Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (16 page)

“This new movement is the mist which rises skyward before one’s eyes,” offered Coughlin, “and while it may become thick enough to make a cloud and look scarlet and silver and gilt-edged in the sunlight, it will yet be the cloud that will blind good political vision. That means that the Municipal Party is a Jonah, an orphan, a child without parents which will cry for a little while an’ die. It means I count myself too smart to associate with ’em. Honest, I’d ruther be a Republican—put that on record—than associate with such a party that stands for nothin’ but a dream, a regular dewy mist. Rise above the mist an’ look for the earth. You can see it, but keep on lookin’. The sun comes out an’ drives the mist away, an’ you see the solid bedrock of Democracy an’ the sands of Republicanism still stickin’ close to the ground. That’s me. I want my feet on the earth.”

With his flashy style and flowing verbiage, Bathhouse John was the ideal front man, but he wasn’t much of an organizer. He was popular enough to ensure himself reelection for the foreseeable future, but he had no real organization behind him. For this, he needed Hinky Dink.

Michael Kenna was the exact opposite of John Coughlin. Though they were raised in similar hardscrabble conditions in the First Ward, and both married local Irish girls, Kenna had none of Coughlin’s flamboyance. An absurdly tiny man, barely an inch over five feet tall, Kenna had acquired his nickname as a youth when kids at the local swimming hole made fun of his diminutive size. He may have been small, but Hinky Dink had oversized ambitions. He dropped out of school at the age of ten to become a newsboy and supplemented his income by running errands for saloon keepers and porters along State Street, striking up valuable relationships with gamblers, brothel madams, and their clients. By the time he was in his late-teens, he had his own newsstand at the corner of Monroe and Dearborn Streets, just outside the old
Chicago Tribune
building. At the age of twenty-four, he opened a saloon, the Workingmen’s Exchange, which would become the most legendary gathering place in the history of First Ward politics.

In the months following Mayor Carter Harrison’s assassination—and in the waning days of Mike McDonald’s empire—Mike Kenna approached Bathhouse John Coughlin. Although they knew each other by reputation and had most likely met before, they were drawn together for the first time by a vexing problem. Both men were saloon owners (Coughlin’s was called the Silver Dollar) who ran modest gambling operations out of hotel rooms above their saloons. In recent months the police had begun raiding both their establishments. Hinky Dink thought it over and said to The Bath: “Times have changed. Mike McDonald can’t do nothin’ for us now. We need our own organization, one that can control the coppers and the people at City Hall. You’re the alderman, and you’ve got another year to run. I can guarantee you reelection if you throw in with me. We stick together, and we rule the roost like nobody ever done before.”

Kenna’s proposition made perfect sense to Bathhouse John. They threw in together. For the next forty years, they were like a classic vaudeville team: Coughlin the loud, back-slapping joke teller, Kenna the sad-eyed straight man. Their stark differences in temperament only added to their unique chemistry, which was both entertaining and highly effective.
⁶

Bathhouse John may have been the showman, but Hinky Dink was the true genius. His street-level approach to political science was founded on an extensive benefit system that incorporated the lowest of the low. At a time when there was no government welfare system to speak of, Kenna became perhaps the best friend the city’s indigent population ever had. The rooms of the Alaska Hotel above his Workingmen’s Exchange became a veritable flophouse, more popular than the local Salvation Army. Bums and hobos were given hot water for bathing and a place to sleep. In the morning, they were offered soup and a sandwich at Hinky Dink’s saloon and allowed to drink the spillover from the night before. All that was required in return was that they vote early and often on election day. The owner rarely showed his face, but the people knew who he was. To the poor, homeless, and hapless of the First Ward, Hinky Dink Kenna was like a saint.

The goodwill and loyalty engendered by Kenna’s soup kitchen became the bedrock of a seemingly indestructible political organization. Kenna and Coughlin set up a defense fund in which a percentage of the protection money paid by brothel owners and gamblers was pooled for all organization followers who got into trouble. Prostitutes suffering from diseases were sent to private sanatoriums in Colorado. Gangsters from the ward who were arrested for fighting hooligans from other territories or for conducting violence on behalf of the organization would be provided legal council. The Machine exerted financial influence over the Chicago Police Department and brought about the installation of the organization’s very own local chief, Captain Michael Ryan, who was a firm believer in the status quo. “This district has never been clean,” declared the good captain, “and it never will be. We keep order as well as possible.”

Election day sometimes got ugly. As in New York, Philadelphia, and other rapidly expanding big cities around the United States, politics in Chicago was a contact sport. The reelection of Coughlin and Kenna as aldermen usually went off without a hitch, but when it came to mayoral elections or elections that involved differences of opinion within the ward’s many precincts, blood flowed. During one particularly contentious election, the Kenna-Coughlin camp acquired the services of the Quincy Street Boys, one of dozens of professional slugger squads who hired themselves out on election day. The Quincy Street Boys were assured that when the time came for the application of billies, blackjacks, and brass knuckles on rival voters, the police would be looking the other way.

Sure enough, the inevitable showdown took place that afternoon. According to the
Tribune
, “Coughlin’s men went after [their rivals] like hungry hyenas in a traveling circus at an evening meal of raw steak.” Later in the evening, the roving street confrontations grew into a full-fledged riot. On State Street during rush hour, cable cars were halted while the rival gangsters beat, cut, and shot at one another. Three squads of police were called into action; they rushed the crowd, clubbing indiscriminately. Eventually the disturbance was quelled.

That night, while election judges and clerks busily tallied the votes for the day, newspapers made up casualty lists. They discovered that forty enemies of the Kenna-Coughlin organization had been wounded, two of them critically, while hundreds were arrested and held in the county jail. Only six Kenna-Coughlin men had been seriously injured, and of the dozens apprehended, all had been vouched for by counsel; none spent the night in jail. The Machine took care of its own.

The First Ward Ball

Elections in the First Ward were violent for one simple reason: The stakes were high. The ward’s Levee district had become a cash cow, a depraved, sinful Shangri-la that spewed forth dirty money like a delirious bank teller high on dope and juju juice. The city’s Vice Commission claimed that vice and crime in Chicago yielded an annual revenue of sixty million dollars, with net profits of fifteen million dollars—most of it generated in the Levee. Gross income from prostitution alone was estimated at thirty million dollars, with half of it paid out as protection to greedy aldermen and crooked coppers.

Over the years, many Protestant religious leaders and political reformers toured the district and issued reports claiming that the Levee represented the end of civilization as we know it, a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah. In 1910, a commission of concerned citizens investigated the district and determined that there were 27,300,000 paid-for couplings annually. More than five-thousand full-time prostitutes worked in and around the Levee, and ten thousand more freelanced on weekends.

Brothels scaled to accommodate every bankroll and coin purse existed in the district. The Everliegh Club was the most famous, a New Orleans-style luxury bordello catering to the city’s leaders of industry. Along Bed Bug Row was a more motley and affordable collection of whorehouses such as Black May’s, The Library, a cathouse called Why Not? and, most famously, the House of All Nations, which claimed to have a bevy of affordable whores from every country on earth.

In addition to prostitution, the Levee offered debauchery to satisfy every desire or fetish: faro clubs, dice joints, penny arcades, opium dens, peep shows, burlesque houses, dance halls, concert saloons, and animal sex acts. There were hundreds of saloons, most of the rot-gut variety with names like The Bucket of Blood, The Crib, Dago Frank’s, and The Lone Star & Palm Club, which was described in a police report as “a low dive, a hang-out for colored and white people of the lowest type.”

The Lone Star & Palm Club was owned and run by Mickey Finn, a foul-tempered pickpocket and jackroller who claimed at times to have been born in Ireland, and at other times in Peoria, Illinois. His saloon advertised a drink called the “Mickey Finn Special,” which was comprised of raw alcohol, water in which snuff had been soaked, and a knockout powder he had acquired from a Haitian voodoo doctor. Suckers who were dumb enough to drink this mystery beverage (the price was a mere two cents) passed out and were then dragged into a back room, where they were robbed of everything, including clothes and shoes. Mickey Finn’s technique was so notorious that his name later became a generic term applied to knockout potions of all varieties.

Finn, like everyone else, paid for the privilege of operating his scams in the district. The fact that local businesses paid protection to the politicians and police was an open secret. The
Chicago Examiner
even published a price scale:

Massage parlors and assignation houses, $25 weekly.

Larger houses of ill fame, $50 to $100 weekly, with $25 additional each week if drinks are sold.

Saloons allowed to stay open after hours, $50 a month.

Sale of liquor in apartment houses without licenses, $15 a month.

Poker and craps, $25 a week for each table.

Having to pay tribute did not keep the hustlers away. On the contrary, the gamblers, bums, thugs, pimps (called cadets), madams, harlots, and bunco artists all came in droves. Eventually, the varied collection of riffraff who operated daily in the district led Hinky Dink Kenna to an idea that would catapult the Levee into a unique position in the history of American vice.

It came to him in the winter of 1896, when Hinky Dink and The Bath were seated in his office at the Workingmen’s Exchange. They were lamenting the fact that, this year, unlike the preceding fifteen, there would be no annual party for Lame Jimmy, a crippled pianist and fiddler who entertained in the ragtime style of Scott Joplin and Fats Waller. In the 1880s and early 1890s, the fund raiser for Lame Jimmy was a hugely popular event; police captains, patrolmen, and district leaders attended as honored guests, mingling with thugs and sluggers who were friends of the Machine. The annual event came to an abrupt end in 1895, when a cop at the party got drunk and shot another cop.

“Hey, I got an idea,” said Hinky Dink, in a rare instance of excitement. “Why don’t we take over the party? We put on an annual event just like the Lame Jimmy affair, only we control everything so nobody can shut us down.”

Bathhouse John loved the idea. “Good God, m’boy, you got something there. We charge one dollar a head to every saloon keeper, madam, and slugger in the district, and we’ll make a small fortune.”

Thus was born the First Ward Ball, a legendary event that became the closest thing to an annual celebration that the Irish American underworld would ever have.

It was held at the Chicago Coliseum. Tickets were sold ahead of time for one dollar each, with a five dollar fee to sit in special roped-off boxes near the dance floor. From the start, the Ball was massively popular, attended by a who’s who of the criminal class. Tom O’Brien, king of the bunco artists, was a regular, as was Billy Fagen, a religious man whose House of David gambling parlor always had one room reserved for “prayer meetings and gospel service.” Buff Higgins was also a regular, until he was hanged in Cook County Jail on a murder charge. Big Jim O’Leary, an up-and-coming gambling czar whose mother Catherine O’Leary owned the cow that allegedly kicked over the lamp that ignited the Great Fire of 1871, was an annual guest.

Reporting on the ball one year, the
Tribune
surmised: “If a great disaster had befallen the Coliseum last night there would not have been a second-story worker, a dip or plug-ugly, porch climber, dope fiend, or scarlet woman remaining in Chicago.” The paper only had it half-right; that same disaster would have wiped out most of the city’s aldermen and a significant portion of the police department as well.

The First Ward Ball reached its zenith in 1907, when angry social reformers repulsed by the annual bacchanal pledged to print a list of the so-called “upstanding citizens” who attended. Bathhouse John came up with an idea for undercutting this cheap tactic. The ball that year would be a masquerade affair, offering everyone an opportunity to disguise their identities. The grand marshal was none other than Bathhouse John himself, who arrived not in a costume, but in his usual finery. His tailcoat was a crisp billiard-cloth green, his vest a delicate mauve. His trousers were lavender, as was his glowing cravat, and his kid gloves a pale pink. His shoes were canary yellow, and perched atop his fine pompadour was a silken top hat that glistened like a plate glass window at Marshall Field’s department store.

The Bath also used the occasion to unveil a song he had written entitled “Dear Midnight of Love,” sung by a professional opera star he had hired for the occasion. The song was corny and lachrymose, but the crowd loved every minute of the performance.

The irony was that, even though Coughlin and Kenna were (contrary to the district they presided over) straight-laced family men whose wives were active in local parish activities, the ball became to the reformers a symbol of all that was wrong with the city’s laissez-faire philosophy of segregated vice. Local newspaper editorials railed against this “saturnalian orgy,” this “vile, dissolute affair,” this “bawdy Dionysian festival.” In response, Hinky Dink smiled a rare smile and counted the proceeds, which ranged over the years from twenty-five thousand to forty thousand dollars of pure profit.