i am in a hurry right now so I didnt get the old post on this, but here some info I promised months back, Oh yeah , now I am in the music bussiness, book and promote bands, just a quick update , talk to you later my friends...


Sunday, October 30, 2005

By STEVE TARTER

of the Journal Star

It's one of the most celebrated names in city history. Trolley tours make note of it, while recently published books recount details of the family's reign.
No, it's not a prominent political family but rather the Shelton gang, criminals who operated in Peoria in the 1940s.

The very mention of the name summons up images of fedora hats, back-room shenanigans and guns.

The Shelton era in Peoria has been documented in "Brothers Notorious: The Sheltons" by Taylor Pensoneau, published in 2002, and "The Shelton Gang: They Played in Peoria," released earlier this year by Bill Adams.

The two books dissect the exploits of Carl and Bernie Shelton from slightly different perspectives. There were other Shelton gang members - people like Big Earl, who toiled on the farm by day and in his southern-Illinois gambling joint by night, and Roy, always in and out of prison, and Dalta, the non-criminal in the family - but it was Carl and Bernie who played in Peoria.

Pensoneau, a former reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reviews the Sheltons from their southern Illinois roots, while Adams covers the gang more from a Peoria perspective.

Aided in his research efforts by veteran St. Louis reporters who covered some of the gangland mayhem that went on in southern Illinois during Prohibition days, Pensoneau details the Sheltons' rise to power in Williamson County in a chapter titled "Bullets, Bombs and Tanks - And a Pile of Corpses."

The writer makes it clear that the 1930s were not a great time to be living in southern Illinois - anywhere near the Shelton gang.

"Gangs have beat up hundreds of people and have killed a great number for which no arrests have been made," stated Marshall McCormack, the mayor of Herrin, beseeching the Illinois governor to declare martial law in the region.

"(The Sheltons) were the dominant criminal figures in downstate Illinois, known statewide," Pensoneau said of the gang.

What added to their stature was the Depression-era mood, he said. "Gangsters, opposed to the establishment and banks, were often regarded as heroes," Pensoneau said.

Bill Adams, who writes a weekly history column for the Journal Star, points to 1938 as the year Carl Shelton came to Peoria.

Peoria's reputation as a "wide-open" town, a center for gambling and prostitution, was an attraction for the Sheltons, wrote Adams, crediting the gang with taking control of gambling in the city by the early 1940s.

"Carl was the head of the Shelton gang, while brother Bernie was his muscle man," he said.

"The Sheltons controlled most of the gambling houses, slot machines and punch boards (in the 1940s)," noted Adams.

But this view of Peoria's criminal past is hotly contested by another historian. Norm Kelly, whose most recent book, "Until You Are Dead," details 10 of Peoria's most celebrated murder cases, says the Shelton gang is getting away with murder in the image department.

"In the 1940s, Peoria had as many as 268 taverns doing business. Of these taverns, we had at least nine casinos. The owners


were not going to turn over those unbelievably lucrative businesses to some uneducated ex-convict pug like Bernie Shelton. Carl was a bit more businesslike, but they were still Prohibition-style gangsters, and Prohibition was over," Kelly said.

With its history of more than 100 years of gambling and prostitution, Peoria was a natural place for the gang at the time, he said. "The Sheltons came here to make money - not to be gangsters," Kelly said.

Bernie Drake, interim director for the Peoria Historical Society, believes the Sheltons had a presence in Peoria.

"Were they in control of City Hall - no. But were they a significant influence from 1940 to 1945? Yes - they had an impact on this town," he said.

City officials weren't necessarily corrupt when it came to the rampant gambling that existed in that era, Drake said.

"They just turned a blind eye. Mayor (Edward) Woodruff's liberal attitude towards gambling was that the best way to handle it was to tax it. If we'd been a little more inventive, we could have been Las Vegas," he said.

But the political climate changed in Peoria in 1945. That's when Mayor Carl Triebel, owner of the Ideal Troy dry-cleaning business, outlawed gambling in the city.

Pensoneau and Adams both describe the matter-of-fact meeting between Carl Shelton and Triebel after the ban was imposed. Shortly after Carl returned to his farm in southern Illinois, the brains of the Shelton gang was gunned down, both writers note.

That left brother Bernie in Peoria. One of the city's most colorful characters, Bernie was the horse-loving, bad-tempered, hard-drinking type.

"He spread money around. Anybody who did business with Bernie Shelton was a happy man. He used his reputation for being dangerous to his advantage. Was he dangerous? Of course he was," Kelly said.

Don Satchfield was a 12-year-old paper boy in 1948 who recalled Shelton as the proprietor of the Parkway Tavern on Farmington Road who always gave him a complimentary soda. "Bernie Shelton was one of my customers. He was always a nice man," he said.

One of the memories Satchfield has of Shelton was his involvement in a fight that erupted outside the tavern one morning. "I remember Bernie had this big black car and there was blood all over it - Bernie's blood," he said.

While Shelton survived the brawl, he met his end shortly after that in the same Parkway parking lot when a mystery gunman shot him down. That 1948 shooting marked a dramatic end to a dramatic period - the Shelton era in Peoria history.

Their activities in Peoria read more like fiction, said Adams, a statement that draws a knowing nod from Kelly.