American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  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

  On 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.

  When McManus dropped dead unexpectedly of a heart attack, it was treated like the passing of a monarch. Some 500 floral pieces filled the back room of the Midtown Democratic Club, where the wake was held. Days later, New York Governor Al Smith led the funeral march of 100 policemen and 300 carloads of mourners.

  In 1945, Maureen’s father, Eugene, nephew of “The” McManus and proprietor of a funeral home on West 51st Street, became district leader. But by the time of his daughter’s wedding in 1960, Eugene was in ailing health. It was rumored that he would soon be turning the district leadership over to his son, James, Maureen’s brother.

  Successive generations of immigrants, Irish and otherwise, had turned to Maureen’s great-uncle and her father, and soon would turn to her brother; the McMani represented something solid and reliable in a neighborhood constantly in a state of flux. Mickey Spillane, on the other hand, represented quite a different tradition. Much had happened since the days of Owney Madden and the Prohibition rackets. What had seemed like an indestructible criminal empire had been dismantled and forced underground. But the stories and traditions still remained, and even flourished—in somewhat altered forms—during the years of Spillane’s youth.

  In the postwar years of the Forties and Fifties, when Mickey was a teenager, Hell’s Kitchen, like so much of New York City, was in the throes of “development.” Long gone was the 9th Avenue El train and the noise and dirt that went with it. As part of the West Side Improvement Project, the New York Central Railroad had lowered its tracks below street level, out of sight and out of mind. And construction of the Lincoln Tunnel, running under the Hudson River to New Jersey, had devastated the area just south of 39th Street. All told, to make way for the tunnel, ninety-one tenements disappeared, as did “Paddy’s Market,” an outdoor bazaar that had been a neighborhood institution since the turn of the century.

  The ethnic makeup of the neighborhood was also changing. Hell’s Kitchen had always been a melting pot. First it was the Irish and the Germans. Then the Italians, Greeks, and eastern Europeans (mostly Poles and Yugoslavians). And in the decade following the war, there was a huge influx of new migrants, mostly Puerto Ricans and Southern blacks. The reasons were not hard to fathom. In 1944, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal government increased the minimum wage to thirty cents an hour. In Puerto Rico, the maximum wage for the most skilled worker was twenty-five cents an hour. As for Southern blacks, the postwar period had seen the mechanization of the cotton industry, l
eaving thousands without employment. Enticed by the prospect of jobs and better wages, they headed north.

  Yet, unlike many parts of New York, where changing neighborhoods had brought about considerable white flight, Hell’s Kitchen was slower to change. The embattled Irish and Italians of an earlier generation were still firmly ensconced in the community’s religious, political, and economic institutions, and they weren’t anxious to relinquish their hard-won positions. As a result, even as racial tensions flared in the saloons and on the avenues, the power structure, both legitimate and criminal, remained remarkably intact.

  In the legitimate world, the most visible example of Irish entrenchment was the Midtown Democratic Club. In the illegitimate world, it was the shylocks, gamblers, shake-down artists, hijackers and assorted strong-arm men who prospered along the waterfront during the second most lucrative era for organized crime in New York City.

  Racketeers on the West Side were in an ideal position to reap the benefits of the Port of New York’s booming postwar trade. Longshoremen seeking work in Manhattan were still under the thumb of a ruthless “shape-up” system, which had existed from time immemorial. Each morning, a group of prospective workers gathered at the piers, where a hiring foreman selected who would work that day. At many piers the procedure grew into hiring a crew or gang as a unit.

  A common result of the shape-up system was the kickback racket. A crew expecting to receive favorable attention from a hiring foreman was required to kick back 10 or 20 percent of its members’ wages. In order to be able to afford such a kickback, many workers were forced to turn to loansharks, or “shylocks,” who were always readily available to loan money at usurious rates.

  With the Hell’s Kitchen docks as its base, it was no surprise that Local 824 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) soon became one of the union’s most powerful. Harold Bowers was a neighborhood delegate to Local 824, commonly known as the “Pistol Local” because its membership was made up of so many convicted felons. But the real power behind Local 824 was Bowers’s cousin, Mickey, whose police record showed thirteen arrests between 1920 and 1940. Mickey Bowers was believed to be behind the death of, among others, Tommy Gleason, a rival for control of the Pistol Local who was gunned down in a 10th Avenue funeral parlor—a convenient spot for a mob hit if ever there was one.

  Of all the Irish racketeers during the Forties and Fifties, the most powerful of all was red-haired Edward J. “Eddie” McGrath. McGrath was a former whiskey baron from Prohibition days who’d made a successful transition to the waterfront rackets. One of an elite group of underworld figures with ties to some of the city’s most influential politicians, he’d been appointed an ILA “organizer at large” by the union’s president, Joseph P. Ryan. At the time, McGrath’s extensive criminal record included arrests ranging from burglary to murder, and he’d once done a long stretch in Sing Sing.

  McGrath’s main “muscle” on the piers was his brother-in-law, John “Cockeye” Dunn, a vicious convicted murderer, and Andrew “Squint” Sheridan, another ex-con who’d once been a triggerman for Dutch Schultz.

  With Cockeye Dunn and Squint Sheridan as his partners, McGrath controlled the lucrative numbers game throughout the Port of New York and was on intimate terms with many of the most powerful organized crime figures of his day. Meyer Lansky was a long-time companion, as was Moe Dalitz, head of the Cleveland syndicate that owned the Desert Inn gambling casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. And in 1950, McGrath shared a suite at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Brooklyn-based syndicate boss Joe Adonis. While there, they were entertained by none other than Owney Madden, the former Duke of the West Side, for whom McGrath had driven a beer truck during the glory days of Prohibition.

  On a slightly smaller scale, Hell’s Kitchen had operators like Hughie Mulligan. For every Eddie McGrath, there were a dozen guys like Mulligan—localized numbers runners, strong-arm men, bookmakers, and all-purpose gofers. It was Mulligan who first saw the potential in a likable young neighborhood gambler named Mickey Spillane, who he immediately put to work as a “runner” in the neighborhood’s ever-expanding numbers racket.

  Short and jowly, with thick black-rimmed eyeglasses, Mulligan himself served as a bookmaker for McGrath and a go-between for the neighborhood’s various ethnic factions—including the cops. At the time, the New York City Police Department was still an Irish institution, and some cops didn’t fancy dealing with Italian gangsters. Mulligan made sure the police got their cut. He liked to call himself a “facilitator,” but most everyone else thought of him as a “bagman.”

  Even with his reputation as a pacifier, Mulligan’s attitudes were no less insular than many West Siders’. Once, during an investigation of police corruption, detectives hid a recording device in his car as he made the rounds from pier to pier collecting tribute. Mulligan was overheard lamenting the changing ethnic makeup of the workers.

  “Look at that over there,” he said, referring to a crew of longshoremen who had gathered. “There ain’t a white man in the bunch. Not a single fuckin’ white man.”

  The crew he was referring to was almost completely Italian.

  Throughout the era of McGrath and Mulligan, criminal profits from the various rackets along the waterfront were staggering. In 1948 alone, the Grace Steamship Line reported losses of $3 million in pilfered goods, of which 80 percent occurred on its New York piers. Along with losses on the docks, many trucks moving cargo between the piers and inland freight terminals were hijacked by armed robbers. Payroll padding, no-show jobs, organized rip-offs, kickbacks, gambling concessions, and loansharking flourished as never before, and any organized crime group worth its salt had contacts in the ILA.

  With so many different operators feeding off the waterfront rackets on so many different levels, no doubt the mob would sooner or later have begun to choke on its own gluttony, leading to the inevitable gang wars. Luckily for many mobsters, the United States government, in the persons of Senator Estes Kefauver and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, saw to it that it never happened. It was the 1951 Kefauver Committee that first declared that racketeers were “firmly entrenched along New York City’s waterfront.” That was followed by Governor Dewey’s New York Crime Commission hearings, which spent most of 1952 investigating the activities of the ILA.

  Ironically, at the same time various government commissions began to purge the New York waterfront of its criminal elements, the industry itself began to wane. In July of 1956, the Andrea Doria sank off Nantucket, signaling the beginning of the end for cruise liners, always a staple on the West Side docks. By 1959, airplanes carried nearly two-thirds of all transatlantic passengers.

  The decline of New York’s waterfront wasn’t as dramatic or rapid as the end of Prohibition: the twenty-first Amendment eliminated the underworld’s business overnight. But the effect on Hell’s Kitchen was immediate. The most reliable source of employment the neighborhood had ever seen was dying. As a result, the railyards went bankrupt. Housing conditions deteriorated. And the area’s middle class, which held strong throughout the 1950s, finally began to erode.

  The gangsters went their separate ways. Hughie Mulligan moved his 300-pound girth and his family to a respectable middle-income abode in Queens Village. Squint Sheridan was given a life sentence for the murder of a hiring stevedore in Greenwich Village. For his role in the same murder, Cockeye Dunn was given 2,000 volts to the cerebellum, courtesy of New York State.

  In 1959, the granddaddy of them all, Eddie McGrath, took a plane ride to Florida. As king of the West Side waterfront rackets, he had presided over the most prosperous period for organized crime in New York since Prohibition. He was lucky. He had not only stayed alive but had come through all the various investigative committees without so much as an indictment. Now all he wanted to do was retreat to a warmer climate, just like the handful of other gangsters he knew who’d been fortunate enough to survive till retirement.

  As the most influential gangster left in Hell’s Kitc
hen in 1960, Mickey Spillane inherited what was left of the neighborhood rackets. They were troubled times for Hell’s Kitchen and the city in general, with the relatively prosperous Fifties about to give way to the social and economic uncertainty of the Sixties. For the Irish, who had ruled the political clubhouses and gambling dens of the neighborhood throughout the century, it was a time of reckoning.

  Within months of Mickey Spillane’s marriage to Maureen McManus in August of 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-sixth President of the United States. For millions of Irish Americans, it marked a point of no return. The children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants, whose ancestors had fled political persecution in their own land and overcome violent discrimination in the States, were now, proudly and unequivocally, American.

  What that meant in the mind of many second- and third-generation Irish-American families was that they were now free to move to the suburbs in pursuit of the postwar American dream. No longer an immigrant class, middle-income Irish Catholics assimilated—with a vengeance.

  But in some predominantly working-class neighborhoods like South Boston, Chicago’s Southwest Side, and Hell’s Kitchen, the transition was slower. To the Roman Catholic poor of these communities John F. Kennedy’s election was an empty promise. Their lives were a far cry from the Kennedys’ lavish summer estates and expensive Harvard educations. What’s more, the upper crust, known as the “lace-curtain” Irish, looked on these “shanty” Irish as a hopeless and disdainful breed, a reminder perhaps of what they had left behind in their frantic climb to the top of the social register.