VINCENT COLL EARNS HIS "MAD DOG" NICKNAME

7/28/1931 - Continuing his ongoing war with gangster Dutch Schultz over respect, money, and revenge for the murder of his older brother Peter, Irish born killer Vincent Coll finds Schultz associate Joey Rao in front of the Helmar Social Club on East 107th and makes the snap decision to take the mobster out on the spot.

           
                        Dutch Schultx                                           Vincent Coll

The choice is not surprising given that Rao is known to be after the $10,000 payday that Schultz has put on the head of Coll, but unfortunately the timing and place are not conducive to mano-a-mano mobster mayhem ... a sweltering evening of temperatures in the 90s, Rao is sharing the sidewalk and street with a host of innocent adults and children, outdoors hoping to encounter a cooling breeze.  Bad decision, Top Shot winners the hoodlums are not!!!!!  Firing from a moving touring car with a shotgun, while his buddy Frank Giordano blasts away with a .45 automatic, Coll misses Rao and his two bodyguards, when sensing danger, the men duck to the sidewalk.  Sadly, he is much more accurate hitting the children that are playing near Rao ... two youngsters, five and fourteen years old are slightly wounded, a seven-year-old is hit five times, a three-year-old sleeping in a stroller is struck twice in the back, and five-year-old Michael Vengali is mortally wounded when hot lead rips through his stomach.
                                
                              
                                                        "Mad Dog" Coll
                           
Instantly on the run, not only from Schultz killers, but now from every cop in the city too, Coll is labeled a "Mad Dog" by New York City mayor Jimmy Walker, and true, the name sticks  In hiding, he will dye his blonde hair black and grow a mustache ... changes in his appearance that nonetheless fail to keep the police from eventually finding him at the Cornish Arms Hotel on October 4, 1931.  Captured without a struggle, Coll and Giordano go on trial later that year for the death of Vengali, but are found not guilty when high profile defense attorney Samuel S. Leibowitz shows the shyster at his core and gets the guilty murderers off by destroying the testimony of the prosecution's star eyewitness, George Brecht.

                                 
                                                         Acquitted

Justice will be served though!  On February 8, 1932, Coll spends so much time in a drugstore phone booth threatening mobster Owney Madden with the kidnapping of his brother-in-law unless he is paid $50,000, that the sometimes partner of Schultz has enough time to have the call traced back to the store.  Still jabbering away, a group of Schultz and Madden gunmen that includes Rao, arrive and open up with machine guns on their trapped enemy, and unable to run or even draw his pistol, in the turkey shoot that ensues, Coll is turned into a slab of human Swiss cheese (fifteen slugs are taken out of his head and chest at the morgue and there are even more leaking holes in the corpse where rounds passed through).  

                          
                               Cops removing Coll from the London Chemist drugstore

The "Mad Dog" is all of twenty-three when he answers for his many crimes!

DID DILLINGER DIE AT THE BIOGRAPH?

7/22/1934 - The accepted story of course is that using information supplied by the infamous "Woman in Red," Anna Sage, a prostitute from Romania seeking to avoid deportation on morals charges, Public Enemy #1, John Dillinger was gunned down outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago when attempting to draw a pistol from his pants pocket he fled from federal agents and East Chicago police officers under the direction of Melvin Purvis.

                                     
                                                                 Biograph
                         
                                                              Going Cold

But is that what really happened?  If the "Jackrabbit" got it as the legend tells, then how do these issues with the killing get resolved (and remember, when Dillinger joined the name and when he went to prison accurate physical measurements that matched each other were taken of the outlaw):

*The corpse presented to the Cook County coroner had brown eyes, but Dillinger's were blue.
*With the muscle relaxation of death, bodies grow slightly taller, yet the Dillinger corpse was half an inch shorter.
*The fingerprints taken from the body identified as Dillinger were not an exact match for those on file at FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.
*The stress of being the most hunted man in America caused Dillinger to lose weight while he was on the run, yet the corpse is heavier than Dillinger's stated weight.
*Why did the official autopsy report vanish?
*The gun displayed for years as being taken from Dillinger after he was shot wasn't manufactured until 1935 ... a year AFTER the events outside the Biograph.

                         
                                                         Gunned Down

*Wounds on the body did not match known bullet hits Dillinger took in several of his robberies.
*When a copy of the original autopsy report is found over thirty years later (the doctor who performed the procedure made himself a copy otherwise the details of body analysis would have been lost forever), the entry angle of the wounds noted could only have come from firing DOWN into a body.
*What happened to the thousands of dollars Anna Sage said that Dillinger was carrying at the time of the murder ... when the corpse arrives at the morgue it has slightly over seven dollars to its name.
*In the meat wagon the corpse can be seen wearing a ruby ring, but when its person effects are documented, no ring is noted (see left hand below).

                          
                                                                 Off to the morgue

*Why did hundreds of people in Dillinger's hometown of Mooresville say the corpse on display at the local funeral parlor was not the bandit?
*The corpse was identified as having a debilitating heart condition that could have caused an early did, and that did lead to major surgery documented on the body by a long healed major scar running from the outlaw's chest to his belly ... but the Navy, prison, captured gang members, and his girlfriend Billie Frechette, never mentioned the condition and throughout his brief outlaw career Dillinger was known for the athletic manner in which he robbed banks and ran from his deeds.

                                           
                                                        Dead On Arrival

*Two days after the outlaw's official funeral, his father has the body dug up and then reburied under tons of concrete and steel bars creating an underground tomb that can never be opened without completely destroying whatever is left of the body within ... why and where did the money come from for the operation?



Questions and issues that now can no longer be resolved ... could the FBI have killed a Dillinger look-a-like and then covered up the deed to preserve Hoover's job ... who can say, but whether killed as his legend is told or able to pull off an escape even better than his wooden gun antics at Crown Point, somewhere John Dillinger is wearing his trademark crooked grin!

                    

PRETTY BOY FLOYD KILLS A GOVERNMENT AGENT

7/20/1931 - On the run from a shootout in the downtown Bowling Green, Ohio, in which his partner in crime, Bill Miller is killed, and he will gun down Officer Ralph Castner and wound the city's police chief, future Public Enemy #1, Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd hides out in turf he is familiar with, the criminal underground of Kansas City, Missouri.
 
Floyd Rap Sheet

Castner

Availing himself of the criminal underground services of Kansas City crime boss John Lazia and local kingpin Democrat politician, Thomas J. Pendergast (who will launch the career of future president, Harry Truman), Floyd is given shelter in a two-story brick building at 1039 Independence Avenue ... the bottom floor occupied by the Lusco-Noto Flower Shop, while a bootlegging operation ran out of the top floor ... Floyd is assigned a curtain partitioned "room" on the second floor.

Lazia

Pendergast

 

Unaware that anyone other than bootleggers occupy the upper floor, Kansas City police officers (led by Lt. E. L. Nelson) and Prohibition agents (Glenn Havens, Joe Anderson, and Curtis Burks) climb the stairway to the second floor, and suddenly crash through the door and into a dimly lit room smelling of whiskey, completely surprising nine men seated around a table.  "It's a raid, boys!  Put 'em up!" Havens orders, and the men seemingly do as requested (helped by the example of a man who protests, and is instantly beaten about the head with a pistol) ... at first.

Burks

Calm despite being surrounded by cops with drawn guns, as officers start searching the boxes in the room for contraband, Floyd slowly rises from the table and acts like he is drunk, stumbling and mumbling to himself, and about to collapse on the floor.  Nothing but a ruse, as a voice of one of the agents proclaims, "Hey, you fellas know who this is? It's that Pretty Boy character," the outlaw throws a whiskey bottle across the room and on to a nearby bed ... and as if watching a volley in a tennis match, all the heads in the room turn for a split second and look at the bed.  A mistake of taking their eyes off Floyd even for a moment, with rattlesnake speed the desperado draws two .45 automatics and begin firing.  An actual "shoot-out-the-lights" moment in which the room goes dark in the lead melee that follows, Floyd empties both guns forward, bulls his way through two men trying to grab him, leaps down the stairs and escapes through a crowd beginning to gather in the street, exiting the area in a nearby parked Plymouth.

Next Day Headlines

Vanishing into Oklahoma's Cookson Hills (a rugged area that had previously sheltered the likes of Jesse James, Belle Starr, the Dalton brothers, and Bill Doolin), the outlaw leaves chaos behind him in Kansas City ... 23-year-old bootlegging suspect Joe Careo is cut down by a law enforcement shotgun blast, 37-year-old bootlegging suspect Joseph Lusco is sent to a local hospital with a fractured skull, officer Joe Anderson suffers a glancing bullet wound to his stomach, detective Clarence Reedy is wounded in the neck, 36-year-old Special Agent is mortally wounded by a round that holes his stomach, and outside, a 23-year-old innocent bystander named M. P. Wilson, from Bessemer, Alabama dies from another bulleted belly.

 

Wanted Poster

Lazia and Pendergast not happy at having one of their operations shot up, Floyd now has the criminal underworld looking for him, along with local and Federal authorities ... trifecta of fate awaiting ... the outlaw has 3 years, 3 months, and 3 days left to live ... a time period in which he is not done killing cops!

Floyd

Fingerprinting Dead Floyd

THE BARROW GANG CHECKS OUT OF THE RED CROWN TOURIST COURT

7/20/1933 - A gun battle between the Barrow Gang (Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, Buck Barrow, Blanche Barrow, and W.D. Jones) and a posse of thirteen takes place, culminating a series of outlaw stupidities that include:

*Hiding out on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri, while the area is still abuzz seeking the killers of four officers of the law and bank robber Frank "Jelly" Nash on 6/17.  The initial dumb, Buck is so upset with Clyde that the brothers are not talking to each other when they arrive in Platte City, Missouri.
*Unknowingly selecting a site within spitting distance of their beds that serves as a gathering place for local cops and members of the state highway patrol ... info bonding over cold beers, fast food, and music at the Red Crown Tavern, also a service station and grocery.

            
                                Red Crown Tavern with Tourist Court behind
  
*Paying the rental fee of $4.00 for two brick cabins of the Red Crown Tourist Court using change taken in a series of gas station robberies in Fort Dodge, Iowa, earlier in the day.


                                              The Red Crown Tourist Court

*Checking into the Red Crown Tourist Court as a party of three, but allowing the owner-operator of the motor court, N.D. Houser, to see five people enter the cabins.
*Letting Houser see the gang park their Ford V-8 in the attached garage "gangster style," facing out for a quick getaway.
*Blanche Barrow running errands in the area for two days in skintight riding breeches, jodhpurs, which draw attention and comments from the locals that will be remembered even 40 years later.
*Twice paying for meals for five with more silver and copper from their gas station conquests.
*Using a vehicle, that when Houser takes down its license plates for registration against the rooms rented, bears stolen tags from Oklahoma.
*Drawing attention that something not right might be going on by taping newspapers over the windows of both of the cabins ... a doubled-edged sword that also keeps the gang from seeing if danger is headed their way.
*Buying bandages and a list of medical supplies at the local drugstore for Bonnie's burn wounds from a car crash that took place in June that druggists throughout the Southwest are advised to let law enforcement know about if purchased.
*Clyde ignoring Blanche's warning that every person in the market across the street stopped talking when she walked in.

Firing positions readied and the garage blocked by a makeshift armored car (a regular car with extra steel plating), convinced that they have trapped a band of outlaws, armed with pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and metal bullet-proof shields, at around 1:00 in the morning a mix of state and local cops led by Missouri Highway Patrol Captain William Baxter and Platte County Sheriff Holt Coffey wake the occupants of the cabins.

                                               
                                                        Coffey & Baxter

"Sheriff ... open up!"  And indeed the Barrow Gang does open up, with Browning Automatic Rifles they have recently been stolen from the National Guard Armory in Enid, Oklahoma, blasting away at anything that moves.  Outgunned, the police are saved by the darkness of the night making it hard for the gang to bullseye their targets, the shields deflecting numerous deadly rounds, and just plain good luck, but they do take damage ... Sheriff Coffey is wounded in the neck, in the less than reliable armored car Jackson County officer George Highfill takes bullets to both knees, and officer Holt Coffey, Jr. is hit in the arm.  Advantage outlaws, and that advantage increases enough to allow them to escape when bullets set off the horn in the armored car which the posse interprets as a signal to cease fire, unwilling to risk further injuries, the wounded Highfill backs the armored car out of its blocking position, and a tear gas rocket misfires and sends its toxic fumes over the lawmen instead of the bandits it was intended to incapacitate.  Shooting all the while, with Clyde at the wheel and the gas pedal floored, the outlaw filled Ford V-8 explodes out of the garage, just misses hitting Sheriff Coffey, turns on to Highway 71 and vanishes into the night.  But it has not been a clean getaway, making his way to the car from his cabin, Buck Barrow is struck by a round from Captain Baxter's machine gun that enters the outlaw's left temple and exits his forehead, taking a fatal amount of brain matter with it, and his wife Blanche is blinded by glass splinters that find both of her eyes when the lawmen unloose a final volley into the windows of the gang's fleeing vehicle.

                          
                                     Buck dying of head wound received at Platte City
                                             
                                                 Blanche days later in Iowa

And escaping with only the clothes on their backs and the weapons in their hands, the bandits are forced to leave behind food, medical supplies needed by Bonnie, and a major portion of their potent arsenal which includes six more stolen BARs, ammunition, and forty-seven Colt .45 automatic pistols!  Gone, but not forgotten by members of the law, the gang will next turn up in Iowa ... and another gun battle will take place. 

          

A WILD DAY IN WILLMAR, MINNESOTA

7/15/1930 - Halfway between the equator and the North Pole, and one hundred miles to the west of St. Paul, Minnesota, the quiet town of Willmar reluctantly hosts a small convention of public enemies, gathered there to rob the local bank.  Among the seven bandits who assault the bank are (also along for the festivities are ham-and-egger hoodlums, Sammy Silverman and Robert "Frisco Dutch" Steinhardt):

*Thomas Holden, a train, bank, and payroll robber and recent escapee from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary where he was serving a 25 year sentence for taking $135,000 out of a U.S. Mail truck (a charmer, eventually returned to prison and paroled in 1947, Holden will become the first person to top the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List in 1950 as a result of the killing of his wife and her two brothers during a drunken family argument in Chicago in 1949).

Holden                    

*Francis Keating, partner of Thomas Holden ... sentenced for the same crimes and also an escapee with Holden from Leavenworth on February 28, 1930.

Keating

*George "Machine Gun" Kelly, along for the Willmar job as payback for supplying Holden and Keating with the forged documents that allow the bandits to walk out of Leavenworth ... the bad boy who is said to have coined the term "G-Man" for agents of the FBI when he screams "Don't shoot G-Men" as he is captured by Federal officers in Memphis, Tennessee, for the 1933 kidnapping of oilman Charles F. Urshel.

 
Machine Gun Kelly

*Verne Miller, former WWI hero and former Sheriff of Beadle County, South Dakota turned bootlegger, freelance gunman, murderer, and bank robber ... it will be Miller that orchestrates the 1933 botched escape attempt known as the Kansas City Massacre in which four lawmen and criminal Frank "Jelly" are killed in the parking lot of Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri.

Miller
                                          
*Harvey Bailey, known as the "Dean of American Bank Robbers" for relieving various financial institutes in the '20s and '30s of over $2,000,000 in cash and bonds ... twice he will bust out of the jails he is placed within.

Bailey
                                          
A plethora of criminal talent, and yet the robbery almost becomes a Waterloo for the outlaws that will be described as by local newspapers as resounding with "... daring and a cold-blooded disregard of human life."  Inside the bank for only eight minutes, the time is spent terrorizing two dozen customers and employees, a cashier that doesn't lie down fast enough gets pistol-whipped ("Lay down or we will kill you.  We mean business!" the people in the bank are told), and withdrawing $142,000 in cash and securities.  During those minutes however, an assistant cashier is able to use his leg to trip an alarm bell under his cash drawer, and when the bandits leave the bank they are greeted with a barrage of bullets from the enraged citizens of the town, which they in turn answer with machine gun fire (in a small town of only 19,000, over a hundred people are outside the bank as the outlaws leave).  Amazingly, no one is killed, but in the exchange of lead several citizens are injured, including an innocent bystander cradling her two-year-old daughter, along with two outlaws being wounded, and the gang is forced to flee the area in a four door sedan that has had its windshield and back window blown out by bullets.

Bank of Willmar - Now the Bremer Bank

And the shooting continues even after the gang has made its getaway! Not happy that Silverman's trigger finger has caused the town to go Wild West on the bandits, and suspecting the bandit has pocketed a portion of the loot, Miller will kill Silverman and two of his Kansas City buddies, Frank "Weinie" Coleman and Michael Rusick, in the days following the bank job; their bodies being discovered in August in a wooded area on the outskirts of the city of St. Paul.

The decade of the '30s just starting ... Minnesota will know even more gunfire and bloodshed once the Karpis-Barker Gang, Baby Face Nelson, Homer Van Meter, Tommy Carroll, and John Dillinger soon start operating within the state!

Fred Barker

CARMINE GALANTE'S LAST MEAL

7/12/1979 - On a sweltering summer day in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Bonanno crime family capo and multiple murderer (his first is police officer Walter O. De Castilla in 1930) Carmine "Lilo" Galante is rewarded for trying to take leadership of the family away from boss Philip Rastelli, and for muscling in on the heroin drug trafficking of the Gambino family.

                        

Stopping at the Joe & Mary Italian-American Restaurant to rectify a mob matter, say "bon voyage" to his cousin and owner of the restaurant Joe Turano (also a mob member who does a business in hi-jacked meat), who is scheduled to leave the next day for a vacation to the island of Sardinia, 69-year-old Galante feels comfortable and safe surrounded by family and friends and makes the mistake of lingering on the umbrella shaded patio of the establishment after finishing a lunch of fish, salad, and red wine.  He will not make 70!

                                                
                                                          Death Scene

Authorized by a vote of the heads of the Cosa Nostra that takes place at a meeting in Boca Raton, Florida, and tipped off by an unknown local, a hit team of four men wearing ski masks arrives at the restaurant in a stolen blue Mercury Montego at 2:40 in the afternoon.  As security, one individual guards the double-parked car with a .3030 M1 carbine while his three heavily armed associates rush into the restaurant, beginning their bloody fun.  Attempting to warn the diners outside with his shouts, 18-year-old John Turano, the restaurant owners' son, is shot twice in the back as he tries to arm himself with a .38 revolver kept in a storeroom next to the kitchen ... he will survive his injuries, but his father and some of the clientele will not be as fortunate.

                                 
                                                              The Patio

Bursting upon the men outside, one of the assassins fires a double barrel shotgun into Galante, killing him instantly with thirty pellets of buckshot in the chest, a death that comes so quick that the gangster's trademark Churchill cigar is still in his mouth when police show up later to investigate the crime.  More carnage quickly follows!  "What are you doing?" are Joe Turano's last words as he is blown off his feet by a shotgun burst that damages major blood vessels in his lungs, neck, and heart, and takes off significant portions of his face and right shoulder.  As Turano dies, mobster Leonard "Nardo" Coppolla makes the error of trying to rise from his seat at the table and takes a .30 automatic round to the face, five more bullets to the chest, and then just to make sure he is out of commission, has the top of his head blown off by another explosion of shotgun lead.  And in a final moment of Italian "hail and farewell," the murderers send four more shotgun blasts into the already dead Galante, then mayhem complete, they flee the restaurant and drive off into Brooklyn.  In on the hit or just lucky, the two bodyguards which Galante has brought over from Sicily to protect him (a job they are miserable failures at), Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato, do nothing while the hit is taking place inches from where they are sitting, and for their incompetence, both men are spared by the killers.

                      
                                                                 Lucky

Unlike many Mob crimes, the murders will eventually be solved and the killers are all identified as Bonanno soldiers hired by capo Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato ... Louis Giongetti, Dominick Napolitano, Dominick Trinchera, and the capo's son, Anthony Indelicato ... all will eventually be killed themselves, or are safely put away behind bars.
           
                        
                                                           Galante

A gruesome mess, for sure Galante should have ordered the spaghetti and then scrammed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!