Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [24]
The financial power and influence wielded by entrenched criminals places a tremendous, unwholesome pressure on agencies of local government and law enforcement. Instead of resisting, a number of businessmen, public officials, and private citizens find it “easier” to give in. (Or they actively contribute to corruption by trying to bribe officials or policemen themselves.) Sometimes, after a reform movement has begun, they discover the job is so complex that the persistence required for a real cleanup dies. That has happened periodically elsewhere as well as in Chicago. But each time, we’ve taken a few steps forward. We are taking a big one now.
It has come as the result of a scandal you’ve no doubt heard of: A handful of policemen in one Chicago district not only were looking the other way when burglars burgled, they were actively helping – and getting away with it. As one jokester put it: “Officer, is this a stick-up or a pinch?” But Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley moved immediately for reform. The man put in charge was Orlando W. Wilson, former University of California criminology dean and adviser in many police cleanups. He is probably the ranking expert now holding office in any police department in the United States.
Nobody I know, including Police Superintendent Wilson himself, believes he will remake the 11,000-man police department into a faultless one, or single-handedly drive every hoodlum from the city. But in approximately two years he already has made vital reforms. He has redrawn the boundaries of the police districts, shaken up the top command to place in power proved young officers, tested and recruited hundreds of new prospects, organized a new internal security unit to check on honesty within the department, introduced new mechanical and electronic devices for detectives’ use, revamped and modernized the crime lab, doubled the size of the police auto fleet, changed a sloppy and dishonest method of keeping crime figures into an honest, dependable one, won pay increases for his men, and abolished a number of potential shakedown devices. One patrolman’s comment when someone from the Tuberculosis Institute offered him a free chest X ray about sums it up: “No thanks, lady. Since O. W. Wilson took charge, we don’t take nothin’ for nothin’.”
Actually, despite a few notorious incompetents, the Chicago police department has produced many outstanding figures. One, John Reid, is a leading lie-detector expert (now operating his own firm, he has tested more than 20,000 persons from whom he has obtained 5,000 felony confessions, including 150 involving murder). Blonde Lois Higgins, former policewoman (one of America’s prettiest) who now heads the Illinois Crime Prevention Bureau, is a widely respected authority on narcotics traffic and enforcement. Frank Pape, a Chicago police captain on leave to head the security force at the Arlington and Washington Park race tracks, has taken on some of the department’s toughest assignments (he’s been in twenty-six gun battles in which nine men were killed, earning him fifteen extra compensations and twenty-six creditable mentions).
Among Chicago’s Federal agents, as any TV viewer knows, there has been a parade of heroes, including the FBI’s Melvin Purvis, who set the death trap for John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in 1934, and the Treasury Department’s Eliot Ness, Chief of Chicago’s “Untouchables.” His real life, incidentally, was a far cry from the hoked-up version on TV. He was not the hard, steely-eyed character portrayed by Robert Stack on television, but a mild-mannered, witty, warm-hearted guy who seldom carried a gun. “If you don’t carry a gun,” he told associates, “the hoods won’t be so quick to shoot.”
As a columnist on the night-club beat, I’ve often been in the peculiar position of figuratively rubbing elbows with the underworld. Such hoodlums