# McClellan Part 33: Peterson on Claude Maddox and Local 450 (8 July 1958), pp. 12531-12535

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/mcclellan-part-33-peterson-maddox-1958-07-08/

Peterson testified that Claude Maddox, whose real name he gave as John Edward Moore, was born in St. Louis in 1901, was a dominant influence behind a Cicero restaurant-workers' local, was arrested and released on alibis as a suspect in the 1929 garage killings, and died in June 1958.

Part 33 of the McClellan Committee's hearings covers the restaurant industry in the Chicago area, July 1958. In his resumed testimony of 8 July 1958 (pp. 12531-12535), Virgil Peterson described Claude Maddox, whose real name he gave as John Edward Moore. He said Maddox was born in St. Louis on January 26, 1901, was a member of "Egan's Rats" there, came to Chicago early in the 1920s and "became affiliated with the Capone gangsters," and died of natural causes in June 1958, weeks before he was due to appear before the committee. Exhibit 14 was Maddox's criminal record.

Peterson recounted arrests from 1919 (a St. Louis burglary) onward, a burglary indictment of December 1, 1923, and a November 4, 1924 ambush of a car in which Maddox rode. He said Maddox was arrested as a suspect in the Saint Valentine's Day killings of 1929 and again in the latter part of 1935, and each time "furnished an alibi" or "had an ironclad alibi" and was released. No conviction for those killings is stated. He said it was common understanding that Maddox organized Hotel, Club, Restaurant Employees Local 450 in Cicero and was its "dominant influence," with indications that he was assisted by Frank Nitti, Murray Humphreys and Louis Romano.

These are the Crime Commission director's statements from its files, not findings. Peterson also gave the street address of the 1929 garage; this archive takes that address only from a 1929 page or a court paper, so it is not used from this hearing. Quotations follow the Internet Archive's OCR of the printed volume. Page numbers are the printed running heads and can be off by one near a page break.

## Sources

- Internet Archive, scan of the printed hearings (Boston Public Library copy): https://archive.org/details/investigationofi33unit
- Full text (OCR) on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/download/investigationofi33unit/investigationofi33unit_djvu.txt