Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [39]
There are probably a few things you need to know about Cicero. First, if you haven’t already figured this out, it’s a tough little town. It always has been. I was once interviewed by a reporter from Japan, and Cicero came up in the conversation: The reporter pulled his index fingers out of his imaginary holsters and started shooting. This gesture has become the town’s international symbol, because as almost everyone knows—especially foreigners, who seem particularly obsessed with America’s gangster tradition—this was for a while the home of Al Capone, America’s most legendary gangster.
When William Dever was elected mayor of Chicago in 1923, he announced that, unlike his predecessor, he intended to enforce Prohibition, and he vowed to crush “the rumrunners and illicit beer peddlers.” So, Capone, who was only twenty-five and still a relatively unknown small-time hoodlum, moved his operations to Cicero. It was a town, writes Laurence Bergreen in his biography of Capone, “small enough for the organization to control. They could own the city government, from the mayor to the dog catcher . . . and indeed, the big city merged almost imperceptibly into its smaller neighbor.”
Capone opened gambling dens and brothels in Cicero, and began fixing races at the Hawthorne racetrack (which still exists). He set up shop first at the Anton Hotel, and then at the more substantial Hawthorne Hotel; he also owned a small apartment building on Austin Avenue, where he’d take his mistresses and hold all-night parties. While it was rumored to have an escape tunnel leading from the building to the garage, Capone’s operations were considerably more low-tech, and indeed he exerted such control in places like Cicero that he had no need for hideouts. (His home, where his wife and mother lived, was a rather modest dwelling on Chicago’s South Side, on the 7200 block of South Prairie Avenue.) In October 1924, Capone commandeered the local Cicero elections with a brutal show of force: His henchmen kidnapped poll workers, one of whom was murdered. On that same day, Al’s brother Frank was gunned down by Chicago policemen who had been deputized to work the election. Although Capone’s slate won, Bergreen writes that “the death of Frank became a turning point in Capone’s career as a racketeer. From now on he would become the dedicated outlaw, determined to crush and control.” Capone operated out of Cicero until Dever lost his election four years later to the highly corrupt “Big Bill” Thompson, whose campaign was in part financed by racketeers including Capone. (One of Thompson’s favorite nightspots was Ralph Capone’s Cotton Club in Cicero.) Capone moved his base of operations back to Chicago but continued to have a significant presence in Cicero until he went to prison in 1932.
It’s a connection that irritates townsfolk, especially because it’s always the first thing the media has to say about this place. In 1953, Cicero considered changing its name because, the town’s lawyer said, “People everywhere think we’re just a bunch of hoods. A kid from Cicero can’t get into a college fraternity.” As recently as 1993, still hoping to divert reporters from the Capone association, the town raised banners that claimed Cicero was THE ORIGINAL BIRTHPLACE OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY. Hemingway actually hailed from nearby Oak Park, which in 1899 was unincorporated and therefore technically—if not socially—a part of Cicero.
Defensiveness about Capone is understandable, but it seems misplaced only because the other reason for Cicero’s notoriety is by most measures considerably more embarrassing. Plainly and simply, for decades Cicero had a policy of no blacks allowed. It was as intense and as forceful as anything seen in the pre–civil rights South. I would venture to guess that the town was among the most adept in the nation at keeping out African-Americans. For many years, the village refused to take certain federal grants so that it wouldn’t have to comply with open housing or hiring laws. Lithuanians and Italians who grew up there have told me that as kids they