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

About This Book

xvii About This Book This memoir was written by the wife of a St. Louis gangster, recruited by Al Capone, who took part in the killing of New York mobster Frankie Yale and participated in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. When her husbandwasshottodeathin1933onordersofFrankNitti,sheattempted suicide but was saved by the wife of Fred “Killer” Burke, the only one identified as a Massacre gunman and by then in prison for an unrelated murder. The following year she tried to expose the workings of the Chicago Syndicate. The Indiana publisher who bought her manuscript was threatened by the mob and canceled the contract, declaring her story “too hot” to printandevenrecallingthegalleysthathadbeensenttobookreviewers. She then contacted Melvin Purvis, Chicago’s chief federal agent, and gave her manuscript to the FBI in the mistaken belief that the U. S. JusticeDepartmentwouldorevencouldcrackdownonthecity ’sracketeers. The writer was Georgette Winkeler* and her manuscript—literate, if less than literary, and sometimes melodramatic—describes her life with Gus Winkeler, a St. Louis hoodlum who moved to Chicago in 1927 and became one of what she called Al Capone’s “American boys.” They included first her husband, then Fred Burke and other gunmen, most from St. Louis, who acted as a special-assignment crew unknown to either the Chicago police or to Capone’s rivals. * The name was spelled Winkler by the press, and some of the dates and language likely came from an earlier version researched by a mysterious Dr. Hollenberger, mentioned in her FBI interrogations and in the biographies. xviii about this book Some of them soon traveled to New York with Thompson submachine guns (the first use of such a weapon in that city) to kill top mobster Frankie Yale on July 1, 1928; then on February 14, 1929, Capone’s “Americanboys”usedtheir Tommygunstokillsevenof theBugsMoran gang in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Georgette’s personal account of that crime was independently supported by a Massacre lookout later captured for other crimes, as well as by Chicago detectives and journalists who had stayed on the case. The FBI wanted nothing to do with it. While Georgette’s story tries to diminish Gus Winkeler’s role as a robber andkillerandnodoubtexaggerateshereffortsto reformhim,she candidly describes the crimes he committed, the fears she experienced, and her stress of being “on the run.” It professes to be a cautionary tale that warns other young women against taking up with gangsters, but in retrospect it is a painful account of her life in the late twenties and early thirties—and it appears to be the only memoir by a person who personally knew Al Capone, his successor Frank Nitti, and other high-profile mobsters and that gives an insider’s account of the St. Valentine’s Day bloodbath that confirmed Chicago as the gangster capital of the world. Gus Winkeler’s murder made banner headlines in Chicago and reached the front page of the New York Times, but by 1933 Capone was in prison,Prohibitionhadbeenrepealed,andKansasCityhada“massacre” of its own that provoked the new FDR administration into declaring the first national “War on Crime.” Practically overnight public excitement shifted to a new breed of federal agent that a little-known but extremely savvy J. Edgar Hoover soon transformed into Dick-Tracy-style “G-men.” They were wrongly portrayed as an “American Scotland Yard,” but it became their job to pursue, capture, or kill “interstate” kidnappers and bank robbers with such catchy monikers as Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby FaceNelson,andtheDillingerGang.(TheDillingeroutlawshadbroken out of an Indiana prison on September 26, 1933, the same day Machine Gun Kelly was captured in Memphis and only two weeks before Winkeler himself was killed.) Winkeler’sdeathonOctober9,1933,wasordainedwhentheChicago Syndicate discovered he was secretly cooperating with federal agents in about this book xix their search for the fugitive Verne Miller, a former Winkeler accomplice involved in the Kansas City killings earlier that year. And in the month after Winkeler was murdered John Dillinger engaged police in a wild shoot-out that landed him the title of Chicago’s Public Enemy Number One. (Hoover had flatly rejected the Chicago Crime Commission’s offer to create a national Public Enemy list, although he didn’t object to newspapers applying “Public Enemy” to any criminal who became the G-men’s main target.) Winkeler, using aliases, had eluded Massacre investigators largely becauseChicagopoliceignoreditsthen-independentdetectivedivision’s leads that pointed at St. Louis. Instead they arrested only the “usual suspects,” whom they...