Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (56 page)

De Priest arrived at the Criminal Courts Building in a limousine, escorted by notables from the South Side. Preachers, businessmen, and women’s clubs supported him, for the city’s black community, knowing
the corruption that existed at all levels of Chicago society, wondered why their leader had been singled out. He too hired Darrow. In court, Darrow described De Priest as a little guy, being boxed around by the big men who ran things in Chicago. Yes, he got payments from Jones and others, but they were campaign contributions, De Priest told the jury. The allegations against him were the concoctions of his political enemies. He might have used his clout to intimidate a few street cops, but he had no pull at police headquarters. “Gambling is a horrible crime,” Darrow drawled. “Why doesn’t our industrious state’s attorney attack it in the women’s clubs, where they play bridge and whist for money and prizes?”

The jury took seven hours to acquit De Priest. In 1928, he was elected to Congress and became the first black man to serve in the House since Reconstruction.
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H
OYNE WAS FURIOUS
but persevered. And obtaining the indictment and resignation of his next target—Police Chief
Charles Healey—was a notable accomplishment. The chief was charged with taking $1,000 a month in graft from the poolrooms, brothels, and saloons. The state had incriminating records seized from City Hall, and wiretap transcripts of Healey’s phone conversations. Among the prosecution witnesses was
Tom Costello, the chief’s bagman, who agreed to testify in return for leniency. Healey had been on the take, said Costello, since 1898. They had manufactured evidence, sold protection, and auctioned off promotions to crooked cops. It looked like a rock-solid case.

Healey was a stand-up guy and refused to implicate Thompson. On the witness stand, he claimed to not remember things. “My client stated some things that were not correct,” Darrow was compelled to explain. “I deny that he lied.”

The defense was based on equal portions of cynicism and sentiment. Healey was no mastermind, Darrow told the jury, just a flawed cop who had tried to keep his head above the waters of corruption. The chief was frail and old, and had a modest home and a blind, devoted wife. He was a victim of the political rivalry between Hoyne and Thompson. Costello was the real schemer, framing Healey to save his own hide. Why, the chief’s miserable performance on the stand was proof, said Darrow, that Healey was not bright enough to organize a grafting ring.

“The state has told you he was a poor witness, and he was,” said Darrow. “Costello was a good witness; one of the cleverest.”

“I … confess that if I were mayor of this city, and knowing Healey as well as I know him now, I wouldn’t make him chief of police,” said Darrow. “It takes a clever man to be chief of police and keep out of jail—and this man is a child in the hands of Costello.”

The trial was a sensation, with the kinds of twists that lent defense attorneys “an aura of sulfur,” said lawyer
Charles Erbstein, who worked with Darrow for the defense. There is no ready contemporary record that Darrow, as was said in the years after his death, would insert a thin piece of wire in a cigar to have jurors focus on the long, dangling accumulation of ash instead of the prosecution or its witnesses. But Erbstein accomplished much the same thing, with a broken watch that took endless noisy winding.

In the end, it was pathos that carried the day. “In poor man’s suit, baggy pants, floppy jacket, stringy tie,” Darrow “sang his song of humanity to the jurors,”
Ben Hecht recalled.

“Mr. Healey is old, broken physically and mentally,” Darrow told the jury. “He has labored under a strain the last few months such has sent other men to the insane asylum, suicide, or drink.” The state’s attorney’s tactics were what should be condemned, not Healey, Darrow told the jurors. They shouldn’t, just couldn’t, send the poor old cop to prison for a few venial sins, for succumbing to temptations such as all men do. This was Chicago.

Hundreds who braved a winter storm heard Darrow ask the jury to deal with Healey as you wish others to deal with you at the grave and serious times of your life. It was sentimental slush. And it worked. After eight weeks of testimony, the jury set Healey and his codefendants free. The chief cried and trembled after hearing the verdict and embraced Darrow. “My one thought now is to get home to my wife and sit with her by the fireside,” Healey told the press, in character to the end.

“The verdict in this trial was a mighty big surprise,” Hoyne grumbled.

Hoyne must have thought back to the Healey verdict—and Darrow’s machinations in the McNamara trial—when the state unearthed a conspiracy to bribe jurors in the next big corruption case.
Francis Becker, a chief examiner for the Civil Service Commission, was defended by Darrow after being charged with shaking down saloons and whorehouses. In May 1918, a jury acquitted him. A few weeks later Hoyne charged
the jury foreman and two other men with soliciting bribes. No money was passed and there was no evidence that Darrow knew anything about it, but he felt the need to reassure Paul. “You may be absolutely sure there isn’t the slightest thing in it,” Darrow wrote his son.

Hoyne was now 0 for 3 against Darrow but finally prevailed when a jury convicted
William Miller, a Thompson man in the governor’s cabinet, for selling the answers to licensing exams to unqualified doctors and pharmacists. There was a limit, after all, to Chicago’s cynicism. Even with the answers, some of the quacks had failed the test.
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“Law and the pursuit of … justice leave but few illusions,” said Erbstein.
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D
ARROW HAD BEEN
paid a $1,000 retainer and $100 a day in the
Healey case. The firm was grossing $100,000 a year. He was back. “Am called for everywhere and by all kinds of people, from preachers and bankers and governors—up to … burglars,” he told Paul. His work for the Thompson-Lundin gang was interspersed with his speaking tours on behalf of the war effort, defense of communists in the Red Scare, learning to drive a car, his first ride in a “Flying Machine,” and a palette of clients whose cases offered a taste of Chicago in the Jazz Age.
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Joseph Weil, aka the “Yellow Kid,” was a debonair con man with a Van Dyke beard and a knack for persuading people to give him their money. His biggest score was said to have been for $250,000, from a swindle in which he and his confederates created a phony stock brokerage, complete with tickers, secretaries, and receptionists. In another variation, they rented a building and got dozens of pals to pose as the customers and employees of a busy bank, with stacks of fake cash, a line of tellers, and—a nice touch—printed stationery and deposit slips. The Kid apologized repeatedly as he and his mark waited to see the “bank manager,” but the bustle convinced the victim that this was a well-run financial establishment. The man handed over $50,000, and was flummoxed when he returned and found an empty building.

But not even Darrow could save Weil when he was caught posing as a mining engineer for Standard Oil and swindling a Fort Wayne banker out of $15,000. While awaiting trial on that charge, Weil and his pals took another Indianan for $110,000. Their photographs were carried across
the country and soon men from all over—a Michigan doctor, a Montana rancher, a banker from Wyoming—who valued their money more than their dignity showed up in Chicago, claiming to have been fleeced.

“I am not holding up my client as a saint,” Darrow told the jury, in something of an understatement. But of the victims, Darrow said: “All these men were out for a pot of gold … I don’t see any reason for wasting sympathy.”

The jury saw it differently. The Kid went off to Joliet in style, with a diamond stickpin in his cravat, a Killarney green overcoat, tan shoes, and an emerald velour hat “of gay and rakish tilt,” the papers noted.
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Darrow maintained his practice of defending heartbroken individuals, rich and poor, whose love affairs led them into conflict with each other or the law. He got hefty fees for handling messy divorces or probate cases for heirs to the Cole circus, McCormick reaper, and Rockefeller oil fortunes. And his defense of
George Munding, the “riding master to the city’s uptown society,” earned front-page coverage.

Munding, believing his fiancée was unfaithful, had shot and killed her as she stood outside the paddock of her riding academy in Hillsdale. “Picture this poor man,” Darrow told the jury, “as one adrift in a row-boat on the sea of elemental emotion. The sea overwhelmed him, as it has overwhelmed many another, and he sank. He was a poor, helpless victim of environment and heredity and the passion that has driven men mad since Cleopatra’s day.” Munding dodged the hangman, and received a prison term.

And then there was
Emma Simpson, who smuggled a revolver into a Chicago courtroom, pulled it from the folds of her dress, and shot her adulterous husband four times as they quarreled over their impending divorce.

Spectators screamed. The judge gaped. A bailiff threw his arms around Ms. Simpson.

“You’ve killed him!” screamed the court reporter.

“I hope so,” Emma said.

Later, she smiled for the newspaper photographers. “My life has been besmirched,” she told the press. “I have always loved … Elmer, and he has always repaid me with faithlessness.”

Simpson was the niece of a streetcar magnate and could afford to
retain Darrow. The city waited as Elmer lingered, for a month, on his deathbed. “I guess I nagged her too much,” he told his doctors. When at last he expired, the state charged Emma with murder and said it hoped to hang her.

Emma showed up in court for her trial, “attired in the customary subdued though fetching raiment of the feminine defendant—plain linen frock, white pumps and sable sailor” hat, one of the newspaper sob sisters wrote. Darrow announced that Emma was temporarily insane. Friends and family members told of her erratic behavior. And Emma did her part. When the prosecutor introduced the handgun as evidence Emma stood, screamed “Take it away!” and, after a dramatic pause, certain that every eye in the courtroom was upon her, collapsed to the floor.

Darrow employed an “honor defense”—telling the all-male jury that women, like men, should be excused by the unwritten law that forgave the killing of adulterers. Ladies, after all, were even more susceptible to emotion. “Women will take a bunch of old love letters, tied with faded ribbon, and relive an early romance,” Darrow said. “To men an old romance would be dust and ashes.”

Why, the shooting “was a crazy act,” said Darrow. “Does it seem to you, gentlemen, that a person in his or her right mind would pick out a court, a temple of justice, where a dozen persons are gathered, to do a murder?” he asked the jury. Darrow could not resist: “It is not only murder but … contempt of court.”

Well, you can’t convict a pretty woman for murder in Cook County, especially for bumping off a cheating louse like Elmer. The jury took half an hour to find Emma innocent. She spent fifty-one days in a mental hospital and was given her freedom.

The good people were outraged. “Sentimentality is lawless. The disease in America is endemic,” the editors at the
Tribune
sputtered. “We need some drastic moral therapy.”
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T
HE GOOD TIMES
rolled on. Darrow was adding to his near-perfect record of saving clients from the death penalty. If he could not persuade a judge or a jury he’d keep at it, and prevail with an appeal or a pardon.

And so
George Vogel, a cheap hood who shot a police sergeant in
the back one night at Paddy the Bear’s saloon, escaped death row when Darrow persuaded the jury that his client acted in self-defense. When troubled
Reinhold Faust was caught lighting a bomb in an opera house, an act that he believed would end America’s war with Germany and convince a bank to give him $100,000, Darrow reached a deal with the prosecutors to get him psychiatric treatment.
J. Ellsworth Griffin was acquitted, in one of the briefest murder trials in Cook County history, after Darrow argued that Griffin had, in a drunken argument, pulled the trigger while wrestling for a pistol with his business partner.

In a case that spurred headlines across America, Darrow got the courts to rule that
Emily Strutynsky was insane when she gunned down her parish priest at confession. She had knelt at her confessor’s feet in the guise of a penitent, pulled out her gun, shot him through the mouth, chased him around the altar, firing until he fell, and hurdled his body in her bid to escape before being tackled by two female parishioners. The congregation was making preparations to lynch her when the police arrived at the church. Darrow got her sent to an asylum. Four years later, she escaped the grounds, hurled herself into the Kankakee River, and drowned.

In 1920, a gang of gunsels tried to rob the State Exchange Bank in Culver, Indiana. The townfolk responded and met the bandits with a volley of bullets. One Hoosier was fatally wounded in the shoot-out. Four robbers were caught, and charged with capital murder. Darrow agreed to defend them. The trial was conducted in rural Warsaw, where crowds flocked to the courthouse with picnic baskets. Men stood on stepladders to peer through the court windows, and there were fistfights over seats. “This is no vaudeville,” the judge lectured the spectators. “I never saw such a crazy crowd. You are completely off your base, people.”

Darrow played the humanist. “These boys, not one of them intended to kill,” Darrow said. “They intended to rob. Their moral guilt is fixed by their intent.”

The jury found them guilty but spared their lives. “I went down to a small town in Indiana to defend four young fellows who tried to get money out of a bank without having deposited any,” Darrow told Mary. “I worked ten days to save their lives—nothing else—and the jury did it—much to the regret of the whole community.”
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