and that he had sold a lot of stock at huge profits just before the market crash.
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Lingle had been a valued asset to the
Chicago Tribune
because he had friends on both sides of the law. He was able to get stories from the Capones, from Bugs Moran's North Siders and from the police. Indeed, he was considered so close to Russell that he became known as "Chicago's unofficial chief of police."
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On the day of his murder, Lingle informed his editor he was going to try to contact Bugs Moran about a gang war story. He didn't try very hard, instead heading down Randolph to catch a train to Washington Park racetrack. With a racing form under his arm, Lingle was puffing a cigar as he headed through the pedestrian street tunnel. A snappily dressed young man worked his way through the crowd behind Lingle. Without a word the young man leveled a revolver to the reporter's head and squeezed the trigger. Lingle pitched forward dead, his cigar still in his mouth, the racing form still under his arm.
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Lingle became an instant national folk hero. Rewards for collaring his murderer totaling $55,725 were posted by Chicago newspapers and other civic groups. Harry Chandler of the
Los Angeles Times
, president of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association, eulogized Lingle as a "first line soldier."
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Unfortunately, Lingle's image could not hold up to even the most cursory investigation. Lingle's role as a master fixer was soon evident, and it also developed he had secret partnerships with some of the local brothel keepers who cut him in on their business to silence him. There was considerable evidence he had doublecrossed Capone in various illegal deals and was shaking down a number of Capone's followers. Lingle had also promised favors to many political leaders, apparently for hefty payoffs, and then failed to come through for them.
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When the facts about him started surfacing,
Tribune
publisher Colonel Robert McCormick alternated between shock and anger as competitor newspapers crucified the late star reporter. In a counterattack, he editorialized, "There are weak men on other newspapers." He set out to prove it by running a 10-part series by a St. Louis reporter, Harry T. Brundige, that named some other errant scribes. One was Julius Rosenheim, a legman for the
Chicago Daily News
, who had been shot to death by gangsters a few months earlier. He had blackmailed bootleggers, brothel keepers and gamblers by threatening to write stories about them in his paper.
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There were many others; some worked with Capone, others with the North Side Gang and still others immunely operated their own rackets.
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McCormick didn't give up hope of removing some of the taint to his man Lingle; he assigned reporters to dig through probate court records to prove that Lingle had, indeed, inherited much of his wealth. Sadly, it turned out that Lingle did not get $50,000 or $160,000 from his father's estate, but a piddling $500.
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Four months later the
Tribune
could report, no doubt with considerable relief, that the police had charged one Leo V. Brothers with the murder. Brothers, alias Leo Bader and "Buster," an accomplished arsonist, bomber, robber and murderer, was imported, the story went, from St. Louis to handle the Lingle hit. Brothers was convicted on the basis of eyewitness identification and drew a 14-year sentence, which was denounced by most newspapers as a ludicrously light punishment and indicative of powerful forces working in Brothers's behalf. Brothers, penniless, had managed to enlist a high-pressure, high-priced defense team of five legal experts, a fact that spurred considerable speculation that Brothers had been recruited to "take the fall" and so defuse public concern about the case. When Brothers heard his sentence, he smirked, ''I can do that standing on my head."
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As it turned out, he only had to stand on his head for eight years, whereupon he faded away. Until his death in 1951, Brothers remained silent about who had covered the bill for his legal defense. And to his grave he took the secret of who killed Jake Lingle, the "world's richest reporter."
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See also:
Brothers, Leo Vincent
.
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Little Joe: Mafia execution signature
Four bullets in the head, each in two straight rows, or two deucesin dice game parlance, this is called "Little Joe." In the Mafia world of murders, this is the execution method for welshers, loan shark debtors, and others who have failed to deliver. (When a loan shark victim is so dispatched, the mob enforcers make sure that all other debtors to the mob know the meaning of Little Joe. The system works more effectively than methods devised by collection agencies.)
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Perhaps the best-known Little Joe victims were Charley Binaggio and his number-one aide and muscleman Charley Gargotta. In the late 1940s Binaggio was the political and crime boss of Kansas City, Missouri, having effectively wrested power from Jim Pendergast, the rather ineffective nephew and successor of the deceased and infamous political boss, Tom Pendergast.
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A man of limitless ambition, Binaggio looked to achieve complete power in the state by getting his own man into the governorship. That required money and Binaggio got $200,000 from "mobsters in the east," meaning primarily the Chicago Outfit. For that sum Binaggio promised he would see to it that both Kansas City and St. Louis were thrown "wide open" to syndicate operations, especially gambling.
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