- #1
Thread Owner
southwest out of Chicago in the fall of 1925 would have had no shortage of quiet places to stop. What the legend lacks is any way to tell which one.
The clearest example comes from the 1933 kidnapping of Oklahoma oilman Charles Urschel by George "Machine Gun" Kelly. The FBI's own history of the case records that a rancher named Cass Coleman helped Kelly hide $73,250 of the ransom money on his land near Coleman, Texas, and that Bureau agents dug it out of a cotton patch on the morning of September 27, 1933. The money had been in the ground for only a few weeks. Ten years earlier, in February 1923, investigators recovered $80,000 of the money taken in the Denver Mint robbery from an abandoned hideout in Minnesota. In both cases, men from the city carried cash far out into the country and left it there because holding it was more dangerous than hiding it.
Amatuna in the fall of 1925 faced the same calculation. Cash in his pockets could be demanded for the defense fund. Cash in his bank accounts could be traced, frozen, or seized by rivals who took over his businesses. Cash buried a couple of hours north of the city, at a place no one connected with him, was safe from all of those threats. The flaw in the plan was the one that undid so many others: it was only as good as the life of the man who knew the spot.
In the 1920s Pell Lake was something unusual, a vacation colony created for working-class Chicagoans through a partnership between a newspaper and land developers. Margaret B. Barker, a retired Madison attorney, tells the story in Newspaper-Real Estate Schemes of the 1920s: Pell Lake and Other Vacation Colonies for Working Class Subscribers, published by McFarland in 2021. Developers sold small waterfront lots around the lake to newspaper subscribers as part of a heavily advertised campaign, and the colony drew working-class buyers who could never have afforded the estates of nearby Lake Geneva.
That history changes how the legend reads. In 1925 Pell Lake was a new summer colony full of strangers from the city, a place where one more car with Illinois plates would not stand out. Chicago lay only a couple of hours away by road, and the highway north toward Lake Geneva ran close by. A man who wanted to hide money where his rivals in the city would never look, but where he could reach it in a couple of hours by car, could hardly have chosen better. The detail that the money lay north of the lake, away from the cottages and toward the open farmland, also makes sense for someone who wanted to dig without being watched.
Pell Lake today covers about four square miles, almost all of it land, at an elevation of 863 feet. The lake itself is small, and the old colony around it has become a year-round residential community within the Village of Bloomfield. Many of the original narrow lots survive in the street pattern, a reminder of the subscriber plats laid out in the 1920s. North of the lake, the land opens into fields and scattered homes, the ground the oldest version of the legend points to.
Pell Lake also sits only about six miles north of Richmond, Illinois, where a separate legend places a buried fortune from the 1930 Lincoln bank robbery. The two stories share a corner of the map, the stretch of road between Chicago and the Wisconsin lake country that the city's gangsters drove often. That overlap is not evidence for either story, but anyone researching one should keep the other in mind.
Men in Amatuna's position did not drive themselves. His driver would have been with him on the trips to and from Pell Lake, would have known roughly where the car stopped, and would have survived him, unlike his two bodyguards, who were killed within days. If that man later told the story to a family member, a fellow driver, or a reporter, it could have passed into the treasure magazines decades later with the details worn down and the highway numbers updated.
The driver's name does not appear in any source consulted for this chapter. Finding it is the single most useful thing a researcher could do. Chicago newspapers covered the shooting, the hospital vigil, and the funeral in detail, and coroner's inquests in Cook County routinely took testimony from the people closest to a victim. The man who drove Samoots Amatuna in 1925 is probably named somewhere in those pages.
Those notes would be valuable as collectibles. In 1925 every piece of American paper money was a large-size note, the bigger bills that were replaced by today's smaller format beginning in 1929. Large-size notes are prized by collectors. A bundle might also include gold certificates, which were common in the 1920s, became illegal for most Americans to hold after 1933, and have been legal to own again since 1964. The middle version's Route 66 cache adds gold and jewels, which would survive burial far better than paper and would be easier to find.
This series values treasure by its weight in gold at $5,000 per troy ounce, converting historical dollars through the pre-1933 gold standard of $20.67 per ounce. At that rate one 1925 dollar equals about $241.90. Table 5 shows what each version of the legend works out to on that yardstick and on ordinary purchasing power, using a rough multiplier of eighteen for 1925 dollars.
The newest version's figure of more than seven hundred thousand dollars matches none of these calculations. It appears to be the oldest version's fifty thousand dollars inflated by consumer prices and rounded, with the jewelry added on. What a finder would actually receive depends on the condition of the notes. The Treasury still redeems old currency at face value, and collectors pay premiums for large-size notes in good condition, but rotted paper is worth nothing at all.
Paper that has been buried for nearly a century should be photographed in place before it is moved. Bundles that have stuck together should not be pried apart by hand. A conservator can often separate damp notes that would tear if forced. Coins and jewelry are hardier, but they too should be recorded where they lie, because the position of each item can help show how and when the cache was buried, and that record can matter if ownership is ever disputed.
Collectors grade old notes by condition, and condition drives price far more than face value. A worn twenty-dollar note from 1925 may sell for only a modest premium, while a crisp one from a scarce series can bring many times its face. A finder who cleans, flattens, or trims damaged notes in an effort to make them look better almost always lowers their value. The safe course is to leave them as found and take them to a reputable dealer or auction house that handles large-size currency.
Read the Chicago newspapers from November 10 to November 30, 1925. The Chicago Tribune, Daily News, Herald and Examiner, and Italian-language papers covered the shooting and funeral closely. Look for the name of Amatuna's driver, any mention of Wisconsin, and any report of what police found among his belongings.
Find the Cook County coroner's inquest into Amatuna's death. Inquest records often list witnesses by name and address, and the driver may have testified.
Search the Cook County probate records for an estate in Amatuna's name from 1925 or 1926. An estate inventory would show how much money he left in banks and businesses, and a small estate would support the idea that he had moved cash elsewhere.
Search the Walworth County Register of Deeds for lots around Pell Lake bought between 1923 and 1925 by Amatuna, Rose Pecorara, the Merlo family, Edward Zion, Abraham Goldstein, or anyone in the Genna circle. A lot in a known name would turn a general area into a specific address.
Read Margaret Barker's book on the Pell Lake colony. Her research into the newspaper's subscriber lists and the colony's early years may identify who owned cottages there in 1925 and how the area north of the lake was used.
Find the oldest printed version of the legend. The 2005 TreasureNet post says it came from old treasure magazines. Copies of Treasure, Lost Treasure, True Treasure, and similar magazines from the 1960s and 1970s are held by collectors and some libraries. The earliest version is the one closest to the chauffeur.
Read the Italian-language press. Chicago's L'Italia and other Italian-language papers covered the Unione Siciliana closely and may have reported details of Amatuna's affairs, his fiancée, and his household that the English-language papers missed.
Look for Briarwood Glen on Cook County maps, plats, and roadhouse directories from the 1920s, and in forest preserve records along Ogden Avenue and Joliet Road.
A paper-only cache wrapped in canvas is close to invisible to an ordinary metal detector. The best chance comes from any metal that went into the ground with it: a tin box, a cream can, a lock, coins, or jewelry. A deep-seeking detector or magnetometer will pick up a metal container at several feet. Ground-penetrating radar can show a backfilled pit even when nothing metal is present, and it lets a searcher show a landowner exactly where a single test hole is needed.
Aerial photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Archives, show the roads, fence lines, and farmsteads north of Pell Lake as they were soon after Amatuna's death. A man burying money in 1925 would have chosen a spot he could find again by a landmark, a fence corner, a lone tree, a culvert, or a bend in the road, and many of those landmarks show up clearly on early aerial photographs even after they have disappeared on the ground.
Identify the man who drove Samoots Amatuna in 1925, and find out whether he ever spoke publicly about his employer.
Find the earliest printed version of the legend and record its exact wording, author, and date.
Locate Briarwood Glen. Establish whether it was a real place in Cook County in the 1920s, and if so, where it stood along the old Ogden Avenue and Joliet Road route.
Determine whether Amatuna or anyone close to him owned or rented a lot at Pell Lake before November 1925.
Find Amatuna's estate file and determine how much money he left on record.
Find out whether Amatuna's body was in fact sent to Sicily, and whether any family members in Pozzallo or Chicago left letters or estate papers that mention money in Wisconsin.
Reconcile the accounts of the shooting, including the number of wounds, the names of the gunmen, and whether he died the next morning or three days later.
May, Allan. "Unione Siciliana." allanrmay.com.
May, Allan. Article on Samoots Amatuna, AmericanMafia.com, March 8, 1999.
"Late for the Opera: 'Samoots' Amatuna." Crime Magazine. crimemagazine.com.
"Part II: Chicago's Unione Siciliana 1920, A Decade of Slaughter." Crime Magazine. crimemagazine.com.
"Death in the Barber's Chair: The Rise and Fall of Sam Amatuna." The Chicago Crime Scenes Project, August 2009.
"Amatuna, Samuzzo (c1899-1925)." The American Mafia: Who Was Who. mob-who.blogspot.com, April 2011.
"A Basket of Roses from Al Brown." Chicago and Cook County Cemeteries, January 6, 2020.
Reference Sources
Wikipedia. "Samuzzo Amatuna." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Genna crime family." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Unione Siciliana." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Vincent Drucci." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Mount Carmel Cemetery (Hillside, Illinois)." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "John Scalise." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Denver Mint robbery." en.wikipedia.org.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. "George 'Machine Gun' Kelly." FBI History, Famous Cases and Criminals. fbi.gov.
Wikipedia. "Chicago." en.wikipedia.org.
Pell Lake and the Highways
Barker, Margaret B. Newspaper-Real Estate Schemes of the 1920s: Pell Lake and Other Vacation Colonies for Working Class Subscribers. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2021.
Wikipedia. "Pell Lake, Wisconsin." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "U.S. Route 66 in Illinois." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "U.S. Route 12 in Wisconsin." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Richmond, Illinois." en.wikipedia.org.
Treasure Legend Sources
TreasureNet. "Wisconsin" forum thread, September 15, 2005, quoting old treasure magazines. treasurenet.com.
TreasureSeekr. "11 Lost Treasures of Illinois." treasureseekr.com.
Detecting School. "Illinois Lost Treasures (15 Mystifying Treasures!)." detectingschool.com.
Rock Chasing. "16 Treasures Hidden in Illinois That Could Still Be Yours." rockchasing.com.
Treasure Valley Metal Detecting Club. "Mystifying Lost Treasures of Illinois." treasurevalleymetaldetectingclub.com.
WHEN GANGSTERS DID BURY MONEY
Skeptics sometimes argue that big-city gangsters did not bury money in the countryside, that they used banks, fences, and safe-deposit boxes. Most of the time that was true. But the record of the period includes well-documented cases of exactly the kind of cache the Amatuna legend describes, and they show what such a cache looked like when it was found.The clearest example comes from the 1933 kidnapping of Oklahoma oilman Charles Urschel by George "Machine Gun" Kelly. The FBI's own history of the case records that a rancher named Cass Coleman helped Kelly hide $73,250 of the ransom money on his land near Coleman, Texas, and that Bureau agents dug it out of a cotton patch on the morning of September 27, 1933. The money had been in the ground for only a few weeks. Ten years earlier, in February 1923, investigators recovered $80,000 of the money taken in the Denver Mint robbery from an abandoned hideout in Minnesota. In both cases, men from the city carried cash far out into the country and left it there because holding it was more dangerous than hiding it.
Amatuna in the fall of 1925 faced the same calculation. Cash in his pockets could be demanded for the defense fund. Cash in his bank accounts could be traced, frozen, or seized by rivals who took over his businesses. Cash buried a couple of hours north of the city, at a place no one connected with him, was safe from all of those threats. The flaw in the plan was the one that undid so many others: it was only as good as the life of the man who knew the spot.
PELL LAKE: THE CLUE THAT HOLDS UP
Pell Lake is real, and its history makes it a far more interesting place to hide money than its size would suggest. It lies in Walworth County, Wisconsin, a few miles north of the Illinois line, at 42°32′16″ N, 88°21′16″ W. Until 2011 it was a census-designated place. On December 20, 2011, it became part of the newly incorporated Village of Bloomfield. In 2010 it had about 3,700 residents.In the 1920s Pell Lake was something unusual, a vacation colony created for working-class Chicagoans through a partnership between a newspaper and land developers. Margaret B. Barker, a retired Madison attorney, tells the story in Newspaper-Real Estate Schemes of the 1920s: Pell Lake and Other Vacation Colonies for Working Class Subscribers, published by McFarland in 2021. Developers sold small waterfront lots around the lake to newspaper subscribers as part of a heavily advertised campaign, and the colony drew working-class buyers who could never have afforded the estates of nearby Lake Geneva.
That history changes how the legend reads. In 1925 Pell Lake was a new summer colony full of strangers from the city, a place where one more car with Illinois plates would not stand out. Chicago lay only a couple of hours away by road, and the highway north toward Lake Geneva ran close by. A man who wanted to hide money where his rivals in the city would never look, but where he could reach it in a couple of hours by car, could hardly have chosen better. The detail that the money lay north of the lake, away from the cottages and toward the open farmland, also makes sense for someone who wanted to dig without being watched.
Pell Lake today covers about four square miles, almost all of it land, at an elevation of 863 feet. The lake itself is small, and the old colony around it has become a year-round residential community within the Village of Bloomfield. Many of the original narrow lots survive in the street pattern, a reminder of the subscriber plats laid out in the 1920s. North of the lake, the land opens into fields and scattered homes, the ground the oldest version of the legend points to.
Pell Lake also sits only about six miles north of Richmond, Illinois, where a separate legend places a buried fortune from the 1930 Lincoln bank robbery. The two stories share a corner of the map, the stretch of road between Chicago and the Wisconsin lake country that the city's gangsters drove often. That overlap is not evidence for either story, but anyone researching one should keep the other in mind.
THE CHAUFFEUR
Every treasure legend needs a witness, and the Amatuna story's witness is his driver. The middle version credits the chauffeur with knowing both burial sites, and that claim is the one most worth testing, because a chauffeur is a real job held by a real person who would have left traces in the records.Men in Amatuna's position did not drive themselves. His driver would have been with him on the trips to and from Pell Lake, would have known roughly where the car stopped, and would have survived him, unlike his two bodyguards, who were killed within days. If that man later told the story to a family member, a fellow driver, or a reporter, it could have passed into the treasure magazines decades later with the details worn down and the highway numbers updated.
The driver's name does not appear in any source consulted for this chapter. Finding it is the single most useful thing a researcher could do. Chicago newspapers covered the shooting, the hospital vigil, and the funeral in detail, and coroner's inquests in Cook County routinely took testimony from the people closest to a victim. The man who drove Samoots Amatuna in 1925 is probably named somewhere in those pages.
WHAT A CACHE WOULD HOLD
The oldest version describes the cache precisely: paper currency wrapped in canvas. Canvas is a poor container. Unless the bundle was also sealed inside a tin box, a jar, or a metal can, ninety years of Wisconsin winters and wet springs would have reduced the paper to pulp. A sealed container could still hold readable notes.Those notes would be valuable as collectibles. In 1925 every piece of American paper money was a large-size note, the bigger bills that were replaced by today's smaller format beginning in 1929. Large-size notes are prized by collectors. A bundle might also include gold certificates, which were common in the 1920s, became illegal for most Americans to hold after 1933, and have been legal to own again since 1964. The middle version's Route 66 cache adds gold and jewels, which would survive burial far better than paper and would be easier to find.
This series values treasure by its weight in gold at $5,000 per troy ounce, converting historical dollars through the pre-1933 gold standard of $20.67 per ounce. At that rate one 1925 dollar equals about $241.90. Table 5 shows what each version of the legend works out to on that yardstick and on ordinary purchasing power, using a rough multiplier of eighteen for 1925 dollars.
| Version of the cache | 1925 face value | Gold-value yardstick | Purchasing power today |
| Pell Lake, middle version | $20,000 | about $4.8 million | about $360,000 |
| Pell Lake, oldest version | $50,000 | about $12.1 million | about $900,000 |
| Route 66 near Briarwood Glen | $50,000 | about $12.1 million | about $900,000 |
| Both caches, middle version | $70,000 | about $16.9 million | about $1.3 million |
Table 5. Values of the Amatuna caches by the series' gold-value convention and by approximate consumer prices. Neither reflects what a finder would receive for paper currency.
The newest version's figure of more than seven hundred thousand dollars matches none of these calculations. It appears to be the oldest version's fifty thousand dollars inflated by consumer prices and rounded, with the jewelry added on. What a finder would actually receive depends on the condition of the notes. The Treasury still redeems old currency at face value, and collectors pay premiums for large-size notes in good condition, but rotted paper is worth nothing at all.
RECOGNIZING 1925 MONEY
A searcher who does find a container from the 1920s needs to know what money from that period looks like, because the wrong handling can destroy most of its value. Every note in circulation in 1925 was a large-size note, roughly seven and a half inches long and three and an eighth inches wide, noticeably bigger than a modern bill. Several kinds circulated side by side. Federal Reserve notes carried the name of one of the twelve Reserve banks. Gold certificates had golden-orange backs and a promise to pay in gold coin. Silver certificates promised payment in silver dollars. National bank notes carried the name of the local bank that issued them, which makes them especially interesting to collectors, because a note from a small-town bank can be rare even if the design is common.Paper that has been buried for nearly a century should be photographed in place before it is moved. Bundles that have stuck together should not be pried apart by hand. A conservator can often separate damp notes that would tear if forced. Coins and jewelry are hardier, but they too should be recorded where they lie, because the position of each item can help show how and when the cache was buried, and that record can matter if ownership is ever disputed.
Collectors grade old notes by condition, and condition drives price far more than face value. A worn twenty-dollar note from 1925 may sell for only a modest premium, while a crisp one from a scarce series can bring many times its face. A finder who cleans, flattens, or trims damaged notes in an effort to make them look better almost always lowers their value. The safe course is to leave them as found and take them to a reputable dealer or auction house that handles large-size currency.
HOW TO FIND IT: A RESEARCH PLAN
The Amatuna legend can be tested in the archives before anyone sets foot in Walworth County. These steps are listed in the order most likely to produce an answer.Read the Chicago newspapers from November 10 to November 30, 1925. The Chicago Tribune, Daily News, Herald and Examiner, and Italian-language papers covered the shooting and funeral closely. Look for the name of Amatuna's driver, any mention of Wisconsin, and any report of what police found among his belongings.
Find the Cook County coroner's inquest into Amatuna's death. Inquest records often list witnesses by name and address, and the driver may have testified.
Search the Cook County probate records for an estate in Amatuna's name from 1925 or 1926. An estate inventory would show how much money he left in banks and businesses, and a small estate would support the idea that he had moved cash elsewhere.
Search the Walworth County Register of Deeds for lots around Pell Lake bought between 1923 and 1925 by Amatuna, Rose Pecorara, the Merlo family, Edward Zion, Abraham Goldstein, or anyone in the Genna circle. A lot in a known name would turn a general area into a specific address.
Read Margaret Barker's book on the Pell Lake colony. Her research into the newspaper's subscriber lists and the colony's early years may identify who owned cottages there in 1925 and how the area north of the lake was used.
Find the oldest printed version of the legend. The 2005 TreasureNet post says it came from old treasure magazines. Copies of Treasure, Lost Treasure, True Treasure, and similar magazines from the 1960s and 1970s are held by collectors and some libraries. The earliest version is the one closest to the chauffeur.
Read the Italian-language press. Chicago's L'Italia and other Italian-language papers covered the Unione Siciliana closely and may have reported details of Amatuna's affairs, his fiancée, and his household that the English-language papers missed.
Look for Briarwood Glen on Cook County maps, plats, and roadhouse directories from the 1920s, and in forest preserve records along Ogden Avenue and Joliet Road.
IN THE FIELD
North of Pell Lake today is a mix of homes, small farms, and open land inside the Village of Bloomfield. All of it is private property. No one should search any lot or field without the owner's written permission, and the agreement should say before any digging how a find will be divided. Wisconsin, like other states, has rules on found property, and money stolen or hidden by a gangster could draw claims from more than one party. A conversation with a Wisconsin attorney before digging is a good investment.A paper-only cache wrapped in canvas is close to invisible to an ordinary metal detector. The best chance comes from any metal that went into the ground with it: a tin box, a cream can, a lock, coins, or jewelry. A deep-seeking detector or magnetometer will pick up a metal container at several feet. Ground-penetrating radar can show a backfilled pit even when nothing metal is present, and it lets a searcher show a landowner exactly where a single test hole is needed.
Aerial photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Archives, show the roads, fence lines, and farmsteads north of Pell Lake as they were soon after Amatuna's death. A man burying money in 1925 would have chosen a spot he could find again by a landmark, a fence corner, a lone tree, a culvert, or a bend in the road, and many of those landmarks show up clearly on early aerial photographs even after they have disappeared on the ground.
GPS COORDINATES FOR SEARCHERS AND VISITORS
| Location | Latitude | Longitude | Note |
| Pell Lake, Wisconsin | 42°32′16″ N | 88°21′16″ W | Legend's first cache lies north of the lake |
| Richmond, Illinois | 42°27′50″ N | 88°18′34″ W | Site of the separate Bailey legend, about six miles south |
| Mount Carmel Cemetery, Hillside, Illinois | 41°51′51″ N | 87°54′27″ W | Amatuna's temporary vault, 1925 |
| Chicago, Illinois | 41°52′55″ N | 87°37′40″ W | City reference point; the barbershop stood near Halsted and Roosevelt |
Table 6. Coordinates are gazetteer reference points as published in each place's Wikipedia entry. No coordinate is given for Briarwood Glen because no such place was found.
IN MY OWN WORDS
[Personal section to be supplied by the author.]
READER'S CHALLENGE
The Amatuna legend is one of the few gangster treasure stories with a named witness, a known date, and a real place. These questions could settle it.IN MY OWN WORDS
[Personal section to be supplied by the author.]
READER'S CHALLENGE
Identify the man who drove Samoots Amatuna in 1925, and find out whether he ever spoke publicly about his employer.
Find the earliest printed version of the legend and record its exact wording, author, and date.
Locate Briarwood Glen. Establish whether it was a real place in Cook County in the 1920s, and if so, where it stood along the old Ogden Avenue and Joliet Road route.
Determine whether Amatuna or anyone close to him owned or rented a lot at Pell Lake before November 1925.
Find Amatuna's estate file and determine how much money he left on record.
Find out whether Amatuna's body was in fact sent to Sicily, and whether any family members in Pozzallo or Chicago left letters or estate papers that mention money in Wisconsin.
Reconcile the accounts of the shooting, including the number of wounds, the names of the gunmen, and whether he died the next morning or three days later.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Sam Anatuna of modern treasure lists is Samuzzo "Samoots" Amatuna, president of Chicago's Unione Siciliana in 1925. This chapter draws on Wikipedia's articles on Amatuna, the Genna crime family, the Unione Siciliana, Vincent Drucci, U.S. Route 66 in Illinois, U.S. Route 12 in Wisconsin, Pell Lake, and Mount Carmel Cemetery; on the work of crime historian Allan May; on a history of Chicago-area cemeteries; and on Margaret Barker's study of the Pell Lake colony. Accounts of Amatuna's shooting and death disagree on several points, and those disagreements are reported rather than resolved. No primary document placing Amatuna at Pell Lake or along Route 66 was found during the research for this chapter, and the chauffeur credited as the legend's source has not been identified. All of my stories use the same gold-value conversions and are a yardstick for comparison, not an estimate of what any find would bring.SOURCES CONSULTED
Historical Sources on Amatuna and the Chicago UnderworldMay, Allan. "Unione Siciliana." allanrmay.com.
May, Allan. Article on Samoots Amatuna, AmericanMafia.com, March 8, 1999.
"Late for the Opera: 'Samoots' Amatuna." Crime Magazine. crimemagazine.com.
"Part II: Chicago's Unione Siciliana 1920, A Decade of Slaughter." Crime Magazine. crimemagazine.com.
"Death in the Barber's Chair: The Rise and Fall of Sam Amatuna." The Chicago Crime Scenes Project, August 2009.
"Amatuna, Samuzzo (c1899-1925)." The American Mafia: Who Was Who. mob-who.blogspot.com, April 2011.
"A Basket of Roses from Al Brown." Chicago and Cook County Cemeteries, January 6, 2020.
Reference Sources
Wikipedia. "Samuzzo Amatuna." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Genna crime family." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Unione Siciliana." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Vincent Drucci." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Mount Carmel Cemetery (Hillside, Illinois)." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "John Scalise." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Denver Mint robbery." en.wikipedia.org.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. "George 'Machine Gun' Kelly." FBI History, Famous Cases and Criminals. fbi.gov.
Wikipedia. "Chicago." en.wikipedia.org.
Pell Lake and the Highways
Barker, Margaret B. Newspaper-Real Estate Schemes of the 1920s: Pell Lake and Other Vacation Colonies for Working Class Subscribers. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2021.
Wikipedia. "Pell Lake, Wisconsin." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "U.S. Route 66 in Illinois." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "U.S. Route 12 in Wisconsin." en.wikipedia.org.
Wikipedia. "Richmond, Illinois." en.wikipedia.org.
Treasure Legend Sources
TreasureNet. "Wisconsin" forum thread, September 15, 2005, quoting old treasure magazines. treasurenet.com.
TreasureSeekr. "11 Lost Treasures of Illinois." treasureseekr.com.
Detecting School. "Illinois Lost Treasures (15 Mystifying Treasures!)." detectingschool.com.
Rock Chasing. "16 Treasures Hidden in Illinois That Could Still Be Yours." rockchasing.com.
Treasure Valley Metal Detecting Club. "Mystifying Lost Treasures of Illinois." treasurevalleymetaldetectingclub.com.
