Shaking old branches

Hi neighbors. The other night I was watching a documentary on television about Al Capone, aka, Scarface. Well, in truth, I wasn't really "watching" it. I was flipping through channels looking for something to catch my eye.

It was my ear that got caught. I heard the two words "Isham" and "Randolph" together. I put down the remote and tuned in with my full attention. The actual name was Robert Isham Randolph and he was one of the group of businessmen who formed the Secret Six. This was a group of good honest men who wanted the men like Capone to stop making them take big losses in business.

The event that triggered the formation of the Secret Six was the shooting of a building contractor's superintendent, Philip Meagher, on Feb. 5, 1930, at the construction site of the Lying-In Hospital in Chicago. The superintendent's employer went to the Chicago Association of Commerce demanding action. The CAC's president, Colonel Robert Isham Randolph, shortly after announced that he was the spokesman of a committee formed to prevent and punish crime. Randolph said the members of the committee did not want to reveal their names. When asked by Doherty how many there were, Randolph replied, "half a dozen."

Of the Secret Six, in his book "The Untouchables," Eliot Ness says this, "These six men were gambling with their lives, unarmed, to accomplish what three thousand police and three hundred prohibition agents had failed miserably to accomplish: the liquidation of a criminal combine which paid off in dollars to the greedy and death to the too-greedy or incorruptible."

It was Robert Isham Randolph's influence that got Eliot Ness the job that made him famous.

The Secret Six handled 595 cases, aided in 55 convictions, with sentences totaling 428 years. Fines of $11,525 had been paid, and they recovered $605,000 in bonds and $52,280 in merchandise. The Secret Six handled 25 kidnapping and extortion cases in which nine convictions were made.

In a July 30, 1931, interview in The Chicago Herald Examiner Al Capone was reported as saying, "The Secret Six has licked the rackets. They've licked me. They've made it so there's no money in the game."

This guy Randolph sounded like some kind of Iron Man leading the Avengers to me.

I quickly checked my database hoping he was related; but no luck. Then I did some Google searches and found out he was a descendant of Mary Isham Randolph. And she is an ancestor!

Now I will have to dig deeper and find out more about the gangland world of early 1900s Chicago and how my relative (maybe) helped clean up the Chicago streets.

It's nice to know people can defeat evil with just banding together and tweaking the law in their favor. Of course that works better if you are rich and powerful to begin with. I wonder where all that money went? Oh well.

Wouldn't it be cool to have a real "superhero" in the family? Every family needs some bragging rights.

I don't know if maybe cousin Robert Isham Randolph would appreciate knowing that no matter how hard he fought Prohibition in the 1920s -1930s it didn't dissuade my grandfather Randolph from running a still in Kentucky.

Grandpa Randolph managed to avoid the "Revenu'ers" and get out of town before getting arrested when his backwoods moonshine still was discovered. Family tradition states he gave Grandma all his cash and told her he would send for her when he got a job in Ohio. Although he didn't get a job making whiskey in Ohio, he did keep the bathtub full of homemade beer.

Maybe it was good fortune that they didn't attend any family reunions in Chicago!

Until the next time friends, remember, that no matter what limbs grow from your family tree; who you are is pretty much up to you.