Record
Hearing
1950-06-13/1951-02-24
U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, via Internet Archive
Kefauver Part 4A, Exhibit 50: "Gangland Murders in St. Louis and East St. Louis Areas"
A committee exhibit (printed pp. 812-819) summarizing St. Louis gang history. It says the "Egan Rats" and the "Hoganites" fought for the rackets of north St. Louis in the early 1920s, that "the top echelon of the Egan gang" was later imprisoned for mail robbery, and that William P. (Dinty) Colbeck was shot dead in his car on 17 February 1943.
- Date
- 1950-06-13/1951-02-24
- Kind
- hearing
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A hearing print of the United States Senate, published by the Government Printing Office. A work of the United States Congress, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The Internet Archive item marks it not in copyright.
Exhibit No. 50 in Part 4A of the Kefauver hearings, headed “Gangland Murders in St. Louis and East St. Louis Areas,” is printed at pages 812–819. It is an unsigned narrative, followed by a dated list of killings, and it gives no sources for its statements. The passages below were read from the archive’s OCR; page numbers come from the OCR’s running heads.
On page 813, after describing several St. Louis gangs of the years after the First World War, the exhibit says: “In the early 1920’s St. Louis’ most important mobs—the Egan Rats and the Hoganites—engaged in a war of attrition for the control of the rackets.” It says the president of the police board and the chief of police called the leaders to a conference and asked them to sign a truce, and continues: “Later the top echelon of the Egan gang were sentenced to long penitentiary terms for mail robbery and did not reenter the local scene until some 10 or 17 years later.” It then introduces “a list of the more important gang murders and shootings in this area in the past 20 years wherein no convictions were obtained.”
One entry in that list (pages 816–817) reads: “February 17, 1943: William P. (Dinty) Colbeck, former Egan gang leader, was machine gunned to death in his automobile at Ninth and Destrehan Streets, St. Louis, shortly after he had driven across the McKinley Bridge.” It says he “was reported in the pinball and slot-machine business” and names three men who “were sought for questioning.” The exhibit’s closing section (page 818) says that the controlling gang in the area at the time of writing “consists of the core of the surviving members of the Egan gang, some former Sheltonites, and a few former Cuckoo gangsters.”
This is a staff exhibit, not testimony and not a finding. Its account of the Egan-Hogan truce and of Colbeck’s death is unsourced, and no police, coroner’s or court record of the 1943 killing has been opened for this archive. The killings on its list are, by its own description, unsolved; the men it says were sought for questioning are not named here. The exhibit does not say which mail robbery it means; the federal mail-robbery case filed here against Colbeck and others is the Staunton case of 1924.
