Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  The two partners realised they could make far more money if they started selling beer to their rivals. Any speakeasy owners who declined to buy their beer were threatened into submission, with the exception of two brothers Joe and John Rock. They refused to be pushed around and although John, decided to give in, his hotheaded Irish brother refused to play ball with the gangsters. Members of the Noe/Shultz gang kidnapped Joe, took him to one of their warehouses and hung him by the thumbs on a meat hook. While he was suspended, Schultz allegedly smeared a piece of gauze with the discharge from a gonorrhoea infection and had it taped over Joe’s eyes. The Rock family paid the gang $35,000 for his release, but not long afterwards Joe reportedly lost his sight.

  Their reputation spread, which made it a lot easier for Noe and Schultz to take control of the beer trade in the Bronx. Around this time, Schultz started to hire new muscle for their operation, including a group of toughs called Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll and his brother Peter, Abe ‘Bo’ Weinberg and his brother George, Larry Carney, ‘Fatty’ Walsh and Edward ‘Fats’ McCarthy. With the extra manpower and strength the Schultz/Noe partnership were ready to move on to bigger things. They started operating in Manhattan, which placed them in direct competition with Schultz’s former associate, Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond.

  clash with the diamond gang

  It didn’t take long before the Diamond gang retaliated to the new opposition on their patch. On the morning of October 15, 1928, at about seven o’clock in the morning, Diamond’s hardmen ambushed Joey Noe outside the Chateau Madrid nightclub on Sixth Avenue. Despite the fact that Noe was wearing a bulletproof vest, a garment which had become part of his everyday attire, bullets ripped through his chest. Before Noe collapsed he managed to fire a few shots of his own and witnesses reported seeing a blue Cadillac hit a parked car and then speed away after losing one of its doors. When the police found the car about one hour later, the body of a Diamond gang gunman, Louis Weinberg, was lying dead in the back seat.

  Noe was rushed to hospital where, despite efforts to save his life, he died three weeks later on November 21, weighing a mere 40 kg (90 lb). Noe’s death hit Shultz hard, and he was bent on revenge.

  On November 4, 1928, Arnold Rothstein, who was the financier of the New York underworld, was shot in the foyer of the Park Central Hotel. Although the common belief was that Rothstein was murdered because he had evaded a gambling debt, in the underworld there were rumours that Schultz may have been involved because of Rothstein’s friendship with Diamond.

  Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond’s enemies finally caught up with him on December 18, 1931. He was shot three times in the back of the head on the day he had been sentenced to four years in jail on kidnapping charges. There has been much speculation as to who was responsible for the murder, including Dutch Shultz, the Oley Brothers (local thugs) and the Albany Police Department.

  vincent ‘mad dog’ cool

  Shortly after the death of Rothstein, Vincent Coll broke away from the Schultz gang, taking with him about a dozen gangsters, including his own brother Peter. They formed their own gang in the Bronx and Harlem, and Coll’s first retaliation against his old boss, Schultz, was to gun down two of his lieutenants, Slats Bologna and Franka Amato. The following day Peter Coll was murdered as revenge.

  Vincent Coll continued to ambush Schultz’s trucks and killed several more of his men. In his heavy-handed way to get at Schultz, Coll also managed to kill several innocent bystanders, including a five-year-old boy. Because Coll did not have the business acumen to take over the underworld beer industry, he decided to try and make money by kidnapping. At that time kidnapping was not a federal offence, and it was not unknown for gangs to kidnap famous personalities or rival boot­leggers to reap large ransoms. Coll was very successful in his kidnapping business and earned himself a lot of money, but eventually Schultz had had enough of his rival and he posted a $50,000 reward for his murder.

  Coll was eventually murdered by a member of the Owney ‘The Killer’ Madden’s gang. Madden was a leading Irish gangster in Manhattan during the time of the Prohibition. He also rang the Cotton Club and was a leading boxing promoter in the 1930s. A gunman, using a sub-machine gun, fired at Coll while he made a call from a telephone booth inside a drug store. Eighteen bullets penetrated his body, almost cutting his torso in half. The remainder of Coll’s gang were either killed or imprisoned within a period of six months.

  independent operator

  With Noe gone, Schultz was now on his own, and with no partner and Diamond out of the way, he was able to move freely in the New York underworld as an independent operator. When Prohibition ended in 1933, Schultz realised that he had to find a new way of earning a living and decided to turn to the numbers racket.

  The end of Prohibition did nothing to slow Shultz down. If anything, he tightened his control over the unions and the numbers racket. He also increased his influence at Tammany Hall, which was the Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in controlling the courts, the police, in fact just about everything in New York city. Schultz literally had a free hand at everything, and raids and arrests became a thing of the past.

  Eventually, when the local authorities failed to do anything about the immense power that Schultz seemed to have, the Federal Government decided to step in. In 1933, Shultz was indicted for tax evasion, but this did little to curtail his activities. The New York police refused to pursue him and for two years no one made a serious threat at having him arrested.

  When J. Edgar Hoover took over as Director of the FBI, he named Schultz as ‘Public Enemy Number One’. Rather than face the same fate as John Dillinger – he was shot by two FBI agents – Schultz decided to surrender.

  schultz is pushed out

  Schultz’s trial for tax evasion started in early 1934. Aware that Al Capone and his brother had recently been brought down by the relatively new charge of evasion, Schultz decided to play his trump card. He sent his lawyer to the Inland Revenue with $100,000 in cash as a settlement offer. However, the Inland Revenue refused the money saying that Schultz owed them a far greater amount. After a mistrial, the judge set a second date and Schultz used some of his lesser-known associates to try and influence the jury. They tried to convince the members of the jury that Schultz was really the ‘good guy’ who was being persecuted by a corrupt government. This ploy seemed to work in Schultz’s favour, and one week later the jury returned with a ‘not guilty’ verdict.

  Schultz’s business had suffered badly during his absence. Added to this, many other leading New York gang members had begun to muscle in on his rackets. They did their best to keep Schultz out of New York, so he decided to set up a new base in Newark, New Jersey. Along with his three closest associates, Bernard Rosenkrantz, Otto Berman and Abe Landau, Schultz held regular business meetings in a back room at the Palace Chop House on Park Street. Unfortunately, this routine made the men easy targets.

  The three men were ambushed on the night of October 23, 1935. The men chosen to carry out the hit were members of the infamous Murder, Inc. – Charles ‘Charlie the Bug’ Workman and the driver, Emanuel ‘Mendy’ Weiss. Although there are varying stories on what exactly happened that night, the general consensus was that Workman walked into the Palace Chop House while Weiss provided cover. Workman walked the length of the bar and pushed open the door to the men’s room. Inside was a man, who he mistook as one of Schultz’s bodygards. He opened fire and the man immediately dropped to the floor. Workman then went to the backroom where Schultz was holding his meeting and fired at the three men sitting round the table. When he realised that Schultz wasn’t among them, it dawned on him that he must have been the one that he shot in the men’s room.

  All four men were taken to Newark City Hospital. Berman was the first to die, approximately four-and-a-half hours after the shooting. Landau, died next from a severed artery in his neck. Schultz, whose wound caused massive internal bleeding and an infection, died at around 8.30 p.m., at the relatively young age of thi
rty-three. Rosenkrantz survived the longest, dying at 3.20 a.m. on October 25.

  Before Schultz died, he lingered in a state of fevered delirium. As police questioned him about his killers, he rambled incoherently in gangster jargon. Saying things like:

  Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.

  Oh, oh; dog biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy.

  We don't owe a nickel; fold it! Instead, fold it against him. I am a pretty good pretzeler.

  The surreal nature of his ramblings inspired a number of writers to devote their works to the famous Dutch Schultz.

  As for the killers, they fled. When the police later found the abandoned car, there were too few clues to identify the culprits and they simply moved on to another case. Eventually, in 1941, Workman was identified as Schultz’s killer by an informer by the name of Abe Reles. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment and parolled in 1964.

  No one really knows for certain who ordered the killing of Dutch Schultz. It was most probably Lucky Luciano and the syndicate who simply wanted him out of the way. Schultz was becoming a major threat to the underworld because he had approached them with plans to kill his nemesis, the US Attorney, Thomas Dewey. While a few of the mob saw advantages in his proposal, the majority shot him down in flames, fearing that their entire world would collapse around their heads if Schultz got his way. When Schultz left the meeting he was furious, claiming the commission tried to steal his rackets while he was being held in custody and was convinced that they were trying to get him arrested once again. After he left, Murder, Inc. head, Louis Lepke, was asked to handle the situation, which of course is exactly what he did.

  Mickey Cohen

  It is fair to say that Mickey Cohen walked in the shadow of Bugsy Siegel. While Siegel comfortably dined with Hollywood’s elite, Cohen broke into their houses and robbed them of their wealth. In many ways they were opposite sides of the same coin. Although they shared many of the same likes and dislikes, Siegel could hide his darker side while the violent and less-refined side of Cohen’s persona kept breaking the surface. After Siegel was punished by the mob for his Flamingo project, Cohen flourished as a muscle man on the West Coast. He was shot at, bombed, arrested, imprisoned and constantly threatened and yet he still bounced back. Although Mickey Cohen may not be remembered as a top-notch gangster, he was efficient and ruthless at his job and proved himself to be a cunning mastermind in the world of organised crime.

  born to crime

  Cohen was born on July 29, 1914, in Brownville, New York. It was a tough area full of poverty and life among the slums taught the young Cohen to use his fists to survive. When he was six years old, Cohen’s family moved to Los Angeles opening a drugstore in Boyle Heights. During the years of the Prohibition, Cohen’s older brother ran a small-time gin mill in the back of the drugstore, and Mickey used to be his delivery boy. It was because of this moon-shine operation, that Cohen had his first brush with the law, being arrested when he was just nine years old. However, his brother had connections with the underworld and nothing came of the charge.

  Cohen loved the feel of money in his pocket and he soon learned that crime ‘does pay’. However, he knew that if he wanted to stay in the world of bootlegging, he would need to know how to look after himself – that was how he first discovered his passion for boxing. Although boxing was illegal in California at the time, he managed to find ways of getting into backroom fights. His success not only earned him cash but also respect, and Cohen decided to pursue a career in boxing. With the blessing of his older brother, but keeping it a secret from his mother, Cohen moved back to the East Coast to become a prize fighter.

  Boxing opened up a whole new world for the young teenager when he met some of New York’s well known gangsters such as Tommy Dioguardi, Johnny Dio and Owney Madden. Cohen was impressed with the respect given to these men and decided one day he would like to be included in their world of crime. Cohen’s career as a boxer ended abruptly when he was knocked senseless by featherweight world champion, Tommy Paul. Aware that he did not have the skill to survive on the professional circuit, Cohen made up his mind to leave the fighting world.

  Cohen found himself with few choices with regards to his future. With no education and only gangsters for friends, Cohen resorted to the one job he knew – hustling. What he didn’t realise, however, was that the places he was robbing were controlled by the mobs, and he was starting to step on the toes of the big boys. Luckily for him, the gangsters saw a raw talent in the young boy, and he was moved to Chicago to work as an enforcer for an East Coast mob.

  Cohen’s first taste of being part of the world of organised crime was when he met Al Capone. Capone was impressed by the young man’s spunk and offered him a job in his outfit. Under the supervision of Capone’s young brother, Mattie, Cohen started running illegal card games and crap tables. However, this taught him an important lesson that playing with the big boys was a dangerous game. After an assassination attempt, Cohen was forced to move to Cleveland, where he worked with Lou Rochkopf, a close friend of Meyer Lansky and Benny Siegel. However, Cohen never really settled in Cleveland as he was used to the action of Chicago, so he was sent to Los Angeles to work with Siegel.

  building an empire

  It is fair to say that Los Angeles was way behind in terms of organised crime. So the combination of Siegel and Cohen with their bright young minds soon transformed the area with their control over gambling, drugs, unions, racketeering and politics. They turned it into a lucrative operation and Mickey Cohen flourished.

  Jack Dragna, who had basically been running things before Cohen and Siegel’s intervention, hated playing second fiddle. He had reluctantly accepted Lucky Luciano’s admonition that Siegel and Cohen were there to take control, but when Siegel headed off to Nevada to pursue his dream to build The Flamingo, Dragna soon found the courage to feud quite openly with Cohen.

  When Siegel was assassinated in 1947, Cohen was primed to take over, and Dragna was furious and decided to take on his rival. Cohen at this time was mixing with the cream of Hollywood. He made friends with politicians, studio bosses and actors including Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. However, when he wasn’t rubbing shoulders with them, he was exploiting them and often blackmailed the stars who had sordid secrets they would rather not have revealed. Even J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI was aware of Cohen’s sideline, which kept him feared and respected by many of Hollywood’s film fraternity.

  However, his new glamorous associates could do nothing to stop the wrath of his rival Dragna, who made an all-out effort to get rid of Cohen. Whether it was just luck or Dragna’s incompetence, Cohen miraculously survived several attempts on his life.

  The first time Dragna’s men hit was when Cohen was driving towards home. As bullets sprayed his Cadillac, Cohen managed to lie on his side but still steer the car up Wilshire Boulevard without actually hitting anything. He escaped on that occasion with only a few cuts from the flying glass.

  Two attempts to blow up his house failed, but a sharpshooter was a little more successful when he succeeded in hitting Cohen in the arm while he ate in a crowded late-night diner. The shot tore away much of the flesh of Cohen’s arm, but Neddy Herbert, a lifelong friend, was not so lucky and was killed in the shoot-out.

  Another assassin tried to take Cohen’s life as he bent down to examine a scratch on his new Cadillac. As he did so a bullet whizzed past his ear, but the gunman didn’t hang around long enough for a second shot.

  By now the ongoing war between Cohen and Dragna had attracted the attention of the Kefauver Committee, headed by Estes Kefauver. It was the first committee set up to try and fight and expose organised crime. Cohen was subpoenaed to testify before the committee and was criticised severely by New Hampshire Senator, Charles Tobey. Ironically, the final charge against Cohen was evasion of income tax and he was sentenced to four years in federal prison.

  mickey and lana turner

  While Cohen was b
anged up on McNeil Island, a close friend of his, Johnny Stompanato, began dating a famous actress by the name of Lana Turner. Stompanato was a handsome, former marine, while Turner was beautiful and wealthy but exceptionally high maintenance. She was an alcoholic with a reputation for whirlwind romances and had worked her way through several husbands. Johnny and Lana had a tempestuous relationship, attracted to each other like moths to a flame, an attraction which eventually ended in tears.

  Cohen had no time for Lana and he wasn’t afraid to make his feelings known. One morning the phone rang and he was told that Johnny had been killed by Lana’s daughter, Cheryl Crane. Cohen was shocked, but the more he thought about it, the more he disbelieved the story he had been told.

  Although the anger between Cohen and Lana simmered slightly, she still let it be known that she was scared he might seek revenge. Cohen was angry about the bad press his friend Johnny was receiving and got his own back by sending Lana’s love letters to the newspapers. Although Cohen was only trying to show the true relationship between Lana and Johnny, his plan backfired when it appeared as if he was trying to blackmail the actress. Cheryl Crane was found not guilty and Cohen was angry that the real killer, probably rival gangsters, had got clean away.

  locked away again

  Cohen was found guilty of tax evasion once again in 1961. He spent fifteen years in the infamous Alcatraz prison in San Francisco and then he was transferred to a prison in Atlanta, Georgia. He suffered a vicious attack from a psychotic inmate, after which he was left partially paralysed and spent the remainder of his time in the prison hospital at Springfield, Missouri.