Mad Dog Coll

            It was so humid on Wednesday morning that at one point it took five minutes to tune my guitar between songs.

            I started working out the chords to “Pour des haricots”.

            I washed a section of my wooden floor under and in front of the bookshelf at the southeast corner of my living room. In some places I had to scrape up a lot of plaster that had gotten into the grooves of the wood.

            On the south side of Queen Street a woman was pulling a rolling suitcase east and carrying a colourful shopping bag. She stopped to deliberately dump the personal contents of the shopping bag onto the sidewalk. Then she took the time to kick it all into the street before continuing on her way.

            I had a cheese, tomato and cucumber sandwich for lunch.

            I did my afternoon exercises and then took a bike ride up Brock to Dundas, across to Dovercourt, south to Queen and home.

            I changed a couple of lines of my poem “The Next State of Grace” that Albert Moritz thought were not clear. I had written, “I can’t drive a girl home / with wheels that don’t turn / I’m buried with pride / when I try to save face …” I’ve changed it to, “

I can’t drive a girl home / with wheels that don’t turn / from the ditch of my pride / where I try to save face …”

            Of the first stanza:

I’m sitting here cooking

in the stew of the street

I’m the part that won’t ever get stirred,

but as I am boiling I drink my own broth

and bend noodles to the shape of these words

He wrote that the first two lines are good “but the balance of the stanza concocts an elaborate conceit that doesn’t do much for the poem”. I agree with most of Albert’s comments but not about this one, unless he gives me a better argument later on. I like how this verse introduces the poem.

I took my last two slices of pizza, topped them with leftover sautéed zucchini and pepper and added cheddar cheese. I had them with a beer and it was a very satisfying dinner.

I watched an episode of The Untouchables. This story dealt with the rivalry between Dutch Schultz and Mad Dog Coll. Mad Dog kidnaps Schultz’s right hand man Lefty and demands a $100,000 ransom. He kills Lefty and the body is found before the payment is made. Coll learns that Schultz has bet $100,000 on a horse called Enchantment to win the Kentucky Derby. He kidnaps the horse and collects a $50,000 ransom from the owner Diana Carten just before the race. Mad Dog then bets on the other favourite horse with the intention of killing Enchantment with a high-powered rifle before the finish line. Eliot Ness tackles him just before he fires the shot from the rooftop.

Diana Carten was played by Suzanne Storrs, who was a former Miss Utah and then from 1954 to 1961 she acted sixteen TV series. In 1967 she married financier Lionel Pincus and retired from acting.

Vincent Coll was born in Ireland but his parents came to the Bronx when he was still small. The family was very poor and eventually the father ran off to never be heard from again. Coll's mother died of TB when he was eleven. After being expelled by several Catholic reform schools he joined the Gophers street gang. By the age of 23 he’d been arrested twelve times. In the late 1920s he became an armed guard for Dutch Schultz’s beer delivery trucks. Before Prohibition Irish gangs ruled the Bronx but when Prohibition kicked in the Italian and Jewish gangsters took over. Coll was still in his mid-teens when he became an enforcer for Schultz. Coll was good looking and spent a small fortune on clothing. He became an assassin for Schultz but began acting independently and in 1930 formed a rival gang that entered into a shooting war with Schultz. Twenty of Schultz’s men were killed and several pieces of equipment. Coll began to kidnap rival gangsters and held them for ransom. During one attempted kidnapping shots were fired and four children that had been playing nearby were shot. When one of them later died the mayor of New York gave Coll the nickname of Mad Dog. Coll was arrested and charged with the murder of the child but he claimed that he was out of town when it happened. At the trial it was revealed that the only witness had a record of mental illness and so Coll was found not guilty. After his acquittal he married New York fashion designer Lottie Kreisberger. Coll was hired by the godfather of the New York Mafia, Salvatore Maranzano to kill Lucky Luciano for $25,000 up front and another $25,000 after the murder. But Luciano was tipped off and his men killed Maranzano just before Coll arrived. Schultz walked into a Bronx police station and offered a house in Westchester to any cop that killed Coll. In February of 1932 Coll was in a phone booth demanding a ransom when some gunmen pulled up and opened fire, killing Coll. Dutch Schultz sent a wreath to the funeral with the words, “From the boys”.

In 1933 Coll’s wife was arrested for her involvement in a jewellery store robbery and the killing of a woman during the crime. Lottie pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served 6 to 12 years. She disappeared after her release.

Dutch Schultz was born Arthur Flegenheimer. His father abandoned the family and so Arthur dropped out of school in grade eight to help his mother. He was sent to prison for robbery at 18 but was such an unmanageable prisoner that he was transferred to a work farm. Two months were added to his sentence after he escaped and was recaptured. Upon release he worked for a trucking company and when Prohibition began the company started smuggling. After he began working as a bouncer at a nightclub owned by Joey Noe, Noe was impressed enough by Dutch to make him a partner. They wanted to take over the bootlegging in the Bronx but their competitors were John and Joe Rock.  They had Joe kidnapped. He was hung by his thumbs from a meat hook and the story goes that they wrapped a blindfold over his eyes that had been smeared with gonorrhoea puss. The family paid $35,000 and shortly after his release he went blind. They took over the Bronx and when they expanded to Manhattan they got into a war with the Irish mob. When Schultz’s friend Noe was killed a Jewish mob kingpin was knocked off and the war heated up. When Prohibition ended, with the help of math genius Otto Berman, Schultz went into the numbers racket. He also began extorting New York restaurant owners and workers until they were all under his Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association. When Schultz discovered that his point man Julie Martin had been skimming money he pulled his gun, shot him in the mouth, cut his heart out and threw his body in a snow bank. When Schultz was tried for income tax invasion the cost of his defence caused him to lower the cuts of his gaming employees. This resulted in a labour strike and he had to back down. Schultz asked for permission from the Mafia to knock off district attorney Thomas Dewey but they turned him down. Schultz tried to go ahead with it anyway and was shot while pissing in a restaurant washroom. He was taken to the hospital but could not be saved. His last words were, “A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kin. You can play jacks and the girls do that with softball and do tricks with it. Oh, oh, dog biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy.”

The older bent over woman who panhandles on Queen Street while shouting at her boyfriend Paul, was mad at him after midnight. He’s usually relaxing somewhere on the street around the donut shop. She was calling out that she hoped he’d die as she does when she’s mad at him. Then she changed her tune and started shouting that she loved him and not to leave her like this. She even said that he could fuck her up the ass if he’d come back.