21. America’s First Aerial Bombing
Charlie Birger became partners in 1925 with another bootlegger gang run by Carl Shelton and his brothers, to jointly transport imported booze from Florida to Chicago. The partnership quickly fell apart, however, because while the crime of bootlegging paid, and paid well, there was widespread cheating in the collection of the proceeds and divvying up of the profits. Things escalated – quickly. In one incident in 1926, Birger’s gang was attacked by a Shelton homemade tank: a two and a half-ton truck covered in steel armor, with a turret from which numerous firearms protruded.
A month later, the Sheltons upped the ante and escalated things some more, when they hired an airplane to drop sticks of dynamite over a Birger hideout. Nobody was hurt, but it made history as the first known aerial bombing in the US. Birger fought back in a more traditional way, with assassinations and ambushes.
