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By Root 212 0

would run any black they saw out of town—at the behest of the police. In 1951, Illinois’s governor, Adlai Stevenson, had to call in the National Guard when for three days a mob threw rocks and chunks of metal into the second-floor apartment of a black bus driver and his family who had just moved in. With town cops looking on (and some allegedly supplying rocks), these Ciceroans eventually stormed the apartment and threw the family’s belongings out the window, including their piano. When Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967 had come to Chicago to lead his open-housing campaign, he announced he’d march in Cicero, a move meant to embarrass Chicago’s Mayor Daley, who had resisted Dr. King’s efforts. But when county officials told King they couldn’t guarantee his safety, he chose not to march, this after having faced the likes of Sheriff Bull Conner in Birmingham. King referred to Cicero as the Selma of the North. And then, in the 1980s, after a run-in between a police sergeant and one of the few African-American families who’d moved to Cicero, the Justice Department ordered the police to undergo race sensitivity training. My father-in-law, Jack, helped lead those workshops, and he recalled one police sergeant attending a session in a T-shirt that read POLICE BRUTALITY. THE FUN PART OF POLICE WORK.

This is what Boyle walked into when he moved here, but initially he and Cicero seemed like a fair match. Boyle, who was a Marine in Vietnam, is built like a rugby player, squat and broad-shouldered. He has a bulldog of a face, ruddy and pug-nosed. When he gets angry, his hands instinctively ball into fists. He says things that he probably shouldn’t, and he often doesn’t know when to retreat. Once, after a town meeting, a man who looked half Boyle’s age stared at Boyle in the hallway. “What you staring at?” Boyle growled. “Bite my fuckin’ ass.”

“Fuck you,” the younger man replied.

“Fuck you,” Boyle replied, pushing up against the man. Boyle’s body tensed, his hands, it seemed, preparing to make contact. “Outside,” he suggested.

It was the young man, not Boyle, who knew enough to walk away.

After being told by the deputy liquor commissioner that it would be best if he kept quiet, Boyle did just the opposite: He convinced nearly four hundred of his neighbors to show up at a city council meeting and got the town to shut down Mr. C’s. He then collected enough signatures for an advisory referendum that called for all bars to close at two a.m. Voters passed the measure, three to one, but the town president refused to rescind the current closing time of six a.m. So Boyle went through town records and found that five bars, which he believed to be run by the mob, hadn’t bothered to renew their liquor licenses. He then went to the police department to lodge a complaint.

That night, at two a.m., he and Nadine were woken by a blast. Dave looked out of his second-floor bedroom window and saw his garage in flames. Someone had blown it up. By the time the fire department extinguished the blaze, Boyle had lost his garage, his construction tools, and his two cars, a van and a Volkswagen Beetle. Then the threats began. “Guys used to call me at night,” he recalled. “They’d tell me they were going to kill me, that they were going to fuck my wife, and I’d call them homosexuals and tell them that my light on my porch is on, that my door’s open, that if you guys got the balls to come over, come on over. My wife’s in a very attractive nightie right now. You might like it.” And then one day Boyle went to get his newspaper, and draped across his porch railing he found a decapitated snake.

Boyle was pretty much on his own. The police were far more interested in harassing Boyle than in finding out who was harassing him. Again and again, over the next few years, they arrested him, eleven times in all, once for defending himself against a rowdy drunk, another time for forcefully escorting home a teenage bully who had been hassling some girls. Nadine, who is as softspoken as Dave is loud, would have to borrow money from neighbors to bail Dave out until she