◆ SpookStack

“ Ler ere Ry SE ILE Re Ne 9 Ae INR te o ( Benny hasn’t been seen or ig heard from since the tele- : phone rang. On November 17, the body of Johnny “Billiken” Rito, a Newberry bourbon hustler, who had formerly worked for the Gennas, was found floating down the Chi- cago river. The manner in which “Billiken” had been dis- posed of was unusually horri- ble, for he had been thor- oughly chopped up and the pieces bound together with hay-wire. The disappearance of Bennett together with the later absence of another New- berry aid, Harry Higgins who hailed from St. Paul, gave credence to the grim rumor that Gangland killers, seeking to destroy the corpus delicti, had established a crematory somewhere on the Near North Side where business competi- tors and disgruntled gang- sters were incinerated into the ashes of oblivion. Ah, a new spirit in Gangland! Who . said that killers have no imagination? At this ried under writing New York friends of Benny Bennett are. running around town with long faces offering re- wards for word of their missing playmate who would come out west. Newberry eventually stepped into the Capone inner circles, taking with him Signor Frank Citro, he of the motionless eyes and expressionless face, better known as Frankie Foster. “All we ever got from ‘Bugs’ was a4 reputation,” explained Teddy and Frankie. Well, the war was on again. Moran and the Aiellos pressed northward into the grea? road- house and summer resort area in the Northwest suburbs. The first shot in the new war, now going, was fired on May 31, and the victim, Peter Plescia, an Aiello organizer and collector, fell dead in the mouth of an alley. On May 81, Phillip Gnolfo, former Genna killer had been a pall-bearer at Angelo’s funeral], was slain in his automobile. A few hours later on the same day two more Aiello boys bit the bricks—Samuel Monistero and Joseph Ferrari. On June 1 came deadly reprisals in the sensational Fox Lake Massacre. Four men and a woman, Mrs. Vivian Ponic McGinnis, wife of an attorney, sat around a table in a roadhouse. Sud- denly one of the men, turning his head saw a ma- chine gun pointed towards him. He got up and be- gan running. The rattle of the machine gun began and he went down, as did two of his companions. The woman was seriously wounded. One of the victims was Sam Pellar, who, you will remember used to work as a chauffeur and handy man for “Little Hymie” Weiss and was walking across the street with his boss on the famous day that “Little Hymie” fell before machine gun fire. Joseph Bertsche, brother of Barney Bertsche, was another Prenkie MacEarlane ave been important cogs in Joe Multis’ beer ms- chine but they were bank robbers under the skin. Miemoth was seized in Chicago recently and m1 heavy guard to Baltimore, Marylan where be was convicted in short order of oom: plioity in @ pay roll robbery three years ago. Miemoth is heliaved to have slain Johnnie “Ding- Dat” Oberta as @ personal favor for McEarlane. {60} victim as was Michael Quirk. George Druggan, brother of the famous Terry Druggan was terribly wounded and he is at this writing in a hospital fighting for his life. A few hours later in Chicago Thomas Somnerio, Capone leader, was strangled to death and his body flung m an alley on the West Side. One of the mourn- ers for Mr. Somnerio was a Gangland Queen, Margaret Mary Collins, who had been the sweetie for five other gangsters, all departed. Some- body put Somnerio on the spot, and it was said that a woman had done it. More hor- ror was produced by Gangland four days Jater when a river tug churned up the hay-wired may body of Eugene “Red” Mc- Laughlin. Aloysius Kearney, hard-boiled gangster doing a specialty business in labor racketeering, became the cause of another murder mystery when his bullet-ridden body was discovered on the morning of June 9. Kearney had been a friend of “Red” McLaugh- lin and an unsuccessful effort was made to find a connection between the murders. From bills in his pocket it was disclosed that he was a collector for the National Garage Owners’ Association. It was this association which, a few weeks before, had inspired criticism from the then Commissioner of Police, William Russell and Col. Robert Isham Randolph, president of the Chicago Association of Commerce, for waging a campaign to have all automobiles found parked at night without lights towed into garages. The cost would be $5.00 to the car owners—a pleasant racket which, strangely enough, didn’t go over. Samuel Maltz, president of the association, questioned by police said: “Tm strictly a business man. There is no racket- eering or hoodlumism connected with my organi- zation. I didn’t know Kearney very well. He had worked for me only for a week. I was paying him $40 a week to collect bills. Don’t give me any hoodlum talk. I’m a business man and don’t go for that.” It was becoming warmer and warmer in Chicago’s loop at this time for those gentlemen of the gat. Jail sentences instead of the customary fines were being handed out. As a result of this, hoodjums hit upon a practice of parking their auto- matics in cigar stores, speakeasies and other places just outside the loop while transacting business. ‘What the uo loop parking law means to gangsters,