by Daniel Wakin
Donahue’s address was given as 635 West 48th Street, the location of the garage owned by Marcey Kelly where the wounded McMahon had been brought. No one there admitted to knowing Donahue. That was because John Donahue did not exist, or at least a boat-owning Hell’s Kitchen John Donahue did not exist. Meanwhile, a police detective, starting with the Detroit factory that made the engine, traced the speedboat to a West Side pier, where boaters identified the owner as Thomas Quinn, who occasionally used the pseudonym John Donahue. Quinn was a former rumrunner, the married father of three children, who lived nearby at 501½ West 43rd Street. He had a criminal record that included arrests for illegal possession of a revolver and was a suspect in a saloon shooting.
When the police went to 501½ they discovered that the Quinns had abruptly abandoned the apartment the day after the robbery. The landlord had seized their furniture in place of back rent. Although there was nothing inside the apartment to give the Quinns away, the detectives hit upon an ingenious way to trace their whereabouts. The superintendent of the building knew the names and approximate ages of the couple’s children. Children, generally, go to school. So the detectives checked out records of the Board of Education and located the children in upper Manhattan. That information led to the Quinns’ new address. Detectives staked out the building in question and followed Quinn’s wife when she took the children for walks in Van Cortlandt Park. But she did not lead them to Quinn, who seemed to have vanished. Sources eventually told the detectives that Quinn had relocated to New Jersey, moving from town to town, presumably to avoid capture.
But Quinn could not take the pressure any longer. On November 16, he showed up at police headquarters in the company of a lawyer and offered to clear matters up. He had read about the robbery in the newspapers, including the descriptions of the boats used in the getaway. That information, he said, jogged his memory. Quinn admitted to owning the two boats, and said that Hughes had bought a half-interest in the speedboat. Hughes, he told the investigators, had brought in some unknown men who rented the boats for a fishing expedition. Fearing that he would be implicated, Quinn said, he ran away. Not buying the story, the police arrested Quinn and held him as a material witness. After three months of questioning, Quinn finally admitted knowing that the boats were to be used in a crime, but was steadfast in denying that he took part in the robbery. The police were forced to release him.
Quinn’s acquaintances later told detectives that he had been seen in the company of John Oley. Separately, an informant offered to police that Kress, who had stolen the cars for the heist, was interested in a robbery on the waterfront. Police questioned Kress, who refused to crack and denied any involvement in the Rubel case.
Suspicion quickly fell on local criminals. During Prohibition, the waterfront along Bath Beach was controlled by Frankie Uale and Vannie Higgins, who was Brooklyn’s top crime boss before dying from an affliction of machine gun fire in 1932. But remnants of the Higgins gang were still hanging on, and given the crew’s expertise at running booze-carrying boats across Gravesend Bay and knowledge of secret landing spots along the Long Island and New Jersey coasts, they weren’t a bad bet. Police got nowhere on the Brooklyn front, and rumors flew wildly farther afield.
Three days after the robbery, police in Philadelphia arrested two well-dressed men from Brooklyn driving in an Oldsmobile. They were carrying five crisp $100 bills, $75 in smaller denominations, and a revolver. A third man who came to the police station to secure their release was also arrested, and all three were held on suspicion of being part of the Rubel gang. The suspicion turned out to be false, although one of the men was identified as the husband of Clara Phillips, a woman convicted in California as the “hammer murderess,” a tabloid sensation of the time.
In Keansburg, New Jersey, a man found a money bag and suspicions arose that it was an important clue—until it was pointed out that the bag had the words FEDERAL RESERVE printed on it, which the stolen bags of money did not have.
Coast Guard cutters roamed the coast after a tip came that three men in a boat were seen off Sandy Hook.
New York City investigators continued to scrounge for more evidence, even making fruitless trips around the country. In response to reports that tied one Joseph Burns of Chicago, a man the Times quaintly described as a “Midwestern desperado,” to the Rubel case, John Ryan, a deputy chief inspector, sent a detective out to Chicago to question Burns. The following May, detectives were dispatched to Providence to question members of a gang arrested for a mail truck robbery in Fall River.
Some of the sharpest and most honored detectives on the New York City police force were assigned to the case. They included Detective Francis Phillips, who at twenty-six had become the youngest officer promoted to first-grade detective. Phillips had arrested Willie Sutton, the bank robber of “Because that’s where the money is” fame, not once but twice. He helped capture Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley, a hoodlum responsible for a remarkably large amount of mayhem before being captured at age twenty in a bullet-drenched raid involving more than 100 officers at 90th Street and West End Avenue. He investigated “Legs” Diamond and served as a bodyguard to Mayor Jimmy Walker.
Another star detective leading the case was John Osnato, a gregarious six-foot-three lawman known as Big John who worked out of the Bath Beach police station. Osnato was a major figure in the early decades of the modern New York City police department, a rare Italian to crack the ranks of the heavily Irish American force. A look at his life is worth a digression here.
The young Osnato was a dutiful young man and after graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School around 1908, he followed the wishes of his parents and become an apothecary’s apprentice. The police force beckoned, however, and he soon joined the department. In his early years walking a beat in his old Lower East Side neighborhood, Osnato tracked down runaway horses and lost children, but also mixed with local hoodlums with names like Dopey Benny and Lefty Louie.
Still trying to square familial duties with his ambitions for a more exciting life, Osnato again bent to parents’ will and left the force to join his father’s smelting business as a salesman, a job he held for six years. According to Lawyer in the House, a memoir by his son John Osnato Jr., tragedy struck twice in this period: John Jr. was stricken with polio, and Osnato’s first wife died of complications related to the birth of their son Dudley.
Osnato returned to the force for good in 1918 and was assigned to the Brooklyn waterfront in what is now Sunset Park, just north of Bay Ridge and several neighborhoods away from Bath Beach. Along with the beat patrolman’s tasks—dealing with domestic violence, keeping an eye out for burglaries—he dealt with crimes specific to the waterfront world: bootleggers and foreign sailors robbed by doxies, or prostitutes. Along the way he married again, this time to a fellow member of the police force, Helen Burns.
In 1919, Osnato was promoted to plainclothes detective. As Geary, Oley, McMahon, and other members of the gang were embarking on criminal careers courtesy of Prohibition, Osnato was arresting bootleggers, busting saloons, and investigating gang-related murders. Within several years he became a detective second grade. Throughout, Osnato honed his ability to cultivate informants, an invaluable skill when it came to tracking down the Rubel robbers. The basic principle involved acquiring credit: overlooking minor crimes or releasing the lesser members of a criminal group with the promise that they would help him in the future. It was an investment strategy.
Osnato developed a virtuoso ability to create and cultivate stool pigeons, through a mix of charm and threat. He paid informants. He played the good cop, “rescuing” a suspect from rough handling by his colleagues. With Italian suspects, he spoke in their language. He never met informants in public places or in the police station, and if one was arrested, Osnato would smack him around to avoid betraying his status in front of others.
In 1925, Osnato crossed paths with Al Capone. On Christmas morning of that year, the detective and his colleagues received a tip about a shoo
ting at the Adonis Social Club, a speakeasy near the Gowanus Canal in Red Hook.
The club had been founded in 1917 with the aim of bringing together Italian and Irish veterans of the Great War, although Italians dominated. This laudable goal was set against the backdrop of vicious strife between Italian and Irish mobsters for control of the lucrative Brooklyn waterfront. The Italian gang, precursors of the modern Mafia, was called the Black Hand, and was led by the noted gangster Frankie Yale (Ioele). Their Irish opponents were dubbed the White Hand, commanded by William “Wild Bill” Lovett, a World War I machine gunner who had received a Distinguished Service Cross. The Italian–Irish strife led to more than 100 murders between 1915 and 1925, few of them solved.
Lovett was murdered in 1923—shot and cleavered in the head, his assailant known only by the Sicilian moniker Due Cuteddu, or Two Knives. Lovett’s brother-in-law, Richard Lonergan, took over. Lonergan, known as Peg Leg because of a childhood streetcar accident that severed a limb, was a vicious killer and a hater of Italians whose own mother fatally shot his father in a fight.
Before decamping to Chicago, Capone frequented the Adonis and was said to use its basement as a firing range. Around Christmas of 1925, he had returned to New York with his wife to have doctors operate on his young son for a mastoid bone infection. Capone was at the club that Christmas Eve, where celebrating was underway. Lonergan came in with five confederates. Drunk and abusive, they began shouting rude epithets. When three Irish girls arrived with Italian dates, Lonergan reportedly yelled, “Come back with white men, fer Chrissake!” Gunfire erupted and Lonergan was killed instantly, his loaded .38 pistol undrawn and a toothpick still in his mouth as he lay dead. Two of his men were killed, one found near the piano and the other in the gutter just outside. Ten people, including Capone, were eventually arrested, although the charges were dismissed. But suspicion lingered that Capone had been summoned to finish off Lonergan once and for all. Osnato was there to investigate, and was given credit for arresting Capone.
Yale’s turn came two and a half years later when he was found shot to death in his car in Bay Ridge. No one ever assumed his mantle, though Osnato’s informants fed him a steady supply of tips about the pretenders to the throne.
Osnato took part in a string of other highly publicized cases in the years leading up to the Rubel robbery. In 1927, he was assigned to investigate the holdup of a poker game where the victims were ordered to take off their pants to stop them from interfering with the getaway of the stickup men. In another poker game holdup, Osnato and his partners arrested a suspect in Harlem, induced him to talk, and gathered up six other accomplices. In 1928 he traveled to Wallingford, Connecticut, to arrest a plasterer who fatally shot a Brooklyn woman in her home while she prayed at a private altar. The plasterer blamed the devil.
In 1930, Osnato helped arrest a group of kidnappers in a case that would have parallels to the O’Connell affair up in Albany. This time, the victim was the son of Pasquale Gandolfo, a wealthy baker. The son, twenty-two-year-old Louis Gandolfo, was grabbed, brought to a safe house, and forced to write ransom notes to his father. Pasquale’s brother-in-law served as the go-between, but was in fact in league with the kidnappers. Pasquale paid $7,000 of a $10,000 ransom demand, which was enough to free his son. He reported the kidnapping only after the gang came back a few months later and demanded the $3,000 balance.
A year later, Osnato handled an entirely different sort of case. For months, bombs had been mysteriously exploding at theaters around the Northeast. An explosion at a Brooklyn apartment brought the detective to the scene, where two unemployed stagehands had been injured. They and several others were arrested in a campaign of violence by union members against the theaters.
Later, when one of his fellow rookie cops—William O’Dwyer—was Brooklyn district attorney, Osnato would serve as a leading investigator in the case brought by O’Dwyer’s office to break up Murder, Inc., also known as the Combination—a Brooklyn-based band of killers that industrialized murder for hire on behalf of Jewish and Italian mobsters. It was Osnato who set the dominos of confession falling. The low-level gang member Dukey Maffetore had been arrested in connection with the killing of a fellow gangster. Repeatedly visiting Maffetore in his cell, Osnato spoke to him in Italian and gave him cigarettes. He probed for a weak spot, pointing out that higher-ups in the mob were living well, in contrast to Dukey’s street corner existence. Working his magic, he induced Maffetore to cooperate. Maffetore named a culprit in the killing. Word of the cooperation reached Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, the leader of the Brownsville faction of Murder, Inc. So Reles asked to see O’Dwyer and eventually unburdened himself of a vast amount of information about wrongdoing—including some sixty-three murders.
Osnato and O’Dwyer ended up becoming close friends, living just a few blocks from each other in Brooklyn, according to the younger Osnato. Osnato Sr. had a canny sense of how the system worked, and how favor-trading kept careers moving, advising his son to take a low-paying job as a criminal defense attorney because he knew that his connections to O’Dwyer would bring in clients. Big John had sent his son to seek O’Dwyer’s advice about going to law school. The young Osnato went back to O’Dwyer after graduating from Columbia Law, and O’Dwyer put in a word with an assistant district attorney, Burton Turkus, to help find him a job. As it turned out, both Turkus and O’Dwyer would figure prominently in the Rubel case.
One question loomed over the Rubel heist investigation: Was it an inside job? Probably not, declared William Dempsey, the United States Trucking executive, who insisted that the guards in the armored car were above reproach. The Federal Reserve had also made it difficult for guards to collaborate with thieves primarily because, according to the Fed’s guidelines, armored car guards were not told their specific route until the morning of the work day, when the driver was given a sealed envelope with his orders as the car’s engine revved up.
Dempsey may have publicly attested to the honesty of the guards, but either he did not believe his own words or the company lost confidence in the armored car crew. Three months after the robbery, the company fired Lilienthal without explanation. A father of seven, Lilienthal went public with a lament, telling the Eagle two years later that he was unable to find a job as an armed guard. Not unexpectedly, the man who stared at machine gun barrels and then went in pursuit, firing back at the thieves, turned on his former employer and said he had refused to help in the investigation, declining—a year after the heist—to travel to Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, to view possible suspects.
“After the rotten deal they gave me, I see no reason why I should jeopardize the lives of my seven children and my wife to help those who have had no consideration for me,” he told the newspaper. “I am afraid that if I was to identify anyone my kids might get hurt, or I might be shot in the back or hit over the head coming home some night.” He added ominously, wielding the only weapon available to someone in his position, “I am fast forgetting that there ever was a robbery.”
Over the next few years, rumors continued to surface about the case, including that John Dillinger was responsible, even though he was killed a month before the robbery. The police had so far been unable to catch up with the gang members, but violence had its own way of finding them. Lilienthal’s fears may not have been unreasonable.
CHAPTER 14.
No. 335: “More Potent for Evil”
IT IS EASY TO PASS BY 335 Riverside Drive without noticing its humble elegance and charming slimness. Closer inspection reveals the subtle confidence with which it registers. First, No. 335 is red brick, unlike the grays and beiges of its neighbors. And in contrast to the block’s Beaux-Arts flavor, it is in the Colonial Revival style, unusual in the neighborhood. Fluted columns supporting a balcony stand in front of a classical porch. “The neo-Palladian window on the parlor floor has Ionic columns and pilasters and a scallop-shell arch surmounting its cornice,” the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted approvingly many years later. “Two heavy garlan
ds are set on the wall just above the third-floor windows. The sixth floor still has its original lead-covered dormers although the cornice below them has been removed.”
One of its first residents was an elderly widow named Mary Thornton Donnell, a proper Baptist whose only child died in infancy. She bought the townhouse in 1903 and lived there a scant three years before dying in December in 1906. Her life passed without much notice, except for news reports nine months before her death about a fire at 335 Riverside, the first of at least three major blazes to strike our Seven Beauties. It broke out in the second-floor laundry room, the Times reported, and “Maggie, a sturdy servant girl, carried Mrs. Donnell in her arms down to the first floor.”
An unremarkable story, yes. But digging a little deeper into the Donnell family background yields a fascinating back story that reminds us how much a single spot in New York can draw in some of the central chapters of the nation’s history.
Mary’s father was the plantation owner and slaveholder Colonel John Thornton, and Mary herself owned five slaves in 1860, according to a local account of Clay County, Missouri. Much more is known about her illustrious husband of forty-four years, Robert Donnell, a Riverside Drive resident only by association, but whose own history begins in the earliest years of the republic.
Donnell had been born on December 13, 1816, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the grandson of a Revolutionary War veteran. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he headed west, to Missouri, settling in Rock House Prairie and a junior partnership in a general store at age twenty-one. So began his travels through various retail businesses and later wholesale firms. He landed in St. Joseph in 1843, the year the city was officially founded. St. Joseph became a place for passing through—for Easterners headed for the Gold Rush and for Pony Express Riders heading both east and west. (One of the arrivals was Jesse James, who moved to St. Joseph in 1881 and was shot dead at his home by an associate, Robert Ford. The home is now a museum. You can see the bullet hole.)