Sin in the Second City (44 page)

“I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter,” Mayor Harrison wrote. “I have revoked the saloon licenses of Harry J. Cusick. I have not yet located a license in name of Frank Lewis. I have given instructions to the Chief of Police to close, and to keep closed, until further notice from my office, the houses at 2033 Armour Ave., 2014 Armour Ave., 2117 Dearborn Street, 2127 Dearborn Street and 32 W. 20th Street.”

Within the week, Dago Frank, Harry Cusick, and Louis Weiss were charged with harboring minor girls, and Committee of Fifteen investigators hinted that evidence was mounting against Big Jim Colosimo, Blubber Bob Gray, “Jew Kid” Grabner, and Ed Weiss.

The Everleigh sisters monitored the developments with mixed feelings. While increased activity didn’t bode well for a grand reopening, it was delicious schadenfreude contemplating the demise of the Weiss brothers. But at 2034 South Dearborn Street, two houses down from Vic Shaw’s, Madam Zoe Millard barreled out her front door and embarked on one of her infamous, fearsome rages, pinwheeling her arms, pushing past bewildered errand boys.

“If there had been no Everleigh Club, there would have been none of this,” Madam Millard shouted. “The Everleighs were too damned exclusive even to be nice to the reformers.”

One of her inmates, Grace Monroe, appeared at the door. The former Everleigh Club butterfly called her new madam’s name, halting Millard in midrant.

“They are clean and good,” the harlot said, loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. She steeled herself for what she knew was coming next.

Millard turned, slowly, on the flat heel of a jeweled slipper and started back toward her brothel. Another madam, who was never identified, slipped in behind Millard and pulled the door closed.

T
wo of them were rampaging the poor girl, Minna heard, and she was already in the yellow automobile, racing down to Dearborn. Not even Ada could stop her. Eyes shrinking behind swelling skin, nose bloodied, teeth chipped, back crisscrossed with welts, wrists snapped like wish-bones. Minna barely remembered the drive, or screeching to a crooked halt outside number 2034, or pushing in the door to Zoe Millard’s and seeing Grace still cowering in the corner, the madam’s fat white fist raised and ready to fall again. She forgot her aristocratic airs. She forgot her disdain for crude language. She forgot her skill for talking clients out of fighting. She forgot her words, on the Club’s last night, that she was not a knocker. She forgot that in real birthday time, she had just turned forty-six, a butterfly approaching her final phase. All of that was replaced, in one spinning second, with the memory of every filthy hand on her skin, the ugly tumble of all those missing years. Minna stepped up to Madam Millard, curled her fist, and swung.

JUST
HOW WICKED

Big Jim Colosimo (left) with his attorney.

You can get much farther with a smile, a kind word, and a gun than you can with a smile and a kind word.

—A
L
C
APONE

“W
e’re getting nowhere,” Ike Bloom fumed. “You have the knack for making everybody sore. I’m surprised somebody hasn’t taken a shot at you.”

Minna bit her lip. Let him holler. She’d gotten the best of Zoe Millard, blackened both her eyes, but the police inflicted the worst injury of all—shutting down the madam’s brothel on September 5, 1912, the day after the brawl. The Friendly Friends—including Millard and Vic Shaw, but, naturally, no Everleighs—held an emergency meeting, but the largest kitty they could muster was a piddling $30,000. (“Pikers,” Ada scoffed. “It’ll take a million to grease the ring-leaders against vice.”) Now, in mid-September, a grand jury prepared to convene, and Levee leaders were growing desperate. Minna called Bloom to check in and feel him out, and she’d expected a furious lecture. His spittle practically shot through the receiver.

“The Levee has it in their minds that your obstinacy is the reason for the cleanup,” he continued. “Why don’t you see Bathhouse John, make a deal, be a good fellow and play ball with the rest of us? We’re all in the same boat. We’ve got to organize our forces. Supposing I call a meeting? You make a speech, say you’re sorry—anything. They’ll be tickled to death to find you a regular. C’mon, what do you say?”

Minna laughed. Her obstinacy was the issue?
She
should be sorry? While Big Jim served up threats with his pasta, and the aldermen forgot which brothel made the Levee the only respectable district in the world? She could listen to Bloom now, accept his reprimands and borrow his optimism, but Minna knew, better than anyone, that not all lies were created equal.

“I could throw a party for some of these law and order leagues,” she offered. “But as for the Levee, I’ll go my way and the rest can go hang.”

Bloom was still muttering swear words when, gently, she lowered the phone. When she lifted it again, she dialed the numbers of several major Chicago newspapers and asked to speak to the city editors. It was time to take out her cache of weapons—all those letters composed by secret light, truth at long last dusted off and doled out.

She had prepared statements outlining every facet of vice in Chicago, Minna said, naming names and quoting prices and casting blame. Perhaps she might consider making them public, if the editors were interested.

O
n September 26, the Cook County grand jury held a private executive session. After an hour, during which reporters waited with ears pressed against the closed door, the foreman emerged and motioned for the deputy county sheriff. Another interminable wait. When the sheriff finally reappeared, he wiped his brow and exhaled a long hiss of breath.

“Wow!” he said. “They’re going to rip off the lid.”

“What lid?” asked a voice in the crowd.

“Graft, vice police, politics, white slaves.” He swept the horizon with his hand. “They’re going to tear the mask from the face of vice. If those fellows do what they say they’re going to do, they’ll make history…and they say we are about to be the busiest little office in Cook County if we get all the persons they are going to examine to find just how wicked a community this is…politicians, policemen, gamblers, resort keepers—all are fish for the grand jury net.”

Before adjourning for the day, the grand jury issued subpoenas for a woman named Virginia Brooks, who had organized a hatchet brigade in West Hammond (a Cook County town just outside Chicago proper), threatening to pull a Carrie Nation; the mayor of West Hammond himself; Arthur Burrage Farwell, who was expected to provide information on dives that violated liquor laws; Clifford Roe, invaluable for his expertise on the white slave traffic; and the city editors of the
Tribune
and the
Daily News.

State’s Attorney John Wayman, Roe’s old boss, was the lone member of Cook County’s law enforcement body who seemed wary of the subpoenas. He was in an impossible position. When he ran for election at the end of 1908, he deftly played both sides, taking subtle aim at critics who denounced his ties to the United Societies—“The man who takes the holier-than-thou position and says he is going to keep clean of the whole nasty business,” he said, “washes his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water”—while also vowing to jail every criminal in the county. At the same time, his relationship with First Ward politicians was relatively cordial; Bathhouse John even declared the forty-year-old “the handsomest man in Chicago.” Now, the state’s attorney was unsure whether to placate the reformers, align himself with the segregationists, or teeter along a fine line in between.

“This grand jury did not consult with me,” Wayman said, “and I know practically nothing of the proposed investigation.” He didn’t know, either, that it was only the beginning of his trouble.

T
he following afternoon, a Saturday, ten thousand men, women, and children gathered in the Loop, preparing for what one observer called “the most pretentious street parade of its kind.” A storm skulked between flattened clouds, dropping just as the procession began. Mounted policemen flanked the crowd, directing traffic. Clergymen, including Bell and his Midnight Mission, sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in a tribute to the legendary Gypsy Smith march. Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, students of the Moody Bible Institute, and members of every conceivable civic and religious group in Chicago fanned out in all directions, rippling and shifting, an entire Lake Michigan of reformers.

The stated purpose of the parade was to “protest against the lawless saloon, the red-light district, the debauched ballot, and a hundred other powers of darkness,” but, as the
Record Herald
put it, “the aim of the crusaders seemed to be rather diffuse.” Virginia Brooks, the West Hammond ingenue who recently exported her crusading efforts to Chicago, had planned to lead the throng mounted on a white stallion and dressed as Joan of Arc, but at the last minute she decided that such attire would make her a “subject of ridicule.” Fifty floats advanced slowly amid the crowd, slathered with signs and strung with banners, a gaudy colony of mutant ants.

There was Lucy Page Gaston and her entire Anti-Cigarette League, waving through dense curtains of rain, declaring
CUBS MUST CUT OUT CIGARETTES
. The Anti-Saloon League wasn’t far behind, boasting a similar sign:
BOOZE BEAT THE CUBS
. Another float, sponsored by the city’s Norwegian churches, carried twelve young men cap-a-pie in armor and a thirteenth clad in bright pink tights and a bearskin coat, representing the god Thor. He sliced through the rain with a hammer and bore a placard around his neck:
THE GREAT GOD THOR WITH HIS HAMMER, THE NORWEGIANS WILL HELP SMITE THE SALOONS
.

Arthur Burrage Farwell and his Chicago Law and Order League lorded over a float designed to look like a “pure ballot.” One Boy Scout wore a Satan costume and warned,
I’LL GET YOU IF YOU DON’T SWEAR OFF
—leaving exactly what one should swear off up to the imagination. Another company of Scouts dragged a small cannon through the slick streets, festooned with a banner declaring,
WE’VE TURNED THE GUNS AGAINST THE SALOONS
. The Washington Park Church outdid everyone, its members riding atop a mini–morality play. The first float depicted Uncle Sam handing a proud dive keeper a liquor license next to a man guzzling beer on a bar stool; the second represented the drunkard’s squalid home, where his wife labored wearily at a washtub while he beat her about the head; and the lone, stark image for the final act was a vehicle dressed up to look like the county hearse.

John Wayman, Shakespearean scholar and fan of farce, would have appreciated the sprawling lunacy of this spectacle—if only its participants hadn’t concluded the festivities with a postparade rally, where they violently assailed Chicago’s officials in general, and its state’s attorney in particular, for failing to close the Levee.

M
inna’s fingers shook as she dialed the number for Chief Justice Harry Olson of the municipal court. Never in her life could she have imagined volunteering information about the Levee district to an authentic arm of the law—a member of the Chicago Vice Commission, no less—but that was before certain men appeared on her doorstep, their faces half-shrouded by bowler hats, giving her a look that spiked her heart and iced her blood. Big Jim Colosimo had always used violence and evil to navigate his world the way other men used a compass, but she never thought he would steer those urges in her direction.