January 9, 2012 • 26 mins
For every Al Capone, there was a cast of lesser-known men who were often just as dangerous. In this episode, Sarah and Deblina explore the lives of gangsters such as "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn and Roger "The Terrible" Touhy. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blie to chalk reporting, and I'm fair down
and people can't seem to get enough of gangster stories.
When we did the recent podcast on John Dillinger, listener
(00:22):
Tories suggested on Facebook that we do a continuing series
on nine twenties and thirties gangsters, and that got me
thinking of all those gangsters throughout history that sort of
became the supporting characters of the gangster world, so to speak,
just in the sense that they're not necessarily as well
known as the Capones and the Dillingers, but they were
still public enemies in their own right. They might have
(00:44):
been really the guys who are out there doing the
dirty work too. You might hear their names pop up
in gangster movies now and again, though often their stories
are changed a bit to fit whatever plot line they're
a part of. But in this episode, we're going to
take a closer look at a few of these sort
of side characters who have popped up in our gangster
research over and over along the way, and we'll try
(01:06):
to find out who they really were, and in some
cases see where they fit into the bigger picture of
nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties gangsters, whether they're kind of
outliers or maybe key players. Yeah, and this is partially
inspired by Lizzie to who edits our podcast, because after
the Dillinger podcast, she wanted to know a little bit
(01:27):
more about baby Face Nelson, in particular because he came
up and she loved how we described him as a psychopath.
She was like, I want to know more about this guy.
So just for you, Lizzy will kick off the list
with baby Face Nelson. Indeed, so this gangster's nickname makes
him sound sweet, but he was really a ruthless killer,
as we learned in the Dillinger episode. He was born
Luster M. Gillis on December eighth, nineteen o six, in Chicago,
(01:51):
and he was a pretty small kid. He was not
someone that you would expect to be frightened by. He
was barely five ft five, so maybe that's why he
felt like he had to be the toughest kid around
to survive from the very beginning, and he really did
start early. He started out running with a crew of
juvenile delinquents and by his teen years he was already
moving up to stealing cars, and his fellow gang members
(02:14):
already had started to call him baby Face by this
time because he just looked so young for his age,
and he was, as we mentioned, kind of a smaller kid.
So baby Face eventually transitioned out of auto theft and
joined the Capone mob. His job was to keep labor
union guys on line, but he was way too into
his work. He kept killing people that he was just
(02:35):
supposed to be kind of roughing up and intimidating a bit,
and this was kind of his trademark, being way too
reckless and quick to kill people. He didn't plan his
jobs to avoid violence or seemed to follow any sort
of gangster code. He just went in guns blazing. He
wasn't really thinking of the business side of being a gangster,
it sounds like. So he was ultimately asked to leave
(02:57):
the Capone gang, maybe the only person to get kicked
out of that group for being too violent that by that.
But around the same time, in about eight he met
and married a sales girl named Helen Waznach and started
holding up jewelry stores and banks in order to support her,
(03:17):
and he got caught after robbing a Chicago bank in
January nineteen thirty one, and ended up spending a year
in prison. He escaped though, in February of nineteen thirty
two while he was being transported between facilities for hearing,
and Helen was waiting for him in a car and
helped him escape. So after that they moved to California,
where Nelson became involved in bootlegging for a while, and
(03:38):
that's also where he met John Paul Chase, another liquor
smuggler slash gangster, and the two of them became really
close friends and partners in crime. Chase would supposedly introduce
Nelson as his half brother sometimes, but by about the
summer of nineteen thirty three, Nelson had done pretty much
all he could do in California's bootlegging business, so he
(03:59):
and Helen packed it up and moved back to the
Midwest and he got involved in robbing banks again. Chase
eventually joined up with them, and then, of course, as
we know from our recent episode about the first Public
Enemy Number one, Nelson joined up with the Dillinger Gang
after Dillinger so famously escaped from Crown Point in jail
in nineteen thirty four, and Nelson worked with the Dillinger
(04:22):
gang for a while, pulling off several jobs, and was
with them during that big showdown with the FBI at
Little Bohemia Lodge, which of course we talked about in
a lot more detail during the Dillinger episode. Nelson killed
one federal agent during that encounter and wounded at least
a couple more, and he and his wife and Chase
all went to California and were there when Dillinger was
(04:44):
shot and killed in Chicago. Nelson got promoted so to
speak to the public Enemy number one spot after that,
but he didn't really do what Dillinger did, which was
sort of trying to Compingstown a little bit since he
had so much heat on him. He didn't lay low
at all. In fact, he returned to the Midwest and
was implicated in several crimes. It almost seemed like he
(05:06):
wanted to live up to his new title liked the
idea of being public Enemy number one. So on November
nineteen thirty four, Nelson and Chase stole a car in
Chicago and drove into Wisconsin. The FBI was on the
lookout for them, of course, and by the next day
a couple of agents had spotted the stolen vehicle, so
(05:27):
the agents and Nelson and Chase all got involved in
a shootout near Barrington, Illinois, and both the agents were
killed as a result of the shootout, and Nelson was
also mortally wounded. He did manage to get back into
the car, though, and drove off with Chase that died
at about eight pm that day. The FBI found his
(05:49):
body the next day near a cemetery in Niles Center, Illinois,
and it had been stripped to delay identification. So he
usually appears as a support warding character in gangster films,
including the nineteen seventy three movie Dillinger, but as we
can see, he was a lot of trouble in his
own right. I was also trying to remember I think
(06:09):
he's in a brother where Art Now. He has a
little part in that where he gives bank robbing with him,
and he's just totally crazy and and kind of fits
what we've just learned here in the podcast. There you go.
So though he has a pretty intimidating nickname, this next
gangster on our list may have been one of the
least tough and scary of all the ones we're going
(06:30):
to talk about He was born George Kelly Barnes in
eighteen ninety five eighteen ninety seven. Sources kind of different
on that in Memphis, Tennessee, and he became known later
as machine Gun Kelly, but he actually started out his
life of crime as a common bootlegger. He started going
by the alias of George R. Kelly and his bootlegging
days supposedly to preserve his family name, and that was
(06:53):
a good thing too, because he did end up serving
some jail time. He spent a year in leve and
Worth in Kansas around nineteen twenty seven or so after
he was caught selling liquor on an Indian reservation. So
when he got out of prison, Kelly went back to
bootlegging and was involved in some hold ups thanks to
these bank robber contacts that he'd made in prison. But
(07:14):
really at that point he was still a pretty small
time criminal. It's after he met his second wife, Katherine Thorne,
around nineteen thirty that things really started to change. So
Catherine had a bit of a criminal background herself. Her
parents ran a fugitive farm in Texas where criminals could
pay by the night to hide out from the law.
This was news to me that such a thing existed,
(07:37):
a fugitive farm. It's like a B and B for
con convicts. Um. But Katherine herself had also been arrested
for various crimes, and she really had bigger ambitions for
her husband than for him to just be a common bootlegger.
She wanted him to be a real criminal. And so
a lot of historians think it's Catherine that created the
(07:57):
whole machine gun Kelly persona. And she's also said to
have been the first one who bought George a Thompson
machine gun and made him practice with it, and um
made him, made him kind of talk to other criminals,
and would talk him up herself to criminals that they knew. Yeah,
I think she was the first to kind of throw
that machine gun Kelly thing around, just visiting places, you know,
(08:19):
bars at night and there my husband machine gun Kelly. Yeah.
So he became fairly proficient with the machine gun, and
he carried it with him on jobs. But apparently there's
no evidence that machine gun Kelly ever actually fired a
machine gun at a person or killed anyone with it.
I think the name alone really does the trick. I
think it does. It's intimidation works wonders. So they pulled
(08:41):
off a few bank jobs, but again pretty small time stuff.
The payoff wasn't that great, so in three they decided
to try their hands at kidnapping, and they picked Charles Erschel,
a wealthy oil tycoon, as their target. But it wasn't
the smoothest crime ever. They made some mistakes kind of
right off the bat. First stoff, they didn't know what
(09:01):
Herschel looked like, so they burst in on Erschel and
his wife and another couple, the Jarrett's, while they were
playing bridge on July twenty two, ninety three. But since
they couldn't figure out who Herschel was and no one
in the room would help him out, I mean, they
asked around, but no one was willing to say, so
they ended up taking both men and they finally found
some idea on Jarrett after they were on the road,
(09:23):
and then stole fifty dollars from them and kicked him
out of the car and machine gun. Kelly and company
asked for a two hundred thousand dollar ransom, which they
did collect nine days after the kidnapping. They released Herschel unharmed,
and George and Catherine Kelly split the ransom money with
their accomplices and then went off on their own. They
dyed their hair, they switched locations a lot to try
(09:46):
to throw the authorities off their scent, but they kept Chicago.
It's kind of their home base and whenever they were
back in Chicago. They lived a very lavish lifestyle during
that time and it only took the FBI a couple
of months to catch up up with them. For one thing,
they had recorded the serial numbers of the ransom money,
so that helped. Also, Herschel was a pretty smart guy,
(10:07):
and even though he was blindfolded during the entire ordeal,
he was able to recall a lot of details and
share them with the authority. So he remembered like the
sounds of men and women talking, and he would record
the number of footsteps that he would make from one
place to another and report those details. That really helped
a lot later and figuring the whole thing out. And
(10:28):
it I mean it did help because machine Gun Kelly
and Katherine were caught the morning of September twenty, nineteen
thirty three, in Memphis, where they were hiding out with
some friends. They were both really hungover at the time,
and legend has it that that morning, after they were
surrounded by the authorities, Kelly cried out, quote, don't shoot.
G men, don't shoot, and thus coined the term g
(10:51):
men to refer to government agents. According to the FBI,
this probably didn't really happen, and it's more likely the
result of faulty or parting, but still a pretty good story.
I have always wondered who first thought of that. Yes,
so legend has it that that's where that came from,
but maybe not, who knows. In October of that year,
(11:11):
George and Catherine Kelly were both convicted and sentenced to
life in prison. So machine Gun Kelly spent the rest
of his life at Alcatraz and at Love and Worth,
where he died of a heart attack in July of
nineteen fifty four, and Catherine was actually released in nineteen
fifty eight and ended up living out her days in Oklahoma.
I think there you go. And interestingly enough, the next
(11:33):
guy on our list also has the same name, machine Gun,
although in this case it is Jack mcgern machine Gun
Jack mcgern. And we've talked about this gangster before in
the St. Valentine's Day massacre episode, and in fact he's
considered by many people to be the one who orchestrated
the whole Saint Valentine's Day massacre for Capone. If you
(11:55):
heard that episode, you'll remember that mcgern claimed he'd been
in bed all morning. This girlfriend, a blonde named Louise Rolf,
who became known famously as the Blonde Alibi and machine
Gun Jack, was never brought to trial for that crime.
But mcgern had an interesting career before that point too.
He was born James Vincenzo de Mora in Chicago's Little
(12:16):
Italy neighborhood in nineteen o four, and in his teenage
years he was a boxer under the name Battling Jack mcgern.
He should promise at that time as a welterweight. His
career the boxer kind of changed course though, in NT three,
when his father, who was a grocer, was murdered by
a gang known as the Jenna Gang. That's Jenna with
a G. And after that mcgern quit boxing and turned
(12:40):
full time to getting revenge for his father's death. He
taught himself how to shoot a weapon. He went to
work for al Capone, who was still at this point
getting established, but also still at this point the Jenna
gang's main rival. Because mcgern had this vendetta fuelling him
and he was getting pretty handy with a gun, Poe
sent him after the Jennat gangs guys. So mcgern ended
(13:03):
up killing six of their gang members within a few weeks.
And each time he killed a guy, he'd put a
nickel in that guy's lifeless hand, And this was supposedly
a reference to how the people who had killed his
father had called him a quote nickel and dimer. So
you'd think that a guy obsessed with revenge like this
would be really rough around the edges, right, But mcgern
(13:24):
actually loved the finer things in life. He loved to
dress up in swanky clothes and slick his hair back,
and he used the money that he made working for
Capone to invest in jazz joints. But sometimes he let
his gangster ways kind of bleed into those other businesses.
There's a good example of this involving a popular comedian
named Joe Louis, who had quit working at one of
(13:45):
the clubs McGurn partially owned to just move on take
a better offer at another club, and ended up becoming
a huge hit at that other club, so mcgern has
don a few thugs to rough him up teach him
a lesson for for jitching his original job. The gang
ended up cutting the comedian's tongue and slashing his throat,
(14:08):
and it took Lewis a really long time to be
able to talk again, in a whole decade to get
back to his comedy career. Even by Capone standards, this
treatment was pretty harsh. After the incident, Capone gave Lewis
ten thousand dollars to help with his recovery. Another interesting
side note about mcgern was that he was an avid golfer.
(14:29):
He'd played with Capone and was actually a quite bit
better than his boss. I imagine you'd have to be
careful with Yeah, I'd be worried about that, but he was.
We've seen the untouchables. We know what Capone can do
with a baseball bat. It would probably be similar with
a golf club. So Jack was so good that three
he was able to enter the Western Open at Olympia
(14:50):
Fields under his original name. He did poorly though in
the first round, but did better the next day. Unfortunately
for him, though, a municipal judge had issued a warrant
for his arrest, and detectives recognized his name while reading
the sports pages, so they knew where he'd be. So
he was arrested approaching the seventh Green one under par
(15:10):
He was apparently very polite, you know, with civil with officers,
but asked them could he be allowed to finish his
game and they agreed to that. Louise Rolph. Meanwhile, the
blonde alibi, who was by this point mcgurn's wife, asked
the policeman, who's brilliant idea with this? So I can
really just see this pretty vividly. So, as we mentioned
(15:35):
in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre podcast, mcgurn's career went
downhill after Capone went to jail, and he ended up
becoming a small time drug dealer, eventually getting gunned down
in a bowling alley. McGurn has also been a supporting
character in several gangster movies, including one in which the
whole Joe E Lewis thing is recounted, and that's the
ninety seven movie called The Jokers Wild with Frank Sinatra.
(15:58):
So for our next entry, we're going to stick with
the Capone gang and move on to Frank the enforcer Needy.
So Frank Canedi was born around in Naples, and when
he moved to the States, he started work as a barber,
making all these contacts in the underworld and expanding his
(16:18):
business eventually to flee stolen goods. And it's this way
that he eventually hooked up with Al Capone's gang during
Prohibition and eventually rose to the position of one of
Capone's top organizers or enforcers. So both Needy and Capone
eventually got prison sentences for income tax evasion, but Needy
(16:38):
served a much shorter term. When he got out of prison,
he became the de facto head of the Capone mob.
According to the Mafia Encyclopedia by Karl Stefakis, Needy wasn't
really the mob's leader, there were too many loose cannons
with allegiances only too Capone, but he was sort of
the frontman, focusing the attention of both the authorities and
(16:58):
the media. And it must have been an effective public
stance because in nineteen thirty two he was shot by
two police officers supposedly acting under the orders of Chicago's Nair,
who at this point wanted to since Capone was in
prison bust up his empire a little bit and distribute
the territory among other crooks who were maybe a little
(17:20):
more willing to to make different alliances than Capon's men were.
But Needy recovered from that attack. He was pretty near
death in fact, and eventually got caught up in a
racket against these Hollywood production companies like Warner Brothers and
twentieth Century Fox, and in March of nineteen forty three,
he was accused of attempted extortion of one million dollars
(17:43):
from various production companies under the threat of union trouble,
which sounds ominous coming from um Capone, a Capone mobster,
but Needy at this point his position as the public
face of the mob men that he was going to
have to take the fall for all the other guys involved,
(18:03):
and he was pressured to do so, but was not
interested in it due to his earlier prison sentence. He
had not had a good time in jail, and so
hours before the New York Federal grand jury indicted him
on the extortion charges, he committed suicide. In two thousand three,
his Riverside home was rejected for a preservation status. One
(18:24):
of the petition supporters said that the unassuming nature of
his house was what really made it worth preserving, and
said quote, he probably had the money to build a
bigger house and riverside. And just one more note on Needys,
since we are sort of mentioning movies and TV shows
and all of that, he's almost a character who's bigger
in fiction than in real life. He a couple of
(18:46):
these are He apparently had a major role on the
old television show The Intouchables and a very memorable role
in the movie Intouchables, which I just mentioned in the
last entry. So we have one a bit more guy
and this is not a member of the Capone mob.
In fact, he is an arch rival. Yeah, we mentioned
(19:08):
that Frank Needy was kind of the Capone chief in
name only, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't sometimes
brutally effective. In the case of our next entry, Roger
the Terrible Twoey, Needy's power proved there was more than
one way to eliminate a gangster. So too, we had
been born in Chicago, one of six sons of a
(19:29):
patrolman and the younger two. We eventually became a gambling
boss and a bootlegger with Twoey territory extending through the
northwest section of Cook County, Illinois, which is the Chicago area.
But by four his gang was going through some tough times.
Three key members were dead and eleven others, including Twoey himself.
We're serving hard time no thanks to Capone's man, Frank Needy.
(19:54):
So here's what happened to We had been convicted in
nineteen thirty four of kidnapping John Factor a K. Jake,
the barber who is the brother of cosmetics founder Max
Factor Senior. The only catch, though, is that John Factor,
who at this point was wanted in England and had
been trying to avoid being extradited there, hadn't ever really
(20:15):
been kidnapped. He had instead conspired with Needy. He was
connected to the Capone gang and uh faked his own
kidnapping in order to frame Tooey, who was accused of
it and sentenced to a hundred nine nine years and
InCAR serrated at Stateville Penitentiary in Juliet, Illinois. In prison, however,
(20:36):
to be connected with a friend from the outside, Basil
the Owl Banghart, and the two started planning an escape.
I think that might be the best mob name in
this episode. And there's a lot of stiff competition, I
don't know. So after years of observation, they had guns
smuggled in through an American flag of all things, and
recruited a few more folks who were willing to risk
(20:57):
an escape. So on October nine, to be kicked off
the brake by attacking a prison garbage truck driver, stealing
the truck and driving it to the mechanical shop, where
the rest of the gang rendezvood, overpowering the guards using
the two forty fives and a Molotov cocktail. They stole
ladders and took two hostages and got some rope, and
(21:20):
so from there they drove to the guard tower, attacked
the tower, scaled the tower with the ladders by the way,
attacked the guard, stole his car, keys, the rifles, a
few other forty fives that were in the tower, and
then um went out the other side of the wall
and drove towards Chicago, abandoning their car in a really
(21:41):
conspicuous location so the FBI wouldn't get involved over them
having cross state lines with a stolen vehicle. They did
not want the FBI on their case. Little did they know, however,
the FBI had a loophole through which they could intervene
on the outside. The men obviously hadn't registered this remember,
and the men had not registered under the Selective Service law,
(22:05):
and therefore they were draft delinquent. So Hoover himself used
this loophole and took charge of the case personally. Basically,
it was a Dillinger Round two for him. So Towie
and the gang led by bang Hart managed to survive
on the outside for a few months by sticking together
for the most part, since Banghart wanted zero outside contact
(22:27):
until they could pull off a big job and spring
for plastic surgery and fingerprint alteration. We touched on that
a little bit when talking about Dillinger too. So there
were really tight quarters in this situation and strict rules
no alcohol, and everyone was pretty paranoid. Every time one
of the gang left to go buy food and provisions,
bang Heart followed behind with a sawed off shotgun as protection,
(22:50):
but presumably since Banghart was the leader, kind of like
I'm watching your bag to Eventually, all of this paranoia
took its toll and the group began to split and crumble.
I think bang Haart pistol whipped a couple of the guys,
and Hoover meanwhile got a lead by searching the names
of mugging victims in the Chicago area who had had
(23:11):
their draft cards stolen, figuring that these fugitives really needed
to get a hold of information like that, some kind
of identifying information, and that these um mugging victims would
be the most likely aliases for the fugitives to use.
And finally Hoover did find a gang member and arrested
Twey and bang Hart personally. After all the connections were
(23:35):
revealed through surveillance, so Too went back to prison, but
continued his appeals process. Eventually, federal courts accepted that the
kidnapping had never happened and released two on November nine.
He was shot dead in front of his sister's home
just weeks later, though, having just come out with an
autobiography called The Stolen Years, and he really had a
(23:58):
bad time in prison, he said of his imprisonment quote,
I was buried alive nothing but darkness, loneliness, and desperation.
So that's a different kind of note to end a
podcast on gangsters. I'd say it's not all um. Shoot
him up, going down in a hail of gunfire. It's
the pretty sad story, right. Well, some would say that's
(24:22):
what they deserve, I guess, depending on your point of view.
So that does it for this podcast on gangsters. Of course,
we're not done with gangsters by any means. We focus
mostly on Chicago based people this time. Of course, there
are gangsters all over the country in the world that
we talked about yet, and there are plenty of stories
to tell, so you can expect more on that in
(24:42):
the future. For now that we're going to move on
to a listener mail. Since we're talking about gangsters, we
wanted to correct the record for the Dillinger podcast. We
had a few people right in from Ohio, UM, including
Carrie Well. I don't know if she's from Ohio, but
she knows Ohio apparently, because she wrote to tell us
that when we were referring to Lima, Ohio it's pronounced
(25:06):
with a long eye, because I think we said Lima
in the podcast, yes, like Peru. So thank you Carrie
for writing in, and thank you to all the people
who wrote in, and um wrote to us on Facebook
about that, so now we know. And I also thought
this was fitting. We got a Christmas present from Hillary,
and she sent us assassination vacations, So maybe we're going
to have some more um murderous type episodes coming up
(25:30):
in the new year. People seem to like those, I
mean maybe laugh but so well popular. We'll check that
out and thank you Hillary. She also gave an interesting suggestion.
She I thought that an episode on like college Secret
Society weird college traditions would be interesting, and had mentioned
a few at her own school, but people have suggested
(25:52):
spellen bones before that sort of thing that would be
interesting collegiate themed episode in addition to all these gangsters. Well,
if you have any more suggestions like that to send us,
you know, you can always write us at History Podcast
at House staff Works dot com, or you can look
us up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at Myston History.
And we also have a great image gallery on Public
(26:15):
Enemy if you can find that by searching our home
page for Public Enemy at www dot house staff Works
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
Stuff from the Future. Join how staff Work staff as
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
(26:36):
The House stuff Works iPhone app has a ride download
it Today on iTunes,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blie to chalk reporting, and I'm fair down
and people can't seem to get enough of gangster stories.
When we did the recent podcast on John Dillinger, listener
(00:22):
Tories suggested on Facebook that we do a continuing series
on nine twenties and thirties gangsters, and that got me
thinking of all those gangsters throughout history that sort of
became the supporting characters of the gangster world, so to speak,
just in the sense that they're not necessarily as well
known as the Capones and the Dillingers, but they were
still public enemies in their own right. They might have
(00:44):
been really the guys who are out there doing the
dirty work too. You might hear their names pop up
in gangster movies now and again, though often their stories
are changed a bit to fit whatever plot line they're
a part of. But in this episode, we're going to
take a closer look at a few of these sort
of side characters who have popped up in our gangster
research over and over along the way, and we'll try
(01:06):
to find out who they really were, and in some
cases see where they fit into the bigger picture of
nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties gangsters, whether they're kind of
outliers or maybe key players. Yeah, and this is partially
inspired by Lizzie to who edits our podcast, because after
the Dillinger podcast, she wanted to know a little bit
(01:27):
more about baby Face Nelson, in particular because he came
up and she loved how we described him as a psychopath.
She was like, I want to know more about this guy.
So just for you, Lizzy will kick off the list
with baby Face Nelson. Indeed, so this gangster's nickname makes
him sound sweet, but he was really a ruthless killer,
as we learned in the Dillinger episode. He was born
Luster M. Gillis on December eighth, nineteen o six, in Chicago,
(01:51):
and he was a pretty small kid. He was not
someone that you would expect to be frightened by. He
was barely five ft five, so maybe that's why he
felt like he had to be the toughest kid around
to survive from the very beginning, and he really did
start early. He started out running with a crew of
juvenile delinquents and by his teen years he was already
moving up to stealing cars, and his fellow gang members
(02:14):
already had started to call him baby Face by this
time because he just looked so young for his age,
and he was, as we mentioned, kind of a smaller kid.
So baby Face eventually transitioned out of auto theft and
joined the Capone mob. His job was to keep labor
union guys on line, but he was way too into
his work. He kept killing people that he was just
(02:35):
supposed to be kind of roughing up and intimidating a bit,
and this was kind of his trademark, being way too
reckless and quick to kill people. He didn't plan his
jobs to avoid violence or seemed to follow any sort
of gangster code. He just went in guns blazing. He
wasn't really thinking of the business side of being a gangster,
it sounds like. So he was ultimately asked to leave
(02:57):
the Capone gang, maybe the only person to get kicked
out of that group for being too violent that by that.
But around the same time, in about eight he met
and married a sales girl named Helen Waznach and started
holding up jewelry stores and banks in order to support her,
(03:17):
and he got caught after robbing a Chicago bank in
January nineteen thirty one, and ended up spending a year
in prison. He escaped though, in February of nineteen thirty
two while he was being transported between facilities for hearing,
and Helen was waiting for him in a car and
helped him escape. So after that they moved to California,
where Nelson became involved in bootlegging for a while, and
(03:38):
that's also where he met John Paul Chase, another liquor
smuggler slash gangster, and the two of them became really
close friends and partners in crime. Chase would supposedly introduce
Nelson as his half brother sometimes, but by about the
summer of nineteen thirty three, Nelson had done pretty much
all he could do in California's bootlegging business, so he
(03:59):
and Helen packed it up and moved back to the
Midwest and he got involved in robbing banks again. Chase
eventually joined up with them, and then, of course, as
we know from our recent episode about the first Public
Enemy Number one, Nelson joined up with the Dillinger Gang
after Dillinger so famously escaped from Crown Point in jail
in nineteen thirty four, and Nelson worked with the Dillinger
(04:22):
gang for a while, pulling off several jobs, and was
with them during that big showdown with the FBI at
Little Bohemia Lodge, which of course we talked about in
a lot more detail during the Dillinger episode. Nelson killed
one federal agent during that encounter and wounded at least
a couple more, and he and his wife and Chase
all went to California and were there when Dillinger was
(04:44):
shot and killed in Chicago. Nelson got promoted so to
speak to the public Enemy number one spot after that,
but he didn't really do what Dillinger did, which was
sort of trying to Compingstown a little bit since he
had so much heat on him. He didn't lay low
at all. In fact, he returned to the Midwest and
was implicated in several crimes. It almost seemed like he
(05:06):
wanted to live up to his new title liked the
idea of being public Enemy number one. So on November
nineteen thirty four, Nelson and Chase stole a car in
Chicago and drove into Wisconsin. The FBI was on the
lookout for them, of course, and by the next day
a couple of agents had spotted the stolen vehicle, so
(05:27):
the agents and Nelson and Chase all got involved in
a shootout near Barrington, Illinois, and both the agents were
killed as a result of the shootout, and Nelson was
also mortally wounded. He did manage to get back into
the car, though, and drove off with Chase that died
at about eight pm that day. The FBI found his
(05:49):
body the next day near a cemetery in Niles Center, Illinois,
and it had been stripped to delay identification. So he
usually appears as a support warding character in gangster films,
including the nineteen seventy three movie Dillinger, but as we
can see, he was a lot of trouble in his
own right. I was also trying to remember I think
(06:09):
he's in a brother where Art Now. He has a
little part in that where he gives bank robbing with him,
and he's just totally crazy and and kind of fits
what we've just learned here in the podcast. There you go.
So though he has a pretty intimidating nickname, this next
gangster on our list may have been one of the
least tough and scary of all the ones we're going
(06:30):
to talk about He was born George Kelly Barnes in
eighteen ninety five eighteen ninety seven. Sources kind of different
on that in Memphis, Tennessee, and he became known later
as machine Gun Kelly, but he actually started out his
life of crime as a common bootlegger. He started going
by the alias of George R. Kelly and his bootlegging
days supposedly to preserve his family name, and that was
(06:53):
a good thing too, because he did end up serving
some jail time. He spent a year in leve and
Worth in Kansas around nineteen twenty seven or so after
he was caught selling liquor on an Indian reservation. So
when he got out of prison, Kelly went back to
bootlegging and was involved in some hold ups thanks to
these bank robber contacts that he'd made in prison. But
(07:14):
really at that point he was still a pretty small
time criminal. It's after he met his second wife, Katherine Thorne,
around nineteen thirty that things really started to change. So
Catherine had a bit of a criminal background herself. Her
parents ran a fugitive farm in Texas where criminals could
pay by the night to hide out from the law.
This was news to me that such a thing existed,
(07:37):
a fugitive farm. It's like a B and B for
con convicts. Um. But Katherine herself had also been arrested
for various crimes, and she really had bigger ambitions for
her husband than for him to just be a common bootlegger.
She wanted him to be a real criminal. And so
a lot of historians think it's Catherine that created the
(07:57):
whole machine gun Kelly persona. And she's also said to
have been the first one who bought George a Thompson
machine gun and made him practice with it, and um
made him, made him kind of talk to other criminals,
and would talk him up herself to criminals that they knew. Yeah,
I think she was the first to kind of throw
that machine gun Kelly thing around, just visiting places, you know,
(08:19):
bars at night and there my husband machine gun Kelly. Yeah.
So he became fairly proficient with the machine gun, and
he carried it with him on jobs. But apparently there's
no evidence that machine gun Kelly ever actually fired a
machine gun at a person or killed anyone with it.
I think the name alone really does the trick. I
think it does. It's intimidation works wonders. So they pulled
(08:41):
off a few bank jobs, but again pretty small time stuff.
The payoff wasn't that great, so in three they decided
to try their hands at kidnapping, and they picked Charles Erschel,
a wealthy oil tycoon, as their target. But it wasn't
the smoothest crime ever. They made some mistakes kind of
right off the bat. First stoff, they didn't know what
(09:01):
Herschel looked like, so they burst in on Erschel and
his wife and another couple, the Jarrett's, while they were
playing bridge on July twenty two, ninety three. But since
they couldn't figure out who Herschel was and no one
in the room would help him out, I mean, they
asked around, but no one was willing to say, so
they ended up taking both men and they finally found
some idea on Jarrett after they were on the road,
(09:23):
and then stole fifty dollars from them and kicked him
out of the car and machine gun. Kelly and company
asked for a two hundred thousand dollar ransom, which they
did collect nine days after the kidnapping. They released Herschel unharmed,
and George and Catherine Kelly split the ransom money with
their accomplices and then went off on their own. They
dyed their hair, they switched locations a lot to try
(09:46):
to throw the authorities off their scent, but they kept Chicago.
It's kind of their home base and whenever they were
back in Chicago. They lived a very lavish lifestyle during
that time and it only took the FBI a couple
of months to catch up up with them. For one thing,
they had recorded the serial numbers of the ransom money,
so that helped. Also, Herschel was a pretty smart guy,
(10:07):
and even though he was blindfolded during the entire ordeal,
he was able to recall a lot of details and
share them with the authority. So he remembered like the
sounds of men and women talking, and he would record
the number of footsteps that he would make from one
place to another and report those details. That really helped
a lot later and figuring the whole thing out. And
(10:28):
it I mean it did help because machine Gun Kelly
and Katherine were caught the morning of September twenty, nineteen
thirty three, in Memphis, where they were hiding out with
some friends. They were both really hungover at the time,
and legend has it that that morning, after they were
surrounded by the authorities, Kelly cried out, quote, don't shoot.
G men, don't shoot, and thus coined the term g
(10:51):
men to refer to government agents. According to the FBI,
this probably didn't really happen, and it's more likely the
result of faulty or parting, but still a pretty good story.
I have always wondered who first thought of that. Yes,
so legend has it that that's where that came from,
but maybe not, who knows. In October of that year,
(11:11):
George and Catherine Kelly were both convicted and sentenced to
life in prison. So machine Gun Kelly spent the rest
of his life at Alcatraz and at Love and Worth,
where he died of a heart attack in July of
nineteen fifty four, and Catherine was actually released in nineteen
fifty eight and ended up living out her days in Oklahoma.
I think there you go. And interestingly enough, the next
(11:33):
guy on our list also has the same name, machine Gun,
although in this case it is Jack mcgern machine Gun
Jack mcgern. And we've talked about this gangster before in
the St. Valentine's Day massacre episode, and in fact he's
considered by many people to be the one who orchestrated
the whole Saint Valentine's Day massacre for Capone. If you
(11:55):
heard that episode, you'll remember that mcgern claimed he'd been
in bed all morning. This girlfriend, a blonde named Louise Rolf,
who became known famously as the Blonde Alibi and machine
Gun Jack, was never brought to trial for that crime.
But mcgern had an interesting career before that point too.
He was born James Vincenzo de Mora in Chicago's Little
(12:16):
Italy neighborhood in nineteen o four, and in his teenage
years he was a boxer under the name Battling Jack mcgern.
He should promise at that time as a welterweight. His
career the boxer kind of changed course though, in NT three,
when his father, who was a grocer, was murdered by
a gang known as the Jenna Gang. That's Jenna with
a G. And after that mcgern quit boxing and turned
(12:40):
full time to getting revenge for his father's death. He
taught himself how to shoot a weapon. He went to
work for al Capone, who was still at this point
getting established, but also still at this point the Jenna
gang's main rival. Because mcgern had this vendetta fuelling him
and he was getting pretty handy with a gun, Poe
sent him after the Jennat gangs guys. So mcgern ended
(13:03):
up killing six of their gang members within a few weeks.
And each time he killed a guy, he'd put a
nickel in that guy's lifeless hand, And this was supposedly
a reference to how the people who had killed his
father had called him a quote nickel and dimer. So
you'd think that a guy obsessed with revenge like this
would be really rough around the edges, right, But mcgern
(13:24):
actually loved the finer things in life. He loved to
dress up in swanky clothes and slick his hair back,
and he used the money that he made working for
Capone to invest in jazz joints. But sometimes he let
his gangster ways kind of bleed into those other businesses.
There's a good example of this involving a popular comedian
named Joe Louis, who had quit working at one of
(13:45):
the clubs McGurn partially owned to just move on take
a better offer at another club, and ended up becoming
a huge hit at that other club, so mcgern has
don a few thugs to rough him up teach him
a lesson for for jitching his original job. The gang
ended up cutting the comedian's tongue and slashing his throat,
(14:08):
and it took Lewis a really long time to be
able to talk again, in a whole decade to get
back to his comedy career. Even by Capone standards, this
treatment was pretty harsh. After the incident, Capone gave Lewis
ten thousand dollars to help with his recovery. Another interesting
side note about mcgern was that he was an avid golfer.
(14:29):
He'd played with Capone and was actually a quite bit
better than his boss. I imagine you'd have to be
careful with Yeah, I'd be worried about that, but he was.
We've seen the untouchables. We know what Capone can do
with a baseball bat. It would probably be similar with
a golf club. So Jack was so good that three
he was able to enter the Western Open at Olympia
(14:50):
Fields under his original name. He did poorly though in
the first round, but did better the next day. Unfortunately
for him, though, a municipal judge had issued a warrant
for his arrest, and detectives recognized his name while reading
the sports pages, so they knew where he'd be. So
he was arrested approaching the seventh Green one under par
(15:10):
He was apparently very polite, you know, with civil with officers,
but asked them could he be allowed to finish his
game and they agreed to that. Louise Rolph. Meanwhile, the
blonde alibi, who was by this point mcgurn's wife, asked
the policeman, who's brilliant idea with this? So I can
really just see this pretty vividly. So, as we mentioned
(15:35):
in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre podcast, mcgurn's career went
downhill after Capone went to jail, and he ended up
becoming a small time drug dealer, eventually getting gunned down
in a bowling alley. McGurn has also been a supporting
character in several gangster movies, including one in which the
whole Joe E Lewis thing is recounted, and that's the
ninety seven movie called The Jokers Wild with Frank Sinatra.
(15:58):
So for our next entry, we're going to stick with
the Capone gang and move on to Frank the enforcer Needy.
So Frank Canedi was born around in Naples, and when
he moved to the States, he started work as a barber,
making all these contacts in the underworld and expanding his
(16:18):
business eventually to flee stolen goods. And it's this way
that he eventually hooked up with Al Capone's gang during
Prohibition and eventually rose to the position of one of
Capone's top organizers or enforcers. So both Needy and Capone
eventually got prison sentences for income tax evasion, but Needy
(16:38):
served a much shorter term. When he got out of prison,
he became the de facto head of the Capone mob.
According to the Mafia Encyclopedia by Karl Stefakis, Needy wasn't
really the mob's leader, there were too many loose cannons
with allegiances only too Capone, but he was sort of
the frontman, focusing the attention of both the authorities and
(16:58):
the media. And it must have been an effective public
stance because in nineteen thirty two he was shot by
two police officers supposedly acting under the orders of Chicago's Nair,
who at this point wanted to since Capone was in
prison bust up his empire a little bit and distribute
the territory among other crooks who were maybe a little
(17:20):
more willing to to make different alliances than Capon's men were.
But Needy recovered from that attack. He was pretty near
death in fact, and eventually got caught up in a
racket against these Hollywood production companies like Warner Brothers and
twentieth Century Fox, and in March of nineteen forty three,
he was accused of attempted extortion of one million dollars
(17:43):
from various production companies under the threat of union trouble,
which sounds ominous coming from um Capone, a Capone mobster,
but Needy at this point his position as the public
face of the mob men that he was going to
have to take the fall for all the other guys involved,
(18:03):
and he was pressured to do so, but was not
interested in it due to his earlier prison sentence. He
had not had a good time in jail, and so
hours before the New York Federal grand jury indicted him
on the extortion charges, he committed suicide. In two thousand three,
his Riverside home was rejected for a preservation status. One
(18:24):
of the petition supporters said that the unassuming nature of
his house was what really made it worth preserving, and
said quote, he probably had the money to build a
bigger house and riverside. And just one more note on Needys,
since we are sort of mentioning movies and TV shows
and all of that, he's almost a character who's bigger
in fiction than in real life. He a couple of
(18:46):
these are He apparently had a major role on the
old television show The Intouchables and a very memorable role
in the movie Intouchables, which I just mentioned in the
last entry. So we have one a bit more guy
and this is not a member of the Capone mob.
In fact, he is an arch rival. Yeah, we mentioned
(19:08):
that Frank Needy was kind of the Capone chief in
name only, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't sometimes
brutally effective. In the case of our next entry, Roger
the Terrible Twoey, Needy's power proved there was more than
one way to eliminate a gangster. So too, we had
been born in Chicago, one of six sons of a
(19:29):
patrolman and the younger two. We eventually became a gambling
boss and a bootlegger with Twoey territory extending through the
northwest section of Cook County, Illinois, which is the Chicago area.
But by four his gang was going through some tough times.
Three key members were dead and eleven others, including Twoey himself.
We're serving hard time no thanks to Capone's man, Frank Needy.
(19:54):
So here's what happened to We had been convicted in
nineteen thirty four of kidnapping John Factor a K. Jake,
the barber who is the brother of cosmetics founder Max
Factor Senior. The only catch, though, is that John Factor,
who at this point was wanted in England and had
been trying to avoid being extradited there, hadn't ever really
(20:15):
been kidnapped. He had instead conspired with Needy. He was
connected to the Capone gang and uh faked his own
kidnapping in order to frame Tooey, who was accused of
it and sentenced to a hundred nine nine years and
InCAR serrated at Stateville Penitentiary in Juliet, Illinois. In prison, however,
(20:36):
to be connected with a friend from the outside, Basil
the Owl Banghart, and the two started planning an escape.
I think that might be the best mob name in
this episode. And there's a lot of stiff competition, I
don't know. So after years of observation, they had guns
smuggled in through an American flag of all things, and
recruited a few more folks who were willing to risk
(20:57):
an escape. So on October nine, to be kicked off
the brake by attacking a prison garbage truck driver, stealing
the truck and driving it to the mechanical shop, where
the rest of the gang rendezvood, overpowering the guards using
the two forty fives and a Molotov cocktail. They stole
ladders and took two hostages and got some rope, and
(21:20):
so from there they drove to the guard tower, attacked
the tower, scaled the tower with the ladders by the way,
attacked the guard, stole his car, keys, the rifles, a
few other forty fives that were in the tower, and
then um went out the other side of the wall
and drove towards Chicago, abandoning their car in a really
(21:41):
conspicuous location so the FBI wouldn't get involved over them
having cross state lines with a stolen vehicle. They did
not want the FBI on their case. Little did they know, however,
the FBI had a loophole through which they could intervene
on the outside. The men obviously hadn't registered this remember,
and the men had not registered under the Selective Service law,
(22:05):
and therefore they were draft delinquent. So Hoover himself used
this loophole and took charge of the case personally. Basically,
it was a Dillinger Round two for him. So Towie
and the gang led by bang Hart managed to survive
on the outside for a few months by sticking together
for the most part, since Banghart wanted zero outside contact
(22:27):
until they could pull off a big job and spring
for plastic surgery and fingerprint alteration. We touched on that
a little bit when talking about Dillinger too. So there
were really tight quarters in this situation and strict rules
no alcohol, and everyone was pretty paranoid. Every time one
of the gang left to go buy food and provisions,
bang Heart followed behind with a sawed off shotgun as protection,
(22:50):
but presumably since Banghart was the leader, kind of like
I'm watching your bag to Eventually, all of this paranoia
took its toll and the group began to split and crumble.
I think bang Haart pistol whipped a couple of the guys,
and Hoover meanwhile got a lead by searching the names
of mugging victims in the Chicago area who had had
(23:11):
their draft cards stolen, figuring that these fugitives really needed
to get a hold of information like that, some kind
of identifying information, and that these um mugging victims would
be the most likely aliases for the fugitives to use.
And finally Hoover did find a gang member and arrested
Twey and bang Hart personally. After all the connections were
(23:35):
revealed through surveillance, so Too went back to prison, but
continued his appeals process. Eventually, federal courts accepted that the
kidnapping had never happened and released two on November nine.
He was shot dead in front of his sister's home
just weeks later, though, having just come out with an
autobiography called The Stolen Years, and he really had a
(23:58):
bad time in prison, he said of his imprisonment quote,
I was buried alive nothing but darkness, loneliness, and desperation.
So that's a different kind of note to end a
podcast on gangsters. I'd say it's not all um. Shoot
him up, going down in a hail of gunfire. It's
the pretty sad story, right. Well, some would say that's
(24:22):
what they deserve, I guess, depending on your point of view.
So that does it for this podcast on gangsters. Of course,
we're not done with gangsters by any means. We focus
mostly on Chicago based people this time. Of course, there
are gangsters all over the country in the world that
we talked about yet, and there are plenty of stories
to tell, so you can expect more on that in
(24:42):
the future. For now that we're going to move on
to a listener mail. Since we're talking about gangsters, we
wanted to correct the record for the Dillinger podcast. We
had a few people right in from Ohio, UM, including
Carrie Well. I don't know if she's from Ohio, but
she knows Ohio apparently, because she wrote to tell us
that when we were referring to Lima, Ohio it's pronounced
(25:06):
with a long eye, because I think we said Lima
in the podcast, yes, like Peru. So thank you Carrie
for writing in, and thank you to all the people
who wrote in, and um wrote to us on Facebook
about that, so now we know. And I also thought
this was fitting. We got a Christmas present from Hillary,
and she sent us assassination vacations, So maybe we're going
to have some more um murderous type episodes coming up
(25:30):
in the new year. People seem to like those, I
mean maybe laugh but so well popular. We'll check that
out and thank you Hillary. She also gave an interesting suggestion.
She I thought that an episode on like college Secret
Society weird college traditions would be interesting, and had mentioned
a few at her own school, but people have suggested
(25:52):
spellen bones before that sort of thing that would be
interesting collegiate themed episode in addition to all these gangsters. Well,
if you have any more suggestions like that to send us,
you know, you can always write us at History Podcast
at House staff Works dot com, or you can look
us up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at Myston History.
And we also have a great image gallery on Public
(26:15):
Enemy if you can find that by searching our home
page for Public Enemy at www dot house staff Works
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
Stuff from the Future. Join how staff Work staff as
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
(26:36):
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