5. Not everyone was welcome equally. The Chinese were excluded. African Americans were bullied into becoming part the Combine; in Harlem, local gangsters were forced to turn over a piece of their lucrative policy rackets or risk being murdered. Blacks had their own speakeasies, but when it came to the downtown speaks or establishments like the Cotton Club, located on 149th Street in Harlem, they were refused entry as patrons.
6. One of the more important regional offshoots of the Combine was based in Providence, Rhode Island and overseen by Daniel L. Walsh, a former Pawtucket hardware store clerk who became one of the most successful bootleggers of the era. Rhode Island was the most Catholic state in the country and virulently anti-Prohibition. Because of the state’s craggy shoreline, it was an ideal location for offloading booze shipments from Rum Row. Danny Walsh was frequently in New York City on business, which fueled speculation that bootlegging on the East Coast was controlled by a consortium known as the Big Seven. Rumored to be among the Big Seven were at least four Irishmen: Walsh, Dwyer, Madden, and a millionaire banker and shipping magnet from Boston named Joseph P. Kennedy, of whom we will learn more in a later chapter.
7. The legend that the nickname Legs was a reference to Diamond’s dancing abilities is probably attributable to The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, a B-movie released in 1962 in which the gangster is absurdly portrayed as a professional ballroom dancer. Directed by Budd Boeticher, the movie has some entertainment value but bears little resemblance to the historical record. The misrepresentation was further compounded in the 1990s with the staging of a big budget Broadway musical supposedly based on Diamond’s life, in which he was once again fictitiously portrayed as a song-and-dance man.
1. In newspaper accounts from the Prohibition era, O’Banion is sometimes referred to as “Dion.” It is not known where this name came from, whether it was an invention of the press or a pet name used by fellow gangsters. In Guns and Roses: The Untold Story of Dean O’Banion by Rose Keefe (by far the most complete account of O’Banion’s life), a former classmate of the legendary bootlegger is quoted saying, “I don’t know where this Dion name came from. We only ever knew him as Dean.”
2. The tommy gun was invented by Brigadier General John T. Thompson, director of arsenals during World War I. At eight and a half pounds, it was light enough for a child to use and could fire a thousand .45-caliber pistol cartridges per minute. Retailing at $175, it was reasonably affordable and did not come under laws pertaining to pistols or rifles; anyone could buy as many as they liked either by mail order or from a sporting goods store. Given the noise and havoc wrought by this weapon, they were as de riguer to gangsters in their day as the Uzi and Tech-9 submachine gun would be during the cocaine and crack wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
3. Roger Touhy is unique among Irish American gangsters. In 1933 (the final year of Prohibition) Touhy was tried and convicted for the kidnapping of Jake “the Barber” Factor, a notorious stock swindler and half-brother of billionaire make-up manufacturer Max Factor. Touhy claimed vociferously that he had been setup to take the fall for a crime he did not commit, but no one listened. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. On October 9, 1942, Touhy and four other inmates at Statesville prison made a daring escape. Touhy was free for two and a half months, until he was recaptured and resentenced for 199 years. In 1943, Twentieth Century Fox released a movie based on his life starring Anthony Quinn entitled Roger Touhy, Gangster. Touhy sued Fox and its distributors on the grounds that the film defamed him. In 1948, he won an out-of-court settlement for $10,000 and a guarantee that the movie would never again be exhibited domestically, though it could be shown overseas.
Throughout his time in prison, Touhy fought to prove that he had been falsely convicted. Over a five-year period, his lawyers filed documents claiming that Factor had faked his own kidnapping and framed Touhy for the crime. In August 1959, Touhy’s case was finally heard. Miraculously, he was totally exonerated, his conviction overturned, and the additional time added after his escape declared unconstitutional. After twenty-two years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Touhy was released.
Around the time of his release, Touhy published an autobiography entitled The Stolen Years. He also announced his plans to sue Jake Factor, who was now running the Stardust Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, which was secretly controlled by underworld figures in Chicago. On December 16, 1959, just twenty-eight days after his release from prison, Touhy was visiting his sister at her home on Chicago’s North Side. Two gunmen approached with shotguns and opened fire, hitting him five times. It was a professional hit; the shooters were never identified. Later that night at a hospital, Touhy died from his wounds.
Roger Touhy is one of the few Irish American gangsters to have a movie based on his life, and the first one of note to publish an autobiography (though the book itself is not very revealing). He is also the only known former gangster to be taken out in a mob hit so many years after he plied his trade. Somebody had a long memory.
4. O’Connor’s Gunners came and went in a flash. They mostly arrived at crime scenes after the fact and were not directly involved in any significant gang prosecutions. After the so-called “War of Sicilian Succession” died down, the unit was quietly disbanded.
5. Anna Lonergan was herself quite a piece of work. She often bragged that the three men in her life—her brother, Peg Leg, and her two husbands, Wild Bill Lovett and Matty Martin (who succeeded Lovett as a “dock organizer” in Irishtown) were responsible for at least twenty waterfront killings, though she always made a distinction between professional murders related to the rough-and-tumble world of the docks, and “stupid” killings attributable to such things as honor, bad temper, and misunderstanding. A tough broad from a family of fifteen, she once let her husband Wild Bill shoot off her toe to prove that she “could take it.” She herself was shot once and stabbed twice in her life. Sometimes referred to as the Queen of Brooklyn’s Irishtown docks, she is thought to hold the all-time record for morgue identifications. The only time anyone ever saw her cry was when she claimed Peg Leg’s body. (For a deft and flavorsome profile of Anna Lonergan see The Eight Million by Meyer Berger.)
6. Some believe that Bugs Moran may have exacted a degree of revenge for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1936. On February 13 of that year, the eve of the anniversary of the massacre, Machine Gun Jack McGurn (real name Vincenzo De Mora), long believed to be a planner and principle in the St. Valentine’s Day hit, was gunned down by a five-man hit team in a Chicago-area bowling alley. When cops arrived they found a nickel in McGurn’s left hand; in his right they found a note that read: “You’ve lost your job,/ You’ve lost your dough,/ Your jewels and handsome houses./ But things could be worse, you know./ You haven’t lost your trousers.” The jokiness of this message smacked of Moran, who was a prankster in the tradition of his mentor, Dean O’Banion.
After leaving Chicago, Moran’s crimes turned petty compared to the glory days of Prohibition. In July 1946, he was arrested in Ohio for robbing a bank messenger of a paltry $10,000, an amount that would have been chump change twenty years earlier. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years. After his release, he was again arrested for an earlier bank raid and sent down for another ten-year stretch at Leavenworth, where he eventually died of cancer in 1957. Unlike O’Banion’s burial, which was an event to remember in the annals of Chicago history, Bugs was given a pauper’s burial in a wooden casket in a potters field just outside the prison walls.
1. Arnold Rothstein’s murder on November 4, 1928 remains one of the great mysteries of the Prohibition era. He was shot during a card game at the Park Central Hotel. Underworld conspiracy theorists believed that the hit had likely been arranged by higher-ups. Prominent among many suspects was Legs Diamond. Rothstein had been forced to cut Diamond loose after Legs became a thorn in the side of the Combine. The betrayal angered Legs, whose ability to harbor a grudge was second-to-none; of the twenty-four murders Legs is believed to have played a role in, many were revenge
killings. Diamond himself always claimed that though he might have wanted Rothstein dead, he had nothing to do with his murder. Was Legs telling the truth? Outside of pure speculation, there has never been any evidence to suggest otherwise.
2. According to Luciano in his autobiography, he and Costello were greatly amused by Joe Cooney’s displeasure when they referred to him as “Joe the Coon”—in other words, “our Irish nigger.”
In a strange bit of underworld symmetry, the primary Irish American bagman for Al Capone at the time was also named Cooney—Dennis “Duke” Cooney, owner of the Rex Hotel in Chicago and ostensibly the highest ranking mick in the Capone organization.
3. The legend of Two Gun Crowley and the Siege at West Ninetieth Street are believed to have been the inspiration for the memorable finale to the James Cagney movie White Heat (“Look ma! I made it. Top of the world!”) As for Crowley himself, he was dispatched within record time. On May 29, 1931, less than a month after his capture, he was found guilty for the murder of the Long Island police officer. He was held at Sing Sing Prison, where at nineteen years old, he was one of the youngest convicts ever on death row.
Capital punishment was all the rage. At Sing Sing alone, twenty men went to their deaths in the electric chair in 1932; eighteen men the following year. In his six months at Sing Sing, Crowley saw thirteen men walk “the last mile” before it was his turn. “My last wish is to send my love to my mother,” he said at eleven o’clock on the night of January 21, 1932. He was then hit with two thousand volts of electricity and declared dead within minutes.
4. In O Albany!, author William Kennedy’s literary paeon to his hometown, many local survivors from the Prohibition era, including saloon keepers, cops, newspapermen, and politicians, are quoted giving their theories on the Legs Diamond hit. Some believe that at least one participant was a tough Albany cop named William J. Fitzpatrick, whose nickname was “Doc” because his frequent comment to those who brought him problems was: “I’m the doctor. Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” The accepted wisdom is that Doc Fitzpatrick and two other cops killed Legs at the behest of Syndicate bosses in New York City. Fitzpatrick later flourished in the Albany police department (becoming head of the notoriously corrupt “Night Squad” and later, chief of the department) until January 5, 1945, when he was shot dead at police headquarters by his best pal, drinking buddy, and fellow detective, John W. McElveney.
5. Hot Springs, Arkansas was a town steeped in Irish mobster history. In the 1880s the town was controlled by two rival gambling combines—one run by Major S. A. Doran, a Confederate veteran, the other by Frank Flynn, a professional card shark. The Flynn-Doran War dominated the local scene for years, until, after a bloody shootout along Bathhouse Row that killed numerous innocent bystanders, the two men were run out of town by a federal militia. Later, during the years of Prohibition and beyond, the town was run by Mayor Leo P. McLaughlin, who was a stooge of the city’s criminal class, which included Owney Madden.
In Hot Springs, Madden married the postmaster’s daughter, lived next door to St. John’s Catholic Church, and became a local legend. He lived there until he died of natural causes in 1965. His years as the mobster patriarch of Hot Springs are touched upon in a wonderful memoir, The Bookmaker’s Daughter by Shirley Abbott.
1. Initially, it was Walker’s intention to resign and then run again for mayor in the next election; he hoped to shame Seabury/Roosevelt by going over their heads directly to the people. Slowly, however, it became clear to the ex-mayor that he did not have the votes. Adding insult to injury, the Catholic Church came out against his reelection. Walker was devastated; like many other machine politicians and some Irish American mobsters, he was a devout church-goer.
In 1933 Jimmy divorced his wife Allie and married Betty Compton. They lived in exile in London for three years before returning to New York. After eight years of marriage, Walker and Compton also divorced, though they remained close. Walker was at Compton’s side when she died prematurely from a malignant tumor. Beau James resisted many offers to get back into electoral politics. He died from natural causes in 1946 at the age of sixty-five.
2. The way the numbers racket worked was simple: Through “runners” associated with Schultz’s operation, known as “the Combination,” people put down small change on a three-digit number. Each day’s winning number was determined by the last three numbers of the para-mutual betting totals, or “total mutual handle,” at the local race track, which was printed daily in the newspaper. Depending on how much was bet on any given day, the return on a wager could be huge—as much as nine hundred to one. If no one hit the number that day, the entire betting totals were pure profit for the Combination. Author Paul Sann, in his book Kill the Dutchman! estimates that the Combination, based in Harlem, was taking in as much as $20 million a year in the mid 1930s.
3. Hines was given a sentence of four to eight years in the state penitentiary. After his appeals were exhausted, he went to Sing Sing prison in 1940, served four years, and was paroled. He died in 1957 at the age of eighty, the last of a breed.
4. On April 24, 1939, Life magazine ran an article speculating that by agreeing with Stark to go after Pendergast, President Roosevelt intended to elevate the Missouri governor as a Democratic version of the crusading New York “Mob Buster” Thomas E. Dewey. “It was clearly a New Deal effort to dim some of Tom Dewey’s crusading glory by destroying a political boss even more powerful than New York’s Jimmy Hines.” Though Life’s reasoning was specious—the magazine was notoriously pro-Republican—the point was well-taken: Going after the political bosses had become a kind of buffalo hunting. They were easy prey and made wonderful trophies.
1. A member of Local 791 at the time was William “Big Bill” Dwyer, who would go on to become King of the Rum Runners, founding father of the Combine, and business partner of Owney Madden. During Prohibition, the headquarters for Local 791 was located in a building on Tenth Avenue, just a few blocks from Dwyer and Madden’s massive Phoenix Brewery.
2. Butler, the son of Irish parents from Tipperary, was born in London’s East End, immigrated to New York, and joined the Longshoreman’s Association in 1898. Dock Walloper was written during his retirement years and is especially good at detailing the rambunctious early twentieth century connection between labor sluggers, politicians, and gangsters—especially on election day. Writes Big Dick: “Elections nowadays are sissy affairs. Nobody gets killed anymore, and the ambulances and patrol wagons stay in their garages. There’s cheating, of course, but it’s done in a polite, refined manner compared to the olden days. In those times murder and mayhem played a more important part in politics. To be a challenger at the polls, you had to be a nifty boxer or an expert marksman. A candidate, especially if he ran against the Machine, was lucky to escape with his life. I was lucky—I only had my skull bashed, and my front teeth knocked out, and my nose broken.”
3. The West Coast longshoremen’s strike of 1934 ended in victory for the workers; a hiring-hall system was instituted and would be overseen not by a hiring boss, but by a dispatcher chosen by a labor board comprised of employers and workers.
The longshoremen’s repudiation of Joe Ryan and business as usual in West Coast ports had much to do with minimizing the development of organized crime in cities like San Francisco and Seattle. Criminal rackets like loan-sharking, organized gambling, policy, and systematic labor corruption were never institutionalized in the same way they were in the Northeast. These factors help to explain why the Irish American mobster and labor racketeer appear rarely on the West Coast, although they remained a viable factor in cities like New York and Boston until the end of the twentieth century.
4. John Bowers, son of Harold and nephew of Mickey, became a member of Local 824 in the 1940s, a union officer in 1956, and, in 1987, president of the ILA and head of the union’s Atlantic Coast Division, for which he currently pulls in an annual salary of half a million dollars. Accusations of corruption in the ILA have continued, with the most r
ecent racketeering indictment against the union coming in 1990.
5. The Iron Heel was first published in 1908 and is still in print. Set in the near future, the novel describes a class war in which corporate America has coalesced into a ruling oligarchy and taken over control of the country. The nascent labor movement is crushed by a fascist plutocracy. Although London’s vision is certainly paranoid and anticapitalist, it proved to be prophetic in many details. Among other things, the novel captured the tone of fear, subterfuge, and distrust between workers and corporations that led certain unions, out of self-defense, to utilize their own gangster squads.
The fact that corporate management in America was out to divide and conquer trade unionism—by force, if necessary—became the self-justification for union bosses like Joe Ryan and Jimmy Hoffa to resort to strong-arm tactics and gangsterism. Over time, wily racketeers within the movement found ways to exploit the labor/management paradigm and plunder their own unions for personal profit.
6. Mayor Bill O’Dwyer’s resignation from office was fraught with irony. His downfall originated with a meeting he’d had with mobster Frank Costello at a Manhattan townhouse apartment in 1942, before he was mayor. At the time, O’Dwyer was on leave of absence as Brooklyn district attorney, serving during the early months of World War II as a major in the procurement division of the army air force. O’Dwyer claimed that he had arranged to speak with Costello, known in the press as the Prime Minister of the Underworld, because he was investigating contract fraud at an airbase in Ohio that Costello might know something about. It was never shown that anything criminal took place or was even discussed at this meeting, but, in the post-Machine era, get-togethers between a notorious mafioso and a district attorney/future mayor were no longer accepted by the public.
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