A recent television documentary about Father Louis Gigante, a Brooklyn priest who has done genuinely good work for the underprivileged in New York's slum areas, treated viewers to footage with an almost macabre air of comedy. It showed Fr Gigante's brother Vincent shuffling down the streets, unshaven and in a bathrobe, in a wily endeavour to convince the world he was a harmless, law-abiding old fellow, rather than what he really was: the grand patriarch of the Genovese crime family.
When "Vinnie the Chin" recently swapped his bathrobe for a prison suit, it was seen by some as the last round-up of the old-style Dons. The Cosa Nostra, although still active, is in headlong retreat, driven from the cities by competition from black and Latino gangs, to say nothing of its own internal disintegration and the efforts of the FBI.
In a perverse way, history has come full circle. Organised crime in America is once more being supplanted by disorganised crime; a century ago, the rise of Sicilian crime syndicates brought the ruthless elimination of the Irish gangster establishment.
Irish gangs
The Irish mob originated almost as soon as the coffin ships arrived at Ellis Island. In the 1860s, after the break-up of the immigrant-based Chicester Gang, a plethora of newer Irish gangs arose, comprising full-time robbers, extortionists and hit men. Chief among them were the Kerryonians, the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies. But the most terrifying gang of the latter 19th century was undoubtedly the Whyos, a murderous crew of urban bandits which included such professional killers as Red Rocks Farrell, big Josh Hines, Slops Connolly and Piker Ryan.
The businesslike nature of their violence was illustrated by Piker Ryan's arrest in 1884, when a price-list of "disfigurements" was found in his coat, ranging from $4 for a black eye to $100 for "doing the big job" (i.e. murder).
Fresh waves of immigration from southern Italy and eastern Europe, as well as Irish assimilation into the legitimate mob of Tammany Hall, soon dissipated the Irish gangster scene. Nevertheless in the 1920s, there were still plenty of Celtic mobsters prowling the underworld of urban America. They included Dion O'Bannion, who ran North Chicago's crime scene from a florist's shop; Vincent "The Mick" Coll, a maddog shooter who even killed children; and the White Hand Gang, so named in deliberate opposition to the Calabrian Black-Handers, who were executed on the orders of Al Capone.
But by the end of Prohibition, most Irish crime lords had been eradicated, Irish-American career criminals being reduced to the status of associates or enforcers, even in Boston. Anyone who has seen Martin Scorsese's film Goodfellas will remember that "Irish blood" precluded full membership of the Italian-run crime families.
"Dapper Don"
So there is a certain irony in the fact that an Irish gang played at least a partial role in the downfall of the most celebrated American gangster since Al Capone: John Gotti.
Known as "Dapper Don" because of his immaculately coiffed hair and $1,800 suits, or "Teflon Don" because no charges would stick to him, Gotti rose from foul-mouthed street punk patrolling New York's Little Italy to boss of the Gambino family. He had earned a place in the heart of Don Carlo Gambino (said to have been the inspiration for Vito Corleone in The Godfather), for the botched murder of an Irish hood named James McBratney in a Staten Island bar in 1973, for which he served a four-year sentence.
Having been formally "initiated" in 1977, Gotti quickly developed such a reputation for brutality that Gambino's successor, Paul Castellano, dispatched him as trouble-shooter to Manhattan's West Side, where a band of ultra-violent Irish-American crazies, nicknamed the Westies, had established their stronghold, dabbling in loan-sharking, racketeering, kidnapping and narcotics, and murdering Italian mobsters foolish enough to invade their territory.
The Westies' savagery was never more obvious than in 1981, when one member, Paddy Duggan, having upset the gang leader, James Coonan, was murdered. Coonan then cut off some of Duggan's digits, depositing them in a "finger bag", with which he would intimidate victims, before taking his severed head to a Manhattan bar, where the rest of the gang enjoyed a fine night, toasting Duggan's memory and indulging in a favourite pastime: Russian Roulette at $1,000 a go.
Concealed microphone
At the Coonan-Gotti summit the two murderers seemed to discover a certain affinity. "I just met a greaseball tougher than we are," Coonan told his cronies. A truce was reached: the Westies would act as Gambino enforcers in return for a cut of the profits. All went well for a time; when Paul Castellano and his bodyguard, Thomas Billotti, died in a hail of bullets in 1985, it may well have been Westie gunmen who helped Gotti to power as boss of New York's largest crime family.
But when the NYPD hauled in a gang member named Mickey Featherstone that same year, it marked the beginning of the end. Featherstone, facing 25 years to life for murder, agreed to turn "snitch", at one point meeting Gotti with a concealed microphone to discuss an IRAstyle "knee-capping" of John O'Connor, a union boss.
Although the subsequent case against Gotti collapsed in 1987, his position was so weakened that it was only a matter of time before another gangster, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, turned traitor, paving the way for Gotti's sentence to life imprisonment for racketeering and murder in April 1992. Happily, the Westies, last of the great Irish-American gangs, virtually imploded at the same time.