The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (5 page)

In England, there is also the long-established rule (in
Phipson
on
Evidence
) regarding evidence as to propensity. Evidence may not be given that the defendant “has a disposition to commit crimes of that kind”, in other words that he is the sort of man who might have been capable of committing the crime with which he is charged.

It is doubtful whether Mr Britton would have been called to give evidence. Britton’s contribution to the search for the killers of little James Bulger in Bootle consisted, according to the police, in assuring them that no adult was involved in the murder. He proved to be right. But since no adult, except a retarded one, would have covered the body with bricks or stuffed batteries in the boy’s mouth, the reasoning that children might be responsible was not a complicated one.

(Jake Lingle, 1930)

Kenneth Allsop

No one knows who shot
“Jake” Lingle dead. But there were strong suspicions that Chicago’s supreme ganglord Al Capone ordered Lingle’s murder. Lingle followed the hazardous calling of crime reporter, covering the Chicago gang wars that disfigured the Prohibition years of the late 1920s. His assassination, on a summer’s day in 1930, was bruited as an outrage even in a city accustomed to violent death. At first, the killing was written off as an act of retaliation by gangsters against an honest $65-a-week reporter. But when investigators scrutinized Lingle’s lifestyle, they found evidence linking him to both the city’s police chief and Capone himself. Federal agents probing Capone’s tax affairs discovered that Lingle’s annual income amounted to some $60,000, and that the humble journalistic drudge was living the life of a millionaire, complete with holiday homes, chauffeured limousine and a permanent suite at a Chicago hotel. Investigators had made an appointment to interview Lingle the day after the murder. One theory holds that Capone feared Lingle might betray him to the tax agents, since (not being a gangster himself) he did not consider himself bound by the underworld’s code of silence. Kenneth Allsop (1920–73) unravels the mystery in his panoramic survey of Chicago’s bootleggers. A prolific writer, Allsop was best known in Britain as a television journalist. In the 1960s he was a reporter on the BBC’s
Tonight
programme, and regularly anchored the nightly current affairs show
24 Hours.

On Monday, 9 June 1930 Alfred J. (“Jake”) Lingle, a thirty-eight-year-old crime reporter on the Chicago
Tribune
, was shot to death while walking, smoking a cigar and reading the racing news in a crowded underpass at Randolph and Michigan during the lunch hour. A noteworthy detail in the plot was that one of Lingle’s killers was apparently dressed as a parson.

His death created a furore, the parallel of which it is difficult to imagine in Britain. An American reporter—that is, a reporter on the general news-gathering staff, a position which has a different connotation from the British title, for the American reporter may be merely a leg-man, a fact-gatherer who telephones in his information to a desk re-write man—is not startlingly well paid. Yet he has a place in public regard, a compound of glamour, respect and authority, that has no counterpart in Britain. The murder of Lingle instantly assumed the importance and gravity that had attached to the murder of McSwiggin and other police and Federal officials—and, as in the case of McSwiggin, it was an uprush of moral indignation that plunged in as precipitous a slump of disillusionment.

Lingle’s duties on the police beat for the
Tribune
earned him sixty-five dollars a week, a poor sum. He had never had a by-line in the paper; his name was unknown to its readers. Posthumously, when his name was famous (and fast becoming notorious), he was revealed to have had an income of $60,000 a year. He owned a chauffeur-driven Lincoln limousine. He had just bought a $16,000 house at Long Beach, on the Michigan Riviera, where his wife and two children, Buddy (six) and Pansy (five) were to spend the summer months. He had recently taken a suite of rooms at the Stevens, one of Chicago’s most stylish hotels. He was an addicted gambler at horse and greyhound tracks. All this was known in a general manner among his colleagues, and the discrepancy between his meagre newspaper salary and his lavish spending was understood to be possible because of a big legacy he had received.

On the day of his death he was on the way to the races. He left his wife packing for her departure to the lake. He himself was that afternoon to go to the meeting at Washington Park, Homewood. Another significant point about that day, 9 June, was that the Sheridan Wave Tournament Club, a society gambling parlour at 621 Waveland Avenue, where the champagne, whisky and food was distributed with the managements’s compliments during play, was to reopen that evening, an event of some interest to Lingle.

Retrospectively, it seems certain that Lingle knew he was in trouble. Attorney Louis B. Piquett, former City Prosecutor, later volunteered to tell the police that twenty-four hours before Lingle’s death he had met Lingle in the Loop. They stood on Randolph Street talking of the discovery of Red McLaughlin’s body from the canal. Lingle was giving Piquett his theory of the killing when “a blue sedan with two men in it stopped at the kerb alongside us. Lingle stopped in the middle of a sentence, looked up at the two men in a startled way and they looked back at him. He apparently had forgotten what he had been saying for he turned suddenly, walked back the way he had come, hurriedly said ‘Goodbye’, and entered a store as quickly as he could.” And again on the day of his murder, after lunching at the Sherman Hotel he met Sergeant Thomas Alcock, of the Detective Bureau, in the lobby and told him: “I’m being tailed.”

He was. After buying cigars at the Sherman kiosk, he walked the four blocks to Michigan Avenue to catch the one-thirty p.m. train for the Washington Park race-track, and descended the pedestrian subway to enter the Illinois Central suburban electric railway in Grant Park. At any time of day the subway is as busy a channel as the killers could have chosen, and at lunchtime on this Monday it was swirling with two opposite streams of shoppers and office workers.

A strange aspect of what followed is Lingle’s apparent unconcern. He knew he was being followed, and a man of his experience must have known that there was only one purpose in that. Yet, on the evidence of witnesses, he arrived at the entrance to the subway walking between two men. One had blond hair and wore a straw boater and a grey suit. The other was dark in a blue suit. At the entrance Lingle paused and bought a racing edition of an evening paper, and as he did so a roadster swung into the kerb on the south side of Randolph Street and blew its horn to attract Lingle’s attention. One of the men in the car called out: “Play Hy Schneider in the third!” According to Armour Lapansee, a Yellow Cab superintendent who overheard the exchange, Lingle grinned, waved his hand and called back “I’ve got him”.

Lingle walked on into the subway. He was seen by Dr Joseph Springer, a former coroner’s physician and a long-standing acquaintance. “Lingle didn’t see me,” Springer stated. “He was reading the race information. He was holding it before him with both hands and smoking a cigar.”

Lingle had almost reached the end of the subway. He came abreast of the newsstand twenty-five feet short of the east exit, and the dark man who had been walking at his side diverted as if to buy a paper. As he did, the blond man dropped behind Lingle, levelled his left hand which held a snub-barrelled .38 Colt—known, cosily, among police and mobsters as a belly-gun—and fired a single bullet upward into Lingle’s neck, which penetrated the brain and left the forehead. He fell forward, cigar still clenched between his teeth, newspaper still in his hands.

Throwing away the gun, the blond killer ran forward into the crowds, then doubled back past Lingle’s body and out up the eastern staircase. He jumped a fence, changed his mind again, ran west into Randolph Street, through a passage—where he threw away a left-hand silk glove presumably worn to guard against fingerprints—and, pursued by a policeman, ran into Wabash Avenue, where he escaped into the crowds.

Meanwhile in the subway, a Mr Patrick Campbell saw the dark-haired accomplice hurrying towards the west exit. He went to intercept him, but his movement was blocked by a priest who bumped into him. Campbell said: “What’s the matter?” and the priest replied: “I think someone has been shot. I’m getting out of here.”

Later Lieutenant William Cusick, of the Detective Bureau, commented brusquely: “He was no priest. A priest would never do that. He would have gone to the side of the stricken person.”

The pattern pieced together. It seemed clear that Lingle had walked into a trap formed by perhaps a dozen men. But what was never put forward as a theory, and which seems the likeliest explanation of his meek and unhesitating advance into the trap, was that, during his progress along the pavement, down the stairs and along the subway between two men, he was being nudged along by a gun hidden in a jacket pocket, under orders to walk naturally and keep reading the paper.

That evening Colonel Robert R. McCormick, proprietor of the Chicago
Tribune
, summoned his news staff together and addressed them on the death of a reporter whom he had never seen and whose name he had never before heard. Pasley, who was there, says he talked for forty-five minutes and pledged himself to solve the crime. Next morning the front page scowled with an eight-column banner headline announcing the sudden end of Lingle. The story read: “Alfred J. Lingle, better known in his world of newspaper work as Jake Lingle, and for the last eighteen years a reporter on the
Tribune
, was shot to death yesterday in the Illinois Central subway at the east side of Michigan Boulevard, at Randolph Street.

“The
Tribune
offers $25,000 as a reward for information which will lead to the conviction of the slayer or slayers. An additional reward of $5,000 was announced by
The
Chicago
Evening
Post
, making a total of $30,000.”

Next morning the Hearst Chicago
Herald
and
Examiner
also offered a $25,000 reward, bringing up the total to $55,000.

McCormick continued to take Lingle’s death as an affront to him personally and a smack at the press which transcended in seriousness all the other hundreds of cases of physical violence and the network of nefariousness. Two days later the
Tribune
carried an editorial headed “
THE CHALLENGE
” which read:

“The meaning of this murder is plain. It was committed in reprisal and in attempt at intimidation. Mr Lingle was a police reporter and an exceptionally well-informed one. His 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.