12. The Little Known Early Mafia Boss
Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, better known as Paul Kelly (1876 – 1936), was an early New York City mafia leader who started off as a boxer. He invested his prize money in a string of brothels, then founded the Five Points Gang – the Big Apple’s last dominant street gang. Kelly recruited and gave a start in the criminal life to many young men who went on to become the biggest names in American organized crime, such as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Seigel, and Meyer Lansky. His career was also significant because it marked Italian organized crime’s transition from street gangs into the organized hierarchical structure of crime families and the Italian-American mafia.
Kelly had emigrated to the US as a teenager and took up boxing. When he turned professional, he Anglicized his name from Paolo Vaccarelli to Paul Kelly, and invested his earnings in brothels in the Italian immigrant district east of the Bowery. He soon added athletic clubs to his properties, which operated as fronts for street gangs that he began to control and consolidate. He melded his criminal activities with politics, and lent Tammany Hall his support in elections. The most notorious instance took place on a primary day in 1901, when Kelly unleashed 1500 gang members against an incumbent who had campaigned to keep brothels out of his ward. Kelly’s goons beat up the incumbent’s supporters, blocked polling booths, and voted early and often for the challenger. One gang member boasted of having voted 53 times that day. The incumbent lost.
