diamond and Vincent Coll? Where were the untold dozens of Irish American gang leaders who’d played such a formative role in the creation of the political-criminal alliance that made Prohibition a hugely lucrative racket in the first place?

The simple answer is that they were shut out. When viewed this way, the Atlantic City conference can be seen for what it really was: not the nation’s first gathering of a multiethnic underworld coalition, but the beginning of a process by which Sicilian, Italian, Italian American, and Jewish gangsters would move the Irish to the fringe of the criminal underworld. The reasons for this development were more complex than mere ethnic animosity. To Italian and Jewish gangsters, the argument for marginalizing the Irish had more to do with the fair distribution of criminal spoils. The Irish, after all, already controlled the police departments and a sizable portion of the political organizations in many of the underworld’s most lucrative domains. Why should they also be acceded equal share in the underworld as well? What’s fair is fair, right?

The Syndicate was more than willing to deal with Irish American cops and politicians who knew how to play along. In New York, Luciano and Costello delivered cash to City Hall and police headquarters through Joe Cooney, a freckle-faced Irish American bagman they sometimes referred to as Joe the Coon.
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Paying off Irish cops and politicians was accepted as the price of doing business; it had its benefits, most notably as a potential entrée into the upperworld, which held the promise of connecting with certain legitimate rackets that would be essential in a post-Prohibition environment. In later years, when Luciano or Meyer Lansky would ask, “What about the Irish? Who’s taking care of the Irish?” They didn’t mean Irish mobsters. They meant the Irish cops, politicians, and establishment figures who were “friendly.” In the eyes of many Italian and Jewish gangsters, this was the fair and proper role for the Irish in the underworld; since they had “gotten here first,” so to speak, and had infiltrated the upperworld, that was their function. The rest should be left to the Italians, Jews, Poles, and even the blacks.

Of course, for this New World Order to work properly, certain Irish gangsters had to be held in check. In New York, there were already a few prominent Irish American bootleggers angry about being sidelined by the Combine. One of them was the dangerous young gangster, Vincent Coll, who had started as a gunman for Dutch Schultz and lately begun muscling in on his former boss’s operations. Dutch Schultz was not happy about this. The near psychotic mob boss, whose gangland murder would later be sanctioned by many of the same men he dined with at the Atlantic City conference, voiced his concerns to all.

“This crazy maniac Coll is causing me no end of grief,” he told those gathered atop the Ambassador Hotel on the second night of the conference. “I want it stopped, or I want him dead. Either way.”

Waxey Gordon then stood and chimed in, “Yeah, and what about this bastid Legs Diamond? He’s hijacking my trucks and raiding our clip joints all over north Jersey.”

The men around the table mumbled their concerns over this growing threat.

Because Coll and Diamond were both Irish, the job of rectifying the problem fell on Owney Madden. He may have been a Liverpool-born Irishman who, in his current incarnation, saw himself as more of a WASP businessman than a street hoodlum, but to the others in attendance he was the only New York mick in the room.

The next day, Madden left the conference early and returned to Manhattan. The Commission seemed to be asking him to take responsibility, not only for Coll and Diamond, but for every Irish American gangster who was disgruntled about the rise of the Italian-Jewish Syndicate and the marginalization of the micks. In Owney’s estimation, it was a hell of a tall order.

“Come and Get Me, Coppers!”

Few Irish American gangsters were students of organized crime. In fact, few were students of anything. Coming from the gutter, they got their information—not through books, newspapers, or even the radio—but through an underworld system known as the kite. At its worst, the kite was a rumor mill. At its best, it was a version of the news wire, except that it was entirely verbal, with nothing ever being written down for posterity or potential prosecution. Meant to be a few steps ahead of the cops and the newspapers, the kite disseminated information by way of saloons, smoke shops, political clubhouses, candy stores, and the streets. Information received through this process was notoriously suspect—prone to embellishment, misinterpretation, and outright deception—but you ignored the kite at your own risk. In the underworld, information received on the street could sometimes save your life.

No one knows the exact origins of the kite. The word itself has many meanings: A kite is flown high in the air to serve, perhaps, as a signal. A kite is also a bird, a member of the hawk family with long, narrow wings and the ability to swoop down and snatch its prey. A kite is also a bad check drawn against insufficient funds. Whatever its etymology, the kite as an information mill seems to be based on the Celtic clan system of long ago, when anticolonial Irish rebel groups passed information among themselves without ever submitting anything to public record. This philosophy also permeated the earliest Irish political machines throughout the United States, where it sometimes meant the difference between a scurrilous accusation with no actual record of wrongdoing and criminal prosecution by way of circumstantial evidence, i.e. public documents and financial records. As the legendary Boston ward boss Martin “the Mahatma” Lomasney once said “Don’t write when you can talk; don’t talk when you can nod your head.” Lomasney was referring to the world of politics, but he could just as easily have been outlining the philosophy of the Irish American underworld.