Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (33 page)

In Hot Springs, Owney resided peacefully and—unlike so many other men he knew—lived long enough to experience the autumnal glory of his golden years. It was a sweet deal indeed.
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Playing at a Theater Near You

In the underworld, there was no pension plan. Long-term survivors like Owney Madden were the exception, and everyone knew it. For most, betrayal and death were daily companions, survival of a perilous game of three-card monty—a game you played even though you knew the result was largely predetermined. The payoffs were obvious: money, dames, material comfort, the illusion of power and respect. By the early 1930s, if you weren’t able to achieve some portion or combination of the above, there was one other possible perk: immortality.

In May 1931, around the same time the exploits of Two Gun Crowley, Legs Diamond, and Mad Dog Coll were being chronicled in the daily press, a movie called
The Public Enemy
opened in theatres across the country. It starred a thirty-one-year-old actor named James Cagney, who had played a secondary role in four previous Hollywood pictures but was relatively unknown beyond the New York stage. In the movie, Cagney played Tom Powers, an Irish American hoodlum who rises from the fetid Stockyard District in Chicago as a kid to become a successful bootlegger. From the day it opened, the movie was a sensation; it would outsell the two other most popular gangster pictures of the era,
Little Caesar
and
Scarface
, and go on to become perhaps the most influential gangster flick in the history of American movies.

The storyline of
The Public Enemy
, loosely drawn from an unpublished novel
Beer and Blood
by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon, incorporated many details from the life of Chicago mob boss Dean O’Banion, including his specially designed suits with the special pockets for his guns. The details may have been O’Banion’s, but the character of Tom Powers, in Cagney’s hands, embodied the actions and attitudes of every Irish American gangster from Spike O’Donnell to Legs Diamond and Owney Madden.

In the movie, Tom starts out as the wayward son of a recently widowed Chicago policeman. He becomes involved in a youth gang based on O’Banion’s real-life Little Hellions. With the dawn of Prohibition, Tom finds work as a truck driver and strong arm man, and then, through a combination of brains, brutality, and charm, he rises to experience the good life before running afoul of rival bootleggers.

Produced by Warner Brothers Studios and directed by William Wellman, the movie had an unusual degree of authenticity for its time, though the rags-to-riches-to-death plotline certainly adhered to the proverbial moralism that crime doesn’t pay. In theatres,
The Public Enemy
was accompanied by an on-screen disclaimer that read in part: “It is the ambition of the authors of [this motion picture] to honestly depict an environment that exists today in a certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal.” There was much gunplay in the movie, the highest degree of physical violence allowable under the newly instituted Production Code, and a shock ending, wherein a rival gang leaves Tom’s dead body at his mother’s doorstep wrapped in a grotesque, bloody parcel.

None of these elements were what made
The Public Enemy
a hit, however. What made the movie a box office smash was Jimmy Cagney. Lincoln Kirstein, primarily a dance critic at the time (he went on to form the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine), summarized Cagney’s appeal in
Hound & Horn
magazine: “Cagney is mick-Irish…[he] has an inspired sense of timing, an arrogant style, a pride in the control of his body and a conviction and lack of self-consciousness that is unique…. No one expresses more clearly in terms of pictorial action the delights of violence, the overtones of a subconscious sadism, the tendency toward destruction, toward anarchy, which is the base of American sex appeal.”

Cagney developed his physical grace and timing as a Tin Pan Alley song-and-dance man, but he picked up his swagger and his “overtones of subconscious sadism” as a youth growing up in rough-neck Manhattan and through his occasional acquaintance with known underworld figures.

Born on July 17, 1899, in the notorious Gas House District around Tompkins Square—the same neighborhood that produced Richard Croker, Honest John Kelly, and other legendary bosses of Tammany Hall—Cagney learned to speak near fluent Yiddish before his family moved north to Yorkville, an ethnic melting pot district on the Upper East Side. In his autobiography,
Cagney by Cagney
, the actor describes his childhood as being “surrounded by trouble, illness, and my dad’s alcoholism…we just didn’t have time to be impressed by all those misfortunes, though we did realize the desperation of life around us. I recall the Fitzpatrick family of Ninety-sixth Street who were put out on the sidewalk when they couldn’t pay the rent, and this was not long after they had seen their little child run over by a refuse wagon. The Cagney’s never had that kind of experience, thank God, and it never occurred to us, despite the poverty, to hold our heads or feel sorry for ourselves…”

The streets of Yorkville could be tough. “Red,” as Cagney was sometimes known because of his hair, tried to stay out of trouble, but it wasn’t always easy. One day he heard the sound of pounding feet behind him. When he turned to look, he saw a boy collapsing with a butcher knife sticking in his back. Another time he saw a boy sobbing, walking down the street, holding his slashed testicle. Violence and physical confrontations were common. Unless you wanted to be a victim, you learned to defend yourself.

“There was almost a kind of chivalry about fighting in our neighborhood,” wrote Cagney. He fondly remembered the antics of a girl named Maude, whose prowess as a fighter would have put her in good stead with the Dead Rabbits, Whyos, and other gangs of the previous century:

A dope addict (“cokie” or “hophead” we called them then) named Daly was urging the little blocky girl on very loudly. Fat Bella, one of Maude’s pals, said a few words to him, he replied in kind to her, and she retorted with an overhand right. Daly grabbed the wide, tightly wired ribbon in her hair and swung her off her feet, making her go round and round like a roman candle. Then we young kids jumped Daly and heaved rocks at him as he scuttled up the street. Maude’s fight flowered into another between two girls about ten years old. The brother of one of the girls stepped in, slapped his sister in the face, and told her to go home. Then this little child said indignantly to her brother, “Well, she ain’t gonna call
me
no whore!”

The rambunctious nature of the city streets fueled young Cagney’s ambitions. A talented amateur boxer, he considered a career in the ring, but his mother was against it. He became more of a joker and dancer than a fighter, but he observed everything. He picked up mannerisms and attitudes deeply ingrained in the lower-middle-class Irish of his neighborhood and turned them into the raw material of a movie persona variously described as “hard-boiled,” “smart alecky,” and “street-wise.” What he didn’t pilfer from the characters of his youth, Cagney got from his mobster associations. The man who made the introductions was a friend and fellow actor, George Raft.

A suave tough guy born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Raft was friendly with Owney Madden, having once served long ago as a junior member of the Gophers. Sometime in the late 1920s, at the world-famous Stork Club, Raft introduced Cagney, the budding movie star, to Madden, the Duke of the West Side. Cagney soaked up Owney’s style, demeanor, and especially his manner of speech, a talking-from-the-side-of-the-mouth sarcasm endemic to Manhattan’s West Side Irish. A cop once described Madden back in his Gopher days as “that little banty rooster from hell,” which was also a good description of early-vintage Cagney, whose cocky strut was modeled at least partly on Madden and his Hell’s Kitchen influences.

Cagney’s portrayal of Tom Powers in
The Public Enemy
was so utterly convincing that there were no protests against the movie by Irish American groups. In the previous two years alone, crime movies such as
Little Caesar
,
Chinatown Nights
, and
Wheel of Chance
, which featured a Jewish racketeer named Schmulka Turkletaub (played by a WASP actor) had stirred the ire of the respective ethnic groups. A year later, the release of
Scarface
would bring about even louder denunciations from The Order of the Sons of Italy, who threatened to picket theatres showing the movie until Warner Brothers caved into pressure and retitled the picture,
Scarface, Shame of the Nation
.
The Public Enemy
met with no such public disavowals. Although the movie did not soft-peddle the vicious, sociopathic nature of Tom Powers (he kills a cop in the movie’s first twenty minutes and later famously smashes a grapefruit in his girlfriend’s face), Cagney, like an
Our Gang
kid gone wrong, imbues the character with a kind of rot-gut humanity.

“I doubt there is an actor extant who could have done what James Cagney does with the character of Tom Powers,” wrote playwright Robert Sherwood. “He does not hesitate to represent Tom as a complete rat—with a rat’s sense of honor, a rat’s capacity for human love; and when cornered, a rat’s fighting courage. And what is more, although his role is consistently unsympathetic, Mr. Cagney manages to earn for Tom Powers the audience’s affection and esteem.”

For the Irish, Cagney’s performance transcended this one character in this one movie. The Cagney persona, which the actor introduced in full flower in
The Public Enemy
then honed in numerous gangster movies throughout the Thirties, was the culmination of a process that had begun decades earlier with Thomas Nast’s ape-like, brutish characterizations of Paddy in magazine and newspaper editorial cartoons. The Irish, so vilified at the time as ignorant, slovenly, and baffoonish, had come from the most backward agrarian culture in Western Europe to the most heavily industrialized environment in the world. They made their way despite resistance at every turn, partly by recreating themselves in a new image. The tough, hyperalert, fast-talking, street-smart operator was an evolutionary adaptation to America’s mean streets, who not only looked and acted like he belonged, but at some level embodied what urban life was all about.

Cagney’s characterization was based partly on a modern urban reality: The understanding that the line between legal and illegal in the Big City was often a question of convenience rather than morality. In the nineteenth century, Paddy had viewed his new country’s capitalist economy as a rigged game. That’s how the political machine and the mobster came into being in the first place. Now that attitude was infused with the ethos of the Roaring Twenties, a time of moral ambiguity and playful liberation, giving birth to a new character—“Jimmy,” the toughest of the tough, but also a natty dresser, a hit with the ladies, possessed of verbal agility and an ironic sensibility that set new standards in urban cool.

To say that the Irish American gangster played an essential role in this incremental transformation from Paddy to Jimmy may be anathema to some, but it’s hard to deny. Society may choose to put forth more stalwart types such as soldiers, firemen, and policemen as heroes, but when it comes to setting trends, the outlaw and the gangster have always been more influential.

The irony, of course, is that just as Jimmy Cagney emerged as the avatar of a new kind of street-wise Irish American style, the mobsters who inspired that style were dropping at an expeditious rate. Deanie O’Banion, Legs Diamond, Mad Dog Coll, Vannie Higgins, Frankie Wallace, and Danny Walsh—among others—were all dead. In Chicago, Al Capone alone had virtually eradicated a whole generation of Irish mob bosses. The era of the Irish mobster that had flowered in the late nineteenth century and peaked during Prohibition was not quite over yet, but the role of Jimmy the Gangster as cock-of-the-walk and master of the underworld appeared to be heading into an ominous era of remission.

You wouldn’t know it by going to the movies, though. In glorious black-and-white, Cagney reprised, refined, and expanded his creation in
Angels With Dirty Faces
,
The Mayor of Hell
,
Jimmy the Gent
,
The Roaring Twenties,
and other memorable 1930s crime pictures, insuring that the image of the Irish hoodlum—no matter what happened out in the streets of America—would glimmer on celluloid for time immortal.

CHAPTER
#
Seven

7. the smoke-filled room and other tales of political malfeasance

P
rohibition came to an end on April 7, 1933, when newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to modify the Volstead Act to permit the manufacture of beer with an alcohol content of more than 3.2 percent. Congress did so immediately. Beer trucks once again rumbled through the streets, free of gangster escorts, and thousands of speakeasies flung their doors wide and became legal beer saloons once again. Later in the year, with passage of the 21st Amendment, all Prohibition-era statutes relating to the sale and manufacture of liquor were officially repealed. The long disaster could now be forgotten, except, of course, for the thousands of dead bodies, the legacy of corruption, and the criminal framework that was fine-tuned, expanded, and—in some respects—still exists to this day.

Mobsterism did not end with the repeal of Prohibition. Why would it? The underworld was larger than any one racket. Spawned amidst the squalor of famine-era immigration, it had sustained itself through civil and international wars, the Gilded Age, economic downturns, changing political regimes, the Industrial Revolution, and the folly of the Noble Experiment. The underworld survived because the underworld
was
America, an inexorable aspect of American capitalism so deeply ingrained in the fabric of big city life that no social revolution or human law could legislate it out of existence.