DON’T MAKE HIM ANGRY
‘Trigger’ killed many people in and around Hell’s Kitchen, even those who were his friends, before being caught
Anyone who ever had the distinct displeasure of knowing Elmer Burke also knew he was the last guy in the neighborhood you’d want to tick off. Didn’t matter if you were friend, foe or just a fella foolish enough to get on his bad side, Burke was a little man who packed big heat and had more than earned his street nickname of “Trigger,” so getting his dander up was done at considerable risk of catching a .45 slug to the head.
Edward “Poochy” Walsh, 26, probably should’ve remembered how sensitive Burke’s hair-trigger temper was when the two went bar-hopping on a sticky summer night in 1952. The fact they grew up together in Manhattan’s tough Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood didn’t stop Trigger from pumping hot lead into the back of Poochy’s head after the old pals got into a booze-fueled beef in a Columbus Ave. bar that night.
Walsh’s sin: He intervened when Burke got into a fight with another patron and stopped Burke from kicking the man while he was down. Seething, Burke questioned Walsh’s loyalty, left the bar in a huff, returned around 3:30 a.m. with a pistol and proceeded to shoot Walsh dead in front of a half-dozen alcohol-addled witnesses.
It was a cold-blooded killing that barely registered in the next day’s newspapers, however. Burke’s name wasn’t even mentioned as the suspect, though police said the gunman was an ex-con who was well-known to them.
A couple of years later, everyone would know Elmer “Trigger” Burke as a machine gun-toting hitman-for-hire whose murderous spree — some of it real, some of it unproven but likely — would land him on Death Row.
After Walsh’s death, the 33-yearold Burke eluded authorities for more than a year — until he was suspected of plugging another neighborhood guy. In November 1953, ex-con John McQueeney, 35, was shot in the back of the head in a Hell’s Kitchen tavern.
Same m.o., same prime suspect, but detectives hoping to pin this one on Burke were stymied yet again.
The bartender and several customers told cops they didn’t see a thing. Everyone was glued to the boxing match on TV, they said — including the victim, who never saw his killer coming.
Two months later, the NYPD finally named Burke as a murder suspect — after a third shooting. A neighborhood tough named George Goll was found with two bullets to the back of the head on W. 53rd St., just a block away from the Ninth Ave. Bar where McQueeney was gunned down.
“Ex-Con Sought in 3d Bullet-in-Head Killing,” screamed the page 3 headline in the Daily News, with the story detailing how Burke, who knew Goll from the neighborhood, was the prime suspect because he had a score to settle with the victim.
Cops said Goll, a hardened excon with a history of robbery and assault arrests, was held as a material witness in the 1947 murder of Burke’s older brother Charley.
Goll was released, but Trigger — doing a five-year stretch for a liquor store robbery at the time — swore vengeance for his sibling’s slaying. Everyone in Hell’s Kitchen — including the cops — figured Goll was a dead man walking.
It took seven years before Goll got his, but cops couldn’t find Burke, who by then was said to have built a thriving business as a gun-for-hire for local gangsters. When he wasn’t shooting friends and acquaintances, Burke was the No. 1 suspect in a string of unsolved murders with underworld ties since 1952 including a 44-year-old
stevedore involved in the waterfront rackets who was gunned down on W. 55th St.; a shylock, 39, shot dead in a Meatpacking District bar; and a 35-year-old numbers runner shot in the head in his car on E. 87th St.
There was a good reason why cops couldn’t locate Burke. He was up in Boston, where he’d lined up a contract killing linked to the infamous Brinks robbery of 1950 that netted a large group of Beantown bandits $2.7 million, then the biggest heist in U.S. history.
In August 1954, with the gang still on the loose but turning against each other, Burke was hired by one of them to silence Joseph “Specs” O’Keefe, an accomplice thought to be blabbing to the feds. According to police, Burke opened fire on O’Keefe with a machine gun from a moving car but only managed to wound his quarry.
Boston police nabbed Burke at a hideout days later and found a machine gun, good for a life sentence under Massachusetts law. He was locked away in a Boston jail, awaiting trial and facing a grim future when he added to his budding legend with a daring daylight escape.
His Brink’s robbery benefactor had paid inmates to disable the locks on jail doors and guards to look away, allowing Burke to jump into a waiting getaway car and lam it just days before his trial was set to start.
For over a year Burke hid out in a rented Charleston, S.C., house he shared with a pal who was himself wanted for a Queens, N.Y., bank robbery. That arrangement ended, though, when the friend and his wife went missing and were presumed dead — two more likely homicides tied to the Hell’s Kitchen hellion.
An anonymous tip led to Burke’s capture and he was extradited to New York, where he went on trial in 1955. His litany of alleged murders shocked the public, but the accused homicidal maniac The News described as “a gunman with ungovernable rage who would shoot without mercy when crossed” was only tried for the slaying of his old buddy, Poochy.
Burke’s lawyers made much of his hardscrabble background in an effort to gain sympathy with the jury. Standing just 5 7 and a mere 130 pounds, Burke was the runt of an eight-child litter born to poor, religious parents, and he’d taken a bad path in life due to circumstances beyond his control, they said.
He had spent time in reform school as a teen for armed robbery, did a nickel upstate for a liquor store hold-up while blind drunk, then joined the Army just in time to see heavy action in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944.
Yes, his attorneys argued, he was a bad boozer with a terrible temper, prone to blackouts when he overindulged. But he was in nowhere near the ruthless hitman the police and press made him out to be, and there was no way he would hurt an old pal like Poochy.
The jury wasn’t convinced, and the fearsome killer known as Trigger was sentenced to die over what amounted to a drunken fit of rage.
Up until the cold January day in 1958 when he sizzled atop Sing Sing’s Old Sparky, Burke who in his criminal heyday gleefully lived off his persona of a stone killer complained bitterly how it was his reputation rather than any real deed that sent him to the electric chair.
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