Empire of Deception

by Dean Jobb

  “Seldom has the populace been so aroused over a criminal case here,” the New York Times reported. There were demands for a citywide roundup of perverts and pedophiles—“morons,” in the euphemism of the time—to prevent more outrages against Chicago’s children. The prosecuting attorney, James O’Brien, who had sent enough murderers to the gallows to earn the nickname Ropes, vowed to seek the death penalty even if the defense pleaded insanity. The press egged him on. “There will be a general opinion,” the Tribune asserted, “that he is sane enough to be hanged.”

  If it was revenge people wanted, Chief Justice Robert Crowe of the Cook County Criminal Court was determined to make sure they got it. When Fitzgerald pleaded guilty to murder in September 1919, Crowe offered him little hope for mercy. “If the evidence shows that hanging is proper,” he announced, “there will be no turning aside.” Fitzgerald had a history of exposing himself and was attracted to children; his wife, who was much younger, called him “subnormal” and, “knowing his weakness,” said she had not been surprised to learn of his crime. Crowe, a father of three—his oldest, a daughter, was Janet Wilkinson’s age—was sickened by what he heard. It was, he said later, “a dastardly crime,” committed by a man who lacked “the decency or the heart to put a handkerchief over that little dead face as he heaped the coal upon it.”

  There was an unwritten rule in Cook County: murderers who pleaded guilty were sent to the state prison in Joliet, not to the gallows. It had been that way for decades. On September 23, 1919, before a packed courtroom, Crowe ordered Fitzgerald to stand and asked if he had anything to say.

  “I’m sorry. I—I ask forgiveness.”

  “Is that all?” Crowe shot back.

  “I ask God to forgive me.”

  Crowe sentenced him to hang the following month. Hundreds of people scrambled for tickets to attend the execution in the Cook County Jail. The Daily Tribune called it an “exact and just” sentence that sent a message to “all those musty minded perverts whose unprintable activities have long been beyond tolerance.” The Chicago Republican, heartened to see justice “unmixed with mercy,” declared that Crowe had not only “performed a plain duty, but also rendered society a service of inestimable value and benefit.”

  “What Chicago needs is not more law,” the paper added, “but more judges of the Crowe type.”

  IN THE YEARS IT had taken Leo to create his phony empire of rice and mahogany, his colleague from their days as young lawyers had gone on to become a star in the legal profession and a man to watch in Chicago politics. Robert Crowe’s early election to the bench—he was still in his thirties when he stopped arguing cases and began deciding them—was the product of political opportunism multiplied by personal ambition.

  After leaving Moran, Mayer, and Meyer in 1903, Crowe opened a practice in downtown Chicago with his brother, Frank, and a classmate from Crowe’s high school days, George Barrett. Barrett, a future judge, was active with his own brother, Charles, in Republican politics on Chicago’s West Side. Frank Crowe was thirteen years Robert’s senior and well established as a criminal lawyer; while his kid brother studied at Yale, Frank was sending bad guys to prison as an assistant state’s attorney for Cook County.

  Robert Crowe gravitated to criminal law, and it was a good fit. There was no murky middle ground, only absolutes: defendants were guilty or innocent, good or evil. He had absorbed his Yale teachings and saw a world where every fact, every action, was either right or wrong. And Crowe was always right. Contemporaries described him as “vigorous and quick-tongued,” as “blunt, stormy, dangerous”—a force to be reckoned with. He charged ahead like a prizefighter, attacking opponents with a flurry of verbal punches. As his rhetoric and blood pressure soared, his husky voice cracked; words tumbled out in a high-pitched, nasal torrent that startled those who had only seen his words in the newspapers.

  Robert Crowe, elected to the bench in 1916 at thirty-seven, was a rising star in Chicago’s Republican party. Crowe and Leo began their legal careers together at a Chicago law firm.

  There was no middle ground in politics, either, only Republicans and Democrats, allies and enemies. It was another good fit for a man with Crowe’s confidence and certainty. The former leader of Yale’s Young Republicans joined forces with the Barrett brothers to become a key player on the West Side. Political life in Chicago was not a matter of principle or public policy, the city’s Evening Post once observed; it was “a professional occupation, carried out by men and women who expect to be compensated, not thru the indirect benefits of efficient government, but thru direct benefits in the form of jobs, contracts and other material gains.” The city functioned as a democracy, but only on the surface.

  The tactics were bare knuckle, the stakes winner-take-all. Voting fraud was commonplace, and hired thugs patrolled polling stations to intimidate or assault anyone who supported a rival candidate. Politicians raided the public treasury to reward the troops and buy their loyalty. The Irish, among the most adept players of the game, built powerful organizations at the ward level that left one observer in awe of “the wild doings of the political Irish gang.” The system was thoroughly corrupt and impervious to civic reform, and it operated above the law. Only Cook County’s judges and the state’s attorney had the power to intervene, but they were elected on party tickets and as beholden to the political machines as everyone else in public life.

  The state’s attorney, equal parts lawman and politician, was perhaps the most powerful elected official in Cook County—a “dictator-like office,” some observed. Crowe and his staff launched and shut down grand jury investigations into crime and corruption. They could target gangsters or crime bosses or political enemies, or choose to leave them alone. They could oppose a defendant’s release on bail or put the suspect back on the street. Prosecutions could be delayed for months, even years. Charges could be pressed with vigor, withdrawn without comment, or plea-bargained down to minor offenses. It was easy to play favorites. Answerable only to political supporters and public opinion, the state’s attorney pandered to both.

  Crowe’s rise to prominence began in this office where politics and the law collided. He campaigned for his friend John Wayman, who ran as the Republican candidate for state’s attorney for Cook County in 1908. Wayman won, hired Crowe as one of his assistants, and took on the role of a reformer. But crime and vice flourished during Wayman’s tenure as it had under his predecessors’, until an exposé of Chicago’s white slave traffic and the debauchery of the Levee forced his hand. Wayman ordered a roundup of pimps and madams in 1912, and within days, the district that had earned Chicago its reputation as the Wicked City was shut down. “Fallen is Babylon!” proclaimed one antivice activist.

  Crowe, watching at close range, saw how Cook County’s state’s attorney balanced the zeal of reformers against corrupt forces as rooted in the city’s landscape as its towering buildings. When Wayman mounted a failed bid for governor of Illinois, Maclay Hoyne took his place as state’s attorney. Some of the Levee’s brothels and gambling dens reopened, enough for Hoyne to mount his own well-publicized crusade to put them out of business in 1914. It was business as usual, with one exception. Hoyne was a Democrat. Crowe, a Republican appointee, knew his days as a prosecutor were numbered.

  He continued to build a political base on the West Side. Crowe caught the eye of a University of Chicago professor who considered him a new type of Republican boss, “aggressive, but with more education and polish” than most of the city’s ward heelers. Crowe’s marriage in 1912 to Candida Cuneo, the daughter of an Italian grocer, extended his political reach into an immigrant community growing in size and clout.

  The Chicago Examiner lauded his “brilliant record” as a prosecutor and lawyer. Judges spoke highly of his ability and integrity. Chicago’s newly elected Republican mayor, Big Bill Thompson, took notice.

  WILLIAM HALE THOMPSON IS a legendary figure in Chicago’s politics, so brash and larger than life that the authors of an early biography feared the
ir work would be considered fiction. “Once upon a time,” they assured readers, “there really was a Big Bill Thompson.” He was six feet tall, square faced, and solidly built, which accounted for his nickname; working on western ranches as a young man explained his showman’s habit of turning up in downtown Chicago on horseback, wearing a Stetson.

  Fred Lundin, the leader of the West Side Republicans, backed Thompson for mayor in 1915 and helped Big Bill win by a landslide. Crowe, a key player in Lundin’s West Side machine, undoubtedly helped elect Thompson as well. The new mayor, who never left a favor unreturned, named Crowe to the city’s legal staff in 1915, and soon he was defending Chicago police officers accused of misconduct. When elections to local and state offices rolled around in November 1916, Thompson and Lundin had the perfect candidate for a seat on the Illinois Circuit Court.

  Crowe was thirty-seven when he was elected to the bench. Energetic and determined to make his mark, he heard cases and delivered verdicts faster than most of his colleagues. When America went to war in 1917, he stepped up as leader of a local branch of the Patriotic League and devoted several nights a week to helping the families of West Side men who were serving overseas. And when gangs began stealing automobiles at an alarming rate, Crowe pushed for a special court to hear only allegations of car theft. He presided in person, convicted nine out of every ten defendants, and was credited with cutting the theft rate in half. A Rolls-Royce limousine, Leo Koretz’s vehicle of choice, “became as safe as the flivver on the streets of Chicago,” Crowe later claimed. Here was a judge, the Chicago Evening American told its readers, who dispensed three kinds of justice: “swift, uncompromising and stern.”

  Chicago needed Crowe-style justice in the summer of 1919. Racial tensions erupted in violence after blacks strayed into a segregated area on a lakefront beach. In the confrontation that followed, a white man threw a stone that struck and killed Eugene Williams, a black teenager. Violence spread across the city, and four days of rioting left thirty-eight dead and hundreds injured.

  Thompson stumbled in the face of the crisis and waited days to call in the National Guard to restore order. Crowe, in contrast, took decisive action. He publicly denounced the “anarchy” in the streets and promised speedy trials for those responsible. While more than half the dead and two-thirds of the injured were blacks, far more blacks than whites had been arrested and charged. Crowe acquitted many of the black defendants and won praise from a leading black newspaper as “the most fair-minded man who ever graced the Chicago Bench.”

  Weeks later, in September 1919, he was appointed to lead the Cook County Criminal Court, the youngest chief justice in the court’s history. He was as imposing on the bench as he had been on the courtroom floor; the dark-rimmed glasses he now wore most of the time, with lenses thick as bottle bottoms, made him look more aloof and imperious than ever. Crowe hit the ground running, sending the child murderer Fitzgerald to the gallows and a loud and clear message to all criminals. He presided over a special grand jury that handed down more than a hundred indictments as part of a nationwide crackdown on Communist Party leaders and labor activists. He set up a special court in 1920 to process a backlog of more than forty murder cases. In ten months his court racked up a record number of convictions—almost two thousand—dispatched twelve hundred offenders to prison, and sent fifteen more to the gallows.

  As Crowe emerged as a leader and a doer, Thompson foundered. There were rumblings of graft and patronage as he followed the time-honored practice of padding the city payroll with thousands of supporters. Thompson spoke out against America’s entry into the war—Chicago was “the sixth largest German city in the world,” he rationalized—and became a national embarrassment. He stood for reelection in April 1919 and limped back into office, his margin of victory slashed to a little more than twenty thousand votes.

  Big Bill was vulnerable. It would soon be time for Robert Crowe to make his next move.

  9

  THE STING

  SUITE 629 OF the Drake Hotel was the grand stage where Leo Koretz’s grand scheme came to life. He had cleared out the standard-issue furnishings and forked over about $2,000—enough money to buy a pair of top-of-the-line Hudson Essex touring cars—to bring in his own. Visitors could relax in a red velour lounge chair or pull up an overstuffed armchair with matching ottoman. A phonograph stood ready to supply background music, and a risqué piece of green statuary depicted a man holding a scantily clad young woman. A framed photograph of Mae served as the centerpiece for a lamp table. Bookcases groaned under the weight of thousands of volumes, an imposing collection that ranged from the complete works of Mark Twain to the latest novels of 1921’s Nobel Prize winner, Anatole France. A lineup of technical works on the petroleum industry, published in an array of languages sure to please supporters of the new League of Nations—French, Italian, Spanish, and German as well as English—hinted at the new source of wealth Leo had discovered in the jungles of Panama.

  Only a select group of investors was invited to do business in these posh digs. When summoned, it was said, they felt “the same glow of pride” as “when gaining entry to an exclusive speak-easy.” Their host held court behind a ten-foot-wide mahogany desk piled with more books and bearing an engraved brass plate that declared, MADE FROM THE FIRST LOG CUT AT BAYANO. Guests chuckled when they saw a gold-framed sign hanging on one wall: YES, WE HAVE NO BAYANO TODAY, it said, a play on a wildly popular song of the day, “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” Good old Lovable Lou—he never missed a chance to crack a joke.

  From his windows, Leo could follow the shoreline of Lake Michigan as it faded from sight. On summer days, Oak Street Beach, a crescent of sand behind the Drake, was crammed with people escaping Chicago’s blistering heat. In winter, Leo’s windows often framed a sullen and brooding landscape of gray sky and grayer water. The hotel stood at the north end of fashionable Michigan Avenue, far enough from the Loop to be billed as one of America’s first urban resorts. Guests could relax on the beach, swim, play tennis, or shoot a round of golf on a nearby course. The H-shaped building, its clean lines modeled on the Renaissance palaces of Rome and Florence, had cost $10 million to build, furnish, and decorate. “Each step you take in The Drake Hotel,” the actor Peter Ustinov would one day declare, “is like walking on diamonds.”

  In the comfort of suite 629, after the checks were written or the hefty dividends had been reinvested, Bayano investors could thumb their noses at the Prohibition laws and celebrate with a shot of rye or bourbon or a few fingers of scotch, or maybe Leo could be persuaded to dust off a bottle of vintage wine from his stash. It all added up—the exclusive hotel, the opulent suite, the million-dollar view, the gracious host who was striking it rich and taking his friends and relatives along for the ride.

  Only the Drake’s bellboys seemed to think something was amiss. Leo always flipped them a silver fifty-cent piece, and this raised a few eyebrows. “Real millionaires,” as one of them explained, “never tip more than a dime.”

  SOMETIME IN 1921, WHILE chatting with a friend, Leo dropped the bombshell—his new, even bigger Big Idea. “I casually mentioned that oil was discovered on this Bayano tract,” he recalled. And just as he had intended, “the news spread rapidly.” The profitable Bayano timber syndicate was in the far more lucrative oil business.

  There were a couple of versions of the story of how oil came to be discovered. He told Mae that a party of South American prospectors poking around Panama had sought permission to drill exploratory wells on the property. There was a more whimsical tale, however, that sounded like vintage Leo. A drilling crew traveling from California to South America along the Pacific coast was shipwrecked and came ashore on the syndicate’s land. Bayano’s local manager—the mysterious A. Espinosa, no doubt—gave them refuge. The crew’s boss, with time on his hands, thought the region looked promising and sought permission to drill. The manager gave the go-ahead and the crew struck oil.

  There was a rush for Bayano shares. “They began to besiege me w
ith money for certificates,” Leo said. “They thrust it on me … and refused to take it back.” One man reputedly paid $30,000 for a single certificate.

  Leo leaked more details to drive up prices and to lure in more buyers. He told Samuel Richman about the discovery and then, in the weeks that followed, mentioned more strikes and more crude. Soon he was assuring Richman he had forty wells in production, each spewing at least ten thousand barrels a day. He told his investment partner Henry Klein that Bayano was earning several million dollars a month. Telegrams arrived at social functions, informing Leo—and everyone around him—of new wells. Bayano’s vast reserves, he bragged, were the envy of Standard Oil. Best of all, he announced, the days of 10 percent annual dividends were over. Oil would earn Bayano shareholders a 5 percent return every month—an astounding 60 percent a year. This was only the beginning; in time, Francis Matthews remembered being assured, “this amount would be doubled.”

  Then came what was perhaps his most brazen ploy. One day, with a close friend playing the role of witness, he produced a check—payment, presumably, for oil sold by the Bayano Syndicate. It was made out for $1 million. “Hooray! Look what I just got from the Standard Oil company,” he shouted. “They’re coming my way now.”