The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone Review

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The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone ReviewIf you enjoy books that have 1001 points of trivia in them, you'll love this. It's jam packed with facts. It's clear the authors researched exhaustively.
For me it was exhausting, too. Some true crime books have a tendency to deteriorate into an spider web of tangentially related facts and read like reports instead of narratives. This is one of them. I now know the street addresses of dozens of gangsters, a dozen pseudonyms for each as well as multiple spelling variants for those pseudonyms. I know the names of relatives. I know the names of various reporters and photographers and the paths they took to the crime scene. We got a seeming word for word recital of every meeting of the coroner's investigation, were told which meetings got postponed and by whom, were informed of the several addresses they were held at and even the exact room numbers. We got a roll call of who was present. After slogging through pages and pages of testimony that to me seemed banal and utterly uninformative, the author sums it up by declaring that the coroner's investigation yielded nothing much of interest.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. So why did we get the blow by blow instead of the few leads that actually contributed to the investigation? Why did we hear about every dead end in detail, only to be informed that... it was indeed a dead end.
And yet, with all that information, as another reviewer pointed out, Bugs Moran and the other North Siders were glossed over.
So that's my take on it. If you are fond of books that are like tossed salads of facts, this is your kind of book. It's a trivia lover's dream. If you like an author to sift out the important details and give you a sequential, streamlined narrative (that's me) this book will drag.The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone Overview

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

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Al Capone and His American Boys: Memoirs of a Mobster's Wife ReviewLike gangster Gus Winkeler, this book is a real killer. William Helmer, who has been one of the true experts on Prohibition-era crime for four decades, hits the mark again with a well-crafted, beautifully written and researched work. Helmer rescued Georgette Winkeler's intimate memoir from FBI files and subsequently brought to light a wealth of first-hand knowledge that names the four shooters of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, who were not the usual suspects in Chicago, but imported, fresh faces, mostly from Saint Louis - now known as "The American Boys." Moreover, he has illuminated August "Gus" Winkeler, who stayed in the city after the killings in the Clark Street garage on Feb. 14th, 1929 to become a force in the Outfit until his own death in 1933.
Winkeler's widow, a shattered but nevertheless cogent and credible witness, wrote her rather dynamic manuscript after her husband's murder at the hands of the Nitti-run mob. Helmer, who in 2004 with Art Bilek wrote "The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre - The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone," (another must read) has completed the historical deconstruction of the denouement of the Chicago Outfit of the 1920's with this latest treatise. Along with Georgette's recollections, Helmer has basically tied up the post-massacre gangland years with a culminating addendum of all the relevant players who have become household names, including Capone, Frank Nitti, and the rest of the infamous crowd who made Chicago rumble. Of all of the journalists who have taken on this epic, Helmer has added to his forty-years of contributions with his best and most revealing efforts in this book, defining the profile of the true historian.
For those of us who never get enough of the elusive truth and who ourselves research those hypnotic times, this book is, simply put, pure pleasure. Georgette's memory of seeing her husband and the other American Boys parading around in their Chicago Police costumes before mowing down George "Bugs" Moran's men in 1929, is the most scintillating solution imaginable to one of the world-changing crimes of the 20th century. Along with his 1969 history of the machine-gun (The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar) and his almanac of public enemies (co-written with the late, great gangsterologist Rick Mattix), William Helmer has once again proven himself as a premier authority on the Prohibition decade. This is an elegant book (buy it in hardcover - it's beautiful) issued by the University of Indiana Press, with no stone left unturned. I admit to being a great Helmer admirer; however, as a researcher myself, I must also say that he sets the standard for all of us. I give this one an unabashed five stars, but it deserves six. It is more fun than a barrel of booze.Al Capone and His American Boys: Memoirs of a Mobster's Wife Overview

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Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders: Chicago's Private War Against Capone Review

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Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders: Chicago's Private War Against Capone ReviewNo, it wasn't Eliot Ness and his "Untouchables" who brought down Al Capone. It was Internal Revenue agents led by Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson and aided and abbetted by the Chicago Crime Commission and its vigilante arm, the "Secret Six." Professor Hoffman presents us here with a well-documented, and highly readable account of the victory of Uncle Sam and Chicago over America's first major crime lord. Forget The Untouchables. This is the truth.Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders: Chicago's Private War Against Capone Overview

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