The Real Charlie
The film is a highly stylized and fictionalized version of the life and exploits of real-life coal miner turned gangster Shachna Itzik "Charlie" Birger. Born in 1881, Birger served in the United States Army from 1901 to 1904. After his honorable discharge he became a cowboy, a coal miner, then later a saloon keeper. In 1920, after the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution began the era of Prohibition when the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" was made illegal, Birger became a bootlegger. He was at war with the Shelton Brothers Gang for control of (illegal) alcohol sales across Southern Illinois until the Ku Klux Klan began to take over Williamson County. The rival gangs worked together to violently purge the KKK from the area, gunning down its local leaders in 1925 and 1926. With the Klan gone by late 1926, Birger returned to his fight with the Shelton Brothers. When he discovered that Joe Adams, the mayor of West City, Illinois, was assisting the Sheltons, Birger threatened Adams and ultimately ordered his murder. Birger was arrested in June 1927, convicted, and hanged in April 1928. He was to be the last man executed by public hanging in the state of Illinois. (Another Illinois convict, Charles Shader, was executed by hanging in October 1928 but that execution was not open to the public.)
Read more about this topic: Bad Charleston Charlie
Famous quotes containing the word real:
“If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,—and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)