![]() Twice he had been arrested on suspicion of murder (once while standing over the body of a victim holding a shotgun) only to have a jury rule the acts as self-defense. “Trouble clung to him like a virus,” wrote author Gary DeNeal. Violence also seemed to follow Charlie Birger. Governor Len Small had to mobilize the National Guard to keep order in the county throughout the decade. A wild gunfight in Herrin on primary Election Day 1926 brought a climax to this violent chapter, but not the end of the story. Torn by violence between miners and strikebreakers, as well as between a briefly-resurgent Ku Klux Klan against Catholics and immigrants, the county was the setting for Paul Angle’s 1952 book Bloody Williamson, which tells the tale in all its sordid detail. Williamson County was a dangerous place in the 1920s. It was also a stopover where out-of-state bootleggers could lay low during daylight hours before continuing their deliveries elsewhere in the Midwest. ![]() Tucked behind a barbecue stand just off the highway, Shady Rest offered plenty of opportunities to have a drink or place a wager on a dog fight. Shady Rest became a well-known headquarters for bootlegging in the region. Birger based his operation out of a hideout called Shady Rest in eastern Williamson County. Their partnership eventually included not just alcohol but also car thefts, slot machines and other gambling. He allied with a local gang of bootleggers, led by a trio of brothers, Carl, Earl and Red Shelton. With the coming of prohibition, Birger saw an opportunity to continue the saloon business in violation of the law. A series of brushes with the law followed. He returned to Illinois where he found work in a coal mine and later, fatefully, as a saloonkeeper. Charlie, as he came to be called in America, joined the Army in 1901 and served for three years. Louis, before moving across the Mississippi to Glen Carbon, Illinois. ![]() They settled first in New York and then St. While Capone is by far the most famous of Illinois’ 20th-century gangsters, another Prohibition-era outlaw at the opposite end of the state named Charlie Birger made plenty of headlines himself until justice finally caught up with him and made him the last man to be convicted and publicly hanged in Illinois.īorn Shachna Itzik Birger in Russia in 1880, his family fled to America to escape the pogroms then terrorizing Jewish families in the Russian Empire. ![]() Valentine’s Day Massacre and Chicago’s Beer Wars grabbed headlines during the Prohibition era, and have remained well known via movies and television shows for almost a century. The stories of Al Capone, Bugs Moran, the St. Tales of gangsters abound throughout Illinois history. ![]()
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