Another Rat Bites The Dust

In the early hours of February 13, 1924 in St. Louis, Egan's Rats gang member Eddie Linehan, age 22, was found in a ditch wrapped in a car blanket. To say that he had been merely bumped off would be an under statement. There was some anger behind the murder. Nineteen bullet holes were found in him, fired from all directions. He had one bullet between the eyes,  another had blown away his right eye. He took one to the adam's apple. Three to the back of his head, a straight line of six between his shoulder blades (perhaps a blast from a Tommy gun?) and various other wounds all over his body,

He was do in court later that day along with a confederate named Ray Renard for a mail robbery. Earlier the previous day, he and Renard were captured by police after a chase that started because the gangsters were speeding. Linehan and Renard told them that they were out rounding up witnesses for their trial and asked to be released so they wouldn't miss their case. The police let them go. After that the police found out that Linehan went to gang leader Dinty Colbeck's cabaret during the evening. After that they don't know what happened. Colbeck couldn't or wouldn't shed any light on the subject during questioning.

At about 2:20 am police found Linehan's body and figured he'd been dead about an hour. It was speculated that Linehan was bumped off because the Rats didn't want him to make it to court. Perhaps Linehan made some threats if Colbeck didn't somehow come to his rescue and so the gang took care of him. Another thought was that a few days before the murder, a St. Louis cop was gunned down in front of a speakeasy. He had been shot in the neck and then, when he was prostrate, the killer fired two more shots through his head. Supposedly, Linehane was known as a "cop hater" ever since he'd been shot by a one a few years earlier. However Egan's Rats had an unwritten law that gangsters weren't to shoot cops. The theory arose that Linehan was the guy who murdered the officer and so met gang justice.

Eddie Linehan

A machine gun toting coward killed Mr. Howard

At a little after 2 am on this day back in 1931, Kansas City, Missouri experienced its first gangland hit involving a Tommy gun. The victim was 38 year-old bootlegger Jimmy Howard who, we are told, refused to fall in line with other KC rum runners in a forming a syndicate. Apparently Howard brought in premium stuff from Canada so was able to both charge more and please customers.

According to police, Howard, an ex-boxer, was originally from St. Louis, where he was a member of Egan's Rats.  For his alcohol business, he used the office of the A.B.C. cab company to take phone calls. In 1927 he arrested for the murder of cabaret singer Bobby Barrone. Barrone was a practical joke who liked to pull a pistol out of his pocket and tell people to "Stick 'em up!" One night he played his joke on Howard, who wasn't in on the gag, and Howard pulled out his own gun and fired. He was exonerated. He had been picked up and questioned periodically for other crimes.

Defying the other KC gangsters put Howard on the spot and he knew it. It was reported that in the last few weeks of his life he was very nervous. Hours before he was finally rubbed out, somebody took to shots at him as he was leaving his girl friends apartment.

Around 2:20 that morning, Howard stood in the front office of A.B.C taxi company speaking with one of the owners when two men walked up. The men stopped in front of the large picture window and, opening his coat, pulled up a Thompson machine-gun which was strapped to his arm and blasted through the picture window. The guy with him pulled out a pistol but didn't need to use it. Howard was perforated by fourteen bullets and expired a few hours later.

A sedan pulled up and the two gunmen jumped in and sped off. Since a tommy gun was used, it was assumed that the killer was a torpedo brought in from Chicago.

Roadhouse Blues

November 19, 1923 saw the demise of St. Louis gangster William "Whitey" Doering in "Halfway", Illinois, (an area located halfway between Marion and Herrin, Illinois) in what is infamously known as "Bloody Williamson" County.

Doering, said to be a member of Egan's Rats, pulled up to Charlie Birger's roadhouse with a carload of confederates and, according to Birger, walked up the porch and called Birger out. The latter stepped out and Doering shot him. From inside the roadhouse a number of shots were returned and Doering collapsed with seven bullets in his body. His pals sped off, and he died later that day in the hospital.

Birger said that Doering tried to rob him and it was the guys in the car that shot him (bad aiming as Birger asserted they were trying to get him) but then again Birger was one of the biggest gangsters in the region and would want to pass blame elsewhere. Other theories were that Doering was a friend of the bartender that Birger had killed earlier that week and was seeking revenge. A bootlegging deal gone awry was another reason given.

Whitey Doering

Two Maxs' One Hit

Today marks the eighty-sixth anniversary of the double murder of Max Greenberg and Max Hassell, both top executives in Waxey Gordon's brewery empire. Both Max' were in a six room suite in side the Elizabeth-Carteret Hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Greenberg had a lengthy police record going back over a decade in his home town of St. Louis, Missouri where he was a member of the infamous Egan's Rats until the gang's namesake felt that Greenberg had double crossed him on a liquor deal. Greenberg survived an attempted murder and Egan was bumped off later. Whether or not Greenberg was behind the murder is not known but Greenberg left town. By the mid 1920s he had hooked up with Waxey Gordon and became a wealthy bootlegger, buying into a number of hotels in both New York and New Jersey.

Hassell was an immigrant from Russia who opened a string of breweries in Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

At the time of their murder, there was a meeting going on between Greenberg and Hassell with a handful of men. It may have been a hit from the onset or perhaps the meeting didn't go the way the gunmen wanted so the shooting irons came out. Either way, it was lucky for Gordon that he wasn't in the meeting or he would have went as well. These murders were the opening salvo in the war to exterminate Waxey and his minions.

Max Greenberg                    Max Hassell