Listen above, on archive.org, or iTunes. Or see more podcasts! Pictured above is Officer Curran. In 1925, he was working the desk at the County Building, where gangsters John Scalisi and Albert Anselmi had just been brought in . They’d been arrested after a chaotic day in which they’d gone out with Mike Genna to…
Tag: gangsters
Al Capone and the Jewelers’ Building
In my gig as a tour director for student groups, I take a lot of other peoples’ boat tours, bus tours, and walking tours. One thing I’m always curious to see is how they’ll tell the story of Al Capone throwing parties in the dome of the Jeweler’s Building at Wabash and Wacker. According to…
Detective John W. Norton: From H.H. Holmes to Al Capone
Back when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term as president, an old pickpocket named George Summers spoke to the Tribune about the old days. “You know what’s the matter with the cannon (pocket picking) racket today?” he asked. “Stickups! These young punks ain’t willing to go through a long apprenticeship anymore, like we…
The Death of Hoops-a-Daisy Connors
Hoops a Daisy Henry “Hoops-a-Daisy” Connors is not one of Chicago’s better-known gangsters. In fact, if he didn’t have such a swell nickname, I doubt any attention would have been paid to him at all. It hasn’t, really. Looking him up now, all I’m seeing about him are vintage newspapers and one mention in one…
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Dog
One of the venerable ghost stories of Chicago concerns the one survivor of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: Highball the dog, who was tied to one of the axles of the trucks in the garage. Some say it was his hysterical barking that brought the attention of the neighbors to the garage after seven guys…
The New Booze, 1920
In 1920, “new” illegal booze hit the market as soon as the old stuff was prohibited. Before the gangsters got all their ducks in a row and started brewing regular old beer in the same breweries that had operated before, the market was flooded with terrible “bathtub” spirits. In September, about eight months into prohibition,…
“Miracle” on Ashland Blvd, 1931:
In 2005, traffic was ground to a standstill when a salt stain said to resemble the Virgin Mary appeared at the Fullerton Underpass. This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened – and another time it not only attracted what may have been an even bigger crowd, but turned out to be the…
Capone’s Underpants
All over Chicago, people will point to fur dealers, suit shops, and any number of places, saying that Al Capone was once a regular customer. Sometimes it seems that there’s hardly a third or fourth generation Chicagoan around who doesn’t have a story about their grandfather selling Al Capone his suits. At his October 1931…