The mobster philosopher
QUESTION Whose motto was the phrase: ‘Man is the hardest animal to kill’?
THIS was a well-known saying by New York mobster Salvatore Maranzano. He was unusually well read for a criminal and had a penchant for philosophising to his
capos (sidekicks). He admired Julius Caesar, and this earned him the nickname of Little Caesar.
Maranzano was born in 1868 in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, the youngest of 12 children, and emigrated to New York in his 50s.
He set up a successful estate agency as a front through which he laundered his profits from bootlegging, gambling, narcotics and prostitution.
He became the mentor to Joseph Bonanno, later a major crime boss, who studied the meticulous way in which Maranzano conducted himself. He always travelled in convoy in armour-plated limousines, sitting in the back seat with a machine gun mounted on a swivel between his legs.
He also packed Luger and Colt pistols, and a dagger behind his back. Every night, he would load his shotgun cartridges with powder while imparting his trademark philosophy. The speech that stuck with Bonanno was: ‘To kill a rabbit, to kill a deer, to kill even a bear is simple. You aim steady and you shoot.
‘But man is the hardest animal to kill. When you aim at a man, your heart flutters, your mind interferes. Man is the hardest animal to kill. If possible you should always touch the body with your gun to make sure the man is dead. Man is the hardest animal to kill. If he gets away, he will come back to kill you.’
In 1930, Maranzano became embroiled in a bloody turf dispute — known as the Castellammare War — with rival mafia boss Joe (Giuseppe) Masseria. It came to an end with the execution of Masseria. Maranzano briefly established himself as
capo di tutti capi (boss of all the bosses) until a murder squad, reputedly hired by mafia bosses Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese, stabbed and shot him in his office on Park Avenue in 1931.
Phil Laven, Nottingham.
QUESTION What was the first whiskey produced in Ireland? Are there any bottles of it left?
WHISKEY has been distilled in Ireland for at least 1,000 years; Ireland’s oldest distillery, in the present day, is the Bushmills distillery in Co. Antrim, which traces its origins back to a 1608 licence. But it would be impossible for whiskey from those early days of distillation to survive right up to the present day. Very rare bottles of the oldest whiskies available now are no more than about a century old.
It’s said that Irish monks brought back the secrets of distilling from Mediterranean countries in about 1000 AD. But distillation there was used to produce perfume; the Irish monks soon adapted the process to produce something much stronger for human consumption. Some historians say that the history of Irish whiskey goes back even further, as far as the sixth century AD.
But it wasn’t until the late 18th century that Irish whiskey distilling came into its own. Some 2,000 stills were in operation by then, but two-thirds of the output was illegal. However, the legally permitted industry grew so much that by the mid-19th century, Ireland had 88 licensed distilleries, producing more than 12million nine-litre cases of whiskey a year, an enormous output.
In the case of the Bushmills , it continued a tradition of whiskey distilling in its own part of north Co. Antrim, close to the coast, that had been going strong since the 15th century.
In 1608, King James I granted a licence to distill to Sir Thomas Phillips, the then governor of Co. Antrim. This is the date the present Bushmills Distillery uses as the basis of its start-up, though the first Bushmills Distillery company wasn’t set up until 1784.
During the 19th century, the Bushmills operation had many changes of ownership, and distilled on a relatively small scale. A disastrous fire in 1885 wrecked the distillery, which was quickly rebuilt. From the mid-20th century up to the present, Bushmills has had various owner, including Irish Distillers, Diageo, and its current owner since late 2014, the huge Mexican spirits firm, Jose Cuervo.
The oldest Bushmills whiskey currently on retail sale is its 21-year-old single malt.
Various historical factors did much to cripple the Irish whiskey trade. In the early 19th century, an Irishman, Aeneas Coffey, invented the single column still, which makes the distillation process much more economical. It was rejected by all the Irish distillers.
However, it was taken up on a widespread scale by Scottish distillers, and this began the long worldwide dominance of the whisky trade by distillers in Scotland, to the detriment of Irish whiskey-makers.
About 90% of the Scotch whisky produced is blended, while a similarly high proportion of Irish whiskey is also blended.
Prohibition in the US in the 1920s and early 1930s did much further damage to Irish whiskey exports, then in the later 1930s, the trade war between Ireland and Britain cut off Irish distillers from their main market. Many of the well- known distilleries in Ireland closed down and it was only with the creation of Irish Distillers in 1966, bringing together Jamesons and Powers in Dublin and Cork Distilleries, producer of Paddy in Cork, that enabled the industry to survive. In 1988, Irish Distillers was taken over by the French group, Pernod Ricard.
But in the past few years, with the worldwide explosion of demand for Irish whiskey, many new distilleries have been started up. However, whiskey doesn’t usually keep for more than a century, so these days, it’s impossible to find a bottle that’s more than 100 years old.
The best place to see some really old bottles is the Irish Whiskey Museum, at the foot of Grafton Street, opposite the front entrance to Trinity College.
It has the last surviving bottle from Cassidy’s Whiskey, which flourished in Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, from 1784 onwards; it closed down in 1921. The old DWD distillery at Jones Road, Dublin, was a big producer of whiskey in the last quarter of the 19th century. In the 1890s, it merged with two other Dublin distilleries. The Jones Road distillery shut down most of its production in 1926 and produced its last bottle in 1942. Two bottles of DWD are still in existence and one of them is in the Irish Whiskey Museum.
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