VALLEY GREEN, NEW JERSEY
SATURDAY MARCH 5, 1932
Mrs. Pennyweight sipped her scotch and said, “So you turned down Walter because you hurt your leg. And then your mother died and you opened a speakeasy. Did Mr. Coll and, what was his name, Mr. Spatini, threaten you again?”
“Spatola. No, not long after his visit to me, Vinnie Coll and Dutch Schultz parted company, and then it became clear to everybody that Vinnie was nuts, completely crazy.”
“Is he the ‘Mad Dog’ you and Mrs. Conway were talking about?” Connie Nix said, finally tasting her drink.
“Yeah, and everybody knows what happened to him.”
“I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” said Mrs. Pennyweight, holding out her glass. I made another drink and refreshed Connie’s with a little ginger ale.
“OK, Vinnie got arrested on a Sullivan Act beef. The cops caught him with a concealed weapon. Dutch made the ten-thousand-dollar bail for him, but Vinnie skipped, and Dutch was out ten G’s. At the same time, if you can believe this, Vinnie demanded a cut of Dutch’s beer business. He wanted to be a partner! I know it makes no sense, but that’s the way Vinnie was. Dutch told him to screw off, pardon my language, and Vinnie answered by killing one of his top guys, Vincent Barelli, and his girlfriend, May. That did it for the Dutchman, who’s pretty close to full-tilt crazy himself. He sent some guys to Harlem looking for Coll. When they couldn’t find him, they killed his brother Pete. Vinnie went even more nuts when he heard about it. After his brother got clipped, Vinnie declared war on Dutch’s operation and killed about half a dozen of Dutch’s guys.”
Both women looked horrified.
“Dutch put a fifty-thousand-dollar price tag on Vinnie’s head. Dead only. Now it was serious. One day Vinnie spotted Joey Rao, one of Dutch’s men, on the sidewalk in Spanish Harlem. So Vinnie and two other guys drove by in a car and opened up with everything they had, spraying the whole street with shotguns and pistols. Only, Joey had already seen Vinnie’s car, and ducked out of sight. So Vinnie and his guys hit five kids playing on the sidewalk. Four of ’em were wounded, some pretty bad. One was killed, a kid named Mikey something.”
I heard Connie Nix catch her breath.
“Now, even with Dutch’s guys killing Vinnie’s guys and vice versa, neither the cops nor the politicians really cared. Another dead bootlegger, no great loss. But when a kid gets killed, everything changes. This guy named Brecht claimed to have seen it all and fingered Vinnie. The papers started calling him a baby killer, and the mayor said he was a mad dog. And then everybody was looking for him. A sane person might have decided this was a good time to head for Canada or Mexico. But not Vinnie. Instead, he kidnapped Owney Madden’s pal, Big Frenchy DeMange, and ransomed him back to Owney for thirty-five grand.”
I turned to Connie Nix. “That’s what I was saying before. Vinnie and some other guys I know would kidnap people. But never anybody who might call the cops. You snatch somebody who’s already in the business, has the money close at hand, and doesn’t want local police or the federal guys involved. For his part, Owney knew that if he came up with the cash, Vinnie would let Big Frenchy go. So he paid up. Vinnie used that money to hire Sam Liebowitz, maybe the best mouthpiece in town, except for Dixie Davis. That was after he got nabbed. They caught up with him and the rest of his guys in a hotel upstate.”
I poured another drink for myself. “So anyway, Vinnie goes to trial. And Liebowitz, the mouthpiece, turned Brecht, the eyewitness, inside out. He convinced the jury that Brecht was lying, that he only wanted the thirty-thousand-dollar reward. Turns out that Brecht had done the same thing in another case, identifying the wrong guy. When it was all over, Brecht was committed to Bellevue and Vinnie walked away a free man. The Reds and the reformers accused the DA’s office of intentionally sabotaging their own case. Other guys said that Owney had arranged for Vinnie to get off so he could take care of the Mad Dog himself. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that the word was out, if you saw Vinnie, you called Owney PDQ. And that’s what somebody did about a month ago.”
They didn’t need to know exactly who that somebody was.
“Again, you’d think that with everybody looking for him, Vinnie would have left town, but he didn’t. He stuck around and got spotted one night when he was making a phone call from a drugstore. One of Owney’s guys with a Tommy gun caught up with him. According to the papers,” I lied, “he just about cut Vinnie in half right there in the phone booth, before he got in a car and drove away. And the next day, two more of Vinnie’s mugs were killed. So after that, do you think anybody in the ‘underworld,’ as the papers and radio like to call it, would harm a kid, particularly the Lindbergh baby?”
Mrs. Pennyweight said, “I suppose not.”
Connie Nix said, “For somebody who says he’s not a gangster, you sure know a lot of people who get shot.”
I’d never thought of it that way.