Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  Between volleys of gunfire, police and onlookers alike heard Crowley’s demented laughter at the destruction. “You ain’t gonna take me alive, coppers!” he called out the window.

  Finally, a heavily-armed squad of police commandos stormed the apartment and wrestled Crowley to the floor. The crazed gangster had been shot four times, but he did not die. He was rushed to the hospital, where he would recover from his wounds to face criminal prosecution.

  The saga of Two Gun Crowley was a media sensation. Over the radio and in the city’s newspapers, Crowley was often described as a “mad Irish gunman” with “the face of an altar boy.” The characterization was an example of what was becoming a common stereotype of the era—that of the genetically reckless Irish gangster who was always willing to take on the System. Never mind that Crowley was possibly not even Irish (his German immigrant mother had given him up for adoption at birth; “Crowley” was the name of his adopted family). But with his irrational brand of courage, boyish good looks, and steely blue eyes, he fit the stereotype to a T.3

  Owney Madden must have read the newspaper accounts of Two Gun Crowley’s rampage with a sense of relief. Although the crazy young hoodlum may have been identified as Irish, he was not in any way affiliated with the Combine and therefore could not be seen as Madden’s responsibility. Such was not the case with another “crazed Irish gunman” making headlines on a near-daily basis, Vincent “the Mad Mick” Coll.

  It was Madden who had brought Coll into the organization in the first place. Back in 1926, when the kid was just seventeen years old, Owney introduced the young gangster to Dutch Schulz, sometimes referred to as “the Dutchman.” Vincent and his older brother Peter had formed a gang made up of the usual assortment of Irishmen, Italians, and Jews. Madden thought they might be useful to the Dutchman, who was then expanding his bootlegging operations into the Bronx. Coll’s reputation as a fearless killer was immediately put to use by Shultz and others as well. Sometime in 1930, unbeknownst to Madden, Vincent Coll was hired by the Maranzano family to bump off Lucky Luciano. Coll was on his way to kill Luciano when the hit was called off. He got to keep the $25,000 advance payment, and the incident secured his reputation as one of the more noteworthy hitmen for hire in the New York underworld.

  In Vincent Coll, Madden may have seen something of himself or at least an image of the kind of doomed gangster he might have become had he not risen above his station. Born in the tiny Gaelic-speaking village of Gweedore, in County Donegal, Coll was brought to New York as an infant in 1909 and lived in a cold-water tenement in the Bronx. His family quickly became mired in a cycle of poverty and despair that evoked the worst hardships of potato-famine immigrants. Before Vincent was twelve, five of his siblings would perish from childhood accidents or disease. His father, Tony, fled the home, never to return. His mother, Anna, died from pneumonia when Vincent was seven. He and his brother Peter were taken away by the state of New York and institutionalized in Staten Island at the Mt. Loretto orphanage, a house of refuge known for its punitive approach to reform. Vincent lived there for three years, escaping repeatedly. He was diagnosed as an adolescent deviant, and one early psychiatric report noted his deep-seeded problems with authority.

  By the time he hooked up with Dutch Schultz, Vincent had already developed the brazen, self-destructive streak that was to become his most distinguishing characteristic as a gangster. At nineteen, authorities charged him with the murder of a speakeasy owner who refused to buy Schultz’s booze. (At trial, Coll was acquitted, probably through Schultz’s influence.) Vincent was gawky and boyish, with a full mane of unruly reddish-blond hair, a prominently dimpled chin, and a broad toothy grin. It was not brains but cold-blooded efficiency as a killer that catapulted the young hoodlum to the leadership position of his gang. Some of Coll’s most devoted fellow gang members were Italian Americans who saw the Mad Mick as their ticket to the upper echelons of the Prohibition rackets. Vincent’s girlfriend and true love, Lottie Kriesberger, was of German extraction—just like his boss and nemesis-to-be, Dutch Schultz.

  Following the mobster conference in Atlantic City, Vincent stepped up his war with the Dutchman, who was getting filthy rich off bootlegging, nightclubs, and the policy racket, while Coll was paid a measly hundred dollars per week by the Schultz organization.

  “I ain’t your nigger shoeshine boy,” Coll told Schultz. “I’ll show you a thing or two.”

  After Vincent and his gang staged an outlandish daytime robbery at the Sheffield Farms dairy in the middle of the Dutchman’s Bronx territory, Schultz waltzed into the 42nd Precinct station house and declared, “I’ll buy a house in Westchester for anybody in here who can stiff the mick.”

  A squad room full of cops looked at the Dutchman in utter disbelief.

  “You know you’re in the Morrisania police station?” asked a detective.

  “I know where I am,” snapped Dutch. “I been here before. I just came in to tell ya I’ll pay good money to any cop that kills the mick.”

  Could Schultz’s offer be taken seriously? Who the hell knew, but the hunt was on.

  Madden tried to intermediate a truce to save the young Irish kid’s life. He and Vincent met at the Stork Club, located in a town house on West Fifty-eighth Street near Central Park. Fast becoming the most renowned speakeasy in the city, the club was partly owned by a silent partnership of Madden, Big Bill Dwyer, and a business associate of Owney’s named George Jean “Big Frenchy” DeMange.

  “See this place?” Madden told Coll at a private booth inside the glamorous Stork Club. “You could own a place like this one day, Vincent. This could all be yours. But you gotta learn to play along.”

  Coll knew when he was being used, and he knew when he wasn’t wanted.

  “I’m the fool who takes all the risks,” he told Owney. “Me and my brother, we been shot at, chased down, and arrested. You want I should be a good little boy while you, the Dutchman, and the dagos get rich? No. We should be equal partners, plain and simple.”

  In the early months of 1931, at least ten gunmen associated with the Combine were stabbed, shot, and beaten to death by Coll’s gang. One of those men, Carmine Borelli, was executed when he refused to take part in a scheme to set up his boss, the Dutchman. Borelli’s girlfriend witnessed the murder, so Coll chased her down and shot her in the head in the middle of a Bronx street.

  A few days later, the Combine retaliated by murdering Peter Coll; he was machine-gunned to death on a Harlem street corner while driving home. Vincent was overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his older brother. Instead of going into mourning, however, he responded with calculated rage. He began kidnapping business associates of the Combine, first Big Frenchy DeMange, whom he snatched off the street and held in an apartment in Westchester County until a ransom of $35,000 was paid, and then Sherman Billingsley, the celebrity proprietor of the Stork Club. Vincent then set out after Joey Rao, one of Schultz’s prime movers in East Harlem, where the lucrative uptown policy rackets were based. What happened next would shock the entire country and seal Coll’s fate as the most reviled man in the underworld.

  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. A touring car came around the corner and opened fire with a tommy gun on Rao, his protectors, and the children. When the fusillade was over, five children lay wounded on the sidewalk. One of those children, five-year-old Michael Vengali, died before he reached a nearby hospital. Rao and his bodyguards escaped without a scratch.

  Everyone in town knew Coll was behind the shooting. The newspapers called it the “baby massacre” and clamored for immediate action. Coll, the Mad Mick, was now christened “the Baby Killer.” Mayor Jimmy Walker referred to gangster Coll as a “Mad Dog” and declared that the police department would pay $10,000 to anyone with information leading to his capture and prosecution. Even th
e underworld was repulsed. Both Madden and Shultz put out a $25,000 bounty on Coll, the lunatic gunman who was giving all bootleggers a bad name.

  Vincent and Lottie went on the run. Wearing disguises and using false identities, they drove north to the Canadian border, then zig-zagged into Western Massachusetts, then back to Upstate New York. When they felt they had been spotted, they ditched their car and traveled by train. Heavily armed at all times, they lived in roadside motels, so they could escape quickly if necessary. They bought every meal to go. Occasionally, with his hair dyed black, a fake mustache, and glasses, Coll stepped out into the early morning or chilly evening to buy a newspaper or make a phone call; danger lurked in every wayward glance, every unwelcomed stare.

  In October 1931, two and a half months after “the baby massacre,” authorities began to zero in on Coll. The incident that started it all was a hit on Dutch Schultz’s Bronx headquarters. Schultz wasn’t on the premises at the time, but the two gunmen who sprayed the storefront with gunfire killed one of the Dutchman’s underlings. A couple of Edison Company repairmen working in a nearby manhole happened to spot the two gunmen and got a good look at their license plate number. The number was traced to two members of the Coll gang. One by one, the cops tracked down and arrested Coll’s fellow gang members, until one of them supplied the police with a hot tip on Vincent’s whereabouts.

  Apparently, Coll had recently snuck back into the city, thinking he could resume his bootlegging activities. The informant told the cops that he was hiding out in a room at the Cornish Arms Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. A squad of more than two dozen cops quietly surrounded the hotel. A smaller group entered and made their way to Coll’s room. They banged on the door and announced their arrival. Vincent was undoubtedly armed to the teeth. He could have fought back and tried to escape, but the Mad Mick had no desire to wind up like Two Gun Crowley, shooting it out with the entire police force. He opened the door and turned himself in to the cops.

  With the money he’d made from his various kidnapping escapades, Coll hired Samuel Liebowitz, one of the best criminal defense attorney’s in town. Along with another member of his gang, he was facing attempted murder and manslaughter charges for the botched hit on Joey Rao and the killing of five-year-old Michael Vengalli. The whole town probably wanted him found guilty and executed in the electric chair, just like Crowley was.

  His metamorphosis was complete: Vincent was now a total outcast. His gang had betrayed him. Everyone wanted him dead. Lottie, his fiancée, was all he had left. The only other solace left to him came from the knowledge that, as bleak as his own situation had become, there was another famous Irish American gangster out there who actually had it worse.

  Happy Days and Lonely Nights

  On December 18, 1931, as Mad Dog Coll’s murder trial got under way in Manhattan, the dark angels of the underworld finally caught up with Jack Diamond. After numerous assassination attempts over the years, Legs was no more. This time, his killers left nothing to chance. They shot him three times in the head at close range, while he lay in bed in his room at an Albany boarding house.

  Coll knew Diamond well. In fact, years earlier, while he was still working for Dutch Shultz, Coll was assigned to kill Jack Diamond. He and members of his gang tracked Legs around Manhattan from one speakeasy and nightclub to another. They finally met face to face at the Hotsy Totsy Club, Diamond’s own popular speakeasy located on the second floor of 1721 Broadway, between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth streets. Although Diamond knew Coll by reputation, he had no idea that the gawky, young, Irish kid with the red hair was there to kill him. They hit it off so well that Vincent reneged on the murder contract and formed a casual friendship with the older, wiser Irish American racketeer.

  That was the first time they met. The last was when Vincent and Lottie were on the run in Upstate New York. The two gangsters convened secretly near Diamond’s home base in Acra, a small town in Greene County. There they commiserated about their mutual predicaments as gangsters in exile, shut out by the Combine, which had morphed into the Syndicate, an Italian-Jewish consortium that seemed determined to wipe all Irish mobsters off the face of the earth

  “It’s that bastard Owney Madden,” Coll told Diamond. “He’s the one I blame for this.”

  Legs couldn’t have agreed more. Although it was Dutch Schultz who’d initiated gangland wars with both Diamond and Coll, and Lucky Luciano who’d devised the plan to shut out the Irishers, they both felt Madden should have been on their side. “If the bastard ain’t gonna stand up for his own fucking people, what good is he?” asked Diamond.

  The two talked about starting their own bootlegging/crime consortium based in Upstate New York. It sounded like a great idea. They could be the Beer Barons of the Catskills, hiding out in the mountains and firing shots at whoever tried to come after them. Problem was, neither of them had the finances to pull it off. Vincent had lately been cut off from his bootlegging revenues, and Diamond had costly legal problems in the form of a murder trial that was scheduled to take place within weeks. As they said their good-byes that day, they had no way of knowing it would be the last time they saw each other alive.

  For Jack Diamond, in particular, the long descent from Combine insider to hunted animal had been a saga of near biblical proportions. Back when Coll was first making his bones as a young upstart with the Dutchman, Legs had already established himself as an independent racketeer in a city crawling with overly ambitious gangsters. Ever since the first known attempt on his life—when his car and body were riddled with buckshot back in October 1924—he’d led a precarious existence. For a time, he tried to steer clear of bootlegging by getting involved in the heroin trade. Luciano had already made millions off dope and so had Rothstein. The potential profits were enormous: In the mid 1920s, one kilo (2.2 pounds) of heroin could be purchased for $2,000. By the time it was cut, diluted, and sold, that same kilo brought in $300,000.

  There were plenty of users. Heroin had not yet been classified as a serious narcotic, so the penalties for use were not overly severe. Some World War I veterans had developed a narcotics habit. Among African American jazz musicians and their predominantly white followers (most blacks were banned from or unable to afford entry to the era’s swankiest nightclubs), heroin had become a trendy high, as had cocaine. The most nettlesome commercial problem with both of these drugs was importation.

  It was Arnold Rothstein who reestablished ties with Legs in an attempt to strike a major narcotics deal, perhaps the largest ever undertaken at the time. In late 1926, Rothstein sent Legs to Europe to make the necessary purchase and arrange for smuggling the product into the United States. Diamond’s efforts paid off months later when a huge shipment of heroin, morphine, and cocaine—hidden inside bowling pins—was delivered to the Valentine’s Importing Company on Walker Street in lower Manhattan. Over a period of months, drug-peddling middlemen from all over the New York area arrived at Valentine’s to purchase narcotics, conducting their business in the presence of the police—who were in many instances involved in the trade. In July 1928, a special intelligence unit conducted a raid on police department lockers at the 1st Police Precinct and caught seven cops with drugs and cash. Eventually, nearly fifty detectives would be implicated in one of the largest narcotics scandals in the history of the NYPD.

  Diamond himself was arrested, but then released on $15,000 bail. The bail bond was posted by the Detroit Fidelity and Surety Company and guaranteed by Rothstein. The charges against him were later dismissed.

  Diamond and Rothstein had a falling out over the drug business—one of numerous disagreements in their relationship, which ran hot and cold; they were like two lovers who knew they shouldn’t be together but couldn’t stay apart. This time, as always, the rift was over money. Legs wanted a bigger piece of the pie, and Rothstein resisted. The stakes were enormous. They had been negotiating a massive narcotics transaction with a millionaire Belgian financier named Captain Alfred Lowenstein. It was the sort of deal that, had
it gone through, would have made it possible for both men to retire in splendor. The deal disintegrated when Lowenstein, the third richest man in the world, died under mysterious circumstances: He fell—or was tossed—from his private plane while crossing the North Sea from England to Belgium. Four months later, Rothstein’s time on earth also came to a sudden end, when he took a bullet in the belly at the Park Central Hotel.

  Lucky for Legs, he was out of town at the time with an airtight alibi—though that didn’t stop Rothstein partisans from exacting revenge. In the months following Rothstein’s death, numerous gangsters associated with Diamond’s crew began to disappear from the face of the earth. They even went after Legs’s brother, Eddie, who was in Denver, Colorado convalescing from a serious bout of tuberculosis (TB). He managed to survive an ambush in which more than a hundred .45-caliber machine gun bullets were unloaded into a car he was driving. Eddie fled Colorado and returned to New York, where his TB worsened. In May 1929, while Capone, Luciano, Lansky, and the others were convening in Atlantic City, Eddie Diamond died in a hospital bed in Upstate New York.

  Legs had now entered what would prove to be a permanent state of affairs as an underworld outsider. Other mobsters didn’t seem to like Legs much. Jealousy might have had something to do with it. He was the snappiest-dressed mobster of the era, easily spotted in his custom-fit dark suits, flashy ties, and sporty black-and-white checkered cap. He had a handsome, black-Irish look that fit the public’s idea of a glamorous gangster. He traveled around town by limousine, with an entourage of bodyguards that made him seem like a dignitary. And he almost always had a pretty dame on his arm.