Al Capone and His American Boys: Memoirs of a Mobster's Wife

Foreword

xiii Foreword That a gangster’s wife would ever think of writing her personal memoirs, or that they would be found buried in files of the FBI some fifty years later—this must be the first, and I suspect the only, occasion such a manuscriptcouldbefound.Thatitwasfoundatall,inthecourseofother research, amounted to quite a stroke of luck. Women don’t usually play a guiding role in organized crime. Gangsters ’ wives are typically silent, obedient, and deliberately kept ignorant of what their husbands do. An outlaw’s “moll,” on the other hand, may actually participate in his crimes. Georgette Winkeler fits somewhere in between. She knew Al Capone, Frank Nitti, and other prominent mobsters of the day. She knew of the robberies and killings by her husband, Gus Winkeler—who became one of Capone’s little-known crew of “American boys”—but not until he and his cronies discussed their crimes afterward . That was how she met many armed robbers of the twenties and thirties, and learned about the gangland killing of Frankie Yale and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. On February 14, 1929, seven members of Bugs Moran’s North Side gang, whose war with Al Capone had kept Chicago in a state of siege since 1924, were lined up against the wall of a freezing garage at 2122 North Clark Street and dismantled with machine-gun fire. Moran escaped death only because a barbershop appointment caused him to run behind schedule. He arrived in time to see the killers, two of them dressedascops,maketheirescapeafterleavingfiveofhistoplieutenants, xiv foreword along with the garage mechanic and an optometrist who liked hanging out with gangsters, lying in a bloody jumble on the greasy floor. Capone had finally won. Briefly. The mass slaying shocked the public out of its decade-long complacency toward gang violence and drew the attention of the federal government to Al Capone and his underworld empire. In 1931 Capone stood trial for tax evasion, a charge easier to prove than murder, and he was sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. Georgette Winkeler says that the “American boys”—her husband Gus, Fred “Killer” Burke, Bob Carey, Ray “Crane Neck” Nugent, and Fred Goetz, most from St. Louis—were the Massacre shooters. She recalled watching them suit up and strut about in the police uniforms meant to fool the Moran gangsters into thinking they were headed for the station house instead of the morgue. It was the last job the crew ever pulled for Capone, who reportedly raged over their failure to include Bugs Moran in the Clark Street body count. After Gus Winkeler was murdered in October 1933, the distraught Georgette attempted suicide andthentriedtopublishhermemoirs,ostensiblytodissuadeotheryoung women from falling for gangsters. When her manuscript was found “too hot,” and presumably too dangerous to the Chicago mob, she gave it to the FBI, which then had no authority to deal with “local” crime. Independent corroboration exists for much of Georgette Winkeler’s account. When I was researching my first book, Guns and Roses: The Untold Story of Dean O’Banion, Chicago’s Big Shot before Al Capone, I interviewed an elderly Kansas resident, Edward Barnett, who had worked for the North Side gang under its first leader, Dean O’Banion. After O’Banion was murdered in 1924, Barnett sought a safer profession, but he maintained a casual acquaintance with the Northsiders for years afterward. He recalled meeting George “Bugs” Moran in a Waukegan tavern in 1932, and hearing a boozy Moran say that he’d just gotten back from “the coast,” where he’d settled an old score with someone named Bob Carey. The name meant nothing to Barnett (or to me, at the time), but it turns out that Bob Carey was one of the “American boys,” and he’d recently been found dead in a New York City apartment. SeveralyearslaterIwroteabiographyofBugsMoran:The Man Who Got Away. Research included interviews with Moran’s relatives. They foreword xv informed me that the aging gangster never discussed the Massacre in detail except to say he’d called the meeting himself, but over the years he dropped the names of the men involved, usually accompanied with a bitter epithet. They included Gus Winkeler, Ray “Crane Neck” Nugent, Fred Goetz, Fred Burke, and Bob Carey, which tallies with Georgette Winkeler’s story. In the eighty-plus years that have passed since February 14, 1929, writers and armchair detectives have postulated any number of theories about the...