A PEEP AT CHICAGO

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1930, Page 7

A PEEP AT CHICAGO

DOMINANT UNDERWORLD " "SUBSIDISED” POLICE. Most Europeans, when they think of Chicago, imagine a city whose streets incessantly resound with the rattle of machine-guns, as the gangsters fight their miniature wars, or slay citizens for the mere pleasure of seeing then! drop and squirm. But, like so many other European ideas of America, this one is more picturesque than accurate. The overwhelming majority of Chicago’s citizens have never seen a gangster and never will, from the day of their birth in a white-tiled hospital room until they die properly at home in bed, on the thirty-third floor of« the De Luxe Apartment Hotel, says the Manchester Guardian. They never hear a gun, except in a shooting gallery or when they go hunting in the wilds of Wisconsin. Few of them ever see the results of a bomb explosion. For them all the city’s picturesque and disgraceful crime exists only, as it does for other people, in the columns of the Press, with one little exception —that is, that these good and sober citizens are responsible for nearly all of this crime, when they insist on violating the Prohibition Law. For if i,t were not for the bootleggers, and the “hijackers” who prey upon them, Chicago’s violence would not be a tenth of what it is. ;

On the day on which I write, there have been forty-two homicides in Chicago since January 1, 1930. One or two of these are honest citizens killed accidentally because they happened to get in the way when gangsters wero_ “shooting it out” in the streets; but each of the others was a bad character done to death by for some violation of the code of the underworld. One murder this year seemed at first to be an exception to this rule—that of Alfred Lingle, the reporter on the Chicago Tribune, who was shot from behind while walking through a pedestrian tunnel in the heart of the city and in broad daylight. It was speedily discovered, however, that Lingle’s journalistic activities were but a disguise for his real duties, which were those of liaison officer between gangsters and police. His income, instead of being £l3 a week as the newspaper supposed, was something like £13,000 a year. Gangsters paid him huge sums to prevent interference by the police in their activities; among his employers was Mr. “Scarface” Al. Capone, who is supposed to have handed over Lingle the bribery iponey by which the police were persuaded to look the other way when large sums were gambled at his dogracing track. The City Council, roughly the equivalent of a board of aidermen, is now investigating the Police Department to see who is implicated. If its investigation were honest and thorough, it would find that nearly everyone is implicated. Well-informed Chicagoans are convinced. that the whole city government, from top to bottom, is closely allied with the forces of the underworld. As in every other large American city, there are thousands of speakeasies and “beer flats,” different varieties, of secret (and, of course, illegal) public-houses. These institutions pay weekly ■ bribes to the police. So do the gambling dens, the houses of ill-fame, and certain of the ‘'racketeers” who make a highly profitable living by blackmailing labour unions and small tradesmen. The expert of the Chicago Dailyx.News, who ought to know, estimates the gross income of these various enterprises at £1.200.000 a week. Bootlegging comes first, with £7'00,000 a week, gambling is worth £250,000, prostitution £200,000, and the racketeers get £50,000 or sc. These are large sums—perhaps too large—though certainly the man who makes the estimate is better qualified to do so than is any outsider to say he is wrong. But cut the amount in two, and it is still large enough to be a formidable forefe in a town which a hundred years ago was a wilderness trading post, one which has always had some of the large carelessness of the frontier. It is a polyglot community which to-day has many thousands of unassimilated foreigners in its midst, including South Italians, who still preserve the Mafia after it has been stamped out in Sicily, and first generation children of immigrants from every country of Europe, defiant of their “greenhorn” parents and ideal material for the gang. The sum is largo enough to pay the small but well-equipped private armies which the (bootleggers provide for their owi safety since the shield of the. law was withdrawn from their business with 'the enactment of national Prohibition. The underworld can and does maintain' something of a Court system of its own, where offenders are actually given a rough trial of sorts and executed if found guilty. The funds they have available are also enough to influence powerfully the city’s own Court sysfem, so that there is a shocking record of guilty men set free by magistrates or ,even by higher courts. Many gangsters boast that no policeman dares arrest them or that no nidge and jury dare find them guilty, and some of these boasts, at least, are well founded; There are also numerous instances of men who have been found guilty of serious crimes, up to homicide, and sent to prison for long terms, who have been mysteriously released, either by parole or pardon, after serving but a brief part of their sentences.