Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle
Though Jake Lingle, in the words of one colleague, "never mastered the art of writing," he was a star of the Tribune newsroom thanks to his well-placed connections—including both Al Capone and Chicago's chief of police.

On the Monday viii decades ago—June 9, 1930—when Chicago celebrated the opening of the new Board of Trade Building, the board's officers planned a lavish dedication banquet at the Stevens Hotel, today'south Hilton Chicago. The urban center badly needed an occasion to cheer. The stock-market crash seven months before had punctured the economy. Gangsters about ran the town, raking in obscene sums when they weren't gunning each other downwards on the street. The corrupt and clownish mayor, William "Big Pecker" Thompson, swaggered around staging ludicrous stunts, when he was effectually at all.

The banquet that night brought together the metropolis's leading citizens, a who's who of Chicago'south financial and political elite. Just at least one name made a curious fit with the rich and powerful: Alfred "Jake" Lingle, a $65-a-week constabulary reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Jake Lingle, however, was no ordinary reporter. He operated at the eye of a network of friends and associates that may stand unmatched for its depth and width in the history of the grown-upwards metropolis. His best friend was William Russell, the chief of police force, however Lingle talked regularly with Al Capone and other gangsters, conversations that produced countless scoops for the Tribune. He hobnobbed with Governor Louis Emmerson and collected tips on investments from Arthur Cutten, the millionaire Chicago trader. Politicians, prosecutors, judges, cops, and athletes all offered confidences to the 38-year-old reporter, simply his network stretched far beyond the well connected. Years later, Levering Cartwright, a Tribune colleague, recalled beingness sent with Lingle on an assignment to Chinatown. "He knew every rat pigsty down there," Cartwright said. "Nosotros'd go [into] the cellar and at that place'd exist Chinamen playing dominoes or whatever it was, he knew them by their offset names. A truck would come up along with a Racing Form, and he knew the driver and would get a copy."

But on that Chicago evening in 1930, Jake Lingle didn't join the 2,450 bigwigs who dined on filet of Colorado mountain trout, saute meunière, in the grand ballroom at the Stevens, while listening to speakers toast the new LaSalle Street temple of capitalism and decry the "parlor socialists" undermining the country. Earlier that day, every bit the reporter ambled through a pedestrian tunnel at Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street, a tall fellow had walked up and fired a fatal shot into the back of Jake Lingle's head.

* * *

The murder of Jake Lingle, which had all the markings of a mob hitting, set off an impassioned outcry in Chicago and beyond the state. It was 1 affair when the mobsters shot upward each other, but at present they had taken out a homo "whose business organisation was to betrayal the work of the killers," as the Tribune put it. "People started to recollect it could happen to anyone," says Tim Samuelson, the cultural historian for the city of Chicago. The furious city "went berserk," as the investigative reporter Edward Dean Sullivan wrote at the time. Preachers, politicians, businessmen, editorialists, civic groups—all rose up and demanded activity against the underworld.

And then, within a calendar week or so, the slow drip of rumor broke into a torrent of news—Lingle was corrupt to his core. The exact levers of his graft remain unclear to this 24-hour interval, but it'southward likely he acted as a middleman amongst mobsters, cops, and politicians, brokering deals to allow illegal operations—speakeasies, gambling joints, dog tracks—to operate freely. Astonishingly, no one at the Tribune had chosen him out for being crooked, fifty-fifty though he lived and spent extravagantly on his lowly newsman's salary, and even though he paraded around wearing a diamond-studded belt buckle, a gift from Capone himself.

The story of Jake Lingle remains ane of Chicago's nagging murder mysteries, retold in books, a moving-picture show, episodes of The Untouchables, and endless newspaper and magazine articles. The case offers a vivid window on a particularly raw moment in Chicago's past, merely the Lingle saga likewise echoes into our era, where it seems that about every day brings a new revelation of wrongdoing by people in positions of trust. Looking through the old newspaper accounts of the murder and its backwash, watching Lingle turn from heroic victim to conniving scoundrel, it's hard not to think of regular Chicagoans feeling their outrage once again sink to resignation. Today, a number of observers (myself included) suspect that that sense of resignation—that hopeless shrug in the face of the Lingle revelations and other public betrayals—persists into our own time and accounts in function for the viral corruption that continues to plague this city and country.

* * *

Photograph: Chicago Tribune photo

Camera-conscious onlookers gather around Lingle's prostrate corpse at the scene of the murder.
Photographic camera-conscious onlookers assemble around Lingle'due south prostrate corpse at the scene of the murder.

For the Tribune'southward imperious editor and publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the Lingle murder remained a lifelong embarrassment and concern. References to the case prove up over and once again in McCormick's personal papers, and even 17 years after a modest-time triggerman had been convicted of the crime, top editors at the Tribune were tracking downwardly yet another fresh lead on what had actually happened. But six months earlier he died in 1955, the Colonel devoted 1 of his weekly speeches on WGN radio to the case.

A remote, driven autocrat—perchance a foreseeable personality trait when your domineering mother unabashedly favors you alcoholic, manic-depressive older brother—McCormick blustered with overcooked opinions and half-baked dogma, simply he believed fervently that newspapers had a mission. "Whenever asked what the nearly important purpose of a paper was, he would say to fight abuse," says Richard Norton Smith, writer of the 1997 biography The Colonel. "That's why the Lingle matter was and so painful." Though Lingle had worked for the Tribune for 18 years, the Colonel knew cypher of the reporter's dishonesty, and the boss and his employee had probably never met. (Tribune Company has owned Chicago magazine since 2002.)

They came from different worlds. McCormick belonged to Chicago royalty, descended from prominent families in manufacturing and journalism. Jake Lingle grew up in the "Valley" neighborhood on the West Side, s of Roosevelt Route, west of Halsted Street—in those days, an impoverished Irish gaelic expanse that produced soldiers and officers in the city's early gangs. Though he told Tribune colleagues that his father was a successful businessman, Lingle came from a hardscrabble family that bankrupt apart. He left school subsequently eighth grade, worked in a warehouse, and landed a chore at nearly age 20 as an role boy at the Tribune, reportedly on the recommendation of a West Side political boss. Even every bit a male child, Lingle had been a cop vitrify, and his Tribune editors quickly recognized his streetwise connections and made him a reporter.

In all his years with the paper, however, his byline appeared but a handful of times. "Lingle had never mastered the art of writing," said John Boettiger, a Tribune reporter who became part of the murder investigation and wrote a 1931 book on the example. Lingle was a and so-called legman—he'd phone in or recite the facts to another reporter who would and so write the story.

Early—by one account, when he was playing semipro baseball—Lingle met the human being who would propel his career, an ambitious police officer named William Russell. The ii became inseparable, sharing everything from golf dates to investments. "Jake'south like a son to me," Russell later on said. Through Russell, Lingle joined the insider fraternity of Chicago's cops and became such a role player in the affairs of the department that he was widely known as the "unofficial Master of Police." Mayor Thompson named Russell police commissioner in 1928, and some observers thought Lingle had a manus in the appointment. The mayor—who feuded bitterly with the Tribune—hoped the paper would mute its criticism if he promoted the star police force reporter'southward all-time friend. McCormick later scoffed at the idea that deals were made.

Using his street savvy and connections, Lingle also worked his way into the spheres of the metropolis's gang leaders, nearly notably the ruthless but irrepressible kingpin, Alphonse Capone. "He loved reporters and they loved him," says the Chicago writer Jonathan Eig, whose book on the prosecution of Capone comes out side by side bound. Lingle became one of the mobster's favorites. They had probably known each other well-nigh since Capone arrived equally a mob enforcer from Brooklyn, and they stayed in close touch as Capone moved upward and consolidated his power. Lingle phoned in stories from Capone's lavish chemical compound in Miami Beach, and he visited the mobster while he served a short term in Philadelphia for gun possession.

Throughout Prohibition in Chicago, an assortment of gangs with fluctuating alliances fought over revenues from booze, prostitution, gambling, and labor racketeering. Past the late twenties, the gang warfare had basically settled around two camps—Capone's group, which controlled the South and West sides, and a North Side gang nether the sway of George "Bugs" Moran. Lingle would accept known Moran and dealt with him, simply Bugs lacked Capone'southward flamboyance—and information technology seems Lingle never warmed to him.

In whatsoever case, the eight or so Chicago newspapers competed with showy and sometimes lurid coverage of the leading players and the mayhem. "There was a point where people looked at [gang activity] as the exploits of modern cowboys, and the press was a lot of that," says the historian Tim Samuelson. Lingle kept the Tribune in the game by bringing in stories from a long roster of mobsters. One Tribune editor, J. Loy Maloney, afterwards described how Lingle once tipped the newspaper to hibernate some photographers near 15th Street across from a building with a law court. At the appointed time, iii hoodlums emerged and ii went down in a shower of gangland bullets, an attack captured on film past the Tribune. "Lingle was the quintessential guy who got around and had connections," says Samuelson. "That's how the Tribune tried to buffer the story [subsequently on]—he needed the connections to do his job."

* * *

From the distance of 80 years, it's hard to get a focus on Lingle'due south personality. His colleagues at the Tribune don't seem to have known him well. Though journalism was hardly a gentleman's trade, a growing number of the editors and reporters at the patrician Tribune had college degrees. Lingle probably stood out with his minimal education and nonexistent writing credentials. Perhaps in compensation, he presented himself well—"always newly tailored, manicured, barbered, shined and polished," as 1 Tribune reporter put information technology.

Boettiger, writer of the 1931 volume, wrote that Lingle had "a blistering natural language and blunt, cynical way of dealing with people he disliked." Another reporter, Walter Trohan, recalled that Lingle once tried to become him fired for lightly questioning his ethics. Other journalists remembered Lingle more fondly, but fifty-fifty his closest acquaintances wondered how this barely literate police reporter could end up mingling with the rich and powerful stars of Chicago's establishment. His hush-hush may accept been his practiced supposition of a role: Lingle had a talent for playing the slightly mysterious, slightly elusive insider—dropping hints, flashing a cryptic smile. People enjoyed him as a unique Chicago character, Boettiger said. At that place's evidence that the role came at a price: An ulcer tortured Lingle for years.

Nothing, all the same, explains the incomprehension of his colleagues and bosses to the strong show that Lingle had a dissonance going on. After reports of his finances came out in the weeks following his murder, his editor at the Tribune wrote a long, embarrassing front-page rationalization for the paper'south failure to spot problem. ("The caput of a family does not customarily go about investigating evil reports of the members of his flock," wrote the paper's city editor, Robert Grand. Lee.) Merely Lingle openly lived similar a lord. With his wife and two immature children planted in a house on the West Side, he stayed in a room on the 27th floor of the Stevens Hotel, one of the fanciest in Chicago at the time. He bought and furnished a weekend house in Long Beach, Indiana, and he took long vacations in Cuba. Sometimes he traveled around town in a chauffeured Lincoln, and he enjoyed peeling bills off a fat wad of money. He made, and lost, a small fortune investing in the Simmons bed company every bit the stock market soared and so crashed. And he had a terrible habit to horse racing, frequently betting up to $1,000 on a horse. "Truly, he was a gambling fool," recalled his colleague Fred D. Pasley.

Lingle explained his curious wealth with vague remarks about inheriting money from his father and his uncle. No ane at the Tribune bothered to check whether Lingle was lying (he was) until later, fifty-fifty as Lingle kept upward his warm association with Capone, who was known to lavish money and gifts on those he favored (and those whose favors he sought). A day after the murder, in an blessing summation of Lingle'south insider connections, the Tribune wrote, "A belt buckle which Lingle wore, which was studded with what appeared to be diamonds, roused interest, and Jake used to express mirth skillful naturedly at rumors it was a present from Capone." The gang king afterward acknowledged giving Lingle the buckle. "He was my friend," Capone explained.

* * *

Photograph: Chicago Tribune photo

A crowd throngs the entrance to the pedestrian tunnel where the crime occurred.
A oversupply throngs the archway to the pedestrian tunnel where the crime occurred.

Jake Lingle'south overjoyed life ended at nearly ane:20 in the afternoon as he walked through a decorated passageway under Michigan Artery on his style to catch a train to Washington Park racetrack, a favorite haunt. With the single shot to his caput, he fell forwards, his cigar even so clutched in his teeth, the Racing Form gripped in his hand—a death scene that writers thrilled to recount. Dozens of people were close past when information technology happened, and witnesses saw the presumed shooter flee up a stairway. He disappeared into the crowds west of Michigan Avenue.

Colonel McCormick got word by phone and hurried to the newsroom, where he appear a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and confidence of the killer. Similar everyone else, McCormick at outset causeless the murder came every bit a reprisal or a warning considering of Lingle's pressing coverage of gang activities. In an editorial that showcased the Colonel's martial infatuation, the newspaper declared war on the gangs. "The Tribune accepts this challenge. Information technology is war. There will be casualties, but that is to be expected, information technology being war."

On June 12th, thousands poured out for Lingle'due south funeral, one of the largest Chicago had ever seen, and dignitaries filled the pews of Our Lady of Sorrows church at 3121 Westward Jackson Boulevard. A huge procession filed out for the burial in Mount Carmel Cemetery. The twenty-four hour period earlier, McCormick had summoned his beau Chicago publishers to a meeting, and in a joint argument they agreed to fix bated ancient rivalries and cooperate in cleaning up the gangs "and any other public viciousness, wherever it may appear." The dangled rewards soon totaled $55,000. Newspapers across the country published passionate editorials demanding that Chicago reply to this attack on the press. The clergy weighed in. "There never was a time in the history of Chicago when nosotros needed the moral back up and the backing of the decent people every bit we do today," pronounced the Reverend Howard R. Brinker, president of the local Episcopal clergy's organization. Coming just 16 months after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the Lingle killing helped anchor Chicago'southward reputation for being out of command.

Panicked into action by the public outcry, the police force arrested 664 people in one 24-hour dragnet, and John Stege, the chief of detectives, announced confidently that the gang leaders had fled the urban center. "We shall run into whether they dare come back to face up our squads of police marksmen," Stege said. Speakeasies and gambling joints shut down around the metropolis (and reopened after the heat cooled).

In one of the moves that looks peculiarly odd by today's standards, Colonel McCormick persuaded the country's attorney to rent Charles Rathbun, a lawyer from the Tribune's law firm, to take charge of the investigation. The paper picked upwardly his fee and expenses, and the Colonel peppered him with notes of advice and observation. What'south more, John Boettiger, the Tribune reporter, joined the investigative team, and for months he worked side by side with the authorities. The potential for conflicts, cover-ups, and insider advantages was obvious, but when Herman Blackness, the publisher of the rival Chicago American challenged the organization, McCormick shot back, "Mr. Black, you accept non been in Chicago very long. . . . [otherwise] yous would know that the Tribune cannot be under suspicion. It is a preposterous thing even to discuss."

(The stunning arrogance of the Colonel's statement is perhaps softened by the fact that he believed it to be true. "The idea of the newspaper's responsibility was in his claret," says Richard Norton Smith, his biographer. "He felt it through his gramps [Joseph Medill, a celebrated early on editor]—his family'due south role and its obligation to the greatest city in the world.")

Behind the scenes, questions about Lingle'southward integrity had started to float through newsrooms and boardrooms. A note in McCormick's personal papers indicates that a colleague had warned him even before the funeral that rumors were circulating. On Monday, June 16th, a calendar week after the murder, the Tribune published a bland, unbylined story saying the search for a motive had led to an investigation of Lingle's finances. Later that twenty-four hours William Russell resigned as police commissioner, complaining that he had endured "9 hundred million tons of pressure level"—presumably a reference to the mounting criticism of his friendship with Lingle and his failure to control the city's lawlessness. Officials were already closing in on information that Russell shared at least one investment business relationship with Lingle.

Rathbun released details of Lingle's finances at the cease of June. Every bit Boettiger put it in his book, "[T]he completed picture of the mad, frenzied finances of Lingle . . . show him a plunger at the races, an unschooled speculator in the marketplace, a borrower of large sums, and the recipient of an income which was in slap-up part a baffling mystery." The $65-a-calendar week reporter had run through tens of thousands of dollars in the last two years, frequently making greenbacks deposits of as much as $two,500. His "loans" came from contrasted politicians, gamblers, and mobsters, and while some were repaid, according to the investigating report, many were non.

To this day, the source of the coin remains a mystery, though several rather obvious explanations have been proposed. Most students of the thing assume that Lingle used his close connections to the upper echelons of the police department to arrange—for a fee—clear sailing for specific illicit operations. None of this was ever confirmed, but, for example, reports circulated that Capone paid Lingle $100,000 to assure that the gangster's illegal canis familiaris tracks weren't raided. Other observers presume that Lingle picked up additional cash by greasing promotions for ambitious cops willing to pay for the service. Whatever the sources, Lingle had plain been at information technology for years, even before Capone was on the scene. Fred D. Pasley remembered Lingle coming back from a 1921 trip to Republic of cuba with "literally a treasure trove of gifts," including smuggled egret feathers, "coveted by women for hats."

* * *

Within days of the murder, a St. Louis reporter appeared on the scene and wrote a series of manufactures suggesting that reporters and editors all over Chicago were on the take. "Just the dumb wits in the newspaper game in Chicago are without a racket," one unnamed newspaper executive was quoted as maxim. "I'm non exactly coin hungry, but what's the apply of living similar a tramp when the filthy lucre is being passed out like rain checks at the ball park." By now, the city's newspapers had abandoned the détente that had flowered after the slaying, and they took turns lobbing shots at each other'south integrity. Capone himself contributed to the bloodletting by asserting in an interview that he had "plenty" of newsmen on his payroll.

The smears were also much for Colonel McCormick. Furious, he ordered an internal investigation of the staff, detailing a trusted aide, Maxwell D. Corpening, a former polo instructor, to handle much of the work. Corpening found nix inappropriate, but his cluelessness virtually journalism made him a newsroom laughing-stock. Several years subsequently, assigned to do some simple reporting, the overmatched polo instructor handed in pages plagiarized from the Encyclopedia Britannica. "At least it proves the son of a bowwow can read," remarked Robert M. Lee, the Tribune's city editor.

The Lingle affair unfolded just at the tail end of the swashbuckling era of Chicago newspapers celebrated in The Front Page, and some commentators take argued that graft pervaded the city's journalism. "The profession was trying to get its act together in that era," says James L. Baughman, who teaches the history of journalism at the University of Wisconsin. Publishers were writing ethics codes, and universities were founding graduate schools for journalists. "But big-city markets like Chicago made their own rules," Baughman adds. Still, it was incorrect to have kickbacks, and everybody knew it—witness the eagerness with which the papers exposed boodling past rival reporters. At the Tribune, rumors circled around Lee, the editor closest to Lingle, but nix serious ever came out. No other Tribune reporter was implicated in wrongdoing at the time, and McCormick's fury at the Lingle revelations suggests the integrity he expected from his employees.

It's worth pointing out that in another sphere of journalism ethics, the Colonel's record is much spottier: He wholeheartedly let his biases influence news coverage. "McCormick was a transitional effigy in that he was very partisan," says Baughman. "But that'south one thing, and it'due south some other thing to be on the have."

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Photo: Chicago Tribune photograph

Lingle's funeral parade proceeds past Our Lady of Sorrows on West Jackson Boulevard.
Lingle'due south funeral parade proceeds past Our Lady of Sorrows on W Jackson Boulevard.

The murder investigation zigzagged along through the summer and fall, with little success. Word had reached Charles Rathbun and his investigators that Lingle might accept been killed by the Due north Side gang in return for his failure to protect a swanky, illegal gambling establishment, the Sheridan Wave Tournament Club. On Waveland Avenue, a few blocks due east of Wrigley Field, the Sheridan Wave sounds like something out of a James Bail movie, co-ordinate to contemporary descriptions—players in evening clothes, free drinks and food, admittance allowed only to those known by the doormen. The lodge brought a steady, hefty stream of revenue to Bugs Moran and his hoods. The cops airtight it in 1928; the place afterwards reopened, then got raided over again in 1929. The proprietors, including Julian "Potatoes" Kaufman, planned to open even so again, and, by some accounts, Lingle tried to hit them up for a fat fee or a cutting of the profits in render for clearing the way. When they balked, Lingle vowed to conform another raid. The Sheridan Moving ridge never did start up over again—opening night was scheduled for June ninth, the day Lingle was shot.

With rumors connecting Lingle to the club, the constabulary arrested a Moran lackey named Jack Zuta, who was thought to be the brains behind the Sheridan Wave. In much of the gimmicky journalism about the underworld, the writers can't hibernate a smirking, boyish admiration for the mobsters. Not so with Zuta. It was bad enough that he "made his living out of women'south shame," as Boettiger put it. He was also, by assorted accounts, a sniveling toady and a coward—though evidently his cowardice had some justification. After picking Zuta upwardly, the police held him at a detective bureau at State and 11th streets, Capone territory. Nothing came of the interrogation, and when the cops released him, he begged for a police ride to the safety of the Due north Side. A cop was ferrying him up State Street in the Loop when a blue sedan pulled alongside, and a gunman let wing with a volley of shots that "sent three or four hundred startled citizens scurrying for cover in doorways, in alleys, backside lamp posts and turn down boxes," the Tribune reported. A stray bullet killed a streetcar operator, the father of 3 children.

Zuta survived and fled to Wisconsin, hiding out at a resort near Delafield. A month later, as he was dropping nickels into a mechanical piano at the resort dance hall, five gunmen strode in and shot him to death. The murder was never solved, and some investigators thought Zuta had been silenced because of a function in the Lingle killing.

Zuta didn't shuffle off, however, without leaving a parting gift. An obsessive packrat, every bit i judge described him, Zuta kept meticulous records, and investigators found a trove of documents connecting him to prominent judges, politicians, cops, and legislators. As Boettiger put it, "Chicago enjoyed a nine solar day sensation. Public officials came tumbling into the offices of the Lingle investigators, explaining how their names came [up] in the Zuta papers, why they took Zuta's money, and how innocent they all were."

* * *

Every bit the investigation dragged on, Capone himself offered to help search for Lingle'due south killer, and the gangster—perhaps playing out a ruse—held several secret, fruitless meetings with a representative of Charles Rathbun. Finally the government got a intermission. An informant heard that a mug going past the name Buster had shot Lingle and that he was still in Chicago. Using phone wiretaps, the investigators traced the suspect to an apartment hotel at 4827 South Lake Park Artery in Hyde Park. After an all-night stakeout, the cops arrested him on December 21st.

Buster turned out to be Leo V. Brothers, a small-time hood from St. Louis, where he had belonged to a gang chosen Egan'south Rats. At 31, Brothers was tall, with wavy blond hair and a long tape, including a murder charge in St. Louis. For 17 days, Rathbun and his team held Brothers in secret and incommunicado at the Congress Hotel while questioning him about the Lingle bump-off. Years later, Brothers claimed his handling had been and so brutal that he had overheard Boettiger tell a detective, "Why, if this human being is freed, he will own the Tribune." The investigators assumed someone had hired Brothers for the killing, but who? Brothers denied everything with a stoicism he kept upward throughout the case.

By the time the trial started in March 1931, several rival Chicago papers—particularly the Hearst-owned Herald and Examiner—charged that the Tribune was railroading Brothers simply to clean upwardly the Lingle affair. For appearances' sake, Rathbun stepped aside as lead prosecutor in favor of the assistant country'southward attorney C. Wayland Brooks (who afterward rode the Tribune's backing to a U.S. Senate seat). In court, a defence force lawyer for Brothers took up the conspiracy charge. "Discover the motive of this prosecution," thundered Louis Piquett. "Is it a prosecution past the state'southward attorney or by the Chicago Tribune? . . . This is the most gigantic frame-up since the crucifixion of Christ!"

The country didn't have to testify a motive, however—it sufficed to show that Brothers killed Lingle. The prosecution'southward instance rested solely on eyewitnesses, seven individuals who took the stand and identified Brothers equally the man seen fleeing the scene of the murder. The defence force responded with seven who said he wasn't. Brothers himself never testified. The jury deliberated for 27 hours before returning what was clearly a compromise verdict—guilty of murder, but with the minimum sentence, 14 years. Brothers famously said afterward, "I can exercise that standing on my head." The upshot no doubt disappointed the prosecution and the Tribune, merely the verdict represented a landmark of sorts: Later more than 500 gang murders in Chicago in the terminal decade, this marked the first fourth dimension the authorities had brought in a conviction.

* * *

Much of Chicago was not persuaded. Rival papers inveighed against the verdict, and even Lingle'south mother wrote to Brothers in prison, saying she believed in his innocence. But the state supreme court upheld the verdict, and at the Tribune, McCormick remained certain that the killer had been found, ignoring a touching letter from Brothers's mother asking for the Colonel's help in freeing her son. ("Would a female parent[']s plea induce you lot to release my son and then my few remaining years tin be spent with him[?] You tin do it. Y'all know you tin can.") Brothers served nine years and died in 1950, e'er insisting he was innocent.

The conviction did nothing to explain who ordered Lingle's murder, however, and the mystery persists to this day. The two main schools of thought parallel the gang warfare of the time. One holds with the Sheridan Moving ridge theory and argues that Lingle fatally annoyed Bugs Moran and his henchmen. By this analysis, Jack Zuta arranged the hit. Every bit ane Capone biographer, Laurence Bergreen, puts it, "From Moran'south point of view, the murder of Jake Lingle was the perfect crime, for Moran knew that the blame would fall on Capone."

The rival caption points the finger at Capone, who, past this line of reasoning, had decided that Lingle had double-crossed him, either past failing to evangelize on promised protection or by cozying up to the Northward Side gang. Another Capone biographer, John Kobler, provides testify for this view in citing a letter written by Mike de Pike Heitler, an estranged Capone "whoremaster." Heitler had left the letter of the alphabet with his daughter with instructions to deliver it to an investigator in the outcome something happened to him. His torso was found in a burned-out car in late April 1931. In the letter, Heitler claimed that eight Capone gangsters had conspired to murder Lingle, and Heitler quoted Capone equally saying, "Jake is going to get his."

Colonel McCormick blamed Capone, but on slightly dissimilar logic. The feds were starting to build the revenue enhancement case that would eventually send Capone to prison in 1931, and they hoped that Lingle, given his warm association with the mobster, might provide some helpful details. (Federal agents did talk to McCormick well-nigh Lingle, simply—contrary to several later on accounts—just after the murder.)

Jonathan Eig, author of the forthcoming Get Capone, doubts that the mobster ordered the hit. "It doesn't brand sense," Eig argues. "Capone had much bigger problems at that point. The feds were breathing down his cervix. He knew his phones were tapped. He was lawyered upwards." The Heitler letter was suspicious from the outset—Heitler was illiterate, and the woman to whom he supposedly dictated it could barely read and write. As for the tax case, "The IRS investigation was already well under style, and Lingle wasn't a central source," Eig says. "At that place were lots of people who knew more and talked to the agents, and no 1 got hurt." Besides, he adds, "The Lingle hit was annihilation only a Capone-manner hit. Too many witnesses."

So does that point the finger at Bugs Moran and his boys? That's Eig'southward best guess.

* * *

Photograph: Chicago Tribune photo

In whatsoever example, Colonel McCormick came to believe that the Tribune-declared war on the gangs contributed to the eventual downfall of Capone and struck a deathblow at the underworld. Boettiger's notions were never far from his dominate'due south, and the writer put it this way at the determination of his book: "[I]north years hence [the murder of Lingle], the crime of a century, may exist reckoned as the starting place from which the autumn of Chicago gangdom shall date."

Of grade, Chicago gangdom didn't autumn. Capone and his meridian aides went to prison, and Prohibition killed the booze trade, simply the underworld regrouped and thrived, standing its alliance with the metropolis's political class—a disheartening partnership that stretched for at least another half century. "Motorcar politics were set up up to protect vice and crime," says Robert Chiliad. Lombardo, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Loyola University. A former law detective, Lombardo concedes that the Chicago Outfit is in pass up today, just he points out that local authorities didn't strike the mortal accident—the suburbs did. "Those old neighborhoods, the dissonance subcultures—they're gone," Lombardo says.

Meantime, the so-chosen culture of corruption in Chicago and Illinois politics continues to offer up a steady effluence of malfeasant public officials. "What is it in the electorate that finds that adequate?" asks Richard Norton Smith, who has immediate knowledge of Illinois, having served as the founding director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. "There'south an element of resignation bordering on cynicism," he adds.

Patrick Collins, the former federal prosecutor who chaired the Illinois Reform Commission appointed in the backwash of the Blagojevich debacle, says he has heard various theories to explain the persistent abuse in Chicago—for example, that the city's tough immigrants embedded the custom of scuffling and cut corners to go ahead; that crime and corruption has go a spectator sport, an amusement that doesn't demand change. In general, Collins concedes, "At a denizen level, for some reason, [the imperative for honesty in government] doesn't take hold—in that location'due south a resistance, a built-in skepticism."

Jonathan Eig suggests that the Lingle murder came as a climax to a critical menses of Chicago history. "It seems to me in that location was a constant battle going on in the twenties in Chicago to endeavour to effigy out merely where the city stood on immorality, considering the reformers came and went, Mayor Thompson came and went." The newspapers by then had a national imprint, so Chicago'due south reputation carried across the state. "I think [Lingle'southward murder] became a dramatic call—an ultimate moment to become on the right side of morality, show the country that Chicago can clean itself up." In that scenario, "Lingle is seen as a symbol of commonwealth."

And so, Chicago came to know him.

* * *

In private ways, the Lingle murder took its cost on the principals. In The Colonel, Richard Norton Smith writes memorably that McCormick's sense of betrayal by his employee led him to become fifty-fifty more suspicious and reclusive. "His function came to resemble the jail prison cell in which Leo Brothers served his sentence, but with i critical exception," writes Smith. "When his time was up, Lingle's convicted killer walked out of prison for good. McCormick remained incarcerated by his own wish for as long as he lived."

John Boettiger parlayed his hard-earned favor with the Colonel into better assignments, and shortly he was covering the 1932 presidential entrada. He came to know Franklin D. Roosevelt's daughter, Anna. Though both Boettiger and Anna were married to others, they fell in love and, later on divorces, married. Boettiger left the Tribune in 1934 merely kept in touch on with the Colonel, writing him as belatedly equally 1947 to remark on a lingering effect in the Lingle case. Over the years, Boettiger failed at assorted journalistic and business ventures; somewhen the marriage to Anna failed, too. Dilapidated past depression and shame, he took his own life in 1950.

And what of Jake Lingle's surviving family? The most poignant story in the backwash of the killing describes the scene at Lingle'southward mother in law's house on the Westward Side, where Jake's wife, Helen, and their ii children were spending a few days before moving to the summer home in Indiana. "Trunks stood ready packed in the hall, and the terminal articles were ready to exist tucked into the traveling bags," the Tribune reported. "Down on the front end backyard, Buddy and Pansy, equally the children are called, romped for the terminal fourth dimension with their playmates." Upstairs, where Helen Lingle had just heard the news, she cried, "If but he'd lived a little while. If only I could take seen him."

The family stayed in Chicago. Helen Lingle never remarried, and the son, Alfred Jr., raised a family hither himself, working as a salesman. Both he and Helen are expressionless now, only I talked to one of his sons—a grandson of Jake—Kevin Lingle, a Chicago actor. He's in his mid-40s, a expert-looking, brown-haired human with piercing eyes. He says family mythology holds that he looks like his granddaddy. In fact, he says, "I'd like to play Jake in a motion picture."

Still, Kevin is guarded about how the shadow of an infamous murder affected his family. His granddaddy'south killing was rarely discussed in the family unit—he says he first learned of its significance watching TV, when Geraldo Rivera told the story equally function of the buildup to the opening of Capone'south vault in 1986. "It was quite a shocking affair," Kevin recalls. Since and so he has done some inquiry, but he's turned up niggling. As for that diamond-studded belt buckle—Kevin says it's vanished somewhere in the past.