Jake Lingle: Victim of a Double Life

 

Jake Lingle

When Alfred “Jake” Lingle, a crime-beat reporter with the Chicago Tribune, was murdered in the city subways on June 9, 1930, the police immediately blamed the city’s gangsters, declaring his death was a warning to newspapers. If they wanted to take on the criminals, they were fair game.

If that were the case, Lingle seemed the ideal target. He’d spent the last nineteen years prowling the city’s underbelly, exposing criminals, cozying up to cops and gangsters, and now they had silenced him.

All signs pointed to a mob hit.

Lingle followed his usual routine that day. He ate lunch at the Hotel Sherman, visited with friends in the lobby, going outside at about 1:15 p.m. He walked up Randolph Street toward the Illinois Central Subway Station. From all appearances, he planned to spend the day at the Washington Park Racetrack in Homewood. After the races, he was going to the reopening of Bugsy Moran’s Sheridan Wave Tournament Club, a gambling den on Waveland Avenue. The club had been closed after a raid in June 1929.

Lingle stopped at a newsstand near the library, where he grabbed a racing form. As he started walking away, a man in a roadster hollered, “Don’t forget to play Hy Snyder.”

Seven Must Read Books on the Civil War

 

Almost every question about America eventually leads back to the Civil War. Politics. Race. States’ rights. Federal power. Even some arguments we’re having today started over 160 years ago.

 

If you only wanted to read seven books on the Civil War, I’d recommend these as a good starting place. Some are military history. Some focus on Lincoln or Grant. One barely talks about battles. Together, they give you a pretty good feel for what the war was really about.

 

I’m not a historian. I just like good books. If it feels like a textbook, I’m probably not going to finish it. Every book on this list taught me something and kept me asking questions.

 

(One quick note. The links below are Amazon Associate links. If you decide to buy one of these books, I might make a few pennies on the sale. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, and it helps keep this website running. Thanks for your support.)

Broadway Butterflies and the Wolves Who Stalk Them

 

Louise Lawson

Louise Lawson came to New York from Walnut Springs, Texas, in 1918. She planned to make it big on the stage or to star in a Broadway musical. Instead, she wound up dead in her luxurious Wall Street apartment. 

The Buffalo Times said Louise had two personalities as widely divergent as the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal story.”

Back home in her Texas hometown, the folks saw Louise as an innocent, high-minded girl who met an unfortunate death while pursuing her life’s dream. However, her friends on Broadway knew her as “a sophisticated young woman. A girl who had chosen the easiest way and was living in idle, diamond-studded luxury by matching her smiles and kisses against the desires of men willing to pay high for them.”

The New York stage was not good to Louise. She played one or two-bit parts, but nothing that would bring her the wealth and fame she wanted. New York City had too many girls competing for the same dream.

D. W. Griffith paid her $20 to work as an extra in Way Down East, a film that starred Lillian Gish. But she had no more luck in the movies than on the stage, and music was no more promising. Back home in Walnut Springs, Louise had been a twelve-year-old piano prodigy who sang in the church choir. In Flo Ziegfeld’s Follies on Broadway, she was just another chorus girl who made fifty bucks a week.

The Cook County Lady's Murder Club

 

Florence Bernstein

“There is something intrinsically fascinating about the woman criminal,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “Men come and go, are arrested and released, follow the life or give it up, but there is seldom anything of a particularly startling nature.

“With women, it is different. There are not nearly so many of them, and they are much more protected.

“She is not ‘peached’ on. She goes free. She is the bane of the police.

“With women murderers, it is different. There is no professional class, for few women murder except for some strong reason, and then few women have more than one or two or even three murders laid at their door.

“And as for the conviction of women murderers—it seems to be a practical impossibility in Cook County at least. ‘Any kind of woman can kill at her pleasure in Cook County,’ said State’s Attorney Malato. ‘Then she can go into the court after the killing, shed a few tears, cast a few wistful glances at the jury, and she will be acquitted.’”

“Indeed,” said the paper, “women, when they take to murder, seem to single their husbands out for victims.”

The clergy expressed the same sentiment.

Could James Buchanan Have Prevented The Civil War?

 

President James Buchanan

Some say that James Buchanan was a “weak, timid, old man” who did nothing to prevent the Southern states from seceding. Some historians have even declared Buchanan was an “accessory after the fact.” He was a president, a Southern sympathizer, and a traitor.

But was he?

The obvious comparisons are Andrew Jackson and George Washington. Jackson stood firm during the South Carolina nullification crisis and threatened to kick the nullifiers in the ass and hang all the traitors from the nearest tree branch if they laid a single hand on federal property or fortifications. During the Whiskey Insurrection, George Washington marched 13,000 troops to western Pennsylvania to put down the rebellion.

By comparison, James Buchanan hid in the White House and issued this special message to Congress on January 8, 1861. “No state has a right by its own act to secede from the Union or throw off its federal obligations at pleasure. To [Congress] belongs the power to declare war or authorize the employment of military force....”

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New York City: The Rise and Fall of Monk Eastman

 

Monk Eastman

The shooting happened outside the Blue Bird Restaurant at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue. Sunset was still a few hours away, but that didn’t matter to the boys. They’d come over from Brooklyn to visit Bradley, a waiter at the Blue Bird.

 

Monk Eastman (aka William Delaney) and Jeremiah W. Bohan left the restaurant together at about 4 a.m. 

They talked as they walked. Monk felt Bohan out, trying to see if the rumors were true.

 

“Jerry,” said the Monk, “you have become a rat since you got that Prohibition job.” He was working for the Feds, enforcing the Volstead Act, and Monk supposedly was running booze.

 

A minute later, Monk Eastman lay dead on the ground with five bullets in his body. Two slugs struck his right forearm, and another the left forearm, just above the wrist. The fourth bullet ripped a path through his hand, and the fifth one smashed through Monk’s chest and into his heart. Bohan insisted it was self-defense—Monk was getting ready to shoot him. But the evidence was against him. Monk didn’t have a gun. They found him with his arms up as if he were trying to shield himself.