The Bootleggers (1)
The Face of Violence*
By KENNETH A LLSOP ON a tropically hot afternoon in July, 1921, some children playing hop-scotch on the corner of Halstead and Fourteenth Streets, near Chicago's Maxwell Street ghetto, paused in their game to watch with momentary curiosity a man being hustled by four others into a black touring car parked at the kerb. He looked agitated and frightened, in a numbed sort of way, and did not cry out. He was shoved into the car, which accelerated away into the traffic. Next day his cold body was found beside a country road near Libertyville, a small town twenty-five miles north of the city. He had been shot in the head. His name was Steve Wisiewski.
He was killed because he had hijacked a consignment of beer belonging to a Chicago West Side gang. Wisiewski was an obscure, small-time racketeer, a corner-boy nobody. His only importance to this record is that he is officially registered as the first of the 703 gangland fatalities of Chicago's fourteen years of Prohibition warfare. Upon him, aiso, fell the distinction of being the inaugural victim of a technique of murder that was to be busily employed. He was the first man to be taken for a one-way ride—that is, whisked off by car to a quiet place for dispatch at leisure and in safety.
A war historian, undertaking to reconstruct a modern military campaign in all its intricacy and gargantuan confusion of movement, has a straightforward task compared with that of de- scribing the fighting between Chicago's booze barons during those fourteen years. At least, in a contest of arms between nations the theatre of war is discernible, the issues in contention are declared although they may become blurred and even repudiated by the passage of time, the oPposing sides remain distinguishable, and there are regimental records and personal memoirs to be consulted; whereas the booze gangs issued no communiqués and preserved no battle-orders, the reasons for particular assaults and assassina- tions were often recondite personal feuds arising out of deeply internal quarrels and betrayals, the pattern of alliances was for ever in a stage of fluidity and flux, and, in place of a sustained Clash of arms, the battles took the form of sPoradic skirmishes, ambushes, sudden pounces uPon individuals, jousts between moving cars similar to dog-fights between fighter aircraft, and the unpredictable, shifting collisions of guerrilla warfare.
Chicago's malodorous reputation was of long standing. From the start, from the days in the 1830s when it was 'the Mud-hole of the Prairies,' an Indian trading post doing a spanking business in Pelts, guns, blankets, girls and whisky, it was a brawling, swaggering, brash, tough and hell- raising town, although it was ten years before it bad its first official hanging. At the portal of the new frontier, aboil with plainsmen and cattle- dealers, merchants and whores, canal boatmen and covered wagoners, pioneers and property investors, it was also a magnetic field for gamblers, con-men and chisellers.
In 1840 it was said to be rife with 'rowdies, blacklegs and all species of loafers.' In 1860 the Chicago Journal cried : 'We are beset on every side by a gang of desperate villains.' In 1872 a citizens committee was formed to fight crime and Promote legal reform, because 'one jostles the elbOW of a murderer at every angle of the street, and Yet'—and how reiterative this complaint was to become—`the law seems powerless to bring the evil-doers to justice.' In 1876 the Times said: 'Big thieves are boldly traversing our streets by day, planning their rackets' (using the later highly familiar word at this early date). In 1893 W. T. Stead, the English journalist, published his book If Christ Came to Chicago, which dis- closed respected citizens living off red-light rents, politicians swinging elections on whisky payola, policemen collecting dues from brothels and saloon-keepers, and gambling syndicates pro- tected by City Hall. In 1906 the Chicago Tribune declared : 'A reign of terror is upon the city. No city in time of peace ever held so high a place in the category of crime-ridden, terrorised, murder- breeding cities as is now held by Chicago.'
So it may be seen that when Prohibition entered in 1920, Chicago was not unrehearsed or inexperienced in the techniques of countering and turning to advantage such a situation. Vice, lawlessness and corruption were not born of that ban on alcohol. Yet the following fourteen years were a distinct and singular phase, for what the new law did was to present in a barrel undreamed- of opportunities for the artisans and artists of crime.
In those', young days of Prohibition Chicago was a fragmentation of hostile criminal duchies. It was Johnny Torrio who performed the func- tion of Charlemagne by bringing the warring factions together, laying down the first crude system of profit-sharing and allocation of terri- tory, and maintaining a temporary, insecure peace by a relatively benevolent despotism and * The first of a series of five extracts from The Bootleggers, a study of Chicago in the 1920s, to be published by Hutchin- son's in the autumn.
Kenneth Alison this week sets and sur- veys the scene in Chicago at the beginning of the gangster era.: the next three extracts consider some of the important influences promoting it—Prohibition, Al Capone, and the Mafia; and the final extract, 'Anatomy of a Gangster,' presents his conclusions. flexibility towards the aspirations of neighbour- ing overlords; it was Dion O'Banion whose in- surrection burst asunder that first capricious federation; and it was Al Capone who became the modern dictator, ruthlessly crushing mutinY and finally, by blaze of gunpower and spilling of blood, forcing the surviving independent barons to accept the principle of central govern- ment.
The genesis of this eventual domination of a city by a criminal dictator—one whose authority extended through the State of Illinois and beyond—is to be found in the decade before Prohibition came into being. Between 1910 and 1920 Big Jim Colosimo was at the pinnacle of his success as boss of Chicago's underworld. He had arrived in America as the child of Italian immigrants, had industriously worked his way up from South Side newsvendor and shoe-shine boy to prosperous Black Hand terrorist, pick- pocket and pimp, had worked briefly at street sweeping as refuge from imminent arrest, and had organised his fellow street-cleaners into a social club and union, the block voting of which he swung to Alderman Hinky Dink Kenna, Chief of the First Ward Democratic machine, in return for political favours and remuneration. In 1902 he married the madame of a brothel and, with the experienced aid of his wife, rapidly ex- panded until he was director of a chain of levee bordellos, gambling houses and cafés. His income then was 500,000 dollars a year, a pittance com- pared with the sums later trawled in by his suc- cessors but enormous for that period. Ha acquired his name of Diamond Jim by arraying his huge check-suited body with diamonds, diamonds on fingers, clothes and accessories, and diamonds carried in leather bags in his pockets, through which he delved as he talked, like a child with a heap of coloured beads. Then the one- time Black Hander himself became the target of Black Hand extortionists, and it was to protect himself that he engaged a New York gunman as bodyguard. He was Johnny Torrio, leader of an East River waterfront mob of hoodlums called the James Street gang.
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