Gentlemen bandits

Brothers Notorious: The Sheltons, Southern Illinois' Legendary Gangsters
By Taylor Pensoneau
Downstate Publications
New Berlin Paper, $15.95

By William Furry

The myth of the gentleman gangster, those dapper pin-stripe thugs who spray bullets and send flowers with equal sincerity, draws new life from Taylor Pensoneau's Brothers Notorious: The Sheltons, Southern Illinois Legendary Gangsters. Here, in the broad panorama of downstate Illinois, the subterranean underworld of vice and corruption during the Prohibition era and later is candidly and deftly reported by a pro.

Pensoneau, who's written biographies on Illinois governors Richard Ogilvie and Dan Walker, literally has struck gold with Brothers Notorious. His self-published book, which came out early in the year, is already in its third printing with sales in the first quarter far beyond what anyone would have predicted, especially SlU-Press, which regrettably dropped its option to publish the book last year. Its popularity, however, was inevitable given the gangsters' influence from "Little Egypt" to Peoria from the 1920s to the '50s.

To say that the Shelton Brothers-Carl, Roy, Earl, and Bernie—colored the landscape of southern Illinois from Prohibition to the end of World War II, would be an understatement. They painted it in blood. Yet their Robin Hood-ish portrayal by neighbors and friends as well as the media and the police, all of whom fed frequently at the Shelton trough, makes this more than just another crime story. Given that the majority of crimes by which the Sheltons earned their dubious livings are now sanctioned and taxed by the government—gambling and liquor sales—it's a wonder that someone isn't putting up their statues as pioneers of economic development.

But the Sheltons were hardly just good old boys with tough jobs. They were gangsters who robbed banks and stole miners' payrolls, thugs who beat up and killed their enemies when it suited their needs.

Though Pensoneau is the first to mine the Sheltons for a book, he was not the first to break ground. Paul Angle's Bloody Williamson came out in 1952, when Shelton blood was still flowing in Illinois, and Gary DeNeal's Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, recently reprinted by SlU-Press, was in print in the early Eighties. Both provide the necessary context for the Sheltons story, which is not to say that Brothers Notorious doesn't stand well alone. Though not the stylist of Darcy O'Brien (Murder in Little Egypt) or DeNeal, Pensoneau lends his considerable skill as a political reporter to Brothers, which gives this book a strong narrative voice and a rich perspective it would not otherwise have. Occasionally his digressions drag the tale, as when he follows the gubernatorial campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson to make a dull point about good politicians, or when he effusively praises the gang-busting talents of St. Louis Post Dispatch reporters for simply doing their jobs. Such quibbles are minor. But in at least one instance Pensoneau follows the track instead of the train, missing a story that would have shed considerable light on the character of Carl Shelton, the undisputed leader of the Shelton gang. In November 1943, Carl, the smooth talking, piano-playing mobster who carried a pearl-handled pistol in his belt and knew how and when to use a machine gun, struck and killed a nine-year-old girl while driving his car from Peoria to Wayne County. The accident took place outside of Decatur and, though not Sheltons fault, haunted him the rest of his life. Yet Pensoneau gives but a scant ten lines to an incident, noting only that the gangster paid all of the girl's funeral expenses. The slighting of such a significant story begs the question: How many other nuggets were left in the ground?

Nevertheless, Brothers Notorious has plenty of muscle and grit and gunpowder to propel readers along. The accounts of the failed September 27, 1924 bank heist in Kincaid, Illinois, as well as the Shelton brothers battle with the KKK and their love/hate relationship with Charlie Birger are fascinating, if only for the window they open onto the madness that was Prohibition. What is remarkable, given the Sheltons' ability to engender corruption everywhere they ventured, is that the madness ever ended, if indeed, it did. The legacies of Paul Powell, Otto Kerner, and now George Ryan suggest otherwise. In that sad light the truth is that the Sheltons were amateurs at best.

ILLINOIS HERlTAGE   15