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worth. After Coll pulled a robbery at the Sheffield Farms dairy in the Bronx without his authorization, Schultz upbraided the young gangster. Rather than back down, as might have been expected, Coll had the audacity to demand that Schultz cut him in as an equal partner.
    “I don’t take in nobody as partners with me,” Schultz said. “You’re an ambitious punk, but you take a salary or nothin’. Take it or leave it.”
    “Okay,” said Coll, with his customary toothy grin. “I’m leaving it.”
    Over the following months, Coll proceeded to make himself a major pain in the ass to both Schultz and Madden, hiring out as a free-lance assassin and trying to muscle in on everybody’s territory. On June 15, 1931, he kidnapped Madden’s closest associate, Big Frenchie de Mange, in front of the Club Argonaut on West 50th Street. Then, in July, just weeks after Madden paid Coll a $35,000 ransom for de Mange, Coll was threatening to kidnap Madden himself.
    At the same time, Coll was waging war against Schultz—hijacking beer trucks, trashing speakeasies, and moving in on the Harlem policy games, one of Schultz’s most lucrative rackets. As his coup de grace, Coll targeted Joey Rao, Schultz’s prime mover in East Harlem, for execution.
    On the afternoon of July 28, 1931, Rao was lounging in front of his headquarters, the Helmar Social Club on East 107th Street. Accompanied by two bodyguards, Rao had a pocketful of pennies which he was distributing to a group of neighborhood children who had gathered. A touring car came around the corner and opened fire on Rao, his protectors, and the children. When the fusillade was over, a five-year-old kid lay dead on the sidewalk and four other children had been wounded. Rao and his bodyguards escaped without a scratch.
    Everyone in town knew Coll was behind the shooting. Newspaper headlines the next day christened him “the Baby Killer.” People on both sides of the law were calling for retribution. Both Madden and Schultz put out a $25,000 contract on Coll, the psychotic “Mad Dog” who was giving the underworld a bad name. Columnist Walter Winchell reported that, “Five planes brought dozens of machine guns from Chicago Friday … Local banditti have made one hotel a virtual arsenal and several hot spots are ditto because Master Coll is giving them the headache.”
    Finally, on the night of February 8, 1932, the inevitable came to pass. At a drugstore on West 23rd Street near 8th Avenue, Coll was in a phone booth carrying on a protracted conversation. An automobile with four men pulled up to the curb outside. Three of the men deployed themselves around the drugstore entrance, while the fourth, carrying a Thompson submachine gun, entered the store. Coll was still jabbering away when the gunman raised his tommy gun and let loose with a short burst of fire through the glass. After correcting his aim, the gunman fired another short burst, then another. He looked in the booth, where baby-faced Mad Dog Coll lay nearly sawed in half amidst blood and shattered glass. Then he strolled out of the drugstore.
    It was Owney Madden who Coll had been talking to on the phone. Later reports suggested that the elder gangster held Coll on the line until the gunmen were able to arrive. If this was true, it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that one child of Hell’s Kitchen would eliminate another as part of a bloody battle for control of the neighborhood’s bounty.
    With Coll out of the picture, things quieted down on the West Side. But by this time, it hardly mattered. The Twenty-first Amendment was passed in 1933, repealing Prohibition. The speakeasies were all closing down and the big dance halls were soon to follow. Within a few months of Coil’s shooting, Madden was imprisoned on a parole violation, where he would languish for twelve months even though newspaper stories claimed he had offered a million-dollar bribe to the state parole board. Upon release, he retired to Hot