CHICAGO’S MURDER MEN

Taranaki Daily News, 4 February 1930, Page 12

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 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 shirt-sleeves, 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 morn“No, I don't know any of the booze gangs, or any other .kind of "ang. I ve never seen any shooting, ana I don/t want I A bullet doesn't have to go into training!” Jack said an earful. THE GANGSTERY 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 he shakes.” I I should say he had reason for shak- ' ing. I met one of the minor gangsters who had been through police head quarters, and who had sat in the ‘ deatl chair” opposite this square-faced gentleman who wears horn-rimmed spectacles , and an expression of permanent siis nicion. Anything he said about Johr , Stege was uncomplimentary. : They call it the “death-chair be • cause the last eight gangsters who hap

been brought to police headquarters to answer questions and have sat in that chair are dead and have been burled with floral honours, THE BLACK HAND. They didn’t go to Joliet and stand with ropes round their necks and die respectably in the nam« 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 duty. . . To understand the gang war in Un-cao-o you must be acquainted with the elements which make for sudden dea tl. 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 w uc. bears the generic title of “racketeerin".” Racketeering may be brieflj and no°t too accurately described as the blackmailing of workmen and employImagine that in London thiee oi f°u r criminals got together, .Y en LJ° Un „„„t all the garages and said: ’You must join the 8 London Garage Protection Association.” The first of the , Cll^ l nals is the president, the second is the secretary, and the third is the treasurer. The organisation has .20 or sv desperate criminals, who will stop at no act of violence to further. the ob-. iects of the company. Imagine tha they went to every garage propreitor and said: “If you join our association we will give you protection, and then, to prove what that protection was cy set fire to all the garages which were not in the association, smashed up vehicles, punctured tyres, beat up 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 winch elect the State attorneys who are supposed to prosecute them, and a few oi the judges who try them,, and the Governor of the State, who has the power to pardon them. , This applies equally to every kind or racket. There was once a vice pm* veyor who, charged with rape, was pardoned before he was tried.

GUNS ARE PULLED. 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 riyal racketeering association that tries to muscle fn”°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. AU the ingredients which are put into commercial alcohol to make, .it unpalatable are 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.

SCAR-FACED AL. 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 movinrr spirits; and allied to and directing tiiese, so far. as madmen can be directed, were John Tbrrio and- his chief of staff,. whom Stege invariably speaks of as “Brown,” who. is known as Al Capone dr Scar-faced AU A fourth element in the skein of Chicago crime is the more legitimate 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 Torrid’s racket and Al Capone’s and Deau 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 witn all the' others is the vice and gambling racket. AU five were represented m the person of Jim Colomiso, when, distracted by threats of blackmail, and, conscious' of his own danger, he sent to New York and drought John Tor no to Chicago—John Torrio, lover of Italianopera, a pleasant, smiling- man, and merciless killer.