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If the Old West Outlaws get a lot of historic attention, a close second are the gangsters of the 1920’s Prohibition era and the 1930’s Depression period. Feared and revered, these American gangsters often controlled liquor sales, gambling, and prostitution, while making popular, silk suits, diamond rings, guns, booze, and broads. 2019-6-22 Events In a prelude to the Castellammarese War in New York City, New York mob boss Joe Masseria attempts to mediate a dispute between Chicago gangsters Al Capone and Joe Aiello However, Aiello ignores Masseria's peacemaking and later threatens him.
Some Tribune headlines of the 1920s and 1930s — like '6 Wounded in 4 Gun Affrays; Gangs Fight Running Battle' — could be recycled today, drive-by shootings being a common denominator of Chicago then and now.
Yet while today's coverage of gang violence is appropriately sober, crime reporters of the Jazz Age felt no need to emotionally distance themselves from their subject matter. They would parse the style of a murder like drama critics analyzing a theatrical production: 'Two killings of the traditional 'ride' variety occurred yesterday in Chicago,' the Trib observed on Oct. 20, 1932. Poetic allusion prevailed over straight reporting, as in a 1930 account of a mobster who 'came to the end of gunman's trail last night.'
Some of the dialogue from Prohibition-era crime stories reads like a script of a gangster movie, as when a cop tried to get a stricken racketeer to finger his assailant. 'I'm going for good. Let me die in peace,' he whispered,' the Trib reported of the 1930 bedside plea of James McManus, a beer runner. And above all else, the Tribune felt an obligation to keep the reading public fully informed of the bad guys' nicknames. Tribune clips are dotted with colorful monikers like 'Mossy,' 'Big Steve,' 'Little Hymie, 'Dutch,' 'Spike' and 'The Scourge.'
Once again, Chicago is confronted by a seemingly intractable problem of gang violence, just as it faced in the 1920s. But back then, the forces of law and order were handicapped by a popular-culture romanticization of the gangster. Hollywood and the media made household names of mobsters who held huge swaths of the city in their deadly grasp, and reduced elected officials to being their lackeys. For the Tribune, it was an era of journalistic civil war between its Editorial page and its news columns — the former decrying lawlessness, the latter feeding the public's seemingly inexhaustible hunger for tales of tough guys with blazing guns.
In a 1925 editorial, the paper noted: 'Why should the criminal worry? If he's caught, there's the grand jury. If he's indicted, there's the trial. If he's convicted, there's the Supreme Court. If his sentence is upheld, there's still the board of pardons and parole and a governor widely heralded for his benevolence. And through all these vicissitudes the constant aid of shrewd and unscrupulous lawyers, lax bail laws, and the sort of help that can be bought with crooked money.'
Almost as if to make the Tribune's point, when South Side mobster 'Diamond Joe' Esposito celebrated his son's christening that year, the guests included two sitting judges, a former judge, the clerk of probate court and a U.S. senator. 'My fren's are de beegest an' highest men in the ceety,' Esposito bragged, according to the Trib's report. Three years later, Esposito was killed in a drive-by shooting while sitting on his front steps. The day he died, U.S. Sen. Charles Deneen publicly praised Esposito as a loyal and generous friend. The day of the funeral, the senator's house was bombed, the most high-profile event from the infamous Pineapple Primary that pitted Deneen's camp against corrupt Mayor William 'Big Bill' Hale Thompson.
Of course many Chicagoans, unlike Esposito's A-list guests, declined to make their peace with the mobsters' hold over the life of the city. In July 1925, the Trib reported a meeting at Senn High School of neighbors angered by the reign of lawlessness on the city's streets. As the meeting let out, a motorist was shot and his car was stolen just a few blocks away. In Chicago Heights, residents formed an anti-mobster vigilante group. And when gangs shot it out on the Boul Mich, a police captain complained: 'It used to be a shot in the dark upon some remote prairie, with a dead man or two found the next morning. But Michigan Avenue at noon, and sixteen shootings at once — that's going a little strong.'
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Still, editorial writers, concerned citizens and indignant cops were fighting an uphill battle in trying raise the public's ire against mobsters, as Page One stories and movies were making them celebrities. A gangland funeral, especially if the guest of honor hadn't died of natural causes, got the kind of gushing coverage usually reserved for a society wedding. 'Sammy (Samoots) Amatuna will be laid away, barring police interference, in a festival of death probably as elaborate as that funeral of funerals, that of the late Dean O'Banion,' the Trib predicted on the eve of a 1925 funeral.
O'Banion, a mobster who doubled as a florist, was the victim of an assassin who cased his shop pretending to order flowers for another mobster's funeral. Of Amatuna's passing, the Trib noted that he was mortally wounded by two gunmen in a Roosevelt Road barber shop 'where he had just been manicured and shaved preparatory, as he then supposed, to an evening at the opera.' Winding its way through the Little Italy neighborhood, the paper noted, the funeral cortege passed 'Death Corner,' the Near North Side site of many gangland slayings.
When the Cabrini-Green housing development subsequently was built nearby, the neighborhood experienced another wave of gangland killings. In both generations, the economic engine driving the violence was the money to be made dealing in an illicit product — drugs in recent times, booze during Prohibition. The profit margin encouraged mobsters to try to grab as much market share as possible via 'men with quick revolvers,' as the Tribune put it in 1925.
Of the Jazz Age gangsters, one of the most ruthless was Al Capone, who methodically eliminated rival bootleggers. When seven of his gang were machine-gunned in a North Side garage on St. Valentine's Day 1929, George 'Bugs' Moran promptly retired, reportedly observing, 'Only Capone kills like that.'
These bootleggers met the public's thirst for alcohol during the widely unpopular Prohibition years, enabling the press to make quasi-heroes of mobsters or simply fascinating fodder with which to sell newspapers.
In late December 1922, Edward Gorman, a minor league hoodlum, ran off with Lillian Ginsberg, the 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Chicago bondsman, which led to a race between her father's clients and the police to find the couple. When they surfaced, Eddie tried to square things by claiming they'd gotten married. The alleged bride said she could neither affirm or deny his excuse. 'I must have been drunk,' she said, 'because I don't remember marrying Eddie.'
Gangsters' family lives were steady fodder for slow news days, as in the story of Florence Murphy Oberta. A 'Gun Widow,' as the Tribune dubbed her, she married and buried two ill-fated mobsters in rapid succession: 'Love, in the span of twenty short months made her a connoisseur of coffins,' the paper noted.
Gangsters' mothers were another standby subject, especially if they stood by their offspring. When one took the witness stand pleading for her son to be spared a hangman's rope, a Tribune reporter pulled out all the stops. His description of Angelina Vinci could have gone straight to the working script for Hollywood movie, without the slightest editing: 'In black dress, black crepe shawl over her smooth hair, she looked the classic mother of the poor, the figure that kneels before comforting saints in dim cathedrals the world over.'
Copy Link Dismiss Copy LinkWilliam J. HelmerAlthough the term 'gangster' is used for any criminal from the 1920s or 30s that operated in a group, it refers to two different breeds.Mobsters belonged to organized crime rings. They generally lived in large cities, and most were immigrants, or children of immigrants.
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Many of these criminal gangs were protected by urban politicians and police. While the Italian mafia was the largest and most powerful, other ethnic groups also had organized crime rings, most notably Jews and the Irish. While the different groups certainly competed with each other, by the early 1930s they are starting to collaborate more closely because public opposition to gang violence makes them so conspicuous.Outlaws typically came from rural areas in the Midwest, Southwest, or the West. According to FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis, 'Most of the top-flight hoodlums of the Middle West were 100-per-cent American boys with no foreign background whatsoever.' The term 'outlaw' applied to robbers, kidnappers, or occasionally, murderers. They followed in the tradition of Western outlaws such as Jesse James, except that after a hold-up, they used cars instead of horses for their getaway.
Hence they were also called 'auto bandits' or desperadoes.Mobsters earned their money by providing illegal goods and services. They were most famous for bootlegging, but also managed gambling, prostitution, and abortion. While outlaws operated independently of mobsters, they did rely on organized gangs for the tools of the trade - firearms, bulletproof vests, and armored cars. They could use the organized rings to pay for hide-outs and police protection. They could also arrange for legal assistance or medical care.
Whether outlaws were wounded in a gunfight or simply became ill, they risked capture by going to an ordinary doctor. For an exorbitant fee, an underworld doctor would treat them and not notify the authorities. The outlaws sometimes took on special jobs for the criminal rings, like murdering an enemy, that a particular organization wanted done but didn't want to take the blame for.The outlaws were relatively democratic. Each gang member received a share of the loot in proportion to the level of participation.
Mobsters, on the other hand, belonged to a hierarchical structure organized like a corporation — hence the name 'syndicate.' The Chicago Syndicate was the country's largest and most powerful organized crime operation. Its chief, Al Capone, controlled all underworld operations in the Chicago area. Capone lived so lavishly and openly that Chicago newspapers wrote about him in their gossip columns.
He cultivated good public relations by donating money to charity, and opening soup kitchens during the Depression.Throughout the 1920s mobsters engaged in street battles over issues of control. Gang warfare reached its climax in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. On February 14, 1929, seven men were killed in a Chicago garage by five unknown men wearing police uniforms.
Witnesses were unable to establish their identity, and the coroner's jury did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute anyone. Al Capone was blamed for the Massacre, even though he was in Florida at the time. To this day, the perpetrators' identity remains a mystery.The St. Valentine's Day Massacre shocked the American public more than any previous street violence, because it resembled an execution. People blamed Prohibition for this violence, and began to favor its repeal.Meanwhile, outlaws were successfully robbing banks throughout the Midwest.
Besides the automobile, they were assisted by new hard-surfaced highways, and the Rand-McNally Road Atlas, which first came out in 1924. Robberies were easier in the Midwest than other parts of the country because small Midwestern towns usually lacked adequate police forces.
The long distances between towns also made getaways feasible.Due to the expansion of newspaper wire services and the radio, bank robberies could become national news instantaneously. Criminals became national celebrities, who symbolized the public's lack of faith in society's crumbling institutions. While the public found their notoriety exciting, the government did not. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover targeted them for pursuit. By 1935, all the famous outlaws had been killed or captured by FBI special agents.Fearing the end of Prohibition, mafia leaders held their first national conference from May 13-15, 1929, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They solidified the networks formed through bootlegging to become national in scope.
Mobsters expanded their markets to racketeering and legitimate enterprises. Violence became more discreet, as street battles became a thing of the past. Ironically, while the syndicates became less visible in American society, their power increased dramatically.
Related Features. ArticleDuring the Great Depression, casting gangsters as heroes created a new film genre that symbolized the decay of American society, as well as the fear that traditional values would not survive the economic crisis. ArticleRead about the growth from Bureau of Investigation (BOI) to Division of Investigation (DOI) to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). ArticleFrechette served two years in federal prison for harboring her criminal lover.Footer Information and Navigation.
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