Like many other immigrant groups, they moved west. Capone, seeing fertile ground with boats coming in from Canada using Lake Michigan, was successful in seizing the city and making it familiar as a bootlegging capital. It did not surprise me, in fact I thought the city would make an earlier appearance, but from Kansas City, the story swung north to Chicago.Chicago really came into the underworld/organized crime game in the 1920’s. I was taken aback as that is not a city frequently associated with the Irish mob but the proliferation of Irish longshoreman and New Orleans role as a seaport on the Gulf and the mouth of the Mississippi made it fertile ground for the Irish mob.Following that, the book looked at Kansas City and the political machine there who were entrenched with Irish politicians using Irish muscle to control the rackets and the votes. In New York, they were definitely part of the Tammany Hall crowd and were frequently used as enforcers to get the votes swinging the right way for ward bosses.Quite surprisingly, the next city to fall sway to the Irish was New Orleans.
The Irish gangs at that time, and through other periods in other cities, were always an integral part of the political game.
The book was written prior to Whitey Bulger being captured and so ends with Whitey still on the run.The earliest period starts in New York with the 5 point gangs as depicted in Gangs of New York. The book is laid out in a very interesting way: it covers the period from when the greatest influx of Irish came to New York and then covers the growth of the gangs regionally which changed every few decades. While so many of the books focus on the Italian’s and the Sicilian’s, there are many, many aspects of the underworld that go by the wayside but whose stories are either closely intertwined with or run parallel to La Cosa Nostra.The Irish are as entrenched in the American underworld as the Italian’s but their story is unique and completely different.
I may as well quit denying that I am not a gangster book groupie – looking through my library I just have so many different books on various aspects of the underworld that I have to throw my hands up and say I am all in when it comes to a good non-fiction book about the underworld.Paddy Whacked did not disappoint.
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