Patrick Campbell

Patrick Campbell is the author of: A Molly Maguire Story; Memories of Dungloe; Death in Templecrone; The Last Days of Oscar Devenney: Tunnel Tigers; Who Killed Franklin Gowen; The Ghosts of Innisfree; Terror at the World Trade Center. From 1960 until 1975 he was theater critic and book editor for The Jersey Journal; from 1965 until 1995 he was a columnist for The Irish Echo.

In 1995, he appeared in two segments of the Disney documentary “Long Journey Home, the Irish in America.” He’s also appeared in these documentaries: “The Real Story of the Molly Maguires” on The History Channel; “The Molly Maguires on the Discovery Channel; “The Molly Maguires” on BBC.

Patrick was marketing communications manager for the World Trade Center until he retired in 1996, after a marketing career with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that lasted 35 years.

He is a graduate of Rutgers University with a masters in English.

Email: pathcampbe@aol.com

The 1993 Bombing of the World Trade Center: Unanswered Questions

Jan. 3, 2013

Editor’s Note: The first Al Qaeda attack on the American homeland was the February 26, 1993 bombing at The World Trade Center, a complex owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. This attack killed six people and injured more than a thousand. It also traumatized millions of people in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area.

Even though this was the most destructive bomb attack suffered by American civilians in a time of peace, it took more than 10 years for authorities at all levels of government to admit that America had been attacked by terrorists who were encouraged and protected by foreign nations. It took just as long to admit that the organization that was responsible for 9/11 was also responsible for the 1993 attack.

Patrick Campbell was in the lobby of the North Tower when the bomb exploded in the basement 20 feet below him. A marketing manager for the Port Authority, Campbell describes the chaos that enveloped the Trade Center in the aftermath of the explosion and the many questions that still haunt him about this terrible day.

by Patrick Campbell

At approximately 11:30 a.m., a Ryder van rolled at a leisurely pace northwards on West Street in Lower Manhattan towards the underground parking garage at the World Trade Center, located on West and Vesey streets. Eyad Ismoil was at the wheel and Ramzi Yousef, the terrorist leader, sat beside him. Following the van in a red getaway car was Mohammed Salameh and Mahmud Abouhalima, with Abouhalima at the wheel.

The four men were part of an Al Qaeda terrorist cell based in Jersey City, New Jersey, and they were now completing a mission that they had been working on for the previous five months. Yousef is a nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who planned the 9/11 attack.

The van entered the World Trade Center parking garage and Abouhalima continued to drive the red getaway car for half a block and then turned right into Vesey Street, which is the northern boundary of the World Trade Center site. Vesey Street is a very wide street and Abouhalima had no problem double parking while he waited for Yousef and Ismoil to emerge from the garage.

The garage seemed empty as the van arrived on the second level below the street [the Basement 2 level], but for a moment Yousef thought they had a problem when he saw a Port Authority van, the same size and color as the Ryder van, parked in the spot previously selected by Yousef to park the Ryder van. However, the Port Authority van suddenly started up and headed off towards the exit, and Ismoil swung the Ryder van in and took its place.

While Ismoil kept an eye out, Yousef lit four fuses, three of which were back-ups in case the first one failed, and then he closed and locked the back of the van, while Ismoil locked the front doors, and both then strolled across the garage to the elevators servicing the North Tower lobby. When they arrived in the lobby they exited through the West Street entrance and within four minute of lighting the fuse they were in Abouhalima’s getaway car and were speeding away from the World Trade Center. The fuse would burn for another seven minutes and then the bomb would explode. By this time, the terrorists were in the Holland Tunnel on their way to Jersey City.

Who Killed Franklin Gowen?

May 14, 2012

Franklin Benjamin Gowen

Patrick H. Campbell makes the case that the death of industrialist Franklin Gowen was a murder, not a suicide. His long investigation into this case was detailed in his book Who Killed Franklin Gowen? Copies of that book may be purchased by sending $20 to P.H. Campbell, 82 Bentley Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07304 ($25 in Canada, $30 for any other country).

by Patrick Campbell

On June 21, 1877, a group of 10 Irish union activists named the Molly Maguires (Mollies) were executed in Pennsylvania in a mass execution of trade union members and their sympathizers. One of those executed was Alec Campbell, the author’s grand uncle.

These executions were organized by Franklin Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad and Coal Company. Gowen sent 10 more union members to the gallows in the two years that followed. All of the Molly Maguires were members of the Workers Benevolent Society (WBA), the miners’ union.

After publishing a book entitled A Molly Maguire Story, which focused on Gowen’s war on the Workers Benevolent Association, I decided to investigate the death of Franklin Gowen, who was found dead in 1889 in a Washington D.C. hotel bedroom with a bullet in his head and a gun by his side. The investigation was published in a book entitled Who Killed Franklin Gowen? The following is an excerpt from this book.

Who Killed Franklin Gowen is an analysis of the death of Franklin Gowen, whose death in a Washington D.C. hotel room in December 1889 was characterized by James Wormley, owner of Wormley’s Hotel where the body was found, as a suicide. Robert Linden, the manager of the Pinkerton Detective Agency who investigated the death of Gowen, agreed with him, and so did Francis Innes Gowen, Franklin’s nephew and business partner. William Patterson, the Washington coroner, who had been out of town when the death was discovered and had not examined the body at the scene of the death, went along with the conclusion of the other three men and pronounced Gowen’s death a suicide.

But Gowen’s wife and daughter claimed that Franklin Gowen would never have committed suicide, and the deputy coroner and senior members of the Washington Police Department stated that the circumstantial evidence clearly pointed to murder, and demanded a full investigation. The coroner, however, still insisted that the death was suicide, and the suicide verdict stood in spite of the public dispute with the police and the huge media coverage which was claiming that the Molly Maguires had got even with Franklin Gowen.

Mad Dog Coll

March 26, 2012

Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll

Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll

Vincent Coll, better known as Mad Dog Coll, was not a typical New York gangster. He was very young when he began a career of violent crime – only a teenager – and only 23 years old when he was killed in a hail of bullets in a Manhattan drug store. Yet, he had become the leader of his own gang and one of the most notorious criminals in New York at the time of his death.

by Patrick Campbell

Mad Dog Coll was a creature of his own invention. Shut out of controlling a slice of New York’s lucrative liquor trade during Prohibition, he started in his own gang and crashed the party. He was very different in another way: Coll robbed other gangsters by kidnapping them for ransom, and towards the end of his career he set himself up as an assassin who would accept contracts from one prominent gangster who wanted to kill a rival.

And finally, he was an Irish-born gangster who was born in Bunbeg, Co Donegal, and was one of the few Irish-born and the only Donegal-born gangster in New York during the glory days of the gangsters, in the first half of the Twentieth Century.