KID CANN

Before the legend

Blumenfeld was born in Romania in 1900 and arrived in Minnesota with his family in 1902. The St. Louis Park Historical Society’s family history traces their arrival through Canada and Duluth. The name “Kid Cann” came later, along with several competing explanations. He claimed a boxing connection; other stories were less flattering. None supplies a dependable origin. He disliked the name that made him famous: MNopedia notes his preference for “Dr. Ferguson,” or simply “Fergie.”

One early encounter with the law is much less mysterious. On June 11, 1920, Minneapolis police arrested the young Blumenfeld for allegedly picking pockets at a Norwegian church gathering at the Armory. Historian Kirsten Delegard, writing for Historyapolis, found his entry in the city’s old identification ledger.

The police measured his head, fingers, foot, forearm and ear, among other features. They even recorded that he had a full set of teeth. It was the Bertillon system, an elaborate method of identification already being displaced by fingerprints. The record makes an unexpectedly intimate introduction to a future crime boss: a young man reduced to measurements, long before his name became shorthand for the city’s underworld.

A fortune in forbidden liquor

Prohibition gave Blumenfeld a much bigger business than street crime. The St. Louis Park account connects his 1929–1933 bootlegging operation with supplies originating in New Orleans and Canada. This was a trade with distant suppliers and thirsty customers close to home. The scale helps explain how a local criminal acquired money, contacts and influence that outlasted the law that had made the liquor illegal.

Repeal in 1933 changed the rules without ending his interest in the bottle. According to MNopedia, Cann used relatives, corporations and concealed interests to control multiple liquor businesses despite restrictions on license ownership. The counter was legal; the arrangements behind it drew investigators back again and again.

Machine Gun Kelly’s money

In 1933, Cann surfaced in one of the decade’s biggest criminal cases: the kidnapping of Oklahoma oilman Charles Urschel by George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his associates. The ransom was $200,000. As the FBI’s history of the investigation records, the search for the kidnappers and their money became a national operation.

Blumenfeld was prosecuted over his alleged involvement with the ransom money. He was acquitted. The distinction is essential to his biography. His name repeatedly appeared beside spectacular crimes, yet prosecutors often failed to turn those accusations into convictions. Headlines and verdicts tell different parts of the story.

The murder that never faded

The darkest chapter concerns Walter Liggett, the newspaper editor who challenged Minneapolis’s corrupt political and criminal world. On December 9, 1935, he was shot dead outside his home. His wife, Edith, and daughter, Marda, witnessed the killing. Decades later, Marda described that winter evening in Stopping the Presses: The Murder of Walter W. Liggett, published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Edith identified Cann as the gunman. He presented a barber as an alibi witness, and a jury acquitted him in 1936. The murder became inseparable from his reputation, but the verdict must remain part of every honest account. Cann was accused and tried; he was not convicted of killing Liggett.

The Flame on Nicollet

The address was 1523 Nicollet Avenue, near 16th Street. The building opened as the Happy Hour Cafe in 1938, became Club Carnival, and took the Flame Cafe name in 1951. The earlier Flame Theatre Lounge had occupied another building nearby. The newspaper-based history at Twin Cities Music Highlights carefully separates those locations.

Abe Percansky, also known as Abe Perkins, and his brother Raye were the club’s public faces. A government historic inventory identifies Abe as Cann’s brother-in-law. Contemporary speculation about Cann financing or secretly controlling the place persisted. His presence there is documented; legal ownership is a more complicated claim.

The room had its own showmanship. A stage rose above the circular bar in the front lounge; a larger room accommodated the headliners and diners. In a later newspaper recollection, Abe remembered the Happy Hour giving away a bottle of champagne every hour. There was a practical reason to keep a table occupied and a customer in good spirits.

When Basie came to town

The music was a substantial attraction in its own right. Count Basie played the Flame in 1955. By the middle of the decade, its jazz identity was giving way to the “House of Western Swing.” Rock followed later. The club survived changes in taste as well as changes in the city around it.

In 1978, Minneapolis shut the Flame down for repeated violations. Its long musical life had extended well beyond Cann’s years as a regular. The musicians, audiences and meals belong to its history alongside the underworld association.

The cases that caught up with him

Cann also faced prosecution in the scandal surrounding the Twin City Rapid Transit Company and its conversion from streetcars to buses. He was acquitted on every count. That often gets lost when the streetcar story is retold as a simple tale of a gangster destroying a city’s transit system.

Federal prosecutors did secure a conviction under the Mann Act, involving Marilyn Ann Tollefson and interstate travel for paid sexual activity. In November 1960, the Eighth Circuit affirmed his two-year sentence and $2,500 fine. His co-defendant, Monte Perkins, also known as Monte Percansky, received a year and a day for conspiracy.

A separate prosecution concerned false statements on federal liquor-tax forms. Cann and four other appellants won a reversal in 1962, when the appeals court ordered judgments of acquittal. But during that case, Cann had attempted a $10,000 juror bribe. He admitted the crime. That conviction stood.

South to Miami Beach

Released in 1964, Cann moved to Miami Beach. MNopedia places him in Meyer Lansky’s orbit, working with the mob financier and pursuing real estate. He died in Minneapolis in 1981, during a visit. Florida supplied the later address; Minnesota kept the legend.