The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (6 page)

When McManus dropped dead unexpectedly of a heart attack, it was treated like the passing of a monarch. Some 500 floral pieces filled the back room of the Midtown Democratic Club, where the wake was held. Days later, New York Governor Al Smith led the funeral march of 100 policemen and 300 carloads of mourners.

In 1945, Maureen’s father, Eugene, nephew of “The” McManus and proprietor of a funeral home on West 51st Street, became district leader. But by the time of his daughter’s wedding in 1960, Eugene was in ailing health. It was rumored that he would soon be turning the district leadership over to his son, James, Maureen’s brother.

Successive generations of immigrants, Irish and otherwise, had turned to Maureen’s great-uncle and her father, and soon would turn to her brother; the McMani represented something solid and reliable in a neighborhood constantly in a state of flux. Mickey Spillane, on the other hand, represented quite a different tradition. Much had happened since the days of Owney Madden and the Prohibition rackets. What had seemed like an indestructible criminal empire had been dismantled and forced underground. But the stories and traditions still remained, and even flourished—in somewhat altered forms—during the years of Spillane’s youth.

In the postwar years of the Forties and Fifties, when Mickey was a teenager, Hell’s Kitchen, like so much of New York City, was in the throes of “development.” Long gone was the 9th Avenue El train and the noise and dirt that went with it. As part of the West Side Improvement Project, the New York Central Railroad had lowered its tracks below street level, out of sight and out of mind. And construction of the Lincoln Tunnel, running under the Hudson River to New Jersey, had devastated the area just south of 39th Street. All told, to make way for the tunnel, ninety-one tenements disappeared, as did “Paddy’s Market,” an outdoor bazaar that had been a neighborhood institution since the turn of the century.

The ethnic makeup of the neighborhood was also changing. Hell’s Kitchen had always been a melting pot. First it was the Irish and the Germans. Then the Italians, Greeks, and eastern Europeans (mostly Poles and Yugoslavians). And in the decade following the war, there was a huge influx of new migrants, mostly Puerto Ricans and Southern blacks. The reasons were not hard to fathom. In 1944, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal government increased the minimum wage to thirty cents an hour. In Puerto Rico, the
maximum
wage for the most skilled worker was twenty-five cents an hour. As for Southern blacks, the postwar period had seen the mechanization of the cotton industry, leaving thousands without employment. Enticed by the prospect of jobs and better wages, they headed north.

Yet, unlike many parts of New York, where changing neighborhoods had brought about considerable white flight, Hell’s Kitchen was slower to change. The embattled Irish and Italians of an earlier generation were still firmly ensconced in the community’s religious, political, and economic institutions, and they weren’t anxious to relinquish their hard-won positions. As a result, even as racial tensions flared in the saloons and on the avenues, the power structure, both legitimate and criminal, remained remarkably intact.

In the legitimate world, the most visible example of Irish entrenchment was the Midtown Democratic Club. In the illegitimate world, it was the shylocks, gamblers, shake-down artists, hijackers and assorted strong-arm men who prospered along the waterfront during the second most lucrative era for organized crime in New York City.

Racketeers on the West Side were in an ideal position to reap the benefits of the Port of New York’s booming postwar trade. Longshoremen seeking work in Manhattan were still under the thumb of a ruthless “shape-up” system, which had existed from time immemorial. Each morning, a group of prospective workers gathered at the piers, where a hiring foreman selected who would work that day. At many piers the procedure grew into hiring a crew or gang as a unit.

A common result of the shape-up system was the kickback racket. A crew expecting to receive favorable attention from a hiring foreman was required to kick back 10 or 20 percent of its members’ wages. In order to be able to afford such a kickback, many workers were forced to turn to loansharks, or “shylocks,” who were always readily available to loan money at usurious rates.

With the Hell’s Kitchen docks as its base, it was no surprise that Local 824 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) soon became one of the union’s most powerful. Harold Bowers was a neighborhood delegate to Local 824, commonly known as the “Pistol Local” because its membership was made up of so many convicted felons. But the real power behind Local 824 was Bowers’s cousin, Mickey, whose police record showed thirteen arrests between 1920 and 1940. Mickey Bowers was believed to be behind the death of, among others, Tommy Gleason, a rival for control of the Pistol Local who was gunned down in a 10th Avenue funeral parlor—a convenient spot for a mob hit if ever there was one.

Of all the Irish racketeers during the Forties and Fifties, the most powerful of all was red-haired Edward J. “Eddie” McGrath. McGrath was a former whiskey baron from Prohibition days who’d made a successful transition to the waterfront rackets. One of an elite group of underworld figures with ties to some of the city’s most influential politicians, he’d been appointed an ILA “organizer at large” by the union’s president, Joseph P. Ryan. At the time, McGrath’s extensive criminal record included arrests ranging from burglary to murder, and he’d once done a long stretch in Sing Sing.

McGrath’s main “muscle” on the piers was his brother-in-law, John “Cockeye” Dunn, a vicious convicted murderer, and Andrew “Squint” Sheridan, another ex-con who’d once been a triggerman for Dutch Schultz.

With Cockeye Dunn and Squint Sheridan as his partners, McGrath controlled the lucrative numbers game throughout the Port of New York and was on intimate terms with many of the most powerful organized crime figures of his day. Meyer Lansky was a long-time companion, as was Moe Dalitz, head of the Cleveland syndicate that owned the Desert Inn gambling casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. And in 1950, McGrath shared a suite at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Brooklyn-based syndicate boss Joe Adonis. While there, they were entertained by none other than Owney Madden, the former Duke of the West Side, for whom McGrath had driven a beer truck during the glory days of Prohibition.

On a slightly smaller scale, Hell’s Kitchen had operators like Hughie Mulligan. For every Eddie McGrath, there were a dozen guys like Mulligan—localized numbers runners, strong-arm men, bookmakers, and all-purpose gofers. It was Mulligan who first saw the potential in a likable young neighborhood gambler named Mickey Spillane, who he immediately put to work as a “runner” in the neighborhood’s ever-expanding numbers racket.

Short and jowly, with thick black-rimmed eyeglasses, Mulligan himself served as a bookmaker for McGrath and a go-between for the neighborhood’s various ethnic factions—including the cops. At the time, the New York City Police Department was still an Irish institution, and some cops didn’t fancy dealing with Italian gangsters. Mulligan made sure the police got their cut. He liked to call himself a “facilitator,” but most everyone else thought of him as a “bagman.”

Even with his reputation as a pacifier, Mulligan’s attitudes were no less insular than many West Siders’. Once, during an investigation of police corruption, detectives hid a recording device in his car as he made the rounds from pier to pier collecting tribute. Mulligan was overheard lamenting the changing ethnic makeup of the workers.

“Look at that over there,” he said, referring to a crew of longshoremen who had gathered. “There ain’t a white man in the bunch. Not a single fuckin’ white man.”

The crew he was referring to was almost completely Italian.

Throughout the era of McGrath and Mulligan, criminal profits from the various rackets along the waterfront were staggering. In 1948 alone, the Grace Steamship Line reported losses of $3 million in pilfered goods, of which 80 percent occurred on its New York piers. Along with losses on the docks, many trucks moving cargo between the piers and inland freight terminals were hijacked by armed robbers. Payroll padding, no-show jobs, organized rip-offs, kickbacks, gambling concessions, and loansharking flourished as never before, and any organized crime group worth its salt had contacts in the ILA.

With so many different operators feeding off the waterfront rackets on so many different levels, no doubt the mob would sooner or later have begun to choke on its own gluttony, leading to the inevitable gang wars. Luckily for many mobsters, the United States government, in the persons of Senator Estes Kefauver and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, saw to it that it never happened. It was the 1951 Kefauver Committee that first declared that racketeers were “firmly entrenched along New York City’s waterfront.” That was followed by Governor Dewey’s New York Crime Commission hearings, which spent most of 1952 investigating the activities of the ILA.

Ironically, at the same time various government commissions began to purge the New York waterfront of its criminal elements, the industry itself began to wane. In July of 1956, the
Andrea Doria
sank off Nantucket, signaling the beginning of the end for cruise liners, always a staple on the West Side docks. By 1959, airplanes carried nearly two-thirds of all transatlantic passengers.

The decline of New York’s waterfront wasn’t as dramatic or rapid as the end of Prohibition: the twenty-first Amendment eliminated the underworld’s business overnight. But the effect on Hell’s Kitchen was immediate. The most reliable source of employment the neighborhood had ever seen was dying. As a result, the railyards went bankrupt. Housing conditions deteriorated. And the area’s middle class, which held strong throughout the 1950s, finally began to erode.

The gangsters went their separate ways. Hughie Mulligan moved his 300-pound girth and his family to a respectable middle-income abode in Queens Village. Squint Sheridan was given a life sentence for the murder of a hiring stevedore in Greenwich Village. For his role in the same murder, Cockeye Dunn was given 2,000 volts to the cerebellum, courtesy of New York State.

In 1959, the granddaddy of them all, Eddie McGrath, took a plane ride to Florida. As king of the West Side waterfront rackets, he had presided over the most prosperous period for organized crime in New York since Prohibition. He was lucky. He had not only stayed alive but had come through all the various investigative committees without so much as an indictment. Now all he wanted to do was retreat to a warmer climate, just like the handful of other gangsters he knew who’d been fortunate enough to survive till retirement.

As the most influential gangster left in Hell’s Kitchen in 1960, Mickey Spillane inherited what was left of the neighborhood rackets. They were troubled times for Hell’s Kitchen and the city in general, with the relatively prosperous Fifties about to give way to the social and economic uncertainty of the Sixties. For the Irish, who had ruled the political clubhouses and gambling dens of the neighborhood throughout the century, it was a time of reckoning.

Within months of Mickey Spillane’s marriage to Maureen McManus in August of 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-sixth President of the United States. For millions of Irish Americans, it marked a point of no return. The children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants, whose ancestors had fled political persecution in their own land and overcome violent discrimination in the States, were now, proudly and unequivocally, American.

What that meant in the mind of many second- and third-generation Irish-American families was that they were now free to move to the suburbs in pursuit of the postwar American dream. No longer an immigrant class, middle-income Irish Catholics assimilated—with a vengeance.

But in some predominantly working-class neighborhoods like South Boston, Chicago’s Southwest Side, and Hell’s Kitchen, the transition was slower. To the Roman Catholic poor of these communities John F. Kennedy’s election was an empty promise. Their lives were a far cry from the Kennedys’ lavish summer estates and expensive Harvard educations. What’s more, the upper crust, known as the “lace-curtain” Irish, looked on these “shanty” Irish as a hopeless and disdainful breed, a reminder perhaps of what they had left behind in their frantic climb to the top of the social register.

While most of Irish America took advantage of their newfound status in the wake of Kennedy’s election and headed for suburbia, there remained in Hell’s Kitchen a small, hard-core community who had neither the means nor the inclination to leave. With the area now entering its newest phase of economic decline, these embattled Irish held tight—for better or for worse—to the traditions established by their forebears. It was this group who turned to Mickey Spillane, whose polite manner and handsome black-Irish features made him something of a Kennedyesque figure in his own right.

By the mid-1960s, what remained of the West Side rackets were now evenly divided between Spillane’s crew, known simply as the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob, and various Italian interests. The Italians still played a major role on the docks and at Madison Square Garden, the city’s premier sports arena, then located at 50th Street and 8th Avenue. At the Garden the labor force was controlled equally by the Gambino crime family in Brooklyn, by Vincent “the Chin” Gigante’s Genovese family crew, and by Spillane’s Irish Mob.

The prize New York Coliseum, which opened in 1956 at 59th Street and 8th Avenue, was also split among numerous criminal factions. Insuring that everyone got a piece of the action, as many as fourteen different unions got involved, many of them acting as brokers between individual contractors, management, and the mob.

Spillane’s alliance with the Mafia was always tenuous. He had inherited the relationship from his former boss, Hughie Mulligan, who had himself inherited a tradition going all the way back to Owney Madden. Since Madden first joined Lucky Luciano’s Organized Crime Commission in 1931, the Italians had far outstripped the Irish in every facet of organized crime. As J. Edgar Hoover chased Communists and denied the existence of the Mafia, the Italians constructed an impressive national network controlled mainly by the “Five Families” of New York City. Local neighborhood mobs like the Hell’s Kitchen Irish were allowed to operate, but only as long as the Italians got their cut.