Böcker av Daniel Waugh

From the Author of Off Color: The Violent History of Detroit's Notorious Purple Gang It was the winter of 1919, and it was the height of a gang war the Motor City hadn't seen before. Detroit's Mafia family had split into two factions, both vying to not only avenge ancient wrongs but also gain control of the city's lucrative illegal alcohol trade at the dawn of Prohibition. In Vìnnitta, author Daniel Waugh offers an in-depth account of the formation of the Detroit Mafia and how they grew from a small band of Sicilian immigrants into one of the most powerful criminal sects. He shares how the mafia infiltrated the Detroit business community and established themselves in illegal rackets ranging from extortion, auto theft, bootlegging, burglary, and construction racketeering. The story is told through the eyes of not only the gangsters themselves, but also those of an undertaker forced to prepare many of his friends for burial after their murders.

“We never shoot unless we know who is present,” gang boss Tom Egan declared in a candid interview with a. leading St. Louis newspaper. Just who was this man who could boast in public about ordering murder? After nearly a century, the story of the Egan’s Rats can finally be told: how a group of Victorian-era street punks mushroomed into a powerful force that controlled Missouri’s largest city for nearly thirty years.Led by two childhood pals, Thomas “Snake” Kinney and Tom Egan, the Rats emerged from the city’s Irish slums. They learned their trade the old-fashioned was, via robberies, brawls, burglaries, and shootings. When Kinney ran on the Democratic ticket in the Third Ward, his friends were at the polls to ensure he received enough votes to win. For nearly ten years, the gang cut a large swath in St. Louis, spreading fear wherever it went. With Snake Kinney elected a Missouri state senator and Tom Egan entrenched as St. Louis’s most dangerous gangster, the gang boated nearly 400 members. Nearly everyone who lived in St. Louis was touched by them in some way or another.Soon the Rats became overconfident and careless, beginning with a public shooting war against a gang led by Missouri beverage inspector Edward “Jelly Roll” Hogan. When the once-fearful public grew tired of the gangs, their leadership ended up in federal prison for twenty-five years, largely on the testimony of one of their own who turned state’s evidence in fear for his life.Egan’s Rats provides a fascinating glimpse into a past that wasn’t always idyllic. It was an era in which roving gangs of thugs terrorized voters with impunity, when alcohol was illegal, when a gangster could brag of his power in the newspaper, and when the tendrils of St. Louis crime reached all the way into the White House.