A man stepped out of his East Side tenement on his way to church. Slouched on the steps was a man whom he took for a drunk. He shook his head and passed. Upon returning from mass he saw the man still lying there, giving him a shake,the man's hat fell off and he saw that it was a corpse. The man summoned a cop and before long identification was made. Joseph Flanagan.
Called "Baby Joe" because he was youngest of the Four Fierce Flanagans, a quartet of East Side brothers who cut a swathe through New York's underworld during the Roaring Twenties, Joseph Flanagan met his end on this date back in 1929.
His career went back to his youth when he was sent to reform school at the age of fifteen. He spent a portion of the Jazz Age in the New Jersey State Penitentiary after being arrested during a jewelry store robbery in Perth Amboy. Like his brothers, Baby Joe was mainly an armed bandit but as the decade was coming to an end police surmised that he was also involved with beer running and, right or wrong, it was for the latter that they blamed. While on his final ride, somebody had placed a gun to Baby Joe's temple around 4 a.m. that Sunday morning and pulled the trigger. The job done, they dumped his body on the stoop.
Baby Joe Flanagan
No comments:
Post a Comment