Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (20 page)

“Owney Madden!” he exclaimed upon seeing the name of the former Gopher gang leader, who once ruled the West Side neighborhood near where Dwyer was born and raised. “I’ll be a son of gun,” he said to a private detective on his payroll. “I thought Madden got sent away to Sing Sing on a murder rap.”

“He did,” said the shamus. “But he’s out now and up to his old tricks.”

Dwyer could have been angry and bayed for vengeance against this gang of hijackers who were costing him money. Instead, he waited quietly. A few weeks later, when the hijacking charges against Madden were dropped for lack of evidence, Big Bill Dwyer, King of the Rum Runners, put out the word to his minions: “Get me Owney Madden. I wanna talk to him. Tell him I got a business proposition we need to discuss.”

Owney the Killer

In the many decades since Prohibition reenergized the underworld and ushered in a new era of American gangsterism, some of the trade’s more notable practitioners have achieved a kind of immortality. Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky are among those whose lives have been chronicled in countless books, television documentaries, and movies. Many of these men actively sought the limelight while they were alive. Capone, crude and verbose, held semiregular press conferences in which he pontificated on a variety of subjects, all for print and posterity. Siegel, sleek and paranoid, sought to immortalize himself through the white light of celluloid and wound up the most hoary of cliches: a failed Hollywood actor. At the time of his death in 1962, Luciano, a glorified pimp and dope pusher, had been at work on his autobiography in which he portrayed himself as a great American patriot. Lansky, a man with a lifelong persecution complex, achieved posthumous fame when he was reincarnated as “Hyman Roth,” the character played by Lee Strasberg in the 1974 movie
Godfather, Part II
.

It is a backhanded tribute to Owen Victor Madden that he remains a shadowy figure many decades after his reign as arguably the preeminent mobster of the Prohibition era. True professional criminals who choose to traffic on the dark side of American society do not normally seek public acclaim. Being “the man behind the man” implies an inner confidence that allows for others to assert themselves in the arena of public aggrandizement while knowing all along that real power resides in the offstage hands of the marionette.

Owney Madden was a street punk and a killer who transformed himself into an underworld star. Feared and admired by those in the know, he was virtually unknown to the public at large. The American underworld was increasingly believed to be the exclusive domain of what in later years G-Men, prosecutors, and journalists tagged with a catchall moniker—La Cosa Nostra, which made the mafia famous, or infamous.

To Madden, fame was a whore to be kept at arm’s length. This isn’t to say he didn’t have fun. He owned nightclubs, buried himself in U.S. currency, had a controlling interest in prizefighters and racehorses, bedded beautiful women, and squired himself around town as the Duke of the West Side. And yet, except for one youthful indiscretion, he never talked to the press and rarely allowed himself to be photographed, even though he had many famous friends. Among them were actor George Raft, whom he grew up with, and James Cagney, who modeled his tough-guy screen persona on Madden. Owney did occasionally court media types like gossip columnist Walter Winchell (whom he once bestowed with the gift of a Stutz Bearcat automobile) and Stanley Walker, city editor of the
Herald Tribune
, who later portrayed Owney as the Prince of Mobsters in his book
The Nightclub Era
. Generally, Madden cultivated these people so they would keep his name
out
of the media spotlight.

But what Madden did best was make money. After a youthful apprenticeship as a thug, he would eventually surpass Big Bill Dwyer as the most diversified bootlegger in the business and as such earn a place in history alongside Old Smoke Morrissey and King Mike McDonald atop the hypothetical Mount Rushmore of early Irish American racketeers.

Madden was born on Christmas Day in 1891 in Liverpool, England, to poor post-famine Irish parents, who had no property or social standing. The name Madden means hound in the original Gaelic. (Whether spelled Ó Madáin, O’Madden, O’Maddane, O’Madigane, or Madigan, it all comes from the same root:
Madach
.) Later in life, Owney would sometimes use an upper crust British accent, seeking to disguise his less-than-royal roots. To those who knew him well, it was a laughable ruse. He may have been born across the channel, but the look and inclinations of the Old Country clung to Owney like the smell of peat moss on a dewy morn in Connemara.

When Madden’s father died in 1903, the boy was sent with his brother and sister to live with an aunt in New York City. The aunt lived in a cold-water tenement in a midtown Manhattan neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. Located on the West Side along the docks of the Hudson River between Fourteenth and Fifty-seventh streets (the neighborhood’s boundaries would change somewhat in later years), Hell’s Kitchen had supplanted the old Five Points district as the quintessential proving ground for young Irish ruffians—the kind of lovable punks who would one day be caricatured in Hollywood flicks like
The Dead End Kids
and
Angels with Dirty Faces
.

Hell’s Kitchen was an immigrant neighborhood, mostly Irish, German, and Italian. The neighborhood’s dominant physical features were the noisy Ninth Avenue elevated railway, which carried more passengers than any other line in the city, and the Hudson River Railroad, which carried freight and livestock along Eleventh 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 cobblestone streets hawking newspapers, fighting, picking pockets, swimming in the Hudson River, or flying pigeons from tenement rooftops.

By the time Owney Madden arrived in the Kitchen with his Liverpool Irish brogue, the area was under the sway of the Gopher Gang, so named because they often met in tenement basements. An amalgam of previous Hell’s Kitchen gangs such as the Gorillas, the Parlor Mob, and the Tenth Avenue Gang, the Gophers were a predominantly Irish gang that sometimes clashed with the Hudson Dusters, who roamed below Fourteenth Street on the western fringe of Greenwich Village.
³

The Gophers became famous not so much for their fights with other gangs, but for their head-to-head altercations with one another. In the decade following the turn of the century, the gang was known to be so turbulent and fickle that few of its leaders held the distinction for more than a few months. A few Gophers earned notoriety, such as Happy Jack Mullraney, who murdered Paddy the Priest for laughing at his facial disfigurement; Mallet Murphy, who routinely bludgeoned unruly customers in his saloon with a wooden mallet; and One Lung Curran, who started a fashion craze in Hell’s Kitchen when he blackjacked a policeman, stole his overcoat, and delivered it to his girlfriend. The girlfriend wore it around town as if it were a prized mink. Soon all the other gang molls clamored for one of their own, and the coppers of Hell’s Kitchen were seen walking around shorn of their overcoats.

If the Gophers became known for one particular criminal activity it was raiding and robbing the West Side railroad yards. In an era when freight trains were the preeminent mode of interstate transport for commercial goods, the railroad yards were a prime target for pilferage. It was here that young Owney Madden established a reputation as a fearless hoodlum (“courageous as a dock rat,” one observer called him). He often led a brigade of Gophers on railroad boosting raids in which they broke into cargo shipments and made off with whatever they could—usually clothes, foodstuff, booze, and sometimes guns and ammo. Madden developed expert proficiency with all the tools of the trade: the revolver, blackjack, brass knuckles, and especially the lead pipe wrapped in newspaper, a favorite weapon of early twentieth century gangsters.

Through guile and daring more than brute force, Madden rose to become the recognized leader of the Gophers, which led to his constant arrests—fifty-seven times before all was said and done. On one early occasion when he was pinched, Owney bragged to a police reporter that he’d never worked an honest day in his life and never intended to. When the reporter asked him to jot down a record of his daily routine, the teenage gang boss obliged. It is the only firsthand account of his life that Madden ever gave to the press.

Thursday
—Went to a dance in the afternoon. Went to a dance at night and then a cabaret. Took some girls home. Went to a restaurant, and stayed there until Friday morning.

Friday
—Spent the day with Freda Horner [his girlfriend]. Looked at some fancy pigeons. Met some friends in a saloon early in the evening, and stayed with them until five o’clock in the morning.

Saturday
—Slept all day. Went to a dance in the Bronx late in the afternoon, and to a dance on Park Avenue at night.

Sunday
—Slept until three o’clock. Went to a dance in the afternoon and to another in the same place at night. After that I went to a cabaret, and stayed there almost all night.

Owney’s account of his routine was highly selective, of course, with no mention of criminal activity or violence for which his gang was known. The cops had nicknamed him “the Killer” by the time he was eighteen, and it wasn’t for his dashing good looks or talents on the dance floor.

He killed his first man at the age of fourteen. An Italian merchant near Owney’s home on Tenth Avenue was bludgeoned with a pipe. Numerous witnesses saw Madden discard the murder weapon and flee the scene. Owney was arrested, but then released when the witnesses adhered to the neighborhood’s code of silence and refused to testify. A year later, he was at it again. After a dispute over a girl with a store clerk named Willie Henshaw, Madden chased Henshaw onto a Ninth Avenue trolley car. In the middle of the day, before numerous onlookers, Owney shot Willie and fled.

This time, detectives were sure they had Madden. There were multiple eye-witnesses, and before expiring at the hospital Henshaw himself identified Owney Madden as his killer. The cops threw a dragnet over the West Side. Owney was eventually spotted. After leading the police on a wild chase across the rooftops of Tenth Avenue, Owney the Killer was apprehended.

But by the time the cocky hood was brought into court a few weeks later, the witnesses against him had vanished, the state’s case collapsed, and the charges were dismissed.

Beating criminal cases was one thing, but when living in the underworld where encounters with rival gangsters were commonplace, events had a way of arranging their own version of justice or retribution, known on the street as payback. It was just such a confluence of events that took place on November 6, 1912, when Owney Madden’s charmed existence took a dramatic turn for the worse at the Arbor Dance Hall on Fifty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. Here he was surrounded by a hit squad of eleven gunmen, some of whom were members of the Hudson Dusters.

“Come on, youse yellow-bellied Dusters,” snarled Owney, reaching for his revolver. “Who’d you punks ever bump off?”

The sound of gunfire chased the patrons out of the dance hall. By the time police and an ambulance arrived, Madden was sprawled on the floor with a half-dozen bullets in him.

“Who did it?” asked a detective.

Barely conscious, Madden replied “It’s nobody’s business but mine who put these slugs in me. The boys’ll take care of them.”

Madden was rushed to New York Hospital and miraculously survived.

In less than a week, three of the eleven suspected shooters had been bludgeoned, shot, or stabbed to death in various locations around Hell’s Kitchen.

Another pitfall of being a gang leader was the constant pretenders to the throne. While Owney Madden convalesced from the assassination attempt under armed guard at the hospital, Patsy Doyle, a minor member of the Gophers, declared that he was now the boss. Doyle’s motives were partly based on jealousy, for Freda Horner, Madden’s sometime girlfriend, had once been his lady.

When Madden heard what Patsy was saying, he decided to engage in a preemptive strike. A day after Owney was discharged from the hospital, Doyle was found in the street almost blackjacked to death. A couple of weeks later, Patsy retaliated by blackjacking, knifing, and shooting one of Madden’s cherished underlings.

The Madden-Doyle Wars continued for many months, with periodic rumbles and shootings. In November 1914, when Madden’s primary hang-out, the Winona Social Club, was raided and trashed by Patsy and a few of his thugs, Madden had reached his limit. Together with Freda Horner and Margaret Everdeane, another gang moll Patsy was sweet on, Madden devised an elaborate scheme for luring his nemesis to a saloon on Forty-first Street and Eighth Avenue. On the night of November 28, the plot went down exactly as planned. Patsy Doyle met Margaret Everdeane and, much to his astonishment, was shot multiple times by two anonymous gunmen. He died in the gutter in front of the saloon.

Although Owney Madden was nowhere in sight when the shooting took place, the district attorney’s office was finally able to build a case against the Gopher boss as planner and instigator of Patsy Doyle’s demise. Their case was built around two squealers, stool pigeons, stoolies, rats, or cheese eaters—choose your epithet. In the end, it was the women who turned on Owney Madden. After considerable cajoling and threatening by the prosecution, Freda Horner and Margaret Everdeane testified against Madden at trial. He went down for the count—sentenced to ten to twenty years at Sing Sing, which was slightly less than the two shooters received. At the same time, the law went after other members of the gang. New York Police Department records show that by the end of the year, sixteen members of Owney’s gang were in jail on a wide assortment of charges. The Gophers were no more.