Mad Dog Madden was born Oisin Madden in Ballinskelligs, Kerry, on June 16th, 1901. A fair-haired boy who came from a poor family, as a child he loved eating porridge. Oisin's life changed forever one morning in the autumn of 1909. Late for school, he gobbled down his porridge without wiping his mouth. When he arrived in the class-room, the other boys thought he was rabid when they saw the remnants of the porridge around his lips. As they ran into the school yard petrified, the boys shouted: "Beware the Mad Dog"! The nickname stuck.
In truth it was not suited to Oisin who was in reality a meek and timid boy, but as he grew older he basked in the false image of being a psychotic tough guy. He also became quite a hit with the ladies, they being impressed by his awesome reputation and he was quick to take up any offers of physical intimacy. Like a lot of young Kerrymen of that era, he was bilingual. He had sex with both Irish speakers and English speakers.
By the age of 20 however, he decided to leave Kerry and join his older brother, Iarnrod, in Chicago. Chicago in the 1920s was a bustling metropolis of ill-repute and danger. Culturally, it was quite an alien place for a young Kerryman. For starters, everybody walked very quickly in a jerky, jumpy fashion. Secondly, nobody spoke a word. They just gesticulated widely to the soundtrack of dixieland jazz bands. And finally, and most inexplicably of all, there was no drink available.
One evening, Iarnrod introduced Oisin to a few of his friends, including a young corpulent Italian called Al Capone. The hoodlum took an instant liking to the strangely naive, would-be Munster tough guy, and within months Mad Dog was Al's second in command and completely out of his depth in the world of bootlegging, extortion and racketeering. Eventually, Al and Mad Dog fell out over a woman, Roxie Fifi DuPont.
Roxie was an exotic dancer, bear wrestler and failed clairvoyant. In temperament, she was a cross between Mae West and Greta Garbo. Mad Dog would ring her and she'd say: "Come on up and see me." When he'd arrive at her place, she'd tell him: "Go away, I want to be alone." (Historical footnote: by 1927, America had learned to talk).
Mad Dog was smitten with her, as he later recalled in his non-selling memoir, from 1958, Mad Dog and Irishmen. "Love does strange things to guys. Sometimes it hits you like a tornado. Other times it sneaks up on you like a tarantula. You could say Roxie was a mixture of a tornado and a tarantula. She was a lot of hot air and had quite a small chest size. But I was crazy about that dame."
In the early summer of 1928, Roxie gave Al a pair of spats for his birthday. The following week she gave Mad Dog an identical pair of spats for his birthday. When Al noticed this, there was a spat. Al wanted to know where Mad Dog got his spats. Roxie, realising her mistake, told Al to stop talking about the aforementioned spats. Mad Dog, still baffled by the present, just wanted to know why people wore spats. The spat over the spats lasted six months until Roxie dumped both Al and Mad Dog and ran off with a barbershop quartet from Tulsa.
After his altercation with Capone, people thought Mad Dog would be all washed up in Chicago, and wouldn't be able to cope on his own without help from his former mentor. He vowed to prove them wrong. He planned his first big bank job for February 14th, 1929. He was surprised by how remarkably easy the robbery was. He thought all bank robberies would be like this. He didn't realise that the police were scarce on the ground that day because they were all downtown investigating the "St Valentine's Day Massacre".
His next job proved more difficult. Sometime in the late spring of 1929, police working from a tip-off waited outside the Gramercy National Bank as Mad Dog orchestrated a robbery inside. As he ran out of the building, he spotted the police. He immediately hijacked a passing car and told the driver to act naturally. Stuck in the middle of that funeral cortege, the officers of the law had no problem arresting him.
Sent to Alcatraz for 12 years, Mad Dog had time to agonise over some big questions that had begun to trouble him. "Why am I here"? "What am I doing with my life"? "What, truly, is the function of spats"? By the late 1930s,, still doing his time, Mad Dog had completely turned away from crime. The final straw came when he was reading the warden's newspaper one day and was dismissively labelled "Public Enemy No. 57" by J. Edgar Hoover.
His thoughts were of home. He'd been away from the auld sod for so long he missed the place. He wrote to his mother daily. These recently unearthed letters give us a vivid insight into the turmoil that was Mad Dog's state of mind at that time. This extract is from a letter dated September 17th, 1937. "Dear Mother, This is just a short letter. Your loving son, Mad Dog."
ONCE out of jail, it was only a matter of time before he returned to Kerry. Never one to naturally embrace violence and prone to self preservation at all times, the timing of Mad Dog's impending departure was precipitated by events at Pearl Harbour, and on the first flight out of Chicago on December 8th, 1941, Mad Dog Madden flew home to Ireland.
Back in Ballinskelligs, Mad Dog married a local girl, Novena Ni Bhainin . Novena bore him eight children. Mad Dog Madden spent his latter years regaling visitors with his exciting stories of the Roaring Twenties and re-acquainting himself with his love of porridge. He died, a full six stone overweight, on New Year's Day, 1984.
Karl MacDermott is currently writer-in-residence at his home in Kilmainham.