August 15, 1946
James Ragen was an anachronism from the rough-and-tumble days of the Teens and Twenties who held his own against larger and more sophisticated groups in Chicago. A co-founder of the athletic club/street mob Ragen’s Colts, he steadfastly remained an independent when that gang was absorbed into the Syndicate via the Chicago Outfit in the 1930s.
After Prohibition was repealed in 1933 the mobs concentrated their efforts largely on gambling to supply the vast funds that booze had once given them. One such source of revenue was provided by the General News Service, which swiftly communicated gambling and racing results to the entire country. With instantaneous race results wired throughout the nation, bookies had inside knowledge of racing winners while they were still taking bets. The possibilities for profit were enormous. Run in the 1930s by publisher Moses Annenberg with Ragen as his assistant, the service was worth a fortune.
In 1939, though, Annenberg was indicted for tax evasion and sold the racing wire to Ragen. Though the mob may have had a foothold in the service during Annenberg’s day, Ragen was determined to run the operation without Syndicate interference and rake in the profits for himself. He became one of the most powerful gambling figures in the country.
The smell of filthy lucre inevitably brought the Syndicate. During a time when supposedly a twelve-year-old couldn’t slice bread in Chicago without the mob’s say-so, there was no way the Outfit was going to let an independent like Ragen get the better of them.
At first the mob attempted to start rival wire services, then to buy Ragen out. But when neither of these plans panned out, the Outfit got serious. Ragen was wily, he’d survived for years on the mean streets of Chicago and he knew how the mob operated. So he contacted journalist Drew Pearson; Ragen had a story to tell.
Pearson communicated with the FBI and when the Feds took down Regan’s statements they found out just how deeply entrenched the Outfit was in all of Chicago’s day-to-day businesses. The mob had representatives everywhere, some of them very highly placed. The information was dynamite, but it apparently went nowhere.
It seemed as if the Feds were sitting on their hands. Backing away from Ragen, they claimed that the responsibility for the Chicago Outfit rested with the city of Chicago itself—in other words it was a municipal and not a federal problem.
Ragen’s next move was to hire bodyguards, but it wasn’t enough and on June 24, 1946 he was shot while driving down the street in his car. Much to the dismay of the Outfit no doubt, Ragen survived this first assault and was taken to hospital, but while trying to recuperate he died suddenly on August 15. The coroner stated that a vial’s worth of mercury had been found in Ragen’s stomach, an amount sufficient to kill three men. But no murder charges could be brought, apparently, because of the slim and incomprehensible reason that it could not be ascertained whether Ragen had died as a result of the gunshots, or the mercury poisoning. Crime in high places indeed.