Machen's Sporting Goods

Machen's Sporting Goods was a store in downtown Derry, Maine, that became the unlikely epicenter of one of the town's most violent episodes: the ambush and execution of the Bradley Gang in October 1929. The store's owner, Lal Machen, recognized the notorious outlaws when they came in to place a massive ammunition order, and his actions set in motion a bloody, extrajudicial massacre that would be officially recorded as a police and FBI victory but was, in truth, a lynching carried out by armed citizens. The store itself, with its bullet-pocked brick façade, stood for decades afterward as a silent monument to Derry's capacity for organized, communal violence—a violence that the town's official histories would quietly paper over.

The Bradley Gang's Visit and Machen's Ruse

In the dog-days of 1929, the Bradley Gang—eight outlaws including Al and George Bradley, the Conklin brothers, Arthur "Creeping Jesus" Malloy, Patrick Caudy, and two women—rented a farmhouse just over the Derry town line in Newport. Bored and low on ammunition, they drove into Derry on October 7th. While Patrick Caudy took the women shopping, the men entered Machen's Sporting Goods. Lal Machen waited on them himself. He recognized Al Bradley the moment he walked in, and also identified Malloy when the nearsighted gangster put on his spectacles to examine a display of knives. Bradley handed Machen a written order for an enormous quantity of ammunition: five hundred rounds of .38-caliber, eight hundred rounds of .45-caliber, sixty rounds of .50-caliber, shotgun shells loaded with both buck and bird, a thousand rounds each of .22 short- and long-rifle, and—most tellingly—sixteen thousand rounds of .45 machine-gun bullets. Machen, keeping his composure, told them he could supply part of the order immediately but would need two days to get the rest. Bradley agreed, giving a false name, "Richard D. Rader." As soon as the gang left, Machen did not call the police. Instead, over the rest of that day and all of the next, he quietly passed the word to every man he knew and trusted: the Bradley Gang was coming back, and they would be heavily armed.

The Ambush and Its Aftermath

On the appointed day, at roughly two-twenty-five in the afternoon, the Bradley Gang drove into the three-way intersection of Canal, Main, and Kansas Streets in two cars—a red Chevrolet and a dark blue La Salle. Al Bradley sensed something wrong and slammed on the brakes. Machen and his helper, Biff Marlow, ran out of the store. "Put em up, Bradley, you're surrounded!" Machen shouted, and opened fire. From doorways, windows, and the courthouse steps, fifty or sixty armed men—including the town's own Sheriff Sullivan, who was supposed to have been out of town bird-hunting—poured bullets into the gang's cars. The firing lasted four or five minutes. When it was over, the cars were riddled wrecks. Al Bradley was shot as he tried to run up Canal Street; George Bradley was killed by a shotgun blast as he reached a bench by the War Memorial; Malloy, the Conklin brothers, Caudy, and both women were all dead. Machen later dug thirty-six slugs out of the brick sides of his own store. The official story, printed in the Derry News, was that state police and the FBI had gunned down the Bradley Gang in a pitched battle, with "local police lending support." The truth—that Machen had orchestrated a vigilante execution—was never reported, and the store's scarred brickwork became one of the few physical records of what had actually happened.

The Clown's Presence

Among the armed citizens that day, several witnesses reported seeing a figure they did not recognize: a man dressed in farmer's biballs, his face covered with white greasepaint and a big red clown-smile painted on, with tufts of orange fake hair. He was shooting a rifle from a window, leaning out so far that Biff Marlow later said he "couldn't believe he wasn't fallin out." Marlow also recalled, weeks afterward, that the clown cast no shadow, even though the sun was out. This figure—later understood to be Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the ancient entity that haunted Derry—had inserted itself into the slaughter, participating in the violence as it had in so many of the town's bloody cycles. Machen's Sporting Goods, the place where the trap was sprung, thus became one of the many locations in Derry where the boundary between ordinary human cruelty and the supernatural horror that fed on it blurred and disappeared.

The Store's Legacy

The store's bullet-pocked brick façade remained a landmark for decades. By the time of the 1985 storm that destroyed much of downtown Derry, the building was still standing, its scars a visible reminder of the town's capacity for organized, communal violence. The store itself had long since passed out of the Machen family, but the story of the Bradley Gang ambush—officially denied, unofficially remembered—survived in the memories of old-timers like Norbert Keene, who had been there with his own rifle. The store's role in the event exemplified a pattern that Mike Hanlon, in his research, would come to recognize: in Derry, terrible things happened, and then they were forgotten, or rewritten, or simply not talked about. Machen's Sporting Goods, with its bullet holes and its silence, was a monument to that forgetting.