Deadly Valentines

January 9, 2012
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.

February 1, 2012
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.

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March 15, 2012
Gusfield takes a look back at gangland Chicago and the Saint Valentine's Day massacre via this dual biography of Capone lieutenant Machine Gun Jack McGurn and his paramour, Louise Rolfe. Long believed to be one of the perpetrators of the infamous February 14, 1929, murders of seven members of Bugs Moran's rival outfit, McGurn is a legendary figure in the annals of Prohibition-era bootleggers. Although he was initially arrested for the gangland-style slayings, the charges against McGurn were eventually dropped, thanks in large part to the alibi provided for him by Louise, anointed by an insatiable press as the blonde alibi. Set against the colorful backdrop of a Jazz Age city besieged by warring Mob factions, this boozy biography will appeal to true-crime buffs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)