In 1912, he was arrested for shooting and killing John "Christie" Maroney, who led a faction of White Handers from the Navy Yard section of Brooklyn.
On the afternoon of March 31, 1920, Dinny Meehan and his wife Sadie were asleep in bed at their apartment at 452 Warren Street in Red Hook.
A total of five shots were fired; one passed through Dinny Meehan's head and then lodged in the shoulder of his wife, who later recovered from her wounds.
At the time of the killing, however, police believed that a possible motive was the gang leader's role in supplying strikebreakers to take the places of employees of the United Fruit Company on piers along the Hudson and East Rivers.
Sadie Meehan told police in November 1923 that her husband's killer was, in fact, Wild Bill Lovett, head of the arch-rival Jay Street Gang.