Jeffrey Gusfield - Deadly Valentines. The Story of Capones Henchman Machine Gun Jack McGurn and Louise Rolfe, His...

A lmost before the gun smoke from the St. Valentines Day Massacre cleared, Chicago police had a suspect: Jack McGurn. They just couldnt find him. McGurn, whose real name was Vincent Gebardi, was Al Capones chief assassin, a baby-faced Sicilian immigrant and a professional killer of professional killers. But two weeks after the murders, police found McGurn and his paramour, Louise May Rolfe, holed up downtown at the Stevens Hotel. Both claimed they were in bed on the morning of the famous shootings, a titillating alibi that grabbed the publics attention and never let go.

Deadly Valentines tells one of the most outrageous stories of the 1920s, a twin biography of a couple who defined the extremes and excesses of the Prohibition era in America. McGurn was a prizefighter, a professional-level golfer, and the ultimate urban predator and hit man who put the iron in Al Capones muscle. Rolfe, a beautiful blonde dancer and libertine, was the epitome of fashion, rebellion, and wild abandon in the new jazz subculture. They were the prototypes for decades of gangster literature and cinema, representing a time that has never lost its allure.

Advance Praise for Deadly Valentines

You might think you know everything there is to know about Chicagos wild Prohibition days, but Jeffrey Gusfield will prove otherwise. With Deadly Valentines, he vividly tells the twisted yet somehow moving love story of an iconic American gangster and his sexy, nutty gun moll. Told with a driving, you-are-there narrative, its a rigorous, sometimes astonishing, and consistently entertaining performance.

Douglas Perry, author of The Girls of Murder City:
Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago

Gusfields book gives a thoroughly researched and colorful account of a bullet-ridden Jazz Age Chicago.

Publishers Weekly

Authoritative, fast-moving, and affecting,Deadly Valentines tells a compelling true-life gangland saga that is loaded with action and, not least, the ache of romance.

Howard Blum, author of American Lightning:
Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century

Jeffrey Gusfields Deadly Valentines is an encyclopedic love letter to the Roaring Twenties as embodied in its title characters, Jack McGurn and Louise Rolfe, each of whom succumbed to the seductive flash and drunken abandon of each other and the dark side of the American Dream.

Paula Uruburu, author of American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the It Girl, and the Crime of the Century

Jeff Gusfields Deadly Valentines is a wonderful exploration of not only Jack McGurns life and violent career but also of that of Louise Rolfe herself. Gusfields work does a wonderful job of clearing up much of the myth and misinformation surrounding McGurn and Rolfe, including in-depth examinations of their upbringing and their torrid yet all-toobrief life together.

Dan Waugh, author of Egans Rats: The Untold Story of the Prohibition-Era Gang That Ruled St. Louis and Gangs of St. Louis: Men of Respect

Skilled researcher and empathetic writer Gusfield steers us into the private world of Al Capone and the pugilist-turned-killer Jack McGurn their clannish roots and gangland alliancesand explores the Machiavellian power that Capone directs toward McGurn and his failed dream of ringside glory. If the underworld ever produced an American tragedy, this is it.

Ellen Poulsen, author of Dont Call Us Molls:
Women of the John Dillinger Gang

Over the yearsmeaning beginning many years before I first met him Jeff has been pursuing the subject of Jack McGurn. During that time he has unearthed important public records pertaining to McGurns life and death in a masterful attempt to find the facts about this man, his second wife and alibi Louise Rolfe, and the events related to them. Jeff is also an engaging storyteller.

John Binder, author of The Chicago Outfit

Copyright 2012 by Jeffrey Gusfield
All rights reserved
First edition

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61374-092-7

Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gusfield, Jeffrey.

Deadly valentines : the story of Capones henchman Machine Gun Jack McGurn and Louise Rolfe, his blonde alibi / Jeffrey Gusfield. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-092-7 (hardback)

1. McGurn, Jack, 1905-1936. 2. Rolfe, Louise. 3. GangstersIllinois ChicagoBiography. 4. Organized crimeIllinoisChicagoHistory. I. Title.

HV6248.M46543G87 2012

364.1092277311dc23

2011043257

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

For Ann Chrispin Gusfield

Zoccu a fimmina avi, lomu u disia.
What the woman has, the man wants.

I was introduced to Jack McGurn in 1953 when I was five years old, a sheltered suburban kid, my brain full of animated Disney characters. My father worked in the advertising department of the Hearst paper, the Chicago American. One Saturday morning there was an emergency, and he had to rush downtown to avoid a costly mistake. To my delight, he took me with him. It was my first trip to the American; I was enthralled by the adult seriousness of the place as well as the smells, noises, and sounds of a big city newspaper. I was a country mouse in a cathedral.

My father put me in the temporary custody of the only person he could find, his friend and legendary photographer Anthony Berardi, who visually recorded the Capone era in poetic black-and-white. He was a small man in his forties, with the tough demeanor of a seasoned public eye. Being himself a father of four, he agreed to take me in tow.

His first question to me was, Do you like pictures? He took me downstairs to the newspaper morgue where all the photographic files were kept in walls of gray drawers. He walked his fingers through a familiar metal cabinet and threw a glossy positive down in front of me.

This was the Saint Valentines Day Massacre in 1929, he said.

Pinocchio, Bambi, and Peter Pan fled my brain, replaced by the tableau of seven murdered men, their blood and brains spattered like grisly confetti. Id never seen a dead body before, although in black and white the violence of that photo seemed more bloody red than any in color.

The St. Valentines Day Massacre, February 14, 1929. COLLECTION OF JOHN BINDER

Powerful feelings invaded me for the first time as I experienced an utter fascination with the kind of reality nobody had dared to reveal to a child. Mr. Berardi produced another picture, this one of a baby-faced, well-dressed young man with soulful dark eyes, a slightly bulbous nose, and a sweet, cherubic smile.

This is the guy who did it, as well as lots more, he added, addressing me as if I were an interested colleague. They called him Machine Gun Jack McGurn.

I still remember the shock and the irony that such an innocent-looking fellow could cause such mayhem and death.