23rd November Chicago gangster, Llewellyn Morris Humphreys, otherwise known as Murray the Hump, whose parents came from Carno, near Newtown, died of a heart attack, doing the hoovering on 23rd November 1965. He was one of the most successful of all gangsters and one of the most powerful men in the Chicago underworld. Murray the Humps, parents were finding it hard to make a living on their isolated hilltop farm and decided to emigrate to America in the hope of making it big in the New World. Their son, Llewellyn Morris Humphreys, was born in their first American home on North Street, Chicago in 1899. By the age of seven young Llewellyn had quit school and was making a living selling newspapers on the street corners. It was a rough and dangerous existence in a city where the newspaper sellers fought with fists and baseball bats for the best pitches. Luckily, Llewellyn found himself befriended by a local judge, Jack Murray, a man who took something of a benevolent and fatherly interest in the mischievous young boy. He soon adopted the judges name and became known as Murray the Hump He took to wearing his trademark camel-hair coats and moved out of newspaper selling, into the world of gangsters and hit men. To begin with he worked as a hired gun - one of his early victims was apparently Capones arch enemy Roger Touhy, blown apart by a shotgun blast shortly after his release from federal prison. Forging his way up the ladder, Murray the Hump was one of the planners behind the infamous St Valentines Day Massacre in 1929 when seven members of Bugsy Morans gang were lined up against the wall of a garage in North Street, the very street where the Hump was born, and machine gunned to death. After that Murray the Hump was the man who, when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, decided to channel the mobsters into the semi-respectable world of running bars, keeping saloons and distributing liquor. He also became involved in controlling the unions and by the early 1950s the mob was making nearly $100,000 dollars a year under his careful and diligent management. When Al Capone died in 1947 Murray the Hump succeeded him at the head of the organisation and introduced money laundering to the mob, investing money from crooked deals in what were otherwise legitimate businesses. He was also the man, who was responsible for the introduction of gambling to Las Vegas. However in 1965, the FBI were beginning to catch up with him and he was involved in a fist fight with them on November 23rd 1965. Later that evening, he was found dead by his brother, Ernest Humphreys, lying fully clothed and face down on the floor. He had apparently been vacuuming the room at the time of his death. Murray the Hump never forgot his Welsh roots and visited Wales in 1963 under an assumed name. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Humphreys
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:10:00 +0000
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