Woodlawn Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church

A previous post discussing the history of the Blackstone Rangers street gang during the 1960s and early 1970s illustrated the perverted genius of gang founder and leader, Jeff Fort, in subverting social and community organizations to help cartelize criminal activities in the Woodlawn neighborhood.

One of the earliest of these efforts was a close relationship with Ed Woods, extension director of the Woodlawn Chicago Boys Club. Together with Fort and gang co-founder Eugene Hairston, Woods searched for a space where the gang could create a supervised teen hang-out. They found their first location here, at Woodlawn Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, 6401 S. Kenwood Ave. The lot where the church edifice once stood is now an empty lot.

The early 1960s were a time of increasing racial strife in Woodlawn. For the past decade, the neighborhood, which was previously majority-white, had seen an influx of black residents from residential areas to the west, plus additional black immigration from southern states. “White flight” out of the neighborhood was increasing rapidly, and the economic prospects for Woodlawn seemed poor. In 1964, median family income in Woodlawn was $4,199 (roughly $30,000 in 2008 dollars) – not poverty-level, but well below the city average, and on a downward trend.

Hyde Park, just to the north of Woodlawn across 60th Street, remained primarily white, as students and faculty from the University of Chicago dominated the housing market there. Hyde Park residents were increasingly concerned about the changing nature of Woodlawn (as well as Kenwood to the north and Washington Park to the west), and the University feared a growing inability to attract students from wealthy families into the city if conditions in the neighborhoods surrounding it did not improve.

Thus, the U of C began floating ideas about building a “south campus” between 60th and 61st Streets, and sought city support for a massive urban renewal campaign intended to demolish much of the decaying housing stock between 60th and 63rd. The effort would have undoubtedly improved the condition of these blocks, but understandably, the program also raised the ire of some poor residents of Woodlawn, who feared losing their homes. Into this political minefield stepped the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization headed by the famed radical, Saul Alinsky, “to unite dispossessed peoples into power groups”. The IAF worked with the pastors of two Woodlawn churches, Rev. Charles T. Leber of First Presbyterian, the oldest congregation in the city, and Rev. Arthur Brazier, pastor of the Apostolic Church of God at 63rd and Kimbark, to found the Temporary Woodlawn Organization (T.W.O.) (after the new group proved not to be temporary – it still exists today – it was renamed “The” Woodlawn Organization, keeping the same initials).

T.W.O. spearheaded the opposition to the U of C south campus plans, and also began attempting to consolidate power in Woodlawn, promoting itself as the singular representative of the community. T.W.O. organized “rent strikes” against slum building landlords, picketed in front of the homes of school principals who they accused of facilitating back-door segregation, and attempted to change the zoning laws to rid 63rd street of saloons.

Given that T.W.O. was founded by church leaders, it is unsurprising that the Greater Woodlawn Pastors’ Alliance held a membership position in the organization. Nevertheless, not all Woodlawn-area churchmen supported the group’s efforts and radical political positions. Associate pastor Otto Sotnak at Woodlawn Immanuel Lutheran Church criticized Alinsky’s role in T.W.O., arguing that black residents saw him as patronizing and an interference. He described Alinsky’s IAF as “an agency whose organizing tactics are based on the cultivation of fear, hatred, and useful antagonism.” Along with five other Woodlawn pastors, he resigned from T.W.O. because, as he wrote to me in recent correspondence, “we realized the philosophy of the organization was essentially totalitarian, and therefore our ideas didn't matter.”

Woodlawn Immanuel was founded in 1899 with 25 members, styling itself as “Immanuel English Evangelical Lutheran Church”. At that time, most Lutheran services were confined to the historically-Germanic north side, but, as the new church’s name suggested, it offered services on the south side in English. The original meeting place was at 43rd St. and S. Champlain Ave, and the church built its first edifice at that site in 1903. In 1917, the Lutheran General Synod (forerunner of the modern United Lutheran Church) was seeking an opportunity to build a congregation close to the University of Chicago, in order to support Lutheran students at that institution. Immanuel English Evangelical answered the call in 1921, and moved to Woodlawn, meeting at the Masonic Temple at 64th St. and University Ave. for three years while a new edifice at 6401 S. Kenwood was under construction. At that time (also the congregation’s 25th anniversary), the church added “Woodlawn” to its name.

(Pictured: Woodlawn Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church)

The church that had begun with 25 members grew quickly under the skilled ministry of Rev. Dr. Clarence E. Paulus, who had found his way to the congregation as a guest minister in 1914, and remained at the church until 1951. By 1948, when the church paid off its debt for the building in a “mortgage burning ceremony,” the membership stood near 750. The church served the community continuously in those years, offering its sanctuary for use by Boy and Girl Scout groups, women’s clubs, youth groups, and other civic organizations. In 1960, the church offered free polio innoculations for Woodlawn residents.

As the neighborhood changed during the 1950s and 1960s, Woodlawn Immanuel responded to residents’ concerns regarding crime. Already by 1952, crime in the neighborhood was serious enough to warrant a mass meeting of neighborhood groups at the church to discuss the problem. At that meeting, Woodlawn Immanuel’s new pastor, Rev. Carl H. Berhenke (who had recently succeeded Rev. Paulus) argued that the solution to growing street crime was to “help the people to realize they are not standing alone in their demand for a good, clean, and decent community, and that by working together we can bring it about.”

Woodlawn Immanuel and T.W.O. were not the only organizations growing in size during the early 1960s. Juvenile delinquents Jeff Fort and Eugene Hairston founded the Blackstone Rangers in the late 1950s, and by the summer of 1963, their control over the streets of eastern Woodlawn was complete, with purse snatchings, robberies, fights, and bloody turf wars with the Cobras, Disciples, and other gangs becoming increasingly commonplace.

Ed Woods, extension director of the Woodlawn Chicago Boys’ Club, worked assiduously to develop a rapport with Fort and Hairston, and in 1964, fearing another vicious summer, he approached Rev. Sotnak at Immanuel Lutheran about opening a youth center at the church where gang members could play basketball, pool, car games, ping pong, and checkers under adult supervision. In an email to me regarding a previous post, Rev. Sotnak described the origins of the Rangers’ hang-out at Immanuel Lutheran:

In the summers of 1963, -64 and -65, gang activity had become a growing threat to residents and business people in South Chicago, which included Englewood and Woodlawn. I remember a block club meeting held in our church basement when we invited a youth officer from the Woodlawn Police Station to speak to us. Afterward, he begged me to do anything I could to get those “kids” off the street.

By coincidence Ed Woods, who was director of a detached worker program at the Chicago Woodlawn Boy's Club, stopped at my office to ask if they could use our church facilities to open a center for the Blackstone Rangers, since the Boy's Club building was in rival gang turf at that time, and the Rangers wouldn't go there. I agreed, and that was how my church and I got involved.

We had about a dozen gang members the first night we opened. After that we had over 100, and the number grew ever larger after that. The Chicago Woodlawn Boy's Club got funding to hire detached workers to mingle with the gang members, gain their confidence and encourage them to leave the gang and either get into school or some kind of legitimate career that, "Put money in their pockets," since most of the gang members, given a choice, would rather not hustle.

We had several success stories. One gang member said he always wanted to be a chef. Mr. Woods found him a job at Passavant Hospital in the kitchen. To the best of my knowledge, the fellow left the gang, at least for a time. However, we learned that leaving any gang is difficult. It's like going AWOL from the army.

Employment was a key part of the program. At the time of his work with Rev. Sotnak and Immanuel Lutheran, Ed Woods told reporters, “In the past, social workers were sent here when trouble was brewing,” but argued that employment would provide a more permanent solution to the gang problem: “If a man has pride it can make him a king, and a job can give the boy the necessary pride.” Jeff Fort himself found himself employed through Woods’ efforts, earning $1.25 per hour.

In 1965, Rev. Sotnak left Woodlawn Immanuel, and the collaboration with Woods and the Rangers ended. As Rev. Sotnak described it to me,

In 1965, I left Chicago and moved to Minneapolis, where I became pastor of Lake of the Isles Luth. Church. That summer was also a long hot summer on the streets of Woodlawn. Pastor John Fry became pastor of First Presbyterian Church at 64th. & Kimbark. The interim pastor at Woodlawn-Immanuel was afraid to get involved with the gang, so Pastor Fry invited the gang to use his church facilities (just a block west of Woodlawn-Immanuel).

First Presbyterian’s previous pastor had been a founder and charter member of T.W.O., so when the Rangers moved their headquarters, they also came into contact with T.W.O. leadership. By 1967, T.W.O. was working together with the Rangers in running a federally-funded job training program, in which the gang leadership (most of whom were high school drop-outs) would administer classes in reading and arithmetic. As preposterous as it may sound today, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission supported the effort to the tune of nearly $1 million between June, 1967 and June, 1968. Like Rev. Sotnak, Rev. Fry, the EEOC, and the community of Woodlawn were facing desperate problems of poverty, crime, and racial strife, and they were willing to adopt unconventional approaches where traditional ones had failed.

The relationship between the Rangers, T.W.O., and First Presbyterian can only be described as a total debacle. The police accused Rev. Fry at First Presbyterian of not only offering space to the Rangers, but actively participating in and supporting their criminality, blessing their attempts at extortion, and passing information about “hits” between gang members. The gang-operated training centers turned out to be a complete farce, with a Chicago Tribune investigation revealing that eight of the program’s top administrators, including Fort and Hairston, were either awaiting trial (for crimes including rape and murder) or had lengthy rap sheets. Police surveillance of the “classes” found no textbooks, rulers, paper or lectures, but dice-throwing, sleeping, and discussions focused on women and sports. The only books available were of the comic variety.

For their part, T.W.O. blamed the bad publicity the programs received on Mayor Richard J. Daley, who, they claimed, despised T.W.O. for the fact that the job training programs they and the Rangers administered were the only government monies in Chicago not directly under city control.

Nevertheless, between June, 1967, and June, 1968, when the EEOC chose not to renew T.W.O.’s grants, two program trainees and one instructor had been charged with murder, three other staff members were arrested for assault and robbery of a youth who had refused to join the program, and one teenager was shot during a class. A subsequent congressional investigation found that the Blackstone Rangers had demanded kickbacks of nearly 50% of the federal checks that students in the program received. Gang leader Jeff Fort eventually went to prison for three years starting in 1972 for his role in defrauding the government.

Perhaps, given his experiences with T.W.O. and the Blackstone Rangers, Rev. Sotnak could have predicted some of these problems. In a speech to a church group shortly after he left Woodlawn Immanuel, he called claims that T.W.O. was improving conditions in the neighborhood “absolutely pathetic”. In recent correspondence, he wrote to me, “As I see it, Mr. Woods and the Chicago Boy's Club completely lost control of the Blackstone Rangers in the summer of 1965. Given the duplicity of the gang's leadership, it was an inevitable development.”

Woodlawn Immanuel Lutheran Church closed in 1973. By that point, the neighborhood had completely changed from the one in which the church had been built in 1924, and there were other Lutheran congregations in Hyde Park and elsewhere that could serve the University community. The edifice at 64th and Kenwood was sold to a Baptist congregation, which worshipped there for a decade, until the building was destroyed. It remains an empty lot today.

The Woodlawn neighborhood continued to deteriorate into slum conditions in the 1970s and 1980s; however, over the last fifteen years, real estate values have improved substantially and crime has declined. The green line elevated tracks, which once darkened 63rd street, were demolished in 1996, and the street which once primarily served as a one-stop shop for liquor, drugs, and prostitutes, is now overwhelmingly empty lots. Since 2001, University of Chicago police have extended their patrols down to 64th St., and the area between 60th and 63rd is increasingly populated again by University students and faculty. Many beautiful and expensive new homes and townhome complexes have been constructed where the dilapidated buildings the U of C once sought to demolish once stood. The recent recession notwithstanding, continued gentrification in Woodlawn seems likely.

It is difficult to imagine a similarly close relationship developing today between street gangs and community and church leaders. Partially that is due to the increasing violence of gangs and their role in retailing crack and other illegal drugs. It is also a reflection of the differences between that time and ours. Then, rioting in ghetto neighborhoods threatened to destroy the city, and radicalism bordered on revolution. As Rev. Sotnak wrote in recent correspondence:

Would I do what I did again? I probably would. Just because life is fraught with danger doesn't mean one should shrink from it. "Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead."

I suppose those of us who tried to "straighten-out" gang members were naive, but we were also desperate. Someone ought to do something, so we did what we could. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, "Politics is the application of proximate solutions to insoluble problems."

Those were indeed the days.

Alderman John Powers' Home Bombed by Political Rivals

In September of 1920, John Powers had been alderman from the 19th Ward for 32 years, but a month before, he had publicly embarrassed his political rival, underworld figure Tony D’Andrea. So everyone pointed to D’Andrea when a dynamite bomb rocked the front porch of Powers’ house, which was located here at 1284 Macalister (now 1284 W. Lexington; the home has since been replaced).

John Powers was born in County Kilkenny, Ireland in 1852, but moved to the United States at age 20, settling in Chicago. After serving an apprenticeship with a grocer, he started his own grocery store on S. Halsted. From a young age, he was interested in politics, and began working to elect Democrats in his home ward, the 19th. In those days, saloons were a major gathering point in Irish communities like the 19th, and owning a saloon was a common way to rise in the political order. Hence, Powers, who was a teetotaler, opened a saloon in the annex to his grocery.

The move worked, and Powers’ political star rose as he became a ward captain. In the 1880s, Powers’ saloon was a major center of support in Chicago for presidential candidate Grover Cleveland. In 1888, he ran for, and was elected, alderman from the 19th, a position he held almost continuously until 1927.

After his election, he closed the grocery store, but kept the saloon, though Powers’ success meant that he needed to expand. Together with a fellow alderman, William O’Brien, he opened a larger saloon downtown, on Madison St., near LaSalle. When allowed under various liberal mayoral administrations, gambling was also featured there, including the city’s largest pool room.

(Pictured: 19th Ward Alderman John Powers)

As an alderman, Powers’ capacity for graft and corruption was eclipsed only by the Kenna-Coughlin machine in the 1st ward. Called “Prince of Boodlers” by the newspapers, nearly a third of the eligible voters in the ward were on the public payroll, and so were dependent on Powers for their jobs. He was famous for buying votes by handing out over a thousand free turkeys each year at Christmas-time, and throwing out handfuls of coins to supporters at campaign events. A notorious gladhander, it is said that he appeared at every funeral and wake in his ward, earning him the nickname, “The Mourner”.

As one detractor said, "Johnnie Powers distributed turkeys on Christmas day, but he has robbed the people 364 days in the year and he can afford to give them a little back on the 365th". The Chicago Herald wrote, "Powers is as fit to be an Alderman as an elephant is to take part in a roller-skating match.”

Powers’ legendary corruption attracted the attention of Jane Addams and her troop of reformers at Hull House. In the 1890s, Addams sent investigators into the 19th, who reported on streets and alleys piled high with garbage and dirt, a complete lack of usable parks and bathhouses, and severely overcrowded schools, where they found 3,000 more students than seats. Addams attempted to chase Powers out of office, fielding reform-minded opponents and holding campaign rallies against him. But to no avail. As Addams herself admitted, "An Italian laborer wants a 'job' more than anything else, and quite simply votes for the man who promises him one." In the 19th, John Powers was that man.

The only lacuna in Powers’ stint on the city council was in 1903, when he decided to enter state-wide politics by running for state senator against the incumbent Peter F. Galligan. That campaign season saw the first (attempted) act of violence at Powers’ home. Powers was holding open office hours for his ward constituents one day when his opponent Galligan showed up.

Galligan forced his way past the servant at the door and declared that he had come to settle a score with his rival. In his hand was a handkerchief wrapped about a small parcel, and the excited inmates feared that a bomb or other weapon was concealed in its folds. Mrs. Powers fled screaming to an upper room, while the Alderman and several of his friends seized the excited man, who was making attempts to swing the weapon towards Powers. After a short struggle it was taken from him and found to be a brickbat with which Galligan is said to have declared he intended putting Powers out of the Senatorial race.

Powers defeated the mentally unstable Galligan, but found himself unsatisfied in Springfield, where he was a small fish in a big pond. The next year, he returned to Chicago to retake his seat as alderman.

That Powers enjoyed being a “big fish” was humorously illustrated after a fishing trip took him to Northern Wisconsin in June, 1900. Returning by train, he loaded his catch into a trunk with his name on it. A game warden inspector, traveling on the same train, found Powers’ box to be too heavy by state regulations.

Alderman Powers, who was also on the train, had wandered with a party of friends up to where the game warden was engaged with his inspection. On being informed that his box did not come within weight the Alderman smiled blandly, and, taking the warden aside, whispered in his ear, "I am Alderman John Powers of Chicago."

But that did not make any difference to the warden, and all the winking and whispering the Chicago man could do did not convince him....Alderman Powers' fish were sold at auction, and were the most palatable offering on the menu of a Milwaukee restaurant today.

At the time John Powers held its aldermanship, the 19th ward included the area between Van Buren and 12th (now Roosevelt Rd.), and between Loomis and the south branch of the Chicago River. Always a poor immigrant neighborhood, it was adjacent to “Bloody Maxwell,” the famously crime-ridden district just to the south. The Tribune described conditions in the 19th graphically in 1897:

Do the drivers on the wagons indulge less freely in profanity? Do the workmen in the street show love and peace? Halsted street betrays it not. Ewing [now 12th Pl.] and Forquer [now Arthington St.] streets look otherwise. Bunker [now Grenshaw St.] and De Koven streets hide it well. Soiled children play upon the walks. The tin can travels on its endless way. Girls bend low over their work in the sweatshops making shirts at eight cents apiece. Six hundred saloons, twenty for each church in the ward, cast their exhilirating influence over the scene. The only thing bearing indisputable marks of a celestial nature is a Chinese laundry.

When Powers was first elected in 1888, the ward was almost entirely Irish, but in the 1890s and 1900s, Italian immigrants flooded into the neighborhood, and by 1910 the voting population was over 80% Italian. The savvy Irishman Powers managed to hold onto his seat, however, by assiduously incorporating potential Italian rivals into the lower levels of his political organization, who then promoted him to their fellow countrymen, even giving him quasi-Italian names like “Johnny de Pow” and “Gianni Pauli”.

However, in off-the-cuff remarks, Powers often denigrated his constituents. "I can buy the Italian vote with a glass of beer and a compliment," he was overheard to say once, and condescending comments like these wore away at his popularity in the ward. Eventually, John Powers met an Italian rival who was too powerful to buy off: Anthony “Tony” D’Andrea.

D’Andrea was a long-time political player in Chicago. Born in Salerno, he had come to Chicago and worked as a Roman Catholic priest until he fell in love with a woman and left the ministry for her. Later he was prominent in the corrupt political process associated with the red-light Levee district; he helped gang leader “Big Jim” Colosimo and “Dago” Mike Carrozzo take over labor unions and raise the political profile of the city’s Italians.

In February, 1916, D’Andrea decided to challenge Powers’ fellow alderman in the 19th, James Bowler (each Chicago ward at that time had two aldermen). While D’Andrea had a natural constituency among Italians in the ward, city newspapers pilloried him for his underworld connections in the Levee and for being a “defrocked priest.” It also came out that D’Andrea was an ex-con, having served a sentence for counterfeiting in 1902 (D’Andrea admitted have been in prison, but insisted he was innocent of the crime).

Finally, just days before the election, a major supporter of Bowler, Frank Lombardi, was murdered in a saloon on Taylor St. Everyone immediately suspected D’Andrea supporters in the crime, although the police also considered the theory that Lombardi was involved in a feud with a Black Hand gang.

Nevertheless, D’Andrea’s name was tarnished throughout the campaign and Bowler prevailed on election day. Despite his loss, D’Andrea remained influential in the Italian community, and three years later, in 1919, he was elected president of the Chicago branch of the Unione Siciliana, the largest Italian political organization in the country. It was a position that gave him tremendous influence, as well as access to the resources of powerful elements of organized crime.

Recognizing that D’Andrea would likely prevail if he chose to run for alderman again, John Powers decided to endorse him for a different, but equally important political position in the 19th, ward committeeman, a position that Powers himself had previously filled. This was a major concession, since it was the committeeman who truly held control over which constituents received plum city jobs (similarly, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna was the long-time committeeman in the 1st ward).

Given D’Andrea’s popularity and Powers’ endorsement, D’Andrea was elected ward committeeman in April, 1920. However, the election that year was marked by serious voting irregularities all across the city (but especially in the 19th). News of sluggings, kidnappings, shootings, ballot box stuffing, and selective culls of voter registration lists reached Springfield, where on June 6, 1920, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled all Chicago ward committeemen election outcomes null and void.

Still, D’Andrea assumed Powers would stand by his endorsement and allow D’Andrea to represent the ward as committeeman at the Democratic County Central Committee meetings in August. When the powerful party convention opened, the secretary called out each ward by name, and the party’s representative from that ward rose to announce his presence. When the secretary asked for the representative from the 19th, John Powers stood up and began to respond.

He was interrupted. A swarthy, spectacled youth with an Italian accent had also arisen. "I'm here to speak for the Nineteenth ward," he began.

Powers responded:

"For thirty-two years I have been alderman of the ward," he began. "I’ve been on the committee for thirty-five years. Last spring, Anthony D'Andrea wanted to be committeeman. For the sake of harmony I yielded. I withdrew after he promised to support Ald. Bowler, my colleague, for reelection. D'Andrea was elected. He hasn't kept his promises. I'm not willing to desert Bowler. The Supreme Court has declared that the newly elected committeemen have no authority and I'm still committeeman."

D’Andrea protested loudly, insisting that he, not Powers, had the support of the majority of the ward’s voters. “Why,” he argued, “Powers only keeps a home in the 19th so he can remain alderman, but he actually lives almost all of the time in the 3rd ward on Michigan Ave.!” But Powers prevailed and D’Andrea left the meeting embarrassed and infuriated.

Just over a month later, on September 28, 1920, John Powers arrived at his 19th ward home and headquarters late in the evening, just before midnight. A few minutes later, a tremendous explosion rocked the neighborhood.

The blast blew the alderman and five others out of bed, tore the front of the house apart, broke most of the windows in the neighborhood, shattered all the glass in the bookcases that line the dining room walls, and woke up all the sleepers for six blocks around, but no one was hurt.

Powers has lived there for four decades, but now mostly lives in another place 4500 S. Michigan, but that night he had just arrived at the home. The alderman has had a private watchman on guard over the house for some time. Why, he did not care to say.

(Pictured: Ald. Powers' home at 1284 Macalister after the bombing)

Perhaps what John Powers did not care to say was that he was familiar enough with D’Andrea and his underworld friends to know he was a target.

After D’Andrea announced he would run against Powers himself in the 1921 aldermanic elections, the feud only intensified. A second bomb exploded during a meeting of D’Andrea supporters on Blue Island Ave. in February, seriously injuring several, and another bomb was later detonated at the home of Joseph Spica, father-in-law of a major figure in the D’Andrea campaign.

The 1921 vote was extremely close, but Powers squeaked by with a tiny 435 vote margin. In the election, Powers had again highlighted D’Andrea’s unsavory history, contrasting it with a picture of himself as a devoted god-fearing, churchgoing family man.

The latter was only partially true. While Powers had been married for many years and was never known to indulge in liquor or gambling, there were none-too-private rumors of an affair. Back in 1910, word reached Chicago that Mayme McKenna, widow of a former alderman, had been charged in New York City with attempting to smuggle $1,000 worth of Parisian ball gowns into the United States without declaring them at customs (she claimed to have forgotten in her rush to return to Chicago). She was caught when a customs inspector found a gown with the label of a Chicago dressmaker sewn into it, but which was obviously brand new, arousing suspicions.

The attention of Deputy Surveyor John O'Connor, known as the custom house expert on styles, was called to the garment. O'Connor concluded it was too far ahead of American styles to be other than of Parisian make.

When she [McKenna] appeared at the custom house in the morning she was accompanied by an elderly man who declined to give his name, but said he was a friend of the family.

It turned out that the “elderly man” was none other than Alderman John Powers, and furthermore, the two had traveled to Europe together under the pretense that she was Mrs. John Powers. The newspapers noted that the register of the Waldorf Hotel in New York bore the names of Mr. and Mrs. John Powers, while the real Mrs. Powers was still in Chicago.

At the time, it seemed like possibly a misunderstanding – perhaps Powers had loaned his powerful name to McKenna in order to facilitate her trip as a favor to his deceased fellow alderman. However, the notion that Powers and McKenna were more than just friends is supported by the fact that, after John Powers’ first wife died in Feb. 1917, he married McKenna the following year.

(Pictured: Ald. Powers with Mayme McKenna on their wedding day)

After the election, D’Andrea swore off 19th ward politics, but it was too late: he was assassinated on the street in front of his home in May, 1921. His political organization, and even his headquarters on Taylor street, the Italian-American Educational Club, was inherited by the Genna brothers, which turned it into a giant dispersed network for the production of bootleg liquor during Prohibition.

Despite his victory over D’Andrea, Powers’ ability to control the burgeoning Italian vote was clearly eroding, and he likely would have lost in the next election to some other Neopolitan politician. However, just after the election, the number of wards was increased from 35 to 50, and the old 19th was carved up into the 20th, 25th, 26th and 27th wards. The Italian supermajority in the old ward turned into substantially smaller pluralities in the new wards. Thus, John Powers was able to remain an alderman in the 25th until his retirement in 1927, at which point he had been on the Chicago city council for 38 years. Powers died in 1930.

John Powers' two-story frame house on Lexington Ave. is gone now, replaced by a handsome three-story brick structure looking out over Arrigo Park.

Political Banquet for O'Banion

In the relationship between organized crime and politics, politicians protect criminals from prosecution, and criminals, in return, either pay protection money or round up votes (or both). This system is derived from the fact that consumers’ willingness-to-pay for prohibited goods, such as prostitution, gambling, and narcotics, is higher than the cost of providing these goods (up to some level of production), generating a surplus equal to the difference. If these goods were legal, economic theory implies that prices would be set so as to divide the surplus between buyers and sellers, with the division depending on how sensitive to price increases buyers are.

Making a good illegal (similar to the case of a sales tax) allows politicians to gain a cut of the surplus (in general, a sales tax is more efficient, but prohibition gives politicians more power to favor certain sellers over others), which they may extract either as direct cash payments (see, e.g., here), or through in-kind payment of get-out-the-vote activities. Sellers of illegal goods generally need to be tough characters, since they operate outside the protection of the ordinary law enforcement system that provides security for sellers of legal goods, and their toughness also makes them especially good at “convincing” voters to cast their ballots for a favored candidate.

One major factor limiting the ability of politicians to capture the surplus from markets in illegal goods is competition from other politicians. The candidate who offers organized criminals protection from prosecution in exchange for the smallest share of the surplus receives their support.

In 1924, Chicago Republicans were reeling. The GOP’s mayoral standard-bearer, William Hale Thompson, was so unpopular he had chosen not to run in the previous year’s election, making way for the victory of Democrat William Dever. Dever had run on a strong anti-crime platform, and he consistently attacked the syndicates that provided illicit alcohol and other illegal goods in the city. But while Chicagoans disliked crime, most of them were deeply opposed to alcohol prohibition, and their desire for liquor created an enormous surplus in that market. Republicans saw an opportunity to undercut their political opponents by offering the underground titans of beer a better deal.

Dion O’Banion, head of the Northside gang, had reliably delivered the 42nd and 43rd wards, including River North, Lincoln Park, and Little Hell/Little Sicily to the Democrats for years. As the saying of the time went, “Who’ll carry the forty-second and forty-third? O’Banion,
in his pistol pocket!”

(Pictured: Dion O'Banion)

So when word got out that O’Banion was thinking about throwing his weight behind the Republicans in the 1924 election, Democrats convened a pow-wow between criminals and politicians in an attempt to stop the defection. In early November, just a few days before the election, a banquet in O’Banion’s honor was held here, at the Webster Hotel (pictured above), 2150 N. Lincoln Park West. Besides O’Banion, representing the Northside gang were “Schemer” Drucci, “Bugs” Moran, and “Hymie” Weiss, along with a coterie of other associates, including Jerry O’Connor, vice president of the janitor’s union. Important politicians, including Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Albert Sprague and county Clerk Robert Sweitzer, were present, as was a contingent of police officers, led by Chief of Detectives Michael Hughes. As a token of their appreciation, O’Banion was presented with a beautiful jewel-encrusted platinum wristwatch.

The presence of Hughes was especially interesting. A crack detective, Hughes had come to Chicago at age 17 in 1888 from Ireland, originally finding work in the stockyards. By 1896, Hughes had joined the police force as a “probationary” officer, called in for work if a regular officer was unavailable. Hughes was a success as a police officer, and found himself at the notoriously corrupt 22nd street station during the 1900s, when it served as the means of exchange between the Kenna-Coughlin aldermanic regime and the pimps, madams, gamblers, and saloon-keepers of the segregated Levee vice district. It was there that he first learned how the political/criminal axis turned.

Nevertheless, Hughes was apparently an excellent cop, and made detective in 1918, winning an award in 1920 for being the city’s top crime-fighter in 1920. He played a prominent role in all of the most cases, including the Leopold-Loeb murder and the assassination of “Mossy” Enright. In 1921, Hughes was named Chief of Detectives.

(Pictured: Michael Hughes)

The platinum watch was apparently not enough to sway O’Banion, and the 42nd and 43rd voted strongly Republican in 1924. Sprague lost to GOP senatorial candidate Charles S. Deneen, and the Republicans continued their gains until 1927, when William Hale Thompson regained the mayoralty (with strong financial support from Al Capone). Just days after the 1924 election, O’Banion was assassinated at his State St. flower shop headquarters, and his followers, Drucci, Weiss, and Moran, proclaimed a vengeful blood-letting.

At the same time, news of the pre-election banquet leaked out, and with the city mired in gangland violence, the relationship between prominent Democrats and the criminal element reflected poorly on Mayor Dever. The Mayor publicly asked why his Chief of Detectives was present at a fete for the man known as Chicago’s “arch criminal”. In response, Hughes claimed to have been misled by Sprague:

I don’t know anything about any banquet for O’Banion. I left the bureau that night, and at the corner I met Col. A. A. Sprague, commissioner of public works, who was then a candidate for United States senator, and County Clerk Robert M. Sweitzer. They asked me to accompany them to a banquet given for Jerry O’Connor, a union business agent, whom I know to be honest and clean. The banquet was for O’Connor, not O’Banion. I went with Sweitzer and Sprague, both close friends of the Mayor. This banquet was like almost all others; the hoodlums were there. They go to all such affairs. O’Connor was affiliated with the Sprague campaign committee and it was a sort of political gathering I left soon after I saw who were there, but there were many judges who stayed.

Dever ordered Hughes demoted back to captain, but before he could be reassigned, Hughes quit the police force, returning his star in an angry fit:

The police department is rotten; I wouldn’t stay on under the present administration, if I had to take a job shoveling the streets. They have been wanting to get rid of me ever since Dever became mayor, but until now they didn’t have the nerve.

Days later, Hughes’ friends convinced him to reconsider, and he was allowed to withdraw his resignation and went to work at the Irving Park station.

Hughes was apparently exceptionally talented at policing, and by 1927, he was appointed head of the highway police department, which focused on the increasing vice trade in the suburbs. After Republican William Hale Thompson returned to the mayoralty that year, he brought Hughes back to Chicago, elevating him to Chief of Police (later retitled police commissioner). Hughes did battle with Al Capone during the late 1920s, getting under the Southside racketeer’s skin by not allowing him into the city to visit his wife and son at the family home.

Eventually, however, the rising wave of crime forced Thompson to take action, and he asked Hughes to submit his resignation in August, 1928. Michael Hughes remained on the police force until his retirement at age 64 in 1935. Hughes passed on in 1954.

The Webster Hotel, where the famous O’Banion banquet took place, was new at the time, having been constructed in 1919 for $2.5 million. Converted to apartments in the late 1970s, it remains today as the Webster House. Below is the building as it looked in 1919:

First Ward Ball

There are few events in Chicago history about which more has been written by journalists, historians, and social reformers than the First Ward Ball, otherwise known as the "Grand Reception of the First Ward Democratic Club," the "Annual Masquerade and Fancy Ball," or simply "The Derby". Between 1896 and 1909, the annual fete took place at the Chicago Coliseum, which was located here at 15th and Wabash.

The raison d’etre of the First Ward Ball was campaign fundraising for those famous 1^st Ward alderman, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin. The 1^st Ward included the old Custom House Place vice district in the 1890s and early 1900s, and later, the infamous 22nd and Dearborn “Levee”. In order to remain open and advertising widely, the madams, gambling-house owners, and saloon-keepers needed protection from the police, and the First Ward Ball was one of the major means by which Kenna and Coughlin received these payments. Every employee of a house of ill-repute or gambling den, every robber, pickpocket, safe-cracker, and streetwalker, and every bartender, bawdy house entertainer, and low groggery proprietor, all were required to buy tickets, which cost between 50 cents and $1, if they wanted to maintain their livelihood.

The larger establishments bought hundreds of tickets each at the strong “suggestion” of the aldermen, with the number of tickets to be purchased rising with the lawlessness of the establishment and the degree of police protection required to remain open. If sales fell behind expectations, even the police were forced to “sell” tickets (the captains of police stations within the ward being political appointees). Officers would then resell these tickets to business-owners on their beats. The newspapers reported one such transaction:

"I see you're down to take three tickets from me, Pete," says the policeman.

"I don't see how that is, I've taken my tickets -- a whole bunch of them -- from the alderman," indignantly exclaims the saloon-keeper.

"Well, that's all right; but I've got to get rid of mine. Do you think I am the government mint or the First National bank? I don't want to use them to take my wife and children. Better come across with the coin. You know it's only a few you take from me."

So the saloon-keeper usually takes the tickets. The policeman protested that nothing was said about the matter of protection, or anything in the way of favors that were supposed to go with the tickets.

Every major underworld figure of the 1890s and 1900s attended, including Andy Craig (who was facetiously named “belle” of the 1903 ball), Ike Bloom, “Polack Ben” Zeller, “Big Jim” Colosimo, “Big Jim” O’Leary, the Everleigh Sisters, Vic Shaw, and many, many more. Over time, the Balls began to draw in more respectable elements of society as well, including the city’s top businessmen and political figures from Chicago and Washington. Mayor Carter Harrison attended, although he always claimed to leave long before the real mayhem began.

The annual take from the event, which accrued to the campaign fund of whichever alderman was running for re-election in the upcoming year (Chicago wards then having two aldermen each), ran upwards of $25,000 each year, with 10,000-15,000 attendees buying not only tickets, but also liquor (supplied at a discount by local breweries) in quantities that allowed them to show their loyalty to Kenna and Coughlin.

In order to receive a waiver of the city's midnight closing laws, by which alcohol could not be sold after 12:00 a.m., the First Ward Balls were officially "charity" events, not campaign fundraisers. An investigative reporter from the Tribune inquired of Kenna skeptically in 1906:

"Where does this money from the ball go?" the alderman was asked.

"Charity, education, burying the dead, and general ward benefits for the people. One or two consumptives will be sent down to Phoenix, Ariz. There is plenty of use for it. When anybody connected with the First Ward Democratic club needs help he applies to Ald. Coughlin or to me, and the money finally comes out of the fund by action of the executive committee of the club."

When pressed to define the “educational” aspects of the First Ward Ball, Kenna admitted:

"It consists of hiring good halls and good speakers to teach the people of the First ward to vote the straight democratic ticket."

The First Ward Ball had several predecessors. Carrie Watson, Chicago’s top madam after the Great Fire, ran an annual benefit ball at Frieberg's during the 1880s in support of her house’s famous “professor” (ragtime piano-player), known as “Lame” Jimmy. As with the later First Ward Balls, drunkenness and acts of wild debauchery were common (as Carrie Watson put it, “joy reigned unrefined”), and rival underworld characters competed to see who could purchase the most champagne -- although in this case it was merely an act of oneupsmanship, instead of an attempt to buy the favor of politicians. The Lame Jimmy benefits lasted until drunken policemen attending the 1894 ball became embroiled in a shootout, leading to public condemnation. A similar, but separate underworld event, the “Veiled Prophet Bal-Masque” was shut down as a consequence of the shooting as well. But it so happened that in 1894, John Coughlin was running for his first reelection campaign, and was opposed in the Democratic primary by Billy “The Clock” Skakel, a gambling-house proprietor from S. Clark St. Skakel had the bright idea to hold a fundraising ball for saloon-keepers in the district, at which he led a fabulous “grand march” of attendees. Late in the evening, a band of Coughlin supporters invaded the festivities and started a fist-fight melee, but the idea no doubt impressed Coughlin.

Coughlin won the election of 1894, and in 1896, he appropriated Skakel’s concept for a dance ball held at the Seventh Regiment Armory, even including a “grand march”, which Coughlin personally led starting at midnight. This was the original First Ward Ball.

The grand march was essentially a conga-line, twenty persons wide and including thousands of followers snaking their way back and forth around the dance floor, while thousands more sat in boxes above the floor, cheering and shouting. Like a Brazilian carnival, the marchers included a wild representation of the excesses of the underworld; women dressed scandalously in bathing suits, bloomers, and slit-cut dresses, men dressed as women, and everyone wore an elaborate and sometimes vile mask. All were on their way – if not already there – to a state of inebriation. Coughlin himself was always attired in one of his world-famous over-the-top suits; for the 1900 ball, he wore a green swallowtail coat and lavender trousers, a white silk waistcoat, brocaded with heliotrope rosebuds and saffron carnations, accompanied by pink gloves and a silk hat. As one Protestant minister and Ball critic later put it, Coughlin appeared "like Satan at the head of the hosts of the damned, leading the grand march of vice and degeneracy."

(Pictured: editorial cartoon in the Tribune depicting the First Ward Ball. The sign on the barrell in front reads, "Guests not contributing voluntarily will regret it!")

In 1899, the new Chicago Coliseum was built at 15^th and Wabash, and First Ward Balls between 1903 and 1909 were held there. The Coliseum was actually the third building by that name in Chicago, the first being a Loop beer-hall, and the second a Jackson Park convention center that burned down in 1897. The origin of the third Chicago Coliseum on Wabash was in 1887, when William H. Gray, one of the city’s top businessmen, toured the Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, on vacation. During the Civil War, the Libby Prison held over 45,000 union soldiers in the South, and Gray saw the opportunity to re-appropriate the building as a profitable museum in Chicago. He found a group of investors, and each brick of the old prison building was painstakingly shipped by rail to Chicago (except for a few that were lost in a train accident in Kentucky), where it was reassembled in replica. The Libby Prison opened in Chicago in 1889, and was a success for nearly a decade. By the end of the 1890s, however, interest had waned, and the building was sold to the Chicago Coliseum Company, which was looking to replace the burned second Coliseum. The new owners kept the surrounding wall of the old Libby Prison, but otherwise rebuilt from scratch.

(Pictured: Chicago Coliseum at 15th and Wabash)

Late nights at the First Ward Balls in the Coliseum were notorious. The grand march took place at midnight, but, as Kenna once explained to a reporter, the party “don't never get good until about three in the morning.” By that time, drunken men began to maul women, couples stole away to dark corners of basement or annex, and others with less capacity for strong drink began passing out on the floor. The increasing depravity of late nights at the First Ward Ball, and the increasing prominence of respectable members of society at the annual orgy began to generate a fervor of reform to shut down the event, where before only a bemused tut-tutting had prevailed. In 1907, Ald. Kenna invited a critical minister of the cloth to attend, who reported back to various pastoral conventions that year about the "scenes unmentionable among self-respecting men,” which were “undisguised and frequent," reminiscent of "pagan Rome in her most degenerate days".

Thus was the beginning of the end for the First Ward Ball. The battle over the 1908 Ball was vigorous, beginning in October of that year, when a Methodist conference passed a resolution condemning the Ball, and demanding that Mayor Fred Busse refuse a liquor permit to the Coliseum. A week later, the Federation of Women’s Clubs joined the chorus condemning the First Ward Ball.

These reformers were surprised on November 27, 1908, when advertisements were nevertheless posted around the 1^st Ward, declaring the annual “Derby” would take place that year on December 14. In response to the protests, Ald. Coughlin wrote one of his famous poems:

Strike up the march, professor, and I will lead the way;
We'll trip the light fantastic too until the break of day.
Who knows that ere another ball we'll be outside the city hall;
Be gay, but not too gay.

Ald. Kenna was more forthright in his criticism of the Ball’s detractors:

There has been so much talk about the First ward ball being disorderly, that this year we decided to invite a dozen ministers and let them see for themselves. If the ball ain't respectable alongside of some camp meetings I have been to I'll give each minister who attends a present of $100....

Preachers are a good deal like saloon-keepers. Most of them are jealous of everybody else in the business if a fellow is going along. If I've got a slot machine and the fellow across the street hasn't, because he ain't in right, he's going to knock. See what I mean?....But whenever you hear one of them fellows shouting that Hinky Dink is a menace to society and that he has horns, just keep your hand on your watch. Savvy?

The day after the advertisements went up, the city’s protestant ministers declared open war on the Ball, in concert with the Law and Order League, an anti-crime pressure group organized by Hyde Park-based reformer Arthur Burrage Farwell. Farwell pleaded with the mayor not to issue a liquor license for the event, arguing for government control to protect the city’s residents from their own ignorance:

Everybody knows that this gathering of criminals under the name of "Ball" permits them to mingle with some young men and women who do not realize the depths to which they are sinking. To prevent crime such a gathering of objectionable citizens should under no circumstances be tolerated…

You must stop this disgrace to Chicago. You must stop it in the name of the young men who will be ruined there. I put this matter up to you personally, Mr. Busse. Suppose you had a young friend whose character and life you prized highly. How would you like to have such scenes of debauchery as are allowed at this ball used to bring degradation and perhaps destruction to your friend?

One wonders how anyone in Chicago could “not realize” the lascivious nature of the First Ward Ball by 1908, but a subtler incentive of the reformers, as with alcohol temprance and Sunday closing laws, was to allow wives to socialize the cost of monitoring their husbands. By the 1910s, women held increased political power and the prospect of attaining the vote in just a few years’ time. Indeed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union joined in the chorus of boos associated with the Ball, saying that "it always engenders immorality and sends out a vicious influence for our young people."

Rev. William O. Walter, pastor of Grace Episcopal, filed a formal request for an injunction against the Ball, in which the prosecutor argued explicitly in favor of the monitoring motive: "We are not trying to correct public morals, but protect our property rights. Many of the old communicants of the church will not permit their daughters to attend after one of these balls." But it was all to no avail – the injunction was denied and the liquor license was approved. The Ball would take place on December 14th that year.

The night before the event, at 8:20 p.m., a bomb exploded in the passageway between the Coliseum Annex and an adjacent junk room on the grounds, blowing out windows of buildings 200 feet away on Michigan and Wabash Aves. Dynamite attacks were common in those years, mostly associated with the Gamblers’ War between Mont Tennes, “Big Jim” O’Leary, and others. But this bomb was more likely thrown by a frustrated reformer, for what kind of amateur could throw a stick of dynamite and miss the entire Coliseum entirely, only blowing a hole in an barely-used adjacent out-building?

A more serious problem for Kenna and Coughlin was the Tribune’s announcement that reporters would be in attendance and the following day’s paper would print the names of all respectable members of society who attended. These social leaders were a major source of revenue, purchasing thousands of dollars of champagne, and their money, if not their persons, would be seriously missed. In fact, the Tribune’s threats did keep many of Chicago’s elite away from the 1908 Ball; many of them contrived elaborate alibis, such as holding a big dinner party that night in which reporters were invited. A few others did attend, but masked their faces before entering.

By the evening of December 14, 1908, tens of thousands of curiosity-seekers and protesters flocked to Wabash Ave., joining the throng attempting to enter the event. The police admitted the first 12,000, but then shut the doors to prevent overcrowding. Thousands more attempted to break in through the exit doors, which the police then locked from the inside. The crowd was so enormous that when women fainted – a common occurrence – they had to be passed overhead from hand to hand towards the exits. Cigar smoke settled on the floor in such thick fogs that visibility was no greater than 30 feet in any direction. The noise of shuffling feet and murmuring overpowered the sound of the dance band, and fist-fights and shoving erupted in all quarters.

When Lyman Atwell, photographer for the Tribune, showed up outside and began setting up his flash and tripod, security notified Coughlin, who emerged from the Coliseum, personally jumping on Atwell, breaking his camera and knocking him to the ground. Coughlin had previously announced that no photography would be allowed (on the grounds that pictures of the poorly-dressed women at the Ball would be used as ammunition by the reformers). Later, defending himself in court, Coughlin claimed he thought Atwell's flash bulb would be perceived as another bomb, causing a riot and a stampede.

As usual, things started to get interesting at midnight, when the regiments of madams and their inmates showed up, led by the Everleigh Sisters. This caused another influx of thousands of men to attempt to enter the building, and everyone craned their necks to get a look at the scarlet women.

The most infamous party in Chicago history lasted until 5 a.m., when the last drunken revelers staggered out of the orgy.

In 1909, when the date of that year’s ball was announced for December 13, the forces of reform returned even stronger than the year before. The Law and Order League and the protestant ministers of Chicago were joined by Roman Catholic leaders, including the Young Men’s Association of SS. Peter and Paul Church, who passed a resolution that was read at city council, over the protests of Ald. Coughlin. While the resolution was read, Ald. Kenna (who was Catholic) hid under his desk. Again, note the argument that government intervention is required to protect "ignorant" citizens from themselves:

Whereas, The experience in past years, as testified to by persons who attended the saturnalia, has shown that unfortunate and vicious men and women of the so-called red light districts display their degradation in public to great injury to morals of others who go there because of ignorance, curiosity, and other reasons....The First ward ball is notoriously reported to be the means of collecting illegal tribute from the lowest and most unfortunate denizens of vicious resorts and is a disgrace to all who, pretending to be respectable, encourage the saturnalia by attending it....

Finally, on December 10, the city revoked the liquor license for the 1909 event, causing Ald. Coughlin to write the shortest of all his poems:

No Ball;
That’s All.

That wasn’t the end of his complaint, though:

Not until within the last two or three years has the press or clergy ever entered a word of protest against the holding of the ball. The reason, I suppose, is that what the people would stand for ten or twelve years ago won't be tolerated at present. Chicago is growing better. There's no mistake about it. And let me tell you I'm just as glad to see the change in social conditions as any man in the city.

On the date of the Ball, Coughlin and Kenna instead held a sober concert at the Coliseum, in which a classical orchestra plodded through the William Tell overture, then selections from popular musical comedies. Only 2,500 attended, and most of these only for a short while, until they could be sure they had been seen by one of the Aldermen. Instead of an enormous dance hall and a grand march, the Coliseum was filled with thousands of wooden chairs, nailed to the floor. The 1909 “Ball” ended at 11:00 p.m.

After the fizzle of the 1909 event, Kenna and Coughlin admitted defeat and did not attempt to hold any future Balls. However, the First Ward Ball became a perennial comparison for any hedonistic event in the city for decades to come. The closest thing to a modern First Ward Ball is the "Players Ball," held every year in the Chicago area as a nationwide convention of pimps, which, like the First Ward Ball, inevitably attracts wide public protest.

After its heyday in the era of the First Ward Ball, the Coliseum continued to hold major conventions, trade, automobile, and livestock shows, circuses, and sporting events until 1971. Each Republican National Convention between 1904 and 1920 was held there. During the 1920s, the fledgling Chicago Blackhawks held home ice at the Coliseum, and in 1935, the “sport” of roller derby was invented there. During WWII, the Coliseum was a training facility for Navy aircraft radio operators. By the 1960s, most major conventions were bypassing the Coliseum for the larger and more modern McCormick Place, but an NBA expansion team, the Chicago Zephyrs, played their home games there for several years before decamping for Baltimore (the successor of that team is the Washington Wizards, where Chicago basketball hero Michael Jordan played and coached during his declining days). Due to structural defects, after 1971 the city refused to issue permits for any further shows, and the Coliseum was shuttered until 1982, when it was sold for $375,000 and demolished.

The site of the Coliseum is now the parking lot for a Buddhist temple. A park commemorating the Coliseum stands across the street.

Mont Tennes, King of Gamblers

"The complete life story of one man, were it known in every detail, would disclose practically all there is to know about syndicated gambling as a phase of organized crime in Chicago in the last quarter century. That man is Mont Tennes."

So declared the Illinois Crime Survey of 1929. The man who stood at the center of Chicago gambling during the first quarter of the 20th century, and who developed a sporting news service that eventually monopolized horse racing operations throughout North America, lived here, in the mansion at 632 W. Belden Ave. (or before the 1909 street renumbering, 404 Belden) during the height of his power.

Jacob Tennes was born in Chicago in 1873 to a large family with five brothers and two sisters. He was nicknamed "Mont" by his mother at a young age, and that became the only name by which the city's King of Gamblers was ever known to be called. Even as a boy, he was known to be an expert at dice and other games, and before his 20th birthday he began running his first handbook operation. His gambling expertise provided the start-up capital he used to open the Tennes Billiard Hall on Lincoln Ave., near Wrightwood Ave., which he operated along with his brothers. There he sponsored pool tournaments, in which he himself was frequently the victor.

Over the next few years, Tennes gained interest in a number of other handbooks operating on the Northside, and in 1900, he began opening saloons, including one inside the Billiard Hall on Lincoln.

By 1901, Tennes' name was already well known among anti-gambling advocates, and a crusade against saloons on N. Clark St. in River North focused primarily on Tennes-owned saloons. The Tribune reported that “residents of the neighborhood allege that the district fast is approaching the condition that existed in the levee” (probably a reference to Custom House Place, the city's biggest red light district at the time).

The newspaper described the operations at what was at the time Tennes' biggest gambling outfit at 143 Clark (now in the 600 block, where the "Rock & Roll" McDonalds sits today), where a ragtime piano player began vamping behind the bar every day after 2:00 p.m.:

On a cigar stand in front of the main room is posted a racing form, which is eagerly studied by those who enter. The ticker is behind a thin partition and the bookmaker gets information of track and odds over the telephone. The results are announced at the bar and down-stairs in the bowling alley, where many men gather....Everyone seems to have the utmost faith in the bookmaker, and gains and losses are taken from his report without a word. The book has been successful, it is believed, for ‘killings’ [large winnings by the house] are rare in Tennes’ place.

Remarkably, women were among the major clients of Tennes' gambling houses, though they rarely entered the saloons, cigar shops, and even cash register shops that fronted his operations, choosing instead to call in their bets or give them to one of a team of employees who traveled around the city, taking wagers in the morning at homes and stores on races taking place in the afternoon, and settling accounts from the previous day's races.

(Pictured: Mont Tennes)

The increased interest in horse racing during the early part of the century created a business opportunity for gambling entrepreneurs, who previously focused on cards or games like roulette and faro. At the same time, off-track betting presented a serious technological problem: how to acquire quick and accurate results from the races, as the house stands to lose substantial sums if gamblers learn the outcome first. Managing and monopolizing the supply of information on tack conditions, odds, scratches, and race results became Mont Tennes' life work.

Starting in 1904, Tennes began operating clearinghouses where national racing information was received by telegraph, then dispersed to handbooks throughout the city by telephone. The first of these, opened in league with other major gambling figures including Tom McGinnis and "Big Jim" O'Leary, was a little cottage in Dunning at Irving Park Rd. and Narragansett, just outside Chicago city limits, where suspicious neighbors noticed two telegraph lines leading in through a kitchen window.

The photo below shows a forest of telephones in one of Tennes' later clearing houses at 123 Clark St. (now 550 N. Clark).


In order to operate such a large and complex operation, Tennes required implicit protection from police raids, which he obtained throughout his career with payoffs from beat cops all the way up to the chief of police. As early as 1902, he was a notorious source of graft:

Frequenters of the place say Tennes has a pull which is strong enough to keep his handbook running in spite of the strong opposition of many people in the vicinity. The East Chicago Avenue Police Station is four blocks away, but Captain Revere’s policemen pay no attention to the poolroom. While strangers have some difficulty in placing money with the bookmaker, there is no great attempt at secrecy, and the betting goes on while chance customers come and go at the bar.

Politicians, however, must satisfy their constituents if they want to keep their jobs, and so in 1903, Mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., declared open "war" on Chicago's handbooks, forcing the hand of the police. He revoked the saloon licenses of all the city's top gamblers, including Bob Motts, Andy Craig, Mushmouth Johnson, Alderman Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, and above all, Mont Tennes.

Thus began a complex and protracted political battle between Tennes, the police force which wanted his graft, the Mayor, and citizens. In league with the police, Tennes publicly declared that, due to Mayor Harrison's order, he was finished with the gambling business, and he sold his saloon license to a "M. A. Jockum," who was actually an associate, allowing Tennes to remain in control of his bars and handbooks. At the same time, he paid the police to focus on raiding the books of his business rivals. This latter practice was one Tennes continued to employ throughout his career as he attempted to monopolize gambling in the city. At the December First Ward Ball, an annual saturnalian party and underworld soiree thrown by Aldermen Kenna and John J. Coughlin, Tennes' men handed out over $2,500 to the various politicans to help turn down the heat on his operations.

Besides the police and city politicians, Tennes also faced continuous trouble from rival gamblers. While his original 1904 clearinghouse in Dunning was a partnership with Jim O'Leary, the two fell out in 1906 over the latter's success in operating the City of Traverse, a gambling boat that operated outside police jurisdiction, four miles offshore on Lake Michigan.

In retaliation, Tennes threatened to start his own gambling cruise operation, the City of Midland, unless his rivals cut him in on the deal. When they refused, he sent a tug boat out to shadow the Traverse, and when it turned on its wireless service to begin receiving racing news for the sports aboard, Tennes' tugboat blasted hits fog horn, thinking this could disrupt the transmissions. Instead, the trick only caused those on shore to believe the City of Traverse was on fire, sending panic throughout the city.

Some reports claim that O'Leary and his associates finally did cut Tennes in as an investor in the City of Traverse later in 1906, ending the feud. But this theory is belied by the fact that the following three years witnessed constant dynamite bombings of rival gamblers' homes and businesses in what the media dubbed the "Gamblers' War".

The Gamblers' War started in June of 1907 when Mont Tennes was physically attacked on the street near his home by a man whom police initially believed to be a disgruntled loser at one of Tennes' resorts. Tennes, however, was convinced O'Leary was behind the attack in retaliation for Tennes' efforts to have O'Leary's Northwest Indiana gambling houses raided by police.

In any case, the home of "Blind John" Condon, who had previously worked with Tennes, but was also an associate of O'Leary's, was bombed on July 9, 1907. Two weeks later on July 25, Tennes' home on Belden Ave. (pictured above) was bombed, creating a gaping hole in the alley behind the house. A month later, O'Leary's resort on S. Halsted was bombed, and on August 19, the Tennes home was again victimized. This time, the bomb landed in the front yard, blowing out all the windows of the house, plus those of his neighbors, several of whom announced plans to move away. Tennes himself sent his wife and children to live out in the country for the next few months.

In all, over 30 bombs exploded at the homes and businesses of the city's major gambling kings over the next three years. The police claimed the bombings were the result of a blackmailing scheme run by a mysterious gang known as "Smith & Jones":

The Chicago dynamiters who blew up gambling places for blackmail did business under the name “Smith & Jones”. That is, when they wanted a gambler to put them in the payroll the gambler would receive a mysterious telephone call telling him to see Smith & Jones. The gamblers all knew what that meant and that they would be dynamited if they did not see Smith & Jones.

The police never offered any evidence of such a scheme, and were never able to arrest Smith or Jones. A more likely cause for the bombings was Mont Tennes' attempts to monopolize the flow of race information into the city.

At the beginning of 1907, Tennes was paying $300 each day to the Payne News Service of Cincinnati, which telegraphed race information from throughout the U.S. and Canada to Tennes' Chicago clearinghouse, which was then in suburban Forest Park, which then conveyed the information to subscribers in the city by secret telephone lines known only to the Chicago Telephone Company. The Payne service had taken control over the race wires after the Western Union company had ceased the business in 1904 under pressure from an anti-gambling shareholder.

Tennes disliked paying such high prices to Payne, and the final straw took place in 1907 when an error in odds reporting by the service on a horse named Grenesque at Fort Erie ended up costing him thousands of dollars. He decided to start his own rival wire service and to drive Payne out of business nationwide.

Tennes hired agents to attend races throughout the country, who would report back to an operator nearby with a telegraph key. Often race track operators wanted nothing to do with Tennes' agents, and removed them from the premises. In such cases, Tennes' men found their way onto the tops of nearby buildings and used telescopes to observe action on the turf. In one interesting case where the racing action couldn't be seen from any nearby building, a woman was sent into the track to observe; she would periodically excuse herself from the action to a spot where she could be seen applying makeup, touching her nose, eyes, and ears in a specified order that indicated the winners of the race to a telegraph operator observing her nearby.

Tennes insisted that all Chicago handbooks use his new General News Bureau service and discontinue any subscription to Payne. Those that refused were either bombed or raided by police friendly to Tennes. Tennes also took the fight against Payne beyond Chicago. He sold his sporting news services in cities across the country, including San Francisco, San Antonio, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, Detroit, and New Orleans. Finally, the Kentucky home of John A. Payne, proprietor of the Payne News Service, was bombed, and the latter gave in, selling out his interest to the Tennes' General News Bureau in 1909, when the flow of bombs in the Gamblers' War finally slowed.

In 1911, Mont Tennes again came to public notice when he was sued by a former gambler-turned-reformer named Harry Brolaski, and a disgruntled General News Bureau business partner, Tim Murphy. Allegations that Tennes was at the head of a national gambling syndicate with 800 clients nationwide and $500,000 per day in revenue inflamed public opinion, and in September of that year, the Tribune published a scathing editorial accusing the chief of police, John McWeeny, of accepting graft. When the paper's reporters confronted McWeeny the next day, the Chief was nonchalant. After reading a copy of the editorial given him by the reporters, he was dismissive.

“That’s just a rehash,” was his comment. “It has been said before.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Let them fight it out among themselves,” the chief said calmly.

“Then you are not interested in what Tim Murphy and Mont Tennes are doing?”

“I don’t know Tim Murphy. He may be a myth for all I know.”

“Mont Tennes is not a myth.”

“No,” the chief admitted. “I have met people who knew Mont Tennes.”

“Are you going to question Tim Murphy or Mont Tennes?”

“Who is the complainant against them?” the chief said bluntly.

“Call the Tribune complainant. It has printed columns about the methods of Murphy and Tennes and the gamblers’ war.”

The chief sighed.

McWeeny insisted, disingenously, "There is no gambling in Chicago and the police do not 'tip off' raids," despite the obvious fact that handbooks were rampant in the city, and the police did tip off their raids in return for Tennes' payoffs. The matter finally ended when Tennes paid off Tim Murphy as well, and the latter wrote letters to the court and the attorneys general of three states swearing off his earlier charges.

Mont Tennes continued to monopolize racing information in Chicago and throughout the country for the next decade. Though the handbooks he operated were constantly raided and he served as a political punching-bag for every mayor and congressman seeking the law-and-order vote, he never served a day in prison, always hiding behind a defense that he was simply a newspaper man, conveying sports information around the country.

In 1916, Federal appeals court judge and future baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis even launched a personal investigation of Tennes' operations, in which it was revealed that his operations netted $75,000 each year, of which 90% went to Mont Tennes personally. Tennes hired superstar attorney Clarence Darrow (of "Scopes Monkey Trial" fame), and eventually Landis' inquiry ended with the conclusion that interstate transmission of gambling information wasn't illegal under federal statues, and actual gambling was a local phenomenon and so not under a federal court's jurisdiction.

One of the few times Mont Tennes lost a substantial bet was during the famous 1919 "Black Sox" scandal, in which Chicago White Sox players allegedly threw the World Series in league with a group of New York gamblers. Tennes later claimed he knew the fix was in, but put up $80,000 on his home team anyway. As a Northsider, Tennes really should have only bet on the Cubs.

When reformer "Decent" William Dever was elected Mayor of Chicago in 1924, a 51 year-old Tennes decided to get out of the business of operating handbooks and focus exclusively on his news service. A few years later, noting the violent tendencies of Al Capone and other Chicago gangsters, who increasingly were expressing interest in the sporting news business, Tennes sold the General News Bureau in 1927, with a 50% interest going to media mogul Moe Annenberg, founder of the Daily Racing Form.

In retirement, Mont Tennes devoted himself to his progeny, his golf, and his charity work. When he died on August 6, 1941, his heirs received a $5 million estate which provided for a $2,000 monthly lifetime income for his wife, Ida, $700 monthly to each of his four children, and $200 monthly for each grandchild. One of the Tennes boys, Ray, ran a Ford dealership, while another, Horace, became a champion motorboat racer.

He also established a $1,000,000 trust fund, which donated to Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Masonic charities, and ordered $10,000 annually to support a new "character home" for wayward boys, Camp Honor.

The General News Bureau was run by Moe Annenberg together with a Capone associate, James Ragen, until the latter went to prison in 1939 (Ragen was murdered by Capone hitmen in 1946). Afterwards, the Bureau was reorganized and rechristened as the Continental Press Service, and eventually passed into the control of Moe's son Walter Annenberg, who used the money from his news empire, which included Continental Press, to fund journalism schools at the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania.

Tennes' mansion at 632 W. Belden, which was built in 1885, still stands today.