The Thompson Submachine Gun Page 5
A more successful smuggling operation than that of the abortive East Side operation had taken place in April 1921, when 30 guns had landed in Cork packed inside furniture loaded on a ship named SS Honolulu. For many years this event has puzzled historians, for the guns apparently arrived in Ireland before production of the M1921 had begun at the Colt factory. They were in fact the first pre-production guns to be made, and the 40 or so produced were mostly hand finished. No records of these completed M1919 guns were apparently kept, making them today the most prized of all of the Thompson models among collectors. It was suggested that these guns were sold to IRA gun-runners with the full knowledge of the Colt board of management, and it is difficult to believe that they could have ‘walked’ out of the back door, particularly in the face of the obsessively meticulous record-keeping of the inspector, Major Barrett. The only answer was that they were sent with the full knowledge of Ryan, Merkling and Thompson. Another 51 guns reached Ireland sometime in June 1921, but the following month a truce was agreed between the IRA and British forces and peace, of a sort, had broken out.
GUNS AND GANGSTERS
The early use of the Thompson in minor conflicts abroad was little reported in the American press, indeed these wars made little impression on the media. At the time, the press was fully occupied in reporting the dismal effects of the financial depression that had swept across America and Europe like an economic locust storm. Several million US men were unemployed, and in the wake of increasing poverty many took to crime as a desperate last resort. The situation had been unintentionally exacerbated by the ill-conceived attempt to ban the sale of alcohol, which started at midnight on the 16 January 1920. Prohibition, as it was called, remained in force throughout the most turbulent years of the depression. It was not repealed until 1933, by which time crime syndicates had been formed that were earning millions of dollars a week through ‘bootlegging’ (the illegal supply of alcohol), extortion, prostitution, tax fraud and all of the other activities that were commonly associated with organized crime. Of the men involved, only an initial few were professional career criminals, but their exploits involving the Tommy gun were soon both to captivate and appal millions of ordinary people as the press and later Hollywood began to report on, and glamorize, their lives.
The effect of .45-calibre bullets fired by police and Federal agents can be seen on the doors of the car that carried Bonnie and Clyde. (Topfoto)
The first sales of Thompsons for law enforcement purposes were few and far between, but in August 1920 an M1919 was taken to Camp Perry in northern Ohio for a series of demonstrations. Its unique looks and impressive performance puzzled and astonished all those watching:
There appeared a strange looking weapon. It was neither rifle nor shotgun: pistol nor revolver. It had two odd-looking pistol grips … it had no butt-stock. The user held the weapon on his hip by firmly grasping the two grips – and squeezed the trigger. Then things began to happen. From the muzzle burst a sheet of flame … from the breech erupted a shower of shiny brass cases. Crowds gathered. Here was a deadly arm, capable of spraying the landscape with sudden death in the form of 230 grain Colt .45 Automatic pistol bullets. ‘What is it?’ was the topmost question. ‘A machine gun? What’s it for?’
Clearly the demonstration had some effect, for the NYPD purchased ten of the guns, but sales were generally slow to law enforcement agencies. However, it was the chance attendance at a subsequent sales meeting at Maumee County, Ohio, by one Edward E. Richardson, the hard-working and utterly honest deputy marshal of Maumee, that would have a longlasting effect on future sales of the Thompson. Richardson was so captivated by the Thompson that he wrote to the company offering his services as an agent for the sale of guns to law enforcement agencies. ‘My idea would be to put on a campaign in small towns and villages, particularly county seats, and to demonstrate the gun before the proper authorities.’ He was well placed to begin such an enterprise, for he knew many of the police forces and agencies in Ohio and surrounding states.
‘Sold only to those on the side of law and order’, Auto-Ordnance’s 1927 price list for the ‘Thompson Anti-Bandit Gun’.
Richardson’s letter struck a chord at Auto-Ordnance, and he received several replies from John E. Sturm, the domestic sales manager. Sturm had quickly recognized that commercial sales to law enforcement could be very rapidly expanded with the right marketing, and he also understood the fragile nature of funding for most local police forces:
There is an excellent market for the Thompson guns among police officers, sheriffs and banks. We concur in your belief that your office and influence in the community will serve to aid in your sales work. Many times where a town or a community cannot afford to buy a gun for their police department, local merchants will band together and pool their money and present a gun to the police department. As you can see a Thompson gun readily protects any town and it is the best form of insurance against banditry. You are perfectly correct in stating that more work can be accomplished by personal demonstration than any amount of literature.
A rare police-style carrying case for the Model 1921, incorporating four 20-round magazines, a 50-round drum and cleaning kit.
Thus the company began to market the Thompson in a new way, advertising it as an ‘Anti-Bandit Gun’. So worried by the threat of robbery were many towns, that the prospect of protecting their lives and property by equipping their police with the latest firearms proved an extremely popular concept, and it was a brilliant marketing ploy on the part of both Auto-Ordnance and Richardson. Marcellus Thompson wrote to him in late 1928, expanding this theory.
For police purposes, it is not intended that the Thompson displace the revolver or pistol, they are for pocket use and hand-to-hand fighting. The Thompson gun is mostly used by police for motor patrols… [The] authorities are often called upon to stop high powered bandit cars. The Thompson gun can completely destroy such a car in the short space of a few seconds where a fleeting shot from a shotgun or pistol would not do the work. The Thompson is also valuable where those on the side of law and order are apt to be outnumbered. If the authorities are equipped with the same type of weapon as the bandits, the latter are often disinclined to shoot it out. A good single demonstration with the Thompson Anti-Bandit gun staged for your local police chief and sheriff will be more convincing than any number of written pages of literature or talks by your salesmen. The gun speaks eloquently for itself by its actual performance.
Richardson took Auto-Ordnance at their word and embarked on a sales tour of Ohio and the neighbouring states of Michigan, Kentucky and Indiana, making the first sale in January 1929 to the police force in Hancock County, Ohio. Interest grew in the guns, and the more he sold, the greater the interest. In the same year, he began to establish a nationwide sales force. County police were soon clamouring for the Thompson and sales were progressing well, so Richardson was asked to act as instructor to the newly formed police submachine gun school at Camp Perry, a post he held for four years. It proved popular, because the tempting prize to the course winner was a new M1921AC. Meanwhile, there was an unfortunate parallel situation becoming apparent, as commercial sales to individuals who were somewhat less than honest began to increase around the country. This new demand was unwittingly fuelled by the changes that had occurred in the senior management of the company. Following the death of Thomas Ryan in 1928 and the withdrawal from business of the founder, General Thompson, the control of the company went to the president, John Larkin, and his secretary, G. McNaughton. Marcellus Thompson stayed on the board, but had little day-to-day control over the running of the company. Both Larkin and McNaughton were financiers who had no interest in the product, only the profit margins, and they embarked on an open sales policy, despite General Thompson’s assertion that ‘There is no desire on the part of the Auto- Ordnance Corporation for civilian use of the Thompson. Its use should be confined by law to Governments, National, State, County and Municipal.’ In reality, dealers were now encouraged to sell to
any individual who had the money to buy a Thompson. John Sturm was appalled at this casual policy adopted by the company, and eventually went on to write an exposé of the company and its double-standards where sales were concerned.
Captain Rand, in the basement firing range of the Columbus, Georgia police department, with an M1921A.
While John Thompson’s sentiment was fine, in practical terms commercial sales of the gun were both vital and profitable to the company and dealers alike. Profit for the company and their dealers on an M1928 was large, about $90 each (about £680 or $1,100 in modern terms), and while orders from organizations such as the police were valuable, they were often glacially slow in being processed and could be abruptly cancelled by a sudden lack of funds. A ready-cash buyer was, on the other hand, quite literally money in the bank. Nor did the law do much to restrict the flow of guns to criminals, for in very few states of America was it actually illegal to buy and own a full-auto weapon. At the time, Thompsons fell into the same category of firearms as sporting rifles, so any individual could purchase one.The result was, predictably, that many of the gangs operating in the major eastern cities in America – New York, Boston, Chicago, for example – began using fictitious names to buy quantities of Thompsons and use them to deadly effect. There was no way of knowing how many guns found their way into criminal hands. Sturm estimated that of the 15,000 Thompsons manufactured up to 1928 some 9,000 had gone to military or police buyers. Of the remaining, he reckoned that 500 or more were in the hands of gangs, a total that represented a considerable amount of firepower on the streets. The ease with which Tommy guns could be acquired was illustrated when a man claiming to be an ex-officer of the US Army walked into the New York office of Auto- Ordnance and bought ten guns for cash. He returned for more, but the clerk had reported the sale (and the fact he had been short-changed by $100) and the office refused. But as Sturm noted, ‘All he had to do was go down the street to an arms dealer calling himself John Smith, and he could have bought them.’ While initially the spate of crime-related killings did little more than make minor headlines, the gangs began to broaden their horizons and take on the forces of law and order.
This picture of the Birger Gang, photographed in Illinois in 1924, illustrates why police and Federal agents were often out-gunned. Aside from at least five pumpaction shotguns, four rifles and a revolver or two as well as other weapons, there are three Model 1921 Thompsons evident, with 100-round magazines, which would have provided a fearsome amount of firepower.
The first sign of the growing problem was in April 1926, when a Chicago-based gang leader ordered the killing of state attorney William McSwiggin, who was shot dead with a Thompson. The police recovered the gun and were able to trace the dealer who had sold it. So seriously did General Thompson take this event, that he accompanied the police to the dealer’s premises in an armoured Buick. The dealer was unable to shed any light on the sale, for the gun had been bought for cash by an anonymous man, who had been understandably disinclined to answer any questions. While taking the gun dealer back to police headquarters for questioning, the Buick was shadowed by another car that tried to close with it on several occasions. When a curious Thompson enquired who they were, an officer of the State Department casually said ‘Hoods’. They shook off the car in heavy traffic, but the unsettled general commented afterwards that ‘I’ve been on the battlefields of France, but have never seen anything like this. I’m glad I’m getting out alive.’ Shortly afterwards a gang of eight men all armed with Thompsons ambushed a mail truck in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in broad daylight, one man opening up on the truck and its guards, the others laying a protective barrage of fire across the traffic light junction of the busy town, sending pedestrians and drivers diving for cover. They fled, leaving behind one guard dead and three badly injured, as well as a Thompson. It was traced to a batch sold by a local dealer, but the names on the bill of sale were, inevitably, false. The gang escaped with $100,000 ($6,000,000 in current value).
In late 1926, things began to get even more out of hand when a prominent gang leader, ‘Hymie’ Weiss, was shot dead with a Thompson in the street, an act that seemed to open the floodgates for Thompson use among gang members, particularly in Chicago. A convoy of eight cars, packed with ‘Tommy-men’ as the gun-carrying gangsters were known, even cruised down a street in north Chicago in territory owned by an upand- coming ‘businessman’ named Al Capone, riddling every shop with bullets. Then as now, there appeared to be an element of fashion among criminals in carrying a modern firearm, and Sturm commented that ‘There was every evidence that machine guns were … an essential part of every efficient gangster’s equipment.’ Amazingly, at that time the Chicago Police Department did not possess a single Thompson, and they belatedly decided that it might be useful to purchase some. They bought 35, but unaccountably the firearms were returned some months later, after senior officers decided that the danger to the public in the event of a shoot-out was too great.
Such considerations appeared not to concern the gangs, however, and shooting incidents continued across the eastern seaboard, with gang killings occurring in New York, Boston, Baltimore and across the Midwest. Use of the guns was spreading like a virus across the country, and the Lincoln Star newspaper of Lincoln, Nebraska, noted in March 1928 that ‘a gang of robbers, some armed with Thompson machine guns, today entered the savings bank and walked out with $30,000. No shots were fired by the gang, who fled in a large automobile.’ Undoubtedly the bank’s guard thought twice about taking on anyone armed with a Thompson, doubtless to the relief of all the customers and staff who were present. Calls were increasing for there to be some form of legislation to prevent the sale of these guns to the general public, but things were to speed-up dramatically after the events of 14 February 1929.
Chicago gangsters, 1927 A raid goes wrong. Three ‘Tommy-men’ armed with M1921AC Thompsons slug it out with a trio of out-gunned lawmen in Chicago in 1927. One Federal agent has already fallen to a hail of .45 calibre bullets and the two uniformed officers bravely take on the robbers with a .38 revolver and Remington pump-action shotgun. Neither gun was a match for the range or firepower of a Thompson, whose heavy bullets could easily penetrate the steel of a car body, which provided little protection in a gunfight. The distinctive burst of flame from the muzzle of the centre Thompson is not exaggerated – in poor light conditions the flash of a Thompson firing was highly distinctive. The very high 700rpm rate of fire of these guns made the 50- or 100-round content of the drum magazines very practical indeed, despite the weight penalty, and there was no firearm that the police or Federal agents possessed that could match it.
ST VALENTINE’S DAY, AND THE AFTERMATH
By the late 1920s, most large cities had been parcelled up into areas controlled by organized crime gangs, and the police and Bureau of Investigation were seemingly incapable of controlling them. At 10.45am on 14 February 1929, a local woman, Jeanette Landesman phoned the Chicago PD to say she had heard shooting next to her apartment on North Clark Street. The space was rented to the SMC Cartage Company, and was known to be an illegal alcohol storage facility owned by George ‘Bugs’ Moran. When police arrived, they found the bodies of six men, and a seventh crawling towards the door, begging to be taken to hospital. This lone survivor was Frank Gusenberg who was, astonishingly, alive after having been shot 14 times by a Thompson. When asked who had shot him, he replied, ‘I’m not gonna talk.’ He lived for three hours. The police launched a huge manhunt, but they needed little in the way of clues about what guns were used, for there lay on the floor some 70 spent .45-calibre cartridge cases, as well as two 12-bore cartridges. Although no individuals were ever brought to trial for the killings, the repercussions were many. A Bureau raid on a suspect named Fred Dane found two M1921s, several drum magazines and 900 rounds of ammunition. Tracing the origin of the guns was not difficult: one had been bought by a known gangster from a Chicago sporting goods shop, the other by a deputy sheriff from Illinois, who had known connect
ions with a Chicago gang. Forensic tests on the guns provided bullets that matched those taken from bodies in the garage, and further investigations showed that Dane was actually the pseudonym of Fred ‘Killer’ Burke, a professional hitman. It was a further year before he was arrested, but while he was found guilty of the subsequent murder of a policeman, he was never charged with the St Valentine’s killings. He died in prison in 1941. Other gang members suffered a more bloody fate, retribution killings accounting for six men who were probably involved. The ringleader, Al Capone, had previously enjoyed some public popularity for his flamboyant lifestyle. Although there was no link to the killings that could be proven in court, the police and Bureau had little doubt he was behind them. As a result of media attention, he found himself not only labelled public enemy number one, but also in very hot water with other gang bosses, who disliked the level of police attention that was now being given to their operations. On leaving a meeting with other crime bosses, he was ‘coincidentally’ arrested for illegal possession of a pistol and then subsequently jailed for tax fraud. He died, insane, in his Florida home in 1947.