The Secret Six

Kevin E. Meredith first covered crime in 1985 as a general reporter for The News of Orange County in Hillsborough, NC, a historic town with its fair share of armed robbery, hostage taking, and theft. As an award-winning reporter at the Savannah News-Press, he covered the military, local education, and election corruption. Since earning his MBA in 1994, he has focused his professional life on the sale of computer technologies, but has continued to write on diverse topics, including evolutionary psychology, history, and crime.

Introduction Part I: Damsel in a Burning City 1. The Case of the Extorted Debutante 2. A City on Fire 3. The Tenth Man 4. A Burning City Sparks a Nation's Hope Part II: First Cases of the Secret Six 5. Early Impact (and a Little Lying) 6. The Truth of the Secret Six 7. Shooting in the Dark 8. The Case of the Extorted Congressman 9. The New Top Cop, and the Case of the Pinochle Shootout 10. The Case of the Queer Actor 11. The Passion of William Speer Kuhn Jr. 12. Nolle Prossed Part III: The Secret Six vs. Al Capone 13. Al Capone Comes Home 14. Al Capone Goes South 15. Al Capone, Miami, and the "Chicago Plan" 16. Col. Randolph Meets the Kingpin Part IV: The War Continues 17. The Best Cases of 1931 18. The Best Cases of 1932 19. The Secret Six Conjures a National Kidnapping Monopoly 20. The Secret Six vs. the Kidnappers Part V: Lord of the Vigilantes 21. A Brief History of Vigilantism 22. A Modest Proposal 23. The Secret Six Were Neither Part VI: The Secret Six and the Cases of Infamy 24. The Case of the Deal with the Devil 25. The Case of the Crooked Cops 26. The Secret Six vs. Swanson 27. The Secret Six on Trial 28. The Case of the Two Bombs 29. The End of the Secret Six Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

"A public outraged by crime, demanding stricter law enforcement - sound familiar? In Chicago during the 1930s era of Al Capone, a group of millionaires funded and directed a posse of vigilantes. In The Secret Six, Kevin E. Meredith tells this long-neglected story of anticrime crusaders with ambitions of taking their vigilantism nationwide. Soon they were feckless laughingstocks who violated civil rights along the way. Meredith's study is scrupulously accurate, fair-minded, and alarming and entertaining at once."-James Merriner, author of Stumbling in the Public Square