On this day in 1965 the owner of the Cotton Club and Prohibition era bootlegger, Owney Madden passed away at the age of 73.

During 1912 Madden was set upon by 3 mobsters of the Dusters (a rival gang), he was lucky to survive having been shot at point blank range with several bullets entering his body as he lay bleeding at the table of a dance hall. He refused to name the hitmen, but a couple of years later he plotted a hit on the leader of the Dusters, the hit was successful.

Owney was later found guilty and was sentenced to 20 years at Sing Sing, he spent just 9 of them behind bars.

His nickname, was ‘The Killer’.

On this day, April 24, 1965, one of the most feared and influential gangsters of the Prohibition era drew his final breath. Owney Madden, the man they called "The Killer," died in Hot Springs, Arkansas, at the age of 73, bringing to a close a life that had taken him from the slums of Liverpool to the glittering heights of New York's criminal underworld.

Born in Leeds in 1891 and raised in Liverpool before emigrating to America, Madden found his feet — and his fists — on the brutal streets of Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. By his early twenties he was already a dominant force in the Gopher Gang, earning his chilling nickname through a reputation for ruthless violence. In 1912, however, death came knocking for Madden himself when three members of the rival Hudson Dusters gang ambushed him at a dance hall, shooting him at point-blank range and leaving him bleeding and riddled with bullets. That he survived at all was remarkable. True to the gangster's code, Madden refused to identify his attackers to the police, biding his time instead. Within a couple of years, he had orchestrated a successful hit on the Dusters' leader, settling the score in the only language the underworld truly understood.

Justice of the conventional kind caught up with him shortly afterwards, and Madden was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years at the notorious Sing Sing prison. He served nine years before being released in 1923, stepping back into a New York that had been transformed by Prohibition — and into an opportunity tailor-made for a man of his particular talents.

Madden quickly built a bootlegging empire of considerable scale and sophistication, producing and distributing his celebrated Madden's No. 1 beer across the city. He moved comfortably among the era's most powerful criminal figures, counting Lucky Luciano and the emerging syndicate bosses among his associates, and understood instinctively that cooperation was more profitable than conflict. His ownership of the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem placed him at the very centre of New York's cultural life during the Jazz Age, with the club attracting both the city's elite and its finest performers, all under Madden's watchful eye.

Sensing the winds changing after Prohibition's repeal and following further legal troubles, Madden wisely retreated to Hot Springs, Arkansas in the 1930s, where he lived out his remaining years in relative quiet, becoming a respected figure in that city's own shadow economy. Owney Madden remains one of the most compelling figures of the gangster era — a Liverpool-born street fighter who helped shape American organised crime at its most turbulent and transformative moment.