Earlier this year I was on Twitter while watching a college basketball game and saw a small reference to the mob being responsible for Rockne’s death. I had never heard that before so did a search to see what was out there and quickly found a piece from Jeff Harrell in Notre Dame Magazine from 2019 titled “Mob Bombs Rockne Plane”.
OK, you have my attention.
Harrell discusses the events that led up to Rockne getting on the plane and more importantly, who got him a ticket to do so.
The story goes that Rockne was looking for a plane ticket to get to Los Angeles in order to work as a consultant on the film, “The Spirit of Notre Dame”. Rockne was to be paid handsomely so wanted to get out west in order to do so and Harrell explains how Rock ran into friend and Notre Dame priest, Father John Reynolds, that gave him a ticket he had.
Just days before, Reynolds — a Notre Dame priest and 1917 graduate who, on June 9, 1930, witnessed the murder of Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle in a downtown train station during rush hour — had testified in the trial of Leo Brothers, a member of Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit charged with Lingle’s slaying.
All along, Reynolds insisted that Brothers was not the gunman. But Chicago’s police and prosecutors needed a conviction to soothe public demand for justice in the killing of the newspaper reporter. (Lingle had moonlighted delivering payments from Capone’s Cicero headquarters to crooked politicians and judges to the tune of $60,000 a year — nearly $1 million today).
Harrell continues that Capone’s right hand man, Frankie Foster, was who Reynolds saw actually pull the trigger and that Capone and the mob wanted Foster protected.
Reynolds had scares with the mob almost immediately after this happened.