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Born Frank Fowler, he went through an assortment of jobs, including driving for gangster Frankie Yale and working as a sandhog on the construction of New York's Holland Tunnel, before turning to writing, first short stories and novels, and later, screenplays.
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 in 1929 and the 1930 gangland murder of Chicago journalist Jake Lingle.