Gangster Evangelist

From the oldtime saloon and penitentiary came many an oldtime evangelist--converted drunks and burglars who could denounce sin after knowing it firsthand. But the most modern and thorough| going sinners are organized. From gangland has yet to come a reformed Capone to make converts as efficiently as he used to machine-gun rival racketeers. Nearest thing to an ex-gangster evangelist is the well-fed, twinkling tub-thumper who was billed last week at a church in a down-at-heel section of Brooklyn as Lou Hill. "Former Hijacker, Gambler, Confidence Man," a Chicago hoodlum turned holy. High point of imaginative Lou Hill's career was strong-arming on a Chicago newspaper route with the late Dion O'Banion, who was later killed in his flower shop, supposedly by that former Brooklynite, Al Capone. In 1923, a fugitive from justice, Lou Hill staggered into a Springfield mission, heard a sermon which converted him. He says he returned to Chicago to give himself up but District Attorney Robert E. Crowe, impressed, turned him loose.*

In Brooklyn last week with Evangelist Hill was a character rarely seen now in city churches, an "Escaped Nun." Good-humored Lou Hill told of his son, a ''little tike who knows Jesus and rides up and down the street on his velocipede all day long singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers.'" Lou Hill likes to sing himself. In the Bible Church of hoodlum Cicero, Ill. he got himself photographed in an impromptu hymn sing (see cut) with four other gangsters turned evangelist: Bert Baker, onetime Capone man, Fred Jacover, "high class confidence man," Fred Ingersoll, "slickest automobile thief of them all," and Ralph Teter, "brains of the $350,000 Dearborn Station mail robbery."

U. S. evangelists find their circles narrowing, embracing smaller & smaller towns. Yet they keep on the job. Next month, with the evangelical season about over, most of them will congregate in Winona Lake, Ind. for their annual meeting. Lou Hill will be there. No shouter, no chair-smasher, he has considerable reputation. On the Winona Lake platform he will pinch-hit for the most famed evangelist of them all, old-time Billy Sunday, 69.

*Mr. Crowe (no longer State's Attorney) said last week that he had never heard of Lou Hill, that he would never have sent a gangster away, after such a story, with a "God-bless-you."

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