Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [41]
Boyle insists he wasn’t run out of town, but Nadine, in particular, began to fear for her husband’s safety. In 1990, they moved to Houston, where Boyle had an uncle, and they purchased a comfortable ranch house with a swimming pool. Boyle went to law school. They had a good life there. Nadine said they laughed together, they could relax. But one day, some ten years later, Dave told Nadine that he wanted to return to Cicero, that it didn’t feel right not being there. She felt sick. She told Dave it was as if he’d hit her with a board. But she knew her husband well enough to recognize that he was going stir-crazy, that even Texas politics didn’t hold a candle to what they’d been up against in Cicero. And so they moved back, bought a small bungalow, and reentered the fray. “I just wanted to finish up business,” he told me.
When Dave and Nadine returned in the summer of 2000, Cicero had undergone a remarkable transformation. During their absence, this town of insiders—Lithuanians, Bohemians, and Italians—had been overrun by outsiders. Cicero had remained fairly successful at keeping out blacks, but slowly, and then in large numbers, Hispanics had moved in—so many, in fact, that by the time the Boyles returned Hispanics made up three-fourths of the population. (“Well, they’re not black,” one resident told me by way of explaining why Hispanics had been permitted to settle in the town.) Yet, the town was still run by the old guard.
Shortly after the Boyles had left for Texas, Betty Loren-Maltese had been elected town president. At the time, she was the wife of Frank Maltese, who was the town assessor as well as bookmaker for then Cicero mob boss Rocco Infelice. (Frank Maltese died of cancer before going off to prison, in 1993.) In the intervening years, Loren-Maltese had become one of the most recognizable politicians in all of Illinois. She honed a look that harked back to the 1950s, and I suspect that the association was not unintentional. (Loren-Maltese said at one point, “I want things like they used to be.”) A full-figured woman, she wore her hair in a pompadour and wore lengthy false eyelashes coated in thick black mascara. Reporters often noted a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor. She favored brilliantly colored pantsuits and wore her electric-blue version to court on at least one occasion. She was highly quotable when she agreed to speak with the press, which wasn’t often, and also highly combustible—which is why her handlers tried to keep her away from those intent on recording her every word. A Chicago columnist once wrote, “She’s a headline.”
Loren-Maltese named the town’s public safety building after her late husband, a convicted felon. When in 1998 the Ku Klux Klan announced plans to march through town, she raised ten thousand dollars to pay them to cancel the rally. She took on the street gangs with heavy-handed—the ACLU said illegal—tactics, which included impounding the cars of suspected gang members. But because Loren-Maltese was often a source of amusement for outsiders, her shrewdness as a politician was underestimated. She included Hispanics in her administration and was reelected twice over the course of ten years, once defeating an Hispanic opponent by a two-to-one margin. Moreover, in the venerable Cicero tradition, she had irregular but effective