The Roamer: Irish gangster who’s said to have been Mae West’s lover

By then ‘Owney’ Madden (one of his nicknames) was a millionaire from the profits of bootlegging liquor during Prohibition (1920-1933) - America’s failed experiment in banning the sale and consumption of booze.

Ballycastle-born journalist Mitchell Smyth, a regular Roamer contributor, encountered the Owney Madden story while writing an article about US mobsters for the Toronto Star, for which he was a features writer and later travel editor.

As well as Madden’s criminal activities, Mitchell discovered, the mobster’s story also features Damon Runyon, author of many short stories about the hoodlums he met through his friendship with Madden.

At least a dozen movies including the musical ‘Guys and Dolls’ were based on Runyon’s tales. Runyon once said that he felt more at home among mobsters than among ordinary people.

Others in Madden’s orbit included the actress Mae West, with whom he was romantically involved (“Sweet, but oh so vicious,” she said of him), and George Raft, Madden’s personal driver who went on to Hollywood and made a career playing...mobsters!

Owen Vincent Madden was born in 1891. An accident of birth would label him English - his father, Francis Madden, and his pregnant wife Mary Neil, had moved to Leeds from King’s County (now Co Offaly) in search of work earlier that year.

But throughout his life Owney always revelled in his Irishness; he used the word ‘eejit’ to refer to rivals, and he talked of the ‘craic’ he enjoyed at his famous nightspot, The Cotton Club, where he entertained the likes of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong.

The Cotton Club, in New York’s black neighbourhood of Harlem, was a favourite of white high-flyers, who flocked from downtown Manhattan. (Only the entertainers and staff were black).

Runyon immortalized the snappy dresser Madden as ‘Dave the Dude’ in several of his stories about the ‘guys and dolls’ of the seamy underside of New York’s Broadway. Dave the Dude had a heart of gold, but Owney Madden had no soft heart - he fully deserved the mob nickname ‘The Killer’. New York Police Chief Max Schmittberger once said, “Owney Madden must own a cemetery.”

After his father’s death, in 1904, Mary Madden and her brother Owney, aged 11, moved to New York where they settled with relatives in the crime-ridden neighbourhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. Before long, Owney had taken over the local youth gang, the Gophers. From there he ruthlessly climbed the mob ladder, while he tried to clean up his image by opening the Cotton Club and staging boxing matches.

But inter-mob murders - highlighted by the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in 1927 - were bad for trade and Owney decided to act. And so, in May of 1928, he invited the leading mobsters from across the US to a meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

There, according to Jimmy Breslin, the famed New York columnist of the last century, in a private dining room of the Shelburne Hotel, 125 people assembled, “the most murderers to gather in one place, including penitentiaries.”

Breslin says Madden laid a New York city street map on the floor and, with a red marker, drew a line around certain areas, showing which mob would control crime there. He told the mobsters to go home and draw similar maps for their cities.

According to Breslin, Frank Costello, a leading New York crime boss, said: “Owney Madden will save us a thousand murders.” Organised crime was born!

Within a few years a new clean-up administration in New York made things too hot for Owney and he ‘retired’ to Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1935, and the Italian mobsters, now calling themselves the Mafia, emerged on top.

Hot Springs was widely known as the crime capital of the southern US. Prohibition had ended but soon Owney was running the gambling and prostitution rackets in the Deep South.

In his sixties, he retired for good. Owney Madden died in 1965. ‘The Killer’ who had sent so many others to their death, died in his bed.