The Corn Latitudes

The events of August 1968 were hardly the first set-to between long-hair leftists and Chicago’s men in blue—history majors among the students may have shouted “Remember the Haymarket!” —and it would not be the last. Chicago had become the stronghold of the pigs in eyes of the more radical of the youths, so it was to Chicago that the radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society who called themselves the Weathermen repaired in October of 1969. For several days, thousands of young people indulged in rock-throwing sprees through the streets of the Loop and Gold Coast; one of the leaders, it transpired, was the son of the chief executive of Chicago’s giant electricity utility, Commonwealth Edison.

Considered objectively, the most violent forces in Chicago—measured by injuries and deaths and insults to civil order—have not been perpetrated by the city’s outcasts of each era but its guardians. The nation watched on TV as the Chicago police in Grant and Lincoln parks waded through crowds of anti-war protesters with clubs as if wielding machetes at a cane harvest; a national commission on violence headed by future Illinois governor Daniel Walker rightly called it a “police riot.” The rest of the world was shocked but students of Chicago history it was a depressingly familiar scene. Going back to the Haymarket incident, the history of police action against presumed enemies of the state in Chicago—immigrants, labor organizers, anarchists, the distinctions not always observed—is long and ignoble.

Alan Pinkerton, America first famous cop, the Eliot Ness of the Gilded Age, worked in Chicago specializing in breaking up strikes. Historians, observing the proprieties of their trade, use politer terms; Clayton D. Laurie, writing in A Wild Kind of Boldness: The Chicago History Reader about the 1894 Pullman Strike, called the Pinkertons “antilabor mercenaries.” That is much nicer that what they were usually called at the time. Pinkerton was in effect a goon under contract to corporations during worker unrest. Old union men still visit Pinkerton’s grave in Graceland Cemetery, to piss on it.

The fear of insurrection in the streets among the bourgeoisie during repeated episodes of labor upset was credible but official violence—sometimes in reaction, sometimes in retribution, sometimes in anticipation of worker violence—was just as vivid. The five regiments of militiamen mobilized Governor Altgeld to quiet the violence during the Pullman Strike in 1894 U.S. Army troops shot and killed seven strikers on July 7; their forces were augmented (usually when the force was under the direction of the occasional pro-labor mayor) by men whom Eugene Debs described, with as much accuracy as venom, “the minions of a despotic judge, the thieves and thugs, taken from Chicago slums, transformed into deputy marshals and armed with clubs and pistols.” Forty police were injured during the fracas during the Republic Steel in 1937 but ten marchers lay dead and at least sixty marchers were hurt or wounded; police said they were fired upon by the strikers first, but hospital reports showed no gun wounds among the policemen.

Of late, disaffected young males have had less to fight about, but that has not kept them from fighting, only from claiming that their fighting has a political point. What in the 1960s looked to some like political demonstrations, or at least a form of street theater, has come to look more like ordinary hooliganism. The historical ingredients—young males, summer nights, and mind-altering substances—still occasional produce combustious public displays. Delays in the start of a concert in Grant Park by the rock group Sly and the Family Stone in the summer of 1970 saw some of the more than a few of the 50,000 fans erupt in an impromptu anti-police riot that saw 128 policemen and 33 civilians injured. In 1979, a Comiskey Park a promotion turned ugly when thousands of drunken fans invaded the playing field between games of a doubleheader, wrecking the batting cage and setting minor fires. “Fan” riots after bulls championship games in 1992 and 1993 led to widespread vandalism and looting that in the former years caused property damage estimated at $10 million. (The 1996 championship celebrations, policed by 6,000 officers and result in roughly 600 arrests, were described by city officials as “relatively peaceful.”)

“A pistol in each hand:” Violent crime in Chicagoland

Chicago’s always had a reputation as a tough town. “I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night,” Fred Allen once cracked. Many tourists to this day, upon hearing that developers of the 1926 Jewelers Building at Wacker Drive and Wabash (now 35 East Wacker) installed elevators in which tenants could be ferried in their cars to and from its interior garage, safe from stickup men, must think to themselves, “I thought every skyscraper in Chicago had one of those.”

Many innovations that Chicago either claim or expanded on—the department store, the train depot, the hotel—owed to the fact that Chicago streets were such nasty places. Each allowed an alternative, a city within the city to which the moneyed or at least the middle class might escape the dirt, the clamor, the danger. Chicago not the only U.S. city in which carriages became popular with the gentry as a means to getting around town—not because they were faster than walking or taking the trolley but because they protected the riders from the insults of the street. (For much the same reason, tens of thousands of middle class Chicago commuters stick to their cars rather than use the cheaper and faster els.)

Saul Bellow, in 1994 interview, cited crime as one reason why he left the city he helped make famous. “When we were younger there . . . we could go anywhere in the city without fear. But now, if I wanted to go down to the Loop for an evening or see a play or an opera, I always had to think of what would happen on the way back if my car broke down on Lake Shore Drive." But fear of crime has been a factor in city life since very near the beginning. Fear of muggers—known as footpads, in those days—was among the factors that spurred the first flight to the suburbs. Lloyd Lewis noted that visitors to the White City in 1893 antici­pated hordes of hoodlums, criminals, and others with vicious intent. “I’m goin’ to Chicago to the Fair,” said a Marion, Indiana, man is suppose to have said, “but I’m gom’ to wear nothin’ but tights and carry a knife between my teeth.” Tourists were made of sterner stuff in those days.

To this day, reports to his neighbors back home that a Downstater ventured out in Chicago at night can draw gasps of amazement, even though violent crime (as in most us cities) is confined to the houses of the angry or the addled, or on the streets of the neighborhood where “crime” is merely the methods of local business.

Fear of violent street crime drained the city of some of its best people and paralyzed many of the rest. Few stories are more heartbreaking than those recalling how (mostly) old people, locked up in their apartments for fear of opening their doors and windows, died from the heat in a 1995 heat wave; more than 700 people died—more Chicagoans than died in the Great Fire.

Homicides are routine enough that it takes a gaudy killing to make the papers, and of those Chicago has seldom been disappointed. Any fair list of the nation’s notorious murders will include at least a few from Chicago. In 1893, Mayor Carter Harrison I was shot and killed by a disgruntled office-seeker, making him by some counts the first mayor in the U.S. to be the victim of a political killing.

The nation’s “first serial killer” is reckoned by some patriots to have been Dr. H. H. Holmes the "Monster of 63rd Street." This swindler, bigamist, horse thief, and pharmacist outfitted his boarding house in Englewood as a murder factory to which Holmes lured guests and young, female stenographers who answered Holmes' want ads. He is thought to have killed at least two dozen people, possibly many more. Holmes’s industry, if not his ingenuity, was matched by such successors as John Wayne Gacy, who during a three-year-period in the 1970s tortured, raped, and murdered at least 33 young men, burying 28 of his victims in the crawl space of his house (since razed) in Des Plaines.

Chicagoans still love to kill each other. In recent years the city led the nation in murders, both per capita and total, in spite of its being smaller than New York and LA. Many of these (an estimated 40 percent in 2002) are the result of gang vendettas and power struggles—an old story in Chicago, where gangs have always been regarded as a form of fraternal organization.

The old gang

When Groucho Marx pressed his hands into the wet cement upon being given a star at Hollywood’s Grauman's Chinese Theater’s Forecourt of the Stars, he quipped,  “There was no need to inform us of the protocol involved. We were from Chicago and knew all about cement.”

The city’s motto, “I will!” seems to have been embraced with special vigor by authors of mayhem, public and private. So pervasive was organized crime in Prohibition that today, three-fourths of a century after his heyday, much of the rest of the world still thinks of Chicago as the home of Al Capone and gun-toting goons. When Herbert Asbury compiled his 1940 informal history of the Chicago underworld, he apologized to his readers in his foreword, explaining that its 377 pages were not enough space to give them a really detailed account of the subject during the Prohibition era. When Saul Bellow left Chicago to live in Massachusetts, he told an interviewer in 1994, having satellite TV meant he didn’t have to give up all his favorite Chicago pastimes. “I can get the crime news on [cable channel] WGN."

Chicago has always been a city of gangs. The visitor may be forgiven her assumption that the gang is the basic social unit of Chicago. Gangs of one kind or another are as much a part of immigrant life in Chicago as the building societies and churches of which they are rather more proud. Chicago’s status as port-of-entry city for immigrants is one of the constants in city history, and much of ghetto life was lived outside the law. Newcomers often arrive from places where police and courts are not trusted. The inability to speak English (or, in case of black Chicagoans, racism) means that the immigrant was not hired by legitimate businesses, leaving the criminal gang as an employer of last resort.

The gang is the basis for its ward machines, its business cabals, its society elites, its sports fans. However, when one says “gangs,” one thinks first of organized crime, the Mob, or the Outfit, as it is popularly known in Chicagoland. Gangs might be said to be creatures of human nature; organized crime is a creature of government. In old Chicago it was possible to drink or gamble or buy sex with ease; it has been suggested, not implausibly, that when reformers finally succeeded in closing or curtailing the taverns and gambling parlors and brothels, they created a market that gangs were admirably organized to exploit.

Chicago’s Italian gangs became world-famous, but almost all the city’s ethnic groups had their gangs at a certain stage of their community’s development. The first Chicago “mob” —not known by that name—was led by Irishmen who held sway into the vice districts, such as legendary First Ward aldermen Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna. The Chinese version was the Tongs, secret societies of which officials counted 12 in the early 1900s. Typical was the On Leong, which served various roles, including providing local Chinese immigrants the protections that the police often did not.

Every ethnic group still has its gangs; only the ethnics have changed. Today’s Chicago gangs are black, Asian—the Hmong and Vietnamese have organized street gangs—and Hispanic rather than Irish or Jewish. So permanent a fixture on the Chicago scene are youth gangs that they have long been the subject of sociological and historical treatises. Typical is the University of Illinois Chicago's Chicago Gang History Project which in 2001 sought to understand this very old phenomenon in new context of post-industrial Chicago. The Jewish youths who frequented Davy Miller’s pool hall-boxing gym on Roosevelt Road, near Kedzie acted as did Daley’s Hamburgers, as a neighborhood militia who in this case defended Yeshiva students and old men from being bullied on the streets by Gentile punks.

The mob is the subject of the most interesting chapter of almost any history of Chicago, and indeed is the subject of many whole books. The gangster era of the 1920s in particular was crucial in Chicago history. It coarsened civic life, and prompted the middle class, newly prosperous and disgusted, to flee by the hundreds of thousands to the suburbs, emptying the city of civic ballast.

Its chieftains lived every peasant’s dream of grandeur, and their influence was legendary. Big Jim Colisimo deserves mention—and seldom gets it—as one of Chicago’s corporate giants, the underworld’s Armour or Field. Colisimo cop-proofed his businesses, much the way that Samuel Insull alderman-proofed his. Ben Hecht, who knew Colisimo, wrote that every public official on the take owed him homage as “the founding father of their corruption.“ When Colisimo died—gunned down in a phone booth—thirty open cars crammed with flowers followed his hearse, and “nearly every whisky-nosed magistrate who owned a silk hat, and more dignitaries of every stripe than had been assembled since the Chicago fire, rode in the grieving procession.”

Romantic figures today, although journalist John Bartlow Martin has recalled that the reality at the time was otherwise. He had come to Chicago from Indiana in 1938 to be a reporter, and occasionally visited the Syndicate gambling joints on the Near North Side.

Each person in a saloon eyed everybody else warily, each wondering if all the others were gangsters, and it seemed to be part of the code not to touch or talk to strangers, though you might drink beside one for hours, lest a false move, as in a grade-B movie, trigger violence.

The king of the mobsters of course was Scarface—Alfonse “Al” Capone. By the end of the 1920s, Capone was thought to have an armed gang of 700 men working for him, an establishment the included not only hoods but cops, judges, and aldermen. In 1927 it was estimated that Capone’s syndicate grossed $95,000,000 from gambling, prostitution, drugs, and illegal booze. The numbers may be suspect but no one who has studied the era does not believe the take was huge.

Fights to control booze or other illicit trade led to much bloodshed. Capone ordered Machine Gun Jack McGurn to lure Bugs Moran and his gang into an ambush on February 14, 1929; Moran slipped out of the net but seven of his henchmen were gunned down in a North Side garage. The mayhem was nothing compared to the real slaughterhouses on the South Side, but the connection impressed itself on people nonetheless, if only subconsciously, and the murders became somehow emblematic. The killing made Capone a star and a target of federal prosecutors; its spawned a mini-industry of books, movies, and articles.

To the out-of-towner it seemed that Chicagoans on their ways to work must have to dodge bullets the way aldermen dodged subpoena servers. For all the mayhem, the average Chicago feared them little. The violence was intramural, and in the interest of good public relations the goons took care not to kill bystanders. Rather than retard tourism, it has probably helped it; people traveled to Chicago to see a real gangster, the way they might travel to Yellowstone to see a real live grizzly in the wild.

What is today overpriced condos and tony art galleries and tourist-friendly restaurants in River North was not that long ago was to mobsters what today’s West Loop is to businesses. North Clark was the site of the Palace Gardens Night Club, a favorite hangout of Babe Ruth in the 1930s. John Dillinger liked to dine on frogs’ legs in Ireland's Oyster House Restaurant at 632-38 N. Clark. McGovern's Saloon (later  McGovern's Liberty Inn) was a gangster hangout in the 1920s and ‘30s, and in the 1950s reputedly was the largest strip club in the city. Sbabardo's Funeral Parlor at 738 N. Wells was a favorite among gangsters; when Dion O'Banion died—gunned down nearby by the way at the Schofield flower shop at 738 N. State—40,000 people dropped by Sbabardo's to see his casket.

Gangsters led gaudy lives that were antic versions of the swells that they imitated. In his success, in his up-from-the-ghetto rise, Capone differed only slightly in morals and methods from the famed robber barons of Chicago industry and finance. (One of the better early biographies of Capone, Fred D. Pasley’s 1930 Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man, makes that point explicitly.) Capone was an Insull for the little guy.  He scattered tips to jazz musicians in the form of five and ten dollars bills in his favorite clubs like a Roman tossing coins to the rabble in the streets. Such largesse was very like the donations that the swells made to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, except that Capone’s support for the arts boosted Chicago culture while that of the swells boosted culture in Chicago.

Certainly, Capone himself came to see his civic role in terms of corporate welfare. The Italian neighborhood on Chicago Heights’ East Side, for instance, was a local center of bootlegging during prohibition days, and owed much of its prosperity to the many locals hired by the mob as runners, sugar buyers, and plumbers.  Capone’s organization funded soup kitchens out of the profits, and was by far the biggest employer in many a poor neighborhood in and around the city. And like all do-gooding company heads, Capone was misunderstood. Leaving town until things cooled down, he reportedly said, “Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job—it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.”

Chicago’s mob in its heyday functioned in a city whose legitimate political leadership was idiotic, corrupt, and irresponsible, as personified by Bill Thompson. Much like the military in some Third World countries, the mob was the only institution with the discipline to get things done. The president of the Chicago Crime Commission in 1928 needed to restore order during an election whose primary had been marred by murders, bombs and threats against voters; he had no official agency capable of restoring order, and famously asked for Capone’s help. The mob boss instructed the cops on his payroll—a force larger than City Hall’s loyal police—to round up and disarm known thugs the night before the election and guard polling areas the next day. The result was Chicago’s cleanest election in 40 years.

To this day City Hall has mobsters the way that other buildings have mice. Some of them even get elected to the City Council. From 1968 to 1991, Fred Roti was alderman of the downtown First Ward, once the fief of the legendary to Hinky Dink Hannah and Bathhouse John Coughlin, Fred's father was  Bruno Roti, one Capone’s Chinatown crew. Acknowledged as the Outfit’s voice on the City Council, Roti was indicted in 1990 for racketeering and extortion (mainly for fixing cases in the Cook County courts) convicted, and served time. A reporter once suggested that Roti’s campaign slogan ought to be, "Vote for Roti, and Nobody Gets Hurt;'' nobody laughed louder than Roti.

The mob’s presence in local politics was not always a laughing matter. Some observers at the time—including President Franklin Roosevelt—asserted that Mayor Anton Cermak, shot to death in Miami in 1933, was merely an unlucky bystander during a botched assassination attempt aimed at his riding companion. Some evidence suggests that Cermark was in fact the target of the bullet; his death presumably had been ordered by the Chicago mob in retaliation for Cermak’s arrest a few months earlier of Capone ally Frank Nitti.

The mob has long been a civic embarrassment to the City of Chicago, but it had a presence in much of Chicagoland. It was the thirst of the affluent in their suburban retreats, for example, that helped keep Capone rich. And while crime is one of the things that people moved to the suburbs to get away from, crooks moved to the suburbs for the same reason everyone else did—costs of doing business were lower, and they could enjoy more responsive local governments. In the 1920s, the mob turned several nearby towns into mob outposts. The home base of Johnny Torrio was  the far south side village of Burnham, from which he expanded to Cicero and Stickney. Roger Touhy’s gang was headquartered in Des Plaines. Capone himself maintained his organization’s largest brothel in Forest View (which became known as “Caponeville” as a result) and even moved to Cicero for a while, to escape the attentions of a reformist mayor in Chicago. The association of man and town lasted longer than Ca[pone did; in 1952 the town considered changing its name, in a kind of civic witness protection program, because, one official said, a kid from Cicero couldn't get into a college fraternity.  

River Forest in the near-west suburbs was and is a popular refuge for successful businessmen, including Sam Accardo who ran the mob; popular crime chronicler Richard Lindberg recalled that in the early 1950s “Big Tuna” purchased a house at 915 Franklin Street there against the advice of associates in the mob, who warned that he and his family would stick out like a sore thumb “and the Feds will always know exactly where you are." It has been alleged that River Forest for years got by with only one policeman, since no one in his right mind would dare cause trouble in the backyard of a mob chief.

Sociologists have pored over the mob like spies over a captured enemy aircraft, trying to learn what makes it tick. Daniel Elazar explained a generation ago that the city’s southern and eastern European immigrants were well placed to fill the vacuum left when the Volstead Act made pariahs of legitimate businessmen who catered to the public appetite for vice. Drinking and gambling and the occasional visit to the brothel were hardly regarded as vice in many old country cultures and the immigrants’ extended families provided a rudimentary organization. When booze became legal, the Outfit used its resources to move into drugs, and continued their hold on gambling.

Athletic clubs, gang bangers, and radicals

The mob is only one kind of Chicago gang. The German followers of the Turnverein movement were not devotees of some wild-eyed political theorist but of Friedrich Jahn, a physical education teacher who taught that moral and physical health were linked. Jahn’s cadres had a distinct paramilitaristic aura, and its members were eager street fighters who were eager members of the street mobs that battled with police during the labor troubles of the 1870s and ‘80s.

The Irish Turnerverein were the neighborhood “athletic” clubs. The young Richard J. Daley for example, was a member and later long-time president of the Hamburg Social and Athletic Club. It was one of many gangs of Irish toughs that tended to the odd jobs keeping the neighborhood tidy, from roughing up the political opponents of their ward boss protectors to defending the boundaries of the neighborhood from incursions from incursions by “foreigners,” a term that was rather expansively defined in the Irish parts of town. In 1919, when Daley was an impressionable seventeen, the Hamburgers were enthusiastic participants in the running street battles between whites and blacks in his Back of the Yards neighborhood. Daley’s role in the riots was neither acknowledged by his admirers nor quite denied, because it is a political credential to be known as a defender of the Auld Sod.

The people in the neighborhoods might have feared them as a menace, but sociologists have always been drawn to youth gangs as a subject. The University of Chicago sociologists cataloged the phenomenon in the 1920s, and counted more than a thousand of what they called "kid gangs" in Chicago. They fascinated novelists too; Alfred Kazin notes that James T. Farrell’s real subject in Farrell's signature trilogy is not the title character, Studs Lonigan, but the gang, with their adolescent follies and brutalities and total spiritual poverty.

There are thought to be many fewer youth gangs these days, but they are larger, and much more lethal.The line between them gangs and organized crime have always been blurry. The youth gangs are a training ground of sorts of adult villains. Many criminal organizations evolved from youth gangs, and they launder dirty money by spending in legit business. The drug business largely been ceded to black and Asians and Latins by Italian-dominated Outfit whose heart was never in it.

The main difference between the street gang and the mob is their scales of operations. The Mob had divided the city into ethnic fiefs, but the logic of capitalism is no less ruthless as it operates on rum-running or drugs than when it operates on sausage-making, and consolidation is the result. What had been a neighborhood problem became a citywide one in the 1960s, for example, when black street gangs formed their version of the Mob. Some 50 area street gangs were melded into a single new organization called the Black P-Stone Nation. Dealing mainly in drugs, the gangs tried to pass themselves off as neighborhood self-help organizations, a ruse that for a while won them subsidies in the form of federal anti-poverty social program funds from politicians eager to appropriate their influence on the street.

Like the old Mob, gang factions battled in the streets for control; the power of the Black P-Stone Nation was countered by the merger of rivals Black Disciples and Gangster Disciples into the Black Gangster Disciple Nation. The gang wars in the 1970s led to concerted efforts to bust the leaders, who ran operations from prison. In anything, these intramural disputes are more lethal than ever; as the new millennium opened, when between 600 and 700 Chicagoans were murdered every year, half of the killings occurred  in only two of its police districts on the West Side, where gangs most active.

The Chicago Police Department is arguably, a sanctioned version of the Irish street gang, the toughest of them all. The CPD has been renowned for innovations, but also for being soft on crooks, hard on political radicals, and very hard indeed on racial and ethnic minorities, indeed outsiders in general. The department traces its birth to a violent public event, the “lager Beer Riot” in 1855, which saw German and Irish mobs take to the streets. The violence stirred the nativist or “Know-Nothing” Party then in power at City Hall to form a full-time constabulary of 80 native-born officers.

The CDP has also always been used as a paramilitary force during strikes and other organized threats to public order, most infamously in 1886 (the Haymarket “bombing”), in 1937 (the “Memorial Day Massacre” at the Republic steel works) and 1968, at the Democratic National Convention; the police riot in 1968 was little more than Hamburgers running off the blacks all over again. Nonviolent methods of control against presumed enemies of the state were used too; surveillance of dissidents of all kinds by the CPD’s “Red Squad” was not ended until 1985, and then only under compulsion of a court order.

If minorities and political radicals excited the cops’ special wrath, African American radicals were destined to bring out the worst in them, as happened in 1969, when police working for the local state’s attorney killed  Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a West Side apartment in an encounter that resembled a mob hit more than a police action—save perhaps for its sloppiness.

A force founded to control obstreperous foreigners carried on that tradition. The contest for control of the city’s working-class neighborhoods left relations with immigrants of all colors more like gang rivalry than civil servant to citizen. Officers occasionally overdo the rough stuff and spark investigations and reforms, such as the Presidential Com­mission that decried the routine resort to excessive force by detectives 1931; the Walker Commission empaneled to investigate the causes of the 1968 Democratic convention violence led to no reforms at all. This was in marked contrast tothe Daley administration's reaction to the Summerdale burglary scandal, which led to hiring police reformer Orlando Wilson, who made substantive changes in the department in the 1960s; cops breaking into bungalows is a crime—everybody agrees on that—but banging a few longhairs or reporters on the head—what’s the harm in that?

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The whole world has not been watching the Chicago police for a long time now, and police mayhem on the street away from the cameras has been on-going in the form of harassment on the streets and beatings in the precinct houses. In 2000 allegations surfaced that the man in charge of a maximum-security wing in Chicago's Cook County Jail routinely tortured confessions out of suspects. The public attitude noted in the 1940s by Graham Hutton in The Midwest —“a little bloodletting is a small price to pay,” he wrote, “for such general tran­quility and order”—hasn’t changed much.

Chicago has not produced nearly as many famous cops as its has famous crooks—that wouldn’t be natural—but it has produced more than its share. The first famous Chicago was Allan Pinkerton. He was a Scotsman who helped form what became the U.S. Secret Service, did counterespionage for the North during the Civil War, and founded the detective agency that bears his name. Pinkerton’s exploits as a slave-freer and private investigator and memoirist were legendary, beginning with his capture of a gang of counterfeiters on the Fox River. In 1846 he was made deputy sheriff of Kane County, later held the same post in Cook County, and in 1850 was made the Chicago’s police force’s first detective, and finally, head of his own private detective agency.

Fabled G-man Eliot Ness was the federal treasury agent who became famous for his campaign against bootleggers in Chicago in the 20s. Ness was Chicago born (in 1903) but he was hardly a typical Chicago cop. The son of Norwegian immigrants who made good in the bakery business, Ness earned a degree in business and law at the University of Chicago; his after-hours he devoted not to bowling and softball and other conventional undergraduate fun but to mastering tennis and judo. It was at the U of C that Ness was exposed to crime, in the form of master’s degree courses in criminology, UC then hosting experts in that new sociological specialty.

Ness was one of the three hundred federal agents responsible for prosecuting the flourishing Chicago bootlegging industry. He never got his man—his arch foe, Capone, was nailed by accountants on income tax charges, not bootlegging or rackets—but Ness so disrupted Capone’s operations with raids that the gang boss paid him the compliment of trying to having him killed.

Ness was a career cop whose post-Chicago years were busily spent busting up stills and gambling joints and, when necessary, the thugs who ran them; he found time to take on labor racketeers, crooked cops, even a serial killer. His 1957 memoir, The Untouchables, was a best seller that inspired a hit TV series in the 1959–63 seasons that proved again that even the most riveting true stories can be made more entertaining by purging them of facts that get in the way of the story-telling. (Hollywood drew on the myth again for the 1987 feature film of the same title.)

There are those who argue that glory days of bloody Chicagoland are long gone. Of late, violent crime in Chicago is no worse—if no better—than most U.S. big cities. The murder rate remains high—a reflection, police insists of gang activity in the neighborhoods. Alas, almost all is ordinary thuggery. The brio, the dash, the sheer gall of the Chicago wrongdoer seems to have vanished.

Oh, there is still plenty of murder—Chicago finished 2003 with 599 homicides—down from 648 a year earlier and 665 in 2001, but still enough that the city still led the nation’s city’s in homicides for the second time in three years. This was due mainly to gang wars; for most Chicagoans, crime is still something that happens safely on the printed page or the museum display. Chicago is again the setting for popular crime novels, notably Sara Peretsky’s V. I. Warshawsky series.

The city is still fascinated by its bloody past. (It couldn’t forget about it if it wanted to, if only because so many tourists keep asking about it.) The Chicago Historical Society in 2004 marked the 80th anniversary of the “Perfect' Crime” with an exhibit on the murder and the trial of Leopold and Loeb, along with the works of popular art inspired by it. However much Chicago’s reputation for depravity embarrasses the gentility, the average Chicago guy looks rather wistfully on the days when “Chicago” meant “tough guy” to an admiring world. “As for the kids in the drearinesses of the wards, they have always loved Chicago’s reputation,” wrote A. J. Liebling. “Citizens of a city celebrated in the movies, they are little Scarfaces as they sit with their molls in the dark­ened cinemas and identify themselves with the glorious past.”

“Where’s mine?”

Not all of Chicago’s crime was violent. As early as the 1860s Chicago was being called the wickedest city in the United States. Chicago politicians are famously corruptible. Vice—a pastime in some cities and an aberration in others—was long a major industry in Chicago. The unofficial motto of the Chicago of the payoff and the kickback was penned by Mike Royko: “Where’s mine?” Everybody was on the take, from building inspectors to baseball players. (See the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919.) 

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Ben Hecht covered a trial in which the famed Clarence Darrow defended a Chicago cop against bribery charges. “He was Chief of Police of Chicago for five years, and he was never able to afford a servant maid, an automobile or a pair of silk pajamas,” said Darrow to the jury. “How much more honest can you expect a public official to be?” Ordinary citizens paid bribes to street cops as if they were tipping waiters; locals give new residents tips on how to fold a $5 bill behind the drivers license when they handed it to a cop who’d stopped them for speeding, as citizens of other towns might explain how to put your nickel into the fare box on the bus.

A much-repeated jest has it that when it comes to the CPD, one good apple is enough to ruin the whole basket. It is the custom in many big city departments take bribes to look the other way when stolen goods rings operate, but in Chicago the cops themselves ran the ring. Over the years Chicago cops also were caught running drug rings and extortion rackets.

Corruption is the least of the crimes of which its police force has been found guilty over the years, which range from running burglary rings to torturing prisoners. The Summerdale Scandal of 1960 erupted when eight officers were found to have conspired with a notorious burglar to enter retail establishments on the North Side of the city.

Police officers are usually taken from the same social stratum as the people they must corral. In 1959 a Chicago police lieutenant toured Europe as bodyguard to Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo, then head of the Chicago mob. Many officers in the 1990s were found to have links to street gangs; among the “Austin 7,” seven West Side CPD officers arrested in 1996 for robbery and extortion, was a high-level member of the Conservative Vice Lords. A former gang crimes officer were found guilty of overseeing a Miami-to-Chicago drug ring and sheltering murder suspect from a Latino gang.

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The real thieves didn’t carry guns and knives. Only pro-business class bias explains why works on Chicago corporate and business history, from Yerkes to Anderson, is not included in the crime section of bookstores. The corporate giants who cheated workers’ safety and public health, developers who slighted fire safety to make a few extra bucks, the manufacturers who  so poisoned the air and water that they fled the city they ruined for sylvan retreats in the suburbs. E. M. Forster summed things up to a correspondent in 1947: “Chicago—is—oh well a façade of skyscrapers facing a lake, and behind the façade every type of dubiousness.” More informed locals could have pointed out that the dubiousness often begins in the skyscrapers, not behind them.

The differences between a street gang, a ward organization, and a corporate cabal are not as great as the law or public opinion would suggest. Save for their resort to violence, the methods of the street gang differ little from those used by the titans of commerce to get and secure their advantage, and in the case of strike-busting, they didn’t differ much even in their violence. When Sociologist Edward Banfield suggested that the rioters on the West Side in 1968 were kin to the early entrepreneurs who saw a market opportunity and seized it, the outrage voiced on behalf of the rioters, one suspects, owed to the fact that the latters were insulted by the comparison.

Herbert Asbury’s best-selling 1940 compendium of villainy, Gem of the Prairie (later reissued as The Gangs of Chicago), could have been three times as long if he had included the exploits of Chicago’s two other great criminal classes—businesspeople and politicians. As Perry Duis notes:

Like the booster histories it undermined, Asbury’s study enshrined innovators. He clearly believed that the inventive criminal mind deserved historical recognition, much in the same way that commercial and industrial leaders were lionized. Thus, while Field, Pullman, and Armour in­habited one pantheon, such characters as Roger Plant, Mickey Finn, Big Jim O’Leary, and Mike McDonald deserved recognition be­cause they introduced new ideas and became the best at what they did. Thus, Asbury credits Johnny Torrio with being the organiza­tional genius who turned bootlegging into a massively profitable business, while dismissing Al Capone as a ruffian who substituted brutal force for intelligence.

Ovid Demaris took a more catholic approach. In Captive City, he castigated what he called, with righteous sarcasm, the “illustrious triumvirate” of “venal politicians, mercenary businessmen and sa­distic gangsters.” The heroes of Chicago capitalism— Potter Palmer, Philip Armour, George Pullman, Charles T. Yerkes, and Samuel Insull—he dismisses as “pirates.” “Today it is nearly impossible to differentiate among the partners—the businessman is a politician, the politician is a gangster, and the gangster is a businessman.”

The Chicago pol—usually imagined with one hand extended for a handshake, the other to receive a bribe—is to Illinois political lore what the leprechaun is to Irish mythology. The city for decades offered visitors an on-going seminar in the techniques of the payoff. Its public payrolls were packed with ghost payrollers, kickback artists, plain thieves, and goof-offs. (Local joke: Q: What's orange and sleeps six? A: A streets and sanitation truck.) In Chicago, the individualistic political perspective that elsewhere produced patronage-based machines was expressed in the equivalent of a municipal protection racket; a building owner unwilling to bribe the plumbing inspector, for example, found his building shut down. Everyone at City Hall—from aldermen to inspectors to judges—were in on it. A 2011 report found that there had been more than 340 convictions of public officials and business people in Chicago and Cook County since 1970, including three governors, 31 aldermen, 21 people in building inspection payoffs, and dozens of park district employees.

The world’s unflattering opinion of the Chicago public servant, it is largely self-drawn. A system so perfectly insulated from penalty tempts people are exploit it; a crony of the first Richard Daley was convicted of soliciting a then-astonishing $187,000 bribe from a voting machine manufacturer. To date, dozens of aldermen, judges, and county officials have been convicted over the years for similar crimes against the public weal.

In Chicago, the code names of government undercover operations aimed at corrupt public officials are as familiar as the hurricanes in Florida—Operation Silver Shovel, Operation Haunted Hall, Operation Incubator. Operation Greylord was a federal probe in the 1980s into corruption in the Cook County courts that sent 15 judges to jail. in a typical case, a sitting judge was bribed $10,000 in a LaSalle Street restaurant near City Hall in return for a “not guilty” verdict in a mob murder trial. In all, the final quarter of the 20th century saw state and federal prosecutors win convictions against almost 50 aldermen and key city officials.

Money was—one should say “is” —not the only medium of exchange in Chicago. Votes counted too, as the means by which one buy power. The elder Richard Daley died with unstuffed pockets, and thus enjoys a posthumous reputation as an upright citizen among observers who fail to draw careful distinctions between an honest man and a prudent one. In fact, he differed from his colleagues only in preferring to get paid off in votes rather than in cash. Chicago even today is the butt of jokes—some grudgingly admiring—as the place where the dead miraculously rise to vote. The most famous episode—when the elder Daley “stole” the 1960 election for John Kennedy—has been pretty convincingly refuted by historians. (Daley probably did steal the election but not for JFK; Daley ran up the party’s vote totals to ensure a hated rival was kept out of the country prosecutor’s office.)

The line between bribery and politics is a thin one. For example, Daley bought votes of the Chicago Federation of Teachers with pay raises so out of scale to performance as to amount to a bribe. Bribery on this scale is dignified in the U.S. government system as “interest group politics.” Under that name it is permissible for governors to bribe legislators with promises of bridges in their districts, patronage jobs for the county chairman, or photo ops for the re-election campaign. Legislative logrolling is a form of bribe too, in which your vote for my bad bill is traded for my vote for your even worse one.

The Great Immoralities

Chicago has long been rather vain about its lack of probity. In an 1897 story, Mark Twain had Satan complain to a newcomer to Hell, “The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous.”

At the turn of 20th century, guidebooks to the vice districts were published for the tourist trade, and they must have been very helpful indeed in a city that had so much to see. The Levee in the south Loop was merely the largest of the city’s several vice districts. Travelers who wished to visit such places more discreetly could purchase a guidebook catering specifically to parts of the city that was said to have nine hundred or more brothels. The Everleigh Club on Cermak just off State Street in the heart of the old Levee district was Chicago’s—and, said those well-traveled enough to know, the nation’s—plushest whorehouse.

The economic historians recognizes that the vice districts—the Sands, Conley Parch, Gamblers’ Row the Badlands, the Levee—were merely one type of specialized urban district, akin to warehousing, theater, or retailing. The differences between State Street and the Levee were matters of respectability, not function; as a crime commission was to reveal, the big department stores outdid the brothels in their exploitation of young women in their employ, often to the extent that their female employees were reduced to prostitution to make ends meet.

Politicians, especially aspirants for the mayor’s office, had to take a stand one way or another on vice, the way that congressional candidates from Illinois  have to take a stand on soybeans. Which stand a candidate took was a function of personal morality, but just as often of electoral calculus. Many an upright mayor tolerated vice for the votes that a grateful vice overlords could guarantee. The Carter Harrisons—Kentuckians and European by background, and thus not reared like New Englanders to be intemperate about things like temperance—kept loose hands on the reigns. The younger Harrison adopted a sensible middle line; he let the whorehouses and gambling dens in the Levee alone, but discouraged it elsewhere, thus making it easier to police.

At the other extreme was Long John Wentworth. Raised in New Hampshire, Wentworth spent much of his four years as mayor in the years just before the Civil War between 1857 and 1861 waging a sort of civility war on Chicago’s low-lifes. Taking office a second time in 1860, he recalled his first term in attacking the hypocrisy of the so-called better element. “I at once set myself at work to enforce all the laws and ordinances of the city. This gave great offense to a class of voters who professed to entertain peculiar notions respecting what they call necessary evils in large cities, of which evils they themselves were not only conspicuous patrons, but often large beneficiaries.” Wentworth even hired spies to determine who was frequenting Chicago's brothels.

At the turn of the 20th century, commercialized vice in Chicago was the object of government commissions, newspaper crusades, and muckraking exposes such as the 1907 McClure’s article, “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities.” Chicago did not become more upright, but it did learn to be a more discrete. The traffic in women, booze, and drugs and bets became more circumspect, and much less entertaining to pop historians.

While many a Downstater and suburbanite loved to cluck about the sinful Chicagoans, the fact is that much of trade came from just those provinces. (And still does; suburban money waters the lush trade in drugs in city neighborhoods.) As William Cronon noted in Nature’s Metropolis, “The urban market concentrated hinterland trade, even the supply and demand for sin.”

And like all commercial enterprises, vice followed its buyers and eventually began dispersing into the suburbs. Gambling using suburban pinball machines got so bad in 1965 that Cook County Sheriff Richard B. Ogilvie threatened to seize 167 ma­chines (mostly in small restaurants and tav­erns) in twenty-one towns locate for the most part in the west and south suburbs. Experts note that the distinction between city and suburb regarding crime is disappearing—slowly in the case of the remoter collar counties, faster in the case of Cook County suburbs that have lots of poor people.

Of course, the answer may be that Chicago was never more violent or more crooked than other places, it was only more famous—and prouder of it. The city’s pride in its crookedness (like its suburbs’ outrage at it) has become ritualized. Amateur sociologists tend to believe that if crime is spreading into the suburbs, it’s because Chicagoans are spreading into the suburbs.

Downstaters too are quick to say that Chicago has a lot of crime because it has a lot of Chicagoans. Perry Duis seeks explanations in the conditions unique to the city. He notes that Chicago was frontier town whose population was predominantly young and male and single, and which was happy to indulge young men’s pleasures such as gambling, prostitution, and fighting. Vice remained rampant when Chicago became a commercial and meeting center, filled with men away from home. In a city teeming with visitors who were easy marks, and it was inevitable that Chicago would have pickpockets and con men for the same reason that the Serengetti Plain had lots of lions.

Vice was centered downtown because that’s where the travelers were, but that also was where were found its large population of transient workers. Single males who could not afford more splendid accom­modations had recourse to cheap boarding houses on the periphery of the Loop. Typically, the first floors of such buildings were occupied by cut-rate stores, cheap restaurants, penny arcades, and later, cheap movie houses. All were marginal businesses, and to make ends meet many merchants supplemented incomes with gambling, prostitution, and similar illicit entertainments. One such district extended from Van Buren to 12th Street, especially in the 1880s and 1890s; by 1900, State and Wabash between Adams and 12th Street was considered the heart of the city’s vice district.

Sociologists have their own explanations. Some point to the immigrant streams that watered the city, peoples whose cultures understood government and parties in clan terms, and government jobs in terms of spoils. Endemic bribery among public employees explained to some extent by the fact that, as is the case in the Third World today, low pay had to be augmented by the taking of bribes, which were  the equivalent of overtime in a factory job; the system allowed the pols to provide services at low cost, with the real costs, which were paid in brides rather than taxes, being off the public books.

Surely corruption would not have endured through so many whirlwinds of change unless it served some societal functions and values. James Merriner, in his book about Chicago corruption, speculates that in a city in which access to legitimate means of getting ahead were closed to so many citizens by language or prejudice, illegitimate means was the only avenue for the ambitious to advance. Indeed, some studies of corruption have argued that it supports the values of stability and of mediation among competing class and economic interests, hardly unimportant values in an America of con­stant social mobility and cultural transformation.

Chicago also had lots of newcomers who failed to pack their morals when they moved. Richard Wright described the effects of displacement on newly arrived southern black people, noted that the sharecroppers who came north left behind poverty but also the family, religious, and social strictures of the Southern small-town life, and, thus unbound, gave way to antisocial impulses that had been squelched back home. (Journalist Nicholas Lemann amplified that notion in Promised Land, his history of the Great Migration north from the Deep South.) This is an old story among Chicago immigrants—it had been offered in explanation of southern Italians’ involvement in organized crime, too, and Theodore Dreiser in his novels had noted the corrupting effects of the city on newly-arrived small-town whites.

Corruption still plagues Chicago. It has changed—the trade these days is in contracts and campaign cash rather than jobs—and the public sees it as sordid rather than natural. John Gunther, who used to live in the city and report about it, complained in 1947, “Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.” A succession of state’s and federal attorneys might amend that opinion by pointing out that the only difference is that the crooks no longer rule the city, they work for the people who do. ●

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