Career
He was the top underworld figure in southern New England, and last major Irish-American gangster in the region, until his kidnapping and apparent murder in 1933. Born in the Cumberland mill village of Valley Falls, Walsh was a clerk in a Pawtucket hardware store before he entered bootlegging in 1920. First driving alcohol shipments for other local bootleggers, by the mid-1920s, he had established a formidable bootlegging operation which included planes, automobiles and a fleet of boats, one of them the legendary rum-runner called the "Black Duck", earning him a reputation as one of the most successful, if not colorful, bootleggers on the east coast.
Considering himself a “gentleman farmer”, Walsh had spent much of his money on thoroughbreds which he raised for his farm in Charlestown, Rhode Island, although he owned two high-class apartments in the east side of Providence and a waterfront mansion in Charlestown.
Rhode Island was known for its lax enforcement of the Volstead Acting, being one of two states which refused to ratify the 18th Amendment. The federal government charged Walsh not with bootlegging but with tax evasion, regarding $350,000 in back taxes and penalties owed the Internal Revenue Service, although Walsh and authorities agreed on a lesser sum.
Following the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Walsh enjoyed enormous wealth as one of the country"s largest bootleggers. His attendance at the later Atlantic City Conference is disputed.
However, he appears to have been shut out along with many other Irish bootleggers and mobsters during the early 1930s, as Italian immigrant criminal groups assumed greater prominence.
In 1933, during the last months of Prohibition, Walsh was last seen at the Bank Cafe in Pawtuxet Village in Warwick, Rhode Island, after having dinner with six business associates on the night of February 2, 1933. Numerous rumors circulated about his disappearance, including his body being stuffed into a barrel filled with cement and dumped into the sea by a rum runner off Block Island, as well as unidentified witnesses who reported seeing several men using lime to fill a shallow grave. However, neither of these leads were investigated.
Over the next several years, police would often investigate unidentified murder victims in the hopes of finding Walsh.
However, as it was reported by the press “any time a suspicious corpse was found – in the Massachusetts or Rhode Island woods – or a skull turned up in a fishing Netto off Block Island, police checked it against Danny Walsh’s dental records.” Despite efforts by law enforcement, Walsh"s body was never recovered.
