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Historic and Excellent Documented Rock Island County Sheriff’s Department Colt Model 1921 Thompson Submachine Gun, Class III/NFA C&R Fully Transferable Machine Gun - Serial no. 9560, 45 ACP cal., 10 1/2 inch round bbl., blue finish, walnut stock. One of the most famous submachine guns in the world, the Thompson rates as one of the truly signature American weapons. While advancements
in manufacturing techniques and materials would allow later designs to match or exceed the Thompson’s performance, none of them have managed to do the job with the same level of style and craftsmanship. The Thompson, a product of old-school hand craftsmanship, is virtually synonymous with the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression, being found
on both sides of the law during the “gangland” era of American history, and also serving on all Allied fronts of World War II, where it stood tall among its more cost-effective stamped steel substitutes. The records
in Herigstad’s “Colt Thompson Submachine Gun”
(page 892) show this 1921 as having been shipped as part of a two-piece order to the Rock Island County Sheriff’s Office in Rock Island, Illinois, on September 24, 1930. Rock Island was one of the notable gateways to the American West, and, like many law enforcement
336 agencies, the Rock Island Sheriff’s Department opted
to upgrade their firepower to meet the hazards
of the Prohibition and Depression era, including organized crime and motorized banditry. Part of the departmental folklore was that the two Thompsons
in the sheriff’s inventory were confiscated from notorious gangster, blackmailer, political operator
and lawyer John Looney, whose rampage of crime
ran from 1897 to 1925. Originally arriving in Rock Island to work as a train dispatcher, Looney reinvented himself as a lawyer and politician. Whether he was good at either depends on your definition of “good”; he won relatively few of his clients’ cases but got
them indebted to him in ways useful for a criminal ,and he was generally more effective at blackmailing politicians than working alongside them. After a failed run for the State Legislature, Looney decided the local paper, the Rock Island Argus, was responsible for his failure and decided that destroying people’s lives was better business than representing them; he started a rival newspaper, the Rock Island News, which served as his personal blunt instrument. The News would dig up dirt, invent dirt whole cloth, or manufacture it’s own dirt (a favorite tactic was to have a photographer lying in wait while a lady of the evening in Looney’s employ would throw herself at the target), extracting healthy “kill fees” from people wanting to keep their good name out of the mud.