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looking to get even.
    The Railroad staged a week-long assault on the gang, beating and harassing known members, drastically depleting their forces, and effectively establishing the railway yards on 60th and 30th streets as off limits. Thus weakened, the Gophers spent more time defending themselves against rival gangs like the Hudson Dusters than they did bothering the law.
    During the Prohibition years, what was left of the Gophers was resurrected by the infamous Owney “the Killer” Madden. Born in Liverpool of Irish parentage, Madden made it through his turbulent youth (five arrests for murder by the time he was twenty-three) to become a gangster of distinction. He amassed his power through control of the bootleg liquor and rum-running trade, which became a booming enterprise in Hell’s Kitchen. Speakeasies abounded throughout the district, and any late-night convoy of trucks loaded with booze inevitably made its way up 10th Avenue towards one of the many West Side warehouses.
    Unlike the earlier generation of Gophers, who were mainly back-alley toughs who preferred to stay that way, Madden aspired to the highest levels of New York society. His nights were usually spent making the rounds at local speakeasies and clubs, where he was known as the Duke of the West Side. An average evening might be spent at his own Winona Club, or at one of the swankier West Side dance halls like the Eldorado or the Hotsy Totsy Club, owned by Jack “Legs” Diamond.
    Madden was the first gangster to come out of Hell’s Kitchen with anything approximating a business sense. In fact, he seemed to have his fingers in everything—bootleg liquor, breweries, nightclubs, taxicabs, laundries, and cloak and cigarette concessions. Eventually, he owned a controlling interest in the highly prosperous Cotton Club in Harlem and a piece of the prizefighter Primo Carnera, who won the heavyweight crown in 1933.
    With such a lucrative base of income, it was only a matter of time before Madden’s reign would be challenged. For years, he’d been able to amicably share his bootleg liquor business with an uptown operator named Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz. But he didn’t seem to have as much luck with some of his own Irish underlings.
    Once, Little Patsy Doyle sought to take over Madden’s operation while Madden was convalescing in the hospital following a late-night shooting at the Arbor Dance Hall on West 52nd Street. When Madden was discharged, he decided to use Patsy as an example. At Madden’s insistence, Doyle’s girlfriend lured him to a saloon at 41st Street and 8th Avenue, where Patsy was shot three times, stumbled through the swinging doors, and died in the gutter outside.
    There were other, far more substantial threats. The biggest challenge of all came from yet another Hell’s Kitchen Irishman with a thick mane of red hair and an engaging—some would say “goofy”—smile. If Madden was the very model of the gentleman gangster, a shining example of a Hell’s Kitchen street tough who had risen above his station, then Vincent Coll was his antithesis. Known in the underworld as the Mad Mick and later by the press as the Mad Dog, Coll was a throwback to the earliest days of the Gophers, when gangsters were doomed to die in the very streets that spawned them.
    Born in County Donegal, Coll was brought to New York at an early age and raised in a cold-water flat in the Bronx by his mother; she died of pneumonia when he was seven. After a prolonged stay at the infamous Mt. Loretto orphanage in Staten Island, Coll went to work for Dutch Schultz before he was even old enough to shave.
    At first, Coll’s gleeful ruthlessness made him a valued enforcer. He was nineteen when police charged him with having killed a speakeasy owner who refused to buy Schultz’s booze. He was eventually acquitted of the charge, probably through Schultz’s influence.
    Before long, the Dutchman started to realize Coll was more trouble than he was