Westies

by T. J. English

  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 Kitchen 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.

  While most of Irish America took advantage of their newfound status in the wake of Kennedy’s election and headed for suburbia, there remained in Hell’s Kitchen a small, hard-core community who had neither the means nor the inclination to leave. With the area now entering its newest phase of economic decline, these embattled Irish held tight—for better or for worse—to the traditions established by their forebears. It was this group who turned to Mickey Spillane, whose polite manner and handsome black-Irish features made him something of a Kennedyesque figure in his own right.

  By the mid-1960s, what remained of the West Side rackets were now evenly divided between Spillane’s crew, known simply as the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob, and various Italian interests. The Italians still played a major role on the docks and at Madison Square Garden, the city’s premier sports arena, then located at 50th Street and 8th Avenue. At the Garden the labor force was controlled equally by the Gambino crime family in Brooklyn, by Vincent “the Chin” Gigante’s Genovese family crew, and by Spillane’s Irish Mob.

  The prize New York Coliseum, which opened in 1956 at 59th Street and 8th Avenue, was also split among numerous criminal factions. Insuring that everyone got a piece of the action, as many as fourteen different unions got involved, many of them acting as brokers between individual contractors, management, and the mob.

  Spillane’s alliance with the Mafia was always tenuous. He had inherited the relationship from his former boss, Hughie Mulligan, who had himself inherited a tradition going all the way back to Owney Madden. Since Madden first joined Lucky Luciano’s Organized Crime Commission in 1931, the Italians had far outstripped the Irish in every facet of organized crime. As J. Edgar Hoover chased Communists and denied the existence of the Mafia, the Italians constructed an impressive national network controlled mainly by the “Five Families” of New York City. Local neighborhood mobs like the Hell’s Kitchen Irish were allowed to operate, but only as long as the Italians got their cut.

  Along with having to walk a fine line between being a partner and a competitor, Spillane resented the fact that La Cosa Nostra, as the Mafia was now commonly known, was able to muscle in on his territory. Since he wasn’t interested in seeing what he could get out of the “partnership” by branching out into non-neighborhood activities, to Spillane the arrangement seemed like a one-way street—a shakedown, in fact. About the only thing he got in return for his cooperation was a guarantee he wouldn’t be fucked with.

  There was always a degree of mutual distrust, and things no doubt took a turn for the worse when Spillane snatched Eli Zicardi, who ran the policy games for Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, head of the Genovese family. While he no longer nabbed neighborhood folks, Spillane still occasionally kidnapped wiseguys, holding them for ransom and then letting them go once he got paid. It was a peculiar aspect of his relationship with the Italians. They often knew Spillane was the one who had done it, but they were willing to tolerate it as long as nobody got hurt and the ransom never exceeded the $10,000 to $15,000 range.

  But something went wrong with the Zicardi kidnapping. The ransom was delivered. Zicardi, however, disappeared from the face of the earth.

  There were no immediate repercussions. But people wondered just how long Spillane would be able to get away with harassing bigshots like Fat Tony Salerno before it all came home to roost.

  In the meantime, Spillane kept his control over Hell’s Kitchen’s “ground-level” rackets. The numbers game was the most lucrative. Each day, Mickey had a dozen or more runners out collecting three-digit numbers and bets to go with them. Since the winning bet often paid extremely high dividends—sometimes as much as 600 to 1—even nongamblers liked to play, betting anywhere between $1 and $1,000.

  The number was determined by that day’s “total mutual handle,” or betting totals at the track, which were published in the daily newspapers. The last three digits of the total were the number for the day. Some days there was more than one winner; some days there were none—in which case the entire pot wound up in Spillane’s pocket.

  Along with the numbers racket, Spillane owned a piece of most of the gambling dens in Hell’s Kitchen. There were at least a half-dozen all-night clubs on 10th Avenue, known simply as “the Avenue” to most West Siders. Spillane himself was an avid dice and card player, and almost any night of the week he could be found at Tommy Collins’s social club, a first floor walk-up at 722 10th Avenue, or at 694 10th Avenue, another frequent gambling spot.

  When he wasn’t gambling or tending to his rackets, Spillane spent a considerable amount of time shoring up his reputation as a man of influence in the community. His marriage to Maureen McManus, of course, was his biggest coup. Among other things, it reinforced the symbiotic relationship that had always existed between the neighborhood’s various spheres of influence. To the old-time residents of Hell’s Kitchen, the coupling of Spillane and McManus evoked nostalgia for those days when the gangster and the politician walked hand in hand, and the Irish ruled the roost. Current reality was quite different.

  Since the turn of the century reign of the McMani and before, outside commentators had been accusing Hell’s Kitchen pols of being under the influence of local gangsters. To a large extent, it was true, though anyone with a knowledge of New York City politics shouldn’t have been surprised. Hell’s Kitchen was far from unique in this regard. From the earliest days of Boss Tweed’s Tammany machine, a local district leader’s influence was based on his ability to deliver services and exert control in his community. In the Twenties and Thirties, that included unleashing gangsters on election day to make sure voters pulled the right levers—even if they had to do so with ten broken fingers. In return, a district leader was able to exert influence over a cop or a county judge when one of the local lads got busted.

  By the 1960s, however, years of political reform altered the relationship between politics and crime in the neighborhoods. It became a lot less binding on both sides. Yes, Mickey Spillane still controlled a certain number of jobs in Hell’s Kitchen, which were in turn parceled out through the Midtown Democratic Club as political favors. And Spillane would still, at the behest of the district leadership, extend loans to local merchants unable to get credit from the banks. But long gone were the days when a local gangster could control enough votes to swing an election, or a local district leader have enough sway to keep his constituents out of jail.

  Throughout the mid and late Sixties, the neighborhood continued its slippery slide towards ghettoization. Funds for low-income housing, always a staple in Hell’s Kitchen, dried up; older buildings stood empty and gutted. Drugs began to be a factor. The streets looked deserted a lot of the time, and there were random muggings, stickups, and harassment from landlords. It was getting so longstanding neighborhood folk couldn’t walk around anymore and feel safe.

  At the White House Bar on 45th Street and 10th Avenue, Spillane heard these and other complaints. Usually he was surrounded by his underlings—an up and coming young kid named
Billy Beattie, older friends like Tom Devaney, Tom “the Greek” Kapatos, the avuncular Tommy Collins, and Eddie Cummiskey. Old-time neighborhood residents came into the bar looking for a favor. Mickey took them off to the side or maybe into a back room and listened while they poured out their hearts. Maybe the guy had a business venture he thought Spillane might want to invest in. Maybe he’d been robbed by a local Puerto Rican kid and wanted to even the score. Maybe his wife or daughter had just gone into the hospital and he needed a loan to cover the bills.

  Mickey listened quietly and did what he could. “Thank you, Mr. Spillane,” they would say. “God be with you.” Sometimes there were hugs and even tears as they reminisced about those long-gone days when the rackets were thriving and the neighborhood was all theirs. Spillane seemed to cherish these encounters. It made him feel like he was doing something for the community. It made him feel like he had respect.

  Meanwhile, outside in the streets, there was something brewing that the courtly Spillane did not fully comprehend. In the late 1960s, kids all across America were questioning authority, with many traditions and conventions being swept aside. Respect itself was becoming outdated as an entire generation embraced the politics of upheaval.

  To the aspiring young gangsters of Hell’s Kitchen it was as good a reason as any to let off a little steam. In the spirit of the times, they danced to the beat of a different drummer. For them Mickey Spillane was an antique, and his adherence to old-world neighborhood values was all phony bullshit. Even Spillane’s reputation as a high-roller and a fancy dresser, as far as they were concerned, was crap. Everybody knew he bought his so-called thousand-dollar suits for almost nothing at Tassiello’s “swag” (stolen merchandise) shop on 9th Avenue.