The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob by T. J. English Read Free Book Online

Springs, Arkansas, where he married the postmaster’s daughter and ran what amounted to a resort town for mobsters on the lam.
    Before Madden left New York, however, in the waning days of Prohibition he was to form one last alliance. In 1931, a young Sicilian immigrant named Charles “Lucky” Luciano was in the process of forming an organized crime “commission.” In a radical departure from the usual closed-door policy of the Italian crime syndicate, it was Luciano’s intention to allow other ethnic mobsters to take part in a nationwide ruling body. Madden had been included as a personal friend of Luciano’s and as a representative of New York’s Irish Mob.
    At the time, Madden’s reign as Duke of the West Side had already peaked, so his inclusion might have seemed like an afterthought. But with this alliance, a relationship was begun between Italian and Irish racketeers on the West Side. It was a relationship that would sustain the area’s criminal interests through the lean years of the Depression, and establish a partnership that would shape the lives of countless gangsters that followed.

2
    LAST OF A DYING BREED
    O n Saturday afternoon, August 27, 1960, many of Hell’s Kitchen’s most distinguished citizens began to arrive at the Church of the Sacred Heart on West 51st Street just off 10th Avenue. It was a beautiful day, with temperatures in the mid-nineties, and the people—over 200 in number—were dressed in their Sunday best. There was a festive atmosphere, with everyone cheerfully greeting one another and exhibiting a communal pride commensurate with the occasion. After all, as any self-respecting West Sider would have known, this was not just any gathering. This was a gathering in honor of Michael John Spillane.
    With his wavy black hair and dashing good looks, Spillane, then twenty-six years old, was especially well liked by the neighborhood’s older residents. Though his exploits as a gangster were known to many, Spillane himself was rarely associated with these acts. Much of it had to do with his abundant personal charms. As they would say long after he was gone, nobody knew how to work the room like Mickey Spillane. And “the room,” in this case, was most of Hell’s Kitchen.
    Spillane first began to make a name for himself at a tender age in the late 1950s. Dressed in fine thousand-dollar suits, he frequently made the rounds bestowing favors in shops and saloons along 9th and 10th avenues. When he heard a neighbor had landed in the hospital, he usually sent flowers. On Thanksgiving, turkeys went out to families in need. He was especially popular with the nuns at Mount Carmel Convent on West 54th Street, to whom he made annual donations.
    Behind this appealing facade was an extensive criminal past. Spillane’s first brush with the law had come in 1950 at the age of sixteen, when he was shot and then arrested by a patrolman while robbing a Manhattan movie theater. There would be twenty-four more arrests over the years on an assortment of charges including burglary, assault, gun possession, criminal contempt, and the crime he was most often associated with, gambling.
    Mickey Spillane’s criminal record, however, was of no great consequence to those who gathered at the Church of the Sacred Heart in August of 1960. Instead, they had come to pay their respects to Spillane on the occasion of his marriage, and no talk of violence or gangsterism would spoil this fine day.
    Only Sacred Heart Church could possibly provide the proper backdrop for such an illustrious event. The building itself had first been dedicated in 1885 by Archbishop Michael Corrigan, and it had since become one of the community’s most enduring symbols. As late as 1920, an overwhelming number of parishioners at Sacred Heart were of Irish extraction. Eventually, more and more Italian surnames began to appear on the official list of subscribers. Even so, intermarriage between ethnic groups was rarely encouraged. Once, in the late