The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (5 page)

There was One Lung Curran, known for his occasional withdrawals to a tubercular ward at Bellevue Hospital. Curran’s girlfriend once complained she didn’t have a warm coat for the winter, so One Lung promptly went out, blackjacked a policeman and relieved him of his jacket. After Curran’s girlfriend had it tailored, other women in the neighborhood expressed envy. Their boyfriends reacted accordingly, and before long the streets of Hell’s Kitchen were populated with coatless policemen.

The Gophers were known to be so turbulent and so fickle that very few of their leaders held that distinction for more than a few months. Nonetheless, they remained a force to be reckoned with until 1910, when the New York Central Railroad organized a special security contingent to take action against them. Many of the railroad’s recruits were former policemen who had taken beatings at the hands of the Gophers and were now looking to get even.

The Railroad staged a week-long assault on the gang, beating and harassing known members, drastically depleting their forces, and effectively establishing the railway yards on 60th and 30th streets as off limits. Thus weakened, the Gophers spent more time defending themselves against rival gangs like the Hudson Dusters than they did bothering the law.

During the Prohibition years, what was left of the Gophers was resurrected by the infamous Owney “the Killer” Madden. Born in Liverpool of Irish parentage, Madden made it through his turbulent youth (five arrests for murder by the time he was twenty-three) to become a gangster of distinction. He amassed his power through control of the bootleg liquor and rum-running trade, which became a booming enterprise in Hell’s Kitchen. Speakeasies abounded throughout the district, and any late-night convoy of trucks loaded with booze inevitably made its way up 10th Avenue towards one of the many West Side warehouses.

Unlike the earlier generation of Gophers, who were mainly back-alley toughs who preferred to stay that way, Madden aspired to the highest levels of New York society. His nights were usually spent making the rounds at local speakeasies and clubs, where he was known as the Duke of the West Side. An average evening might be spent at his own Winona Club, or at one of the swankier West Side dance halls like the Eldorado or the Hotsy Totsy Club, owned by Jack “Legs” Diamond.

Madden was the first gangster to come out of Hell’s Kitchen with anything approximating a business sense. In fact, he seemed to have his fingers in everything—bootleg liquor, breweries, nightclubs, taxicabs, laundries, and cloak and cigarette concessions. Eventually, he owned a controlling interest in the highly prosperous Cotton Club in Harlem and a piece of the prizefighter Primo Carnera, who won the heavyweight crown in 1933.

With such a lucrative base of income, it was only a matter of time before Madden’s reign would be challenged. For years, he’d been able to amicably share his bootleg liquor business with an uptown operator named Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz. But he didn’t seem to have as much luck with some of his own Irish underlings.

Once, Little Patsy Doyle sought to take over Madden’s operation while Madden was convalescing in the hospital following a late-night shooting at the Arbor Dance Hall on West 52nd Street. When Madden was discharged, he decided to use Patsy as an example. At Madden’s insistence, Doyle’s girlfriend lured him to a saloon at 41st Street and 8th Avenue, where Patsy was shot three times, stumbled through the swinging doors, and died in the gutter outside.

There were other, far more substantial threats. The biggest challenge of all came from yet another Hell’s Kitchen Irishman with a thick mane of red hair and an engaging—some would say “goofy”—smile. If Madden was the very model of the gentleman gangster, a shining example of a Hell’s Kitchen street tough who had risen above his station, then Vincent Coll was his antithesis. Known in the underworld as the Mad Mick and later by the press as the Mad Dog, Coll was a throwback to the earliest days of the Gophers, when gangsters were doomed to die in the very streets that spawned them.

Born in County Donegal, Coll was brought to New York at an early age and raised in a cold-water flat in the Bronx by his mother; she died of pneumonia when he was seven. After a prolonged stay at the infamous Mt. Loretto orphanage in Staten Island, Coll went to work for Dutch Schultz before he was even old enough to shave.

At first, Coll’s gleeful ruthlessness made him a valued enforcer. He was nineteen when police charged him with having killed a speakeasy owner who refused to buy Schultz’s booze. He was eventually acquitted of the charge, probably through Schultz’s influence.

Before long, the Dutchman started to realize Coll was more trouble than he was worth. After Coll pulled a robbery at the Sheffield Farms dairy in the Bronx without his authorization, Schultz upbraided the young gangster. Rather than back down, as might have been expected, Coll had the audacity to demand that Schultz cut him in as an equal partner.

“I don’t take in nobody as partners with me,” Schultz said. “You’re an ambitious punk, but you take a salary or nothin’. Take it or leave it.”

“Okay,” said Coll, with his customary toothy grin. “I’m leaving it.”

Over the following months, Coll proceeded to make himself a major pain in the ass to both Schultz and Madden, hiring out as a free-lance assassin and trying to muscle in on everybody’s territory. On June 15, 1931, he kidnapped Madden’s closest associate, Big Frenchie de Mange, in front of the Club Argonaut on West 50th Street. Then, in July, just weeks after Madden paid Coll a $35,000 ransom for de Mange, Coll was threatening to kidnap Madden himself.

At the same time, Coll was waging war against Schultz—hijacking beer trucks, trashing speakeasies, and moving in on the Harlem policy games, one of Schultz’s most lucrative rackets. As his coup de grace, Coll targeted Joey Rao, Schultz’s prime mover in East Harlem, for execution.

On the afternoon of July 28, 1931, Rao was lounging in front of his headquarters, the Helmar Social Club on East 107th Street. Accompanied by two bodyguards, Rao had a pocketful of pennies which he was distributing to a group of neighborhood children who had gathered. A touring car came around the corner and opened fire on Rao, his protectors, and the children. When the fusillade was over, a five-year-old kid lay dead on the sidewalk and four other children had been wounded. Rao and his bodyguards escaped without a scratch.

Everyone in town knew Coll was behind the shooting. Newspaper headlines the next day christened him “the Baby Killer.” People on both sides of the law were calling for retribution. Both Madden and Schultz put out a $25,000 contract on Coll, the psychotic “Mad Dog” who was giving the underworld a bad name. Columnist Walter Winchell reported that, “Five planes 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.”

Finally, on the night of February 8, 1932, the inevitable came to pass. At a drugstore on West 23rd Street near 8th Avenue, Coll was in a phone booth carrying on a protracted conversation. An automobile with four men pulled up to the curb outside. Three of the men deployed themselves around the drugstore entrance, while the fourth, carrying a Thompson submachine gun, entered the store. Coll was still jabbering away when the gunman raised his tommy gun and let loose with a short burst of fire through the glass. After correcting his aim, the gunman fired another short burst, then another. He looked in the booth, where baby-faced Mad Dog Coll lay nearly sawed in half amidst blood and shattered glass. Then he strolled out of the drugstore.

It was Owney Madden who Coll had been talking to on the phone. Later reports suggested that the elder gangster held Coll on the line until the gunmen were able to arrive. If this was true, it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that one child of Hell’s Kitchen would eliminate another as part of a bloody battle for control of the neighborhood’s bounty.

With Coll out of the picture, things quieted down on the West Side. But by this time, it hardly mattered. The Twenty-first Amendment was passed in 1933, repealing Prohibition. The speakeasies were all closing down and the big dance halls were soon to follow. Within a few months of Coil’s shooting, Madden was imprisoned on a parole violation, where he would languish for twelve months even though newspaper stories claimed he had offered a million-dollar bribe to the state parole board. Upon release, he retired to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he married the postmaster’s daughter and ran what amounted to a resort town for mobsters on the lam.

Before Madden left New York, however, in the waning days of Prohibition he was to form one last alliance. In 1931, a young Sicilian immigrant named Charles “Lucky” Luciano was in the process of forming an organized crime “commission.” In a radical departure from the usual closed-door policy of the Italian crime syndicate, it was Luciano’s intention to allow other ethnic mobsters to take part in a nationwide ruling body. Madden had been included as a personal friend of Luciano’s and as a representative of New York’s Irish Mob.

At the time, Madden’s reign as Duke of the West Side had already peaked, so his inclusion might have seemed like an afterthought. But with this alliance, a relationship was begun between Italian and Irish racketeers on the West Side. It was a relationship that would sustain the area’s criminal interests through the lean years of the Depression, and establish a partnership that would shape the lives of countless gangsters that followed.

2

LAST OF A DYING BREED

O
n Saturday afternoon, August 27, 1960, many of Hell’s Kitchen’s most distinguished citizens began to arrive at the Church of the Sacred Heart on West 51st Street just off 10th Avenue. It was a beautiful day, with temperatures in the mid-nineties, and the people—over 200 in number—were dressed in their Sunday best. There was a festive atmosphere, with everyone cheerfully greeting one another and exhibiting a communal pride commensurate with the occasion. After all, as any self-respecting West Sider would have known, this was not just
any
gathering. This was a gathering in honor of Michael John Spillane.

With his wavy black hair and dashing good looks, Spillane, then twenty-six years old, was especially well liked by the neighborhood’s older residents. Though his exploits as a gangster were known to many, Spillane himself was rarely associated with these acts. Much of it had to do with his abundant personal charms. As they would say long after he was gone, nobody knew how to work the room like Mickey Spillane. And “the room,” in this case, was most of Hell’s Kitchen.

Spillane first began to make a name for himself at a tender age in the late 1950s. Dressed in fine thousand-dollar suits, he frequently made the rounds bestowing favors in shops and saloons along 9th and 10th avenues. When he heard a neighbor had landed in the hospital, he usually sent flowers. On Thanksgiving, turkeys went out to families in need. He was especially popular with the nuns at Mount Carmel Convent on West 54th Street, to whom he made annual donations.

Behind this appealing facade was an extensive criminal past. Spillane’s first brush with the law had come in 1950 at the age of sixteen, when he was shot and then arrested by a patrolman while robbing a Manhattan movie theater. There would be twenty-four more arrests over the years on an assortment of charges including burglary, assault, gun possession, criminal contempt, and the crime he was most often associated with, gambling.

Mickey Spillane’s criminal record, however, was of no great consequence to those who gathered at the Church of the Sacred Heart in August of 1960. Instead, they had come to pay their respects to Spillane on the occasion of his marriage, and no talk of violence or gangsterism would spoil this fine day.

Only Sacred Heart Church could possibly provide the proper backdrop for such an illustrious event. The building itself had first been dedicated in 1885 by Archbishop Michael Corrigan, and it had since become one of the community’s most enduring symbols. As late as 1920, an overwhelming number of parishioners at Sacred Heart were of Irish extraction. Eventually, more and more Italian surnames began to appear on the official list of subscribers. Even so, intermarriage between ethnic groups was rarely encouraged. Once, in the late 1930s, an Irish father had even threatened to shoot the Reverend William Scully for marrying his daughter to an Italian.

In later years, as the neighborhood’s Catholic population became more and more Spanish-speaking, Sacred Heart’s congregation was still disproportionately Irish. Those Irish who had remained rallied around this modest Venetian Gothic structure with its bright-red doors as if it were the last remaining link to their proud and embattled past.

On this particular afternoon, a soft light cascaded down from the cathedral’s elegant clerestory windows as Spillane, dressed in an impeccably tailored black tuxedo, strolled down the aisle past the assemblage. In keeping with his image, he winked at those he knew and smiled politely at those he didn’t.

Spillane’s bride-to-be, the lovely Maureen McManus, was led down the aisle by her father. Dressed in a flowing white gown, her resplendent reddish-brown hair tumbling to her shoulders, she was flush with excitement. Following behind her was her good friend and bridesmaid, Eileen Farrell, and Mickey’s best man and twin brother, Charlie Spillane.

As Spillane and Maureen McManus stood before the Reverend J. M. Brown, backed by a majestic fifteen-foot-high marble altar, the older guests could hardly contain their pride. Together, this distinguished couple represented two of the neighborhood’s most formidable traditions.

Since 1905, the McManus family, affectionately known in the neighborhood as “the McMani,” had controlled the political fate of the district through their leadership of the Midtown Democratic Club. In the beginning, there was Thomas J. “The” McManus, who first wrested control of the district leadership from George Washington Plunkitt, one of the most powerful bosses of the infamous New York political organization known as Tammany Hall. Following his election, McManus himself became a practitioner of Tammany Hall politics, using his position to bequeath patronage jobs and welcome new immigrants with voter registration forms.