Irish-American gunman died as he lived - in a hail of lead

Coll, whom the New York police labelled the Mad Mick, then Mad Dog, epitomized the ruthlessness and violence of the 1929s and early ’30s, the era of Prohibition, America’s ill-fated attempt to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol.

Coll became friends with Owney Madden, the crime boss whose parents came from County Longford.

Madden’s dark tale was shared here in March thanks to regular contributor Mitchell Smyth, who returns today to tell us about Vincent Coll.

They were different types of mobsters: where Madden kept his hands clean, assigning his killings to hit-men, Vincent Coll was very much a hands-on killer.

Smyth, a Canadian journalist who hails originally from Ballycastle, learned about Coll’s short and violent life while researching an article about organised crime for the Toronto Star.

He says that, apart from his contract killings carried out for for Madden and Mafia boss Dutch Schultz, Coll was immersed in the lucrative ‘kidnap-for-ransom’ business.

In one high-profile case, crooner, actor, and radio host Rudy Vallee’s handlers paid $100,000 to secure the release of their man.

Then Coll kidnapped one of his friend and mentor Owney Madden’s lieutenants. Madden paid $38,000 ransom - and vowed revenge.

Coll had earlier fallen out with his former employee Dutch Schultz. Now Schultz and Madden put a price of $50,000 of Coll’s head. Which brings us to the night of February 7th/8th, 1932.

At 12:30am Coll entered a drug store to use the phone booth. He had received a message to call Madden, to discuss a truce. Madden, in his office in the Cotton Club nightclub, kept him talking while his men traced the call to London Chemists at 313 West 23rd Street, six miles away. Ten minutes later a man entered the shop.

“Keep cool, now,’’ he said to the druggist as he drew his sub-machine gun from under his coat and opened fire. The shattered glass door of the phone booth opened and Mad Dog Coll’s body rolled out. Vincent Coll was 23.

Morgue attendants removed 17 bullets from his corpse and it was reported that at least as many more went right through Coll’s body. No charge was ever laid for the murder.

While researching America’s organised crime and gangsterdom for his newspaper, Mitchell Smyth also looked into the criminals’ roots, which were often in Ireland.

Vincent Coll was born in 1908 in Gweedore, a well-known Irish-speaking district in County Donegal, about 15 miles east of Donegal town. Fleeing poverty, the family emigrated and settled in the crime-ridden district of New York known as Hell’s Kitchen.

Vincent joined the vicious street gang, the Gophers, the gang that had spawned Owney Madden a decade earlier.

By the age of 16 Coll was in big-time crime, working as an “enforcer” for Dutch Schultz's bootlegging operation, hijacking booze wagons, torching rivals’ warehouses and killing anyone who got in his way.

His favourite weapon - a Thompson sub-machine gun (the “tommy gun”).

At 19 he was charged with the murder of a speakeasy (illicit tavern) owner who had refused to sell Schultz’s beer.

He was found ‘not guilty’ after Schultz’s thugs threatened the jurors.

Later he fell out with Schultz, boasting that he would drive Schultz out of New York.

In 1931, in an attempted assassination on the street, four children were wounded; one, aged five, died and the press labelled Coll “baby killer.”

Gang boss Salvadore (or Salvatore) Maranzano offered Coll $25,000 to kill his rival Charles Luciano.

But Luciano, living up to his nickname Lucky, got wind of the plan and when Coll arrived at Maranzano’s headquarters to discuss the execution, he met two of Luciano’s men fleeing after killing their boss’s foe.

“By this time,” says Smyth, “Vincent had made enemies of three of the most powerful crime bosses in New York. But his arrogance blinded him to the danger when Madden suggested a truce, then sent his executioner to West 23rd Street.”

Dutch Schultz was killed by a Luciano hit-man in 1935; Madden died in his bed in 1965; Luciano died of a heart attack in 1962 in Italy, to which he had been deported after serving a jail sentence for murder.