The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes by Roger Wilkes Read Free Book Online

personal friendships included the highest police officials and the contacts of his work made him familiar to most of the big and little fellows of gangland. What made him valuable to his newspaper marked him as dangerous to the killers.
    “It was very foolish ever to think that assassination would be confined to the gangs who have fought each other for the profits of crime in Chicago. The immunity from punishment after gang murders would be assumed to cover the committing of others. Citizens who interfered with the criminals were no better protected than the gangmen who fought each other for the revenue from liquor selling, coercion of labour and trade, brothel-house keeping and gambling.
    “There have been eleven gang murders in ten days. That has become the accepted course of crime in its natural stride, but to the list of Colosimo, O’Banion, the Gennas, Murphy, Weiss, Lombardo, Esposito, the seven who were killed in the St Valentine’s Day massacre, the name is added of a man whose business was to expose the work of the killers.
    “The Tribune accepts this challenge. It is war. There will be casualties, but that is to be expected, it being war. The Tribune has the support of all the other Chicago newspapers . . . The challenge of crime to the community must be accepted. It has been given with bravado. It is accepted and we’ll see what the consequences are to be. Justice will make a fight of it or it will abdicate.”
    Police Commissioner Russell was galvanized into at least making a statement. It went colourfully: “I have given orders to the five Deputy Police Commissioners to make this town so quiet that you will be able to hear a consumptive canary cough,” but he added, as a preliminary explanation for any further action: “Of course, most of the underworld has scuttled off to hiding-places. It will be hard to find them, but we will never rest until the criminals are caught and Chicago is free of them for ever.” An editorial next day remarked bleakly: “These gangs have run the town for many months and have strewn the streets with the lacerated bodies of their victims. Commissioner Russell and Deputy-Commissioner Stege have had their opportunity to break up these criminal gangs, who make the streets hideous with bleeding corpses. They have failed.” Instantly Russell replied: “My conscience is clear. All I ask is that the city will sit tight and see what is going to happen.”
    All that actually happened was that Russell and Stege, in the words of a newspaper, “staged a mock heroic battle with crime by arresting every dirty-necked ragamuffin on the street corners, but carefully abstained from taking into custody any of the men who matter”. Meanwhile some of the blanks that until now had remained gaping oddly in the accounts of Lingle’s character and circumstances began to be sketched in.
    It is fair to infer that up to then the Tribune management was genuinely unaware of them. Some of the facts that had so far remained unmentioned were that he had been tagged the “unofficial Chief of Police”; that he had himself hinted that it was he who had fixed the price of beer in Chicago; that he was an intimate friend of Capone and had stayed with him at his Florida estate; that when he died he was wearing one of Capone’s gift diamond-studded belts, which had come to be accepted as the insignia of the Knights of the Round Table of that place and period; that he was improbably maty, for a newspaperman of his lowly status, with millionaire businessmen, judges and county and city officials; that he spent golfing holidays and shared stock market ventures with the Commissioner of Police.
    By the time a week had passed certain reservations were beginning to temper the Tribune ’s anger. It is apparent that more details of Lingle’s extramural life were emerging. On 18 June there appeared another leading article, entitled “ THE LINGLE INVESTIGATION GOES ON ”. In this the Tribune betrayed a flicker of