The garlic assassins
QUESTION
Is it true that prohibition-era gangsters covered their bullets in garlic? If so, why? This practice is thought to have been brought to America by mafia thugs Albert Anselmi and John scalise who left italy together sometime around 1920, fleeing murder charges.
They ended up in Chicago and went to work as enforcers for the Genna brothers and later for Al Capone.
Anselmi and scalise believed that rubbing bullets in garlic would assure a kill, since garlic was poisonous when in the blood system and would finish the victim off if the gunshot didn’t. Precisely where this notion came from is uncertain, but garlic and onions are known to be toxic to dogs and cats (they damage red blood cells and cause anaemia) so this might be the source.
There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that the practice caught on. in 1924, Al Capone and his mentor John ‘Papa Johnny’ Torrio had bootlegger Dion O’Banion gunned down in a flower shop. This put them in danger from O’Banion’s allies, in particular ‘hymie’ Weiss and George ‘Bugs’ Moran, a violent and unstable prohibition gangster who got the nickname ‘Bugs’ because everyone thought he was nuts or ‘buggy’.
in January 1925, Torrio and his wife Ann left their car to walk to the door of their Chicago apartment block after a shopping trip, with Torrio walking behind carrying the packages.
Weiss and Moran pulled up and, thinking Torrio was still in the car, fired wildly, wounding the chauffeur. Catching sight of Torrio, they shot him in the chest and neck, then his right arm and groin. Moran held a gun to Torrio’s temple and pulled the trigger, but the magazine was empty.
The police arrived in the nick of time and reported Torrio mumbling about ‘pungent’ bullets. As he was being rushed to hospital he shouted to the medics: ‘Cauterise it! cauterise it!’, thinking this would be some sort of antidote. he survived, anyway.
in 1928, when Anselmi and scalise were working for Capone, ‘ Diamond Joe’ Esposito, who wore a $50,000 diamondstudded belt, ignored Capone’s threat to ‘get out of town or get killed’ and police reported that he was gunned down with 50 garlic-tipped bullets.
in fact, garlic would not have had any such effect: it’s been used for years as a disinfectant. Rubbing the bullets in garlic merely sterilised them. Despite this, the practice seems to have continued in sicily for some time. in a mafia trial in 1958, U.s. narcotics agent Martin Pera stated that of the 14 assassinations committed in sicily between 1955 and 1958, most were committed with bullets rubbed in garlic.
William Caspar, Edinburgh.
QUESTION
I have read that only one Roman Emperor was ever held as a prisoner of war. Who was this? PUBliUs licinius Valerianus, Roman emperor from 253 to 260, was born to a noble senatorial family at the end of the 2nd century AD. Details of his early life are elusive apart from his marriage to Egnatia Mariniana with whom he had two sons: later emperor Gallienus and Valerianus Minor.
Under his predecessor Gallus (emperor from 251 to 253), licinius Valerianus was the commander on the Upper Rhine and was summoned to bring the northern armies to assist in Gallus’s struggle against the rival emperor Aemillian. he arrived too late to save Gallus but managed to avenge and succeed him.
As Emperor Valerian, he vigorously persecuted the Christians, executing among others Bishop Cyprian of Carthage and the popular martyr Bishop sixtus ii of Rome.
To help control his sprawling empire, Valerian appointed his son Gallienus as emperor in the West while he marched east to repel a Persian invasion. But his attempts to negotiate personally with Persian King shapur i ended in failure when he was captured in June 260 and suffered the ignominy of being the only Roman emperor to become a prisoner of war.
his fate as a PoW is uncertain. lactantius, Christian adviser to Emperor Constantine, a virulent anti-Persian, maintained that Valerian was subjected to the greatest insults by his captors; in particular he was said to have been used as a human footstool by shapur when mounting his horse.
After three or four years of such degradations, shapur was said to have forced Valerian to swallow molten gold, then had the unfortunate captive skinned and his skin stuffed with straw and preserved as a trophy in the main Persian temple.
in about 1521, hans holbein the Younger drew The humiliation Of Emperor Valerian, a design for a mural for the Council Chamber of the Town hall in Basel, featuring Valerian being used as a footstool. it was designed to remind councillors of the need for good government and warn against the abuse of power. The piece was never used but a pen and ink draft still exists.
Anna Smith, Banbury, Oxon.
QUESTION
The word ‘awful’ originally meant ‘awe-inspiring’: what other words have changed their meaning over time? The phenomenon of a word or phrase changing meaning over time is known as ‘ semantic spread’ and the English language has many examples, including bully — originally a good man/a team player. A commander in Victoria’s Navy might have said ‘i have an excellent crew . . . each one is a bully boy’. The expression ‘ bully for you’ echoes the original meaning of the word. Others include:
Without: outside, eg: ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall.’
Harlot: A young man about town, often of aristocratic background.
Dainty: Being high born but outside the aristocracy.
Hardly: Very hard: ‘The green team and the blue team were equally matched but the blue team played hardly and won the game.’
Shambles: Where animal slaughterers practised their trade.
Told off: a military term to mean one or two men being separated from the main body to perform a specific task, eg: ‘Three men were told off to collect firewood while the remainder of the platoon erected tents.’
When a word suffers semantic spread it generally assumes a lower moral value. At the moment the word ‘professional’ is a victim of semantic spread and is increasingly being used to mean ‘a job well done’.
My friend, who is a white collar worker, built a small brick wall in his garden. Another man viewed the finished wall and described it as ‘very professional’, causing my heart to sink.
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