Samuel Morton
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Samuel J. "Nails" Morton (1894-May 13, 1923) was a gunman of Dean O'Banion's Northside gang. A World War I veteran, Morton had received the French Croix de Guerre and been promoted to Lieutenant by the wars end. As a young man in the West Side of Chicago, Morton won the admiration of the Jewish community for allegedly creating a self-defense society against anti-semites. The Chicago police also suspected him for at least two murders. He is a relative of Thomas Morton, who worked as a front man for Lucchese crime family capo Paul Vario and family boss Thomas Lucchese in the 1950's and 1960's.
Morton was to die an early death at the hands (or hooves) of a horse. While riding in Lincoln Park, he was thrown from his horse and trampled to death. Grief stricken members of the North Side gang, including George "Bugs" Moran, Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci, Earl "Hymie" Weiss, and Louis "Two Gun" Alterie took the offending horse from its stables, led it to the spot where Morton died, and then shot the horse "with four slugs to the head".
This scene would later be reenacted by James Cagney in the film The Public Enemy after Cagney's character kills a horse which kicked to death fellow gangster "Nails" Nathan played by Leslie Fenton. It may also have inspired the infamous horse head in the bed scene from Mario Puzo's The Godfather Saga.
Morton received an elaborate military funeral attended by prominent politicians, city officials, and gangsters. According to the Chicago Daily News, 5,000 Jews paid their respects to Morton that day.
[edit] Further reading
- Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. ISBN 0-231-09683-6
- Mayer, Milton Sanford. "What Can a Man Do?". University of Chicago Press, 1964.
- O'Kane, James M. The Crooked Ladder. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994. ISBN 0-7658-0994-X
- Reppetto, Thomas. American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004. ISBN 0-8050-7798-7
[edit] References
- Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of Chicago: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1986. ISBN 1-56025-454-8
- English, T.J. Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN 0-06-059002-5
- Kelly, Robert J. Encyclopedia of Organized Crime in the United States. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. ISBN 0-313-30653-2
- Sifakis, Carl. The Mafia Encyclopedia. New York: Da Capo Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8160-5694-3
- Sifakis, Carl. The Encyclopedia of American Crime. New York: Facts on File Inc., 2001. ISBN 0-816
