The Postcard
A postally unused postcard bearing no studio name.
The divided back of the card has been hand-stamped with the date 9th. October 1933.
There are no indications as to the identity of the mother or the location of the photograph.
Peter Mansfield
So what else happened on Monday the 9th. October 1933?
Well, the day marked the birth in Lambeth of Peter Mansfield, British physicist. He was the 2003 recipient of the Nobel Prize for his development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Peter died in 2017.
Gus Winkler
The day also marked the death at the age of 32 of the American gangster Gus Winkler in a shooting.
Gus Winkler, who was born on the 28th. March 1901, headed a Prohibition-era criminal gang specialising in armed robbery and murder for hire with Fred "Killer" Burke.
Winkler was an associate of Chicago mob boss Al Capone, and is considered a suspect in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Gus Winkler - The Early Years
Winkler was born August Henry Winkeler to Bernard J. Winkeler and Mary K. in Lemay, Missouri of German descent.
In September 1917, at the age of 16, Winkler enlisted in the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps and served on the Western Front with the 91st Infantry Division.
After his return to America, Winkler joined up with the notorious Egan's Rats gang. It was during this time that he first became associated with Fred "Killer" Burke and Bob Carey.
Winkler later confessed to his wife Georgette to participating in the "one-way ride" murder of auto thief Wesley Smith in July 1923.
After the heart of the Egan gang went to prison for mail robbery in November 1924, Winkler and his pals signed on with the South City-based Cuckoo Gang.
Winkler, Burke, and Milford Jones were captured in downtown St. Louis on the 5th. June 1925 after a high-speed chase and shootout with the St. Louis police. Within a year and a half, Winkler moved to Detroit and briefly aligned himself with the Purple Gang that was under control of Abe Bernstein.
Gus Winkler's Partnership with Al Capone
After arousing the ire of Al Capone by kidnapping a Detroit gambler, Winkler and his pals hired themselves out for freelance work from Capone and the Chicago Outfit in exchange for releasing the gambler unharmed.
Capone and Winkler developed a close friendship, and the Chicago mob boss used Gus and his friends (Fred Burke, Bob Carey, Raymond "Crane Neck" Nugent and Fred Goetz) for special assignments.
Capone jokingly referred to the men as his "American Boys." Circumstantial evidence and testimony from Georgette Winkeler indicates that Winkler and his crew may have participated in the July 1928 murder of Brooklyn gangster Frankie Yale and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
The American Boys were also implicated in the murder of Toledo police officer George Zientara on the 16th. April 1928, who was shot dead in the aftermath of an American Express armored truck heist.
Winkler himself enjoyed Capone's complete confidence, even after Fred Burke was publicly named as a suspect in the massacre and the discovery of the murder weapons. Winkler often told people that he worked as a 'contractor' which might have played on the undertone of the word and his career as a contract killer.
The Death of Gus Winkler
The fallout from the Valentine's Day massacre proved to be the undoing of the American Boys as an organised sub-group. Fred Burke was eventually captured and imprisoned for the murder of Michigan police office Charles Skelly. Bob Carey was exiled from Chicago after attempting to blackmail a friend of Capone's, and Crane Neck Nugent vanished without a trace.
Gus Winkler, along with St. Louis gangster John "Babs" Moran, was severely injured in a car accident in Berrien County, Michigan on the 3rd. August 1931. While Winkler survived, the crash cost him one of his eyes. While in his hospital bed, Winkler was accused of planning and taking part in the September 1930 robbery of $2 million from a bank in Lincoln, Nebraska.
While Winkler hadn't done the robbery, he knew who did, and claimed he could convince the actual heisters to turn over the loot. After this assurance, Capone reluctantly put up Winkler's $100,000 cash bond. After his release, Winkler did indeed deliver as promised. By the next year, Gus had carved out a lucrative position in the rackets of Chicago's North Side, despite his co-operation with authorities.
The beginning of the end for Gus Winkler began upon Capone's 1931 imprisonment. With Frank Nitti now in charge of the mob, Winkler was surrounded by gangsters whom he didn't trust. Nitti and other top Outfit mobsters had never been especially fond of the American Boys, whose rise to prominence was a product of Capone's generosity.
After Nitti was shot and nearly killed by the Chicago police detective Harry Lang in December 1932, his suspicions towards Winkler only intensified. Gus Winkler was observed making visits to the office of FBI agent Melvin Purvis in the summer of 1933. While Winkler was in fact only giving the feds tips on the Kansas City Massacre suspect Verne Miller, Nitti believed that Gus was turning informer.
Nitti decided to act. While entering the beer distribution office of Charles Weber at 1414 Roscoe Street in Chicago on the afternoon of the 9th. October 1933, Winkler was hit by multiple shotgun blasts fired by unknown assailants hidden in the back of a green delivery truck.
Winkler died a half-an-hour later after arriving at a local hospital. He was buried at Park Lawn Cemetery in St. Louis.
Winkler was one of the main casualties of a half-year-long purge where Frank Nitti eliminated the last of the so-called American Boys; including one of Winkler's alleged killers, Fred Goetz.
Gus's wife, the former 'Georgette Bence' (1898-1962), later wrote her memoirs in which she detailed her life with the notorious gangster.
A Further Death
On the 29th. February 1960, while at his home in Florence, South Carolina, former FBI agent Melvin Purvis died from a gunshot wound to the head fired from a .45 automatic given to him by fellow agents when he resigned from the Bureau.
The FBI investigated his death and declared it a suicide, although the official coroner's report did not label the cause of death as such.
A later investigation suggested that Purvis may have shot himself accidentally while trying to extract a tracer bullet jammed in the pistol. It was found that the pistol that had taken Purvis's life had once belonged to none other than gangster Gus Winkler; the gun is believed to have been confiscated from Winkler during his debriefing in the summer of 1933.
