JOHNNY BRODERICK, THE HAM-FISTED DETECTIVE WHO retired in 1947 with a string of one-punch KOs over underworld hard guys dating back to the mid-Twenties, wasn't much for handing out compliments to the natural enemy in the Broadway jungle, but he did say this once:
"Vincent Coll and Fats McCarthy, his partner, are the two toughest guys I ever met."
On the first end of that twin endorsement, Broderick never would have gotten an argument from Dutch Schultz. A chum dating back to the street corners of his teens and then,
too briefly, an officer candidate in his hoodlum army, the baby-faced Coll brought more travail on the Dutchman than the entire New York Police Department. Indeed, the brash
Mick, born into a decent family from County Kildare in Ireland in 1908, four years after Arthur Flegenheimer's debut, caused his old buddy more damn trouble than anybody
but the paid assassin who put that last slug into his side. There was just no way to deal with Vincent Coll except by force; you could not set up a peace conference with him no
matter how soft you made the terms.
Coll drove Arthur to such distraction that the Dutchman went around to the 42nd Police Precinct in The Bronx one day in 1931 and offered to put a bounty on his head, the way they used to do it in the Old West. Of course it strains the imagination, but it happened. Schultz simply walked into the detective's squad room and said, "Look, I want the Mick killed.
He's driving me out of my mind. I'll give a house in Westchester to any of you guys who knocks him off." There were three detectives on hand and the one who knew the beer merchant
best, Fred Schaedel, from his old neighborhood, answered him.
"Arthur," the big cop said, "do you know what the hell you're saying? You know you're in the Morrisania station?"
"I know where I am," Schultz snapped. "I've been here before. I just came in to tell ya I'll pay good to any cop that I kills the Mick."
Schaedel gathered by now that this wasn't one of those days when L'il Arthur might have been sampling his own bottled goods. Now he addressed him a bit more seriously.
"If you tell us you know what you're saying, Arthur," he said, "then you must be out of your head."
"I know what I'm saying," Schultz replied. "The guy that kills the Mick gets the Honor Medal anyway--I'm just makin' it more interesting."
"Okay," Schaedel said, getting up out of his chair. "Then get your ass out of here before we pinch you. You hafta be out of your head."
Can you imagine a time so carefree and happy that a known gangster could walk into his friendly neighborhood station house and offer the police a contract like that? Talking to
Fred Schaedel in 1969, the author, who counted Morrisania among the way stations of his own youth, asked why Schultz had not indeed been pinched if he was seriously trying to
exchange Vincent Coll's life for one of those medium-priced Westchester houses Steve DiRosa and Julius Salke had turned down that night outside Central Park.
"We never could have made it stick," Schaedel said. "The Dutchman would have walked out five minutes after his lawyer arrived. He'd just say he was kiddin' with us. Besides, it was a
good bet by then that Schultz and the Mick were going to take care of each other, one or the other, without our help. We had our hands full just picking up the bodies they were
scattering around the borough in those days."
And there was no shortage of bodies, for that matter.
The precise origin of the Schultz-Coll war is difficult to trace because none of the principals kept diaries and there was nobody in
that set blessed with the total recall of a Joe Valachi and the same compulsion to share it with his fellow citizens. What is known is that no one in the Dutchman's band grew more restive
than Vincent Coll as the rapid successes of the fading Twenties blossomed into the even more limitless prosperity of the early Thirties. The sky seemed to be the limit--and Vincent and
Peter Coll were still nothing more than a pair of hired hands. This was not calculated to sit well with a man of Vincent's tastes and temperament.
>From information in the files of the Manhattan District Attorney's office, it would appear that the war broke out when the high-spirited, dimple-chinned Coll, an athletic five-ten with
curly
blond hair and a face that might have made the movies if he had not chosen the gun instead, announced that he wanted his own piece of the beer business in The Bronx and Harlem.
Schultz's one and only partner, of course, had been Joey Noe, and he had managed quite well on his own since Noe's death.
So the answer was no and Coll went on a rampage. Schultz trucks suddenly began to fall to hijackers--remember when beer trucks were being hijacked, not jet planes?--and, inevitably,
Schultz men began to die. The toll, unfortunately for the historian, would never be known because the Dutchman, a more private man then, didn't put out any casualty lists. Nor did Coll
when the bullets started coming the other way. You can imagine the result. Denied official communiques, the newspapers competed strenuously to come up with some kind of count of
the dead and injured. It started conservatively, like SEVEN DEAD IN SCHULTZ-COLL WAR, then it was 12, then 15, then 20 and by 1932 outlandishly round numbers like 50 were
being kicked around. It was really idle, all of it, because there was no way to count; the victims in the main were faceless gunmen, unknown to fame, or simple toilers in the beer drops
and garages Coll put under siege when he made his move.
If there ever was any lingering question about the Mick's private renown as a modern-day gunslinger, Joe Valachi would sweep it away more than three decades later by spilling the
details of a murder contract of staggering proportions. The pint-sized underworld turncoat told his new-found buddies in the United States Senate that in 1931 Coll hired out to Cosa
Nostra chieftain Salvatore Maranzano to kill nobody less than Lucky Luciano and his equally-terrifying first lieutenant, Vito Genovese.
There, indeed, is the measure of the man--a summons from a Capo di tutti Capi ("Boss of all Bosses") to knock over two of his contemporaries in an enemy Family. The Mick had to be
most flattered. Don Salvatore had selected him, every inch the outsider, over all the soldiers in his own army.
The mission did not come off, as Valachi recounted it from the storehouse of his bottomless memory, only because the contract was cancelled--with guns and knives--by its intended victims. To get to the heart of it, a little background is in order.
Salvatore Maranzano was the leader of the Castellammarese forces, mostly imports from the area around the Gulf of Castellammare in Sicily, who in 1929 challenged the New York rule
of Giuseppe (Joe the Boss) Masseria. This was the war in which Joe (The Baker) Catania eventually fell in the Masseria cause, dispatched by a Maranzano execution team which
included Mr. Valachi himself, before some of the Boss's own partisans, led by Luciano and Genovese, decided that he himself would have to go--in the interests of peace, of course.
This item was attended to in a Coney Island restaurant on April 15, 1931, with Charley Lucky himself on the premises but responding to a hurry call in the washroom when the
usual "person or persons unknown" deposited some slugs in the Masseria brain.
This happenstance removed the worst of his irritations from Don Salvatore's world, or underworld, but the Luciano-Genovese ascension to power on the enemy side found the
Castellammarese forces still beleaguered, and this is where the Mick comes in.
Don Salvatore, according to Valachi, set up a peace session for September 10 in his well-fortified office in the New York Central Building on Park Avenue and arranged for Vincent
Coll to drop in and blow some holes into his high-level guests, Charley and Vito. Well, you know about the best laid plans. The Maranzano peace formula fell short because Messrs.
Luciano and Genovese failed to show up.
Instead, the host had a visit from four kosher delegates on loan from Murder Inc., dressed as policemen for his special occasion. When they left, Don Salvatore's life was leaking
away from a combination of four gunshots, a slashed throat and six stab wounds. It turned out, moreover, that September 10 had been set aside as a kind of Moscow purge day,
Italian-style, and that perhaps 30 to 40 other Sicilian notables had fallen around the American countryside in the bloodiest of
the Italian family quarrels; once again, there would never be an exact count suitable for engraving on any memorial scroll.
Where was Mr. Coll when Maranzano fell? He was on his way into the scheduled hearts-and-flowers (and bullets) session, right on time, just as the early-bird assassins were coming out. Valachi said he heard this at the time from Bobby Doyle (a very free translation of Girolamo Santucci), a fellow Costa Nostra soldier who happened to be on the premises that day, and
that six years later a self-certified member of the murder band, Sam (Red) Levine, confirmed the story in a moment of high confidence. Here is some of the reformed badman's testimony from that point on under the questioning of general counsel Jerome S. Adlerman and Senator John L. McClellan, the Arkansas Democrat who is chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations:
MR. ADLERMAN: As I understand it, then, Red Levine and two or three others, Jewish gangsters, had gone in there to kill Maranzano. They killed him. As they were leaving the scene of the killing they met Vincent
Coll coming in?
MR. VALACHI: Coming in as they were going out and they waved him away.
MR. ADLERMAN: What did they say to Vincent
Coll?
MR. VALACHI: Just like that, "Beat it."
MR. ADLERMAN: Did they tell him the cops were on the way?
MR. VALACHI: Yes. "Beat it, the cops are on the way."
THE CHAIRMAN: What was Coll doing there?
MR. VALACHI: It came out that Maranzano had hired or got Vincent Coll--I never knew he was contacting Coll--the purpose was that they were going to kill Vito and Charley which Vito and Charley never showed up.
The Valachi revelations conflicted in one key respect--who done it--with a version put forth years before by Dixie
Davis. In his memoir, the Schultz barrister listed Bo Weinberg as Don Salvatore's killer, but the point already has been made in this chronicle of death and taxes that Davis had a habit of putting notches on the trusty Weinberg .45 with utter abandon. The way he told it, poor Bo barely would have had a chance to switch his gabardines and matching shoulder holster from one murder errand to the next.
The failure of the Coll mission, it is worth noting here, was a tough break both for Joe Valachi and Dutch Schultz. It was bad for Valachi because Genovese lived and went onward and upward and years later, when they were cellmates in Atlanta on narcotics raps, put the "kiss of death" on him as a suspected turncoat, causing the old soldier to turn government informer because that seemed so much better than getting knocked off in prison. It was bad for Schultz because Lucky Luciano lived and he was going to have trouble with that droopy-eyed charmer after a while.
As far as the Mick himself goes, bear in mind that in the time under discussion he wasn't relying solely on his outside shooting contracts to keep body and soul (and his combat platoon) together during his profitless war with the Dutchman. He had to have money to finance the expedition against Fortress Flegenheimer. One way to raise it was in the popular kidnapping trade.
Thus in 1931 Coll staged the exploit that made the rest of his career up to that time--marked by 14 arrests for everything from juvenile delinquency in 1920 to homicide in 1930--pale by comparison. On the balmy night of June 15, he piled some helpers into a sedan and drove over to the Club Argonaut on Seventh Avenue and there, on the street, picked up the establishment's large and prosperous owner, George Jean (Big Frenchy) DeMange. Now DeMange happened to be Owney Madden's partner in a string of Manhattan rackets ranging all the way from booze to extortion to protection to the sport of boxing. It was a power almost akin to the kind-hearted police force itself, but there was the Mick, on Owney the Killer's turf, taking Big Frenchy into temporary custody.
"Why, men, this is silly," DeMange protested while his midsection was being tickled with the barrel of a .38
concealed in Coll's right-hand jacket pocket. "If it's money you want you can have it, but don't try this gun stuff."
You can imagine how much impression that made.
"Get inna car," Coll said, "I ain't here to argue."
The prisoner was driven up Riverside Drive, the scenic route, into Westchester County. It was a springtime outing fraught with distress for Big Frenchy, since he knew as much about the quick Coll trigger finger as anybody in town, but it was kept fairly diverting with a low-key man-to-man
disussion: how many American dollars would Mr. DeMange's life be worth in the current market?
The Mick had an absolutely outlandish sum in mind, in six figures or close enough, while his harried but practical guest thought that something like $10,000 might be more equitable in the current market (the economic upturn, one must note here, was still awaiting the arrival of Mr. Roosevelt in the White House). Some of the stories later had it that the wily Frenchman had managed to buy his body back for the paltry ten grand. Other estimates ran way beyond that.
What was paid, once the necessary phone call was made to midtown and Owney Madden could scratch the cash ransom together toward midnight, was a round $35,000, C.O.D. This
is the figure reposing in the confidential files of the Manhattan District Attorney. Of course, the Madden-DeMange
cartel, with its heavy beer and liquor interests, if nothing else, could have shelled out the low number or the high one with equal ease, if not downright nonchalance. What had to hurt was the principle of the thing. Vincent
Coll had committed an act of the worst possible form--not that kidnapping wasn't so rife in the land at this time as to drive even the vaunted FBI to distraction. And not that this was just an instance of the boys stealing bodies from each other. This one was at once unthinkable and unforgivable because a trigger-happy punk from The Bronx, without a full-blown mob beyond a handful of other mindless guns, had challenged the power and muscle of Mr. Madden. It's worth some reflection.
Owney Madden came out of the slums of Liverpool to settle in the slums of Hell's Kitchen. He made his mark in no time. He was only 17 when they started calling him Owney the Killer, 18 when he took over the West Side's Gopher Gang, 19 when at least two murders were credited to him, 20 when a small army of rival Hudson Dusters put five slugs into him, and 22 when he went up the river in the barroom murder of Little Patsy Doyle. That was in 1914, but Owney was out of Sing Sing by 1923 and moving pretty well (look, he piled up 57 arrests altogether). He was a very big man on Broadway, known as the Duke of the West Side in his own court, when Coll decided to put the snatch on his partner. Madden had to have the dimmest possible view of any such breach of
underworld etiquette.
Did it bother the Mick? It wouldn't seem so, because after a while the word was around that Coll, far from being alarmed by the reports of the irascible Madden's displeasure, was talking about kidnapping the racket boss's brother-in- law, Jack Marron, the very next time he had the shorts. For a while after that, Marron was almost as scarce around the midtown haunts as Dutch Schultz, who had become almost entirely invisible once the shooting war with Coll began.
Beyond the successful DeMange adventure, the Mick's other exploits in his sideline remained vague because of the universal reticence of kidnapping victims to talk about such mundane matters as money. Coll was believed to be the cad who made off one day with George Immerman, brother of Connie, the Harlem night club impresario, in a case of
mistaken identity which reportedly produced some $45,000 in spending money for him nonetheless. It is hard to imagine what kind of price tag the zestful hoodlum might have pinned on the body of the well-heeled Connie Immerman himself.
The Mick also drew the credit in the supposed kidnapping of Rudy Vallee, a saga of the Broadway badlands which came down in popular history in two versions. In one, the ever-thrifty crooner bargained his ferocious captor down to such a low figure--say, $10,000--as to make the whole venture a questionable risk at best. In the other, originally put forth by the Daily Mirror, Vallee came up with a round $100,000 after the soles of his feet had been toasted to a crisp. The singer-tured-actor, a smash hit on Broadway in the Sixties in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, told the
author that none of it was true. "Larry Fay used to come into my club, the Villa Vallee," he said. "He took a liking to me and sometimes gave me a lift downtown in his armored car. One of my friends spotted me in the car with Larry one day and nearly fainted at the thought that I was being taken for a ride. That's how the kidnapping thing got around but I can't imagine how
Coll got mixed up in it."
Coll did have a legitimate credit line in the kidnapping of an affluent bookmaker named Billy Warren but no ransom figure ever emerged. This is understandable, since an honest turf accountant who talked openly about showering large sums of cash on virtual strangers might have some explaining to do to the Internal Revenue Bureau. Whether the highly placed Owney Madden ever had to tell the tax men how he scratched together that $35,000 for Mr.
Coll is something else; if the government was at all curious about the sources of the Madden-DeMange income the secret was rather well kept.
While Coll's kidnapping proclivities made him an extremely poor risk in the lower levels of the town's society even beyond his little problem with Dutch Schultz, he was about to suffer a rash of publicity that would put him on the very bottom of all the popularity charts in every walk of the city's life. It happened on July 28, 1931, even before the full story of the DeMange caper had dribbled out through the underworld's paper curtain. On that steaming summer day, a touring car carrying five gunmen drove into crowded East 107th Street in Spanish Harlem, slowed down in front of Joey Rao's Helmar Social Club and laid down a stream of fire, presumably aiming at some lucky bum who had been marked for the spot but wasn't on it. While the mission
failed, it had a far more tragic effect, for in the hail of some 60 bullets a five-year-old boy, Michael Vengalli, was killed, and four
other children playing on the slum street were wounded.
The headline writers labelled the deed the "Baby Killing"
and the police lost no time in naming Coll as the maestro of the assassination band in the car. Now he wasn't just the Mick but the Mad Mick and the Mad Dog and a nationwide alarm went out for his arrest. The cops leaned to the theory that the real victim was supposed to be Mr. Rao himself. That gentleman was a long-time ally of Dutch Schultz's but the story was that the senseless shooting spree had nothing to do with the Dutchman but rather marked a battle for control of the East Harlem rackets, including narcotics and policy.
Coll grew a mustache and dyed his sandy locks black and managed to stay out of the dragnet for three months,
probably without leaving town at all. When he was picked up, finally, two of his principal lieutenants, Frank Giordano and Pasquale Del Greco, alias Patsy Dugan, were charged with him but the murder trial that December ended in a disaster for the state.
Coll had the services of one of the nation's leading criminal lawyers, Samuel Leibowitz, later a County Judge in Brooklyn and very hard on malefactors
of any stripe, while the District Attorney, with a thin case at best, had to depend on a rather fragile star witness. That character, George Brecht, turned out to be a felon from St. Louis who had made something of a specialty as an eyewitness in
murder trials. Leibowitz left him in so many shreds that the state itself had to ask for a directed verdict of acquittal.
Coll, a blond again and with 23-year-old Lottie Kriesberger, his best girl, beaming at his side, emerged from the Criminal Courts Building with a prepared statement to mark the biggest of his courtroom victories.
"I have been charged with all kinds of crimes but baby killing was the limit," the statement said. "I'd like nothing better than to lay my hands on the man who did this. I'd tear his throat out. There is nothing more despicable than a man who would harm an innocent child."
The Mick celebrated his triumph by marrying the lanky Lottie, culminating a courtship which began when she was 16 and had suffered nothing more serious than the minor
interruptions occasioned by Coll's difficulties with the law. Lottie was a German import who had arrived on these shores at the age of two with the name of Van Denninger or Denerlein. The Kriesberger handle came from an unsuccessful robber to whom she had been married almost too briefly to remember.
In October 1931, even while Coll presumably was rather taken up with his defense preparations in the Vengalli case, one of the more consequential events of the war with Schultz took place.
Joe Mullins, a 5O-year-old $5O-a-week odd-job man for the Dutchman, was cut down in front of a beer drop on the poorer part of Park Avenue, in the Lower Bronx, by two trained torpedomen who had made the switch from the Schultz legions to the hotheaded
Coll band. It proved to be a poorly conceived killing--or poorly executed at best--because a couple of Edison Company repairmen, working right there in a manhole, happened to be close enough to form a perfectly splendid image of the distinctively hard faces of the Coll handymen, Dominic (Toughy) Odierno, 23, and the aforementioned Frank Giordano, 32, so they might as well have left their calling cards at the scene.
Both hoodlums paid for the spot killing in the electric chair but the Dutchman himself, to the day he died, insisted that the cops had the wrong men in that case. He was wrong, but it would have been a nice piece of irony if true. Odierno and
Giordano were the only two mercenaries ever brought before the bar in the widespread and seemingly endless warfare touched off by the Mick.
The Mullins murder capped a period in the strife which had been stepped up quite a bit since the preceding
Decoration Day, a memorable date because it marked the killing of Peter Coll. He was cut down on a Harlem street corner and the word was that the Dutchman had decided that Peter, the older brother, would have to go because the Mick had
violated one of the underworld's more treasured codes. Schultz had come up with the $10,000 bail Coll needed on a Sullivan Law rap some time back, in happier days, but the Mick, due for trial in the spring of 1931, failed to show up. Since he was always so elusive, Schultz evidently sent his messengers after the next of kin to square the account.
Vincent took Peter's passing very hard. Four Schultz men fell before blazing guns in the next few weeks as the war reached its peak. It was from that moment on that the Dutchman became rather scarce around town. He confided to someone once that this period, however extended, had not been a total loss. He said he had caught up with a lot of reading, from Dickens to a spate of American history as well as some biography and a peek into a few medical tomes. He did not say what had prompted his interest in the human anatomy; his own physique, neither seriously neglected nor challenged with too much of the stuff Schultz was selling, was generally in tip-top condition.
By then, there was so much artillery going off that the police found themselves doing free guard duty at the Schultz beer drops. Thus Fred Schaedel and a sidekick were assigned at one time to station themselves in an unmarked sedan outside of one of the Dutchman's larger plants, on Randall Avenue in the Hunts Point section of The Bronx. A Schultz marksman, Sid Goldstein, manned the roof of the drop with a rifle and Henny Ahearn, one of the insiders whose name could be detected later in the Dutchman's deathbed ravings, was the man in charge. Schaedel said the Schultz men spotted the police detail right off the bat and couldn't have been more charming, since it was a time when a little police protection was as good as an ounce of prevention. If you wonder why the drop wasn't busted, well, that was the job of the federal Prohibition snoops, and they couldn't dam up that whole river of amber, could they? Who would watch the 50,000 speakeasies? Who would watch the door-to-door deliverers of the bathtub gin? Who would knock over the economy-size stills in the private homes?
And who could measure the corruption of that moment in history?
Fred Schaedel recalls that one day a heedless young foot cop, seething with ambition, pulled into the 42nd Precinct with a brand new Lincoln truck loaded with 55 barrels of beer, parked it in the station house yard--and watched it driven off by its rightful owners a couple of hours later. Illegal search and seizure, you know. The officer had no right to go take that truck away from Mr. Flegenheimer without a warrant, and the feds weren't going to follow it to the drop and snatch it back either. The wonder is that the Dutchman didn't demand either a letter of apology or some reparations for the time lost in the delivery of the golden brew.
Be that as it may, the intensified watch on the drops was credited with cutting down some of the bloodletting even if it didn't interfere with the flow of the Dutchman's high quality needle beer. Nonetheless, any count in the two-year Schultz-Coll showdown had to show that it ranked with, or even surpassed, any other gang war going back to the turn of the century in a metropolis so rich in spoils that it would always have its share
of self-purges in its underworld society. (In New York, as in Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland or Philadelphia, name it, the hoodlum community in its higher echelons often will do more than the law itself about thinning out its own ranks. Perhaps it isn't that the law is so grossly inefficient; maybe it is just that the underworld,
unencumbered by due process and the other restraints of the Bill of Rights, has so much less difficulty keeping the house clean. Hell, maybe because it's sometimes easier to buy off a cop than a rival gangster with mayhem on his mind.)
A single incident will perhaps illustrate best the no-limits nature of the Schultz-Coll blood purge.
On February 1, 1932, a quartet of gunmen dropped in on a card game in a four-family frame dwelling on Common- wealth Avenue in the North Bronx and sprayed the room with gunshots. There was no return fire; nobody had a chance. When the police arrived, Patsy Del Greco,
Coll's man and the possessor of a decently long police record, was dead on the floor along with Fiorio Basile, another
Coll triggerman, and a woman, Mrs. Emily Torrizello. Louis Basile, a brother of Fiorio, was wounded, along with another woman guest. Two children playing in the apartment, and two babies in cribs, were unhurt.
The inevitable comparisons with the St. Valentine's Day massacre made the early tabloids but that was too much of a stretch. It was a major atrocity just the same, surely one of the worst mass shootings in the city's history, and it had to be charged up to the going war because those two
Coll men were among the dead. The police said the executioners actually were on the hunt for
Coll himself on information that the apartment was one of his hideouts and that he was due there that night with his tough-talking bride, Lottie.
Fairly strong confirmation would be forthcoming exactly seven nights later--over the riddled body of the Mick
himself, in fact.
On the evening of February 8, not long after the darkness threw its veil over the towers of Manhattan, the Daily
Mirror's "bulldog" edition for the next morning hit the street with a Walter Winchell column which contained
this sizzling paragraph:
"Five planes brought dozens of machine gats from Chicago Friday to combat the Town's Capone. Local banditti have made one hotel a virtual arsenal and several hot-spots are ditto because Master Coll is giving them the headache."
It was the sort of thing that made the early Winchell--before he began to see himself on a more global canvas--such an incomparable peek-a-boo columnist. He had good
information, bobbing above the engulfing waves of his bad information, much of the time. This time, while it was patently
silly to imagine that anyone would have to import guns into the armed camp that was New York,
Winchell, who was going to need a bodyguard after a while, surely was on to something sizzling hot.
The word had been around for months now that there was a $50,000 price on Master Coll's head, and he was holed up with Lot
tie either in the Cornish Arms Hotel on 23rd Street or in a furnished room in that block. Whether he troubled to pick up an early Mirror to see whether Master
Winchell had any tidbits about Vincent Coll, or what the often-shrill news columns might be saying about him, is not known.
In any event, he left his room around 12:30 A.M. and went to the London Chemists drugstore across the street either to take a prearranged phone call or to make some calls without
running the risk of a police bug. He had $101.48 in his pockets and no artillery on him. He went directly to one of the three phone booths in the back and he was in it about 10 minutes when a limousine drew to the curb and three men got out. Two of them stayed outside the drugstore. The third went in, observed that there were five people there--two clerks and a woman and two men customers--and said, calmly, "All right, everybody, keep cool now and you won't get hurt." Then he drew a Tommy gun from under his coat, lined up in a firm stance a few feet away from the Mick's booth, and opened fire.
There never was an accurate count of all the lead poured in the next minute or so, but the body of Vincent
Coll pitched forward out of the booth even as the executioner turned to leave. One slug had smashed into the right side of the Mick's face, broken his nose and lodged in the brain. Two others entered his forehead, one came to rest above his heart, and he had seven wounds in the right arm and four in the left arm, so there was just no doubt that the man with the machine gun had the glass trim of the booth in his sights, not the heavy wood frame, from the time he squeezed off the first burst. The autopsy would show 15 steel-jacketed slugs in what was left of
Coll's body but it would not necessarily show how many others had passed through him.
The assassin and his outside helpers had to be forever thankful that they had brought along a real good car, because Patrolman James Sherlock, on the beat, heard the shattering noise of the automatic fire and ran up just as they were pulling out of 23rd Street into Eighth Avenue. Sherlock stopped a cab and rode the running board all the way to 50th Street before giving up the uneven chase. It is possible that the getaway car happened to be in the hands of a cool and
competent driver. Dixie Davis said the man at the wheel was none other than Bo Weinberg, apparently having stepped aside, uncommonly, for an even surer marksman. Davis also said that the man who had Coll engaged in that long dialog on the phone was Owney Madden, calling from Harlem 's Cotton Club and talking overtime because somebody with a heater had suddenly materialized at his side and told him to keep the Mick occupied for a while.
Even while the chase up Eighth Avenue was still in progress, Lottie Coll rushed into the drugstore, screaming and weeping hysterically over the horrifying scene she
encountered. She did not wish to have any traffic with the arriving police. Was she with her husband before he was shot? No, she was in the hotel across the street. When did she see her husband last? The afternoon before. Did he say where he was going? No. How did she know about the shooting so quickly? "Well, a telephone call was made and I heard about it." Who called? "I don't want to be stubborn but I'm not going to say anymore about Vincent and me." That was all, except that the young widow, 24 then, did say to someone who
approached her that she was madly in love with Coll and that even at that moment she was wearing the same red dress she had on the day they were married.
Vincent's messy departure, by the way, failed to turn the ex-Mrs. Kriesberger onto the straight and narrow. She would do time on a Sullivan Law rap after a while and then draw 6 to 12 years in the Bedford Reformatory for Women because she happened to be along when two new-found friends
unwittingly killed a girl bystander during a stickup in The Bronx.
The morning after the drugstore party, Police Commissioner Mulrooney, calling the execution "a positive defiance of law and order," which was a fairly conservative way to put it, contributed an interesting footnote to the story. He said that another man had come into the store with the victim, seated himself at the soda fountain while
Coll entered the booth, and then got up and strolled out when the fellow with the Tommy gun went to work. "He was double-crossed and put on the spot by his own bodyguard," the Commissioner said. Who did it? Had Owney Madden finally caught up with the Mick for the kidnapping of Frenchy DeMange the year before? No. Then was it the Dutchman's crowd? The Commissioner wouldn't answer that one way or the other. He did say that the two getaway cars used in the Commonwealth Avenue shooting party bore plates stolen from a shipment out of Auburn Prison and so did the souped-up limo used by the Coll assassin. Moreover, a Tommy gun like the one
employed so effectively in the London Chemists had been found in one of The Bronx cars. And what was Commissioner
Valentine's parting estimate of Vincent Coll? It was just like Johnny Broderick's: "He was a real tough fellow."
Apart from its "positive defiance of law and order," hardly an unusual phenomenon in the Big Town, then or now, the Coll murder turned some Police Department faces red for another reason. There was supposed to be an around-the-clock tail on the Mick in the hopes that he might lead the cops to the
thick-lipped, quick-on-the-trigger Fats McCarthy. The paunchy killer, freely named as one of the mechanics in the East Harlem shooting spree, was rather badly wanted in the slaying of Detective Guido Passagno in a gun battle in Manhattan back on October 19. On the side, the police had some questions for McCarthy about the thoroughly professional job that had rid the community of Legs Diamond in that same month. The question now, of course, was where was the tail on Coll when that sub-machine gun went off? Like so many other questions of that kind, it would never be answered.
It wouldn't matter either, for the fat guy ceased to be a problem for the harried men in blue come summer. Trailed to a hideaway outside Albany with his bride and two helpers that July, he perished shooting it out with State Police
Sergeant Walter Riley, State Trooper W.A. Chesterfield and Detective Harold Moore, who was hit three times himself before he put a bullet into McCarthy's head. In a moment of loosely credited murders, the obituaries suggested that Fats may have taken the
Coll contract from his ex-employer, Dutch Schultz, because of some momentary unpleasantness in the insurgent
band.
The Coll funeral on February 11, in a steady drizzle, reminded no one of that spare-no-expense affair for Danny Iamascia, who had never turned his back on the Dutchman. The underworld, still busily breathing sighs of relief, skipped the obsequies, and a church service announced by
Coll's sister, Mrs. Florence Redden, was interdicted by the Archdiocese. There was no priest at the Walter B. Cooke Funeral Home on Willis Avenue in The Bronx, where less than 100 persons came to pay their last respects. and none at St.
Raymond's Cemetery. The undertaker simply read the Lord's Prayer at the graveside and
Coll was laid to rest in an imitation metal coffin over which there was a simple wreath of red and white flowers bearing that age-old legend of the ever- anonymous underworld, "From The Boys."
On the headstone over the grave alongside this mortal enemy of the Dutchman's, the mourners could read this:
"In loving memory of my beloved brother, Peter. Died May 30, 1931. Age 24. Rest in peace.
Coll."
Now all the Coll men were out of the way, but this did not mean that the streets of New York would forever be safe for Arthur Flegenheimer. Indeed, that cautious citizen waited only three days after Vincent's messy passing--he missed the funeral, but then he had passed up Danny Iamascia's too, and Danny was his friend--to slip up into Hamilton County in the foothills of the Adirondacks and get himself a brand new appointment as a Deputy Sheriff so he could always keep his waistband filled with his trusted .45 without having to worry about the more finicky cops.
Sheriff Peter Wilson had made that appointment even after the state troopers counseled him that the applicant was a person of somewhat questionable background. "I never saw this Flegenheimer," the Sheriff said when the heat caused him to drop his new deputy on February 19. "A friend of mine, who didn't know the man either, asked me to make the appointment because he had been informed the man intended to become a resident of the county. Naturally, we thought he might be opening a camp and wanted to protect
it.
Open a camp up there in the tall grass?
Ridiculous.
The Dutchman by now, way beyond his modest role as The Beer Baron of The Bronx, was sitting astride one of New York's richest industries. Without a Deputy Sheriff's badge, and without any registered guns, he had taken the policy game away from the colored bankers of Harlem. He was a very busy man.
