by Gordon Kerr
Capone and Moran kept an uneasy distance from each other. Moran would hijack the odd shipment of bootleg liquor and Capone would retaliate by burning Bugs’s dog track. Then Moran would burn Capone’s Hawthorne racetrack. But Moran was still killing Capone’s associates. It also scared him and he was now going everywhere with a retinue of 15 bodyguards surrounding him.
Bugs made yet another attempt to assassinate him, this time by putting poison in his food. However, Capone’s chef discovered the plot before it could happen. Even his own men were beginning to betray him – the Sheldon Gang, supposed to be his allies, were supplying hootch to Moran. Capone was getting edgy.
He became even edgier following the murders of a couple of close friends of his, successive leaders of the Unione Siciliano – Antonio Lombardo and Pasqualino ‘Patsy’ Lolordo. Lombardo was shot dead at a crowded intersection on 7 September 1928 and the killers are believed to have been Bugs and Frank Gusenberg, one of his men. Lolordo was shot in his own apartment. His wife reported that as the killers left, one of them gently placed a pillow under the dead man’s head. Moran’s regular bombings of his businesses did not help and Capone was beginning to unravel. There was only one thing to do and that was to undertake a massive strike against the North Siders. He missed Bugs who was late for a meeting at the S-M-C Cartage Company garage in North Clark Street which served as his headquarters, on 14 February 1929, but his men, dressed as cops, audaciously massacred seven North Siders in the Valentine’s Day Massacre, one of the most infamous gangster hits in history.
The massacre was organised by Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn, but, by 1936, seven years later, McGurn was broke. He had been abandoned by his former gangster associates and had even tried to make it as a professional golfer. One day he was at a bowling alley when two men carrying machine guns, walked in and shot him to death. Beside the body they placed a handwritten note containing a cruel rhyme. It read: ‘You’ve lost your job/You’ve lost your dough/Your jewels and handsome houses/But things could be worse, you know/You haven’t lost your trousers.’ The date? Valentine’s Day. Bugs had finally taken his revenge.
After the Valentine’s Day killings, things started to go awry for Bugs and the North Siders. Capone began to move in and although he and what was left of the gang tried to regain their lost territory, it was all over and he was left with no option other than to get out of town.
He moved first of all to Wisconsin and then back home to Minnesota. His marriage broke up and he fell on hard times. Moving back to Illinois, he robbed a few banks and filling stations but by 1940 he was back in Ohio, a member of the Virgil Summers–Albert Fouts gang, a bunch of small-timers a million miles away from the hoods he used to run with. He was eventually arrested by the FBI in 1946 for robbing a bank messenger of $10,000, a sum he would not have crossed the road for in the good old days. Moran went to the Ohio Penitentiary for ten years, being released in 1956. However, he was immediately re-arrested for an earlier bank robbery that had brought him and his fellow robbers a measly $4,000. He went to Leavenworth Penitentiary for another ten years.
George ‘Bugs’ Moran died in Leavenworth of lung cancer on 25 February 1956, missing Valentine’s Day by just 11 days.
Vernon C. Miller
The body lay in a ditch by the side of the road outside Detroit. It was 29 November 1933 and Vernon C. Miller, known as Verne, had been tied up, savagely beaten and shot to death. It was surmised that he had been the victim of a gangland slaying, but the real reason was unclear. It had been an eventful few months, however. In October, he had been staying with New Jersey gangster Abner ‘Longy’ Zwillman in Orange, New Jersey, but an argument had ended in him killing one of Zwillman’s henchmen. Then, on 1 November, while he was hiding out in the apartment of his girlfriend Vi Mathis, posing as an optical supplies salesman, the FBI had raided it. He had escaped but only just, shooting his way out.
It had all been so different back in 1916, when Verne Miller was 16. Tall and blond, he was born in Kimball in South Dakota to parents who divorced while he was still young. He went to live with his Uncle Clarendon, a county commissioner, treasurer and sheriff, in Bule County, South Dakota. He worked as a car mechanic and then left home aged 16, and convincing a recruiting officer that he was 21 enlisted in the National Guard, serving on the Mexican border when Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa was active. In the First World War, he served in France with the 18th Infantry Regiment. He was gassed, wounded twice and, he claimed, was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French for bravery. He reached the rank of colour sergeant before being honourably discharged at the cessation of hostilities.
He returned to America a war hero and spent his spare time fishing and boxing, although the latter activity was seriously hampered by the lung damage he had received in the war. He took a job as a policeman in the town of Huron, but resigned in 1920 to take the post of sheriff of Beadle County, South Dakota.
Prohibition had been voted in 1919 and Miller is reported to have raided at least ten stills making illicit whiskey in its first 18 months. In 1921, he displayed his own brand of justice when a young farm worker was shot dead by members of the Industrial Workers of the World, otherwise known as the Wobblies. He infiltrated the Wobbly ranks, disguised as a hobo, and although he never actually brought the killer to justice, he arrested a man for attempted murder. He disappeared at one point into what were known as the Badlands of South Dakota. It was believed that Sheriff Miller had meted out his own justice to the boy’s murderer.
Miller was considered after that to be a little too ready to use his gun to administer justice and is reported to have even fired warning shots at cars breaking the speed limit. However, he pursued lawbreakers relentlessly, even arresting a gang of his own friends who were running an illegal still.
Then suddenly, in July 1922, he disappeared. He had said he was going to a Washington hospital for treatment to his damaged lungs, but, when he failed to return, his deputies discovered that he had embezzled $6,000 from city funds. He was arrested in St Paul the following October, gave up without a struggle and pleaded not guilty. When it came to his trial, though, he changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to two to ten years in prison and fined $5,200.
Miller kept his nose clean in the state penitentiary. He had none of the bad habits that most prisoners had, such as gambling or drinking, and the warden of the prison made him his personal chauffeur. He was released on parole in November 1924, after just 18 months, working as a farmhand for $70 a month until the conditions of his parole had been satisfied.
He was in trouble again in June 1925 when he was arrested for violating Prohibition. He skipped bail that had been put up by his father and brother and left town. The following summer, Miller met Vi Mathis, who had recent divorced her husband following his incarceration for first degree murder. When Miller met her, Vi was working at a carnival in Brainerd, Minnesota. When Miller spotted an antagonistic customer bothering the woman, he intervened and rescued her from a nasty situation. After that the couple were inseparable.
They prospered. Miller is thought to have been the getaway driver in a bank robbery in Huron, South Dakota and he was working as a bootlegger with a member of Al Capone’s gang. But during the second half of the 1920s he was in the grip of syphilis and had been a heavy drug-user for years. He became unstable and prone to sudden violent outbursts. This was the case one night in February 1928, when he got into a fight at the Cotton Club in Mineapolis, in which two policemen were shot and wounded. His associates Kid Cann and Bob Kennedy were arrested, but released due to lack of evidence.
He was identified around this time as having taken part with another two men in a bank robbery in the small Minnesotan town of Good Thunder. Then, several months later, he was indicted for the shooting of a Prohibition agent.
By now he was a gun for hire, working on a freelance basis for Midwest mobsters and bootleggers. In 1930, one of his associates was gunned down by Al Capone’s men and Miller, incensed, tracked down three of t
hem to a hotel in Fox Lake, Illinois, where he ruthlessly gunned them down. It was getting a little too hot and he and Vi quietly left town, heading for Montreal where, in partnership with a New Jersey mobster, they opened some casinos.
Returning to the States in 1932, Miller hooked up with the Holden–Keating Gang whose members included Harvey Bailey, the leader, known as the ‘Dean of American Bank Robbers’; Tommy Holden; Francis ‘Jimmy’ Keating and accomplices Machine Gun Kelly and Frank ‘Jelly’ Nash. Their first bank robbery took place not long after Miller returned to American soil. They hit a bank in Wilmar, Minnesota, getting away with a $70,000 haul. One member of the gang was killed and two passers-by were wounded. However, there was an argument about the robbery, Miller believing that someone had double-crossed them. The outcome was the discovery by the police in the course of their investigation, of three men, shot to death and dumped at White Bear Lake. Miller had lost it and killed his three associates, Frank ‘Weinie’ Coleman, Sammy Stein and Mike Rusick.
The next three years consisted of little other than robbing banks and living the good life for Verne and Vi. Amongst these was a bank in Ottuma, Iowa, robbed in September 1930, netting them $40,000, and one in Sherman, Texas, in April the following year from which they got away with another $40,000.
Miller now retired from robbing banks and concentrated on being a hired gun, but he did not lose contact with the other members of the gang. Through them, he was hired as a shooter in one of the most notorious criminal attacks of the time, the incident known as the Kansas City Massacre.
Frank Nash, a member of the Holden–Keating gang, was a career criminal, sentenced to life in 1913 for murder, only to be pardoned. In 1920, he received a 25-year sentence for burglary with explosives, but again, astonishingly, he was pardoned. Twenty-five years was also the sentence handed down to him for assaulting a postman in 1924. This time he stayed inside for six years, escaping from the notorious Leavenworth penitentiary in October 1930. A huge manhunt was launched, but it was unsuccessful. In the meantime, Nash was thought to have helped in the escape of seven prisoners from Leavenworth.
The authorities knew that he had connections with the bank robbers Francis Keating and Tommy Holden, and when those two were arrested in 1932 they provided vital information as to where he was hiding out.
So in June 1933, two Federal agents, Frank Smith and F. Joseph Lackey, accompanied by Police Chief Otto Reed of McAlester, Oklahoma, travelled to the Arkansas town of Hot Springs where they had been informed they would find Nash. After combing the town, they picked him up in a local store. They then drove him to the train station at Fort Smith, where they boarded a train bound for Kansas City. It would be arriving there next morning, at 7.15 on 17 June. In Kansas City they were to be met by R.E. Vetterli, the agent in command of the FBI’s Kansas City office.
On the train were a number of agents apart from Lackey and Smith. Agent Raymond Caffrey and Kansas City detectives, W.J. Grooms and Frank Hermanson were also there as back-up.
Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Miller, Adam Richetti and Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd waited, machine guns at the ready.
Floyd and Richetti had already had an eventful couple of days. On the way to Kansas their car had broken down and while they were waiting in a garage for the work to be done on it, the local sheriff came in. Richetti, fearing he would be recognised, grabbed his machine gun and told the sheriff and the mechanics to stand against the wall. The two men then transferred the small arsenal they were carrying in their car into another, bundled the sheriff in and drove off in the direction of Deepwater, Missouri where they abandoned their vehicle and stole another. They released the sheriff and drove on to Kansas City, arriving at 10.00 p.m. on the 16th. Again, they abandoned their car, replacing it with another, and went to meet Miller who took them to his house. There he outlined the plan to free Nash which had been given to him by the plan’s originators, Chicago mobsters Richard Tallman Galatas, Herbert Farmer, ‘Doc’ Louis Stacci and Frank B. Mulloy.
Early on the morning of the 17th, they had driven to Kansas City’s Union Station where they took up their positions and waited for the train from Fort Smith.
The agents were extremely cautious when they arrived. Lackey disembarked first to check that it was all clear, leaving Nash on the train with the other agents and police officers. Vetterli was waiting for them with two cars that were parked outside. The seven officers accompanied Nash off the train into the station. Lackey and Police Chief Reed were armed with shotguns, the other officers carrying pistols. At the entrance to the station, they stopped momentarily to check that there was nothing suspicious before moving towards the parked cars.
Agent Caffrey unlocked a door of one car, ordering Nash into the back seat. Lackey, however, insisted that Nash should get into the front seat, which he did. Lackey climbed in at the rear, on the driver’s side, Smith sat in the middle and Reed on the right. As Caffrey walked round to the driver’s seat, he suddenly spied two men running from behind a car parked nearby. Both were armed with machine guns. Before he could shout a warning, one of the two men called out ‘Let ’em have it!’ The men opened fire and agents Grooms and Hermanson crumpled to the ground dead. Vetterli took a bullet in the arm and tried to crawl over to Caffrey, crouching down on the car’s left side. As he did so, Caffrey took a bullet in the head and sprawled on the ground dead. Nash and Reed inside the car were also dead, but Lackey and Smith cowered in the back seat; Lackey was seriously wounded, but Smith was unscathed.
The gunmen ran to the car and, seeing that everyone was dead, turned and sped towards their own vehicle. At that moment there was gunfire from the direction of the station where a police officer had appeared, trying to see what the commotion was. One of his bullets hit Floyd, but he carried on running. They jumped in their car and took off, disappearing into the morning.
Floyd and Richetti headed for Toledo, Ohio and thence to Buffalo. Richetti was hanged for the murder of Frank E. Harmanson in October 1938. Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd died in a shootout with law officers at a farm near Clarkson, Ohio. The creators of the plan to free Frank Nash – ‘Doc’ Stacci, Herbert Farmer, Richard Galatas and Frank Mulloy – were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in October 1934. They were found guilty of conspiracy to cause the escape of a Federal prisoner from the custody of the United States. Each was sentenced to two years and fined the maximum amount of $10,000.
Whether Verne Miller was killed because of the killing at Zwillman’s apartment, because of the failed attempt to free Frank Nash or because of the Fox Lake Massacre will probably never be known. But back in Huron, they chose to remember Vernon C. Miller the sheriff, and not Verne Miller the outlaw. The local newspaper, The Evening Huronite, reported that the citizens of Miller’s hometown ‘refused to remember his reputation of a life of crime and grieved the Verne Miller, fearless sheriff and valiant soldier they knew’. His wife Mildred, though legally separated since 1929, said that she didn’t believe all the things that they were saying about her husband, ‘. . . because he became involved in a few scrapes nearly every major crime in the country was laid to him. He was wonderful to me and I have nothing against him.’
As an army veteran and a member of the American Legion, Miller was entitled to full military rights at his funeral, but the local Legion prevented it. Instead, Verne Miller received his military rights at a service in his father’s hometown, White Lake. His casket had a Stars and Stripes flag draped over it and was escorted from White Lake to Huron by friends of his who were ex-servicemen. There, after a service in front of a huge crowd of onlookers, Verne Miller was buried in Huron’s Riverside Cemetery
Louis ‘Two Guns’ Alterie
He would amble into a speakeasy, his large frame dominating the room, and throw his ten-gallon hat down on the bar, sending a loud cowboy whoop echoing off the rafters. He would then proceed to ‘persuade’ the proprietor that it would be in his best interests to sell the beer or whiskey that displayed the label of his boss, Dean O’Ban
ion. They always knew it made sense. The alternative was a wrecked establishment, a beating, or a gutful of lead. Sometimes all three.
Louis Alterie was a complete one-off in the gangster world of the first four decades of the 20th century. He was a cowboy in the big city and photographs show him incongruously wearing a huge stetson and a double-breasted suit. He had a range of nicknames. Mostly he was known as ‘Two Gun’ but the names ‘Three Gun’, ‘Diamond Jack’ and ‘Kid Hays’ also attached themselves to him.
He was born Leland A. Varain, the son of a rancher in Northern California in 1886 and had been a shooter for the South Side’s Terry Druggan gang, a union enforcer who loved to pretend to be a cowboy cleaning up the town like Wyatt Earp, although he was more like Jesse James. Alongside Hymie Weiss, Vincent Drucci and Bugs Moran, he became a member of Chicago’s North Side gang, engaged in mortal combat with Al Capone’s South Side gang throughout the 1920s.
Alterie’s speciality for O’Banion was fixing union elections. He would threaten union leaders with violence in order to get him and his associates elected to the presidencies of their unions. This is reckoned to have netted him around $50,000 a month, after he had paid his dues to his boss, O’Banion.
He used his wealth to buy many things – restaurants, nightclubs, apartment buildings and theatres. He also fulfilled his cowboy dream when he purchased a 3,000-acre ranch in the vicinity of a town called Gypsum in Colorado. He would be seen walking around town in his huge white stetson, diamond-encrusted cufflinks and belt-buckle, and expensive, hand-made cowboy boots. His car had a massive pair of bullhorns fixed to the bumper. He always maintained that he made his living in the city, but his heart belonged to the West, claiming that he preferred wrestling unruly steers to fellow gangsters as the former endured mistreatment better.
