For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (28 page)

To solve such problems, it was necessary, according to those who believed in free agency, to enforce the law and to apply sufficient punishment to deter the criminal. Remove the loopholes in the law, restore morale in the police force and the judiciary, reestablish respect for the law among the general public, impose draconian sentences for wrongdoing—and crime and murder would stop. Punishment acted to deter, and just as soon as the criminal appreciated the increased probability of arrest and the disadvantages of a lengthy prison sentence, so at that moment the crime wave would subside.

The idea that impersonal forces had any bearing on crime was, to Robert Crowe, nonsense. Criminal behavior was no different from any other type of behavior, Crowe believed; it was freely decided on and deliberately chosen. To claim that impersonal forces compelled the criminal to act was tantamount to removing the concept of responsibility from the criminal justice system; it questioned the very foundations of the law. Crowe’s attitude toward deterministic theories of crime was contemptuous and dismissive—it was not even worth his time, he contended, to argue against such fallacious and erroneous notions.

And in any case, Crowe’s political ambitions provided him with little reason to concede ground to a viewpoint that might be interpreted as offering leniency to criminals. He hoped to be mayor of Chicago, and he could best realize that ambition by demonstrating his competence and ability in fighting crime. He had limited resources—the state’s attorney traditionally had just forty police officers at his disposal—but soon after taking office he began to use them against the spread of illegal gambling houses. “Gambling in Chicago must stop,” Crowe announced in May 1921. “It does not matter whether it flourishes in cigar stores and the back rooms of saloons or in the society residence district; it must be driven out.” Crowe’s campaign against crime made good copy: each evening, Crowe’s men would raid gambling dens, seizing dice tables, slot machines, roulette wheels, tally sheets, and racing handbooks. Most of the raids occurred in the Second Ward, in the area south of the Loop notorious for its black-and-tan cabaret clubs: the Dreamland at 3518 State Street, the Green Mill on the corner of 37th Street and Vernon Avenue, the Stopover on 35th Street, the Excelsior on Indiana Avenue, the Saratoga at 3445 State Street, and the Waiters’ and Porters’ Club at 3415 State Street. The journalists would follow behind—waiting patiently beside the patrol wagons as the police battered down the doors of pool rooms and gambling houses and filing their reports in time for the morning editions. Crowe zealously cultivated the reporters, feeding them inside information and anecdotes; the journalists repaid the favor, liberally quoting Crowe, praising his administration of the state’s attorney’s office, and supporting his initiatives.
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It was all calculated to win publicity in the media. It was more for show than for effect—how could Crowe’s forty constables have any meaningful impact on crime in Chicago?—and Charles Fitzmorris, the chief of police, angrily denounced the state’s attorney for interfering with the work of his own department. Fitzmorris had reason to feel aggrieved—the police under Crowe’s command were technically on loan from the Chicago police department—and Fitzmorris moved to withdraw them from the state’s attorney’s office. But Fitzmorris himself was under attack for allowing corruption to spread within the police department—by his own admission, at least half of the men under his command were involved in the liquor trade—and he had little inclination to pursue a confrontation with the state’s attorney over the inappropriate use of police resources.
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The crackdown on gambling emphasized Crowe’s independence and integrity—his war on crime, no matter that it was essentially fleeting and transitory, could only redound to his credit. And it enabled him to lessen his dependence on Fred Lundin and the City Hall machine.

The Harding landslide in November 1920 had swept all of Lundin’s candidates into office. Lundin’s influence over Cook County politics had metastasized—supporters of City Hall now occupied every significant political position in the county. The City Council, fiercely independent before 1920, had begun to capitulate to the Lundin regime—one by one, the aldermen were throwing their support behind City Hall. And Lundin’s reach even extended as far as Springfield; the new governor of Illinois, Len Small, was one of Lundin’s closest allies.

Only the judiciary still retained its independence, but now it too came under attack. The courts in Cook County had traditionally been nonpartisan, beyond the reach of party or faction, but tradition was about to be swept aside, or so it seemed. The voters would go to the polls in June 1921 to elect judges to the Superior Court and the Circuit Court; if they pulled the Republican lever, they would elect a pro-Lundin slate that was unashamedly partisan.

But Lundin had taken a step too far. The courts were the last redoubt against the excesses of City Hall, a final bulwark against the hegemony of the Republican Party machine; if Lundin controlled the judiciary there would no longer be any hope of redress against corruption and thievery.

On 6 June the voters turned out en masse and elected a nonpartisan reform ticket—City Hall had lost. It was a stunning defeat for Lundin, his first setback in thirty years. The
Chicago Daily Journal
, the sole Democratic newspaper in a Republican city, crowed that “Napoleon Fred Lundin has met his Moscow. Whether this will be followed by a Waterloo remains to be seen; but just now the city hall cohorts are trekking back toward the Beresina with a chill in their hearts…. Will this be the beginning of the end of the Lundin-Thompson power?”
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Such a spectacular failure of the machine to elect its candidates was a sure sign that Lundin had lost his magical touch; association with City Hall might now be as much a liability as an advantage. Over the next eighteen months, Lundin’s allies began to desert him, and his enemies became increasingly emboldened. Robert Crowe, now a powerful figure within the Republican Party, split with Lundin in February 1922. Crowe explained to the newspapers that Lundin had been interfering with his duties as state’s attorney, but Crowe’s departure was as much a bid for leadership of the Republican Party as a sign of dissatisfaction with City Hall.

The decline of Lundin’s influence, and the continuing factionalism among the dissident Republicans, provided the Democrats with a rare opportunity to take power. Alfred Lueder, a political novice whose previous experience in public office amounted to a single year as postmaster, was the compromise candidate for the Republicans in the mayoral election in April 1923. Lueder, by his own admission, was a hopeless public speaker who never could arouse much enthusiasm for his candidacy among the electorate. His Democratic opponent, William Dever, won the election convincingly, receiving almost 400,000 votes.
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Dever’s victory was less a consequence of Republican disunity than an effect of the corruption scandals that had begun to bubble their way to the surface in 1922. The City Hall machine under Lundin’s direction had siphoned millions of dollars from the municipal budget. Corruption was rampant, and no single area of government had been more systematically despoiled than the public school system. The Board of Education had awarded contracts for school supplies to companies—often controlled by friends of Fred Lundin—that sold substandard, shoddy goods at wildly inflated prices. Why had the board paid the Hiawatha Phonograph Company almost $500,000 for 300 phonographs? Patrick H. Moynihan, a member of the City Council, was a part owner of the company—was there any connection? Why had the board spent an exorbitant amount, almost $1 million in 1920, for the purchase of coal? Why had the Apex Supply Company received an unauthorized contract to provide athletic equipment to the Chicago public schools? Edwin Davis, president of the Board of Education, was an uncle of Walter Titzel, an owner of the company—had that relationship influenced the board’s decision to award the contract?
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In May 1922 Robert Crowe presented indictments against William Bither, an attorney working for the Board of Education, accusing Bither of stealing rents derived from school property. Later that year, in August, Crowe indicted three more officials, on charges of conspiracy to defraud the school system. In September 1922, Crowe charged an additional ten officials with malfeasance and misconduct and conspiracy to defraud.
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Crowe had always hoped to connect Fred Lundin to the corruption scandal—with Lundin in the penitentiary, Crowe would face one less obstacle in his drive for the mayoralty—and early in 1923, Crowe announced the indictment of Lundin for conspiracy to defraud. The Board of Education had awarded a contract for steel doors for school buildings to the National Steel Door Company; was it a coincidence that Lundin was president of the National Steel Door Company?
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Crowe had enlisted Jacob Loeb, a former president of the Board of Education, as the star witness for the prosecution. Few families played as prominent a role in Chicago’s Jewish community as the Loebs: Jacob Loeb had made his fortune as a young man as an insurance broker, and since 1912 he had been president of the Jewish People’s Institute; his brother, Albert, was vice president of Sears, Roebuck and a generous contributor to many Jewish charities. Jacob Loeb had been one of Lundin’s victims—Lundin had engineered Loeb’s removal from the Board of Education—and Loeb willingly agreed to Crowe’s suggestion that he testify on the witness stand about the corruption of the public school system by City Hall.
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T
HE TRIAL OF
F
RED
L
UNDIN
and fifteen codefendants in the Criminal Court began on 5 June 1923. The sixth-floor courtroom was packed; Lundin’s friends and supporters had turned out en masse. Lundin himself, dressed in a black frock coat, a white shirt, and a black Windsor tie, sat near the front of the court, his legs stretched out before him, his thumbs in the pockets of his black waistcoat, looking relaxed and untroubled. Lundin had hired Clarence Darrow to defend him. Darrow sat by Lundin’s side, reading silently to himself from a sheaf of papers on his lap, occasionally pausing to confer with one of the other defense lawyers seated to his right.

The assistant attorney general, Marvin Barnhart, began his opening statement. Fred Lundin had conspired to appoint trustees to the Board of Education who would acquiesce in the theft of school funds. Lundin himself had profited directly in two instances. In the first, he had arranged for the school board to purchase insurance coverage for school buildings and property from Virtus Rohm & Company, despite a clear conflict of interest: Lundin was a founding partner and director of the firm. In the second, the Central Metallic Door Company, owned by Fred Lundin, had sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of doors and windows to the Board of Education through a noncompetitive contract.
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Jacob Loeb took the stand on 7 June. Loeb testified that Lundin had badgered and threatened him to remove incorruptible trustees from the school board. Lundin had contempt for civil service laws, and he had eventually managed to fire those trustees who had refused to bend to his command, replacing them with his cronies. The Public School League, a public interest group that traditionally oversaw appointments to the school board, had protested against the new trustees, but to no effect. Lundin had been successful, Loeb admitted, in evading external supervision of his appointments, and after 1919, when Loeb himself had been removed from the Board of Education, the pilfering of school funds had begun in earnest.
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The trial continued through June and into July. The former mayor, William Thompson, interrupted a vacation in Hawaii to testify on behalf of his old friend and to excoriate Jacob Loeb as a “liar and a crook” who had wanted control of the Board of Education for his own purposes. And on 9 July, Lundin himself took the stand to deny everything. Yes, he replied in answer to a question from Clarence Darrow, he knew Jacob Loeb well, but he had never discussed appointments to the school board with Loeb or anyone else—he assumed that the mayor and the City Council dealt with such matters. And that insurance business? Darrow asked. Was there any truth to the allegations that he had sold insurance coverage to the school board? Lundin replied that he had lent a friend some money to start up an insurance firm in 1918, but Lundin himself had never made any money out of it and had had no interest in the firm—the transaction had been a loan to a friend, nothing more. What about the Metallic Steel Door Company, Darrow inquired? Had Lundin been connected with that business? Had he made any money from it? Lundin shook his head. “I had,” Lundin testified, “nothing to do with selling. I sold my interest in the National Steel Door company in January 1922 to Blaine Thelin, my nephew. I received $5000. They owed me $20,000 and I took notes which I have since sold. I gave my stock in the Central Metallic company to Titus Thelin, my nephew.” His connection with the business had been purely passive, he continued; he had had no knowledge of any sales to the Board of Education.
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Clarence Darrow, in his closing speech to the jury, pointed his finger at the prosecution as the real culprit in the case. The accusations against Fred Lundin—“one of the biggest, cruelest conspiracies I ever saw in a court of justice, a conspiracy to imprison a man whom they can’t beat in open war”—had been cooked up by Lundin’s political enemies in an attempt to send him to the penitentiary. Robert Crowe had dug and dug, looking for evidence to present before the grand jury, finally indicting Lundin for conspiracy; Jacob Loeb, like a lapdog, had tagged along behind Crowe, volunteering to testify on Lundin’s supposed influence with the school board, and perjuring himself on the witness stand; and Edward Brundage, the attorney general, had coordinated the prosecution in the courtroom. Everyone knew that each man had an agenda: Crowe sought to become mayor of Chicago; Brundage hoped to be governor of Illinois; and Jacob Loeb looked to revenge himself against City Hall for his removal from the school board in 1919. Crowe and Brundage needed Fred Lundin out of the way for political reasons and, unable to defeat Lundin by fair means, they had resorted to criminal charges to get Lundin into the penitentiary.