American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  To an outside observer, this might have seemed like a high-risk proposition, given that most of the victims were people who knew Spillane. In some cases, they might even have lived down the block or around the corner from Spillane’s own West 50th Street apartment. These people could easily have ratted to the police.

  But Spillane knew that was unlikely. He was relying on something called the West Side Code, a tradition so sacred that even noncriminal types saw that it was adhered to. Simply stated, it went something like this: Under no circumstances does anyone talk to the cops. To do so would mean certain castigation within the community. It might also mean something very bad could happen to a member of your family.

  The West Side Code wasn’t based on any criminal impulse, per se. It was more a sign of solidarity against outside forces; a way to show loyalty and “build character.” But over the years the gangsters were able to make the Code their own, and people like Mickey Spillane always knew they could bank on it.

  Spillane never really liked the kidnap-for-ransom racket, unless it involved other mobsters. That was good business. But to kidnap somebody’s uncle or cousin and hold him at gunpoint was uncivilized. As soon as he was in a position to give it up, he did so, and put out the word to all his underlings that kidnapping neighborhood people was now forbidden.

  But Mickey Spillane could not rewrite his past. Like all the prominent Hell’s Kitchen gangsters who had preceded him, he’d had to do some pretty nasty things to get where he was. And some people just weren’t going to let him forget about it.…

  It had been a kidnapping not unlike all the others. Years before the Canelstein/Morales shooting, John Coonan, a neighborhood accountant who ran a tax office on West 50th Street, was snatched late one night and taken to the White House Bar. He was held there and pistol-whipped by Spillane and a few others. After a couple hours, a payment was made and he was let go.

  After the kidnapping, Coonan was willing to let things slide. But his son Jimmy was not. For years, Jimmy would remember the humiliation his father had suffered at the hands of Mickey Spillane. It would fester inside like an illness, and he would swear time and time again that he would never be a victim like his father was. Never.

  Given Coonan’s strong feelings on the matter, it was a testament to his patience that he was, for the most part, willing to lie in wait. Oh, there were daily harassments, like machine gun fire from rooftops and occasional shootouts in the street. But that was just to prove he couldn’t be pushed around. Coonan knew Spillane could not be removed overnight. He was too popular, too well-connected. If he removed Spillane now, no one would see him as the natural successor. He was much too young. What he had to do was make a name for himself first; muscle in on as much of Spillane’s territory as he could; establish important alliances of his own, possibly with the Italians.

  Coonan knew this would take time. But he was willing to build slowly to achieve his larger ambitions.

  In the meantime, the plan was to fuck with Mike Spillane as much as possible.

  * * *

  Bounded on the south by 34th Street, on the north by 59th, and stretching from 8th Avenue west to the Hudson River, few neighborhoods have contributed more to the saga of New York City street life than Hell’s Kitchen. Along the neighborhood’s eastern flank stands Times Square, the city’s world-renowned theater district, with its staggering array of Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres, restaurants, and movie palaces—not to mention a thriving drug, pornography, and prostitution trade. To the west, the Hudson River and the waterfront, once the most lucrative cargo and passenger port in the United States and an unending source of income for racketeers.

  A number of popular legends concerning the origin of the name “Hell’s Kitchen” have now become part of the city’s permanent record. Some say it came from a German couple named Heil who owned a diner popular with local dockworkers in the post-Civil War years. Somehow Heil’s name was mispronounced as Hell, with Heil’s Kitchen thus becoming Hell’s Kitchen.

  Another has it that two Irish cops, one a veteran and the other a rookie, stood watching a small riot on West 39th Street. “This place is hell itself,” the rookie is supposed to have said.

  “Hell’s a mild climate,” responded the veteran. “This is Hell’s Kitchen, no less.”

  Whatever the origins of its name, there have always been certain inalienable traditions in Hell’s Kitchen, traditions that grew out of the neighborhood’s reputation as a cauldron of urban activity. At their best, these traditions have produced the cream of a proud and thriving metropolis. Doctors, priests, politicians, scientists, judges, athletes. People who used their working-class roots as the foundation for a life of compassion, service, and achievement.

  But over the decades, as Hell’s Kitchen was buffeted by forces that would shape and reshape the city, the neighborhood became known for another kind of tradition—a tradition of gangsterism. This was the tradition inherited by Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Spillane and the others who now found themselves caught up in the Coonan/Spillane Wars. It was a rich tradition, proudly cultivated by successive generations of tough guys, with a lineage rooted deep in the soil of New York City’s past.

  At the turn of the century, the area was largely an Irish and German enclave. Its most dominant physical features were the noisy 9th Avenue elevated railway, which carried more passengers than any railway line in the city, and the Hudson River Railroad, which carried freight and livestock along 11th Avenue, or “Death Avenue” as it was known to most West Siders because of the dust, congestion, and dangerous rail traffic.

  In 1910, a privately funded report by a group of social workers painted a graphic picture of the area at its most wretched. Hell’s Kitchen, they wrote, is characterized by “dull, square, monotonous ugliness, much dirt, and a great deal of despair.” Their account included a description of what life was like for young kids, who spent most of their time on the bustling cobblestoned streets hawking newspapers, fighting, picking pockets, swimming in the Hudson River, or flying pigeons from tenement roofs.

  There was a closeness within the community, however, that evaded the social workers. Because of their proximity to the docks and railroad lines, the people of Hell’s Kitchen felt as if they were constantly under siege from transient forces, and they reacted accordingly. Those who stayed put cultivated a fierce loyalty to the neighborhood as protection against the outside world. The area’s most prominent social institutions—the church, the political clubhouse, the neighborhood saloon—were more than just gathering places. They were fortresses of stability in the midst of what was largely a migrant community.

  Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, by far the most common form of activity for a young male was involvement in some sort of gang. Of all the gangs in the city, those on the West Side of Manhattan were known to be the most audacious. At night, local cops had to walk the beat in “strong-arm squads” of four or five to avoid being bushwhacked by hoodlums. Street gangs like the Parlor Mob, the Gorillas, and the Tenth Avenue Gang flourished amongst the poverty and urban squalor so characteristic of the neighborhood.

  The most powerful of the early Hell’s Kitchen gangs was the Gophers, so named because they usually met in tenement basements. At their peak in 1907, they were believed to have as many as 500 members. Primarily an Irish gang, they burglarized shops along the gaslit streets at night, ruled the saloons and pool halls, and staged frequent raids on the docks and the Hudson River Railroad, later renamed the New York Central Railroad.

  The Gophers were themselves a throwback to an earlier era of gangsterism when, in the late nineteenth century, New York City was at the mercy of nearly a dozen ruthless street gangs concentrated in the notorious Five Points area of lower Manhattan. Comprised largely of Irish immigrants who had fled their homeland during and after the Great Potato Famine, the Five Points gangs staged outlandish daytime robberies, engaged in nighttime gang wars and remained the bane of law enforcement throughout the latter part of the late 1800s
. The Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, and the Kerryonians were known and feared, but the most violent of all were the Whyos, led by the likes of Red Rocks Farrell, Googy Corcoran, and Baboon Connolly.

  Neither the Five Points gangs nor the Gophers engaged in what would later be commonly referred to as organized crime. The turn-of-the-century gangs were undisciplined and relatively disorganized. There were none of the lucrative rackets that would come later in the Twenties with the passing of the 18th Amendment, otherwise known as Prohibition. Occasionally the Gophers could rent themselves out as bullyboys or enforcers for various political candidates, but much of their time was spent fighting among themselves—an Irish proclivity which amazed and appalled the less violent Dutch and German settlers of the era.

  The Gophers were to continue in the tradition of the Five Points gangs, reigning over Hell’s Kitchen for twenty-odd years in all manner of professional mayhem. Although no single member was as powerful or well known as Monk Eastman, the most prominent gangster of the era, they nonetheless established a pantheon of memorable psychopaths.

  There was Happy Jack Mullraney, who had a partial paralysis of his facial muscles that made it appear he was always laughing. Mullraney was known to be very sensitive about his disfigurement. One night he was in a saloon on 10th Avenue and he said something that irked Paddy the Priest, the saloon’s owner and a longtime friend of Mullraney’s. Paddy sneered, “Why don’t you try laughing out of the other side of your face, Happy Jack?” Mullraney pulled out a revolver and put a bullet in Paddy’s skull.

  There was One Lung Curran, known for his occasional withdrawals to a tubercular ward at Bellevue Hospital. Curran’s girlfriend once complained she didn’t have a warm coat for the winter, so One Lung promptly went out, blackjacked a policeman and relieved him of his jacket. After Curran’s girlfriend had it tailored, other women in the neighborhood expressed envy. Their boyfriends reacted accordingly, and before long the streets of Hell’s Kitchen were populated with coatless policemen.

  The Gophers were known to be so turbulent and so fickle that very few of their leaders held that distinction for more than a few months. Nonetheless, they remained a force to be reckoned with until 1910, when the New York Central Railroad organized a special security contingent to take action against them. Many of the railroad’s recruits were former policemen who had taken beatings at the hands of the Gophers and were now looking to get even.

  The Railroad staged a week-long assault on the gang, beating and harassing known members, drastically depleting their forces, and effectively establishing the railway yards on 60th and 30th streets as off limits. Thus weakened, the Gophers spent more time defending themselves against rival gangs like the Hudson Dusters than they did bothering the law.

  During the Prohibition years, what was left of the Gophers was resurrected by the infamous Owney “the Killer” Madden. Born in Liverpool of Irish parentage, Madden made it through his turbulent youth (five arrests for murder by the time he was twenty-three) to become a gangster of distinction. He amassed his power through control of the bootleg liquor and rum-running trade, which became a booming enterprise in Hell’s Kitchen. Speakeasies abounded throughout the district, and any late-night convoy of trucks loaded with booze inevitably made its way up 10th Avenue towards one of the many West Side warehouses.

  Unlike the earlier generation of Gophers, who were mainly back-alley toughs who preferred to stay that way, Madden aspired to the highest levels of New York society. His nights were usually spent making the rounds at local speakeasies and clubs, where he was known as the Duke of the West Side. An average evening might be spent at his own Winona Club, or at one of the swankier West Side dance halls like the Eldorado or the Hotsy Totsy Club, owned by Jack “Legs” Diamond.

  Madden was the first gangster to come out of Hell’s Kitchen with anything approximating a business sense. In fact, he seemed to have his fingers in everything—bootleg liquor, breweries, nightclubs, taxicabs, laundries, and cloak and cigarette concessions. Eventually, he owned a controlling interest in the highly prosperous Cotton Club in Harlem and a piece of the prizefighter Primo Carnera, who won the heavyweight crown in 1933.

  With such a lucrative base of income, it was only a matter of time before Madden’s reign would be challenged. For years, he’d been able to amicably share his bootleg liquor business with an uptown operator named Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz. But he didn’t seem to have as much luck with some of his own Irish underlings.

  Once, Little Patsy Doyle sought to take over Madden’s operation while Madden was convalescing in the hospital following a late-night shooting at the Arbor Dance Hall on West 52nd Street. When Madden was discharged, he decided to use Patsy as an example. At Madden’s insistence, Doyle’s girlfriend lured him to a saloon at 41st Street and 8th Avenue, where Patsy was shot three times, stumbled through the swinging doors, and died in the gutter outside.

  There were other, far more substantial threats. The biggest challenge of all came from yet another Hell’s Kitchen Irishman with a thick mane of red hair and an engaging—some would say “goofy”—smile. If Madden was the very model of the gentleman gangster, a shining example of a Hell’s Kitchen street tough who had risen above his station, then Vincent Coll was his antithesis. Known in the underworld as the Mad Mick and later by the press as the Mad Dog, Coll was a throwback to the earliest days of the Gophers, when gangsters were doomed to die in the very streets that spawned them.

  Born in County Donegal, Coll was brought to New York at an early age and raised in a cold-water flat in the Bronx by his mother; she died of pneumonia when he was seven. After a prolonged stay at the infamous Mt. Loretto orphanage in Staten Island, Coll went to work for Dutch Schultz before he was even old enough to shave.

  At first, Coll’s gleeful ruthlessness made him a valued enforcer. He was nineteen when police charged him with having killed a speakeasy owner who refused to buy Schultz’s booze. He was eventually acquitted of the charge, probably through Schultz’s influence.

  Before long, the Dutchman started to realize Coll was more trouble than he was worth. After Coll pulled a robbery at the Sheffield Farms dairy in the Bronx without his authorization, Schultz upbraided the young gangster. Rather than back down, as might have been expected, Coll had the audacity to demand that Schultz cut him in as an equal partner.

  “I don’t take in nobody as partners with me,” Schultz said. “You’re an ambitious punk, but you take a salary or nothin’. Take it or leave it.”

  “Okay,” said Coll, with his customary toothy grin. “I’m leaving it.”

  Over the following months, Coll proceeded to make himself a major pain in the ass to both Schultz and Madden, hiring out as a free-lance assassin and trying to muscle in on everybody’s territory. On June 15, 1931, he kidnapped Madden’s closest associate, Big Frenchie de Mange, in front of the Club Argonaut on West 50th Street. Then, in July, just weeks after Madden paid Coll a $35,000 ransom for de Mange, Coll was threatening to kidnap Madden himself.

  At the same time, Coll was waging war against Schultz—hijacking beer trucks, trashing speakeasies, and moving in on the Harlem policy games, one of Schultz’s most lucrative rackets. As his coup de grace, Coll targeted Joey Rao, Schultz’s prime mover in East Harlem, for execution.

  On the afternoon of July 28, 1931, Rao was lounging in front of his headquarters, the Helmar Social Club on East 107th Street. Accompanied by two bodyguards, Rao had a pocketful of pennies which he was distributing to a group of neighborhood children who had gathered. A touring car came around the corner and opened fire on Rao, his protectors, and the children. When the fusillade was over, a five-year-old kid lay dead on the sidewalk and four other children had been wounded. Rao and his bodyguards escaped without a scratch.

  Everyone in town knew Coll was behind the shooting. Newspaper headlines the next day christened him “the Baby Killer.” People on both sides of the law were calling for retribution. Both Madden and Schultz put out a $25,000 co
ntract on Coll, the psychotic “Mad Dog” who was giving the underworld a bad name. Columnist Walter Winchell reported that, “Five planes brought dozens of machine guns from Chicago Friday … Local banditti have made one hotel a virtual arsenal and several hot spots are ditto because Master Coll is giving them the headache.”

  Finally, on the night of February 8, 1932, the inevitable came to pass. At a drugstore on West 23rd Street near 8th Avenue, Coll was in a phone booth carrying on a protracted conversation. An automobile with four men pulled up to the curb outside. Three of the men deployed themselves around the drugstore entrance, while the fourth, carrying a Thompson submachine gun, entered the store. Coll was still jabbering away when the gunman raised his tommy gun and let loose with a short burst of fire through the glass. After correcting his aim, the gunman fired another short burst, then another. He looked in the booth, where baby-faced Mad Dog Coll lay nearly sawed in half amidst blood and shattered glass. Then he strolled out of the drugstore.

  It was Owney Madden who Coll had been talking to on the phone. Later reports suggested that the elder gangster held Coll on the line until the gunmen were able to arrive. If this was true, it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that one child of Hell’s Kitchen would eliminate another as part of a bloody battle for control of the neighborhood’s bounty.

  With Coll out of the picture, things quieted down on the West Side. But by this time, it hardly mattered. The Twenty-first Amendment was passed in 1933, repealing Prohibition. The speakeasies were all closing down and the big dance halls were soon to follow. Within a few months of Coil’s shooting, Madden was imprisoned on a parole violation, where he would languish for twelve months even though newspaper stories claimed he had offered a million-dollar bribe to the state parole board. Upon release, he retired to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he married the postmaster’s daughter and ran what amounted to a resort town for mobsters on the lam.