Deadly Valentines: The Story of Capone's Henchman "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn and Louise Rolfe, His Blonde Alibi

by Jeffrey Gusfield

Overview

Almost before the gunsmoke from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre cleared, Chicago police had a suspect: Jack McGurn. They just couldn’t find him. McGurn, whose real name was Vincent Gebardi, was Al Capone’s chief assassin, a baby-faced Sicilian immigrant and 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 public’s 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 and the ultimate urban predator and hit man who put the iron in Al Capone’s 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613733752
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/01/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey Gusfield, a native Chicagoan, has researched the history of Jack McGurn, Louise Rolfe, and the Capone years for more than four decades.

Table of Contents

Preface xiii

Author's Note xix

The Capone Outfit, 1928 xxi

Prologue: Call Everybody! Valentine's Day, 1929 3

Part I Arrival

1 I Came to America to Give a Better Future to My Children, 1906 11

2 Sicily in Brooklyn, 1907 16

3 He's Capable of Learning Many Things, 1911-1917 22

4 She Who Is Born Beautiful Is Born Married, 1918 28

5 Boxing, 1921 36

6 If You Don't Do What I Want, I Won't Be Happy, 1921 44

7 Everyone Wants to Earn More Money, 1922 49

Part II Scorpion

8 Terrible Misfortune, 1923 57

9 We Remain Tormented in This Land, 1923 62

10 I've Been Living in This City for Three Years, 1923 68

11 This Man Knows Precisely What He Wants to Do, 1924 72

12 Dean Is More Clever than Intelligent, 1924 77

13 You Don't Have to Say Anything, 1925 83

14 I'd Like to Buy a Hat, 1926 92

15 The More One Works, the More One Earns, 1926 100

16 I'm Not Afraid of His Words, I'm Afraid of What He Can Do, 1926 109

17 Aren't You Ashamed of What You Did? 1927 116

18 Sometimes Cat and Mouse Dance Together, 1927 125

19 We'll Come Back Later, 1928 133

20 Do You Know Who I Am? 1928 142

21 When Love Knocks, Be Sure to Answer, 1928 149

Part III Massacre

22 Who Looks for a Quarrel Finds a Quarrel, 1929 161

23 The Wicked Man, 1929 172

24 This Doesn't Suffice to Remove All Suspicions, 1929 181

25 Mind Test, 1929 190

26 See You Soon! 1930 196

27 I'd Send You to Jail, 1930 203

28 Nothing Lasts Forever, 1931 210

29 The Bad Intention, 1932 219

30 A Great Victory, 1932 225

31 I Am Innocent! 1933 235

32 Only You Were Singing in the Silence, 1933 245

33 I Don't See Anyone, Anywhere, 1934 252

34 February May Be Short, but It's the Worst Month, 1935-1936 256

35 Why? 1936 271

36 Whoever Desires Too Much Ends Up with Nothing, 1936 278

37 I Feared He'd Come Back and Kill Me, 1936 283

38 Lulu Lou: What I Want, You Don't Have, 1936-1995 290

Acknowledgments 301

Notes 303

Bibliography 327

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

"An engrossing look inside Al Capone’s murderous ranks.”  —Kirkus Reviews on cloth edition

From the Publisher

Part history of the Capone era and part biography of one of Big Al’s top enforcers and his quintessential gangster’s moll, Gusfield’s book gives a thoroughly researched and colorful account of a bullet-ridden Jazz Age Chicago. Vincenzo Gibaldi immigrated from Sicily to the U.S. with his family as a four-year-old in 1906. Young Vincent was drawn to boxing and, taking the alias “Jack McGurn,” had moderate success in Chicago as an amateur welterweight. But McGurn’s other profession, with Al Capone’s “Outfit,” proved more lucrative: with his baby face and easygoing manner, McGurn was treated like an honorary Capone brother, known for precise and well-planned hits. He emerged into the spotlight when seven members of George “Bugs” Moran’s rival gang were brutally murdered in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. While no definitive proof exists that McGurn was one of the gunmen—Louise Rolfe, his hedonistic young lover embodying everything seductive about the Jazz Age, provided his alibi—Gusfield makes a strong case that he planned the attack. Despite the narrative being written annoyingly in the present tense, Gusfield portrays both McGurn and Rolfe as alluringly flawed and deadly in their own ways. 50 b&w photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Gusfield presents the short, brutal life of "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn (1902 –1936), born Vincent Gebardi, a gifted athlete who became notorious as Al Capone's deadliest lieutenant and putative organizer of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929. In a parallel narrative, the author charts the dissolute history of Louise Rolfe, an archetypical jazz-baby flapper who, when liquored up behind the wheel, would prove nearly as fatal as her eventual paramour McGurn. Gusfield structures the book as the tale of the young lover's ill-starred romance, but the story is heavily weighted toward McGurn, whose natural toughness, intelligence and physical grace quickly elevated him in the ranks of the Capone organization, where he earned a reputation as a meticulous planner and devastatingly effective assassin. Gusfield provides a lively, detailed history of gangland Chicago in the 1920s, deftly parsing the intricate chains of betrayal and murder that drove the city's bootlegging trade and limning the era's swinging style and heat. The author perhaps overly idealizes McGurn, endlessly praising his boyish good looks, athletic gifts, taciturn implacability and ruthless efficiency--a climactic passage in which McGurn's dream of playing professional golf decisively collapses is rendered with the gravitas of Greek tragedy. Rolfe, portrayed here as essentially a spoiled, drunken nitwit, never resonates as a compelling character in her own right, making Gusfield's emphasis on their short-lived and unremarkable romance puzzling and giving his otherwise cleanly propulsive account a somewhat lopsided shape. McGurn would never have stood for such sloppiness. Still, an engrossing look inside Al Capone's murderous ranks and a chilling examination of a natural born killer.

Kirkus Reviews