Prohibition: Snoopers And Spotters 1923-1928 | Haunted Rockford

Originally published in “Murder And Mayhem In Rockford, Illinois” by Kathi Kresol. Copyright © 2015 Kathi Kresol.

Prohibition was a dangerous time in Rockford’s History. Police conducted
raids on houses and speakeasies, seeming to be always one step behind the rumrunners. By 1923, the police were desperately trying to catch up. They developed undercover men called “snoopers” and “spotters.” These men worked from the inside of the bootlegger business and reported back to the police on the makers and the sellers of the illegal liquids. Rival gangs also employed snoopers to gain inside knowledge of the other gangs’ activities.

But these undercover operators had a terrible side effect. When these men started reporting what they found, the gangs retaliated with gunfire. The first incident occurred on the corner of South Main and Morgan Streets. This area of Rockford was the center for the illegal activity associated with these gangs.

Believed to be one of the first victims was nineteen-year-old Adam Lingus. Lingus lived on South Winnebago Street and was known in the neighborhood for his disfigured face. He had a noticeable scar and a hair lip that made him very self-conscious. Lingus became a ward of the state when his parents forced him to leave their house. Phillip Oddo owned a cafe called Oddo Inn at 219 Morgan Street and supposedly helped Lingus by feeding him. On December 30, 1923, Oddo shot Lingus. Lingus lived for a while after the shooting and gave conflicting stories to the police. Phillip Oddo first claimed that an unidentified drunk man shot Lingus. Then after hours of intense questioning by the police, Oddo stated the shooting was an accident. He was cleaning the gun in the kitchen, and it discharged and hit Lingus in the side.

The .38-caliber bullet entered into his right side and passed through both of his lungs.

The police suspected they had the actual shooter in Oddo. What they could not discern was the motive. There was no known argument between the men, no love triangle and no jealousy issues. They could not find that any reason for Oddo to shoot Adam Lingus. Phillip Oddo was charged for Lingus’ murder, and at trial, acquitted, and he went back to running his cafe. He was arrested numerous times over the years for selling illegal liquor. A newspaper article from 1930 suggested that Adam Lingus was a spotter for the police and that Oddo had discovered this and shot him.

In 1925, there was another bad batch of hooch that circulated, but this time, the effects were worse than just making people sick. Near the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad line in Rockford, there was a sand house that was a popular hangout for hobos and transients near Kent Creek. Two of the men who rendezvoused there were John Wickler and William Waller. These men were old friends, and they had been unemployed for a while by November 1925. Apparently, the men had made a visit to their favorite bootlegger on November 4. Neither of the men could know that it would be their last. Police found John Wickler not far from the sand house around three o’clock that cold afternoon. Wickler was staggering around, and police initially thought he was intoxicated, so they took him to jail to sober up. Wickler soon started having seizures and died in his cell.

A short time later, an anonymous person called in a tip that there was a body inside the sand house near the railroad line. The police went to investigate and found William Waller inside. He was obviously dead, and the appearance of his body led officers to believe that he had been so for several hours. Despite an intense investigation, the makers of the poisonous liquor were never found.

Authorities in Rockford decided to go all out on for a “Make Rockford Dry by Christmas” campaign. The police department and the sheriff’s office combined forces and held a succession of raids of houses and known speakeasies. On December 2, authorities raided ten houses and arrested two men and two women. Police, working with spotters from Chicago, had gathered evidence for weeks until they had enough to act. Mr. and Mrs. Choppi of 144 Fourteenth Avenue, John Castree of 1224 South Main Street and Mary Pushca of 7 Magnolia Street were all arrested on charges of selling liquor. They pleaded guilty and were fined SI,000 each. During the raid, over one thousand gallons of wine plus three dozen bottles of beer were found at the Choppi house.

On the same day as these other raids, federal agents, working independently from the local authorities, raided the warehouse and then the home of William D’Agostin at 208 Fifteenth Avenue. First, the federals swooped down on the D’Agostin Soft Drink warehouse at 324 North Madison Street and collected eight hundred gallons of alcohol. Then they proceeded to the D’Agostin home, cut the telephone wires and arrested D’Agostin. Within fifteen minutes, the agents had taken D’Agostin into custody and confiscated seventy gallons of liquor. The Rockford Police Department, the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office and even State’s Attorney William D. Knight had no idea the raid was going to take place. The federal agents were in Rockford less than two hours for the whole process.

Some of the leaders of the bootlegging gangs met to discuss joining forces to protect themselves against the raids. But as sometimes happens, one party thought another party wanted too much of the pie and negotiations literally exploded into gunfire.

This time, it was the attempted murder of police spotters David Dotz, twenty-three, and his eighteen-year-old brother, Alex, on September 22, 1926. The Dotz brothers were called spotters deluxe because of the number of bootleggers they reported on.

The boys were leaving their house at 905 Sixth Avenue and climbing into their vehicle when they noticed a large sedan approaching. The four men in the passing car opened fire with their shotguns, and as a result, David was injured in his eye. He would later lose sight in this eye because of the wound. Alex was grazed in the head and took a full hit to his shoulder that broke his scapula. The car continued down Fifth Street toward Keith Creek, turned west onto Eighth Avenue and then onto Kishwaukee Street, where it was lost in traffic. Police found one of the firearms in a creek a few blocks down the street from the Dotz home.

Later, State’s Attorney Knight took David to a garage where a car matching the description was found. David identified the car and told the police that he recognized Phillip Caltagerone, George Saladino and Tom DiGiovanni as the shooters.

The next spring, the three men were put on trial for the attempted murder of Alex Dotz. The trial lasted fifteen days and ended in an acquittal for the men. It was described in the newspaper: “The trial of the three defendants was one of the most sensational and long drawn out criminal trials in the legal history of Winnebago County.”

After the trial, State’s Attorney Knight was quoted, “I have seen the signs of this growing boldness for some time and this shooting is what I’ve been expecting. It is time the people of Rockford awoke to the bootleg menace here. The time has come to choose to decide whether it will become another Cicero or Canton.”

The Dotz brothers were so frightened by the attack that they not only left Rockford but also Illinois and moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Later, they would be arrested for a robbery that occurred at the Kenosha Theater in which $ 1,000 was taken. The Dotz boys claimed they were framed. It was a hard fall for the once-legendary spotters.

On January 30, 1928, Larry McGill, a twenty-three-year-old watchman at the Joseph Behr junkyard, was shot. He was with a couple of friends in a Behr Company truck at a house on the corner of Keefe and Fifteenth Avenues. His companions were William Oberg and Joseph Kranski, both seventeen years old. The house that Larry was observing that evening was owned by Joseph Choppi.

As he lay dying, Larry McGill testified to Assistant State’s Attorney Karl Williams and Robert Nash at Rockford Hospital. Later, he would tell police that he was just curious and decided to watch the house. There was a betrothal party going on at the house, and McGill wanted to see who attended. The other two boys’ stories matched McGill’s.

According to Larry, two men and a woman left the house. One man, dressed in a long fur coat, spotted Larry and his companions sitting in the truck. The man approached the pickup truck, yelled profanity, slapped one of the men with McGill and then shot McGill. McGill told police that Vince “Big Jim” Diverno shot him. Diverno was known to police as a “rum runner, racketeer, and a general bad character.” He had also been questioned in Freeport as a suspect in other shooting and stabbing assaults.

Diverno owned a grocery store in Freeport, and police from both Rockford and Freeport searched for him. They followed tips in several different cities, and there were reports that police met with Diverno’s wife to work out a possible surrender. But it was all in vain, and authorities never found Diverno.

Police suspected that Larry was working undercover as a spotter for one of the local gangs, and his cover was blown when he got careless. They did not believe his story of just being curious about the party goers.

Coroner Fred Olson searched for family members to claim McGill’s body and had just about given up hope when McGill’s estranged wife appeared. She made arrangements for Larry’s body to be shipped to Cherry, Illinois, where she lived with their young son. Mrs. McGill promised Coroner Olson that she would bury Larry like “his parents would have wanted.”

Less than a week later, another murder, this one even more violent, took place. Tom Perra, thirty-five years old, also known as Redda, was once in the bootlegging business. He lived at 726 South Winnebago with his family. During the first week of January 1928, all of Perra’s bootlegging equipment was confiscated by the boss of one of the local gangs. A couple of days later, he decided to approach the police to offer to become a spotter for them. He was assigned to a partner who was working in Freeport. Perra moved his family to a new home at 810 Houghton Street on January 30, 1928. Later that day, he left the house, and his family never saw him alive again.

Perra went missing on Tuesday, January 30, but evidence showed he had only been dead a couple of days when he was found on Tuesday, February 6, 1928. Perra was the first Italian to turn into a spotter, and the man who worked with Perra in Freeport said that Perra was very spooked by the whole idea.

Perra’s body was found around 9:00 a.m. on February 6 by Ben Olsen, a farmer who lived near Cherry Valley. Olsen was headed into New Milford with his wagon when he made the gruesome discovery. Perra was found in the woods off Perryville Road “by the old rifle range,” one mile east of New Milford.

Perra was lying on his left side about fifty yards east of the road in the wagon ruts that lead through the woods. He had been shot in the head four times, and blood covered his face. The bullets had entered the back of Perra’s head on the right side and exited on the left side of the forehead. He had his arms up in front of him as if he was trying to protect his head. The gun used for the killing was found a short distance away from the body.

Another farmer, Frank Carlson, told police he heard several shots on Sunday morning. He did not report the gunfire because he thought it might be a hunter. Another farmer who lived in the area said he noticed cars coming and going in the woods, but that was usual for a Sunday. It seemed that the location was popular as a lover’s lane.

Perra’s wife, Rose, had been in bed since shortly before he went missing. She was expecting their next child. Rose gave birth, and police waited to tell her of her husband’s death because she was in serious condition after the birth of her fifth child. The Welfare Society and Visiting Nurses nursed the mother and baby while caring for the other four children. The family was left destitute by the death of Perra.

Police were searching for Walter Filkins, the man who was Perra’s partner for the spotter job in Freeport. They were hoping he could shed some light on the motive for the killing. They also suspected that the partner might have told local bootleggers of Perra’s true identity as a police spotter. Police never found Filkins, and Perra’s murder was never solved.

The bootleggers in Rockford got very nervous after the deaths of Perra and McGill. There were also rumors that federal agents were heading into Rockford for a “mop-up” campaign. The sellers were so cautious they turned customers away if there were any strangers in the area or the buyers were unfamiliar. There were also rumors that since it was suspected that some of the police force might be involved or at least warning the bootleggers of the raids, federal agents were working independently of local authorities.

The next time the guns roared, it was not a spotter they were aimed at. Gaetano DiSalvo, known as Tom DiSalvo, twenty-nine years old, owned a cafe at 1301 Seminary Street. He was a well-known racketeer who ended up at the wrong end of a gun. Tom’s body was found on September 2, 1928, on the 200 block of Morgan Street, inside a car he had borrowed from another alleged gang member, Peter Salamone. DiSalvo was slumped over the steering wheel of the fancy LaSalle Roadster with nine steel jacket bullets inside his body. Police had a difficult time with this investigation because no one wanted to share any information. They uncovered the fact that DiSalvo had moved to Rockford a year before his death from Cleveland. He still had a brother in Akron, Ohio.

DiSalvo was finely dressed and had a large diamond ring on his finger and a diamond stickpin in his tie. DiSalvo carried a bankbook with entries that added to over $1,000. He also had papers that declared his intent to apply for citizenship. The papers stated that he moved to the United States from Italy in 1923.

Police questioned DiSalvo’s supposed sweetheart, Lillian Tinney, who denied that they were lovers. Apparently, DiSalvo had a wife whom he left back in Italy. Lillian did admit she worked for him at his cafe and was in love with him. She claimed to have no idea why someone would kill him. Lillian was with DiSalvo on the night he was killed. DiSalvo took Lillian for a drive before dropping her off at home around six o’clock in the evening.

Others who remained nameless did admit to the police that DiSalvo was in the illegal alcohol business and that he had crossed another prominent local bootlegger and paid for it with his life. Another theory that was shared with police was that DiSalvo was killed as retaliation for the torture and murder of Tom Perra.

One thing was certain: when DiSalvo pulled his LaSalle Roadster up in front of the blacksmith shop on Morgan Street, there were at least two men waiting for him. One was probably on the sidewalk and engaged DiSalvo in conversation. Another man approached from the street and fired a bullet into the back of DiSalvo’s head. Both men opened fire and shot eight more bullets into DiSalvo’s body.

Only six people showed up for DiSalvo’s funeral. Even his girl, Lillian, stayed away The paper claimed that DiSalvo had no friends and no one mourned his death, except for maybe his wife in Italy, who, not knowing of his brutal shooting, waited for his return.

Sources:
Rockford (IL) Daily Register Gazette. “Hint Gambling Is Motive in Local Slaying,” October 12, 1925.
___________. “Take Alky in Night Raid.” December 3, 1925.
___________. “Tragedy Ends Scuffle Over Unloaded Gun.” December 31, 1923.
___________. “Trap Four in Pre-Holiday Liqour Raids.” December 3, 1925.
Rockford (IL) Republic. “Big Jim Diverno Hiding in Cicero, Police Hear.” March 9, 1928.
___________. “David Dotz Spends Morning on Stand.” May 12, 1927.
___________. “Fear More Liquor Gunfire Here.” September 23, 1926.
___________. “Gangland Code Seals the Lips of Girl Witness.” September 5, 1928.
___________. “Gangland Guns Blaze Death to Racketeer.” September 4, 1928.
___________. “Hootch Sells at $7.00 a Pint.” September 29, 1920.
___________. “Nine Shots Fired into Man’s Body.” September 4, 1928.
___________. “Not Guilty Verdict in Three Hours.” May 27, 1927.
___________. “Oddo Swears Killing Was Accidental.” February 7, 1924.
___________. “Pals Desert Murdered Racketter at Funeral.” September 8, 1928.
___________. “Rockford Has Seven Unsolved Deaths on Records.” August 17, 1930.
___________. “Search for Slain Man’s Pal Futile.” February 7, 1928.
___________. “Sheriff Raids Three Alleged Liquor Resorts.” May 9, 1931.
___________. “Shotguns Roar in War Against Booze.” September 23, 1926.
___________. “Truckload of Liquor Seized.” November 19, 1925.
___________. “Victims Taken for a Ride and Shot to Death.” February 6, 1928.
___________. “Wife Promises Decent Burial for Slain Man.” February 3, 1928.