Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  “Mr. Healey is old, broken physically and mentally,” Darrow told the jury. “He has labored under a strain the last few months such has sent other men to the insane asylum, suicide, or drink.” The state’s attorney’s tactics were what should be condemned, not Healey, Darrow told the jurors. They shouldn’t, just couldn’t, send the poor old cop to prison for a few venial sins, for succumbing to temptations such as all men do. This was Chicago.

  Hundreds who braved a winter storm heard Darrow ask the jury to deal with Healey as you wish others to deal with you at the grave and serious times of your life. It was sentimental slush. And it worked. After eight weeks of testimony, the jury set Healey and his codefendants free. The chief cried and trembled after hearing the verdict and embraced Darrow. “My one thought now is to get home to my wife and sit with her by the fireside,” Healey told the press, in character to the end.

  “The verdict in this trial was a mighty big surprise,” Hoyne grumbled.

  Hoyne must have thought back to the Healey verdict—and Darrow’s machinations in the McNamara trial—when the state unearthed a conspiracy to bribe jurors in the next big corruption case. Francis Becker, a chief examiner for the Civil Service Commission, was defended by Darrow after being charged with shaking down saloons and whorehouses. In May 1918, a jury acquitted him. A few weeks later Hoyne charged the jury foreman and two other men with soliciting bribes. No money was passed and there was no evidence that Darrow knew anything about it, but he felt the need to reassure Paul. “You may be absolutely sure there isn’t the slightest thing in it,” Darrow wrote his son.

  Hoyne was now 0 for 3 against Darrow but finally prevailed when a jury convicted William Miller, a Thompson man in the governor’s cabinet, for selling the answers to licensing exams to unqualified doctors and pharmacists. There was a limit, after all, to Chicago’s cynicism. Even with the answers, some of the quacks had failed the test.4

  “Law and the pursuit of … justice leave but few illusions,” said Erbstein.5

  DARROW HAD BEEN paid a $1,000 retainer and $100 a day in the Healey case. The firm was grossing $100,000 a year. He was back. “Am called for everywhere and by all kinds of people, from preachers and bankers and governors—up to … burglars,” he told Paul. His work for the Thompson-Lundin gang was interspersed with his speaking tours on behalf of the war effort, defense of communists in the Red Scare, learning to drive a car, his first ride in a “Flying Machine,” and a palette of clients whose cases offered a taste of Chicago in the Jazz Age.6

  Joseph Weil, aka the “Yellow Kid,” was a debonair con man with a Van Dyke beard and a knack for persuading people to give him their money. His biggest score was said to have been for $250,000, from a swindle in which he and his confederates created a phony stock brokerage, complete with tickers, secretaries, and receptionists. In another variation, they rented a building and got dozens of pals to pose as the customers and employees of a busy bank, with stacks of fake cash, a line of tellers, and—a nice touch—printed stationery and deposit slips. The Kid apologized repeatedly as he and his mark waited to see the “bank manager,” but the bustle convinced the victim that this was a well-run financial establishment. The man handed over $50,000, and was flummoxed when he returned and found an empty building.

  But not even Darrow could save Weil when he was caught posing as a mining engineer for Standard Oil and swindling a Fort Wayne banker out of $15,000. While awaiting trial on that charge, Weil and his pals took another Indianan for $110,000. Their photographs were carried across the country and soon men from all over—a Michigan doctor, a Montana rancher, a banker from Wyoming—who valued their money more than their dignity showed up in Chicago, claiming to have been fleeced.

  “I am not holding up my client as a saint,” Darrow told the jury, in something of an understatement. But of the victims, Darrow said: “All these men were out for a pot of gold … I don’t see any reason for wasting sympathy.”

  The jury saw it differently. The Kid went off to Joliet in style, with a diamond stickpin in his cravat, a Killarney green overcoat, tan shoes, and an emerald velour hat “of gay and rakish tilt,” the papers noted.7

  Darrow maintained his practice of defending heartbroken individuals, rich and poor, whose love affairs led them into conflict with each other or the law. He got hefty fees for handling messy divorces or probate cases for heirs to the Cole circus, McCormick reaper, and Rockefeller oil fortunes. And his defense of George Munding, the “riding master to the city’s uptown society,” earned front-page coverage.

  Munding, believing his fiancée was unfaithful, had shot and killed her as she stood outside the paddock of her riding academy in Hillsdale. “Picture this poor man,” Darrow told the jury, “as one adrift in a row-boat on the sea of elemental emotion. The sea overwhelmed him, as it has overwhelmed many another, and he sank. He was a poor, helpless victim of environment and heredity and the passion that has driven men mad since Cleopatra’s day.” Munding dodged the hangman, and received a prison term.

  And then there was Emma Simpson, who smuggled a revolver into a Chicago courtroom, pulled it from the folds of her dress, and shot her adulterous husband four times as they quarreled over their impending divorce.

  Spectators screamed. The judge gaped. A bailiff threw his arms around Ms. Simpson.

  “You’ve killed him!” screamed the court reporter.

  “I hope so,” Emma said.

  Later, she smiled for the newspaper photographers. “My life has been besmirched,” she told the press. “I have always loved … Elmer, and he has always repaid me with faithlessness.”

  Simpson was the niece of a streetcar magnate and could afford to retain Darrow. The city waited as Elmer lingered, for a month, on his deathbed. “I guess I nagged her too much,” he told his doctors. When at last he expired, the state charged Emma with murder and said it hoped to hang her.

  Emma showed up in court for her trial, “attired in the customary subdued though fetching raiment of the feminine defendant—plain linen frock, white pumps and sable sailor” hat, one of the newspaper sob sisters wrote. Darrow announced that Emma was temporarily insane. Friends and family members told of her erratic behavior. And Emma did her part. When the prosecutor introduced the handgun as evidence Emma stood, screamed “Take it away!” and, after a dramatic pause, certain that every eye in the courtroom was upon her, collapsed to the floor.

  Darrow employed an “honor defense”—telling the all-male jury that women, like men, should be excused by the unwritten law that forgave the killing of adulterers. Ladies, after all, were even more susceptible to emotion. “Women will take a bunch of old love letters, tied with faded ribbon, and relive an early romance,” Darrow said. “To men an old romance would be dust and ashes.”

  Why, the shooting “was a crazy act,” said Darrow. “Does it seem to you, gentlemen, that a person in his or her right mind would pick out a court, a temple of justice, where a dozen persons are gathered, to do a murder?” he asked the jury. Darrow could not resist: “It is not only murder but … contempt of court.”

  Well, you can’t convict a pretty woman for murder in Cook County, especially for bumping off a cheating louse like Elmer. The jury took half an hour to find Emma innocent. She spent fifty-one days in a mental hospital and was given her freedom.

  The good people were outraged. “Sentimentality is lawless. The disease in America is endemic,” the editors at the Tribune sputtered. “We need some drastic moral therapy.”8

  THE GOOD TIMES rolled on. Darrow was adding to his near-perfect record of saving clients from the death penalty. If he could not persuade a judge or a jury he’d keep at it, and prevail with an appeal or a pardon.

  And so George Vogel, a cheap hood who shot a police sergeant in the back one night at Paddy the Bear’s saloon, escaped death row when Darrow persuaded the jury that his client acted in self-defense. When troubled Reinhold Faust was caught lighting a bomb in an opera house, an act that he believed would end America’s war with
Germany and convince a bank to give him $100,000, Darrow reached a deal with the prosecutors to get him psychiatric treatment. J. Ellsworth Griffin was acquitted, in one of the briefest murder trials in Cook County history, after Darrow argued that Griffin had, in a drunken argument, pulled the trigger while wrestling for a pistol with his business partner.

  In a case that spurred headlines across America, Darrow got the courts to rule that Emily Strutynsky was insane when she gunned down her parish priest at confession. She had knelt at her confessor’s feet in the guise of a penitent, pulled out her gun, shot him through the mouth, chased him around the altar, firing until he fell, and hurdled his body in her bid to escape before being tackled by two female parishioners. The congregation was making preparations to lynch her when the police arrived at the church. Darrow got her sent to an asylum. Four years later, she escaped the grounds, hurled herself into the Kankakee River, and drowned.

  In 1920, a gang of gunsels tried to rob the State Exchange Bank in Culver, Indiana. The townfolk responded and met the bandits with a volley of bullets. One Hoosier was fatally wounded in the shoot-out. Four robbers were caught, and charged with capital murder. Darrow agreed to defend them. The trial was conducted in rural Warsaw, where crowds flocked to the courthouse with picnic baskets. Men stood on stepladders to peer through the court windows, and there were fistfights over seats. “This is no vaudeville,” the judge lectured the spectators. “I never saw such a crazy crowd. You are completely off your base, people.”

  Darrow played the humanist. “These boys, not one of them intended to kill,” Darrow said. “They intended to rob. Their moral guilt is fixed by their intent.”

  The jury found them guilty but spared their lives. “I went down to a small town in Indiana to defend four young fellows who tried to get money out of a bank without having deposited any,” Darrow told Mary. “I worked ten days to save their lives—nothing else—and the jury did it—much to the regret of the whole community.”9

  ENDS GENERALLY OUTWEIGHED means in Chicago, and Darrow’s success returned him to high standing. For his sixty-first birthday, Darrow was given another banquet in his honor, by a far more prosperous and notable crowd than the preachers and radical lawyers who had welcomed him back from Los Angeles five years earlier.

  Carl Sandburg was among those who spoke. There was a “big honesty of shiftiness about Darrow,” said the poet, with the insight into the city and its sons that made him famous. “There are times when you cannot be right without being shifty. And this faculty of his, the power of being … everything in general and nothing in particular, just about hits him off.”

  Then the poet read a verse in tribute.

  Let the nanny-goats and the billy-goats of the shanty people eat the clover over my grave.

  And if yellow hair, or any blue smoke of flowers is good enough to grow over me, let the dirty-fisted children of the shanty people pick those flowers.

  I have had my chance to live with the people who have too much and the people who have too little, and I chose one of the two and I have told no man why.

  “On the whole the years have passed rapidly,” Darrow said when it came his time to speak. “So quickly have they sped that I hardly realize that so many have been checked off.” There was rheumatism to remind him, and “the Lord never seemed to know much about teeth,” Darrow said. A dentist had manufactured a complex bridge for him, he confided, with four false teeth. “These new ones do good work,” he said. “They never hurt me. I generally wear them in my pocket.…

  “The fact is, age does not necessarily bring wisdom; it may here and there bring caution, but not always that,” he told the crowd. Man’s awful cruelty dismayed him. Life’s meaninglessness saddened him. The sensualists had it right. “Neither the old nor the young can live long without pleasure … The denial of this is death or worse than death,” said Darrow. “I could never resist temptation … Why live without joy?”

  He closed on a serious note.

  “I have lived a life in the front trenches, looking for trouble,” he said. “The front trenches are disagreeable; they are hard; they are dangerous; it is only a question of days or hours when you are killed or wounded and taken back. But it is exciting. You are living; and if now and then you go back to rest, you think of your comrades in the fight; you hear the drum; you hear the cannon’s voice; you hear the bugle call; and you rush back to the trenches and to the thick of the fight. There, for a short time, you really live. It is hard, but it is life.

  “This is life … to play the game, to play the cards we get; play them uncomplainingly and play them to the end. The game may not be worth the while. The stakes may not be worth the winning. But the playing of the game is the forgetting of self, and we should be game sports and play it bravely to the end.”10

  MAURICE “MOSSY” ENRIGHT was one game sport who played it bravely to the end, which came on the night when, on the street in front of his home, he was riddled with bullets in a gangland slaying. Enright was a convicted murderer, labor racketeer, and union enforcer. His motto was “Spare the rod and you’ll spill the beans.”

  “Moss slugged and shot and intrigued his way into prominence where prominence comes hard,” the Daily News said. “But last night it was his turn … as he was stepping out of his new swell automobile to enter his new swell home for dinner.”

  Enright was a man of many friends—five thousand showed up for the gangland funeral—and enemies. When the police rounded up the “usual suspects,” the count exceeded fifty. Among those interrogated were Timothy “Big Tim” Murphy, former legislator, president of the gas workers union, and onetime Enright protégé; Michael “Dago Mike” Carozzo, the leader of the street sweepers’ union; and Vincenzo “Sunny Jim” Cosmano—all members of a labor faction that had been feuding with the deceased. Carozzo asked to remain in his cell when two hot-blooded women, both claiming to be his wife, and previously unknown to each other, arrived to bail him out. The police were fortunate when young James Vinci, paling at the sight of the noose, confessed to driving the murder car and named the three as the killers.

  Darrow knew them all. The Irish-born Enright was a union man who had worked, for a time, as an investigator for Erbstein. Murphy was an old friend of Mont Tennes and a veteran goon from the bone-breaking days of the Hearst circulation wars. Cosmano, who was named by Vinci as the triggerman, hired Darrow to serve as his lawyer. State’s attorney Hoyne’s chief foe was delay. Over time, witnesses in Chicago had a way of vanishing. And when Darrow kept asking for continuances (as he was then defending Lloyd and the local communists) the newspapers raged. But the courts agreed to the postponement and, sure enough, the witnesses went away. The big men were freed. Only Vinci was convicted of Mossy’s murder, and his conviction was overturned on appeal.

  The Enright assassination marked “the beginning of a new epoch in the evolution of the Chicago underworld,” the Tribune’s Philip Kinsley wrote. Ruthlessness had replaced honor. There were no “more or less courageous gun battles and fights in barrooms,” said Kinsley. “The scene shifts from this time on to the ways of the stealthy Sicilians, the hired gunmen who followed their victims for weeks, if necessary, shooting with sawed-off shotguns from automobiles into the back of an unsuspecting man.”

  Cosmano and Murphy prospered, but only for a time. Sunny Jim was shot in the gut in a tussle with Big Jim Colosimo’s gang, which in turn became (after Colosimo was gunned down one night in the lobby of his café) Johnny Torrio’s and Al Capone’s “Outfit.” And the tall, well-tailored Big Tim, though he seemed to live a charmed life, eventually met Mossy’s fate. He answered the door one night and was machine-gunned on the steps of his home at the age of forty-two, leaving a meager estate of $1,000. “He had always been a good spender,” his widow sighed philosophically.11

  IN JANUARY 1920, the good people triumphed, and the United States began its thirteen-year experiment with Prohibition. Darrow had opposed the temperance movement for decades, as a matter of good business,
since he represented various beer and liquor interests, and conviction, as an intrusion on personal freedom. “A man would be better off without booze, but the same is true of pie,” he told audiences.

  The ban on alcoholic beverages was supposed to correct human behavior and curb crime. It did just the opposite. Speakeasies flourished, smugglers made fortunes, people kept drinking, and Americans lost respect for law. The trade in illicit liquor was staggeringly lucrative, sustaining organized crime and breeding crops of gangsters who stippled the streets with gunfire. “You can hardly be surprised at the boys killing each other. The business pays very well, but it is outside the law and they can’t go to court like shoe dealers or real estate men or grocers when they think an injustice has been done them or unfair competition has arisen in their territory,” Darrow said. “So they shoot.”

  Given his philosophical leanings, Darrow had no qualms about defending the bootleggers—even killers like Bugs Moran, Frank McErlane, Terry Druggan, Frankie Lake, George “Red” Barker, and William “Three-fingered Jack” White. But his willingness to serve such villains dismayed his admirers. He was called a “pitiable spectacle” by federal judge Evan Evans, who said that the “dangling purse” of the rumrunners had ruined a great lawyer.

  Darrow suffered defeat in the trial of Michael “Mike de Pike” Heitler and his confederates, who were convicted of buying some of the remaining stock of proscribed bourbon from the Old Grand Dad distillery, selling it to speakeasies in Chicago, and having corrupt friends on the police force steal it back in bogus “raids.” His next clients were more respectable—wealthy Chicagoans who were offered the leftover inventory of the Grommes & Ullrich distillery if they purchased “shares” in the business. Several bought hundreds of cases for their basements. “Your honor, a bootlegger is one who professionally buys or sells liquor,” Darrow told the judge. “The defendants … were not professionals.” Hoarding liquor was a universal custom for those who liked a snort. “Don’t you know that hundreds of Chicago families have as much as $30,000 or $40,000 worth of liquor in their cellars?” Darrow asked. None of the defendants was convicted.12