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Brothers Notorious: The Sheltons, Southern Illinois' Legendary Gangsters. By Taylor Pensoneau. (New Berlin, Illinois: Downstate Publications, 2002. Pp. X, 310. Photographs, index. Paper, $15.95).
The 1951 report of the Kefauver committee-a Senate committee investigating the influence of organized crime-dated the rapidly rising influence of criminal syndicates to the Prohibition era of the 1920s and stated that, in the entire country, the criminal gang wars in St. Louis and southern Illinois "reached a peak in bloodiness unparalleled in United States crime history." (25) And at the center of this maelstrom stood the Sheltons, a trio of brothers from Wayne County, Illinois, who formed a gang that dominated, at various times, East St. Louis, Herrin, Peoria, and Fairfield, and whose control of illegal activity in southern Illinois was so total that even Chicago's Capone gang kept a respectful distance. In Brothers Notorious, Taylor Pensoneau, former Illinois political correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, narrates the story of Earl, Carl, and Bernie Shelton, from their origins in rural, late-nineteenth-century Wayne County, through their rise to power and their glory days in the early 1930s, to their eventual downfall and its aftermath in the late 1940s. Much of the story has been told before, and better, in such books as Paul Angle's Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness and Gary DeNeal's A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, but Pensoneau's is the first book-length study focusing specifically on the Sheltons, and thus fills a significant niche.
The Sheltons' father, Ben, came to rural Wayne County in the late 1800s, part of a larger migration of people moving into the area from the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee. In the new location, as in the...