Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (85 page)

8.
The term “racket,” ironically, is today most commonly used by the ranks of the New York police and fire departments, who still refer to retirement parties and in-house fundraisers as rackets.

9.
It was in his bar on Chrystie Street that Sullivan was given the nickname “Dry Dollar” for his habit of lifting wet dollars off the bar counter and carefully drying them before putting them in the till. He later became known as “Big Tim” or “The Big Fella.” “Big” was a common Irish appellation that could either denote physical stature or a person’s standing in the community. In Sullivan’s case, it referred to both.

1.
The sight of Irishmen in New Orleans was not an unprecedented phenomenon. Don Alexander O’Reilly, an Irish soldier of fortune in the service of the King of Spain, was one of the city’s original founding fathers. Appointed governor and captain general of the province of Louisiana after Spain first wrested the colony from France, O’Reilly arrived in August 1769 with a mandate to quell an incipient Creole and Acadian rebellion. He did so with unparalleled brutality, for which he is remembered as “Bloody O’Reilly.” The Don also instituted the province’s first police force, known as the
Santa Hermandad
, or Holy Brotherhood.
Many other Irishmen came later, after Louisiana passed through Spanish, British, and into American hands. Most were Protestant Irishman of the land-owning, slave-owning class drawn to New Orleans from places like Kentucky and Virginia. As card-carrying members of the Southern gentry, they went to great lengths to separate themselves from the Catholic famine Irish, who they considered to be nothing more than “bogtrotters” and “turf-diggers”—lower than “the niggers” (see
The Irish in New Orleans 1800–1860
by Earl F. Niehaus).

2.
According to Herbert Asbury’s book,
The French Quarter
, until the latter years of the nineteenth century, New Orleans held the distinction of being the dirtiest and unhealthiest city on the North American continent—and municipal authorities consistently defeated every attempt to make it otherwise. “The water supply was bad,” writes Asbury, “swamps remained within the city limits, and the sanitary arrangements were unbelievably primitive. The sewage system consisted simply of open gutters between the sidewalks and the streets. Into them filth and refuse of every description were emptied, and when they overflowed, as they frequently did in the rainy seasons, the streets became well-nigh impassable.” As a result, the death rate in New Orleans, even after deducting those killed during the many cholera, malaria, and yellow fever epidemics, was nearly double that of New York, Boston, or Philadelphia.

3.
“Bunco” is a term originally derived from “banco,” a crooked card game similar to three-card monty with origins in London. Initially in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, and then elsewhere around the United States, bunco became a word to describe con men and scam artists of infinite variety. Bunco men always dressed nicely, but never loud or showy. Usually working for a gambling boss of some type, they made it their business to know when gamblers of stature or other “players” were in town. It was their job to steer likely prospects toward the gambling bosses’ roaming dice and card games, for which they received the right to operate their own low-level scams.
“Sucker” comes from the Irish
sách úr
, meaning a “fresh, well-fed fellow” or “fat cat” ready to be fleeced like a ripe Donegal sheep.

4.
Given the stigma of prostitution among most classes—and certainly among Irish Catholics—it was common for women involved in the trade to use a pseudonym. An exposé of Fanny Sweet in the December 8, 1861 issue of the
True Delta
revealed that her real name was Mary Robinson, and that she was an Irish American girl born in a small New York town in 1827.

5.
During a two-year period in the 1850s when the Know-Nothings were in power, they fired hundreds of Irish cops and spitefully auctioned off the police department’s two prized mule-drawn paddy wagons, the Red Maria and the Black Maria. By the end of the decade, the Know-Nothings were voted out, never to return again.

1.
There had been attempts to establish an antiforeigner movement in Chicago as early as 1855, when the city’s mayor, Dr. Levi Boone, grandnephew of frontiersman Daniel Boone, pledged publicly to “rid the city of its rowdy Irish and low Dutch (German) elements.” The mayor and other nativist political leaders banded together to pass legislation that prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol on Sundays and increased saloon licensing fees to exorbitant levels. The legislation was aimed squarely at the city’s Irish and German immigrant population. The result was Chicago’s first major social disturbance, a bloody siege that broke out on April 21, 1855 between an angry German/Irish mob and the city’s under-equipped, part-time police brigade. The Lager Beer Riot, remarkably, resulted in no deaths, but there were sixty arrests and scores of injuries. From then on, the immigrant vote played a major role in Chicago’s political affairs.

2.
Quinn’s book,
Fools of Fortune or Gambling and Gamblers
, published in 1892, is one of two important works, both written by Irish Americans, chronicling America’s nineteenth century gambling underworld. The other is
Wanderings of a Vagabond: An Autobiography
by John O’Connor, a novelist of the period writing under the pseudonym John Morris.
Wanderings of a Vagabond,
published in 1873, is a fictional account of the adventures of a gambler from 1820 until after the Civil War. Unfortunately, neither book is available, though both are cited copiously by Herbert Asbury in his 1938 classic,
Sucker’s Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America.

3.
In Chicago, young gangsters who supplied muscle for political interests were called “sluggers.” In New York they were known as “shoulder hitters.” Either way, their role was the same: they threatened and intimidated people and committed violent acts at the behest of the Machine.

4.
King Mike’s retirement kept his name out of the papers for a while, until another marital scandal once again turned his personal life into a cause celebre. In 1898, years after he had dissolved his marriage to the perennially unfaithful Mary Noonan, he met and married Flora Feldman, a woman thirty-eight years his junior. Flora was a dancer at the Chicago Opera House and Jewish. Having already renounced his Catholicism, he now converted to Judaism. Mike’s new wife was notoriously high-strung; she once got into a physical altercation with one of his sons, who felt she was a gold digger. But Mike was blindly loyal to Flora. For years he would remain totally unaware of her longstanding affair with a fifteen-year-old school boy. But in February 1907, when the school boy (now a young man) tried to end the relationship, Flora became hysterical, pulled out a gun and shot him in the neck, then flung herself through a plate glass window. Flora was arrested and institutionalized. Still, Mike McDonald would not abandon her, not even after police discovered a cache of photographs in her lover’s office—photos that showed Flora in many half-naked, provocative poses. Much to McDonald’s embarrassment, a few of the photos were published, but he continued to visit his wife in the sanitarium on a regular basis, until the burden became too much to bear. On August 9, 1907, at the age of sixty-eight, the former most powerful man in Chicago died, some say of a broken heart.

5.
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
(republished in 1995 by Signet Classics) is a small book—less than one hundred pages. You can open it almost anywhere and be entertained. Plunkitt’s loquaciousness, malapropisms, and slippery morality are the stuff of vaudeville comedy; in the mid-1990s the book was turned into a humorous one-man stage show by the esteemed New York Irish actor and author Malachy McCourt.

6.
Kenna himself ran for alderman in 1894. A dour campaigner who rarely smiled, Hinky Dink’s idea of inspirational rhetoric was to declare, “If I am elected, I will try to show the people I am not as bad as I am painted on account of the name ‘Hinky Dink.’” To the voters of the First Ward, it didn’t matter what he said; he won by a landslide and remained an alderman until the city council reduced the district from two aldermen to one in 1923 (see
Lords of the Levee: The Story of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink
by Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan).

7.
The First Ward Ball did not go on forever. In 1908, after a twelve-year run, the ball was discontinued after intense pressure was put on the city’s newly elected Republican mayor. In retrospect, the forces that brought about the end of the ball, which were galvanized by an organization called the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, represented the beginning of a movement that would gain considerable steam over the next decade, culminating with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, otherwise known as Prohibition.

8.
Lower middle class Irish American alienation of this period is captured with harsh realism by author James T. Farrell in his classic
Studs Lonigan Trilogy
. Born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, Farrell set the first of his Lonigan novels in his old neighborhood in 1916, with young Studs on the cusp of adulthood, his life consisting of poolrooms, heavy drinking, constant fighting, and having to prove his manhood. Studs prefers life as a young punk because all other career alternatives—the priesthood, fire department, police, or other civil service rackets—seem numbingly dull by comparison. As for politics, whenever Studs and his friends notice one of their own getting a sizable beer belly, they refer to it as “an alderman,” which is meant to imply that the person has become fat and complacent and has resigned himself to living off the municipal teat.

1.
In his years in public office, Big Tim Sullivan had some impressive legislative accomplishments as well. True to his reputation as a defender of common folk, he was a strong supporter of women’s suffrage and organized labor, having fought successfully to limit the amount that women could work in factories in New York State to fifty-four hours a week. He also wrote into law a number of tenement reform bills and pioneered the state’s first effort at gun control, the Sullivan Law of 1911, which is still on the books today.

2.
Paul Kelly’s use of a pseudonym was another example of what would become a common practice in the American underworld, that of Italians using Irish surnames. Among the most notable were New York mob boss Frank Costello (Francesco Castiglia), Chicago hitman Machine Gun Jack McGurn (Vincenzo DeMora), and Charles “Chuckie” English (Salvatore Inglese), right-hand man to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana.
In
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano
, mobster Luciano claims to have come up with the idea of giving his pal Francesco Castiglia an Irish name. He explained the benefits of such a practice this way: “When we got up to our ears in New York politics, it didn’t hurt at all that we had an Italian guy with us with a name like Costello.”

3.
In the annals of Irish American gangdom, the Hudson Dusters merit special mention, though they were not exclusively an Irish gang. They got their name because most of the gang’s members had a strong taste for cocaine. They were not ferocious fighters like the Gophers or early Irish gangs such as the Dead Rabbits or Ragen’s Colts in Chicago. Mostly they were known as rabble-rousers and revelers in an incipient Greenwich Village bohemian lifestyle. According to author Luc Sante in his book
Low Life
:
Lures and Snares of Old New York
, “future Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day, by her own admission, spent a great deal of time partying with [the Dusters] in her salad days, as did many others, including Eugene O’Neill.”

4.
Larry Fay’s impressive string of luck ran out shortly after midnight on New Years Day, 1933, when he was shot dead by Edward Maloney, a disgruntled employee, while standing in front of the Casa Blanca nightclub. Maloney, a doorman at the club, was angry that his pay and hours had been cut. Reportedly, it was the first time in six months that the forty-four-year-old Fay had not worn his bullet-proof vest.

5.
Not everyone was welcome equally. The Chinese were excluded. African Americans were bullied into becoming part the Combine; in Harlem, local gangsters were forced to turn over a piece of their lucrative policy rackets or risk being murdered. Blacks had their own speakeasies, but when it came to the downtown speaks or establishments like the Cotton Club, located on 149th Street in Harlem, they were refused entry as patrons.

6.
One of the more important regional offshoots of the Combine was based in Providence, Rhode Island and overseen by Daniel L. Walsh, a former Pawtucket hardware store clerk who became one of the most successful bootleggers of the era. Rhode Island was the most Catholic state in the country and virulently anti-Prohibition. Because of the state’s craggy shoreline, it was an ideal location for offloading booze shipments from Rum Row. Danny Walsh was frequently in New York City on business, which fueled speculation that bootlegging on the East Coast was controlled by a consortium known as the Big Seven. Rumored to be among the Big Seven were at least four Irishmen: Walsh, Dwyer, Madden, and a millionaire banker and shipping magnet from Boston named Joseph P. Kennedy, of whom we will learn more in a later chapter.