Chicago Crime Commission request for Bureau records on twenty-eight Chicago gangsters (1930)

Part 07 of the FBI Vault’s Capone file, scans 3–5, 9–10 and 27. The cover sheet for the part gives Bufile 32-15941, a general file on Chicago gangsters reproduced in the Capone release. All three letters are on the letterhead of the Chicago Crime Commission (The Chicago Association of Commerce, 306 West Adams Street). They are addressed to the Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation, for the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, and signed by the Commission’s Assistant Operating Director, whose name is garbled in the OCR.

The first letter (scan 3), subject “Records of twenty-eight gangsters”, attaches a list of twenty-eight racketeers and gangsters known in Chicago. It asks whether any of them has a previous record outside Chicago, and mentions that No. 58 of Criminal Justice, the Commission’s official publication, is being sent separately. The list (scans 4 and 5) is badly read by the OCR. Names that can be made out include Al Capone, Ralph Capone, Jack Guzik, Lawrence “Dago” Mangano, Terry Druggan, Frankie Lake and James Belcastro. It ends: “The above list represents persons who are constantly in conflict with the law.”

The second letter (scan 9) acknowledges the Bureau’s “kind letter advising that you are unable to furnish the previous records of twenty-eight gangsters submitted unless these are accompanied by copy of finger prints or police numbers”. It encloses the list again, with the Chicago Police Bureau of Identification picture numbers or fingerprint code numbers (scan 10). Its receipt stamp is read in the OCR as August 1930; the day is not legible. The third letter (scan 27) sends photographs of the fingerprints of twenty-seven of the gangsters and asks for their return. The Bureau’s own letter is not among the legible pages. The research index for the part calls this the Commission’s “public enemies” list; the letters themselves, as far as the OCR shows, say “twenty-eight gangsters”. Most of the rest of Part 07 reproduces a privately published narrative of Chicago gangland, which is not a federal record and is not used here. This page was compiled from the OCR text and the research index and was not re-checked against the page images.