| Vincent Coll | |
|---|---|
Mugshot of Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll as seen on the cover of an educational video |
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| Born | Uinseann Ó Colla July 20, 1908 Gweedore, County Donegal, Ireland |
| Died | February 8, 1932 (aged 23) New York City |
| Nationality | Irish, American |
| Other names | "Mad Dog" |
| Occupation | Mobster, Hitman, Kidnapper |
| Known for | Hitman for Dutch Schultz |
Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll (born Uinseann Ó Colla, July 20, 1908 – February 8, 1932) was an Irish mob hitman in 1920s New York City. Coll gained notoriety for the accidental killing of a young child during a mob kidnap attempt.[1][2]
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Coll was born in Gweedore, an Irish-speaking region of County Donegal, Ireland; his family emigrated to the U.S. a year later. Coll was a distant relative of Northern Ireland Member of Parliament Bríd Rodgers.
Coll was raised in The Bronx by an elderly woman who took him in as her own. After being expelled from multiple Catholic reform schools, he joined The Gophers street gang, where he became a protege of mobster Dutch Schultz.
Coll's ruthlessness made him a valued enforcer to Schultz at first. As Schultz's criminal empire grew in power during the 1920s, he employed Coll as an assassin. At the age of nineteen, Coll was charged with the murder of the owner of a speakeasy who refused to sell Schultz's bootleg alcohol. He was eventually acquitted, though many suspect this to have been from Schultz's influence. Coll later pulled a robbery at the Sheffield Farms dairy in The Bronx without Schultz's authorization. Schultz confronted Coll about this, but rather than being apologetic, Coll demanded to be an equal partner; Schultz declined. These combined incidents led to a shooting war between the Schultz and Coll gangs. One of the earliest victims was Vincent's brother Peter, who was shot dead on May 30, 1931, while driving down a Harlem street.
To finance his new gang, Coll would kidnap gangsters and hold them for ransom. He knew that the victims would not report the kidnappings; they would have a hard time explaining to the Bureau of Internal Revenue why the ransom cash had not been reported as income. One of his best-known victims was gambler George "Big Frenchy" DeMange, a close associate of Owney Madden, boss of the Hell's Kitchen Irish Mob.
On July 28, 1931, Coll unsuccessfully attempted to kidnap Joey Rao, a Schultz underling. A shootout ensued, and a crowd of children were caught in the crossfire. A five-year-old child, Michael Vengalli, died after having his stomach practically blown away; several other children were wounded. After this atrocity, New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker dubbed Coll "Mad Dog".
Coll went to court to fight charges on the Vengalli killing. He retained famed defense lawyer Samuel Leibowitz. Leibowitz destroyed the credibility of the prosecution's main witness, George Brecht, a man who made a covert living as a witness at trials. In December 1931, Coll was acquitted.
In September 1931, between the killing of young Vengalli and his acquittal for that death, Coll was hired by Salvatore Maranzano, who had recently crowned himself the Mafia boss of all bosses in New York City, to murder his right-hand man, Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Luciano had previously helped Maranzano win the infamous Castellammarese War in New York and gain control of the New York Mafia. However, Maranzano suspected Luciano of wanting to kill Maranzano and seize power for himself.
Coll agreed to murder Luciano for a $25,000 payment in advance and a $25,000 payment on completion of the job. On September 10, 1931, Maranzano invited Luciano to visit his office. The plan was that Coll would turn up and kill Luciano. However, Luciano had received a tip-off about this plan (although probably not the identity of the hitman), so he instead sent over a squad of his own hitmen who stabbed and shot Maranzano to death. Coll finally arrived to kill Luciano, only to find Maranzano dead and Luciano's hitmen fleeing the scene.
It was said that both Dutch Schultz and Owney Madden had put a $50,000 bounty on Vincent Coll's head. At one point, Schultz had actually walked into a Bronx police station and offered "a house in Westchester" to whomever killed Coll.
On February 1, 1932, four or five gunmen invaded a Bronx apartment which Coll was rumored to frequent and opened fire with pistols and submachine guns. Three people (Coll gangsters Patsy Del Greco, Fiorio Basile, and bystander Emily Torrizello) were killed. Three others were wounded. Mad Dog himself did not show up until thirty minutes after the shooting.[3]
A week after the Bronx shootings, at 12:30 a.m. on February 8, Mad Dog Coll was using a phone booth in the London Chemists drug store at Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street. He was reportedly talking to Madden, demanding $50,000 from the gangster under the threat of kidnapping his brother-in-law. Madden kept Coll on the line while the call was traced. Three men soon arrived in a dark limousine. While one waited behind the wheel, two others stepped out. One of them waited outside while the other walked inside, told the cashier to "Keep cool, now", drew a Thompson submachine gun from under his overcoat and opened fire on Coll in the glass phone booth. A total of fifteen bullets were dug out of Vincent Coll's body at the morgue; more may have passed through him. The killers were chased unsuccessfully up Eighth Avenue by a foot patrolman who had heard the gunshots and commandeered a passing taxi.[4]
Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll's killers were never definitely identified. Dutch Schultz attorney Dixie Davis later claimed that gangster Bo Weinberg was the getaway driver of the limousine. Another suspect was one of Coll's own men, Edward Popke aka Fats McCarthy. The submachine gun that killed Coll was found a year later in the possession of a Hell's Kitchen gunman named "Tough" Tommy Protheroe, who used it during a 1933 saloon killing. On May 16, 1935, Protheroe and his girlfriend Elizabeth Connors were shot and killed by unknown triggermen in Queens.[5]
Schultz himself sent a wreath to Coll's funeral bearing a banner with the message, "From the boys". Dutch continued to operate his rackets for only a few more years. On October 23, 1935, Schultz was killed at the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey on orders from the new National Crime Syndicate.
His widow, Lottie Coll, was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon and sentenced to six months. She refused to leave prison following her parole, because she feared the people who had killed her husband would also murder her.[6]
In 1935, Owney Madden, still under police scrutiny for the Coll killing, moved to Arkansas, where he died in 1965.[7]
Vincent Coll has been portrayed in the following films and TV shows: