It Occurs To Me:  Frothing and bursting bubbles! 

The seasoned Derry supporter beside me was incandescent with rage. Although from a soccer-dominated city, he’s a lifelong GAA head. The Gareth McKinless sending off put the tin hat on it, and he sunk his heads in his hands and then sunk a big frothy pint and a generous glass of whisky. I ventured an opinion. “Mickey Harte doesn’t seem to have a plan B!” 

“Plan B?” He hissed, “There’s no bloody Plan A! Look at our keeper…still coming way out, despite what Donegal did to us. If we had Jim McGuinness in charge, we’d beat Galway.” 

On Sunday, Joe Brolly called the sending off a “shocking and outrageous act” and apologised ‘“on behalf of the Derry GAA”. He then finished his article with “Jimmy’s bursting bubbles”. My Derry supporter left five minutes before the match ended, with a parting shot. “I’m frothin’ hi, frothin!”

Jim McGuinness is ‘bursting bubbles’

The St Mirren supporter, to whom I’d just explained some basic GAA football rules, turned to me and scratched his ‘heed’: “Frozen? Did he say he was frozen!” 

Ha ha! Yeah, even when the temperature is 25 plus, wandering keepers and red cards can turn a body to ice! 

                                   The portal…loo

I see the Dublin-New York Portal, which was launched on May 8, and had been temporarily closed due to “inappropriate behaviour”, has opened again. However, measures have been put in place to crack down on the hooliganism which blighted “live-streaming art installation”. It was supposed to connect the two cities through technology. The New York end (and I use that word advisedly) in the main showed people genuinely delighted to be in touch with the ‘old sod’, but in Ireland’s capital, the gurriers and scumbags took over, flashing body parts, urinating and swearing. I’m not surprised. O’Connell Street has long been a thoroughfare well worth avoiding, and as one man interviewed on the street said, “It's not exactly the Champs Elysses, is it ?” He, like many other critics, wondered why O’Connell Street was chosen at all? 

He wondered if it should be outside the Dáil in Kildare Street with plenty of guards around, to put manners on the offenders. Mmmm? But then we’d be subjected to doughnutting TD’s jostling for space, as they do in photographs over the shoulders of a minister, and we might be right back to swear words and political mooning.

No, if they’re going to leave it in O’Connell Street, and giving due consideration to the pressure on the poor Justice Minister’s shoulders currently, why not put a large unbreakable photo of Helen McEntee alongside, surrounded by senior members of An Portal Siochana? As they say in north Donegal, “That’ll tighten the dung in them!” 

                            Mad Dog Coll

Listening to Rory Gallagher singing about Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll reminded me of Breandan Delap’s great book about the infamous Gweedore-born gangster, which I first read and reviewed nearly 25 years ago. Recently, I read ‘Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster’, a brilliantly researched book by TJ English. He tells us that “Coll was brought to New York as an infant in 1909 and lived in a cold-water tenement in the Bronx. His family quickly became mired in a cycle of poverty and despair that evoked the worst hardships of potato-famine immigrants. Before Vincent was twelve, five of his siblings would perish from childhood accidents or disease. His father, Tony, fled the home, never to return. His mother, Anna, died from pneumonia when Vincent was seven.

He and his brother Peter were taken away by the state of New York and institutionalised in Staten Island at the Mount Loretto orphanage, a house of refuge known for its punitive approach to reform. Vincent lived there for three years, escaping repeatedly. He was diagnosed as an adolescent deviant, and one early psychiatric report noted his deep-seated problems with authority. By the time he hooked up with Dutch Schulz, Vincent had already developed the brazen, self-destructive streak that was to become his most distinguishing characteristic as a gangster.”

“Vincent was gawky and boyish, with a full mane of unruly reddish-blond hair, a prominently dimpled chin, and a broad toothy grin. It was not brains but cold-blooded efficiency as a killer that catapulted the young hoodlum to the leadership position of his gang.”

By 1927, the Big Bill Dwyer-Owney Madden criminal Combine had unprecedented influence in New York. Unlike the Italian Mafia, you didn’t have to be Irish to be a gang member…Jews, Italians and African Americans worked hand in hand with the Combine. Up-and-coming gangsters included Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello and the aforementioned Dutch Schultz. Coll quickly fell out with Schulz who put out a contract on the Donegal man. Dutch brazenly walked into a police precinct and said: 

“ I just came in to tell ya I’ll pay good money to any cop that kills that Mick.” 

                                    The end 

As English relates in ‘Paddy Whacked’: “In the early months of 1931, at least ten gunmen associated with the Combine were stabbed, shot, and beaten to death by Coll’s gang. One of those men, Carmine Borelli, was executed when he refused to take part in a scheme to set up his boss, the Dutchman. Borelli’s girlfriend witnessed the murder, so Coll chased her down and shot her in the head in the middle of a Bronx Street. 

“A few days later, the Combine retaliated by murdering Peter Coll; he was machine-gunned to death on a Harlem street corner while driving home. Vincent was overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his older brother. Instead of going into mourning, however, he responded with calculated rage…What happened next would shock the entire country and seal Coll’s fate as the most reviled man in the underworld.”

Coll went after a Dutch Schultz associate, Tommy Rao, who was distributing pennies to local children. A gunman in a car opened fire with a Tommy gun on Rao, but when the attempted assassination was over, but only succeeded in injuring five children. One of them, five-year-old Michael Vengali, died before he reached hospital. Rao and bodyguards escaped untouched. TJ English again:  “His metamorphosis was complete: Vincent was now a total outcast. His gang had betrayed him. Everyone wanted him dead.”

Although he was acquitted, (he’d hired renowned defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz), the die was cast. 

“Arriving at the New London Pharmacy and Candy Shop around twelve-thirty A.M., Coll stepped into a phone booth in the rear of the store. The bodyguard took a seat at a counter near the soda fountain. Vincent called Madden at the Cotton Club and was jabbering away when a car pulled up in front of the store. Four men, one of them wearing an ankle-length coat and gray fedora, got out of the car. Three of the men positioned themselves around the drugstore entrance. The man with the long coat and fedora entered the store and nodded to Coll’s bodyguard. Coll’s betrayer swiftly climbed off his stool and skedaddled out the front door. From beneath his coat, the man in the gray fedora produced a tommy gun. While Vincent chattered on the phone heatedly and obliviously, the gunman approached, raised his machine gun, and fired a short burst into the booth, shattering glass and creating a loud racket. He paused, corrected his aim, and fired again, making sure to riddle Coll’s body from head to toe. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds.”

Police Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney called the act “a positive defiance of law and order,” with the accent on “positive.” Mayor Walker said, as disturbingly violent as the killing had been, he hoped that it might signal the end of the open warfare that had claimed so many lives. Dutch Shultz declared, “The Mad Mick got what he deserved.”                                                

                              Words of wisdom 

I love this quote from actor Anthony Hopkins: “My philosophy is:  What people say about me is none of my business. I am who I am and do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And that makes life easier. We live in a world where funerals are more important than the deceased, marriage is more important than love, looks are more important than the soul. We live in a packaging culture that despises content.”