Cuba turned out to be the thing that got Marty in dutch; no good deed goes unpunished, as they say. Back in December of 1930 I’d sent him over to Havana on business, and when he came back through Miami, he did what everybody else did, which was to say he was an American citizen, which he wasn’t So now here it is twenty-three years later and somebody in Washington says he entered the country illegally way back when and that, because of his priors, he was deportable on the grounds of moral turpitude. Unlike me, Social Security number 432–62–2509, Marty had never gotten around to fixing the citizenship thing, which meant that he didn’t have the proper visa or some such, and given his rap sheet—a pathetic arrest record, not a patch on mine—he was ordered to return to England, the land of our birth.
That made me mad. Just like you don’t choose your parents, you can’t choose your siblings. They just happen at random, blind fate, turn of the card, spin of the wheel, all life 9 to 5 against. And yet there they are, squalling into the world, so I guess you can say we all beat the odds, for a while.
Marty and Kitty were living down at Somerset Farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, named after the street we were born on in Leeds, horses and cattle, but that came to naught, like everything else Marty tried, especially with the deportation proceedings looming, and so they sold it off in 1954 for $77,000 and moved back to Manhattan, to 27 West 96th Street, a nice building where I kept a couple of flats for emergency purposes. I didn’t want to see my brother shipped out for Liverpool, the Madden family going in reverse, so I made a few phone calls and called in a few favors. What else were Senators good for?
The first bill to naturalize Marty, S. 3216, introduced on the Senate floor in March, crapped out, which meant my donation hadn’t been high enough. It made me damn mad that these bastards were shaking me down for more, but there was nothing I could do about it. So Agnes and I made a handsome contribution to McClellan’s reelection campaign, which was hand-delivered by one of my stooges in a nice tidy envelope to the Senator on July 10, 1954. “We decided this is more prudent than going to any Committee in HS as it seems every ‘2 bit’ politician and newspaper writer tries to make capital with everything connected with our name,” Agnes wrote in the note. I never put my name to anything I didn’t have to.
The second bill, S. 541, introduced on January 18, 1955, was more like it. “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That for the purposes of the immigration and nationality Act, Martin Aloysius Madden shall be held and considered to have been lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence as of the date of the enactment of this Act, upon payment of the required visa fee.”
The bill was sponsored by Senator, former Governor, Herbert H. Lehman of New York, helped along by Senator McClellan, and was ratified by the full Senate on June 14. We listened hard to hear any objections from Dewey, but Albany was silent.
Things had come full circle: first the politicians owned the gangsters, then we owned them and then they became us. It was Tammany’s last laugh, disguised as reform: the Tiger at a masquerade ball, wearing a goo-goo mask but still the same hungry beast beneath.
I got a nice telegram from Marty the next day: “DEAR BROTHER TRIED TO CALL YOU ALL MORNING AND NO ANSWER THE SENATE VOTED IN MY FAVOR ON MY BILL YESTERDAY AND IT PASSED EVERYTHING LOOKS VERY GOOD LOVE MARTY.” Through the good offices of the Honorable W. F. Norrell of the Sixth District in Arkansas—he was from Monticello, Arkansas—it sailed through Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania’s Judiciary Subcommittee No. 1 (Immigration) in mid-July and passed the House on July 30, 1955, which meant that Marty was home free.
The New York law firm I hired, Cotton, Brenner and Wrigley, of 225 Broadway, prepared a handsome brief in support of S. 541. Testimonials from everyone who’d known my brother since we were pups—priests, rabbis and vicars. Kitty Madden. Cops and robbers, Sixty-seven pages of encomia, ending with this from the mouthpieces, dated March 2, 1954: “In our letter of yesterday, we inadvertently omitted to mention that the nearest relative living in this country of Mr. Martin A. Madden is his brother Owen Madden, who resides in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Respectfully Yours, COTTON, BRENNER & WRIGLEY.”
You can’t make this stuff up. Last billed in my most important appearance in my brother’s life.
Marty died a few years later. Simons, where I was getting to be a regular, dressed him out and St. Mike’s sent him into the hereafter. May, Ma and now Martin—four blocks from where we landed we were already a vanishing race, down to me and my little girl, wherever she was.
It seemed everybody was leaving me, or trying to. A punk named Vinnie the Chin took a shot at Costello right in the lobby of his apartment building on Central Park West, but Vinnie was a lousy shot and only grazed him. Frank and I knew Genovese was behind it, but unfortunately the botched hit led to an inquiry into our ownership of the Tropicana, which meant Frank had to do a little time. Vito took over Frank’s business in his absence, which is to say my business, and that’s how the Genovese “crime family” was born, even if Costello and I did all the heavy lifting.
Movie fellas kept pesterin’ me about selling them the rights to my life story, as if they haven’t already stolen it from me a dozen times. Mugs who were sportin’ knee pants when I was running the rackets read the papers and get bright ideas: “Jutting brows over cold eyes, lean cheeks, aquiline nose, thick, tight lips, human TNT held in leash by an iron will—that’s Owney Madden, Hell’s Kitchen’s ‘Uncle Owney,’ ‘Owney the Killer,’ ‘Owney the Hermit’ of Sing Sing, in his prime the terror man of mystery, richest and most politically influential racketeer of his day…” Swill like that.
W.P. Hendry of MGM wrote to me in 1943 that neither Clinton Anderson, the chief of police in Beverly Hills, nor the L.A. district attorney, Fred Howzer, would have any objection if I wanted to come and live in Beverly Hills—“provided, of course, no former business be transacted.” I turned him down cold. Ten years later Metro came back to me in the person of one Art Cohn, who wanted to write a book about me. Gave him the air too. Jim Bishop had written me a month earlier, asking what my favorite prayer was. “It would be most helpful if it is a prayer of your own devising, your own words.”
I guess this book’s your answer, Jim.
And so I started to fade, like one of them old photographs. People that used to be so clear and so familiar that you didn’t even bother to write their names on the backs turn into nameless ghosts, spirits of the past, the only power they have left to haunt.
It’s funny how, at the end of your life, you finally start to think about the future, when it’s too late to do you any good. The brightest kids in town like to hang out at the Southern, sitting in the front room, looking for swells and watching for gangsters, soaking up whatever they can. I always had time for ’em, and a word of advice or two, and once in a while a double sawbuck.
After the war I let Mayor McLaughlin go and replaced him with a bunch of GIs fresh back from the war, running on a reform ticket. This being Hot Springs, there was no Republican Party to speak of, so it was a Democratic reform ticket, which meant there would be plenty of Democrats and precious little reform. A trio of lawyers, Sid McMath, Clyde Brown and Nathan Schoenfeld, put up a slate of candidates county-wide, which included my own personal lawyer down here, Q. Byrum Hurst. Sid was the former southwestern Golden Gloves champ, which made me like him straight off. He ran for prosecuting attorney. They all won.
Naturally there was a great deal of flapdoodle about this bein’ curtains for gambling in Hot Springs, etc., etc., but of course it wasn’t. This was my kind of reform. Somebody asked Orval Faubus, the governor, why the state didn’t shut down illegal gambling in Hot Springs and he said the state police were too busy directing traffic to interfere in local matters.
After eleven terms, Leo took it hard, but I wasn’t in the mood to fool around, and so when he started kicking, I got him indicted on bribery charges, a nice touch. He did some time but he
kept his mouth shut. Earl Ricks, who owned a Buick dealership with Raymond Clinton, became the new Mayor. That was in 1947.
Raymie’s got a brother, Roger, who isn’t much good for anything when he’s drunk, which is often, but is a pretty good mechanic otherwise. He works on my cars. His wife, Virginia, a busty party-girl-turned-nurse, sometimes takes care of me whenever I need medical attention, so the Clintons have me coming and going. Virginia has a son I’ve taken a shine to, a bright kid named Billy who likes to hang out at the Southern Club with Byrum Hurst’s kid. Maybe he’ll learn something.
Later some zealous punk out to make a name for himself put Byrum on trial for income-tax-evasion shenanigans, but I testified that the income they claimed he was hiding was simply a loan from me, and no, I couldn’t remember whether he’d paid me back yet, but I was sure he would. I loan money to lots of people, and some of ’em pay me back and some of ’em don’t. Everybody knows that. He beat the rap.
One of the lawyers who handled his case wrote me a letter: “I am still enjoying the picture of you on the witness stand answering so well the questions I asked you relative to your background and your loans to Byrum, and I particularly remember the outstanding manner with which you handled yourself when cross-examined by the Government.” That’s me, still the master…
My friends down here gave me a testimonial dinner on St. Patrick’s Day in 1958. Eddie Rogers and his Arlington Hotel Orchestra played my favorite songs: “Machushla,” “Where the River Shannon Flows,” and of course the best, “Danny Boy.” I told them not to play “The Last Rose of Summer.”
The papers say I’m sitting on four million dollars. That got the tax men all riled up, naturally, and the past couple of years they’ve been coming after me pretty vicious. Ever since they nailed the Big Fella, the green-eyeshade gang is feeling its oats. They want to know how I can report an income of less than ten grand a year when the word is that the Southern Club alone is pulling in thirty grand a month, but that’s what the books show.
Cash is a different story. It’s everywhere. Agnes stuffs it down coffee cans, slips it between book covers, wraps it up with rubber bands and hides it in the toilet tanks. Not to mention she wears it. A yellow gold heart-shaped brooch set with one hundred diamonds and one pear-shaped blue sapphire. A platinum diamond bracelet set with two square diamonds, fifty-four baguette diamonds and 244 brilliant-cut diamonds. A platinum diamond bracelet set with three marquise diamonds, thirty-six baguette diamonds and 340 round diamonds. You get the picture.
After I’m gone, after she’s gone, nobody will ever find it. It’s all taken care of. They say you can’t take it with you, and maybe you can’t, but you sure as hell can fix it so no dirty sonofabitch can take it away from you either.
So that’s about it. I’m in this state now, this funny state that flashes me back to before I was even born, to where May wanted to go when she got to the other side, and where she is now, and where I’m going. Flashes me back to the Last Rose of Summer, which it’s taken me all these many years to figure out all along what was growing in my own flat, my own 352, my own 440, my own flesh and blood and if that’s a sin, then God damn me to Hell. You’d have done the same too.
I see my Da, lying on his back, not in the ring, but on the dock, fighting for breath, the breath You gave him and which You, the Boss, the Big Fella, the real capo di tutti capi, took away, for no reason, because You could.
I been in this damned Ouachita Hospital four days now, undershirt and pajama bottom my only inventory. Lying on my back, just like Da, just like I did so long ago at the Arbor, sucking in breaths with great difficulty, remembering, the pain intense, the clock ticking, and it must amuse You something fierce, something diabolical, only this time it’s not a bull leaning over me, asking me Owney who done this thing, but a nurse or two, maybe a doctor, and they’re all wearin’ white, like the angels in heaven, or maybe all the saints.
The answer’s still the same: I done it to myself.
They’re leaning over me with that look on their face, that look I’ve seen once or twice, the look that says he ain’t gonna make it, what a tough break, and do you have any last words?
I’m alone, which is the way we all go out. I can hear the voices, speaking through the solitude—the great Jack Johnson, who on the canvas in Havana embraced it; the great Dutch Schultz, on the deck in Newark, calling for the bill and begging for it.
I’m having trouble breathing. Emphysema, the doctors have been telling me. Cigarettes. Bullshite. Them bullets in me are acting up, and the ones that are gone are acting up worse. Each one with Little Patsy’s name on it, every one reminding me of Leeds and Wigan and Liverpool and the time Fats cut the strings of my mother’s purse. The time when I got my payback, when I conked him with the lead pipe; the time when he got my own wife, my Loretta, to lure me to the Arbor, so’s he could take a shot at me. The time when I lured him with dear sweet Freda into Nash’s, so’s I could finish him off. And who would have thought that all these memories—especially now—could come flooding back to me, like the pigeon’s blood, like Luigi’s and Willie’s and Vannie’s blood, like Dutch’s fedora, wobbling on that table, trying to decide which way to fall and coming right down in the middle, fifty-fifty, the jury still out.
I hope you’re proud of me, Da. I wasn’t a fighter like you, but I was a fighter just the same.
Not alone. Agnes is here, and Loretta, and I think that’s Freda and Margaret Everdeane standing behind her, alongside my Mother, who’s holding hands with Mary Frances. All the women of my life, the Marys and the Margarets and the Magdalenes, come to comfort me in my hour of need. To shepherd me.
All but one.
Dutch figured it out, delirious Dutch on his deathbed, with Monk’s last slug in him, mother is always the best bet, Hoboe and Poboe I think mean the same thing, and you know what, Dutch, you almost got it right. If there’s one thing we know, it’s how to settle a tab and settle a score, no matter how long it takes.
We are Irishmen and we are a type and I know who is best.
A boy has ever wept. Tears and blood are the same thing.
My suit is pressed and ready, and my hat, the fedora I haven’t worn since that day in 1935, and best of all my .38, Monk’s .38, loaded again, a miracle, may all the saints be praised.
She’s here, her face whole again, not a hair of her head out of place, radiant, smiling, happy…her hand extended.
I reach and rise.
The city, the river, the sky. Me, up high, duke of all I survey. Her hand in mine, looking out over our empire, and her head still intact, with her pretty face still shining and me with my guts and my spirit still in me, just the two of us holding hands, innocent as always, like when we were kids, looking out over all the world and knowing it was ours, and just waiting for the day when it would be, never to be separated again. Two holy ghosts starting over, standing over 352, looking out, running now, into the darkness, rushing for the edge of the building—
We jump.
Not a dare or a dream but reality. Over the roofs of old New York, with the horses and the pushcarts and the dirt from the Seventh Avenue subway spritzing everywhere, and the iceman and the coalman and the ragman and the boneman singing their songs, but we don’t care because we’re up above them now, beyond them, way up in the air, watching the Waldorf fall and the Empire State rise, watching the els tumble and the motorcars flock, sailing out over the Harbor, over the Bay, over the wide Ocean, over everything, until at last we can see, way off in the distance, the hills our Mother told us about, the grey limestone of the Slieve Elva and the green Bens and far off, the Mountains of Mourne, the Mountains of Home.
So please don’t mourn for us, May and me, who didn’t know no better, who didn’t have a chance to know no better, for all of those who have gone before us in sin and sorrow, heathen or Christian, Jew or Gentile, the blessed and the damned, past and future to come, for we are all equal now and we don’t need your sympathy, just your understanding.
It doesn’t hurt anymore.
So hold my hand.
And soar.
Acknowledgments
Spending seven years inside the mind and heart of one of American history’s most ruthless, murderous, influential and altogether fascinating criminals is not a task undertaken lightly, nor without stout companionship. Among those who helped guide me on my journey were, in New York: Maureen Egen, Sara Ann Freed, Jay Cocks, Don Congdon, Susan Dempsey, Mari Ellen Goodspeed and the late John F. Kennedy, Jr.; in Hot Springs, Arkansas: Kathern Kinsey, Sandy Sutton, Q. Byrum Hurst, Sr., Chuck Cunning, Bobbie Jones McLane and the staff of the Garland County Historical Society; in Los Angeles: Daniel Melnick, Jeff Berg, Mark Glabman, Michael Nathanson and Greg Foster.
Special thanks to my wife, Kate, and our daughters, Alexandra and Clare, for indulging my enthusiasm for all things gangland these many years.
Finally, thanks to Owen Vincent Madden his own good self, at rest in Hot Springs nearly forty years, whose life and fate provide an object lesson for us all.
Lakeville, Connecticut
Summer 2002
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