Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll (born Uinseann Ó Colla, July 20, 1908 – February 8, 1932) was an Irish-American mob hitman in the 1920s and early 1930s in New York City.
Coll gained notoriety for the alleged accidental killing of a young child during a mob kidnap attempt.
Coll was born in Gweedore, an Irish-speaking district, in County Donegal in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland.
1909
He was related to the notorious Curran family, and his family emigrated to the U.S. the following year as steerage passengers on board the S/S Columbia, sailing from port of Derry to the port of New York, April 3 to 12, 1909.
Coll was a distant relative of the former Northern Ireland Assemblywoman Bríd Rodgers.
At age 12, Coll was first sent to a reform school.
After being expelled from multiple Catholic reform schools, he joined The Gophers street gang.
Run-ins with the law were almost inevitable.
Vincent soon developed a reputation for being a wild child of the streets.
At age 16, he was arrested for carrying a gun, and by the age of 23 he had been arrested a dozen times.
1920
In the late 1920s he started working as an armed guard for the illegal beer delivery trucks of Dutch Schultz's mob.
Coll's ruthlessness made him a valued enforcer to Schultz at first.
As Schultz's criminal empire grew in power during the 1920s, he employed Coll as an assassin.
At age 19 Coll was charged with the murder of Anthony Borello, the owner of a speakeasy, and Mary Smith, a dance hall hostess.
Coll allegedly murdered Borello because he refused to sell Schultz's bootleg alcohol.
The charges were eventually dismissed, and many suspect this to have been due to Schultz's influence.
Schultz was not happy about Coll's actions.
1929
In 1929, without Schultz's permission, Coll robbed a dairy in the Bronx of $17,000.
He and his gang posed as armed guards to gain access to the cashier's room.
Schultz later confronted Coll about the robbery, but rather than being apologetic, Coll demanded to be an equal partner; Schultz declined.
1930
By January 1930, Coll had formed his own gang and was engaged in a shooting war with Schultz.
1931
One of the earliest victims was Peter Coll, Vincent's older brother, who was shot dead on May 30, 1931, while driving down a Harlem street.
Coll subsequently went into a rage of grief and vengeance.
Over the next three weeks he gunned down four of Schultz's men.
In all, around 20 men were killed in the bloodletting; the exact figure is hard to pin down; New York was also in the midst of the vicious Castellammarese War at the same time.
It was mayhem on the streets of Manhattan, and the police often had difficulty in deciding which corpse belonged to which war.
On June 2, Coll and his gang broke into a garage owned by Schultz and destroyed 120 vending machines and 10 trucks.
As the war continued, Vincent Coll and his gang killed approximately 20 of Schultz's men.
To finance his new gang, Coll kidnapped rival gangsters and held them for ransom.
He knew that the victims would not report the kidnappings to police; they would have a hard time explaining to the Bureau of Internal Revenue why the ransom cash had not been reported as income.
One of Coll's best-known victims was gambler George "Big Frenchy" DeMange, a close associate of Owney Madden, boss of the Hell's Kitchen Irish Mob.
According to one account, Coll telephoned DeMange and asked to meet with him.
When DeMange arrived at the meeting place, Coll kidnapped him at gunpoint.
He released DeMange 18 hours later after receiving a ransom payment.
On July 28, 1931, Coll allegedly participated in a kidnapping attempt that resulted in the shooting death of a child.
Coll's target was bootlegger Joseph Rao, a Schultz underling who was lounging in front of a social club.
Several children were playing outside an apartment house.
A large touring car pulled up to the curb, and several men pointed shotguns and submachine guns towards Rao and started shooting.
Rao threw himself to the sidewalk, and four young children were wounded in the attack.
One of them, five-year-old Michael Vengalli, later died at Beth David Hospital.
