by Daniel Wakin
Being back in my old home ignited memories: coming home from school, opening the door, and seeing my mother’s graduate students in the living room, the result of Vietnam War protests shutting down Columbia University. Standing in the kitchen and hearing a string of firecrackers pop, which were really gunshots aimed at two police officers on Riverside Drive. Sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, watching the Nixon-Humphrey returns in 1968.
Other memories lurked behind the facade of 334 Riverside Drive, namely Bennie the Bum’s mutilation. Now it was a quiet, familiar place to amble by with the dog or hurry past for Little League games in Riverside Park. For all those years, I was blithely unaware of the building’s dark history, or of the stories of its neighbors, those townhouses I came to call the Seven Beauties, and their many inhabitants. But years later, once the lights of the past slowly blinked to life behind the windows of those houses, this idea tugged at me: What do we really know about the physical surroundings of our daily life? What are the events that occur and then vanish as if they never happened? How do we confront the rather clobbering idea that moments of such significance in our daily lives, our very lives themselves, will evaporate into nothingness while the walls still stand?
In the ensuing chapters, I’ll be giving the forgotten inhabitants of the Seven Beauties their due as ensemble players in a twentieth-century New York City drama starring Bennie and company in the leading roles. Imagine the row of townhouses as a Grand Hotel, and this book a trip through the hallways with a peek into the lives of a large cast of hotel guests. Looked at another way, the story of the townhouses helps us understand just what is special about cities in general. The Grand Hotel guests may have known each other only slightly—or in most cases not at all—as they lived cheek by jowl, but their lives intersected in ways they may not even have realized. At the least they shared the same architectural landscape, the same urban geography. What is a city but a concentrated collection of individual stories?
The result of my research is a work that is one part true-crime drama, one part New York history, and one part insanely detailed walking tour of a single city block. It is also a story of New York in microcosm, from its rural origins as a Dutch settlement, through British takeover, division into estates and their breakups, land speculation, the building of neighborhoods, their flourishing and decline and eventual gentrification, and coagulation into the mix of poor, middle class, rich and capitalist and bohemian that makes the city so special today.
CHAPTER 1.
The Planning, Stage 1: “Bags of Money”
PROHIBITION ARRIVED IN THE UNITED STATES on January 17, 1920, and with it came profound changes to American life. Women received the vote partly because of the alliance between suffragists and temperance advocates. Gangsterism ran rampant, and criminal syndicates of immense wealth and power arose to supply alcohol to the masses. A considerable amount of blood was spilled.
In this fertile ground for many Irish American gangsters, Bernard McMahon and John Manning, another key figure in the Rubel robbery, took part as bootleggers. “Many people of Irish descent saw the temperance movement and Prohibition as a direct assault on their very existence,” T. J. English wrote in Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster. The movement took aim at a central place in Irish life—the saloon, a communal gathering spot—and a common occupation among Irish immigrants, the liquor business. Defying Prohibition was a “cultural duty,” as English put it.
McMahon and Manning knew each other from earlier days on the docks along Manhattan’s West Side, where they served as strong-arm help for labor racketeers who controlled much of the business of loading and unloading ships. Central to the enterprise at the time was the International Longshoremen’s Association, a union where many gangsters cut their teeth. The Port of New York was an economic powerhouse. Thousands of ships passed through each year, and by the eve of World War II, the port handled about a third of the cargo coming and going into the United States, at a value of some $15 billion.
The ban on drink eventually proved decidedly unpopular, and repeal came in the form of the Twenty-first Amendment, ratified fully on December 5, 1933. Thus came the demise of the mob’s cash cow, and the end of a good living for men like McMahon and his friend Manning. They had to seek income elsewhere, like so many of their breed. A new racket had to be found. Some chose kidnapping or bank robbery. Some took up numbers-running or hijacking. Others went back to the docks to grab a piece of the illegal cash pie there, such as loan sharking, gambling, and violence designed to keep longshoremen in line. Our West Side duo’s search for income led them to Brooklyn on a summer day in 1934.
Manning, twenty-seven, was slender, which naturally led to his acquiring the nickname “Fats.” With blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses, he had the innocent, soft-spoken manner of a seminarian.
During Prohibition, Manning had transported illegal booze and handled payments, but his arrest record was pure, and so were his ambitions: to retire quietly to a farm upstate and raise cattle, a bucolic vision inspired perhaps by his upbringing in a village in Ireland. Or maybe, like so many poor, city-bound people, he simply yearned for a little calm in the countryside. In any case, his fate turned out to be something quite different.
Manning’s friend boasted a flashier criminal pedigree. Bennie the Bum McMahon, a proud graduate of the Elmira Reformatory, a penal institution in upstate New York, sported slicked-back hair, intense eyes, and arrests for disorderly conduct, receiving stolen goods, and burglary. His mouth turned down into a sneer from pursed lips, his eyes were placed a little too close together, and his ears stuck out. He had the look of a schoolyard bully. He was also an alumnus of the mob run by “Legs” Diamond, one of the most flamboyant and famous gangsters of the Roaring Twenties. (McMahon’s association with Diamond was before Diamond made it big, before his violent death in an Albany rooming house in 1931, and before the Roaring Twenties became the Mundane Thirties for Bennie the Bum.)
In his youth, McMahon was a rumrunner too, smuggling liquor into speakeasies during Prohibition. McMahon had had one of his brushes with the law eleven years before the Rubel case when federal Prohibition agents, disguised as butchers, visited John’s Restaurant at 553 West 36th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, the spawning place for Irish thugs on Manhattan’s West Side, and arrested him and the proprietor, John Felske. Why was McMahon at the restaurant? What was he arrested for? What was his connection to Felske? Details in news reports are scant. But we do know that at the time McMahon lived at 885 Columbus Avenue near 104th Street—four long blocks east of Riverside Drive—and now the site of the Frederick Douglass Houses. By the time planning for the Rubel heist began, McMahon had turned to hijacking and earned his sobriquet of “Bum” thanks to minor jobs like what might be called the Great Pill Heist.
On January 6, 1933, McMahon and a partner, Frank Mosconi, hijacked a truckload of aspirin on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. They grabbed the driver, Herman Heim, and stashed him on the roof of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement. Both McMahon and Mosconi were arrested. Such was “Legs’s” fame that, even in small police blotter items such as the one relating this case, McMahon was described as the last of the Diamond gang. In any event, the charge didn’t stick. The truck driver said he could not identify McMahon as the man who robbed him, and the case was dropped.
On that summer day the next year in Brooklyn, as McMahon and Manning strolled around Coney Island investigating the possibility of robbing a bath house, they were stopped by a more promising sight: an armored car belonging to United States Trucking, parked in front of a Brooklyn Trust Company branch on West 12th Street near Surf Avenue. The pair watched as guards carted out canvas bags stuffed with money and loaded them into the vehicle.
The sight of those bags was like the smell of a roast to a hungry dog, and so the pair changed plans. Why not rob the bank, they thought. They began going out to Coney Island every day to scout out the branch and plan escape routes. Manning went inside to talk to a bank of
ficial, ostensibly about opening an account.
A bank being a more ambitious target than a bathhouse, the pair decided to recruit reinforcements. Manning tapped John “Archie” Stewart, an acquaintance from the West Side docks. Stewart, thirty-four, was a well-dressed ex-convict with a long record dating back to a burglary conviction at age fifteen and one for armed robbery at eighteen, for which he was sentenced to seven and a half to fourteen years in prison. When he wasn’t behind bars, Stewart was a jack-of-all-crimes. He ran speakeasies and crap games and kept book. He was a gambler, a beer runner, and a bootlegger. For several years he carried a gun while transporting the take from floating crap games on the West Side. Like several of his fellow Rubel gang members, he served briefly in the Navy at the end of World War I. He bragged about knowing the gangster Owney Madden and mob boss Lucky Luciano.
As it turned out, the choice of Stewart would not be a wise one for the gang.
Although the bank was the original target, the trio soon decided to focus on the United States Trucking vehicle. A getaway could go awry on the crowded streets around Surf Avenue; if a bystander should be accidentally killed, the robbers would risk the death penalty.
The company’s large green trucks—seventy-five of them, with windows over an inch thick—were a familiar sight in the metropolitan area. On any given day, armored cars carried a total of $19 million through the streets of New York. Guards, many of them former military men, were required to be crack shots. In that spirit, United States Trucking boasted its own rifle range, and regular practice and recertifications were required. The age limit for guards was thirty, thus excluding paunchy retired police officers.
The guards were not told their routes until the morning they were scheduled to set out, and they often rotated through different crews. They were assigned out of US Trucking’s headquarters at 44 Beaver Street, now offices of the city’s Department of Transportation. The trucks themselves were state of the art. They were fitted with portholes to fire out of and slides that could be pulled down as far as the gun barrel to prevent outsiders from pushing a gun through the opening. A brake in the storage area cut off the ignition if a bandit should make his way into the driver’s compartment; an additional porthole allowed guards in the back of the truck to shoot any hijacker who got into the front. In the end, the technical specifications sounded much more effective than they were.
As the planned heist grew more ambitious and complicated, so did the workforce. Stewart brought in an old partner in crime, Stewart Wallace, a fifty-one-year-old Sing Sing alum with convictions for forgery and grand larceny who had lost a hand in a car accident, earning him the nickname One Arm. The two men met on West 50th Street in Manhattan, just off Broadway. “I asked Wallace whether he’d be interested in a job of taking over the armored car,” Stewart said later. “Wallace said he would be, but that he’d like to look over the armored truck himself.”
The next day, Stewart brought Wallace, McMahon, and Manning together at Coney Island. “We waited around for a while and then went to Surf Avenue and saw the car outside the bank. We saw two men get out of the car and go into the bank with bags of money. We followed the car for several stops.”
Back in Manhattan that evening, the four men gathered at 79th Street and Riverside Drive, just opposite Riverside Park. All felt that the cash looked ready for the plucking. “Manning said, ‘This looks like money from home,’ and the rest of us agreed with him,” Stewart later said. But Manning thought they would need more help and suggested inviting others into the gang. “I said I knew Percy Geary and John Oley, that they were broke, and that I knew they’d like to go along on the job,” Stewart said. Manning hesitated. He knew a little something about Geary and Oley. They were two of the most wanted men in the country.
As the stonemasons were finishing up work on our Beaux-Arts townhouses along Riverside Drive, and as the first owners were preparing to move in, John Joseph Oley was born on January 7, 1901, the son of Irish immigrants who lived on Orange Street in Albany. His father was a machinist for the railroad, which would later employ several of his brothers. At sixteen, after two years in high school, Oley enlisted in the Navy. The date was July 17, 1917, just three months after the United States entered World War I. He served a year and ten days, the last seven months aboard the USS South Carolina, a battleship that spent most of the war cruising up and down the Atlantic seaboard. He was discharged a seaman 2nd class.
There is some evidence that even before turning twenty-one, Oley had sway in the commingled Albany underworld of lowlifes and politicians. Orange Street, where he grew up, was just a block from Sheridan Avenue, home of the Sheridan Avenue Gang, which William Kennedy, in his book O Albany! Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels, described as the redoubt of a “band of Irish toughs who, by legend, guarded their turf rigorously and let no strangers pass through.” Accounts in the Knickerbocker Press describe a head-banging brawl on February 18, 1921, outside a dance at the Union Hall. The affair was billed as a benefit for striking streetcar workers. The roughhousing began inside with the assault on a police officer named Stephen Donnelley. A group of young men forced Donnelley into a coatroom and beat him with brass knuckles. Police officers arrived and cleared out the hall, but soon the brawlers turned on the cops. Four young men were arrested and at their arraignment the next day, “politicians, little and big” showed up in court to support them, the Knickerbocker Press reported. One of the young men was named John Oley.
It’s unclear if this was the same Oley who surfaced in Brooklyn more than a decade later. In the newspaper account, Oley is described as eighteen—he would actually have been twenty—and from Sheridan Avenue, not Orange Street. It’s entirely possible that the Press got both Oley’s age and his address wrong.
In any event, court records show that before his twenty-first birthday, our John Oley had served six months in the Albany County Penitentiary for burglary. Four months later, he was sent down to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta and served four years for larceny. On April 4, 1928, he was arrested for first-degree assault with intent to kill, but was acquitted at trial. The victim was one Joey Green, a small-time racketeer who survived a barrage of gunshots.
By the time of the Rubel job, Oley was a blustering tough guy with a wide chin and thick hair parted in the middle. His face hung down low, and something about it seemed out of proportion, as if the distance from his eyes to the tip of his nose was too short compared to the height of his forehead and the length of his jaw. Officially, he was an independent trucker.
In Albany, Oley lived with his wife, Agnes, a nurse; his brother William; and his father. Francis, another brother, lived on the same block. Francis was younger and appeared to be the straighter arrow. He played basketball at Albany High School and by all accounts was a popular guy there. Nevertheless, according to Kennedy, John and Francis “grew up to become the city’s best-known homegrown criminals.”
Oley, with an associate named Manny Strewl, headed an Albany crew that hijacked trucks, sold bootleg liquor, and robbed banks. Liquor flowed from Canada to New York City, making Albany a key point along the route and a place to reap big profits. Indeed, Oley provided well for his family. According to an FBI report dated August 24, 1937, “He has a very limited education but has given his parents and brothers a large amount of property and money, proceeds obtained through bootlegging.” Despite only a year of high school, Oley was not dumb: he had an IQ of 108.
Oley and Strewl pulled various capers. On an October day in 1928, they impersonated Prohibition agents and tried to shake down a Hoosick Falls hotel owner named Elizabeth Grabowski, threatening to arrest her for serving alcohol unless she came up with $300. Given the number of law enforcement officials corrupted by the mob during Prohibition, it wasn’t an outlandish request. Mrs. Grabowski stayed cool, snuck out of the house, and called the police. Oley and Strewl spent a year in the penitentiary.
Oley�
��s gangster associates in Albany included Percy Geary, nicknamed Angel Face. Geary was skinny, a pencil-necked beanstalk of a man with a narrow face, reddish hair, crossed eyes, and supercilious smile. He had the ability to show a congenial side, but had little education and never held a legitimate job for long. He was born the same year as Oley, 1901, and lived a mile away on Irving Street. Geary was the fifth of eleven children, four of whom had died at young ages. His father, William, had an eighth-grade education and worked as a bricklayer. Geary’s surviving siblings had stable adult lives. The men in the family worked as a contractor, fireman, bricklayer, truck driver, and railroad brakeman. Geary lived in the family home until he was thirty-one, when he married his wife, Josephine.
Geary also spent part of his childhood in New York City. He was a loner, although he attended church and Sunday school often enough to be confirmed and receive first communion. Because of many illnesses and absences, he survived school only through the fifth grade, which he completed at age fourteen. He worked as a messenger boy, a helper at a laundry and a florist, and in beer wholesaling. His largest salary was $50 a week.
Geary’s first recorded arrest, for burglary, came when he was fifteen. At least half a dozen other arrests followed, mostly for burglary, breaking and entering, and gun charges. Before the Rubel job, he had spent eleven years, a third of his life up to that point, in prison.
Documents related to his assignment to the prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1938 described Geary as “a habitual criminal of the most vicious type.”
Archie Stewart may have claimed that bringing Oley and Geary in was his idea. But it is likely that McMahon, the Manhattan gangster, knew the Albany criminals through a key connection: “Legs” Diamond. The Oley brothers and Geary both worked with Jack “Legs” Diamond in the early 1930s.