The Outfit Read Free Page A

the nether region for which it served as a main point of entry. For just below Plant’s “Barracks” was a labyrinthine maze of tunnels, rooms, and underground streets that drew, according to Jay Robert Nash, “hundreds of pickpockets, jackrollers, highwaymen, and killers for hire, the most fearsome collection of hoodlums anywhere in the U.S. at the time."
    But by far the most loathsome aspects of the underworld were its crimes against women. In this dungeonlike world, young girls were often forced into “the life,” otherwise known as prostitution. In standard operating procedure, “ropers” scoured the country for fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls who could be lured to Chicago with promises of a big payday. Upon arrival, these girls were raped and otherwise terrorized into submission, kept pliant with opium, and assigned to whichever whorehouse bought them (for a couple hundred bucks plus a percentage of their earnings). For the next few years, while their youthfulness was still in demand, the girls paid their “owner” 60 to 90 percent of their ten-dollar trick fee. When their skin became ravaged by disease, they were tossed out on the streets only to succumb to drug overdoses. It was called white slavery, and it could be argued that it was every bit as brutal as the black variety. 2
    The wanton criminality flourished in large part because Chicago maintained a police department in name only. In 1850, with an exploding population of eighty thousand, there existed only nine “city watch marshals” - as no police department had yet been established. Five years later - and too little too late - a minimalist Chicago Police Department was organized. In five more years, Chicago mayor Long John Wentworth actually decreased the force to a mere sixty cops.
    Word traveled fast throughout the nation’s criminal network. Soon Chicago sustained an influx of criminals from New Orleans, Mississippi, New York, and virtually every burg with a train depot or a healthy horse. At this turbulent juncture, the first true crime lord, Michael Cassius McDonald, appeared. A resident of “Hair-Trigger Block,” McDonald was a noted gambler, and among underworld successes the first to appreciate the importance of the political fix. After coalescing the city’s riffraff into “McDonald’s Democrats,” he engineered the election of Mayor Carter Harrison in 1879. As his reward, McDonald gained the exclusive bookmaking franchise for all Chicago and Indiana. His gambling parlor, The Store, was known as the unofficial City Hall. McDonald, who was known to hate policemen, was once approached by two cops for a two-dollar donation. “We’re burying a policeman,” one of them said, to which Mike responded, “Here’s ten dollars. Bury five of them."
    McDonald’s organization coined the term
syndicate
to denote his crime consortium. The moniker would be appropriated much more infamously by a Chicago gang of the twentieth-century.
    In 1871 denizens of the underworld acquired still another source of revenue: looting. On the night of October 8, after a severe, record-shattering drought during which a scant one inch of rain fell in four months, a cow in the barn on Mrs. Catherine O’Leary’s Southwest Side farm knocked over a lantern. Fueled by ferocious gusts that have earned the city still another moniker, The Windy City, the barn fire escalated into the Great Chicago Fire. When it finally ended thirty-six brutal hours later, eighteen thousand mostly wooden buildings that had once concealed the underworld were incinerated. The city sustained more than five hundred deaths and was saddled with more than ninety-eight thousand newly homeless citizens. Fully half the city was consumed. Eyewitnesses described the horrific aftermath: like a pack of rats emerging from the underworld, the con men, scalawags, hoodlums, and whores descended on the ruins, looting anything that had not turned to cinders. Local clergy intoned that God’s wrath, not