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St. Louis Mafia Part 1
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. This is the first in my three-part series on the history of organized crime in St. Louis, MO. This episode delves into the fascinating world of St. Louis crime families. We are joined by author Daniel Waugh, who has written several books on the topic. Daniel introduces his books, including “Egan’s Rats,” “Gangs of St. Louis, Men of Respect,” “Off Color: Detroit’s Purple Gang,” “Vinnita: The Birth of the Detroit Mafia,” and “Beithioch: The Life and World of a Chicago Gangster.” We discuss the diverse mix of Syrians, Irish, and Italians in St. Louis, eventually forming the Italian and Syrian mafia. We learn about the connection between the Detroit and St. Louis mafia, as many families from both regions come from the same Sicilian towns. Click here to find all of Daniel’s books on Amazon.
Daniel takes us back to the early days of gangs in St. Louis, specifically discussing Egan’s Rats. This gang started as a riverfront gang and later became a political terrorist, engaging in illegal voting and other forms of intimidation. We also learn about Thomas Kenny, one of the early gangsters, and the relationship between Fred Killer Burke and Al Capone. Fred Killer Burke, who started as a small-time criminal in Kansas, joined Egan’s Rats and later became involved in bootlegging and high-profile thefts.
One notable crime committed by Egan’s Rats was the robbery of the United Railways Company office in St. Louis. They got away with $39,000 in cash but had to carjack another motorist when their getaway car had a tire issue. After Egan’s Rats went to prison, some members joined the Cuckoo Gang and later attached themselves to the Purple Gang. Fred Burke, in particular, became an expert with the Thompson machine gun and was eventually taken in by the Capone mob, carrying out high-risk assignments. He was connected to the murder of Frankie Yale and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
We also explore the Pillow gang, originating from Sicilian Mafiosi, and their transition from homemade whiskey to illegal stills and beer production. A war broke out between the Sicilian gangs and the Cuckoo Gang in 1926, resulting in the Cuckoo Gang inflicting heavy casualties on the mafia and forcing other mob bosses to intervene. This war dealt a major blow to the St. Louis mob’s reputation.
We then delve into the Russo brothers and the migration of their faction to Cleveland and Detroit after they were killed during Prohibition. Thomas Licavoli established a powerful crew in Toledo, and his cousin, Jack Licavoli, became the boss of the Cleveland family. Another Licavoli brother, Pete, remained in Detroit before eventually moving to Arizona.
Tony Giordano emerges after Prohibition and becomes connected to a gangland homicide. We also discuss the Syrian families led by Jimmy Michaels, who grew up in Soulard and formed the Cuckoo Gang. They partnered with older crooks and eventually became leaders themselves through criminal actions. Jimmy Michaels, in particular, became a prime suspect in multiple gangland homicides by the age of 22.
We learn about the autonomous relationship between Jimmy Michaels and the Sicilian mafia and the emergence of the Leisure family, which later clashed with Michaels, leading to a war in the early 1980s. The St. Louis mob, managed by Chicago, made significant profits from gambling, union racketeering, and handling stolen goods. The Chicago outfit had a strong influence over the St. Louis mob, including approving the appointment of a new boss.
We also touch on the corrupt practices within the St. Louis Police Department during Prohibition, including their access to Thompson submachine guns before the gangsters did. The Greenlease kidnapping and its connection to Irish gangster Jack Griffin is discussed, as well as the involvement of lawyer Morris Schenker, Joey Lombardo, and local politics.
Throughout the conversation, we highlight the diverse and well-preserved ethnic neighborhoods of St. Louis, such as Dogtown and the Hill, which are famous for their Italian cuisine. We also discuss the importance of understanding the development of the Midwest mafia and its connections to other major cities. The host, Gary, mentions his upcoming book on Egan’s Rats and emphasizes the value of solid mob history over sensationalism.
We thank Daniel Waugh for sharing his knowledge, encouraging listeners to explore his books and author’s page on Amazon, and reminding everyone to be cautious on the road and seek help when needed. St. Louis has played a significant role in the history of organized crime, and by delving into its past, we gain a deeper understanding of this underground world.
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Transcript
[0:00] Well, welcome all you wiretappers back here in the studio of Gangland Wire.
We’re going to go to St. Lewis this week. I have a three part, maybe four part.
I don’t know. This is a pretty extensive crime families in St.
Lewis with some real unusual twist with Syrians and Irishmen and Italians.
And so it’s it’s it’s a real interesting combo mix, if you will, of gangs in St. Louis that morphed into the modern day Italian mafia and the Syrian mafia.
I think we used to call it at one point in time.
But I have Daniel Waugh here, who is an author from St.
Louis, and he has written several books on it. Welcome, Daniel.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Happy to be here. So, Daniel, tell us about name off your books, guys, and I’ll have pictures.
You’ll see pictures if you’re on YouTube and I’ll have links to Daniel’s YouTube page, but name off your books. My first book is Egan’s Rats, about the first and most famous of the old St. Louis gangs.
My second book is called Gangs of St. Louis, Men of Respect, which covers not only Egan’s Rats, but the Hogan Gang, the Green Ones, the Pillow Gang, the Russo Gang, and of course, the Cuckoo Gang.
I have a third book about the Detroit-based Purple Gang called Off Color.
I have a fourth book called Vinnitta, which is about the early years of the Detroit Mafia.
[1:24] And my most recent book, Beithioch, is a biography of Chicago gangster Frank McGurin, who is a cold-blooded psychopath who was known as the first gangster to use a Thompson submachine gun in Chicago.
[1:37] That will take a whole episode itself. I may have to have you come back just to go down that path. That’s really interesting.
I got a lot of Chicago fans too. You did some stuff with Detroit and with St. Louis.
I know I’ve always get asked about, well, what’s the connection between the Detroit, I mean, the Kansas City Mafia and the St.
Louis Mafia are so close. And I said, you know, I heard one of our guys married a girl who was of Syrian ancestry, but I don’t really know any connections.
We never really got any much information. There’s a little bit.
We had one little thing that’ll happen in the 70s where John Spica from St.
Louis supposedly got some dynamite from one of our upstart young gangsters, Carl Spiro, and Nick Civella was mad at him and he called Tony G or Tony Giordano.
But other than that, as far as business and all that, our guys are connected to Chicago.
Your guys in Detroit were connected, I mean, in St.
Louis were connected to Detroit. Now, tell us a little bit about the history of that. Why are they so close to Detroit?
Fraternal Connection between Detroit and St. Louis Mafia
[2:40] It is a fraternal connection between the gangsters, the mafiosos in Detroit and St. Louis.
Many of their families come from the same Sicilian towns, specifically the towns of Terracini and Cinesi and Partenico.
They’re small towns that are located west of Palermo.
[2:58] A lot of times, families like the Bommaritos, Licavolis, Mascheris, they all came from the same Sicilian towns, and as a result, when their families immigrated to America, they tended to go where other people from the same village land, which were mostly in the cities of St. Louis and Detroit.
And as a result, as they entered lives of crime, they had very strong connections between their Sicilian compares in their neighboring cities of whether it was St. Louis or Detroit.
That like explains that for me. I really appreciate you explaining that for me.
Let’s start off with some of these early gangs that of course, back in the olden days, everybody was brand new, brand new immigrants.
The Irish had been here before the Italians more than likely.
So they probably were maybe the first gangs when the Italians first got there in St. Louis.
So it was those real early days. You know, they had the gangs of New York.
They did a whole movie about it in five points area.
How did this go down in St. Louis?
The vast majority of early St. Louis gangs were political in nature.
[4:02] Egan’s Rats, they initially got started as a riverfront gang that went through a couple of different phases, but they were originally known as the Ashley Street Gang.
They lived in the eastern edge of St. Louis’ Irish district, which was known as the Cary Patch.
They specifically lived in an area of the Cary Patch called Pigeon Hill, which bordered right on the Mississippi River.
It was about where the Lumiere Casino is now. And they got their start picking pockets, robbing people, doing burglaries.
But the early Egan’s Rats, they functioned as political terrorists.
Because the city of St. Louis had numerous, they had elections just about every year for different parts of the city government.
And what the Egan’s rats would do is that they would go to the polls, they would vote illegally, repeat vote, they would prevent their opponents from voting, terrorizing voters, stuffing ballot boxes, the whole nine yards.
A lot of that has to do with how fragmented St.
Louis City government was in the late 19th century that would enable the Egan’s rats and other gangs to be able to put their favorite politicians in office.
And once the politicians got into office, they used the gangsters to enforce their will.
[5:20] And those political positions were very lucrative for the men who had them.
Probably the best known of the early gangsters was a guy named Thomas Kenny.
His nickname was Snake Kenny.
Fred “Killer” Burke and his association with Egan’s Rats
[5:31] And he was basically the first boss, if you will, of the Egan’s Rats.
Now, Egan’s Rats, most famously, I think, in more modern times, was Fred Killer Burke and maybe somebody else that went up and worked for Al Capone and became known as his American Boys.
Now, can you tell us a little bit about Fred Killer Burke and that relationship?
Sure Fred Killer burke’s original name was thomas camp he was actually born in southeastern kansas on a farm.
You want to sunday school even briefly study better than every medicine before you turn to crime.
In fact it’s gangland buddies actually nicknamed doc rather than killer. burn.
He eventually went to Kansas City and started doing some small-time crimes and migrated west to St. Louis.
He got indicted for forgery at one point. He joined the army and fought in France in World War I. He was a tank corps sergeant.
He did prison time in both Michigan and in Missouri at Jeff City.
In the early 20s, Egan’s rats had morphed from political terrorists into bootleggers slash high-profile thieves.
They specialized in robbing banks, bank messengers.
[6:48] And Fred Burke came to Egan’s Rats and had an idea for a job.
And him and some of the boys held up the United Railways Company office in St.
Louis at 39th and Park on July 3rd, 1923.
That was a streetcar company provider for the city. And they ended up getting about $39,000 in cash.
[7:10] While they were driving away and escaping through South City, St.
Louis, one of the tires on their getaway car popped off and they ended up having to carjack another motorist so they could successfully escape.
After the bulk of the Egan gang leadership went to prison for mail robbery in November of 1924, Brent Burke and a number of his buddies eventually fell into the lower ranks of the Cuckoo Gang for a time.
Then they moved on around the country and started doing all various kinds of mayhem.
They attached themselves to the Purple Gang for a time.
Fred Burke became an expert shot with the Thompson cell machine gun, and he used that Tommy gun very effectively for the Purple Gang, killing three of their enemies in what’s known as the Miraflores Massacre in March of 1927.
Burke and his buddies eventually fell out with the Purple Gang, and they headed west and fell in with the Capone mob.
Fred Burke’s involvement with the Capone Mob and St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
[8:03] Al Capone apparently had a soft spot for the ex-Egan’s Rats boys, in particular Gus Winkler, who was a close buddy of Brett Byrne.
He nicknamed them the American boys because they weren’t Italian.
And he ended up using them for special high-risk assignments.
[8:20] One job they went into brooklyn new york in july of nineteen twenty eight to kill Capone’s old mentor Frankie Yale.
[8:27] In an incident that got national headline and then.
I’ll decided that the american boys would be perfect to take out bugs moran in chicago and the saint louis american boys working with a.
Capone affiliated crew on the north side of Chicago called the Circus Cafe Gang were the ones who pulled off the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.
The Circus Cafe Gang, that was what Tony Ocardo was involved in early on in his career.
So that’s really interesting there.
Maybe Tony Ocardo was probably at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
That’s an interesting area to look into.
But anyhow, I know I read about Fred Burke that they found him later on, they did a search warrant or something, or they searched the house and they recovered a Thompson submachine gun and ballistically, it connected back to the St.
Valentine’s Day massacre. So that’s not just, you know, some informant said that or some policeman speculating that’s backed up by solid evidence, isn’t it? Oh, yeah.
Not only did they match the machine guns, Burke also had the It’s a very distinctive .45 caliber ammunition that was fired in the garage.
It was a special run of bullets out of the Denver factory that were stamped with like a small S, that only like a handful of them were ever made.
So that’s another solid evidence link between Burke and his guns in the massacre.
The Pilla gang, that was the Italian gang in St. Louis, right?
So tell us a little bit about how that came together.
The Origins of the Pillow Gang in Sicily
[9:53] The Pillow Gang was originally a group of Sicilian mafiosi that originally got their start as black hand artists.
They were originally led by a gentleman by the name of Pasquale Santino.
He and many of the men in his crew were from southern Sicily, specifically the area around Agbrogento province.
[10:15] And they continued, they locked heads with of the other Sicilian factions of the Mafia family, notably the Green Ones and the Russo Boys.
During the 1927 Civil War, where the Mafia factions were all shooting each other to pieces, Santino was killed and they were taken over by his second in command, Charlie Fursina.
Charlie Fursina was from northeastern Sicily, and during the war, he and his bodyguards were ambushed in the Dogtown section of St.
Louis. And Charlie, the bodyguards were killed and Charlie Ficino took a machine gun bullet through his lower hip.
And while he was recovering from it, he used a pillow to cushion his rear end when he sat down in chairs.
And police saw him doing this and they sarcastically nicknamed his crew the Pillow Gang. That’s where that came from.
[11:02] The Sicilians are coming together. There’s several Sicilian-based gangs leading up to Prohibition.
And then something’s going to happen just like all over the United States, the old black handers and the old, you know, street thugs and people preying on other Italian members of the community are going to be pushed out.
You know, it’s depicted in the Godfather movie that these guys, these young guys come up and start with Lucky Luciano and they start pushing out these old guys and they’re going to get into bootlegging because that’s where the money is.
So can you talk about that transition in St. Louis?
With the Sicilian Mafia, they started off cooking homemade whiskey because of the location of St. Louis, because it’s pretty much in the center of the country.
It’s relatively far away from the borders of Canada or Mexico, and shipping whiskey, especially in the early years of Prohibition, was difficult for the St.
Louis Mafia, and they were still considered relatively small potatoes.
So they started, what they did was they erected illegal stills, not only in and around the city of St. Louis, but across the river in Illinois.
[12:10] That’s where a large supply of their illegal whiskey came from.
The Cuckoo Gang’s War and Humiliating Defeat
[12:14] They also did a similar operation with beer as well.
Eventually, they got to make so much money that eventually Greek took over, and that’s how they started fighting with each other.
But in 1926, a war started between the Sicilian gangs and the Cuckoo Gang, which was based in South City at the time.
[12:35] And quite frankly, the Cuckoo Gang wiped the floor with them.
They inflicted a lot of casualties on the mafia, to the point where other mob bosses from the East Coast actually had come into St. Louis and mediated.
And the Cuckoo Gang demanded extensive reparations for.
Starting the war. And the terms were quite humiliating.
I mean, the mafia had to go buy each cuckoo gangster a new suit of clothes and a new car and give them like $50,000 cash or something like that.
It was a real black eye for the St. Louis mob hierarchy.
And my own personal opinion is that their reputation with other mafia families around the country never fully recovered from that.
Maybe with the help of the other people and especially out of Detroit, because you had a pretty strong Sicilian faction going during Prohibition in Detroit.
The Liccavoli’s had some connection back down to St. Louis, and then one of the Licavoli’s went to Cleveland.
Talk about that, kind of how that during Prohibition and how, how’s this all going to shake out?
A number of members, after the Russo brothers, two of them were killed and the rest led the city in the summer of 1928.
The Russos initially went down to Fort Worth, Texas, before migrating to Cleveland.
Liccavoli’s Toledo Crew and Rivalries in Ohio
[13:50] What was left of their faction, quite a few of their number moved to Detroit, specifically the Liccavoli brothers, the Maceris, and they joined the pre-existent family in Detroit.
[14:02] And eventually, Thomas Licavoli, who’s also known as Yanni because his original name was Damiano, he started up a crew in Toledo, Ohio, which grew very powerful until Licavoli himself was in prison for murder in 1934, I believe it was.
He got into a beef with a gangster named Jack Kennedy, of all things.
This Jack Kennedy was actually having an affair with Licavoli’s wife.
And I think another one of the Licavoli’s top guys confronted him about it.
Kennedy apparently beat the heck out of him.
And after Kennedy was killed, Licavoli and a couple other people were convicted of his murder and sentenced to life in the Ohio State Prison.
But Licavoli’s cousin, Jack Licavoli, eventually moved to Cleveland and in the 1970s became the boss of that family.
And in the 1970s, Jack Licavoli became involved in a very high-profile war with a gangster named Danny Green has made famous in the movie, kill the Irishman.
So I thank you. I did want to tie that together because I knew there was a connection from St.
Louis to Ohio and, and Detroit and Cleveland.
So I’m appreciate you tying that all together and the other lick of bully will add another lick of bully that stays in Detroit, that, that becomes a mover and shaker later on in Detroit. Correct.
Yes. that’s Pete. He’d stayed in Detroit for a number of years and then he eventually moved to Arizona.
[15:31] And I believe that he had shares of the Aladdin Casino, if I’m not mistaken, and he became very big in Tucson, Arizona and whatnot.
And eventually, I think he had, if I remember correctly, he had a very large ranch down there.
So he did very, out of all the Licavoli brothers, he was probably the one who did the best overall.
[15:52] So now where does Tony Giordano, Tony G come in this, does he start coming up
Tony Giordano’s Emergence after Prohibition
[15:57] during these the prohibition, but post prohibition and the depression era, is that when Tony Giordano starts coming up?
I get the impression that Tony Giordano made his bones just after prohibition ended.
I remember him being connected to a gangland homicide in, I believe it was the spring of in 1934, a gentleman by the name of Mike Palazzolo was killed, and Tony Giordano was a suspect.
I remember seeing something about Tony Giordano in the early 40s.
I’m not quite as versed on mob history like after World War II.
But yeah, this post-prohibition, that’s when Tony Giordano starts coming into the picture.
[16:39] So now my next question is, St. Louis is so diverse and so interesting.
Is the Syrian families, and where did they come from, and how did they fit into this early on?
The Syrian crime families, they grew up in Soulard, just south of downtown, notably Jimmy Michaels and a couple of, I think he had a couple of younger brothers as well.
But Jimmy Michaels grew up with the Tipton brothers who lived in Soulard.
They were streaking on and out together. Incidentally, the Tiptons, Jimmy Michaels and a couple of their buddies, they were originally Sandlot baseball players.
And they got the name Cuckoo from a brand of soda pop that sponsored their baseball team in the early teens.
I have looked high and low for like an advertisement or something for this Cuckoo Soda Pop, but I’ve never been able to find it.
If anyone out there has it, yeah, please let me know.
But they eventually started getting into trouble in the late teens and the police kind of tacked the name Cuckoo Gang on them.
And they partnered up with some older crooks who were part of a pre-existent, crew of thieves known as the the showdown Avenue gang who kind of showed them the ropes of the underworld and.
[17:55] Before long the younger cuckoo gang eventually knocked off the older boss of the showdown Avenue gang.
I believe his name was Jack Lyons and they started bootlegging in and around the Sioux art and other points in South st.
Louis and Jimmy Michaels and the rest of the Syrians you, were dragged into a gang war with the Sicilians because Some of the younger members of the grinning ones tried to frame Jimmy Michaels for a murder, but unbeknownst to them, not only did Jimmy Michaels beat the rap he came back after them and just Just unleashed hell on them By his 22nd birthday.
Jimmy Michaels was already a prime suspect in eight unsolved gangland homicides So it’s literally through the sheer force of criminal willpower war, that Jimmy Michaels catapulted himself into a leadership position in the Cuckoo Gang.
All of his Syrian buddies, Pete Webbe was one, Gus Webbe, they all came along for the ride.
Jimmy Michaels and his relationship with the Sicilian mob
[18:55] Eventually, after prohibition, Jimmy Michaels ended up doing a number of years in prison. He got out in 1944, I believe it was.
Jimmy Michaels commanded an enormous amount of respect from the Sicilian mob hierarchy, just because of who he was and what he had done.
So as a result, Michaels and his family existed.
They had a somewhat autonomous relationship with the traditional Sicilian mafia in St. Louis.
And going into the 40s and 50s, another family appears, which would be the Leisures.
And eventually, they ran afoul of Jimmy Michaels.
I believe one of the Leisures, Richard Michaels, Richard Leisure, was killed in a bar brawl, I believe it was, in East St.
Louis, and the Leisures became convinced that Jimmy Michaels helped his killer get off.
And so that started a lot of animosity towards them, and that culminated in their war around 1980 or 81 or 4.
The Leisures and Michaels, though, these two Syrian families, when they were fighting in the early 80s, they were indeed the last vestiges of an organization that, once upon a time, had been known as the Cuckoo Gang.
Interesting. Even though they stopped using them, that cuckoo gag around World War II or so. Yeah. So.
[20:10] During the thirties, during the depression and prohibitions over that, how did they move into gambling?
Were they part of the national wire service and they had a, there was a sportsman’s park.
I think there was a racetrack in, in St. Louis was there, was that a big moneymaker for the mob during that time?
[20:29] Yes. Yes, it was. Most of the gambling, it seems to me like, especially post-World War II was kind of remote controlled by the Chicago outfit. The St.
Louis mob kind of managed it for Chicago.
Chicago spoke for St. Louis in meetings with the commission, that kind of stuff.
[20:48] But absolutely, the racetracks, illegal gambling parlors, that kind of stuff.
Union racketeering as a moneymaker for the mob
[20:54] It was a very big moneymaker for the mob.
So what about their involvement in union racketeering?
Now, did that start then or did that start later on? Because by the time of this leisure war and in the seventies and eighties, that’s a huge moneymaker for him as the laborers union. Yeah. Start back then.
Uh, yeah. Union racketeering dates back to the last days of prohibition.
When, you know, the, the, the illegal alcohol business was, you know, with, with repeal, I mean, they’re going to lose that money maker, so they have to look to other ways to make money.
And that was when they started getting involved with union racketeering and whatnot.
And, uh, yeah, I, I believe it was local one 10. of the labor union.
That was a focal point of the leisure wars in the early 80s, were those union positions.
What about the Italians in labor unions during the 30s, or did they just stick to handling swag and things like that?
I’m sure that they did. The Italians certainly wouldn’t want to pass up the money and the profits that illegal union racketeering had offer.
[22:01] That’s really interesting about the Chicago connection. I didn’t know that before either, that Chicago.
I do know that when Giordano’s nephew was getting ready to take over, the story goes that he went to Aiuppa in Chicago and got his approval, and then came back, and supposedly it got out to the newspapers that he’d done that, and Aiuppa accused Trupiano of leaking that to the newspaper.
I don’t know if there’s any truth to that story or not, but that Chicago influence over him is really interesting. I tell you, that Chicago, they controlled the Midwest.
You would have thought he would have had to go to Detroit, maybe, but they had to go to Chicago for that kind of approval for the next boss.
Frank Agrusa and his connection to Vito Giannulli and Capone
[22:43] Yeah, even as far back as the 30s, Frank Agrusa, whose real name was Frank Abate, he was the protege of Vito Giannulli, a former boss of the Green Ones that was killed during Prohibition.
[22:55] Abate slash agrusa ran the st.
Louis family in the Late 20s early 30s.
He was the official boss, but He was little more than a puppet of the Capone bob in Chicago In fact when he was deposed in St. Louis, he eventually moved up to the Chicago area and was like demoted to a captain, And eventually he ran afoul of the Chicago mob He tried to hide in rural Arkansas and they found him down there and took care of him there In 1944, I believe it was. I hadn’t heard that story.
Speaking of that time, and you may not know anything about this, there was a famous kidnapping in Kansas City of the Greenlease baby, or boy. Yes, I’ve heard of it.
And the people that did it, they got like $500,000 and they went to St.
Louis and started drinking and spending this guy’s money.
And a corrupt St.
Louis policeman.
Mob-Connected Hotel and Missing Money
[23:55] Ended up arresting him and bringing that money in.
And that was connected to, they were staying in a hotel that was a mob connected hotel.
And the cab driver that was hauling them around was, you remember anything about that story?
You think? I remember hearing about it, but I have never researched the Greenlease case in depth.
But yeah, I absolutely have heard of it though. Well, it looked like probably the mob boss at the time had been Giordano, I guess, or whoever was just before him, ended up with a big bulk of that.
There’s 300,000, I think, missing out of the 500,000 in the end or some number like that.
And it never reappeared. And they had all the serial numbers written down.
And some bills reappeared in Chicago. You mentioned Chicago.
There’s a few bills that did reappear in Chicago. but other than that, that whole $300,000 during 1950 is when it was, that’s a lot of money, $500,000 in 1950. So interesting.
[24:55] I assume that the St. Louis Police Department was probably corrupted totally by the mafia during these years.
Was there any crime busters or anything that, that kind of, that, that did anything about the mob?
During Prohibition, there actually was a pretty tough squad led by a captain by the name of John Carroll.
And he was notoriously pitiless with crooks.
Couldn’t be bought the whole nine yards. In fact, he even killed a couple of members of the Russo gang in a police chase in October of 1926.
St. Louis Police Department’s early use of Tommy guns
[25:32] Excuse me, some members of the St. Louis Police Department, their squad, they outfit themselves with an armored car and Thompson submachine guns as early as 1921.
So St. Louis is one of the few cities in America where the cops actually got their hands on the Tommy gun before the gangsters did. Oh, really? Yeah.
I wonder how that came about. They must have had some military connections back then and they were able to snag them out of uh, armory or something.
It was straight. Yeah. The Thompson submachine gun, it was really slow to take off sales.
When it was first marketed commercially in March of 1921, but because it wasn’t used in world war one, it didn’t really have much of a reputation.
And it was pretty expensive. It costs $200 retail, which was about half the cop, half the price of a car back then, so just the average Joe couldn’t really afford it. the post service, the postal service wants them to protect their messengers.
And departments like the St. Louis Police Department, they could obviously afford it.
In fact, I think just a few years back, the St.
Louis Police Department actually discovered some of these machine guns that they had like at Cold Storage or whatever, and they auctioned a whole bunch of them off.
If only I had like about $70,000 laying around, I would have bought one.
[26:49] That would be a collector’s item, a Thompson submachine gun that had been around since the 20s, that you knew had been around since the 20s, you could document that, that would be quite a collector’s item there.
Is there anything else you need to tell us about?
Jack Griffin, an Irish gangster in St. Louis and Kansas City
[27:06] Uh, sure. Uh, we were talking about the Greenlease kidnapping.
Are you familiar with a gangster by the name of Jack Griffin?
I don’t think so, no. Uh, he was an Irish gangster who was actually a member of the Russo gang in St. Louis during Prohibition.
He was kind of an anomaly as an Irish gangster moving within a Sicilian crime family.
He actually had a working knowledge of the Italian language and he was a cold-blooded killer.
He was believed to have been the one who killed Vito Giannola, the boss of the Mafia family, in the attic of his girlfriend’s house.
As a result, the Green Ones tried to kill him multiple times.
He survived a number of violent attempts on his life and he eventually in 1933 moved to Kansas City. Thank you.
He adopted the name Jack Gregory and tried to work his way into the crime scene there.
But, you know, Johnny Lazio ran the Kansas City Mob like a clothes shop.
[27:59] And Jack Griffin and a crew of gangsters he worked with eventually were accused of assassinating Johnny Lazio in Kansas City in July of 1934.
[28:08] And the Kansas City Mob tried to kill Griffin. They wounded him and they put him in the hospital.
And at one point, the FBI came to interview him about not only the Lazia murder, but also about the Kansas City massacre, which had happened a year earlier.
And it turned out that a corrupt Kansas City cop by the name of Detective Lieutenant Jeff Rayen took Griffin out of the hospital in an ambulance and basically killed him.
One story goes that while he was being driven to his doomed-out Independence Boulevard or whatever.
He asked the goons on either side of him in the car for one last cigarette.
They’re like, okay sure why not. So Griffin lights up the cigarette, puffs it to a red-hot glow, and jams it into the eye of the guy sitting next to him.
And in a rage they end up like burning him alive in the furnace of an apartment building.
[28:57] Interesting. But all Griffin’s guys, most of them at the hands of Jeff Rea and himself, ended up getting killed.
One of them, Jimmy Needles, La Capra, ended up falling into the hands of the FBI.
They protected him for a little while, but kicked him loose and he was eventually tracked down and killed in upstate New York, I believe it was.
The only guy involved in Lazia’s murder who got away was a general by the name of Nugent La Palma.
He hid out in Colorado for a while. Kansas City mobs sent some guys after him in Colorado and La Palma actually killed one of them outside of Pueblo and got away.
He turned up in the late 1950s as a union official in Seattle.
[29:39] But by that point, I guess enough time had gone by that the Kansas City mob just decided to let bygones be bygones as far as Johnny Lassie was concerned.
And yeah, Nugent LaPalma lived to be like 83 years old and died in August of 1996.
[29:53] But yeah, that specific St. Louis gangster Jack Griffin definitely made his mark in the Kansas City underworld.
I’ll have to look that up. I didn’t really know that story before.
It’s a really interesting story.
I end up focusing on things all around the United States and don’t really do that stuff, actually, I’ll be quite honest.
Only if I was involved, then I’ve done that.
But the old stuff, I’ve done a little bit, but not a lot.
So this has been great. Daniel, I really appreciate you helping us fill in our knowledge base on St.
Louis Mob and how important they were, you know, in the Midwest and with the other cities now that are related to these other cities.
I guess one last question. What about that lawyer, Morris Schenker?
[30:37] Do you remember anything about him?
I’ve heard the name, but to be honest, I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about it. I’m sorry.
No problem. He was Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer for a while, real tight with Jimmy Hoffa, and he got involved with Las Vegas things, and he was a really famous threat by Joey Lombardo out of Chicago.
He told him, he said, you say you’re 73, your birthday you’re going to be 73, you’re 72 now.
Well, if you want to see 73, you’ll pay this money to Alan Dorfman.
So and another funny story about him. And I know as a St. Lewis guy, historian, you’ll appreciate this.
I have a friend here on the police department actually went to academy together and he’s from St. Louis, named Jim Fitzgerald.
And he always told the story about his dad. It was an Irishman, of course, and they had a gas station and was kind of a mover and shaker in some kind of a neighborhood around there in wherever that gas station was.
I think it was somewhere around Fourth Park. And he ran for city council, and his opponent was Morris Schenker, and he got beat.
And he said his dad used to say, well, that’s pretty good. I got beat by a Jew in an Irish ward.
Contrasting Ethnic Neighborhoods in St. Louis and Kansas City
[31:51] So St. Louis is really more than Kansas City, maintain their different ethnic kind of neighborhoods and relationships, it seems to me like.
Kansas City and people didn’t really retain it that much.
They moved out the suburbs pretty quick and and kind of blended in.
But St. Louis is just like back east or Chicago.
They maintain those ethnic neighborhoods.
[32:15] Yes, there’s there’s Dogtown and the Hill, of course. They just recently made a real nice documentary about the Hill. Yeah, I heard that.
And if any of you guys out there, you ever want some really good Italian food.
He just mentioned the Hill. Well, that’s the Italian section.
And that’s where all the good Italian food is. There’s a ton of good Italian restaurants there. What’s your favorite there on the Hill?
Uh, G and Tony’s G and Tony’s. Yeah. I think that’s the one that I think that’s the most famous with them, what everybody seems to recommend.
So G and Tony’s guys, if you ever go down there.
So Daniel wall, I really appreciate you doing that. And you got any new books that you’re working on? What are you working on now?
Uh, actually Gary, yes. I’m working on a reboot of Egan’s rats, my original book.
I’m working on an updated and expanded history of. Egan’s Rats, the gang.
Its tentative title is The Apaches of St. Louis, an updated and expanded history of Egan’s Rats.
It delves a lot more deeply into their story, specifically the political aspect of it, and a lot more expanded history of both the gangsters themselves, their family histories, their crimes, and also correcting some errors that were in my first book.
Self-publishing it, so I’ll be able to make it as long as I want to.
It’s Strictly for the fans and the diehard readers, that kind of thing.
[33:30] But I’m working on it. It’s a ways from completion though. Probably won’t be done until maybe 2025 or so, but it is on the way.
[33:38] Well, that’s what we’ve got here is diehard fans. I promise you that.
And no frills, a mafia history here on gang land where I get people make comments on Facebook every once in a while about that.
We like you because you just deal with the history and none of the drama and some of these other guys, they want to these mobsters have gone into business, so to speak, and then they act like they’ve got to fight between each other.
So this is no frills, just solid mob history.
So Daniel, while I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your knowledge with us and guys, don’t forget, I’ll, I’ll have links to all his books, his author’s page, if you will, on the, on Amazon.
So if you want one of these books, why, why you can really get a sense of the Midwest mafia and its relationships and how they connected back in the early days, We kind of tend to go after the more modern kind of action and oriented things.
But where did everybody come from and how did they develop here in the Midwest?
There is a lot of stuff about New York and how that developed there in the five families, but not that much about the Midwest.
So this is a big piece of it. St. Louis was right in the middle, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and had some connection to Kansas City.
But Kansas City seemed to develop on its own. And it’s I don’t know, it’s a little it’s hard to understand sometimes how this work, but you explained a lot of it, how people came from the same town in Sicily and that then came out from there.
[35:07] So, Daniel, I really appreciate you come on on the show. And guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So if you’re out there driving around, watch out for motorcycles.
If you have a problem, PTSD, as you know, I always say go to their website, the VA website, if you’ve been in the service and get that hotline number.
If you’ve got a problem with drugs or alcohol, you can get help from a real deal former Gambino soldier, Anthony Ruggiano.
Go to his website or his YouTube page. That’s Anthony Ruggiano.
Like and subscribe and keep coming back. I really appreciate everybody that listens in and be sure and check out Daniel Waugh’s other page down in the show notes.
View all episodes
By Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective
4.6
596596 ratings
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. This is the first in my three-part series on the history of organized crime in St. Louis, MO. This episode delves into the fascinating world of St. Louis crime families. We are joined by author Daniel Waugh, who has written several books on the topic. Daniel introduces his books, including “Egan’s Rats,” “Gangs of St. Louis, Men of Respect,” “Off Color: Detroit’s Purple Gang,” “Vinnita: The Birth of the Detroit Mafia,” and “Beithioch: The Life and World of a Chicago Gangster.” We discuss the diverse mix of Syrians, Irish, and Italians in St. Louis, eventually forming the Italian and Syrian mafia. We learn about the connection between the Detroit and St. Louis mafia, as many families from both regions come from the same Sicilian towns. Click here to find all of Daniel’s books on Amazon.
Daniel takes us back to the early days of gangs in St. Louis, specifically discussing Egan’s Rats. This gang started as a riverfront gang and later became a political terrorist, engaging in illegal voting and other forms of intimidation. We also learn about Thomas Kenny, one of the early gangsters, and the relationship between Fred Killer Burke and Al Capone. Fred Killer Burke, who started as a small-time criminal in Kansas, joined Egan’s Rats and later became involved in bootlegging and high-profile thefts.
One notable crime committed by Egan’s Rats was the robbery of the United Railways Company office in St. Louis. They got away with $39,000 in cash but had to carjack another motorist when their getaway car had a tire issue. After Egan’s Rats went to prison, some members joined the Cuckoo Gang and later attached themselves to the Purple Gang. Fred Burke, in particular, became an expert with the Thompson machine gun and was eventually taken in by the Capone mob, carrying out high-risk assignments. He was connected to the murder of Frankie Yale and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
We also explore the Pillow gang, originating from Sicilian Mafiosi, and their transition from homemade whiskey to illegal stills and beer production. A war broke out between the Sicilian gangs and the Cuckoo Gang in 1926, resulting in the Cuckoo Gang inflicting heavy casualties on the mafia and forcing other mob bosses to intervene. This war dealt a major blow to the St. Louis mob’s reputation.
We then delve into the Russo brothers and the migration of their faction to Cleveland and Detroit after they were killed during Prohibition. Thomas Licavoli established a powerful crew in Toledo, and his cousin, Jack Licavoli, became the boss of the Cleveland family. Another Licavoli brother, Pete, remained in Detroit before eventually moving to Arizona.
Tony Giordano emerges after Prohibition and becomes connected to a gangland homicide. We also discuss the Syrian families led by Jimmy Michaels, who grew up in Soulard and formed the Cuckoo Gang. They partnered with older crooks and eventually became leaders themselves through criminal actions. Jimmy Michaels, in particular, became a prime suspect in multiple gangland homicides by the age of 22.
We learn about the autonomous relationship between Jimmy Michaels and the Sicilian mafia and the emergence of the Leisure family, which later clashed with Michaels, leading to a war in the early 1980s. The St. Louis mob, managed by Chicago, made significant profits from gambling, union racketeering, and handling stolen goods. The Chicago outfit had a strong influence over the St. Louis mob, including approving the appointment of a new boss.
We also touch on the corrupt practices within the St. Louis Police Department during Prohibition, including their access to Thompson submachine guns before the gangsters did. The Greenlease kidnapping and its connection to Irish gangster Jack Griffin is discussed, as well as the involvement of lawyer Morris Schenker, Joey Lombardo, and local politics.
Throughout the conversation, we highlight the diverse and well-preserved ethnic neighborhoods of St. Louis, such as Dogtown and the Hill, which are famous for their Italian cuisine. We also discuss the importance of understanding the development of the Midwest mafia and its connections to other major cities. The host, Gary, mentions his upcoming book on Egan’s Rats and emphasizes the value of solid mob history over sensationalism.
We thank Daniel Waugh for sharing his knowledge, encouraging listeners to explore his books and author’s page on Amazon, and reminding everyone to be cautious on the road and seek help when needed. St. Louis has played a significant role in the history of organized crime, and by delving into its past, we gain a deeper understanding of this underground world.
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Transcript
[0:00] Well, welcome all you wiretappers back here in the studio of Gangland Wire.
We’re going to go to St. Lewis this week. I have a three part, maybe four part.
I don’t know. This is a pretty extensive crime families in St.
Lewis with some real unusual twist with Syrians and Irishmen and Italians.
And so it’s it’s it’s a real interesting combo mix, if you will, of gangs in St. Louis that morphed into the modern day Italian mafia and the Syrian mafia.
I think we used to call it at one point in time.
But I have Daniel Waugh here, who is an author from St.
Louis, and he has written several books on it. Welcome, Daniel.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Happy to be here. So, Daniel, tell us about name off your books, guys, and I’ll have pictures.
You’ll see pictures if you’re on YouTube and I’ll have links to Daniel’s YouTube page, but name off your books. My first book is Egan’s Rats, about the first and most famous of the old St. Louis gangs.
My second book is called Gangs of St. Louis, Men of Respect, which covers not only Egan’s Rats, but the Hogan Gang, the Green Ones, the Pillow Gang, the Russo Gang, and of course, the Cuckoo Gang.
I have a third book about the Detroit-based Purple Gang called Off Color.
I have a fourth book called Vinnitta, which is about the early years of the Detroit Mafia.
[1:24] And my most recent book, Beithioch, is a biography of Chicago gangster Frank McGurin, who is a cold-blooded psychopath who was known as the first gangster to use a Thompson submachine gun in Chicago.
[1:37] That will take a whole episode itself. I may have to have you come back just to go down that path. That’s really interesting.
I got a lot of Chicago fans too. You did some stuff with Detroit and with St. Louis.
I know I’ve always get asked about, well, what’s the connection between the Detroit, I mean, the Kansas City Mafia and the St.
Louis Mafia are so close. And I said, you know, I heard one of our guys married a girl who was of Syrian ancestry, but I don’t really know any connections.
We never really got any much information. There’s a little bit.
We had one little thing that’ll happen in the 70s where John Spica from St.
Louis supposedly got some dynamite from one of our upstart young gangsters, Carl Spiro, and Nick Civella was mad at him and he called Tony G or Tony Giordano.
But other than that, as far as business and all that, our guys are connected to Chicago.
Your guys in Detroit were connected, I mean, in St.
Louis were connected to Detroit. Now, tell us a little bit about the history of that. Why are they so close to Detroit?
Fraternal Connection between Detroit and St. Louis Mafia
[2:40] It is a fraternal connection between the gangsters, the mafiosos in Detroit and St. Louis.
Many of their families come from the same Sicilian towns, specifically the towns of Terracini and Cinesi and Partenico.
They’re small towns that are located west of Palermo.
[2:58] A lot of times, families like the Bommaritos, Licavolis, Mascheris, they all came from the same Sicilian towns, and as a result, when their families immigrated to America, they tended to go where other people from the same village land, which were mostly in the cities of St. Louis and Detroit.
And as a result, as they entered lives of crime, they had very strong connections between their Sicilian compares in their neighboring cities of whether it was St. Louis or Detroit.
That like explains that for me. I really appreciate you explaining that for me.
Let’s start off with some of these early gangs that of course, back in the olden days, everybody was brand new, brand new immigrants.
The Irish had been here before the Italians more than likely.
So they probably were maybe the first gangs when the Italians first got there in St. Louis.
So it was those real early days. You know, they had the gangs of New York.
They did a whole movie about it in five points area.
How did this go down in St. Louis?
The vast majority of early St. Louis gangs were political in nature.
[4:02] Egan’s Rats, they initially got started as a riverfront gang that went through a couple of different phases, but they were originally known as the Ashley Street Gang.
They lived in the eastern edge of St. Louis’ Irish district, which was known as the Cary Patch.
They specifically lived in an area of the Cary Patch called Pigeon Hill, which bordered right on the Mississippi River.
It was about where the Lumiere Casino is now. And they got their start picking pockets, robbing people, doing burglaries.
But the early Egan’s Rats, they functioned as political terrorists.
Because the city of St. Louis had numerous, they had elections just about every year for different parts of the city government.
And what the Egan’s rats would do is that they would go to the polls, they would vote illegally, repeat vote, they would prevent their opponents from voting, terrorizing voters, stuffing ballot boxes, the whole nine yards.
A lot of that has to do with how fragmented St.
Louis City government was in the late 19th century that would enable the Egan’s rats and other gangs to be able to put their favorite politicians in office.
And once the politicians got into office, they used the gangsters to enforce their will.
[5:20] And those political positions were very lucrative for the men who had them.
Probably the best known of the early gangsters was a guy named Thomas Kenny.
His nickname was Snake Kenny.
Fred “Killer” Burke and his association with Egan’s Rats
[5:31] And he was basically the first boss, if you will, of the Egan’s Rats.
Now, Egan’s Rats, most famously, I think, in more modern times, was Fred Killer Burke and maybe somebody else that went up and worked for Al Capone and became known as his American Boys.
Now, can you tell us a little bit about Fred Killer Burke and that relationship?
Sure Fred Killer burke’s original name was thomas camp he was actually born in southeastern kansas on a farm.
You want to sunday school even briefly study better than every medicine before you turn to crime.
In fact it’s gangland buddies actually nicknamed doc rather than killer. burn.
He eventually went to Kansas City and started doing some small-time crimes and migrated west to St. Louis.
He got indicted for forgery at one point. He joined the army and fought in France in World War I. He was a tank corps sergeant.
He did prison time in both Michigan and in Missouri at Jeff City.
In the early 20s, Egan’s rats had morphed from political terrorists into bootleggers slash high-profile thieves.
They specialized in robbing banks, bank messengers.
[6:48] And Fred Burke came to Egan’s Rats and had an idea for a job.
And him and some of the boys held up the United Railways Company office in St.
Louis at 39th and Park on July 3rd, 1923.
That was a streetcar company provider for the city. And they ended up getting about $39,000 in cash.
[7:10] While they were driving away and escaping through South City, St.
Louis, one of the tires on their getaway car popped off and they ended up having to carjack another motorist so they could successfully escape.
After the bulk of the Egan gang leadership went to prison for mail robbery in November of 1924, Brent Burke and a number of his buddies eventually fell into the lower ranks of the Cuckoo Gang for a time.
Then they moved on around the country and started doing all various kinds of mayhem.
They attached themselves to the Purple Gang for a time.
Fred Burke became an expert shot with the Thompson cell machine gun, and he used that Tommy gun very effectively for the Purple Gang, killing three of their enemies in what’s known as the Miraflores Massacre in March of 1927.
Burke and his buddies eventually fell out with the Purple Gang, and they headed west and fell in with the Capone mob.
Fred Burke’s involvement with the Capone Mob and St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
[8:03] Al Capone apparently had a soft spot for the ex-Egan’s Rats boys, in particular Gus Winkler, who was a close buddy of Brett Byrne.
He nicknamed them the American boys because they weren’t Italian.
And he ended up using them for special high-risk assignments.
[8:20] One job they went into brooklyn new york in july of nineteen twenty eight to kill Capone’s old mentor Frankie Yale.
[8:27] In an incident that got national headline and then.
I’ll decided that the american boys would be perfect to take out bugs moran in chicago and the saint louis american boys working with a.
Capone affiliated crew on the north side of Chicago called the Circus Cafe Gang were the ones who pulled off the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.
The Circus Cafe Gang, that was what Tony Ocardo was involved in early on in his career.
So that’s really interesting there.
Maybe Tony Ocardo was probably at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
That’s an interesting area to look into.
But anyhow, I know I read about Fred Burke that they found him later on, they did a search warrant or something, or they searched the house and they recovered a Thompson submachine gun and ballistically, it connected back to the St.
Valentine’s Day massacre. So that’s not just, you know, some informant said that or some policeman speculating that’s backed up by solid evidence, isn’t it? Oh, yeah.
Not only did they match the machine guns, Burke also had the It’s a very distinctive .45 caliber ammunition that was fired in the garage.
It was a special run of bullets out of the Denver factory that were stamped with like a small S, that only like a handful of them were ever made.
So that’s another solid evidence link between Burke and his guns in the massacre.
The Pilla gang, that was the Italian gang in St. Louis, right?
So tell us a little bit about how that came together.
The Origins of the Pillow Gang in Sicily
[9:53] The Pillow Gang was originally a group of Sicilian mafiosi that originally got their start as black hand artists.
They were originally led by a gentleman by the name of Pasquale Santino.
He and many of the men in his crew were from southern Sicily, specifically the area around Agbrogento province.
[10:15] And they continued, they locked heads with of the other Sicilian factions of the Mafia family, notably the Green Ones and the Russo Boys.
During the 1927 Civil War, where the Mafia factions were all shooting each other to pieces, Santino was killed and they were taken over by his second in command, Charlie Fursina.
Charlie Fursina was from northeastern Sicily, and during the war, he and his bodyguards were ambushed in the Dogtown section of St.
Louis. And Charlie, the bodyguards were killed and Charlie Ficino took a machine gun bullet through his lower hip.
And while he was recovering from it, he used a pillow to cushion his rear end when he sat down in chairs.
And police saw him doing this and they sarcastically nicknamed his crew the Pillow Gang. That’s where that came from.
[11:02] The Sicilians are coming together. There’s several Sicilian-based gangs leading up to Prohibition.
And then something’s going to happen just like all over the United States, the old black handers and the old, you know, street thugs and people preying on other Italian members of the community are going to be pushed out.
You know, it’s depicted in the Godfather movie that these guys, these young guys come up and start with Lucky Luciano and they start pushing out these old guys and they’re going to get into bootlegging because that’s where the money is.
So can you talk about that transition in St. Louis?
With the Sicilian Mafia, they started off cooking homemade whiskey because of the location of St. Louis, because it’s pretty much in the center of the country.
It’s relatively far away from the borders of Canada or Mexico, and shipping whiskey, especially in the early years of Prohibition, was difficult for the St.
Louis Mafia, and they were still considered relatively small potatoes.
So they started, what they did was they erected illegal stills, not only in and around the city of St. Louis, but across the river in Illinois.
[12:10] That’s where a large supply of their illegal whiskey came from.
The Cuckoo Gang’s War and Humiliating Defeat
[12:14] They also did a similar operation with beer as well.
Eventually, they got to make so much money that eventually Greek took over, and that’s how they started fighting with each other.
But in 1926, a war started between the Sicilian gangs and the Cuckoo Gang, which was based in South City at the time.
[12:35] And quite frankly, the Cuckoo Gang wiped the floor with them.
They inflicted a lot of casualties on the mafia, to the point where other mob bosses from the East Coast actually had come into St. Louis and mediated.
And the Cuckoo Gang demanded extensive reparations for.
Starting the war. And the terms were quite humiliating.
I mean, the mafia had to go buy each cuckoo gangster a new suit of clothes and a new car and give them like $50,000 cash or something like that.
It was a real black eye for the St. Louis mob hierarchy.
And my own personal opinion is that their reputation with other mafia families around the country never fully recovered from that.
Maybe with the help of the other people and especially out of Detroit, because you had a pretty strong Sicilian faction going during Prohibition in Detroit.
The Liccavoli’s had some connection back down to St. Louis, and then one of the Licavoli’s went to Cleveland.
Talk about that, kind of how that during Prohibition and how, how’s this all going to shake out?
A number of members, after the Russo brothers, two of them were killed and the rest led the city in the summer of 1928.
The Russos initially went down to Fort Worth, Texas, before migrating to Cleveland.
Liccavoli’s Toledo Crew and Rivalries in Ohio
[13:50] What was left of their faction, quite a few of their number moved to Detroit, specifically the Liccavoli brothers, the Maceris, and they joined the pre-existent family in Detroit.
[14:02] And eventually, Thomas Licavoli, who’s also known as Yanni because his original name was Damiano, he started up a crew in Toledo, Ohio, which grew very powerful until Licavoli himself was in prison for murder in 1934, I believe it was.
He got into a beef with a gangster named Jack Kennedy, of all things.
This Jack Kennedy was actually having an affair with Licavoli’s wife.
And I think another one of the Licavoli’s top guys confronted him about it.
Kennedy apparently beat the heck out of him.
And after Kennedy was killed, Licavoli and a couple other people were convicted of his murder and sentenced to life in the Ohio State Prison.
But Licavoli’s cousin, Jack Licavoli, eventually moved to Cleveland and in the 1970s became the boss of that family.
And in the 1970s, Jack Licavoli became involved in a very high-profile war with a gangster named Danny Green has made famous in the movie, kill the Irishman.
So I thank you. I did want to tie that together because I knew there was a connection from St.
Louis to Ohio and, and Detroit and Cleveland.
So I’m appreciate you tying that all together and the other lick of bully will add another lick of bully that stays in Detroit, that, that becomes a mover and shaker later on in Detroit. Correct.
Yes. that’s Pete. He’d stayed in Detroit for a number of years and then he eventually moved to Arizona.
[15:31] And I believe that he had shares of the Aladdin Casino, if I’m not mistaken, and he became very big in Tucson, Arizona and whatnot.
And eventually, I think he had, if I remember correctly, he had a very large ranch down there.
So he did very, out of all the Licavoli brothers, he was probably the one who did the best overall.
[15:52] So now where does Tony Giordano, Tony G come in this, does he start coming up
Tony Giordano’s Emergence after Prohibition
[15:57] during these the prohibition, but post prohibition and the depression era, is that when Tony Giordano starts coming up?
I get the impression that Tony Giordano made his bones just after prohibition ended.
I remember him being connected to a gangland homicide in, I believe it was the spring of in 1934, a gentleman by the name of Mike Palazzolo was killed, and Tony Giordano was a suspect.
I remember seeing something about Tony Giordano in the early 40s.
I’m not quite as versed on mob history like after World War II.
But yeah, this post-prohibition, that’s when Tony Giordano starts coming into the picture.
[16:39] So now my next question is, St. Louis is so diverse and so interesting.
Is the Syrian families, and where did they come from, and how did they fit into this early on?
The Syrian crime families, they grew up in Soulard, just south of downtown, notably Jimmy Michaels and a couple of, I think he had a couple of younger brothers as well.
But Jimmy Michaels grew up with the Tipton brothers who lived in Soulard.
They were streaking on and out together. Incidentally, the Tiptons, Jimmy Michaels and a couple of their buddies, they were originally Sandlot baseball players.
And they got the name Cuckoo from a brand of soda pop that sponsored their baseball team in the early teens.
I have looked high and low for like an advertisement or something for this Cuckoo Soda Pop, but I’ve never been able to find it.
If anyone out there has it, yeah, please let me know.
But they eventually started getting into trouble in the late teens and the police kind of tacked the name Cuckoo Gang on them.
And they partnered up with some older crooks who were part of a pre-existent, crew of thieves known as the the showdown Avenue gang who kind of showed them the ropes of the underworld and.
[17:55] Before long the younger cuckoo gang eventually knocked off the older boss of the showdown Avenue gang.
I believe his name was Jack Lyons and they started bootlegging in and around the Sioux art and other points in South st.
Louis and Jimmy Michaels and the rest of the Syrians you, were dragged into a gang war with the Sicilians because Some of the younger members of the grinning ones tried to frame Jimmy Michaels for a murder, but unbeknownst to them, not only did Jimmy Michaels beat the rap he came back after them and just Just unleashed hell on them By his 22nd birthday.
Jimmy Michaels was already a prime suspect in eight unsolved gangland homicides So it’s literally through the sheer force of criminal willpower war, that Jimmy Michaels catapulted himself into a leadership position in the Cuckoo Gang.
All of his Syrian buddies, Pete Webbe was one, Gus Webbe, they all came along for the ride.
Jimmy Michaels and his relationship with the Sicilian mob
[18:55] Eventually, after prohibition, Jimmy Michaels ended up doing a number of years in prison. He got out in 1944, I believe it was.
Jimmy Michaels commanded an enormous amount of respect from the Sicilian mob hierarchy, just because of who he was and what he had done.
So as a result, Michaels and his family existed.
They had a somewhat autonomous relationship with the traditional Sicilian mafia in St. Louis.
And going into the 40s and 50s, another family appears, which would be the Leisures.
And eventually, they ran afoul of Jimmy Michaels.
I believe one of the Leisures, Richard Michaels, Richard Leisure, was killed in a bar brawl, I believe it was, in East St.
Louis, and the Leisures became convinced that Jimmy Michaels helped his killer get off.
And so that started a lot of animosity towards them, and that culminated in their war around 1980 or 81 or 4.
The Leisures and Michaels, though, these two Syrian families, when they were fighting in the early 80s, they were indeed the last vestiges of an organization that, once upon a time, had been known as the Cuckoo Gang.
Interesting. Even though they stopped using them, that cuckoo gag around World War II or so. Yeah. So.
[20:10] During the thirties, during the depression and prohibitions over that, how did they move into gambling?
Were they part of the national wire service and they had a, there was a sportsman’s park.
I think there was a racetrack in, in St. Louis was there, was that a big moneymaker for the mob during that time?
[20:29] Yes. Yes, it was. Most of the gambling, it seems to me like, especially post-World War II was kind of remote controlled by the Chicago outfit. The St.
Louis mob kind of managed it for Chicago.
Chicago spoke for St. Louis in meetings with the commission, that kind of stuff.
[20:48] But absolutely, the racetracks, illegal gambling parlors, that kind of stuff.
Union racketeering as a moneymaker for the mob
[20:54] It was a very big moneymaker for the mob.
So what about their involvement in union racketeering?
Now, did that start then or did that start later on? Because by the time of this leisure war and in the seventies and eighties, that’s a huge moneymaker for him as the laborers union. Yeah. Start back then.
Uh, yeah. Union racketeering dates back to the last days of prohibition.
When, you know, the, the, the illegal alcohol business was, you know, with, with repeal, I mean, they’re going to lose that money maker, so they have to look to other ways to make money.
And that was when they started getting involved with union racketeering and whatnot.
And, uh, yeah, I, I believe it was local one 10. of the labor union.
That was a focal point of the leisure wars in the early 80s, were those union positions.
What about the Italians in labor unions during the 30s, or did they just stick to handling swag and things like that?
I’m sure that they did. The Italians certainly wouldn’t want to pass up the money and the profits that illegal union racketeering had offer.
[22:01] That’s really interesting about the Chicago connection. I didn’t know that before either, that Chicago.
I do know that when Giordano’s nephew was getting ready to take over, the story goes that he went to Aiuppa in Chicago and got his approval, and then came back, and supposedly it got out to the newspapers that he’d done that, and Aiuppa accused Trupiano of leaking that to the newspaper.
I don’t know if there’s any truth to that story or not, but that Chicago influence over him is really interesting. I tell you, that Chicago, they controlled the Midwest.
You would have thought he would have had to go to Detroit, maybe, but they had to go to Chicago for that kind of approval for the next boss.
Frank Agrusa and his connection to Vito Giannulli and Capone
[22:43] Yeah, even as far back as the 30s, Frank Agrusa, whose real name was Frank Abate, he was the protege of Vito Giannulli, a former boss of the Green Ones that was killed during Prohibition.
[22:55] Abate slash agrusa ran the st.
Louis family in the Late 20s early 30s.
He was the official boss, but He was little more than a puppet of the Capone bob in Chicago In fact when he was deposed in St. Louis, he eventually moved up to the Chicago area and was like demoted to a captain, And eventually he ran afoul of the Chicago mob He tried to hide in rural Arkansas and they found him down there and took care of him there In 1944, I believe it was. I hadn’t heard that story.
Speaking of that time, and you may not know anything about this, there was a famous kidnapping in Kansas City of the Greenlease baby, or boy. Yes, I’ve heard of it.
And the people that did it, they got like $500,000 and they went to St.
Louis and started drinking and spending this guy’s money.
And a corrupt St.
Louis policeman.
Mob-Connected Hotel and Missing Money
[23:55] Ended up arresting him and bringing that money in.
And that was connected to, they were staying in a hotel that was a mob connected hotel.
And the cab driver that was hauling them around was, you remember anything about that story?
You think? I remember hearing about it, but I have never researched the Greenlease case in depth.
But yeah, I absolutely have heard of it though. Well, it looked like probably the mob boss at the time had been Giordano, I guess, or whoever was just before him, ended up with a big bulk of that.
There’s 300,000, I think, missing out of the 500,000 in the end or some number like that.
And it never reappeared. And they had all the serial numbers written down.
And some bills reappeared in Chicago. You mentioned Chicago.
There’s a few bills that did reappear in Chicago. but other than that, that whole $300,000 during 1950 is when it was, that’s a lot of money, $500,000 in 1950. So interesting.
[24:55] I assume that the St. Louis Police Department was probably corrupted totally by the mafia during these years.
Was there any crime busters or anything that, that kind of, that, that did anything about the mob?
During Prohibition, there actually was a pretty tough squad led by a captain by the name of John Carroll.
And he was notoriously pitiless with crooks.
Couldn’t be bought the whole nine yards. In fact, he even killed a couple of members of the Russo gang in a police chase in October of 1926.
St. Louis Police Department’s early use of Tommy guns
[25:32] Excuse me, some members of the St. Louis Police Department, their squad, they outfit themselves with an armored car and Thompson submachine guns as early as 1921.
So St. Louis is one of the few cities in America where the cops actually got their hands on the Tommy gun before the gangsters did. Oh, really? Yeah.
I wonder how that came about. They must have had some military connections back then and they were able to snag them out of uh, armory or something.
It was straight. Yeah. The Thompson submachine gun, it was really slow to take off sales.
When it was first marketed commercially in March of 1921, but because it wasn’t used in world war one, it didn’t really have much of a reputation.
And it was pretty expensive. It costs $200 retail, which was about half the cop, half the price of a car back then, so just the average Joe couldn’t really afford it. the post service, the postal service wants them to protect their messengers.
And departments like the St. Louis Police Department, they could obviously afford it.
In fact, I think just a few years back, the St.
Louis Police Department actually discovered some of these machine guns that they had like at Cold Storage or whatever, and they auctioned a whole bunch of them off.
If only I had like about $70,000 laying around, I would have bought one.
[26:49] That would be a collector’s item, a Thompson submachine gun that had been around since the 20s, that you knew had been around since the 20s, you could document that, that would be quite a collector’s item there.
Is there anything else you need to tell us about?
Jack Griffin, an Irish gangster in St. Louis and Kansas City
[27:06] Uh, sure. Uh, we were talking about the Greenlease kidnapping.
Are you familiar with a gangster by the name of Jack Griffin?
I don’t think so, no. Uh, he was an Irish gangster who was actually a member of the Russo gang in St. Louis during Prohibition.
He was kind of an anomaly as an Irish gangster moving within a Sicilian crime family.
He actually had a working knowledge of the Italian language and he was a cold-blooded killer.
He was believed to have been the one who killed Vito Giannola, the boss of the Mafia family, in the attic of his girlfriend’s house.
As a result, the Green Ones tried to kill him multiple times.
He survived a number of violent attempts on his life and he eventually in 1933 moved to Kansas City. Thank you.
He adopted the name Jack Gregory and tried to work his way into the crime scene there.
But, you know, Johnny Lazio ran the Kansas City Mob like a clothes shop.
[27:59] And Jack Griffin and a crew of gangsters he worked with eventually were accused of assassinating Johnny Lazio in Kansas City in July of 1934.
[28:08] And the Kansas City Mob tried to kill Griffin. They wounded him and they put him in the hospital.
And at one point, the FBI came to interview him about not only the Lazia murder, but also about the Kansas City massacre, which had happened a year earlier.
And it turned out that a corrupt Kansas City cop by the name of Detective Lieutenant Jeff Rayen took Griffin out of the hospital in an ambulance and basically killed him.
One story goes that while he was being driven to his doomed-out Independence Boulevard or whatever.
He asked the goons on either side of him in the car for one last cigarette.
They’re like, okay sure why not. So Griffin lights up the cigarette, puffs it to a red-hot glow, and jams it into the eye of the guy sitting next to him.
And in a rage they end up like burning him alive in the furnace of an apartment building.
[28:57] Interesting. But all Griffin’s guys, most of them at the hands of Jeff Rea and himself, ended up getting killed.
One of them, Jimmy Needles, La Capra, ended up falling into the hands of the FBI.
They protected him for a little while, but kicked him loose and he was eventually tracked down and killed in upstate New York, I believe it was.
The only guy involved in Lazia’s murder who got away was a general by the name of Nugent La Palma.
He hid out in Colorado for a while. Kansas City mobs sent some guys after him in Colorado and La Palma actually killed one of them outside of Pueblo and got away.
He turned up in the late 1950s as a union official in Seattle.
[29:39] But by that point, I guess enough time had gone by that the Kansas City mob just decided to let bygones be bygones as far as Johnny Lassie was concerned.
And yeah, Nugent LaPalma lived to be like 83 years old and died in August of 1996.
[29:53] But yeah, that specific St. Louis gangster Jack Griffin definitely made his mark in the Kansas City underworld.
I’ll have to look that up. I didn’t really know that story before.
It’s a really interesting story.
I end up focusing on things all around the United States and don’t really do that stuff, actually, I’ll be quite honest.
Only if I was involved, then I’ve done that.
But the old stuff, I’ve done a little bit, but not a lot.
So this has been great. Daniel, I really appreciate you helping us fill in our knowledge base on St.
Louis Mob and how important they were, you know, in the Midwest and with the other cities now that are related to these other cities.
I guess one last question. What about that lawyer, Morris Schenker?
[30:37] Do you remember anything about him?
I’ve heard the name, but to be honest, I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about it. I’m sorry.
No problem. He was Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer for a while, real tight with Jimmy Hoffa, and he got involved with Las Vegas things, and he was a really famous threat by Joey Lombardo out of Chicago.
He told him, he said, you say you’re 73, your birthday you’re going to be 73, you’re 72 now.
Well, if you want to see 73, you’ll pay this money to Alan Dorfman.
So and another funny story about him. And I know as a St. Lewis guy, historian, you’ll appreciate this.
I have a friend here on the police department actually went to academy together and he’s from St. Louis, named Jim Fitzgerald.
And he always told the story about his dad. It was an Irishman, of course, and they had a gas station and was kind of a mover and shaker in some kind of a neighborhood around there in wherever that gas station was.
I think it was somewhere around Fourth Park. And he ran for city council, and his opponent was Morris Schenker, and he got beat.
And he said his dad used to say, well, that’s pretty good. I got beat by a Jew in an Irish ward.
Contrasting Ethnic Neighborhoods in St. Louis and Kansas City
[31:51] So St. Louis is really more than Kansas City, maintain their different ethnic kind of neighborhoods and relationships, it seems to me like.
Kansas City and people didn’t really retain it that much.
They moved out the suburbs pretty quick and and kind of blended in.
But St. Louis is just like back east or Chicago.
They maintain those ethnic neighborhoods.
[32:15] Yes, there’s there’s Dogtown and the Hill, of course. They just recently made a real nice documentary about the Hill. Yeah, I heard that.
And if any of you guys out there, you ever want some really good Italian food.
He just mentioned the Hill. Well, that’s the Italian section.
And that’s where all the good Italian food is. There’s a ton of good Italian restaurants there. What’s your favorite there on the Hill?
Uh, G and Tony’s G and Tony’s. Yeah. I think that’s the one that I think that’s the most famous with them, what everybody seems to recommend.
So G and Tony’s guys, if you ever go down there.
So Daniel wall, I really appreciate you doing that. And you got any new books that you’re working on? What are you working on now?
Uh, actually Gary, yes. I’m working on a reboot of Egan’s rats, my original book.
I’m working on an updated and expanded history of. Egan’s Rats, the gang.
Its tentative title is The Apaches of St. Louis, an updated and expanded history of Egan’s Rats.
It delves a lot more deeply into their story, specifically the political aspect of it, and a lot more expanded history of both the gangsters themselves, their family histories, their crimes, and also correcting some errors that were in my first book.
Self-publishing it, so I’ll be able to make it as long as I want to.
It’s Strictly for the fans and the diehard readers, that kind of thing.
[33:30] But I’m working on it. It’s a ways from completion though. Probably won’t be done until maybe 2025 or so, but it is on the way.
[33:38] Well, that’s what we’ve got here is diehard fans. I promise you that.
And no frills, a mafia history here on gang land where I get people make comments on Facebook every once in a while about that.
We like you because you just deal with the history and none of the drama and some of these other guys, they want to these mobsters have gone into business, so to speak, and then they act like they’ve got to fight between each other.
So this is no frills, just solid mob history.
So Daniel, while I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your knowledge with us and guys, don’t forget, I’ll, I’ll have links to all his books, his author’s page, if you will, on the, on Amazon.
So if you want one of these books, why, why you can really get a sense of the Midwest mafia and its relationships and how they connected back in the early days, We kind of tend to go after the more modern kind of action and oriented things.
But where did everybody come from and how did they develop here in the Midwest?
There is a lot of stuff about New York and how that developed there in the five families, but not that much about the Midwest.
So this is a big piece of it. St. Louis was right in the middle, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and had some connection to Kansas City.
But Kansas City seemed to develop on its own. And it’s I don’t know, it’s a little it’s hard to understand sometimes how this work, but you explained a lot of it, how people came from the same town in Sicily and that then came out from there.
[35:07] So, Daniel, I really appreciate you come on on the show. And guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So if you’re out there driving around, watch out for motorcycles.
If you have a problem, PTSD, as you know, I always say go to their website, the VA website, if you’ve been in the service and get that hotline number.
If you’ve got a problem with drugs or alcohol, you can get help from a real deal former Gambino soldier, Anthony Ruggiano.
Go to his website or his YouTube page. That’s Anthony Ruggiano.
Like and subscribe and keep coming back. I really appreciate everybody that listens in and be sure and check out Daniel Waugh’s other page down in the show notes.
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