July 18, 1935
One of the slickest moves to come out of the Roaring Twenties was the “ambush murder”. In this type of hit, snipers would rent a location across the street from a joint their victim was known to frequent. Then, when the mark showed up, the assassins would lay waste to him in a spray of bullets. The technique was precise and methodical, one that was sure to guarantee success. And it was a method of murder made famous by Louis “Two-Gun” Alterie.
Louis Alterie was a member of Dean O’Banion’s North Side gang. Though he lived and worked throughout the twenties in Chicago, Alterie’s heart—he always said—was in the West, where he loved to put his feet up at his ranch. The descendant of Spanish and French ranchers in California, Alterie saw himself as a cowboy and tended to dress the part. Tall, with dark slicked-back hair, he must have cut quite a figure when he was all duded up in his ten-gallon hat, cowboy boots and diamond-studded belt, especially when standing next to some torpedo from New York looking all slick in pinstripes and a fedora.
Alterie also loved to let loose like an outlaw in a saloon. Case in point: when Dean O’Banion was killed, Alterie told all and sundry, including the press, that he wanted to meet the killers out in the street somewhere and shoot it out, Western style. After this outburst the rest of the North Siders convinced Alterie to retire for a while—they had enough on their hands with Al Capone and didn’t need any extra scrutiny from the press and the police.
Alterie laid low for a while on his ranch then, punching cows and lassoing longhorns. But Two-Gun being Two-Gun, it didn’t take long before he got into an altercation or two. Shooting up the Denver Hotel, Alterie was arrested and after his conviction was banished from Colorado for a period of five years.
So Alterie headed back to Chicago. It was now 1933, and America was knee-deep in the Depression. Though the North Siders were still limping along, their power had been greatly depleted. Despite this, Alterie was able to slip easily once more into the life of a racketeer, making a tidy sum in the labour unions. But Alterie hadn’t counted on the Chicago Outfit. Though Capone was in jail, his mob had the city all sewn up and they weren’t looking to share their labour profits with Alterie.
On July 18, 1935, as Alterie and his wife were leaving their hotel, shots rang out from across the street. Alterie spun around, arms in the air, then fell to the ground, hit by a total of nine bullets. He died later that day on the operating table, a victim of an ambush, the very technique he had pioneered. Louis “Two-Gun” Alterie had gone to that big ranch in the sky.