Hidden Life and Mysterious Ending of Mad Dog Coll, Sadly He was 23

It is just after 5:30 in the evening on February 8th, 1932. And if you were walking past the London Chemists Drugstore on West 23rd Street in Manhattan right now, you would see a small young man in a tailored suit standing inside a wooden phone booth. One hand on the receiver, the other hand tapping the glass. He is 23 years old.

In less than 60 seconds, he will be dead. cut apart by machine gun fire inside that booth with the phone still clutched in his hand and a voice on the other end of the line hearing everything. His name is Vincent Call. The newspapers call him Mad Dog. And if you clicked this video expecting some grizzled old gangster in a fedora at the end of a long career, I need you to sit with this number for a moment.

>> 23, not 53, not 40. 23 years old, younger than most of the men who will read about his killing over breakfast the next morning. In the time it takes you to make a phone call to your mother, the length of a real conversation, 3 or 4 minutes, Vincent Cole had gone from the most feared gunman in New York to a body slumped in a booth with somewhere between 15 and 30 spent shell casings scattered around his shoes.

 But here is what the tabloids never told you. Who was the 23-year-old on the phone? And how did he go from a barefoot immigrant boy from a village in Donnagal to the name that made Dutch Schultz the head of the entire New York bootlegging empire afraid of his own city? And there is a second question that has haunted this case for more than 90 years.

 Who arranged the killers in that drugstore? Because everyone in New York knew who ordered it? Everyone. And yet, not one man was ever convicted for firing a single shot into that phone booth. And there is one more thing the papers never quite answered. Was the mad dog really the psychopath they said he was? Or was he something the tabloids invented to sell papers to a frightened city? By the end of this video, you will understand exactly how a boy from Guidedor became Mad Dog Call, and you will know what really happened in the last 4 minutes of

his life inside that phone booth. If you’re fascinated by the hidden stories behind history’s most notorious names, the ones the newspapers got half wrong and Hollywood got wrong twice, hit that like button and subscribe. It genuinely helps this channel grow. Now, let me take you back not to the phone booth, but to a stone cottage in County Donnie, Ireland.

 Picture a small boy on the deck of a transatlantic liner around 1911 watching gulls swing behind the ship. He is maybe 3 years old. His family, parents, a crush of siblings has just left the stonewalled village of Guedor in County Donnagal, Ireland. 4,800 km of cold Atlantic water separate the world he was born into from the world he is being carried toward.

 That boy’s name is Vincent Cole. He does not remember Ireland. What Vincent remembers is Hell’s Kitchen. A cramped tenement on Manhattan’s west side. Too many children, not enough beds, a father breaking his back at day labor for a wage that never quite stretched to Friday. By 10, Vincent is on the street selling newspapers.

 By 12, he is running errands for men who linger too long on street corners. By 15, he is stealing. And by 16, he has been noticed by a man named Arthur Flegenheimimer, the man the world will come to know as Dutch Schultz. Schultz was 30 then, German Jewish, born in New York, raised in the Bronx by a mother who worked while his father disappeared.

 He hated being called a gangster. He thought of himself as a businessman, a man who ran breweries and speak easys, who paid off the police, who solved his labor disputes with bullets, but always insisted in that odd Bronx flat voice of his that it was nothing personal. It was business. And Vincent Cole became one of his best young workers.

 But here is the dramatic irony that runs through this whole story. The man Dutch Schultz was training in 1926 to protect his empire is the same man who 6 years later will nearly bring that empire down. Schultz is teaching Vincent Call how to shoot. He is teaching him how to hijack. He is teaching the boy exactly the skills the boy will one day turn against him.

 By 1928, Vincent is hijacking rival liquor trucks along the Bronx roads. By 1929, he is one of Schultz’s most feared enforcers. Prohibition made men like Schultz rich. An ordinary bottle of Canadian whiskey became a small fortune the moment it crossed a state line, and the men who protected those bottles with machine guns became rich, too.

 Vincent liked money. He also liked tailored suits, and he began to notice that Dutch Schultz was getting rich while Vincent was still getting paid like a soldier. And here is something the movies never tell you. The men working for Dutch Schultz were not monsters born in a lab. They were young men, Irish, Italian, Jewish, some from Vincent’s own block.

Kids who had grown up in the same tenementss who had shot craps together on the same stoops who had watched their fathers come home broken from factory shifts. When Vincent Cole finally turned on Dutch Schultz, he was not just turning on a boss. He was turning on the boys he grew up with. By early 1930, Vincent Cole is 21 years old, small, 5’7, maybe less, wiry, with a way of holding himself that made people underestimate him until they saw his eyes. He dresses like a Broadway actor.

Tailored suits, silk ties, hair combed back and glistening. And he carries hidden under that suit a reputation for pulling the trigger before other men had finished asking the question. His gang, when he builds it, will never be large. Fewer than 20 men. Five or 10 core gunmen.

 Some of them Irish boys from the west side. Some of them Italians disaffected with older bosses. A few of them former Schultzmen who liked Vincent better than Dutch. They had one great advantage. Nobody thought a 22year-old could run an army, which meant nobody was ready for what Vincent Cole was about to do against him. Dutch Schultz. 20 to 40 gunmen on the payroll.

 Dozens more in the breweries, drivers, lookouts, corrupted police officers, corrupted aldermen. An income measured in the hundreds of thousands per year at a time when a working man made $20 a week. Schultz did not just have more men. He had the city. So when Vincent Cole walked into Dutch Schultz’s office one afternoon in early 1930 and asked for more money, Schultz laughed.

 Which brings us to the moment that started the war. Whether this conversation happened exactly the way it has been told. Historians have argued for decades. Different associates gave slightly different versions to different reporters. But the emotional core of the moment, a 21-year-old immigrant kid facing down the most powerful gangster in New York is beyond dispute.

 Picture it. A back room somewhere in the Bronx. Schultz behind a desk. A cigar burning low. Ledger books open. Vincent in front of him. still standing, hat in one hand. Vincent has been thinking about this for months. He has counted the money. He has counted the men who would follow him. He has counted the risk.

 And he has made his choice before he walked through the door. He asks for a partnership, not a raise, a partnership, a cut of the empire he is helping to protect. Schultz stares at him for a long moment. Then he says, according to a former associate who told the story years later, “That punk, he don’t know how this business works.” Vincent does not argue.

 He does not shout. He puts his hat back on his head and as he walks toward the door, he turns and says the words that will start everything. I ain’t working for Dutch anymore. I’m going to have my own outfit. He walks out. He does not know it yet, but he has just started a clock. The clock that will end in a phone booth on West 23rd Street in exactly 1 year and 11 months.

 And here is the thing you have to understand about that moment. Everyone in that room knew what a break with Dutch Schultz meant. Everyone. You did not resign from Dutch’s organization the way a man resigns from a bank. You resigned by being buried. and Vincent Call, 21 years old, small wiry in his best suit, had just resigned.

 The war will be fought on street corners, in Bronx tenementss, in Manhattan’s speak easys, in the backs of dark sedans pulling up alongside restaurants. This is not a battlefield with lines and flanks. This is a city. Five burers, 7 million people, and Vincent Cole is going to try to hunt the biggest man in it while the biggest man hunts him back.

Ordinary New Yorkers are about to become the terrain of the war. The children in the streets, the women at the market, the men reading the paper on the stoop. All of them unknowing are about to become part of the front line. In July of 1931, the war will finally spill onto a sidewalk in the Bronx, and a 5-year-old boy who has never heard the name Vincent Cole will pay for it.

Before we go to that Bronx sidewalk, hold this in your head. Vincent Cole has been alive for 22 years. He has been in the criminal life for maybe seven of them. He has less than 8 months left to earn the nickname that will follow him into every history book, every gangster movie, every list of America’s most notorious killers. 8 months.

 That is how quickly a name is made. In the summer of 1931, Vincent Cole begins his war. It does not look like a war. It looks like a series of small, vicious shocks to Dutch Schultz’s system. A hijacked liquor truck outside a Bronx warehouse. A Schultz left tenant grabbed off the street, held in a rented room, released only after $50,000 in cash changes hands.

 A speak easy manager beaten in an alley for refusing to pay Cole instead of Schultz. Each strike individually is survivable, but they keep coming and coming. Kidnapping becomes Cole’s signature. $50,000 for one man, a h 100,000 for another. In 1931, money the equivalent of$1 to2 million dollars today in a country that has just crashed into the Great Depression.

 Cole is generating cash faster than any small gang in the city and he is generating it directly at Dutch Schultz’s expense. Schultz is furious, but he is also for the first time in years uncertain because Vincent Cole knows Schultz’s operations from the inside. He knows the roots. He knows the trucks. He knows the men.

 He knows which drivers can be intimidated and which speak easys can be squeezed. And every time Schultz responds, sending gunmen to Cole’s known hangouts trying to lure him into a meeting. Vincent moves. He does not sleep in the same place twice. He works from payones. He never eats at the same restaurant. He has become at 22 a ghost with a machine gun.

 But here is what should stop you cold. Vincent Cole was not just fighting Dutch Schultz. He was without fully realizing it. Forcing every other major crime boss in New York, Lucky Luciano, Oni Madden, all of them to take a side because a war this loud, this public, in a city this crowded was bad for everyone’s business. Vincent Call thought he was fighting one man. He was fighting a city.

 July 28th, 1931. A late afternoon in the Bronx. It is hot. The kind of New York summer where the tenement bricks radiate the day’s heat back into the night and children spill out of hallway apartments onto the sidewalks because it is cooler outside than inside. Somewhere near 107th Street, a Schultz affiliated gangster is standing at a corner.

 He is the target, but he does not know it yet. A large dark sedan rolls slowly down the street. In the back seat, at least two men. One of them, whether it is Vincent himself or one of his gunmen witnesses, could never agree, is holding a Thompson submachine gun, the Tommy gun. The signature weapon of the era, drum magazine, 20 or 30 rounds, cyclic rate somewhere between 6 and 700 rounds a minute.

 In plain language, it is a weapon that empties itself in 3 seconds. The car passes the corner. The barrel comes out of the window. The world becomes noise. Witnesses would later describe it as a clatter like firecrackers. The rapid sticcato of the Thompson bouncing off tenement walls. Bullets tear across the street. Storefront glass shatters.

 A wooden vegetable stand splinters. Adults hit the pavement. and a 5-year-old boy who has been playing near a curb is struck in the head by a stray round. The car speeds away. The rival Schultz man is unheard. The child is not. A New York police officer arrived at the scene within minutes and would later testify at the coroner’s inquest with words that no reporter present would ever forget.

 I arrived at the corner about 5 minutes after the shooting and found a child lying on the sidewalk with a wound to the head. Several persons stated that a large automobile had driven past and two men in the rear seat were firing a machine gun into the crowd. By the next morning, every newspaper in New York carried the story.

 And within days, one nickname had crystallized in the headlines. Mad Dog, a killer who would shoot a machine gun into a crowd of children on a public street. A rabid animal, a creature to be put down. The nickname made it into the courtroom. Standing before a judge in a bail hearing later that year, an assistant district attorney used the word directly.

 Vincent Cole is known in the underworld as a mad dog. He is a man who will shoot without hesitation in the public street if he thinks it will serve his purposes. The prosecutor was not exaggerating. He was reading from the newspapers. But here is the strange thing. Vincent Cole had never been convicted of the killing. Witnesses could not agree on who fired the shot.

Some placed him in the car. Some placed him firing the gun. Some later writers would argue Cole was not even present that day. The truth of what happened on that Bronx corner is contested to this hour. What is not contested is what happened next. Every police force in New York began hunting him.

 Every newspaper printed his face. Every rival gangster who had merely disliked him now had a business reason to want him dead. Dutch Schulz put the word out through the underworld. $100,000. Some accounts said to any man who could kill Vincent Call. Cole was arrested. He was released. Witnesses vanished. Memories failed.

 The case fell apart. He was arrested again. Released again. But the noose was tightening. By autumn 1931, Cole was living inside a paradox. He had never been richer. He had never been more famous. He had never been more alone. And here is the sensory detail that stayed with the officers who worked the Bronx corner.

 The smell, not just the gunpowder. Every driveby smelled of gunpowder. It was the smell of the vegetable stand. Crushed tomatoes from the shattered store mixed with the coppery smell of a child’s blood on hot pavement. That is what the mad dog nickname smelled like when it was born. By December 1931, Vincent Call has become something New York has rarely seen before.

 A fugitive not just from the police, but from every organized force in the city. Carl himself, according to a rival gangster interviewed years later, said one line during this period that stuck. They call me a mad dog, but I ain’t mad, I just ain’t scared. Whether he ever really said those exact words, nobody knows, but the men who ran with him always claimed it captured him perfectly.

 He was not insane. He was simply not afraid and in a business built on fear that made him more dangerous than a hundred rational men. Cole stops sleeping in the same room twice. He moves from Midtown hotel to Midtown hotel, sometimes checking in under a false name, sometimes registering as a traveling salesman, sometimes not registering at all.

 He conducts his business almost entirely from public phone booths. A booth cannot be wiretapped in any reliable way. in 1931. A booth is anonymous. A booth is safe. Or so he thinks. Winter closes over Manhattan. The tenement rooftops ice over. The reservoir in Central Park freezes. And Vincent Cole, 23 now, his birthday having passed quietly in July, grows thinner, paler, more nervous.

 His men see it. His girlfriend sees it. Even a bellhop at one of his hotels would later tell a reporter that Cole had begun looking over his shoulder every time he walked through a lobby. He was still wearing the tailored suits. He was still combing his hair back, but something in him had changed. He was, though he could not admit it, being hunted, not just by Schultz, by everyone.

 He tried to make new alliances. He reached out to a Bronx racketeer, a man with his own quarrel with Schultz, and floated the idea of an alliance. He tried to extort a wealthy businessman connected to the nightclub trade. He kept the ransoms coming, kept the money moving, kept the phone booths ringing, and in that constant motion, he began to make a mistake that would kill him.

 He began to use the same boos more than once. Somebody was watching. This is the part historians have argued about for 90 years. Some believe it was a Schultz spy planted among Call’s own men. Some believe a rival boss simply paid for information from a bellhop or a phone company employee or one of the drugstore clerks who saw Cole come in day after day to use the same booth.

Some believe police were involved, turning a blind eye to underworld surveillance because they too wanted him dead. There is no proof for any single version. But by early February 1932, someone knew Cole’s pattern. They knew he called from the London Chemists Drugstore on West 23rd Street near 7th Avenue. They knew what time.

 They knew how long his calls usually lasted. And on February 8th, 1932, they were ready. Consider what this means. The most feared gunman in New York, the man who had survived a year of open warfare against the largest bootlegging empire in the city, was not killed in a shootout. He was not killed in a car chase.

 He was not killed in a jewel between armies. He was killed because he called the wrong number from the same booth twice. That afternoon, Vincent Cole was working the phones from a suite in a Midtown hotel. He was negotiating with a Bronx bootleger over money, possibly a ransom, possibly a protection deal. The bootleger asked him to hold.

 Cole agreed to call back from a nearby drugstore because his hotel switchboard could be tapped. He put on his overcoat. He straightened his tie. He walked out of the hotel and turned down West 23rd Street toward the pharmacy. He was, by every account, calm. A drugstore clerk who watched him walk in would say later that Cole nodded politely, walked directly to the wooden booth at the back of the store, closed the door behind him, and picked up the receiver. He dropped in his nickel.

 He gave the operator the number. On the other end of the line, the Bronx racketeer picked up and behind Vincent Cole, a few feet from the door of the booth, two men in overcoats, walked into the drugstore. One of them was carrying a Thompson submachine gun. The clerk saw them first, a tall man and a shorter man, both in dark overcoats, hats pulled low.

 The shorter one, had his hand inside his coat. The taller one, the one with the machine gun, did not bother to hide it. He carried the Thompson openly, its wooden stock against his hip, its drum magazine catching the light of the drugstore chandelier. The clerk did the smartest thing he ever did in his life. He dropped behind the counter.

 Vincent Cole in the booth did not see them. The booth faced the wall. He was talking fast, nervous. The clerk would later say that Cole’s voice through the glass sounded almost like an argument. The tall man walked directly to the booth. He stopped about 3 ft away. He raised the Thompson, and for one absurd fraction of a second, the entire drugstore froze.

 The tall man aiming, Cole still talking, the clerk hidden, the pharmacist staring, the woman at the soda counter with a spoon halfway to her mouth. Then the tall man pulled the trigger. The Thompson does not fire the way it sounds in movies in an enclosed space inside a drugstore 20 ftx 40 ft with a tin ceiling and glass shelves.

 It does not sound like firecrackers. It sounds like an explosion that never stops. Witnesses said the burst lasted several seconds, but the human perception of gunfire is notoriously bad. In real time, it may have been 3 seconds, 4 seconds at the outside. In that time, somewhere between 15 and 30 bullets tore into the wooden booth.

 The drugstore clerk speaking to a newspaper reporter the very next day put the moment into words that survive as the closest thing we have to a live account. He was in the phone booth talking fast, you know, like he was nervous. Then these two fellows came in and went straight for him. I heard the shots and saw the glass fly.

 I dropped behind the counter. When I looked up, he was all torn up inside there. The glass panels of the phone booth blew inward and outward at the same time. Splinters of wood peppered the drugstore floor. A brass shell casing bounced off a display of aspirin bottles and rolled under a shelf. The Thompson ran through most of its drum.

 The tall man stopped firing, not because he had finished his intent, but because the weapon was empty. Vincent Cole was not standing anymore. His body had folded into the corner of the booth. The receiver of the phone was still swinging on its cord. And on the other end of the line, this is the part nobody in the drugstore knew yet.

 The Bronx racketeer he had been speaking to had heard everything. The shots, the glass, the silence. The two men in overcoats turned and walked unhurried toward the front door of the drugstore. A car was waiting outside, engine running, driver behind the wheel. They stepped in. The car pulled away from the curb and merged into evening traffic on 23rd Street.

 Consider the arithmetic of a killing. Vincent Cole had been alive for 23 years, 6 months, and 19 days. He had built a reputation that terrified the largest crime organization in New York. He had generated headlines that could still make a newsroom fall silent, and it took two men and about 4 seconds to erase all of it.

 Inside the booth, Vincent Cole was already gone. Multiple catastrophic wounds to the head and torso meant there was no hope, no surgery, no recovery from what those seconds inside the booth had done to him. The clerk, when he finally raised his head from behind the counter, saw the phone receiver still in Cole’s hand. He would remember that detail for the rest of his life.

 The receiver still in his hand. A woman was screaming outside. Somebody had run out of a neighboring store shouting for the police. Within minutes, perhaps eight, perhaps 10, the first patrol car arrived. Uniformed officers pushed through a growing crowd on the sidewalk. Inside the drugstore, they found what they had already been told they would find.

 A young man in a tailored suit slumped in the wreckage of a phone booth. Blood on the tin ceiling, broken glass across the floor. Shell casings scattered like coins. One of the officers checked for a pulse. There was none. The ambulance that arrived took Vincent Cole’s body, technically living or already dead.

 The reports disagreed by minutes. To the nearest hospital, where he was formerly pronounced dead. His age at the time of death was recorded as 23 years and depending on the cler writing the form either six or seven months. By the next morning, the headline had already been written. It required only three words. Mad dog slain.

 The detectives arrived within the hour. They photographed the booth. They counted the shell casings, between 15 and 30 of them, depending on which officer’s report you read. They diagrammed the drugstore. They interviewed the cler, the pharmacist, the woman at the soda counter. And every neighbor on the block who might have seen the getaway car.

 And in the way of every gangland killing in early 1930s New York, they got nothing. Nobody had seen the shooters faces clearly. Nobody remembered the license plate of the car. The cler who had heard everything and seen most of it could not identify either man from a photograph. This was not a failure of policing.

 This was the ordinary shape of underworld justice. A wall of silence built out of fear, out of loyalty, and out of the sensible understanding that talking to a detective was a shorter route to your own death than any other. Cole’s body was moved to the morg. An autopsy cataloged multiple bullet wounds to the head and torso, catastrophic blood loss, and death by gunfire.

 No surprise, the medical examiner’s file joined the police file, and the police file joined the vast New York archive of gangland homicides for which no one would ever be tried. By the next morning, every newspaper in New York, and quickly, every newspaper in the country carried the story. Photographs of the phone booth ran on front pages.

 A shot of the shattered glass. A shot of Cole’s family in hell’s kitchen learning of the death of their son. His mother, according to the wire reports, said nothing to the reporters who came to her tenement door. She simply closed it. In another part of the city, Dutch Schultz heard the news. A gangster who was in the room later gave his recollection to a crime writer.

Dutch said, “The mad dog’s been put down.” He didn’t smile or nothing, just said it like it was business. That was the extent of the eulogy from the man who had employed Cole, taught him, then paid to have him killed. It was business. It had always been business. But here is the answer to the question I asked you at the top of this video.

 Who ordered the killing? Every historian, every crime writer, every retired detective who has ever looked at this case has come to the same conclusion. Dutch Schultz, almost certainly with the tacit approval, perhaps the active coordination, of several other New York prime bosses, who had grown equally tired of the small man in the tailored suit.

 Cole had become bad for everyone’s business. Everyone in the polite New York underworld of 1932 agreed he had to go, and so he went. And yet, not one man was ever officially charged. Not one of the shooters was ever named in a courtroom. A veteran New York detective speaking to a reporter days after the killing put the fatalism of the department into a single sentence.

 He lived by the gun and he died by the gun. We’ll do what we can, but these boys don’t leave calling cards and they didn’t. The case remains technically unsolved to this day. Sit with that for a moment. One of the most famous gangland killings of the 20th century. photographed, front paged, recreated in movies, and nobody was ever convicted for firing a single shot into that booth.

 Not one, 90 plus years and counting. Vincent Cole’s funeral was small. His family, a few remaining associates, a Catholic priest willing to preside over the burial of a man the newspapers had called a mad dog. There was no procession like the ones that would attend the funerals of older, more established gangsters. He had died too young to have earned that kind of sendoff.

 23 years old, half a life at most, and buried on a cold February morning under a modest stone. His gang did not survive him. Within weeks, its members had scattered, some killed, some arrested, some absorbed quietly into rival organizations. The Cole War ended the moment Kle himself did. It had always been a war built around one man. And when that man was removed from the equation, the equation collapsed.

 The child on the Bronx sidewalk, the 5-year-old whose death had earned Cole his nickname, had already been buried the previous summer in a ceremony most of the city did not attend and did not remember. His family, workingclass immigrants like Cole’s own, went back to work. There was no ransom money in that story, only a small coffin and a mother who had told reporters in the days after the shooting that her boy had never done anything to anyone.

 In the 90 plus years since Vincent Cole died in that phone booth, his story has been retold in dozens of films, novels, and television episodes. Hollywood invented conversations he never had. Screenwriters gave him monologues. Actors gave him faces that looked nothing like his own, and the nickname mad dog became the thing most Americans remembered about him, if they remembered him at all.

 The truth was quieter and more human. Vincent Cole was not, by the standards of his peers, insane. He was calculating. He used kidnapping strategically. He used violence to build a power base. He miscalculated exactly once. the day he underestimated how quickly the entire New York underworld would unite against the boy from Donnagor who had refused to know his place and that single miscalculation killed him.

 And here is the specific fact that most people get wrong. Most people when they hear the name Mad Dog Cole imagine a grizzled older gangster, a man in his 30s or 40s, a career criminal with two decades of blood behind him. That is not who died in the phone booth on West 23rd Street. The man who died there was 23 years old. 6 years from news boy to corpse was the entire length of his serious criminal career.

He was younger than most of the police officers who wrote his death report. He was younger than most of the reporters who wrote his obituary. He was in every sense that matters still a young man playing at being a legend. And the legend killed him before he was old enough to become anything else. Go back to where we started.

 The phone booth, the tailored suit, the receiver still in his hand. And now, knowing what you know, the immigrant childhood, the tenement, the boss who trained him, the war he chose, the child on the sidewalk, the 4 seconds inside the drugstore. Look at that booth again. The man in it is not a legend. He is a small, wiry 23-year-old kid from a village in Ireland he does not remember.

 He is a boy who wanted more than his father had. He is somebody’s son and the mad dog was never the animal the papers made him. He was the ordinary shape of poverty, ambition, prohibition, error, money, and a decision made at 21 to walk out of Dutch Schultz’s office instead of staying quiet.