Hell’s Kitchen Before the Mafia — The Gopher Gang’s Bloody Reign – HT
November 6th, 1912, just past midnight, the Arbor Dance Hall on 52nd Street, Manhattan. The music was loud. The room was packed. Howie Madden stood near the bar, a 20-year-old kid from Leeds, England, who had already killed at least two men and earned the nickname the killer on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.
He was laughing, drink in hand, surrounded by his gopher boys. He never saw them coming. The Hudson Dusters had sent a hit squad. They opened fire from across the room. The first bullet caught Madden in the hip, then the shoulder, then the chest, then the stomach. By some accounts, six bullets tore through his body. By others, 11.
Madden collapsed onto the floor of the dance hall. Blood everywhere, screaming, people stampeding toward the exits. Three of his fellow gophers were killed that night. And Ali Madden, the most dangerous man on the west side, was carried out on a stretcher, barely breathing. The doctors gave him no chance. He survived anyway.
This was not just another gang shooting in turn of the century New York. This was the beginning of the end for the most powerful Irish street gang the city had ever seen. 500 members deep, a territory that stretched from 7th Avenue to 11th Avenue, from 14th Street to 42nd Street.
They controlled the railroads, the docks, the gambling dens, the brothel, and even the politicians. They had their own female army. They stole police uniforms off the backs of beaten cops and wore them through the streets like trophies. They were the gopher gang. And for nearly three decades, they owned Hell’s Kitchen. This is the story of how a collection of starving Irish immigrant kids built a criminal empire from the basement and sellers of Manhattan’s most dangerous neighborhood.
How they rose from nothing to dominate an entire city. And how ambition, betrayal, and violence tore them apart from the inside out. But here is what most people never learn about the Gophers. They did not just fight other gangs. They fought the police. They fought the railroads. They fought Tamony Hall when it suited them and worked for Tamony Hall when the money was right.
And the most famous gangster to ever come out of their ranks was not even Irish. He was an English kid from Leeds who could barely read. And he outlived them all. To understand the gophers, you have to understand where they came from. And where they came from was Hell. Hell’s Kitchen in the 1890s was not a neighborhood. It was a war zone.
The name first appeared in print on September 22nd, 1881 when a New York Times reporter covering a gruesome multiple murder described a tenement at 39th Street and 10th Avenue as being in a place he called Hell’s Kitchen and said it was probably the lowest and filthiest area in the city. There is another story, maybe better.
A veteran cop named Dutch Fred was watching a riot between two gangs on West 39th Street near 10th Avenue with a young partner. The rookie, horrified by the carnage, said, “This place is hell itself.” Dutch Fred, calm as a man ordering coffee, replied, “Hell’s a mild climate. This is Hell’s Kitchen.” He was not exaggerating.
The area ran from roughly 34th Street to 57th Street, west of 8th Avenue, down to the Hudson River. It was packed with tenement buildings. Six, seven, eight families crammed into apartments designed for one. No running water in most units, shared outouses in the alleys. The smell of sewage, rotting garbage, and cold smoke hanging over everything like a permanent fog.
The streets were unpaved mud in winter and baked dust in summer. Children ran barefoot through it all. The first settlers were Irish immigrants and free African-Americans who found work on the Hudson River docks. Then came the German immigrants, most of whom moved on to the Midwest.
Then came the famine ships from Ireland. Wave after wave of desperate families fleeing starvation, packing into tenementss that were already bursting. By the 1880s, Hell’s Kitchen was an Irish enclave. And when you packed that many desperate people into that small a space with no jobs, no money, and no way out, gangs were inevitable.
You have to understand something about these gangs. They did not form because the men were evil. They formed because the men were hungry. Crime was not a career choice in Hell’s Kitchen. It was a survival strategy. The Gopher gang emerged around 1890 from the merger of several smaller Irish street gangs that had been fighting over scraps in the neighborhood for years.
Three men organized the merger. Marty Brennan, a tough direct operator who handled logistics and muscle. Stumpy Malarkey, whose real name has been lost to time, but whose street name was earned honestly. and Newberg Gallagher, arguably the smartest of the three, who saw that a unified gang could control territory that 20 small crews never could.
They set up their headquarters in a saloon on 10th Avenue called Battle Row, owned by a minor criminal named Mallet Murphy. The name tells you everything you need to know about the clientele. Inside Battle Row, the leadership would meet regularly to plan robberies, divide profits from their gambling operations and brothel, and settle internal disputes before they turned bloody.
It was organized crime before anyone called it organized crime. The gang got their name from their favorite escape tactic. When the police came looking, the gophers would disappear into the maze of basement, cellers, and tunnels beneath the tenement buildings. They knew every crawl space, every connecting basement, every drainage tunnel in the neighborhood.
You could chase a gopher into a cellar on 39th Street and he would pop up three blocks away on 42nd. The cops called them gophers as an insult. The gang adopted it as a badge of honor. Their primary target was the New York Central Railroad yards, which ran along 11th Avenue through the heart of their territory. Here is how the scheme worked.
The railroad moved freight through Manhattan’s west side on tracks that ran right through the streets. Goods sat in rail cars and on loading docks, sometimes overnight, sometimes for days. The gophers established a systematic theft operation. They would hit the yards between 2 and 5 in the morning when security was at its thinnest.
A crew of 8 to 10 men would move in, break open rail car seals, and haul out whatever they could carry. Crates of manufactured goods, barrels of food, bolts of fabric, whatever was on the manifest, the gophers took it. But theft was only one revenue stream. They also extorted the workers.
Long shoreman and dock workers paid weekly tribute to the gophers just to keep working without getting their legs broken. Saloon owners paid protection fees. Gambling den operators paid a percentage of their take. Brothel owners paid for the privilege of operating in Gopher territory. The money flowed upward to the leadership at Battle Row where it was divided among the top members.
At their peak, the gophers had roughly 500 members. That is not a gang. That is an army. And they had subordinate groups feeding into them. The baby gophers were teenagers, apprentice criminals, learning the trade, running errands, acting as lookouts, and graduating into the main crew when they were old enough and mean enough.
The Parlor Mob, the Gorillas, and the Roads Gang all operated as client gangs, paying tribute to the Gophers in exchange for protection and the right to operate within their territory. But the most remarkable division of the Gopher gang was its women. The Battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club, as they were officially known, was one of the first female auxiliary gangs in New York City history.
They were led by Annie Walsh, known to everyone in Hell’s Kitchen as Battle Annie. She was called the queen of Hell’s Kitchen, and she earned that title the hard way. Battle Annie was described by contemporaries as the most feared brick hurler of her time. When the Gophers needed reinforcements for a territorial dispute, Batalani could assemble a fighting force of 50 to 100 women within hours.
All of them armed with clubs, bricks, and knives. The Lady Gophers did not just fight rival gangs. They hired themselves out to both sides of labor disputes. Business owners would pay Battle Annie to provide female muscle to break strikes. Then the unions would pay her to provide muscle to fight the strike breakers.
Annie did not care who she fought for. She cared about who paid. There were few strikes in New York in the early 1900s where Battle Annie did not provide her services. And she encouraged her women to use, as one newspaper put it, more strenuous activity with teeth and nails. You want to know how deep the Gopher’s power ran? They were political muscle for Tamony Hall.
the Democratic political machine that controlled New York City. On election days, Gopher members would fan out through the neighborhood, intimidating voters, stuffing ballot boxes, and beating anyone who threatened to vote the wrong way. In exchange, Tam Hall politicians provided political protection. Arrests disappeared. Charges were dropped.
Judges looked the other way. It was a perfect system. The Gophers provided the muscle. Tamony Hall provided the immunity and the people of Hell’s Kitchen paid the price for both. Now, you have to understand something about the Gopher’s leadership. It was volatile. Leaders did not last long. Some were killed, some were arrested, some just burned out.
The turnover was constant, but a few names stood out from the crowd, and each one tells you something different about what this gang really was. Take Happy Jack Mulra. He was called Happy Jack because he always appeared to be smiling. The writer Herbert Asbury, who chronicled New York’s gang history, claimed the smile was caused by partial paralysis of his facial muscles.
The truth is more complicated. Prison intake records at Singh described his features as regular with no mention of any deformity. What is documented is that Moleni smiled often and inappropriately. He grinned during his murder trial. He laughed when he was sentenced to death. Some accounts say he had the remnants of a smile on his face after he was electrocuted.
On October 4th, 1911, Mulrai and a companion were looking for a clothing store to rob. They could not find one without iron security bars on the door. Frustrated, they walked down the block and entered a saloon run by a man named Patrick McBrreen. Everyone called him Patty the priest because despite being a saloon keeper, he was known for acts of kindness and charity.
McBrreen was counting receipts at the till when Mulrai and his partner pulled their guns. McBrreen thought it was a joke. He reached behind his back to untie his apron. Mulaney thought he was reaching for a weapon and shot him three times. Patty the priest died on the floor of his own bar.
Moleni was tracked down through police rogues gallery photographs. One witness picked him out because, as the witness said, he looked so mean. Moleni was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He sat on death row filing appeal after appeal, presenting four or five different versions of what happened that night. Several of his defense witnesses, including his own mother, later admitted to perjury.
In May of 1913, Happy Jack Molraine was executed in the electric chair at Sing Singh. He was smiling. Then there was Newberg Gallagher, one of the original founders. In 1907, he got into a feud with a local bartender named William Lennon over a card game. The feud lasted 3 years. Lennon slashed Gallagher’s face with a knife in one encounter, leaving scars that required stitches.
Gallagher later claimed Lenin had threatened to shoot him on site and the two engaged in several gunfights. In December of 1909, Lenin wounded Gallagher in a shootout. On May 17th, 1910, Gallagher and Marty Brennan walked into a saloon at 11th Avenue and 45th Street where Lenon was working. According to Gallagher’s confession, Lenin spotted them, cursed at them, and reached for his hip pocket.
Gallagher pulled his pistol and fired three shots. Lennon died on the spot. Both Gallagher and Brennan were convicted. On November 9th, 1910, Gallagher received 9 to 19 years. Brennan, because of a prior stint at Elmyra received 19 years. Two of the three founding members of the Gopher gang sent to sing Singh in a single afternoon.
And then there was one lung Currin. His real name was Petty Curran and he got his nickname the honest way. Tuberculosis had destroyed one of his lungs, leaving him physically weakened but absolutely fearless. Curran took over leadership of the gophers in the early 1910s and he ran the gang with an iron fist and a sense of style that was entirely his own.
Here is the thing that made one Lung Curran famous. He hated cops. Not in the abstract, complaining about them over drinks kind of way. He personally attacked them. Curran would ambush lone patrolman walking through hell’s kitchen, beat them unconscious, and steal their uniforms. He would then take the stolen clothes back to his girlfriend, who would alter them into what was described as a smart military style.
Curran would then wear the altered police uniform around the neighborhood, parading past the very station house where the stolen uniform had come from. It was not just theft. It was humiliation. It was a message. The Gophers owned this neighborhood and there is nothing you can do about it. The stunt became a trend. Over the following weeks, several more police officers found themselves beaten and stripped of their jackets.
Gopher members strutted through Hell’s Kitchen in their new coats like they were wearing medals. The police department, embarrassed and outraged, responded by ending solo patrols in Gopher territory entirely. From that point forward, officers entered Hell’s Kitchen in groups of four or five. One lung Curran had literally changed police tactics through sheer audacity.
But the most important gopher of them all was not born in Hell’s Kitchen. He was not even born in Ireland. Owen Vincent Madden came into the world on December 18th, 1891 in Leeds, England. His parents were Irish immigrants. His father, Francis, had planned to bring the family to America, but died before he could book passage.
His mother, Mary, made the crossing alone with her three children. They arrived in New York in 1902. Oie was 11 years old. The Madden settled in Hell’s Kitchen and the neighborhood swallowed down a hole. Within a year, he had joined the Gopher gang. By his early teens, he was known for carrying a length of lead pipe as his weapon of choice.
He was slim, dapper, described by one contemporary as having the gentle smile of a cherub and the cunning and cruelty of a devil. He spoke with a northern English accent his entire life. One of his Hell’s Kitchen contemporaries later remarked, “He was a smart man, a class act, and he was not even Irish. He was born in England.
” Shows you what a tough bastard he was just to survive in this neighborhood. By the time he was 20, Madden had earned the nickname the killer. And he earned it with blood. On September 6th, 1911, Madden shot and killed a member of the rival Hudson Dusters right in the heart of Dusters territory around 30th Street.
Nobody was arrested. In February of 1912, Madden was riding a crowded street car when he got into an argument with a store clerk named William Henshaw over a woman. Madden pulled a gun and shot Henshaw in the face. Henshaw lived just long enough to name Madden as his killer. Despite the police having his name and dozens of eyewitnesses on the street car, Madden never went to trial.
Every single witness either disappeared or developed sudden amnesia. Two murders, no consequences. That is when the rest of Hell’s Kitchen understood exactly what Madden was. By 1912, Madden had risen to lead the largest faction of the Gophers. But the gang was already starting to crack. The original founders were gone.
Gallagher and Brennan were in Singh. Stumpy malarkey had faded from the scene. The gophers were fragmenting into sub gangs, each faction pulling in a different direction. And then came the war with the Hudson Dusters. Here is where it gets complicated. The Hudson Dusters had been founded by Goooo Knox, a former gopher who had tried and failed to take leadership of the gang from Marty Brennan back in the 1890s.
Knox fled and linked up with two other criminals, Circular Jack and Kid York, to form a rival gang based around Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. For years, the Gophers and the Dusters maintained an uneasy alliance, cooperating against other gangs during the Gay90s gang wars. But by the 1910s, that alliance had collapsed.
The rivalry between Madden and a duster named William Little Paty Doyle became personal. Doyle hated Madden for two reasons. First, control of territory. Second, a woman named Freda her. Madden had stolen her from Doyle, and Doyle could not let it go. The insult burned deeper than any bullet wound. But Doyle made a fatal mistake. He became an informant.
He started feeding information about Madden’s operations to the police. In the world of Hell’s Kitchen, in the world of any gang, that was a death sentence. Madden did not forgive and he did not forget. On November 28th, 1914, Madden put his plan into action. He used women to bait the trap. His ex-girlfriend Margaret Everdine met with Doyle’s aranged fiance, Freda her at the Utner Brothers Bar at 41st Street and 8th Avenue.
Everdine called Doyle on the telephone and told him that Freda wanted to reconcile with him. Doyle, blinded by love, believed every word. He arrived at the bar around 8:30 in the evening. He walked in and asked for Freda. Someone told him she was in the bathroom. He waited. That is when Madden’s henchmen, Johnny Mardle, and Art Beadler, stepped out of the shadows. They opened fire.
Doyle staggered out of the bar, mortally wounded, and died on the steps outside. This time, Madden’s luck ran out. The police arrested both Everdine and her as material witnesses. Under intense interrogation, both women cracked and implicated Madden in the murder. The Gophers put enormous pressure on the women to recant their testimony, and they eventually did, but the judge was not having it.
He ruled that their original statements were valid. Madden was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in singing Singh prison. Mardle received 30 years. Beadler received 18. The gopher gang’s most dangerous leader was gone and the hits kept coming. In 1913, HappyJack Molra had already been executed.
In 1910, Gallagher and Brennan had been sent away. One lung Curran was still running what was left of the operation, but his body was failing him. The tuberculosis that had earned him his nickname was killing him slowly, and the external pressure was mounting. In the early 1910s, the New York Central Railroad had finally had enough of being robbed blind.
The company organized a special police force specifically to destroy the Gophers. Many of these railroad officers were former NYPD patrolmen who had, as one account put it, suffered grievously at the hands of Gopher members. Some of them may have even lost their coats to one lung current. They were motivated by revenge, well funded by the railroad, and they were effective.
The systematic raids on gopher operations along the rail yards cut into the gang’s primary revenue stream. At the same time, Tamony Hall pulled its support. The corrupt politicians who had shielded the Gophers for years decided the gang was yesterday’s news. The political landscape was shifting. Reform movements were gaining strength.
Tammy Hall needed to distance itself from the most visible criminal elements in the city. The Gophers, who had provided election muscle and street level intimidation for decades, were suddenly expendable. Without political protection, the Gophers were exposed. Arrests that would have been quietly dismissed now led to trials.
Charges that would have been dropped now led to convictions. The police, no longer told to look the other way, moved in aggressively. The gophers were being squeezed from every direction. The railroad police from one side, the NYPD from another. Tamony Hall withdrawing cover from above, and rival gangs sensing weakness, pressing in from every border.
In 1917, one lung Curran died. Tuberculosis finally took him at the age of 26. He had spent the last years of his life struggling to breathe, running a gang from a body that was slowly consuming itself. With his death, the last thread holding the gophers together snapped. There was no leader left with enough authority or enough fear behind his name to keep 500 men in line. The gang fragmented.
Members drifted away. Some joined other gangs. Some went to prison. Some simply disappeared into the crowded streets of a city that had already moved past them. By 1920, the Gopher gang was gone. 27 years of robbery, extortion, murder, and political corruption. Ended not by one dramatic event, but by the slow accumulation of arrests, deaths, and defections.
The gang that had terrorized Manhattan’s west side, that had stolen police uniforms and worn them as trophies, that had assembled armies of women armed with bricks and knives, simply ceased to exist. But the story does not end there because the most famous gopher of all was sitting in a cell at Sing Singh Prison, watching the world change around him.
Anonyi Madden was released on parole in 1923 after serving 7 years of his 20-year sentence. He stepped out of prison and into a completely different America. Prohibition had been the law of the land since January of 1920. The 18th amendment had banned the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcohol.
And since America was still very thirsty, organized criminals suddenly had a massive market with very little competition from the law. The rough and tumble street gang days were over. This was a new era. Bootlegging, speak easys, sophisticated criminal networks. Madden adapted instantly. He went to work first as hired muscle for a bootleger named Larry Fay.
Learning how whiskey was smuggled in from Canada in the boots of taxi cabs. Then he set up his own operation. He muscled out a rival bootleger named Big Bill Dwire, forcing him to hand over his entire business. Within months, Madden was running one of the biggest bootlegging operations in New York. But his most famous venture was the Cotton Club.
In 1920, former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson had opened a supper club on the corner of 142 Lennox Avenue in Harlem. Johnson could not keep it going during Prohibition and sold it to Madden. The rebranded Cotton Club became one of the most famous nightclubs in American history.
Duke Ellington played there. Cab Callaway, Louisie Armstrong, Lena Horn, Billy Holiday, Bessie Smith. The greatest black performers of the era, playing to white audiences in a segregated club run by a gangster from Leeds, England. That was the Cotton Club. Madden became a celebrity. He owned more than 20 nightclubs. He dated May West and funded her first play when nobody else would put up the money.
She later described him as sweet but oh so vicious. He hired a young friend named George Raft as his personal driver. Raft would leverage his friendship with Madden to launch a career as a Hollywood actor famous for playing gangsters who looked and moved exactly like the real gangsters he had spent years driving around Manhattan.
By the early 1930s, Madden was enormously wealthy. He promoted boxing matches and is believed to have fixed the 1934 heavyweight title fight between Max Bear and Primo Carner in which Bayer knocked Carera down 11 times in 11 rounds. The fix maximized gambling profits for Madden and his associates. But the world was closing in on him again.
Italian-American mafia families were expanding their territory and musling out the old Irish and Jewish operators. Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello were reshaping the underworld. Madden, a pragmatic man above all things, read the situation clearly. He was getting older. His body still achd from those bullets at the Arbor Dance Hall decades later.
In 1935, possibly with the quiet blessing of Luchiano and Costello, Madden closed up shop and retired to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Hot Springs was a known haven for criminals with a corrupt city government and a relaxed attitude toward gambling and vice. Madden arrived under the guise of seeking treatment in the town’s famous healing waters.
He opened a bar called the Southern Club. He married Agnes Dembi, the daughter of the local postmaster. He became a pillar of the community. He supported local charities. He replaced his gangster’s fedora with a country gentleman’s slouchy cap. The man who had been shot 11 times, who had killed without remorse, who had run a criminal empire from the basements of Hell’s Kitchen to the pen houses of Harlem, became a quiet, modest businessman in a small Arkansas town.
For 30 years, AI Madden lived this double life. The locals may or may not have known his full history. Hot Springs was not exactly a town of innocence. Its mayor, Leo P. Mclofflin was later found to be controlling much of the local vice trade. Lucky Luciano was arrested there in 1936. Frank Costello, Meer Lansky, and Joe Adonis all visited Madden over the years.
Whether completely legitimate or not, he was a remarkable figure for having achieved something almost no gangster of his era managed. He got out alive. On April 24th, 1965, Owen Vincent Madden died of emphyma at a hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was 73 years old. Many people in the town came to pay their respects.
Some knew exactly who he had been. Some were reportedly shocked when his full history came to light in the weeks that followed. So, what does the story of the Gopher gang tell us? It tells us that organized crime did not start with the Italian mafia. Before Lucky Luciano, before Al Capone, before the five families carved up New York, there were the Irish gangs.
And the Gophers were among the biggest and the most brutal. They controlled a territory bigger than some small cities. They had political connections, a female fighting force, and a systematic approach to crime that foreshadowed everything that came after them. It tells us that poverty creates the conditions for crime, but that crime does not solve poverty.
500 men and women poured their lives into the Gopher gang, and what did they get for it? Prison sentences, early graves, tuberculosis, the electric chair. The founders all ended up behind bars. The leaders died young or disappeared into history without a trace. Only one man got out and he spent the rest of his life pretending he was someone else.
And it tells us something about New York itself. Hell’s Kitchen in the 1890s was one of the most desperate places in America. A generation later, it was still desperate. But the gangs that had thrived on that desperation were gone, replaced by new gangs, new wreckets, new forms of the same old violence.
The Gophers thought they were building something permanent. They were building something temporary, and they just did not know it yet. The Gophers did not end with a dramatic last stand. They ended the way most criminal empires end. Slowly, one arrest at a time, one death at a time, one man turning on another until there was nobody left to run the show and nobody left to care.
500 members at their peak, a territory covering nearly 40 city blocks. Millions of dollars stolen, extorted, and gambled away. And in the end, the only gopher anyone remembers is the English kid from Leeds who got shot 11 times and still would not die. Who ran the Cotton Club and dated May West and fixed heavyweight title fights and who spent his last 30 years in a small town in Arkansas pretending none of it ever happened.
That is the real story of the Gopher gang. Not the glory, not the power, the slow, inevitable collapse. And one old man in a hospital bed, 700 miles from Hell’s Kitchen, finally running out of time. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below and tell us what mafia figure or gang you want us to cover