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

A Note on Georgette and Gus Winkeler

August Henry Winkeler was born in St. Louis on March 28, 1901, to Mary and Bernard Winkeler, following six older brothers and sisters. Gus apparently moved his birth date back to March 28, 1900, so he could join the army and serve overseas as an ambulance driver, after which he returned to live a life of crime. Georgette’s birth date has been harder to pin down. According to a “delayed” birth certificate issued many years later, as well as her death certificate in 1962, she was born in Louisville on August 10, 1898, to Thomas and Mary Bence. However, she evidently shaved a few years off her age, since a John Thomas Bence and his wife “Mollie,” her presumed parents, died in the mid-1890s. About the only thing known of Georgette is that she and her two brothers, Andrew and Henry, and two sisters, Bertha and Minnie Belle, probably were raised by relatives who moved to St. Louis. At a fairly early age Georgette and one of her sisters (probably Minnie ) opened a boarding house that attracted a rowdy crowd—including young military veterans associated with the Egan’s Rats gang, who graduated from burglary to bootlegging and other crimes. That she and hersisterwererunningwithanunsavorycrowdcanbeinferredfromthe card playing and whiskey drinking that went on in their parlor in spite of Prohibition, which became the law of the land in January of 1920. ThereshemetGusWinkeler.ItwasafterhisfirststintintheSt.Louis Workhouse that she and Gus took up with one another and supposedly were married by a St. Louis minister in the early twenties. Georgette conveniently neglects to mention that on January 21, 1920, Gus had been A Note on Georgette and Gus Winkeler 1 2 al capone and his american boys Georgette Winkeler. Gus Winkeler. A Note on Georgette and Gus Winkeler 3 married to one Pearl Hays, whose possession of a stolen fur coat already had landed him in jail, and that at the time of Georgette and Gus’s wedding , Gus possibly still was married to Pearl. Georgette remained devoted to Gus even as he advanced from hooligan to hoodlum. When many of the “Rats” had either fallen in battle or gone to prison the survivors began migrating to other northern cities , where anyone from the battlefields of St. Louis could find gangster employment in one capacity or another. One of Gus’s early cronies, Fred Burke, had graduated from robberat -large to Detroit kidnapper and hit man, and by 1927 had a $27,000 price on his head. That same year Gus and Georgette arrived in Chicago and Gus began collaborating with Burke in what was called the “snatch racket”—the low-rent kidnapping of rival gangsters and illegal gamblers whowereusuallyreleased unharmed (andunreported)after paymentof a modest ransom. The snatching of one of Al Capone’s Detroit friends, whom Winkeler had sequestered in Chicago, led to an uncomfortable meeting with Capone, who recruited Gus, Bob Carey, and Ray Nugent as a specialassignment crew that Georgette called the “American boys” because they were unknown to rival gangsters or Chicago cops. With them came Burke, who had worn out his welcome in Detroit. Gus distinguished himself by killing Brooklyn’s notorious Frankie Yale on his first major assignment and then participating in the St. Valentine ’s Day Massacre. After lying low for a year he took the name Michael Rand (which gave rise to his nickname “Big Mike”) and rose to prominence as the owner of fashionable nightclubs in Chicago’s Gold Coast district. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, however, ultimately proved to be Capone’s undoing. Following that bloodbath Capone was summoned to a so-called national gangster convention in Atlantic City, after which he began a ten-month sabbatical in a Pennsylvania prison that lasted into 1930 and was followed by his conviction for tax evasion in Chicago on October 24, 1931. Two months later, to fulfill his mother’s wishes, Gus and Georgette were married in a Catholic ceremony at Chicago’s Notre Dame Church on December 16, 1931. The wedding was conducted by Father Edward Dwyer, a priest and confidant of Georgette and Gus, who either didn’t 4 al capone and his american boys know of his Frankie Yale and St. Valentine’s Day indiscretions or was extremely forgiving. By this time Gus’s business acumen was earning him major concessions in what had been Bugs Moran’s North Side territory, and with Capone’s blessing...