Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (13 page)

One person who carried this message deep in his heart was a young boy named Giuseppe Imburgio. His father was one of the eleven Italians murdered that day. In the wake of fear and hysteria, Giuseppe was spirited to safety by a Cajun woman. She took the boy up the Mississippi River to a relatively new and fast-growing city on the banks of Lake Michigan: Chicago. Given the anti-Sicilian climate of the times, the boy’s name was changed to Joseph “Bulger,” an Irish surname most common in the eastern regions of County Clare. The boy was an unusually serious-minded youngster; he applied himself to his studies with the discipline of a Trappist monk. Eventually, Joe Bulger would graduate from law school at the age of twenty and become one of the most influential behind-the-scenes legal advisers, or consiglieri, for the Windy City’s growing Italian crime fraternity.

But if young Giuseppe Imburgio thought that moving to Chicago, Hibernicising his name, and acquiring a fancy law degree would protect him from the enveloping influence of the Irish American underworld, he was in for a hell of a surprise.

CHAPTER
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Three

3. up from mud city

T
he Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was a real doozy. Among the tens of thousands of revelers who came from all over the United States to partake of what had been advertised as “the greatest Public Expo in human history” were a phenomenal number of grifters, con artists, gamblers, whores, bunco men, pickpockets, sneak thieves, and mobsters.

Officially, the fair was known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. Although the theme of the Expo changed from year to year, the festivities were an annual event. The previous World’s Fair had been held in Paris, the cultural center of Europe. The selection of Chicago as the site of the 1893 fair was an enormous tribute to the city. Chicago—not New York or Philadelphia—was being showcased as an example of the true American spirit. Money from all over the world was pumped into the local economy to finance the fair’s exhibits and underwrite the many social events that would entertain the hoi polloi during the exhibition’s long run, which began in late spring and continued well into the autumn months.

Considering that much of the city had been burned to the ground just twenty-two years earlier in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Fair was trumpeted as a major coming out party for the Gem of the Prairie. Chicago was a rambunctious, wide-open American metropolis that had risen from mud flats along the banks of Lake Michigan to become the country’s fourth largest city after New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

To the city’s WASP aristocracy, the World’s Fair may have been an opportunity to showcase Chicago’s many cultural attributes (such as its museums, architecture, and great universities), but for the men and women who made their living from the city’s thriving underworld of vice and crime, it was a showcase of another kind. Since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow allegedly kicked over the lamp that started the great conflagration that devoured the city, Chicago had reasserted itself in large part by becoming the most gleefully sinful city-for-sale in the entire United States. Many a traveling businessman had stopped in the City by the Lake and marveled at the largest, most diverse red light district in the country, a sprawling riverfront area known as the Levee. The South Side Levee had become a catchall name for Satan’s Mile, Hell’s Half-Acre, the Black Hole, Shinbone Alley, and a half dozen other vice districts that had existed before the fire. Gambling parlors, multiple saloons, opium dens, and cat houses of every variety thrived in the Levee, which was bounded on one side by Lake Michigan and on the other side by the south branch of the Chicago River.

In the decades leading up to the World’s Fair, it was a well known fact that money generated by various illegal enterprises in the Levee was the secret elixir that fueled the city and kept it afloat. Chicago’s founding fathers had long ago accepted the notion that vice was an irrefutable fact of big city life. Better to designate a specific locale for sin and avarice and to contain it in one easily identifiable and controllable neighborhood than try to suppress human nature and thereby create a subterranean economy that benefited no one except the criminals. Chicago’s politicians and community leaders understood that dirty money could be washed and used to build parks, playgrounds, and schools. And so, in the heartland of America, a booming city had developed that no fire could destroy—a city in which the underworld and upperworld were virtually indistinguishable. That was the Chicago way.

It was no coincidence that the development and institutionalization of the Chicago way happened to coincide with a steady influx of new immigrants. Germans, Poles, Slovaks, and Bohemians flocked to the city, but few ethnic groups were as insistent in making their presence felt as the Irish. Though the number of citizens claiming Hibernian roots in Chicago would never be as high as in New York, Boston, and some other East Coast cities, the nineteenth century Irish would become more influential in Chicago than anywhere else.

Most of the early Chicago Irish had first touched down in other U.S. cities—in New York, the initial port-of-call for many immigrants, or New Orleans, where a generation of famine immigrants suffered tropical heat and subhuman working conditions. In Chicago, there was opportunity, and, for anyone with a touch of larceny in his or her soul, there was something more. The city’s all-encompassing approach to urban development, which practically embraced gangsterism and the dictates of the Mob as part of the municipal charter, insured that vice lords and politically connected mobsters were among the town’s most renowned movers and shakers.

The greatest of them all was “King Mike” McDonald. In the pantheon of Chicago’s great civic innovators, Mike McDonald, gambling czar, political overlord, and the man who coined the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute,” is right up there with Marshall Field, Charles Pullman, and Cyrus McCormack, though you wouldn’t know it by driving around modern-day Chi-Town. Today, there are no statues or monuments honoring the accomplishments of King Mike and no edifices adorned with his name. Given the morally questionable nature of his reign and, as we shall see, the tawdry nature of his demise, the oversight is understandable. Nonetheless, if there were a Mount Rushmore for the founding fathers of the Irish American underworld, Mike McDonald’s mustachioed face would be right up there alongside Old Smoke Morrissey. For over forty years—from the beginnings of the Civil War to after the turn-of-the-century—no one played a more significant role in the day-to-day machinations of Chicago than Mike McDonald. He was the town’s Irish American godfather, a man whose early life and glory days were synonymous with the fabulous rise of Mud City.

See Mike

Michael Cassius McDonald was born in Niagara Falls, New York in 1839. As a boy, he apprenticed to be a bootmaker, but this trade held no enduring interest for the youngster whose Irish immigrant parents had encountered virulent anti-Catholic bigotry in the Northeast and been confined to an immigrant ghetto on the city’s west side. Young Mike yearned for something more; he yearned for the open road. As a teenager, he left home to take a position with the Michigan Central Railroad as a train butcher, a kid who sold magazines and confections to passengers commuting between cities. Around 1857, at the age of eighteen, McDonald’s job on the railroads took him to New Orleans, where he first experienced the glamour and excitement of the city’s gaming parlors and river steamboats; he saw the rich and influential sporting men in their natural habitat, and was inspired by the idea that the New Orleans model could be adapted to other cities—especially a fast growing, wide-open town like Chicago.

McDonald first visited Chicago sometime in 1855. At the time, the Gem of the Prairie was not much more than an idea waiting to take shape. The city had been built, inexplicably, in the middle of a mud flat, which necessitated raising portions of the downtown area on stilts above the sloshy earth, giving Chicago the first of many nicknames: Mud City.

The less-than-ideal geological conditions did not deter young Mike McDonald. He settled in the city around 1860, and, in less than a year, he had established himself as enough of an influential figure to cosponsor a petition calling on “all Irishmen” to join Corcoran’s Illinois Irish Brigade and fight on behalf of the Union in the Civil War. McDonald, of course, had no intentions of joining the brigade himself. Instead he organized his first major criminal scam, in which he colluded with army deserters who agreed to turn themselves in, reenlist, and split the commission that McDonald received for recruiting them to join.

But McDonald’s Civil War profiteering was small potatoes compared to the money he began to amass through his gambling interests. Dressed like an undertaker, always in black, with stark white shirts, a prominent sage-brush mustache, and a bowler derby hat, McDonald was a regular along a stretch of the First Ward known as Gambler’s Row. Although he never gambled himself, he financed a traveling faro bank, and, in 1867, he opened his first gambling establishment at 89 Dearborn Street. It wasn’t long before he got into trouble with the law. In 1869, he was accused of stealing thirty thousand dollars from an assistant cashier of the Chicago Dock Company, who had given him the money to finance his gambling operations. Unable to furnish bail, McDonald spent three months in jail before he was acquitted at trial. He returned to his gambling operation on Dearborn Street, although the expense of his criminal trial made it difficult for him to continue the necessary protection payments to the police. As a result, the place was raided two or three times a week, and McDonald was frequently arrested and fined.

The constant harassment by greedy cops with their hands outstretched engendered in Mike a resentment toward the men in blue that persisted until his dying day. Later in life, when he became politically powerful, he enjoyed nothing more than to put the squeeze on a cop. His dislike for policemen became so well-known that it even gave rise to a famous Chicago anecdote that was repeated for years in the city’s saloons and by local vaudevillians. With occasional variations, the story went like this: King Mike McDonald was in his club one afternoon when a community organizer came in and said “Mike, we’re raising money for a good cause, and we were looking to put your name down for two dollars.”

“What’s it for?” asked McDonald.

“Well,” answered the man, “sadly, we’re burying a policeman.”

“B’jaysus,” responded Mike. “In that case, here’s ten dollars. Bury five of ’em.”

McDonald’s antipathy toward the coppers became an ancillary motivator that drove him toward higher and higher levels of accomplishment. The fact that the Chicago of his day was perhaps America’s first truly wide-open big city—relatively free of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant bigotry so common in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and the southern states—contributed to his success. Sure, Chicago had its share of Protestant old wealth, and there were certainly pockets of anti-immigrant bigotry in city, county, and state government, but by and large, the Know-Nothing Movement never really flourished in Chicago as it did in and around the original thirteen colonies.
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First generation Irish Americans like Mike McDonald were typical of Chicago’s Irish population in that they weren’t immigrants at all, but native-born Americans. They were the children of a pioneering immigrant generation that had suffered through starvation, exile, discrimination, and squalor. That generation had managed to survive and pass along their enterprising nature and psychological scars to their offspring. Mike McDonald and his generation—restless, daring, and relatively unfettered by the constraints of the past—were the first to venture forth with a sense of entitlement. They were determined to make their mark within the bounds of popular norms and dictates of American capitalism—which, in the case of Chicago and many other booming towns and cities, allowed for considerable moral leeway.

McDonald’s first major venture came in 1873, with the opening of a gambling emporium unlike anything ever seen outside the riverboat parlors of New Orleans. A four-story building on the northwest corner of Clark and Monroe streets, King Mike’s place, which he owned with a consortium of silent partners and financial backers, went by the name the Store and included a saloon, a hotel, and a fine dining establishment. The second-floor gambling room was so extravagantly equipped with roulette wheels and faro tables that even McDonald’s partners expressed concern.

“It’s too much,” said one partner upon seeing the dozens of gaming tables being installed. “We’ll never get enough players to fill up the games.”

It was then that McDonald uttered the phrase for which he became famous. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

The Store was a success almost from the start. To gain entrance, a gambler first had to knock on the door and be recognized by the elegant black doorman in a waistcoat and cummerbund who was trained to recognize all sporting men of note. If the gambler was not known to the doorman, he could gain entrance by using the name of one of the many ropers or bunco men who King Mike employed to hang out at the city’s train stations and finer hotels to steer newly arrived gamblers toward the Store.

Once inside, the prospective gambler was overwhelmed by the caliber of gaming establishment that presaged the grand casinos of Las Vegas by more than a hundred years. The room was furnished with the most expensive oak furniture and illuminated by gaslight chandeliers. Dealers and croupiers were formally dressed, as were the waiters. There was not a woman in sight, though McDonald’s wife, Mary Noonan McDonald, did run the establishment’s fourth-floor boarding house, which accommodated hard core sporting men who needed only an afternoon nap to revive themselves, replenish their bankrolls, and return to the tables.