GL NEWS 2/27/2020

[Bklyn21]

This Week in Gang Land
By Tom Robbins

Tales of a Waterfront Gangster
Gang Land Exclusive!George BaroneWatching The Irishman made me think about George Barone. Like Frank Sheeran, the gruff Teamsters union enforcer played by Robert DeNiro, Barone was a big union man. His was another notoriously corrupt outfit, the International Longshoremen's Association where Barone was long a top official. Corruption aside, their unions helped raise both men out of the grinding poverty in which they were raised: Sheeran in Philadelphia, Barone on Manhattan's West Side. As young men, both served in World War II, Sheeran in Europe, Barone in the Pacific. Both took part in ruthless and bloody combat. That experience helped condition them for their post-war careers when both moonlighted as hitmen for the mob. Late in life, both also reflected on the strange and violent lives they'd led.

Sheeran died in 2003 but not before telling his tales to Charles Brandt for his book I Heard You Paint Houses, on which the movie is based. Barone died a few years later, in 2010. By that time, he'd become a government witness after learning that a new generation of Genovese crime family gangsters planned to forcibly eliminate him. He told his own stories to the FBI and juries. That led to convictions of a batch of mobsters, including Peter Gotti, along with several ILA bigs. It also helped convince others, like Genovese boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante and his son Andrew, who Barone knew well, and Genovese mobster Pasquale (Patty) Falcetti, to decide to plead guilty.

Tom RobbinsAfter he had finished testifying, Barone agreed to talk to me for a book about his own life. Unfortunately, he was 86 years old, stone deaf, ailing from cancer and a half dozen other ailments. He ran out of time before we could finish. But he told some interesting stories from a bygone wiseguy era, and since Gang Land has been bugging me about them for a while, I agreed to share a few.

Editor's Note: Crack investigative reporter Tom Robbins is a longtime Gang Land buddy, a 1990s colleague at the New York Daily News, and co-author of Mob Boss, The Story of Little Al D'Arco, The Man Who Brought Down The Mafia.

John Earle, And A Hit On The West Side
Johnny EarleIn the early 1950s, George Barone was working on the docks near Greenwich Village. His job was scrubbing out cargo holds on freight ships after they were unloaded. It was hot, dirty work. He looked up one day and saw a big man watching him. "He was built like Rocky Marciano," Barone recalled. "Hands like sledge hammers." The man's name was John Earle. He was just home from prison and friends in the ILA local that ruled the piers along that stretch of the river had given him the foreman's job for Barone's work crew. The two men hit it off. Earle asked Barone what he was doing. "Nothing," shrugged Barone. Earle told him he was putting together a gang to take over local bookmaking and numbers action. "Why don't you come with us?" Earle asked. OK, said Barone.

He was quickly in awe of his new partner. On a waterfront teeming with two-fisted sluggers, Earle was the toughest, Barone insisted. One of the gang's hustles was muscling in on the stevedore firms that worked the docks. "They sent this guy, he is about six-foot-eight, tried to put the bum on us. John is like five-eleven. He steps back. Bang, he hits him. The guy didn't wake up for two days." He grinned at the memory of it. "Toughest-guy-I-met-in-my-fucking-life."

Daily News Front Page April 7, 1952Barone's first assignment was to help take out a competitor whose gambling operation the gang coveted. "John said we are going to kill this guy," said Barone. "So we did."

By the time we spoke, many of the specifics of George Barone's early crimes had been lost to the foggy ruins of time. When he took the witness stand, defense lawyers struggled in vain to get him to fill in the grisly details of his killings. They succeeded only in rousing his quick temper and loud bark, one that was all the louder because he couldn't hear himself. He also cursed like the sailor he once was and had little patience for dumb questions. "How did you do it?" I asked.

"I didn't talk him to death," he snarled. "I shot him. With a gun."

Gentle coaxing produced a few tidbits. "We got information that this guy went to see his girlfriend every couple of nights. He took her Chinese food. We waited there at that address. It was on the West Side, in midtown. I shot him as he headed in the door."

This wasn't much to go on. But as it happens, the front page of the Daily News of April 7, 1952 carried the headline: "Stevedore, On Parole, Slain." Beneath it, a photo showed a stocky, well-dressed man stretched out on the street, quite dead. A detective and a pair of patrolmen sadly contemplated the scene. The newspaper reported that the victim was a 44-year-old longshoreman named John Regan who worked as a checker on the West Side piers. Regan's rap sheet included 14 arrests and at the time of his death he had been on parole after serving 17 years for a hold up. He had been on his way to visit his girlfriend who lived at 450 West 50th Street when someone shot him behind the left ear. Next to Regan's lifeless arm, the newspaper helpfully noted, sat a brown paper bag containing two cartons of chow mein.

The Killer Who Couldn't Shoot Straight
Elmer BurkeThe murder of John Regan was never solved. But then it was just one of scores of such killings of waterfront hoodlums in that era. Barone guessed that his and Earle's gang knocked off at least a dozen men as they grabbed as many rackets as they could on the West Side. All went officially unpunished by police or courts.

The bigger threat was rival gangs. Barone described how Earle and their crew were steadily at war with the competition. "We fought everyone, all across the West Side, the Irish, the Italians." They also took casualties. In 1953, the day after Thanksgiving, a member of their gang, a boyhood pal of Earle's named John McQueeney, was shot to death as he was taking a drink in a tavern called the Glass Bar on West 52nd Street and Ninth Avenue. Barone said there was no doubt about who was responsible. "There was this guy Johnny McQueeney hated. Every time he came in the bar, Johnny would say, 'Why didn't you let me know you were coming? I would shoot you, you prick.' It went on and on. He kept saying this, but he didn't kill him. So this guy got tired of it and got a friend of his to come in the bar and shoot Johnny McQueeney."

The gunman for the guy who got tired of worrying about Johnny McQueeney was a 36-year-old demolition worker and bank robber named James Wright. "They called him 'The Beaver', I don't know why," said Barone. The gang spent a fair amount of time waiting to settle the score. But they eventually learned The Beaver was due to meet a date outside the old Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street. To carry out the hit, Barone and Earle recruited one of their associates, a pint-sized New York outlaw named Elmer (Trigger) Burke. A mere 130 pounds, Burke had served in the Army Rangers in Italy during the war where he was said to have single handedly wiped out a German machine gun nest. He came home with a chest full of medals and began hawking his services as a deadly marksman for hire. The plan was to install Burke and a rifle in a hotel room with a view of the street corner where Wright was to meet up with his girlfriend. The deadeye gunman would plug Wright, then quietly slip away.

George Barone"I go up and get a room at the hotel across the street," said Barone. "Second floor looking right down. We get Elmer a rifle. It is an easy shot. I could do it. Too bad I didn't. Bang. Bang. He misses. He says 'Oh, that never happened before.'"

Burke managed only to wing Wright in the arm and leg. A stray bullet struck a 55-year-old woman working at the corner newsstand in the face.

At first, police were mystified. The story in the next morning's News reported that "a mad sniper" had fired a high-powered rifle into a crowd outside the Garden, wounding two. Eight or nine shots were fired, but the sound was drowned out as kids nearby began shooting off firecrackers at the same time. A search led police to a second floor room at the Hotel Square Garden at 253 W. 50th Street. There they found a .30-.30 rifle and several spent shells. The guest who rented the room had given a fake name and address. Hotel employees described a man with an olive complexion, about 5-8 and 145 pounds, with dark brown hair and wearing a blue-gray suit and snappy gray hat. It was a pretty good description of George Barone who, photos show, cut a handsome figure at the time.

George Barone 1954Telling the story more than a half century later, Barone was still furious. "That cocksucker said he could take the eye out of a squirrel at a thousand feet. Cocksucker couldn't shoot a guy standing across the street."

I never got a chance to ask Barone about those kids with the firecrackers, which seemed more like inspired distraction than coincidence. By the time I found the old News clip he was long gone. But in our talks, he fumed repeatedly about Trigger Burke who, within days of the shooting, won the notoriety he craved.

After botching the hit job at the Garden, Burke sped up to Boston where another client apparently wanted him to knock off Joseph (Specs) O'Keefe, whose gang had pulled the legendary $1.2 million Brinks robbery. But Burke fared no better in Beantown. Despite spraying dozens of machine gun bullets outside a Dorchester housing project, he managed only to wound O'Keefe. Acting on a tip from New York City detectives, Boston cops picked up Burke the next day near the Back Bay boarding house where he was staying. In his room were five revolvers and a machine gun. The tabloids described him as a trigger-happy waterfront killer, "a gunman of ungovernable rage." Police immediately credited him with a half dozen unsolved killings, including the hits on John Regan and John McQueeney. Before he could be extradited to New York, however, men posing as guards helped bust Burke out of jail at gunpoint.

The chase became frantic. Fifty detectives from the NYPD were assigned to the hunt, along with the FBI. Barone said he and Earle helped with money and hideouts over the next year while Burke was on the lam. But Barone wasn't happy about it. "It cost us a fortune. We're driving him someplace down in Carolina and he's talking how tough he is. He's screaming, 'I'm the tough guy. You're nobody.' Tough guy? He couldn't even kill the guy across the street. Big tough guy. What did he ever do? But John liked him. He says, 'Well, he was in the Rangers you know.' What Rangers? I said, 'John, if he don't get himself someplace good I am going to shoot this cocksucker.'"

Burke was later discovered in the seaside cottage they'd rented for him in South Carolina. Brought back to New York, he stood trial for the one murder the D.A. could prove. It was the barroom slaying of a good friend who had tried to pull Burke away from a fight. Drunk and enraged, Burke shot his pal in the back of the head. At that distance, he apparently couldn't miss. Sentenced to death, Trigger Burke died in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1958. "The Hottest Seat for The Coldest Killer," ran a News headline.

'We Took What We Wanted'
Redmond CribbenMuffed assassinations aside, the crime crew prospered. Any money making schemes on the West Side were considered fair game. "We took what we wanted," said Barone. Only those under Mafia protection were off limits. Earle and Barone forged their own alliance with Vito Genovese, whose crime family was the final authority on Manhattan's lawless West Side. They had done Genovese a large favor, winning a contract on the piers for a loading company he controlled. "He put his arms around us," said Barone. "And he loved John."

Otherwise, the gang operated on feral instinct. On April 6, 1955 a rival crew, headed by a veteran thief named Redmond (Ninny) Cribben, robbed a Chase Manhattan branch in Woodside Queens of $312,0000. At the time, it was the largest haul ever from a local bank. Earle and Barone instantly set out to grab it. Learning that Cribben was hiding with the loot in a house on Long Island, they drove out to take a look.

"There is a big house with a garage in back with an apartment on top of it," said Barone. "I was pretty athletic. I crawl up to the second floor, open a window, climb in." No one was home, but the money was there in a suitcase. The two men waited until Cribben returned. When he showed, they shoved him into a chair and shot him. The body was dumped in a car trunk, the car ditched in a parking lot. Other gang members disposed of what was left of Ninny Cribben. His body was never found.

George BaroneAs with his other killings, Barone didn't have much to say about it. Maybe if he'd shot that pain in the ass, Trigger Burke, it might have been one story he enjoyed telling. Had he known Cribben before that? I asked. No, he said. "Just the name, that's all. And that he was in and out of jail." In a bid to draw him out, I showed him an old news clip from the 1930s about how, while at Sing Sing, Cribben had scored a touchdown after a magnificent 90-yard run for the prison's team. Had he known Cribben was once a star football player?

Before answering an annoying query, Barone, the aging waterfront pirate, had a habit of dropping his head an inch or two in your direction. It left you looking at a pair of menacing dark eyes beneath enormous shaggy gray brows. With his curved beak of a nose, the effect was that of a hawk looking at a possible lunch.

"Well, he ain't any more," he said

[TommyGambino]

Slow week Jerry

[Bklyn21]

Yea , This is old news about Barone

[bert]

Franzese dies 2 days ago and they do a column about old news stories.

[baldo]

Barone seemed like an interesting character. Too bad they never wrote that book.

[bert]

Barone seemed like an interesting character. Too bad they never wrote that book.

He told some suspect stories, like the one of the movie West Side Story being based on him and his friends.

[Joe m]

Thanks nice

[Bklyn21]

Franzese dies 2 days ago and they do a column about old news stories.

I agree , I think most people read this rehashed crap about Barone and the Jets and the Cribbins bank robbery etc. I did a double take to make sure I was reading the right article

[TwoPiece]

i assume they're gonna cover franzese next week. capeci is probably trying to get quotes and info from people. i'm ok with waiting a bit for a more polished report.

[mafiastudent]

i assume they're gonna cover franzese next week. capeci is probably trying to get quotes and info from people. i'm ok with waiting a bit for a more polished report.

Newsday just put out a huge article and documentary with Sonny talking after he got out. I don't think Capeci will beat that. You'll find the link in teh Button Guys link and I also purchased a temporary subscription so everyone can read it. It's very good.

[SonnyBlackstein]

Thanks for the post Brooklyn

[Frank]

I'm sure it will be next week. He probably has a certain deadline and didn't have time to research and write the article. Lol then again he could have wrote it and had it ready for the last 10 years lol

[JIGGS]

Yea , This is old news about Barone

You knew about them bring connected to the trigger burke?

JIGGS

[vmw100475]

It's a good article but a lot of it was reported maybe 10 years ago in Village Voice article

[JIGGS]

It's a good article but a lot of it was reported maybe 10 years ago in Village Voice article

I dont remember the trigger burke story and the shooting in front a the old madison squares garden. Only thing about this week in the gangland was that it was too short. Other than that it was a decent read.

Anyone know who was barones captain? Was it tony bender and then tommy ryan? Or somesbody else? Thanks pal.

JIGGS