ST. LOUIS • August "Gus" Winkeler grew up in Lemay and went bad in a hurry. He ran with the hoods known as Egan's Rats, sometimes as wheelman for the gang's last boss, William "Dinty" Colbeck.

Winkeler turned 19 while doing time in the City Workhouse. He met Georgette Bence at her family's boarding house, a Rats hangout, and married her. Police scorned him as a "punk," or lesser figure, when Colbeck went to prison in 1925. Newspapers even misspelled his name, referring to him as Winkler.

He and Fred "Killer" Burke, another dispossessed Rat, drifted to Chicago, where they made the big time.

They became lieutenants to Al Capone and probably took part in the machine-gun executions of seven rival gangsters in a garage on St. Valentine's Day in 1929, with Winkeler as getaway driver. He show

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