O’Dwyer was not a Tammany-sponsored politician. In fact, he’d run for mayor on an anti-Tammany ticket, claiming that his racket-busting past as district attorney showed that he was above reproach. This claim was damaged when his meeting with Costello became public knowledge and was further destroyed by a sensational investigation into police corruption in Brooklyn. In that investigation, it was shown that the NYPD command structure in Brooklyn, from beat cops all the way up to lieutenants and captains, had for years been receiving illegal cash payments from bookmakers and gambling houses throughout the borough. The “bag man” for this operation was James J. Moran, a former assistant district attorney and close political confidant of O’Dwyer’s. The suspicion was that Moran had been delivering some of this dirty money directly into the campaign coffer of his former boss and friend. Moran was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison on charges of perjury, conspiracy, extortion, and tax evasion, although he steadfastly refused to implicate O’Dwyer in any criminal wrongdoing.
With accusations from newspaper editorialists and Goo Goos ringing in his ears, O’Dwyer resigned from office in August 1950, he claimed, so that he could accept the position of ambassador to Mexico that had been kindly offered to him by President Harry Truman. Ambassador O’Dwyer served in Mexico for two years and then retired from public life, dying of coronary thrombosis in November 1964.
7. Bud Schulberg, age ninety-two, was interviewed by the author in March 2004.
1. Joe Kennedy’s role in “the Pantages Affair” and the death of Eunice Pringle were not publicly revealed until years after the fact, after he had moved on to other endeavors. The incident became part of Hollywood lore, chronicled in Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon, as was Kennedy’s highly public affair with starlet Gloria Swanson and his relationship with mobster Johnny Roselli. Joe Kennedy’s exploits in Hollywood were later eclipsed by those of his son, J.F.K., who befriended mobster acolyte Frank Sinatra and bedded the greatest “trophy” of them all—Marilyn Monroe.
2. Even at such a high price, the Merchandise Mart was believed to be a steal for Kennedy. At the time of his death in 1969, it was valued at $75 million. Observed his wife Rose, “Joe had a genius for seeing something and knowing it would be worth something more later on. And with the Mart, he was absolutely right…it skyrocketed in value and became the basis for a whole new Kennedy fortune.”
3. James Michael Curley, beloved by the electorate, was throughout his career under constant attack from the press, especially the Boston Globe. Frequently under investigation for political and financial improprieties, he was sentenced to jail a second time in 1946, for influence peddling. Five months later he was granted executive clemency by President Truman. Curley lost his final election bid in 1950, at the age of seventy-six, but soon found himself to be more renowned than ever when writer Edwin O’Connor’s novel, The Last Hurrah—based loosely on Curley’s life and career—became a national bestseller. Two years after its release, the book became a classic Academy Award–nominated movie starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Ford, securing Curley’s place in history as perhaps the most glorified of all the old Irish political bosses.
4. The Apalachin conference was an interesting indicator of just how successful the old Italian-Jewish consortium had been at eradicating the Irish mobster from the equation. Of the fifty-eight men rounded up and held for questioning, the overwhelming majority were Italian or Italian American, with only a few Jews. There was not a single Irish mobster in attendance. In the years since Prohibition, when they dominated operations in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, Irish American mobsters had been completely shut out of the operations of the Syndicate. The result, as we shall see, was an increased hostility between Irish and Italian racketeers, with decades of bloodshed to come.
5. According to Edna Daulyton, who was a hostess at Felix Young’s Restaurant at the time of this meeting, “It was as though every gangster chief in the United States was there.” In 1988, Daulyton told Irish journalist Anthony Summers: “I took the reservations…. I don’t remember all the names now, but Johnny Roselli was there…they were all top people. I was amazed Joe Kennedy would take the risk.”
6. Singer Eddie Fisher, a friend of Sinatra’s, once remarked, “Frank wanted to be a hood. He once said, ‘I’d rather be a don of the Mafia than president of the United States.’ I don’t think he was fooling.” Born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra was the product of a typical Italian-Jewish-Irish neighborhood familiality common in so many American cities at the time. His father, Marty Sinatra, an aspiring boxer early in his life, fought under the alias “Marty O’Brien.”
7. The meetings between Joe Kennedy, Mayor Daley, and Giancana are detailed in Double Cross, written in 1992 by Sam and Chuck Giancana, the brother and nephew of Momo, who was murdered in his home in 1975. As described in the book, the details of these meetings are somewhat specious, slanted in such a way as to make Giancana look strong-willed and Kennedy look like a fool. Although the “you are there” nature of these scenes—complete with bad Hollywood dialogue—are to be taken with a grain of salt, their having taken place is not entirely surprising given Mayor Daley’s benign relationship with the Outfit. In 1955, Daley won the Chicago mayoral election with a 13,275 to 1,961 plurality in the Outfit-controlled First Ward. At Ward Headquarters on election night, the mayor boasted of his record of giving city jobs and civil contracts to Outfit associates. “I’ve been criticized for doing this,” he said, “but I’ll make no apologies. I’ll always stand alongside the man with a criminal record if I think he deserves a second chance.”
In fairness to Daley, his feelings about mobsters was based on more than self-interest. His views on the subject were rooted in the belief that the American social structure was slanted in favor of the WASP, and that ethnic mobsters were a regrettable although legitimate aspect of immigrant upward mobility (for an insightful presentation of Daley’s philosophy, see Don’t Make No Wave Don’t Back No Losers by Milton Rakove). Either way, his approach was good for the Outfit. A high-ranking member of the Chicago mob was once captured on wiretaps saying of Daley, “This mayor has been good to us. And we’ve been good to him. One hand washes the other.”
1. For a naturalistic delineation of Boston’s raffish underworld, see the fictional works of George V. Higgins, especially his first and arguably best novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, published in 1970.
2. The man who’d been hired to take out Specs O’Keefe was a notorious Irish American hitman from New York City named Elmer Francis “Trigger” Burke. Best known back in New York City for having killed his boyhood pal, Poochie Walsh, Burke was born and raised on the West Side of Manhattan. A professional contract killer, he was often employed by Cosa Nostra and other underworld factions and was
believed to have committed at least a dozen murders in Boston, New York, South Carolina, and elsewhere. In 1955, after years on the lam, he was apprehended by federal agents at Folly Beach on the Carolina coast and extradited to New York State, where he was tried and convicted on multiple murder charges. Trigger Burke was handsome, with an angular face, chiseled features, and a lithe athletic frame; he was also a cold-blooded killer with ice in his veins. On January 8, 1958, Burke got what many people on both sides of the law felt was his due: He was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.
3. Pat Nee was interviewed by the author in Boston over a series of days in late March and early April 2004.
4. A good source on the underworld manipulations of FBI agents Paul Rico and Dennis Condon (and on the Boston gang wars in general) is the 154-page April 2003 congressional testimony of Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, who became a government witness in the late 1990s after admitting to having carried out more than a dozen contract murders for the mob.
5. The role played by agents Paul Rico and Dennis Condon in the Boston gang wars of the 1960s represents one of the most sinister violations of the public trust in FBI history. Rico, in particular, was a diabol
ical figure; he fed information to selected gangsters that resulted in countless underworld deaths. He once heard, through an FBI wiretap, of a planned hit against a small-time Irish gangster named Edward “Teddy” Deegan. Rico said nothing and allowed the hit to go off as planned, then sat back and did nothing as the wrong men were prosecuted and convicted for the murder.
In 1975, Rico retired from the FBI and lived in splendor in Miami Shores, Florida, where he became director of security for World Jai Alai, a sports betting enterprise. In October 2003, Rico was arrested for murder. Back in 1981, he had helped James “Whitey” Bulger, the mob boss of South Boston, to set up and kill the millionaire owner of World Jai Alai (see Chapter Fourteen).
At his arraignment, Rico was asked if he had any remorse for his long life of treachery and crime. “Remorse?” said the former FBI agent. “For what? Do you want tears or something?” In early 2004, before he could be prosecuted for murder and other charges, Paul Rico died of natural causes at the age of seventy-nine.
6. In the late 1970s, Pat Nee was one of the key organizers of a major gun smuggling operation in which guns from the United States were shipped to Ireland aboard the Valhalla, a fishing trawler that set out from East Boston. The Valhalla was intercepted at sea, courtesy of an informant inside the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was to receive the shipment of weapons. Nee was arrested and prosecuted on federal weapons smuggling charges; he served eighteen months in prison for the crime.
In 1989, Nee was caught in the act of robbing an armored bank vehicle; he was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison but released early due to a legal technicality after serving eight years. Today, Nee is a retired gangster and ex-IRA gun-runner working as a laborer in South Boston. He is currently working with a writer on a memoir of his criminal years.
7. Part of the persuasive power of the Godfather movies is that the story is told solely through the eyes of the Corleone family, with hardly a single outsider’s perspective (Michael Corleone’s wife, played by Diane Keaton, may be the only exception). In this regard, the movies present a striking example of how the insular Italian American mobster viewed, among other things, the role of the Irish in society. Aside from Tom Hagen, the German-Irish consigliari played by Robert Duvall, there are exactly two Irish American characters in Godfather I and II. In Part I, it’s Captain McCluskey, the venal, corrupt police captain who is shot in the face by Michael Corleone. In Part II, it’s Senator Pat Geary, the venal, corrupt politician who is compromised by the Corleone family, but only after he is revealed to be a soulless, hypocritical degenerate. This trend is continued in Godfather III, in which the primary Irish character is Archbishop Gilday (played by Irish actor Donal Donnelly), the venal, corrupt Vatican clergyman who willfully solicits a “donation” from the Mafia and is later murdered.
Taken together, the Godfather movies offer a blunt, undistilled interpretation of how the Irish were viewed within the Italian American underworld, with the cop, the politician, and the clergyman—all of them corrupt—fulfilling the roles that had been designated for the Irish, in real life, by Johnny Torrio, Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, and other mafiosi at the 1929 mob conference in Atlantic City. (For an insightful analysis of The Godfather and the role of gangster movies in American society in general, see Crime Movies by Carlos Clarens.)
1. A copy of Sullivan’s manuscript, entitled Tears and Tiers (penned by him and his wife) was obtained by the author as research for this book. The would-be autobiography focuses mostly on Mad Dog’s prison years, although there are many detailed descriptions of professional killings. Throughout the manuscript, Sullivan attributes his criminal psychosis to a kind of deeply ingrained Catholic guilt (he claims to have been sexually abused at the age of ten by a nun).
Sullivan’s long life of crime continued into the early 1980s, when he was eventually arrested after a bank robbery spree in Upstate New York, but not until after he engaged in a wild shootout with state troopers and FBI agents in which he was shot and wounded. During his tumultuous criminal career, Sullivan managed to marry and have three kids. At the end of Tears and Tiers, he offers this small chestnut of hope: “The only saving grace for the maintenance of my often elusive sanity is that, barring the ever-possible freak cruelty of nature, my sons will never have the sins of their father visited upon them. I have told them of my own less-than-noble brand of domestic terrorism, and have never glorified it like I’d care for them to emulate it.”
2. Spillane’s murder was never officially solved, although most of the participants were identified years later, after the perpetrators were themselves killed in various gangland slayings. One key mystery remains: Whose voice was it on the intercom that lured Spillane down to the street? Obviously, it was someone Spillane knew and trusted, given the former mob boss’s concern about the recent spate of killings of his West Side underlings. Spillane knew these killings had been engineered by the Genovese crime family, and he’d been trying to barter a truce at the time of his death.
Spillane had been trying to use Eddie McGrath as a go-between in his negotiations with Cosa Nostra. His meeting with McGrath at the Thunderbird Hotel in Miami Beach bore little fruit, but Spillane stayed in touch with the old-time labor racketeer who was still on a first-name basis with many of New York’s most powerful mafiosi. The record shows that Eddie McGrath was in New York City attending a funeral and dealing with a legal matter around the time of Spillane’s murder. McGrath, who had been a legendary figure in Hell’s Kitchen during Spillane’s teen years, is one of the few men he would have trusted enough to come outside, unarmed, if he was called. McGrath was never questioned about the murder. Instead, police arrested and charged Mickey Featherstone, who was nowhere near the murder scene that night. Featherstone was later acquitted at trial.
1. It became part of underworld lore that John Gotti “made his bones” with the killing of Jimmy McBratney. If so, he was not the first mafiosi to do so by whacking an Irishman. Al Capone’s first kill was also of the Celtic persuasion, a Brooklyn dock walloper named William Finnegan.
Gotti did six years for his role in the McBratney murder. After he got out of prison, the future boss of the Gambino family was often heard on government wiretaps bragging about the killing of McBratney, whom he alternately pumped up as a major gangster with big-time connections or denigrated as “a no good Irish lowlife.”
2. In the movie, Burke is memorably portrayed by Robert DeNiro. The real Jimmy Burke died in an Upstate New York prison from stomach cancer on April 13, 1996.
3. “The Ballad of Danny Greene” was first published in 1998 in To Kill the Irishman by Rick Porrello, a book-length account of Greene’s life and death.
4. Before all was said and done, Bulger and Flemmi were identified as having perpetrated at least nineteen murders. Among their many victims were two women; one was a girlfriend of Flemmi’s who was trying to break up with him at the time, and the other was Deborah Hussey, the daughter of another girlfriend of Flemmi’s, with whom he was having an affair. Hussey, at the age of twenty-six, was strangled to death by Whitey Bulger and buried in the basement of a Southie home along with two other murder victims. A series of hidden graves throughout the Boston area were filled with the bones of mobsters, ex-girlfriends, former friends, and other unfortunate saps who happened to get on the bad side of Bulger-Flemmi.
1. Jimmy Flynn was a rare rank-and-file survivor of the Boston Gang Wars, a Renaissance criminal weaned at the knee of the originator of the Winter Hill Gang, Buddy McLean. After Brian Halloran’s murder, Flynn went on the run. He was caught two years later and put on trial. His lawyer was able to show that Flynn was nowhere near the murder scene on the night in question. Flynn was acquitted. Investigators later determined that he’d been set up to take the fall by Whitey Bulger.
2. Billy Bulger’s testimony on June 19, 2003 before a House Committee on Government Reform in Washington D.C. proved to be his undoing. The committee was interested in finding out if Bulger had in any way aided his brother, who a
t that time had been on the run for eight years. Bulger was out of state government, having retired from the senate in 1996 and taken on his prestigious new job as President of the University of Massachusetts. His testimony before the committee was widely covered by the Boston media, to whom Bulger had rarely given the time of day. Stoic, defensive, and evasive to the end, Bulger’s long years of walking a tightrope between being a strong advocate for his neighborhood of South Boston and being a mobster’s brother finally caught up with him. In the wake of the hearings, he was forced to resign as president of University of Massachusetts and has since remained retired from public life.
3. To say that Special Agent Connolly’s actions were solely a product of Irish American underworld history or the internecine culture of South Boston would not be telling the full story. Connolly was also an FBI agent, the product of a law enforcement culture that was not averse to violating internal rules or national laws. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, which involved the illegal wiretapping and surveillance of civil rights leaders throughout the 1960s, the Bureau established a mindset in which subverting the law was well within the bounds of standard operating procedure. The Boston office was perhaps the Bureau’s most corrupt, with a pattern of using informants for conniving purposes going back at least to the murderous H. Paul Rico. Connolly was following in this tradition. The nature of his relationship with Whitey Bulger was well-known within the Boston office, and it went mostly unchallenged even as Bulger cut a huge criminal swath through the city’s underworld. Connolly was aided and abetted by his FBI supervisors. The fact that Bulger was able to play Connolly to the extent that he did is just one example of how the underworld and upperworld occasionally intersect to sustain that long-running American vaudeville act known as organized crime.
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