Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (3 page)

Far more successful for the Irish were the neighborhood-based gangs that came to represent the last of the Irish Mob. In New York and Boston, the Irish Mob remained a viable force in the underworld long after most Irish Americans had assimilated into the suburbs and became generic white people in America. Mobsters in these cities inherited certain criminal rackets that had traditionally been controlled by Irish gang factions going back more than a century. The Westies gang in New York and Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang in Boston were comprised of tough-talking, street-savvy Irish hoods who appeared to be caught in a time warp. They were tough, emotional, paranoid men who adhered to the underworld dictum that three men can keep a secret, but only if two of them are dead.

The fact that the Irish Mob in its later decades engaged in a kind of macabre, internalized violence that can only be characterized as self-destructive should not be surprising. When a vast, morally corrupt universe that has murder as its ultimate principle goes through a kind of death throes, violent thrashing and internal self-immolation are the likely result. The Irish American gangster was always known for his wild, impulsive, antisocial behavior, which certainly characterized the last bloody days of the Irish Mob in America.

The main events of this saga take place in New York, Chicago, and Boston, with side trips to New Orleans, Kansas City, and Cleveland. Although the Irish Mob did not have the kind of initiation rights or agreed-upon rules of interaction that made Cosa Nostra such a cohesive underworld force throughout the United States, there were certain social systems put in place by the Irish that were remarkably similar in all of the aforementioned municipalities. An Irish mobster in Chicago might not be bound by the same rules as an Irish mobster in Boston, but the way they went about conducting business in these different cities made it seem as if Irish underworld players had all gone to the same divinity school. Whereas the Mafia was a private club, the Irish Mob was more of a philosophy, a shared social contract characterized by a loosely-connected sphere of influence in which the underworld and upperworld intersected under the guise of the lawman, the politician, and the gangster.

The men and women who populate this long march through the underbelly of American society are not easy to characterize. At the street level, there are numerous examples of the kind of doomed, untamed desperado who would come to symbolize the Irish gangster for many Americans. Leaders and followers populate this yarn, as do sociopaths and tragic cases. Many of their lives were tawdry, some downright despicable, but they were almost never boring. The life of the gangster was harsh, dangerous, fraught with paranoia, and sometimes exciting to the point of delirium.

The history of the Irish Mob includes a fair number of criminal visionaries, men and women who might have done well for themselves if they had applied their skills to more legally acceptable modes of commerce. The Irish Mob stretched into the legitimate world, more than most underworld fraternities, entangling the fortunes of untold policemen, federal agents, union men, political figures, and at least one prominent tycoon whose lifelong dalliance with the underworld changed the course of U.S. history.

Over the decades, much hot air and ink has been expended in the media’s attempt to understand why the rise and fall of the gangster has remained such an enduring myth throughout the country’s history. Certainly part of the attraction is the way in which the underworld has become a metaphor for American capitalism. Anyone who has tried to get ahead and make a living in the United States, from the lowliest street vendor to the most powerful corporate CEO, recognizes the brutal, dog-eat-dog reality of the American Dream. Some fantasize about taking matters into their own hands. In defiance of the laws and mores of polite society, the gangster does just that. In fact, everything about the gangster’s life is a rebuke to the mundane, everyday life of the solid citizen. He lives in the moment, pursues immediate gratification with reckless abandon, and revels in his own narcissism like a slop-house pig. The gangster lives according to his own rules, as if he were judge, jury, and executioner—as if he were God.

There must be a little something of the suppressed gangster in the imagination of many people, given the prominence of gangster lore in popular culture. This tradition far precedes the most recent cinematic incarnations. From the days of the earliest newspapers and photographs to the present, Americans have exhibited a fascination and identification with the dark recesses of American commerce.

The American mobster as we perceive him today—violent, impulsive, disreputable, often irredeemable—is tethered to the earliest days of the Irish immigrant experience, when the Mob was born out of starvation, disease, desperation, and bigotry. Over the last century and a half, men and women of innumerable ethnicities and social backgrounds have taken a bite of the apple, from the lowliest criminal to the most esteemed members of society. But for sheer audacity and reckless ambition, few plied their trade with as much staying power or as much panache as the originator: the Irish American gangster.

PART
One

birth of the underworld

CHAPTER
#
One

1. blood at the root

J
ohn Morrissey was a young ruffian—a teenage, Irish punk with no job, no money, and few possessions other than the clothes on his back. The year was 1849, and Morrissey had just arrived in New York City from the upstate town of Troy, where he had been raised after moving from Ireland with his parents at the age of three. In Troy, Morrissey developed a reputation as a brawler and a troublemaker. He’d been indicted for burglary, assault, and assault with intent to kill; served a sixty-day stint in the county jail; and was under constant harassment from local authorities. They said eighteen-year-old Morrissey was a gangster, but the young man knew in his heart that his ambitions were too great for that two-horse town. And so, possessing a restless energy that could not be contained in the placid, confined roads of small-town America, he set out for the great metropolis 160 miles to the south, where pilgrims, immigrants, and refugees were presently arriving in droves.

Morrissey knew exactly where he needed to go: the Empire Club, a gambling parlor and political clubhouse that was famous throughout the state. Located on Park Row in lower Manhattan, the club was the home base of Captain Isaiah Rynders, legendary sporting man, gambling impresario, and political fixer for the Democratic party. Rynders was the employer of hundreds of political operatives, gambling club workers, saloon keepers, and gangsters; his organization was at the heart of a political machine that made the great city hum. Morrissey—hungry, hard-headed, and propelled by the desires of youth—was determined to harness the power of Rynders’s organization to raise himself out of the ghetto and make his mark in the world.

He arrived at the Empire Club on one June afternoon, stood overlooking the gaming tables and declared, “I’m here to say I can lick any man in this place.”

Captain Rynders himself, presiding at a gaming table, looked up at the intrepid young man—five-foot-eleven inches tall, maybe 175 pounds, with a barrel chest and hands the size of meat hooks; impressive, yes, but not so imposing that he could intimidate with sheer physical presence alone.

“And who might you be?” Rynders asked the young Irishman.

“My name is John Morrissey, and I’m the toughest pugilist on the eastern seaboard. I’m here to prove it.”

Rynders pursed his lips in an enigmatic Mona Lisa-smile for which he was famous and glanced around at his fellow club members. He assessed the brash youngster, looking him over from head to toe, then nodded for his underlings to advance. They descended upon the young punk with fists, bottles, chairs, slung shots, and other weapons. Morrissey more than held his own until Big Tom Burns smacked him behind the ear with a spittoon, knocking the young hooligan unconscious.

When Morrissey awoke he was laying on a cot in the back of the Empire Club with a knot the size of an acorn on the crown of his skull. Captain Rynders, dressed in finery the likes of which Morrissey had never seen before, stood over the bruiser and said, “You’re a bold, young bastard.”

Morrissey felt the lump on his head and said nothing.

“I want you to come work for me. You’ll make a fine shoulder-hitter for the organization. You can stay at my boarding house and work the docks.”

And so began the political career of young John Morrissey.

He was put to work as an immigrant runner, one of hundreds who worked Castle Garden wharf in lower Manhattan, where the immigrant ships disgorged their human cargo. Each day he watched the arrival of his countrymen, and his heart ached at what he saw.

Having been born in Templemore, County Tipperary in 1831 and raised in an Irish slum in America, Morrissey knew a thing or two about poverty. In Troy, whenever his father was able to find work, it had been at the local wallpaper factory or on the docks alongside other Irish laborers. Young John had grown up believing his family was dirt poor, but what he saw at Castle Garden made him reassess his circumstances. Gaunt, haunted Irish peasants arrived by the boatload, weak from dropsy and gout, clinging to satchels that contained all that they owned. They told shocking tales of the Great Famine that had ravaged the Old Country over the last few years and of the horrific, disease-ridden journey across the ocean in hopes of a better future.

It was Morrissey’s job to greet these new arrivals and direct them to soup kitchens and boarding houses controlled by the Rynders organization. Mixed in among the many legitimate immigrant runners were dozens of con artists and “land sharks,” men who preyed upon the ignorant new arrivals. Later accounts of the era often characterized the job of the immigrant runner as that of a parasite, which may have been a bit harsh. Certainly the position straddled the line between charity and exploitation. Among runners, Morrissey developed a reputation as a tough though fair man who directed hundreds of desperate immigrants to food and lodging. In exchange, they signed voter cards and pledged their support to the political organization that Morrissey represented. On election day, it was Morrissey’s job to see that these people delivered on their pledge—under the threat of violence, if necessary.

Along with tens of thousands of other Irish immigrants arriving in New York City on a monthly basis, Morrissey found lodging in Five Points, the infamous slum neighborhood that dominated the Sixth Ward at the lower tip of Manhattan island. For a time, he lived in a boarding house on Cherry Street and frequented a grog shop, or speakeasy, on lower Broadway known as the Gem Saloon.

Five Points was a lively area though the physical conditions of the district were awful. Laid out on top of what had once been a sewage pond known as the Collect, Five Points had evolved from being mostly an industrial district of tanneries, glue factories, and turpentine distilleries to a residential haven for the city’s growing immigrant class. Poor Germans, Irish, Jews, and African Americans were crowded into two-story wooden structures built unsteadily on landfill over Collect Pond.

The district contained what was ostensibly the nation’s first tenant house, or tenement. The Old Brewery was a former beer factory that had been converted into living quarters. A five-story monstrosity that glowered over the Five Points district like a slovenly toad, the building housed an impoverished collection of newly arrived immigrants and freed African Americans. For less than two dollars a month, lodgers resided in conditions that were stifling, overcrowded, and with a sanitation system so haphazard that the building and surrounding area were sometimes buffeted by waves of cholera that reached epidemic proportions.
¹

Fetid conditions in the Old Brewery almost guaranteed that the building would become the center of much violence and depravity in the district. In the sprawling basement, known locally as the Den of Thieves, gambling, organized dog fights, prostitution, and all manner of robbery and assault were not uncommon. For local authorities, be they police or officials of the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor (AICP), the Old Brewery was a virtual no-go zone; the belief was that if you entered uninvited you were not likely to come out alive. Within the building’s many warrens and hallways, violent crimes—including rape and murder—were so commonplace that years later, when the building was finally demolished, observers claimed to see construction workers carrying out bags of bones belonging to numerous murder victims who had been buried beneath the building’s floorboards and in the walls.

The abysmal conditions in the Old Brewery spilled out into the district, creating an area that became well-known for general licentiousness and depravity. There was a saloon or speakeasy on nearly every corner with drunks stumbling out into the streets to be jack-rolled by gangs of prepubescent hooligans. Organized thievery was also common, with a high concentration of pickpockets, sneak thieves, and con artists of every variety. At night, the district descended into a kind of hellish debauchery; practically every other tenement was set up as a house of assignation, and basements and backrooms were designed for even more adventurous commercial sex practices. Gaming and backroom dance parlors were also common and eventually gave rise to a vibrant new dance style that was a combination of the African American shuffle and the Irish jig. This style was called a “break down” and became the forerunner of modern tap dancing.

By the time of John Morrissey’s arrival in Five Points, the dangerous and licentious nature of the area had become something of a drawing card. Numerous writers and social commentators had recently visited the area to gawk at and pass judgement upon its inhabitants. In 1841, Charles Dickens, the great social observer and illustrious English novelist, immortalized the neighborhood in
American Notes
, an account of his five-month tour of North America: