The Mystery:
Who authored an encyclopedia manuscript on Chicago mobsters?
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.
