How a brazen murder in downtown St. Paul upended the city's liquor trade 100 years ago

Yahoo

14-02-2025

If not for the way he died, it's doubtful Burt Stevens would be much remembered today.
A 22-year-old liquor hijacker from small-town Iowa, Stevens was gunned down on a busy St. Paul street corner shortly after 1 p.m. on Feb. 16, 1925.
His murder would expose a nationwide criminal network that supplied the Saintly City — and more than a dozen others across the country — with illegal booze during Prohibition.
'The shooting of Burt Stevens led to the unraveling of what was called the largest liquor ring in America,' said Paul Maccabee, whose book, 'John Dillinger Slept Here,' chronicles Prohibition-era St. Paul. 'The dominoes started falling.'
Stevens had run afoul of 'the Syndicate,' a businesslike gang of local bootleggers who had established themselves as the leading dealers of illicit liquor in the city, generating weekly revenues that exceeded $3 million after adjusting for inflation.
When two of its kingpins — brothers Ben and Abe Gleeman — took the fall for Stevens' murder, they rolled over on the Syndicate and its Cleveland-based supplier network, upending the liquor trade in St. Paul and uncorking a wave of criminal indictments that reached both coasts, Maccabee writes.
'GLEEMANS EXPOSE GIGANTIC LIQUOR RING HERE,' screamed a front-page headline in the Pioneer Press just seven months after Stevens was killed.
Prohibition was deeply unpopular in St. Paul. The city's sizable German and Irish populations resented efforts to curtail their consumption of beer and whiskey. But a formalized system of official corruption ensured they never had much trouble getting a drink.
When St. Paul Police Chief John O'Connor took office in 1900, he let it be known that criminals were free to lie low in his jurisdiction, as long as they handed over the customary bribe and didn't break any laws while they were in town.
At first, this devil's bargain seemed to work as designed, keeping St. Paul relatively free of major crime while the local economy benefited from frequent infusions of illicit cash.
'The good people of St. Paul, they knew about this deal,' Maccabee said. 'It was open.'
Although the chief's tenure ended just as Prohibition was enacted, the so-called 'O'Connor System' lived on. Booze poured into St. Paul while the city's cops looked the other way.
Much of it made its way south to the Twin Cities from Canada in the early days, 'flowing into Minnesota in a giddying flood,' a St. Paul Dispatch article reported in November 1920.
'Thousands of gallons are smuggled across the 300 miles of wilderness borderland daily,' the article claimed. 'Individual whisky-runners are bringing it into Minnesota by canoe, sleds and pack sacks. … Along the north shore of Lake Superior, fishermen have abandoned their nets to engage in the illicit trade.'
As time went on, St. Paul's bootleggers became increasingly professionalized. A few of the more entrepreneurial liquor traffickers in town banded together in 1923 and formed what they called 'the Syndicate.' Among its executives were Ben and Abe Gleeman, who ran a St. Paul speakeasy called the Produce Cafe.
From a network of rented warehouses, the Syndicate used trucks painted with the names of fictitious freight companies to haul liquor shipments to its customers in and around St. Paul.
With no shortage of demand for their products, the Gleemans and their associates tapped into several sources for illicit alcohol, taking advantage of St. Paul's position as a regional railroad hub to import it. Among their suppliers was a rum-running ring based in Cleveland, which stretched from coast to coast.
Ben Gleeman later told investigators that his outfit was importing no less than two train car-loads of liquor from Cleveland to St. Paul each week, setting aside 14 percent of their considerable profits for bribes, according to Maccabee.
The Syndicate's success made it a tempting target for gangs of hijackers — small-time criminals who would intercept liquor shipments in transit. Burt Stevens was one of them.
A few days before he was shot, Stevens and another man tried to extort protection money from Syndicate employees who were picking up a shipment of alcohol at the Milwaukee rail yard in St. Paul, Maccabee writes. They refused to pay it.
On the morning of Feb. 16, Ben Gleeman caught Stevens following him as he transported a truckload of liquor and warned him not to touch the Syndicate's booze.
A few hours later, Stevens called Gleeman from the Dreis Bros. drugstore at Ninth and St. Peter streets in downtown St. Paul, daring Gleeman to meet him there.
'He was just a hothead,' Maccabee said. 'He taunted the Syndicate and apparently made some antisemitic comments.'
Gleeman and a Syndicate enforcer named Morrie Miller drove over to the drugstore and found Stevens outside. After exchanging some words with him, Miller produced a revolver and shot Stevens several times in full view of witnesses. A bystander was also injured by gunfire.
It didn't take long for police to identify 24-year-old Ben Gleeman as a suspect, but they misidentified his accomplice as his younger brother Abe, who was elsewhere at the time making liquor deliveries.
The Gleemans evaded a St. Paul police dragnet for three days, surrendering only after the chief issued a shoot-to-kill order to his officers who were hunting the brothers. A week later, they were indicted on first-degree murder charges.
The Syndicate quickly hired attorneys for the Gleemans, promising to use its influence to win them an acquittal — provided they kept their mouths shut about the organization.
The case went to trial in March, but the jury failed to reach a verdict after 48 hours of deliberation and a mistrial was declared. It seemed like the Syndicate had kept its word.
But a month later, the Gleemans were back in court for a second trial. This time around, the state recruited hotshot local attorney Pierce Butler Jr. — son of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler — to serve as special prosecutor on the case. The Gleemans were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Over the summer, the brothers dismissed the Syndicate lawyers and hired their own. In late September, they filed bombshell affidavits that not only accused the Syndicate and its attorneys of framing them for the Stevens murder, but also explained that their operation was just one arm of the massive Cleveland ring that supplied liquor to bootleggers across the country, Maccabee writes.
Miller, the real gunman in the Stevens slaying, had been sent to St. Paul from St. Louis by the Cleveland ring to protect its interests there, the Gleemans said.
The following year, a Cleveland grand jury armed with the Gleemans' testimony indicted 112 people in a massive liquor conspiracy case — including 41 St. Paulites, according to Maccabee. The case rattled the Saintly City's underworld as never before, but the O'Connor System held.
'It made the papers, but it did not stop the O'Connor System,' Maccabee said. 'Was there outrage? Yeah, but it did not change the remarkable contract between the police, the public and the underworld.'
Miller was finally arrested in 1929 for pulling the trigger on Stevens, but two Ramsey County grand juries failed to return an indictment on him and he never faced trial, Maccabee writes. Miller met his own end in 1933, gunned down by his fellow gangsters.
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