ILLINOIS: Now There Is One

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One quiet morning last week a man crept carefully down a bushy slope on the outskirts of Peoria, Ill., worked his way to within a hundred feet of a-shabby, concrete-box roadhouse. As a man in a chalk-striped suit walked out, he aimed carefully, squeezed off one thunderous shot, and crawled quietly away.

Bulky, hard-mouthed Bernie Shelton,-50, youngest and meanest of the ill-famed Shelton boys, fell. He was dead in half an hour. His 59-year-old brother Carl—a big, amiable murderer, who carried a red bandanna and dressed like a hayseed—had been ambushed and killed by a machine-gunner last fall. Of the three brothers who had held Southern Illinois in fief during the noisy years of Prohibition, only Earl, grey-haired and bitter-mouthed, was left.

In their time, the Shelton gang had been responsible for scores of violent deaths. They were whiskey runners, saloon keepers and slot-machine operators. They fought the Ku Klux Klan, fought the law, bought up sheriffs. But mostly they battled a tough, boastful gangster named Charley Birger.

The Shelton and Birger gangs, roaming through bloody Williamson County in armored cars, blazed away at each other on sight, killed mayors and cops with abandon. But they did not annihilate each other. Birger was convicted of murder and hanged.

After Birger's death, the Sheltons grew rich and prosperous, settled down on big farms. Bernie's was called Golden Rule Acres. Last week, Bernie got a fine funeral at Boland's mortuary in Peoria. He was laid out in a $3,000 bronze casket, got four roomfuls of flowers. But it looked as though the Sheltons were cooked. Old Earl was a nervous man; he kept looking sidewise and complained bitterly that the law was giving him no protection.