Capone's Chicago- Louis Two-Gun: A Headline GangsterHe was a most outlandish man.
Perhaps in the final moments, he had a fleeting glimpse of the horse he murdered, the men he had killed, his glorious days on the dude ranches in Colorado as he played at being a cowboy. The money, the jewels, the raucous lifestyle.
Maybe it was just the gathering darkness, the dull ache of end of life, and then it was all gone.
Born in California, he dies in Chicago, a city filled with a miasma of violence, lingering over the lake and across the avenues and streets, a storm always in wait. He’s there in the boom-town years, when boom literally means the sound of gun-fire and the noise of falling bodies.
Alphonse Capone and the gathering of gangsters, a cosmopolitan brocade of Polish and Irish and Italian and Jewish gunmen, all searching for their piece of the Windy City’s blanket of opportunity. For Louis Alterie in the gloaming of a confoundable life, Chi-Town will only bring the wrong comforter, heavy with noise and deadly with rhythm.
Before anything else, he was a headline gangster.
A man with so many nicknames it’s hard to keep up: Jack Verain, Diamond Jack, Two-Gun Louis, Clyde Hayes, State and Madison Alterie, Frank Ray, Lew Alteries, are some of them listed in documents and newspaper reports.
Leland Varaine, sometimes called Lee, maybe always yearned to be a cowboy. He was born in August 1886, (his death certificate claims August 1885 and the 1900 census 1891) to one, Charles W. allegedly of European descent, French, maybe a bit of Spanish, and a distant relative of Napoleon Bonaparte. His mother, Mary Lincoln Brown, of Irish descent, had nine other children with her husband who ranched in Hell Hollow, a valley in Mariposa County in Northern California.
Read the entire story about Louis Alterie on Gangsters Inc:
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/louis-two-gun-a-headline-gangster[b][/b]
