What a failed robbery from 1951 tells us about Chicago crime

On July 9, 1951, three oddly dressed robbers approached a security truck owned by Brink’s while it was parked at the Bowman Dairy Company near Goose Island. The only thing standing between the shotgun-wielding criminals and the cash in the armored car was Julius Blanchart, a Brink’s security guard, and his two partners, Emmett Ebert and Theodore Kobylinski.

A shootout and a scuffle ensued; minutes later, two of the robbers were dead, while the third escaped in a getaway car with a fourth.

Lincoln Park resident Matt Ebert, grandson of Emmett, said his grandfather never talked about this wild story.

“My dad said he really didn’t know about it until much, much later, I think after [my grandfather] died,” Matt Ebert said. “It sounds like he didn’t really tell my grandma too much about it either.”

Matt’s cousin found an old newspaper article describing the particulars of the botched robbery, but the family wanted to know more, particularly about this strange detail: Each of the men wore butcher smocks. Chicago’s then-chief of detectives even told the media the men were part of a “Butcher Smock Mob” wanted for a string of recent robberies.

You’ve likely heard of big names in crime like Al Capone, Sam Giancana and the Chicago Outfit. And while the Butcher Smock Mob isn’t a household name, it is catchy, and their story is part of Chicago’s history of organized crime. Entangled in this history is that of Brink’s guard Emmett Ebert, a future Chicago police detective who would later investigate Chicago’s many mob figures.

Who was in the Butcher Smock Mob?

The butcher-smock gangsters were criminals individually but not exactly a successful gang.

We asked a half dozen historians if they’d ever heard of them and each said no.

“The newspapers are really the only direct line to access this stuff, because the police records are long gone,” said historian Rich Lindberg, author of “Gangland Chicago: Criminality and Lawlessness in the Windy City” and many other nonfiction accounts of Chicago gang history.

Fortunately for the Ebert family, the botched Brink’s robbery made lots of headlines in Chicago and all the way to Dothan, Ala.

“For a very brief period in 1951, they were quite prominent,” Lindberg said, pointing to evidence from local news clippings. “They held up several locations, but as quickly as they faded in, they faded out.”

The two deceased robbers were Rocco Belcastro and Frank Piazza. A third man, Michael Pranno, was identified and arrested two years later.

“They carried shotguns, which to me indicates a very high level of malevolence,” Lindberg said. “To carry a shotgun with the intention of using it, what you have here is a criminal psychopath.”

Piazza, the robber shot simultaneously by both Ebert and Blanchart, had a long criminal history, according to the Chicago Tribune. In 1931, when he was reportedly part of a Prohibition-era gang of juveniles called The 42 Gang, Piazza played a role in the killing of a Chicago cop.

“[It was an] adolescent gang, street gang, young kids, teenagers,” said Robert Lombardo, historian and author of the book “Organized Crime in Chicago: Beyond the Mafia.” Lombardo said promising members of The 42 Gang would often graduate into the various adult gangs in Chicago. One of The 42 Gang’s most notable members was future Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana.

The other gangster killed in the Brink’s job was Rocco Belcastro, who had an even longer rap sheet. He spent time at Pontiac, Joliet and Stateville prisons and even the infamous Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

Importantly, witnesses identified Belcastro at a similar robbery a month earlier, in which gunmen stole over $20,000 from two armed employees of a Thillens check-cashing service. At least one of the gunmen had on a “long white coat such as butchers wear,” according to a 1951 Tribune article.

So, was this actually a gang or were these just guys wearing butcher smocks while they committed a crime?

“My opinion is that they started out as a one-off,” said Lindberg, “and they got away with it the first time, so they planned a bigger score the second time. And the butcher smock thing is just — I think it’s just a gimmick that they used to disguise themselves.”

Future smock-wearers

Despite losing two accomplices, butcher smock-wearing banditry continued. A year later, two men with shotguns, wearing butcher smocks and bandanas, held up a UPS office in Stickney, while a third stood guard and a fourth waited in a dark sedan outside.

That job may have been pulled by some of the original members, but criminals in butcher smocks would appear in the local papers several more times in the decades afterwards, including a group of three near-teenagers in 1958.

“They’re copycats,” said Lindberg. “Quite likely they either knew the original Butcher Smock Gang or there might have been a network on the South Side where these original butcher smock guys became neighborhood legends.”

Chicago was “hog butcher for the world,” after all. Lindberg speculated that the original butcher-smock robbers may have picked up this bright idea from the stockyards, which weren’t far from where the robbers were from.

“If you think of just the idea of butchery, in some ways it’s professional violence,” said professor Alison Matthews David, who is studying the relationship between fashion and crime at Toronto Metropolitan University. “Maybe this gang used that kind of implicit threat or violence implied in butchering to make a statement, or to kind of create a gang affiliation.”

Whoever was pulling these crimes, Lindberg said if they made enough money, they would have had to pay a “street tax” to organized crime figures, even if they weren’t directly affiliated with the larger crime syndicate.

“That was a part of doing business in the heyday of the Chicago Outfit,” Lindberg said. “Say what you will about Al Capone in the ‘20s, the real strength and power of the mob did not surface until the Sam Giancana, Tony Accardo years in the 1950s and 1960s. If you were a lone-wolf independent thief in Chicago and you had an idea of making a lot of money without paying your respects to organized crime, you weren’t going to be long for the world.”

Connections to organized crime

Like other small-time criminals of this era, these men in butcher smocks were likely paying into the larger crime network. A couple threads from old newspaper accounts suggest that at least one member of the original Butcher Smock Mob had connections to the Chicago Outfit.

In a 1954 expose on Chicago’s “Mob Menace,” The Tribune published an interview with William A. Lee, the former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor and “the biggest man in the Chicago labor movement.” Lee recounted an incident in 1950 when he was shaken down by two gangsters in a dark sedan, who told him “We want in,” a loaded phrase in mob parlance. After the police showed him photographs, Lee identified one of the gangsters as Rocco Belcastro — one of the guys who would get killed wearing a butcher smock a year later.

If Lee’s story is to be believed, then Belcastro had to have ties to the larger crime syndicate. Threatening a union leader isn’t a “garden-variety” crime like a Brink’s truck robbery. It’s something you get assigned to do by a higher up.

“The deciding factor in what makes something organized crime is political corruption,” said Lombardo. “People fail to realize, but the Outfit in Chicago was tightly integrated into the political structure.”

And here’s where this story connects back to Emmett Ebert, one of the Brink’s guards: The other gangster identified by Lee was a getaway driver named Vincent Inserro, a career criminal “well-known in mob circles,” according to Lindberg, and an inducted soldier in the Chicago Outfit according to a membership chart from the Button Guys. The Tribune called Inserro a “particular friend” of Sam Giancana, the future leader of the Outfit who would one day be investigated and tailed by none other than former Brink’s guard and future Chicago police detective Emmett Ebert.

Emmett Ebert’s scrapbook story

In the days after the foiled robbery, Brink’s lauded their three guards as heroes. The company gave each of them cash rewards, gold wristwatches, and two week vacations.

Emmett Ebert’s heroism extends well beyond that July Monday in 1951: He won a Bronze Star paratrooping into German-occupied France during World War II. He single-handedly stopped an armed robbery at a West Side drugstore in 1964. And he tailed mob bosses like Sam Giancana for 25 years as a Chicago police detective.

Historian Rich Lindberg has a name for stories like the botched Brink’s robbery: “scrapbook stories,” because they’re remembered by some and forgotten by everyone else.

And sure, people may have forgotten about the Butcher Smock Mob — not a famous gang, but one that almost certainly had connections to organized crime. But the memory of Brink’s guard Emmett Ebert lives on, especially for his family members.

“It’s amazing to have as strong a sense of pride as I do for someone I never really met,” Matt Ebert said of his grandfather. “I think he was always one of those special people who was born to be a hero.”