Originally Posted by jace
Originally Posted by jackdempsey1930
If i recall Mcgrath's number two and the boss in his absence was henry"buster"Bell. I believe it mentions it in dock boss. But i have also read articles claiming Connie Noonan was Mcgrath's number 2. When Mcgrath went into semi retirement, moved to florida, he maintained the boss position. His gang was severly dismantled due to the court ordered execution of two of his gangs most feared killers. Some guys went to jail and others died of old age. The days of controlling the docks in manhatten were long gone but the mobs historical bread and butter (the hells kitchens rackets) was still valuable. So mcgrath let queens native mulligan run the rackets in his absence. Not known for violence and not from the neighborhood, mulligan was the total opposite of Mcgrath. Mcgrath controlled the irish mob after it lost the top spot in the underworld and the italians were top dog. There relationship was shakey and the italians could decide at any time to destroy what was left of the irish. Mcgrath became the first irish mob boss to build friendships and share rackets with the italians. His word was gold to mafia bosses, he adapted and learned to navigate through a dangerous world. Mulligan openly hated italians and publically taunted them. Mulligan chose fellow queens native jimmy burke as his replacement when he stepped down as acting boss, to which burke declined. Another man had his eye on being the king of his own neighborhood, hells kitchen had real boss again, a street fighting legend who would become the irish godfather to the irish of hells kitchen.


Was Jimmy Coonan just starting to come around at this time?


When these fellas were active Jimmy Coonan wasn't even a bleep on the Irish Mob's radar screen. He seems to have popped out of nowhere long after the "heart and soul" of The Arsenal Mob was long gone.

As a product of their Hell's Kitchen area, Coonan, Featherstone, and their friends were just tough (and nutty) neighborhood kids and troublemakers who eventually tried to emulate the likes of McGrath, Mulligan, Noonan, Dunn, and the rest of that crew. The only problem was that their time in the sun was long gone, and they really had no racket strength or intelligent leadership by which to steer the ship.

Once the killed Mickey Spillane who was one of the last old-timers and took over...they said to each other, "now what?" They didn't have a clue.

PS: Another notion that I wanna dispel, which in my opinion is largely a myth, is that James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke was even a member of "The Arsenal Mob" Irish crew. Just because he was Irish, a hoodlum, and probably knew some of them, does not mean that he was a card-carrying member of the Irish crew.

To the best of my knowledge he was always around and under the protection of the Italians, in particular the Lucchese crew under Paul Vario.