The bar is owned by the son of a well-known Irish crook.
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New York As we walk past Mr. Biggs at 43rd Street and Tenth Avenue, an American friend said to me, “They killed people there and cut them into small pieces so that they could be better disposed of.” Today the bar is for my taste too cool and the music too loud, I only got lost in it once. It used to be known as “Club 596” – named after the number on the avenue, and it was a hangout for the Westies, the Irish mafia that ran its dirty business west of Times Square for decades.
One block further west was the “Market-Diner” until 2015, which unfortunately has since been torn down. It was a beautiful, one-story building from the 1960s that could have come from a David Hopper painting and that reminded me of the Hemingway story “A clean, well-lighted place”. There I often drank a beer at the bar. The cars or Harleys of the New York police were regularly in front of the door. Taxi drivers also stopped there because the restaurant was open 24 hours. Diane Keaton is said to have been a frequent guest. And it used to be a meeting point for the Westies too.
A little further north is a bar called “Mickey Spillane”, named after one of the most famous Irish crooks who was killed in 1977 by the Italian mafia. One of his sons is also called Mickey Spillane and is a lawyer; the bar belongs to the family.
Welcome to Hell’s Kitchen. Nobody knows exactly why the area between Times Square and Hudson River is so called. But the fact that “hell” appears in the name is certainly no coincidence. This area, including 43rd Street, where I live, was one of the most dangerous corners of New York until the 1980s. TJ English, who himself comes from an Irish working-class family, has described in his book “Westies” the stories of the crooks, blackmailers, kidnappers and murderers who were up here.
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In Club 596 and other places, people were actually killed and then professionally dismembered to be dumped in plastic bags in the East River. Those who vomited during the operation were laughed at by the others. One of the crooks had learned the butcher’s trade in prison and passed it on to his buddies. Not all corpses were disposed of with such care. Sometimes they were left lying on the street, one flew out of a high-rise onto 10th Avenue. Another murder was conveniently carried out in a funeral home.
The Irish mafia wasn’t nearly as big as the Italian one, but it was at least as brutal. The future mayor Rudy Giuliani, then still a public prosecutor, played a key role in bringing the perpetrators to prison if they had survived.
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