SIR,-1 am troubled by Kenneth Allsop's contented acceptance, in the
last extract of The Bootleggers, of the image of the Chicago gunman as a dead-eye dick. Thus he quotes a contemporary source, Pasley, on the training of Capone killers: 'It might be only the imperceptible tremor of a trigger-finger, or the slight- est wavering of an eye . . . yet the cost of the lapse would have to be reckoned in lives and money.' Mr. Allsop then adds: 'Accuracy of the eye was main- tained at regular target practice on private machine- gun ranges...
I cannot recall seeing any evidence of Chicago gangster 'accuracy' nor, I think, does Mr. Allsop cite any. Take the Mafia killings he detailed on August 18: it took Three men, firing 18 bullets (only 11 of which struck) at ranges inside a room to kill Pasqualino Lolordo. Four sawn-off shotguns killed Big Jim Colosimo. Dum-dum bullets killed Tony Lombardo. Agreed, Frankie Yale (the one killing attributed to the Capone gunmen) suffered from a certain sort of accuracy when he was hit by 100 machine-gun bullets, but hardly an economic sort. Nor did the traditional back-of-the-head Mafia execu- tion call for much accuracy. And in all these instances nobody was shooting back.
Still, all these people did get sufficiently, if messily, dead, and I would not be quibbling if it did not appear that Mr. Allsop, in putting together the psychological jigsaw of the typical gangster, is alleg- ing that fast and skilful use of weapons was one of the pieces. Not only am I unconvinced that they were fast and skilful, 1 don't even think they thought they were. Take their weapons: the tommy-gun, the sawn- off shotgun and the 'pineapple' bomb—none of these arc weapons with which it is possible to achieve what most of us would call 'accuracy.' And, of course, the pistol--which is only as accurate as the length of its barrel. It was in Chicago at this time that the practice started of sawing off revolver bar- rels. They were then known as 'belly' guns': if you touched your enemy's belly, you could hit him.
I can see nothing to suggest that the Chicago gun- man had any pride in his skill with weapons. I would suggest instead that, on evidence Mr. Allsop gives, the gansters tried to make their killings as destructive and flamboyant—and perhaps pour en- courager le attires, as newsworthy—as possible.
GAVIN LYALL
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