The Cuckoo Gang: Bootleggers, Killers, and the St. Louis Underworld That Helped Invent American Organized Crime Series Name: Gateway Crime Series Numb (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798188144753)

On the morning of February 14, 1929, four men dressed as police officers walked into a Chicago garage and killed seven members of Bugs Moran's gang. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre became the most famous act of organized crime violence in American history.

The four men were from St. Louis.

They had learned their trade in the city's bootlegging wars of the 1920s, in and around a criminal organization known as the Cuckoo Gang. Named for their brazen and deadly gunplay, the Cuckoos were one of five major criminal organizations that fought the St. Louis liquor wars during Prohibition - a decade of spectacular violence that gave rise to car bombs, drive-by shootings, and a death toll that shocked the country.

The Cuckoo Gang tells the full story of Prohibition-era St. Louis organized crime: the five gangs that divided the city's bootlegging trade, the Cuckoo-Green Ones war that established the Cuckoos as the dominant non-Italian force in the city, Fred "Killer" Burke's evolution from St. Louis street criminal to Capone's most trusted hit man, the Gus Winkler connection to the Valentine's Day Massacre, and the remarkable Syrian thread that ran from the Cuckoos through Jimmy Michaels to the 1980 mob war that ended organized crime in the city.

Al Capone had his own men. When he needed something done right - something that required men unknown to Chicago police, men with specific skills and specific capabilities - he went to St. Louis.

The Cuckoo Gang is Book 4 in the Gateway Crime series - true crime narratives from St. Louis and its surroundings.