By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.
He was a most outlandish man.
Perhaps in the final moments, he had a fleeting glimpse of the horse he murdered, the men he had killed, his glorious days on the dude ranches in Colorado as he played at being a cowboy. The money, the jewels, the raucous lifestyle.
Maybe it was just the gathering darkness, the dull ache of end of life, and then it was all gone.
Born in California, he dies in Chicago, a city filled with a miasma of violence, lingering over the lake and across the avenues and streets, a storm always in wait. He’s there in the boom-town years, when boom literally means the sound of gun-fire and the noise of falling bodies.
Alphonse Capone and the gathering of gangsters, a cosmopolitan brocade of Polish and Irish and Italian and Jewish gunmen, all searching for their piece of the Windy City’s blanket of opportunity. For Louis Alterie in the gloaming of a confoundable life, Chi-Town will only bring the wrong comforter, heavy with noise and deadly with rhythm.
Before anything else, he was a headline gangster.
A man with so many nicknames it’s hard to keep up: Jack Verain, Diamond Jack, Two-Gun Louis, Clyde Hayes, State and Madison Alterie, Frank Ray, Lew Alteries, are some of them listed in documents and newspaper reports.
Leland Varaine, sometimes called Lee, maybe always yearned to be a cowboy. He was born in August 1886, (his death certificate claims August 1885 and the 1900 census 1891) to one, Charles W. allegedly of European descent, French, maybe a bit of Spanish, and a distant relative of Napoleon Bonaparte. His mother, Mary Lincoln Brown, of Irish descent, had nine other children with her husband who ranched in Hell Hollow, a valley in Mariposa County in Northern California.
Leland attends schooling in Lodi and his early years are mostly a mystery. He’s a rodeo rider then he takes up boxing, having grown into a six-footer at about 200 pounds and adopts the name Louis Alterie as his ring-name, although some sources claim he also boxed as ‘Kid Hayes.’ He’s a man growing into the casual use of violence, which will govern so much of his future actions.
Boxing on the California coast and sometimes in Hawaii, he then moves west to Denver, where he meets and marries a socialite, Mabel ‘Mamie’ Hayes, in 1920. They move back to Los Angeles, where his mother, divorced from Charles, had re-married and settled in Santa Monica.
There’s a lot of mystery about his period of his life as he allegedly joins the Venice police department and rises through the ranks to the position of lieutenant, before leaving it in 1916. It’s something his criminal pals will joke about in the years ahead. A small town south of Santa Monica, once independent, now absorbed by Los Angeles. With incorporation, records vanish, memories fade, leaving uncertainty.
In 1921, he’s heading east to a place becoming so unreflectively violent it was almost ingrained in its local constitution. According to Alva Johnson in The New Yorker Magazine, Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world.
Prohibition had arrived in 1920, a year after a bloody race riot involving black workers which overlapped the Alderman’s War between local politicians in the city’s Little Italy district. The worst was still ahead, but the rewards were incredibly enticing.
In 1926, Al Capone, the gangster of all Chicago gangsters, generated $70 million (about 1.5 billion in today’s money) through brewing, gambling, vice and distilling operations, according to Edward A. Olsen, U.S. District Attorney.
Alterie was thirty-five when he breezed into the winds of Chicago. Heading north into middle age, he was on the older side to be a hoodlum, but the city, to him, was a universe where cruelty and terror were the way people expressed themselves and this was an environment he knew. His time as a boxer had taught him that. Guns and murder seemed as normal as bacon and eggs.
Guilt was never a luxury he had time for in the years ahead.
One legend that clings to Varaine aka Alterie is that he introduced the Tommy Gun into Chicago’s underworld arsenal. Ranchers in the west had traditionally used them to control wolves, a constant hazard to stock breeding in places like Colorado where he had spent some time working and socializing with cowboys before moving east. The. 45 calibre Thompson sub-machine gun would become a lethal equalizer among the gangs fighting each other over the next ten years, generating a new craze in orchestrated murder. It became known to criminals and police as “The Chicago Typewriter.”
Another story about him that lingers like the scent of garlic is the one about murdering a horse.
For someone obsessed by the romance of the old west, killing the animal that epitomizes it more than almost anything, suggests that Louis was indeed “flaky,” a reputation that will haunt him through his years in Chicago’s gangland. His confrontation with the frisky young colt, called “Morvich” may or may not have happened, but it makes good reading.
The way news reports and writers have anthropomorphised the event suggests this is perhaps more fable than substance.
It’s supposed to take place two years after his arrival and then induction into the hierarchy of Chicago’s North Side that leads us into the murky world of Dashiell Hammett type memes- gangsters, crooked cops, speakeasies, bent politicians and perilous thugs.
Louis is first involved with a west-side mob under the leadership of Terry Druggan along with Frankie Lake, and then somehow ends up working with Dion O’Bannion, the leader of a gang on Chicago’s North Side. He becomes so close to the boss, his pals refer to him as “Man Friday.”
One of its members is Samuel “Nails” Morton, a Jewish mobster who had served in World War One with distinction, returning to his Chicago neighbourhood a hero.
When he visited Colorado and socialized with Alterie, he was introduced to horses and became somewhat addicted to the animal upon returning to Chicago.
On a Sunday in January 1923, Morton and a group are riding their horses in Lincoln Park. “Morvich,” apparently a skittish horse, throws Morton and one of the lashing hooves catches the gangster on the head, killing him instantly. The story then goes that Alterie and a group, including Earl Weiss and George Moran, other members of the North Side, had kidnapped the horse from its stables on North Clark Street, lead it to the scene of the crime, and shot it dead.
Or did they?
And maybe it wasn’t the first time a gunman in Slab Town killed a nag.
There’s another story featuring Salvatore “Samoots” Amatuna, a gunsel, perhaps more than that, in the gang lead by the terrible Genna Brothers, who operated west of the city’s’ Loop, in Little Italy. Allegedly having having a beef with the Chinaman who did his laundry and scorched one of his silk shirts, when getting nowhere with a man who didn’t speak English “Samoots” went outside the shop and in a fit of rage, shot dead the laundryman’s horse tethered to the delivery cart.
True or fiction, or simply a legend of Chicago’s great “Roaring Twenties?” When facts go astray, fantasy blooms. In the splendid garden of make-believe, the seeds of deception always flourish.
Chicago gangs waged constant war against each other and the law. In 1924, noted author Herbert Asbury claimed there were 15 of them scattered across a population of close to 3 million people in America’s second biggest city.
However, a sociologist at The University of Chicago, one Frederic M. Thrasher, claimed, with a detailed map to support his thesis, that between 1923 and 1926, the gangs numbered 1313, comprising over 25000 members. A lot of gangsters.
Louis Alterie, as one of them, was, in thirteen years, following his arrival in Chicago, involved in an impressive series of violent confrontations and discord in his life in Illinois and Colorado.
A year after he arrives, drunk and obstreperous, after a night of heavy boozing, he gets into a scuffle with Charles Strauss at a nightclub and shoots him in the face. Arrested and taken to Stanton Street police station, he is soon free when Strauss, learning of Alterie’s connections, quickly drops any charges against his attacker. It’s the first of many arrests, but very few convictions, which will hassle him both in Chicago and in Colorado after he moves back and forward to the Denver area.
Six months later, in June 1922, the authorities arrested him, his wife, and Druggan in connection with a $25,000 jewellery robbery at Green Mill Gardens, a restaurant and nightclub at 4806 North Broadway. Subsequently, the law decides not to prosecute them.
In 1924, he is the president of Local 25 of the Chicago office of the Theatre and Amusement Janitor’s Union, a position he will hold on to until his death. It’s the same year he nearly kills a lawyer and his wife in an auto accident in Lincoln Park. He flees the scene but traced by his plate number. Everything goes away. As usual.
In August 1924, Alterie and a group of drunken friends, shoot up a bar on Broadway and Devon and try to kidnap two police officers called to the scene. Scared off by another police officer who is there in plain clothes and who kills one of the gang, the rest disperse. After years of legal disputes and witness amnesia, Louis walks away once again.
He’s involved the same year along with Johnny Torrio, Dion O’Bannion and other gangsters in aF scam at the Siebens Brewery on The Near North Side.* O’Bannion, a part owner, knew from his contacts in the Chicago Police Force that the brewery was soon to be raided. Knowing Torrio had a previous conviction for breaking the Prohibition Law, O’Bannion sells off his shareholding to him before the cops arrive on May 19. Police arrest Torrio and he goes to prison for nine months, paying a $5000 fine in addition. It was this act of treachery that almost certainly will cost O’Bannion his life.
A grand jury in Chicago indicts Alterie for his role in a kidnapping ring. He’s part of a plot that involves a former Cook County state’s attorney to embezzle half a million dollars.
On February 22, 1925, during another drunken display at The Midnight Frolics on Wabash Avenue, detectives arrested him. He seems to have spent a lot of his time, wherever he was, drunk and dangerous. Following bail arrangements, he leaves Chicago and sets up shop at his ranch in Sweetwater, west of Denver. It’s time to going back to being a cowboy.
He gets divorced from Mabel and remarries Ermina, the daughter of Denver underworld king, Mike Rossi. They wed in Philadelphia. In 1927, the same year, during a drunken argument on his ranch, his brother, Bert, blasts him with a shotgun. Louis recovers and refuses to press charges.
On November 7, 1932, in a drunken rage, he shoots, and injures two men, and beats up a third in The Hotel Denver, in Glenwood Springs.. Tried and convicted, Judge Shumate, instead of sending his to prison, exiles him from Colorado. Louis and his wife leave the state on February 1, 1933, presumably, never to return.
Towards the end of 1924, a gangland killing marks a milestone in the underworld conflicts raging in Chicago, the murder of Dion O’Bannion. It will set in motion events that change everything for Louis Alterie.
In retrospect, we can see that the murder played a pivotal role in the gangland history of Chicago during this period. Like almost all mob hits, it will go unsolved and his departure will shepherd leadership changes that will lead, almost inescapably, to a garage on North Clark Street and a mass murder of unbelievable proportion in a city seemingly immune to violence.**
At noon, on November 10, 1924, that is an abstract probability and far away. On this chill, overcast day, coloured like sea-gulls, there will be only one victim, but he will find out that death was a neighborhood with lots of well-known faces.
At thirty-two, he was five years past the prime by gangland standards. Some wondered how he had lived that long. Charles Dean O’Bannion had graduated from singing waiter, to petty theft, to hi-jacking and labor slugging in newspaper wars across the city, to the big-time hoodlum with the dawn of Prohibition.
It’s claimed he allegedly staged the city’s first liquor hijacking on December 19, 1921, stealing at gunpoint a truck loaded with Gromes and Ullrich whiskey waiting at a stop sign in The Loop, Chicago’s business district.
In his prime, it’s claimed he was earning one million dollars a year from his bootlegging activities and supplementing this with added revenue by hijacking other gangs’ booze shipments. Like his friend and bodyguard, Alterie, he carried three pistols in specially designed pockets of his clothing.
On this day, four men arrive in a blue Jewett sedan. Leaving the driver in the car, three of them walk into his business, Schofield’s Flower shop, at 738 North State Street. They had come for wreaths for a funeral being held for Mike Merlo, who had recently died.
As head of the Unione Siciliana, a fraternal organization that may have been a front for a criminal cartel of extraordinary size and reach, he had, unusually, died a death of natural causes, cancer, two days earlier. Lots of people coming into the city to attend his committal. Lots of them known criminals. O’Bannion made lot’s of money selling flowers to gangsters. Earlier in the year, he had supplied wreaths and arrangements estimated to have cost north of $20,000 for the funeral of Frank Capone, brother of Al, shot dead by the police in April during a municipal election affray. It’s also been suggested that he created a serious side-line, killing gangsters and then looking after the flower department at their funerals.
O’Bannion greets the visitors as friends, and as one shakes his hands, the other two prove otherwise, drawing pistols from their belts they shoot the Irishman in the head and body, and one gunman carries out the traditional coup de grâce with a shot into the brain. Close enough to scorch the skin.
The Cook County coroner noted in the court’s margin record:
“Slayers not apprehended. John Scalice, Albert Anselmi and Frank Yale suspected, but never brought to trial.” ***
Reports stated that 10,000 people either watched the O’Bannion cortège or attended his funeral, with all the trimmings: a casket costing $7500, a funeral bill totalling $10,000, and the exact number of tens of thousands spent on floral tributes remains unknown. Allegedly 40,000 had viewed his body, laid out in state at Sharbaro & Co funeral parlor at 708 North Wells Street. Louis Alterie is one of six men who were coffin-bearers. Five Municipal Court judges and at least one alderman attended his wake. There are 24 cortège cars, each stuffed with massively expensive wreaths and flowers. 124 funeral cars, leads literally, blocks of private cars bringing mourners to the church and funeral ceremony.
The killing of O’Bannion features a bunch of characters that seem to be everything, everywhere, all at once. And maybe, just maybe, one of them is Louis Alterie.
He will claim he was not at the shop that morning, but at home, recovering from a hangover. Which, for a man who seemed to spend half his life in an alcoholic haze, sounded like a reasonable excuse. Yet the killers knew he wouldn’t be there. Obviously, they had no concerns about walking into the shop ready to kill, having a plan, not worried about interference. From anybody.
Although Alterie makes threats against the murderers, raging like Lear on his blasted heath, offering to meet them with pistols for a show-down at State and Madison Streets, it’s perhaps smoke and mirrors rather than true intent. Is his outcry sprouting retribution or an act by a conspiratorial player in a complex charade?
On November 17, Alterie and George Moran have a meeting at The Friars Inn, a nightclub on Van Buren Street, and the next day Louis leaves town, by train. But not to Colorado, as some sources claim. His destination is New York. That same evening, Johnny Torrio also heads for New York by train. As they attempted to leave on another train headed for The Big Apple, the police arrested Frank Yale and another New York mobster, Saverio “Sam” Pollaccio.
Pollaccio is the consigliere or counsellor for New York’s big Mafia boss, Giuseppe Masseria, and Yale is a capo or crew boss in the same family, based in Brooklyn. With strong ties to Chicago through Torrio and others, Yale is also a suspect in the murder of James Colosimo, who founded the Capone group as early as 1910 when Al was an eleven-year-old kid street thug.
Masseria and Capone have some sort of alliance; it’s even claimed Masseria promoted Capone into his New York Mafia family, making him a capo, which presumably was an honorary title as Al never operated in New York. As a young man, he had worked for Yale at The Harvard Inn, a speak-easy come nightclub the mobster owned on Coney Island. Mob politics power events and create relationships way beyond the scope of traditional parliamentarians.
The Italian gangs of Chicago come out of Calabria and Naples, not Sicily. Its members linked more by geography than kinship. They expand into multi-ethnic groups, and there are no traditional ceremonies or induction rites. No swearing of Omenta-silence or death. The only commonality between Italian-American gangs in New York and Chicago is that they are criminals.
We don’t know what, if anything, was taking place in New York, and how it features in the murder of O’Bannion. It’s just part of the never-ending mystery of Chicago’s gangland.
Early in 1925, Louis Alterie will leave Chicago, moving back to Colorado. His flaky actions following the murder of O’Bannion were causing concern among the North Side. It’s believed Moran urges “Two-Gun,” taking a break from business was advisable. His departure was in the same month as that of Torrio. Shot and seriously wounded, he retires from the Chicago mob and moves to New York, taking up with another one there, headed by a man called Charles Luciano.
Whether by design or good fortune, he will miss out on all the dramatic years to follow as Capone and The North Side Gang fight each other to the death culminating in that dark moment on North Clark Street.
His years in Colorado are eventful, often centred on his appetite for booze and his unstable temper. Previously known as “Two-Gun Louis” because of his propensity for carrying duel revolvers, (like O’Bannion, he actually mostly hefted three,) his new nickname became “Diamond-Jack” as he allegedly wore $15-$20,000 worth of them on belt-buckle, watch and chain and the many rings he wore. Which always came in useful when he was using his fists.
He wore $100 Stetsons that were so big they imaged miniature dirigibles, drove a cream colored Cadillac sporting Longhorn Cattle horns on the hood, and flashed a roll of cash that looked like a beached whale.
Alterie sells his first ranch at Jarre Canyon, Moonridge, and buys the second, in April, 1926, at Sweetwater, near Glenwood Springs, two hundred miles west of Denver. In 1930 he’s arrested for shooting at men fishing on Sweetwater Lake, and is a suspect in several kidnapping cases in Colorado and Illinois, including the famous Lindbergh baby case which happens in New Jersey, far from his normal stomping grounds. Getting drunk in night clubs, shooting at people, breaking the law. It’s what he does.
A man for all seasons, except his behaviour is, if ever, appropriate, for any occasion.
He travels back and forth between Colorado and Chicago, although he keeps clear of The Northside. His main source of income seems to be the union he presides over, and it’s suggested he was showing too much interest in another, The Moving Picture Operators Union, which is controlled by Capone’s mob, although by the end of 1934, Al was spending his days in Alcatraz Prison, San Francisco after having been sentenced in 1931 to eleven years for tax evasion. He will die in 1947 at his home in Florida.
Police raid Alterie’s office on Wabash Avenue in October 1933 and arrest him, charging him with fraudulent labor malpractice, basically taking money off people looking for jobs, promising them, and never delivering.
The new boss of the South Side was Francesco Nitto aka Frank Nitti, cousin to Al, and the man who controlled the money flow when Capone ruled the roost. His early nickname, “The Enforcer,” earned him a place in the early days as a bodyguard to the boss.
Alterie, in his longing to expand his business empire, is tempting fate. And fate gets impatient.
We all know our birthday, but few of us know our death day. It’s always there, waiting. If life is the tenant of the room, death is the ruffian on the stair.****
On July 18, 1935, Alterie and his wife are living in a suite on the 6th floor of Eastwood Towers, an apartment building on the avenue of the same name in Uptown Chicago, on the North Side, having moved there on April 1.
On July 9, his killers are already setting up shop across the street at a boarding house directly opposite the front entrance of The Towers. They move there, renting a room by a man called “Sullivan”, on the first floor and start a stake-out. They are, in fact, following a procedure which became known as “The Rented Ambush,” and which may have been created ironically, or at least perfected by Alterie and Hymie West, another North Side gangster.*****
A stake-out crew would go through local newspapers and boarding houses and buildings looking to rent rooms in a location near the target’s home or place they frequent. Once the rooms were booked, gunmen would move in and essentially turn it into a sniper’s nest. The assassins would wait patiently, possibly working in teams until they could get the perfect shot of their target, giving no warning and leaving enough time to escape before the police were arriving.
Some days earlier, it’s alleged Ermina received a telephone call, and a voice said, “The Angel of Death will call on you unless you get out. The Syndicate wants the union.” Whether this was a tip-off, some kind of veiled threat, or what, has never been established. It begs the question why Capone’s mob would show consideration to a man who almost certainly killed many of its members.
At about 8.30 am on a sunny Thursday morning, Alterie and his wife come down to the entrance of the building. Someone brought his car from the apartment building garage and parked it outside. As Ermina walks towards it, she would drive him to the union office, down town, and Louis leaves the entrance stepping to the car, gunshots boom across the street from the building opposite.
According to witnesses, Alterie spins around, flapping his arms crazily around his head as though swatting at bees, and collapses on the street. Rushed to Lakeview Hospital, he dies on the operating table at 9.45 am without regaining consciousness, although some news reports claim his last words to his wife, as she held him in her arms, were, “Honey, I guess I’m through.” His fatal wounds were nine shotgun pellets to the head, along with six to his left shoulder.
When the hospital nurses empty his pockets, he’s carrying $23 and change. And no guns.
His killers leave their nest, escaping through their apartment building into the back alley and a getaway car. They leave behind a shotgun and an unfired. 351 Winchester rifle on the bed and the usual mystery, who were they?
We will never know.
Five days later, his body shipped west, family and friends gather for Alterie’s funeral service and burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Unlike some of the ostentatious ones in Chicago’s gangland, his is low key, only 39 attend of whom 16 are women. His eighty-six-year-old father is there, but not his mother, who apparently is too distressed by his sudden death. They bury him in an unmarked plot as Leland Deveraigne, another name in death, to add to the litany that accompanied him in life, leaving the usual mystery of who and why.
According to newspaper headlines in Chicago, a fight over control of the two unions is claimed to have triggered his murder. The one he commanded and the other he was allegedly lustring after. “They are rich properties for men who can handle them” claimed The Chicago Tribune in its edition on July 19, 1935. Although no one knew for certain what lay behind his killing, senior detectives in the police and state attorney’s office all claimed Alterie was “long overdue for the tragedy.”
Some believe his murder was in revenge for his testimony in 1931 in the IRD against Ralph Capone, brother of Al, although that had taken place years before. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, although this length of time suggests atrophia rather than retribution.
There was a third, if somewhat tenuous, option:
Someone killed Alterie because he had become a government witness after trying to muscle in on the Denver rackets. Involving a man called Harry Schechtel, a broker under indictment for bond fraud along with 23 other suspects, who it’s alleged receives a telephone call the night before the shooting on Eastwood Avenue, and warned the same fate would befall him unless he could get the investigation squashed. There’s big money involved over $500,000, and the rumour floating that “Two-Gun” had squealed to the Feds to help him get rid of some of his competitors.
A trifecta of options, although a gambling man would lay odds on Frank Nitti and his thugs as prime suspects in the murder of Louis Alterie.
I leave it to Clement Quirk Lane, reporter and editor of Chicago newspapers, to have the last words:
“This is the story of ‘Two-Gun Louis’ Alterie, one-time pugilist, one-time policeman, one-time robber, one-time lieutenant of Dean O’Bannion. Erstwhile rancher and union business agent, and today the subject of a coroner’s inquest as to who shot him and why not sooner.”
Clem Lane. Chicago Daily News. 1935.
* John Torrio, born near Naples, came with his mother to America at the age of two. Following a life of crime in New York, he moved to Chicago to work with his uncle, Giacomo Colosimo (some sources claim they were not related and met through a common interest in boxing,) who it’s been alleged he had murdered in 1920, taking over control of the rackets. Through his friend Frankie Yale in New York, he meets Capone who moves to Chicago and joins him, and the rest is history.
** The Valentine Day Massacre refers to the mass murder in a garage on North Clark Street on February 14, 1929. Seven members or associates of the North Side gang are lined up against a wall around 10.30 am and shot dead by four men, two dressed as police officers. Their obvious target, boss George Moran, arriving late for a meeting, due apparently to a severe cold, spots the fake police car outside the garage and beats a quick retreat. The garage was Moran’s headquarters, also used as a depot for storing and then distributing illegal alcohol.
*** Scalice and Anselmi were killers in the Capone organization who, in due course, will go the way of all gangsters who lead lives of quiet desperation. Their dead, mutilated bodies, turn up in a field on the outskirts of Chicago in May 1929.
**** With acknowledgment to the poem Madam’s Life a piece in Bloom by W. E. Hanley.
*****O’Bannion was assassinated on November 10, 1924. Hymie Weiss replaced him and was murdered on October 11, 1926. Vincent Drucci succeeded Weiss and was killed by police on April 4, 1927. George Moran assumed leadership of the gang, but after the 1929 massacre, he drifted away from Chicago and ended up dying of lung cancer in prison in 1957.
Sources:
booktryst.com
Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of Chicago. Hippo Books, Hammond, IN, U.S.A. 2002.
Thrasher, Frederick Milton. The Gang. The University of Chicago. Chicago, 1936.
Schoenberg, Robert J. Mr Capone. William Morrow & Co. New York, 1993.
Keefe, Rose. Guns and Roses. Turner Publishing Co. 2003.
Hopewell Herald. 24 August, 1932.
Urbana Daily Courier. 18 July 1935.
Globe Gazette, Iowa. 18 July, 1935.
North America Review. 228. No. 3 (1929).
Los Angels Times. 24 July, 1935.
https://www.uptownupdate.com/2009/02/more-notorious-uptown.htm
Chicago Tribune. 10 February, 1929.
San Bernardino County. Sun. July 24, 1935.
Chicago Tribune. 13 May, 1935.
Chicago Tribune. 12 June, 1935.
Chicago Tribune. 19 July, 1935.
Chicago Tribune. 29 November, 1936.
https://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id204.htm
The Daily Sentinel. March 5, 2024.
Chicago Jewish History. Volume 13, No 1. October 1989.
Andrews, Harold. X-Marks The Spot. Michael Dunkley (January 1, 1930).
©Thom L. Jones. 2024.
Leave a Reply