If you're asked to name any of the alltime classic gangsters no doubt Al Capone will quickly come to mind. The stereotype is of an Italian, trilby-wearing, gun-touting guy in a suit, a fast-talking wise guy who makes offers that can't be refused and who may ask you if it is he that you are indeed talking to. The genre of the mob movie has permeated our culture to such an extent that the gangster has long had an iconic status. It may therefore come as a surprise that one of the greatest American gangsters was in fact an Irishman. "Mad Dog Coll", born in Gweedore in 1908, adds new meaning to the term "the Donegal Mafia".
Vincent Coll was born in Bunbeg, Co Donegal. He emigrated to New York as a child and after a troubled early life quickly rose to prominence in the world of organised crime during the prohibition era. His is a story of a man hardened by poverty, who emerged from the slums of the Bronx to lead one of the most ruthless gangs that New York has ever seen. In the first biography of Coll, journalist Breandan Delap feels that he has told a story that was just waiting to be written, a story that shatters one or two myths along the way.
"One of the great myths is that the Irish built America. But it took them longer than almost any other ethnic group to assimilate. It took them almost 80 years to finally make their mark in American society. The likes of the Colls ended up in a slum in the Bronx, they weren't going anywhere. The first Irish president was in the 1960s. That story isn't often told."
Like many of the ethnic groups that came off the boat, the Irish started life in the new world at the bottom of the barrel. Poles, Jews, Irish and Italians all competed for the same jobs, each new arrival being consigned to some slum or other, all eking out a living in a society still owned by an older and more established order. For some, like Vincent Coll, the prospect of a quick way to the top proved too attractive to ignore. As Breandan Delap points out, with a childhood as an institutionalised orphan behind him, Coll wanted something better.
After he left the institution at the age of 19, Coll joined up with a guy called Dutch Schultz. Now Schultz had grown up in the Bronx himself, of Jewish background, and Coll played with him when he was young but didn't treat him very well. Years later when Coll left prison he was confronted with Schultz who was now running the show, so he had to win his way back in. The way he did it was by going to Schultz's "speakeasy" and chatting up Schultz's girlfriend. Schultz sent over his henchmen to teach Coll manners but Coll dealt with them. Because of that Schultz reckoned Coll had a lot of "moxie", so he put him on the payroll.
The maxim that there is no honour among thieves was proved right when "Mad Dog" quickly turned against his new boss. Asking Schultz first to cut him in, Coll then set up a rival gang and started bumping off his former friends. A war of attrition ensued, in which at least 20 people were killed. Gradually other gangs were drawn in. The "Vincent Coll Gang" were very quickly at war with other leading mobsters, like Lucky Luciano and Owney Madden. Concentrating on kidnapping and extortion, Coll soon made a lot of money and even more enemies.
During this period "Mad Dog" became a household name in the United States. But his reputation was more that of a psycho murderer than a bandit hero. His notoriety stemmed from what became known as "the Harlem Baby Massacre". In a hit on one of Schultz's men, a five year-old child was killed in the cross-fire. Coll was promptly arrested and put on trial for the crime. Only the legal wizardry of famed lawyer Samuel Leibowitz got him off the hook, but by now Coll was both front page news and a national hate figure. The legal defence had cost him his fortune. His enemies were closing in. It was the beginning of the end.
AS Breandan Delap explains, that end finally came through an act of betrayal. If the gangster world is a place where the cliche reigns, Coll's fate proved the truth of yet another: watch your enemies closely, but watch your friends even more so.
"He had ruffled so many feathers of other gangsters, like Owney Madden and Lucky Luciano, that eventually they were all trying to get him. They put out a price on his head and eventually what happened is that he was betrayed by his own bodyguard. He went into a phone booth on the February 8th, 1932, on West 23rd Street, and Owney Madden, who he was blackmailing at the time, traced him down and had him shot. He died with his fortune squandered. He had only $101 in his pocket when he was killed."
The death of Mad Dog Coll was something of a milestone. It marked the end of the tradition of Irish gangsters, who lost out to the more organised Jewish gangs and Italian mobsters that were emerging - the Italians particularly becoming synonymous with the whole gangster myth.
Yet the story of "Mad Dog Coll" has survived as something of a legend, albeit a fictionalised one. He has inspired two Bmovies, Mad Dog Coll and Killer Instinct, and has made appearances in films such as Mobsters, The Cotton Club and Sleepers. Breandan Delap's documentary biography of Vincent Coll's life, to be broadcast on TG 4 on Christmas Day, will go some way to separating the fact from the fiction, including the viciousness that brought him to prominence.
"He was vicious. When he was employed by Schultz he was his top enforcer. He would go to a speakeasy and threaten, `why don't you stock Schultz's beer'. One guy who owned a speakeasy, Joe Rock, was really stubborn. Coll tortured him for days, beat him to a pulp. According to files in the Manhattan district attorney's office, he used a gauze cloth soaked in gonorrhoea-infected bodily fluids, put it over his eyes. The guy retired from bootlegging a broken man. That was the kind of viciousness he was capable of."
Delap is concerned that the real Vincent Coll be known, that he be neither romanticised nor sanitised into some kind of rogue hero. And yet, after spending the last two years researching the life of the man, Delap does feel a certain sympathy for "the local boy who made bad".
"The whole Coll story is sad. Apart from the viciousness of what he did, when you read his records it's a story of an orphaned boy, bouncing in and out of institutions from the age of seven, numbing poverty in the Bronx, all his brothers dying of TB. It's a sad story. Before I read the records it was the story of a vicious man. When I had read them it was the story of a sad childhood and what became of that."
Mad Dog Coll reminds us of a forgotten story, of what became of at least some of those who left our shores for the new world. Some of those uglier, more ambivalent stories are now being told for the first time. Breandan Delap has told us just one of them.
Mad Dog Coll: An Irish Gangster is published this month by Mercier Press. A documentary of Vincent Coll's life will be broadcast on TG 4 on Christmas Day. Breandan Delap is editor of Foinse, the weekly Irish language newspaper.