The North Siders - Chicago’s Pirate Robin Hoods: Hymie Weiss

The Roaring Twenties were a time period filled with tales of adventure and glamour. Prohibition fueled a party lifestyle - and made available a dangerous but adrenaline fueled life to some of the more enterprising members of the underworld. In Chicago, Illinois, the Twenties have become a time of legend and usually call to mind one man, Al Capone. But Capone, for all intents and purposes, was only a figure head during the Beer Wars. He ran his gang and racket, but he delegated the dirty work.

To the north of him was a group that was, as one newspaper of the time called them, Modern Day Pirates, The North Side Gang. Consider Capone the Prince John to their Robin Hood and his Merry-men, an analogy that Rose Keefe introduced in her book, Guns and Roses: The Untold Story of Dean O’Banion. Robin Hood isn’t quite as steal from the rich to give to the poor and you’ll need to give Little John a temper and thirst for vengeance that was unrivaled. Also, make the merry-men a little crazier and a lot more deadly. You get the picture.

Hymie Weiss more than likely would look back at 1924 as one of those years where everything and anything just seemed to have gone wrong for him. It had all calumniated in the death of his best friend and mentor in November. When Dean O’Banion died, Hymie said everything he had in the world was gone. But that didn’t mean that he was going to stand by and let it stay that way. He mourned his friend, buried him and then began a campaign of vengeance.

Erin Finlen continues her series.

Part one is here.

Grave of Hymie Weiss at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. Source: Nick Number, available here.

Childhood

West Division Street ran through the middle of the Polish neighborhood of Bucktown on the West Side of Chicago and at 2021 W. Division Street was a saloon that was run by William Wojciechowski and his wife Mary. The pair had moved from New York with their children, Joseph, Bernard, and Frederick. In Chicago, they welcomed another daughter named Violet. Then, on January 25, 1898, the youngest of their children, Henryk Josef Wojciechowski, was born, although he would later change his name to Earl, saying it sounded like royalty. His mother would eventually decide to Americanize their last name to Weiss, although not legally.

He was enrolled at a school, St. Malachy’s on Washington, where he, from all accounts was a smart child with lots of friends, adored by his teachers. One even gave him a pocket bible which he would carry in his pocket for the rest of his life. The influences of the saloon life ran deep, and in 1913 his oldest brother, Joseph, was arrested and charged in the murder of three men. According to Joseph and his father a fight had broken out and Joseph was acting in self-defense. He was acquitted. However, rumors soon started circulating in the newspapers that the trial had been fixed and Joseph moved to New Mexico, where he died from Tuberculosis. Whatever the effect this had on Jospeh’s younger siblings is hard to say, as at this time Henryk would have been sixteen and already involved in crime on his own. He had also taken the name Earl.

Hotheadedness and violence seemed to run in the family though, as William, his father was arrested and injured in a labor dispute in Buffalo, New York in 1894 and Fred, Earl’s brother, was also considered to have had a formidable temper as well.

For the most part though, young Earl was no different than most other boys his age, involved in street gang wars from the time he was ten. He wasn’t the healthiest and had suffered from headaches for a long time. In 1918, he tried to join the army but was denied, as his draft card says, for a “double rupture” in his heart. At the time, Weiss was angry, annoyed that he couldn’t serve his country with the skills he had earned on the street. History, though, had different plans for Earl Weiss.

The Making of an Outlaw

Weiss was not an outwardly friendly individual and he was even less adept at making friends with newspapermen, telling them, “If you take my picture, I swear I’ll kill you.” Making an enemy of the press had earned him a much hated nickname, “The Perfume Burglar,” after he tried to rob a store, knocked over the perfume counter and was arrested smelling strongly of multiple scents. Eventually, the press and the underworld gave him a new nickname, “Hymie,” because of his outwardly Jewish appearance, even though he was catholic. He didn’t mind the nickname and seems to have let it stick.

After being turned away from military service he turned his criminal pursuits to safe cracking with Charles Reiser, where he met his mentor and best friend, Dean O’Banion. As discussed in Dean’s article the pair were a study in opposites and while Weiss is often branded the temperamental one it was he that was better at thinking through his actions and planning ahead. Unless provoked, of course.

In June of 1920 he shot his brother, Fred, in their shared apartment for a joke his brother made about Hymie not serving in the military (while newspaper articles at the time say that Fred served in the army, I have yet to find anything besides his draft card and his headstone does not bare the veteran symbol). In a fit of anger he shot Fred square in the chest and then, took him to a nearby hospital before running away. Fred survived and begged the doctors to not look into, although they reported it to the police anyway. The police arrested Weiss, but were not able to find any evidence to convict him.

In the meantime, he was busy helping Dean build their bootlegging empire with their friends Vincent Drucci and George Moran. They were making enough money now to be able to bribe most cops and judges. While they were bootlegging, they continued to pursue other criminal activities. In 1922, Weiss and Moran, under his alias of George Nolan were arrested after a police chase for stealing jewels. No charges were ever pressed all the police did have to fire shots to get the pair to pull over.

Illness and Mourning

At the same time, Weiss was making regular use of the couch that Dean had placed in his office for him. The regular headaches that had plagued him all his life were growing more frequent and the pain getting so unbearable he once had a fit on the floor of the North Siders garage. In early 1924, he left Chicago for Hot Springs, Arkansas in hopes of improving his health. While away, his brother in law and Dean were placed under suspicion for the murder of John Duffy and his name was brought into the equation due to the car being in his name. There probably wasn’t much of the hoped for relaxing on the trip.

When he returned he received a devastating diagnosis, he had terminal arterial cancer. This had been causing the headaches and fainting for so long. It was also the cause of that double rupture that had kept him out of World War I. He was given around two years to live and he intended to make the most of them. He is quoted as saying, “I’m not going to live long, but I will live long enough.” He just had to deal with fallout from Sieben Brewery raid.

It is suspected that he was the real mastermind behind ending the Torrio treaty. He was the thinker of the group but whether he didn’t consider the consequences or simply didn’t think they would be so severe, he still found himself mourning the loss of his best friend in November of that year.

A lifetime of an impulsive temper and hard knocks had taught Weiss a thing or two about revenge and as he drove out of Dean O’Banion’s funeral he was determined to make the people who took him from him pay.

Love and War

Weiss waited and he planned. From November until January he gathered information and observed. Then on January 24, 1925, when Johnny Torrio and his wife pulled up outside their home after a shopping trip Weiss and Moran with Drucci driving the car pulled up next behind them. After waiting for Anna Torrio and the dog to be clear of the car they fired on Johnny Torrio, hitting him multiple times. When he fell to the ground, George Moran ran up to shoot the fatal shot when a laundry truck came around the corner and Drucci blew the horn: it was time to go. Thinking they had done enough damage the North Siders fled the scene. Anna Torrio, a nurse ran to her husband’s side and slowed the bleeding until ambulances arrived.

When word reached Hymie Weiss that he had not succeeded in eliminating Torrio, who was now in critical condition but very much alive in a hospital he was furious. One nurses account gives us an idea of how he reacted when the planning and intelligent part of his brain gave way to the impulsive and angry emotions. She told authorities that a man had run up to the desk demanding to know where Torrio was. She refused, saying no one was allowed to see him, Torrio’s wife had insisted on no one but family and an approved few friends. The man insisted and the nurse, thinking quickly, informed him that there was an increased police presence at the hospital. The man left in hurry after that. The nurse later identified the man as Earl “Hymie” Weiss from his mugshot.

1925 was not off to an auspicious start in anyway and in April, Weiss appeared in court for charges from a bootlegging arrest the previous year. Having originally made a plea of not guilty, he changed it to guilty and in May would serve six months at McHenry County Jail. He was still able to keep in touch and visit with the other members of the North Side Gang and by this time it had become clear that he was the new boss, through his intelligence and the charm that he did have but regularly chose not to use.

When he got out in the fall of 1925, the Genna Gang was no longer an issue, being eliminated through the police, Capone, and Drucci and Moran. He seemed to have relaxed a little and that could be because fell in love shortly after his release.

He met a Follies’ Girl by the name of Josephine Simard in the lobby of the Congress and the two immediately hit it off. He even followed her to New York when she left and returned with her now as husband and wife.

She was what Dean had been for him, a ray of sunshine to his dark moods and while they did fight often—the famous scene in “The Public Enemy” (1931) where James Cagney shoves a melon into Mae Wests face is supposedly based off of Hymie Weiss shoving an omelet in Josephine’s face when she wouldn’t stop talking one morning— they were a well matched pair and seemed very happy together.

He might have cooled in his quest for revenge but his temper certainly had not. In June of 1926, when he was at a party raided by police, he forced the policeman to leave at gun point. The police obviously came back with help and Weiss and a friend were arrested. Weiss wasn’t done yet and filed a petition to be reimbursed for items he believed were stolen during the raid. The petition was quickly denied, but it seems that it might have stirred something of the old Weiss in him.

The Battle Resumes

In August of 1925, Weiss and Drucci, who had been a massive thorn in the side for Al Capone for a while were attacked by rival gangsters and involved in a shoot-out in front of the Standard Oil Building. Well, Drucci was. Weiss ran for cover and Drucci hopped on the running boards of a passing car, telling the driver to follow the assailants, before he was nabbed by the cops. Weiss telephoned his mother, Mary Weiss, who showed up at the police station to pay Drucci’s bail. Drucci’s explanation to police for the event was the gangsters were trying to rob him.

Police and the North Siders weren’t fooled. It was the Capone gangsters as retribution for the killing of Al Capone’s chauffeur, who it was believed was kidnapped and tortured for information about Capone’s routine by the North Side Gang (Note: John Binder, in his book “Al Capone’s Beer Wars” posits that this was probably not the North Side Gang and I am inclined to agree: it did not fit with any of the other crimes committed by the gang under Weiss. Torture of those not directly involved with a life of crime was not their style. It was more likely the Saltis gang behind the chauffeur’s death).

For a month, Hymie Weiss, Vincent Drucci, and George Moran waited before their next attack. The audacity and publicity of the attack has gone down in history as one of the more dramatic gangland attacks of all time. On September 20, 1926 a parade of cars pulled up in front of the Hawthorne Hotel where Capone was having lunch. They fired a first volley of blank ammunition to draw Capone outside and then the real firing began. The mess of shooting used somewhere around two hundred bullets and witnesses agreed they saw Hymie Weiss and Moran or one of the Gusenberg Brothers get out and fire Tommy Guns into the restaurant. One of the Capone gunmen from the Standard Oil Shootout was injured and so was a woman eating in the restaurant. Capone paid for her hospital bills.

Capone decided to give peace talks one more try but not in person, he sent a liaison. Capone was famously scared of Weiss and it’s easy to see why. Capone was a man with a lot to lose and Weiss, as he saw it, had nothing. Weiss told the liaison that he would agree to peace if Capone surrendered John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, who he knew were involved in the murder of Dean O’Banion, to the North Siders. Capone refused and Weiss left the meeting angry.

October 11, 1926, Hymie Weiss’s car pulled up outside Holy Name Cathedral, with four of his men. As he was crossing the street bullets from Thompson SubMachine Gun burst from the window of a nearby apartment. Weiss fell to the ground unconscious and died on the way to the hospital. Paddy Murray, a fellow gangster was also killed and the other three men were critically injured. The side of the church was broken with machine gun bullets and streets away, when Vincent Drucci heard the news he was distraught and newspapers reported that he was being held back from attacking the perpetrators.

Saying Goodbye

Weiss’s funeral wasn’t quite as big as O’Banion’s, a fact that irritated Josephine Simard, but Moran tried to gently explain that they had lost several friends to violence over the last two years. Mary Weiss was accompanied by her two sons and sobbed next to the coffin.

In the fall of 1927, the will of Earl J. Weiss was called into question and while Josephine tried to stand her ground she was no match for the formidable Mary Weiss, who refused to relinquish anything except the car that had been gifted to her (and even that was on court orders) without a marriage certificate, which Josephine could not produce.

Left with two bosses to choose from, there was really only one person to step in after Hymie Weiss died, the man who had loved him as a brother and the one who was nicknamed Schemer for his crazy plans, Vincent Drucci.

Find that piece of interest? If so, join us for free by clicking here.

Sources

Binder, J. J. (2017). Al Capone’s Beer wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago during Prohibition. Prometheus Books.

Burns, W. N. (1931). The one-way ride: The Red Trail of Chicago Gangland from Prohibition to Jake Lingle.

Keefe, R. (2003). Guns and roses: The Untold Story of Dean O’Banion, Chicago’s Big Shot Before Al Capone. Turner Publishing Company.

Keefe, R. (2005). The Man who Got Away: The Bugs Moran Story : a Biography. Cumberland House Publishing.

Kobler, J. (2003). Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. Da Capo Press.

Sullivan, E. D. (1929). Rattling the cup on Chicago crime.

The North Side Gang—Chicago’s Pirate Robin Hoods

The Roaring Twenties were a time period filled with tales of adventure and glamour. Prohibition fueled a party lifestyle - and made available a dangerous but adrenaline fueled life to some of the more enterprising members of the underworld. In Chicago, Illinois, the Twenties have become a time of legend and usually call to mind one man, Al Capone. But Capone, for all intents and purposes, was only a figure head during the Beer Wars. He ran his gang and racket, but he delegated the dirty work.

To the north of him was a group that was, as one newspaper of the time called them, Modern Day Pirates, The North Side Gang. Consider Capone the Prince John to their Robin Hood and his Merry-men, an analogy that Rose Keefe introduced in her book, Guns and Roses: The Untold Story of Dean O’Banion. Robin Hood isn’t quite as steal from the rich to give to the poor and you’ll need to give Little John a temper and thirst for vengeance that was unrivaled. Also, make the merry-men a little crazier and a lot more deadly. You get the picture.

Who was responsible for running this group of gangsters that, while small, caused a lot of trouble for the biggest figure of Chicago’s Underworld? That was none other than Dean O’Banion. Our figurative Robin Hood.

Erin Finlen starts her series here.

Dean O’Banion.

Dean O’Banion

Dean O’Banion, or Dion as he is often misnamed in history, is considered the archetype of Irish Chicago Gangsters. An impulsive, faintly religious, prankster who was oddly chivalrous and loyal to a fault was the original boss of the North Side Gang during Prohibition and his death became the catalyst for what are known as The Beer Wars.

The Death of a Mother

Born in Maroa, Illinois on July 8, 1892, to Charles and Emma O’Banion, Dean was a middle child of three, with a big brother named Floyd and a little sister named Ruth. He was a good student and in one of the only surviving childhood pictures of him, taken at his school in Maroa, it is easy to see a precocious but loving child staring back. Maroa is a small town a few hours’ drive south of Chicago and away from the influences of the big city it is possible that O’Banion would have taken a very different path is things had stayed the same with his happy family to guide him.

Except, Dean was struck by a tragedy that no child is equipped to endure and certainly not back them when there was no therapy or mental health knowledge, not in the way we have now. When he was six years old, O’Banion’s mother passed away from tuberculosis and his world was shattered. He had loved his mother dearly and after her death not only did he lose her, but his father moved him and his older brother to Chicago in an effort to be closer to his own family and for better employment opportunities. His sister Ruth stayed behind in Maroa and ended up living in Kansas and having a family of her own when she was older.

Chicago, it’s His Hometown

The shock of not only losing him mother but then being uprooted from his childhood home and leaving behind his sister was probably traumatic and confusing. It would have given a much less optimistic child a pessimistic and depressed disposition. Dean, however, found that he enjoyed the adventure that was waiting for him.

In Chicago, he was enrolled at Holy Name School on State Street, but school only did so much to curb his impulsiveness and there was no stopping the influences of the neighborhood they lived in an area that was called “Little Hell,” and that lived up to its name with child gangs running the streets.

Then when he was sixteen, he went to hop on the back of a trolley car, slipping when he grabbed the handle, he fell and was hit by the wheels of the trolley. It broke his leg and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Given the state of medicine in the early 1900s, he seems to have had some of the luck of the Irish to have not had a worse outcome.

He eventually left school and started working, first as a singing waiter in a saloon, where he met the acquaintance of a criminal named Charles Reiser. Reiser would introduce him to safecracking, although, Dean, always a little trigger happy and impulsive, wasn’t the best at deciding how much nitroglycerin to use. His frame of mind was always ‘more is better’ and he had a tendency to ruin the contents of the safe when he blew it open, once blowing a hole in the wall of the building but leaving the safe unharmed.

Through Reiser and safe cracking he met the man who would become his best friend and right hand man, Earl “Hymie” Weiss.

Robin Hood and Little John

Weiss and O’Banion were friends from the start, a study in opposites. O’Banion was impulsive with a temper that was easily triggered but just as easily satisfied. He was jovial and people were drawn to him, wanting to be his friend. Weiss was serious, with a temper that was terrifying when he was set off and not nearly as easily calmed. Smart and forward thinking he was O’Banion’s perfect foil and the two almost seem to be made to rule the Prohibition scene. Which they began almost as soon as it started, with O’Banion hijacking the first truck and immediately starting his booze running racket. They were very successful and it showed.

They were also regularly in trouble together, but by that point they were able to pay off most juries and judges. When asked why they were robbing a telegraph office O’Banion said he was there to apply for a job. Similarly, when asked why his finger prints were at the scene of the crime, he replied with “That was an oversight. Hymie forgot to wipe them off.”

O’Banion’s biggest passion was the flower shop, Schofield’s, that he had bought stock in with his friend Sam ‘Nails’ Morton. Where Morton was content to be a silent partner, though, O’Banion preferred to work there, getting his hands dirty. One of the most notorious gangsters of his day was unrecognizable humming and arranging bouquets, while helping customers when they came into the shop. The store also his office. On its second floor he ran the North Side Gang, taking calls and meetings, he even installed a couch for Weiss, who was frequently laid low with migraines.

O’Banion loved to dress nicely and dine well. What he didn’t put up with was…well, it was a lot. Once in a restaurant he heard a man yelling at his wife. O’Banion intervened and wrestled the man to the floor. When someone made a barbed remark about them he shot them in a crowded theater. Afterwards, he realized what he had done and apologized, according to a newspaper man at the time, asking him what brand of cigars he should send him. When some of his drivers complained that one of the other men who worked in the garage was gay, he told them to deal with it or leave, that that was just the way the man was and he wasn’t hurting anything.

O’Banion, as evidenced by the man in the restaurant berating his wife, was not one to take a marriage commitment lightly and when he met Viola, who would become his bride. He was immediately smitten. The pair were deeply in love and when he died, she told reporters that the man she knew wouldn’t have hurt a fly. That he only carried a gun because of the danger in the city. Naive? Yes. Lying? Possibly. But it is very likely that the version of him that she knew was not the man who shot people in theaters or took men on one way rides, a term, by the way, that is credited to his best friend, Hymie Weiss.

Two of his other best friends and his other underbosses in the North Side were Vincent Drucci and George Moran. Moran and O’Banion were good friends, but the important one to look at here, is Vincent Drucci. Drucci was a Sicilian who had grown up on the north side of Chicago. When he came home from World War I, he fell in with O’Banion and his friends. Drucci offsets any rumors that O’Banion hated Sicilians, as the two played pranks together and would go to speakeasies, laughing and having a good time. It wasn’t Sicilians that O’Banion hated, it was just one family of them: The Gennas. They are the ones caused the most trouble and who would eventually lead to his death.

The Murder of John Duffy

At the start of 1924, Dean O’Banion was already in a bit of trouble, although no one could really pin the blame on him. A man named John Duffy had been found murdered in a ditch north of the city. His body was found with three bullet holes in it and when police went to his house they found the body of his girlfriend who had been shot dead by Duffy. No one questioned with the regards to the couple seemed at all surprised that Duffy would have murdered her and expressed concern for her. Duffy was not a well-liked man.

It was suspected that Dean O’Banion killed him, as Duffy was last seen getting into a car with O’Banion and one man who authorities later decided was James Monahan, Hymie Weiss’s brother in law, outside of the Four Deuces, an establishment run by South Side leaders Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. The car that police seized in the investigation belonged to Monahan, though he told police that Weiss was paying on the car for him. In Hot Springs, Arkansas at the time, receiving treatment for his headaches, Weiss was released of suspicion.

Some suspect that O’Banion was trying to frame Torrio and Capone for Duffy’s murder by meeting him outside The Four Deuces. However, it is more likely that was simply a way to get Duffy to meet him, as Duffy was believed to have ties to their gang. That fact and the fact that Weiss’s car was used, inadvertently throwing suspicion on O’Banion’s friend, implies that rather than being a plot to frame Torrio, it was another of O’Banion’s impulsive, spur of the moment decisions.

The Sieben Brewery Raid

When Prohibition had started it had been a free for all in Chicago, with everyone trying to steal alcohol and speakeasies from everyone else. Johnny Torrio, according to history, organized the gangs and got them to agree to only sell alcohol in their assigned territories. This had worked out remarkably well, except that The Terrible Genna Brothers, as they were known, a family gang of ruthless killers from the west side of the city refused to back off of O’Banion’s territory. And by May of 1924, O’Banion had had enough, deciding to cut ties with Torrio and the whole situation entirely. Unfortunately, he chose the worst possible way to do it.

Telling Johnny Torrio that he was interested in selling his stock in the Sieben Brewery O’Banion asked him to meet at the brewery to finalize the deal. What Torrio didn’t know but Dean O’Banion did was that on that particular day the brewery was set to be raided by the police. Torrio had already been arrested for violating prohibition once, but O’Banion had not, meaning that he would more than likely get off with a warning, while Torrio was going to have to serve jail time.

Making matters worse, O’Banion didn’t hide that he had been expecting the raid well, shaking hands with the police and in general being in quite a good mood for someone being arrested. It didn’t take much for Torrio to put together what had happened.

When the Genna Brothers found out, they demanded permission to kill O’Banion. The only person stopping them was the leader of Sicilian Union in Chicago, Mike Merlo, who was against violence and urged them not to get revenge. The Gennas and Torrio with their heavy respect for Merlo, agreed. Except it was really just waiting. Merlo was dying of cancer and once he died, there would be nothing standing in their way.

Let the War Begin

Over the summer of 1924, O’Banion was busy as ever. In July he was arrested for violating the Volstead Act again, this time with Hymie Weiss and another gangster, Dan McCarthy. Their trial was put on hold however, as Weiss was too ill to go to court and doctors informed authorities that they weren’t sure Weiss would live long enough to stand trial.

After the second arrest, O’Banion took a brief vacation out west, where he was introduced to a new weapon. The Thompson Submachine Gun. He was extremely interested in them and brought them back with him when he and his wife returned to Chicago.

November 9, 1924, Mike Merlo succumbed to cancer and took with him the stay of execution that he had given O’Banion. The Gennas brought in a hired gun and placed orders for thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers. In spite of them being rivals this was not unusual, Schofield’s was the place to go for your flower order, especially if you were part of the Underworld. That night, after O’Banion had left the shop Jim Genna and another man came in, getting a feel for the shop and picking up $1,000 of the $3,000 worth of flowers they had order from Mr. Schofield, telling him they would get the rest in the morning.

When the car pulled up on the day of the funeral to pick up the order, four men emerged from the car. Frankie Yale, John Scalise, Angelo Genna and Salvatore Ammatuna walked into the shop. According to William Crutchfield who was working that day, sweeping up fallen petals, O’Banion recognized them and asked William to go to the back so he could speak with them. O’Banion didn’t seem suspicious according to him. In fact, he greeted them with an outstretched hand. That was his view as the door to the back room closed behind him. And only a few moments later he heard gunshots. Dean O’Banion had been shot four times and lie dead on the floor of his beloved flower shop. And all hell was about to break loose.

Crutchfield telephoned the authorities who arrived at the shop, with sirens on and began their investigation. Coming down the street, Hymie Weiss and George Moran saw the cars and detoured to Weiss’s mothers house, where he telephoned the shop asking for O’Banion. He was informed of what had happened, and according to Rose Keefe in her book, The Man Who Got Away, silently went into the bathroom and locked the door. Moran had to break it down and when he did he found Weiss sobbing, saying “Everything I have in the world is gone.”

Saying Goodbye

O’Banion’s funeral was the biggest that Chicago had ever seen and it enthralled and disgusted people in equal measure. The funeral itself was attended by many figures of gangland and Torrio and Capone paid their respects as well. A bold move, considering it was generally accepted that they had helped with, if not entirely ordered the hit on the man for whom the funeral was being held. Vincent Drucci and Hymie Weiss cried openly and Weiss was photographed helped Viola, Dean’s widow, after being unable to carry the casket due to his grief.

After the funeral, as the last of the mourners filed out and the gangsters got into their cars and drove away, everyone knew this was not going to end well. Chicago held it’s breathe. The Chicago Beer Wars had begun.

Find that piece of interest? If so, join us for free by clicking here.

Sources

Binder, J. J. (2017). Al Capone’s Beer wars: A Complete History of Organized Crime in Chicago during Prohibition. Prometheus Books.

Dean Charles O’Banion. (n.d.). https://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id158.htm

Keefe, R. (2003). Guns and roses: The Untold Story of Dean O’Banion, Chicago’s Big Shot Before Al Capone. Turner Publishing Company.

Keefe, R. (2005). The Man who Got Away: The Bugs Moran Story : a Biography. Cumberland House Publishing.

Kobler, J. (2003). Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. Da Capo Press.

Sullivan, E. D. (1929). Rattling the cup on Chicago crime.

What were the Biggest Scams and Scandals of the Roaring Twenties in America?

The economy boomed during the Roaring Twenties and rising incomes gave ordinary Americans access to enticing new conveniences, including washing machines, refrigerators, cars and other luxuries that would have once seemed unattainable. For a number of people, the idea of owning a car wasn’t enough. Such eagerness played right into the hands of the Roaring Twenties’ legions of fast-talking promoters, charlatans and outright swindlers, who enticed the would-be wealthy with scores of seemingly foolproof schemes—from stock companies that didn’t really exist, to speculation in Florida real estate or California oilfields. 

In this article Richard Bluttal will examine the get rich quick schemes of the 1920s - which laid the foundation for the more elaborate ones of the 21st century.

Charles Ponzi.

Charles Ponzi

Many people lacked the financial literacy to understand the difference between investing in a legitimate company and a scheme such as the one operated by Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who claimed to have become a wealthy man through sheer ingenuity and hard work. 

Charles Ponzi was a dapper, five-foot-two-inch rogue who in 1920 raked in an estimated $15 million in eight months by persuading tens of thousands of Bostonians that he had unlocked the secret to easy wealth. Charles Ponzi was born Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi on March 3, 1882, in the town of Lugo in northern Italy. His parents, Oreste and Imelda Ponzi, Ponzi later said, were part of a wealthy Italian family that had become borderline poor by the time he was born. Ponzi is said to have expressed criminal tendencies early on, stealing from his parents and even parish priests.

As a young man, he attended Sapienza University in Rome, where, by his own account, he was less than a model student. As a result, after four years, Ponzi was forced to leave with no money and no degree. During his university years, he had heard stories of other Italians who went off to America to find fame and fortune and decided that this was the only course left open for him.

In 1919, after having set himself up in a small export-import business, Ponzi received a letter from a Spanish company requesting an advertising catalog. Inside the envelope, he found an iinternational reply coupon (IRC), a type of voucher accepted in various other countries in exchange for local postage stamps. Ponzi quickly realized the moneymaking potential of taking advantage of exchange-rate differences to buy IRCs in one country and redeem them in another.

In 1920, Ponzi organized a company called Securities Exchange Co. in which he sold stock (promissory notes) advertising 50% interest after 90 days. The funds obtained from investors were supposed to be used to buy IRCs to redeem in the U.S. Instead, Ponzi used funds obtained from new investors to pay off old investors. It was a big idea—one that Ponzi managed to sell to thousands of people. He claimed to have elaborate networks of agents throughout Europe who were making bulk purchases of postal reply coupons on his behalf. In the United States, Ponzi asserted, he worked his financial wizardry to turn those piles of paper coupons into larger piles of greenbacks. Pressed for details on how this transformation was achieved, he politely explained that he had to keep such information secret for competitive reasons.

By way of explaining why he did this, Ponzi blamed the Universal Postal Union for suspending the sale of IRCs once it learned about his coupon redemption scheme. After attempting to get around the suspension, Ponzi shifted to his “Rob Peter to pay Paul” scheme. For a while, it worked. He raked in $15 million ($220 million in 2022 dollars) in the first eight months of 1920. He kept the scheme going by telling investors he had created an elaborate network of agents buying IRCs for him overseas that he could redeem in the U.S. for a tidy profit. In fact, there was no elaborate network of coupon buyers; he was using new investments to pay off old investors.

In July 1920, the Boston Post ran a flattering front-page feature on Ponzi pegging his net worth at $8.5 million. Less than a week later, the U.S. Post Office Department announced new conversion rates for international postal reply coupons, though officials said the rate change had nothing to do with Ponzi.

Investigations of Ponzi ensued but made little progress until the Boston Post launched its own investigation, which generated bad press, causing Ponzi to decline to accept new investments. This caused a run by current investors, and Ponzi reportedly paid out more than $1 million.

More bad press from the Post ultimately sealed Ponzi’s fate. He was eventually convicted on federal charges of mail fraud and served 3½ years in prison. Upon parole, he was convicted of state charges, jumped bail, was caught, and went to prison again, getting out in 1934. At that time, he was deported to his native Italy, having never become a U.S. citizen. His history in Italy and Brazil is not well documented, though it is known that he died on Jan. 18, 1949, in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro, leaving just $75 to pay for his burial.

Florida land boom speculators

By 1920, Florida had a population of 968,470 people. Just five years later, the population had grown to 1,263,540. Advertised as “heaven on earth,” Florida became the number one destination spot for upwardly mobile American families during the Roaring Twenties. In just five years, more than 200,000 Americans flocked south. What had caused such a rise in the population?

Following World War I, large numbers of Americans finally had the time and money to travel to Florida and to invest in real estate. Educated and skilled workers were receiving paid vacations, pensions, and fringe benefits, which made it easier for them to travel and to purchase real estate. The automobile was also becoming an indispensable way for families to travel, and Florida was the perfect destination. Many of the people who migrated into Florida were middle class Americans with families. Unlike visitors of the past, these newer arrivals wanted homes and land rather than resorts and hotels. Moguls bought up cheap land, advertising accommodations-to-come through bold announcements across the country. Developers rushed to transform Everglade swamps into resort towns, like Miami Beach and Tampa Bay. 

During this boom, however, most people who bought and sold land in Florida had never even set foot in the state. Instead, they hired young, ambitious men and women to stand in the hot sun to show the land to prospective buyers and accept a "binder" on the sale. The binder was a non-refundable down payment that required the rest of the money to be paid in 30 days. Many people got rich quickly from the commission they made from these sales. With land prices rising rapidly, many of the buyers planned to sell the land at a profit before the real land payments were due. Sometimes land buyers didn't even have enough money to pay for the land; instead, they had just enough money for the binder. They were depending on the prices to continually rise.

It was during this time that many vacation spots were created and some of our most popular cities were developed. Dave Davis, the son of a steamboat captain, built Davis Island in the Tampa Bay area. Barron Collier started Naples and Marco Island as winter resorts. There were so many characters and stories of the boom times. There’s D. P. Davis, who in 1924 sold 300 building lots in Tampa Bay in three hours — while they were still underwater — and who remarried his first wife because, his brother said, he wanted to make his mistress jealous. There’s Barron Collier, who developed 1.2 million acres of southwest Florida that made him, if you could believe the price tags he put on them (and many thousands did), richer than John D. Rockefeller. The society architect Addison Mizner spun a fairyland of neo-Spanish castles in Palm Beach. His con man brother Wilson prophetically said, “Easy street is a blind alley,” and not much later the two of them found themselves stumbling along its darkened length.

Unfortunately, this land boom did not exist without problems. The demand for housing was so high that the cost of rent soared. Because the speculators had inflated the economy, many Americans who had migrated to Florida could no longer afford to live here. They began to write back home and tell people about their problems. Newspapers began writing stories that advised prospective residents to stay away from Florida.

At the same time, the demand for building materials overwhelmed the railway systems that transported them here. Railroads could not keep up with the needs and began to shut down. This acted as a brake on many developments, slowing down or stopping the boom's momentum. Once land prices stopped going up, many speculators couldn't sell at the high prices. There were suddenly thousands of acres of overpriced land without any buyers.

The boom stopped as suddenly as it had started. An unusually cold winter in 1925 followed by an extremely hot summer frightened away many potential buyers. It also cast doubts on the state's reputation as "heaven on earth." What was to follow was a series of natural disasters (freezes, hurricanes) that would send Florida into a tailspin, causing it to enter a Florida Depression four years before the 1929 stock market crash brought the whole country's economy down in the Great Depression.

Chauncey C. Julian

In the Roaring Twenties, this oil stock swindler dressed to the nines while boasting to small investors that his sham oil-drilling operations would yield easy 30-to-1 returns. His specialty was writing newspaper sales pitches that used folksy, plainspoken language. Julian became a millionaire, chiefly by selling more shares in his worthless syndicates than existed. When his empire began to crumble, Julian fled to Shanghai. One night in 1934, he arranged a banquet in his own honor, excused himself, and went upstairs to his hotel room to drink a suicidal dose of poison.

Charles A. Stoneham

The inveterate gambler was known in the 1920s for allegedly winning against the New York Giants baseball team in a game of poker. On Wall Street, he specialized in “bucket shops,” cut-rate brokerage houses that dangled low commissions as means to obtain money the firm almost never invested or repaid. Individual stock orders would be entered into the books but not filled on the open market. Instead, they would be “bucketed,” or combined into larger blocks that would be traded only if prices favored the brokerage. Despite his close association with Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who reportedly fixed the 1919 World Series, Stoneham was never sanctioned by Major League Baseball. The only time he was ever brought up on stock fraud charges, he was acquitted amid allegations of jury tampering.

Radio Pool

 The 1920’s was the last decade before the onset of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  As a result, stock manipulation was virtually legal, and was performed by pools of investors who traded large blocks back and forth in consortium with each other to drive the price of certain stocks up substantially.  One such group, the Radio Pool, traded Radio Corporation of America (RCA) stock until the price rose from $100 per share in 1928 to over $500 per share just before the big crash.  The pool then sold out and left the vast number of smaller shareholders with huge losses just in time for the stock market to crash in October 1929.  With the advent of the depression and ensuing regulations, the investor pool collaboration was among those activities that were outlawed.

Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil

Long before Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o said he was duped by an imaginary Internet girlfriend, Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil was plucking the gullible. A regular entry on Chicago police blotters in the first half of the 20th century, Weil was dubbed the "king of the con men" by reporters who eagerly chronicled his nefarious schemes. He brought out the poet in headline writers. A 1924 Tribune story was titled: "Weil Loses His Sangfroid as Accuser Glares."

The lead paragraph wasn't too bad either. He was described as a "debonair fast talker who plants in the provinces and reaps in the cities" — a reference to Weil being an equal-opportunity swindler who fleeced country bumpkins and city slickers alike. In his later years, he worked the local, off-beat lecture circuit, claiming to have taken suckers for a total of more than $8 million. Yet when he died in 1976 at the age of 100, the Kid was virtually a pauper, leaving an estate of $195 in the form of a credit at the Sheridan Road nursing home that was his final address.

When the Lake Front Convalescent Center threw a party for Weil's 99th party, he told a Tribune reporter he had no regrets about what he had done with his life. "I'd do it the same way again," he said. Sometimes he claimed to be not a victimizer but a victim of reporters giving free rein to their imaginations in order to sell papers.

According to the Tribune, he told one judge: "The dastardly fabrications of the metropolitan newspapers, the reprehensible conduct of journalists to surround me with a nimbus — er — a numbus of guilt, is astonishing." Yet in his "Autobiography of a Master Swindler," he acknowledged his chosen profession, even as he bemoaned its decline. "There are no good confidence men anymore," he wrote, "because they do not have the necessary knowledge of foreign affairs, domestic problems, and human nature." 

He certainly demonstrated more than a smattering of knowledge of those fields. He characterized the psychology underlying his working methods much as a judo wrestler explains how he turns his opponent's strength against him. He said: "A chap who wants something for nothing usually winds up with nothing for something." On other occasions, he defended his swindles with a Robin Hood twist. "He said he 'never took a dollar from a man who didn't deserve to lose it' because of greed," the Tribune recalled in Weil's obituary.

During World War I, Weil and his longtime confederate Frederick Buckminster swindled a Kokomo, Ind., banker out of more than $100,000, duping him "into purchasing fake stock in an Indiana steel mill by posing as representatives of German interests at a time when German ownership of American securities was embarrassing," the Trib noted.

Bankers were a favorite target of Weil, who took a Fort Wayne, Ind., banker for $15,000 in a 1917 scheme in which a confederate posed as an Englishman. A year later, Weil had no less than six phony brokerage offices up and running, their supposed bona fides supported by fake letters on counterfeit stationery of J.P. Morgan & Co. "We have learned of several letters bearing the supposed signature of Mr. Morgan," an assistant state's attorney told a Tribune reporter.

But Weil was not above fleecing at the other end of the economic ladder. Under a 1949 headline: "The Yellow Kid Beats $3 Case by Technicality," the Tribune reported he pocketed a $3 check solicited on behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Weil told the judge he'd be happy to give the nuns the money. "And I would have been happy to give you a year in the Bridewell (a nickname for jail) if the case had been submitted to me on the proper charge," the judge told Weil.

Like many other areas of his life, the story of Weil's nickname had several versions. It was attributed to his fancy-dan attire, a supposed taste for yellow gloves, spats and vests, an etymology Weil denied in his autobiography. Others credit it to "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, a turn-of-the-20th century alderman and protector of vice operations in Chicago's red-light district. Apparently "The Bath" hung the moniker on Weil in 1901, borrowing it from a comic strip of the day, "Hogan's Alley and the Yellow Kid."

Weil was, in his own way, civic minded. In 1928, doing time in the Leavenworth, Kan., federal prison, he sent letters to Chicagoans appealing for funds so fellow inmates might properly celebrate Passover. He signed the letter: "Joseph Weil, president Jewish congregation."

He also felt strongly that there was a pecking order among gentlemen thieves, and Weil had nothing but contempt for one peer. In 1949, one Sigmund Engel, called "Chicago's marrying swindler" for defrauding women over a five-decade career, finally was being charged. As Weil commented, his "neatly trimmed mustache and parted beard fairly bristled," the Tribune noted. "There isn't a day that someone doesn't abscond with a woman's money," Weil said. "Preying on the love of women for money is one of the most despicable ways of making a livelihood I ever heard of."

Though he could be proud, he wasn't above taking a blow to the ego — if it might save him from a stint in the clink. When Weil was charged in 1925 with writing a bum check, a court-appointed doctor from the "psychopathic laboratory" found the Kid had the intelligence of a 16-year-old. "He is foppish to the last degree, a moral imbecile, possessed of a busy brain that is eternally plotting against somebody but unaware that injury is being done to others," the psychiatrist told the judge.

Weill seconded the motion. "I can't defend myself," he told the judge. "Why the very learned Dr. Hickson says I have the mentality of a child of sixteen." He was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

And he could wax philosophically on the vagaries of human existence, as in 1925, when he lost a Sheridan Road hotel, he owned for failing to make his loan payments.

"Life is a funny proposition, after all," he told a Trib reporter. "We are born, we live a while, and then someone forecloses the mortgage."

Did you enjoy the piece? If so, join us for free by clicking here.

Scared America: 1920s America - Nativism and Restrictions on Immigration

In the aftermath of World War One, and many changes in the previous decades, many in 1920s America wanted a return to ‘normalcy’ - and this included a change in immigration policy. Here, Jonathan Hennika (his site here) continues his Scared America series by looking at nativism in the 1920s.

Past articles in the series are on strained 19thcentury politics here, Chinese immigration here, and anti-German propaganda during World War One here.

29th US President Warren G. Harding. Harding signed the 1921 Quote Law that restricted immigration to the US.

As the United States headed towards the holiday season and the new year, another government shutdown loomed. President Donald Trumpinstigatedthe showdown over funding for the Mexico border wall. Congress and the White House entered a tense negotiating stance; on the ground in Mission, Texas another type of battle loomed.

On the outskirts of the town situated close to the border on the Rio Grande River is the National Butterfly Center. Recently Border Agents informed the Executive Director of the Center that wall construction wouldcommence in February 2019. It is unknown how much land the Center will lose, but estimates indicate 70% of the Center’s propertywill be on the other side of the wall. “The center's 100-acre sanctuary… is home to at least 200 species of butterfly, and serves as criticalhabitat for the migration of the threatened Monarch butterfly and endangered species including the ocelot and jaguarundi.” Also, for construction to commence, twenty-eight federal laws governing the land were waived; including the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act.[i]

The Mexico border wall is a cornerstone of the Trump administration. When dealing with border security, the President fixateson the southern border. However, it was using the legal student visa process that enabled the September 11, 2001 terrorists to enter the country and not via the Mexican border. Politicians, usually of the conservative stripe, have been decrying the lax border security conditions on the southern border for decades. Immigration control on the southernborder links back to the nativist movement of the 1920s.

A Return to Normalcy

The European War was over, peacebrokered, and the American people were tired. The decades of the aughts and the teens were exhausted with the rapid change of Progressive reforms and mobilization towards war. In the election of 1920, one man was speaking their language; in a campaign announcement “aide Ed Scobey announced: `One of his slogans is `back to normal’ and another is `America First.’ In connection with the former, I think I can say there is no man better fitted to bring this country backtonormal more efficiently than Warren G. Harding.” [ii]The return to normalcy included a return to the isolationist days of the nation. One of the ways to achieve that goal was a severe limitation of immigrants permitted entry into the United States.  Congress enacted, and Harding signedthe 1921 Quota law. The Quota law mandated the number of immigrants permitted into the United States, limiting it to three percent of each nationality. The percentage derived by the total number of that nation’s immigrant counted in the 1910 census. While structured around the category of “nationality” soon the quotas naturally evolved into ones based on race.  The Johnson-Reed Act amended the Quota Act of 1921becoming the Immigration Act of 1924.[iii]

The 1924 law had two significant changes: the origin point in determining a nationalities population shifted from 1910to the 1890 census, andthe percentage of acceptable immigrants fell from three to two percent.  “The new immigration law differentiated Europeans according to nationality and ranked them in a hierarchy of desirability…. non-European immigrants—among them Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, and Filipinos—acquired ethnic and racial identities that were the same. The racialization of the…national origins rendered them unalterably foreign and unassimilable to the nation.”[iv]

The 1921 law established the Quota Board whose job it was to determine the definitions governing immigration. Tocalculate quotas, the Board needed to define such terms as “National origin,” “foreign stock,” and “native stock.” Any citizen who traced their lineage to those present in the United States before1790 were native stock. All other were foreign stock. The countryof birth defined national origin. However, there was no American nationality because “inhabitants in [the] continental United States in the 1920s’does not include (1) immigrants from the [Western Hemisphere] or their descendants, (2) aliens ineligible to citizenship or their descendants, (3) the descendants of slave immigrants,or (4) the descendants of the American aborigines.”[v]The American nation, therefore, was made up only of those white European settlers who arrived before1790. 

In addition to setting quotas on immigration,the act also banned outright immigration from the Asian states. Citizens of Japan, China, et al.were considered aliens ineligible for citizenship. Unfortunately, thepolitical reality of the 1920s included a system of mandates and protectorates established after World War One. Great Britain and France were the major colonial powers after the war and governed much of modern-day Africa, the Middle East and parts of Eurasia. Most often, immigrants from those regions were not natural born citizens, but rather, descendants of the governing colonial powers. For instance, there were scant black South African emigresadmitted while white South Africans, with British heritage, entered the United States.  This practiceaided the quotas in decreasing non-white immigration.

The Era of Scientific Racism 

Attitudes towards indigenous and non-white populations made an interesting turn at the end of the 19thcentury.Aboriginesand indigenous peoplewere considered something less than the civilized white Europeans. This belief was so strong that English author and poet Rudyard Kipling penned a poem mocking this belief, entitled The White Man’s Burden. In 1903, G. Stanly Hall, President of Clark University wrote in the Journal of Education: “My plea is that Indians, who are men of the stone age, and other low races should be first of all sympathetically studied as we study children.”[vi]

It was during this period that scientific theory was gaining a widespread societal acceptance. By the 1920s the White Man’s Burden became a defactoscientific theory. “Historical and sociological data [were] used to prove that race lines, racial distinctions, and inequality of the races are essential.”[vii]In drawing up,the quotas the scientific rationalization of racial prejudice casts its influence. Racial mixing resulted in the downfall of ancient civilizations from Rome to Athens was the argument used to justify limitations on the unacceptable nationalities. That same worry dominated a large segment of the American population in the 1920s. It was a period that saw a sharp rise in membership and activities of patriotic clubs, as well as the Ku Klux Klan. These organizations preached a message of fear regarding the unadvanced foreign interloper. The main concern revolved around the theory that the outsider was unable to conform to accepted American societal norms. The fear was the outsider might manipulate the system toachieve equal societal status with the average American. Thus, “the ambitious immigrant, non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant, whose frequent tendency to overachieve led to actions to `keep him in his place.’”[viii]One of those actions was the strict immigration acts of the 1920s.

The Trouble with Mexico

The Mexican-American war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. As part of the peace, Mexico ceded a broadswathof territory to the United States. The present-day states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and California all comprise former Mexican territory. The treaty declared that those living in the areasbecame American citizens after one year if they did not announce their intentions to return to Mexico. Unlike the other nations of the world, the treaty governs the naturalization of Mexicans to American citizens.  Hence, Mexico was exempt from the quota system. “While not subject to numerical quotas or restrictions on naturalization, Mexicans were profoundly affected by restrictive measures enacted in the 1920s, among them deportation policy, thecreation of the Border Patrol, and the criminalization of unlawful entry.”[ix]

Embracing the respectability of scientific theory, President Herbert Hoover commissioned a large study conducted by academics and social scientists. The resulting report provides a detailed look at American life in the decade of the 1920s. The report, entitled Recent Social Trends, examined the state of racial and ethnic groups in chapter eleven.  In discussing Mexican migration, the report noted: “that the Mexican element has increased from 3 to 16 percent of all immigration within the past twenty years. Thishas meant an increase from 400,000 in 1910 to nearly a million and a half in 1930 in the number of persons born in Mexico or of Mexican parentage. Of this million and a half,about 65,000 were enumerated in 1930 as "white Mexicans" or those of Spanish descent, while the remaining 1,400,000 were of “Indian and Negro descent.”[x]The report found a variety of pull and push factors for Mexican migration; civil unrest in Mexico and a strong United States economy beforethe Stock Market crash. The impact of the Great Depression decreased the flow of migrants into the United States from Mexico. The American border while porous became tighter in the 1920s; the trickle of emigres permitted in through the quota system virtually stopped as a result of the events of the 1930s. As for the immigrants already present in the United States, the return to normalcy translated into Americanization. Under the pressures of nativism, the narrative of the American melting pot became more one of assimilation. 

What do you think of the article? Let us know below.

[i]CBS News, “Butterfly Sanctuary in Texas Expected to be Plowed Over for Trumps Border Wall,” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/butterfly-sanctuary-in-texas-expected-to-be-plowed-over-for-trumps-border-wall/

[ii]David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of Six Presidents, (New York: Basic Books, 2007) 314.

[iii]Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The 1920s to the 1990s, (Harper Collins: New York, 1983) 205.

[iv]Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” The Journal of American History, 86 June 1999, 69-70

[v]Ibid., 72

[vi]G. Stanley Hall, “The White Man’s Burden Versus Indigenous Development of the Lower Races,” The Journal of Education, 58 July 1903, 83.

[vii]W.O. Brown, “Rationalization of Race Prejudice,” International Journal of Ethics, 43 April 1933, 302-3.

[viii]Paul L. Murphy, “Sources and Nature of Intolerance in the 1920s,” The Journal of American History, 51 June 1964, 69.

[ix]Ngai, 71, 88.

[x]T.J. Woofter, Jr., “The Status of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” Recent Social Trends (York, Pa: The Maple Press Company, 1933), 561.