What is a Chicago overcoat slang for?
A Chicago overcoat is a 1920s underworld term for a coffin.
During Prohibition, the taking of trucks full of illegal liquor became commonplace. When it happened, a gunman would say, “High, Jack,” to indicate how the driver should raise his hands.
FBI agent Melvin Purvis was known as the Man Who Shot Dillinger. Purvis never actually fired at John Dillinger in the 1934 shootout in Chicago that ended in the death of”public enemy number one.” But Purvis directed the trap and pointed Dillinger out to other agents and police.
Borrowing from eighteenth-century English penal procedures, southern states began using chain gangs before the Civil War and continued the practice for nearly a hundred years. Georgia became the last state to outlaw this method of punishment in the late 1940s. The decline of chain gangs was due as much to automation as to public protest:…
It was “Son of Sam” killer David Richard Berkowitz (b. 1953) who was known as the 44-Caliber Killer. From July 1976 to August 1977 he killed six people and wounded seven others with a .44-caliber gun.
While hanging may have occurred earlier in U.S. history, the practice of lynching was probably started by Colonel William Lynch of Virginia in the 1780s. Lynch organized a vigilante band aimed at ridding Pittsylvania County of its bad element. An 1836 editorial by Edgar Allan Poe discusses Lynch’s career.
An air dance is an execution by hanging. Other slang terms for hanging: air jig, air polka, and air rumba.