Madden, who owned Harlem’s famous Cotton Club in the 1920s, claimed that Kennedy's liquor was served there.
The Kennedys have consistently maintained that ‘the patriarch’ was neither a smuggler nor a bootlegger, and so has David Nasaw, Kennedy’s most recent biographer - neither in New England, where he lived until the eighth year of Prohibition, nor in metropolitan New York, where he lived and worked thereafter. Owney Madden, Joseph Bonanno, Frank Costello, and the Lower East Side’s Lansky-Siegel gang all claimed to have ties with Joseph Kennedy, father of the future U.S.
