Peter von Frantzius (sometimes ''Frantizius'') (* 1896; died April 6, 1968) was a Chicago businessman and arms dealer to the Chicago underworld during
Prohibition
Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic ...
, later dubbed by the press as ''"The Armorer of Gangland"''.
He was the son of German immigrants. His father
Fritz von Frantzius
Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" von Frantzius was a German-born American businessman and millionaire.
Life and career
Von Frantzius was born on May 17, 1865, in Sawdin, West Prussia to parents Arthur (1823-1889) and Ida (Ehlert) von Frantzius (* 1831) ...
was a stock market dealer and died 1917.
Frantzius started with mail order sales of guns from his parents home and opened a shop later on. 1924 he had a very successful business selling all manner of sports goods including guns.
An almost exclusive supplier of the
Chicago Outfit (although often selling to rival gangs such as the
North Side Mob), he was one of the first to supply "Tommy"
submachine guns and other specialized weaponry connected to countless gangland slayings during the bootleg wars of the 1920s, including the murder of Brooklyn mobster
Frankie Yale in 1928, the
St. Valentine's Day Massacre
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre was the murder of seven members and associates of Chicago's North Side Gang that occurred on Saint Valentine's Day 1929. The men were gathered at a Lincoln Park, Chicago garage on the morning of February 14, ...
in 1929 and the 1930 gangland murder of Chicago journalist
Jake Lingle.
On one occasion, when asked by authorities to explain the sale of six machine guns to known organized crime figures, Frantzius answered before a coroner's jury that he had assumed the weapons were for the use of the Mexican government to use against revolutionaries.
Despite his connections to organized crime, Frantzius was never prosecuted against and continued to operate his sporting goods business
Sports, Inc. until his death on April 6, 1968. Sports, Inc. produced and sold many firearms related items, including his namesake FRANZITE pistol grips, until going out of business in 1969.
Further reading
*Sifakis, Carl. ''The Mafia Encyclopedia''. New York: Da Capo Press, 2005.
*Sifakis, Carl. ''The Encyclopedia of American Crime''. New York: Facts on File Inc., 2005.
External links
* https://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_hersteller_detail.cfm?Company_id=18773
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Frantzius, Peter von
1968 deaths
1896 births
Businesspeople from Chicago