Meaning

noun United States labor leader (born in Ireland) who helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World (1830-1930)

noun United States railroad engineer who died trying to stop his train from crashing into another train; a friend wrote a famous ballad describing the incident (1864-1900)

noun United States golfer (1902-1971)

originEd Boland, in an article in March 2002 of the The New York Times, attributes the term to heroin addicts who frequented Great Jones Alley in New York City, off Great Jones Street between Broadway and Lafayette Street, although the slang term has obviously been around much longer. Dan Waldorf states that the use of the term, in the sense of addiction, originated among heroin addicts.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0