Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  Pretty soon the driver asks the guy with the shotgun, “Where you gonna get rid of these guys?” The fat fellow [McErlane] laughs and says, “I’ll take care of that in a minute.” He was monkeying with his shotgun all the time. Pretty soon he turns around and points the gun at Keane. He didn’t say a word but just let go straight at him. Keane got it square on the left side. The guy loads up his gun and gives it to Keane again. Then he turns around to me and says, “I guess you might as well get yours, too.” With that he shoots me in the side. It hurt like hell so when I seen him loading up again, I twist around so it won’t hit me in the same place. This time he got me in the leg. Then he gives me the other barrel right on the puss. I slide off the seat. But I guess the fat guy wasn’t sure we was through. He let Morrie have it twice more and then he let me have it again in the other side. The fat guy scrambled into the rear seat and grabbed Keane. He opens the door and kicks Morrie out into the road. We was doing about fifty from the sound. I figure I’m next so when he drags me over to the door I set myself to jump. He shoves and I light in the ditch by the road. I hit the ground on my shoulders and I thought I’d never stop rolling. I lost consciousness. When my senses came back, I was lying in a pool of water and ice had formed around me. The sky was red and it was breaking day. I staggered along a road until I saw a light in a farmhouse….

  In later years, Frank McErlane’s life became a succession of court proceedings, attempts on his life, and extended periods in hiding from killers or the law. One dark, rainy night he was found drunk in the middle of the street firing his tommy gun into the sky. “They were trying to get me, but I drove ’em off,” he told a cop. McErlane was sent to the drunk tank, but his problems were more serious than that. “Gangland Years Make Wreck of Frank McErlane” wrote the Tribune after a psychiatric evaluation suggested that the gangster was quite possibly insane. Crazy or not, McErlane was so loathed in the underworld that when he finally died from alcohol-related pneumonia on October 8, 1932, police had to guard the ambulance that held his body so that no one would try to break in and mutilate the remains.

  The West Side O’Donnells (no relation to the South Side O’Donnells)—Myles, Klondike, and Bernard O’Donnell were the first bootleggers to establish a beachhead in Cicero, which would prove to be a primary battleground in the war between the dagos and the micks. In the early years of the decade, they operated under a treaty with Johnny Torrio that was beneficial to all. The O’Donnells controlled the beer concessions along Roosevelt Road, the town’s main drag, while Torrio was allowed to sell beer elsewhere, as well as operate various cabarets and the Ship, a massive gambling house.

  After Papa John fled the city, Al Capone commenced bullying his way into Cicero. The West Side O’Donnells violently resisted especially since they were dead set against the brothel business, which Capone intended to introduce to the town in a big way. Between 1925 and early 1929, Cicero would become ground zero in the war between the exclusively Irish O’Donnell Mob and the Capone syndicate. The battle would eventually result in nearly two hundred gang-style murders.

  The Terrible Touhys—Born in the Valley (the same fetid turn-of-the-century Irish slum that produced Terry Druggan and many other aspiring gangsters), Roger, Johnny, Eddie, Tommy, and Joe Touhy underscored the fact that not all bootleggers were bad men. Sons of a Chicago cop and a mother who died when the boys were still young, a couple of the brothers became burglars and low-level criminals. The smartest of the bunch, Roger, became a union organizer, a Morse Code wireless operator, and eventually owner of a fleet of trucks based in Des Plaines, a sleepy Chicago suburb in northwestern Cook County. With the onset of Prohibition, Roger Touhy’s trucking business became a bootlegging operation. Soon Touhy was making his own product, brewed with spring water, which became known as the best beer in the entire county. By 1926, Roger and his brothers were selling one thousand barrels a week at $55 a barrel, with a production cost to them of $4.50 a barrel. The profits were enormous.

  Only five foot six, with curly hair and a big beak for a nose, Roger Touhy was intelligent and well-liked. Initially, he eschewed violence, preferring to win over customers with the superior nature of his product. But that changed when Al Capone got wind of Touhy’s profitable Des Plaines operation. Capone moved his own product into Des Plaines and began terrorizing Touhy’s customers. The result was a sporadic shooting war that took place first on the empty back roads of Cook County, then—after Roger secretly obtained the backing of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermack and the city’s police department—erupted inside the city limits as well.3

  The Terrible Touhys and all of the Irish gangs that took on Capone did so with the knowledge that it was a battle to the death. Unlike Torrio, Capone had no interest in negotiation or appeasement. His bluntly stated goal was to take over not only the entire city, but also the county, the state, and the entire midwestern region of the United States. There would be no partners, only subsidiaries.

  But the Irish were not his only competitors. The Sicilian Genna brothers hated Capone and would remain his sworn enemy until he had two of them killed (another Genna was murdered by Bugs Moran and Hymie Weiss in May 1925). The Chicago chapter of the Unione Siciliane resented Capone, who was not Sicilian and therefore never actually a member of the Mafia. When Big Al succeeded in installing his own handpicked choice as president of the Unione, it touched off a bloody, corpse-laden war within the organization dubbed by the press “The War of Sicilian Succession.”

  With Scarface Al turning up the heat, things were getting out of hand. During the three-year period from 1924 to 1927, there were, according to the recently formed Chicago Crime Commission, 150 Prohibition-related killings. The crisis became so bad that it brought about the formation of yet one more gang, this one in the police department.

  With much fanfare, newly appointed Chief of Detectives William O’Connor announced the formation of an elite unit that became known as O’Connor’s Gunners. Comprised of volunteers from the police force who had fought in the war in Europe and could therefore handle a machine gun, O’Connor’s Gunners were further equipped with steel-plated police cars. O’Connor himself gave the unit their marching orders, in a blustery speech at police headquarters that was widely quoted in the city’s newspapers.

  “Men,” he announced, “the war is on. We’ve got to show that society and the police department, and not a bunch of dirty rats, are running this town. It is the wish of the people of Chicago that you hunt these criminals down and kill them without mercy. Your cars are equipped with machine guns, and you will meet the enemies of society on equal terms. See to it that they don’t have you pushing up daisies. Make them push up daisies. Shoot first, and shoot to kill. If you kill a notorious fuedist [a reference to the internal Sicilian feud], you will get a handsome reward and win a promotion. If you meet a car containing bandits, pursue them and fire. When I arrive on the scene, my hopes will be fulfilled if you have shot off the top of their car and killed every criminal inside.”

  O’Connor’s red meat rhetoric was typical of the times, portraying cops and gangsters as players in a drama. When Capone was told about the Chief’s new unit, he had a good laugh. “Whaddya know,” he said. “Another bunch of Irish bastards with guns.”4

  Big Al’s Better Half

  Among the more curious aspects of Capone’s contentious relationship with the Irish American underworld was the fact that he was married to the enemy. Mae Coughlin Capone, Al’s wife, was born in Brooklyn, New York to Michael Coughlin, a construction laborer, and Bridget Gorman. Mae had four sisters and two brothers. The Coughlin family lived in a small two-story home at 117 Third Place and were respected in the local Irish community for their rectitude and religious devotion.

  Mae was tall and slim, with a face that many thought would one day make her an actress or a model. Those aspirations were scuttled forever after she met Al Capone, in 1918, at a party in a Carroll Street cellar club. Capone, who already had the four-inch scar on his cheek that earned him his nickna
me, was rough around the edges, with thinning hair and a manner of speech commensurate with someone who never made it past elementary school. Somehow it worked, and the courtship was quick.

  The man Capone worked for in Brooklyn, Johnny Torrio, had already married an Irish girl, Ann McCarthy. For Italians at the time, marrying Irish girls was a sign of upward mobility. There was also the fact that Italian men generally did not hesitate to marry and start a family early in life, whereas Irishmen tended to wait until they were financially stable—or until “ma” said it was okay. And so, Mae Coughlin and Al Capone were married on December 18, 1918, in a ceremony presided over by the Reverend James J. Delaney, pastor of St. Mary Star of the Sea Church, where the Coughlins worshipped. The following year, Mae bore her first and only child, Albert Francis, nicknamed Sonny. The child’s godfather was Papa John Torrio.

  In 1919, Torrio, having already moved to Chicago, summoned Capone. Al packed up his wife and son and moved to the Windy City, where they lived in a shack. In public, Capone went by the name “Al Brown” and passed himself off as a used furniture salesman. In truth, he was a pimp and strong-arm man who roughed up people on behalf of his boss. Then Prohibition came and changed everything.

  Throughout Al Capone’s reign as the overlord of Chicago, Mae Coughlin remained a mysterious figure. She rarely shared her husband’s suite at the Metropole Hotel, where he conducted his affairs (business and otherwise). She did not accompany him to the theatre, nightclubs, or the racetrack. Few members of the gang and even fewer outsiders ever knew her. On those rare occasions when Mae was seen in public, usually at one of Capone’s many court appearances, she was the bane of press photographers; she always partially covered her face, never spoke to the newshounds, and tried to keep her son out of the limelight. In the tradition of the old country Italian dons, Capone kept his wife confined to the home. Mae would eventually spend most of her time in Miami at the lavish Palm Island estate that Capone purchased in 1927.

  A rare insight into Mae Capone’s personality was revealed in Capone, an essential biography of the gangster written by John Kobler and published in 1971. Kobler relates the story of a woman who owned a bungalow in Miami that was rented out by a real estate agent to a man named “Al Brown.” The absentee owner was appalled when she learned that Al Brown was Al Capone. For weeks, the woman worried that her bungalow would suffer damage at the hands of the notorious gangster and his underlings, who were eventually joined by Mae and Sonny Capone. The woman needn’t have worried. Not only did the Capones leave the place in impeccable condition, but Mrs. Capone wrote a note asking the owner to accept as gifts the sets of fine china and silverware that they left behind, as well as numerous unopened cases of wine. The only sour note was a telephone bill for $780 in calls to Chicago. The owner needn’t have worried about that either. According to Kobler:

  Soon after the [bungalow owner] received the phone bill, a Cunningham 16-cylinder Cadillac pulled into her drive, and out stepped a slender woman, quietly dressed, her blond hair falling below her shoulders, her pearly skin lightly tinted by the Florida sun. “I’m Mrs. Capone,” she said in a soft, low voice. The telephone bill had slipped her mind, she apologized, and she wanted to pay it without further delay. When [the owner] mentioned the charges, she handed her a $1,000 note. “Never mind the difference,” she said. “We may have broken a few little things, but this should cover it.”

  If Mae Capone intended to bring a civilizing influence into her husband’s life, she was swimming against the tide. Scarface Al was, by most accounts, a famously brutish man who killed many people with his own hands, ordered the torture and deaths of probably hundreds, and on one notorious occasion bludgeoned to death a criminal associate with a baseball bat in the middle of a fancy, black-tie dinner. His psychosis was undoubtedly complex and far-reaching (he would eventually lose his mind and die after being diagnosed with tertiary syphilis), but one persistent source of aggravation was the feelings of hatred he harbored toward the Irish thugs he’d had to confront throughout his life of crime.

  Whether Al ever vented these feelings around his Irish wife would never be known. Having been born and raised near the Brooklyn waterfront, Mae would have known about the battles between Irish and Italian dock wallopers, a brutal labor war that sent ripples of fear through the borough. If her knowledge of these ethnic hostilities was lacking, she definitely got a crash course in late December 1925, seven years into her marriage, when she and her husband returned to Brooklyn to seek medical treatment for their son.

  Seven-year-old Sonny had developed a severe mastoid infection, necessitating radical surgery. Al and Mae preferred that the operation take place in New York. They consulted various doctors, all of whom said the procedure would be risky but unavoidable. “I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars if you pull him through,” Capone told one doctor. The surgery was performed the day before Christmas. Little Sonny came through okay, although he was left partially deaf and had to wear a hearing aid.

  Of the events that followed, Capone later explained to a reporter: “It was Christmas Eve when my wife and I were sent home to get some sleep. We found her folks trimming the Christmas tree for her little nieces and nephews, and it broke her up.” The following night, according to Al, “a friend of mine dropped in and asked me to go around the corner to his place to have a glass of beer. My wife told me to go: It’d do me good. And we were no sooner there than the door opens, and six fellows come in and start shooting. My friend had put me on the spot. In the excitement two of them were killed and my friend got shot in the leg. And I spent the holidays in jail.”

  Capone’s version of the incident left out many crucial details, starting with the probability that the killings had been planned ahead of time. It all took place at the Adonis Social Club, a no-frills speakeasy located near the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Capone himself had frequented the Adonis Social Club back in his early days as a Brooklyn dock walloper (he was known to use the club’s basement for target practice). In fact, both Capone and Johnny Torrio first made their bones in the underworld during the violent labor war between Brooklyn Italians and what the papers dubbed “the White Hand,” a gang of Irish racketeers led by the notorious William “Wild Bill” Lovett.

  Lovett had been a machine gunner with the 11th Infantry in France during the war and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. After returning stateside, he became a ruthless extortionist in a section of the Brooklyn waterfront known as Irishtown, a rough-cobbled area between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Fulton Ferry, under and around the approaches to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. After assassinating Dinny Meehan to take over the Brooklyn rackets, Lovett fought to keep the Mafia off the docks. The hostilities that developed between Irish and Italian criminal interests on the Brooklyn waterfront resulted in over a hundred unsolved murders between 1915 and 1925. They were a key instigating factor in a war between the dagos and the micks that would spread throughout the country and continue to the end of the century.

  Wild Bill Lovett was shot multiple times and hacked to death with a longshoreman’s hook on Halloween night, 1923, by a mysterious Sicilian assassin imported from Palermo, known only as Dui Cuteddi (Two Knives). Afterward, leadership of the so-called White Hand fell to Lovett’s brother-in-law, Richard “Peg Leg” Lonergan, who was believed to have authored a dozen professional murders. It was the red-haired, pugnacious Lonergan, along with five of his buddies, who stumbled into the Adonis Social Club on Christmas night, 1925, where Al Capone and a room full of his old Brooklyn paisans were waiting.

  Peg Leg Lonergan was a well-known bigot. Although he had lost his leg in a trolley car accident as a youth, he was an accomplished brawler who first distinguished himself in Irishtown by killing a Sicilian drug dealer in a bike shop on Navy Street. Later, he and his fellow gangsters occasionally went on ginzo hunting expeditions in saloons and dives along the waterfront. According to witnesses at the Adonis Social Club, Lonergan and his people came into the club drunk and unru
ly, loudly referring to the patrons as “dagos” and “ginzos.” When three Irish girls entered the club on the arms of some Italian boys, Lonergan chased them out of the place, yelling, “Come back with white men, fer chrissake!”

  At this, someone in Capone’s group gave the nod: The lights were cut off and bullets flew. In the ensuing melee, chairs and tables were overturned, glasses shattered, and customers rushed for the exit. When cops arrived on the scene, they found one of Lonergan’s men lying in the street with the back of his head shot off. The cops followed a trail of blood back into the social club, where they found Lonergan and another member of his group shot execution style in the head. A fourth member of Peg Leg’s crew was found a few blocks away, crawling in the street; he’d been shot in the thigh and leg and was rushed to the hospital.

  Capone and six others were held without bail until the Lonergan man in the hospital had recovered enough to talk. The man refused to testify or even admit that he was in the Adonis Social Club on the night of the shooting; he was wounded in the street, he insisted, by a stray bullet from a passing car. Al and the others were released on bail bonds of $5,000 to $10,000. Without any witnesses willing to take the stand and testify, the case was soon dismissed.

  Lonergan’s sister, Anna, who was also Wild Bill Lovett’s widow, attributed the slaughter at the Adonis Social Club to “foreigners.” “You can bet it was no Irish American like ourselves who would stage a mean murder like this on Christmas day,” she said.5

  The Capone family returned to Chicago. There is no known record of how Al might have tried to explain the carnage to his Brooklyn Irish wife, but it’s clear that his loathing for gangsters of the Celtic persuasion grew over the years. The extent of his loathing—not to mention his own innate narcissism—was best exemplified in a statement he made late in his life to a fellow prison inmate, Morris “Red” Rudensky. Rudensky had been gently needling him about O’Banion, O’Donnell, Moran, et al., to which Capone replied “Those silly Irish bastards. They got more guts than sense. If we ever woulda all hooked up, I coulda been President.”