In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with organized crime historian and author John Binder to explore the violent and chaotic world of Prohibition-era Chicago. Drawing on his acclaimed book Al Capone’s Beer Wars, Binder traces the explosive rise of organized crime in the 1920s and how bootlegging transformed local street gangs into powerful criminal empires.
Click Here to Listen
The discussion examines how Prohibition reshaped America’s underworld, creating unprecedented opportunities for ambitious gangsters like Al Capone. Gary and John trace the roots of Chicago’s infamous gang wars, focusing on the bitter conflict between Capone’s organization and the North Side Gang. Central to the story is the assassination of Dion O’Banion, a murder that ignited a bloody cycle of revenge killings and permanently altered the balance of power in Chicago’s criminal landscape.
The episode dives into the roles played by immigrant communities, particularly Italian and Jewish gangs, who entered the bootlegging business during a period when economic opportunities were limited. Gary and John discuss how organized crime flourished in poorly policed neighborhoods, where gangs established territorial control and built sophisticated alcohol distribution networks spanning multiple states.
Listeners also hear detailed stories about notorious gangland figures including Machine Gun Jack McGurn and the fearsome Frank McErlane, whose violent reputation became legendary even within criminal circles. The conversation reveals the ruthless tactics these men employed as rival factions fought for dominance in the lucrative bootlegging trade. The episode also explores the blurred line between organized crime and legitimate business during Prohibition, showing how gangsters used political influence, territorial control, and business alliances to expand their operations. Gary and John discuss the strategic importance of places like Cicero, which became critical strongholds for Capone’s growing empire.
John Binder also discusses his Chicago Prohibition Gangland Tour, which allows participants to visit the streets, neighborhoods, and historic locations where these infamous events unfolded. The tour provides a rare opportunity to experience the physical landscape of Chicago’s mob history while learning about the real people behind the myths. This episode offers a compelling look into the rise of organized crime during Prohibition, separating fact from fiction while uncovering the brutal realities that created some of America’s most notorious gangsters.
Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire
Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”
Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information.
To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here
To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.
To purchase one of my books, click here.
Transcript
[00:00:00] hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, later turned sergeant, now a podcaster and a documentary filmmaker, and I’ve got a few books out there.
Go to my website and I got links to all my stuff that I’m selling. We always like to sell stuff or you always like to get money in, so today I have a Chicago show for you. Gonna kinda bounce back between Chicago and New York, ’cause I’ll tell you what, guys, that’s where the stories are is Chicago and New York.
I don’t know. There’s always a battle between the two, and a- and so we’re gonna go to Chicago. And today we have a guy… If you’re on Facebook very much, you may know John Binder or John Binder’s prohibition tour that he has in Chicago and we’ll talk more about that. And as a matter of fact, guys, I’m gonna go up and take that tour, and then I’ll make up a video of that and put it out on the YouTube channel so you can kinda see what he does up there.
So welcome, John. Hey, great to be here, Gary. [00:01:00] Yeah I’ve watched your stuff, and I know you did this. And like I was telling you before, I thought, I think I was gonna get a hold of you early on, and I don’t know, you just get distracted. And pretty soon I’ve got all these publicists that have books, authors and books and they’re getting a hold of me now.
Sure. And I’m, like, practically tied up. I don’t even, I don’t even have a chance to tell my own stories, go out and research and then tell- huh … my own particular stories. So I’d kinda like to get back to that. I’ve got one I got three of them, actually, that are up there I did. Okay. One a Chicago story about them putting horse meat in a, out through restaurants.
I thought that was pretty interesting. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. Absolutely. But there’s a little bit of- Oh, yeah … little bit of that going on. 1950. Yeah. And I got another one. What was it? That was, And that’s how they got the horses to run fast in the track. Run faster or else. Yeah. Or, sh- you’re dog meat.
In this place, you’re people meat. And, we had a mob guy here in Kansas City, Willie Commison, that had a meat locker or had control of one. [00:02:00] A- and they caught him putting out what they called cancer-eyed beef. That’s beef, if you’re raised on a farm, like I was, once in a while you’ll get a cow that gets cancer eye, and you can’t sell it- Oh
out in the free market. And he was buying those- … real cheap and cutting them up and putting them out. Think about that next time you think it’s cool to eat in a mob restaurant. Where’d they get that food from? Huh. ‘Cause dudes those dudes like to cut a corner I promise you that.
But anyhow, today we’re gonna talk about the prohibition era in Chicago ’cause John’s got a book on that. So John, what’s the na- what’s the title of that book? I didn’t have it and I can’t remember. Yes. But put the title of that book and then talk about your, kinda your interest in that prohibition era.
A little bit about your background. Sure. The short title of the book is Al Capone’s Beer Wars, and then there’s a colon and some stuff after that. But I guess for me to describe it, I meant that to be a complete history of organized crime in Chicago during Prohibition. Obviously the story begins before Prohibition.
That’s the base that it’s built on, and [00:03:00] what was organized crime before Prohibition just continues, but then you add bootlegging with all its ramifications to the story. And, my goal was to answer all the important questions about organized crime in Chicago during the Prohibition era in this one book.
Interesting. Interesting. Because that, Prohibition, that was a turning point. That’s what really made the mafia, or organized crime or the syndicate or whatever you wanna call it. When they start organizing for bootlegging and all those huge profits in it, and Chicago of course is such a famous story when you get Al Capone- Yeah
into it. He was such a, he was such a a media magnet, if you will. There’s never- … been a bigger media magnet than Al Capone. A mob m- museum guy told me that Al Capone still gets the most hits whenever… Al Capone and John Gotti go back and forth as to who’s the most popular by- by hits on their email when their, or their blog site, whatever they did, do something on, either one of those two. So it’s just, it’s a hell of [00:04:00] a story. How did that get started? How did they early get it, get early into that? It was a lot of Jewish mobsters I have to assume got in on that too.
Talk about the genesis of that. Before Prohibition in Chicago, in most major cities, there was gambling and prostitution were the main things in the world of organized crime. And a lot of cities the players there were either of a Jewish background, mostly Eastern European Jews- Yeah
or Irish. Not that excludes anybody else, but that’s who many of the faces were. Then when Prohibition gets going, you get a lot of new faces in Chicago at least. Many of the people that were leading and were prominent figures in the Prohibition or bootlegging gangs were not in organized crime before Prohibition.
What of, what becomes Capone’s gang, that was, that’s somewhat of an exception. And that was heavily but not totally Italian or, Italian American. Short story there is what Big Jim Colosimo started in organized crime in 1902, [00:05:00] John Torrio got in 1920 after he has Big Jim murdered. . When Torrio leaves Chicago having gotten shot up a bit during the gang wars in 1925, what was then the Torrio gang becomes the Capone gang, and it’s Capone’s until he goes away to federal prison then on the income tax evasion charges.
But Capone dramatically builds up what he got from Torrio. Torrio dramatically built up what he got from Colosimo. Interesting. And Capone won a war bet- was it the Genna brothers that, that happened during that time? I can’t remember exactly. Plus the Irish, of course, the well-known battle with the North Side Irish, but wasn’t there also a little Italian inter-warfare early on in the in those beer wars as Capone- the Genna brothers gang…
Sorry. Go, that’s okay. As Capone wanted to, yeah, he wanted to dominate the whole city. A- and so how did that develop? The Genna brothers gang that was centered on the near West Side of Chicago [00:06:00] around Taylor Street, they were originally Capone, Torrio-Capone allies. But as they weakened up got shot up by the North Side Gang Capone at that point I don’t think had any problems moving in and pushing out what was left of the the Genna gang, and taking over that area, and taking over some big rackets.
So the Genna brothers gang was heavily Italian, Southern Italian. The North Side Gang, as you mentioned, had Irish members, but it was not, by no means, exclusively Irish American. Name any ethnicity on the North Side of Chicago and I think I can put at least one or two guys from that ethnic group in the North Side Gang.
They’re an equal opportunity employer, Gary. Interesting. Back during Prohibition. And Chicago is such an ethnically diverse place. You- … got a huge Polish population and several other ones. How did that contribute to the kind of these as these newly arrived immigrants came in and they’re searching, they want, they just want a piece of the American [00:07:00] pie.
They want to be successful. And Prohibition- … was a way that you could make money pretty quickly because the existing business people, mainly English and some Irish that had been here early, they weren’t gonna let you outsiders in who are from Eastern Europe, and Jewish people and Italian people.
So how’d you see that developing? In Chicago, like a lot of other cities, to the point you just made there was always discrimination against the ne- the next ethnic group to show up. The previous ethnic groups who maybe got discriminated against 20 years before, they turned their nose up against the new guys.
Yeah. So that was pretty common. And, depending upon which group arrived when some people in those groups had no problem making a dishonest buck. Most of them, including most by far Italian Americans, were here to make an honest buck. They were, they had nothing to do with organized crime.
But there was a significant portion of especially southern Italian immigrants- Who significant in the sense of a large number of them even though it was [00:08:00] maybe only half a percent of all the Italian immigrants were willing to get into organized crime, if you want to focus on that group.
So you get these various ethnic groups involved in bootlegging around various parts of the city. At the start of prohibition there was something like 11 or 12 major bootlegging gangs inside Chicago. The I’ll call it at that point when Colosimo was dead, the Torrio-Torrio Capone gang was only one of those groups.
As you noted the Capone gang is the big winner during the prohibition-era gang wars. Really? Compared to everybody else. For example, the, one of the more famous murders before the St. Valentine’s massacre, and I think nicely known, would be the murder of Dion O’Banion in the flower shop. That’s been- Right
that’s a storied murder there. Can you tell us about that? How that, how did that develop? What were the, who were the warring parties in that? Sure. From the start of prohibition onward the two biggest bootlegging gangs in Chicago were the Torrio-Capone gang operating on the [00:09:00] South Side, near West Side, and into the southern western suburbs, and then the North Side Gang, original leader Dean, D-E-A-N, O’Banion, that operated on a big slice of the North Side and into the northern suburbs.
They got along for a while. They were allies, and then O’Banion had a serious falling out with some people, like the Genna brothers, and also blamed Torrio and Capone for some of the problems there. And he double-crossed Torrio. Keep the story short here. Double, visibly double-crossed Torrio on a brew, on a brewery deal.
They didn’t kill him immediately, but they waited till November 1924, and then O’Banion was murdered in his flower shop by a group of gunmen ill- who were probably sent by both Capone and Torrio and by the Genna brothers gang. They both had a grievance against O’Banion. Now, that kicks off the major what you might call South Side, Torrio-Capone gang on the one hand versus North Side, Dean O’Banion and the North Side gang war that runs until late [00:10:00] 1930 in Chicago.
Wow. That was, I knew it was important. I couldn’t remember it was that important that it really kicked off the big gang war. Interesting. Now, I d- I tell you, I have a story and I read this somewhere and I think I remember seeing something like this on a movie or The Untouchables or something. The, Yeah
Capone was in the Lexing- I think it was the Lexington Hotel, and some people came by and just, with machine guns, and just shot that thing up. Is there any basis to, truth to the basis of that? That was actually in the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero. Oh, Hawthorne. Which for a time the Capone and Torrio were using that place in Cicero as their business headquarters.
That was the front office. Partly because, or largely because there was a reform mayor for about four years in Chicago. And during the gang wars, the North Side Gang at that point, 1926, led by Earl, known as Hymie Weiss, more or less decided to send a message to Capone. Cavalcade, a motorcade of guy- of cars [00:11:00] drove by the Hawthorne with machine guns and shotguns and absolutely cut loose.
Capone apparently was inside, but hit, he hit the deck and then ran out the back when it was an opportune time, and he was safe. But they’re hoping, and there’s reports that it’s just, basically to say to him, “Yeah? There’s more where that came from. You better get out of Chicago, buddy.
You, you better step aside or we’ll get you.” Wow. And that was Hymie Weiss. I’ll be darned. Yep. I didn’t… See I didn’t remember who- It’s okay … those parties were on that. It’s it’s a great story. Where was Tony Accardo during this? Seem like I’ve read some stuff where he was supposedly a bodyguard or he was involved in and around Capone.
Where was he during these ti- these years? I would say that probably by 1930 or so, Accardo becomes a member of the Capone gang. He’d previously been with a Capone allied gang on the near Northwest Side, the Circus Gang. Yeah. But the Circus Gang gets absorbed pretty clearly by [00:12:00] 1931 at the latest by the Capone gang.
And so Accardo probably comes over at that point. Maybe he came over in a little bit earlier. And again, he’s still a young guy then. He’s born in 1906. He’s only 24 in 1930, if you want to pick that year. And he’s doing low-level stuff, bodyguarding, killing might’ve been apprentice to Jack McGurn to learn the fine art of of killing people during prohibition for Al Capone.
Wow. Yeah, that machine gun Jack McGurn, that’s that’s quite a story all in it- Yep … just all in itself. I did this one story- … about, you know about Capone and the golf course that he used to go to and would play with Greasy Thumb Jake Guzik and Jack McGurn. Jack McGurn was really a pretty good golfer.
Do you remember that story at all? , Jack McGurn was a fine athlete. He’d actually been, when he was a young man, a professional boxer. I think he has six, maybe seven professional fights. I believe it was as a welterweight, but then he went on the, He went off, shall we say, maybe the straight and narrow [00:13:00] and got involved in killing people in revenge for the murder of his stepfather, and that was then his his entree to slide into gang land.
He had a skill set by that point that was very desirable to various people, including eventually the Capone gang. Yeah. He was a great golfer and he could handle a machine gun. Did he learn that… Did he go to World War I? Was he… Did he learn that in the war? I can’t remember anything more about him.
Or he just picked that up on his own. No, I think he was probably too young. Yeah, okay. The birth the birth year for Jack McGurn seems to be 1902. Yeah he, unlike a lot of the prohibition-era gangsters who are claimed to have served in World War I and learned part of their trade for the country under Uncle Sam before they- Yeah
Came back into gangland. There, there’s no evidence that McGurn was was a US soldier in World War I, but- Okay some other guys certainly were. Certainly that’s that’s where people started learning about that early Thompson machine gun that was developed in World War I and showed up so probitly or prevalently or prominently on the streets of [00:14:00] Chicago during those years.
You could write a whole book on that probably. Absolutely. And during this time what are… Tell us some of your favorite stories that re- you remember, personal favorites that you remember. Oh, gosh. Let’s see. There, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of individual vignettes that help define this guy or that guy around Chicago gangland.
There are tons of interesting characters. One of the most interesting is Frank McErlane. As Irish as the name sounds simply put, a homicidal lunatic. I describe Frank McErlane as probably the most dangerous man in the United States, not just Ch- Chicago during the 1920s. I have this distance test.
Gee, I wouldn’t like to be walking down the same street as that guy. He’s dangerous. Yeah. I wouldn’t wanna like to be in the same city as this other guy. I wouldn’t wanna be in the same county as this third guy. I don’t think I’d wanna be on the same planet as Frank McErlane, ’cause when he was drunk, which appears to have been much of the time, no one was safe.
Wow. [00:15:00] One of those guys that walks in a bar and he doesn’t walk out. He’s not happy unless he gets in a fight before he walks out. I knew guys like that back in the day. It… Yeah it happened. I think he had a… as dangerous as he was when he was sober, the fact that he drank apparently a ton just made him-
a really unstable, violent incredibly dangerous to be around. Yeah. You know what they say, the Irish would’ve ruled the world if it wasn’t for whiskey, I have… Yeah, I’ve heard that, and the Scots I think have also claimed the same thing, yeah. It’s the only, it’s the only thing that kept them from incredible greatness.
I hoot-hoot.
I have a question. I don’t re- I’m not sure if they figured into that, would be Fred “Killer” Burke and hi- and what they call the American Boys that worked for Capone. Yeah. How did… That, and they were out of St. Louis. How did… and of course Capone, what I think is interesting about Capone, he was such an organizer, you know- with Lui- Lucky Luciano, back, the famous meeting at in Atlantic City and some other meetings. And so- … he [00:16:00] really had this organized and had a multi-city connection. Could, talk about his multi-city connections and maybe the American Boys on down into St. Louis.
Yeah Capone and the Capone gang during Prohibition had extensive connections multi-city, you say, and around the country. On the second point, the Capone gang got control of or heavily controlled of the illegal industry in Chicago producing pure alcohol during Prohibition. They had gallons and gallons of it, and they were exporting it to many different states, many of them west and southwest Chicago, but some even directly south and east.
It- it’s very avail- very well-known. That’s a major income producer for the Capone gang. On the other hand, in terms of where things were being made that were coming into Chicago, whether it was scotch from obviously Scotland or Canadian whiskey, there was no prohibition in Canada, therefore the US prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to Canadian distillers , [00:17:00] or rum and stuff coming in from the islands.
All the stuff people drank before Prohibition, they still wanted to drink during Prohibition. We can come back to the eth- the groups in Chicago in just a second. I would like to. And it’s, it’s still gotta come into the country, so the Capone gang was importing it, but quite often with connections to others.
The best route, lowest cost route to get scotch into the US is probably ship it into a port like New York and then unload it and then put it on trucks if it’s going to Chicago. So probably the New York bootleggers are becoming the major wholesale importers of that. And b- booze, the Capone then have connections to them and buy from them, get it on his trucks back to Chicago.
The stuff from the islands coming in through ports like Miami, Atlanta. So there were important, intracity connections back then in terms of how the booze, broadly defined, moved around and in some ca- in many cases [00:18:00] then got to Chicago. And then Capone’s gang in turn might have served as a whole, a regional wholesaler to other cities, in the Midwest.
All right, I’m bringing it into Chicago. Yeah. You can get it from me That’s what I read. They even had Capo- what they called Capone beer down here in Kansas City d- during those years. So that was, Unconfirmed, yeah … I know there was some kind of a connection with that. He had he had his own brewery, I think, and brewed his own beer.
That Capone beer, did that turn into any legitimate kind of brand that we know today? Not really. As soon as Prohibition ended, although there was fears that the bootleggers are gonna try and keep running their breweries and pushing their stuff, whether it’s their beer or their, s- in some cases very low-quality whiskey into bars.
Pretty much they all went away. The legitimate producers from before Prohibition all came back in the picture, and then the bootleggers were out. Basically speaking, this is a big summary statement here about [00:19:00] organized crime, but the hoodlums are very good at doing illegal things. They’re incredibly good at that.
Yeah. But you make them compete against a legitimate businessman in some industry- Yeah … where the hoodlums have to play by the same rules as he does, the legitimate businessman will kick their pants off every time, and that’s indication of it. Basically, as soon as Prohibition is over, these guys are largely out of the liquor business.
Interesting. Beer business, et cetera. Beer business. A- and of course they went into the gambling business right on the heels of that- Sure … which they’d already been developing and the race wires and all that, which they’d already been working- … on during those times. So what about the American Boys, Fred “Killer” Burke?
What do you know about that connection? I would say quite a bit. I think there’s abundant convincing evidence that the gunmen at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were not mainline Capone guys. Al Capone wisely brought in outside faces who the North Side Gang would not recognize on sight- Yeah
to try and do that, and it’s Fred Burke [00:20:00] and these guys he ran with. Now, some of them had been, like Burke himself, had come out of St. Louis gangland. Some had come from elsewhere. But before the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, this was a a crew of gunmen, killers, kidnappers, bank robbers. They’d done all kinds of stuff during the ’20s, including in Detroit gangland for hire, and Capone and his allies hired them to be the shooters in the St.
Valentine’s Day Massacre. Okay. There’s a variety of evidence that very clearly connects those dots. Yeah. I believe I read that this Fred “Killer” Burke, they served a search warrant on a house he was hiding out at, and they found one of the machine guns that they linked ballistically back to, or two of them, back to the- Yeah
massacre. And because there was a lot of bullets to examine out of that massacre, I believe. Yeah. They found 70 .45 caliber- Shell casings on the floor Yeah. Yeah But they’d… all those rounds had been fired by just two submachine guns, and they found both those submachine [00:21:00] guns. They’d been in Burke’s possession.
Burke skipped out of town in southwestern Michigan. The authorities were 10 to 15 minutes behind him. He got out of there so fast ’cause they were be- right behind him. He left his arsenal with him. They grabbed the guns. They tested them out in Chicago, and sure enough, those two machine guns are your weapons.
Yeah. What a- With the master- … what a find. What a find. I could imagine those coppers w- what they like. “Can you believe this? These are the guns. These are the guns. Call the media. Alert the media.” Berrien County Sheriff’s Department in southwestern Michigan still has those guns. Oh, really? Those two machine guns.
Yeah. Are they on display somewhere? They got a little museum or something at their, at the county- … sheriff’s office or the county? No, not that I know of. Inside the Berrien County, they’re in the armory. They’re held under tight control, but they have put them out for display. They are regularly displayed or have been on a regular basis displayed, for example, at the Vegas Mob Museum.
They’ve been displayed at gun shows, et cetera. So Berrien County has been pretty good [00:22:00] about, you know- … letting them go out, under control of course, but- Yeah … for display for, a day, two days, a couple weeks a- again, depending upon, the term different time periods. Oh, interesting.
That’s that’s crazy. That would… Want to talk about the ultimate artifact for a Bob fan, this would be- Oh, yeah … one of those machine guns. Priceless. Priceless. Yeah. If we can use the word priceless, which is overused- yeah … priceless. What collectors wouldn’t… some high-end collectors wouldn’t give-
for those guns. It’s like the original Bonnie and Clyde car. Yep. Some things like that. I think there, there’s probably some Bonnie and Clyde BARs out there, probably some ones that are claimed to be that aren’t really. But I wouldn’t be surprised there weren’t some phony submachine guns out there somewhere in somebody’s collection that they’re claiming was one of them.
… That’s a problem with a lot of gangland artifacts broadly defined. There’s a lot of claims for a lot of things and unfortunately quite often there isn’t a lot of substantiation. There’s lots of [00:23:00] cars, for example, that are cl- And I’ve actually looked into this and I wrote something about that one time.
There’s a lot of cars that have been claimed to be Capone or Capone cars. . But you look for any s- sort of substantiation, there’s none except for somebody claims it was a quote- Capone car. The evidence on that is is very less than scanty. . And, and- like nonexistent … there’s no providence on that. You’d need… For a car, you’d have to have the VIN, and they didn’t keep records that good back then on cars. . Or, a bill of sale. . Some- something like that or government records like, “We grabbed this car- Capone was in it, and here’s the VIN number.”
That would be a good one. Essential serial number. Something like that. And nope it doesn’t exist. Interesting. So give us a little overview of your tour. Actually I do two tours. The Chicago Prohibition Gangland Tour, which you and I are gonna do here pretty shortly go- go around in a short loop in the City of Chicago, ’cause if we [00:24:00] wanted to visit everything it would take two days.
So to keep it manageable, about a three-hour tour, geographically it’s a short loop, near South Side up to a spot on the North Side. But we visit the major prohibitionary gangland sites associated with the Capone gang, the North Side Gang, as well as the Genna brothers gang, the Drug and Lake Gang that was on the very near Southwest Side there just outside the loop, stuff like that.
And we go by the site of several of the major gangland killings, such as the murder of Dean O’Banion, the murder of Hymie Weiss, the murder of… Sorry, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And even though he’s not truly a gangster, ’cause he was not involved in organized crime, but because John Dillinger was nice enough to get himself shot and killed- Yeah.
according to the usual course in our city, we go up to the Biograph Theater. Dillinger was shot just a few steps away from the entrance there. So that comes in as well. Cool. That sounds… That… I’m really looking forward to that, John. I really [00:25:00] am. I think you’ll enjoy it, Gary. Yeah. So that…
it seemed like I had one more question about that era. Capone’s original house, is it just sitting vacant down there? The first real house Capone owned is on the middle of the South Side, like 72 44 South Prairie Avenue. No. To my understanding, it’s not vacant, but it’s not the best of neighborhoods. Yeah. Thoughts about turning that into some sort of museum or attraction don’t seem to be getting any traction-
because of the neighborhood. Yeah, that’s too bad. That would be a, that would make a heck of a nice little museum. Too bad it wasn’t closer into downtown. Yeah, exactly. Cicero, what is Cicero like? We a- you always associate Cicero with Al Capone it seems to me in my mind.
Maybe that’s from The Untouchables- … I don’t know. But what’s Cicero like? It’s a different Cicero than when Capone and Torrio were headquartered there. Long story short, the G- the Torrio-Capone gang got its hooks [00:26:00] into Cicero in 1924, and then organized crime has never left. We may hear, you may get a call from the mayor of Cicero disputing that, but that’s a subject for another day.
Yeah. In fact, they were riding high in Cicero for years. For years Cicero was flush with illegal gambling, and after a certain point with illegal prostitution, et cetera. It was a real playground for organized crime. As I think I’ve said once or twice if you look at the the history of the world’s most disreputable places, the list goes like this: Cicero, Illinois; Calumet City, Illinois; third, Sodom; fourth, Gomorrah.
There you go. Yes. And what a lot of people- People like it when- Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good one. What a lot of people don’t realize is like Cicero is a different political organization than the entire city of Chicago. So you had a small city government, a small police department.
A lot easier to take control of the levers of government and the police and, you know- Absolutely [00:27:00] correct … get warned if the feds were coming down on- Yeah … when you have a small city like that, the Chicago intelligence, Chicago coppers were not coming down into there. Yeah. Despite claims of the contrary, the Capone gang never controlled Chicago.
Yeah. There’s no way. Even during Prohibition, the mayor had like what? A 6, 7,000 man police force. And if he wanted to, that could be backed up by the National Guard and maybe even more than that. There’s no way the Capone gang with some, at its height maybe 500 gunmen, is gonna buck that. Nobody ever pushed the mayor of Chicago around.
But the Capone gang are the premier example. They got control, essentially control of at least a couple of major Chicago suburbs and then ran their rackets wide open there. So did they try to keep their, like their distribution points and everything in these smaller suburbs where they controlled more of the the police?
It depends what and which suburb. The biggest thing about [00:28:00] those suburbs were there were just like major retail outlets for the Capone gang. It tended to be flush with gambling and and drinking, things like that. But in Cicero, for example, there was a lot of prote- Pardon me, production of pure alcohol as well as in some other parts of the Chicago area.
The stuff that we talked about before, heavily produced in the Chicago area. At one point the C- the Capone gang largely controlled that, and that was exported then. Pure alcohol being the basis of any alcoholic beverage exported to many states. In many states west of Chicago, for example, apparently the the beer…
What they did was they legally brewed near beer in the vicinity with half percent alcohol or less, and then they just spiked it with- … pure alcohol to get it up to the standard 5%, something like that. Yeah. And that’s what they, apparently that’s what they drank in much of the Western United States, what they called needled beer.
Yeah. Needled, injected with alcohol. I’ll be darned. During that era. Yeah. All courtesy of… [00:29:00] Alcohol courtesy of the Capone gang. I’ll be darned. That’s interesting. Kansas City included, Mr. Jenkins. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because it didn’t… I tell people, “Oh, I like the taste.” It ain’t about the taste. It’s what’s gonna get a buzz on, what’s gonna make my head go buzz under.
That’s what it’s about. It ain’t about the taste. Come on. Yeah. I think a lot of the stuff people d- you know, that the average man drank during Prohibition was like really substitute liquor, yeah. The whiskey they drank was p- in, in a lot of s- places like Chicago. The bootleggers like the Capone gang made pure alcohol.
They cut it half and half with water. They put in some flavoring, some sugar- Yeah … some coloring. Yeah. Let’s get it, a lot of whiskey from wherever. Had a little bit of brownish tint. There you go. You know- Here’s your over-the-counter whiskey. … Maybe tasted a bit like whiskey. Yeah. Now the discriminating customer with a lot of money could get the real stuff.
Yeah. Could get pure scotch that was brought in- Yeah … from s- Scotland or pure Canadian whiskey or [00:30:00] something like that. But- … that was more expensive. And I think one last question. What about the hijacking each other’s loads? I used to see that on Untouchables quite a little bit.
People would hijack either other’s loads. How prevalent was that? When when some of the major bootlegging gangs were fighting with each other, then, a reasonably common activity to some extent was to hijack the other guy’s liquor. Now of course there were also, during much of Prohibition, there were all kinds of people who were, I would s- I would say these guys are not real smart, who took it upon them… They thought they were tough. I- just independents, not with any bootlegging gang, decided they’re gonna go hijack bootlegging shipments too, whoever, from whatever gang, and grab it and resell it. If the Capone gang caught up with you you were in a lot of trouble.
You were dead men. If you did that. But some people had more, Is it okay, or okay, or c- what can I say balls than sense on this show? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. More balls, yes. They were using dollars and [00:31:00] cents, but they didn’t have a lot of sense- Yeah. … with the Baldassi NSC. But they seemed to think they had a lot of guts or balls and, They did, yeah
got them killed. Yeah. On end of the day, the guys that rip off the cocaine dealers, those are the- … those are the toughest dudes on the… Those are the dan- most dangerous dudes out there on the street, the ones that’ll go rip off these cocaine dealers. Yeah, it’s it takes- Yeah, they’re gonna come looking for you
a hard character. Yeah, they’re gonna come looking for you, and you’re gonna run into a place that’s got guns and will shoot back at you not like you’re robbing a store. Yeah. Un- unless, of course, there’s instances of rogue police officers- Oh, yeah. … them knocking over drug houses. And they’ll c- you know, for the rogue police officers, they might come in with their vests and labeled as police.
Yeah. Now, whether the whether the the cocaine cowboys or whatever, the heroin cowboys shoot back or not- … yeah, that could be touch and go. But, Yeah … they… if they think it’s really cops, then they won’t shoot back, and so they- Yeah … now these rogue cops are even better off. Grab, grab the stash, grab the money- Yeah
and [00:32:00] no gunfire. For a rogue cop, that’s a perfect day, right? Yeah. Dirty cop. It is. Yeah. We probably had a little bit of that back then, too. Oh, sure … but anyhow, all so John, that’s this has been great. This has just been wonderful. Thank you. I’m looking forward to taking your tour. And talk again, sell your book again and we’ll get out of here.
Yeah. The book we just talked about is Al Capone’s Beer Wars, published in 2017. I think that anybody who’s seriously into the prohibition era will find this book interesting. Now it’s c- it tends to be somewhat heavier on statistics and facts, but you can’t answer all the interesting questions just through storytelling.
Yeah. Who shot whom? Yeah, okay, that you can do with storytelling. But if you really wanna get into some of the important issues like, so as claimed, were most of the gangland killings in Chicago during prohibition one-way rides, or were most of them drive-by shootings? You’ve gotta go look, and I did at all- Yeah
like 729 of [00:33:00] them. Wow. 1919 to 1933. Tabulate it and then count them up, et cetera. ‘Cause otherwise you can’t answer those questions. Light and breezy storytelling ain’t gonna do it on that. Yeah. Interesting. We like those stories, but you really wanna get down to- Yeah … the nitty-gritty and find out what was going on.
You gotta look- Yeah … you gotta find out how many murders there were, how did they commit them and, some of them were, domestic deals and some of them were something else. So it’s you gotta- … really get into the weeds on that. I, What about record-finding? How hard was that?
It, How’d you go about that? Some of those old records are really hard to find. Oh. See in Chicago, unlike any other major city I know of, there was an organization that took it upon self to keep count. They were the official scorekeeper, shall we say- Oh, really? … for prohibition and the years afterwards.
The Chicago Crime Commission started tabulating gangland-style killings in the year 1919, and has for years up into the 2000s [00:34:00] done that in the Chicago area. So there is the list. And then part of what I do is look at what is th- this list really? One of the myths that you destroy by looking at it carefully, Gary, is those aren’t all members of the major bootlegging gangs.
In fact, a lot of those killings have nothing to do with bootlegging per se, but unless you go look, you don’t know that either. You don’t know. But that’s the list I worked off of. And then I went to the newspapers and looked for the actual details of e- every o- in one of the… every one of those slayings.
Wow. The who, what, where, when, how, why, according to the newspapers. Yeah. The Tribune has a heck of a archive and I assume- … there’s other archives up there. And, those old newspaper reporters, they’re great. They’re great because those reporters they really went into some details and they got a lot more details than modern reporters.
Modern reporters, the cops won’t give them the time of day hardly. They never… won’t even talk to them. But back then people would talk, and they really did… got some great stories [00:35:00] and great information, more than you’ll get today. Yep. The, and the public loved that stuff.
Yeah. In Chicago and elsewhere, the public couldn’t hear enough about that stuff. The reporters had great contacts both with the police and with the hoodlums. Yeah. So they could probably ask, if a killing or a double murder or something, a triple homicide is a result of gang A fighting gang B, they probably knew somebody, gang A, gang B, go talk to the gang guys.
“Yeah tho- those two idiots from gang B-” “… they hijacked a couple of our beer trucks over the last several weeks, so we were really looking for them.” Yeah. And we found them. “So what else could we do?” They hijacked our truck. Yeah. What are you… What else could we do? Come on, come on. Give a little under- if not compassion, please leave a little understanding here. Yeah. They brought… from the point of view of gang A, they brought it on themselves. Yeah, they did. They did. You gotta follow the rules. Yeah. Otherwise, there’s a consequence. Yeah. Y- All yeah, exactly. However the rules got made up, the rules are well-known And anybody who’s playing the game knows [00:36:00] the rules, just as you said, an- any independents out there who got the guts to go and rip off drug dealers- … they know what, they know how the game’s played, they know what the rules of the game are.
Those guys are gonna come back at you. Yeah, interesting. All right. Yep. John Binder, thanks so much, and I really look forward to taking your tour here in a couple of weeks. Pleasure’s mine, Gary.