American Pharaoh (44 page)

Now that he had taken himself out of the running, Daley needed a candidate for governor. County judge Otto Kerner had made
an impression two years earlier, when he had run strongly, and even carried the Cook County suburbs. Equally important, Kerner
was that rare breed, a Protestant with strong ties to the Chicago machine. If Kennedy were at the top of the ticket, Kerner
would provide the ethnic balance necessary to hold on to the Protestant vote. When the slate-making committee convened at
the Morrison Hotel in early January, Kerner was officially slated for governor. For clerk of the Municipal Court, Daley tapped
Joseph McDonough, son of his old 11th Ward patron. It was an obscure position, but one that was vitally important to the machine
because of the number of patronage positions it controlled. Daley could trust McDonough. The other critical race was state’s
attorney. Daley’s old nemesis, Benjamin Adamowski, had been the top Cook County prosecutor for the past four years, and he
had been using the position as a battering ram against Daley and the machine. If he was reelected, it would mean four more
years of allegations and investigations — and the odds were good that he would use the office as a platform to run for mayor
against Daley in 1963. It is an indication of just how seriously Daley took the race that he reached outside the ranks of
the machine to select a candidate of unimpeachable qualifications and reputation. Daniel Ward, dean of DePaul University Law
School, was this year’s Paul Douglas or Adlai Stevenson — the machine candidate designed to make voters forget what they didn’t
like about the machine. Adamowski saw just what Daley was up to in selecting Ward, and at every opportunity he told voters
that his real opponent was not Ward, but Daley and the machine. In the course of the campaign, he actually challenged Daley
— not Ward — to debate him. “Daley should quit sitting back being the Edgar Bergen of the Democratic organization, with his
Charley McCarthys out there in front making the statements coming out of his mouth,” Adamowski said.
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There is no good time for a mayor to be hit with a massive police scandal, but the timing of the Summerdale scandal was particularly
unfortunate. Just as Daley was gearing up for a big election year, Chicagoans learned that their policemen were engaged in
the ultimate betrayal of their positions. Corruption in the Chicago police department was certainly nothing new. One history
of the Chicago police starts out by noting that “scandal, disgrace, and rampant political corruption characterized the administration
of the Chicago Police Department for 100 years.” In fact, most Chicagoans looked on police corruption as a bit of odd local
color. As columnist Mike Royko once observed, “The Chicago River is polluted, the factories belch smoke, the Cubs are the
North Side team, the Sox are the South Side team, George Halas owns the Bears, and the cops are crooked — so what else is
new?” Chicagoans learned before they were old enough to drive that the way to beat a speeding ticket was to wrap their driver’s
license in a five-or a ten-dollar bill when they handed it to the patrolman. Comedian Mort Sahl once observed that the question
of whether it was to be five dollars or ten made Chicago’s highways the last outpost of collective bargaining in America.
Nor was it any great secret that the syndicate, policy wheel operators, drug dealers, and pimps had all worked out their accommodations
with the police department — often with Democratic ward committeemen and precinct captains acting as intermediaries. Daley
knew these facts of life in Chicago better than most: many of his Bridgeport neighbors, and members of both his family and
Sis’s, were on the police force. Daley likely shared the prevailing view in Bridgeport that a modest level of payoffs was
part of what Chicago police recruits bargained for when they signed on, and that many policemen needed the money to support
large families. In fact, Daley had been elected in large part because of his willingness to tolerate flawed law enforcement.
Dawson and the black submachine had pushed Mayor Kennelly out of City Hall for ignoring the Chicago tradition of keeping the
heat off politically protected policy wheels and illegal jitney cabs.
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Even to Chicagoans raised on police corruption, the news that broke in January 1960 came as a shock. Richard Morrison, a twenty-three-year-old
burglar in police custody and awaiting trial, revealed that he had been helped in his criminal exploits by twelve officers
from the Summerdale police district on the city’s North Side. Morrison, whom the newspapers quickly dubbed the “babbling burglar,”
delivered up a seventy-seven-page confession in which he recounted how for a period of almost two years his police accomplices
had helped him steal from local shops, using squad cars to take the goods to be fenced. Incredible charges, but they seemed
to be confirmed when investigators raided the policemen’s homes and found four truckloads of stolen merchandise. Daley had
been on vacation in Florida when the scandal broke, but he came back early to pronounce it “the most shocking and disgraceful
incident in the history of the Chicago Police Department.” The newspapers eagerly pointed out that crime statistics from the
Summerdale district indicated that burglaries in the area where the police burglary ring operated were up 48 percent in the
first nine months of the year. Daley acted quickly to contain the political damage. He met with police commissioner O’Connor,
who announced that he was taking personal charge of the investigation. O’Connor began questioning 130 policemen from the Summerdale
district, and Daley assured the public that “every police officer — every other person who is in any way involved in these
crimes and betrayal of the public trust — will be investigated and brought before the civil service board and prosecuted in
the courts if the facts so warrant.”
¹³

The real danger posed by the Summerdale scandal was not the burglary ring itself, though that was plenty embarrassing. It
was that the investigation threatened to open the lid on how policing and politics had mixed during Daley’s five years as
mayor. Reports of other police malfeasance quickly surfaced. Another police robbery ring was uncovered in the North Damen
Avenue station. And in another case that received lavish press attention, two burglars in Joliet Prison for stealing $1 million
in furs and jewels said that they had bribed policemen with payments of up to $1,000 in an attempt to beat the charges. They
reported that they gave one $1,000 bribe to a detective who helped disguise the suspect’s hairdo and gave him horn-rimmed
glasses so a witness would not recognize him at a police lineup. Most damaging of all were allegations that Daley had personally
imposed machine politics on the police department. Jack Muller, an outspoken detective who prided himself on his political
independence, charged that Daley was “completely responsible for the scandal which is bringing shame to Chicago’s police department.”
The truth was, he said, that O’Connor was “a commissioner in name only.” Daley promoted men up the police hierarchy whom O’Connor
did not want elevated, Muller said, and prevented O’Connor from disciplining officers who had “political clout.” Muller also
invoked Daley’s dismantling of the Scotland Yard division after his election. Sheriff Joseph Lohman, a onetime Daley protégé,
also came forward to accuse Daley and the machine of intruding themselves on his office. Lohman asserted that Daley had asked
him to appoint a ward committeeman from the 18th Ward as a chief deputy in the sheriff ’s office. Lohman had refused to go
along. “This man was working in the Department of Sewers,” he said, and “he was not qualified to do police work.” Lohman warned
that the Chicago Police Department had to be “freed from clout and the captains’ aunties,” Chicago slang for a politician
who protects a policeman. The Republicans lost no time in putting the scandal to partisan advantage. Governor Stratton held
a press conference in his Chicago office, across the street from City Hall, and threatened to step in and take over the Chicago
Police Department unless Daley “stops laughing and cleans up the mess himself — quickly.” To underscore the Republican theme
that the machine and city government were overly intertwined, Stratton demanded that Daley step down as party chairman to
devote himself more fully to addressing the police crisis.
¹⁴

The Summerdale charges were dangerous because they played into people’s worst fears about Daley. When he first ran for mayor,
his critics had attacked him as the candidate of the “hoodlum element,” and it now appeared that they were right. The scandal
also threatened to make a mockery of Daley’s frequently repeated claims that he had improved city services. It would not matter
how many garbage cans or streetlights he added if most Chicagoans believed that their local police were in league with criminals.
The more he became the focus of the scandal, the more irate Daley became. At a press conference, he turned on a photographer
who was trying to take his picture. “Let’s not have this sort of thing while I’m talking,” he shouted. “I’ll not have the
mayor’s office turned into a circus or hippodrome.” In a rant directed at the entire City Hall press corps, Daley yelled,
“There are even crooked reporters, and I can spit on some of them right here!”
¹⁵

One reason Daley was so tense was that Adamowski appeared to have gained the upper hand in the scandal. Daley had tried to
put the matter in Irwin Cohen’s hands, but Adamowski responded that he would charge both Daley and Cohen with obstruction
of justice if Cohen didn’t “stop sticking his nose into this investigation.” Daley realized it was time for more dramatic
action. As the then police commissioner, Tim O’Connor, put it, “Somebody has to be the sucker and it could be me.” In fact,
Daley was soon announcing at a press conference that O’Connor had resigned because of gall bladder problems. And Daley was
careful to lay the blame for the troubles at O’Connor’s feet. “Tim was always telling me how he went home at night and watched
TV instead of running around getting into trouble,” Daley said. “I should have asked him why he wasn’t running around checking
on his policemen at night instead of sitting home watching TV.” Daley appointed an acting commissioner, and a search committee
to look for a permanent replacement. Once again, he employed his favorite damage-control tactic: drafting someone of unquestioned
integrity, ideally an academic, to make it go away. Daley’s choice to head up his search committee was Orlando W. Wilson,
dean of the criminology school at the University of California, and author of
Police Administration,
a leading criminology textbook. Daley also named his old crony William McFetridge, vice president of the Chicago Federation
of Labor, to the committee to keep an eye on Wilson.
¹⁶

The Wilson committee met in executive session for twenty-eight days at the University Club. It considered ninety candidates
for commissioner, and interviewed fifty-three. It was an indication of just how bad things were in the department that when
the committee asked the twenty-four current members that it interviewed what percentage of Chicago police they believed were
dishonest, the estimates ran well over 50 percent. While the committee went about its work, Daley reported that he was getting
a “tremendous amount” of mail, and that the letters were running 6–1 in his favor. But when reporters asked to see them, press
secretary Earl Bush refused, saying they were “letters to the mayor and aren’t meant for publication.” On February 22, the
committee settled on its choice for Chicago’s next police commissioner. “We suddenly realized on Sunday night that the best
qualified man for the job was the chairman of our committee,” said Franklin Kreml, vice chairman of the committee. The idea
had been McFetridge’s, and it was clear he was acting for Daley.
¹⁷

Wilson was a brilliant choice. A native of Veblen, South Dakota, he was described by the
New York Times
in an admiring profile as “lean, hard-boiled, soft-talking [and] scholarly-appearing.” Wilson had a distinguished academic
record, but he had also served as a patrolman on the Berkeley police force, and as police chief of Wichita, Kansas, where
the mayor had called him “too damned efficient.” As an outsider to Chicago, he could not easily be attacked as a machine hack
or a defender of the status quo. Governor Stratton took a break from his criticism of Daley long enough to declare that Wilson
“has a good reputation and should be given an opportunity to do a good job.” Adamowski was more skeptical. He told a luncheon
of Republican women that “Daley is holding this respected man up as a facade while they try to sweep the whole mess under
the rug.” If the department were ever run honestly, he charged, it would mean the “virtual destruction of the Democratic political
machine.” Adamowski tried unsuccessfully to block Wilson’s appointment on procedural grounds. The thin-skinned Daley was becoming
testy under the constant criticism. In Springfield to oppose a bill to reform the Chicago Police Department, Daley lashed
out at a Republican legislator from Aurora, Illinois, who asked if there was any corruption in the department that had not
yet come to light. “I assume if you look closely enough you’ll find dishonest policemen in Aurora,” Daley retorted. Then,
drawing on his own service in the Illinois legislature, he added acerbically, “I can’t attest to the honesty in this room.”
¹⁸

Before the Summerdale scandal was over, eight Chicago policemen were sent to jail. Hundreds more officers submitted to lie-detector
tests, and those who refused were suspended. When he arrived on the scene, Wilson shook up the Chicago Police Department staff,
and soon the Summerdale scandal receded from the headlines. Unfortunately for Daley, it was quickly replaced by a new scandal
over “loafing” city workers. The city was forced to suspend forty-four employees from the Bureau of Electricity for putting
in for bogus overtime work. Making matters worse, the fraudulent overtime reports were all prepared by a timekeeper with syndicate
ties, who had once run a large West Side betting parlor. The newspapers had caught the man weeks earlier running his grocery
and meat market when he was supposed to be installing traffic lights near Midway Airport. The newspapers were also reporting
that city asphalt crews routinely idled on the job sites or at nearby taverns for the last hour or two of their shifts, claiming
they could not get asphalt delivered late in the day. The articles were accompanied by photographs of sewer gangs idling and
napping at their work sites. Reporters investigating one foreman found that on three separate workdays he was hanging out
in a North Side tavern shooting pool and drinking beer when he was supposed to be supervising a fifteen-man Water Department
gang. They also discovered that he was operating a $3 million oil and gas business on city time. Daley responded that the
foreman in question was a good worker, and that every time the city checked up on him he had been on the job. The complaints
against him came from his competitors in the oil business, Daley insisted. In a concession to the criticism, though, Daley
said that in the future the sewer foreman would not be permitted to use a city worker as a chauffeur for his air-conditioned
Cadillac.
¹⁹