Bottoms Gang
| Founded by | Frank Hussey Anthony Foley |
|---|---|
| Founding location | St. Louis, Missouri, United States |
| Years active | 1905-1917 |
| Territory | St. Louis, Missouri, United States |
| Ethnicity | Irish-American |
| Membership (est.) | 50-60 (est. 1909) |
| Criminal activities | Organized crime |
| Rivals |
Egan's Rats St. Louis Police Department |
The Bottoms Gang was an American street gang that terrorized St. Louis, Missouri in the early 20th century. Their main criminal activities included voter intimidation, armed robbery, assault, illegal lottery, and murder. The gang's members were primarily Irish-American, with a handful of German and Missouri Creole hoodlums sprinkled in their ranks. The ferocious Bottoms Gang had a meteoric rise and fall in St. Louis's underworld. They feuded with the larger Egan's Rats gang and became notorious for going out of their way to attack members of the St. Louis Police Department. They made up for their lack of numbers with frenzied brutality and reckless nerve. Crippled by arrests and murders, the Bottoms Gang had ceased to exist by the time America entered World War I.
The Bottoms Gang had their roots in the political gangs that infested St. Louis city wards at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the most powerful was headed by John "Bad Jack" Williams, a former detective turned gangster who acted as an underworld liaison for Democratic political boss "Colonel" Ed Butler. Bad Jack Williams's crew was headquartered at a saloon at the corner of Nineteenth and Chestnut streets in a neighborhood of rickety tenements, saloons, brothels, and gambling dens. This rough district ran north of Union Station to about Cass Avenue. At a slightly lower elevation than the surrounding area, it was alternately known as the "Bad Lands" or the "Bottoms". It was from this latter nickname that the future Bottoms Gang would obtain its moniker.
By 1904, Missouri attorney general and future governor Joseph Folk had smashed the Butler Machine and with it the Williams Gang. Most of its members were either locked up or dead. One of the only survivors of Bad Jack's Williams' inner circle was 25-year-old Frank Hussey, who was a rarity in that he was one of the city's only gangsters to have attended college; he majored in political science and business at St. Louis University. That year, Hussey had been elected to the St. Louis House of Delegates at the Democratic Party in the Twenty-Second Ward. Not unlike other St. Louis political bosses, he began using local street toughs to help enforce his will. One of his key associates was his half-brother Lawrence "Lawler" Daley, who was active in local politics as well; Daley served as a member of both the Missouri State and St. Louis city Democratic committees.
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