Preface

In early 2012, I was researching an old-time gang- ster, whose name and intriguing nickname I’d heard over the years—Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. At the time, I was considering Coll as a subject for a documentary film. While locating several newspaper articles about this notorious hood, I found only one book about his life. Titled Mad Dog Coll: An Irish , it was re- leased in Ireland in 1999 and had been out of print for several years. I was fortunate to locate a copy and after reading it, I knew I had to produce that documentary. What was so fascinating about this gangster? After all, scores of such hoods roamed the streets of New York City during the years. But Vincent Coll took street violence to another level. He was a fearless soldier who became a leader. He forced , one of the toughest gang bosses of the era, into hiding. He revolutionized the drive-by shooting, still used today by modern street gangs. His kidnap- ping schemes targeted other , knowing they wouldn’t go to the cops. He systematically cut down his opposition, even though he was outnumbered by more than 10 to one. Eventually, he emerged as the most hunted criminal in the nation. His arrest, trial, and acquittal, and his murder in a drugstore phone booth, all front-page news at the time, served as inspi- ration to writers of gangster films to follow. And he did this all over the span of just a few years, between the ages of 19 and 23. Then there was the real “brains” behind the Coll gang—a woman. Known by the name of Lottie Kreis- berger, she was the quintessential gun moll and, when teamed with Vincent Coll, set their destiny for either greatness or disaster. After reading Mad Dog Coll: An Irish Gangster, I communicated with the author, Breandán Delap, and we spent a year and a half sharing new material that we’d unearthed since the book’s publication. This is the revised and expanded edition, what we hope is a most entertaining, interesting, and informa- tive true story of the life and times of Mad Dog Coll.

—Rich Gold March 2016 Introduction

Vincent Coll lived a brief and bloody life before he met with an untimely death at the tender age of 23. By that time, he’d acquired a fearsome reputation as Pub- lic Enemy Number One, having had a hand in more than a score of murders. He locked horns with such notorious gangsters as Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, , Owney Madden, and Bugsy Siegel as he shot his way to a position of gangland hierarchy, leaving a stream of corpses in his wake, including that of a five-year-old boy. His gangster entourage blazed a gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the early 1930s and introduced the city of New York to depths of de- pravity once thought to be the exclusive preserve of Chicago. Even the outlaws chose to outlaw him. Coll’s career defies summary. He was a thief, boot- legger, kidnapper, hijacker, and extortionist, and, of course, a cold-blooded killer. Though a shallow thinker, he had an unfettered imagination and an in- flated sense of his own worth. In the absence of hard biographical evidence, most film directors have chosen to portray him as a bilious rebel without a cause or a moody malcontent suffused by evil. Yet despite his criminal reputation, he undoubtedly oozed charisma and could shock and delight with equal facility. He had a magnetic charm and could enchant a gathering with the force of his personality, yet could clear a room with the shadow of a foul mood. Coll was the quintessence of a Prohibition gangster. He was an Irish immigrant who realized that the quick- est way to the American Dream was through the bar- rel of a gun. His rise from a trough of persecution to a pedestal of power was nothing short of meteoric. While outwardly despising his cruelty, many of the subse- quent immigrants must have held a sneaking regard for Coll. He and his accomplices amassed great wealth and influence in the teeth of sustained opposition from the white Anglo-Saxon establishment. On the day he was buried, the New York City Police Commissioner was even prompted to commend Coll’s hands-on ap- proach to running a criminal gang. More than 80 years later, Coll continues to be a subject of fascination to many. He’s the subject of two B-movies (Mad Dog Coll and Killer Instinct) and full ep- isodes of both “The Untouchables” and “The Lawless Years.” He crops up from time to time as well in films, such as Mobsters, Billy Bathgate, The , and Sleepers. On some Internet websites, numerologists try to read apocalyptical messages into the fact that he died on West 23rd Street at the age of 23 and that Dutch Schultz, the man who had more than likely ordered his assassination, was himself killed on October 23, 1935, by the alleged gunman who served 23 years in prison for the crime. This story contains considerable conflicts between official statistics and popular perceptions, but the truth about Coll’s life is stranger than the fiction. Post facto legendizing abounds, but the facts speak eloquently for themselves. Chapter One

Coll is a common surname in the three parishes that make up the Irish-speaking area of northwest Donegal known as the Gaeltacht. Originally from Scotland, the Colls came to those shores as gallowglasses (elite mer- cenaries, mostly from the Norse-Gaelic clans of Scot- land) at the beginning of the 16th century. The family coat of arms ironically bears a fairly vicious looking canine on it. Though times were tough, Vincent’s fore- bears were widely regarded as being respectable, the only blot a reputation for land-grabbing. Vincent’s fa- ther, Tuathall Óg, or Toaly, was born in 1868 and eked out a modest existence as a farmer before emigrating to America in 1892 at the age of 24, where he took up res- idence at 686 Myrtle Avenue, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There, he met Anna Mary Duncan, six years his junior. She’d been born in Dublin in 1874 to an Irish fa- ther, Thomas Duncan, and an Australian mother, Mary Reilly. Toaly and Anna were married after a short pe- riod of courtship and a baby girl, Florence, was born to them on November 4, 1893. At this stage, the Coll family returned to Toaly’s home in Gaoth Dobhair, in the northwestern part of Ireland, which he had recently inherited. This was an unusual move at the time and it seems extraordinary that Toaly should have returned to Ireland after such a short stay in America. Most of Toaly’s siblings had also emigrated to America and Australia, and none of them had returned. No explanation exists as to why Toaly and Mary returned from exile, taking up residence in the modest Coll family homestead. Two sons died at the age of two from scarlet fever before the turn of the century. That left the eldest, Florence, along with four surviving sons, Thomas (born 1898), Charles (1903), Peter (1907), and Vincent, who was born July 20, 1908. Some historians contend that Vincent Coll was born into an essentially violent society. The previous two generations had seen periods of serious social un- rest and there may even have been a glamorization of violence in the area as a result. Attempts by a local landlord to introduce black-faced sheep and Scottish shepherds to the parish between 1857 and 1860 pre- cipitated such widespread anarchy that 300 policemen had to be drafted into the area to keep order. Thirty years later, Gaoth Dobhair was again thrown into chaos when a district inspector was bludgeoned to death by an angry mob as he tried to arrest a parish priest to answer a charge of incitement. Several active members of a secret society, the Molly Maguires, ac- cused of murder, arson, kidnapping, and other crimes during industrial agitation in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania originally hailed from Gaoth Dobhair. It must be emphasized, however, that most of these incidents, though bloody and barbaric, were the culmi- nation of years of land agitation, unlike the savage acts of casual violence that characterized Vincent Coll’s rise to notoriety in the 1930s. Six months after Vincent first saw the light of day, the family picked up again and returned to America. Apparently, Toaly tried to work the yieldless ground and eventually threw his hat at it in exasperation. He might also have accumulated large gambling debts and squandered whatever modest wealth the family had. It’s unclear why they decided to go back to New York. Again, like the move from the U.S. back to Ire- land, the Coll family’s return to America was highly irregular and contrary to all conventional patterns. But on April 3, 1909, Toaly Coll took his family to the port of Derry and boarded the SS Columbia bound for New York. Chapter Two

After a nine-day journey, which included a brief stopover in Glasgow, the SS Columbia docked. The Coll family, having already spent some time in the U.S., was discharged on the pier and spared the rigors of an Ellis Island inquisition. They settled in an area of the Bronx known as the Hub, a section popular among arriving immigrants during the era. By the time the Coll family arrived on the scene, the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood was predominantly German and Irish. The rural Irish were still a peasant caste in New York in the early years of the century and their horizons were severely constricted by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment. Contrary to popular per- ception, it took the Irish longer than almost any other ethnic group to assimilate into mainstream American society. Writing in the 1890s, the great reformer Jacob Rïïs categorized the Irish as the permanent inhabitants of tenements, an underclass that had internalized their poverty and were unable to pull themselves up on the American ladder of success. Though the color of their skin was no barrier to assimilation, Irish immigrants fought for acceptance. They were distrusted by the Protestant ruling class, who perceived their allegiance to a foreign pope as treacherous and disloyal. Thus, as Peter Quinn notes in How the Irish Stayed Irish, “Reli- gion—not color—became the line of demarcation.” Modern “mobocracy” in America can be said to have its genesis in the disregard for the forces of law and order by the new unassimilated European im- migrants in what they perceived as a rigidly strati- fied society. This was particularly true in the migrant melting pot of the Bronx. The borough’s heady mix of sprawling slums and flyblown gin mills proved to be the ideal spawning ground for anyone prepared not to let morality stand in the way of social mobility. Flour- ishing under police protection, notorious gangs ruled the Bronx streets, marauding amongst the clapboard houses, taverns, slaughterhouses, railroad yards, and gasworks. A privately funded report by social work- ers in 1910 described the squalor of the city as charac- terized by its “dull, monotonous ugliness, much dirt and a great deal of despair.” Droves of filth-encrusted kids thronged the steamy fetid streets, hawking petty goods, keeping pigeons on tenement roofs, picking the odd pocket or two, and taking an occasional dip in the Hutchinson and Bronx rivers. Such was the rugged en- vironment that spawned Vincent Coll. In many ways, the fate of the Coll family can be seen as a microcosm of the hardship endured by new arrivals in general. The Colls were the flipside of the American Dream, unable to eke out an existence at home and finding “the land of hope and opportunity” to be something of a closed shop. The empty husks of their dreams can still be seen in Kensico and St. Ray- mond’s cemeteries. None of the Coll boys reached the age of 25, and ailments of the lung, brought about by the horrendous living conditions, accounted for two of their deaths. Florence was the only Coll sibling who lived to middle age. On February 12, 1916, Vincent’s long-suffering mother, Anna, passed away. She’d lived a sad and tortured life. Along with the harrowing experience of losing two of her children in Ireland, a baby girl, Irene, born to the couple shortly after their arrival in the U.S., died of enterocolitis at just over seven months old. Anna likely received very little support in her efforts to provide for her children amid numbing poverty and declining health. A report by the Bronx Catholic Big Brothers League described her as being “industrious and in every re- spect a good mother,” but stressed that she was so over- worked and undernourished that she suffered from some sort of scrofulous disease. This illness resulted in running sores on various parts of her body that ap- peared from time to time, but left no scars. She eventu- ally died of lobar pneumonia and “general weakness” at the age of 42. She was buried in Kensico Cemetery in a plot that her brother, Peter Duncan, purchased for $400 at the turn of the century. This was considered a lot of money at the time, leading one to believe that Duncan was fairly well off. Aside from this expense, it didn’t appear that he provided his sister and her fam- ily any financial assistance that might have alleviated her hardship. The death of his mother must have been a shatter- ing blow for young Vincent, who was only seven years old at the time. But worse was to follow. On December 15, 1920, his brother Charles died of tuberculosis af- ter a protracted illness. Charles was 17 and had been working as a waiter on Staten Island. Two months later, Vincent’s oldest brother Thomas, employed as an attendant at the Middleton State Homeopathic Hospi- tal in Orange County, died, also of tuberculosis, at the tender age of 23. In a society where peer survival was at a premium, five of Vincent’s siblings had died before he reached the age of 12. In such a world, it may well have been that Vincent himself did not expect to see old age and therefore set out, subconsciously at least, to achieve everything he could in his youth. With tongue wedged firmly in cheek, Vincent Coll’s second cousin, former Minister for Agriculture in the Government of Northern Ireland, Bríd Rodgers of the SDLP (the Social Democratic and Labour Party), tells how she was always led to believe as a child that Mad Dog’s bad blood had come from the maternal side of his family. The truth was probably somewhat differ- ent. Though the scant historical documents available raise more questions than they answer, it can be in- ferred from contemporary death certificates and census forms that Toaly Coll was not exactly an ideal father. Like many other Irish immigrants at the time, he was essentially a peasant farmer and lacked the labor skills demanded by America’s industry-driven society. The report by the Bronx Catholic Big Brothers League refers to him as a lazy drunkard who “never made any real effort to support his family.” In addition to the League’s speculation that Toaly died of diabetes and tuberculosis at the age of 49, there’s a June 9, 1919, death record for “Anthony” Coll, age 49, who died in Brooklyn and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, also in Brooklyn. Some of the elder people in Gaoth Dobhair indicated that Toaly remarried after Anna died, though he lived only three more years. In fact, a marriage record for Anthony and Brigid Coll on March 1, 1919, in Brooklyn reveals that the union barely lasted four months. What one can be sure of is that Toaly fled the nest, leaving his young sons as good as orphaned in the teeming squalor of the Bronx. Students of psycho- analysis may point to the protracted absence of a fa- ther figure as a seminal factor in the configuration of events that led to Vincent Coll’s becoming one of the most feared mobsters ever to roam the streets of New York. Can his violence be seen as a sign of some deeply repressed childhood trauma or unresolved inner con- flict? Was he permanently scarred by the conflicts of his formative years? Vincent Coll was clearly not the only poor immigrant boy to come from a broken home. There were many poor immigrants, but displaying ex- treme psychotic symptoms that stretched the bound- aries of a dysfunctional childhood, there was only one Mad Dog Coll. Vincent’s psychological and physical reports make disturbing reading. A cogent pattern emerges of a young boy, uprooted and rudderless, struggling to cope with the rigors of an alien, even hostile, environ- ment. His first years in America have been character- ized by great deprivation, unrelieved poverty, parental discord, social dislocation, illness, and neglect. He appears to have been a delicate child and was chron- ically constipated during his teenage years. He had dull hearing and though he had 20-20 vision, his eyes didn’t align properly. He often went unfed, unclothed, and grew up largely unprotected in the exacting envi- ronment of the streets. The forces that molded his errant behavior cannot easily be determined. While he was undoubtedly a vic- tim of circumstance, the theory that a life of crime was forced on him by his repressed impoverished back- ground doesn’t account fully for the lust for blood and torture he displayed during his later years. In gangster parlance, he had a “bloody mouth,” appearing to revel in murder as a form of entertainment. Unlike other gang leaders, Coll had a hands-on approach to crime and liked to do the job personally. It was as though committing a crime filled him with a sense of power or joy.