Mickey Duffy
The house had a black metal palm tree spreading across the front of it.
That was the trademark, and it was how everyone knew the place — the House of the Black Palm, out on City Avenue in Lower Merion where the respectable money lived. It had been built in 1929 as an architectural showcase, Mediterranean style, white stucco, about ninety thousand dollars’ worth. Mickey and Edith Duffy bought it in 1930.
Then he set about making it safe. Every door and window wired into a central alarm. Steel plate behind the walls and behind some of the doors. Floodlights buried in the shrubbery. And somewhere inside it, a secret room with steel walls.
He had eighteen months in that house. A boy from Grays Ferry, born to Polish immigrants in 1888, who had reached the absolute top of what Philadelphia had to offer him — and who spent his first months in the finest house he would ever own turning it into somewhere he could survive.
He was born around 1889, into a poor Polish immigrant family in Grays Ferry, and even his name is uncertain at this distance. The records give Cusick, sometimes with Michael in front of it, sometimes William. Somewhere on the way up he became Mickey Duffy, because Irish played better with the gangs he wanted in with than Polish did.
At sixteen he was in reform school. He went back in and out again on armed robbery and hijacking, and in May 1919 he was arrested for assault and battery with intent to kill and served the better part of three years in Eastern State Penitentiary.
He walked out of Eastern State into a country that had just made his skill set enormously profitable.
That is worth pausing on, because it happened to a great many men and it is the whole engine of the decade. Prohibition did not create criminals. It took men who were already violent, already organized, already outside the law and largely unsuccessful at it — and handed them a product every adult in America wanted and nobody could legally sell.
He started with a brewery in Camden and was soon known as the beer baron of South Jersey. Beer is the detail that matters: it’s bulky, it’s perishable, it can’t be smuggled in a coat pocket, and moving it at volume requires trucks and warehouses and men and a working arrangement with the people who might otherwise stop you. Beer is an industry. Which is why the men who ran it got so rich, and why they killed each other over it.
In 1924 he opened Club Cadix at Twenty-third and Chestnut, which was the fashionable end of the business — the part with a dance floor and a doorman and a respectable clientele who preferred not to think too hard about the supply chain. He ran the beer and the numbers out of the Ritz-Carlton.
His rival was Max “Boo Boo” Hoff, a fight manager who controlled Philadelphia bootlegging through the middle of the decade, with the Bailey brothers doing the work that required doing. A grand jury came for Hoff in 1928 and damaged him badly, and Duffy moved into the space. Northward, in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey brewery country, he pushed into Max Hassel’s operations until Hassel gave up some of them — and then, in the way of that world, the two of them did business together afterwards as though nothing had happened.
By 1930 the district attorney was calling him the king of the numbers racket, and for a short while Philadelphia had him down as its Public Enemy No. 1. He was forty-one, he had come from Grays Ferry with nothing, and the city had officially named him its worst man.
What it cost
On the night of February 25th, 1927, Mickey and Edith Duffy came out of Club Cadix. Edith had just sat down in the car when the shooting started.
Mickey was hit three times. His bodyguard, John Bricker, was killed. Earl Brown, the club’s doorman — a man whose entire involvement was opening a door — was seriously wounded. Edith, by whatever margin these things are decided, was not touched.
Mickey was taken to Hahnemann and given the last rites. The papers said he wasn’t expected to live. He was back at work within weeks, and when he left the hospital he gave them a thousand dollars for saving him. He put up a monument to John Bricker, too.
That is what fiction usually gets wrong about these men. It’s easy to write a gangster who is simply cold. The harder and truer version is a man who will have a rival shot on a Tuesday and on Thursday pay for the headstone of the employee who died in his place, and who appears never to have felt the slightest contradiction between the two.
The doorman is the one I keep thinking about. He opened a car door for a customer and was seriously wounded for it, and his name comes down to us only because he was standing near a more interesting man.
Duffy went home to the house with the metal palm tree and carried on for four more years — until the night of August 29th, 1931, when he was asleep in a suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City and somebody came in and shot him dead. He was forty-two. No one was ever charged, and the theory that lasted longest was that it had been his own people.
Thousands came to the funeral. Police held the crowds back along Kingsessing Avenue and let only family and friends with passes through the gates; the procession ran to thirty-one cars, and he went into the ground in a bronze coffin. Souvenir hunters stripped flowers off the floral tributes to take home. That last detail is the one that tells you what he had become by the end — not a man any longer but a piece of civic folklore, the Grays Ferry kid who was in the papers every week.
The stone itself is plain. His name is on the right-hand side. On the left is his mother’s — Elizabeth Cusick, who died of tuberculosis in 1906, when he was seventeen and two years short of his first arrest.
He had a Mediterranean mansion with a steel-walled room in it and a Duesenberg parked out front, and he was buried under a modest stone beside his mother, who had lived and died poor in Grays Ferry and never saw a penny of any of it.
She is in the record more than you’d expect and far less than you’d want.
She had been a hat-check girl before she married him, shortly after he came out of Eastern State. She was there on the night of the Cadix shooting — she’d just got into the car when the shooting started, close enough to have been killed and not killed. She was joint owner of the house on City Avenue, which means she was on the deed of the most valuable thing either of them ever had.
And then, in 1933, when the funeral director’s lawyers went looking for Mickey Duffy’s widow, they could not find her.
That is the last documented fact about Edith Duffy that I have been able to turn up. Not that she died, not that she remarried, not that she went anywhere in particular. Only that somebody with a legal reason to locate her, two years after the murder, could not.
I can’t tell you what happened to her. Nobody wrote it down — she wasn’t the story, she was the wife in the story, and the reporters who filled a filing drawer at the Inquirer with Mickey Duffy’s arrests and rivals and addresses never once thought to ask her a question worth printing.
But a woman who disappears that completely, from a husband that famous, has almost certainly done it on purpose.
That’s where the fiction starts. Not with what the record holds, but with the shape of the hole in it — the women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America whose worlds these men ran, and who mostly did not get to leave an account behind them.
Philadelphia in Duffy’s years is the world of the Bootleggers’ Chronicles. And an entirely invented Edith Duffy — invented because the real one left me almost nothing — takes the Rum Runners’ Chronicles south to Florida after his death, which is one answer to where a woman goes when she means not to be found.
Her story begins in Red Sky at Night, a free novella set twelve miles off Miami in 1932. It’s yours if you’d like it — download your copy.
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