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Who authored an encyclopedia manuscript on Chicago mobsters? | Chicago Mysteries with Geoffrey Baer

Who authored an encyclopedia manuscript on Chicago mobsters?

Stylized typed text from Bullets for Dead Hoods
No. 5F3C0828 Case Opened 1933

The Mystery:

Who authored an encyclopedia manuscript on Chicago mobsters?

The Bullets for Dead Hoods book laying on a black table

Who authored an encyclopedia manuscript on Chicago mobsters? Geoffrey Baer speaks with the man who discovered and later published the amazing artifact in a resale shop.

While on his way home from the grocery store one morning, Chicago gallery owner John Corbett made a fortuitous U-turn to follow signs for a going-out-of-business sale at a secondhand store. He got to talking with the store’s owner, mentioning his interest in noir. The owner then presented him with a worn envelope containing a manuscript of an encyclopedia of Chicago’s mobsters from the 1930s. “He offered it to me at such a ridiculously low price that I just couldn’t believe it. So I just put my money down and took the manuscript,” Corbett told Geoffrey Baer. Corbett then worked with Julia Klein to publish the manuscript as a facsimile, entitled Bullets for Dead Hoods. It features handwritten margin notes and colorful descriptions of mobsters, such as that of Sylvester Agoglia. “With a name like that, this 37-year-old New York killer could be anything. He is. For a clean swift shooting, you won’t find a handier man with a ‘rod’ west of the Alleghenies.” But who wrote these descriptions? That remains a mystery. Whoever they were, it was probably a risk writing such things about the mob. “We speculate that it was…an insider. It might’ve been a former mob member. It could have been a former policeman,” Corbett said.

The Outcome

Unsolved

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