CHICAGO'S MURDER MEN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 3 February 1930, Page 7

CHICAGO'S MURDER MEN

EDGAR WALLACE SUMS THEM UP * TWENTY BIG GANGS Edgar Wallace, master of detective fiction, has been studying various aspects of lawbreaking 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 Statos 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 consists 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 shirt sleeves, and discuss life and the peculiar and immediate problemsof 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 and two guests. I was one, Jack Dempsey was the other, and for three ' hours we sat talking and talking. Jack talked about the Tunncy light and his fight with Willard. He had never been hurt (touching wood) in anv 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 lights and draws as much as a thousand pounds for acting as referee. Ho 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 mo 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 rever seen any shooting, and I don't want! A bullet doesn't have to go into training!" ' Jack said an earful. THE GANGSTER IS YELLOW / 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 lie shakes." T 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-rimmed spectacles {•lid. an expression of permanent suspicion. Anything he said about John 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. THE BLACK HAND 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 with 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 dr.ty. To understand the gang war in Ghicago 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':s 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- \t* denizens may be in the booze game or the vice game, and probably are. You. must then visualise an immenseand complicated organisation which bears the generic title of "racketeering." Racketeering may be briefly and not too accurately described as the blackmailing or 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, punctured tyres, beat np drivers from the non-associated 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 the power to pardon them. This applies equally to every kind ot racket. There, was once a vice purveyor who, charged with rape, was pardoned before he was tried. GUNS ARE PULLED There arc 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 £2 to £3 a day for distilling denatured alcohol into alcohol that is not denatured. All the injr'-dients which are p t

into commercial alcohol to make it unpalatable are extracted by "these "alky cookers," avlio are working for a master wlio pays them well, protects them, furnishes them with the raw material, which costs about 50 cents a gallon and which, when distilled, fetches from two to live dollars a gallon. SCAR -FACED AL Protecting these is a very powerful body of gangsters, who arc the "big shots" in the gang war. To generalise roughly: six brothers named Genua, 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 and his chief of staff, whom Stege invariably speaks of as "Brown," who is known as Al Capone, or Scar-faced Al. A fourth clement in the skein of Chicago crime is the more lcgitimato business of beer./ Bootlegged beer is good beer, because it 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, *.ymie Weiss, and culminated in tho St. Valentine's Day murder, when seven men were stood against the wall and mowed down by machine-gun. The fifth clement ' which mingles with all the others is the vice and gambling racket. AH five were represented in the person of Jim Colo-, miso, 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.