Bloody Williamson (30 page)

Two days later Pulliam’s family, apprehensive about his safety, decided to take the wounded man to a hospital in Benton. His mother rode in the ambulance with him, his wife followed in another car. A short distance south of Benton an automobile filled with armed men passed the ambulance at high speed, then swung across the road so as to block it. After ordering the men in the Pulliam party to line up with their hands in the air, the gunmen forced their way into the ambulance. Pulliam’s mother, frantic, threw herself across her son’s body and refused to move even when prodded with gun barrels. Finally one of the invaders grunted at the wounded man: “Well, we don’t intend to kill a woman to get you.” So they beat him into unconsciousness with gun butts and drove away. Later, in the hospital, Pulliam declined to comment on the affair, and no one in his party could or would identify the assailants.

Not even the local editors, anxious as they were to play down anything that might revive Williamson County’s notoriety, could ignore the fact that the Holland killing and the attack on Pulliam signified that a gang war was in progress. With the defeat of the last remnant of the Klan in the election-day riot, bootleggers and gamblers had proliferated with hothouse luxuriance. Roadhouses had sprung into existence overnight until their number was larger than before the clean-up. Each was a gathering-place for actual or potential criminals—gunmen who had been drawn to the region during the Klan warfare, or local boys who had come to hold the law in contempt. Now the outlaws were fighting among themselves. Why they were fighting was not yet clear. The gangsters were shooting, not talking.

The mystery, however, did not last long. One day early in October loiterers on the streets of Marion noticed a big truck as it passed through the town and headed east. In place of the usual truck body it was equipped with a steel tank resembling those
used by farmers for watering troughs. By itself, that would not have been unusual, but the tank was filled with men who made no effort to conceal the rifles and submachine guns they carried.

Near Harrisburg the men in the truck found the object of their search—Art Newman and his wife, driving westward on the highway. They fired a volley. Mrs. Newman was hit, but not hurt seriously; Newman escaped uninjured. Before the cumbersome truck could be turned around he sped away to safety.

Newman was a gambler, bootlegger, and former friend of the Sheltons who had recently broken with them. In Harrisburg he had been visiting Charlie Birger, also a former associate of the brothers and now, according to rumor, their bitter enemy. Apparently, the feud was between the Sheltons on the one hand and Birger on the other.

The alignment was confirmed a few days later when several carloads of armed men shot up a Shelton roadhouse north of Herrin. The place had not been occupied for several weeks, but on this particular night lights had been seen inside the building. The attacking party fired several rounds, then battered in the door, smashed the fixtures, and riddled the interior with bullets. Soon afterward, carrying their guns, they swaggered into the lunchroom of the Jefferson Hotel. “If anybody wants to know who did the shooting,” one of the men bragged, “tell them that Charlie Birger did it.” A few days later Birger himself urged a St. Louis reporter to visit the ruined roadhouse. “Look it over,” he said, “and see what these babies”—pointing to his machine guns—“can do.”

Within two weeks—on the early morning of October 26—the body of a Birger follower known as “High Pockets” McQuay was found on an old dirt road between Herrin and Johnston City. A bullet-riddled Ford coupé stood near by. On the same day the body of Ward Jones, one of Birger’s bartenders who went by the inevitable name of “Casey,” was discovered in a creek near Equality in Saline County, thirty-five miles east of the spot where McQuay had been killed. Birger claimed both men as his
own, charged the Sheltons with the killings, and swore vengeance.

By all signs, a pitched battle was imminent. The day before the bodies of his two henchmen were discovered Birger and several of his men paid a call on Joe Adams, a great lump of a man who combined in his person the somewhat incongruous callings of roadhouse operator, Stutz dealer, and mayor of West City, the small town on the edge of Benton in which he lived and operated. Birger had heard that the Sheltons had left the steel tank of their truck at Adams’s garage for repairs.

“You old son-of-a-bitch,” Birger told the mayor, “you give me the top to that armored truck, or I’ll drill you so full of holes people won’t know your corpse.”

Adams refused. An argument followed, which Birger ended with an ultimatum and another threat:

“It’s almost midnight now, and if you’ll deliver that half a truck, right side up with care, at ‘The Hut’ before five a.m. you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble with undertakers and caskets, if you know what I mean.”

At a near-by barbecue stand, where the gang stopped before leaving West City, Birger became even more explicit:

“If that tank isn’t delivered to me before five o’clock tomorrow morning, we’re going to kill that double-bellied son-of-a-bitch, and the God-damned Franklin County law isn’t big enough to stop us!”

Instead of complying, Adams called on the county authorities for protection. When they refused it he appealed to the Sheltons, who had been his friends for years. With a number of armed men they fortified the garage and waited for Birger and his gang to return. The State’s Attorney learned of the presence of the mayor’s allies and ordered them from the county. They left.

Early on the following morning a farmer who lived beside a roadhouse, reputedly Birger’s property, near Johnston City, saw fifteen or twenty men stealthily emerge from the near-by woods
and open fire on the place. In a few minutes it caught fire. The men laughed and talked as they watched the flames. Passing motorists slowed down, but none dared stop. As dawn broke, the attackers slipped back into the woods, where they had parked their cars, and drove away.

Newspaper reporters decided that the best answer to these questions could be had from Birger himself. Their usual procedure was to drive out to his roadhouse halfway between Marion and Harrisburg and park at a barbecue stand that served as an outpost of the main establishment. One of the several men who always lounged there would go to Birger’s headquarters—a large cabin on the edge of a grove a hundred yards from the road. When the messenger returned, four or five heavily armed roughs, all young, would escort the visitor to the gang leader.

The cabin, known usually as “Shady Rest” but sometimes called “The Hut,” had been built in 1924. By way of amusement it offered not only bootleg liquor and gambling, but also cock-fights and dog fights. During the day, when patronage was light, liquor runners from Florida lay over there so that they could make the last leg of the trip to St. Louis after dark. Though notorious throughout southern Illinois, “Shady Rest” was never molested by the authorities.

Now, its patronage frightened away by the gang war, the place had been put in shape to stand a siege. Its foot-thick logs were practically bulletproof, and the deep basement would be a safe place even during an attack. Rifles, sub-machine guns, and
boxes of ammunition lined the walls; cases of canned goods assured plenty of food. A truck with an open body sheathed with steel plate—Birger’s answer to the Sheltons’ mounted tank—stood in the yard. Floodlights, supplied with electricity generated on the grounds, prevented surprise after dark.

Visitors meeting Birger for the first time were invariably impressed by his attractive appearance and pleasant greeting. Dark skin, prominent cheekbones, and heavy black hair suggested his Russian Jewish parentage, but he spoke with no trace of accent. His handshake was hearty, his smile quick. The riding-breeches, puttees, and leather jacket that he customarily wore were neat and clean. Just under six feet tall, he carried himself with military erectness, and looked younger than his forty-four years. He usually wore two guns in holsters, and often cradled a sub-machine gun in one arm as he sat and talked.

By his own account, he had been born in New York City. While he was still a young child his parents, recent immigrants, moved to St. Louis. There, as he always related with pride, he had first gone to school. After a few years the family removed to Glen Carbon, a coal town near East St. Louis. That was his home until the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Though under age, he enlisted in the Regular Army, served his full term in a cavalry regiment, and was honorably discharged. On his return he found life in Glen Carbon insufferably dull and escaped it by going to South Dakota, where he worked for three years as a cowhand. Back in southern Illinois once more, he drifted into saloonkeeping and gambling. After prohibition, he became a bootlegger.

In the fall of 1923 Birger achieved sudden notoriety when he killed two men in three days. The first was a youth of seventeen—Cecil Knighton by name—who had worked for him as a bartender. Police, called as soon as shots were heard, found Knighton dead, and Birger standing over him with a shotgun in his hands. The next day a coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of self-defense. His second victim was a St. Louis gangster named
“Whitey” Doering, under sentence on a federal robbery-charge but out on bail pending an appeal. According to Birger’s story Doering called him out from his roadhouse, then fired at him as he stepped from the door. Birger fired back. Doering was mortally wounded; Birger, hit in the arm and lung, recovered. Again he was exonerated on a plea of self-defense.

The next year he made news by drawing a fine of $2,500 and a jail sentence of a year for violation of the prohibition law—the heaviest sentence passed by the court in the trials arising from the Klan clean-up.

Yet many people chose to see Birger as a public benefactor rather than as a killer, bootlegger, and ex-convict. In Harrisburg, where he lived with his fourth wife and two small children of former marriages, he had helped many a person in need. One severe winter he had canvassed the town and sent coal to all the destitute families he could find. On another occasion he had bought schoolbooks for the children whose parents could not afford to buy them themselves. He let it be known that he would not permit a resident of Harrisburg to patronize one of his gambling tables—“you can’t win in a professional game.” He claimed, perhaps with justification, that he had forestalled several robberies in his home town. With the outbreak of the gang war he assumed the role of public protector, assuring his fellow townsmen that “in Harrisburg, his home, where he was educating his children,” no one would be harmed. Even on the public highways they would be safe “because a gangster’s bullet in this instance will be aimed at an enemy gangster.”

To the reporters who questioned him about the causes of the gang war he talked freely. He had first met Carl Shelton in the fall of 1923, when he was in the Herrin hospital recuperating from the wounds he had received in the Doering affray. The two men became personal friends and business associates in bootlegging and the slot-machine racket, which they practically monopolized in Williamson County. In all the Klan fighting they stood together against the clean-up forces.

Birger admitted that he was resentful when the Sheltons, as he charged, skulked the last battle with the Klan in April 1926, while three of his own men were killed, but the real break with his former partners came as the result of his determination to protect the people of Harrisburg from harm and robbery. In late August, according to his story, “Blackie” Armes and several Shelton gangsters—none of the brothers was in the group—robbed a Harrisburg businessman of a valuable diamond ring that they intended to hold until he redeemed it with cash. Birger forced them to return it.

After that it was war, though as yet undeclared. “The Shelton gang just began to shoot up roadhouses where I had been,” he said, “and I knew what that meant. Every time I would visit a place, ‘Blooey,’ a few minutes later the Sheltons’ armored truck would go by and pour in the lead.

“Now,” he told a
St. Louis Star
reporter, “I’m out to get Shelton or any of his men, because if I don’t get them they’ll get me.”

He continued with no more emotion than most men would display in discussing a business transaction:

“I showed what I’d do to them when we caught Mack Pulliam, one of Shelton’s friends, on the road in an ambulance a few weeks ago. His mother was sitting beside him, and they had some sort of a procession … to make it look like a funeral and fool us. But I and my men drove up and conked that fellow until he fainted away. We showed him.”

His gang, he always emphasized, had been formed only for protection. Where the Sheltons were a crowd of “red hots”—“professional trigger-pullers and roughnecks”—his boys were simple coal-miners, farmers, and clerks, brought together by their friendship for a man in a tight spot. Yet he would match them any time against his enemies. “The boys would be tickled pink to have it out on the open road,” he told Roy Alexander of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“We don’t want to have a shooting scrape in any of the towns where someone might get hurt, but we’re glad to meet the Shelton crowd any time.

“And,” he concluded soberly, “it’s likely we will.”

The Sheltons were natives of southern Illinois. Their father, as a young man, had come from Kentucky to settle in Wayne County, where he had married a local girl. He was a sober, God-fearing farmer who worked hard but without much success. He and his wife were the parents of numerous children, but for practical purposes, in the twenties, “the Sheltons” meant three of the five brothers—Carl, born in 1888; Earl, two years younger; and Bernie, born in 1899.