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

the inquiry have been much altered. The crime and the criminals remain, and they are the concern of the Tribune as they are of the decent elements in Chicago . . .
    “If the Tribune was concerned when it thought that an attack had been made upon it because it was inimical to crime, it is doubly concerned if it be the fact that crime had made a connexion in its own office . . . That Alfred Lingle is not a soldier dead in the discharge of duty is unfortunate considering that he is dead. It is of no consequence to an inquiry determined to discover why he was killed, by whom he was killed and with what attendant circumstances. Tribune readers may be assured that their newspaper has no intention of concealing the least fact of this murder and its consequences and meanings. The purpose is to catch the murderers . . .
    “The murder of this reporter, even for racketeering reasons, as the evidence indicates it might have been, made a breach in the wall which criminality has so long maintained about its operations here. Some time, somewhere there will be a hole found or made and the Lingle murder may prove to be it. The Tribune will work at its case upon this presumption and with this hope. It has gone into the cause in this fashion and its notice to gangland is that it is in for duration. Kismet.”
    Kismet, indeed. For during this revisionary interim McCormick’s investigators and the police had uncovered transactions of a ramification that could not have been anticipated in the affairs of a slum-boy baseball semi-professional who had wormed his way into bottom grade journalism. Lingle’s biography, in fact, accords with the career of any under-privileged opportunist who finds in the gang a reward for endeavour. His first job after leaving a West Jackson Boulevard elementary school was as office boy in a surgical supply house, from where, in 1912, he went as office boy at the Tribune . He was at the same time playing semi-professional baseball, and met at the games Bill Russell, a police patrolman, with whom he struck up a friendship, and who, as he progressed through a sergeantcy upward to deputy commissionership, was a valuable aid to Lingle in the police-beat feed work he was now doing for the Tribune . Pasley, who worked on the Tribune with him during the twenties, has described Lingle’s relationship with the police and the underworld: “His right hand would go up to the left breast pocket of his coat for a cigar. There was a cigar for every greeting. They were a two-for-a-nickel brand and Lingle smoked them himself. He knew all the coppers by their first names. He spent his spare time among them. He went to their wakes and funerals; their weddings and christenings. They were his heroes. A lawyer explained him: ‘As a kid he was cop struck, as another kid might be stage struck.’ The police station was his prep school and college. He matured, and his point of view developed, in the stodgy, fetid atmosphere of the cell block and the squad-room. Chicago’s forty-one police stations are vile places, considered either aesthetically or hygienically. I doubt if a modern farmer would use the majority of them for cow-sheds. Yet the civic patriots put their fledgling blue-coats in them, and expect them to preserve their self-respect and departmental morale.
    “In this prep school and college, Lingle learned a great deal the ordinary citizen may, or may not, suspect. He learned that sergeants, lieutenants, and captains know every hand-book, every gambling den, every dive, every beer flat and saloon on their districts, that a word from the captain when the heat is on will close any district tighter than a Scotsman’s pocket in five minutes, that they know which joint owners have ‘a friend in the hall or county’, and which haven’t. Few haven’t. He learned that the Chicago police department is politics-ridden.”
    Pasley’s view is that Lingle’s undoing was gambling—“he was a gambling fool”. He never bet less than