Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (57 page)

E
NDS GENERALLY OUTWEIGHED
means in Chicago, and Darrow’s success returned him to high standing. For his sixty-first birthday, Darrow was given another banquet in his honor, by a far more prosperous and notable crowd than the preachers and radical lawyers who had welcomed him back from Los Angeles five years earlier.

Carl Sandburg was among those who spoke. There was a “big honesty of shiftiness about Darrow,” said the poet, with the insight into the city and its sons that made him famous. “There are times when you cannot be right without being shifty. And this faculty of his, the power of being … everything in general and nothing in particular, just about hits him off.”

Then the poet read a verse in tribute.

    
Let the nanny-goats and the billy-goats of the shanty people eat the clover over my grave.

    
And if yellow hair, or any blue smoke of flowers is good enough to grow over me, let the dirty-fisted children of the shanty people pick those flowers
.

    
I have had my chance to live with the people who have too much and the people who have too little, and I chose one of the two and I have told no man why
.

“On the whole the years have passed rapidly,” Darrow said when it came his time to speak. “So quickly have they sped that I hardly realize that so many have been checked off.” There was rheumatism to remind him, and “the Lord never seemed to know much about teeth,” Darrow said. A dentist had manufactured a complex bridge for him, he confided, with four false teeth. “These new ones do good work,” he said. “They never hurt me. I generally wear them in my pocket.…

“The fact is, age does not necessarily bring wisdom; it may here and there bring caution, but not always that,” he told the crowd. Man’s awful cruelty dismayed him. Life’s meaninglessness saddened him. The sensualists had it right. “Neither the old nor the young can live long without pleasure … The denial of this is death or worse than death,” said Darrow. “I could never resist temptation … Why live without joy?”

He closed on a serious note.

“I have lived a life in the front trenches, looking for trouble,” he said.
“The front trenches are disagreeable; they are hard; they are dangerous; it is only a question of days or hours when you are killed or wounded and taken back. But it is exciting. You are living; and if now and then you go back to rest, you think of your comrades in the fight; you hear the drum; you hear the cannon’s voice; you hear the bugle call; and you rush back to the trenches and to the thick of the fight. There, for a short time, you really live. It is hard, but it is life.

“This is life … to play the game, to play the cards we get; play them uncomplainingly and play them to the end. The game may not be worth the while. The stakes may not be worth the winning. But the playing of the game is the forgetting of self, and we should be game sports and play it bravely to the end.”
¹⁰

M
AURICE
“M
OSSY
” E
NRIGHT
was one game sport who played it bravely to the end, which came on the night when, on the street in front of his home, he was riddled with bullets in a gangland slaying. Enright was a convicted murderer, labor racketeer, and union enforcer. His motto was “Spare the rod and you’ll spill the beans.”

“Moss slugged and shot and intrigued his way into prominence where prominence comes hard,” the
Daily News
said. “But last night it was his turn … as he was stepping out of his new swell automobile to enter his new swell home for dinner.”

Enright was a man of many friends—five thousand showed up for the gangland funeral—and enemies. When the police rounded up the “usual suspects,” the count exceeded fifty. Among those interrogated were
Timothy “Big Tim” Murphy, former legislator, president of the gas workers union, and onetime Enright protégé;
Michael “Dago Mike” Carozzo, the leader of the street sweepers’ union; and
Vincenzo “Sunny Jim” Cosmano—all members of a labor faction that had been feuding with the deceased. Carozzo asked to remain in his cell when two hot-blooded women, both claiming to be his wife, and previously unknown to each other, arrived to bail him out. The police were fortunate when young
James Vinci, paling at the sight of the noose, confessed to driving the murder car and named the three as the killers.

Darrow knew them all. The Irish-born Enright was a union man who had worked, for a time, as an investigator for Erbstein. Murphy was an old
friend of Mont Tennes and a veteran goon from the bone-breaking days of the Hearst circulation wars. Cosmano, who was named by Vinci as the triggerman, hired Darrow to serve as his lawyer. State’s attorney Hoyne’s chief foe was delay. Over time, witnesses in Chicago had a way of vanishing. And when Darrow kept asking for continuances (as he was then defending Lloyd and the local communists) the newspapers raged. But the courts agreed to the postponement and, sure enough, the witnesses went away. The big men were freed. Only Vinci was convicted of Mossy’s murder, and his conviction was overturned on appeal.

The Enright assassination marked “the beginning of a new epoch in the evolution of the Chicago underworld,” the
Tribune
’s
Philip Kinsley wrote. Ruthlessness had replaced honor. There were no “more or less courageous gun battles and fights in barrooms,” said Kinsley. “The scene shifts from this time on to the ways of the stealthy Sicilians, the hired gunmen who followed their victims for weeks, if necessary, shooting with sawed-off shotguns from automobiles into the back of an unsuspecting man.”

Cosmano and Murphy prospered, but only for a time. Sunny Jim was shot in the gut in a tussle with Big Jim Colosimo’s gang, which in turn became (after Colosimo was gunned down one night in the lobby of his café) Johnny Torrio’s and Al Capone’s “Outfit.” And the tall, well-tailored Big Tim, though he seemed to live a charmed life, eventually met Mossy’s fate. He answered the door one night and was machine-gunned on the steps of his home at the age of forty-two, leaving a meager estate of $1,000. “He had always been a good spender,” his widow sighed philosophically.
¹¹

I
N
J
ANUARY
1920
, the good people triumphed, and the United States began its thirteen-year experiment with
Prohibition. Darrow had opposed the temperance movement for decades, as a matter of good business, since he represented various beer and liquor interests, and conviction, as an intrusion on personal freedom. “A man would be better off without booze, but the same is true of pie,” he told audiences.

The ban on alcoholic beverages was supposed to correct human behavior and curb crime. It did just the opposite. Speakeasies flourished, smugglers made fortunes, people kept drinking, and Americans lost respect for law. The trade in illicit liquor was staggeringly lucrative, sustaining
organized crime and breeding crops of gangsters who stippled the streets with gunfire. “You can hardly be surprised at the boys killing each other. The business pays very well, but it is outside the law and they can’t go to court like shoe dealers or real estate men or grocers when they think an injustice has been done them or unfair competition has arisen in their territory,” Darrow said. “So they shoot.”

Given his philosophical leanings, Darrow had no qualms about defending the bootleggers—even killers like Bugs Moran,
Frank McErlane,
Terry Druggan,
Frankie Lake,
George “Red” Barker, and
William “Three-fingered Jack” White. But his willingness to serve such villains dismayed his admirers. He was called a “pitiable spectacle” by federal judge
Evan Evans, who said that the “dangling purse” of the rumrunners had ruined a great lawyer.

Darrow suffered defeat in the trial of
Michael “Mike de Pike” Heitler and his confederates, who were convicted of buying some of the remaining stock of proscribed bourbon from the Old Grand Dad distillery, selling it to speakeasies in Chicago, and having corrupt friends on the police force steal it back in bogus “raids.” His next clients were more respectable—wealthy Chicagoans who were offered the leftover inventory of the Grommes & Ullrich distillery if they purchased “shares” in the business. Several bought hundreds of cases for their basements. “Your honor, a bootlegger is one who professionally buys or sells liquor,” Darrow told the judge. “The defendants … were not professionals.” Hoarding liquor was a universal custom for those who liked a snort. “Don’t you know that hundreds of Chicago families have as much as $30,000 or $40,000 worth of liquor in their cellars?” Darrow asked. None of the defendants was convicted.
¹²

Occasionally, Darrow’s success would have tragic repercussions.
Joseph Kyle, a wealthy Realtor, left the mob-owned Derby Cafe in the early morning hours with a couple of pals and three young women who were variously described as “dancers” or “cabaret girls.” His racy Templar speedster careened through Chicago before caroming into a farm truck, killing the aged driver,
C. C. Hudson. When the police arrived at the scene, Kyle tried to bribe them.

A coroner’s jury cleared Kyle of wrongdoing and the state’s attorney stepped in, suspecting that the Colosimo gang had corrupted the inquiry. Kyle hired Darrow, whose closing argument—that his client had spent most of the night in question washing his yacht—somehow failed to win
the jury’s sympathy. Kyle was sentenced to the penitentiary, but freed after Darrow persuaded a judge to overturn the verdict as part of a negotiated settlement in which Hudson’s family received $12,500.

“Well,” Darrow told reporters, “everybody seems to be satisfied.” Not everyone. Five years later, after another all-night tour of roadhouses with a young lady, Kyle crashed into a milk wagon, critically injuring another innocent driver.
¹³

Some of Darrow’s gangland clients, like Murphy and Cosmano, had Runyonesque qualities. But the hellions of Rock Island, Illinois, were downright Gothic. For more than two decades, the warring factions filled the streets with bullets and bombs as the dead-eyed
John Looney, in the guise of a newspaperman, sought to install himself as thane.

Looney was “the stormy petrel of Rock Island politics and journalism—an eccentric, brilliant man, posing as reformer and moralist, who kept the town in terror,” said the
Tribune
. He ate raw liver, spread on soda crackers, and believed he had demonic protection. He ran whorehouses and speakeasies. Looney shot it out on a downtown street with a rival publisher, whose presses were dynamited. A few years later, he was hauled into City Hall and beaten by a corrupt rival—the mayor—as the police looked on. The next night a riotous mob incited by Looney besieged the police station. The governor had to send in the National Guard.

In 1922, Looney’s son was killed when rival gangsters drove up in two automobiles and opened fire on a busy downtown street. “It’s come,” Looney shouted and ran for cover to a nearby doorway. His son pulled a pistol but wasn’t fast enough. It is hard to see what motive lured Darrow to Rock Island to defend the men who killed Looney’s boy, other than the $30,000 that reportedly was paid him. In any event, he couldn’t do much for
George “Crimps” Holsapple and
Anthony Billburg and their accomplices. Darrow tried to play “the part of the grand old man, gentle in every respect,” a newspaper reported. But the whole town had seen the attack, and the jury was not swayed.
¹⁴

D
ARROW MARKED HIS
seventh decade with some fine diversions. He took two months off in the summer of 1921 and retreated to Fish Creek, Wisconsin, to write a book on the causes of crime. He had been suffering from a digestive ailment and was told he might need surgery, but the rest
seemed to cure him. In 1922, Darrow celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday by touring Europe and the Holy Land, traveling across Canada to visit Paul and his family in Colorado, and wintering in Florida. He attended World Series games and, in 1923, in the middle of a trial, took off on a junket to the Kentucky Derby.

Darrow joined in the effort to kill the proposed new Illinois constitution, which called, among other things, for Bible reading in public schools. He wrote an article for
H. L. Mencken’s magazine, the
American Mercury
, on the “ordeal of Prohibition” and spoke out against the city health board’s new regulations on venereal disease, which allowed its inspectors to arrest and publicly stigmatize the infected. And he and Ruby opened their apartment to
Sinclair Lewis when the Nobel Prize–winning author visited Chicago to conduct research for his novel
Arrowsmith
. “When many people imagine I’m in a secret and sinister conference with the Reds, or indignantly fighting the censorship of burlesque show posters … or lecturing with a flushed face on capital punishment,” Darrow told editor
George Nathan, “what I’m really doing—and having a grand time doing it—is getting a lot of friends over to my house in Chicago and reading aloud to them.”
¹⁵

Then, at sixty-six, Darrow returned to the arena for the biggest political corruption trial yet. The prosecutors in the state’s attorney’s office had worked their way up the ladder and nailed Lundin himself. The Chicago school board was the venue for his larceny. He and the boys demanded kickbacks for just about everything that it purchased: land, buses, boilers, doors, insurance, furniture, coal—even lightbulbs.

The “Poor Swede,” as he was known, was a goggle-eyed salesman of patent medicines who had risen through Republican ranks to become a master political strategist and a congressman. The newspapers called him “the silent power” behind Thompson and “the long-recognized czar” of city and state politics. “To hell with the public,” Lundin said, when one school board member questioned the size of a kickback on textbooks. “We are at the trough now and we are going to feed.”