In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with author Kevin E. Meredith to examine a little-known but highly influential force in Chicago’s Prohibition-era crime wars—the Secret Six. Click here for a link to get the book The Secret Six: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s Greatest Vigilantes.
Meredith, a former newspaper reporter turned historian, explains how he uncovered the story while researching another project. What he found was a group unlike any other: wealthy businessmen who stepped outside traditional law enforcement to combat the chaos of organized crime and corruption gripping Chicago in the early 1930s.
The Rise of the Secret Six
The conversation begins with the conditions that gave rise to the Secret Six—widespread corruption, violent labor disputes, and a city dominated by gangland power structures. A key turning point was the murder of construction supervisor Philip Meeker, which galvanized prominent business leaders into action. Rather than working quietly, the Secret Six operated in full public view, using media attention as a weapon. They were not truly “secret,” nor limited to six members, but their branding captured public imagination during a time of fear and instability. Vigilantes with Resources: Meredith details the group’s unconventional tactics: running a covert jail inside the St. Clair Hotel; financing independent investigations; using early lie-detection technology; coordinating with local law enforcement. Their financial power allowed them to function almost like a parallel police force, blurring the line between legal authority and private enforcement.
High-Profile Cases and Mob Pressure
The Secret Six became entangled in some of the most notorious events of the era, including fallout from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Their aggressive tactics earned both praise and criticism. One of the most striking episodes discussed is their involvement in an extortion case tied to socialite Marian Wright. Their heavy-handed investigative style brought results—but also legal and ethical scrutiny. Their existence also intersected with figures like Al Capone, who recognized the group as a legitimate threat to organized crime operations.
The Fall and Legacy
Operating from roughly 1930 to 1933, the Secret Six ultimately collapsed under mounting criticism and suspicion. Deals that appeared questionable—such as the recovery of stolen bonds—raised doubts about their methods and motives. Despite their short lifespan, they had a significant impact. Meredith emphasizes how their story reflects enduring tensions between public safety and civil liberties—questions that remain relevant today.
Final Takeaway
This episode explores a unique chapter in American crime history where private citizens took the fight to organized crime, raising complex questions about justice, power, and accountability. Get this great book The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s Greatest Vigilantes
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Transcript
[0:00] Hey, guys, back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City, Missouri, police officer, detective, sergeant, former member of the Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit.
[0:10] Worked on the mob for about 14 years. And now I’ve got this podcast mainly about the mafia in the United States, from all over the United States. And today we’re going to go to Chicago. And I have an author and his book. I deal with a lot of authors and a lot of books. It’s called The Secret Six, and it’s Kevin E. Meredith. So welcome, Kevin.
[0:30] Thank you, Gary. Great to be here. Appreciate your interest. All right. There’s the book, guys. I’ll have links to that down in the show notes, down at Amazon, where if you want to get that book or get the Kindle version of it, it’ll be there for you. It’s a really interesting book. It goes into Chicago, a little-known part of Al Capone and Prohibition and what was going on in Chicago.
[0:52] It’s not really made it into the popular culture. Al Capone dominates everything in Chicago, of course. And so it but it really can fill you guys and i know a lot of you guys are really into this into the minutiae and the real details of what’s really going on behind all the headlines so this book has got it so kevin tell us just a little bit about yourself we talked before your newspaper reporter and now and your this is one of your retirement projects so tell us a little bit about yourself.
[1:20] Yeah, I was a reporter for newspapers in North Carolina and Georgia and Savannah for seven, eight years in the 80s and 90s, and then decided that I needed to make enough money to raise my sons. So I got an MBA in sold technology, but never stopped writing and stumbled across this story. When you’re a former reporter and somebody says, geez, we should write a book about this. As a reporter, you have to. If you used to write for a living and then you come across something that seems like it should be a book, it’s on you to write it. And I stumbled across the Secret Six working on another book. I’d never heard of them. It made no sense to me because this Secret Six would come in according to the press of the day. And we’re talking the early 30s. The Secret Six would come in and just start investigating things. And I didn’t understand who they were. And I started digging and 10,000 newspaper articles later, I had my book.
[2:29] So they were neither sex nor secret. Is that what you told me? Yeah. The secret sex or neither. That’s one of the chapters of my book. They were very public. I think they had a publicity team. Things were being reported about them every week in the newspaper. And there’s no way that reporters had been a newspaper reporter. I know I can tell when a story is being fed to the press. They have all the names. They have all the details. They weren’t secret at all, nor were they six. The myth at the time, and that myth has persisted to this day, is there were six.
[3:05] Secret millionaire businessmen, and they get named sometimes, Julius Rosenwald, the guy that headed up Sears at the time. He was based in Chicago. The names come out, and it doesn’t make any sense. A millionaire is not going to go do a stakeout, is not going to investigate, is not going to interrogate suspects.
[3:28] They’re not going to do police work. They’re millionaire businessmen, and they’re going to keep doing that. What they did was give money to the Secret Six. And the Secret Six had a lot of money. They had $5 million is what they were saying at the time. And the rule of thumb for converting $1930 to $2026 is about a factor of 20. So when somebody says five million dollars you’re talking about about a hundred thousand dollars yeah a hundred million dollars yeah five million dollars would be a hundred million dollars you’re talking five million dollars that’s a hundred million dollars you can’t imagine what kind of law enforcement you could afford that kind of money and and so they had a lot of money a lot of publicity and the money came from their supporters who were many more than just six gentlemen and the real people doing the work were all named in the press. I found about 20, 30 names in the press of actual cops, and a lot of them were on loan from the Chicago Police Department. They were detectives in other contexts, and they were named repeatedly as the guys working the cases, arresting the perpetrators.
[4:44] The Secret Six had their own jail. That’s one of my favorite details. They had their own jail at the St. Clair Hotel. They imprisoned people there, and they were allowed to do by the authorities of Chicago.
[4:56] Let’s set the scene. Now, what are the causes and conditions that allowed this to rise? Now, we know Chicago was notoriously corrupt back then during Prohibition. It’s like narcotics today. There’s so much money flowing in, and Prohibition was not that popular anyhow. Wow. So among the general population, among law enforcement, they all wanted to drink too. So the cause and conditions that allowed this to rise and was it Al Capone because he got so much publicity that they couldn’t seem to do anything about him or what was it? There was a man, a well-respected young man, and I think he was in his 30s. His name was Philip Meeker. And he was managing, supervising the construction of the laying-in hospital at University of Chicago. Building it is still there. It’s beautiful. It’s the kind of buildings they built in the 20s and 30s in Chicago. I think they call it Gothic. And he was supervising. One day, a couple of guys showed up and asked for him. And a couple minutes later he headed out of a construction building and he was walking with one of his supervisors down the street and these two guys ran up behind him and started shooting shot him in the back three or four times and the press at the time was interesting because it said they killed him, but he actually apparently lived for years after that.
[6:20] But the reason they shot him, the best theory they came up with, they never caught the shooters. The best theory they came up for why he was targeted was labor disputes. You had unions, and then if anybody hired non-union, their building would get blown up. Somebody would get shot. So it was probably a labor dispute that led to the shooting of Philip Meager. And that was the last straw for the powers that be. Philip Meager worked for the H. Barnard Company, and Mr. Barnard was outraged. And he went to the Chicago Association of Commerce and said, you’ve got to fix this. And a man named Colonel Randolph was head of the association. And.
[7:03] He was, because of that pressure and because of the outrage and just because of the general crime conditions of Chicago, they decided to take matters into their own hands. I didn’t find a lot of evidence that the Chicago police were corrupt. In fact, I found the opposite while I was researching, but their budget, they weren’t getting paid. These Chicago cops hadn’t been paid for months because of a budget crisis in Chicago. So you had a perfect storm of gangsters who were fighting over alcohol turf, and that’s where prohibition comes in. But you also have labor disputes. You have what I would call general thuggery and just the usual crime conditions. And then a police department that still, a lot of these guys are still on the force, but not getting paid. and the way the chief put it at the time was we can solve crimes after they happen, but we can’t prevent them. We don’t have the manpower to prevent them. And then I would say the last factor that caused the rise of the Secret Six is you didn’t have a good national police force. The FBI was in its infancy.
[8:17] J. Edgar Hoover was in charge, but he didn’t have much power. He didn’t have a budget. Now we’re talking Depression-era funding. Nobody had money. And so you have this vacuum of federal authority, just a lot of crime conditions in Chicago, and then the shooting of Philip Meager and…
[8:40] The Association of Commerce says, all right, we’re going to do something. The last factor, but it was also important, a lot of these businesses in Chicago were being shaken down regularly. Even miniature golf courses had to chip in. Somebody would show up, I don’t know, once every week or month or something and say, all right, it’s time for our cut. They would throw uh non-existent buffets and say you come into the buffet next week right we need your money for that and nobody would ever show up for them then we would host them it was all just understood that this is just protection money or racket money or whatever you want to call it the once the secret six started up in february of 1930 one of their messages was hey everybody We need your money. Just divert it from all the gangsters you’re giving it to and give it to us instead. So the flow was already there. And Colonel Randolph was an engineer. The way I like to put it in my book was he probably saw it as a water crop. He did a lot of work with water. And the idea was, let’s just divert this flow, let’s just change this valve and divert the flow of money from this direction to this direction into our pockets and we know what to do with it.
[9:59] Interesting. So once they got that money flowing in, then they set up shadow police department, if you will, it sounds to me like. Is that a good way to describe that? Yeah. A shadow police department, they came out saying they were going to be so secret that the people that worked for them wouldn’t even know who the other people were working for them. They were going to have multiple teams who were completely closed off from each other. And that wasn’t true at all. You just pick up the Chicago Tribune and there’s everybody’s name right there. And they spent a lot of money on their employees. And then they also…
[10:41] Started at one point an actual bar. They call it the Garage Cafe. And there’s some mystery there. I never really could get tracked down, but Colonel Randolph years later said, yeah, we even had a bar. We served liquor. We broke the law at the Garage Cafe. We invited in the gangsters. They didn’t necessarily know who ran this place, who owned it, but they would come in and talk and we’d get the lowdown on whatever was going on. And so that was an intelligence operation. They spent thousands of dollars to set up that speakeasy. That was the thing.
[11:20] That’s a hell of a, that is a hell of an idea, man. Yeah. Yeah. And I looked at Garage Cafe, tried to research it. They said it was in Cicero. But then if you look at the address in the press, it’s in another location that’s not actually part of the Cicero corner of Chicago. And eventually it got raided and they chased off the bartender, the man that managed it. And nothing really came of that. But I had a lot of trouble digging up information about that. I think it’s such a great story that I think it’s grown legs of its own, independent of reality. Yeah. Interesting. I tell you, one of the major crimes of that time that really changed things a lot was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. And I noticed that, and we know now that was the Capone’s American boys from down in East St. Louis that came up and participated in that Fred Killer Burke. I saw some stuff in the book about chasing down some of those guys. Can you remember much about that from your book?
[12:21] Yeah, of course, they had a few charges, a few trials, I think Burke was focused on, but nobody ever got convicted in the Valentine’s Day massacre. But that was very much another aspect of people just having had enough.
[12:39] It was interesting if you want to just run down the list of things that the secret six did and this list is unbelievable until you look at the old press and realize this is what was going on when al capone went down he gave an interview when he was headed to prison he gave an interview he said the secret six are the ones that brought me down there’s no money in the game anymore the secret sixes got me licked that’s the way he put it the secret six started the untouchables elliot ness he was brother-in-law to alexander jamie the head detective for the secret six they were related to each other alexander jamie put in a good word with the feds because alexander jamie had really strong background with the feds he was a prohibition agent and he put in a good word for for elliot ness and elliot ness got the commission that is how he got the role as the head of the untouchables and that’s how the untouchables themselves were started up was with the encouragement of the secret six they inspired a movie.
[13:42] They used the latest technology. They were copied around the country. When you search the secret six in the old press, you find city after city, including my own city, Columbia, South Carolina, starting their own civilian vigilante secret sixes. Sometimes they call them the secret six. Sometimes they’d say this group, they’d call it something else, but they’d say it’s inspired by the secret six. And there was a lot of discussion in the press, too.
[14:13] In San Francisco? Do we need a secret six here in San Francisco? It really captured the imagination of the nation. But I think partly because they faded in such infamy in 1933, and it’s just a messy story. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s been forgotten. But in their day, from 1930 to 1933, the Secret Six were an American institution that were recognized throughout the country. Interesting. During those years, the 30s, there was kidnappings of rich people. There was extortions of really rich people. You mentioned something about the Marian extortion. You want to talk about that a little bit?
[14:58] Yeah, it’s a funny story, and it really was one of the biggest Secret Six fiascos, if you will. Marian Wright.
[15:06] 18-year-old socialite. Her father, William Wright, was a steel magnate and a very wealthy man in Chicago. She started getting letters from this Lester McKay. They were creepy letters. They were saying things like, I can shoot poison darts at you from a quarter mile away. I’m going to kill your dad. And then they were saying things like, I saw you last night in person. You certainly are a sweet girl or an attractive lady. And I need, I believe the figure was $25,000. Send me $25,000. And I don’t fully understand how you pay off an extorter back then. I think you put the money and cash in some kind of box, and then they come and get it, and nobody ever catches them. So it’s interesting. Thank you. Marion’s father did not call the police. He certainly didn’t call the FBI because this isn’t something the FBI would get involved in. He called the Secret Six. He called the Secret Six. They were the police in his mind. This well-established, very wealthy man in Chicago calls this group of business vigilantes, and they come in. They start taking a look at who Marion has hung around with lately.
[16:29] And they settle on this young man that she had been on some dates with. He was a clerk in a stock trading or a securities trading firm. He was the son of a wealthy guy in California, and he was on his way up. I think he was like 21. Marion was 18. And he was a problem drinker. William Kuhn was his name, K-U-H-N, and he would go to speakeasies. Liquor was very easy to get in Chicago. He’d go to bars and he would drink and then he would talk to his drinks and that struck some of the bartenders as odd. He got kicked out of a few places. A few speakeasies didn’t want him coming back.
[17:14] He went on a date with Marion. He got very drunk. He tried to get her drunk. He got her into a speakeasy, but she wasn’t comfortable with that. So they got in a cab to drive back to her place. And she was, so they got in a cab to drive back to her place. And he starts pawing at her, trying to whatever, just drunken, aggressive, whatever he was doing. Marion wasn’t happy about it. She told him no. And he backed off. But according to some stories, he said, I’m going to get even with you for telling me no and turning me down or whatever it was, just drunken, dumb stuff. But he emerged as a top suspect for the Secret Six. A very interesting gentleman named Edgar Dudley was the top Secret Six investigator. He was a former prohibition officer. And so Edgar Dudley began investigating this. He looked into this coon boy and they found a typewriter. They alleged that the typewriter was an exact match of the typewriter that had been used to type these extortion letters to Mary. And she got four or five of them.
[18:27] They got into William’s apartment, his hotel room. They all stayed in hotels. They lived in hotels. He lived there with his brother. They found some what they called sordid detective novels, possibly some Sherlock Holmes or something. And so they started building this profile of this problem drinker who liked detective stories, who had access to a typewriter at the brokerage where he worked, and they decided he’d done it. And they… Arrested him. And when I say the Secret Six arrested him and put him in their jail at the St. Clair Hotel on St. Clair Street. Now, I’m talking about some vigilantes, some businessmen. I’m not talking about the Chicago police or any other law enforcement agency. These were vigilantes that investigated this case after the father called them in. They arrested this young man and put him in their own jail.
[19:27] I’m pretty sure based on what they had done to some other folks, I’m pretty sure they locked him up, in a place where they could surveil him. They could record what he was saying on the latest, greatest recording technology of the day, which was a dictaphone. And because they had spied on others that way, they brought his brother in at one time to meet with him in this jail and talk about, and I’m sure they listened. And his brother just said, don’t say anything. And so they had him officially charged. They could only take this case so far. They could investigate, arrest, incarcerate. They gave him a lie detector test. The inventor of the lie detector was the one who administered this lie detector test. They were into technology, and they decided he was guilty, but they couldn’t imprison. They couldn’t sentence. So then they had to bring in the authorities, and the authorities were satisfied that the Secret Six had done good work, and they went ahead and charged him officially. At which point, this poor young man, William Kuhn, his face is splashed in newspapers all across the country, extorting, they call it the poison dart extorter.
[20:44] And his face and his name and his job and the fact he lives in Chicago were splashed across the country. This story was covered in Alaska. It was such huge news. And of course, the secret six gets their man the secret six arrests this terrible extorter he was innocent he didn’t do it he was in boston he didn’t do it he was in boston when some of these letters got sent when they really looked hard at the typewriter and the letters that marion had received yeah it wasn’t the same typewriter the typewriter he had at the brokerage was not the same machine and it.
[21:21] They had an expert quote unquote who said oh this is the same typewriter but in the end it wasn’t and apparently it was very obvious that it wasn’t the same typewriter the case just fell apart this young man has been nationally pilloried by the secret six yeah and so he sued he sued them for hundred thousand dollars which i point in the book point out in the book and he sues marion her father and a bunch of guys with the secret six he can’t sue the secret six itself because it’s not even a bona fide organization yeah it’s not established in any way it’s not a it’s not chartered it’s it’s not a corporation it’s nothing it’s just some vigilantes who just got together so he he sues marion her father and these some of the top secret six guys for $100,000, which was four times the extortionist’s original request from Marion, because he just wanted $25,000.
[22:26] And the case went to trial, and about a month before the Secret Six folded and probably contributing to their collapse, he won a $30,000 settlement from the jury he never collected the defendants appealed judge agreed this wasn’t they had some legitimate reasons to consider him a suspect they should have done a better detective work but imagine if you’re one of these donors one of these wealthy business donors to the secret six and you’re seeing that well.
[23:02] Now, the money I’m donating is just going to pay off the victims of your incompetence. And so that was a month before the Secret Six ceased to exist in January of 1933.
[23:15] Interesting. There’s probably a lot of money for some off-duty policemen during those three years that were connected and could get going. They had to pay the detectives. I think they probably paid pretty well. And then they did a lot of space in Chicago. They had their main offices, and they had some satellite offices where they had more secret operations going. So it was like a business.
[23:41] Interesting. I noticed one thing you did in the book, Kevin, is you Capone’s homes, I didn’t really go word for word, but a couple of times in Capone’s homes, you went to Zillow and compared and contrasted what the home was worth and the size of it and what it’s worth today. And then modern today on Zillow, which is pretty interesting, I thought. Yeah, he had a very modest home in Chicago, but that’s not where he lived. He lived on a whole floor at the Lexington area.
[24:12] Hotel. And apparently, he paid by the year and the whole place was set up to be very secure. It was customized for Al Capone. The way it was described by one reporter who was allowed to come in and have an audience with Al Capone was you had to pass through multiple rooms, each protected by armed men with long memories, is the way the story put it. So you pass through room after room before you get anywhere near Al Capone. And then he’s got, it was interesting, he’s got pictures of George Washington and the corrupt mayor, whose name is escaping me right now, but the corrupt mayor of Chicago at the time.
[24:52] A picture of him. What was it, Anton Cernak? Was he the mayor? I think he came, I thought he was the next one. Yeah. He may have been the new broom that swept clean. I can’t remember. Yeah, I think so. The story I thought was interesting is that there was a witness who could testify all about Capone’s money. I think it was Randolph claimed they sent him on a cruise to South America before the Capone trial. So they did things like witness protection.
[25:18] Those days, boy, witnesses, there was no formal witness protection. And law enforcement, as you said, was very poorly paid, and they weren’t going to put a lot of energy into this. And Secret Six obviously did function as a WITSEC at the time. Yeah, it’s a great story. It’s another one of those stories that lives on when people talk about the Secret Six today. It may not be true. The Chicago Tribune, which never fell in with the Secret Six romance, they always took a hard-nosed look at it. If the Secret Six did something right, they reported it. If the Secret Six goofed something up, they definitely reported that as well.
[26:01] They went to the feds after Al Capone was convicted and said, so tell us about this guy that Colonel Randolph’s talking about who was sent on a South American cruise for a while. And they just said, we don’t know who he’s talking about. There’s not really a person that fits that profile that was that key to the Al Capone case. And so we don’t know who he’s talking about. They didn’t say it wasn’t true. They just said, we can’t support that story. We don’t know who that witness is. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t true, but it wasn’t corroborated by anybody outside the Secret Six. Ah, interesting. And that happens a lot.
[26:43] Yeah, I was just going to ask you this. Colonel Robert Randolph, he was a flamboyant character. It was really hard to discern between fact and fiction, I would imagine. Yeah, yeah.
[26:54] Colonel Randolph, and the way I put it in my book, and I don’t say this lightly, he started lying within two months of the Secret Six birth in February of 1930. He was taking credit for putting some astounding number of bombers away in their first two months. Like maybe we’ve incarcerated, our investigations have led to the imprisonment of eight bombers, I think he said. And you can’t get eight bombers put away in two months. It just, that’s just not how it works. And then I, so I decided to check the press. Did eight bombers actually go to prison? And there was nothing to support that. There were some bombers arrested and convicted, but the ones I found had no secret six involvement, at least not expressed in the press.
[27:47] And anytime the secret six was involved in something, they got credit and it was mentioned reporters love talking about the secret six yeah and so if they didn’t get mentioned at the time somebody was arrested or convicted or sent to prison then are you sure you were involved and i think it’s highly suspect interesting so tell us another story another one of your favorite stories out of something the secret six did one one.
[28:20] One story, this is about the St. Clair Hotel again. It’s still there. And I wanted to stay there when I was going to Chicago to do my research. And so I looked it up and I couldn’t find the Hotel St. Clair on the normal travel sites. I kept searching. I looked the address up and it was like Hotel Chicago. It had changed its name too, but it wasn’t even available under that name for booking a room. So I stayed somewhere else, and then I just rode a hotel bike that I borrowed from the hotel over to the Hotel St. Clair. Beautiful building. It’s got lion’s faces all the way around it. And I just went inside with this crazy idea that maybe somewhere on one of the top floors, there’s still some heavily barred doors or something that nobody understands. I had this dream of finding something and snapping some pictures of it. And so I got into the lobby, and these two very nice Hispanic women came out. This was obviously no longer a hotel. It turns out it’s a migrant shelter now. And it was a rainy day. I was out in shorts and a t-shirt on a bike, pulled up, I wandered into this migrant shelter.
[29:44] Ranting about this hundred-year-old jail and the secret six vigilantes. Did they see anything upstairs? It looks like a prison. I think mainly I just scared them. And they very nicely said, this is a private facility. Can you please leave? I get it. There’s probably nothing up there. The… And another story is when I went to Wikipedia, and I love Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great place to start if you’re doing research. You don’t want to quote Wikipedia, but they have a great article about vigilantism, which amazingly did not include The Secret Six until I added The Secret Six in. Until my book came out a couple of months ago, there was… No, actually, I added The Secret Six reference, I don’t know, maybe six months ago to prepare for it. But anyway, if you go to the Secret Six page on Wikipedia a year ago, it said, nobody knows what the Secret Six did because they were secret.
[30:47] And so I just know there’s 10,000 articles in the press of the day that talks all about everything they did. You just have to read it. And the resource I used, and I love this resource. And if I can digress for a second about how one does research like this, newspapers.com. This is not a plug. I’m not endorsing them. I had to pay a subscription just like everybody else. But it is an incredible resource. Not just because it has, I don’t know, hundreds of millions of newspaper pages, but because they’ve all been scanned. All the words on the pages have been scanned. So they’re searchable. So you type in secret six and you get 60,000 and it was about 60,000 articles returned from 1930 to my first search was 1930 to 19 to it was 1930 to 2020 or 2024 just to see everything that’s out there. And I think it was like maybe 60,000, 80,000 articles. And it was all kinds of junk. There was the movie, of course, and that got a lot of hits in 30, 32. There were other things.
[32:02] There was a whole series of articles about a couple who kept their marriage proposal secret six months. And so those get pulled up. And so I had to parse all those out and just focus on the actual Secret Six, the group in Chicago, probably got it down to about 10,000 articles, which I didn’t count, but I looked at all those. And if I hadn’t had newspapers.com, I couldn’t have done the project. I simply could not have done it because finding, I probably referred to hundreds of newspapers, including some in Canada, including one in Australia. The Secret Six got written about in Australia. That’s how big they were. And the idea of going to all the cities and going through those papers, if they even existed anymore, which sometimes there’s not even, you can’t even find those papers anymore. It’s just impossible. So a story like The Secret Six, and there are probably a million other stories like this waiting to be told. You can’t do it without a resource like newspapers.com. And that’s what I used.
[33:08] I’d love for people to go use that resource and check my work. There have been times on wikipedia i tried to add a paragraph to chicago’s wikipedia page about just there was this thing happened this time and here’s what happened in the 20s and here’s some interesting things that happened in the 30s and so i put a paragraph it just said the secret six vigilante started by the association of commerce they inspired a movie al capone gave him credit for shutting him down they started the untouchables and elliot ness they were inspired secret sixes all over the country and somebody read what i added and said that’s ai you’re gone and they put it right out i that’s and i argued no i did the research if you look at my secret six page on wikipedia you’ll see all the research i did hundreds of links but it’s such an outrageous story, And it requires so much research to tell that it’s the first thing I think, the first reaction is it’s unbelievable. It sounds like something that AI would come up with.
[34:16] But like you said, they were all over the country. I know I did a story about some Jewish fellows with a writer that formed a little vigilante group in their neighborhood because of all the Jewish mobsters. They put pressure on them to quit extorting money from shopkeepers and stuff like that. So that was not that uncommon in the 30s. Yes, there have been all kinds of vigilante groups. And I found a lot of those. Wikipedia is a great place to just look at a list of them.
[34:44] I would argue, and I wanted this on the cover of the book, but Indiana University Press, cooler heads prevailed, let’s say, to keep me from calling the Secret Six the greatest American vigilantes. I really wanted that on the title. But I think you can make the case. These guys, who else did Al Capone give credit to for bringing him down? They inspired the movie. They inspired The Untouchables. And when I say they inspired them, read The Untouchables. In the first few pages, Elliot Ness, the book by Elliot Ness, he talks about how The Secret Six came in and helped him get his commission as The Untouchables’ head and started and helped get the whole thing off the ground. And and then the money they had five million dollars in 1930 bucks the influence they had the inspiration that they and then they syndicated articles alexander jamie had articles in newspapers all across the country where he was writing about crime they testified before congress no other vigilante group can comes anywhere close to that that i could find in all my research yeah.
[35:54] And I’ll tell you what, one more plug for that newspapers.com guys. And you can get that here in Kansas city. If you have a library card to the midcontinent public library and you can go in and get newspapers.com for free, the price of a library card, which is nothing that’s a few hoops to jump through, but I use it all the time. And those old newspaper articles, you can write a book just from their writing because they wrote all these details. You just have to kind of watch your facts, and they might play a little fast and loose with it, but they wrote so much, so much content in a real readable form for more true detective kind of stories and things like that in those old newspapers. Yes. It’s just a fantastic resource. It scares me that the only place that exists are places where you have to pay a subscription. That’s great, but if newspapers.com says, we’re going to change our business model, We just sold out to Meta or whatever, and our pages aren’t available anymore. Somebody paid us money to shut it down. We lose a part of the American soul, and that terrifies me. I wish it was a nationally owned resource. That’s an area where I think the government could do some good stuff.
[37:04] You got time for another favorite story of mine? Yeah, one more. Let’s do that. Lincoln National Bank robbed September 17th, 1930. Really professional job. These five, six guys get out. A car parks right in front of the bank. It’s downtown.
[37:22] Five guys get it out. One of them’s got this machine gun like nobody’s ever seen before. Two of them stand on the sidewalk walk. The rest go in, immediately announce that they’ve got a bank robbery underway. We’re going to take lots of money. They had to hit a couple of people but fortunately didn’t shoot anyone. They got close to…
[37:46] And let me see how much they got away with they shut they got so much money they shut the bank down and put almost put six other banks out of business because the the lincoln national bank was holding the resources of these other banks and so the total haul was in bonds it was, like six hundred thousand dollars which again that factor of 20 i think that comes to about 12 million. 16, yeah, 12 million. And so they get out with all these bonds, and it’s the bonds that were the biggest deal because those bonds were worth tons of money. And back then, if you had bonds in a bank, that was your actual physical wealth. And there was not like a bank account that you could go look at online. And the way they put it was There were elderly widows, there were people who were otherwise destitute who had most of their money tied up in these bonds that had been stolen. And so there was really a personal cost to this bank robbery because these bonds were worth so much.
[39:01] So Roy Steffen, he was a very public Secret Six operative. He met up with somebody that was suspected of having stolen the bonds. That is Gus Winkler. Gus Winkler. Yeah. So Gus Winkler gets in a car wreck. Roy Steffen goes and sits down in the hospital room with him. And they’re trying to get dirt on Al Capone. But Roy Steffen says, if you can’t give me that, Gus, how about you get those bonds back? And so many months ensue, Gus Winkler is suspected of the bank robbery, the Lincoln bank robbery, but he didn’t do it as far as anything I could find. He was innocent, but he knew who did do it and he knew how to get these bonds back. And so long story short.
[39:55] Roy Steffen recovers the bonds by making a deal with Gus Winkler where they won’t prosecute Gus for all these other crimes he’s suspected of. Gus does not want to go back to prison. And he works for Al Capone, and Al Capone doesn’t want him to go back to prison. So they recover these bonds. And the problem is, this makes the Secret Six look bad because it’s like they made a deal with the devil. You got these bonds back by agreeing not to prosecute these bad guys. And is that what law enforcement has come down to? There was a lot of outrage in Nebraska and around the country. And so the punchline of the story is the day after they recover these bonds and everybody is up in arms about how you’re doing deals with the devil and you’re rewarding criminals they return the stolen goods and you’re making sure they don’t get prosecuted anymore and so Roy Steffen just comes out and says no I didn’t make a deal with Gus Winkler I got these bonds another way. I was about to track all the bond thieves down to an apartment and they called me and said, Don’t track us down or we’ll kill you. And then you can go outside your house and the bonds are in a suitcase right outside your house.
[41:24] The story had so many holes in it, but it was obvious they were just trying to not look bad. And the story was just ridiculous. Why would a bunch of guys drive bonds back to a cop’s neighborhood? If you don’t want those bonds anymore, you light them on fire or you put them in the nearest trash can and you just get going. But no, Roy Stephan was saying, oh yeah, they were afraid I was about to catch them. So they brought me the bonds and that’s how I got them. I didn’t make any deals with Gus Winkler, even though for months before that, he had been announcing specifically that I’m making a deal with Gus Winkler. So for me, that was one of the most glaring examples of the Secret Six,
[42:11] just flat out lying, just telling stories to protect their image. And it was so obvious, but the press never called them out at the time. I couldn’t find anywhere where the press, any editor, anybody said, this is ridiculous. They just were allowed to say these things and they were duly printed up in the newspapers. And that’s how it went. And I could go on and on with stories because there were just so many different things. There was the North’s first black congressman who was extorted, and they cracked that case. They did great work on that case, the Secret Six.
[42:47] There were a charity cheat, a serial charity cheat who was finally brought down by the Secret Six, just on and on. There were so many things they did, and they were all very public. You just have to read the newspaper articles and put together the stories. Interesting alright.
[43:08] There’s the book, guys. Kevin Meredith, The Secret Six, The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s Greatest Vigilantes. You got the greatest vigilantes in there, Kevin. I did. They let me do that. But they weren’t just Chicago’s greatest vigilantes. At least Illinois’ greatest vigilantes. All right. All right, Kevin. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Jerry, thank you. Really appreciate it.