THE FIDDLER'S FORTUNE © (Part 1)

[Trlewis48]

THE FIDDLER'S FORTUNE ©

Samoots Amatuna and the Buried Money of Pell Lake

By T. R. Lewis

A SHAVE BEFORE THE OPERA​

On the evening of Tuesday, November 10, 1925, a slim, carefully dressed young man walked into a barbershop near the corner of Halsted Street and Roosevelt Road on Chicago's Near West Side. He was twenty-seven years old. He was known for his silk shirts, and by most accounts he was on his way to the opera that night. He settled into the chair for his usual shave and manicure.

Two men came through the door behind him. They fired eight shots between them. Accounts of the wounds differ. One historian writes that a single bullet struck him, entering his neck and leaving his back below the shoulder blade. Wikipedia's account says he was shot twice in the chest. Either way, the man in the barber's chair never made it to the opera. He died at about two o'clock on the morning of Friday, November 13, after plans for a deathbed wedding to his fiancée had to be abandoned.

His name was Samuzzo Amatuna. Chicago's newspapers called him Samoots, and they also called him the Beau Brummel of Little Italy. For less than six months he had been president of the Unione Siciliana, the Sicilian fraternal society that had become the richest political prize in the Chicago underworld. He was the third man to hold the office in a single year, and the second of them to be shot.

Ninety years later his name, misspelled as Sam Anatuna, turns up in lists of lost treasures. The most recent version of the story says he was a Prohibition outlaw who pulled daring heists, hid more than seven hundred thousand dollars in loot near a place called Briarwood Glen, and went to prison without revealing where it was. Almost none of that matches what is known about him. But underneath the newest version lie two older ones, and at least one of them points to a real place, at a real time, where a frightened Chicago gangster might well have buried his money.

THREE VERSIONS OF ONE LEGEND​

The Amatuna treasure story has changed every time it has been retold. Before testing any of it, it helps to lay the versions side by side.

	Old treasure magazines	Later online lists	Current online article
Name	Sam Amatuna	Sam Anatuna	Sam Anatuna
Who he was	Gangster	Head of the Unione Siciliana	Outlaw known for daring heists
What he hid	$50,000 in paper currency wrapped in canvas	$20,000, plus $50,000 in cash, gold, and jewels	Cash, jewelry, and other stolen items
Where	North of Pell Lake, Wisconsin	North of Pell Lake along U.S. 12, and along Route 66 near Briarwood Glen in Cook County	Near Briarwood Glen
When	The 1930s	During Prohibition, before a meeting with Capone	The 1920s, after a big robbery
Source named	None	His chauffeur	None
How it ended	Not stated	Shot in a Chicago barbershop	Caught and imprisoned
Value claimed	$50,000	$70,000 in all	Over $700,000 today

Table 1. The three published forms of the Amatuna legend. The oldest form survives in a 2005 TreasureNet post quoting unnamed treasure magazines.​

The oldest form available online comes from a 2005 post on the TreasureNet forum in which a moderator copied leads from what he called old treasure magazines. Under Walworth County, Wisconsin, the entry reads: "Gangster, Sam Amatuna, buried $50,000.00 in paper currency wrapped in canvas in the 1930's north of Pell Lake." No magazine title or author is given.

The middle version appears on the TreasureSeekr and Detecting School websites. It splits the money into two caches, twenty thousand dollars north of Pell Lake along U.S. Highway 12 and fifty thousand dollars in cash, gold, and jewels along Route 66 near Briarwood Glen in Cook County, south of Chicago. It gives Amatuna's motive, fear that Al Capone would take his operations and his money, and it names a source, Amatuna's chauffeur. It ends with Amatuna shot in a Chicago barbershop before he could dig anything up.

The newest version, the one reproduced on advertising-supported list sites in the last few years, keeps Briarwood Glen and drops Pell Lake. It turns Amatuna into a robber of wealthy people and businesses, sends him to prison, and raises the value to more than seven hundred thousand dollars. Each retelling has moved further from the record. The middle version, with its chauffeur and its fear of Capone, is the one that fits the facts of Amatuna's life best.

HOW AMATUNA BECAME ANATUNA​

The way the legend has drifted is itself a clue to its history. The 2005 TreasureNet entry spells the name correctly, Sam Amatuna. Somewhere between that post and the online lists that followed it, the m became an n. Once Anatuna appeared on one popular site, other sites copied it, and the misspelling now outnumbers the real name in treasure searches.

The organization he led has fared even worse. TreasureSeekr calls it the Unione Sicilone. Detecting School calls it the Union Silicone Group, a phrase that would have baffled every Sicilian in Little Italy. The newest version drops the organization entirely and turns Amatuna into a freelance robber, because without the Unione the story needs some other explanation for his money.

Each step in that drift follows a familiar pattern. A writer working from a secondhand summary misreads a word, fills a gap with a guess, or rounds a number upward to make the story more exciting. The next writer copies the result and adds a guess of his own. After three or four rounds, the legend describes a man who never existed. That is why the oldest version is worth the most effort to find. It is the one with the fewest layers of guesswork between the reader and whatever the chauffeur actually said.

THE BEAU BRUMMEL OF LITTLE ITALY​

Samuzzo Amatuna was born in Sicily, in the port town of Pozzallo according to Wikipedia, on August 3, 1898. Other sources give his birth year as 1899. His family brought him to Chicago, where they settled in the Italian neighborhood of the Near West Side, the district the city called Little Italy.

He was not an ordinary street tough. The crime historian Allan May describes him as a union musician and an accomplished violinist with a fine lyric singing voice, a young man equally at home with a fiddle and a revolver. He dressed beautifully. May reports that he owned about two hundred monogrammed silk shirts. One story told about him, which may have grown in the retelling, says that when a Chinese laundry ruined one of those shirts, Amatuna took his revenge by shooting the laundryman's horse.

By the age of twenty-five, according to Wikipedia, Amatuna held several bank accounts and owned businesses, including the Bluebird Cafe on Halsted Street. That detail matters to the treasure question. A man with bank accounts and businesses had places to put money other than a hole in the ground, at least until the day he came to believe those places were no longer safe.

THE GENNA MACHINE​

Amatuna's career was built inside the organization of the Genna brothers, six Sicilian brothers from Marsala who ruled bootlegging in Little Italy. James was the leader. Angelo, called Bloody Angelo, was the enforcer. Mike, called The Devil, handled the most violent work. Antonio, known as The Gentleman, stayed behind the scenes, Sam handled the politicians, and Peter ran a saloon.

In 1919 the Gennas obtained a federal license to manufacture industrial alcohol, and once Prohibition took effect they sold that alcohol illegally. Their real factory was the neighborhood itself. Families across Little Italy ran small stills, the alky cookers, in their homes and basements, and the Gennas collected the product, cut it, colored it, and sold it. It was a profitable business, and Amatuna was one of the men who kept it running.

He started early. In 1916, at seventeen, he was a messenger for the Gennas, and on February 21 of that year he is said to have earned full membership by shooting a man named Frank Lombardi outside a saloon. By the time Prohibition began he was a leading member of the gang, overseeing alcohol production and serving as bodyguard to Angelo Genna. He was suspected in several killings tied to the political wars of the Nineteenth Ward, where Alderman John Powers and his challengers fought for control of the Italian vote. Allan May places him among the men involved in the 1921 killings of Paul Labriola, murdered on March 9 of that year, and Harry Raimondi. He was never convicted of any of them.

That record already contradicts the newest form of the legend. Amatuna was not a bank robber or a highway outlaw, and there is no record of him robbing wealthy people or businesses. He was a bootlegger, an enforcer, and in the end a political boss. Nor was he ever caught and imprisoned for anything. He died free, and he died young.

THE PRIZE CALLED THE UNIONE​

To understand why Amatuna died, and why he might have hidden money in the weeks before, it helps to understand what he had taken. The Unione Siciliana began as a fraternal society for Sicilian immigrants. Like many such societies, it sold life insurance to its members, held dances and banquets, and helped newcomers find work and housing. By the early twentieth century it also controlled much of the Italian vote in Chicago, and votes were what Prohibition-era gangs needed most. A gang with friends in City Hall and the ward offices could keep its stills running and its trucks moving.

Control of the Unione brought money, patronage, and the loyalty of thousands of members. It also brought danger. Antonio D'Andrea, an earlier president, was assassinated in May 1921 in the middle of a violent struggle over the Nineteenth Ward. Mike Merlo, who followed him, managed to keep the peace for three years, partly through his friendship with Al Capone's mentor Johnny Torrio and partly through sheer force of personality. When Merlo died, every ambitious Sicilian in the city understood that the presidency was open, and every gang leader in the city understood that whoever held it would matter.

THE YEAR EVERYTHING FELL APART​

For three years the Unione Siciliana was held together by its president, Mike Merlo, who kept an uneasy peace among the city's Sicilian gangs and Al Capone's organization. Merlo died of cancer on November 8, 1924. Two days later, Dean O'Banion, boss of the North Side Gang, was shot in his flower shop, and the peace Merlo had kept fell apart with him.

Angelo Genna claimed the Unione presidency. On May 27, 1925, after a high-speed car chase, he was shot to death by the North Siders. Mike Genna was killed in a gunfight with Chicago police on June 13. Antonio Genna was ambushed and shot on July 8. The surviving brothers, James, Sam, and Peter, left Chicago. In less than seven weeks the Genna organization had lost its leaders and the presidency of the Unione was empty again.

The violence of 1925 did not belong to the Gennas alone. Johnny Torrio, who had built the South Side organization that Capone would inherit, was shot and badly wounded outside his home in January 1925 and soon left Chicago, turning the business over to Capone. The North Side Gang, now led by Hymie Weiss and Vincent Drucci, blamed the Gennas and Capone for O'Banion's death and set out to kill as many of them as they could. Little Italy, where the Gennas' alky cookers bubbled in hundreds of kitchens, sat squarely in the line of fire.

Amatuna filled it himself. According to May, he hired two bodyguards, Edward Zion and Abraham Goldstein, walked into the Unione's headquarters, and declared himself president without the approval of the national organization. Wikipedia notes that the move upset Al Capone. After Amatuna's death the office went to Antonio Lombardo, a Capone ally. It was a bold step for a twenty-six-year-old. It also put a price on his head.

A CALENDAR OF 1925​

The whole Amatuna story, from the death of Mike Merlo to the murder of his bodyguards, fits inside about twelve months. Laid out in order, the dates show how little time Amatuna had to hide anything and when he was most likely to have done it.

Date	Event
November 8, 1924	Unione president Mike Merlo dies of cancer.
November 10, 1924	North Side boss Dean O'Banion is shot in his flower shop.
January 1925	Johnny Torrio is shot outside his home and soon leaves Chicago to Capone.
May 27, 1925	Angelo Genna, Merlo's successor, is killed after a car chase.
June 13, 1925	Mike Genna dies in a gunfight with police; Officers Olsen and Walsh are killed.
July 8, 1925	Antonio Genna is ambushed and killed. The surviving Genna brothers leave Chicago.
Summer 1925	Amatuna declares himself Unione president with bodyguards Zion and Goldstein.
Fall 1925	Amatuna owes about $22,000 to the Scalise and Anselmi defense fund while police raid his stills.
November 10, 1925	Amatuna is shot in a barbershop near Halsted Street and Roosevelt Road.
November 13, 1925	Amatuna dies, by most accounts, after a planned deathbed wedding is abandoned.
Late November 1925	Bodyguards Zion and Goldstein are murdered.

Table 2. Amatuna's last year. The summer and fall entries are approximate because sources do not give exact dates.​

If Amatuna buried money, the likeliest window runs from late summer to early November 1925. Before that he had not yet seized the presidency, and he had less reason to fear Capone. After November 10 he was dying in a hospital bed. Weather supports the same window. In southern Wisconsin the ground usually stays workable well into November, and a summer colony like Pell Lake empties out after Labor Day. A man digging north of the lake in October 1925 would have had the place nearly to himself.

MONEY TROUBLE​

Amatuna's presidency came with a debt. Two Genna gunmen, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, were on trial for killing two Chicago police officers in the June 1925 shootout that ended Mike Genna's life, and the Unione had committed itself to raising one hundred thousand dollars for their defense. As president, Amatuna inherited the obligation. May writes that Amatuna confided to a police contact that he still owed about twenty-two thousand dollars to the defense fund at the same time that police raids were taking his stills, the source of the money he needed to pay it.

The shootout that put Scalise and Anselmi on trial took place on June 13, 1925. After a high-speed chase with police that ended at Western Avenue and Sixtieth Street, Officers Harold Olsen and Charles Walsh were killed and Officer Michael Conway was badly wounded. Mike Genna died in the same running fight. Scalise and Anselmi were convicted of manslaughter in the death of Officer Walsh and sentenced to fourteen years, but they won a retrial in December 1926 and were acquitted in June 1927. Raising money for that defense was dangerous work. Orazio Tropea, known as The Scourge, became the fund's chief collector after Amatuna's death, and he was shotgunned to death on Halsted Street on February 15, 1926.

This is the most important fact in the record for anyone weighing the treasure story. In the fall of 1925 Amatuna was not a man with money to spare. He was a man being squeezed from three sides, by the defense fund, by police raids, and by Capone. That could cut against a buried fortune, since a man who owed twenty-two thousand dollars had little reason to put seventy thousand in the ground. It could also explain one. A man who believed his rivals might seize his businesses and his bank accounts, and who was being pressed to hand over his cash to a defense fund, had every reason to move whatever money he still controlled to places no one else knew about.

DEATH IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR​

The shooting on November 10 was the North Side Gang's work, by most accounts, part of its war against the Gennas and Capone. Wikipedia names the gunmen as Vincent Drucci, Jim Doherty, and Frank Gusenberg. Wikipedia's own article on Drucci names Drucci and Hymie Weiss instead and gives the wrong date for the killing. No one was ever prosecuted.

Amatuna was taken to the hospital, where his fiancée, Rose Pecorara, joined him. She was the sister-in-law of the late Mike Merlo. A deathbed wedding was planned, but Amatuna slipped into a coma before it could take place. Sources disagree on the timing of his death as well. May and Wikipedia put it at two o'clock on the morning of Friday, November 13. An earlier article by May describes him dying at Jefferson Park Hospital the morning after the shooting.

His wake drew twenty thousand dollars' worth of flowers, enough to spill off the porch and across the front lawn, the backyard, and the neighbors' yards. The funeral procession passed the barbershop where he had been shot on its way to Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, where his body was placed in a temporary vault. A history of Chicago-area cemeteries reports that the body was to be sent home to Sicily for burial. Within days, both of his bodyguards, Zion and Goldstein, were also murdered. Lombardo took the Unione presidency.

The middle version of the legend says Amatuna buried his money before going to negotiate with Capone. The record does not show such a meeting, but it does show the circumstances that would have led a man to make one: a disputed presidency, Capone's anger, and a debt he could not pay. If Amatuna hid money in the fall of 1925, he had only weeks to do it, and he would have done it alone or with the help of someone he trusted, such as the driver who carried him back and forth across the city every day.

THE MEN WHO MIGHT HAVE KNOWN​

One reason the Amatuna story survived only as a secondhand tale is that nearly everyone close to him was dead within a few years. The list reads like a casualty roll.

Person	Connection to Amatuna	Fate
Edward Zion and Abraham Goldstein	His bodyguards in 1925	Both murdered within days of his death
Orazio Tropea	Collector for the Scalise and Anselmi defense fund	Shotgunned on Halsted Street, February 15, 1926
Hymie Weiss	North Side Gang leader; named in some accounts as a gunman	Shot to death outside Holy Name Cathedral, October 1926
Vincent Drucci	North Side Gang leader; named as a gunman	Shot by a Chicago police detective, April 4, 1927
Antonio Lombardo	His successor as Unione president	Murdered September 7, 1928
Frank Gusenberg	Named in some accounts as a gunman	Killed in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, February 14, 1929
John Scalise and Albert Anselmi	The gunmen whose defense he was funding	Found beaten and shot near Hammond, Indiana, May 8, 1929

Table 3. The fates of men connected to Amatuna in 1925.​

By the end of the 1920s, almost no one who had stood near Amatuna in his last months was alive to talk. The man most likely to have outlived them all was the one with the least power and the least to fear, the driver. A chauffeur was a witness, not a target. If anyone carried the location of Amatuna's money out of the 1920s, it was probably him, and that fits the middle version of the legend exactly.

WHAT THE LEGEND GETS WRONG​

Claim in the legend	What the record shows
He was an outlaw who pulled daring heists on wealthy people and businesses.	He was a bootlegger, Genna enforcer, and Unione Siciliana president. No robbery is attributed to him in any source consulted.
He was caught and imprisoned and never revealed the hiding place.	He was never convicted of any crime. He was shot on November 10, 1925, and died three days later.
The money was buried in the 1930s.	Amatuna was dead by November 1925.
One cache lies along Route 66.	U.S. 66 was designated on November 11, 1926, a year after his death. In 1925 the road southwest of Chicago was Illinois Route 4, following Ogden Avenue and the old Pontiac Trail.
The other lies along U.S. Highway 12.	U.S. 12 also dates from 1926. In 1925 the same road was Wisconsin Highway 12, so the route existed but the number is a later label.
The Route 66 cache is near Briarwood Glen in Cook County.	No place called Briarwood Glen in Cook County was found in any source consulted for this chapter.
The treasure is worth more than $700,000.	The oldest version says $50,000 and the middle version $70,000. The value depends entirely on the method used, as shown below.

Table 4. Claims in the published legend tested against the historical record.​

The Route 66 and Highway 12 labels deserve a closer look, because they are clues to how the story was put together. Both highway numbers came into existence on the same day in November 1926, a year after Amatuna died. Anyone who buried money along those roads in 1925 would have known them by other names. A storyteller writing after 1926 would naturally use the new numbers. The labels prove nothing about whether the caches are real, but they show that the version we have was written down, or at least retold, well after the events it describes.

Briarwood Glen is a bigger problem. The middle version places it in Cook County, south of Chicago, along Route 66. The old Route 66 left Chicago to the southwest along Ogden Avenue and Joliet Road through suburbs such as Berwyn, Lyons, and McCook. No town, subdivision, park, or roadhouse by that name turned up in the searches done for this chapter. It may have been a small resort or a forest preserve picnic grove whose name has been forgotten, or it may be an error. Until someone finds it on a map from the 1920s, the second cache has no location at all.

The old road itself is still there in pieces. Route 66 and its predecessor followed Ogden Avenue out of the city and then Joliet Road through Lyons and McCook, where an abandoned stretch of the old pavement survives near the quarries. In 1925 that corridor ran past farms, roadhouses, picnic groves, and the edges of the new Cook County forest preserves. A gangster driving