June 9, 1930
The last day in the life of Alfred Lingle reads like something straight out of a Hollywood movie. On July 9, 1930, he left the Sherman House Hotel and headed to catch the 1:30 p.m. train from Illinois Central Station to the Washington Park racetrack. Meeting a police friend along the way, Lingle told him that he felt he was being tailed. Despite this, he carried on to the Randolph Street Tunnel, a subway that leads to the train terminal. It was packed at that time of day. Lingle stopped to buy a racing form, while a priest mingled with the crowd. Unfolding the paper, Lingle looked up as two men in a car waved to him, calling out “Play Hy Schneider in the 4th.” Two other men, one dark and one fair-haired, fell in step beside him.
As Lingle made his way through the tunnel, a cigar clamped in his mouth, the fair-haired man lifted a .38 and shot him in the back of the head. Pandemonium ensued. The killer bolted, discarding some grey gloves he’d been wearing. One witness started in pursuit of the blond gunman, but the “priest” who had been lounging in the station blocked his path.
The killer, unable to navigate his way through the crowd, was forced to double back past Lingle’s body, the cigar still clamped in the lifeless mouth. Then, jumping over a guard-rail, he disappeared into the bushes.
This was quite an operation, one that reeks of a mob set-up, with at least five hit-men involved—a number that includes the strategically placed “priest” and the two men in the car who fingered Lingle to the killer. The murder was professionally planned and professionally carried out, and when it hit the papers, all hell broke loose.
So, who was Alfred “Jake” Lingle? As far as the average citizen of Chicago was concerned, Lingle was simply a “legman” for the Chicago Tribune. Not actual reporters, legmen sniffed out hot crime stories, then phoned them in to the paper where a journalist could write them up.
Immediately after his murder, however, Lingle became something more than a legman. In death, he was transformed into a martyr, a symbol of the crusading newspaperman who had uncovered a story so sizzling that the mob—probably Capone—had to take him out. The papers even offered a $55,000 reward for Lingle’s killers. A little while later, once things had cooled down a bit and some real journalists had done some digging, another side of Alfred Lingle began to emerge—one that was very different from a brave contributor to the press.
Though Lingle only made $65 a week, he had several huge bank accounts and expensive homes, along with taking luxury vacations in Cuba with his wife and children. He was known to make very large bets on the horses and eat at high-class restaurants and, most damning of all, he boasted one of those diamond-encrusted belt buckles that Al Capone liked to give his buddies. In fact, he was wearing it when he died.
Pennies began to drop everywhere—in fact there was a deluge of pennies. Lingle was not the upstanding, hard-hitting, crusading newspaperman that everyone thought he was. Lingle was a louse, a mob go-between who was playing several games at once. Tight friends with Police Commissioner William F. Russell, Lingle would give the mobs the heads-up whenever a raid was planned, or even get Russell to call off busts when it was advantageous; he would extort money from the gangs, threatening busts on speakeasies and clubs if he wasn’t given a share of the profits; he would sell promotions to ambitious young police officers; and he was rumoured to own a piece of every barrel of liquor sold in Chicago. All of these schemes provided Lingle with a very healthy pay-off. It looks like he really earned that belt buckle from Capone.
So really, it could have been anyone who murdered Lingle—or at least anyone who could pull off a very professional job. After all the suspects were sifted through, police—and undoubtedly Capone as well—came to the conclusion that the mastermind behind Lingle’s murder was undoubtedly ex-Capone man turned North Sider Jack Zuta. The reason probably had to do with the price Lingle was extorting for the reopening of a North Side property, the Sheridan Wave Club—but by the time the bulk of this had been revealed, the press had lionized him as one of their own going down in a blaze of glory and Lingle had received a funeral worthy of a war hero.