Never a City So Real

by Alex Kotlowitz

  There’s a touch of self-pity in his voice, but I’ve become convinced over time that Guinan wouldn’t have it any other way. To be recognized now in his city would mean he’d have to rewrite his own story. A friend with whom he’s had a falling out says of his outsider status: “I guess I always thought that was just part of his personality. I guess my point is that not being appreciated in Chicago is largely a deliberate thing. Van Gogh was anguished over [not being appreciated in France]. He was terribly unhappy about it. That’s probably why he killed himself. But it’s the way Bob wants it. . . . It’s by design.” Loeb told me, out of Guinan’s earshot, that perhaps Guinan’s obscurity in his native city is necessary: “That’s the way he looks at society, as an outsider.”

  For all of Algren’s affection for and reliance on Chicago, he became more and more embittered by the rejection of his hometown. In an afterword he wrote ten years after the initial publication of City on the Make, he wrote: “Love is by remembrance. Unlike the people of Paris or London or New York or San Francisco, who prove their love by recording their times in paintings and plays and books and films and poetry, the lack of love of Chicagoans for Chicago stands self-evident by the fact that we make no living record of it here.”

  But of course that’s precisely what Guinan has done. He’s expressed his love by remembrance. For all of Guinan’s identification with Algren, he lacks the author’s bluster and harshness. In a moment of candor, he told me, “I feel so damn lucky I’m appreciated somewhere. And it’s so damn nice to walk down a street in Chicago and nobody knows who I am. The whole thing’s an accident. Somebody from Europe liked my work and that’s why I’m there.”

  It still doesn’t explain why Guinan hasn’t found a place in his hometown, why he isn’t more celebrated here. Those I spoke with suggested that it must be the subject matter. Too depressing. Too dark. Too desolate. When we were at Rite Liquors, I asked Guinan what seemed to me the obvious question: “Why not move to Paris, where you’re loved?” But Paris, he told me, is too pretty. “It’d be like living your life in a pastry shop,” says Guinan. “What can you paint in Paris?” He took another swig of his Zywiec.

  Inside Out

  You are gigantic in your virtues and gigantic in your vices. I don’t know in which you glory the most.

  British journalist WILLIAM T. SNEAD,

  on visiting Chicago in 1893

  Periodically, Dave Boyle leaves long, rambling messages on my voice mail. He usually starts off by saying, “Alex, I thought you’d enjoy this.” He then proceeds to recount some perceived act of lunacy (or larceny) that’s occurred in his hometown of Cicero. There was one occasion, though, after the town’s president was indicted, when he left an uncharacteristically brief message, his glee undisguised: “Alex, ‘Ding Dong! The witch is dead.’ ” In fact, that was the first of two times he left that particular greeting. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

  Dave Boyle is a gadfly, a persistent, irritating, in-your-face critic of the powers that be in Cicero. I understand that this is a book about Chicago, about the city proper, but it’s impossible to talk about the city without speaking of the suburbs. Unlike New York, where the suburbs feel as if they might as well be on the other side of the Hudson River (which, in New Yorkese, means a not inconsiderable distance), or in Los Angeles, where the city feels like an illegitimate child left behind by the sprawl, Chicago’s first ring of burghs are, in truth, extensions of the city. The city moves outward from Lake Michigan, and as you venture north, south, or, in Cicero’s case, west, you seamlessly and unknowingly cross into these small towns which feel more urban than suburban. Indeed, the city’s transit line extends into a number of them. Street names often remain the same. (I live in Oak Park, four blocks from the city’s border, a block from the El, and down the street from a building that houses teachers from a Chicago elementary school.) Cicero, a town of small brick bungalows, narrow streets, and manufacturing plants, is almost indistinguishable from the city’s West Side neighborhoods, and this working-class community’s history is deeply intertwined with Chicago’s. But finally the story of Cicero is a story of Chicago’s tribalism: For years, it was a town run by insiders who successfully fought to keep the world at bay.

  Dave and his wife, Nadine, bought a home in Cicero in 1983; Dave was a contractor and the town seemed to be on the verge of new development, so he thought it would be a good place to ply his trade. Within the first year of their stay, he was on his way to a job early one morning when he pulled out of an alley and saw a rough-looking crowd outside Mr. C’s, a local tavern frequented by the Chicago branch of the Outlaws motorcycle gang. It quickly became clear that someone had been murdered. Boyle could make out the chalk lines of a body, and the police were gathering evidence. As for the gang members, they were on the sidewalk, drinking beer and celebrating: There had been a fight and the best man, at least in the eyes of the surviving Outlaws, had won. Boyle pulled over, got out of his car, and asked what had happened. “The police told me that the guy had been stabbed inside, and while he was still bleeding from a gut cut from a buck knife, gurgling blood, these bikers carried him out of Mr. C’s onto the street so he’d die out there,” Boyle recalls. It became clear that the bikers had moved the dying man to keep the bar from getting shut down, even temporarily, and it also quickly became apparent that police had obliged them. Mr. C’s was still serving beer.

  Boyle decided that Cicero would be a better place to live if Mr. C.’s, which had a history of wild brawls, was closed down, so he went to see the village’s deputy liquor commissioner. The commissioner told Boyle that there was nothing he could do about Mr. C’s, and that if Boyle knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t mention it again. But Boyle, who’s not easily discouraged, returned six days later, and this time the deputy commissioner was more blunt. He told Boyle that if Boyle did anything about Mr. C.’s, not only might they kill Boyle but they might kill him, as well. The “they” he was referring to was organized crime.

  “I just basically thought, ‘Fuck you. I’m Dave Boyle,’ ” Boyle told me. “I walk upright, and I ask you to do the right thing, and you tell me the mob won’t let you do it. I thought, ‘What kind of pussy are you?’ ”

  There are probably a few things you need to know about Cicero. First, if you haven’t already figured this out, it’s a tough little town. It always has been. I was once interviewed by a reporter from Japan, and Cicero came up in the conversation: The reporter pulled his index fingers out of his imaginary holsters and started shooting. This gesture has become the town’s international symbol, because as almost everyone knows—especially foreigners, who seem particularly obsessed with America’s gangster tradition—this was for a while the home of Al Capone, America’s most legendary gangster.

  When William Dever was elected mayor of Chicago in 1923, he announced that, unlike his predecessor, he intended to enforce Prohibition, and he vowed to crush “the rumrunners and illicit beer peddlers.” So, Capone, who was only twenty-five and still a relatively unknown small-time hoodlum, moved his operations to Cicero. It was a town, writes Laurence Bergreen in his biography of Capone, “small enough for the organization to control. They could own the city government, from the mayor to the dog catcher . . . and indeed, the big city merged almost imperceptibly into its smaller neighbor.”

  Capone opened gambling dens and brothels in Cicero, and began fixing races at the Hawthorne racetrack (which still exists). He set up shop first at the Anton Hotel, and then at the more substantial Hawthorne Hotel; he also owned a small apartment building on Austin Avenue, where he’d take his mistresses and hold all-night parties. While it was rumored to have an escape tunnel leading from the building to the garage, Capone’s operations were considerably more low-tech, and indeed he exerted such control in places like Cicero that he had no need for hideouts. (His home, where his wife and mother lived, was a rather modest dwelling on Chicago’s South Side, on the 7200 block of South Prairie Avenue.) In October 1924, Capone commandeered
the local Cicero elections with a brutal show of force: His henchmen kidnapped poll workers, one of whom was murdered. On that same day, Al’s brother Frank was gunned down by Chicago policemen who had been deputized to work the election. Although Capone’s slate won, Bergreen writes that “the death of Frank became a turning point in Capone’s career as a racketeer. From now on he would become the dedicated outlaw, determined to crush and control.” Capone operated out of Cicero until Dever lost his election four years later to the highly corrupt “Big Bill” Thompson, whose campaign was in part financed by racketeers including Capone. (One of Thompson’s favorite nightspots was Ralph Capone’s Cotton Club in Cicero.) Capone moved his base of operations back to Chicago but continued to have a significant presence in Cicero until he went to prison in 1932.

  It’s a connection that irritates townsfolk, especially because it’s always the first thing the media has to say about this place. In 1953, Cicero considered changing its name because, the town’s lawyer said, “People everywhere think we’re just a bunch of hoods. A kid from Cicero can’t get into a college fraternity.” As recently as 1993, still hoping to divert reporters from the Capone association, the town raised banners that claimed Cicero was THE ORIGINAL BIRTHPLACE OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY. Hemingway actually hailed from nearby Oak Park, which in 1899 was unincorporated and therefore technically—if not socially—a part of Cicero.

  Defensiveness about Capone is understandable, but it seems misplaced only because the other reason for Cicero’s notoriety is by most measures considerably more embarrassing. Plainly and simply, for decades Cicero had a policy of no blacks allowed. It was as intense and as forceful as anything seen in the pre–civil rights South. I would venture to guess that the town was among the most adept in the nation at keeping out African-Americans. For many years, the village refused to take certain federal grants so that it wouldn’t have to comply with open housing or hiring laws. Lithuanians and Italians who grew up there have told me that as kids they would run any black they saw out of town—at the behest of the police. In 1951, Illinois’s governor, Adlai Stevenson, had to call in the National Guard when for three days a mob threw rocks and chunks of metal into the second-floor apartment of a black bus driver and his family who had just moved in. With town cops looking on (and some allegedly supplying rocks), these Ciceroans eventually stormed the apartment and threw the family’s belongings out the window, including their piano. When Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967 had come to Chicago to lead his open-housing campaign, he announced he’d march in Cicero, a move meant to embarrass Chicago’s Mayor Daley, who had resisted Dr. King’s efforts. But when county officials told King they couldn’t guarantee his safety, he chose not to march, this after having faced the likes of Sheriff Bull Conner in Birmingham. King referred to Cicero as the Selma of the North. And then, in the 1980s, after a run-in between a police sergeant and one of the few African-American families who’d moved to Cicero, the Justice Department ordered the police to undergo race sensitivity training. My father-in-law, Jack, helped lead those workshops, and he recalled one police sergeant attending a session in a T-shirt that read POLICE BRUTALITY. THE FUN PART OF POLICE WORK.

  This is what Boyle walked into when he moved here, but initially he and Cicero seemed like a fair match. Boyle, who was a Marine in Vietnam, is built like a rugby player, squat and broad-shouldered. He has a bulldog of a face, ruddy and pug-nosed. When he gets angry, his hands instinctively ball into fists. He says things that he probably shouldn’t, and he often doesn’t know when to retreat. Once, after a town meeting, a man who looked half Boyle’s age stared at Boyle in the hallway. “What you staring at?” Boyle growled. “Bite my fuckin’ ass.”

  “Fuck you,” the younger man replied.

  “Fuck you,” Boyle replied, pushing up against the man. Boyle’s body tensed, his hands, it seemed, preparing to make contact. “Outside,” he suggested.

  It was the young man, not Boyle, who knew enough to walk away.

  After being told by the deputy liquor commissioner that it would be best if he kept quiet, Boyle did just the opposite: He convinced nearly four hundred of his neighbors to show up at a city council meeting and got the town to shut down Mr. C’s. He then collected enough signatures for an advisory referendum that called for all bars to close at two a.m. Voters passed the measure, three to one, but the town president refused to rescind the current closing time of six a.m. So Boyle went through town records and found that five bars, which he believed to be run by the mob, hadn’t bothered to renew their liquor licenses. He then went to the police department to lodge a complaint.

  That night, at two a.m., he and Nadine were woken by a blast. Dave looked out of his second-floor bedroom window and saw his garage in flames. Someone had blown it up. By the time the fire department extinguished the blaze, Boyle had lost his garage, his construction tools, and his two cars, a van and a Volkswagen Beetle. Then the threats began. “Guys used to call me at night,” he recalled. “They’d tell me they were going to kill me, that they were going to fuck my wife, and I’d call them homosexuals and tell them that my light on my porch is on, that my door’s open, that if you guys got the balls to come over, come on over. My wife’s in a very attractive nightie right now. You might like it.” And then one day Boyle went to get his newspaper, and draped across his porch railing he found a decapitated snake.

  Boyle was pretty much on his own. The police were far more interested in harassing Boyle than in finding out who was harassing him. Again and again, over the next few years, they arrested him, eleven times in all, once for defending himself against a rowdy drunk, another time for forcefully escorting home a teenage bully who had been hassling some girls. Nadine, who is as softspoken as Dave is loud, would have to borrow money from neighbors to bail Dave out until she finally caught on and stored cash in the house. What was hardest for Nadine is that there was no one to turn to. “I didn’t talk to my friends anymore because I felt different than they did,” she told me. “They were having babies. They were decorating their houses with Laura Ashley things and I’m cleaning up ashes from the garage.” The paranoia began to get to her. “There was a man in the alley behind our house, he had urine stains on his pants, he had three-day-old newspapers in his hands, he had on gym shoes and a funny hat. He told me he was an undercover guy for the CIA. And I’m sure that’s what I sounded like to my friends. And then there was a point where I started to believe that guy. I didn’t know anymore. That was a sign we needed to move on.”

  Boyle insists he wasn’t run out of town, but Nadine, in particular, began to fear for her husband’s safety. In 1990, they moved to Houston, where Boyle had an uncle, and they purchased a comfortable ranch house with a swimming pool. Boyle went to law school. They had a good life there. Nadine said they laughed together, they could relax. But one day, some ten years later, Dave told Nadine that he wanted to return to Cicero, that it didn’t feel right not being there. She felt sick. She told Dave it was as if he’d hit her with a board. But she knew her husband well enough to recognize that he was going stir-crazy, that even Texas politics didn’t hold a candle to what they’d been up against in Cicero. And so they moved back, bought a small bungalow, and reentered the fray. “I just wanted to finish up business,” he told me.

  When Dave and Nadine returned in the summer of 2000, Cicero had undergone a remarkable transformation. During their absence, this town of insiders—Lithuanians, Bohemians, and Italians—had been overrun by outsiders. Cicero had remained fairly successful at keeping out blacks, but slowly, and then in large numbers, Hispanics had moved in—so many, in fact, that by the time the Boyles returned Hispanics made up three-fourths of the population. (“Well, they’re not black,” one resident told me by way of explaining why Hispanics had been permitted to settle in the town.) Yet, the town was still run by the old guard.

  Shortly after the Boyles had left for Texas, Betty Loren-Maltese had been elected town president. At the time, she was the wife of Frank Maltese, who was the town assess
or as well as bookmaker for then Cicero mob boss Rocco Infelice. (Frank Maltese died of cancer before going off to prison, in 1993.) In the intervening years, Loren-Maltese had become one of the most recognizable politicians in all of Illinois. She honed a look that harked back to the 1950s, and I suspect that the association was not unintentional. (Loren-Maltese said at one point, “I want things like they used to be.”) A full-figured woman, she wore her hair in a pompadour and wore lengthy false eyelashes coated in thick black mascara. Reporters often noted a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor. She favored brilliantly colored pantsuits and wore her electric-blue version to court on at least one occasion. She was highly quotable when she agreed to speak with the press, which wasn’t often, and also highly combustible—which is why her handlers tried to keep her away from those intent on recording her every word. A Chicago columnist once wrote, “She’s a headline.”

  Loren-Maltese named the town’s public safety building after her late husband, a convicted felon. When in 1998 the Ku Klux Klan announced plans to march through town, she raised ten thousand dollars to pay them to cancel the rally. She took on the street gangs with heavy-handed—the ACLU said illegal—tactics, which included impounding the cars of suspected gang members. But because Loren-Maltese was often a source of amusement for outsiders, her shrewdness as a politician was underestimated. She included Hispanics in her administration and was reelected twice over the course of ten years, once defeating an Hispanic opponent by a two-to-one margin. Moreover, in the venerable Cicero tradition, she had irregular but effective ways of quieting her critics.