seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Queens (New York)


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Death of Irish American Mobster Mickey Spillane

Michael J. Spillane, Irish American mobster much better known as Mickey Spillane from Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, is killed outside his apartment in Queens on May 13, 1977. Spillane, who is called the “last of the gentleman gangsters,” is a marked contrast to the violent Westies mob members who succeed him in Hell’s Kitchen.

As a young boy in Hell’s Kitchen, Spillane starts as a numbers runner for various organized crime figures in his neighborhood. In 1960, he takes over the rackets left to him by his predecessor Hughie Mulligan. He marries Maureen McManus, the daughter of the Democratic district leader Eugene McManus.

Though Italian mobsters dominate organized crime in the city, the Italian mob stays out of Hell’s Kitchen while Spillane is the boss. Often, Spillane kidnaps members of the Italian Mafia and holds them for ransom to raise money for his operations. Although he runs the rackets such as gambling and loansharking, he never allows the sale of drugs.

It is Spillane’s refusal to allow the Italian mobsters to participate in the Hell’s Kitchen rackets that leads to his downfall. The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is being built on Spillane’s westside at the time. The amount of money the new convention center, Madison Square Garden, the waterfront and the unions are generating for Spillane is enormous, and the Italians are desperate for a piece of the action. Spillane refuses to allow the Italian mob to participate, and the New York Irish-Italian Mob War begins.

In the 1970s the Irish mob sees an increased threat from the Italian Mafia as the Genovese crime family seeks control over the soon to be built Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Since the convention center is located in Spillane’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, Spillane refuses to allow any involvement by the Italians. Although the Italian gangsters greatly outnumber the members of the Irish mob, Spillane is successful in keeping control of the convention center and Hell’s Kitchen. The Italians, frustrated and embarrassed by their defeat to Spillane and the Irish gangsters, respond by hiring a rogue Irish American hitman named Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan to assassinate Tom Devaney, Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, and Tom “the Greek” Kapatos, three of Spillane’s chief lieutenants. By the mid-1970s, Spillane has moved his family out of Hell’s Kitchen to Woodside, Queens, because of threats of violence against his children.

In 1966, a young upstart named Jimmy Coonan attempts to take the neighborhood from Spillane, muscling in on his territory and murdering a Spillane underling. Ultimately, Coonan is sent to prison in 1967. When he is released from prison, Coonan seeks to align himself with the Gambino crime family through an up-and-coming mobster from Brooklyn, named Roy DeMeo. This marks the beginning of the end for the Irish mob, as Coonan eventually goes to work for the Gambinos.

On May 13, 1977, Spillane is killed outside his apartment in Queens. It has long been rumored that DeMeo murdered Spillane as a favor to Coonan, who subsequently takes over as the boss of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob. Spillane is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York.


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Birth of Novelist Mickey Spillane

mickey-spillane

Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, American crime novelist whose stories often feature his signature detective character Mike Hammer, is born in Brooklyn, New York City, on March 9, 1918. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane is also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Spillane is the only child of his Irish bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. Spillane attends Erasmus Hall High School, graduating in 1935. He starts writing while in high school, briefly attends Fort Hays State College in Kansas, and works a variety of jobs, including summers as a lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Spillane starts as a writer for comic books. While working as a salesman in Gimbels department store basement in 1940, he meets tie salesman Joe Gill, who later finds a lifetime career in scripting for Charlton Comics. Gill tells Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who writes for Funnies Inc., an outfit that packages comic books for different publishers. Spillane soon begins writing an eight-page story every day.

Spillane joins the United States Army Air Forces on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor. While flying over Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, he says, “That is where I want to live.” Later, he uses his celebrity status to publicize the Grand Strand on television, but when it becomes a popular resort area and traffic becomes a problem, Spillane says, “I shouldn’t have told people about it.”

Spillane decides to boost his bank account by writing a novel. In nineteen days he writes I, the Jury. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sends it to E. P. Dutton. With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sells 6-1/2 million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduces Spillane’s most famous character, hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer.

Spillane is an active Jehovah’s Witness. He and Mary Ann Spillane have four children, and their marriage ends in 1962. In November 1965, he marries his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou. After that marriage ends in divorce and a lawsuit in 1983, Spillane shares his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, whom he marries in October 1983, and her two daughters.

In the 1960s, Spillane becomes a friend of the novelist Ayn Rand. Despite their apparent differences, Rand admires Spillane’s literary style, and Spillane becomes, as he describes it, a fan of Rand’s work.

He receives an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995. Spillane’s novels go out of print, but in 2001, the New American Library begins reissuing them.

Spillane dies July 17, 2006, at his home in Murrells Inlet, of pancreatic cancer. After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, begins the task of editing and completing Spillane’s unpublished typescripts, beginning with a Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone (2008).

In July 2011, the town of Murrells Inlet names U.S 17 Business the “Mickey Spillane Waterfront 17 Highway.” The proposal first passes the Georgetown County Council in 2006 while Spillane is still alive, but the South Carolina General Assembly rejects the plan at that time.


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Annie Moore Departs Queenstown for the United States

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Fifteen-year-old Annie Moore departs Queenstown, now Cobh, County Cork, on December 20, 1891, and becomes the first immigrant to the United States to pass through the Ellis Island facility in New York Harbor.

Her parents, Matthew and Julia Moore, had come to the United States in 1888 and are living at 32 Monroe Street in Manhattan. Moore departs from Queenstown aboard the S.S. Nevada, one of 148 steerage passengers. Accompanied by her brothers, Anthony and Philip, she spends twelve days at sea, including Christmas Day, arriving in New York City on Thursday evening, December 31. It is reported that her arrival is on her 15th birthday, but records in Ireland reveal that her birthday is in May, and she is actually seventeen.

Ellis Island officially opens on January 1, 1892, and, as the first person to be processed at the newly opened facility, Moore is presented with an American $10 gold piece from an American official. All three children are soon reunited with their parents in New York. From 1820 to 1920, more than 4 million people leave their native shores of Ireland bound for the Port of New York and a new life in America.

Moore marries a son of German immigrants, Joseph Augustus Schayer, an employee at Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market, with whom she has at least eleven children. She dies of heart failure on December 6, 1924, and is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Queens. Her previously unmarked grave is identified in August 2006. On October 11, 2008, a dedication ceremony is held at Calvary which celebrates the unveiling of a marker for her grave, a Celtic cross made of Irish Blue Limestone.

The Irish American Cultural Institute presents an annual Annie Moore Award “to an individual who has made significant contributions to the Irish and/or Irish American community and legacy.” Moore’s story is told in the song “Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears,” written by Brendan Graham. The song has been performed by Ronan Tynan and by The Irish Tenors, of which Tynan was formerly a member. Other artists performing the song include Seán Keane, Sean & Dolores Keane, Daniel O’Donnell, Celtic Thunder, Irish tenor Brian Dunphy, Celtic Woman, and Tommy Fleming.

A woman named “Annie Moore” who died near Fort Worth, Texas in 1924 had long been thought to be the one whose arrival marked the beginning of Ellis Island. Further research, however, established that the Annie Moore in Texas was born in Illinois.


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Death of Vergilius of Salzburg, Churchman & Astronomer

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Vergilius of Salzburg, also known as Virgilius, Feirgil or Fergal, Irish churchman and early astronomer, dies on November 27, 784, in Salzburg, Austria. He serves as abbot of Aghaboe, bishop of Ossory and bishop of Salzburg. He is called “the Apostle of Carinthia” and “the geometer.”

He originates from a noble family of Ireland, where his name is Feirgil, and is said to have been a descendant of Niall of the Nine Hostages. Feirgil is likely educated at the Iona monastery.

In the Annals of the Four Masters and the Annals of Ulster he is mentioned as Abbot of Aghaboe, in County Laois, where he is known as “the Geometer” because of his knowledge of mathematics.

Around 745 Vergilius leaves Ireland, intending to visit the Holy land but, like many of his countrymen who seem to have adopted this practice as a work of piety, he settles down in France, where he is received with great favour by Pepin the Short, who is then Mayor of the Palace under Childeric III of Franconia. He serves as an adviser to Pepin. He probably uses a copy of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis, an Irish collection of canon law, to advise him to receive royal unction in 751, to assist his recognition as king Pippin III after the deposition of Childeric. After spending two years at Cressy, near Compiègne, he goes to Bavaria, at the invitation of Duke Odilo, where he founds the monastery of Chiemsee, and within a year or two is made Abbot of St. Peter’s at Salzburg. Among his notable accomplishments is the conversion of the Alpine Slavs and the dispatching of missionaries to Hungary.

While Abbot of St. Peter’s, Vergilius comes into collision with Saint Boniface. A priest, through ignorance, confers the Sacrament of Baptism using, in place of the correct formula, the words “Baptizo te in nomine patria et filia et spiritu sancta.” Vergilius holds that the sacrament has been validly conferred, but Boniface complains to Pope Zachary. The latter, however, decides in favour of Vergilius. Later on, Boniface accuses Vergilius of spreading discord between himself and Duke Odilo of Bavaria and of teaching a doctrine in regard to the rotundity of the earth, which is “contrary to the Scriptures.” Pope Zachary’s decision in this case is that “if it shall be clearly established that he professes belief in another world and other people existing beneath the earth, or in another sun and moon there, thou art to hold a council, and deprive him of his sacerdotal rank, and expel him from the church.”

Unfortunately, we no longer possess the treatise in which Vergilius expounds his doctrine. Two things, however, are certain: first, that there is involved the problem of original sin and the universality of redemption; secondly, that Vergilius succeeds in freeing himself from the charge of teaching a doctrine contrary to Scripture. It is likely that Boniface, already biased against Vergilius because of the preceding case, misunderstands him, taking it for granted, perhaps, that if there are antipodes, the “other race of men” are not descendants of Adam and are not redeemed by Christ.

After the martyrdom of Boniface, Vergilius is made Bishop of Salzburg in 766 or 767. Until his death in 784, he labours successfully for the upbuilding of his diocese as well as for the spread of Christianity in neighbouring heathen countries, especially in Carinthia.

Vergilius is venerated as a saint in the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. In 1233 he is formally canonized by Pope Gregory IX. Aside from being personally associated with Abbey of Aghaboe and Salzburg Cathedral, a number of parishes around the world are dedicated to him, mostly being founded by small populations of far-flung Irish Catholics, like himself. There is a church still bearing his name dedicated to him in Broad Channel, Queens, New York. A parish in Morris Plains, New Jersey is also dedicated to him.


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Death of Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, Composer & Bandmaster

patrick-sarsfield-gilmore

Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, Irish-born American composer and bandmaster, dies in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 24, 1892. He lives and works in the United States after 1848. While serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War, Gilmore writes the lyrics to the song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, the tune taken from the old Irish antiwar folk song, Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye. This is published under the name Louis Lambert.

Gilmore is born in Ballygar, County Galway, on December 25, 1829. He starts his music career at age fifteen and spends time in Canada with an English band. Already a fine cornet player, he settles in Boston, Massachusetts in 1848, becoming leader of the Suffolk, Boston Brigade, and Salem bands in swift succession. He also works in the Boston music store of John P. Ordway and founds Ordway’s Aeolians, a group of blackface minstrels. With the Salem Band, Gilmore performs at the 1857 inauguration of President James Buchanan.

In 1858, Gilmore founds “Gilmore’s Band,” and at the outset of the American Civil War the band enlists with the 24th Massachusetts Volunteers, accompanying General Ambrose Burnside to North Carolina. After the temporary discharge of bands from the field, Governor John Albion Andrew of Massachusetts entrusts Gilmore with the task of re-organizing military music-making. General Nathaniel P. Banks creates him Bandmaster-general.

When the war ends, Gilmore is asked to organize a celebration, which takes place in New Orleans. That success emboldens him to undertake two major music festivals in Boston, the National Peace Jubilee in 1869 and the World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in 1872. These feature monster orchestras of massed bands with the finest singers and instrumentalists, including the only American appearance by “waltz king” Johann Strauss II, and cements Gilmore’s reputation as the leading musical figure of the age. Coliseums are erected for the occasions, holding 60- and 120,000 persons. Grateful Bostonians present Gilmore with medals and cash, but in 1873 he moves to New York City, as bandmaster of the 22nd Regiment. Gilmore takes this band on acclaimed tours of Europe.

On September 24, 1892, back in the United States preparing an 1892 musical celebration of the quadricentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus‘ voyage of discovery, Gilmore collapses and dies in St. Louis. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York, where his wife is later interred.

In many ways Gilmore can be seen as the principal figure in 19th-century American music. He holds the first “Promenade Concert in America” in 1855, the forerunner to today’s Boston Pops. He sets up “Gilmore’s Concert Garden,” which becomes Madison Square Garden. He is the Musical Director of the Nation in effect, leading the festivities for the 1876 Centennial celebrations in Philadelphia and the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. In 1888 he starts the tradition of seeing in the New Year in Times Square.

Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore is inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.