This is the eighth article of a series on the gangsters of boozedom and what they did to Chicago. In previous installments Mr. Bennett has told the stories of Dean O’Banion, Johnny Torrio, and other notorious hoodlums.
Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1929
BY JAMES O’DONNELL BENNETT
Two talkies out of Chicago boozedom:
Label one “The Effect.”
Now look and listen:
Scene, West Chicago avenue police station.
Time, Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 9, 1928_
At the moment the only sober persons in the foreground are little, keen eyed, gray haired Mrs. Margaret Jones, matron of the station, and a newspaper reporter.
Twelve women, shrieking drunk on boozedom’s products, are locked in cells. Sometimes their shrieks trail away into moans; sometimes into imbecile weeping; sometimes into ghastly retching_
Then the clamor rises again.
A woman clinging to the bars of a cell and lacing the air with profanity flings these words at the matron, the reporter and her fellow prisoners:
- I’m going to leave this damn country and go somewhere where there’s liberty. I’ve got some property and I’ll sell It and get out. If they think I’m going to sober up they’ve got another think coming. I’ll make so much noise they’ll have to let me out.
A woman who has been lying in stupor on a cot in the next cell rouses herself. Her eyes glare. “Shut up,” she shouts, “and let me get some sleep.”
Bedlam and Billingsgate.
The woman who has threatened to exile herself responds to this plea with screams of maniacal laughter.
Matron Jones shakes her head.
“Twelve so far today,” she says.
“Seventeen yesterday, and forty-two on Sunday; More and more women are being arrested and brought in here. It’s as if a sudden wave of drunkenness among women had sweptthis district.”
Renewed shrieking and moaning make her pause. She shudders.
“Listen to them!” she exclaims.
“The stuff they’ve been drinking has made them crazy. They don’t seem to sober up quickly.”
Two policemen appear at the entrance of the women’s quarters. They are holding a swaying woman between them.
“Number thirteen,” says self-respecting Mrs. Jones wearily.
“Welcome, sister! ” shrieks the maddest of the mad women—the one who had said she would make so much noise they would have to let her out. Wild laughter also welcomes the swaying newcomer. The shriek and cackle of it make you think of the witches in “Macbeth.” It is like stage laughter, yet horribly actual.
A boy—seeming about 3 years old is clinging to the newcomer’s skirts.
“What’s happened?” Mrs. Jones asks the policemen.
- Here s a distillery of the type common in Chicago, where every brand of brewery and moonshining known to science and the bootlegger may be found in basements, in tenements, and in homes and apartments. Dead rats have been found in the barrels of mash from which is made the poison that poured in pretty bottles, is sold at high prices to those customers who stIll have faith in the statement:
“This is the real stuff.”
The Usual Thing.
“Usual thing,” one of them replies
—”just staggering along the street blind drunk, and this child tagging after her.”
“Bring her in,” the witches yell. “Throw her In the can. Make her
like it!”
The child, clinging to his mother’s unresponding hand, begins to cry. The policemen depart.
“Thank heaven,” says Mrs. Jones, “there’s some one sober in the place—I and that baby.”
The mother flings herself upon the cot. The child continues to whimper til Mrs. Jones takes him away.
“Poor Iamb,” she murmurs, poor lamb.”
Talkie Number Two.
Label it “The Cause. ”
A singed Sicilian is being dragged by police and firemen out of wreckage caused by explosion of an illicit still in a squalid tenement in an area extending to the west and south of that world famous shrine of Abouben-Adhemism, Hull House.
Among the Alky Cookers.
The time is any week during the last five years.
“What were you doing here?” the police ask the singed Sicilian.
“A man told me to watch that.”
“Watch what?”
“That “—pointing to the wrecked still—” 1 don’t know what it is.”
“What’s his name? ”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t—Joe.”
“What’s the rest of it?”
“Marsala.”
“He’s lying,” says one of the officers.
“Marsala’s the name of a big town in Sicily where a lot of these alky cookers come from.”
“What made it explode?” asks another officer, turning to the Sicilian.
“I don’t know. Maybe I fell asleep.”
“How much did the man give you to watch it?”
“Fifteen dollars a day.”
“Fifteen dollars a day just to watch it! What else did you do?”
“He told me to boil something—I don’t know.”
An officer, impatientIy—” You’ll get nothing out of him. Not knowing is the best thing they do. Lord, how this place stinks! Let’s get out.”
“Look here!” exclaimed an officer who has been poking about in the wreckage.
What the Boobs Buy.
He is peering into a barrel of mash and is counting. “One—two—three—four—five-six. Holy Moses! Six dead rats in this one barrel. And it’s the muck that they make the stuff from that the boobs buy at six dollars a pint with a pretty label on the bottle.”
“That’s nothing,” remarks the officer who has shown a yearning for fresh air. “Stege”—he means the
present deputy commissioner of police, John Stege, the incorruptible foe of boozedom—” Stege found a hundred barrels of mash last week, everyone with dead rats in it. They come nosing around for the yeast and sugar and get overcome by this stink. Come_ on, let’s get out.”
The police depart with their singed Sicilian and a five gallon can of the alcohol distilled from the mash with the dead rats in it. “Doc Bundesen will like this for his collection,” says the officer carrying the five gallon can. “I’ll tell him plenty.”
- Capt. A. C. Townsend, left, and agent Joseph J. Wahl look over booze confiscated during a raid in August of 1925.
Distillers of Death.
With that you can snap off Talkie Number Two and listen to Bundesen.
Herman N. Bundesen, formerly commissioner of health of Chicago, is now coroner of Cook county. His partisanship is not violent, but his solicitude for the health of the community is passionate—and thoroughly informed. As public o1Dcial and as physician he has made the crimes of boozedom one of h1s chief eoncerns, and he will tell you that its worst crime is not murder, but the stuff it makes and sells. He has a knack for phrases. Once he called the gangsters of boozedom “Distillers and Distributors of Death, Unlimited.”
His “collection.” as the policeman called it, comprises enough samples of the death product to set a regiment shrieking, and it is supplemented by analyses frightening enough to sober a regiment in one reading.
Dr. Bundesen said:
- With the alky cooker, and with his customer, the maker of bogus whisky, speed is everything.
Their apparatus is makeshift.
Their surroundings are filthy.
Their processes are hurried.
Their materials are the cheapest.
They themselves are usually novices.
They constantly face the danger of detection and that fact alone would render them desperate if they were not by nature desperate men.
Boozedom’s Product.
What they produce amid their filth and with their makeshifts is a gross imitation of a liquor which to produce properly requires a modern distillery with extensive capital and every resource of modern science at its command. The chief problem of honest distillers in the days when their business had a legal status was the elimination of impurities from their product. The skill of thoroughly trained chemists was brought to bear on this problem.
The contrast between those methods and the hasty, furtive messing of the tenement house moonshiner is so grotesque that it provides its own emphasis and all the warning that sane persons ought to require.
How extensive is the sale of bogus liquor with deadly poisons in it?
It is in the proportion of about a hundred thousand sales of bogus liquor to a thousand sales of sound liquor.
The sources of. Chicago’s bootle liquor—the liquor which the gangsters of boozedom peddle—are moonshine, denatured alcohol that has been imperfectly redistilled, smuggled goods, and liquor illegally withdrawn from bonded warehouses.
Polson In Them All
Neither the smuggled goods nor the liquor illegally withdrawn are safe by the time they reach the consumer, for they are diluted several times and the weakness caused by dilution is concealed by the addition of poisonous ingredients.
Moonshine used to mean liquor secretly manufactured by Kentucky mountaineers in defiance of the internal revenue laws. It now has come to mean imitation whiskies, various blends of alcohols, and home brew.
To get the desired flavor into imitation whisky many synthetic mixtures are added to the diluted alcohol. The chief of these blends are amyl alcohol, or fusel oil; ethyl, butyl, and amyl esters—or ethers—of acetic and butyric acids; creosotes, and oemanthyllc ether.
In the laboratories of the Chicago department of health samples containing all of those poisons have been analyzed.
The color of whisky legally and scientifically manufactured is produced by the absorption of rosin and tars from the charred barrels in which the whisky is aged.
That takes time.
No Questions Asked.
The tenement house distiller and blender do not dare to take time. So into their mess go—when they lack caramel—the coal tar dyes. But the bootlegger knows the gullible individuals with whom he deals and he is reasonably certain of disposing of his deadly stuff without question.
Fusel oil! There’s a killer. In the best whisl{y there was always fusel oil. Science kept it to a minimum of less than 0.2 per cent in the distillate. But the ignorant, desperate tenement house manufacturer for the gangsters of boozedom neither knows how nor has time to eliminate much of the fusel oil from his product.
And so the drinkers of his whisky,with its high content of fusel oil which are knocked into a stupor which sometimes ends in death. This high content of fusel oil in bogus whisky has created a new form of alcoholism and a specifiC form of insanity, of which the signs are murderous impulses, ungrounded suspicions, hallucinations, and marked mental depravity.
Denaturing Poisons Remain.
No tenement house distiller who is trying to redistill commercial or denatured alcohol as a basis for his bogus whisky is able to get the denaturing poisons out—and he knows that if he knows anything. The denaturant most frequently found in our specimens of bootleg liquor is wood alcohol.
Undiluted wood alcohol taken internally is deadly poison.
A comparatively moderate dose of it can produce dangerous effects which last three or four days.
As small a quantity as a teaspoonful has produced blindness.
In the majority of fatal cases, death from wood alcohol comes within twenty-four hours, and there have been cases where wood alcohol killed in lesa than an hour.
The bludgeoning testimony of this man of science and man of affairs, every word of which investigations by Prohibition Administrator YeUowley confirm, has an important bearing on Chicago’s befuddled atate of mind as to wbat constitutes the most devastating crime of boozedom.
Boozedom’s Chief Crime.
That crime is its booze and not its mutual murders.
In pamphlets, broadsides, in interviews, Dr. Bundesen has tried to beat that thought into the community
But Chicago remains dumb.
It continues to regard the gangsters of boozedom as purveyors of a rather cheery product instead of as makers and merchandisers of a proved poison. Juries must regard them in much the same way, for the considered estimate of Judge Frank Comerford is that ninety per cent of the persons placed on trial for violations of the prohibition laws are guilty that only twelve per cent of the ninety per cent are convicted, and that those convicted are mostly forlorn Negroes.
No gangster of boozedom, even though he be a notorious killer is a social outcast in anything approaching the degree In which other types of criminals are. Managers of hotels supposed to be not merely reputable but “exclusive,” permit them to rent their most expensive apartments, taking no thought of the morrow until It is a morrow that brings another gang killing and mention of the fact that the victim’s residence was the Hotel Soandso. Then come fawning letters to the editor begging
that the name of the hotel be omitted from future references to the crime.
Nor are the gangsters of boozedom made outcasts when—after they have of “gotten up in the bucks” (that is, become rich)—they continue to live in the areas that bred them.
Why should they be outcasts in the opinion of the ignorant, humble, needy, hard working people around them?” asked John Landesco of the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice when I was puzzling over these matters under his eye. Then, with his gift for uttering the pith of a matter, he added:
- They are the successes of the neighborhood.
The struggling, foreign born peasant woman sees them in their expensive cars and their fur trimmed overcoats. She hears that they are sending their children to private schools as Joe Saltis does. She hears them called ‘beer barons,’ and, if she can read the headlines in the English language newspapers, she sees them described as ‘beer barons’ and ‘booze kings’ in print. The word ‘booze’ has no criminal significance to her, but the words ‘king’ and ‘baron have a most lofty sIgnificance. About all she knows is that these richly dressed young men are making or selling somethIng that the Americans want to buy.
“Good to His Mother.”
Incidentally, she hears in gossip with another toil worn neighbor that Johnny Torrio, ‘king’ of them all, gave his old mother back home in Italia a villa, with fifteen servants to run it.
If the robber, labor thug, and racketeer, the late Tim Murphy, who was the co-criminal of the gangsters of boozedom, spoke at a Thirteenth ward meeting in behalf of one of gangdom’s political henchmen, that did the candidate no harm. For was not a priest sitting next to Murphy on the platform? If some tactless soul asked, ‘Is he the Tim Murphy that they said robbed the mails?’ the
response was deeply resentful. The attitude of the Ignorant foreign born who judged gangdom in the terms of its success would be, first, that it was doubtful whether Murphy did rob the mails and, second, ‘What harm did that do us?’ Hence the support of Big Tim never hurt Dingbat Oberta, political henchman of Joe Saltis’ gang of beer runners. Oberta gave a stand of colors to Nellis post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Some of the money of racketeer banquets where Murphy acclaimed Oberta would be given to the same organization.
How Issues Are Blurred.
Thus, and In a hundred other ways, the whole issue between good and bad government and good and bad men is befuddled, and the sole conviction of the Ignorant is that these ‘successes of the neighborhood’ seem to take vastly more interest in neighborhood matters than men not In the booze racket do.
These befuddled views which Mr. Landesco analyzes are not confined to the ignorant and the needy. Every movement of illicit llquor from the bootlegger to the boob is attended by fraud and violence. The large and immediate sums to be gained from aiding the movement in any way have overcome the probity of many men who ten years ago would have shuddered at the thought of fraudulent dealing and bribe taking.
“Cheating Cheaters.”
Here is an illustration:
A corrupted railroad clerk in—say Newark, N. J .—will inform a corrupted railroad clerk in Chicago that a carload of illicit liquor, listed as some other commodity, is on its way to a consignee in Chicago. When the consignment, which is worth $15,000, arrives in Chicago the railroad clerk informs the rum runner that his booze is in the yards. For this information he receives $500. He also informs corrupted prohibition agents of the arrival of the car. And for that information he receives $500. The agents seize the car, get in touch with the consignee, and hold him up for half the value of his booze before they will release it to him.
This whole dastardly transaction is known in boozedom as “cheating cheaters.”
Similar sculduggery attends the movement of Canadian booze through sanctified Michigan to Chicago. The Chicago booze runner bringing in small consignments by automobile buys 300 pints at $2 a pint in Canada. He prefers pints because they can be stacked more compactly in the specially built compartments in the bottom of the car. His 300 pints, then have cost him $600. He can sell them in Chicago at $7 a pint, which would seem to mean a profit after the expenses of the trip have been paid of $1,200.
More, far more.
Profits and Risks.
For usually the bootlegger “cuts”—that is, dilutes and degrades—his 300 pints of pretty good Canadian liquor to make from 600 to 900 pints of sozzle for the Chicago boob, who can be counted upon to pay $7 a pint for the diluted article. Thus the bootlegger’s gross receipts in Chicago will run from $4,000 to $6,000. But from his gross he must deduct expenses for the trip, $1,500 in bribe money to prohibition agents for letting the car through, and big wages to the cutters. Even so, he stands to clear trom $2,000 to $4,000 On his venture if all goes well.
Sometimes all does not go well.
Sometimes prohibition agents who have not been adequately looked after overhaul the load and go in for cheating the cheater.
“We wlII keep the load,” they say, “and you can keep the car—for $1,000.”
The cutting plants are nests of brazen fraud. All of them, in addition to the poisons with which the cut liquor is restored to potency, are provided with counterfeit strips, labels, and revenue stamps.
And yet the boob purchaser continue to believe in that figment of fancy called “an honest bootlegger.”
Degrading the Immigrant.
Another alarming phase of boozedom’s operations is the utter destruction of decent citizenship in block after block of the areas of Chicago which are densely inhabited by immigrants from Italy and Sicily. This has been largely the work of the Genna, the Aiello and the Cutaia gangs. They developed the business .of alky cooking in tenement houses occupied by their compatriots.
Many of these compatriots are hard working, thrifty people intent upon making an honest living. Many others are the scum of the cities of southern Italy and Sicily, and they are eager to become alky cookers—that is, tenders of illicit stills—in ramshackle tenement houses at a wage ot $10 to $15 a day.
A still that can be sequestered in one of these structures will produce 350 gallons ot alcohol per week at a cost of about 75 cents a gallon. Sometimes the cost, depending in part on the wage paid the alky cooker and the varying price of sugar and yeast, will be nearer 50 cents a gallon. It Is a
very rough product and Is sold by the employers ot the tenement house alky cookers to the wholesalers for $2 a gallon or a little less, depending on cost and demand. The wholesalers have the rough product redlstllled in order to remove Its more obvious filth and then sell It to dives and speakeasies for $6 a gallon. The proprietors of those places dilute this $6 gallon to half its strength with water. From the two gallons thus obtained they sell about 192 drinks at 25 cents a drink.
The speakeasy proprietor makes—roughly—at least $40 out of a gallon of poisonous liquor that cost him $6. To put it another way, he makes at least 22 cents on every drink his victim buys.
Prohibition’s Supreme Problem.
The enormous profit—the trebling, the quadrupling, and the double quadrupling of profits—which attends\ the movement of poison liquor from the filthy tenement house to the belly of the boob demands the readers’ careful pondering. Vast sections of the ignorant, needy immigrant class cannot resist these profits. Every section of the criminal class gloats over them\ and schemes to share in them.
How such sources of easy, evil money can be removed is the supreme problem of prohibition enforcement.
The methods of the gangs—now called syndicates—which employ the tenement house alky cookers range from luring to menace.’ If there is an urgent need for more cookers. a neighborhood gangster in a section of “Little Sicily.” will simply order his compatriots to put stills, which the gang provides, in their homes. If they refuse because they are afraid or because they wish to remain decent they are bludgeoned. If they are receptive to the proposition, everything is made easy for them.
In some cases the arrangement is that the alky cooker shall pay his own expenses and make his profit by selling his product to the gang for $2 a gallon. In other cases the gang pays the alky cooker a fixed wage plus his rent and light bill. It also arranges tor the stealing ot gas required in cooking alky. The gas is stolen not because the gangsters are unable or unwilling to pay for it, but because they tear that it the meter readers note an extraordinary consumption ot gas in a tenement they will “put the shake” on them, which means report their operations to the prohibition omcers unless they are given substantial hush money.
In despair over conditions in his neighborhood, Father Louis Giambastiani, pastor of the Church of Filippo Benizi, caused this sign to be placed above the door of the edifice at Cambridge avenue and Oak street. It appealed to the Sicilians to pray for a cessation of the manslaughter that had terrorized that district.
Death Stalks with Fraud.
Thus this single phase of the traffic in illicit liquor leads Into endless and unexpeoted ramifications of specific fraud and general demoralization.
Death stalks with fraud and demoralization.
Sometimes a gang’s workman dies as a result ot his inexpert tapping of mains from which gas Is stolen, the rush of gas trom the large pipe under the sidewalk overcoming him. His body is carried to another tenement and a physician in the pay of the gang is called in to write a certificate ot death by natural causes.
“Little Sicily” is west of and little more than halt a mile trom Lake Shore drive, the most resplendent apartment house area of Chicago. But so tar as politlco·moral issues are concerned, the contrast thus implied does not mean as much as you might think, tor as recently as March, 1928,
the most resplendent section of Lake Shore drive had, in Titus Haffa, a convicted leader ot boozedom as its alderman.
“Little Siclly: is halt a mlle square. By 1928 it had become under boozedom’s debauching touch an area of despair.
A Reign of Terror.
Scores ot needy, timid householders who would not cook alky were driven from their homes. Rival employers of those who did cook tollowed up menace with murder. Decent men of the neighborhood unwillingly became adherents of one side or the other because they did not dare remain neutral. The gangsters of boozedom voted the people like sheep for candidates who promised them Immunity from
interference by the police. The district was shot through and through with cross currents of intimidation and some of its residents were shot through and through with bullets.
Father Louis GiambasUanl, pastor of the Church ot San Filippo Benizi, Cambridge avenue and Oak street, was in despair and he nailed this placard to the church door:
Lay not the flattering unction to your souls. O Americans of the old stock, that conditions created by the gangsters ot boozedom are confined to the politics and the civic lite of your newly made tellow citizens. They are not. You have allowed them to permeate your political and civic life also.
High lights of the effect of your scandalous dereliction will make the next chapter.
CHICAGO GANGLAND BY JAMES O’DONNELL BENNETT
- Gangland 1—Charles Dean O’Banion
Gangland 2—O’Banion Funeral
Gangland 3—Rise and Fall of John Torrio
Gangland 4—The Nefarious Deeds of John Torrio
Gangland 5—Day of Sixty Shots
Gangland 6—The Ferocious of the Gangsters
Gangland 7—TThe End of “Little Hymie”
Gangland 8—Distillers and Distributors of Death
Gangland 9—The Murders of McSwiggin and Esposito
Gangland 10—The Big Fellow
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