In the 1920s and 1930s, St. Louis was a “passenger hub” of westward expansion, but also a location for travelers heading from north to south or south to north, said Christopher Alan Gordon, the director of library and collections with the Missouri Historical Society.
“St. Louis was at the crossroads of America,” Gordon said. “All these people are funneling through the city, arriving in many ways, be it train, riverboat, coming to St. Louis because it’s where the West began and there are trails going west, rivers flowing west, it becomes this terminus.”
“When you’re at that point, you are attracting all kinds of people. People who are trying to make their way, but also criminals trying to take advantage of them, pickpockets, robbers and highwaymen, con men who gamble and rip people off and separate them from their money. It’s a natural magnet to crime and unfortunately, violent crime as well. As time passes by, St. Louis becomes an industrial city as well, becomes a railroad city and the tradition of people flowing through, it naturally becomes this place where crime is an unfortunate reality of life,” Gibson continued.
Gibson said that from the very beginning of the city, there’s been violent crimes. However, it was rarer back when the city was a French colonial village, with very few mentions of violent crimes during the first few decades and then when the Louisiana purchase was finalized and Americans crossed the Mississippi river, there appear stories of crimes.
“People come from Kentucky and the backwoods areas and as far east as Virginia, and they flow across the river into St. Louis and Missouri, it was a very different culture,” Gibson said. “Suddenly you see all these stories about murders, fights, knife fights, shootings. Frontier people were pretty violent, you hear stories about how St. Louis became violent as the 19th century begins to progress.”
St. Louis was recently named the fourth-most dangerous city in America, but the city has always appeared to be dangerous. It’s not the only place, as history of any place is often full of crime, Gibson said. We can learn a lot from that history of crime as well.
“History obviously is full of crime and crime reveals many aspects of human behavior but it also reflects trends and problems and issues that are going on at that time in history,” Gibson said. “The other thing you also have to think about in terms of history and crime is it at the same time shows us things don’t really change. People act in violent ways and in rash ways that we can easily recognize in any time period.”
That was especially so in the 1930s, as the Midwest itself was a hotspot for crime. In cities like Chicago, gangsters like Al Capone became wealthy through racketeering and other illegal activities and in the countryside during prohibition, there were stills and bootleg alcohol production facilities. The Great Depression was also a period of bank robbers like Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd holding up small-town banks. There were events like St. Valentine’s day massacre in Chicago and the shooting at Union Station in Kansas City as people were caught up in the crossfire.
The St. Louis office of the FBI was shut down in August of 1920 with operations assigned to Kansas City. Within three months, the office was reopened and resumed operations, however. Changes during the Hoover reforms of 1924 saw the removal of personnel who did not or would not perform, tightening standards and defending the Bureau from political attacks. That helped prepare St. Louis for more difficult crime problems which came with the 1930s.
That included corruption of multiple kinds as well as the strong-arming of labor, in addition to the organized crime development that happened throughout the country during the 30s.
“St. Louis had its share of that type of crime, bootlegging and gangsters and mobsters that are jostling with each other to control different aspects of illegal liquor, this trend of organized labor and corruption building around that as well,” Gordon said.
Gordon told the story of Leo W. Quick, a labor leader in East St. Louis, who was head of the boilermakers union in the 1930s. Quick was also a member of the St. Clair County Board of Commissioners and in a position of strength in St. Clair County. That led to him negotiating an important labor deal in 1932, a contract with Phillips 66 petroleum, which built a large plant south of East St. Louis.
Quick, like many organized crime figures, intimidated those who didn’t like him with the help of “Frisco”, a former professional wrestler who served as Quick’s bodyguard. Quick was voted out of power in 1938 after people had enough of him, Gordon said, and after going to a basketball game with his wife in March of 1938, Leo was murdered while putting his car in his garage, having been shot seven times by two unidentified men with a .38-caliber pistol.
“Police launched an investigation and found the pistol sitting beside a drainage ditch,” Gordon said. “It never made it to the evidence locker after being turned over to police in Madison County and later it was discovered in a pawn shop. There was some evidence uncovered that it may have been Quick’s own bodyguards, when they investigated the pistol they found out through records that the pistol was in Quick’s own name and he had bought it shortly before his murder, presumably for one of his bodyguards to use to protect him.”
Quick’s wife hired private investigators but neither they nor the police ever fully solved who killed Quick. Quick’s story, Gordon said, shows how labor dealings went in the 1930s and the government corruption of the time, the police corruption of the time, and the atmosphere of lawlessness that pervaded the region during the era.
St. Louis’s FBI bureau had to deal with a lot at the time. From tracking down Martin Durkin, who murdered Special Agent Edwin Shanahan in Chicago, to a loose support structure of bootleggers, kidnappers, bank robbers and assorted criminals that Missouri was a key part of, St. Louis had plenty of criminal activity through the early part of the 20th century. That criminal activity frequently bled across the river into the Metro East area.
“Definitely so,” Gordon said. “The two cities (East St. Louis and St. Louis) were linked, these guys were going back and forth across the river and especially during prohibition, speakeasies were on the east side, people would drive across the bridges and go to the east side to party. There were a lot of gangster types that became very wealthy from running illegal gin joints and taverns and paying off the authorities and things like that to keep it quiet, the two cities were linked together and by association. Granite City and all those smaller towns, they all were connected through these types of organized crime networks.”
This fascination with true crime is nothing new, and it can also help us understand the world at various points in time. Unsolved mysteries like the Quick case are also something that has long fascinated people.
“I think people are fascinated by, and this is in general, people are fascinated by death,” Gordon said. “Fascinated by questionable behavior and why people are motivated to commit crimes and regardless of the time period you’re talking about. As you can see from literature and movies, people love mysteries and the action in some of it. It’s thrilling to many people and sometimes unfortunately crime is also romanticized. The one thing when you study crime and history and delve into details, that romanticism falls away and you see how violent and heartbreaking it is, regardless of the time period.”
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Originally Appeared Here