… As it happened, nothing official came of Bolton’s so-called confession. But his highly publicized yarn did catch the eye of a Chicagoan named Frank T. Farrell. When Farrell read Bolton’s version of events, he sat down and composed a letter to John Edgar Hoover, head of the federal Bureau of Investigation—dated January 28, 1935—saying he had information that might be useful to the feds. His account—recently discovered in the FBI archives and never before revealed—offers the most logical and satisfying solution to the crime ever presented.
In cramped but tidy script, Farrell told the director that he had been doing “Undercover Investigation” work—he gives no more detail than that, and neither do the FBI archives—at the time of the crime. He said that if federal agents would check Chicago police logs, they would find that a 40-year-old former firefighter named William Davern Jr., the son of a Chicago police sergeant, had been shot during a bar fight in November 1928. Davern, the letter said, was the key to unraveling the mystery of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Davern had been in the kitchen of the C. and O. Restaurant at 509 North Clark Street, a popular gangster hangout, when a fight erupted. Davern was shot in the stomach. Spurting blood, he was carried to a car, driven to the corner of Rush Street and Austin Avenue (now Hubbard Street), and dumped there. Davern managed to crawl to a fire-station call box and ring for help. He was taken to the hospital, where he held on for a month. And while he wouldn’t tell the police who had shot him, Davern did tell his first cousin, William White. William Davern and William White had grown up together in Chicago. Now, as he lay dying, Davern decided there was only one man he could trust, and so he gave White the names of several members of the Moran gang, including one of the Gusenberg brothers. In his letter, Farrell doesn’t say which brother. Those are the guys who shot me, Davern told his cousin.
William “Three-Fingered Jack” White was beady-eyed, bald, and double-chinned. He was even tougher than he was ugly. A boyhood accident or a botched safecracking job—accounts varied—had taken two of the fingers on his right hand. For the better part of the decade he had maintained status as one of Chicago’s most vicious criminals, with a rap sheet as long and savage as the processing line at the Armour meatpacking plant. When Davern died, according to Farrell’s letter, White made up his mind to avenge his cousin’s murder. He contacted the same Gusenberg brother who had been involved in the murder of Davern and said he was planning to hold up a factory for its payroll and needed men to help.
White probably knew both the Gusenbergs. They had allegedly worked together in 1926 on the $80,000 robbery of the International Harvester factory on 31st Street. In that job, they had used eight men, and when one of those men ratted to the cops and started naming his accomplices, White arranged for two of his cohorts to disguise themselves as police, go to the rat’s home, and murder him while he slept. White knew that when people saw police uniforms they tended to be more trusting, and they tended not to notice the distinguishing features of the men in the uniforms. All they saw were hats and badges. And getting uniforms was easy. White knew plenty of crooked cops. In this case, he might have enlisted the help of his uncle, Sergeant William J. Davern, of the Chicago Police Department, the father of the man killed at the C. and O. Restaurant./
Farrell’s letter resolves many of the mysteries surrounding the massacre. It helps explain why so many of Moran’s men were in the garage that morning, why they were dressed well, and why they never fired their guns when faced by their intruders. It also offers a clear motive—one with enough emotional power to explain the fury of the attack. It may even account for why the investigation of the crime went nowhere. Perhaps word had spread through the police department that the garage killing had been carried out in retaliation for the murder of a cop’s kid. Sergeant Davern might have provided the uniforms and the police car. That could have been enough to quell further investigation and persuade the detectives to accept this rough justice.
If White had been arrested and confessed that he’d committed the crime in retaliation for the murder of Davern, the newspapermen certainly would have followed up with the next logical questions: Was Sergeant Davern involved? Did other cops help him commit or cover up the crime? And once those questions were asked, the reporters no doubt would have cited the dying words of Frank Gusenberg, which to this day remain the only testimony from a victim of the crime.
“Cops did it,” Gusenberg had said.
Shortly after the massacre on Clark Street, two eyewitnesses came forward to tell police that they had seen some of the action on the street. Their testimony seemed inconsequential at the time and was quickly forgotten, but it included this nugget of information from one of them: “Just about the time I arrived in front of the place, an automobile I thought was a police squad car stopped in front of the garage. There were five men in it. The fellow who stayed at the wheel had a finger missing. His hand was spread out on the steering apparatus, so the old amputation was apparent.” Police, it seems, never followed up on the lead.
For several years in the early 1930s, White worked as a federal informant, supplying information about Chicago hoodlums to federal agents in exchange for their protection, according to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. If John Edgar Hoover knew of White’s role in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the bureau might have helped to cover his tracks for fear of losing an informant and jeopardizing the lives of the agents who worked with him.
In January 1934, when some of his peers figured out that White was a rat working for the Bureau of Investigation, White was executed in his home. Federal agents were seen visiting White at home shortly before the murder. The killers were never caught. …