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