Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (31 page)

Young Thompson never became a full-fledged cowboy (he was assigned work as a camp cook), and, to please his father, continued to follow winter courses at Chicago’s Metropolitan Business College, but he did acquire the brash, macho ways of the cowboys he so admired. He also learned how to run a ranch, and, in 1888, his father bought him one in Nebraska. It did well, and Thompson was all set to remain there when his father died and his mother begged him, as the oldest son, to take over the family business. Back home, his father’s office more or less ran itself. Bill joined the Chicago Athletics Club, becoming one of its outstanding water polo and football stars, and making his mark as a yachtsman.

In 1900, he entered politics, as a Republican alderman in Chicago’s Second Ward. He did so for a bet, but the hard-drinking, all-male world of Chicago politics, revolving around saloons and brothels, soon became a substitute for the “Wild West” of his youth, and he never looked back. A playboy who continued to devote more time to sports than to his alderman’s job, he quickly acquired the tricks of the politician’s trade, and his tub-thumping speeches, though at first barely literate, proved effective.

His local standing as a member of a prominent, wealthy family and his popularity as an athlete, along with his shallow, lazy approach to politics, convinced a small caucus of unscrupulous businessmen that he was an ideal front man behind whom tidy fortunes could be made. They got together to sell “Big Bill” Thompson to Chicagoans as candidate for mayor. Among them was William Lorimer, a prominent Chicago
Republican. As he put it, Thompson “may not be too much on brains, but he gets through to the people.”

The career of “Blond Boss” Lorimer, his earliest patron, had already unraveled. Although the former streetcar conductor had had a meteoric rise, becoming, briefly, senator for Illinois, he had not remained one for long. In return for large campaign funds from a local lumber company, Lorimer, whose bristly mustache made him look like a Mack Sennett cop, had voted in favor of high lumber tariffs, and this came to the attention of the Chicago press, forcing his resignation. Thompson, who remained loyal to Lorimer, never lost his hatred of the
Chicago Tribune
and other Chicago papers responsible for destroying Lorimer’s political career.

Another even more valuable mentor was Congressman “Poor Swede” Fred Lundin, an ex-shoeshine turned street hustler who had peddled homemade “juniper ade” on the streets of Chicago, and still invariably wore his hustler’s outfit — a long black frock coat, Windsor tie, plains hat, and huge gold watch — as a trademark.

Lundin applied the same brash organizational talent to “selling” Thompson he had shown parlaying his juniper ade tonic into a profitable company. He worked the streets, recruiting local “street captains” as election agents, leaving cards behind to be filled in with names and numbers of likely Thompson voters. “On each card was a space for a notation of what kind of job the precinct captain wanted in case of victory.”
⁶

Although “Big Bill” campaigned only intermittently — at one crucial stage he left for Cowes to race his motor launch
Disturber III
, making a gracious speech after losing (his anti-British sentiments not yet to the fore) — his oratory was that of an earnest reformer. “I am going to clean up the dirt of the rotten administration in power,” Thompson promised. “No policeman will be sent to the cabbage patch if he offends some politician; not while Bill Thompson is your mayor.” For all his expressed good intentions, some of his most assiduous campaigners were gangsters; men such as Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and Jimmy Mondi, owner of the Sportsman’s Club, an underworld hangout.

Thompson also undertook to “protect the fair womanhood of Chicago.” On a more practical note, he promised to introduce cheaper streetcar fares, improve public transportation, and build more and
better schools. To Chicago blacks, arriving in large numbers from the South, he said: “I’ll give you people the best opportunities you’ve ever had.” He seems to have been genuinely anti-racist at a time when this was relatively rare in mainstream Chicago politics, but was also aware that the black vote would be crucial in several wards.

With the start of the First World War, Thompson also realized the importance of gaining the support of another minority group: Chicago’s 600,000 Germans and Austrians. His anti-British, anti-Royalist bias, later to become an obsession, first became apparent as his campaign for mayor got under way in 1914. An honorary member of Chicago’s German-American Alliance, he delighted in quoting excerpts from the articles of another even more pro-German Thompson — who happened to have been, until recently, U.S. consul in Berlin, and who had written extensively about the “hysterical” anti-German campaign in the British and American press. Most listeners assumed the quotes were his own. So rabid did Thompson’s anti-British rhetoric become that many Chicagoans started calling him “Kaiser Bill.”

The Prohibition issue was crucial, and Thompson’s rival, Democrat Robert M. Sweitzer, had the support of the drys. “Ice cream, soda water, ginger ale and pop! Sweitzer, Sweitzer always on top!” was his opponent’s ringing, singularly apolitical slogan. A dry Chicago parade saw a turnout of 12,000 marchers carrying appropriate banners, such as “Booze brutalizes” and “Boozers are losers.” But they were vasdy outnumbered, shortly afterward, by 40,000 wets, organized by the saloon and liquor lobby, the United Societies for Local Self-Government whose secretary was Anton J. Cermak, later a Thompson rival who would become mayor himself. With the help of the wets, and the support of the German, Austrian, and Afro-American minorities, Thompson won handsomely.

His reformer image did not last long. Although he did bow to dry opinion by promising to implement the Sunday closure laws, favored saloons (including “Big Jim” Colosimo’s establishments) were never raided, and city workers hired on a patronage basis found they had to kick back part of their salaries to a William Hale Thompson Republican Fund (each new garbage team contributed $5 per horse and cart).

Lorimer had rightly surmised that Thompson was no intellectual giant, and that his clique of helpers would be free to plunder the city. With “Big Bill”’s tacit consent, “Poor Swede” Lundin virtually ran
Chicago, and the misrule began. Violent crime increased by 50 percent in a single year, and Colosimo’s vice empire — and that of other underworld barons — flourished, in part as a result of the men Thompson chose to fill the unenviable post of police chief. The new chief of detectives, Nicholas Hunt, was a dandy with an expensive life-style and abysmal reputation, who had already been compelled to resign from the force in 1912 for protecting brothels in the Hyde Park district. So had another prominent Chicago detective, Mike Ryan, once on Colosimo’s payroll.

One of Thompson’s many police chiefs, Charles Healey, came to trial in 1917, and his “little green book,” produced in court, showed weekly cash payments from brothels and saloons and lists of places not on the take that “can be raided.” Despite overriding evidence of corruption, Clarence Darrow, the famous Chicago lawyer, won him an acquittal, thanks to a singularly understanding, appropriately selected jury.

Even before gangsters became Chicago’s real masters, thanks to Prohibition, citizens were complaining that the police consistently looked the other way. John A. Carroll, head of the Hyde Park State Bank, told reporters that in order to get results, he had been compelled to hire private detectives to investigate a $272,000 bank robbery. The police were “simply not interested.”

The escalating breakdown in law and order, even before Prohibition, was largely Thompson’s doing. He ordered the scaling-down, then the demise, of Chicago’s Morals Division, and introduced a zoning system, devised by “Poor Swede” Lundin, that made independent police work virtually impossible. In each of the city’s wards, a suitably pliant police captain was selected to act as a liaison man, routinely receiving orders from a ward committeeman relaying “guidance” from Thompson and Lundin. A number of honorary precinct captaincies were created. One of them went to “Big Jim” Colosimo shortly before he was gunned down.

There were rumors, later substantiated, of payoffs and illegal profits in almost every field of city activity — school and hospital construction, public works, tramway and bus concessions. Able, honest administrators were systematically removed, and — in at least one case — driven to suicide as a result of campaigns against them. City departments were run by political hacks, whose personal loyalty to
Thompson was the sole prerequisite. The Lundin fund-raising techniques anticipated those of Colonel Charlie Forbes, soon to become the Harding administration Health secretary and prime asset-stripper. But the “Big Bill” electoral magic still worked, and he was elected for a second term in 1919.

Shortly afterward, the choice of Chicago as the site of the Republican Convention was a further boost to his career. Thompson enthusiastically endorsed Harding as candidate — like Thompson an isolationist “America firster” — but Harding’s victory mattered less to him than that of his candidate for governor of Illinois, Len Small, a benign-looking farmer and unprincipled political hack. During his own campaign meetings, Small, aware of his mediocre oratorical talent, invariably cut short his own speech with groveling humility. “I’m sorry to be taking up your time,” he told the crowds, “for I know you want to hear the greatest mayor Chicago ever had — the greatest man in the United States.”

Until they fell out, several years later, Governor Small would protect Thompson and his clique from trouble of all types, granting pardons not only to Thompson appointees but to gangland members. Thompson’s first political eclipse, in 1923, was largely the consequence of Governor Small’s appearance before a grand jury for corruption. Although Thompson was acquitted (later there was ample evidence that the jury had been tampered with), their friendship did not survive. The law also caught up with Fred Lundin, who promptly left town. He too was subsequently acquitted on corruption charges, in one of the murkiest trials Chicago had yet seen. Lundin too, in later years, would turn against the man whose career he had fashioned.

In his early days, Johnny Torrio, who inherited the Colosimo empire of speakeasies, breweries, and brothels — and who was soon in partnership with
his
bodyguard, the youthful, up-and-coming New York Lower East Side expatriate Al Capone — had relied more on Democrats than on Republicans to expand his business empire — men such as Morris Eller, a trustee of the Chicago sanitary department and a prominent figure in local Democratic politics, as well as respectable attorneys and at least one former U.S. deputy marshal. But with Thompson’s election as mayor, the Torrio-Capone gangs established close ties with Republican ward-heelers, aldermen, and the new Thompson political appointees.

Thompson’s second spell as mayor was plagued with scandal from the start. The removal of honest city officials had taken its toll: the city was sliding into bankruptcy. Thompson knew that if he wanted a third term, his election campaign would be an expensive one. In 1921, he raised the money in ways that would later become standard practice among politicians hard pressed for cash from Grenoble to Valparaiso. He hired experts, at a cost of $3 million, to carry out a number of urban planning studies. After receiving their commissions, they discreetly turned the money over to his secret campaign fund. These funds remained unused for a long time. As Chicago’s problems worsened, Thompson tried to shore up his waning popularity in increasingly demagogic ways, but was sufficiently astute to see the writing on the wall, and in 1923 announced he would not seek a third term. Chicagoans elected William E. Dever, an upright, Democratic judge — and committed dry.

Without entirely loosening their hold on Chicago — Dever’s attempts to enforce Prohibition would in any case be a resounding failure — Torrio and Capone promptly shifted their activities to Cicero, a small, hitherto peaceful Chicago suburb in Cook County.

That they were able to do so was directly attributable to the local Republican party machine. Ed Konvalinka, a soda fountain owner and rising star of the local Republican party, struck a deal with Torrio and Capone: if they would work for the election of the Republican candidates in Cicero, the Republican political bosses, if elected, promised not to interfere with their activities. Torrio-Capone speakeasies, brothels, and greyhound racing tracks there were soon bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Lauterback’s, one of Capone’s many Cook County investments, was both a saloon openly serving whiskey (at 75 cents a shot), beer (35 cents a stein), and wine (30 cents a glass), and a casino whose roulette stakes were almost certainly the highest in the world, often amounting to over $100,000 worth of chips on the table per spin of the wheel. “Overnight,” wrote Fred D. Pasley in his
Life of Al Capone
, “Cicero seceded from the Volstead United States and went wilder West, and wilder wet, than Chicago [itself].”

The 1924 Cicero election was a textbook example of gangsterdom in action. It did not have to be rigged. Voters known to be opposition Democrats were hijacked and driven out of town, and voters were forced to cast Republican votes at gunpoint. When, alerted by outraged
citizens, police arrived on the scene, there were gunfights. Among the dead was Frank Capone, one of Al’s brothers.

The results were never challenged, and consequently, under nominal Republican leadership, Torrio and Capone virtually ran Cicero — its puppet mayor, Joseph Z. Klenha, soon living in mortal fear of the gang he had ushered into power.

In Chicago itself, even during Thompson’s temporary eclipse, collusion between politicians and gangsters was almost as blatant. Dan O’Banion, its most powerful, colorful gangland boss, had long had a working relationship with the Democratic party. A former choirboy and lifelong devout Catholic, he had started out in life as a professional killer and strong-arm enforcer, and by the time of his violent death was accredited with twenty-five murders, though he was never brought to trial for any of them. But there was another side to this teetotaling, devoted family man, with an impeccable, Irish lace-curtain private lifestyle: he loved flowers and was the proud owner of a fashionable flower shop, which was both his official place of business and his “front.” The elaborate bouquets he put together for selected clients were highly prized.