9237042888?profile=originalBy Thom L. Jones

I have struck a city-a real city-and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

- Rudyard Kipling

In Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s there was enough crime to go around. Plenty to satisfy everyone.

As one journalist put it, "In all the seven seas and the lands bordering thereon there is probably no name which more quickly calls up thoughts of crime, violence and wickedness than does that of Chicago."

According to David E. Ruth:

"Yet even during the twenties and thirties, Chicago's levels of violence and vice were never especially high. Instead, the city's reputation was a matter of myth and symbol. For Chicago—in its booming growth, unrestrained energy, and sometimes explosive conflicts—symbolized for many the promises and perils of America's urban future. In its "excessiveness," one writer on crime explained, Chicago "is like other American cities—only more so." The myths of Chicago crime were compelling because they spoke to larger concerns—about morality, economic competition, ethnicity, sexuality, the pursuit of pleasure, and its dangers."

Most of which revolved around a new law passed by the government: a nationwide constitutional ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, which came into effect on January 17th, 1920: The Volstead Act.

Prohibition as it came to be called, not only made a lot of people very rich, it made a considerable number of them very dead.

One was Matt Kolb.

A short, five-three, morbidly obese, 280 pounds, pot-bellied, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, wheeler and dealer, he was one of the major players in the Chicago underworld by the 1920s. Not big like "Big Al Capone," but still, a premier player in a city that was wide open and full of first league criminals. Chicago was truly an American "melting-pot." Every race, every nationality, every type of criminal.

"From the moment of its incorporation as a city in 1837, Chicago has been systematically seduced, looted, and pilloried by an eonian horde of venal politicians, mercenary businessmen, and sadistic gangsters. Nothing has changed in more than 130 years"

So said crime writer Ovid Demaris. He was pretty much on the mark about how things worked in the 1920s and 1930s. Crime, as in Organized, wasn't so much a job as a single-minded commitment. The Italians and the Irish and the Poles and the Jews and the Germans and on and on and on. They all wanted part of it and were more than happy to kill each other to achieve their ambitions.

9237043480?profile=originalHow fat, little Matt got to be there, and where it led him, is an interesting story.

He was born in Chicago on September 2nd, 1891 to Mathias, born in Germany, and Josephine Corbett of Illinois. He was one of eight children, the eldest. There were six boys and two girls. When he was 18 he was working as an apprentice plumber. At 20, as a carpenter. By the time he was 25, in 1916, he was claiming to be a driver of a delivery wagon for West Side Ice, based at Hoyne Avenue and Rice Street in Wicker Park. He lived at 818 North Francisco Avenue, on the west side of town. By then, he was married. His wife was Alma, and they had the first of two daughters-Pearl and Marie. How he went from being a truck driver to a multimillionaire booze and gambling baron in fifteen years has never been determined with any certainty.*

Some of it may be explained by the fact that Charles B. Graydon, the owner of West Side Ice, became Cook County Sheriff between 1926 and 1928. He allegedly hired Matt (left) as a member of the highway patrol, which had been formed in April 1922, and Matt traveled the county telling everyone how close he and the sheriff were and using his influence to help tavern owners circumvent the laws on drinking and gambling. Using this as a way to develop his illegal businesses, establish contacts and create future customer bases, as well as dispensing privileges and collecting tributes.

In August 1930 Jack Zoota, also known as Zuta, an immigrant from Poland, believed to have organized the killing of crooked Chicago Tribune newspaper reporter Jake Lingle, who had been likely, informing to the chief of police and Capone, against the Moran mob, was shot dead in a roadhouse, The Lake View Resort, in Delafield, Wisconsin. Zuta was a political fixer and an accountant, the bookkeeper and “thinker” of a North Side gang headed by George Moran and Joe and Dominic Aiello.

Special investigator, Pat Roache of the state's attorney office, dug around and found numerous safe deposit boxes that contained detailed information of mob business, including payments of $100,000 amounts to one "MK" which the police believed to be Matt Kolb, and lists of aldermen, a judge, a state senator, a police chief, a lawyer and numerous high-ranking city officials who they believed were the recipients of this money.

There was little doubt that this was protection money. The police at this time had targeted Kolb as "a satchel man for unnamed grafts." This transferring of money had gone on for years which indicated that Kolb was running more than one business in what must have been a pretty frenetic kind of life. There was obviously a lot of palms to grease

As Studs Terkel, the writer said, "Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt."

At the time of his death, Matt Kolb lived in Morton Grove where he ran a roadhouse called The Club Morton, at the corner of Dempster Street and Lincoln Avenue. It had operated under a number of different owners and names: The Russian Village, The Golden Grove (or Gate) then The Bridge Inn and finally The Club Morton. Morton Grove was only fifteen miles by road from the heart of Chicago.

There are conflicting accounts on the club's location, but The Chicago Tribune in an article in 1931 at the time of Kolb's death, showed it on a map, at this location which, today, is a large, empty field. The Club Morton was one of many roadhouses that hugged Dempster and the surrounding streets making Morton Grove a wide-open attraction for Chicagoans anxious to wet their whistles and kick up their heels after work.

Matt and Alma had divorced by then. He was recently remarried to Florence, and had bought her a brand new multistory home at 8819 Marmora Avenue, just a two-minute drive from the roadhouse. Unlike The Morton, this house still stands, eighty-five years later.

Morton Grove was the epicenter of what came to be called "Rural Bohemia," an area to the north-west of Chicago city limits up into Lake County. A territory of country roadhouses, up to 500 of them, dotted across the land, attracting gamblers and drinkers, party-goers and criminals eager to squeeze every dollar out of every opportunity. Clubs like The Dells, Ferris Inn, The Studio, Club Del Rio, Murphy's, The Bungalow, Villa Venice, The Purple Crackle, The Garden of Allah, The Triangle Café, The Lincoln Tavern, Glenview, Club Rendezvous and hundreds more.

Kolb had worked out of Morton Grove some years prior to his murder. In 1920, he was operating his business out of The Como Inn on the south-east corner of Dempster and Ferris Avenue, only two blocks east of The Club Morton. His business was illegal booze and gaming machines. People just wanted to have fun, and drinking and gambling seemed to fit the bill, even though they were both against the law. This was only four years since he was manhandling ice off his truck so he had come a long way in a relatively short time.

Bootlegging, as the illegal sale and distribution of alcohol came to be referred to in America, was in fact never a by-product of Prohibition as many writers have claimed. It began before the Volstead Act and continued long after it was appealed, as a means of bypassing taxation duties on alcohol. The profit on booze was astronomic. In one year only, during the period of prohibition in Chicago, it was estimated that bootlegging revenue generated $4 billion US dollars.

During prohibition, the 2.7 million people of Chicago had a huge selection of drinking venues to choose from. By 1900, there were 6763 registered saloons in Cook County. In the stock yards district alone, the vilest slum in Chicago, known as Packingtown, or Back of the Yards, there were 500 in just a few blocks. The numbers, city and county-wide, would have increased considerably by 1920 as Chicago had added one million to its population in those twenty years, an increase of 60%! In 1906, it was estimated every man, woman and child in Cook County drank on average each year, seventy gallons of alcohol, nearly four times the average United States consumption.

There were around 20,000 "spots" offering booze and entertainment during Prohibition, across the city and suburbs, each being supplied and serviced by a particular syndicate that catered for the needs of a specific area, through at least 15 illegal breweries.

There were many gangs, and crime historians are continually renewing and redefining who and what they were, but broadly, it looked like this:

Klondike O'Donnell worked Cicero and the West Side. Spike O'Donnell (no relative) and Polak Joe Saltis and Frank McErlane (immortal if for no other reason than allegedly introducing the Thompson sub-machine gun to Chicago's underworld,) covered the West and South Sides. Bugs Moran covered part of the Far North Side. Matt Kolb and his group the North West along with Matt Hoffman in Wilmette and Ray Pregenzer, based in Fox Lake. Hymie Weiss the North Side, and the Genna brothers, Little Italy and Melrose Park. There was Claude Maddox and his Circus Gang, and Ralph Sheldon and his mob on the South West Side. Al Capone and his mob of thirty-three (known) hoodlums allegedly controlled hundreds of speakeasies (a term that meant speak softly when ordering) scattered all over the area, and controlled Chicago Heights, a major illegal beer-producing area, 30 miles to the south of the city, and according to law enforcement agencies, the most lawless town in Cook County.

Federal authorities estimated Capone pulled in $75 million a year net profit and the rest of the gangs shared another $40 to $50 million or so. Al was a multi-millionaire by the time he was thirty. He had gone from dirt-poor in Brooklyn to the immigrant apogee of wealth, fulfilling the great American Dream.

Kolb, the little fat man knew that in the short term, because of prohibition, which in fact came to last 13 years, the demand for booze, would always exceed supply, and that with the right controls in place, manufacturing and distribution would evolve providing he could control the police and the politicians, and all that needed was good networking and plenty of pay-off cash to grease the palms of venal law officers, (Chief of Police Charles Fitzmorris complained that 60% of his force were in the bootleg business), along with judges and state attorneys who controlled the laws governing alcohol and gaming statutes in Cook County.

That, and the ability to stay well clear of the other fat man in Chicago. The one with the badly scarred face and temperament to match: Alphonsus Capone.

9237043876?profile=originalCapone (right) would come to play a significant role in the life and death of Matt Kolb and another player who was already waiting in the wings to add his influence to events that would shape the life and times of the little fat man.

His name was Roger Touhy.

Matt Kolb was an inveterate gambler in his early manhood years, wheeling and dealing as a ward heeler on Chicago's North Side. A heeler (a term in use since at least 1888) was an urban political fixer working for a party within a ward, the smallest electoral subdivision in a major city. There were thirty-five in Chicago and Cook County in 1920, according to the Census. His job was chasing votes, organizing campaigns, sign-age, advertising, working as an advocate for the constituents. The background stuff that supports a candidate's campaign for election. He earned a reputation as a man who could sort out police problems for gamblers, vice operators and illegal liquor distributors.

He also, by 1922, ran a saloon at the corner of Augusta Boulevard and California Avenue in the Humboldt Park district, a few miles west of downtown Chicago. He worked between there and Morton Grove as his business demanded.

Sometime in the early 1920s, he went into partnership with Al Winge, an ex-Cook County police lieutenant and Martin Guilfoyle, a big-time gambler who ran a gaming room behind his cigar store at 2220 South Wabash Avenue.

Al Capone when he arrived in Chicago around 1919 would live next door at 2222, commonly known in the area as "The Four Deuces." He had come to Chicago from New York to help Johnny Torrio who had in turn come to Chicago from New York, to help his cousin's husband, Giacomo Colosimo, in a problem he was having with The Black Hand, the Italian extortion ring, who were blackmailing him and his brothel empire. Michael Cassius McDonald is credited with starting organized crime in Chicago. That may well be so. But it was "Big Jim Colosimo" who made it a Chicago "business." He had built an empire based on vice but was involved in gambling and labor racketeering as well.

Guilfoyle and his partners ran their beer business from an office in a building on the corner of Kedzie and Chicago Avenues. The expression "Check your guns at the door," appears to have originated when visitors to Guilfoyle's bar were expected to do just that, before proceeding down the street to his office. There was a very good reason for this.

From 1922 to 1926, 215 gangsters killed each other in Cook County fighting for control of the beer wars. The police killed another 160.

By 1926, the three partners were allegedly pulling in $3 million a year, and then for some reason, Winge and Guilfoyle decided to shift their allegiance over to the Capone camp.

About 2 miles north of Matt's saloon, was a car sale yard run by Roger Touhy, at 4311 North Avenue. Touhy was younger than Kolb, but the two men got to know each other, and one day, Roger sold Matt a car. It was the start of a friendship that would take one to his death and the other into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

A few months after the car sale, Kolb offered Roger a partnership in his business for $10,000, and Touhy accepted. According to Roger, they joined forces sometime in 1927. They would work together until a fateful day in 1931. Touhy claimed later, in court testimony that their operational area ran north from North Avenue to the county line and from Harlem Avenue, east and west outside the city limits.

Roger Touhy was the youngest son of a family of eight children. His father was a police officer and his mother died when Touhy was ten years old when there was an explosion in the family's kitchen. He operated the car dealership in Chicago for a number of years but decided to go into bootlegging, and then to link in with Kolb, when the opportunity arose, to make more money. The dealership brought him in about $60,000 a year in income. His new business with the little fat man would generate him about $1 million a year!

9237044467?profile=originalTouhy (right) had started out selling beer to roadhouses and saloons in the small towns and villages north and north-west of Chicago. He was said to have gained public support, or at least people turned a blind eye to his activities, by him donating generously to different organizations, schools and social clubs. He lived in Oak Park, but after his first child was born he moved onto a farm in Des Plaines near the Maryville Academy. According to legend, he later extended his bootlegging to this farm but could not conceal the waste products or the smell of his operations. To take care of this problem, he invited his neighbors to go on a three-week trip to Europe. While they were away, he had an engineering company come in and construct an underground drainage system that would carry all the waste from his land, under their property and empty it into a creek that led into the Des Plaines River.

The partnership between Kolb and Touhy was a success and apparently, highly rewarding. He claimed in his biography, The Stolen Years, they sold 1,000 barrels of beer a week, at $55 a barrel, to over 200 road houses, nightclubs and saloons north of Chicago City. They were grossing between $1 and $2 million dollars a year or more, from the beer business alone, before tax, which, of course, no honest bootlegger would ever pay. Then there was the take from the gambling machines installed in the same places that bought their beer. Each machine could generate them $100 a day, sometimes, double that. This was at a time when the average wage was $17 a week, a Ford Model T cost $360 and a two -story family home could be purchased for $20,000.

John Drury of the Chicago Daily News, in 1931, wrote:

"Northwest of Chicago, and directly west of the millionaire colonies along the North Shore are located the pleasure palaces of the wide open spaces. These are lavish dine-and-dance establishments, serving first-class foods and providing elaborate revues and music and space for dancing. In such places, Chicagoans and North Shoreites enjoy themselves during the summer nights, feeling a sense of relief among the cool trees after a hot, feverish day in the city. If you are interested and own a motor car, and if you don't mind getting caught in traffic jams on the way out or on the way in, then the following places are worth your time and attention."

In this period, Touhy refers to Kolb as "old man Matt," although he was, in fact, only twelve years his senior, and that his partner was anything but a tough guy. "He would have run away from a ten-year-old kid with a flyswatter," he once jokingly remarked. Touhy talked a lot about "little Matt," although he himself was just two inches or so taller than his friend. Matt did, however, make no excuses for the fact that he loved being a gangster. He bathed in the limelight and the attention being a gangster brought to him. He went out one day in 1930 and bought himself a $20,000 Dusenberg auto-mobile. A big, powerful, gaudy car fit for a mobster.

Maybe it made the little guy feel important. The whole world could see how successful he had become.

9237044094?profile=originalKolb's Dusenberg

Being kidnapped probably brought him down to earth with a bang. The only reference we have to this is from Touhy. He states that Matt Kolb was snatched by Capone's men and only released when Touhy paid up a $50,000 ransom. This occurred in 1927, and Kolb was held prisoner in The New Southern Hotel on the corner of Michigan Avenue and 13th Street. In the spring of 1931, Capone had another go, and this time, under threat, Matt paid $25,000 for not being kidnapped. Earlier in the same year, during May, Capone's men had raided many of Kolb's and Touhy's spots, trashing the gaming machines and throwing out the liquor supplies in 41 road houses, warning the operators to use Al's services in the future, or else! It was all coming to a head.

Matt Kolb died in the wee hours of Sunday, October 18th, 1931.

Working the Club Morton that morning were two waiters, Jack Smalloy and Frank Francis. This early in the day, the restaurant was still busy. Matt's thirty-three-year-old sister, Clara Fergus of Elmwood Park, was one of the diners. Maybe she was there with her husband, Joseph, an Irish born immigrant. Newspaper reports don't mention him in their reports however. Arthur Kroeger, a kitchen hand was helping the chef, Emanuel Gonzales. Robert Lutz was working the bar and Paul Bolenski, the yard man was working in the back of the building. William Mardorf the manager, was supervising the front door. Bolenski noticed a car pull up at the rear of the building and two men exit and walk into the inn. Matt was standing by the bar talking to Lutz as the two men came into the building. One was tall, about six feet, the other of average height, five seven or eight.

According to the statement made by Lutz to the police, the two men seemed to know Matt, and their greetings were friendly. As the taller man shook hand with Matt the two men leaned into each other and Lutz heard laughter. At that point, the shorter man pulled out a pistol and shot Kolb in the head six times. His body tumbled to the floor, and the two men turned to leave, The shooter paused, was heard to say, "I better make sure," walked back, leaned over the inert body and fired a seventh time into Matt's head. An unnecessary coup de grâce. The little fat man was long gone. It was 1:45 am.

On hearing the shooting, sister Clara rushed out of the dining room but could do nothing to help her brother who lay in a widening pool of blood.

The Cook County Highway Patrol maintained a substation just 3 miles away, at 8970 North Milwaukee Avenue, in Niles, and they received their first call about the shooting at 1:50 am. Lieutenant James Meyerling was the responding officer, but Kolb was beyond help.

Meyerling had an interesting relationship with Touhy and Kolb. Meyerling's brother, William, a decorated World War One hero, was elected Cook County Sheriff in 1930, allegedly due to the political pressures that Matt Kolb and Touhy brought to bear. It was also believed that James Meyerling had worked hand-in-glove with Kolb when he had been part of the department, helping taverns and roadhouses avoid the gaming laws. "It was entirely up to the Sheriff whether the slot machines would run or not," Touhy was once reported saying.

In the Club Morton no one knew anything.

Except Mardorf. He saw the killing but did not recognize either man. Lutz the bartender, who reports claim was the closest to the three men, claimed he did not see the shooting. There was obviously some very selective recollecting going on in the roadhouse that morning. Two weeks earlier, Matt had called the Highway Patrol saying that four men in a car were acting suspiciously outside the roadhouse, but when the police arrived, they had gone. There was no room at the inn as far as police co-operation was concerned. The staff were obviously bothered more by their anxiety over their personal safety than their urge to be helpful witnesses.

Investigating the killing, detectives were mystified, not because it was difficult to find a theory for the murder, but, on the contrary, because so many different theories seemed so plausible:

Matt was killed because he had refused to contribute to the defense fund needed to support Capone in his legal battle against the federal authorities who had charged him with tax evasion. Because he had refused to pull out and stop supplying booze in Cook County. For not testifying as a character witness in the Capone trial which had started on October 5th in the federal courthouse in downtown Chicago. For trying to move in on Capone's gambling clubs once Al was distracted by his legal problems.

And the list of potential killers was endless: James Belcastro, Paul Ricca, George "Red" Barker, George "Bugs" Moran, Frankie Rio, Claude Maddox, Rocco De Grasse, Joe "Gold Tooth" Montana, Dominic Bello, Dominic Brancanto and Albert Anselmi. He was in the list by default, having been himself murdered by Al Capone in 1929. He and his partner John Scalise, two of Al's most preferred killers, until they turned traitor and tried to overthrow the boss, had perfected the "hand-shake" hit, or as it became know, the "When friends kill" technique. It had obviously been adopted by the two gunmen when they had come calling on Matt Kolb.

9237044866?profile=originalRoger Touhy was certain one of the perpetrators was Paul Ricca (right). Originally Felice DeLucia, he was born in Naples and had already murdered two men by the time he fled Italy and arrived in New York in 1920 at the age of twenty-three. He moved to Chicago and became good friends with Capone to the extent that Al was his best man when he married in 1929.

Whoever those two men were, one thing was certain. They were sent by Al Capone or his subordinates. Busy as he was with his own problems, he never overlooked the big picture.

Al was found guilty on his tax case in the federal courthouse, Chicago, at about 11:00 pm on the evening of the day before Matt Kolb was murdered. The judge would send him to prison for eleven years, the longest term ever handed down for tax evasion.

In his book, Touhy says, "All I could do was give Matt a decent burial."

The wake and service were held at E.C. Hammann Funeral Home, 1023 North California Avenue, just a few yards from the corner where Kolb had run his bar. He was buried in the cemetery of Saint Joseph Catholic Church on Belmont Avenue in River Grove, laid to rest in section U of block 2. It's a flat, grassy area, dotted with trees, looking out over the Des Plains Trail, bordering the river. Baby Face Nelson and his wife, Helen Gillis, are buried somewhere in the cemetery. As is Robert L. May, the creator of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Somewhere between a bank robber come murderer, and a Jewish copywriter for Montgomery Ward, Mathias Kolb lies forever, his name almost forgotten, rarely mentioned in the stories of Chicago, just a minor footnote in a period of American history when the culture of lawlessness was seen as the norm rather than the aberration it was.

Al Capone sent a huge, horseshoe wreath that had cost $100 ($1500 in to-days money).

Roger threw it into the trash container behind the funeral home.

He was arrested in December 1933, and convicted of kidnapping a man named John (Jake the Barber) Factor, who was a friend of Al Capone and a half-brother to Max, the cosmetic giant. John was wanted in England on fraud charges where he had been tried in his absence and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. His sham kidnapping was part a scheme to avoid deportation back to England and part a favor to Capone who used it to get Touhy off the street. Touhy denied the charges and claimed that he was framed by Al Capone's gang. In 1942, after being in prison for nine years, he broke out, although he was recaptured within a few weeks and served a further seventeen years behind bars.

9237045067?profile=originalRoger Touhy (right) was the Alfred Dreyfus of Chicago's mob land. Wrongly convicted for a crime that not only he did not commit, but which in fact, never occurred, he was incarcerated at The Statesville Correction Centre at Crest Hill, Illinois, and served almost twenty-six years before his release in November, 1959. Less than a month later, on December 16th, he was shot while entering the home of his sister, Mrs Ethel Alesia, at 125 North Lotus Avenue, in Oak Park. Seriously wounded, his left leg almost severed by shotgun blasts, he was rushed to hospital but died from shock and loss of blood.

In an ironic replay of the murder of his friend Matt Kolb, one of the shooters was tall and the other short, and they fired a total of six or seven shots. Although this time, the killers used shotguns, not a pistol. This was according to Touhy's bodyguard, ex-police officer Walter Miller, who was also shot, but survived his wounds.

"The bastards never forget," Roger whispered before he went.

The bastards were, of course, the Chicago syndicate, the mob Colosimo beget Torrio who had in turn beget it to Capone, now known locally as "The Outfit."

The two killers had been staking out the sister's house from a basement in an apartment building across the street, almost from the day their victim was released from prison.

As The Chicago Tribune wrote, "In a world where there are few roses, Roger Touhy did not pretend to be one, but his finish emphasizes that even a man who was not so good may be the victim of men who are worse."

Al Capone was long dead. He had been America's most well-known gangster, helping more than anyone to create the image of Chicago as America's most lawless city. His legacy lived on however though through hoodlums, many and varied. They all had one thing in common:

Like Matt Kolb, they loved being gangsters.

Morton Grove has grown from a place of hundreds to a small town of thousands, although it still refers to itself as a "village," and long lost its reputation as a hideout for the lawless. On June 8th, 1981, a council statute came into effect banning the sale and possession of handguns within the village limits. It was the first such law to be enacted in the United States.

The mobs of Chicago fought each other for years. In October 1926, Capone called a summit in the Lavender Room at the Hotel Sherman on the corner of Clarke and Randolph. Across the street from the chief of police. This is one version. Other sources claim the meeting was held at The Morrison Hotel on South Clarke Street. Sitting next to Al was Antonio Lombardo and Jake Guzik and Ralph Sheldon, and across the table George Moran, and Vincent Drucci and Joe Saltis and Jack Zuta; Eddy Vogel, Julian Kaufman, Frank Citro and Peter Gusenberg were also attending. A veritable who's who of Chicago's finest. Crooks that is. They agreed to stop fighting. Maxie Eisen, a labor leader par excellence, organized the meet. He was there as a mutual peacemaker. At one stage, he addressed the conference:

"We're a bunch of saps, killing each other this way and giving the cops a laugh," he said.

Up to the 20th of that month, there had been 62 murders in and around Chicago. No one else died as a result of mob-land violence until December 30th. It became known as the Seventy Days peace.

If only they could have kept it going, Matt Kolb might have died a natural death, although, in his chosen profession, the odds weren't that great.

Donald L. Miller called Chicago The City of the Century. It had started out as an outpost between a swamp and a sand-choked river. From a village of 200 it had grown into a metropolis of over a million, the second largest urban area in America by the time Matt Kolb made his appearance. From its creation until his death, was less than 100 years. It was a city that tried so hard to maintain its humanity without losing its force field and didn't always succeed. People like big Al Capone and little Matt Kolb were part of the reason why.

Imperfect people in a cruelly imperfect world.

In the wonderful, mellifluous, saccharine-sweet and verbose language of early 1950s crime reporting, Sid Feder writes in the book, Murder Inc.:

"For all the free-shooting, mad dog wars of Prohibition's heyday, gang crime was but a suckling in swaddling clothes and diapers through the tempestuous twenties."

It wasn't so hot on the other hand for the gang's victims.

According to the Chicago Crime Commission (CCC), 729 people were slain gangland style in Cook County, Illinois, which contains the city of Chicago and the surrounding area, all 954 square miles of it, from 1919-1933, starting with thirty-year-old Frank Poroino (aka Porcino or Forino) on January 4th.

Being one of them was a distinction Matt Kolb would surely rather have not earned.

There's only one thing for Chicago to do, and that's to move to a better neighborhood.

- Herman Fetzer

I think that's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, "Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west."

- Richard Jeni

* The details of Matt Kolb's early life are based on newspaper reports, census records and his World War 1 Draft Registration Card, dated June 5th, 1917. Apart from the Draft Card, their accuracy is open to debate.

You can read more of Thom L. Jones stories at his Mob Corner at Gangsters Inc.

Follow Gangsters Inc. on Twitter and Facebook.

If you enjoyed this article you might also enjoy reading:

Copyright © Thom L. Jones 2015

You need to be a member of Gangsters Inc. - www.gangstersinc.org to add comments!

 

Gangsters Inc. News