CHICAGO S MURDER GANGS

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 109, 1 February 1930, Page 29

CHICAGO S MURDER GANGS

ACCORDING TO EDGAR WALLACE

Edgar Wallace, master of detective fiction, has. been studying various aspects of law-breaking during his recent tour of the United States, and writing in the. “Daily Mail,” throws some light on American crime.

.' The most exclusive club in . the United States is to be found in the city of Chicago—in a sense the greatest and most American of all American cities. The membership of this club con-sists-of the heads of departments of a great Chicago newspaper. They meet at one o’clock in the morning,.after the paper has "gone..to bed,” and sit round a big table, mainly in their shirtsleeves, and discuss life and the peculiar and immediate problems of the world.

The managing-editor sat at one end of the table, a mild and charming man whom you might well think was a senator. The editor sat on my left, a keen, good-looking man in the middle forties. The sporting editor, the night editor, the publisher, the master printer and two guests. I was one, Jack Dempsey was the other, and for three hours we sat talking and talking. Jack talked about the Tunney fight and- his fight with Willard. He had never been hurt (touching wood) in any fight he ever. had. He:gave a perfectly logical and convincing explanation as to why he lost the 'fight with - Tunney. Oh, no, he’s not coming back or even attempting to come back. He is a promoter of fights and draws as much as a thousand pounds for acting as referee. He brought the sporting editor to his feet to illustrate what was foul and what was fair, in fighting. But he said nothing quite as illuminating'as when he was driving me home to my hotel at four in the morning. • “No, I don’t know any of the booze gangs, or any other kind of gang. I’ve never seen any shooting, and I don’t want! A bullet doesn’t have to go into training!” Jack said an earful. • John Stege, Deputy-Commissioner and chief of the detective force of Chicago, put it another way. “The gangster is yellow; take away his gun and he shakes.” I should say he had reason for shaking. I met one of the minor gangsters who had been through police headquarters, and who had sat in the “death chair” opposite this squarefaced gentleman who wears horn-rim-med spectacles and an expression of permanent suspicion Anything he said about John Stege was uncomplimentary. . . „ , They call it 'the “death-chair” because the last eight gangsters who have been brought to police headquarters to answer questions and have sat in that chair are dead and have been buried with floral honours. They , didn’t go to Joliet and stand with ropes round their necks and die respectably in the name of the law. They have been found by the roadside with from five to ten bullets in their bodies or have been discovered by police patrols, huddled in doorways; or have been found by odd people in abandoned motor-cars, lying on the floor with their legs on the seat. The main thing Is that they are dead. Gangland vengeance is swifter than the law, more terrible, more certain. Up at police headquarters there is a large frame filled w’lth the badges of officers who have been killed in the execution of their duty. Eleven died this year. There is no frame for the two score gangsters whom the police have killed in the execution of their duty , To understand the gang war in Chicago you must be acquainted with the elements which make for sudden death. You must suppose first of all the existence of a Black Hand organisation, a Mafia in miniature. This is an entity which is independent of, yet with its finger in, every racket; an organisation-which blackmails and kidnaps and murders. It is

a little world of its own; its denizens may be in the booze game or the vice game, and probably are. You' must then visualise an immense and complicated organisation which bears the generic title of “racketeering.” Racketeering may be briefly and not too ■ accurately described as the blackmailing of workmen and employers.

Imagine that in London three or four criminals got together, went round to all the garages and said: “You must join the London Garage Protection Association.” The first of the criminals is the president, the second is the secretary, and the third is the treasurer. The organisation has 20 or 30 desperate criminals, who will stop at no act of violence to further the objects of the company. Imagine that they went to every garage proprietor and said: “If you join our association we will give you protection,” and then, to prove what that protection was they set fire to all the garages which were not in the association, smashed up vehicles, punctufed tires, beat up drivers from the non-associat-ed garages, and then try- to understand (this is the hardest bit) that.the police are Perfectly impotent to deal with this type of crime, because the racketeers subscribe largely to political funds which elect the' State attorneys who are supposed to prosecute them, and a few of the judges who try them, and the Governor of the State, who has power to pardon them. . This applies equally to every kind or racket There was once a vice purveyor who, charged with rape, was pardoned before he was tried. There are about 20 big associations in Chicago which are run on the lines I have indicated. The association does nothing, draws big money, and offers only the protection from any rival racketeering association that tries to “muscle in” on their province. Then the guns are pulled and the rival companies shot up. The third element to be considered is the booze element. All over Chicago, in little tenement houses, poor Italian labourers are earning from £- to £3 a day for distilling denatured alcohol into alcohol that is not denatured. All tfee ingredients which are put into commercial alcohol to make it unpalatable arc extracted by these “alky cookers,” who are working for a master who pays them well, protects them, furnishes them with the raw material, which costs 50 cents a gallon and which, when distilled, fetches from two to five dollars a gallon. Protecting these is a very powerful body of gangsters, who are the “big shots” in the gang war. To generalise roughly: six brothers named Genna, three of whom are in that heaven where angels carry automatics, were the moving spirits; and allied to and directing these, so far as madmen can be directed, were John Torrio anil his chief of staff, whom Stege invariably speaks of as “Brown,” who is known as Al Capone or Sear-faced Al. A fourth element in the skein of Chicago crime is the more legitimate business of beer. Bootlegged beer is good beer, because is is brewed in Chicago, and, curiously enough, it is brewed in a brewery that always has been a brewery and which is still a brewery. Behind this beer racket is the most powerful of all the crime organisations. It is Torrio’s racket and Al Capone’s and Dean O’Banion’s. It brought Dean to his death and founded the feud which killed his successor, Hymie Weiss, and culminated in the St. Valentine’s Day murder, when seven men were stood against the wall and mowed down by a machine-gun. The fifth ’element which mingles with all the others is the vice and gambling racket. All five were represented in the person of Jim Colomiso, when, distracted by threats of blackmail, and, conscious of his own danger, he sent to New York and brought John Torrio to Chicago—John Torrio, a lover of Italian opera, a pleasant, smiling man, and a merciless killer.