Hi my name's Kevin Hicks welcome to my YouTube channel The History Squad. Now
we're shooting on location today down at Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, Canada and we're taking
the tour of the Tunnels of Moose Jaw. There are three separate tours but the one we're doing now
is about Prohibition and Moose Jaw's part in that uh incredible part of history because apparently
a famous, or infamous, individual who used to come to Moose Jaw. Al Capone, to escape things
in Chicago and he got too heavy, and I'll tell you it's a fascinating story. Before we go down
into the tunnels uh perhaps explain that Moose Jaw, South Saskatchewan, lovely old town but when
they built some of these big buildings they built tunnels in the basements going from one building
to another, for a simple reason, so that the engineers for all of these steam-powered boilers
could simply move from one building to another without disturbing the people upstairs with
all of their tools and smelly overalls. So the actual origins of these tunnels is honest, its,
it's great however they became something else as time went by. So before we go down let's just have
a little look where we are at the moment because we started the tour. We're in Fanny's place,
a nice saloon, call it what you will, decked out in the 1920s. Moose Jaw was a good time town.
Before we actually go down into the tunnels I thought I'd show you this it's part of the
tour the Prohibition tour in the, the Moose Jaw Tunnels. What they've done is they've recreated
a couple of the rooms from the Lexington Hotel in Chicago. This is where Al Capone hired an entire
floor, lived on this floor, and this is his office that they've recreated. Game of chess. Who would
have thought that Al Capone was a very keen chess player, but just a word of warning, don't play to
win because you'll upset him and that's one man you do not want to upset. But the way they've set
this out, money being put into nice little parcels here for certain police chiefs and that kind of
thing, and this I find fascinating. It's his chair, they've recreated his chair which had an
armored plate in the back, because a little-known fact about Al Capone was he was scared to death of
being bumped off. He always had his two bodyguards with him and these men were killers. So here we
are this is his office, nice cigars and then next door here we have recreated his bedroom
and it just shows you his opulent lifestyle and as you come on the tour they give you some
little tips about what he liked what he didn't like, but something I've learned about Al Capone
is everybody came to him. He didn't go to them.
Wow! Is it though this door? No, it's this door.
Oh my goodness me, have a look at this.
These tunnels were described by a boy who says, some of it was brick some of it was stone. Wow.
So we finally made it to the bottom of the tunnels here we are, and what they've done is
they've recreated an illicit still. All the mash, all the work's been done in here and the whiskey
being stored here, and it gives you an idea of, of what could have gone on at the time because
Saskatchewan, what a place. Its toes are on the American border so it's dead easy to get across
into the United States. Now prohibition what a great idea, 1915 it started in Saskatchewan and
finished in 1924. Can you imagine that? First World War 1915? Yeah? You might come home on
leave, you've been wounded, the first thing you want is a drink. Oh no you can't have a
drink because we've brought in Prohibition. It's a social problem you see, we want to reduce the
tax burden on prisons and, and orphanages, and we want you know to give people a better lifestyle,
better health. In comes Al Capone, because 1920 to 1933 the American Prohibition was absolute.
It was countrywide. All of a sudden Yank, you can't even have a beer, you no way you're going
to have a scotch or a martini. So in steps organize crime. Al Capone. He comes n north
and there is a railway connection straight from Chicago to Saint Paul's and then across
straight to Moose Jaw. The Sioux Line. It comes straight in and you could purchase your booze.
However from what I understand Al Capone didn't have to bother with these stills,
this is the illicit part. Every farmer apparently in Saskatchewan had his own still and when there
was a wedding there was plenty of booze, but Seagram's Whiskey over near Regina Saskatchewan,
they continue to produce good whiskey and it was this that Al Capone was after because he
could then blend it, water it down, ship it back across the border. And it's how he
conducted his business here in Saskatchewan, or shall we narrow it down to Moose Jaw?
So the Prohibition era is quite fantastic. You know there's one part of Canada, Prince Edward
Island, had prohibition from 1901 to 1948. Can you imagine that? Two World Wars, but hey they would
have just popped into Newfoundland or somewhere for a pint. But this whole business of organized
crime, people romanticize it nowadays, it was deadly. This is what was nicknamed the Chicago
Piano, it's a Thompson submachine gun. It's got the heavy drum on it. I don't know if this is,
I think this might be 80 rounds, but you can get them more. I fired one of these several
times and I don't like them, too heavy and if I remember correctly they pull up, so
this is one of their favorite tools, but of course these were incredibly expensive,
but if you think about Al Capone, the money he had at his disposal. Just a simple weapon rack here,
we've got a trench shotgun, we've got the Browning automatic rifle, he could get better weapons
than the police and of course his men were not controlled by the law. So what they reflect down
here is how organized crime moved in. It's quite interesting, it's quite atmospheric here because
there's creaking upstairs. We're underneath another building, they don't know we're here.
So here we are in a lounge part, a bit of an office, a place where people can play cards.
A barber's chair has been set up, but what gets me is the ingenuity of man, how clever we are. So you
can come to Canada and you can buy as much booze as you like in Moose Jaw and the surrounding areas
because the police were in fact as crooked as the day is long. I'll go into that in a little bit uh
later, because it's how did they ship the booze? So you could catch a train from Chicago straight,
on the Sioux Line as they call it, to Moose Jaw. What I didn't realize is,
there were stores on the side of the railway station, and there were tunnels that went down
to where we are now. So if you wanted to bring booze up, load stuff onto a train, you didn't
trundle it down the street. You didn't have trucks reversing up. You simply had it down, through the
tunnels, loaded onto trains and the way they went. Hopefully the shipment would not be intercepted.
But they did other ways as well. How about a fleet of trucks that were carrying lumber, timber.
All sawn all nice, all stacked up but in fact the lumber only went that far into the
back of the truck because the whole thing was a door. Behind it was all your Seagram's Whiskey.
Cadillacs, cars all with false floors, manufactured that way, they weren't just
oh let's cut a hole and put a top on it, these things had secret compartments. They also had a
thing called a boozorium, which were grain stores, farmer's grain stores, right on the borders with
the US. The United States and Canada, and these boozoriums, they were literally full to the brim
of whiskey ready to be sold illicitly into the United States and of course, who made the profit?
Al Capone, must have been one of the richest men alive in the United States.
A lot of the history we have about Al Capone and Prohibition in this area of, of Canada is actually
oral history, it's by word of mouth, stories handed down. You know Al Capone was a secretive
man he didn't like people knowing where he was. For instance he arrives at Moose Jaw on the train,
he steps off the train into a storage room, down into the tunnels. He walks through the tunnels,
into a hotel and he's set up. He doesn't go outside. He calls people to him, and one of
the occasions where somebody was called to him was, was the barber. Mr Beamish was his name,
a local character there who says that he had an appointment for Mr Al Brown,
which was a pseudonym, a name for Al Capone. And he comes over and he shaves him, so there's one
of the stories we have. Al Capone in Moose Jaw and we have a guy who actually shaves him. But
there's a more serious story. So what we have now is the story of Dr Young. So this isn't
um some down and out guy or somebody who's spinning a yarn, this is a professional man,
a pillar of society here in Moose Jaw. He tells how he was called to doctor somebody,
and two gentlemen come to pick him up. He's blindfolded, taken down from one hotel through
the tunnels and he appears in another hotel. The blindfold is taken off and it's none other than Al
Capone, but Al Capone is in a serious condition. And people don't really understand this, but when
I was a cop I had to deal with a fatality as a result of what I'm about to tell you.
Al Capone had an abscess in his tonsils. Now if your tonsils close off, you choke to death.
If you get the surgery wrong and everything goes down the throat, you choke to death.
So the doctor is going to administer some form of anesthesia, and Al Capone says no,
you do it as it is. So the mouth must have been wedged open, men would have had to hold him
because this is an incredibly painful operation. So leaning inside Al Capone's mouth they lance the
abscess, and if you get it right apparently, and I I've heard doctors talk about this, the puss,
the poison can shoot out of the mouth all over you. And then the sheer pressure that's built up,
the swelling, will actually drain that out. So that was done, Al Capone's his life is saved.
The doctor is then blindfolded taken down the tunnels, across the street up into another
hotel but he had to come back and repeat the whole thing four days later to make sure that
Al Capone had survived this surgery. To me that's, that's quite a story because it's not just a case
of 'oh the doctor come down because this guy had a cold', this is specific and it's serious. You
get that operation wrong you have a dead man on your hands, and the way thing things were done,
blindfold, two men escorting, it all adds up to one incredible story and I for one,
the way it's been told, I believe there is more than a grain of truth in that story.
It's interesting to reflect that Al Capone in Chicago had the police force in his pocket. Here
in Moose Jaw, he also appears to have had the police in his pocket. The police chief here,
a Walter P Johnson, a wealthy man had property at the lovely resort there of Watrous,
had a house here, quite nice. However his police force itself was known to be crooked and they'd
been thieving of a night time. When they were checking out different stores, the doors were
open the police could go and look around, one of them helped himself to a hat which he gave to his
wife as a gift. However the shopkeeper recognized said hat, bought in a complaint seven officers
were brought up who looked at their boss 'hey hang on a second you're part of this you know what's
going on' but he was never charged. So seven officers bang away they go they've lost their job,
but Walter P Johnson he goes from strength to strength, turning a blind eye of course, and
becomes the Lord Mayor of Moose Jaw. Just goes to show you need the police on your side when you're
doing stuff like this. One of the stories that's been passed down, father to son a kind of thing,
was of the newspaper boy Ken Turner who was as honest as the day is long. He used to stand out
there on Main Street selling newspapers. He was not allowed to go beyond a certain area because
that was a little bit of the downtown kind of place, and he would stand there when one day two,
shall we say gangster looking men came up, very smart dressed and they says 'the boss wants to
see you' and this poor young lad, you know he's only 10 or 11. 'Who's the boss? Where'd you...'
Come with us. And he said well I'm not allowed to go beyond there and they turned and looked at
him and said when the boss says he wants to see you, you come, and he goes now, he's blindfolded
all those kind of things, comes up into a room and there is Al Capone. He didn't know who he was and
Al Capone basically wanted to reward him for doing his paper boy duties and he gave him five dollars,
five bucks. But this young lad had been told by his father you don't accept money from strangers,
so he refused it. The gangsters behind him, sharp intake of breath you know,
and one pulls back his jacket but Al Capone says okay, calm down boys, calm down and he goes to
offer the lad twenty dollars because he thought the lad was negotiating, but he says 'No, no,
I can't take your money, my father said I must not take money from strangers'. And Al Capone replies,
well that's really good, you keep your nose clean son, and they take him away. And these stories are
absolutely fantastic. There's another one for the lookout, and his nickname was Moon Mullins,
named after a cartoon character at the time and his job was when he was tipped off by the
police chief that there was going to be a raid, he would run through the tunnels shouting at the
top of his voice "storms a coming, storms a coming." These stories to me are the essence
of local and personal history, I love to listen to the stories that people have.
Well I hope you enjoyed our little tour of the Chicago Connection of the Moose Jaw Tunnels
here in Saskatchewan, we've had a wonderful time. If you liked it, don't forget like,
share and subscribe and don't forget to turn on the all notification button so you know what's
coming on down the line because hey, you never know are we going to pop up next. Now before I go,
quick mention I've got a couple of patrons Jodie, I've got to read this because I don't want to make
a mistake Jodie Giacalone, I think I got that right and Ben Jenkins. Ben Jenkins I can do
but it's the Italian I've got to take care of, but before I actually sign off, where I am sat
is haunted. They've had the ghost-hunters down and they've spent a night down here and they've
made contact with a young boy who apparently was one of the lookouts for none other than Al Capone.
Storms a coming. Now that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up,
because as I've just said that it's gone really cold in here.