Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (32 page)

At the trial, prosecutors produced multiple witnesses who claimed to have seen Legs Diamond in or around the area of the kidnapping on the night in question. A terrified Grover Parks took the stand and told his story. Upon cross-examination, Diamond’s attorney sought to portray Parks as a pathetic publicity hound who was hoping to enhance his social standing in the refracted glow of the defendant’s legend. The trial lasted four days. The jury deliberated for three hours. Legs was found not guilty.

“Gang Law Beats State Law in Diamond Case” blared a headline in the late edition of the
Albany Evening News
. The verdict seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears: Justice was a whore.

That night, amid the inevitable cries of jury tampering, Diamond and his entourage retired to the bar of the Kenmore Hotel in nearby Albany. Jack’s wife Alice was there, as was his mistress Kiki, who’d been hidden away in a separate apartment during the trial. That night Legs danced to his favorite tune, “Happy Days and Lonely Nights.” Later, without wife or mistress, he went to a celebration at a popular speakeasy across from Union Station. He got drunk, then went to Kiki’s apartment and got drunker. At some point, Legs stumbled back to the boarding room where he was staying under the name Kelly. He stripped to his underwear and fell into bed.

Around five-thirty in the morning, two visitors entered the boarding house and went to Diamond’s room, which was apparently unlocked. The landlady would later state that she heard Jack Diamond pleading for his life. She also heard one of the visitors reject mercy and tell Legs, “Others pleaded with
you
.” Shortly thereafter, the sharp retort of gunfire pierced the dawn: three shots, up close and personal. After a lifetime of close calls and near misses, Legs was finally, absolutely, positively dead.

The killers were never identified, though they were seen speeding away in a red Packard. The way the hit went down, it had to have been at least partly set up by local players. In the months that followed, there was much speculation. Could Jack Diamond have been set up by Alice, his long-suffering wife? Was he possibly betrayed by members of his own gang? Did local cops, a fair number of whom were on the payroll of one mobster or another, play a role or even provide shooters to take out the area’s most notorious criminal?

Whoever pulled the trigger, it made little difference. The result was the same: Luciano, Schultz, Lansky, and the others were now one step closer to their grand scheme of establishing an underworld free of uppity Irish gangsters.
⁴

With Friends Like These…

Vincent Coll’s trial for the killing of five-year-old Michael Vengalli got under way in Manhattan on December 16, 1931. If the lad from Gweedore was concerned about his fate, it was with good reason. All he had to do was look at the papers. Jack Diamond had been dramatically acquitted, then summarily executed. Under these circumstances, Coll might have viewed his own trial with considerable trepidation. Would he be better off being found guilty and sent to the electric chair a la Two Gun Crowley? Might his chances be worse if he were acquitted and sent back out into the streets, where he could be hunted down and murdered by the Syndicate?

These were tough times for an enterprising Irish racketeer. The press and the public had already convicted Coll of the horrendous act. Vincent the Mad Dog was a renegade Irish gangster, enemy of the establishment, which made him GUA (Guilty Upon Arrival). Compared to Jack Diamond, Coll was like a platypus wallowing in the mire. Legs had been acclaimed, while Vincent was despised—though they did represent flip sides of the same coin that had been designated for extinction.

At trial, the prosecution’s star witness turned out to be a man who claimed to have been walking along 116th Street in East Harlem on the day in question. While minding his own business, lo and behold, he saw four men in a car driving by. One of those men stuck a machine gun out the back window of the car and opened fire, aiming at a man identified as Joey Rao, but striking instead a gaggle of young children. The triggerman’s face was partially obscured by a fedora pulled low on his head, but the intrepid witness was able to identify the shooter as Vincent Coll because of the prominent dimple in the middle of his chin.

Coll’s criminal defense attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, was on the case. During pre-trial investigations, Liebowitz had learned that the witness, along with being a convicted felon who did time as a jewel thief, was little more than a professional witness, a breed endemic to the criminal justice system. The man had only recently been paid for his testimony at a murder trial in St. Louis, where he was found to have committed perjury.

“Have you ever testified in a criminal proceeding before?” Liebowitz asked the witness on the stand.

The man denied that he had.

“Have you ever been paid, sir, to testify in a criminal proceeding?”

“Uh…no. I have not.”

Liebowitz produced the records from the trial in St. Louis, and the government’s case against Mad Dog Coll was finished. Their star witness was exposed as a cheap fraud. Before it was over, the judge would be compelled to instruct the jury that, given the mendacity of the government’s case, they had no choice but to find the defendant not guilty.

Coll, dressed in his best suit, stepped into the afternoon chill outside the Criminal Courts Building with Lottie, his twenty-three-year-old fiancée, beaming at his side. To the assembled reporters, he read a rare public statement: “I have been charged with all kinds of crimes, but baby-killing was the limit. I’d like nothing better than to lay my hands on the man who did this. I’d tear his throat out. There is nothing more despicable than a man who would harm an innocent child.”

Vincent Coll was released from custody that day, but he was hardly a free man.

In the euphoria of acquittal, he and Lottie were married on January 4, 1932, in a civil ceremony. There was no honeymoon. In the weeks that followed, the two lovebirds were stopped a half dozen times and harassed by cops. They were held on minor matters, such as not having their registration for their automobile. Police authorities made it clear that they would not stop pestering Vincent Coll until he left town and never returned.

The reasons Coll and his bride stayed in the area remain something of a mystery. Vincent may have been delusional enough to believe that he could reemerge as a player in the city’s underworld, though the murder of Legs Diamond should have disabused him of those notions. Nonetheless, he and a small handful of young loyalists sought to reestablish themselves. They set up an informal headquarters at a four-family frame dwelling on Commonwealth Avenue in the northern reaches of Vincent’s home borough, the Bronx.

On February 1, less than one month after Vincent and Lottie’s marriage, three members of Coll’s crew, along with two women and two babies, were in the Bronx apartment. The men were playing cards, and the women were tending to the infants, when a team of four gunmen burst in and began shooting. There was no time for the occupants to return fire. Methodically, the gunmen shot everyone in the room, except for the two babies, who cried hysterically in their cribs. After they were finished, the killers made a hasty retreat.

When the cops arrived, there was blood splattered everywhere. Two of the men and one woman were dead. Another man and woman were badly injured. The whole scene was underscored by the sound of screaming babies. Even by Prohibition-era standards, it was a grisly incident. The tabloids, in typical hyperbolic fashion, compared the shooting to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Police sources speculated that the executioners were actually on the hunt for Vincent Coll and had gone on information that he was due there that night with his bride, Lottie.

Yet again, Vincent and Lottie holed up at the Cornish Arms Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. The entire city knew the underworld was out to get the man; many probably wished that the gangsters would get it over with so that the carnage might end. Star columnist Walter Winchell turned up the heat by narrating the whole thing through his radio broadcasts and his column in the
Daily Mirror
. Wrote Winchell, “Five plains brought dozens of machine guns from Chicago Friday. Local banditti have made one hotel a virtual arsenal and several hot spots are ditto because Master Coll is giving them the headache.”

Vincent sought to buy some time by establishing contact with the only man in the upper echelon of the Syndicate whom he could even remotely call a friend: Owney Madden. He did so in his usual hotheaded, counterproductive style—by threatening to kidnap Madden and hold him for ransom, just as he had done with Madden’s sidekick, Big Frenchy DeMange.

“Just imagine how the dagos and kikes is gonna feel if they gotta shell out a hundred grand to save your sorry ass,” Vincent told Owney. “Pay me now, up front, and I’ll save you the trouble.”

Madden told Coll he’d get back to him. Meanwhile, Madden conferred with Dutch Schultz and decided that the best way to get to the Mick was through one of his bodyguards.

Just after midnight on February 8, Vincent received a call from Madden, who was in his office at the Cotton Club. Concerned that the phone at the hotel might be tapped, the two men agreed that Coll would step out to a pay phone inside a candy store on Twenty-third Street and call Madden back from there. Vincent and his bodyguard, part of a rotating crew he kept on the premises at all times, left the hotel together.

Arriving at the New London Pharmacy and Candy Shop around twelve-thirty
A
.
M
., Coll stepped into a phone booth in the rear of the store. The bodyguard took a seat at a counter near the soda fountain. Vincent called Madden at the Cotton Club and was jabbering away when a car pulled up in front of the store. Four men, one of them wearing an ankle-length coat and gray fedora, got out of the car. Three of the men positioned themselves around the drugstore entrance. The man with the long coat and fedora entered the store and nodded to Coll’s bodyguard. Coll’s betrayer swiftly climbed off his stool and skedaddled out the front door.

From beneath his coat, the man in the gray fedora produced a tommy gun. While Vincent chattered on the phone heatedly and obliviously, the gunman approached, raised his machine gun, and fired a short burst into the booth, shattering glass and creating a loud racket. He paused, corrected his aim, and fired again, making sure to riddle Coll’s body from head to toe. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds.

Vincent’s wife Lottie arrived on the scene around the same time as the police. She was hysterical, of course, seeing her betrothed reduced to a mass of barely recognizable blood and flesh. The police badgered her with questions, a few of which she answered until she lost control and said, “I don’t want to be stubborn, but I’m not going to say anything more about Vincent and me.” To a bystander she confided that she was madly in love with Coll, and the dress she was now wearing was the same dress she had worn on the day they were wed. Their current lifesavings, she said, was a hundred dollar bill she kept pinned inside her bra.

By and large, the city greeted news of Coll’s gangland execution with a sense of relief. Police Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney called the act “a positive defiance of law and order,” with the accent on “positive.” Mayor Walker said, as disturbingly violent as the killing had been, he hoped that it might signal the end of the open warfare that had claimed so many lives. Dutch Shultz declared, “The Mad Mick got what he deserved.”

With the murder of Legs Diamond and now Vincent Coll, the Syndicate had eliminated two of their biggest headaches in New York. But they weren’t done yet. The mobster conference in Atlantic City had established a new directive: The Irish mobsters must go. Even before Diamond and Coll were murdered, the bloodletting had begun. Earlier in 1931, prominent Boston bootlegger Danny Wallace, leader of the Irish Gustin Gang, was lured to the North End Italian section of Boston and assassinated, along with his number two man, Barney Walsh (a third Gustin, Timothy Coffey, was hit but managed to escape). Next on the hit parade were Diamond and Coll. Then came Vannie Higgins, the mob boss of Brooklyn; he was gunned down while strolling along a Brooklyn street with his wife and seven-year-old daughter, who was grazed by a stray bullet. The next to be murdered was Danny Walsh of Rhode Island. He was last seen on February 2, 1933, at a diner in Pawtucket, a few days before a group of Italian men were spotted digging a grave on his property and lacing it with lime.

Over the three-year period from 1931 to 1933, virtually every high-ranking Irish American bootlegger in the Northeastern United States was systematically eliminated, gangland-style. If the underworld needed a reminder that there was a New World Order in place, in which the wild, renegade behavior so famously associated with the Irish gangster would no longer be tolerated, all anyone had to do was count the bodies.

No one understood this better than Owney Madden. The Duke of the West Side had risen from the gutter to the top of the underworld hierarchy, and he had done so partly by turning against the very forces that got him there. He was a highly circumspect individual whose thoughts and feelings were intentionally never recorded for posterity (the man behind the man does not tell all). But we do know this about Madden: In 1932, a few months after the murder of Mad Dog Coll, he was arrested on a minor parole violation charge. With his connections and access to high-powered legal representation, Madden could easily have contested the charge. But he chose not to. Given the current climate in the underworld, a year off the streets was preferable—even attractive—to the man whose role as planner and facilitator in the deaths of both Diamond and Coll had left him with a reputation as an Irishman who betrayed his own.

So Owney gladly removed himself from the scene and did a year in the joint. Upon his release, he negotiated a formal exit strategy with Luciano, Costello, and the others. By agreement, Madden would leave New York altogether and retire to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he would preside over a collection of casinos, brothels, and luxury hotels that were controlled by the Syndicate. The idea was that Hot Springs would serve as a virtual resort town for mobsters on the lam, a southern outpost for organized crime figures. And Owney Madden, the former Gopher from Hell’s Kitchen, would tend to this relatively peaceful racketeer’s paradise like a player coach—valued for his experience and wisdom, but also capable of taking the mound and throwing the occasional screwball or knuckler when circumstances required it.