The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE SHORT, SWEET MARTYRDOM OF JAKE LINGLE by 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 TheChicagoEveningPost, making a total of $30,000.”

Next morning the Hearst Chicago HeraldandExaminer 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.

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 uneasiness about the character of its martyr. “We do not know why this reporter was killed,” it admitted, “but we are engaged in finding out and we expect to be successful. It may take time; the quicker the better, but this enlistment is for duration. It may require long, patient efforts, but the Tribune is prepared for that, and hopes that some lasting results will be obtained which will stamp justice on the face of the crime.” To endorse its new crusading resolution, two days later the Tribune added to its Platform for Chicagoland on the masthead of its centre page “END THE REIGN OF GANGDOM”. Appended was an explanatory editorial: “The killers, the racketeers who exact tribute from businessmen and union labour, the politicians who use and shield the racketeers, the policemen and judges who have been prostituted by politicians, all must go.”

Ten days elapsed, and there had obviously been some concentrated rethinking by McCormick and his editorial executives. The word-of-mouth buzz about Lingle’s background and liaisons that was meanwhile racing around Chicago, supported by somewhat less reverent stories in other newspapers, evidently induced the Tribune to take a revised, frank, let’s-face-it attitude. On 30 June a column-and-a-half editorial was published. Under the heading “THE LINGLE MURDER”, it read: “When Alfred Lingle was murdered the motive seemed to be apparent… His newspaper saw no other explanation than that his killers either thought he was close to information dangerous to them or intended the murder as notice given the newspapers that crime was ruler in Chicago. It could be both, a murder to prevent a disclosure and to give warning against attempts at others.

“It had been expected that in due time the reprisals which have killed gangster after gangster in the city would be attempted against any other persons or agencies which undertook to interfere with the incredibly profitable criminality. No one had been punished for any of these murders. They have been bizarre beyond belief, and, being undetected, have been assumed, not least by their perpetrators, to be undetectable-at least not to be punishable.

“When, then, Lingle was shot by an assassin the Tribune assumed that the criminals had taken the next logical step and were beginning their attack upon newspaper exposure. The HeraldandExaminer and the ChicagoEveningPost joined the Tribune in offering rewards for evidence which would lead to conviction of the murderers. The newspaper publishers met and made a common cause against the new tactics of gangland. The preliminary investigation has modified some of the first assumptions, although it has not given the situation a different essence.

“Alfred Lingle now takes a different character, one in which he was unknown to the management of the Tribune when he was alive. He is dead and cannot defend himself, but many facts now revealed must be accepted as eloquent against him. He was not, and he could not have been a great reporter. His ability did not contain these possibilities. He did not write stories, but he could get information in police circles. He was not and he could not be influential in the acts of his newspaper, but he could be useful and honest, and that is what the Tribune management took him to be. His salary was commensurate with his work. The reasonable appearance against Lingle now is that he was accepted in the world of politics and crime for something undreamed of in his office, and that he used this in his undertakings which made him money and brought him to his death…

“There are weak men on other newspapers and in other professions, in positions of trust and responsibility greater than that of Alfred Lingle. The Tribune, although naturally disturbed by the discovery that this reporter was engaged in practices contrary to the code of its honest reporters and abhorred by the policy of the newspaper, does not find that the main objectives of 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 $100 on a horse, and often $1,000. In 1921, when he was earning only fifty dollars a week, he took a trip to Cuba and came back loaded with gifts for his friends and colleagues, including egret plumes then coveted by women for hat decorations. His big spending and general prodigal way of life began to attract comment, and he gave it to be understood that he had just inherited $50,000 under his father’s will (examination of the probate court records in June 1930 showed that the estate was valued at $500). Later he invented a couple of munificent rich uncles. Pasley’s deduction is that it was in 1921 that Lingle “began living a lie, leading a dual life”, that the course of his income was not at this time Capone but possibly someone in the Torrio ring-gambling rake-off, slot-machines or police graft. Additional information about his life after office hours was given by John T. Rogers in a St Louis Post-Dispatch series. Pointing to the “mysterious sources of the large sums of money that passed with regularity through his bank account”, Rogers wrote: “If Lingle had any legitimate income beyond his sixty-five dollars a week as a reporter it has not been discovered… He lived at one of the best hotels in Chicago, spent nearly all his afternoons at race-tracks and some of his winters at Miami or on the Gulf Coast… At his hotel he was on the ‘private register’. His room was No. 2706 and you could not call it unless your name had been designated by Lingle as a favoured one… All inquiries for Lingle were referred to the house detective. ‘Sure, he was on the private register,’ the house officer said. ‘How could he get any sleep if he wasn’t? His telephone would be going all night. He would get in around two or three and wanted rest.’ ‘Who would be telephoning him at that hour?’ the writer inquired. This question seemed to amaze the house officer. ‘Why!’ he exclaimed, ‘policemen calling up to have Jake get them transferred or promoted, or politicians wanting the fix put in for somebody. Jake could do it. He had a lot of power. I’ve known him twenty years. He was up there among the big boys and had a lot of responsibilities. A big man like that needs rest.’ ”

This sketch of Lingle’s function seemed to be confirmed by a check made of outgoing telephone calls from his suite. They were mostly to officials in the Federal and city buildings, and in city hall.

That Lingle had operated as liaison officer between the underworld and the political machine was the conclusion of Attorney Donald R. Richberg, who said in a public address: “The close relationship between Jake Lingle and the police department has been published in the Chicago papers. Out of town newspapers describe Lingle even more bluntly as having been ‘the unofficial Chief of Police’. But Lingle was also strangely intimate with Al Capone, our most notorious gangster. Surely all Chicago knows that Samuel A. Ettelson, [9] Mr Insull’s political lawyer, who is corporation counsel for Chicago, is also chief operator of the city government. Thompson is only a figurehead. Are we to believe that there existed an unofficial chief of police associating with the most vicious gang in Chicago, without the knowledge of Mr Ettelson-who is neither deaf nor blind but on the contrary has a reputation for knowing everything worth knowing about city hall affairs?”

That he had been on intimate terms with Lingle, that Lingle was “among the big boys”, was readily conceded by Capone himself. He was interviewed on the subject at Palm Island by Henry T. Brundidge of the St Louis Star, who on 18 July 1930 published this report of their conversation:

“Was Jake your friend?”

“Yes, up to the very day he died.”

“Did you have a row with him?”

“Absolutely not.”

“If you did not have a row with Lingle, why did you refuse to see him upon your release from the workhouse in Philadelphia?”

“Who said I didn’t see him?”

“The Chicago newspapers.”

“Well, if Jake failed to say I saw him-then I didn’t see him.”

Asked about the diamond-studded belt Lingle was wearing, Capone explained: “A Christmas present. Jake was a dear friend of mine.” And he added: “The Chicago police know who killed him.”

Who in fact had killed Lingle? That aspect of the case seemed to have been temporarily shelved while the fascinating data of his financial state was, bit by bit, exposed for examination. By 30 June 1929 two-and-a-half years of business with the Lake Shore Trust and Savings Bank was on the public record. In that period he had deposited $63,900. But, obviously, many of his deals had been in cash, for only one cheque for $6,000 related to the purchase of his $16,000 house. He also carried a large amount of cash on his person-he had had $9,000 in bills in his pocket when he was killed. In March 1930 he paid insurance premiums on jewellery valued at $12,000, which was never located. During that two-and-a-half years he drew cheques for the sum of $17,400 for horse-track and dog-track betting.

Another interesting branch of his activities that came to light were his “loans” from gamblers, politicians and businessmen. He had “borrowed” $2,000 from Jimmy Mondi, once a Mont Tennes handbookman, who had become a Capone gambling operator in Cicero and the Loop-a loan, the report read, which had not been paid back. He had $5,000 from Alderman Berthold A. Cronson, nephew of Ettelson, who stated that the loan was “a pure friendship proposition”; it had not been repaid. He had $5,000 from Ettelson himself, who could not be reached but who sent word that he had never loaned Lingle anything at any time, although he “had a custom of giving Lingle some small remembrance at Christmas time, like a box of cigars”. He had a loan of $2,500 from Major Carlos Ames, president of the Civil Service Commission, and Ames stated that this loan “was a purely personal affair needed to cover market losses”. He had $300 from Police Lieutenant Thomas McFarland. “A purely personal affair,” declared McFarland, as he had been “a close personal friend of Lingle’s for many years”. Additionally it was alleged that Sam Hare, roadhouse and gambling-parlour proprietor, had loaned Lingle $20,000. Hare denied it.

Yet further enlightenment thrown by the investigation upon the private operations of Lingle was that he had been in investment partnership with Police Commissioner Russell, one of his five separate accounts for stock-market speculations. This particular one was opened in November 1928 with a $20,000 deposit, and was carried anonymously in the broker’s ledger as Number 49 Account. On 20 September 1929-preceding the market crash in October 1929-their joint paper profits were $23,696; later, a loss of $50,850 was shown. On all his five accounts his paper profits at their peak were $85,000; with the crash these were converted into a loss of $75,000. Russell’s losses were variously reported as $100,000 and $250,000.

“As to the source of the moneys put up by Lingle in these stock accounts and deposited by him in his bank account,” the report commented with grim formality, “we have thus far been able to come to no conclusion.”

But the Press and the public had come to conclusions-and they were the drearily obvious ones, the ones that again confirmed that they were the inhabitants of a city that lived by spoliation, that they were governed by dishonourable leaders and venal petty officials. As had happened so monotonously before, the dead hero changed into a monster in this fairy-story in reverse. The newspapers continued to theorize why Lingle had been eliminated, and the public were, flaccidly, interested to know; but the fervour, the righteous wrath, had waned. Both the most likely theories identified Lingle as a favour-seller, and both circumstantially indicated Capone’s opposition, the Moran and Aiello merger. One story which had percolated through from the underworld was that Lingle had been given $50,000 to secure protection for a West Side dog-track, that he had failed-and kept the money. Another implicated him in the reopening of the Sheridan Wave Tournament Club which had been operated by the Weiss-Moran gang, but which, after the St Valentine’s Day massacre, and the fragmentation of the gang, had closed. After recouping, Moran had for eighteen months been trying to muster official help for a reopening. It had been in charge of Joe Josephs and Julian Potatoes Kaufman. It was stated that Kaufman, an old friend of Lingle, had approached him and asked him to use his influence to persuade the police to switch on the green light. The Chicago DailyNews alleged that then, Boss McLaughlin-who on another occasion had threatened Lingle for refusing to intercede in obtaining police permission for the operation of another gambling house-was commissioned by Moran to make direct contact with the State’s Attorney’s Office. Kaufman and Josephs separately approached a police official, who agreed to let the Sheridan Wave Tournament open, if Lingle was cut in.

Following this, according to the report, Lingle called on Josephs and Kaufman and demanded fifty per cent of the profits. Kaufman abusively refused. So the club remained closed.

Another newspaper, the Chicago HeraldandExaminer, carried a similar story. According to their version Lingle demanded $15,000 cash from Josephs and Kaufman, and when this was refused, retorted: “If this joint is opened up, you’ll see more squad cars in front ready to raid it than you ever saw in your life before.”

Three days before Lingle was killed, State’s Attorney Swanson’s staff of detectives, on the orders of Chief Investigator Pat Roche, raided a gambling house in the Aiello territory, the Biltmore Athletic Club on West Division Street. Within an hour after the raid, Lingle was repeatedly telephoning Roche, who refused to talk to him. Next day Lingle accosted him in person and said: “You’ve put me in a terrible jam. I told that outfit they could run, but I didn’t know they were going to go with such a bang.”

Meanwhile, Kaufman and Josephs had made up their minds-doubtless after consultation with Moran-to restart the Sheridan Wave Tournament Club in defiance of Lingle. It was widely advertised that it would be opening on the night of 9 June-the day on which Lingle set out for the races for the last time.

An equally plausible theory was that he had got too deeply tangled up in the struggle for money and power in the gambling syndicate. For years there had been bitter war between Mont Tennes’s General News Bureau, a racing news wire service which functioned entirely for the purposes of betting, and the independent news services. As an appointed intermediary, in January 1930 Lingle brought the two opposed factions together and a two-year truce was agreed upon. The truce may not have extended to Lingle, whose services perhaps did not satisfy all the parties.

Possibly all are true: it was simply that Lingle, like so many before him, had gone too far out in these barracuda waters of gang-business.