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Pistol Pete’s Payback and Other Historic Vengeances

Khalid Elhassan October 15, 2020 31 min

World War II - Quisling — Quisling with SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Cotton Boll Conspiracy

19. Machine Gun McGurn

Machine Gun McGurn and a mob molly. Mob Museum

Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn (1902 – 1936) got his nickname because of his love of Thompson submachine guns. He was a Sicilian-born small-time boxer, who changed his birth name from Vincenzo Gibaldi to the Irish-sounding Jack McGurn, because boxers with Irish names got better bookings back then.

Boxing did not work out for McGurn, so he put more time and effort into his criminal sideline as mob muscle. By the mid-1920s, he had become one of Al Capone’s chief bodyguards and hitmen. He was a suspect in Capone’s most notorious payback hit, the 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre. However, authorities were unable to charge McGurn because of a lack of evidence.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.