The price for big money, sexy women, absolute power and a daily dose of adrenaline was the awareness that they would die young and a sudden death. Every gangster of the prohibition era knew about it. And what was the end of their girlfriends?
There was no question of equality here. Although the mafiosi women were often more cruel and degenerate than themselves, they were subject to completely different rules of dying. First of all, the risk of death in gangster settlements or shootings with the policemen was relatively low. Bonnie &Clyde's drastic death, when police officers stuffed 150 bullets into their car in just sixteen seconds, was the exception that proves the rule.
Clyde Barrow probably died right away, one of the first bullets hit in the temple. His famous partner Bonnie Elizabeth Parker she died in rather short, but terrifying torments - as Diane Ducret writes in her book Mafia Women :the witnesses of the incident were "chilled by the woman's terrifying scream, the roar of a dying panther, sharp and piercing, louder than all the shots put together" .
The women were not usually threatened with a long time in prison. The judges gladly accepted the game à la "sweet idiot" with translations such as:"My boyfriend is a gangster? I knew nothing of his criminal activities! ”
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker died literally punctured like a sieve. There were as many as forty bullets stuck in it, which the policemen fired as soon as the pair of gangsters were recognized.
When their lovers and partners were imprisoned, they, freed from responsibility, most often began a completely different life, which ultimately aimed rather at a slow extinction than an outbreak of a violent fire ... strong> Buda Godman . The only thing that her biographers managed to establish is the year of her death:1944.
Mistresses of longevity
The phenomenal Blond Alibi, or Louise Rolfe, has also disappeared from the radars of judges, policemen and journalists. who had so many husbands in her life that, for lack of free men, she had to marry one of her exes again! When she was already 80 years old, she decided to go out with Bob Mash, her ex-husband, who spotted her years later in a television program. They have lived the last five years in harmony, not denying themselves alcohol, cigarettes, fatty food and sentimental memories from gangster times.
Chicago's most famous brothels, Ada and Minna Everleigh, had a similar, and even more impressive longevity. Ending their dark business in the city, they evacuated with an enormous fortune that secured them financially for life. So they could allow themselves to make their dreams come true by opening a reader's club in New York, to whom they devoted themselves in their retirement. They lived to a ripe old age in happiness, prosperity and peace - 96 and 82, respectively.
You can read about the most dangerous women of the prohibition era in Diane Ducret's book "Mafia Women" (Horizon Mark 2017).
Cutting off the coupons of former glory
For some Mafia women, the gangster past had so strongly determined their lives that they could no longer think “days we don't know yet,” stubbornly returning to the past. Evelyn Frechette, one of John Dillinger's many lovers, even wrote - in honor of her relationship with the famous bandit - a play called Crime Doesn't Pay . She then went on a tour of the United States to tell the crowds her love story. After five years, she returned to her native Indian reservation, where she died of cancer at the age of 61.
Helen Gillis, she knew perfectly well what fate sooner or later awaited her husband "Baby Face Nelson":"I knew that he must die soon and I wanted to be with him as long as possible". All of her subsequent life was just waiting to be reunited with her husband. When she died, nearly 50 years later, she had herself buried next to him in St. Joseph in Chicago.
The example of Evelyn Frechette shows that you can be a female gangster and become famous for it. After her boyfriend was locked up, she toured the world as the author of an autobiographical play, still telling the story of her love for a bandit.
Suicide and alcoholism
Life in gangster retirement was not all roses, and often ended in a tragic death. "Mafia Queen", Virginia Hill after Bugsy Siegel's death, she married an Austrian ski instructor, a very decent man. However, she could not forget the good old mafia times - countless lovers (and a slightly smaller list of husbands), an ocean of the most expensive spirits, obscenely expensive jewelry and extravagant costumes. Distraught by the gray of out-of-gang life and lost youth, she committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills at the age of forty-nine.
On Anna Sage , a former prostitute and Chicago brothel, was cursed for trading John Dillinger's FBI agents. The reward for displaying the robber was to regulate her emigration status - after all, her real name was Ana Cumpănaș. After Dillinger's liquidation, federal agents no longer had to honor the contract and deported the woman to Romania, where she died at the age of 58. Her liver, however, could not withstand the melting of life's sorrows in alcohol for a long time.
Anna Sage, two days before Dillinger's death, was smiling and carefree. After all, she was promised to settle her immigration status for turning in a gangster. However, fate played a trick on the woman ...
And they lived long and boring…
Companion of Dillinger's last moments, Polly Hamilton , who barely escaped from the shootout, got involved with a humble Chicago salesman. As Edythe Black, she spent the last few decades of her life with him in peace and quiet.
The cruel Kathryn Kelly has also changed her name , Kelly's depraved wife of Machine Gun, who returned to society after eighteen years in prison as Lera Cleo Kelly. Of absolutely natural causes, the Shrouded Bandit, Edna Martha Stanley will also die , Jack Murray's wife. Forty years after her husband Al's departure, she died in a retirement home Mae Capone , who devoted the last few decades of her life to the apple of her eye, an Italian restaurant in Miami Beach.
Edna Murray, a member of the Barker-Karpis gang and wife of Jack Murray, ended her turbulent life in the most natural and non-spectacular manner. But did every Mafia woman have to pay for the sins of her youth with a tragic death?
This is how you have to live ...
And probably only one woman can be said that the mafia episodes were not her life highlight, but only an introduction to life with unimaginable momentum. As Diane Ducret writes in her book Mafia Women :
Duchess Dorothy di Frasso dies on January 4, 1954 aboard the Union Pacific Train at the age of sixty-six after having held its last party in Las Vegas, covered in $ 250,000 worth of jewelry.