by Gordon Kerr
Tom’s younger brother Willie took control of the gang, but he was not the man that Tom had been and he soon fell out with the other gang members. He wanted to establish the bootlegging side of their activities as a long-term business. However, the younger members, known as ‘red hots’, were not prepared to wait for the money to come rolling in. They preferred the fast and easy money that armed robbery provided and rebelled against the boss, carrying out numerous attacks on banks, armoured cars and bank messengers.
Max ‘Big Maxie’ Greenberg was an unhappy senior member of the gang and when he double-crossed Willie Egan in a whiskey deal, Egan tried to kill him but failed. This was small thanks for the time when Big Maxie was imprisoned on federal charges of interstate theft. Then, Willie Egan had used his influence, reportedly all the way up to President Woodrow Wilson, to have Greenberg’s sentence reduced. He served a mere six months of a five-year sentence. Greenberg went off to New York for a while, setting up a successful rum-running operation with bootlegger Waxey Gordon and New York crime boss Arnold Rothstein, before returning to St Louis in 1921.
By now Egan had enemies on all fronts and a new rival gang was beginning to muscle in on his rackets. The Hogan Gang had been founded by Edward ‘Jellyroll’ Hogan and his brother, James. Jellyroll was one of six sons of a St Louis police officer and was also involved in city politics. In 1916 he was elected to the legislature as a state representative. He also happened to be the Missouri State Beverage Inspector. When Greenberg returned to town, he was working with the Hogans against the hated Egans.
Willie Egan incurred the Hogans’ anger when, in March 1921, his men took some potshots at Max Greenberg while he was standing in a group of men in the middle of town. Greenberg was only wounded in the incident, but political lobbyist John P. Sweeney was killed. Six months later the Hogans took their revenge when they shot Egan to death outside his saloon on Franklin Avenue. Jellyroll Hogan and his gang were the main suspects and the story went that $30,000 was the price of the hit. Egan died in City Hospital, refusing to the last to name his killers. ‘I’m a good sport,’ were reported to be his last words on the subject. A week later Greenberg walked into a police station and provided a watertight alibi for the day of the murder, accompanied by Jacob H. Mackler, the Hogan Gang’s lawyer.
The Rats’ next leader was the aggressive former plumber and First World War infantryman, William ‘Dint’ Colbeck. Colbeck struck back hard at the Hogan boys, and violence stalked the city streets with both mobsters and passers-by being gunned down. Colbeck knew that Greenberg had planned the murder of Egan, that the lawyer Macklin had been involved in the payments for the hit, that James Hogan had been one of the shooters and that Hogan hitmen John Doyle and Luke Kennedy had also been involved.
They killed John Doyle first, in January 1922. Then they failed to injure Macklen, Kennedy or James Hogan when they opened fire on their car in town. A short while later, however, Macklen’s luck ran out when 15 bullets were pumped into his car on Twelfth Street. He died instantly. The Hogans replied with a hit on Rat, George Kurloff, in a restaurant and the Rats responded in this tit-for-tat war by leaving the bodies of three Hogan Gang members, Joseph Cammarata, Joseph Cipolla and Everett Summers, in ditches beside remote country roads. Then it was Luke Kennedy’s turn. His car was peppered with bullets in May 1922. When Dint Colbeck’s plumbing store was shot up, the Egan boys retaliated by doing the same to Jellyroll Hogan’s house.
The public and the media were outraged. In one incident, a young boy had been hit by a car driven by gunmen trying to escape. The anger was such that Colbeck was forced to move his headquarters out of the city. They converted an 11-roomed mansion into a club they called the Maxwelton Club and they commandeered an old, abandoned horse and motorcycle track where they would drive round at speed shooting at tin cans and empty bottles.
There had now been 24 deaths in the war between the Hogan Gang and the Egan Rats, but the Rats still wanted to take care of their nemesis, Greenberg. It was getting too hot for Big Maxie and he took off for New York, picking up where he had left off with Waxey Gordon. Although he did not die in St Louis, someone caught up with him eventually. He was found murdered in a New Jersey hotel room in 1933.
In March 1923 the Rats messed up an attempt to assassinate Jellyroll Hogan and his sidekick, Hogan Gang enforcer Humberto Costello, as they drove down Grand Boulevard in St Louis. Two of the shooters were arrested – Elmer Runge and Isadore Londe – and Hogan was invited to the police station to identify his assailants. ‘I’ll identify them, alright,’ he is reported to have growled. ‘I’ll identify them with a shotgun.’
Next, the two mobs staged a Wild West-type shootout on a St Louis street, Lindell Boulevard, scattering passers-by, but, fortunately, injuring no one. Colbeck, speaking to reporters, denied his boys’ involvement and railed at them for fingering his team for any bit of violence that happened in the city.
The city had had enough and rushed to bring the shooting to an end. In April 1923 Philip Brockman, president of the Board of Police Commissioners, and a Catholic priest, Father Timothy Dempsey, brokered a peace between the two gangs. It lasted just two months. Some Rats spied James Hogan in a crowd of people. They opened fire, missed him and killed two innocent men, one of whom was a state representative. Colbeck attributed the atrocity to ‘boyish high spirits’. ‘I know three of the boys were full of moonshine and were riding around in a big touring car,’ he is reported as saying. ‘They might have seen Hogan in the crowd at Jefferson and Cass and maybe took a few shots at him for fun.’
In the meantime, Colbeck was maintaining the Rats’ income with a stream of spectacular armed robberies, netting, it is estimated, some $4.5 million in a five-year period. In one robbery alone, in April 1923, they stole $2.4 million in cash and negotiable bonds from a mail van, with the help of another St Louis gang, the Cuckoos.
Things were going well and the Hogan Gang had just about had enough. The Rats got them to agree to a peace treaty but a tidal wave of robbery and killing followed. The Rats were ruthless, killing anyone who got in their way, even their own gang members.
By now Dint Colbeck thought he was untouchable. He was famous for his flamboyance and liked nothing more than to pull out a wad of cash and go up to a uniformed policeman and say to him: ‘Want a bribe, officer?’
In 1924, however, the bubble burst when captured Rat, Ray Renard, started to cooperate with state prosecutors. On the back of his information, a hoste of Rats were arrested and charged with armed robbery – Dint Colbeck, Louis ‘Red’ Smith, Steve Ryan, David ‘Chippy’ Robinson, Oliver Dougherty, Frank Hackenthal, Charles ‘Red’ Lanham, Gus Dietmeyer and Frank ‘Cotton’ Epplesheimer. They went to prison for 25 years each.
The imprisonment of the gang’s leadership led to the break-up of Egan’s Rats but those who had not gone to jail started causing havoc in other parts of the country. One team, led by Frankie ‘Killer’ Burke, surfaced in the Midwest where they carried out numerous contract killings, robberies and abductions. They are also believed to have been part of the team that Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurk used in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929.
Ex-Rat, Leo Vincent Brothers gained underworld notoriety when he gunned down Chicago Tribune reporter, Jake Lingle. Lingle was slain, gangland-style, at the Illinois Central Station underpass, during rush hour on 9 June 1930, in full view of crowds of people. The Mob were horrified as they insisted they only killed their own. It transpired later, however, that Lingle did, in fact, have racketeering connections.
Pete and Thomas ‘Yonnie’ Licavoli set up on their own with the River Gang which became the main bootlegging operation in Detroit as well as in Toledo, Ohio, while another former Rat, Elmer Macklin, was the murderer of Detroit crime boss Chester LaMare in February 1931.
When the Rats were released from prison in the early 1940s, most of them went to work for the organised crime boss Frank ‘Buster’ Wortman, while Colbeck tried to regain his former power. However,
driving home one night in February 1943, at around 10.30 p.m., a car drew up alongside his vehicle, at Ninth and Destrehan Streets. There was a burst of sub-machine-gun fire and Dint Colbeck died with half a dozen bullets in him. He was 58 years old.
Meanwhile, Jellyroll Hogan remained in Democratic Party politics for 50 years. He served five terms in the Missouri state house and four in the state senate, retiring in 1960 when he lost his seat to Theodore McNeal, the first black man to be elected to the Missouri state senate. Hogan died in 1963, aged 77, after a short illness.
The Bonnot Gang
In France before the First World War, conditions for workers were bad. Wages were low and if anyone dared to demand an improvement in pay or conditions he was branded a militant and sacked or, worse still, arrested. Jules Bonnot was such a man. In 1911 out of work and largely unemployable because of his political beliefs, Bonnot decided to follow what seemed to him at the time, to be the only path available – a criminal one.
Born in 1876 in Pont-de-Roide, a town in eastern France, Bonnot’s mother had died when he was five, leaving him to be brought up by his father, a factory worker, and his grandmother. His childhood was, needless to say, difficult. He was a handful, being sent to prison twice as a teenager – on one occasion for assaulting a police officer. To cap it all, he was sacked from a factory job for allegedly stealing copper shavings.
Eventually, aged 21, he was conscripted into the French army, serving for three years as a car mechanic. He learned to shoot a rifle, becoming an excellent shot, and left the army with the rank of corporal.
In 1901 he married, but soon began to experience problems with employers who were wary of his political views and suspicious of his connections with anarchists. Consequently, he was blacklisted as an agitator. Moving to Geneva he managed to find employment, but lost his job when he struck his boss with an iron bar. By 1907 his wife had had enough and left him, taking their child with her.
In 1908 Bonnot was working with a gang of Italian anarcho-individualists who were involved in counterfeiting. In addition to counterfeiting, he was also involved in small-time theft and burglary which progressed to the theft of luxury cars in France and Switzerland, the knowledge he had picked up about cars in the army being put to good use. By 1910 he was in Lyon, robbing the houses of rich lawyers. He would pose as a businessman and case their properties while apparently visiting on business.
In order to avoid arrest, Bonnot moved to Paris in 1911 where he hooked up with an anarchist group led by Octave Garnier. Garnier had come from a long line of trouble-makers. His father had been a militant syndicalist who had refused to do military service and consequently had spent his life on the run. His son, known as ‘Poil Du Carotte’ due to his red hair, had followed suit.
The group aired their views through L’Anarchie, an anarchist newspaper, and consisted of a disparate band of people sharing similar political views. They had all been unemployed for some time and, given their politics, it was unlikely that anyone would give them a job. Most of the gang had associations with the syndicalist movement which, put simply, wanted to run society for the greater good of the majority. Almost inevitably, they gravitated towards criminality to achieve their ends. As far as they were concerned, there was no alternative apart from starvation or joining the army.
There were around 20 of them, and they were people of all sorts, from Victor Kibalchich, a Russian revolutionary who took the name Victor Serge, to André Soudy, a young grocer who suffered from tuberculosis. Soudy had been sacked from a number of jobs because of his political activities and had also contracted tuberculosis following several terms in prison. Nonetheless, illness had failed to dampen his rebelliousness. Other members included the Belgian Eduard Carouy, a huge man with a massive physique, who brought added muscle, and Raymond Callemin, known as ‘La Science’, a lover of the theatre and music who came to the gang with a dislike of violence which did not last long. The gang’s first robbery was a historic one – the first time in history that a motor car was used to escape from the scene of a crime. They snatched a satchel from the shoulders of a bank courier as he left the Societé Générale Bank in the Rue Ordener in Paris on 21 December 1911, fleeing in a Delaunay-Bonneville that they had stolen the previous week and firing at anyone who got in their way. Bonnot, Octave Garnier, Raymond Callemin and Eugéne Dieudonné, an anti-militarist from Nancy, got away with 5,126 francs.
A week after the bank robbery, the gang broke into the Foury Armoury in Rue Lafayette, just as it was closing down for the Christmas holiday. They would later add to their armoury in the New Year when they raided the American Armaments Factory in Boulevard Haussmann, stealing pistols and rifles. Then on 2 January 1912 they entered the home of a Monsieur Moreau, brutally murdering both him and his maid and escaping with loot valued at 30,000 francs.
In February, now known as the Bonnot Gang and after Bonnot gave an interview in the Petit Parisien newspaper, they moved their activities to the south, stealing a car from an industrialist in Beziers, in the Languedoc, and robbing the Nimes Mining Company because one of them had been sacked from a job there due to his trade union activity. Throughout February they carried out a wave of robberies and their name became famous throughout France for their daring and their use of modern technology – cars and firearms – that left the forces of the law in their wake. Hysterical headlines in the papers screamed: ‘Where will they strike next?’
A political and philosophical debate also raged as to whether this activity was aimed against political repression or was just plain criminality with the objective of enriching the perpetrators. But the public were drawn to this gang whose actions seemed to them to be charmingly amateurish. Ordinary people cared little for banks losing money and less for a police force not known for its sensitivity. They liked the fact that the gang was an assortment of types, from the suave good-looking characters from good backgrounds, to the honest labourer; from the huge, physical presence of a man like Carouy, to the small, intellectual form of the arts-loving Callemin. There were intellectuals and trade union militants and the gang even had women members who supported their men no matter what. The members talked ceaselessly of revolution and placed articles in the anarchist press defending their actions. They made little effort to disguise themselves; their photographs were circulated by the newspapers, which described the authorities’ efforts to capture the gang as laughable. In fact, when the press made a mistake in its coverage of the gang’s activities, they would be sure to receive a letter from a gang member, putting them right.
They even communicated with the police through the pages of newspapers. In March 1912, in an open letter to Sûreté Chief Xavier Guichard, Octave Garnier wrote: ‘I assure you that all this hue and cry doesn’t prevent me from having a peaceful existence. As you’ve been frank enough to admit, the fact that I’ve been traced has not been due to your perspicacity, but to the fact that there was a stool pigeon amongst us. You can be sure he’s had his come-uppance since. Your reward of 10,000 francs to my girlfriend to turn me in, must have troubled you, N.L. Guichard . . . you really shouldn’t be so lavish with State funds. A bit more, and I’ll hand myself over, with guns thrown in. You know something, Guichard, you’re so bad at your lousy profession I feel like turning up and putting you right myself. Oh, I know you’ll win in the finish all right. You have a formidable arsenal at your disposal, and what have we got? Nothing. We’ll be beaten because you’re the stronger and we’re the weaker, but, in the meantime, we hope that you’ll have to pay for your victory. Looking forward to seeing you (?) – Garnier.’
In the face of a huge public outcry and an outraged and sarcastic press, the Sûreté Nationale launched a huge manhunt. Using the registry of anarchist organisations they succeeded in making one arrest, but by this time the gang had escaped to Belgium where they disposed of the stolen car they had been using. While attempting to steal another, they shot dead a Belgian policemen.
The car thefts and robberies continued and another two p
olicemen were shot. But by 1912 the police had begun to make inroads, arresting a number of people connected to the gang. On 25 March 1925, in a forest south of Paris, the gang shot a driver in the head and stole his car, a De Dion-Bouton. They drove it to the north of Chantilly and robbed a branch of the Societé Générale Bank. In the process, they shot three of the bank’s cashiers, escaping in the stolen car and pursued somewhat ridiculously by two gendarmes, one on a bicycle and one on horseback.
Now, the authorities were becoming very irritated. The gang seemed to do as it pleased. Sûreté Chief Guichard, who later appeared in Georges Simenon’s Maigret books as the eponymous detective’s superior, became personally involved in the hunt. Meanwhile, politicians were becoming concerned and an extra 800,000 francs was made available to police funds. Banks increased their security and cashiers began turning up for work carrying guns. The Société Générale Bank offered a reward of 100,000 francs for information leading to the arrest of gang members.
Eventually things began to unravel and a number of gang members were picked up. On 30 March 1912, a few days after they had shot dead a man as they were stealing a car, André Soudy was arrested at Berck-sur-Mer on the Channel Coast. Soudy’s tuberculosis was at an advanced stage and he said that he no longer cared whether he died from his illness or by guillotine. Eduard Carouy was arrested four days later and Raymond Callemin four days after that. An angry mob gathered when news of Callemin’s arrest began to spread and police had to hold them at bay to prevent them from lynching him on the spot. Another, Antoine Monnier, was arrested in Paris on 24 April. By now 28 gang members and their supporters were locked up. But still the gang’s three founder members, Garnier, René Valet and Jules Bonnot himself, remained at large.