The Irish Gang Ran the Brooklyn Docks Until Capone Walked In – HT
December 26th, 1925. 3:15 in the morning. The Adonis Social Club on 154 20th Street in South Brooklyn. The Christmas party was still going. Cheap whiskey, cigarette smoke, a player piano grinding out tinny music off a scratched roll. Richard Lonergan, 25 years old, one wooden leg, a pistol in his belt, was leaning against the bar screaming slurs at every Italian in the room.
Then the lights went out. For 20 seconds, nothing but muzzle flashes and breaking glass. When the lights came back on, Lonergan was slumped near the player piano, shot execution style through the back of the skull. His best friend Aaron Harms lay dead in the street outside. Cornelius Ferry, a dope addict they called Needles, was face down on the dance floor.
Three White Hand gang leaders, dead in under a minute. And sitting at a corner table, sipping a drink, watching the whole thing unfold, was a thick-necked visitor from Chicago named Al Capone. This wasn’t just a bar fight. This was the end of an empire. For 25 years, the White Hand gang had ruled the Brooklyn waterfront with a brutality that made the Italian mobsters look polite.
They ran every dock from Red Hook to the Navy Yard. Every ship that tied up paid tribute. Every longshoreman kicked back a piece of his wages or he didn’t work. They called themselves White Hand to mock the Sicilian Black Hand. They were Irish. They were proud. And by 4:00 in the morning that Christmas night, they were finished.
This is the story of how a gang of Irish dock thugs built the most profitable extortion racket in American port history. How they turned the Brooklyn waterfront into their private bank. And how a fat kid from Navy Street named Alphonse Capone, a kid they once humiliated and ran out of town, came back years later and erased them from the map.
But here’s what the old history books leave out. The White Hand didn’t just lose to Capone. They lost to themselves first. They killed their own founder in his own bed. They shot their own brother-in-laws in backroom speakeasies. By the time the Italians finally came for them, the Irish had already done half the work. This is the rise and bloody extinction of the last great Irish gang on the New York docks.
To understand how it all started, you have to understand the Brooklyn waterfront in 1900. It was the busiest stretch of salt water on the planet. 50,000 dockworkers, thousands of ships a year. Cotton, sugar, [clears throat] coffee, tobacco, steel, whiskey, grain, Empire Stores, the Bush Terminal, the Atlantic Basin, the Red Hook Piers.
If you wanted your ship unloaded on time, you paid the Irish. If you didn’t pay the Irish, your ship caught fire. The neighborhood they ran it from was called Irish Town. A few square blocks wedged between the Manhattan Bridge and the Navy Yard. Tenements packed on top of saloons, packed on top of opium dens.
This is where the man who started it all came up. His name was Dennis Meehan. Everybody called him Dinny. Meehan was born in Brooklyn in the 1880s. Thick build, black hair, a brawler’s face. He grew up fighting for nickels on the cobblestones of Sands Street. By 1905, he was leading a pack of teenage street thugs, the first version of what would become the White Hand.
In 1906, he was arrested for setting off firecrackers next to a drunk passed out on an elevated train platform. It was a stupid, cruel, throwaway crime, but it tells you who he was. Dinny Meehan had no sentiment in him. He thought violence was funny. In 1912, he stood trial for murdering a rival gang leader named Christy Maroney. He walked.
From that moment on, nobody questioned who ran Irish Town. Meehan set up shop at 25 Bridge Street, a saloon, a gambling room in the back, and the dirtiest ledger in Brooklyn. Here’s how the operation worked, and this is where the genius of it becomes clear. Every terminal along the Brooklyn waterfront had a dock boss, a foreman who decided which longshoreman got hired that morning.
In the 1900s and 1910s, dock work was done by the shape-up. Hundreds of laborers showing up at dawn, standing in a half circle, praying the boss picked them. If you got picked, you fed your family that night. If you didn’t, you didn’t. Meehan understood the shape-up was a goldmine. Every one of those dock bosses, he put on tribute.
You paid Dinny Meehan at 25 Bridge Street or you don’t work on the Brooklyn docks. Simple. Every longshoreman who wanted his name called first, he kicked back a slice of his wages. Every ship captain who wanted [clears throat] his cargo off his boat on schedule, he paid what they called the dock fee. And if anybody refused, Meehan had a specialist for that, a guy they called Cinders Connolly.
Cinders would board the ship, untie it from the pier bollards, and set it on fire. And the whole of Irish Town would come out to watch the thing burn down the East River. One ship burned made the next 10 captains pay on time. You have to understand something about Dinny Meehan. He wasn’t [clears throat] running a gang.
He was running a private tax collection service on the busiest port in the Western Hemisphere. Scholars estimate the gang pulled in tribute money, stolen goods, and extortion fees worth 1 to 2 million dollars a year in 1920 dollars. Adjusted for today, that’s somewhere north of 30 million a year, every year. Clean cash, no taxes.
And this is what they called the White Hand gang. The name itself was a political statement. Starting around 1907, Sicilian gangsters in New York had begun sending extortion letters to fellow Italian immigrants signed with a drawing of a black hand, the Black Hand. It was a crude, terrifying shakedown. Pay or die. The Irish looked at it and saw an opportunity.
Meehan’s men started calling themselves White Hand, white meaning Irish. White meaning not them. >> [snorts] >> It was tribal branding before tribal branding had a name. And it worked. Every Irish longshoreman in Brooklyn knew whose side he was supposed to be on. Now here’s where a young kid enters the story. In the early 1910s, a teenage street punk from Navy Street, a block from Meehan’s territory, got into a knife fight with a White Hand member outside a waterfront saloon.
The kid got his face slashed. Three deep cuts across his left cheek. He’d carry those scars the rest of his life. The newspapers would eventually call him Scarface. His name was Alphonse Capone. Capone was born in 1900 in a tenement at 95 Navy Street inside White Hand territory. He grew up terrified of the Irish and resentful of them.
Around 1921, depending on which source you trust, Capone got into another altercation with a White Hander. This time he either killed the man or wounded him badly. Frankie Yale, his Italian boss in Brooklyn, put him on a train to Chicago the next day. Capone was 21 years old when he fled Brooklyn.
He didn’t forget who ran him out. But while Capone was heading west, the White Hand was beginning to rot from the inside. Remember that name, Wild Bill Lovett. Because he’s the man who killed Dinny Meehan, and he’s the reason everything started coming apart. William J. Lovett was born in 1994. Thin, dark-eyed, quiet when sober, a lunatic when drinking.
He loved dogs and cats more than people. He once shot one of his own men for pulling a cat’s tail. Think about that. A man who ran a waterfront extortion racket, who ordered killings for a living, could not tolerate cruelty to an animal. That was Wild Bill, a man full of contradictions. The day after America entered the First World War in 1917, Lovett walked into a recruiting office and enlisted in the United States Army.
He was assigned to Company C, 13th Machine Gun Battalion, 77th Infantry Division. He fought in the trenches of the Western Front. And here’s the part that separates him from every other waterfront thug of his era. He was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery under fire. This is the second highest combat medal the United States Army gives.
Wild Bill Lovett came home from the trenches of France, a legitimate war hero, and then he went back to being a gangster. Lovett ran a crew called the Jay Street gang, based around Jay Street and Plymouth. While he was overseas, Meehan had continued running Irish Town. When Lovett came home in 1919, he wasn’t interested in kicking tribute up to a man he considered beneath him.
The two crews started bumping. Bodies started dropping. Samuel D’Angelo, September 1919. Dan Gillen, September 1920. Lovett was the prime suspect. Nothing stuck. He beat every case. And then, on the afternoon of March 31st, 1920, two men walked into Dinny Meehan’s apartment on Warren Street in broad daylight.
Meehan was asleep in bed with his wife Sadie. The shooters stopped in the hallway to chat with his young son on the way in. They were [clears throat] friendly, familiar. The kid wasn’t scared. They walked into the bedroom and put bullets into Dinny Meehan while he slept. Sadie took a round in the shoulder. She survived. Dinny didn’t.
Here’s the detail the history books miss. Italian gunmen would never have been let in the front door. A strange Italian face in Irish town would have been noticed, reported, and dealt with before it got within two blocks of Meehan’s apartment. Whoever killed Dinny Meehan, he let them in because he knew them.
Police at the time believed, almost unanimously, that the shooters were Irish, most likely Wild Bill Lovett’s men, possibly Wild Bill himself. This is the pattern you need to understand about the White Hand gang. They didn’t die because of the Italians. They died because every leader they ever had was murdered by another Irishman who wanted the job.
Lovett took over the gang. He kept the headquarters at 25 Bridge Street. He kept the tribute system. He kept the extortion. But he made one decision that sealed his fate. He refused to get into bootlegging. Prohibition had started on January 17th, 1920, 73 days before Meehan was killed. Alcohol was suddenly illegal, and there was an ocean of money to be made smuggling it, brewing it, selling it.
Every other gang in New York pivoted. Frankie Yale pivoted. Arnold Rothstein pivoted. The young Italian crews pivoted. Wild Bill Lovett stayed on the docks. He was a dock extortionist. And a dock extortionist he would die. On January 3rd, 1923, Lovett was walking near Jay Street when a gunman opened fire. Three bullets into the chest.
Close range. He should have died. He didn’t. When cops got to his hospital bed, they asked him, “Who did it?” Lovett said, “Quote, I got mine. Don’t ask any questions. End quote.” Then he added, “Quote, don’t try to pump me. It’s give and take. When we get it, we take it and say nothing. End quote.” That was the code of the White Hand.
That was also the code that would eventually destroy them. Because in refusing to talk to police, they forced every dispute to be settled with a bullet. And they had more disputes than bullets to settle them. Weeks later, the man suspected of shooting Lovett, Eddie Hughes, was found shot to death. Nobody charged.
On May 3rd, 1923, the Quilty brothers, Timmy and James, walked into a saloon on Sands Street that Lovett frequented. Timmy Quilty was killed. James was critically wounded. 18 days later, a Lovett gunman named Frank Healy was murdered in retaliation at the corner of Jay and Plymouth. Five days after that, Healy’s suspected killer was shot while walking with a friend.
The friend died. You following this? Because in a 6-week window, six men connected to the gang were shot. And this was just their own side killing each other. By the summer of 1923, Lovett was exhausted. He was 29 years old, a three-time shooting survivor, a war hero, a drunk, and he was falling in love. Her name was Anna Lonergan.
24 [clears throat] years old. Dark, Irish features. Known in Brooklyn as the queen of the Irish Town docks because she was one of 15 children in the most violent Irish family on the waterfront. Her brother was a one-legged killer named Richard, a man everybody called Peg Leg Lonergan. Bill and Anna married on June 26th, 1923.
Lovett promised her two things. He was going to quit drinking. And he was going to quit the rackets. He turned over leadership of the White Hand gang to his new brother-in-law, Peg Leg Lonergan. He bought a little cottage in Little Ferry, New Jersey. He tended a garden. He was trying to become a normal man.
He lasted three months. On October 30th, 1923, Lovett told his wife he had a job interview in New York City, a foreman’s position at a silk factory. He asked Anna to come with him. Because you have to understand, he knew himself. He knew if he went into the city alone, he’d end up drunk. Anna refused. She was angry.
She wanted him to be a man, not a baby who needed a chaperone. So Wild Bill went into the city alone. He never made it to the interview. By noon, he was drinking at Thomas Sands saloon on Bridge Street. The next morning, Anna tracked him down by phone and begged him to come home. He asked her to come pick him up.
She refused again. Those were the last words they ever exchanged. That was Halloween. Lovett kept drinking into the night with an old friend named Joseph Flynn. Sometime after midnight, the two of them staggered into the back room of an abandoned store at 25 Bridge Street, the old White Hand headquarters. They passed out on the floor.
Flynn claimed he woke up between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning and walked home. He left Lovett sleeping. Between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. on November 1st, 1923, two men entered that back room. They bludgeoned Wild Bill Lovett about the head with a blunt instrument. Then they shot him three times. Two bullets in the head, one in the neck.
They left his body on the floor. He was found the next morning. A legend grew up around the killing, a legend that a Sicilian hitman named Willie Two Knife Altieri finished Lovett off with a meat cleaver that Frankie Yale sent him. The legend is probably false. The police investigation, then and since, concluded that the killers were almost certainly fellow Irish gangsters.
An Italian wouldn’t have known Lovett was passed out in that specific back room that specific night. Somebody close to him set it up. Wild Bill Lovett was buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery with full military honors. He was 29 years old. He had run the White Hand gang for three years. And now the gang belonged to a 23-year-old one-legged Irish racist named Richard Lonergan.
Let me tell you about Peg Leg Lonergan because this is the man who was going to walk the White Hand off a cliff. Richard Joseph Lonergan was born on January 16th, 1900. Same year as Al Capone, just a few blocks apart in Brooklyn. His father, John, was a bare-knuckle prize fighter. Richard was one of 15 children in a tenement full of violence.
When he was a little boy, he fell under a moving trolley car on Sands Street. It cost him his right leg. From that day on, he wore a wooden prosthetic. And he grew up angry about it. Really angry. People made fun of him. He made them stop with his fists, with knives, and eventually with guns.
By the time he was a teenager, Peg Leg Lonergan had already killed his first man. A Sicilian dope dealer in a bike shop on Navy Street. He caved the man’s skull in with an iron bar. The police knew. Nobody testified. Lonergan took over the White Hand at 23 years old. Authorities believed he was personally involved in at least a dozen murders.
He was known for leading what he called “Guinea hunting expeditions” into Italian saloons. He would walk in with five or six of his boys, order drinks, and start shouting slurs at the Italian patrons, daring them to say something back. When they did, the shooting started. This was the leader of the White Hand gang in 1923.
A one-legged 23-year-old with a pathological hatred of Italians, a pistol in his belt, and a gang full of men who had watched every one of their previous bosses get murdered. And right at this moment, the Italian side of Brooklyn was consolidating power. Frankie Yale, born Francesco Ioele in 1893, was running Brooklyn’s Italian rackets out of his Harvard Inn on Coney Island.
Yale had mentored a young bouncer named Al Capone before shipping him west. In May of 1920, Yale had personally traveled to Chicago and murdered the reigning boss, Big Jim Colosimo, at the request of Johnny Torrio, opening the throne for Torrio and eventually for Capone. Yale supplied Capone with Canadian whiskey throughout the early ’20s.
They were partners. They were friends. Here’s the thing traditional history has gotten wrong for a hundred years. The idea that Frankie Yale was fighting a full-scale war with the White Hand gang is largely a myth. Recent research shows Yale’s worst enemies in the early 1920s were not the Irish.
They were rival Italian families in Brooklyn. What Yale wanted was the docks, sure, but he was patient. He was waiting for the Irish to keep killing each other. And they obliged. Under Lonergan’s leadership, the White Hand doubled down on the old way of doing business. Dockside extortion, pier shakedowns, cargo theft. They ignored bootlegging.
They ignored the numbers racket. They ignored the narcotics trade. They were a 19th century gang trying to survive in a 20th century economy. And they kept Guinea hunting. Joe Adonis and Albert Anastasia, two young Italian gunmen working under the Mangano family, began moving in on the Brooklyn piers.
Lonergan started attacking them directly. The Italians didn’t retaliate immediately. They waited. Now let’s talk about Christmas Eve, [snorts] 1925. Lonergan had spent the holiday drinking. He and five of his top men, Aaron Harms, his best friend, James Ragtime Howard, Patrick Happy Maloney, Cornelius Deedles Ferry, a heroin addict, and James Hart.
Six White Handers drunk, armed, and looking for trouble. Sometime after midnight, now early morning of December 26th, they decided to hit the Adonis Social Club. The Adonis Social Club was owned by the Italians. Specifically, it was run by Joe Adonis himself, 154 20th Street in South Brooklyn. A speakeasy, a social club, Italian territory.
The White Handers walked in like they owned the place. They ordered drinks. They started shouting slurs at the Italian patrons, wops, dagos, guineas, full volume. Lonergan was the loudest. And then three young Irish women walked into the club on the arms of three Italian men. Three Irish girls dating Italians. Lonergan lost his mind.
He stood up, stomped across the floor on his wooden leg, and screamed at them, “Quote, [clears throat] come back with white men for Chrissake.” End quote. Those were Pegleg Lonergan’s last recorded words. The three girls fled. Their Italian dates went to find someone. A few minutes later the lights went out.
What happened in the dark we can partially reconstruct. Gunfire erupted from multiple positions inside the club. The White Handers were caught completely by surprise. No return fire was organized. Aaron Harms, Lonergan’s best friend since childhood, ran for the exit. He was shot in the street outside and bled out on the sidewalk.
Inside, somebody dragged Pegleg Lonergan to the floor near the player piano. Somebody put a gun to the back of his head, execution style, through the skull. He was dead before the song finished playing. Cornelius Ferry took a bullet to the head on the dance floor. James Hart tried to crawl out.
He took rounds in the thigh and leg. He made it two blocks before he collapsed on the sidewalk. He survived. When the lights came back on, there was blood on the dance floor, blood on the bar, blood in the street, and three members of the ruling Irish gang of Brooklyn were dead in a room full of Italians. The shooters had vanished.
Seven men were arrested. Among them, sitting in the club when cops arrived, smoking a cigarette like nothing had happened, was a visiting businessman from Chicago, Al Capone, 26 years old. Capone told police he was just in town to see his mother for the holidays. He had been having a drink. He knew nothing.
Bail was set between $5,000 and $10,000. Every man made bail within hours. The case was eventually dismissed. No witnesses would talk. James Hart, wounded and hospitalized, told police he had been shot by a stray bullet from a passing car on a completely different street. Everyone knew he was lying. Nobody could prove it. Anna Lonergan, Pegleg’s sister, Bill Lovett’s widow, held a press conference and gave reporters a quote that would become famous.
She said, “Quote, you can bet it was no Irish-American like ourselves who would stage a mean murder like this on Christmas Day.” End quote. She was right about one thing. It was Italians. Most likely it was Yale’s men with Capone directly involved in the shooting. Some accounts put the gun in Capone’s own hand.
Some say he just watched. The truth has been buried for a century. What’s documented is that Capone was in the room when three White Hand leaders were executed. The Adonis Social Club massacre was the deathblow. Within 48 hours the White Hand gang, as a functioning organization, ceased to exist. There was nobody left to lead.
The docks were wide open. Frankie Yale moved in. Joe Adonis and Albert Anastasia moved in. By 1928, the Italian Mafia completely controlled the Brooklyn waterfront. The shape-up system that Danny Meehan had built continued for another 30 years, but now Italians collected the tribute.
The same longshoremen paid the same kickbacks to the same dock bosses. Only the names on the envelopes had changed. Now here’s what the story tells you about organized crime in America. The Irish lost because they failed to adapt. Bill Lovett refused to touch bootlegging. Lonergan refused to touch anything except the docks. They were running a pre-prohibition racket in a prohibition economy.
Meanwhile, Frankie Yale, Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, and Arnold Rothstein were building continental empires on illegal alcohol. By the time the White Hand woke up, the Italians had 10 times their money, 20 times their political reach, and 100 times their organizational discipline. The Irish also lost because they wouldn’t stop killing each other.
From 1920 to 1931, every significant leader of the White Hand gang was murdered. Danny Meehan, Gary Barry, Wild Bill Lovett, Pegleg Lonergan, Eddie Lynch, shot in December 1927, Non Connors, killed by a woman named Helen Finnegan in January 1928, Eddie Maguire, shot November 5th, 1928, Red Donelly, killed January 28th, 1930, Jimmy Murray, shot later in 1930, Matty Martin, killed in 1931.
11 bosses in 11 years. Most of them killed by fellow Irishman. Frankie Yale didn’t have to destroy the White Hand gang. They destroyed themselves. Capone just came back for the ceremonial last kick. And here’s the last piece of the puzzle. Frankie Yale didn’t enjoy his victory for long. On July 1st, 1928, less than three years after the Adonis Social Club killings, Yale was driving his brand new Lincoln down 44th Street in Brooklyn when a Buick pulled up alongside him.
The occupants opened fire. A shotgun to the left side of the head. A submachine gun round through the brain. Either wound would have killed him instantly. It was the first recorded use of a Thompson submachine gun in a New York City gangland killing. The shooters were Al Capone’s men. Capone had suspected Yale of hijacking his whiskey shipments.
He did exactly to Yale what he had done to Pegleg Lonergan, killed him in a room full of allies. Friendship in this world meant nothing. Geography meant nothing, only power. Anna Lonergan lived on into old age, twice widowed, once to Wild Bill Lovett, once to Matty Martin, her second husband, himself killed in 1931.
She kept giving interviews. She kept talking about the glory days of Irishtown. She kept insisting the Italians had never beaten the Irish in a fair fight, that they had only won because they ambushed drunk men at Christmas She wasn’t entirely wrong, but she was missing the larger truth. The White Hand gang ruled the Brooklyn docks for a quarter of a century.
They invented the waterfront extortion model that every gang after them copied. They terrorized thousands of longshoremen. They burned ships. They shot cops. They buried rivals in the East River. They made millions, and in the end, they left nothing behind. No institutions. No lasting power. No next generation. When Pegleg Lonergan died on that Adonis Social Club dance floor, the entire Irish criminal dominance of the New York waterfront died with him.
The Italians took over, kept the system running, and for the next 50 years the Mafia made the Brooklyn docks their personal treasury. The movie On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando was made in 1954. It was about the same dock rackets. By then it was all Italian. Nobody remembered the Irish had invented it. That’s the real lesson of the White Hand gang.
Criminal power is not inherited, and it is not earned by violence alone. It is kept by adaptation, by discipline, by the willingness to evolve when the economy evolves. The Irish had the first mover advantage on the New York waterfront. They had the numbers, the neighborhoods, the political connections with Tammany Hall. They should have owned that port for the entire 20th century.
Instead, they spent 25 years shooting each other over the same 10 square block patch of Brooklyn. And when the moment came to defend it against an organized outside threat, there was nobody left standing to defend it. Danny Meehan built an empire in bed with his wife. Pegleg Lonergan ended it on a dance floor next to a player piano.
And a scar-faced kid from Navy Street, a kid the White Hand once ran out of town, became the most famous gangster in American history. The Irish waterfront was over. The Italian century was just beginning. If this story hit you the way it hit us, hit that subscribe button. We drop a new mob documentary every week.
Leave a comment below. Who do you think really pulled the trigger on Pegleg Lonergan at the Adonis Social Club? Capone, Yale, or an Irish traitor inside the room. Drop your theory below.