Review, Taylor Pensoneau, Brothers Notorious: The Sheltons, Southern Illinois’ Legendary Gangsters (Downstate Publications, 2002)

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2002

The 1951 report of the Kefauver committee—a Senate committee investigating the influence of organized crime—dated the rapidly rising influence of criminal syndicates to the Prohibition era of the 1920s and stated that, in the entire country, the criminal gang wars in St. Louis and southern Illinois “reached a peak in bloodiness unparalleled in United States history.” And at the center of this maelstrom stood the Sheltons, a trio of brothers from Wayne County, Illinois, who formed a gang that dominated, at various times, East St. Louis, Herrin, Peoria, and Fairfield, and whose control of illegal activity in southern Illinois was so total that even Chicago’s Capone gang kept a respectful distance. In Brothers Notorious, Taylor Pensoneau, former Illinois political correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, narrates the story of Earl, Carl, and Bernie Shelton, from their origins in rural, late-nineteenth-century Wayne County, through their rise to power and their glory days in the early 1930s, to their eventual downfall and its aftermath in the late 1940s. Much of the story has been told before, and better, in such books as Paul Angle’s Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness and Gary DeNeal’s A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, but Pensoneau’s is the first full-length study focusing specifically on the Sheltons, and thus fills a significant niche.

The Sheltons’ father, Ben, came to rural Wayne County in the late 1800s, part of a larger migration of people moving into the area from the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee. In the new location, as in the old, the migrants earned a hard-scrabble subsistence, supplementing crops raised from the poor farming soil with the region’s more bountiful fish and game. In this context developed a culture founded on a handful of imperatives. The migrants, Pensoneau says, “continued to insist in their new homeland on raw, simple rules for conducting their lives in which individualism was tempered only by strong allegiance to family. Government was regarded with suspicion by these individuals who often persisted in settling disputes on their own instead of through authorities. Independence was cherished.”

After having, variously, served time in prison and the military, and worked in the coal mines of Williamson County, the Shelton brothers ended up in East St. Louis in the aftermath of World War I. For the brothers it was fortuitous timing, bringing them into a city with an active underworld and thriving vice district at the dawn of America’s great experiment in social engineering, Prohibition. “If not for Prohibition,” Pensoneau says, “the Shelton gang might never have gotten off the ground. Without question, the history of organized crime in the country would have been far less recognizable.” The brothers quickly perfected the combination of force, intimidation, bribery of public officials, and satisfaction of public desires that would prove the foundation of their success for more than a quarter-century. Pensoneau does an adequate job of limning the characters of the brothers, especially hot-headed Bernie, and Carl, who in many ways epitomized the quintessential mid-twentieth-century American Character, the salesman, but who was always denied the social respectability he craved.

As the Shelton organization grew in strength, it expanded beyond East St. Louis to cover much of southern Illinois by the mid-1920s, where it came into conflict with other powerful forces, primarily Charlie Birger’s rival gang and the Ku Klux Klan, led by erstwhile federal agent S. Glenn Young. The intersection of these three organizations in and around Williamson County resulted in several frontier-style shootouts in the streets of Herrin, the murders of the mayors of Colp and West City, and the aerial bombing raid of Birger’s hideout, the Shady Rest. “Few place in America,” Pensoneau comments, “had been more torn asunder by the powerful and very emotional forces unleashed by Prohibition.”

Significantly, it was the Sheltons who emerged from Prohibition-era Bloody Williamson intact, reaching the peak of their power in 1930. The gang’s influence was such that it survived the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, shifting its emphasis from liquor to gambling and its base from East St. Louis to Peoria. Pensoneau sketches a portrait of Peoria in the 1940s greatly at odds with the city’s stereotypical image as exemplar of wholesome, middle American values. Under the Shelton influence, order was maintained in Peoria’s active red light district and gambling dens while large pay-offs smoothed relations between criminal syndicates and city hall. But this cozy relationship unraveled in the late 1940s as the Sheltons lost their grip on their empire, culminating in the assassinations of Carl in 1947 and Bernie in 1948.

Pensoneau argues that the reverberations from the fall of the Shelton gang would be felt for a long time. Following his brothers’ murders, Earl cooperated with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a series of exposés delineating corruption in local and state political and law enforcement offices. The resultant outcry from reform groups and public anger at the largely Republican office-holders exposed bolstered the gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Adlai Stevenson—who made the drive to clean up vice a centerpiece of his campaign—leading to a clean Democratic sweep in the fall elections, including a narrow victory for presidential candidate Harry Truman. As Pensoneau concludes, “Without the strong showing of Stevenson, Democrat Truman most likely would not have carried Illinois, a state that turned out to be crucial for Truman in his upset victory over Dewey.”

The Sheltons, Pensoneau concludes, were transitional figures in the modernization of American crime. “Historically, the Shelton boys and their gang were a bridge in Illinois between old and new. They had one foot in the past when lawlessness featured independent gunmen and their henchmen preying on society at their own will without regard to other outlaws. In that world, the Shelton brothers were very successful in defending themselves. On the other hand, Carl, Bernie, and Big Earl were forerunners in the move to major organized crime, to the consolidation of far-flung criminal enterprises under the iron hand of one individual or ruling gangland clique.” If, in the long run, the Sheltons could not compete with the modern crime syndicates, it may have been because their roots were too firmly in turn-of-the-century rural Wayne County.

The Sheltons’ story is so compelling it virtually tells itself, which is fortunate because Pensoneau’s leaden style consistently gets in the way. He too often falls into the passive voice, and his writing is filled with malapropisms, clichés, sentence fragments, and other grammatical errors (especially an ignorance of the difference between lie and lay). But, despite Pensoneau’s pedestrian telling, the intrinsically fascinating nature of the story propels the narrative.