Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (87 page)

1.
A member of Local 791 at the time was William “Big Bill” Dwyer, who would go on to become King of the Rum Runners, founding father of the Combine, and business partner of Owney Madden. During Prohibition, the headquarters for Local 791 was located in a building on Tenth Avenue, just a few blocks from Dwyer and Madden’s massive Phoenix Brewery.

2.
Butler, the son of Irish parents from Tipperary, was born in London’s East End, immigrated to New York, and joined the Longshoreman’s Association in 1898.
Dock Walloper
was written during his retirement years and is especially good at detailing the rambunctious early twentieth century connection between labor sluggers, politicians, and gangsters—especially on election day. Writes Big Dick: “Elections nowadays are sissy affairs. Nobody gets killed anymore, and the ambulances and patrol wagons stay in their garages. There’s cheating, of course, but it’s done in a polite, refined manner compared to the olden days. In those times murder and mayhem played a more important part in politics. To be a challenger at the polls, you had to be a nifty boxer or an expert marksman. A candidate, especially if he ran against the Machine, was lucky to escape with his life. I was lucky—I only had my skull bashed, and my front teeth knocked out, and my nose broken.”

3.
The West Coast longshoremen’s strike of 1934 ended in victory for the workers; a hiring-hall system was instituted and would be overseen not by a hiring boss, but by a dispatcher chosen by a labor board comprised of employers and workers.
The longshoremen’s repudiation of Joe Ryan and business as usual in West Coast ports had much to do with minimizing the development of organized crime in cities like San Francisco and Seattle. Criminal rackets like loan-sharking, organized gambling, policy, and systematic labor corruption were never institutionalized in the same way they were in the Northeast. These factors help to explain why the Irish American mobster and labor racketeer appear rarely on the West Coast, although they remained a viable factor in cities like New York and Boston until the end of the twentieth century.

4.
John Bowers, son of Harold and nephew of Mickey, became a member of Local 824 in the 1940s, a union officer in 1956, and, in 1987, president of the ILA and head of the union’s Atlantic Coast Division, for which he currently pulls in an annual salary of half a million dollars. Accusations of corruption in the ILA have continued, with the most recent racketeering indictment against the union coming in 1990.

5.
The Iron Heel
was first published in 1908 and is still in print. Set in the near future, the novel describes a class war in which corporate America has coalesced into a ruling oligarchy and taken over control of the country. The nascent labor movement is crushed by a fascist plutocracy. Although London’s vision is certainly paranoid and anticapitalist, it proved to be prophetic in many details. Among other things, the novel captured the tone of fear, subterfuge, and distrust between workers and corporations that led certain unions, out of self-defense, to utilize their own gangster squads.
The fact that corporate management in America was out to divide and conquer trade unionism—by force, if necessary—became the self-justification for union bosses like Joe Ryan and Jimmy Hoffa to resort to strong-arm tactics and gangsterism. Over time, wily racketeers within the movement found ways to exploit the labor/management paradigm and plunder their own unions for personal profit.

6.
Mayor Bill O’Dwyer’s resignation from office was fraught with irony. His downfall originated with a meeting he’d had with mobster Frank Costello at a Manhattan townhouse apartment in 1942, before he was mayor. At the time, O’Dwyer was on leave of absence as Brooklyn district attorney, serving during the early months of World War II as a major in the procurement division of the army air force. O’Dwyer claimed that he had arranged to speak with Costello, known in the press as the Prime Minister of the Underworld, because he was investigating contract fraud at an airbase in Ohio that Costello might know something about. It was never shown that anything criminal took place or was even discussed at this meeting, but, in the post-Machine era, get-togethers between a notorious mafioso and a district attorney/future mayor were no longer accepted by the public.
O’Dwyer was not a Tammany-sponsored politician. In fact, he’d run for mayor on an anti-Tammany ticket, claiming that his racket-busting past as district attorney showed that he was above reproach. This claim was damaged when his meeting with Costello became public knowledge and was further destroyed by a sensational investigation into police corruption in Brooklyn. In that investigation, it was shown that the NYPD command structure in Brooklyn, from beat cops all the way up to lieutenants and captains, had for years been receiving illegal cash payments from bookmakers and gambling houses throughout the borough. The “bag man” for this operation was James J. Moran, a former assistant district attorney and close political confidant of O’Dwyer’s. The suspicion was that Moran had been delivering some of this dirty money directly into the campaign coffer of his former boss and friend. Moran was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison on charges of perjury, conspiracy, extortion, and tax evasion, although he steadfastly refused to implicate O’Dwyer in any criminal wrongdoing.
With accusations from newspaper editorialists and Goo Goos ringing in his ears, O’Dwyer resigned from office in August 1950, he claimed, so that he could accept the position of ambassador to Mexico that had been kindly offered to him by President Harry Truman. Ambassador O’Dwyer served in Mexico for two years and then retired from public life, dying of coronary thrombosis in November 1964.

7.
Bud Schulberg, age ninety-two, was interviewed by the author in March 2004.

1.
Joe Kennedy’s role in “the Pantages Affair” and the death of Eunice Pringle were not publicly revealed until years after the fact, after he had moved on to other endeavors. The incident became part of Hollywood lore, chronicled in Kenneth Anger’s book
Hollywood Babylon
, as was Kennedy’s highly public affair with starlet Gloria Swanson and his relationship with mobster Johnny Roselli. Joe Kennedy’s exploits in Hollywood were later eclipsed by those of his son, J.F.K., who befriended mobster acolyte Frank Sinatra and bedded the greatest “trophy” of them all—Marilyn Monroe.

2.
Even at such a high price, the Merchandise Mart was believed to be a steal for Kennedy. At the time of his death in 1969, it was valued at $75 million. Observed his wife Rose, “Joe had a genius for seeing something and knowing it would be worth something more later on. And with the Mart, he was absolutely right…it skyrocketed in value and became the basis for a whole new Kennedy fortune.”

3.
James Michael Curley, beloved by the electorate, was throughout his career under constant attack from the press, especially the
Boston Globe
. Frequently under investigation for political and financial improprieties, he was sentenced to jail a second time in 1946, for influence peddling. Five months later he was granted executive clemency by President Truman. Curley lost his final election bid in 1950, at the age of seventy-six, but soon found himself to be more renowned than ever when writer Edwin O’Connor’s novel,
The Last Hurrah
—based loosely on Curley’s life and career—became a national bestseller. Two years after its release, the book became a classic Academy Award–nominated movie starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Ford, securing Curley’s place in history as perhaps the most glorified of all the old Irish political bosses.

4.
The Apalachin conference was an interesting indicator of just how successful the old Italian-Jewish consortium had been at eradicating the Irish mobster from the equation. Of the fifty-eight men rounded up and held for questioning, the overwhelming majority were Italian or Italian American, with only a few Jews. There was not a single Irish mobster in attendance. In the years since Prohibition, when they dominated operations in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, Irish American mobsters had been completely shut out of the operations of the Syndicate. The result, as we shall see, was an increased hostility between Irish and Italian racketeers, with decades of bloodshed to come.

5.
According to Edna Daulyton, who was a hostess at Felix Young’s Restaurant at the time of this meeting, “It was as though every gangster chief in the United States was there.” In 1988, Daulyton told Irish journalist Anthony Summers: “I took the reservations…. I don’t remember all the names now, but Johnny Roselli was there…they were all top people. I was amazed Joe Kennedy would take the risk.”

6.
Singer Eddie Fisher, a friend of Sinatra’s, once remarked, “Frank wanted to be a hood. He once said, ‘I’d rather be a don of the Mafia than president of the United States.’ I don’t think he was fooling.” Born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra was the product of a typical Italian-Jewish-Irish neighborhood familiality common in so many American cities at the time. His father, Marty Sinatra, an aspiring boxer early in his life, fought under the alias “Marty O’Brien.”

7.
The meetings between Joe Kennedy, Mayor Daley, and Giancana are detailed in
Double Cross
, written in 1992 by Sam and Chuck Giancana, the brother and nephew of Momo, who was murdered in his home in 1975. As described in the book, the details of these meetings are somewhat specious, slanted in such a way as to make Giancana look strong-willed and Kennedy look like a fool. Although the “you are there” nature of these scenes—complete with bad Hollywood dialogue—are to be taken with a grain of salt, their having taken place is not entirely surprising given Mayor Daley’s benign relationship with the Outfit. In 1955, Daley won the Chicago mayoral election with a 13,275 to 1,961 plurality in the Outfit-controlled First Ward. At Ward Headquarters on election night, the mayor boasted of his record of giving city jobs and civil contracts to Outfit associates. “I’ve been criticized for doing this,” he said, “but I’ll make no apologies. I’ll always stand alongside the man with a criminal record if I think he deserves a second chance.”
In fairness to Daley, his feelings about mobsters was based on more than self-interest. His views on the subject were rooted in the belief that the American social structure was slanted in favor of the WASP, and that ethnic mobsters were a regrettable although legitimate aspect of immigrant upward mobility (for an insightful presentation of Daley’s philosophy, see
Don’t Make No Wave Don’t Back No Losers
by Milton Rakove). Either way, his approach was good for the Outfit. A high-ranking member of the Chicago mob was once captured on wiretaps saying of Daley, “This mayor has been good to us. And we’ve been good to him. One hand washes the other.”

1.
For a naturalistic delineation of Boston’s raffish underworld, see the fictional works of George V. Higgins, especially his first and arguably best novel,
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
, published in 1970.

2.
The man who’d been hired to take out Specs O’Keefe was a notorious Irish American hitman from New York City named Elmer Francis “Trigger” Burke. Best known back in New York City for having killed his boyhood pal, Poochie Walsh, Burke was born and raised on the West Side of Manhattan. A professional contract killer, he was often employed by Cosa Nostra and other underworld factions and was
believed to have committed at least a dozen murders in Boston, New York, South Carolina, and elsewhere. In 1955, after years on the lam, he was apprehended by federal agents at Folly Beach on the Carolina coast and extradited to New York State, where he was tried and convicted on multiple murder charges. Trigger Burke was handsome, with an angular face, chiseled features, and a lithe athletic frame; he was also a cold-blooded killer with ice in his veins. On January 8, 1958, Burke got what many people on both sides of the law felt was his due: He was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.

3.
Pat Nee was interviewed by the author in Boston over a series of days in late March and early April 2004.

4.
A good source on the underworld manipulations of FBI agents Paul Rico and Dennis Condon (and on the Boston gang wars in general) is the 154-page April 2003 congressional testimony of Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, who became a government witness in the late 1990s after admitting to having carried out more than a dozen contract murders for the mob.

5.
The role played by agents Paul Rico and Dennis Condon in the Boston gang wars of the 1960s represents one of the most sinister violations of the public trust in FBI history. Rico, in particular, was a diabolical figure; he fed information to selected gangsters that resulted in countless underworld deaths. He once heard, through an FBI wiretap, of a planned hit against a small-time Irish gangster named Edward “Teddy” Deegan. Rico said nothing and allowed the hit to go off as planned, then sat back and did nothing as the wrong men were prosecuted and convicted for the murder.
In 1975, Rico retired from the FBI and lived in splendor in Miami Shores, Florida, where he became director of security for World Jai Alai, a sports betting enterprise. In October 2003, Rico was arrested for murder. Back in 1981, he had helped James “Whitey” Bulger, the mob boss of South Boston, to set up and kill the millionaire owner of World Jai Alai (see Chapter Fourteen).
At his arraignment, Rico was asked if he had any remorse for his long life of treachery and crime. “Remorse?” said the former FBI agent. “For what? Do you want tears or something?” In early 2004, before he could be prosecuted for murder and other charges, Paul Rico died of natural causes at the age of seventy-nine.