Owen Madden was such a man.
Madden's widowed mother, an O'Neil, sailed from Liverpool to New York in 1901 with her sister, landing up in Hell's Kitchen, the West Side slum that Irish refugees from the potato famine had made their own uncoveted manor for nearly fifty years. From the moment Owen followed a year later, aged nine, to join his mother and her sister in a cold-water flat on Tenth Avenue, he traded strongly on his Irish roots.
His friends called him Owney. While he was growing up in the company of Arnie Rothstein, “Lucky” Luciano, Jack “Legs” Diamond, and Dutch Schultz, none of them choirboys, Madden, born in Leeds but made for New York, was also known more chillingly as “The Killer.” He was a top-flight thug, a graduate of the feared Gopher Gang who earned his reputation wielding a gun as if he were in a Wild West show. After his uncontrollable temper got the better of him once too often, he spent nine years in prison for murder.
When Madden got out of Sing Sing, in 1923, there to meet him at the gates was Joe Gould, sitting at the wheel of a fancy Packard, alongside a convicted murderer called Arthur Bieler. Gould, a small-time boxing hustler, had been instructed to collect Madden on behalf of Schultz, one of New York's premier liquor salesmen. Madden got in and Gould handed him a beer. “This is what Dutch Schultz puts out,” Bieler told him. “If you play your cards right, you can get in on the act. Dutch don't like no fuckin’ freelance operators. You would do well to do what he says.”
Madden didn't much care for the quality of the spiel, or the beer—and he spat the latter all over Bieler's pinstriped suit. Owney determined he would open his own brewery. He told Bieler to tell that to Schultz. To start out as a bona fide bootlegger, though, he had to get rid of Eugene O'Hare (a fellow Irish American), that Schultz had installed in Madden's territory after he was sent up the river. Within weeks, O'Hare's dead body was found on an empty scrap of land on the Lower West Side.
Gould, meanwhile, was soon to play a role quite a deal more important than driving a Packard to Sing Sing for Dutch Schultz. In the course of boxing history he would not have envisaged a role much grander than that—but for his association with Owney Madden. Gould was the manager of James J. Braddock; Owen had a large piece of Max Baer. And one day they would collide.
Braddock, born in Hell's Kitchen, raised in New Jersey, was just another “Irish” fighter as the thirties got underway, a good one among thousands, but not exceptional. He fought often—and often he fought with cracked ribs, sore knuckles, and not much food in his belly. But, as was the norm, he had to do business with people who put a better gloss on their reputations than was deserved.
Gould was indisputably one of those chameleons. Joe was close to Madden—and that was not like being next to cleanliness. With Prohibition came endless business opportunities, chiefly at the shakedown end of the retailing gig. You could sell Madden's booze, if you signed up for Madden's goons to “protect” your premises and your back. Madden worked for Schultz only as long as it took him to stamp his own authority on his territory, Chelsea. With money from strikebreaking and bootlegging, Madden opened the Cotton Club—previously owned by the world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson when patrons knew it as the Club DeLuxe. (Years later, the establishment and its owner achieved immortality of sorts when Bob Hoskins played Madden in Francis Ford Coppola's eponymous movie of the infamous hangout.) Owney also had a stake in the Stork. If you were looking for crime and criminals, these were the places to be seen.
Madden thrived in Chelsea. His brewery occupied a building so obvious—on Tenth Avenue between 26th and 27th Streets—it must have been difficult for policemen of the day to walk past without putting their hands over their eyes. His beer, called Madden's Number 1, was, by all accounts, not bad, and he served it in pints. Damon Runyon asked him once if he were not stretching the patience of the law by putting his name on the bottle. Madden said it was the most popular beer in New York and he was “dead proud” to have his name on the label.
According to Jimmy Breslin, Madden took Runyon to one of his fancy apartments one night, a penthouse at the top of the London Terrace block on 23rd and Ninth Avenue. From the rooftop, they could see his brewery. Staying in the apartment were Ray Arcel, who would go on to become one of boxing's most revered trainers, and his fighter, Charley “Phil” Rosenberg. Madden was now entrenched in the boxing business and had arranged for Rosenberg to fight Eddie “Cannonball” Martin for the world bantamweight title. Rosenberg was in his apartment because Madden wanted to keep an eye on the challenger's diet. To that end, he also installed in the swanky apartment Charley Phil's cook, his mother.
Come fight night, Madden bet $1,000—on Martin, because he didn't think Phil had been eating right. Charley Phil cut the champ to pieces. Owney was livid.
Madden is sometimes overlooked in the history of gangsterism's grip on boxing, but it was during the turbulent thirties that he was at the height of his dubious powers. Along with Schultz and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll (whom he'd later help kill), Owney had a piece of the world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera—even though, as far as the National Boxing Association was concerned, the champ's managers were Louis Soreci, Billy Duffy, and Walter Friedman. Next to Joe “The Human Punch Bag” Grim, who was knocked down at least eighty times and won maybe four of 113 verified contests in the thirteen years leading up to the Great War, Carnera was the most pathetic figure in all of boxing. At the end, he owned less than 10 percent of himself.
Madden was near the heartbeat of the sick beast Boxing throughout the Depression. At one point, he controlled the bantamweight and light heavyweight titleholders, as well as four of the five heavyweight champions between 1930 and 1937. Max Baer was the only fighter to hold out against him, publicly at least. It was always rumored Madden had a piece of him too, through Duffy and an underworld tough called George “Big Frenchy” DeMange. Gould was now on the inside, with a so-so heavyweight and connections to all the people who controlled the title.
Owney, it is said, also owned a slice of Braddock. And you won't see that in the schlock movie Cinderella Man, which depicts Braddock as an innocent victim of his times and calling, oblivious to the deals Gould was doing with the psychopath Madden.
Braddock's story was a good one. Devastated by the Wall Street Crash, he famously rose from the breadline and occasional work on the Jersey docks and, against all the odds, got a shot at the awesome puncher Baer.
Gould expended a lot of energy in putting the hitherto down-and-out Braddock in the limelight, introducing him to influential friends of all stripes. Later, he would pull off one of the cheekiest scams in boxing history, but first, they had to get their hands on the title.
Gould was a master of hype—the best in the business.
He was not fazed by threats or demands, even from the men in pulled-down hats. He knew many of them as friends. He had Madden on board. He knew Carbo, Palermo, Costello, and J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. This was some guardian angel. While selling Braddock to a skeptical audience, he maintained a classic front, retaining an office he could not afford, making promises he wasn't sure he could keep.
Baer, known here and there as “The Livermore Larruper,” was an awesome hitter. He'd killed one man in the ring and given a beating to another who died later, tragedies that took the edge off his aggressive instincts and made a lighthearted man occasionally sad. Might it also have contributed to what has been described over the years with ever-increasing conviction, even by those who were not there, as the biggest upset in heavyweight history?
Max was more than fourteen pounds heavier than the challenger, and should have murdered Braddock, in the nicest possible way, that night in the Madison Square Garden Bowl, an offshoot of the MSG, in nearby Long Island. But he hadn't trained properly and there was a lot of the clown in Max, who loved the high life. He took James too lightly. Braddock found something deep down he always knew was there. It came together for him over the fifteen rounds in his career that mattered more than any other, and he beat Max. His opponent wished Jim well, saying he hoped he valued the title more than he had done, a gnomic reference perhaps to the pressures brought to bear behind the scenes by Madden.
Lucky Jim was now not only the world heavyweight champion, he was the unofficial king of New York, with the run of the clubs and bars up and down Broadway and its environs.