Hello everyone. Praise the Lord!
My wife and I were just up in Wisconsin visiting with my mother's family that still lives in the area. We also escorted my elderly mother up there with us. While we were living with my mothers older brother, my uncle Jerry Mankowski, and his wife Nancy.
Jerry and Nancy still live on the old dairy farm of my Grandfather Ed Mankowski, the old booze runner for the Al Capone gang! Jerry still had one of the old pistols that belonged to Al Capones men! The other three blog posts that tell of my family's involvement with the Capones are, "The Escape From The Mob," "The Booze Runners," "FBI Crackdown."
When the famous St. Valentines Day Massacre occurred, Charlie, an Chicago policeman, was first on the scene. He took the opportunity to relieve one of the dead mobsters of one of his sidearms. He took a pistol. Charlie was married to a lady named Stella, the sister of Frank and Ed Mankowski.
Frank and Ed worked for the Al Capone gang! Ed was a booze runner, and Frank was a gang enforcer! Ed was my grandfather. In the nineteen-thirties, crime scene investigations was not the science that it is today. Cops taking souvenirs from a crime scene was pretty common back then, especially if it was not directly involved in the crime.
Many years later, when Charlie died, his wife Stella had the pistol. Stella gave it to her brother-in-law ED, my grandfather, and father to my uncle Jerry. When my grandfather died, Hellen, my grandmother, gave it to her son Jerry. That's how my uncle Jerry came to own a pistol carried by a Chicago gangster that died in the St. Valentines Day massacre!
Apostolic Theological Seminary
