Today In City History

I've lived in New York City for almost seven months now, but long before i ever lived here i absorbed much of its past and culture, particularly its sordid criminal history. There are certain neighborhoods and intersections that ring out in my mind when i hear them now and evoke certain people or events i read about, but certain incidents i can remember even the very date. July 28th. It brings to mind The Harlem Baby Massacre. It brings to mind Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll. The Harlem Baby Massacre, on E 107th st in what was then an Italian neighborhood, was a botched drive-by shooting that occurred on this date in 1931 in which the intended targets were left unharmed, instead four children were wounded and a five year old boy killed. The shooting was eventually chalked up to the ongoing war between the unhinged young Irish hoodlum Vincent Coll (the tall one on the left in the photo), and his former boss, Jewish bootleg kingpin Dutch Schultz. The conflict between the two Bronx boys, which started when ace gunman Coll split with Schultz over a salary dispute and decided to form his own organization and usurp the Dutchman's territory, was now spilling into Upper Manhattan, and allegedly Coll and a few members of his small gang (roughly ten men, all also defectors from the Schultz mob) were the ones who made the attempt on the East Harlem Mafiosi who were the targets that day, since they were known to work with Schultz, and Coll may have suspected their complicity in the murder of his brother, found dead in his car in that very neighborhood the previous May. The public outcry to bring in Vincent Coll, now known as "Mad Dog" in the press was so great that it spurred what was up to that point the greatest manhunt in the nation's history. The Coll gang scattered across the city, some of them to upstate New York for a time, before reuniting in the city that fall to step up the war against the Dutchman, which ultimately led to the arrest of Coll and the majority of the gang that October. Coll was charged with the baby killing, along with another member of his gang, and Schultz and the rest of the underworld sat back for a minute, assured Vincent Coll had a date with the electric chair at Sing Sing. Coll was however smart enough to use the money he'd earned freelancing hits and kidnapping rival hoodlums for ransom during the period he was on the run to hire the Johnny Cochrane of his day, Samuel Liebowitz. Liebowitz tore the prosecution's case to shreds, and Coll walked free just a couple days before New Year's. Once back on the street,with both virtually everyone in the underworld against him and the police force bent on hauling him in on whatever bullshit charge they could think of (which they proceded to do repeatedly), it was clear Coll's days were numbered.In the first week of February, a Schultz squad showed up at a known Coll hideout in the Bronx and took out three Coll men and a female bystander, just missing the arrival of the Mad Dog himself. Then a week later , in the first minutes of February 8 1932, Coll left his hotel in Chelsea ,Manhattan to place a call at the drugstore across the street. As he attempted to extort Irish bootleg boss Owney Madden over the phone, a man entered the drugstore, and waved off Coll's traitorous bodyguard, who immediately left. The man, widely said throughout the years to have been chief Schultz gunman Bo Weinberg, (though recent evidence suggests otherwise), produced a Tommy gun from under his coat and blasted Vincent Coll into history, while legend has it another Schultz goon showed up in Madden's office at The Cotton Club and directed him at gun point to keep Coll on the phone. He was 23 years old, three years younger than myself, dead in a phone booth after a brief nine months as one of the nation's most feared and hated men. In all i've read of these events, there has never been too much hard evidence to to pin down Coll as the culprit behind the baby massacre, except sheer logic, both in terms of motive and the apparent fact that noone else in the underworld was crazy enough to have opened fire on a street full of playing children. A character heavily based on Coll, Vincent"Mad Dog" Dwyer was portrayed by Nic Cage in 1984's "The Cotton Club"



Where Coll met his end