Mike Basile had been a bodyguard for Vincent Coll, the freelance enforcer of all sides of NY's bootleg wars. Basile was with Coll when he earned his tabloid tag as "Mad Dog" by strafing an East Harlem street corner with machine gun bullets, felling a five year old boy. A few months later, Coll met his own end, gunned down while sitting in a drugstore phone booth on west twenty third street. Basile retreated with the remaining gang members to an upstate hideaway in Colonie, NY, near Albany. There he was wounded in a shoot-out with detectives. Sentenced in 1933 to seventeen to thirty-five years for attempted first-degree murder on a policeman, Basile served the full term.


By the time Al met him, Basile, was soon to be released. But like aging tough guy Anthony Russo, it wasn't going to do him much good. He was dying of cancer. They'd never done anything for him in the hospital. He was an attempted cop killer do they really wouldn't treat him. They just let him get sicker.


Basile did finally make it out of Sing Sing, only to die in an ambulance on his way to an outside hospital.

(That was from D'Arco's book)



DOES anyone have any info on him? Was he SICILIAN? Was he affiliated with any of the NY families? There's not much info on him.



http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1932/...gang-card-party

It's interesting how Coll is sometimes called one of the last leaders of the "Irish mob", while his underlings had names like: Basile, Giordano, Odierno, Del Greco... All typical "Irish" surnames, as you see

I don't think Coll was ever affiliated with the Irish gangs of the day, he was associated with Dutch Schultz early on before turning on him and starting his own gang who were a mish mash of different ethnic backgrounds.