Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (30 page)

By the dawn of the 1930’s, as the nation began its descent into the harsh realities of the Great Depression, the word on the kite was that the underworld was in transition. The Irish were out; Jews and Italians were in. Irish American bootleggers looking to make a buck increasingly ran up against a brick wall. Some never even made it to the starting gate.

One such hoodlum was a young punk named Francis “Two Gun” Crowley, who probably hoped to be a bootlegger one day. In February 1931, he was little more than a bank robber and petty stick-up man, though he had shot and wounded a detective who tried to arrest him during a running gun battle in Manhattan. Crowley got away, and, a short time later, he turned up in New Rochelle, Westchester County, where he held up a bank at high noon. His crime spree continued over the next month, until May 6, 1931, when he shot and killed a Long Island cop who chanced upon him and his sweetheart necking in a car.

“Francis Crowley…who glories in the nickname of Two Gun Frank and is described by the police as the most dangerous criminal at large was hunted through the city last night,” began a May 9 article in the
Daily News
. Authorities in New York didn’t need to look far. Francis Crowley, a baby-faced kid who stood five foot three and barely weighed 145 pounds, had commandeered the apartment of a former girlfriend at 303 West Ninetieth Street, where he barricaded himself with a small arsenal (while his current girlfriend hid under a bed). There he waited, as a massive gathering of police and spectators filled the streets below.

When two detectives tried to enter the apartment via the building hallway, Crowley appeared with two guns blazing. “Come and get me, coppers!” he shouted while firing.

The detectives were forced to retreat.

Crowley then turned on the cops in the street. “I’m up here! I’m waiting for you!” he called down from a fifth-floor window, before opening fire and sending cops and onlookers scattering for cover.

The Siege of West Ninetieth Street continued for hours. At one point, police cut a hole in the roof and dropped canisters of tear gas into the apartment. Crowley fired shots through the ceiling, grabbed the canisters and tossed them into the street. Smoke clouded the area. The staccato sound of machine gun fire echoed through the streets; police hid behind their vehicles as bullets rained down from above.

Between volleys of gunfire, police and onlookers alike heard Crowley’s demented laughter at the destruction. “You ain’t gonna take me alive, coppers!” he called out the window.

Finally, a heavily-armed squad of police commandos stormed the apartment and wrestled Crowley to the floor. The crazed gangster had been shot four times, but he did not die. He was rushed to the hospital, where he would recover from his wounds to face criminal prosecution.

The saga of Two Gun Crowley was a media sensation. Over the radio and in the city’s newspapers, Crowley was often described as a “mad Irish gunman” with “the face of an altar boy.” The characterization was an example of what was becoming a common stereotype of the era—that of the genetically reckless Irish gangster who was always willing to take on the System. Never mind that Crowley was possibly not even Irish (his German immigrant mother had given him up for adoption at birth; “Crowley” was the name of his adopted family). But with his irrational brand of courage, boyish good looks, and steely blue eyes, he fit the stereotype to a T.
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Owney Madden must have read the newspaper accounts of Two Gun Crowley’s rampage with a sense of relief. Although the crazy young hoodlum may have been identified as Irish, he was not in any way affiliated with the Combine and therefore could not be seen as Madden’s responsibility. Such was not the case with another “crazed Irish gunman” making headlines on a near-daily basis, Vincent “the Mad Mick” Coll.

It was Madden who had brought Coll into the organization in the first place. Back in 1926, when the kid was just seventeen years old, Owney introduced the young gangster to Dutch Schulz, sometimes referred to as “the Dutchman.” Vincent and his older brother Peter had formed a gang made up of the usual assortment of Irishmen, Italians, and Jews. Madden thought they might be useful to the Dutchman, who was then expanding his bootlegging operations into the Bronx. Coll’s reputation as a fearless killer was immediately put to use by Shultz and others as well. Sometime in 1930, unbeknownst to Madden, Vincent Coll was hired by the Maranzano family to bump off Lucky Luciano. Coll was on his way to kill Luciano when the hit was called off. He got to keep the $25,000 advance payment, and the incident secured his reputation as one of the more noteworthy hitmen for hire in the New York underworld.

In Vincent Coll, Madden may have seen something of himself or at least an image of the kind of doomed gangster he might have become had he not risen above his station. Born in the tiny Gaelic-speaking village of Gweedore, in County Donegal, Coll was brought to New York as an infant in 1909 and lived in a cold-water tenement in the Bronx. His family quickly became mired in a cycle of poverty and despair that evoked the worst hardships of potato-famine immigrants. Before Vincent was twelve, five of his siblings would perish from childhood accidents or disease. His father, Tony, fled the home, never to return. His mother, Anna, died from pneumonia when Vincent was seven. He and his brother Peter were taken away by the state of New York and institutionalized in Staten Island at the Mt. Loretto orphanage, a house of refuge known for its punitive approach to reform. Vincent lived there for three years, escaping repeatedly. He was diagnosed as an adolescent deviant, and one early psychiatric report noted his deep-seeded problems with authority.

By the time he hooked up with Dutch Schultz, Vincent had already developed the brazen, self-destructive streak that was to become his most distinguishing characteristic as a gangster. At nineteen, authorities charged him with the murder of a speakeasy owner who refused to buy Schultz’s booze. (At trial, Coll was acquitted, probably through Schultz’s influence.) Vincent was gawky and boyish, with a full mane of unruly reddish-blond hair, a prominently dimpled chin, and a broad toothy grin. It was not brains but cold-blooded efficiency as a killer that catapulted the young hoodlum to the leadership position of his gang. Some of Coll’s most devoted fellow gang members were Italian Americans who saw the Mad Mick as their ticket to the upper echelons of the Prohibition rackets. Vincent’s girlfriend and true love, Lottie Kriesberger, was of German extraction—just like his boss and nemesis-to-be, Dutch Schultz.

Following the mobster conference in Atlantic City, Vincent stepped up his war with the Dutchman, who was getting filthy rich off bootlegging, nightclubs, and the policy racket, while Coll was paid a measly hundred dollars per week by the Schultz organization.

“I ain’t your nigger shoeshine boy,” Coll told Schultz. “I’ll show you a thing or two.”

After Vincent and his gang staged an outlandish daytime robbery at the Sheffield Farms dairy in the middle of the Dutchman’s Bronx territory, Schultz waltzed into the 42nd Precinct station house and declared, “I’ll buy a house in Westchester for anybody in here who can stiff the mick.”

A squad room full of cops looked at the Dutchman in utter disbelief.

“You know you’re in the Morrisania police station?” asked a detective.

“I know where I am,” snapped Dutch. “I been here before. I just came in to tell ya I’ll pay good money to any cop that kills the mick.”

Could Schultz’s offer be taken seriously? Who the hell knew, but the hunt was on.

Madden tried to intermediate a truce to save the young Irish kid’s life. He and Vincent met at the Stork Club, located in a town house on West Fifty-eighth Street near Central Park. Fast becoming the most renowned speakeasy in the city, the club was partly owned by a silent partnership of Madden, Big Bill Dwyer, and a business associate of Owney’s named George Jean “Big Frenchy” DeMange.

“See this place?” Madden told Coll at a private booth inside the glamorous Stork Club. “You could own a place like this one day, Vincent. This could all be yours. But you gotta learn to play along.”

Coll knew when he was being used, and he knew when he wasn’t wanted.

“I’m the fool who takes all the risks,” he told Owney. “Me and my brother, we been shot at, chased down, and arrested. You want I should be a good little boy while you, the Dutchman, and the dagos get rich? No. We should be equal partners, plain and simple.”

In the early months of 1931, at least ten gunmen associated with the Combine were stabbed, shot, and beaten to death by Coll’s gang. One of those men, Carmine Borelli, was executed when he refused to take part in a scheme to set up his boss, the Dutchman. Borelli’s girlfriend witnessed the murder, so Coll chased her down and shot her in the head in the middle of a Bronx street.

A few days later, the Combine retaliated by murdering Peter Coll; he was machine-gunned to death on a Harlem street corner while driving home. Vincent was overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his older brother. Instead of going into mourning, however, he responded with calculated rage. He began kidnapping business associates of the Combine, first Big Frenchy DeMange, whom he snatched off the street and held in an apartment in Westchester County until a ransom of $35,000 was paid, and then Sherman Billingsley, the celebrity proprietor of the Stork Club. Vincent then set out after Joey Rao, one of Schultz’s prime movers in East Harlem, where the lucrative uptown policy rackets were based. What happened next would shock the entire country and seal Coll’s fate as the most reviled man in the underworld.

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. A touring car came around the corner and opened fire with a tommy gun on Rao, his protectors, and the children. When the fusillade was over, five children lay wounded on the sidewalk. One of those children, five-year-old Michael Vengali, died before he reached a nearby hospital. Rao and his bodyguards escaped without a scratch.

Everyone in town knew Coll was behind the shooting. The newspapers called it the “baby massacre” and clamored for immediate action. Coll, the Mad Mick, was now christened “the Baby Killer.” Mayor Jimmy Walker referred to gangster Coll as a “Mad Dog” and declared that the police department would pay $10,000 to anyone with information leading to his capture and prosecution. Even the underworld was repulsed. Both Madden and Shultz put out a $25,000 bounty on Coll, the lunatic gunman who was giving all bootleggers a bad name.

Vincent and Lottie went on the run. Wearing disguises and using false identities, they drove north to the Canadian border, then zig-zagged into Western Massachusetts, then back to Upstate New York. When they felt they had been spotted, they ditched their car and traveled by train. Heavily armed at all times, they lived in roadside motels, so they could escape quickly if necessary. They bought every meal to go. Occasionally, with his hair dyed black, a fake mustache, and glasses, Coll stepped out into the early morning or chilly evening to buy a newspaper or make a phone call; danger lurked in every wayward glance, every unwelcomed stare.

In October 1931, two and a half months after “the baby massacre,” authorities began to zero in on Coll. The incident that started it all was a hit on Dutch Schultz’s Bronx headquarters. Schultz wasn’t on the premises at the time, but the two gunmen who sprayed the storefront with gunfire killed one of the Dutchman’s underlings. A couple of Edison Company repairmen working in a nearby manhole happened to spot the two gunmen and got a good look at their license plate number. The number was traced to two members of the Coll gang. One by one, the cops tracked down and arrested Coll’s fellow gang members, until one of them supplied the police with a hot tip on Vincent’s whereabouts.

Apparently, Coll had recently snuck back into the city, thinking he could resume his bootlegging activities. The informant told the cops that he was hiding out in a room at the Cornish Arms Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. A squad of more than two dozen cops quietly surrounded the hotel. A smaller group entered and made their way to Coll’s room. They banged on the door and announced their arrival. Vincent was undoubtedly armed to the teeth. He could have fought back and tried to escape, but the Mad Mick had no desire to wind up like Two Gun Crowley, shooting it out with the entire police force. He opened the door and turned himself in to the cops.

With the money he’d made from his various kidnapping escapades, Coll hired Samuel Liebowitz, one of the best criminal defense attorney’s in town. Along with another member of his gang, he was facing attempted murder and manslaughter charges for the botched hit on Joey Rao and the killing of five-year-old Michael Vengalli. The whole town probably wanted him found guilty and executed in the electric chair, just like Crowley was.

His metamorphosis was complete: Vincent was now a total outcast. His gang had betrayed him. Everyone wanted him dead. Lottie, his fiancée, was all he had left. The only other solace left to him came from the knowledge that, as bleak as his own situation had become, there was another famous Irish American gangster out there who actually had it worse.

Happy Days and Lonely Nights

On December 18, 1931, as Mad Dog Coll’s murder trial got under way in Manhattan, the dark angels of the underworld finally caught up with Jack Diamond. After numerous assassination attempts over the years, Legs was no more. This time, his killers left nothing to chance. They shot him three times in the head at close range, while he lay in bed in his room at an Albany boarding house.

Coll knew Diamond well. In fact, years earlier, while he was still working for Dutch Shultz, Coll was assigned to kill Jack Diamond. He and members of his gang tracked Legs around Manhattan from one speakeasy and nightclub to another. They finally met face to face at the Hotsy Totsy Club, Diamond’s own popular speakeasy located on the second floor of 1721 Broadway, between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth streets. Although Diamond knew Coll by reputation, he had no idea that the gawky, young, Irish kid with the red hair was there to kill him. They hit it off so well that Vincent reneged on the murder contract and formed a casual friendship with the older, wiser Irish American racketeer.