While both Minneapolis and St Paul were knee-deep in crime in the 1930s, it’s usually suggested
that the Irish mob was more prevalent in St Paul, while the Jewish gangs controlled the streets of
Minneapolis. This was generally the case, but there were Jewish gangsters in St Paul as well. Leon Gleckman, for instance, was the major bootlegger there until the very end of Prohibition. Likewise, Tommy Banks, an Irish mobster, controlled much of the illegal liquor racket in Minneapolis. Ultimately, though, Bank’s prominence would be dimmed by a young upstart, a kid, named appropriately enough, Kid Cann, who would eventually become the most famous mobster in Minneapolis history.
Kid Cann was born Isadore Blumenfeld in Romania in 1900, and his family emigrated to America and Minneapolis when he was 2 years old. He grew up selling newspapers on downtown corners and made spare change by bringing coffee to prostitutes in Minneapolis whorehouses. When his father died in 1923 he turned to the most lucrative cash a poor kid could make during Prohibition, in bootlegging of course. He quickly learned the business and made a bundle of money, and in the process formed his organization, the “Minneapolis Combination”. After warring with Tommy Banks and his Irish gang, the two of them decided in the early 1930’s to divvy up the business and form an alliance, allowing them both to focus on providing refreshments to thirsty customers. While making a fortune in the liquor industry, Cann also became known for constantly eluding the law. In trial after trial for various crimes through the next few decades he had an uncanny ability to convince juries he wasn’t as bad as his prosecutors made him out to be.
In 1924 he was arrested and tried for the murder of a taxi driver, evidently shooting him dead after a heated discussion about a girl. A grand jury decided the killing was an accident. In 1928 he was arrested for the murder of a motorcycle cop at Minneapolis’s Cotton Club restaurant. The smug gangster rejoiced as he was let go and the case dismissed, for lack of any direct evidence linking him to the shooting.
Eventually in 1934, in an Al Capone-like IRS sting, the FBI got to Kid Cann’s bookkeeper, Conrad
Althen, and gathered enough accounting evidence to convict him of a lesser charge, conspiracy
to operate a still. It was enough to lock him up for a year. In the meantime however, Cann made sure his traitor bookkeeper paid the price; Althen was found dead and riddled with bullets in a
northern suburb, shoved out of a car and ripped to pieces. After Kid Cann did his time, he
went back to work. Now that Prohibition was over he stepped over Tommy Banks and expanded
into legitimate liquor businesses, controlling the liquor licenses that were issued in the City of
Minneapolis and making a healthy profit on each one. He also was able to keep a firm ownership
of Minneapolis’s underworld by keeping a close friendship with Meyer Lansky, a mob leader who
started in New York with Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano.
The mid 1930’s were a busy and profitable time for Kid Cann’s outfit. He had police and
politicians on the payroll, he was teamed with powerful out of state partners, and Tommy Banks, his Irish rival was muscled out of the picture after Prohibition ended, leaving Cann in a powerful position. Most of the city lived either in fear of him, or were on his payroll, and not many had the courage to point out how corrupt city politics were and how Kid Cann made a mockery of civic virtue.
One man however, a long time journalist and founding member of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor
party named Walter Liggett, had the moral backbone to stand up to the hypocrisy. He ran a
small print shop and publishing company on Lake Street, producing a community newspaper to
pay the bills, and a paper called the Midwest American to do his crusading. Of primary
importance to Liggett was pointing out what he perceived to be corruption in the governor’s office. Liggett thought Floyd B. Olson was manipulating the Farmer-Labor party for his own interests, using it as a springboard to a US Senate Seat and national exposure. Of local interest were the close relationships between Minneapolis cops, politicians and criminals. When bribes didn’t work Kid Cann decided that Liggett was shining too bright a light on their local interests. After a severe beating by some of Cann’s hoods in an ambush, Liggett still managed to get his paper out, even more bent on revealing the city’s true dirty secrets , and first hand accounts of gangsters gone wild in the streets. When brutal beatings didn’t stop the presses, Walter Liggett, would meet a date with destiny in an alley, in 1935.
On December 9th at about a quarter to six in the evening, Liggett, his wife Edith and ten-year-old daughter Marda had just come home from the grocery store. They parked in the alley, behind the apartment building they lived in, which still stands at 1825 2nd Ave S in Minneapolis. He let the car idle just underneath their second story window. Walter got out of the car first, and another vehicle slowly pulled up next to theirs. Out from the window someone carefully aimed a Thompson machine gun, and when the shooting was over Liggett lay dead in the frozen alley, his body filled with five bullets in a coldly professional job, gunned down in front of his family. Each bullet would have been fatal on its own.
Mrs. Liggett identified Kid Cann out of a police lineup along with a couple of other witnesses at
the scene who also claimed they recognized the man as Kid Cann; regular citizens with no
reason to lie and put themselves in revenge’s way. But Cann conveniently had an alibi; the
boys down at Garfinkle’s Artistic Barbershop on Hennepin Avenue insisted he had been getting a
haircut at the exact same time the murder occurred. Cann walked after a jury found him not
guilty. While it could have been Cann, another theory is that it might have been someone who
looked like him brought in to do the job. In fact Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s right hand man in
Chicago had been seen in town just days before Ligggett’s murder. Nitti’s facial features were
strikingly similar to Cann’s.
Ultimately the FBI would set their sights on bringing down Kid Cann, but they’d have to wait
decades to do it. Even a progressive, crime fighting mayor named Hubert Humphrey, elected in
1944 – couldn’t eliminate Kid Cann’s influence, which by this time had extended into gambling
joints and an extensive bookmaking network. While Humphrey was successful in getting rid of
small time bookies taking bets in alleys and driving out street gambling, it ultimately allowed Kid
Cann’s large professionally run operations to flourish even more. The INS had had success deporting foreign born mobsters back to their native-born countries instead of imprisoning them, and Kid Cann was a top prospect for their deportation program in the 1950’s. Hoover still had it in for him too, and he was hounded relentlessly by the FBI, constantly under surveillance and investigation. Finally, in 1959, the Feds found the damning evidence they needed to bring him down. He was busted for transporting a girl across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. Sentenced to eight years in Leavenworth prison, he served until his
parole in 1964, and escaped the cold winters of Minnesota forever, preferring to live out a
retirement in Miami Beach, Florida. He had plenty of money to make the transition, having
invested heavily in Florida real estate and was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He finally
died in 1981, at age 80, of heart disease.
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