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Book Tour: On the Job: Behind the Stars of the Chicago Police Department by Daniel P. Smith

Get a sneak peak into Smith’s new book about the lives of Chicago’s finest.

Excerpted from: “The Chicago Way: Police Work in the Urban Landscape” chapter from Daniel P. Smith’s On the Job: Behind the Stars of the Chicago Police Department (Lake Claremont Press, 2008).

Chicago, ever since prohibition, has had this remarkable history of no line between what is legal and illegal.
—Studs Terkel in Battleground Chicago

For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more, I cannot control myself.
—Scribbled in lipstick by murderer William
Heirens on the wall of a victim’s home

The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder. ——Late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley


For better or worse, we are Capone’s city as much as Daley’s or Jordan’s. A history of criminal figures and events engraved in its existence, Chicago is identified for its murders over its mayors, its schemes over its superstars. Latin Kings. Disciples. El Rukn. Heroin. Gacy. Speck. The Outfit. St. Valentine’s Day.

The city’s criminal history has reached fabled proportions, a product of Hollywood as much as Chicago’s own acceptance—and sometimes celebration—of its dim underbelly. Outsiders, having been asked about their knowledge of Chicago, have been known to form a gun with their fingers and say “bang.”

“That’s Chicago,” as Billy Flynn would say.

“It’s easy to add to the myth because Chicago is a town defined by its history of being tough. It’s not San Francisco or Los Angeles—it’s a real ‘American’ city. New York, even, is more cosmopolitan and international,” says author Frank Kusch, an observer of Chicago from his vantage point over the Canadian border.

Adds Chicago author Richard Lindberg: “There is a Chicago way—even among the most articulate—an alertness to the whole issue of violence and brutality that dots our city. This is still a meat-and-potatoes town and Chicago’s a product of its industrial background—the old memories and impressions are genetic in the culture.”

Criminal Chicago

Chicago’s criminal history roots itself in the city’s frontier spirit from the mid-1800s. While the city has never been mistaken for Wyatt Earp’s wild west, it has nevertheless entertained a coarse image throughout its history. In the mid-nineteenth century, the city’s newspapers were filled with reports of thefts, rapes, murders, and arson, each tale underlining the fact that Chicago’s criminal streak flourished. In 1840, the city held its first public hanging, with 2500 in attendance—over half of the city’s reported 4400 citizens—confirming Chicago’s recognition of crime as well as its firm stomach for handling the darker side of life. Vice, meanwhile, was not contained to backrooms; rather, gambling, prostitution, and other assorted criminal ventures prospered in plain view.1

As the decades of the nineteenth century moved ahead, lawlessness further entrenched itself in the city’s lore. The Haymarket affair in 1886, a movement attempting to secure workers an eight-hour day, pit Chicago’s undermanned police force against a horde of unionists, reformers, and socialists. When the two sides clashed, a bomb hurled at police touched off a succession of chaos. Sixty officers were injured, eight killed, joining an undetermined number of protestors killed or wounded.2 In the 1890s, the Levee District between 18th and 22nd Streets earned repute as Chicago’s most brazen display of vice, bringing worldwide visitors and attention to the city’s criminal activity. Chicagoans and the city hierarchy professed an acceptance of vice, so long as it remained in pockets of the city.

“The disreputable women, the pickpockets and petty thieves are better ‘bunched’ in one section of the city than scattered all over it,” said the Chicago Chronicle in 1899. “The police know where to find them. Respectable people know how to avoid them."[1]
As such, misdeeds thrived in some districts under the open eyes of the city and its visitors. With its containment approach and rather blasé attitude, Chicago’s criminality only further engrained itself into the city’s psyche and history, as well as dictating police response.
“A man born in the city slums [with] only a grade school education probably did not share the same moralistic views about wagering as a clergyman or Gold Coast reformer,” writes Richard Lindberg in To Serve and Collect. “The perception of the seriousness of the crime was frequently a determinant in the police response."[2]

As early as the 1880s, a burgeoning gang scene developed in such historic neighborhoods as Bridgeport and Back of the Yards on the South Side, where ruffians raided street peddlers and robbed men leaving work at the stockyards. By the 1920s, an estimated 1300 gangs existed in Chicago, the vast majority considered social clubs such as the Hamburg Club and the Old Rose Athletic Club.[3] The Ragen’s Colts, a group spurring from the Morgan Athletic Club and at the center of the city’s 1919 race riot, claimed many members that would later become skilled politicians and labor representatives, wiggling their way into Chicago’s political landscape, creating a patronage army, and demonstrating the city hierarchy’s ever-increasing dealings with illicit factions. Such gangs served the foundation for Chicago’s most infamous criminal unit, The Outfit, and transferred Chicago’s reputation as a place of lawlessness into a city of underworld authority.

Indeed, it is Alphonse Capone who stands among the city’s most dominant figures—criminal or otherwise. The Brooklyn-born Capone arrived in Chicago in 1919, settling with his Irish wife and infant son at 7244 South Prairie Avenue. Capone’s decade-long reign in Chicago was characterized by dominance in city matters as well as criminal inventiveness and ruthlessness. From 1925 to 30, Capone took charge of the fleeing John Torrio’s outfit empire, which included speakeasies, gambling dens, brothels, and breweries, accumulating an estimated annual income of nearly $100 million. Yet, Capone also earned public trust for his Depression-era soup kitchens and widespread generosity, lending credence to Chicago scribe Nelson Algren’s words: “For always [Chicago’s] villains have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted."[4]

On Valentine’s Day 1929, Capone’s men entered rival gang leader “Bugs” Moran’s garage, and committed an act forever etched in city lore. Disguised as Chicago Police officers, the four Capone underlings ordered the seven inhabitants to face the wall, and fired over 150 bullets into their victims. The murder, sensationalized by such newspaper headlines as “MASSACRE,” solidified the city’s penchant for violence as well as Capone’s image as a vicious gangland leader, even prompting Chicago Tribune reporter Ridgely Hunt to claim that Capone “raised murder to the level of a national spectator sport."[5] The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which led to the police department’s creation of a crime lab expressly to solve the crime, also highlighted the Chicago Outfit’s unique and lasting commitment to crime on display. Where the New York mob has often preferred to hide victims’ bodies, the Chicago Outfit has appeared forever proud of their work, allowing such carnage to remain untouched and the message to arrive without debate.

With Capone, Chicago inherited a criminal legacy that survives to this day, one defined by gunshots and gore. The mythical stature of Chicago’s criminal landscape sheds light on the city’s nostalgic yearning to be seen as tough, rugged, and hardnosed. A firm handshake town. A don’t-back-down town. A city where fistfights and tenacity define one’s passage. As much as many Chicagoans may seek a more cosmopolitan image, the city has long refused to abandon its gritty character—a fact evident in mayors ruling like dictators, baton-wielding police, and territorial defense of neighborhood codes.

That’s Chicago.

“Once you’ve come to be a part of this particular parch,” Algren sang of Chicago, “you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."8

Subsequent decades have done little to shed the city’s jagged, tumbling, robust aura. There are the oft-reported cases of Richard Speck, who in the summer of 1966 methodically murdered eight Chicago nursing students, as well as John Wayne Gacy, the mass-murdering businessman who buried the remains of his 30 victims under the crawlspace of his Northwest Side home. Such incidents have only advanced Chicago’s criminal identification, labeling it as the city that works outside the law.

“When [former Chicago Mayor] Big Bill Thompson put in the fix for Capone he tied the town to the rackets for keeps,” said Algren of the wonderfully corrupt Thompson. “The best any mayor can do with the city since is just to keep it in repair…. And since it’s a ninth-inning town, the ball game never being over till the last man is out, it remains Jane Addams’ town as well as Big Bill’s. The ball game isn’t over yet. But it’s a rigged ball game."[6]

Copyrighted material reprinted with permission from Lake Claremont Press (www.lakeclaremont.com).