FBI Chicago memorandum on Jack Guzik's death (February 21, 1956) and the closing of the file (Vault Jake Guzik)

A Chicago memorandum (p. 47) records that, according to the Chicago Sun-Times of February 22, 1956, Jack Guzik “died of heart [attack] on the evening of February 21, 1956” at his home. The OCR of that line is partly garbled.

It also summarizes his suit in federal court in Chicago for false arrest against the police commissioner and a police lieutenant, after an arrest on January 13, 1956 in which, the memorandum says, the Criminal Court refused to let the Police Department file disorderly-conduct charges because it held the arrest was made solely to harass him; a March 1956 newspaper item says the suit was pressed after his death. Because he was deceased, the memorandum says, “he is being deleted from the list of Chicago’s top hoodlums and this file is being closed.”

The death date is the newspaper’s as the Bureau relayed it. The file page records the death line; this page adds the suit and the closing of the file. A memorandum elsewhere in the file (p. 13) gives a sentencing date of April 8, 1930, which conflicts with the November 1930 conviction in Peterson’s Kefauver testimony and with the Seventh Circuit’s 1931 opinion; that date is not adopted. This archive read the page through the Vault viewer’s OCR text layer. The scans are poor; names, dates and figures can be garbled, and many names are redacted under FOIA exemptions (b6, b7C, b7D).

The page prints his home address and the name under which he lived, so no page image is stored and neither is repeated; the page shows a document plate.