Nation: Chicago Slaughter

“A falling out among thieves” was the way Chicago’s Police Superintendent Orlando W. Wilson put it. In fact, it was more of a falling down of bodies. Six members of Chicago’s underworld were killed in just ten days, a rate of extinction that compared favorably with that of the ’20s, when Al Capone was lord high executioner and the Thompson submachine gun was known affectionately as the Chicago piano.

Gaudiest of all the murders was that of Albert Testa, a midget-model (4 ft. 6 in.) burglar, counterfeiter and gambler, who was shot twice and dumped into a West Side alley. Testa was a friend of the late William (“Action”) Jackson, a 300-lb. “juice man” (a collector of loans for gangland usurers known as “juice dealers”), who was tortured to death and stuffed into the trunk of his Cadillac last August. Testa, 48, had also been romancing an 18-year-old, green-eyed stripper who moonlighted as a police informer, picked up her lowdown by keeping her ears open as she took her clothes off at command performances before mobmen in the Cicero and Franklin Park motels.

In addition to the versatile Testa, the death list included some burglars, a thief, and a suspected juice dealer. Since the killings began, the possibility that they may fit into a master plan of thugicide has fascinated Chicago, a town that has never lost its interest in organized murder. But the most popular theory is that the hoods are being killed in unrelated fights over the crumbs left by the syndicate bosses, who, under police pressure, have been cutting down operations. Says Deputy Police Superintendent Joseph Morris: “These fellows were all messenger boys. If they were controlled by the syndicate, the killings wouldn’t happen. The top hoodlums don’t like to bring attention to themselves in this way.”