During the 1920s, Chicago was the scene of three perverse—and enduring—homicidal dramas: Leopold and Loeb’s killing of Bobby Franks, their little neighbor boy;1 the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of members of the Moran gang by a firing squad of Capone men dressed as police detectives and patrolmen;2 and the two man killers who became “Velma” and “Roxie Hart” in Maurine Watkins’s play Chicago.3
Chicago in the twenties may not have been Sophocles’ Thebes, and the nightmare fables its most grotesque murders became may have had characters more twisted than tragic, but the city and its homicides—now almost ninety years in the past—have become as much a part of America’s bloody mythology as Kennedy in Dallas, Custer at Little Bighorn, and the fall of the Twin Towers.
One city, in one decade, produced three Grand Guignol, theater of cruelty dramas. Dramas that have endured.
How did that happen?
Consider these facts:
In 1924, the year of Leopold and Loeb and of “Velma” and “Roxie Hart,” Chicago’s homicide rate, measured in homicides per 100,000, was 24 percent higher than the national urban average.4
By April of 1924, the Chicago Tribune had begun to print a strange kind of clock face on the inside pages of its weekday editions. The Tribune’s clock had three hands, “The Hands of Death”: one hand was labeled “Moonshine”; one hand was labeled “Guns”; one hand was labeled “Autos.” Death by automobile was a new phenomenon. Death caused by cars driven by people who had never driven before, or by people who had never driven while impaired by alcohol, was also a new phenomenon.5
There were other cities—Birmingham and Memphis, Nashville and New Orleans—that had homicide rates many, many times higher than Chicago’s. But Chicago was America’s second largest city—after New York. The comparison—and the rivalry—between the two cities had an effect on the way America perceived Chicago. In 1924, the year Chicago’s homicide rate was 24 percent higher than the national urban average, New York’s was 31 percent below that average.
Since New York was the intellectual, entertainment, and communications capital of the country, whatever its opinion makers thought was true soon became the “common knowledge” of their counterparts elsewhere. When New York writers, reporters, and intellectuals walked the streets of their city, then looked up and away at their distant rival to the west, they came to believe that the place they inhabited was far more civilized than the slaughterhouse that had turned from killing hogs to murdering its own citizens.
The statistical disparities between Chicago and New York never lessened during the decade: New York’s homicide rate was always at least thirty (or even more) points lower than the national average. Of course, New Yorkers—ordinary people and opinion makers—didn’t see things from a “national average” point of view. Since the life they lived was “normal,” Chicago was a place depraved—a Bedlam, a City of Mayhem, and a Throne of Blood.
Numbers and New York hauteur weren’t the only reasons Chicago became “Murder City.”
Chicago’s own newspapers told their own bloody stories to their own readers. William Randolph Hearst bought his way into a very competitive Chicago newspaper market in 1900, first with the raw headlines of his Chicago American, then, in 1902, with his Chicago Examiner.
“A Hearst paper,” said Arthur Pegler, a Chicago reporter, “is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” Robert Casey, another Chicago reporter, described the newsroom of Hearst’s American this way: “Nobody moved even to the water cooler except at a dead run. . . . The city editor yelled at his copy readers, the copy readers yelled at the copy boys, and the copy boys yelled at each other. Each story, from a triple murder to a purse snatching in the ghetto, was a big story and greeted with quivering excitement by everybody who had anything to do with it.”6
By 1910, a series of circulation wars had begun between Hearst’s American and the McCormick family’s Tribune. Both papers hired thugs to threaten newsboys, newsdealers, and even subscribers who read one news-paper instead of the other. Dean O’Banion, the bootlegger (who was assassinated the same year Leopold and Loeb committed their less than perfect crime), got his start hijacking Tribune delivery trucks for the American. In 1912, three gunmen on the American’s payroll boarded a trolley. They shot and killed the conductor, and then they shot and killed two passengers. The passengers had been foolish enough to be caught reading copies of the Tribune. The McCormicks hired their own killers: Max Annenberg and his younger brother, Moe. The Annenbergs were brilliant mercenaries, switching from one side to the other, depending on who offered them the most money, the best protection, and the most power.7
Between 1913 and 1917, as many as twenty-seven people—civilians, newspaper employees, and newspaper thugs—died.8 The newspapers responsible for the attacks and counterattacks of the circulation wars reported them as “labor disputes” caused by striking employees. When William Hale Thompson, elected mayor in 1919, cast around for a dependable police chief, he settled on a man—Charles Fitzmorris—whose primary qualification for the job was his experience as city editor for Hearst’s American.
Ring Lardner wrote for the Tribune; Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht wrote for the Daily News; Charles MacArthur worked for the American. Chicago’s newspapers employed gifted writers and critics, and reporters of talent. But: the same newspapers that reported the bloodletting of the twenties were themselves soaked with blood. The stories they told in columns under two-inch headlines—stories that continued for months, even years, one unnerving homicide overlapping with another—were chanted in unison, sung in antiphonal chorus. These stories, point and counterpoint, these recitations of anger, greed, hunger, fear, cruelty, avarice, cunning, and deceit—floated in the public air like a bloody haze, a fog of droplets, a mist that colored the light. The people who read these stories shared a common history: a world war followed by a pandemic; a postwar depression punctuated by upheavals and strikes. The people who read the stories retold in this book read them, one day after another, one week to the next, like chapters from a novel, published in installments. The strange thing was that the novel appeared to be true.
There are two other facts to consider about Chicago and its murders:
In 1927, Al Capone’s gross annual income (as estimated by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago) was $105 million.9 That sum would be worth ten times as much today.10
Capone’s income was enormous—but like everything, it had a past, a lineage. It had grown, from one criminal generation to the next. Capone inherited an enterprise that had been making money for thirty years.
The enterprise was based on sex work and on gambling. Alcohol, legal and illegal, fueled it.
This was its genealogy:
In 1921, Capone was brought to Chicago from Brooklyn by a very smart man named John Torrio. Torrio and Capone were cousins. They were both Neapolitan crooks—crooks whose incomes were traditionally based on pimping, extortion, and gambling.11 Syphilis—mixing business with pleasure—was an occupational hazard of such work.
The man who brought John Torrio to Chicago (in 1910) was a brothel owner named “Big Jim” Colosimo. Colosimo had grown rich—very rich—by running brothels, first in the city’s vice district, then scattered, here and there, big and small, all over the city.12
From Capone to Colosimo, the lineage was purely criminal. But: The man who was Colosimo’s mentor wasn’t a crook, or a pimp, or a brothel owner. Colosimo’s mentor was a local politician, a city council alderman named “Bathhouse John” Coughlin. The link between Bathhouse and Big Jim had something in common with the link between Big Jim and John Torrio.
The ward Bathhouse represented was the city’s vice district. Its First Ward. Also known as “the Levee.” Bathhouse knew talent when he saw it. Big Jim became one of Bathhouse’s precinct captains. He also became one of Bathhouse’s “collectors.”
Bathhouse—along with nearly everyone else on the city council—was a “boodler.” A boodler took bribes—big bribes—from contractors. Contractors who wanted exclusive licenses—monopolies—to do things like lay track and operate trolleys or lay pipe and deliver natural gas to city neighborhoods.13 The bribes such “public” utility contractors paid were generous; the profits such contractors made—if and when they provided the services for which the city paid—were enormous.14
The tidal flows of money that passed through the bank accounts of city council boodlers like Bathhouse John were sizable—but those funds met and mingled with another tide of illegal money—money from the city’s vice district, its Levee. The Levee lived and grew inside the city’s First Ward like a parasite inside its host.
By 1910, the city’s Vice Commission estimated that there were 1,020 brothels in the Levee, run by 1,880 pimps and madams, employing 4,000 prostitutes.15 The Vice Commission estimated that the Levee’s enterprises—its brothels, bars, and betting parlors—generated a collective gross annual income of $60 million.16 The commission estimated the Levee’s annual profits to be $30 million.17
The difference between the Levee’s gross and net incomes wasn’t the result of salaries paid to bouncers, cooks, piano players, and whores:
Large sums—over time, huge sums—were paid for “protection.” Paid to precinct captains/collectors like Big Jim Colosimo. Collectors who took something for themselves, then passed the cash to Bathhouse and other aldermen, who took what they needed, then passed the money upstream—to police officers at all levels and all ranks, to court clerks and bailiffs, to prosecutors and judges, to fellow city servants, to . . .
Every favor had a price: $1,000 stopped an indictment for pandering; $2,000 stopped a complaint for “harboring a girl.” Saloons paid fees; bookies paid fees; after-hours clubs paid fees. Fees and fees and fees.
For thirty years, vice-money bribes commingled with public utility bribes. The city’s courts, police, and politicians had been taking bribes for a generation by the time Al Capone began to buy the protection he needed to do business in Chicago and elsewhere. By 1929, the parasite that had once been the Levee had begun to consume the city that had once been its host. The stories that resulted from this became the crime dramas that Americans have been consuming ever since like salted nuts at a bar. Criminals killed criminals, but their deaths only added to Chicago’s unprecedented homicide rate. It wasn’t just the professionals who were painting the town red.
There is one last set of historical circumstances to consider. They provide perspective to the murders committed by the plucky heroines of Maurine Watkins’s Chicago.
Before Maurine Watkins, playwright, wrote Chicago, she had been Maurine Watkins, police reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Watkins didn’t so much invent “Velma” as transpose what she’d reported about the arrest, trial, and acquittal of a middle-aged, former cabaret singer named Belva Gaertner. Chicago’s “Roxie Hart” had the same newsprint lineage: the beautiful Beulah Annan had shot her boyfriend in the back less than a month after Belva Gaertner had shot her lover during an alcoholic blackout. The murders both women committed—and the acquittals they enjoyed—were part of a pattern of crime and criminal justice dating back nearly fifty years.
The number of murders committed by women in Chicago between 1875 and 1920 increased by 420 percent.18 Men did most of the killing in the city: murders committed by women during the period the stories in this book begin accounted for only 6.6 percent of the total. But: very, very few of the women who killed their husbands during that time ever went to jail. “Every white woman who killed her husband between August, 1905 and October, 1918, was exonerated or acquitted, totaling 35 consecutive cases.”19 Thirty-five consecutive cases.
“A woman, by marrying, does not become the slave or chattel of her husband,” said a judge instructing a jury, just before the jurors passed sentence on a husband killer named Jessie Hopkins. Mrs. Hopkins shot her husband on New Year’s Day, 1905, after he’d hit her once too often, following years of abuse. Said the judge: “If a woman is unfortunate enough to marry a brute whose favorite pastime is to mistreat her, she has the same right as her husband. . . . She has the right to kill her husband in self-defense if she is in imminent danger of bodily harm.”20
The jury that acquitted Jessie Hopkins was an entirely male jury—as was every jury that acquitted the women who killed their husbands or their lovers from 1905 until the very end of the 1920s. Every lawyer who defended a woman who’d killed a man, married to him or just having an affair with him, argued—true or not—that their client was innocent, either because she’d acted in self-defense or because she’d been overwhelmed: emotions and intoxicants had impaired her judgment. The jurors who heard such arguments agreed with them because they believed two things. First: Women—especially white women—were innocent and not responsible, by reason of their gender. Second: Men, white or black, rich or poor, native born or immigrant, were, by their very nature, brutes. The jurors were usually right about the men.
One final note:
The stories in this book have been told in chronological order. Their progression forms a sequence; that sequence has patterns, explicit and implicit. These patterns have a variety of meanings. The story of Leopold and Loeb and the story of St. Valentine’s Day were part of that sequence of meanings. They have been omitted from this book for two reasons: they are at the center of so much research and writing that there was little I thought I could add; second, I wanted to retell stories that were part of Chicago’s own bloody mythology. Stories that reveal as much (or more) about Chicago’s collective consciousness as they do about America’s troubled soul. The story of Belva and Beulah turned out to be far more local—and the facts about these women more obscure and more revealing—than Chicago and its iterations have made known.
There is one story in this book—a 1926 murder in Wisconsin—that appears to be out of place. The Chicago papers gave that story the same coverage and the same headlines as they did the 1920 murder that begins this book. There were two reasons for such coverage: the victims in both stories were young, pregnant women; the men who murdered them were the fathers of the children they carried. When the first such crime was reported, it seemed so strange that everyone who read about it, investigated it, prosecuted it, and defended it began to question what was sane and what wasn’t—what was normal and what was pathological. When the second such murder happened, in Wisconsin, it seemed to confirm people’s worst fears: the bloody fog that covered Chicago had drifted north and settled over the countryside. Whatever was infecting the city had spread.