The unusual practice of bribing customers to stay out of one’s place of business may not have originated with Charlie Devlin, but he helped to popularize it. “Owners would pay him off to get rid of him,” says Marty Rubin, a highly respected bar owner whose drinking establishments became a second home to burglars and cops alike. In fact, many bar owners in Kensington and surrounding neighborhoods decided that it was better to pay Devlin to stay out of their businesses than to have him as a customer. Friday and Saturday nights were particularly profitable for Devlin. He’d travel by taxi to popular bars and pick up envelopes or be handed a couple of twenties. At the end of the night, he had a pretty good haul. He’d then stiff the cabbie who had just spent the night driving him around the city. Those taxi drivers who protested quickly learned the error of their ways; Charlie enjoyed dishing out the punishment.
“I saw Charlie walk over to a guy in Magee’s Bar and just beat the hell out of him,” recalls one witness, still seemingly stunned by the incident. “Charlie was a no-good bum.”
Devlin’s attacks were unprovoked, indiscriminate, commonplace, and in plain view for all to see; he was a full-time, equal-opportunity head thumper. If you became the object of his interest, it was lights out; suicide might be a better alternative.
Tommy O’Rourke, a 30-year-man in the U.S. Marshal’s Service, was the recipient of the Charlie Devlin treatment early in his law enforcement career. “I was a city cop at the time,” says O’Rourke, “and after work one night I stopped in Joe Scanlan’s bar for a drink. Soon after, Charlie Devlin and Leo Gillis walk in. Both of these guys have serious reputations. They’re as tough as they come, but I’m minding my own business. Devlin doesn’t know I’m a cop. Just my luck, he comes over to me and says, ‘Hey, you have a cigarette?’
“I told him, ‘I don’t smoke.’
“Then Charlie puts his face within an inch of mine and says, ‘I didn’t ask if you smoked. I asked if you had a cigarette.’
“There was no doubt Charlie wanted to start a fight,” says O’Rourke. “I’m just off duty and all of a sudden I’m in a bunch of shit.”
Fortunately, some other customers familiar with Charlie’s routine decided to intervene. They calmed Charlie down, bought him a drink, and persuaded him to find another watering hole. “The next day,” says O’Rourke, “I’m at the station house and hear Charlie started a fight at Kellis’s Bar last night and all hell broke loose. Charlie Devlin was a nasty bastard.”
Kellis’s, a well-known watering hole for alcoholics at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, was a regular haunt of Devlin’s—to the dismay of the Kellis family. They had purchased the Majestic Restaurant in 1952 and a few years later converted it into a bar. It was immediately popular and soon became a favorite hangout of the K&A burglars, who would often meet there before going on the road. John Kellis, the owner’s son, recalls little trouble from the regular gang members. “The guys were always clean-cut looking,” says Kellis. “They wore white shirts and nice suits. There were no bums among them. Jackie Johnson, for example, was a nice guy. He wasn’t an animal. He was always well-dressed and behaved himself.”
Charlie Devlin was a different story, a predatory Great White anxious to feed, ready to strike, always smelling blood in the water. John Kellis saw more than his fair share of the carnage. He hated Devlin.
“Charlie was an animal,” says Kellis. “When he came in, the joint cleared out. I’ll never forget that guy. I get chills up and down my spine just thinking of that son-of-a-bitch. He was an animal. I nearly had to shoot him one day. He came in the bar one afternoon and the joint cleared out; everybody just got up and walked out. It happened every time he came in. Nobody wanted to be around him. They were afraid of him. He killed my business. He said he was gonna break every bottle over my head, and then he grabbed my throat. I pulled a gun from under the bar and put it right in his face. He backed off real quick.
“Even the cops were afraid of him,” says Kellis. “I seen cops come to pull Charlie out of here and they were scared shitless. They were saying real nice, ‘Come on, Charlie.’ ‘Be nice, Charlie.’ ‘C’mon, Charlie.’ ‘Don’t cause a problem, Charlie.’ I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it.” But Kellis is well aware that he was lucky to get the police to show up at all. Often they wouldn’t even respond to his calls for assistance: too many of them required emergency room treatment after confrontations with Devlin. Riding through the district, cops in squad cars would ask the police dispatcher, “Is it Charlie Devlin?” when notified of a Kensington bar disturbance. Some cops chose to pass up the honor of tangling with Charlie Devlin. In such cases the Kellis family and other targets of Charlie’s interest had to fend for themselves.
Even Devlin’s good buddies came in for abuse. Jackie Johnson, for instance, was a regular recipient of Charlie’s bullying, and John “John L.” McManus once had to slug Devlin over the head with a baseball bat to keep Devlin off him; they were working out in a prison exercise yard at the time. Jimmy Dolan often tells his own prison story: the time Charlie twisted him into a pretzel while they were exercising in the yard at a large maximum-security state prison in Pennsylvania.
“We’re playing basketball at Graterford one morning,” says Dolan, wincing at the memory. “I’m 150 pounds and running around like a wild man. I stole the ball from Charlie 10 times and was scoring like crazy. Charlie was getting hotter and hotter. Finally, he snaps out and comes after me. He wants to kill me and, don’t you know, catches me before I can get away. Charlie gets me in a hold and starts twisting and squeezing me. I can barely breathe. All of a sudden, I hear something snap. I can’t feel my legs. I’m paralyzed below the waist. I can’t feel a thing and I’m scared to death. I scream, ‘I’m hurt! Let me go!’
“I’m now lying out on the court and they’ve got to bring a stretcher out for me and take me to the prison hospital.
“Devlin looks worried. He leans over and says, ‘I’m sorry, Dolan. I didn’t mean it.’
“I told him, ‘I know, Charlie, but look what you done to me.’
“They carry me to the hospital and I’m thinking, I’m ruined, that damn gorilla paralyzed me for life. Fortunately, the doctor knew what had happened to me. He turned me on my stomach and pressed with all his might on my back. I heard a snap and immediately started to get some feeling in my legs. He snapped my back in place again and I was okay, but Charlie nearly fucked me up for good. He didn’t know his own strength.”
Devlin’s reputation for “fucking people up” preceded him. Even seasoned jailhouse toughs kept their distance. Although Philadelphia’s county jails and Pennsylvania’s state prisons were heavily black by the mid-sixties, leading most white prisoners to try to keep a low profile, “Devlin would walk up to the niggers in the jail and if he saw cigarettes in their top pocket, he’d just take them out and tell the guys to fuck themselves if they objected. Very few guys—black or white—could stand up to him.”
Most K&A men who spent any time at all in Kensington’s taverns saw at least one or two of Devlin’s back alley brawls and heard spellbinding accounts of many others. Sometimes, rarely—usually when he was outnumbered—Charlie endured a beating that would have killed a lesser man. As one observer said, “What would kill a horse wouldn’t bother him.” But even the honor of defeating Devlin was of short duration. In his book, the bout wasn’t truly over until he was victorious. “If you beat him,” says Gene Pedicord, “he was at your door the next day and would want to fight all over again. You could never get away from him until he won.”
Jimmy Laverty witnessed a good many of Devlin’s antics. “I went from first to sixth grade with Charlie,” says Laverty. “He was a pretty nice fellow, a friendly guy, but prison changed him. When he entered the prison system as a teenager, I guess he figured, I’m gonna be a here a while so I better get tough.”
What amazed Laverty was Charlie’s capacity to absorb punishment. He seemed impervious to blows that would knock down and cripple most other combatants. “His big thi
ng,” says Laverty, “was that you couldn’t hurt him. I saw six cops with blackjacks on Charlie one time. They were beating the hell out of him. Blood was squirting all over the place, but he wouldn’t stop. He just wouldn’t quit.” The cops got the message: deal with Charlie Devlin at your own risk. “The cops were afraid of him. They’d wait till they had three or four cop cars available and a half-dozen guys before they’d try to take him on.”
Numbers—as in being outnumbered—didn’t seem to faze Charlie. Some neighborhood guys recall the time Charlie took on an entire football team. “One time,” says Jimmy Moran, obviously still impressed, “Charlie had a beef with some guys from the Venango Bears, a local semi-pro football team. It must have been pretty bad because one day about a dozen of them tracked Charlie down to the Crescent Bar at Front and Allegheny. They weren’t looking to kiss and make up either; they were carrying pipes, chains, and tire irons. Charlie got a call at the bar that they were coming down for him, but he doesn’t run and sneak out the back door. He was no pussy. He rolls up his sleeves and tells the guys who are drinking in the bar there’s gonna be some action soon, and he wants to know who’s prepared to help him. Most guys got up and told Charlie they had to catch a plane. They got the hell out of there. They weren’t gonna get killed for Charlie.
“Well, the Bears, all 12 of ’em, come in the bar. Charlie gets cornered against a wall by a dartboard. Things are looking bad. They’re ready to maul him, and what does Charlie do? He yells at them, ‘Okay, motherfuckers, let’s go.’
“Well, the first guy rushes Charlie and is dropped immediately. Charlie gave him a right hand shot to the jaw, and the guy goes down for the count. No sooner than he’s through saying, ‘Who’s next?’ when they all rush him. I’m tellin’ you, they beat the ever-lovin’ piss out of him. They hurt him real bad. He had to be taken out of there on a stretcher. On the way out, though, he said to a guy, ‘If they all would have come at me like the first guy, it would have been okay. I would’ve taken them all out.’ I’m telling you, Charlie Devlin was a tough son-of-a-bitch,” says Jimmy Moran. “He didn’t back down from anybody.”
Charlie may have had some mental problems, but stupidity wasn’t one of them, say some of his old neighborhood cronies. “He was no dummy,” claims one life-long associate. “Charlie was definitely smart. He had ideas. He came up with ways to make money.”
Charlie’s powers of memorization were renowned. He would bet bar patrons they couldn’t name a drinking establishment in the area whose phone number he didn’t know. Guys would come up with 20 to 30 bars, and Charlie knew every number. It was as if he had an alcoholic rolodex implanted in his brain.
Even more unbelievable was Charlie’s partiality to poetry and the classics. All the time he was chasing John L. McManus around the exercise yard at Graterford Prison, he was reciting “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. The dramatic rendering underscored Charlie’s threatening intentions, explaining why John L. felt he had no choice but to slug the poetry-quoting lunatic with a baseball bat.
Jimmy Moran recalls the time a half-dozen factory workers and roofers nearly fell off their bar stools when Charlie started an impromptu drama festival. “We’re in a bar one day,” says Moran, “and all of a sudden Charlie begins to recite a Shakespeare soliloquy. It went on for several minutes. And then he did another one. Jaws dropped all over the place; everyone was dumbfounded. They never expected a big lummox like Charlie, who loved to fight and was always drunk, to come out with Hamlet.nd Shakespearian sonnets. But what people didn’t know was that Charlie was well-read. A lot of those guys who did a lot of time were big readers.”
Charlie was still best known as a tough guy, a ham-and-egg, bare-knuckle masher who never backed down and didn’t require a sidearm or any other weapon to get his point across. On those rare occasions when he resorted to carrying a gun, however, he wasn’t afraid to use it. He shot Ray Chalmers, a long-time acquaintance, and according to Jimmy Laverty, who witnessed the confrontation, it started over those staples of bar-room hostility: a woman and money.
It seems a real looker known as “Up and Down Mary” was at the Randolph Club one night and while dancing had her pocketbook lightened by 40 dollars. Mary believed Charlie Devlin, the bar’s bouncer, had stolen her money and encouraged Chalmers to get it back for her. Ray Chalmers, better known as “Raybo” to all his Kensington buddies, was no tough guy; he was a K&A burglar and normally would never have approached a legitimate tough guy like Charlie over such a matter. However, Raybo had been hoping to catch Up and Down Mary’s eye for some time. The prospect of being the hero who saves the day for a damsel in distress appealed to him. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite work out that way.
As Jimmy Laverty tells the story, Chalmers and Devlin have a sit-down over the missing money, and things quickly get out of hand. Devlin, outraged by the accusation, threatens Chalmers, but “Raybo tells Charlie to stay seated, he says he has a.45-caliber semiautomatic under the table and it’s pointed right at him. He then tells Charlie to get the money.” Devlin, not used to being bullied, leaves the Randolph, but only to get his own gun. When he returns to the club, he tells Laverty to bring Raybo outside. “Tell the skinny little bastard to apologize,” he instructs Laverty. “If he doesn’t apologize, I’m gonna kill him.”
“Raybo comes out of the bar and laughs when he sees Charlie holding a gun,” says Laverty. “He tells Devlin, ‘What are you doin’ with a gun, Charlie? Tough guys aren’t supposed to carry guns.”’
Worked up and unused to being laughed at, Charlie sees that Raybo is unarmed and asks, where’s his gun? Raybo admits he was bluffing and laughs at Charlie again. Furious, Charlie fires his gun but aims at the pavement. Shards of concrete fly up around them.
Raybo laughs again and barks, “Devlin, you’re blind as a bat. You can’t hit a thing.”
Charlie then raises the weapon and fires it again, this time hitting Chalmers in the thigh. Stunned and nearly knocked off his feet, Raybo looks down at his leg, which is now bleeding profusely. He then, according to Jimmy Laverty, looks up at Devlin with an incredulous expression and says, “I don’t fuckin’ believe it. I just bought this suit.”
Friends and bar patrons come out onto the sidewalk and assess the damage as the police arrive. Raybo has to be taken to the hospital, but he instructs the bartender not to take his drink away: “I’ll be back before last call.”
Herbie Rhodes was one of the arresting officers who responded “to a shooting outside the Randolph Club.” He admitted to “not liking Charlie a little bit” and wasn’t one to put up with his shenanigans. “I whacked him pretty good,” recalled Rhodes. “I hit him in the head with a shotgun when I arrested him.”
As usual, police had a difficult time getting the K&A men to cooperate; even the victim was close-mouthed. “Chalmers at first refused to identify his assailant” and told Rhodes that he was already paying the price in the neighborhood for being thought to be an “informant.” Eventually, though, Chalmers told the full story, and Devlin was charged with “assault with intent to kill, aggravated assault and battery by shooting, and violation of parole,” but such a case was far from a prosecutor’s dream. Philadelphia’s court system in those days resembled a crapshoot, especially when well-connected and savvy K&A guys were involved. At trial, Devlin was found not guilty, and his case was discharged.
“Charlie Devlin had nine lives,” says one observer. “He was one of the luckiest guys you’d ever meet.”
ALTHOUGH DEVLIN may have been the only Shakespeare-quoting bully prowling Kensington’s streets and pubs, he was far from being the neighborhood’s only “tough guy.” Many Philadelphians from that era believe that the toughest guys in the city came out of Kensington. “There were three tough guys on every corner,” says one native. Another witness to the almost daily carnage argues without hesitation, “Kensington produced the best street fighters in the world.”
Police officers apparently agreed. Locking up Kensington incorrigibles was no w
alk in the park. “I sincerely believe K&A had more tough guys than any other neighborhood in the city,” said Herbie Rhodes, a city detective who was part of the freelancing Special Investigations Squad. That job afforded him the opportunity to compare the backbones of Philadelphia’s most intimidating criminals, and Rhodes is sure “the toughest guys in the city came out of Kensington. Those K&A guys were incredible fighters. They’d put people in the hospital.”
Lou McCloud, Porky McCloud, Frankie Wetzel, Leo Gillis, Charlie Taggert, Joey Cooper Smith, La La McQuoid, Pete Logue, Joe Lepowski, Eddie Lucas, Nails Manginni, and Cocky O’Kane are just a few of the battle-scarred combatants who earned impressive reputations and terrorized those who crossed their paths. Although the neighborhood was said to have “a million sucker-punch artists who’d run a block to nail you in the jaw,” there was no shortage of guys who would go toe to toe all night long. As one long-time observer recommended, “You better pack a lunch if you were gonna take one of them on.”
Many of the Kensington bars hired tough guys as bouncers to maintain a semblance of law and order. Their reputations, physical prowess, and moxie were frequently tested. It wasn’t unusual for South Philly, Roxborough, or Germantown tough guys to pay a visit to the Randolph, the Shamrock, the Bubble Club, or the Pleasantville Inn looking for some action. On any given Friday night, one of these bars or social clubs could turn into a pugilistic O.K. Corral. Blood often flowed as freely as the alcohol, and having an eye gouged out with a broken beer bottle or a nipple bitten off was not unheard of. “I saw guys fight for three hours once,” says one observer familiar with the well-established ritual. “They’d fight for a while, take a break for coffee, and then go right back at it again.”
Confessions of a Second Story Man Page 18