The Shifting Structure of Chicago's Organized Crime Network and

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Document Title: The Shifting Structure of Chicago’s Organized

Crime Network and the Women It Left Behind

Author(s): Christina M. Smith

Document No.: 249547

Date Received: December 2015

Award Number: 2013-IJ-CX-0013

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Department of Justice.

THE SHIFTING STRUCTURE OF CHICAGO’S ORGANIZED CRIME

NETWORK AND THE WOMEN IT LEFT BEHIND

A Dissertation Presented

CHRISTINA M. SMITH

Submitted to the Graduate School of the

University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

September 2015

Sociology

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

DEDICATION

For my sister, who wanted me to write a dissertation about gender.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a dissertation does not take a village. It takes a social network—

especially a social network of durable professional and personal ties. First and foremost, I

thank Andy Papachristos for his incredible mentorship, investment, training, creativity,

sense of humor, and support. Social ties predict outcomes, and Andy made the process

toward the outcome fun, engaging, fruitful, and inspiring. Don Tomaskovic-Devey has a

high degree of mentorship ties to some of my favorite sociologists. I am fortunate that

Don shared his relational resources, friendship, and mentorship with me. Bob Zussman

thinks creatively and relationally. He convinced me that there was something in this

dissertation topic when I could not see it, and he continued to push me to see it. Jen

Fronc’s period expertise, historian’s voice, and writing inspired me to not neglect the

historical narrative. It has been a pleasure and an inspiration to work with these four

intellectual giants.

University of Massachusetts Amherst Sociology is a dense section of my social

network full of amazing people. I owe many thanks to Beth Berry, Roland Chilton, David

Cort, Christin Glodek, Rob Faulkner, Naomi Gerstel, Sanjiv Gupta, Sandy Hundsicker,

Janice Irvine, James Kitts, Jen Lundquist, Karen Mason, Joya Misra, Wenona Rymond-

Richmond, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Millie Thayer, Barbara Tomaskovic-Devey, Maureen

Warner, Wendy Wilde, and Jon Wynn. UMass Sociology became increasing multiplex

through friendships with my brilliant fellow graduate students. Thank you Dustin Avent-

Holt, Irene Boeckmann, Laura Heston, Missy Hodges, Ken-Hou Lin, Elisa Martinez,

Sarah Miller, Mary Scherer, Eiko Strader, Mahala Stewart, and Ryan Turner. Melinda

Miceli was my broker to UMass, and I thank her for my introduction to sociology at the

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire, mentoring me through graduate school applications,

encouraging me to apply to UMass, and for friendship throughout the years.

I received assistance from archivists and research coordinators at the Chicago

Crime Commission, Chicago History Museum, and the National Archives Great Lakes

Region—special thanks to Scott Forsythe and Matt Jacobs for their assistance in the

archives. This dissertation received support from the National Science Foundation under

Grant number 1302778, the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S.

Department of Justice under Award number 2013-IJ-CX-0013, the University of

Massachusetts Amherst Graduate School, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Department of Sociology.

Personal ties brought balance and support during graduate school. Thank you

Soha Achi, the Alegria family, Jess Barrickman, Eric Burri, Tesa Z. Helge, the Hill

family, the Jensen family, Amanda Lincoln, Katie Trujillo, Rachel Weber, and Nicole

Wilson. My siblings, Amber and Matt Smith, have been with me on this journey since

they were too young to remember. Much of what I do is for them. Sharla Alegria brings

joy, adventure, and brilliance to our home every day. Thank you, Sharla, for this

wonderfully multiplex social tie.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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vii

ABSTRACT

THE SHIFTING STRUCTURE OF CHICAGO’S ORGANIZED CRIME

NETWORK AND THE WOMEN IT LEFT BEHIND

SEPTEMBER 2015

CHRISTINA M. SMITH, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN- EAU CLAIRE

Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Andrew V. Papachristos and

Professor Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Women are underrepresented in crime and criminal economies compared to men.

However, research on the gender gap in crime tends to not employ relational methods and

theories, even though crime is often relational. In the predominantly male world of

Chicago organized crime at the turn of the twentieth century existed a dynamic gender

gap. Combining social network analysis and historical research methods to examine the

case of organized crime in Chicago, I uncover a group of women who made up a

substantial portion of the Chicago organized crime network from 1900 to 1919. Before

Prohibition, women of organized crime operated brothels, trafficked other women, paid

protection and graft fees, and attended political galas like the majority of their male

counterparts. The 1920 US prohibition on the production, transportation, and sale of

alcohol was an exogenous shock which centralized and expanded the organized crime

network. This organizational restructuring mobilized hundreds of men and excluded

women, even as women’s criminal activities around Chicago were on the rise. Before

Prohibition, women connected to organized crime primarily through the locations of their

brothels, but, during Prohibition, relationships to associates of organized crime trumped

locations as the means of connection. Relationships to organized crime were much more

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

viii

accessible to men than to women, and consequently gender inequality increased in the

network. The empirical foundation of this research is 5,001 pages of archival documents

used to create a relational database with information on 3,321 individuals and their

15,861 social relationships. This research introduces a unique measure of inequality in

social networks and a relational theory of gender dynamics applicable to future research

on organizations, criminal or otherwise.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v

ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... vii

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. xi

LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... xii

CHAPTER

1. LOCATING WOMEN IN ORGANIZED CRIME NETWORKS ..........................1

Gender & Crime .......................................................................................................6

Women & Organized Crime ..................................................................................10

Research Questions ................................................................................................13

Social Network Analysis ........................................................................................14

Historical Methods .................................................................................................16

Data ........................................................................................................................18

Sample ....................................................................................................................24

Chapter Outline ......................................................................................................31

Notes ......................................................................................................................36

2. WOMEN IN CHICAGO ORGANIZED CRIME, 1900-1919 ..............................40

The Laws ................................................................................................................41

The Sex Economy ..................................................................................................46

The Three Levees ...................................................................................................53

The Corruption .......................................................................................................59

The Vice Syndicate ................................................................................................66

The Women of the Syndicate .................................................................................70

The Closing of the Levees .....................................................................................74

Conclusion .............................................................................................................80

Notes ......................................................................................................................82

3. WOMEN IN CHICAGO ORGANIZED CRIME, 1920-1933 ..............................92

The Amendments ...................................................................................................94

The Women of Prohibition ....................................................................................98

The Syndicate .......................................................................................................104

The Associates .....................................................................................................114

The Women of Organized Crime .........................................................................117

The End of Prohibition .........................................................................................129

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Conclusion ...........................................................................................................132

Notes ....................................................................................................................134

4. THE SHIFTING STRUCTURES OF ORGANIZED CRIME ............................143

Chicago Organized Crime Network, 1900-1919 .................................................147

Chicago Organized Crime Network, 1920-1933 .................................................163

Increasing Inequality ............................................................................................174

The Criminal Elite ................................................................................................179

Discussion ............................................................................................................188

Conclusion ...........................................................................................................191

Notes ....................................................................................................................194

5. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................195

Limitations ...........................................................................................................198

Contributions .......................................................................................................202

Implications & Future Directions ........................................................................205

Notes ....................................................................................................................208

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................209

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1. Primary and secondary sources ........................................................................... 21

2. Capone Database totals ....................................................................................... 23

3. Sample totals, 1900-1919 and 1920-1933 .......................................................... 30

4. Structural properties of Chicago organized crime network, 1900-1919 ........... 147

5. Organized crime network properties by gender, 1900-1919 ............................ 151

6. Structural properties of Chicago organized crime networks compared,

1900-1919 and 1920-1933 .......................................................................... 164

7. Organized crime network properties by gender, 1920-1933 ............................ 166

8. Degree for elite men, non-elite men, and women in Chicago organized

crime, 1900-1919 and 1920-1933 ............................................................... 180

9. Gender inequality in two organizational structures .......................................... 192

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xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. All Capone Database criminal ties from 1900-1919 and 1920-1933 ................. 27

2. Women’s percent of alcohol related addresses in Chicago, 1900-1933 ........... 102

3. Women’s percent of prostitution related addresses in Chicago, 1900-1933 .... 128

4. Chicago organized crime network, 1900-1919 (n=267) ................................... 148

5. Histogram of degree distribution in Chicago organized crime, 1900-1919 ...... 154

6. Change in structural properties of the Chicago organized crime network

after deletion techniques, 1900-1919 .......................................................... 159

7. Chicago organized crime network, 1920-1933 (n=937) ................................... 165

8. Histogram of degree distribution in Chicago organized crime, 1920-1933 ...... 168

9. Change in structural properties of Chicago organized crime network after

deletion techniques, 1920-1933 .................................................................. 173

10. Bar chart comparing the gender gaps, 1900-1919 and 1920-1933 ................... 175

11. Bar chart comparing the elite gaps between elite and non-elite men, 1900-

1919 and 1920-1933 ................................................................................... 181

12. Bar chart comparing the gender gaps between non-elite men and women,

1900-1919 and 1920-1933 .......................................................................... 182

13. Change in structural properties of the Chicago organized crime network

after deletion techniques, 1900-1919 .......................................................... 186

14. Change in structural properties of the Chicago organized crime network

after deletion techniques, 1920-1933 .......................................................... 186

15. Percent of organized crime dyads per year, 1900-1933 .................................... 190

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CHAPTER 1

LOCATING WOMEN IN ORGANIZED CRIME NETWORKS

Vic Shaw was a woman of Chicago’s underworld for nearly 50 years. Shaw was a

successful woman in Chicago’s organized crime network before Prohibition through her

brothels located in Chicago’s red-light district, her friendships with corrupt politicians,

and her marriage to a gangster. However, as Prohibition caused the structure of organized

crime to shift in ways that excluded women, organized crime left Shaw behind. Shaw

sold booze, sex, and narcotics in isolation from the organized crime network but her

businesses suffered.

Vic Shaw arrived in Chicago at the age of 13 around the time of the 1893 World’s

Columbian Exposition.

Her real name was Emma Fitzgerald, and she had run away from

her parents’ home in Nova Scotia. As her first job in Chicago, she became a burlesque

dancer. One night after her performance, a socialite named Ebie, whose parents were

Chicago millionaires, ran away with Shaw to Michigan where he convinced her that they

had gotten married. Ebie’s family lawyer caught up with the young couple posing as

newlyweds and informed them that they were indeed not legally married and that Ebie

had committed a crime, as Shaw was a juvenile. Upon their return to Chicago, the lawyer

arranged a large payout to Shaw in exchange for her leaving Ebie and Ebie’s family

alone.

Shaw suddenly had more money than she knew what to do with, and her friends

advised her to use it to open brothels—so she did. In the beginning, Shaw was not a great

entrepreneur, as she was “more interested in men than the business,” but by the turn of

the twentieth century Shaw was operating two successful luxury brothels in Chicago’s

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red-light district.

She had little competition in the luxury brothel market and good legal

and political protection arranged through her corrupt friends and organized crime

associates, Aldermen Michael Kenna and John Coughlin. According to Chicago’s

organized crime world, Shaw was their “queen.”

Reporter Norma Lee Browning interviewed Vic Shaw at the age of 70 to reflect

on her 50 plus-year career in Chicago’s underworld.

The Chicago Tribune published

Shaw’s interview in a three part series in 1949 just a few years before her death.

Shaw

confessed to Browning her one regret, “‘Listen, chicken,’ [Shaw said] philosophically, ‘I

wouldn’t trade places with anybody. If I had it to do over again, I’d live every day just

the same except for one thing. The only regret I have is giving up a good man like

Charlie to marry Roy Jones.’”

Charlie was one of Shaw’s lovers, a hotelman who bought

Shaw her brownstone at 2906 Prairie Avenue, where she ran a brothel during Prohibition

and where she spent her later years running a hotel for transients.

When Shaw expressed regret over losing Charlie, she was referring to when she

eloped to New York City with Roy Jones, another Chicago brothel keeper. Jones was one

of several men of Chicago organized crime who married a successful brothel madam,

greatly increased his own income and influence, and eventually divorced the madam for a

younger woman—who, in Roy’s case, was a sex worker and Shaw’s employee.

However, the case of Vic Shaw and Roy Jones is much more than a tragic tale of a man

building his career through his wife and then leaving her. Tracing Vic Shaw and Roy

Jones’s paths within organized crime highlights the particular dynamics of gender

inequality in organized crime networks during Prohibition, leaving formerly successful

women like Shaw behind. This introduction will use the contrast between Shaw and

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Jones and their relationships to organized crime to summarize the central argument of

this dissertation about organizational change and increasing gender inequality.

From 1900 to 1919, Chicago organized crime was a loose, decentralized

syndication of politicians, police officers, collectors, and gambling and prostitution

business owners. Coordinating collection of protection and bribery fees and the

corruption of legitimate offices, organized crime was largely territorial, focusing on

geographically concentrated districts of illicit businesses. Entrepreneurial women

connected rather easily to the specialized market of organized crime through the location

of their brothels. Location mattered for both Shaw’s and Jones’s early connections to

organized crime before their marriage.

During their marriage, while Jones’s connections

to organized crime grew as he developed new relationships and expanded business,

Shaw’s connections shrank. She continued to draw her benefits from organized crime, but

now through Jones.

When Illinois state’s attorney John Wayman forced the closing of the Chicago

red-light districts in 1912, organized crime shifted to opening and protecting new

unsanctioned red-light districts—a transition which included Jones, but excluded Shaw.

Structurally organized crime remained small and decentralized, and the specialized

protection market still focused on specific territories in the city. The need for protection

increased with new laws and regulations challenging the sex work economy. Around this

time, Shaw and Jones divorced. Following the closing of the red-light district and her

divorce, Shaw opened a more discreet brothel on Michigan Avenue and expanded

business into the distribution of narcotics. Shaw was unable to connect her new business

to the protection offered by organized crime and, as a result, faced regular raids by police

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and morals inspectors. During a 1914 raid on her resort led by morals inspector

Dannenberg, Shaw was so fed up with Inspector Dannenberg that she refused to leave her

bed and held a revolver threatening to shoot Dannenberg if he tried to get her.

Meanwhile, Roy’s businesses thrived—even the ones located in a formally closed red-

light district—because of his strong connections to organized crime. This transition

period slightly shifted the locations of organized crime’s territories, but women with

brothels in the new districts could still get protection and connect to organized crime.

The major structural reorganizing that excluded many women would come in 1920 with

the passage of Prohibition.

The US Prohibition of the production, transportation, and sale of intoxicating

beverages dramatically altered the structure of organized crime. Organized crime tripled

in size, became a more centralized organization, spread geographically into the

neighboring villages, and surged in profits and influence. During Prohibition, organized

crime’s market became less territorial and less specialized. Gambling and prostitution

were still an important part of organized crime, generating even greater profits with the

additional sales of bootleg booze. At the same time, organized crime diversified its

overall portfolio to include bootlegging, labor racketeering, political corruption, and

racetracks in addition to multiple legitimate businesses.

The consequence of this restructuring was that the locations of individual

businesses mattered less as a means of connecting to organized crime. Entrée to the

restructured organization required relationships to crime bosses or associates rather than a

having a business in a particular territory. These relationships tended to be between men

and men excluded women from these relationships—a process that began with and

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produced greater gender inequality. For example, following Prohibition, Shaw moved her

own business into bootlegging where she exploited the underground passages of her

brothels to move and store booze.

But even with her prime location in the central city,

she was not able to connect to organized crime during Prohibition. While her ex-husband

Roy ran a protected Al Capone brothel during Prohibition, Vic encountered police raids

and charges of violating Prohibition laws.

In this dissertation I argue that from 1900 to 1919 the Chicago organized crime

network was small, sparse, and decentralized, operating a territorial and specialized

market of protecting illicit businesses through the corruption of legitimate offices. This

organizational structure provided some limited opportunities for women. During this

period, women made up a substantial portion of the organized crime network (18 percent)

when they could connect to organized crime based on the location of their illicit

businesses and ran their prostitution establishments relatively autonomously.

This all changed in 1920 when Prohibition criminalized the desired and profitable

product of alcohol. The Chicago organized crime network responded to the new

criminalized market by multiplying in size, centralizing around a core of gangsters and

politicians, and spreading geographically to villages outside the city. This revamped

market was less territorially concentrated because the demand for booze spread much

farther geographically than the boundaries of the red-light districts. This organizational

structure excluded women who dropped to only 4 percent of organized crime associates

during Prohibition—a 14 percent decrease. Connecting to organized crime during

Prohibition required relationships to organized crime associates more so than illicit small

business locations. Relations trumped locations, exacerbating gender inequality in

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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organized crime because women could not access the relationships to associates like men

could. Organized crime required trusting and instrumental relationships between criminal

associates when it engaged in riskier markets, like bootlegging. Men in organized crime

sought these relationships with other men and not women. Even though the proportion of

women’s criminal establishments in booze and prostitution were increasing during

Prohibition, men excluded women from the protection offered by organized crime. The

organization had gotten too big and the market too spread out for entrepreneurial

women’s small businesses to be included.

Organizations, whether formal, informal, licit, or illicit, unequally distribute

relationships and the resources afforded by those relationships. Organizational inequality

is dynamic and can worsen when exogenous shocks force restructuring and redistribution.

In the predominantly male world of Chicago organized crime existed moments of less

and greater gender inequality; this shift in the gender gap in crime in the Chicago

organized crime network deserves interrogation. Vic Shaw and Roy Jones started at

similar points in the Chicago underworld, but once in the organized crime network

women and men did not form new relationships equally. When relationships produce

outcomes such as jobs, political affiliations, country club memberships, promotions, and

access to organized crime, we need to consider the inequality not just in the outcomes,

but also in the inequality residing between relationships.

Gender & Crime

Men dominate crime and criminal economies. According to the Bureau of Justice

Statistics, 75 percent of all arrests in 2010 were men, and men accounted for 93 percent

of the prison population (state and federal).

As gender gaps go in the US, the gender

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gap in crime is among the largest. Research shows that men and women often have

similar motivations for committing crimes—e.g., money, respect, safety, and status—but

that gender greatly impacts the various ways crimes are enacted and completed.

For

example, research on home burglars and street robbers show that both men and women

offenders equally commit crimes for money, but gender influences their decisions on

weapons, co-offenders, targets, and risk.

The gender gap in crime is largely a phenomenon of the past 200 years. Legal

scholars Malcolm Feeley and Deborah Little’s research on the gender gap in crime

examined 226 years of British court data from 1687 to 1912.

They found that that 30 to

40 percent of convictions from the late 1600s to the late 1700s were women, and it was

not until the 1800s that the gender gap began increasing toward its present-day rates.

Feeley and Little argued that the dramatic gender gap in crime was largely a product of

historical and cultural shifts around the ideals of womanhood.

The gender gap in crime is also partly explained by the fact that relationships are

gendered and give differential access to crimal activities. Initiation to crime is an

interactional process between people that transfers the knowledge and skills to commit

crime and the values to support crime in contrast to the law.

Compared to men, women

tend to be in weak criminal networks with less access to criminal initiation and less

access to relationships containing skills and influence. Men tend to access crime through

their family, peers, and mentors—almost all of whom are other men.

When women

engage in criminal activity, research shows that women’s entrance to offending is

frequently through their husbands and romantic partners.

Romantic partners and

husbands become the gatekeepers, or brokers, of women’s access to crime. Research on

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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legitimate workplaces shows that for women to improve their positions in firms they

must rely on or borrow social capital from men in the workplace.

Women also borrow

men’s social capital when it comes to crime. Research on co-offending shows the pattern

of women’s lack of social capital in crime: men tend to co-offend with men, women co-

offend with men, but seldom do women co-offend with women.

When criminals access

their social networks for co-conspirators, they access relationships with men and ignore

their relationships with women.

Criminology lacks a strong theory as to why criminal relationships tend to

exclude women with such regularity. One possible inequality-producing mechanism is

the trust and concealment required in these relationships, but the results from research on

crime, trust, and gender are mixed. Some research has found that men of the underworld

unabashedly admit that they think women cannot be trusted, and they categorically

exclude women from illicit economies and underworld organizations.

Men’s accounting

for women’s exclusion relays stereotypes of women as weak, gossips, or opportunistic

gold-diggers.

In contrast, other scholars have found that criminally involved men

consider the women in their lives, especially their wives, most trustworthy.

Sociological and criminological research show that particular organizational

forms constrain women’s opportunities more than other organizational forms. Flat team-

based organizations provide better conditions for women’s careers than large, durable,

and hierarchical institutions.

A small but excellent literature on criminal markets and

gender consistently shows that women have greater crime opportunities when markets are

more open, flat, and decentralized rather than closed and hierarchal. This is especially the

case in drug markets.

Patricia Adler described drug dealing and smuggling at her

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research site in the Southwest as a market of free enterprise, entrepreneurialism,

disorganization, short-term deals, and high turnover.

Women could participate as high-

level dealers in this type of market with the knowledge and connections gained from their

dealer boyfriends and ex-husbands—although women dealers struggled if men refused to

deal with or didn’t trust them.

In contrast, Lisa Maher found that the drug markets in New York City were

vertical hierarchies with tiers of “well-defined employer-employee relationships.”

this criminal market, women, with one exception, were completely absent from the boss

and management tiers of the hierarchy, and a very small number of women worked in the

lowest levels of street dealing and only on a temporary basis.

Instead, women found

work in the peripheral sex market, a market so intrinsically connected to the drug market

that as the drug economy grew, the profits for sex work lowered and violence against sex

workers increased.

This gendered pattern of organizational structure is not just applicable to drug

markets as research on Chinese human smugglers finds this same pattern of women’s

increased participation in flatter organizations. Chinese human smuggling operations are

sporadic and completely decentralized, relying on a long chain of one-on-one interactions

between individuals who fill only a single role in the smuggling process.

Women fill

some of these roles, and women’s presence alleviates some families’ concerns for safety

while negotiating the smuggling of women and children.

If we are going to find

increased opportunities for women in criminal organizations in a society with high gender

barriers in interaction and expectations, we need to look to flat decentralized

organizations that create the structural space for women to prosper.

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Women & Organized Crime

Scholars have been debating the usefulness of the term “organized crime” for

decades.

Criminologist Klaus von Lampe traced the history of the term’s origin and

found that the Chicago Crime Commission coined the term “organized crime” in 1919 in

reference to Chicago’s estimated 10,000 professional criminals who conducted crime in

an orderly, business-like fashion.

The term “organized crime” went dormant for a

while, but we have Senator Estes Kefauver’s Senate Committee of the 1950s and Mario

Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather to thank for the more mainstream conceptualizations of

organized crime as a national hierarchical syndicate imported with Sicilian blood oaths.

In some organized crime groups, a defining feature of organized crime by

members, especially mafia members, is its complete absence of women.

While there

certainly is no argument against organized crime as being dominated by men, it is

illogical to assume a complete absence of women in an organization that centers on

family and kin.

Needless to say, research, especially feminist research, complicates the

notion of organized crime as only masculine by uncovering cases of women connected to

organized crime. Women’s presence and importance in organized crime is more of a

question for the empirical networks than an abstract definition generated by mafia men.

It is no easy task for law enforcement or researchers to specify the boundaries of

the label of organized crime: on who to include and who not to include. When applying

the label, researchers’ judgment is often clouded by preconceived notions of organized

crime as only masculine, when in reality women have always been involved. Historical

research has challenged preconceived notions that women were not involved in organized

crime and instead revealed the connection between organized crime and work for poor,

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often immigrant, women at the turn of the twentieth century in New York. Alan Block

identified over 300 women in New York organized crime rings involved in prostitution,

theft, drug dealing, and managing brothels and gambling dens.

Rona Holub’s research

uncovered an organized crime ring led by “Queen of Fences” Fredericka “Marm”

Mandelbaum, who syndicated a network of men and women thieves and amassed

approximately $1 million from stolen goods.

Research on contemporary cases of mafia-

like organizations shows a range of women’s involvement from silent complicity to

collecting money for and relaying messages to their incarcerated partners.

The

‘Ndrangheta mafia group in Milan has a kinship structure that assumes women in

leadership and work positions.

These women in organized crime were not just

exceptions to some masculine organization rule or dismissible anecdotes.

Since the 1970s, empirical research on organized crime has focused on (a) the

social system of overlapping kinship, neighborhood, and village ties, or (b) the

coordination between illegal enterprises and legitimate society.

For the purposes of this

research, organized crime was the largest constellation of connected criminal ties

between gangsters, politicians, law enforcement, and other associates embedded in

Chicago’s criminalized markets of protection, sex, gambling, and alcohol. At the level of

the dyads, most criminal relationships were not terribly interesting, such as co-offenses or

exchanges of money for illegal products and services. However, there were hundreds of

these seemingly minor criminal relationships that revolved around prominent actors

whose influence on these relationships imposed an organizational structure. The criminal

relationships of organized crime were not just a random smattering of co-offenses, they

contributed to the larger structure of control and access to criminal, political, and legal

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resources. I am agnostic to the theories implying a particular organized crime structure—

e.g., patriarchal patrimonialism, illegal enterprise, patron-client models—because the

network itself reveals the structure and how that structure changes over time.

Additionally, the network reveals women’s proportions and positions in organized crime.

Generally, academics and policymakers are comfortable arguing for women’s

equality in wages or promotions within formal organizations, but this is not necessarily

the case when applying the logic of women’s equality in organized crime or equality in

offending more generally. Locating women in organized crime or identifying contexts in

which the gender and crime gap is lower is not the same as saying we need more women

criminals. For decades, feminist criminology has been dismantling the trope of “bad

girls” that equates women offenders with failed traditional gender performance.

The

goal of research on the gender crime gap is to dismantle law enforcement, courts,

archives, and, more broadly, society’s essentializing assumptions about women as

peaceful, maternal, and pro-social. In doing so, we can interrogate if and how these

essentializing gender assumptions interact with processes of recruitment, segregation, or

exclusion in crime. If the gender gap in crime is because of women’s unequal access to

criminal relationships, then the gender gap theory is not about some difference between

men and women. It is about relational inequality. Feminist researchers should attend to

the relational preconditions, not only for exclusion, erasure, and, subordination, but also

for inclusion, prominence, and respect. Moving to the roots of unequal relationships is an

important theoretical direction for criminology.

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Research Questions

When I first began coding the early twentieth century Chicago organized crime

network, I routinely came across vague mentions of women engaged in a variety of

organized crime activities. This dissertation started from a rather simple two-part

question: Were women important to the organized crime network, and, if so, in what

ways? But this simple question did not have a simple answer. Throughout my analysis I

found notable variation in women’s participation in organized crime over time warranting

additional consideration, specifically around the changes accompanying Prohibition.

Women were more present in pre-Prohibition organized crime than during Prohibition. I

shifted the project to a more nuanced and sequential set of research questions grounded in

the theories of organizations and relational inequality: (1) What was the structure of

Chicago organized crime before Prohibition, and how did women fit into that structure?

(2) How did the shock of Prohibition, and accompanying legal changes, change the

structure of organized crime in Chicago, and how did women fit into this revised

structure? From these questions I have come to document increasing gender inequality

across the two points in time, which produced my third and final research question: (3)

Why did gender inequality increase so dramatically in organized crime? To document

change over time I needed precise measurements of organizational structure plus

measures and statistics to calculate and compare gender gaps. To understand why

organized crime and gender inequality changed so dramatically, I needed historical detail

and historical causality. I concluded that these research questions would be unanswerable

without the mixed methods of social network analysis and historical narrative.

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Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis is the growing field of theory and method that centers on

the social relationships among sets of actors and analyzes how the patterns of

relationships affect various outcomes.

Social network research gathers, compares, and

analyzes multiple network properties at the individual, group, and system level in order to

describe organizational types, structural changes over time, and patterns of behavior,

influence, and interaction. Historians and social scientists have been plowing forward

with the tools and theories of social network analysis, but the same has not held true for

feminist scholars. Additionally, social network scholarship has tended to be weak on

gendered and intersectional analyses; the scholarship has been largely stuck on treating

gender as little more than an attribute variable failing to recognize the larger theoretical

potential of gendered relationships. Computational advances have driven many social

network research questions, but less work has rigorously applied these new methods to

classic sociological questions of inequality.

Criminologists have employed formal social network analysis to examine the

structure of street and motorcycle gangs, organized crime syndicates, narcotics

distribution, terrorist organizations, and white-collar conspiracies.

New criminological

research is exploring the theoretical and empirical benefits of moving social network

analysis into prison research.

In some cases, social network analysis may be the only

way to study criminal groups. Ethnographic and survey based studies require a level of

detail and personal information that is not easily tapped when studying crime. It is

comparatively easier to get information on how people are connected (e.g., wiretaps, co-

arrests, gang affiliation, and who is hanging out with whom) than completed surveys or

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interviews with crime-involved individuals. For example, analyses of wiretap data have

revealed many individuals who are not law enforcement targets or even known criminals

make up substantial portions of criminal communication networks, and in some cases

these non-targets hold important structural positions of reciprocity and brokerage in the

network.

Researchers have also used relational data from police field observations to

examine young men’s risk of violence across their gang networks in Boston’s Cape

Verdean neighborhoods.

These examples show that in contrast to cases of thin

individual-level data pertaining to the offenders, thick data on relationships has the

potential to reveal much about crime groups’ actions and outcomes.

My approach to social network analysis is to start with a classic sociological

question about gender inequality and use social network analysis to map out inequality

within an organization. The implicit assumption is that the category of difference

produces the network, but that the network perpetuates the category. This approach also

assumes that the network itself contains and distributes resources. The resources

contained in the relationships of the organized crime network are access to crooked

politicians, police officers, judges, fixers, and influential gangsters. Not being connected

to or near these individuals is a disadvantage for both women and men leading to

exclusion from the protection afforded by organized crime as well as the relatively high

income associated with this form of criminal activity.

There is an epistemological debate in social networks on context versus structure.

Emily Erikson summarized this debate as “relationalism versus formalism,” and

explained that the divide in social networks comes from differing theoretical assumptions

on issues of content, meaning, interaction, and agency.

On the relationalism side of the

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debate, the interactions between actors situated in their historical and cultural context

generate meaning. On the formalism side of the debate, network structure predicts action

and this linkage permits generalizability, a priori categories, and theory testing. Erikson

proposed that empirical research has the potential to provoke a rich middle ground

between the two traditions.

Given the mixed methods approach to this project, I tend to side with the

relationalism stance in this debate because it provides the intellectual room to interrogate

the meaning of the social relationships in the networks and to examine closely the

historical moment in which the networks occurred. However, I also acknowledge that

generic network processes—such as homophily, status, power, and influence—are at play

and measuring and comparing these processes can provide insight to a variety of

contexts. I adhere to a dialectical approach between the networks and the historical

narrative and context to evolve meaning and develop theory. Inherent to this is that I treat

social network analysis as a logic of discovery for a particular set of events, group of

people, and historical moment more so than a logic of proof.

Historical Methods

The task for historical research is to master a particular moment and place and

read through the records of that moment in search of interpreting events, reinterpreting

received narratives, and uncovering new perspectives.

Historical researchers must read

records in their contexts, document and organize content, and constantly pose questions

as to the origin and purpose of the documents themselves.

Historical research methods

are not uncommon in sociology. Criminology, in contrast, has been reluctant to adopt

historical research methods. Robert Bursik used his 2008 presidential address at the

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Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology to remind criminologists to

remember the classics, to stop reinventing the wheel, and to return to the dusty shelves of

libraries and archives.

Historical methods allow social scientists to reveal process,

events, and even intentions, while applying the powerful analytical tool of time ordering

and causal process tracing.

Archives are not neutral spaces. They house the records of powerful families,

churches, and states, privilege institutional histories over individual and household

histories, silence historically marginalized groups, and wield the power to shape

memories and index collective histories.

Archives have often obscured women’s history

through male-dominated archiving efforts that ignored women’s contributions, physically

separating repositories for women’s records, and women’s own consideration of their

writings as inconsequential and not worthy of storage.

While the historical record will

always be incomplete, this is especially true for women’s histories.

Feminist historians bring a critical lens to institutional archives in order to locate

where women’s voices were intentionally or unintentionally buried. Jennifer Fronc

interrogated the records of private surveillance firms from the early 1900s in New York,

which included thousands of pages of reports written by undercover investigators.

Fronc explains the need to read between the lines and read the silences in these reports in

order to reveal how these organizations practiced and produced surveillance that in turn

developed cultural space for a more repressive state through targeting the working class,

women, African Americans, immigrants, and anarchists.

Cynthia Blair uncovered the

history of black women’s sex work in early 1900s Chicago through official Census

records, insurance papers, court documents, church records, city guidebooks, and songs,

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but these sources did not foreground the voices of African American sex workers.

Blair’s critical lens on institutional archives acknowledged women’s lost voices, but

simultaneously recognized the available documentation of women’s activities.

These

historians demonstrate that the gender problem in history is not only in what is in the

archive, but in the gendered bias in what is retrieved from them.

Data

Organized crime constitutes a hidden population. Hidden populations are hidden

because their total population is unknown to the public, and the activities of the group are

largely unknown.

Hidden populations are difficult to study because entering institutions

as members of a hidden population, whether for medical treatment or filling out a survey,

unveils individuals’ previously hidden activities and identities. Strategies that have been

used to sample hidden populations include snowball sampling, respondent-driven

sampling, and targeted sampling.

A snowball sample is a chain of referrals that begins

with the informant or initial seed and multiplies as referrals from referees move farther

from the informant.

There is no population list of organized crime members from which

I could draw a truly random sample, so this project employed two snowball sampling

approaches, initially using Al Capone as the seed from which I grow the network of

affiliations. The first snowball sample was via sources and the second was via associates.

As a source-based seed, I used Al Capone as a search term to locate primary and

secondary sources, and then I coded the sources beyond their sections on Al Capone. This

is how I came across John Landesco’s Illinois Crime Survey of 1929 for example.

While searching for archival sources pertaining to Al Capone, I located a reference to the

Illinois Crime Survey. I ended up coding this source in its entirety even though Capone

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appeared on only 40 of the 146 coded pages. This source-based snowball began with one

seed, Al Capone, but in this source I located 660 individuals other than Capone who were

also mentioned.

The origin of this project was also a source-based sample. The Chicago Crime

Commission (CCC) is a watchdog organization founded in 1919 by business leaders

concerned with corruption in Chicago. The organization still exists today and houses a

large card catalogue linking organized crime individuals through archive folders.

Requesting a random selection of consolidation files and public enemy files created a

random seed from which to start building the database. The CCC’s random selection of

files included many folders pertaining to Al Capone but also included consolidation

folders on a variety of major crime activities from the early 1900s and the CCC’s original

public enemy reports. The CCC folders contained mostly newspaper clippings, but there

were also some investigator notes, legal documents, letters to CCC members, arrest

records, and reports. This source-based snowball approach expanded the network beyond

Al Capone without having to manually locate and code every document from Prohibition

Era Chicago.

The second type of snowball sampling came via associates. For an associate-

based snowball, I used the list of names generated from Capone’s archives as a starting

point for new searches. Online access to the Chicago Tribune provided a search function

for some of these names. Due to time constraints I could not exhaust the list of Al

Capone’s associates. However, I strategically targeted certain associates on the list (e.g.,

public enemies and women) and reached saturation around prominent historical events

and the individuals involved. Overall, this project required creative approaches to

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snowball sampling a hidden population because I could not ask informants for a list of

referrals, instead I snowballed within the archives chasing leads and digging through

boxes.

A major concern for sampling hidden populations is avoiding bias introduced

through the initial seed or informant. Al Capone was by no means normal in terms of his

social position in Chicago. In fact, what makes Al Capone a useful informant is that he

had hundreds of discrete documented ties. From Al Capone’s not-so-normal point of

view we get a picture of the largest organized crime network in Chicago during this

period. Using Al Capone as the informant introduces bias to the sample, but it is that very

bias that is of interest in social network research. The Al Capone bias in the data captures

the reality that friends and bootlegging partners were not random events. In traditional

statistical linear modeling, Al Capone would be an elephant-sized sampling challenge;

however, social network tools are designed for exploring non-random aspects of social

life.

If archives have obscured women’s history, this is even truer for criminal

women’s history. Locating women in the archives required a relational approach by

relying on the publicly available cases of the criminal men in their lives. In other words,

women’s criminal and noncriminal events and relationships are in the archives, but they

are filed and preserved through men’s archives. In the folders and boxes dedicated to Al

Capone, his cronies, and other public enemies, I found names of women and descriptions

of their criminal and non-criminal activities. At the Chicago History Museum, I read

young men’s life histories that occasionally referenced the women in their lives.

Returning to the CCC archives with a list of women’s names connected to organized

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crime permitted a card catalogue search and resulted in several cases of women who had

CCC investigation folders of their own.

Table 1: Primary and secondary sources

Physical Archives

Pages

Chicago Crime Commission

2,081

Chicago History Museum

178

National Archives—Great Lakes Region

1,072

Newberry Library

Online Archives

Internal Revenue Service

FBI FOIA Electronic Reading Room

Northwestern’s History of Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930

130

Proquest Newspapers Chicago Tribune

788

Historical Secondary Sources

Asbury, Herbert. 1940. Gem of the Prairie.

172

Landesco, John. 1929. Organized Crime in Chicago.

231

Pasley, Fred. 1930. Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-made Man.

Reckless, Walter. 1933. Vice in Chicago.

Contemporary Secondary Sources

Abbott, Karen. 2007. Sin in the Second City.

Eig, Jonathan. 2010. Get Capone.

159

Russo, Gus. 2001. The Outfit.

Stelzer, Patricia. 1997. An Examination of the Life of John Torrio.

Total

5,001

To build a relational database on organized crime, I accessed files and boxes at

four physical archives located in Chicago, downloaded files from four online archives,

and coded pages from a selection of historical and contemporary secondary sources.

Table 1 presents an exhaustive list of all the sources and the distribution of the 5,001

pages of documents coded to create the database. The types of documents in the physical

and online archives vary greatly ranging from newspaper clippings and obituaries to

details of police investigations, bail bond cards, tax documents, and court testimony.

Together these documents provide an outsider perspective of organized crime that was

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recorded concurrently with the organized crime activities. For the insider perspective, I

typed 178 pages of notes from the Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories

Collection located at the Chicago History Museum. I was unable to identify individuals

or code these life histories for relational data due to the nearly 100-year-old

confidentiality protections, but these life histories provided context and voice to some of

the activities within organized crime.

Across these sources were 3,321 individuals who were in some way connected to

organized crime in Chicago in the early 1900s, some 15,861 social relationships between

them, and 1,540 locations where they spent time. I organized these individuals,

relationships, and addresses in a relational database called the Capone Database. Most

social science lacks any information on the relationships between actors, but relationships

were central to the design of this database. The Capone Database is unique in its scope,

detail, size, and historical moment. It contains detailed information on over 100 different

types of relationships. Each relationship is linked to its original source for purposes of

triangulation and reliability. Data on criminal networks are rare, and, to the best of my

knowledge, the Capone Database is the largest and most complete database on a

historical criminal organization albeit admittedly with some missing data.

Table 2 presents counts on some of the content in the Capone Database. Note that

not every person, address, or tie in the database was part of organized crime, rather these

were the people, locations, and relations that appeared in the sources as possible

organized crime activity and its take down. Social network analysis is required to sort out

these distinctions.

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Table 2: Capone Database totals

Individuals

Total

Men

Women

3,321

2,988

333

(100%)

(90%)

(10%)

Addresses

Total

Women Involved

Ownership Missing

1,540

254

578

(100%)

(16%)

(38%)

Relationships

Total

Man and Man

Man and Woman

Woman and Woman

15,861

14,544

1,148

169

(100%)

(92%)

(7%)

(1%)

Individuals in the database include attorneys, judges, police officers, and, of course,

criminals (i.e., folks who committed crimes) and gangsters (i.e. criminals who were

associated with gangs). Ten percent of the individuals in the database are women.

Addresses in the database include alcohol, prostitution, and gambling establishments, as

well as hotels and restaurants. Almost 40 percent of the addresses in the Capone Database

had no information on owners or managers, and ownership and management changed

over time. About 16 percent of the addresses in the database at some point had women

owners or managers, and this count includes women who co-owned or co-managed

properties with men. There are over 100 different types of relationships in the Capone

Database such as business associations, criminal associations, family members, romantic

partners, friendships, financial exchanges, funeral attendance, legal charges and rulings,

courtroom witnesses, travel, political associations, rivalries, union associations, and

violence. The majority of these relationships occurred during Prohibition. Each

relationship in the Capone Database counts a connection between two individuals, which

is also called a dyad. Dyads have three categories when analyzing gender composition:

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dyads that connect two men, dyads that connect a man and a woman, and dyads that

connect two women. The vast majority, 92 percent, of relationships in the Capone

Database are between two men, 7 percent of the relationships are between a man and a

woman, and 1 percent of the relationships are between two women. The gender

distribution of percentages varies depending on the type of tie.

The Capone Database is complex. Some of the ties are directed, such as paying

someone’s bail or shooting someone, while others ties are undirected, like being brothers

or traveling to the Bahamas together. Some ties are negative such as rivalries and

violence, whereas others ties are positive like friendships and political campaign

contributions. For these reasons, it would be awkward to analyze the Capone Database as

a whole. Instead, analyses require subsets from the database in order to generate samples

that are of theoretical interest.

Sample

This dissertation utilizes two subsets from the Capone Database: one on

relationships and one on addresses. In this section, I describe each subset in detail and

explain its relevance to my analysis. I extracted all of the criminal ties occurring during

two time periods for the first subset: 1900 to 1919 and 1920 to 1933. This restricted

timeline required me to drop all criminal ties that did not have approximate years from

the sample, but I attempted to approximate a year whenever possible. I also dropped other

types of relationships, such as family, friendships, legitimate ties, rivalries, violence, etc.,

from the sample in order to focus solely on the criminal network. I do rely on details from

these other types of relationships when available to contextualize individuals’ entrance

into and access to organized crime. All of the criminal relationships in this subset are

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undirected, which means that there is no distinction between who sends and who receives

the criminal tie.

Criminal ties in this subset include general criminal associations, co-owners of or

co-workers in illegitimate business, making graft or protection payments, co-arrests,

criminal mentorships, political corruption, etc. The value and variation in the criminal

ties get reduced in this analysis as I treat each criminal relationship as equal. For purposes

of the analysis, a $50 payment to a graft collector is equal to corruption of the Mayor’s

office. The benefit of flattening the criminal ties is that the value and variation arise

through the configuration of relationships within the networks, focusing on each person’s

count of criminal ties, the number of ties to central figures, and the number of

relationships that individuals brokered in the network—properties that shed insight on the

organizational structure of organized crime.

Sociologists have leveraged social networks to build organizational theory and

map organizational structure. The concepts of markets and organizations have a

tendency, in theory, to become rather abstract even though markets and organizations

would not exist without actors and their exchanges. Social networks make markets and

organizations less abstract and more social by populating them with actors and actors’

routines and interactions. For example, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey conceptualizes labor

markets as a network of employees moving between employers.

Lazega and Pattison’s

research on a law firm finds that cooperation and exchange relationships clustered within

levels of the organization but not up the organizational chain, a cooperation pattern

consistent with the bureaucratic structure of the law firm organization.

This type of

research assumes that organizations and markets at their core are social networks, and the

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social networks are maps of the structure of the organization. Similarly, criminal network

researchers assume this logic in mapping the structure of criminal organizations—

networks can define the structure of organizations. Wayne Baker and Robert Faulkner’s

research on price-fixing conspiracy networks is one of the best examples of this.

They

conceptualize the criminal organization not as the separate companies involved in the

conspiracies but as a larger conspiracy network.

It is certainly challenging to map the structure of informal and illicit

organizations, but patterns emerge in social network data that point toward organizational

structures. In the Capone Database, a criminal relationship between two individuals, such

as an owner of a speakeasy buying booze from a bootlegger, does not equal organized

crime; this relationship is just a criminalized employment or market tie. Rather the

constellation of how these criminal relationships come together and center on particular

individuals within particular markets reveals the larger structure in which this single co-

offense was embedded. To be part of the organized crime network, criminal ties had to

directly or indirectly connect to the coordinated activities between small groups of

powerful gangsters, politicians, and law enforcement embedded in Chicago’s

criminalized markets of protection, sex, gambling, and alcohol.

I have organized the Capone Database to differentiate between organized crime

and general criminal pairs or groups. Plotting all of the criminal relationships from 1900

to 1919 and 1920 to 1933 available in the Capone Database produces multiple separate

components, i.e., different pieces of a network that are not connected, as shown in Figure

1. In Figure 1 each dot represents an individual in the Capone Database and each line

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represents a criminal tie between two individuals. Each person in these two networks was

involved in some sort of crime.

Figure 1: All Capone Database criminal ties from 1900-1919 and 1920-1933

It does not require advanced training in social network analysis to notice that both of

these networks have a large discrete section connecting the majority of people.

At the center of these two arrays of relationships is organized crime—i.e., the

single section of the network connecting the greatest number of individuals including the

ties to the powerful group coordinating protection and corruption that I use to define

organized crime. Within the largest components are the relationships between crooked

politicians and law enforcement, famous mobsters and their childhood friends, and

husbands and wives. Not surprisingly, since organizations are bounded networks with

density around powerful roles, large components link many individuals and are

dominated by prominent actors with many ties. The smaller components outside the

largest components connecting just a few individuals represent co-offenses (e.g., bank

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robberies, illegitimate businesses, street gangs) that showed up in the archival searches

related to organized crime but never connected to organized crime. The lack of

connection to the largest components suggests that these criminal groups were distinct

from organized crime and had no overlapping criminal relationships with members of

organized crime. I operationalize organized crime for the purposes of this research as the

largest components of criminal relationships extracted from the Capone Database. This

definition removes all the petty criminals and smaller components that existed outside of

organized crime during the two time periods.

The largest components map the structure of the organization at two points in

time. Illicit and informal organizations comprise sets of interactions coordinating

corruption and profits beyond the walls of a headquarters building and beyond the list of

individuals on a roster, but when these criminal relationships and individuals overlap they

form the larger structure of organized crime. Analytically it is important to conceptualize

the largest component as the organization in order to speak to broader organizational

changes and to bound what is included and excluded in these changes. To these ends, I

consider the phrases “the network of organized crime” and “the organization of organized

crime” to be conceptually equivalent. Both include the cultural and historical space

containing the legal and social resources of organized crime. Throughout this dissertation

I refer to the organization or the organized crime network interchangeably, and both refer

to the largest component in my data.

The second subset I utilized from the Capone Database was address data. For this

subset, I extracted all of the sex work and alcohol related addresses that operated from

1900 to 1933 and had information on proprietors, co-proprietors, operators, or managers.

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The information on the people associated with the addresses was necessary for me to do a

gender comparison, so I dropped all addresses without information on proprietors, co-

proprietors, operators, or managers from the subset. These addresses include organized

crime establishments as well as establishments not related or connected to organized

crime.

I identified 500 alcohol related addresses within the 34-year time period that

included saloons, speakeasies, restaurants serving alcohol illegally, small shops and

pharmacies selling alcohol illegally, and breweries. These addresses also include

domestic spaces like blind pigs, beer flats, and domestic sales of moonshine. I identified

517 sex work related addresses within the 34-year time period that included formal

spaces such as brothels as well as cabarets, dance halls, restaurants, and saloons that

violated prostitution laws. The sex work related addresses also included the domestic

spaces of apartments and houses where women and men operated informal brothels.

These addresses provide context regarding the illicit activities within the urban space of

Chicago, but they also provide some evidence regarding the changing markets around sex

work and alcohol.

Table 3 summarizes the bulk of the evidence in this dissertation. I detail these

counts and their relevance throughout the chapters, but these are the samples on

organized crime and addresses extracted from the Capone Database that I refer to

throughout the dissertation. The first set of counts and percentages in Table 3 is

composed of the individuals in the largest components indicating the individuals in the

organized crime network. The second set of counts and percentages is a summary of the

criminal ties within organized crime. The third set of counts and percentages includes

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organized crime addresses as well as addresses outside of organized crime. In general,

men-involved addresses are the total addresses minus some, but not all, of the women-

involved addresses because of co-ownership and co-management establishments.

Table 3: Sample totals, 1900-1919 and 1920-1933

Time 1

1900-1919

Time 2

1920-1933

Organized Crime Individuals

Total

267

937

(100%)

Men

220

899

(82%)

(96%)

Women

(18%)

(4%)

Criminal Relationships in Organized Crime

Total

789

3,250

(100%)

Man and Man

641

3,134

(81%)

(96%)

Man and Woman

122

109

(16%)

(3%)

Woman and Woman

(3%)

(<1%)

Illicit Establishment Addresses

Alcohol Related

328

172

(100%)

Women Involved

(5%)

(27%)

Sex Work Related

332

185

(100%)

Women Involved

128

(39%)

(48%)

I identified 47 women and their 148 criminal ties in organized crime from 1900 to 1919,

and I identified 38 women and their 116 criminal ties in organized crime from 1920 to

1933. I refer to these women and their relationships with regularity through the chapters.

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The organized crime network went from being 18 percent women to only 4 percent

women. This dramatic change in percentages was the foundation for my research

questions for this project. I answer these questions via social network analysis and

comparing relevant biographical details of these women.

I leverage the address data to understand the shifting illicit markets in Chicago in

order to test whether women’s dramatic decrease in organized crime was a more general

pattern of women’s decrease in crime during Prohibition. The address data suggest

otherwise. I find that the percent of women-involved addresses increased during

Prohibition in both alcohol related addresses and sex work related addresses. I situate the

organized crime networks within these larger market shifts in the proceeding chapters.

Chapter Outline

Good mixed methods research overcomes the weaknesses of one method with the

strengths of another. Social network analysis provides a set of tools to organize and

analyze historical relationships and organizations, but these tools also require a level of

abstraction that limits explanation. Interpreting social network results through historical

narrative methods brings the power of temporal ordering and causality back to the

analysis. This project employed social networks to organize information on over 3,000

individuals and over 15,000 relationships associated with criminal activity and its take

down in Chicago between 1882 and 1952, with the majority of these relationships

occurring during Prohibition. Analyzing these networks permits me to map out organized

crime, calculate multiple descriptive statistics, model hypotheses, and compare

organizational change and gender inequality in two different institutional contexts. In the

end I was left with a robust finding about the structural shifts of organized crime

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excluding women but with no answer as to why. Interpreting the network results through

historical narrative allowed me dig deeper in order to answer the why. Returning to the

original archival sources, I identified the conditions that connected women to organized

crime in the first place and excluded them in the next. The subsequent chapters are

technically organized by method though I intentionally obscured these boundaries by

leveraging historical data with network data in the causal explanations across the

chapters.

Chapter 2 explains the legal and geographic conditions that permitted organized

crime to develop and thrive in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. Organized

crime from 1900 to 1919 revolved around the exploitation and protection of sex work and

gambling, illicit urban entertainment economies accompanying Chicago’s explosive

population growth. Organized crime began in Chicago’s red-light districts as the

coordination between aldermen, police officers, and business owners exchanging tributes

for protection from police raids or legal prosecution. The organized crime network was

relatively small and decentralized with no clear group of crime bosses. Organized crime,

at this time, coordinated a specialized protection market that was territorial. This

organizational context had increased opportunities for women. Eighteen percent of the

individuals in the organized crime network were women, and women’s connections to

organized crime were almost entirely through their brothel businesses. Their locations in

Chicago’s sanctioned and unsanctioned red-light districts were part of organized crime’s

territory, so women paid in and joined accordingly to avoid raids, escape prosecution, and

fix judges. These organized crime opportunities did not require familial and romantic

relationships to organized crime men.

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Chapter 3 identifies the consequences of the exogenous shock of Prohibition on

the organized crime network and women’s subsequent exclusion from organized crime.

Prohibition shifted the legitimate production and distribution of alcohol to the criminal

economy, which produced a fundamental shift in the organizational structure of crime. In

response to the US prohibition of the production, transportation, and sales of intoxicating

beverages, the organized crime network tripled in size and became more sparse and

centralized with a clearer leadership structure at the center. The market was less

territorially concentrated as organized crime spread geographically to villages outside of

Chicago when the increased scale of production was tied to activities rather than

locations. This organizational restructuring mobilized men and excluded women. Women

made up only 4 percent of the Prohibition organized crime network even as women’s

proportion of alcohol and sex work activities and properties around Chicago were

increasing. Women entrepreneurs could not connect to the organization on the location of

their small businesses alone. Thus, relations trumped locations as the means of

connecting to organized crime, and women could not access those relationships to

organized crime as easily as men could. During Prohibition, women’s access to organized

crime came to be defined mostly by their husbands or romantic partners.

Chapter 4 employs the tools of social network analysis to map out the organized

crime networks at two points in time: 1900 to 1919 and 1920 to 1933. In the small and

decentralized structure of pre-Prohibition organized crime, women were peripheral but

they made up 18 percent of the individuals in the network and resided on 19 percent of

the criminal relationships in the network. Prohibition tripled the number of people and

quadrupled the number of relationships in the organized crime network. The network

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simultaneously became more sparse and more centralized. Similar to previous research

on women’s success and access to powerful roles influenced by organizational structure,

I find that the centralized structure during Prohibition excluded women. Women’s

participation dropped to only 4 percent of the individuals in the network and 4 percent of

the relationships in the network. This organizational shift also diminished the remaining

women’s positions in the network. Evidence for this comes from calculations of gender

gaps across multiple network positions, and my finding that gender inequality increased

in every single measure from the pre-Prohibition network to the Prohibition network.

In chapter 4, I also replicate the structural analysis with sensitivity to the role that

criminal elites had on the gender gap. Treating criminal elite men and criminal non-elite

men as conceptually different categories reveals a moment of rough gender parity before

Prohibition when all women looked like the non-elite men in organized crime in terms of

structural positions. This parity eroded during Prohibition. Not surprisingly, a large

gender gap remained between women and non-elite men because non-elite men formed

ties with elite men when women did not. Before Prohibition women and non-elite men

did not control network resources, but they had similar access to networked resources;

during Prohibition, non-elite men had better access to networked resources than women.

Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation with a brief summary of the findings and

arguments as they relate to the three research questions presented in this chapter. I then

turn to a discussion of the limitations, contributions, and implications of this research.

The historical narratives and organized crime networks in the following pages are often

not flattering, but they revisit a historical moment and a historical organization to correct

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misconceptions about women’s locations in history and render women, even criminal

women, visible and relevant.

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Notes

Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Oldest Vice Queen Finds Reform at 70.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, March 14, pp. 1, 6.

Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Grandeur Turns to Squalor for Ex-Levee Queen.”

Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15, p. 4.

Ibid; Blair 2010:132.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1915. “‘Vic’ Shaw’s Flat Raided: ‘Doctor’ and Drugs Taken.”

December 18, p. 5; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1916. “‘Vic’ Shaw, Vice ‘Queen,’ Deported

from Canada.” March 13, p. 13.

Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Oldest Vice Queen Finds Reform at 70.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, March 14, pp. 1, 6.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1951. “Vic Shaw, Queen of Vice on the Old Levee, Dies.”

November 13, p. 20.

Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Oldest Vice Queen Finds Reform at 70.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, March 14, pp. 1, 6.

Ibid; Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Grandeur Turns to Squalor for Ex-Levee Queen.”

Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15, p. 4.

Ibid.

Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Grandeur Turns to Squalor for Ex-Levee Queen.”

Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15, p. 4; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Vice Sleuths

Raid Flat of Roy Jones.” November 16, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Inside Story of Vice’s Grip on Chicago.” July 18, pp. 1,

3; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1915. “‘Vic’ Shaw’s Flat Raided: ‘Doctor’ and Drugs Taken.”

December 18, p. 5.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “$13,900 Chief’s Share in Graft, Costello Says.”

December 19, pp. 1, 10; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1918. “U.S. Raiders Put End to Resort

Long Immune.” February 20, p. 5. See also Clement (2006) and Reckless (1933) on the

formal closing of red-light districts and the shift to more informal sex work.

Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Dope and Death Doomed Levee, ‘Queen’ Recalls.”

Chicago Daily Tribune, March 16, p. 12.

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Chicago Daily Tribune. 1928. “‘Vic Shaw,’ 60, Fined $500 for Possessing Liquor.”

January 28, p. 1.

Bureau of Justice Statistics 2015; Guerino, Harrison, and Sabol 2011.

Anderson 1999; Feeley and Little 1991; Jacobs and Miller 1998; Jones 2010; Miller

1998, 2001.

Miller 1998; Mullins and Wright 2003.

Feeley and Little 1991.

Becker 1953; Sutherland 1947.

Black 2009; Decker and Van Winkle 1996; Ianni and Reuss-Ianni 1972; Morselli,

Tremblay, and McCarthy 2006; Mullins and Wright 2003; Shaw 1938.

Giordano, Deines, and Cernkovich 2006; Haynie et al. 2005; Leverentz 2006; Mullins

and Wright 2003; Steffensmeier, Schwartz, and Roche 2013; Zhang, Chin, and Miller

2007.

Burt 1998; Lutter 2015; McDonald 2011.

Becker and McCorkel 2011; Schwartz, Conover-Williams, and Clemons 2015;

Steffensmeier, Schwartz, and Roche 2013.

Adler 1985; Gambetta 1993.

Ibid.

Dino 2007; Pizzini-Gambetta 2014.

Kalev 2009; Smith-Doerr 2004.

Pizzini-Gambetta 2014.

Adler 1985.

Ibid.

Maher 1997:85.

Ibid.

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Ibid. See also Clement (2006) about the increasing violence and exploitation of sex

work during Prohibition when organized crime controlled the alcohol market.

Zhang 2014.

Zhang, Chin, and Miller 2007.

Felson 2006; Haller 2012; von Lampe 2014.

von Lampe 2001:104.

Moore 1974; von Lampe 2014.

Gambetta 1993:68; Siebert 1996.

See, for example, Giancana and Renner 1984 Ianni and Reuss-Ianni 1972.

Block 1977.

Holub 2007.

Massari and Motta 2007; Siebert 1996.

Ingrasci 2007.

Abadinsky 2013; Albanese 1989; Albini 1971; Blok 1974; Boissevain 1974; Collins

2011; Haller 1970; Haller 1971; Haller 1990; Ianni and Reuss-Ianni 1972.

Abadinsky 2013; Adams 2005; Collins 2011; Gambetta 1993; Haller 1990; Hess 1990.

Chesney-Lind and Irwin 2008; Miller 2002.

Kadushin 2012; Marsden 1990; Wasserman and Faust 1994; Wellman 1983.

Baker and Faulkner 1993; Baker and Faulkner 2003; Klerks 2001; Malm, Bichler, and

Van De Walle 2010; McGloin 2005; Morselli 2003; Morselli 2009; Natarajan 2006;

Papachristos 2009; Papachristos and Smith 2014; Pedahzur and Perliger 2006; Roman et

al. 2012; Xu and Chen 2003.

Kreager et al. forthcoming.

Morselli and Giguere 2006; Natarajan 2006.

Papachristos, Braga, and Hureau 2012.

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Erikson 2013.

Erickson 2013:237.

Abbott 2004.

Howell and Prevenier 2001.

Bursik 2009.

Howell and Prevenier 2001; Nora 1989; Schwartz and Cook 2002.

Moseley 1973; Voss-Hubbard 1995.

Fronc 2009.

Ibid.

Blair 2010.

Ibid.

Heckathorn 1997.

Gile and Handcock 2010; Heckathorn 1997; Watters and Biernacki 1989.

Wright et al. 1992.

Landesco [1929] 1968.

Tomaskovic-Devey 2013.

Lazega and Pattison 1999.

Baker and Faulkner 1993.

Ibid.

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CHAPTER 2

WOMEN IN CHICAGO ORGANIZED CRIME, 1900-1919

Chicago organized crime coordinated the protection and exploitation of illicit

gambling and sex work businesses with the corruption of legitimate political and law

enforcement offices from 1900 to 1919. Structurally, the organized crime network was

small, sparse, and decentralized. Organized crime’s protection market was territorial

focusing on Chicago’s red-light districts where brothels, gambling dens, dance halls, and

saloons concentrated. This organizational structure and its territorial focus provided

increased organized crime connections for women because entrepreneurial women could

access the protection market through the locations of their brothels. Women made up a

significant percentage of the organized crime network during this period when they paid

collectors and fixers, owned or managed protected brothels, or trafficked other women.

Women’s entrée to organized crime was through the locations of their brothels rather

than their relations to organized-crime-involved husbands or romantic partners.

In this chapter, I detail the legal and geographic conditions that permitted

organized crime to develop and thrive in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. I

begin with a discussion of the fluctuating laws, regulations, and enforcements regarding

the sex work economy that made sex work risky business even when it was technically

legal. Then I examine men and women’s ownership and management of brothels. Though

sex work was inherently women’s work, the profits of sex work were divided among men

and women. The sex work economy existed throughout the city but concentrated in the

red-light districts which were easy to locate and easy to exploit. I describe the territory of

the red-light districts where organized crime developed and focused its protection market.

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Under these conditions, politicians, law enforcement, and men and women illicit

entertainment business owners coordinated a loose and profitable syndication of graft

payments, collections, protections, and extortion. Former mayors, Chicago School

sociologists of the 1920s, and urban historians have made the connection between early

twentieth century Chicago organized crime and the sex work economy by focusing on a

few key men.

My research goes beyond this connection and these few key men by

situating women of the sex work economy as relevant actors in the 1900 to 1919 Chicago

organized crime network.

The Laws

Illicit entertainments were risky businesses. Though not illegal, saloons and dance

halls were highly regulated by city and state statutes and frequently raided by Chicago

police and morals inspectors. Violations included unescorted women, interracial dancing

or socializing, or failure to follow closing hours. Sex work and gambling were technically

legal, but the spaces in which these activities occurred were criminalized under the 1874

Criminal Code, which prohibited the keeping or leasing of a house of ill-fame or

disorderly house that encouraged “idleness, gaming, drinking, fornication, or other

misbehavior.”

Disorderly house laws were broad, and police and judges enforced them

irregularly. Commentators pointed out the ambiguity of the sex work laws and the

ambiguity of their enforcement; for example, Chicago Tribune journalist John Callan

O’Laughlin noted Chicago’s failure to enforce state law:

I am told an Illinois state law prohibits prostitution. This law is not enforced in the

city of Chicago. I am told there is a city ordinance so constructed that it permits

by wide interpretation the regulation of this moral crime. In Chicago vice is

neither prohibited nor is it well regulated.

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University of Chicago sociologist Walter Reckless agreed in his survey, Vice in Chicago,

and stated, “Prostitution was never quite legalized or even tolerated in Chicago or in

other American cities. It merely had been permitted to exist (in spite of statutory law)

during a period when public discussion of it was tabu.”

Thus, within this legally gray area of the early twentieth century, the rules and

regulations targeting brothels and sex work frequently landed women selling sex, men

buying sex, or either managing the selling of women’s sex in jail and in court. The

cacophony of sex work economy regulations prohibited solicitation from windows,

leasing property to operate brothels or “houses of ill repute,” liquor sales at brothels, and

boarding women against their will. It was not until 1915 that an amendment to the

disorderly conduct laws criminalized the solicitation of sex work, which was the first

criminal statute to impact the sex workers themselves.

Chicago law enforcement altered the sex economy’s rules and regulations while

proclaiming themselves reformers or bowing to the pressures of the loud moral activists

of the Progressive Era.

For example, when police arrested women assumed to be sex

workers in raids, they took the women to the police stations but would not book them

until 1:00 AM. Inspectors argued that this departmental policy kept women off of the

streets and out of the brothels as their bails would not be posted until after mandatory

citywide closing hours.

The irony of this supposedly protective action was that women

had to complete more sex work in order to pay back their bail.

In 1909, Chief of Police Leroy Steward issued a new directive against Chicago’s

red-light districts.

Singlehandedly, Chief Steward banned swinging doors, colored lights,

and delivery boys under the age of 18 from brothels. He banned brothels outside of the

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segregated red-light districts, brothels within two blocks of a school, church, hospital, or

other public institution, and brothels located on Chicago’s elevated train line. Steward

also promised rigid enforcement of a ban on women entering saloons without a male

escort. Enterprising unescorted women banned from the saloons turned their attentions

toward cheap theaters where they could “sit and solicit drinks from the men in the

audience” or hired male escorts to sit with them in saloons and cafes.

Immediately

following the three-day grace period to comply with Chief Steward’s new orders, police

made over 50 arrests of about 30 men and the rest women.

Later in the week, 20 more

women were arrested at North Side saloons because they were without male escorts.

The regulations meant to protect women effectively increased the criminalization of

women—sex workers or not.

Chief Steward’s regulations were a startling display of power. The regulations

caused immediate confusion among the red-light district workers who swarmed precinct

stations with questions.

The most public opposition came from William A. Brubaker,

chairman of the Prohibition Central Committee of Cook County, in an open letter

published in the Chicago Tribune in which Brubaker admonished Chief Steward for

abusing his power:

Permit me to ask: Who clothed you with legislative powers and authorized you to

nullify the ordinances of the city of Chicago and the laws of the state of Illinois?

When and by whom was the chief of police of Chicago made superior to the

governor, the legislature, and the Supreme Court of Illinois?

Even though Brubaker chaired a committee calling for the criminalization of sex work

and the closing of the red-light districts of Chicago, the contents of Brubaker’s letter

focused on law enforcement’s failure to follow and administer state law. Perhaps

Brubaker recognized that a rogue chief of police could not bring lasting change to the

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state of Illinois. In response, Chief Steward refused to read Brubaker’s letter or

acknowledge its contents, and he had no qualms about discrediting Brubaker’s position

on the criminalization of sex work as being unrealistic.

Two years later, Police Chief

Steward’s order was “hailed as one of the best regulative orders that Chicago ever had

known and it worked a wonderful change in the [red-light district].”

This legal

ambiguity and fluctuation occurring in the streets was also occurring in the courts.

Forced to respond to the changing regulations of sex work and the red-light

districts, some judges’ rulings were inconsistent with Progressive Era activists’ attempts

to save women. In 1911, Municipal Judge Walker discharged 11 women from his court

striking at the police order that banned unescorted women from saloons. He justified his

actions by saying, “A woman has as much right in a saloon as a man” and criticized the

police for not also targeting unescorted high society women at the “fine hotel cafes.”

Judges’ rulings for greater gender equality were punitive as well. For example, Morals

Court Judge Hopkins was the first judge in the state of Illinois to charge women, alleged

sex workers from South Side brothels, with vagrancy. Reporters commented that Judge

Hopkins had “annihilated the double code of morals when he announced his intention of

punishing in equal measure men and women alike found in resorts.”

Similar to the

reactionary regulations introduced by the police chief, judges’ inconsistencies in rulings

increased legal ambiguity around sex work.

New specialized courts in Chicago’s judicial system also added legal ambiguity to

the sex work economy. The Morals Court was a specialized branch of the Municipal

Court that processed sex work related arrests.

In response to the Chicago Vice

Commission’s 1911 report, Chicago officials established the Morals Court, in 1913,

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which was fully operational by 1914. The Morals Court operated as a public clearing

house, records keeper, and enforcer of sex work regulation.

The morals upheld in the

Morals Court preserved the Progressive Era ideal of white women’s femininity when

mention of sex work and women’s sexuality was taboo.

The criminalization of moral

transgressions was largely a criminalization of women. Men booked at the Morals Court

were able to leave quickly if they could arrange bail.

Women were held overnight in

order to undergo medical examinations and appear in court the following morning. If

women tested positive for venereal diseases, they were sent to Lawndale Hospital for

treatment.

Judges frequently viewed the hospitalization as punishment and would

dismiss the pending cases when women were no longer infected. The moral double

standards of this court shifted slightly in 1919 when judges could hospitalize infected

men as well as women.

Courts revived old laws and adopted new ones to discourage and suppress sex

work in Chicago. A civil case in 1912 reminded the Chicago courts of the old 1874

disorderly conduct law that implicated the landlords of properties used for “disorderly

houses.” Under the disorderly house law, private citizens could file civil cases against

property owners.

In 1915, Illinois passed a new injunction and abatement law that could

close any property associated with sex work for one year.

The private anti-prostitution

activist group the Committee of Fifteen aggressively investigated and filed cases against

alleged brothels and women’s homes under the injunction and abatement laws for years.

Legal ambiguity and fluctuation made the sex work economy risky business.

Increased police raids cost brothel owners money when posting bail, and judges’

vagrancy rulings cost brothel owners money when paying legal fees and fines. New

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morals judges and morals inspectors, with their heightened convictions, were more

difficult to fix and pay off.

All of these payments cut into profits. There was money to

be made if a protection market could undercut the price of bail, legal fees, and fines. An

elaborate syndication of protection, graft, and corruption could also force businesses into

the protection market with threats of frequent police raids. Organized crime developed in

this ambiguous legal space.

The Sex Economy

From 1880 to 1890, Chicago’s population more than doubled, making it the

second largest city in the United States with a population just over one million. By 1910,

Chicago claimed more than two million residents. Rural laborers, waves of migrants from

southern and eastern Europe, and the great migration of southern blacks all moving to

Chicago in pursuit of food, work, and money fueled urban growth. Urban entertainment

thrived on the wages of industrial capitalism. Workers’ demands for leisure redefined city

blocks, outpaced regulations, and brought together men and women from all walks of

life.

Unaccompanied young men and women were arriving in Chicago in

unprecedented numbers. In 1909, Jane Addams, charter member of the American

Sociological Society, sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, and founder of

Chicago’s Hull House, lamented the changes she observed in urban youth and young

adults:

Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly

released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon

the city streets and to work under alien roofs; for the first time they are being

prized more for their labor power than for their innocence, their tender beauty,

their ephemeral gaiety. … Never before have such numbers of young boys earned

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

money independently of the family life, and felt themselves free to spend it as

they choose in the mist of vice deliberately disguised as pleasure.

While Addams’s sentiment exemplified the social movement politics of the Progressive

Era, she was also remarking on the changing social conditions for working-class women

as a growing part of the urban workforce. Some of these women had left Midwest family

farms, but many were immigrant and black working women.

Women’s paltry wages did

not get them far in the city. Women earned about $8 a week in manufacturing or sales or

about $5 to $6 a week plus tips in waitressing, which adjusting for inflation would be

approximately $130 to $190 a week in 2015 dollars.

Jane Addams and other Progressive activists were concerned with white women’s

exploitation in the urban labor force, but their alarm of “vice deliberately disguised as

pleasure” referred to the lucrative wages that women found in sex work. In tandem with

an increasing working population and increasing wages of industrial capitalism was a

growing urban entertainment economy of sex work, gambling, saloons, cabarets, and

dance halls. White women working at modest or midrange brothels could earn just as

much salary a week as the white shop girls and waitresses while working fewer hours and

receiving free room and board.

Carrie Watson, with her successful brownstone brothel

on Clark Street, told British muckraker William Stead that if women had youth, health,

and good looks, their assets were valued more on Clark Street than in offices and retail

shops.

Sex work, she explained, was “an easy lazy way of making a living” for women,

and all of her employees were each supporting three to four dependents with their

wages.

In 1911, The Chicago Vice Commission estimated that there were 5,000 sex

workers in Chicago and $15 million spent each year in Chicago’s brothels.

Although it

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was in the Vice Commission’s interest to inflate their figures, their claim of an influential

underground economy in which many women found work went undisputed.

Women’s work in the sex economy was not just as sex workers. Entrepreneurial

women ran brothels, employed and managed sex workers, and recruited talent. I find that

women managed and profited in the commodification of sex at rates similar to those of

men. According to my calculations of brothel and sex work related addresses, women

owned, co-owned, managed, and/or operated 28 percent of the sex economy businesses

from 1900 to 1909 and 52 percent of the sex economy businesses from 1910 to 1919. To

the best of my knowledge, there is no single historical source to validate my calculations,

but I have found a few sources with similar kinds of estimates. Historian Cynthia Blair

analyzed British muckraker William Stead’s 1894 “Black List” of some of the most

notorious brothels in Chicago’s red-light district, and she found that women owned 24

percent of the brothels on Stead’s list.

However, Stead’s Black List did not include

information on women managers or operators, which would have increased women’s

percentage.

The captain of the 22

Street police station estimated in 1909 that women

owned 50 percent of the 140 brothels in his district.

Chief of Police Steward estimated

in 1909 that women owned 75 percent of Chicago’s 400 brothels, but Steward’s count of

brothels was much lower than sociologist Walter Reckless’ 1910 count of 1,020

brothels.

Unfortunately, Reckless did provide information on how many of the 1910

brothels were owned or operated by women, which makes it difficult to verify Chief

Steward’s estimate. Somewhere in the middle of this distribution is the rough estimate

that women made up about 50 percent of the ownership and management of the sex work

economy. The sex economy was predominantly women’s work, but the ownership and

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management shows that the profits of the sex economy were divided between men and

women.

Chicago’s most elite brothels generated such great profits that women owners

retired in comfort and luxury. On October 19, 1909, evangelical preacher Gipsy Smith

led a revival parade of hundreds marching through the segregated red-light district. His

anti-red-light district and anti-sex-work parade to save women was an unconventional

albeit effective advertisement for brothel owners. One unnamed woman who managed

one of the largest brothels in the district joked and moralized to reporters about the boom

in business that the preacher brought to her part of the red-light district:

I have been in this neighborhood more than five years, and I can truthfully say

that I never saw anything like the crowds that are coming to the houses tonight.

Several times since the parade this place has been so full that we have had to

refuse any more admittance. From a business standpoint I suppose we should be

highly pleased. However, notwithstanding all the easy money that has drifted our

way this evening, I am sorry that it happened. I am sorry for the young boys that

were attracted to the district—many of them for the first time in their lives. And

the young girls that walked along the street and gazed into the houses cannot

escape a tinge of corruption. But far be it from me to moralize. I’m here to make

the money, and it certainly is coming in fast tonight. If Gipsy Smith would lead a

few more parades down here I would soon make money enough to retire and live

on the interest of my wealth.

Talk of profits and retiring on brothel-earned wealth were not uncommon for the

red-light districts’ most successful women brothel owners. The elite brothels of Chicago

wined and dined distinguished clients with live music, luxury furnishings, premium

champagne, and talented women. The elite and notorious Everleigh Club banished all

visitors who spent less than $50 a visit, and the women working there pocketed $100 a

week (about $2,400 a week in 2015 dollars).

Upon the closing of the Everleigh Club,

the never-married Everleigh sisters retired to New York with their collection of luxury

items and died comfortably of old age amid their Chicago-accrued wealth.

Bessie

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Hertzel, who had “more diamonds than any landlady on the West Side” and a serious

heroin addiction, sold her brothel in 1910 when she woke up married to Eddie Jackson.

She made somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 in the sale—approximately

$360,000 to $480,000 in today’s dollars accounting for inflation.

This level of wealth was certainly not available to the majority of brothel owners.

Most men and women of Chicago never came near the startup capital necessary to open

an elite brothel in Chicago’s red-light districts. Vic Shaw went from being a burlesque

dancer to owning two elite brothels only because of the large cash bribe she received

from a Chicago millionaire family.

Many of Chicago’s brothels were nothing more than

shanties or small apartments where men and women coordinated the selling of sex. Annie

Plummer’s brothel on 13 ½ Peoria Street was a “miserable shack” that she struggled to

keep open because of the increasing rents and her abusive ex-husband.

Sex workers on

the West Side rented horse stalls and rooms in ruined buildings by the day for a place to

conduct their work.

Most brothels provided homes by day and workplaces by night for

many men and women of the red-light district, but brothels varied greatly in terms of

comfort and profits.

Prices for sex work in Chicago ranged from 25 cents to $20 with black women

sex workers receiving the lowest wages.

According to historian Cynthia Blair’s analysis

of Chicago’s 1900 Census, black women made up 17 percent of registered brothel sex

workers when they made up only 2 percent of Chicago’s population.

Black brothel

owners and sex workers earned less than their white counterparts, but occasionally they

accessed niche markets catering to the curiosities of a white male clientele.

Historians

have identified that much of the moral panic of the Progressive Era was in reaction to

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racial mixing when white women socialized and coupled with black men.

The moral

panic did not apply to black women selling sex to white men as this transaction

reinforced the system of racialization linking black women to depraved sexuality.

In their efforts to save young, poor, white women, Progressive Era activists

targeted and vilified men who profited off of women’s sex work. Activists and reverends

produced books and films that exaggerated and perpetuated enslavement and trafficking

narratives, including titles such as the 1911 book Chicago’s Black Traffic in White Girls,

the 1912 book The Vice Bondage of a Great City, the 1912 book Can Such Things Be? A

Story of a White Slave, and the 1913 silent film Traffic in Souls to name a few

examples.

These narratives painted men, often black men, in the sex work economy as

abductors and enslavers. The narratives ignored the low-earning brothel staff positions

that men, including black men, filled in the sex work economy such as piano players,

waiters, and porters.

In 1909, when Chief of Chicago Police Steward singlehandedly changed red-light

district regulations, one of his reform measures targeted the men profiting from the sex

economy.

He prohibited men from owning or operating brothels, and promised to arrest

all men subsisting off the income of sex workers on charges of vagrancy.

Progressive

Era activists were enthusiastic about this new gendered policy because it reinforced the

notion of protecting women from the “white slavers” and the male “undesirables” living

off the profits of women.

In response to Steward’s regulation, some men registered their

wives’ as the brothel owners and some women received swift promotions to brothel

manager.

However, the powerful men of the red-light districts were immune to

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Steward’s regulations.

Brothel owners paying into organized crime’s protection market

avoided the raids and arrests demanded by Chief Steward.

The Chicago organized crime network from 1900 to 1919 coordinated the

protection and exploitation of illicit gambling and sex work businesses with the

corruption of legitimate political and law enforcement offices. The bulk of organized

crime activity in the network was contained within the market of protection: graft and

payment collection from brothels and gambling dens, fixing of legal cases, donations to

aldermen, and corruption of police departments. The protection market was open,

meaning that organized crime could absorb businesses wanting protection and

connections, and organized crime could exploit businesses that it wanted to protect or

close.

The protection market and the geography of Chicago required organized crime to

become territorial. Spatially, Chicago was and continues to be a large city in terms of

square miles (234 square miles), especially compared to older eastern cities such as

Boston (90 square miles) and Philadelphia (143 square miles). Though sex work occurred

throughout the city, the segregated red-light districts provided a profitable concentration

of illicit entertainment establishments. The coordination of the protection market with the

police departments and local aldermen zoomed in on the territories of red-light districts

and did not expand much beyond those territories. Women’s brothels were among the

many illicit entertainment establishments requiring protection in these districts, and

women connected to organized crime through their payments into and their benefits from

the protection market.

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Three Levees

The segregated red-light districts of Chicago were called the Levee districts. The

earliest criminal ties in the pre-Prohibition organized crime network were located in

Chicago’s Levee districts, and the majority of the ties in the 1900 to 1919 organized

crime network occurred within and revolved around the Levees. “Levee” referred to

districts along the river ward.

The original Levee was located just south of the central

business district, bounded by Clark Street and State Street from west to east and Van

Buren Street and 12

Street from north to south.

In the shadows of the Loop high-rises

were Chicago’s vices of gambling, brothels, dance halls, and saloons all condensed into

several blocks. Locals, laborers, and visitors had no trouble finding their way to the

entertainments of the Levee. The Levee district was a prominent feature of central

Chicago, which the naysayers were quick to ask: “Do the people of Chicago know that

their business district, known as the ‘loop,’ can hardly be reached except by passage

through or in close proximity to infected districts?”

The sounds, smells, and sights of the “infected district” included music, train

arrivals and departures, cigarettes, alcohol, interracial mixing, modern dancing, and a

steady traffic of clients and sightseers. Cabarets of the Levee district brought together an

unfamiliar combination of “saxophone music, fox-trotting, risqué entertainment, open

promiscuity, wholesale intoxication and cigarette smoking, prostitutes, shop girls, and

slumming society folk.”

Dance halls called “black and tans” catered specifically and

illegally to both white and black patrons.

A single room at the Hotel Queen would be

rented eight times in a single day, though under oath the owner explained that the eight

visitors a night were due to room changes from the insects or uncomfortable temperatures

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rather than short visits by clients and sex workers.

A 1909 Chicago visitor described the

Levee district and Levee lore with horror:

I have been through the red light districts of Chicago, and I am filled with a great

loathing. I have seen your dance halls, where temptation to sin is offered in the

form of lights, and music, and drink. I have seen saloons which are but the ante-

rooms to iniquity. I have visited your vice quarters, and have been astonished at

the open traffic that exists therein. I have learned of how “white slavery” is

conducted in Chicago. I have been told of women imprisoned behind bars and

forced to do the will of their keepers. I have learned of police service to prevent

the escape of unfortunates. The condition that exists is at once heartrending and

disgusting. It is a blot upon the fair name of Chicago.

Objectively, the Levee was a rough place with a tough reputation. It was the kind

of place where travelers to Chicago would find themselves robbed by thieving gangs of

women, such as August Bloemfon’s allegations that four women thieves at 377 State

Street stole $55 from him while he was lost in Chicago looking for his cousin.

The

Levee provided sex workers, hobos, and drug addicts and their corresponding stigmas a

segregated place to live, hustle, and work.

Other residents of the Levee included

working-class, immigrant, and black families renting filthy and cold rooms in dilapidated

hotels and boarding houses.

Their children played in the streets next to soliciting

women, much to the dismay of at least some police officers.

In 1911, the Chicago Vice

Commission calculated that 3,931 children lived in Chicago’s First Ward, which

contained the Levee district.

Saloons functioned as the primary social service agencies,

providing warmth, toilets, stew, and bread to the residents and visitors of the Levee.

There was a second Levee on the West Side of Chicago where brothers Mike and

Joseph Heitler owned and controlled entire blocks of shanties and flophouses, especially

along Green Street and Sangamon Street. Mike and Joseph were both connected to the

organized crime network, and Mike was one of the most powerful individuals in the

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

network in terms his criminal connections and his important position as a broker. Many

organized crime activities from 1900 to 1919 centered on or include Mike Heitler. Rents

in the Heitler brothers’ West Side Levee typically would have been about $15 a month

for working-class residences, but within the prosperous Levee economy the Heitlers

could charge up to $300 a month for their shacks used as brothels or gambling dens.

Around 1910, the Heitlers expanded into Curtis Street and Carpenter Street, buying up all

the available houses near their monopoly of properties in the West Side Levee.

The

West Side Levee did not receive as much attention from the press, tourists, and social

reformers as the original Levee because it was farther from the central business district,

but the West Side Levee was no less important as an organized crime territory.

In 1903, the Citizens’ Vigilance Committee, an activist organization with the goal

of banishing brothels from the First and Second Wards of Chicago, complained to Mayor

Harrison of a third “encroaching” red-light district spreading Chicago’s vices farther

south to 22

Street.

This was not a desirable high-class neighborhood, even though the

Citizens’ Vigilance Committee claimed to represent residents and property owners.

Historian Cynthia Blair’s research found that brothels started opening around the area

that was to become the 22

Street Levee as early as the 1880s when brothel

entrepreneurs were attracted to the low rents of shabby houses unsuitable for working-

class families.

Reflecting nearly 10 years later on the opening of the 22

Street Levee district, a

Chicago police officer using the pen name Officer 666 anonymously wrote in the

Chicago Tribune, “There had been a lot of talk about the disgrace to the city of a levee

district in the shadow of the big loop office buildings. All of a sudden it was announced

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there was a new segregated district out around 22

Street.”

This announcement came

from Mayor Carter Harrison and his political wing in their efforts to push the Levee

district out of the south Loop to the area around 22

Street.

The new Levee segregated

the hobos, sex workers, drug addicts, and poor families to second-rate properties away

from the valuable streets and real estate near the Loop frequented by Chicago’s business

elite. There was also money to be made in the protection market of the brothels already

located in the area of the 22

Street Levee, and organized crime might have had financial

interests in relocating there. The new 22

Street Levee was a success for illicit

entertainment businesses and organized crime.

Located on the northern side of Chicago’s Black Belt, the 22

Street Levee

included the 12 blocks between 18

and 22

Streets from north to south, and Clark Street

to Wabash Avenue from west to east.

These neighborhood borders were porous,

however, with brothels, saloons, and gambling dens stretching farther south deeper into

the Black Belt. By 1911, the district police captain estimated 152 resorts in the 22

Street

Levee.

The 22

Street Levee district was as fascinating and grand as the original

Levee: the district was illuminated late into the night by electric lights, women wore real

diamonds at the “gilded” brothels, and when 20 states’ attorneys toured the district in

1907, they declared the “chatter of the geisha girls to be the most attractive thing of the

evening.”

If the walls could talk, we would want to listen to the buildings of the 2000

blocks of South Wabash Avenue of the 22

Street Levee. This was where the “grizzly

bear” dance was first introduced to Chicago, where bondsmen accompanied police

officers during raids, where love triangles ended in murder, and where illegal gambling

occurred in nearly every flat, barber shop, and cigar store.

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The thrill and legend of the 22

Street Levee coalesced at Colosimo’s Café,

2126-2128 South Wabash Avenue. Jim Colosimo and his wife, Victoria Moresco, had

been successful brothel owners in the original Levee. Folks referred to Colosimo as

“Diamond Jim” for the jewels he wore on each finger and the diamonds he carried around

in his pocket to play with while sitting.

Around 1910, Colosimo and Moresco opened an

Italian restaurant and cabaret in the 22

Street Levee and had all intentions of running a

classy joint, but their close associations with Chicago’s criminals made their high-society

aspirations difficult to achieve. The small dining room was modestly decorated in rose

and gold, hanging laps ran down the center of the ceiling, and tables and chairs crowded

the edges of the dance floor and orchestra in the middle of the room.

Accustomed to

being immune from legal trouble, Colosimo and Moresco violated liquor laws, paid

bribes to maintain licenses, illegally served alcohol to uniformed soldiers and sailors

during wartime, had “immoral” appearing women flirting and selling cigarettes table to

table, and managed a staff accused of beating a cigarette girl.

When legal troubles

finally caught up with them in 1914, Jim transferred all of the properties to Victoria’s

name.

The locals only ever knew it as Jim’s place. The reputation of Colosimo’s Café

was as large as the man himself:

‘Colosimo’s’ as ‘Big Jim made it’ wasn’t just a cabaret. It was a place of interest,

a rendezvous, an enticing lure and one of the best known in the world, a gathering

spot for men and women of all classes. … Yes, there was lure in Colosimo’s, and

thrills. Its reputation was naughty, but its character was not unnice. There seldom

was any ‘rough stuff’ there. When there was it was promptly stopped. You saw

painted women and maudlin women, and drunken men. You saw thieves and

gamblers and crooked coppers and lords and dukes of the badlands. But you could

see, too, millionaires and merchants and bankers and novelists and teachers of

kindergarten.

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Jim Colosimo’s popular café and its tables filled with “gamblers and crooked coppers”

illuminated Colosimo’s importance in organized crime. Of all 267 individuals in the

Chicago organized crime network from 1900 to 1919, Jim Colosimo was the most central

person in the network. He has the most criminal connections within the organized crime

network, which included relationships with underworld gamblers, brothel owners,

traffickers and local ward politicians. The Colosimo Café tables that seated politicians

and police officers next to gamblers and brothel owners reflected the underworld and

upper world organized crime relationships that centered on Jim Colosimo. Victoria

Moresco, who by 1914 held the title to Colosimo’s Café, was also in the organized crime

network though she was not a central figure.

Chicago’s vices of gambling, sex work, and drinking were all satisfied within the

hotels, saloons, brothels, and cabarets of the Levees. The Levees concentrated illicit

entertainment businesses to a small territory where the organized crime protection market

provided immunity from police and moral investigator raids, a payment plan with judges

to release sex workers quickly, and ward politicians who fought to keep the Levees open.

Organized crime’s protection market did not include all of the businesses of the Levees,

nor was the protection market always good for business. Paying off organized crime cut

into profits, but there was no alternative.

The Chicago Tribune reported, “No man in the First ward Levee opened a saloon,

started a handbook or poolroom, and no woman opened a disorderly house without first

gaining the consent of at least one of the members of the syndicate.”

The saloon,

handbook, and poolroom businesses owners who connected to the organized crime

network were men, but the protection market of organized crime was open and made

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room for women. Women established their connections to organized crime within the

concentrated territories of the Levees.

The Corruption

In 1929, John Landesco, the only scholar of the Chicago School of Sociology who

studied organized crime, argued that the history of organized crime in Chicago went back

25 years to the early 1900s.

Landesco’s scrupulous detailing of who was who in

organized crime revealed a legacy of immune people and untouchable places going back

to the organized prostitution and gambling rings at the turn of the twentieth century. In

response to Landesco’s research, Landesco’s advisor, Ernest W. Burgess, summarized

that “the position of power and affluence achieved by gangsters and their immunity from

punishment was due to an unholy alliance between organized crime and politics.”

The

syndication of protection in the Levee districts laid the foundation to Chicago organized

crime, well before some of Chicago’s most influential mobsters even arrived to the city.

One of the earliest criminal ties in the 1900 to 1919 organized crime network

highlighted the integration of politics and crime in the Levees when Ike Rosen rigged

votes for Alderman Michael Kenna. Ike Rosen gained favor in City Hall during the 1900

election season by converting the back room of his Levee saloon that regularly served as

the women’s section into a boarding room. By November 1900, 34 men were registered

voters living in Rosen’s back room at 367 South Clark Street, and all of them supported

Michael Kenna for Alderman of the First Ward. Chicago police arrested Rosen for

violating state lodging laws and closed his saloon. His arrest deterred some of his

boarders from showing up to the polls, but the political alliance between Ike Rosen,

Alderman Kenna, and Mayor Harrison had been solidified.

The following May, Rosen

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reopened his saloon with the Mayor’s permission, and Rosen and his patrons celebrated

the defeat of the Chicago Police Department:

Greasy nickels were shoved over the bar at Ike Rosen’s saloon at 367 South Clark

Street yesterday, rough-looking men plowed their way through the sawdust

covering of the floor or lounged against the cracked-toned defaced piano, while

women gathered in the rear room, separated from the bar only by a flight of two

steps and the mere framework of a partition, waiting for someone to “buy a

drink.” Ike Rosen’s place was doing its usual daily business. This order of things

is to continue for Mayor Harrison, having restored Rosen’s license after revoking

the privilege on a report submitted through Chief of Police O’Neill, asserts that no

further action will be taken unless a “new complaint comes in.” As he served out

drinks in grimy glasses Ike Rosen did not conceal his satisfaction over his own

importance. He had won a victory over the Police department, so his followers

asserted, and this had brought proof of his position as a political power of the

levee.

Mayor Harrison, for the most part, did not get in the way of relationships between

aldermen and saloon owners or other organized crime activities. He was not a gangster’s

politician like some Chicago mayors.

Chicago had four different mayors between 1900 and 1919; two of them had

criminal ties in the organized crime network and two did not. Mayor Carter Henry

Harrison served five terms as Chicago Mayor from 1897 to 1905 and 1911 to 1915.

Mayor Harrison’s terms were interrupted by Mayor Edward Dunne from 1905 to 1907

and Mayor Fred Busse from 1907 to 1911. Mayor Harrison’s successor in 1915 was

Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, who served from 1915 to 1923 and 1927 to

1931.

Mayors Harrison and Busse avoided connections to the organized crime network,

but both Mayors Dunne and Thompson had one criminal tie in the 1900 to 1919

organized crime network.

Even though Mayor Harrison was not connected to the organized crime network,

he did not interfere with organized crime activities before losing the mayor’s office in

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1905. However, in 1903, Mayor Harrison threatened to revoke liquor licenses of 17

saloons along South Wabash when attorney Louis Behan, lawyer for and manager of the

Citizens’ Vigilance Committee, presented evidence collected by his organization that all

of these saloons had all violated midnight closing hours.

The Citizens’ Vigilance

Committee was a civilian based organization that hired private detectives to collect

inflammatory evidence to further their Progressive crusades and agendas.

For years,

Mayor Harrison danced a very non-committal dance around Progressive Era crusaders

and the issue of segregated red-light districts, so at first glance Mayor Harrison’s threats

to revoke saloon licenses in 1903 implied that he was siding with the Citizen’s Vigilance

Committee and their tactics. However, his threats were empty as only a few weeks later

these South Wabash saloons were enjoying the crowds that the new 22

Street Levee

district had attracted.

Unlike Mayor Harrison, Mayor Dunne and Mayor Thompsons’ actions connected

more directly to the organized crime network. A tactic of the organized crime protection

market was to provide police departments with lists of unprotected brothels to raid and

City Hall with lists of unprotected saloons to revoke licenses. Mayor Dunne, who would

later become governor of Illinois, set a Chicago mayor record for revoking the largest

number of saloon licenses within the first 20 months of his term that began in 1905.

The

Chicago Tribune accused Mayor Dunne of Levee district favoritism in 1906 when he

selectively revoked certain saloon owners’ licenses while ignoring flagrant law violations

by other saloon owners.

Mayor Dunne’s term was a short two years and his organized

crime connections were mild compared to Mayor Thompson. Mayor Thompson returned

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

generous campaign contributions with political favors and appointments—a trend he

started in 1917 during his first term as Mayor that he would continue into Prohibition.

100

The underpaid city officials came to expect generous donations from the brothel,

saloon, gambling den, and dance hall owners of the Levees.

101

Progressive Era activists

were especially keen on exposing organized crime and corrupt officials because it

provided even greater evidence for their crusade against the red-light districts.

Progressive activist Kate Adams ran the Coulter House, a reform house for sex

workers.

102

She regularly testified about the system of graft payments from brothels

getting split between police officers, bondsmen, doctors, and the “higher up.” Adams was

especially vague regarding the “higher up” and she failed to name names or identify how

high up this person was.

103

Chicago officials and residents assumed, however, that the

Aldermen of the First Ward were the “Lords of the Levee.”

104

Aldermen Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin of the

First Ward, the ward containing the south Loop Levee and the 22

Street Levee, drove

much of the political wing of organized crime. They were the well-known the political

bosses of the Levee “vice trust”—the syndication of graft payments and protection

between the thieves, saloons, gambling dens, and brothels in coordination with the police

and politicians.

105

Kenna and Coughlin were both central figures in the organized crime

network and among the criminal elite with the top 10 percent of criminal ties. They also

persisted in the organized crime network into Prohibition though with much less

influence. Alderman Kenna owned a saloon on Clark and Van Buren Streets that catered

to a rough crowd. When Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding Kansas saloon smasher,

visited the Chicago Levee in 1901, she labeled Kenna’s saloon a “hell hole,” crying,

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

“You are sending scores of persons to hell every day.”

106

Had Carrie Nation focused her

hatchet on the broader corruption and organization of crime, she may have lodged even

stronger insults and accusations at the Alderman.

The most public moments of Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin’s influence and

connection were during their annual First Ward Democratic Balls. The balls were grand

affairs attended by 25,000 guests who were entertained by masquerade dancing, 35,000

quarts of beer, and 10,000 quarts of champagne.

107

Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin’s

constituents were not the Chicago tycoons and elite; rather the First Ward voters included

thieves, saloon owners, gambling den operators, and male brothel keepers. Madams and

sex workers of the Levee were unable to vote, but required the Aldermen’s protection and

influence at keeping the lid off of the Levee. Chicago Tribune reporters writing about the

annual First Ward balls focused much of their critique on the lower class and social

standing of the majority of the guests intermixing with the political and legal arms of

Chicago, “They packed the Coliseum so full of gentlewomen of no virtue and gentlemen

attached to the aforesaid gentlewomen that if a great disaster, thorough in its work, had

befallen the festive gathering there would not have been a second story worker, ‘dip,’

thug, plug ugly, porch climber, dope fiend, or scarlet woman remaining in Chicago.”

108

The reporters padded their critique of Chicago’s criminal class with fodder on

their fashion, drinking, smoking, dancing, flirting, and swearing of women attending the

ball. The balls gained the reputation of debauchery and were eventually referred to only

as “orgies” in the Chicago Tribune headlines.

109

When the press threatened to report

names of public figures attending the ball, many developed elaborate alibis as evidence of

no longer attending.

110

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The First Ward Democratic Club raised thousands of dollars from the balls, and

though Alderman Kenna described the educational and social services the funds would

provide to First Ward residents, it was reported and understood that the profits paid for

the Aldermen’s re-election campaigns.

111

Saloon and brothel keepers purchased up to

$200 worth of tickets that they liberally distributed to their employees and customers to

increase the presence of the constituents.

112

Levee business owners were expected to

purchase bottles of wine at the ball based on the size of their business.

113

Even though

many of the guests and constituents did not vote or could not vote,

114

the increasing

attendance and increasing profits each year were successes for the political party. In

1902, Alderman Coughlin commented on the increase of 5,000 guests from the previous

year, “The increase means just one thing—victory for the democratic ticket at the spring

election.”

115

His prediction was right.

Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin had strong ties to the Mayor’s office because they

could deliver votes. Their demand in return was that the Levees were theirs to regulate. In

one instance, when a New York gambling ring operator made plans to take over a floor in

a downtown Loop hotel to expand his operations in the open city of Chicago, the

Aldermen interfered and shut him down to protect local gambling establishment

owners.

116

In another instance, the Aldermen banned the “grizzly bear” dance from Chicago.

Their ban began at Frieberg’s dance hall, where they had deep financial interests. The

Aldermen found the grizzly bear dance offensive and wanted more respectable and

higher-class dances like two-steps and waltzes performed at Frieberg’s. Business at

Frieberg’s tanked as a result of the dance hall’s ban because patrons loved the ragtime

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

steps of the grizzly bear dance. The grizzly bear dance originated in black dance halls,

and its movements included leaning into partners’ chests and wrapping arms around each

other. Critics of the dance considered it overtly sexual because of how closely dance

partners embraced.

117

The Aldermen were among the critics, and, in the interest of

Frieberg’s, they organized a citywide ban on the grizzly bear dance calling it immoral.

Their dance hall competitors who permitted the grizzly bear dance following the citywide

ban faced so many raids that eventually one of them tore the dance floor out of his

establishment.

118

Local beat police officers “winked” at the Aldermen’s protected

establishments operating in direct violation of laws and ordinances when Kenna and

Coughlin were “Lords of the Levee.”

119

They staked their claim as durable members of

Chicago organized crime.

In 1911, when Mayor Harrison was re-elected to his fifth and final term as mayor,

he attempted to crack down on organized crime and police corruption by ordering an

investigatory commission.

120

This marked a drastic change from his first four terms as

Mayor when his interference with organized crime was minimal. His Civil Service

Commission required the testimony of 36 police lieutenants regarding the sex work

conditions in their districts, and 35 of the lieutenants swore that Chicago was

“immaculately pure” and that they had never “seen vice in any of its manifold forms or

even discovered evidence that vice had ever existed.”

121

The Commission was furious to

the lieutenants’ “blindness” and blamed Chief of Police McWeeny for spreading his lies

to his entire force.

122

The boldness of the 35 lieutenants’ testimony that no vice existed

when the Levee districts were still open for business and sex work related arrests were on

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

the rise speaks to organized crime’s close relationships with the legal and political arms

of Chicago.

123

By the end of the Civil Service Commission’s investigations, five police officials

in the 22

Street Levee were charged with “allowing vice to flaunt itself unrestrained in

the south side levee district, the most notorious of the Chicago ‘badlands’” as well as

“neglect of duty and inefficiency.”

124

The Commission promised damaging evidence

against the “higher powers in the political world” above and beyond the district police

office, but it does not appear that the Commission was able to deliver on this promise.

125

The Commission’s official report to Mayor Harrison was only able to cite police

conditions with an ambiguous reference to some “bipartisan political ring.”

126

The failure to identify the “political ring” of organized crime could have been a

protective cover-up by the Commission or some higher ups to keep a lid on the organized

crime connections, but ambiguous references to organized crime bosses and political

leaders without names or clear evidence were quite common during the first two decades

of the twentieth century. What these investigators, committee members, and reporters

could not see from their perspective was that the organized crime network during this

period was flat and decentralized with no clear leadership structure.

The Vice Syndicate

The organized crime network from 1900 to 1919 was small, sparse, and

decentralized. The Lords of the Levee, Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin, were part of an

ambiguous and shifting leadership of organized crime included business owners and graft

collectors. The Aldermen placed and kept the “notoriously corrupt or notoriously

incompetent” Captain Michael Ryan of the 22

Street police station as Chief of Police of

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

the First Ward—a position Captain Ryan held until 1914 when he was transferred for

being accused of maintaining the vice conditions in the Levee.

127

In addition to Aldermen

Kenna and Coughlin and their police captain, the remaining “bosses” of organized crime

were less clear. Investigators and journalists had little idea regarding the number or

names of organized crime bosses and at times referred to the “Big Three,” “Big Four,”

“Big Five,” and even the “Big Seven” of the “Vice Trust”:

While every “vice ring” is described as a wheel in a political machine, the

situation in Chicago is said to permit the carrying out of the details of the figure of

speech to an unusual length. In other cities the “ring” has been found to be a

clique of gambling kings who ruled the situation. In Chicago the ring is extended

to the formation of a complete wheel. [Captain Michael] Ryan [of the 22

Street

police station] is the hub. His plainclothes policemen, his “confidential men,” are

the spokes, and the sections of the rim are the “Big Four” or the “Big Five” as

conditions happen to be at the time, the dive owners and keepers controlling the

strings of saloons and resorts that travel along without interruption. But—more

important than any of all of these parts—the one thing without which the wheel

could not revolve—is the axle, and this axle is “the little fellow” [Alderman

Kenna] to every denizen of the district.

128

The organized crime network from 1900 to 1919 did not have a “hub” and “spokes”

structure to it. There was one area of the network that somewhat resembled a hub and

spokes structure as part of the larger decentralized clustered pattern, but this was not the

part of the network where Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin and Captain Ryan were

situated. Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin resided in a dense part of the network with many

overlapping ties and no boss hierarchical structure.

Reporters and investigators occasionally attempted to identify the ambiguous

leadership with conflicting results, but their reports did have one thing in common—the

names provided for the Big Three through Seven were all men and all owners of large,

successful, and not always legitimate businesses in the Levees. Over time the list

included Roy Jones, George Little, Frank Wing, Ed Weiss, Jim Colosimo, Ferdinand

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Buxbaum, Ike Bloom, Samuel Hart, Samuel Harris, Ben Hyman, Tom Costello, Mike

Heitler, Mont Tennes, Solly Friedman, Jakey Adler, Harry Hopkins, Andy Craig, Louis

Weiss, Bob Gray, and John Jordan.

129

Katie Adams, the vocal Progressive Era activist,

alleged that this group of men owned and managed 200 of the better-known brothels and

disorderly establishments of the Levee districts.

130

For the most part, the reporters and

investigators’ lists that included these 23 “bosses” were congruous with the most central

criminals in the 1900 to 1919 organized crime network, but there were some

inconsistencies. Three of the names identified by reporters never connected to the

organized crime network. Of the remaining 20 bosses on the lists, all but 3 of them were

among the criminal elite in the organized crime network defined as the individuals with

the top 10 percent of all criminal ties. Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin’s Captain Michael

Ryan only had 5 ties in the organized crime network, when the average for the network

was 6 ties—so few ties would hardly establish him the “hub” of the vice “wheel.”

There were a few notable oversights from the reporters’ lists of bosses. Four men

in the organized crime network who were not named in the “bosses” lists were more

criminally central in the network than the 65 percent of the “bosses” on the reporters’

lists. These oversights included Maurice Van Bever and Johnny Torrio, two men who

worked for Jim Colosimo but had strong influence in organized crime. Johnny Torrio

would become an actual organized crime boss during Prohibition as measured by the

organized crime network and the historical record. The other two oversights were

Inspector Edward McCann and Frank Lewis who were co-conspirators in a large

protection ring on the West Side Levee around 1909.

131

The exact qualities for making

reporters’ lists of bosses might have been based more on organizational roles, popularity

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of their local establishments, or details not otherwise preserved in the archives. The

organized crime network requires an aggregation and a cross section unavailable to the

reporters, but it does offer a bird’s-eye perspective of the decentralized and clustered

structure of organized crime—a structure that would be vastly different during

Prohibition.

Organized crime was decentralized with no clear leadership structure. There was

no core of individuals hoarding the resources contained within the network and no single

powerful individual controlling access to the resources. There were many brokers

connecting different sections of the network as organized crime was dominated by the

collection and distribution of graft and protection payments. These brokers were the

gatekeepers to organized crime often deciding which illicit entertainment businesses were

in and which were out. The diversity of gatekeepers and their localized territorial interests

increased women’s chances for connecting to the vice syndicate.

Shifting from the ambiguous and amorphous center of organized crime to the

margins reveals configurations of gambling den and brothel owners, thieves, sex workers,

housekeepers, and traffickers who all contributed to the size and structure of the

syndicate. The margins of the network contained individuals with fewer criminal ties who

were more weakly connected to organized crime. These were not the political bosses,

police officers, or the Big Five, but they were individuals coordinating and benefiting

from the organization of crime and protection in the Levees. What is often ignored in this

historical case is that the margins of organized crime included women.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Women of the Syndicate

Dozens of women operated brothels, paid extortion fees, got arrested, posted bail,

trafficked other women, and attended political galas while embedded in Chicago’s

organized crime network from 1900 to 1919. Of the 267 organized crime individuals I

identified from 1900 to 1919, 47 of them (18 percent) were women. Nearly all of these 47

women (89 percent) were involved in the sex work economy either as brothel owners,

managers, operators, sex workers, clerks, or traffickers. Only one woman in the

organized crime network clearly had no connection to the sex work economy, and she

connected to organized crime through a co-arrest with her husband. The remaining four

women in the organized crime network were arrested by the police with four men while

at a saloon. These men and women were all regulars at the saloon, and they called upon

Frank Lewis to fix the judge in the case for them.

132

It is possible that these four women

were sex workers, but police and morals inspectors often arrested unmarried women at

entertainment establishments incorrectly assuming that they were sex workers. With five

exceptions, women of the organized crime network in the first two decades of the

twentieth century were almost entirely within the sex work economy. It was the location

of their brothels and establishments within organized crime territories that facilitated their

entrée into organized crime.

As a point of comparison, 33 percent of the men in the organized crime network

were involved in the sex work economy, and 30 percent of men in the organized crime

network were involved in the gambling economy. Some men overlapped in both the sex

work and gambling economies. Organized crime individuals included those involved in

the gambling and sex work economies plus the positions of collectors, fixers, and corrupt

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

police officers and local politicians. These were no women in these positions of collectors

or corrupt officials.

Women brothel owners could have been exploited by organized crime and forced

to pay into the protection market or face closing. This bittersweet arrangement exchanged

profits for protection from raids and prosecution, but both were expensive. May Ward

operated a brothel at 25 North Carpenter Street. She testified to the Civil Service

Commission in 1911 that Mike Heitler and Mike Fewer threatened to close her brothel on

multiple occasions unless she paid them $150.

133

When May told collector Mike Fewer

that she would testify, he threatened her that if she testified, Chicago would not be a

pleasant place for her. She ran away to Michigan shortly after testifying, either by choice

or by force.

134

May’s payments to Mike Fewer and Mike Heitler were the criminal

transactions that connected her to the organized crime network, but her case suggests

exploitation by members of organized crime rather than her seeking access to and

resources of organized crime.

Only 10 of the 47 women in organized crime also had marital and familial

relationships to men in organized crime. These marriage or family ties co-occurred with

criminal ties to the organized crime network—e.g., husbands and wives co-owning a

brothel or operating a trafficking ring together. It is remarkable that only 21 percent of

women from the early 1900s were connected to organized crime with their husbands or

male relatives. In predominantly male organizations, men are the gatekeepers to the

organization. A trusting relationship with a husband or male relative might be the only

way for women to access an organization that is largely closed to women. It appears,

however, that unmarried women could do just fine for themselves and married women

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

did not necessarily need their husbands in organized crime in early twentieth century

Chicago. This pattern did not persist during Prohibition.

Not all ten of these women entered organized crime because of their husbands. At

least two women, Vic Shaw and Victoria Moresco, were brothel owners in the Levees

before their marriages to organized crime men. It was Vic and Victoria’s previous wealth

and Levee success before their marriages that arguably catapulted the organized crime

careers of their husbands, Roy Jones and Jim Colosimo. These husbands and wives might

have even met through organized crime. In the end, Vic and Victoria’s marriages to

organized crime men pushed both of the women out of organized crime upon their

divorces.

Husbands’ business failures entangled their wives in ways that husbands’

successes did not. Listings of brothels owned by men could have failed to acknowledge

wives contributions to the business, but when men failed at escaping prosecution often

their wives were also implicated in the legal cases. For example, Julia Van Bever worked

directly with her husband, Maurice, in trafficking and selling women to Jim Colosimo

and Victoria Moresco’s brothels. Julia’s success in the trafficking business was

dependent on her husband’s organized crime connections, but Maurice’s convictions also

implicated Julia. When police and prosecutors uncovered the Van Bever-Colosimo

trafficking operations, Jim and Victoria were insulted from prosecution because of their

legal ties and organized crime protection, whereas Maurice and Julia both received

sentences at Leavenworth prison.

No brothel in the Levee districts received as much positive and negative attention

as the Everleigh Club of 2131 South Dearborn Street. Owned and operated from 1900 to

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1911 by the mysterious, glamorous, and unmarried Everleigh sisters, Minna and Ada, the

Everleigh Club had the reputation as the most elite and luxurious brothel of Chicago.

Amid the gold piano, gold spittoons, gold plated room, and perfume fountain, on one

occasion German royalty and his entourage all drank champagne from the shoes of the

women working at the Everleigh Club.

135

The Everleigh sisters were regular features of Aldermen Kenna and Coughlin’s

First Ward Democratic balls, and they escorted the Aldermen during the grand march.

136

During the 1908 ball, Minna and Ada were spending $50 an hour on wine for their box,

when collector Ike Bloom called out to Minna “Keep it up, Minnie. You are the only live

one around here.”

137

The Everleigh sisters funneled money to the Aldermen outside of the

balls as well. Minna testified that they contributed $3,000 to Aldermen Kenna and

Coughlin when the Alderman needed funds to defeat a legislative bill forbidding the sale

of liquor in brothels.

138

Though competitors with many of the men business owners of the

Levee, the Everleigh sisters secured their position in the syndicate through a single tie to

Alderman Coughlin. Their criminal ties to organized crime were the privileged protection

their establishment received from Alderman Coughlin as thanks for their legitimate

political donations.

Their establishment was immune to raids and forced closings for almost 12

prosperous years, until 1911, when Mayor Harrison started to crack down on the Levees

and specifically ordered the closing of the Everleigh Club.

139

The Levee was shocked by

the news, but the Everleigh sisters remained poised:

“I don’t worry about anything,” [Minna] continued… “You get everything in a

lifetime. Of course, if the mayor says we must close, that settles it. What the

mayor says go, so far as I am concerned. I’m not going to be sore about it either. I

never was a knocker, and nothing the police of this town can do to me will change

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

my disposition. I’ll close up the shop and walk out of the place with a smile on

my face. Nobody else around here is worrying either,” she went on with a smile,

waving a hand literally coruscated with diamonds toward the parlor, from which

came sounds of music and bursts of laughter. “If the ship sinks we’re going down

with a cheer and a good drink under our belts, anyway.”

140

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the actual closing of the Everleigh Club. The official

orders were lost on someone’s desk for about 48 hours, but allegations were that the

Everleigh sisters paid a large sum of money for one final night of operation.

141

By 1925,

the former Everleigh Club building on Dearborn Street had been converted into a

rooming house for black residents, which was demolished in 1933 by a wrecking ball.

142

The Everleigh sisters and women like them were important and fascinating

figures in Chicago organized crime, but to say that women were part of organized crime

does not imply any sort of equal standing to men within the organization. Women were at

the margins of organized crime, making regular graft payments and arrangements with

fixers. In some cases like May Ward’s, organized crime men exploited women brothel

owners. Even in the decentralized structure of 1900 to 1919 organized crime, women

were not the collectors, fixers, or bosses, but rather they were paying members of the

protection syndicate.

The Closing of the Levees

The Levee districts were lightning rods for the large cultural debate around sex

work. On one side, the “segregationists” declared that the Levee districts were a

necessary evil in order to contain disease, enforce regulations, and keep sex work out of

residential neighborhoods.

143

Segregationists even pressed the discipline of sociology into

service as the “practical proof” for their argument, though failing to offer any

sociological specifics.

144

Their opponents, the “abolitionists,” wanted an end to sex work,

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

which they equated to slavery, bondage, and the trafficking of women.

145

Abolitionists

wanted the Levee districts shut down and the courts to go after brothels, madams, pimps,

and anyone profiting off of women’s bondage.

146

In 1912, Chicago aldermen organized a

special aldermanic committee chaired by Alderman John Emerson in order to settle the

“vice question” regarding which position—segregation or abolition—was better for the

city. A five and a half hour debate between the segregationists and the abolitionists

transpired before the committee. The segregationists argued on the grounds of practicality

and history, “You can’t club morality into a person with a policeman’s club … There

always has been vice and there always will be. The thing to do is to place all those

women in a single district and force these illegal flats out of the residence sections. You

can’t drive out vice; you can only shift it.”

147

The abolitionists rebutted with their own

counts of the number of women trafficked to the segregated red-light districts and argued

that segregation inflated the supply of sex workers beyond the demand:

Segregation creates a neglect on the part of the public. It fosters a ‘don’t care’

spirit toward the question, while scattering incites the public to attention, puts the

public on guard. … This ‘don’t care’ spirit on the part of the public allows the

vice interests to overestimate the demand and establish ways of recruiting the

supply by most obnoxious methods. This recruiting has given rise to the awful

white slavery of today.

148

Abolitionists frequently incited fears of racial mixing between black and whites through

comments on white slavery and allegations that the majority of brothel workers were

black.

149

The aldermanic special committee and debate did not resolve the “vice question”

for Chicago largely because city officials attempted to remain agnostic in the broader

cultural debate. Members of the Chicago Police Department argued that abolition would

scatter sex work around the city requiring ten times as many police officers to maintain

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similar levels of control.

150

Mayor Harrison said that the matter should be left up to the

voters.

151

Officials were more comfortable riding out the impassioned debates with a

neutral position than to risk upsetting the voters and disrupting the money of the red-light

districts.

Chicago abolitionists believed they had won when Illinois State’s Attorney John

Wayman officially closed the Levees in 1912.

152

The closings occurred shortly after

Congress passed the Mann Act, officially the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910 which

prohibited crossing state lines with women for immoral purposes.

153

Global forces also

shaped the sex work economy, as protecting soldiers from venereal disease during the

First World War became a major public health concern for the War Department.

154

It was

also the case that segregationists and city officials had a harder time defending the Levees

against abolitionists as investigations continued to uncover the increasing control of

organized crime. Segregationists’ arguments faltered in the face of a new conception of

the problem—pimps and “male parasites” were no longer just profiting off of women,

they had organized a vice ring that was infiltrating and corrupting public offices.

155

The Levees transformed in response to the closing. A 22

Street Levee bartender

waxed philosophically, “The levee is on th’ bum for true. They’s no telling’ when

things’ll be opened up right again.”

156

In 1916, Chicago Tribune writer Henry Hyde

walked the Levee for his series on the aftermath of their closing:

It is 1 o’clock in the morning. The trolley car stops at State and Twenty-second

streets. … This is the heart of the old red light district, the bad lands, the lava

beds, of international notoriety. At this hour, little more than three years ago, the

“line” was just waking up for its night’s work. … Tonight the district is dark and

silent. There are no lights of any color. It is like landing in some remote and

ruined city devastated by the plague. … Not only are the House of All Nations,

the Everleigh club, the California, Tokio, the Mecca, and all the other notorious

resorts tightly closed, but the buildings which they occupied are utterly deserted.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Not only are they deserted, but many of them stand only as empty shells. They

have been looted and gutted until nothing but the outer walls and an occasional

stairway is left in place. In many of the buildings, which formerly rented for $200

or $300 a month, the front door swings open to the touch. One steps in and his

feet crunch an inch deep layer of plaster and glass. The very doors are gone. All

the lead pipe, plumbing fixtures, gaspipe, and hardware long ago disappeared.

The plastering has been ripped off the walls. An internal cyclone could have

wrought no more complete havoc.

157

This abolitionist win was not a loss for organized crime. The closing of the Levee

districts forced brothels underground and scattered them throughout working-class

residential neighborhoods.

158

With the brothels underground, the large dance clubs and

all-night saloons and cafes that coordinated meetings between sex workers and clients

had even less competition. This was not a new type of sex work in the Levees, but it was

more covert than the sex work of the former, large, and famous brothels.

In spite of reports like Henry Hyde’s about the destruction and abandonment of

the Levees, contradicting reports of raids and massive arrests suggested that the former

Street Levee had remained under the rule of “vice kings.”

159

These unnamed vice

kings had mention again in 1914 when a private detective and ex-police officer, Harry

Cullett, attempted to bribe the head of the Morals Inspection Bureau, W. C. Dannenberg

to permit the reopening of the 22

Street Levee district.

160

Cullett claimed to represent

ten times more resort owners than had been around in the old Levee district and promised

the inspectors up to $2,200 a month (about $52,000 a month in 2015 dollars).

161

Cullett’s

claim of “ten times more resort owners” in the former 22

Street Levee suggests that the

protection market had grown dramatically following the closing of the Levees.

Even with organized crime’s increasing protection market, the powers remained

scattered and largely undefined. Officer 666’s anonymous account in the Chicago

Tribune alleged that in 1914 there were three protection rings competing with each other:

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

one led by Jim Colosimo with Maurice Van Bever and Johnny Torrio; one led by Julius

and Charles Maibaum, who took Ed Weiss’ places under their wing; and the third by

brothers Joe and Bill Marshall.

162

Officer 666 was among the first to acknowledge

Johnny Torrio and Maurice Van Bever’s importance to organized crime. These two were

among the criminal elite of the organized crime network, but reporters and investigators

underestimated their roles when naming vice syndicate “bosses.” Julius and Charles

Maibaum were in the organized crime network each with five criminal ties, and the

Marshall brothers never connected to the organized crime network. From the perspective

of the organized crime network, the Marshall and Maibaum brothers were far from

competitors with Torrio and Van Bever who were among the most criminally connected.

In 1917, a big case for Illinois State’s Attorney Hoyne painted a centralized

organized crime triumvirate that appeared to be largely for prosecution purposes more so

than actually having cracked the decentralized clustered organized crime network.

Hoyne’s men raided a luxury office at 109 North Dearborn Street and discovered Tom

Costello, Mike Heitler, William Skidmore, and Lieutenant Martin White sorting through

packages of money secured by rubber bands.

163

The raid also uncovered Lieutenant

White carrying a small Moroccan leather notebook that included lists of protected hotels,

brothels, and saloons. A page in the notebook contained the heading “Can be raided,” and

underneath the heading was a list of names and partial addresses.

164

Hoyne submitted this

notebook as evidence of the police departments’ control and efficacy in the new

forbidden red-light districts.

165

He argued that the “rulers of the vice world” were

Costello, Heitler, and Skidmore—names familiar from the days before the Levees closed

and all well connected members in the organized crime network. The “rulers of the vice

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

world” were protected by Chief of Police Charles Healey who personally netted about

$25,000 a year as beneficiary to the vice ring (about $460,000 in 2015 dollars).

166

Hoyne

built his case only against the West Side vice ring, but he noted that the existence of a

second vice ring operating in Chicago about which he had nothing more to say.

Head of the West Side vice ring, Tom Costello turned state’s witness in the case

against Chief of Police Healey. In his testimony, Costello detailed how the Chicago

police department had become “a veritable bribe assessing and collection machine with

Healey the master grafter.”

167

One of the details that got buried in Costello’s hours of

testimony against Chief Healey was an interaction that Costello had with Johnny

Torrio.

168

Torrio knew that Costello had connections to Chief Healy and to members of

the prostitution fighting investigatory Committee of Fifteen, so Torrio went to Costello to

buy into the protection syndicate for his brothel and five brothels of his associates.

Costello agreed, and the next day Torrio took Costello and Harrison Streeter of the

Committee of Fifteen for a drive in his Studebaker to show them the six brothels

requiring protection. Torrio drove the men to the former 22

Street Levee where the six

brothels were located. Near the Vestibule and the De Luxe were two women owned

brothels, Emily Marshall and Georgie Spencer’s places. Emily and Georgie’s envelopes

of cash to Johnny Torrio who passed them to Costello who passed them to Chief Healy

secured their positions in the organized crime network. Brothels were forced underground

when the Levees closed making the protection market even more lucrative. However,

territory still mattered to organized crime as demonstrated by Johnny Torrio’s Studebaker

tour of his establishments. Moreover, women’s brothels, even when underground and

covert, were still able to enter the organized crime network.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The closing of the Levees was essentially the closing of the large, prosperous, and

most famous brothels of Chicago—brothels owned by men and women. Several

organized crime women, like the Everleigh sisters, closed up shop and left their Chicago

playground. Others, like Vic Shaw, moved to smaller and more discrete locations within

the former Levees or farther out into residential districts.

169

Mayor Harrison closed Jim

Colosimo’s café and cabaret, but Jim transferred the title over to Victoria Moresco and

she was able to keep it open in the 22

Street Levee.

170

Georgie Spencer and Emily

Marshall accessed the protection of organized crime and the bawdy reputation of the

former Levees with their brothels five years after the closing. Organized crime women

continued to traffic women for the sex work rings running out of brothels, hotels, and

saloons.

171

Sex workers even returned to their old Levee brothels according to a

Committee of Fifteen complaint to Mayor Harrison alleging that the old “vice kings” had

purchased the brothel buildings, converted them into hotels and saloons, and re-hired the

sex workers to solicit from the back rooms.

172

Locations still mattered for women’s

entrée to the organized crime network.

Conclusion

Sex work was technically legal at the turn of the twentieth century, but shifting

and ambiguous laws and their enforcement made sex work risky and profitable business.

Chicago’s vices of gambling, sex work, and alcohol concentrated within the segregated

red-light districts known as the Levee districts. Organized crime developed in the Levees

as a loose protection market connecting illicit entertainment business owners with

corrupted ward politicians and police officers. Organized crime’s nearly exclusive focus

on protection forced organized crime to be territorial because the protection market

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

required the concentrated locations of illicit businesses. Organized crime was also

decentralized at this time with no clear leadership core. Women had greater opportunities

of being in the organized crime network when the structure of the organized crime

network was small and decentralized and the market of organized crime was open and

territorial.

Women’s brothels were among the many illicit entertainment establishments

requiring protection in the Levees, and women connected to organized crime through

their payments into and their benefits from the protection market. There were 47 women

in the organized crime network from 1900 to 1919, and 89 percent of these women were

involved in the sex work economy. Women did not require marriage and family

relationships to organized crime men in order to connect to the organized crime network.

Much of what was to become of Chicago organized crime in the following years

of Prohibition was imprinted by a particular trajectory that began in the early 1900s: the

districts, the blocks, the illicit entertainment economies, and some of the men. The same

was not true for organized crime women. During Prohibition, women’s relationships to

organized crime became increasingly dependent on their marital and familial

relationships to organized crime men. Women brothel owners and other women

entrepreneurs no longer entered organized crime through their business locations alone.

Organized crime’s interest in the sex economy grew during Prohibition, but its interests

excluded the increasing percentage of women brothel owners across Chicago. Women

bootleggers and moonshiners operated on a small domestic scale in isolation from

organized crime. Relations trumped locations for women entrée to organized crime

during Prohibition when locations had served women well before Prohibition.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Notes

Blair 2010; Haller 1971, 1990; Harrison 1935; Landesco [1929] 1968; Reckless 1933.

Starr and Curtis 1885; Stead 1894:452.

O’Laughlin, John Callan. 1909. “Vice is Flaunted in Chicago’s Face.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, October 10, pp. 1, 4.

Reckless 1933:1-2.

Joslyn 1920.

See Jennifer Fronc’s (2009) discussion of the importance of the term “activists” in

contrast to “reformers” when referring to the social movements of the Progressive Era (p.

5).

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Graft or a Plot? M’Cann Fight On.” July 25, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Steward’s Order Throttles Levee.” October 11, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Police Close Limits Hotel.” October 29, p. 3; Chicago

Daily Tribune. 1913. “Mann Act Case Bares Vice Ring.” October 19, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Police Seize Men in Levee Raids.” October 13, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Vice Regulation Methods Opposed.” October 17, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Vice Loses Pomp in Levee Penance.” October 12, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Vice Regulation Methods Opposed.” October 17, p. 3.

Ibid.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Find ‘Dago Frank’ Levee Insurgent.” May 1, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “‘Blind to Vice:’ 35 Lieutenants.” October 26, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1913. “‘Vag’ Warrants for Women.” December 19, p. 3.

Reckless 1933:238.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “The Vice Report.” April 7, p. 8; Reckless 1933:239.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Reckless 1933:1-2.

Ibid p. 243.

Ibid pp. 60, 243.

Ibid p. 243.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1913. “Morals Court to Open War on Vice.” March 16, p. 1.

Reckless 1933:258.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Committee of Fifteen. File Number 4525-4.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Morals Chief Traps Briber for Vice Ring.” February

26, p. 1.

Addams [1909] 1972:5-6.

Meyerowitz 1988.

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015; Donovan 1920; Meyerowitz 1988.

Blair 2010.

Stead 1894:249-250.

Ibid p. 2

51.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “What the Vice Commission Found; How It Would

Correct Evil.” April 6, p. 6.

Blair 2010:82.

Ibid.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Steward’s Order Throttles Levee.” October 11, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Vice Loses Pomp in Levee Penance.” October 12, p. 1;

Reckless 1933:15-16.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Gipsy’s Marchers Storm Sin’s Front.” October 19, p. 1.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Abbott 2007:24-27; Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015.

Abbott 2007.

Landesco 1936:896.

Ibid; Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015.

Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Oldest Vice Queen Finds Reform at 70.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, March 14, pp. 1, 6; Browning, Norma Lee. 1949. “Grandeur Turns to Squalor

for Ex-Levee Queen.” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15, p. 4.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Franks Confess Graft in Detail.” July 25, p. 2.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “West Side Levee Hears Its Knell.” November 5, p. 1.

Blair 2010:45.

Ibid p. 28.

Ibid pp. 46, 143.

Ibid p. 141; Fronc 2009:100-102. See also Cressey 1932; Reckless 1933.

Blair 2010:143.

Diffee 2005; Gleeson 1915; Harland 1912; Turner-Zimmerman 1911.

Blair 2010; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Steward’s Order Throttles Levee.” October

11, p. 1; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Police Seize Men in Levee Raids.” October 13,

p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Steward’s Order Throttles Levee.” October 11, p. 1.

Ibid; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Find ‘Dago Frank’ Levee Insurgent.” May 1, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Steward’s Order Throttles Levee.” October 11, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Vice Loses Pomp in Levee Penance.” October 12, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Find ‘Dago Frank’ Levee Insurgent.” May 1, p. 3.

Landesco [1929] 1968:846.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Blair 2010:27, 51.

O’Laughlin, John Callan. 1909. “Vice is Flaunted in Chicago’s Face.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, October 10, pp. 1, 4.

Reckless 1933:101.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1907. “Charges of Graft Pile up on Police.” October 3, p. 2;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1916. “Nootbaar Goes Back to Levee in New Shakeup.” October

8, p. 3; Reckless 1933.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “West Side Hotels Raided: Eight Houses Visited and

Only Fifteen Arrests Made.” September 5, p. 5.

O’Laughlin, John Callan. 1909. “Vice is Flaunted in Chicago’s Face.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, October 10, pp. 1, 4.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1900. “Levee is Resuming Activity.” April 14, p. 5.

Reckless 1933:54.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1907. “Defends Honor of Yale.” May 25, p. 2.

Ibid.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “What the Vice Commission Found; How It Would

Correct Evil.” April 6, p. 6.

Stead 1894.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “Chott Is Shifted; Will Have Trial.” October 9, p. 4.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Federal Vicenet Entangles Eight.” November 8, p. 7.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Silver’s Palace Denied License.” May 28, p. 3;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Quits the Levee Crusade.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2,

p. 7.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Silver’s Palace Denied License.” May 28, p. 3.

Blair 2010:51, 128.

Officer 666. 1914. “Vice Trust Tactics Bared by Insider.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July

20, pp. 1-2.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Blair 2010:127; Harrison 1935:311.

Blair 2010:51, 126.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Wheelock Gives Police Officers Lesson on Vice.”

November 2, pp. 1, 4.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1907. “Lawyers Visit Vice Center.” July 10, p. 2; O’Laughlin,

John Callan. 1909. “Vice is Flaunted in Chicago’s Face.” October 10, pp. 1, 4.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1901. “Raid on Woodruff Hotel.” February 11, p. 3; Chicago

Daily Tribune. 1914. “Man Patron Slain Mysteriously in Roy Jones’ Dive.” April 9, pp.

1-2; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Mayor Queries about Shooting.” April 10, p. 3;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1919. “Gentleman’s Killing Bares Wide Gambling.” September

2, p. 1.

Eig 2010.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “Divorced Wife’s Brother Tells of Family Rows.” May

12, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1918. “Drinks for Soldiers and Sailors.” September 2, p. 13;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1919. “Tilting of Lid Brings Big Jim Second Arrest.” May 21, p.

14.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Colosimo Gives Realty to Wife.” August 27, p. 13.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “Divorced Wife’s Brother Tells of Family Rows.” May

12, p. 3.

Landesco 1936:892.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “Immune to Law at Craig’s Tivoli.” December 26, p. 8.

Landesco [1929] 1968.

Burgess [1929] 1968:1091.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1901. “Levee Rejoicing; Mayor Defiant.” May 11, p. 3.

Ibid.

Chicago Historical Society 2005.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Silver’s Palace Denied License.” May 28, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Quits the Levee Crusade.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July

2, p. 7. See Jennifer Fronc’s (2009) book on the rise and consequence of this type of

undercover surveillance in US history.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “‘New Levee’ Gay; ‘The Maxim’ Open.” June 14, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1907. “License Revoking Just a Big Farce.” February 15, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “Immune to Law at Craig’s Tivoli.” December 26, p. 8.

100

Asbury 1940:309; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “Insider Points Road Leading to

Hoyne Raid.” January 10, p. 2.

101

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Inside Story of Vice’s Grip on Chicago.” July 18, pp.

1, 3.

102

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1913. “Mann Act Case Bares Vice Ring.”October 19, p. 3;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Police Fail to Close Up Levee Capitol.” July 24, p. 1.

103

Ibid.

104

Abbott 2007.

105

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Brolaski’s Story Imperils Police in the ‘Vice Trust.’”

November 19, p. 1.

106

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1901. “Mrs. Nation in Tour of Levee.” February 13, p. 1.

107

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1907. “First Ward in Annual Orgy.” December 10, p. 5.

108

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1908. “Levee’s Hordes Storm Coliseum.” December 15, p. 1.

109

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “Calls Ward Orgy Boon to Charity.” December 12, p.

110

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1908. “Levee’s Hordes Storm Coliseum.” December 15, p. 1.

111

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “Calls Ward Orgy Boon to Charity.” December 12, p.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

112

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “Calls Ward Orgy Boon to Charity.” December 12, p.

113

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1908. “Levee’s Hordes Storm Coliseum.” December 15, p. 1.

114

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1902. “First-Warders at Ball.” January 16, p. 9.

115

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Big Dance Is a ‘Sizzler.’” January 7, p. 3.

116

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Huge Vice Trust Thwarted Here.” August 19, p. 5.

117

Erenberg 1981:73,154-156.

118

Officer 666. 1914. “Vice Trust Tactics Bared by Insider.” Chicago Daily Tribune,

July 20, pp. 1-2.

119

Abbott 2007; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1906. “Immune to Law at Craig’s Tivoli.”

December 26, p. 8.

120

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Report Shows Police Corrupt; Demands New

Organization.” March 11, p. 1.

121

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “‘Blind to Vice:’ 35 Lieutenants.” October 26, p. 3.

122

Ibid.

123

Reckless 1933:10.

124

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “South Side Vice Trials on Today.” December 26, p. 3.

125

Ibid.

126

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Report Shows Police Corrupt; Demands New

Organization.” March 11, p. 1.

127

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Inside Story of Vice’s Grip on Chicago.” July 18, pp.

1, 3; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Quiz Levee Police at Secret Advance Trial.” July 23,

p. 1.

128

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Inside Story of Vice’s Grip on Chicago.” July 18, pp.

1, 3.

129

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Steward’s Order Throttles Levee.” October 11, p. 1;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “M’Weeny to File Charges against Bonfield Today.” June

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

9, p. 1; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Brolaski’s Story Imperils Police in the ‘Vice

Trust.’” November 19, p. 1; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Ask City to Call Nation’s

Experts on Vice Problem.” October 30, p. 1; Officer 666. 1914. “Vice Trust Tactics

Bared by Insider.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 20, pp. 1-2.

130

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Ask City to Call Nation’s Experts on Vice Problem.”

October 30, p. 1.

131

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Frank on Stand Accuses M’Cann.” September 11, p. 1.

132

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Detectives Seize M’Cann’s Relative.” September 12,

p. 1.

133

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Returns Woman for Vice Inquiry.” December 4, p. 3.

134

Ibid.

135

Abbott 2007.

136

Ibid.

137

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1908. “Levee’s Hordes Storm Coliseum.” December 15, p. 1.

138

Landesco [1929] 1968:850.

139

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “‘Blind to Vice:’ 35 Lieutenants.” October 26, p. 3.

140

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Starts Vice War.” October 25, p. 1.

141

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Wheelock Gives Police Officers Lesson on Vice.”

November 2, pp. 1, 4.

142

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. Photo Standalone 3. February 19, p. 32; Chicago Daily

Tribune. 1933. “Wreckers Begin Tearing down Everleigh Club.” July 25, p. 3.

143

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Would Keep Vice in One District.” October 28, p. 2;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Ask City to Call Nation’s Experts on Vice Problem.”

October 30, p. 1.

144

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1903. “Would Keep Vice in One District.” October 28, p. 2.

145

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Ask City to Call Nation’s Experts on Vice Problem.”

October 30, p. 1.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

146

Ibid.

147

Ibid.

148

Ibid.

149

Drake and Cayton. [1945] 1962.

150

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Vice Regulation Methods Opposed.” October 17, p. 3.

151

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Wayman Men Raid Resorts; Levee in Panic.” October

5, p. 1.

152

Drake and Cayton [1945] 1962; Reckless 1933:vii.

153

Langum 2006.

154

Clement 2006.

155

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1912. “Ask City to Call Nation’s Experts on Vice Problem.”

October 30, p. 1; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Inside Story of Vice’s Grip on

Chicago.” July 18, pp. 1, 3; Hyde, Henry M. 1916. “Zone of Vice Affords Cloak to

Crook Ring.” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 13, p. 17.

156

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Duel in Levee Gangster Job; Ended Wrong.” July 19,

p. 1.

157

Hyde, Henry M. 1916. “Old Red Light District Like Earthquake City.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, January 11, p. 13.

158

Blair 2010; Reckless 1933.

159

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Maj. Funkhouser to Resist Ouster.” January 19, p. 3.

160

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Morals Chief Traps Briber for Vice Ring.” February

26, p. 1; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Second Bribery Plot of Vice Ring.” February 27,

p. 3.

161

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Morals Chief Traps

Briber for Vice Ring.” February 26, p. 1; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Second Bribery

Plot of Vice Ring.” February 27, p. 3.

162

Officer 666. 1914. “Vice Trust Tactics Bared by Insider.” Chicago Daily Tribune,

July 20, pp. 1-2.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

163

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “Hoyne Arrests Healey.” January 9, p. 1.

164

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “Mr. Hoyne’s Conference; One of the ‘Big Three’; The

Accused Chief; An Arrested Lieutenant; Page from Vice ‘Red Book.’” January 9, p. 3.

165

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “Hoyne Arrests Healey.” January 9, p. 1.

166

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “Hoyne Arrests

Healey.” January 9, p. 1.

167

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “$13,900 Chief’s Share in Graft, Costello Says.”

December 19, pp. 1, 10.

168

Ibid.

169

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Maj. Funkhouser to Resist Ouster.” January 19, p. 3;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Inside Story of Vice’s Grip on Chicago.” July 18, pp. 1,

170

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Colosimo Gives Realty to Wife.” August 27, p. 13;

Harrison 1935:304.

171

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Sift Jones Raid Data for Mann Act Violations.”

November 17, p. 13; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1916. “‘Mike De Pike Convicted as ‘White

Slaver.’” June 2, p. 17.

172

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1914. “Vice Women Held Vagrants.” January 11, p. 1.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

CHAPTER 3

WOMEN IN CHICAGO ORGANIZED CRIME, 1920-1933

US Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, was a law which banned the production,

transportation, and sale of intoxicating beverages, which essentially shifted legitimate

alcohol production and legitimate alcohol selling establishments into the criminal

economy. The societal changes introduced by Prohibition not only created the crime of

violating liquor laws, but these changes also mobilized and refashioned pre-existing

criminal organizations. Prohibition was an exogenous shock to the Chicago organized

crime network. Whereas organized crime before Prohibition revolved around the

protection and exploitation of illicit entertainment economies in Chicago’s Levee

districts, organized crime during Prohibition added the product of intoxicating beverages.

This new product required space, transportation, distribution, and protection. Operating

gambling and prostitution resorts during Prohibition required keeping the beer and liquor

flowing, and these original illicit entertainment economies of organized crime became

even more profitable when complimented by illegal booze. Speakeasies, gambling dens,

and brothels formed an important part of the distribution network that connected booze to

thirsty customers.

The organized crime network tripled in size and became more sparse and

centralized with a clearer leadership structure at the core. Powerful men at the center of

the network became even more powerful. Organized crime expanded its operations

beyond the protection market to large-scale production and distribution of booze. Rather

than the territorial concentration in the Levee districts, Chicago organized crime’s

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

production and protection spread geographically across the city, into the villages outside

Chicago, and to some neighboring states.

The organizational restructuring of crime mobilized men and excluded women.

Women made up only 4 percent of the Prohibition organized crime network even as

women’s proportion of alcohol and sex work activities and properties around Chicago

were increasing. Women could no longer connect to organized crime solely through the

location of their illicit businesses in organized crime territory. Relations trumped

locations as the means of connecting to organized crime, and women could not access the

relationships to organized crime like men. Women of the Prohibition organized crime

network included silent wives, alibis, victims, entrappers, and public enemies. The

majority of women (66 percent) accessed organized crime through relationships with

their husbands, romantic partners, or male family members.

Chicago organized crime changed dramatically during Prohibition in terms of its

product, its geographic reach, scale, organizational centralization, and its power and

influence. Participating in the restructured form of organized crime required relations

more so than locations. Organized crime developed beyond its territorial focus of

scooping up illicit entertainment business of the Levee districts to include in its

protection market. During Prohibition, relationships became the main way to connect to

the organization that was growing in size and geographic reach. Clear criminalization of

the alcohol market required trusting relationships between criminal associates. In this

chapter, I argue that even as women made up a growing percentage of the alcohol and sex

work locations, they had less access to the types of relationships that would connect them

to organized crime. This lack of connection left women’s businesses vulnerable to raids

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

and prosecution and minimized the profitability of their businesses. Essentially, the

shifting structures of Chicago organized crime left women behind.

The Amendments

Progressive Era activism achieved two constitutional amendments in 1919: the

Prohibition of alcohol and women’s right to vote. The anti-alcohol temperance movement

and women’s suffrage movement coincided temporally and overlapped in membership.

Both were strong movements that had multiple successes at the state levels. The

temperance movement engaged in some of the largest and most aggressive lobbying

efforts the US had ever seen.

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had more

members than entire suffragists’ movements, but there was considerable overlap between

the two.

Elite and educated women organized around saving poor women from violent

drunk husbands who were squandering the household income at the local saloon.

The

momentum of women’s increasing political involvement and influence in the temperance

movement motivated national brewers and distillers to lobby against women’s suffrage.

States passing suffrage laws tended to be in the West and had increasing opportunity

structures for women in education, work, political organizing, and property ownership.

In 1913, Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi to grant women the right to

vote in municipal elections and presidential primaries, but women’s ballots were counted

separately from men’s ballots.

The temperance movement gained momentum during WWI with increasing anti-

German sentiment, “bread, not beer” campaigns to support the soldiers abroad, and anti-

immigrant alarm targeting the growing populations of urban poor.

As a result, WWI

effectively silenced working-class and immigrant opponents to Prohibition. In 1919, both

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

the temperance and suffrage movements achieved constitutional reform with the passing

of the 18

and 19

Amendments to the US Constitution. The 18

Amendment, or

Prohibition in the shorthand, banned the production, transportation, and sale of

intoxicating beverages. Prohibition went into effect on January 17, 1920. Congress

approved the 19

Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1919, but it was not

ratified by the states into law until August of 1920. Illinois was among the bulk of the

states that ratified the 18

Amendment in January 1919 and was among the first states to

ratify the 19

Amendment in June 1919.

From 1920 until 1933, the United States conducted the “noble experiment” of

Prohibition. The state of Illinois had largely ignored the Wartime Prohibition Act that

began in July 1919, so January 17, 1920 was the first day of major consequence

regarding the anti-alcohol legislation and prosecution.

The eve of Prohibition was an

especially busy day for liquor sales as citizens of Chicago stocked their home supplies.

The law permitted personal consumption and storage of alcohol—a Prohibition perk

available to the wealthy. At midnight, the Chicago drys (i.e., supporters of Prohibition)

sang songs to a symbolic John Barleycorn, Chicago’s head of Prohibition enforcement

discussed a 10-day grace period for saloon owners to register their alcohol stock with

federal agents, and police responded to 20 incidents of alcohol robbery.

Prohibition

related crimes had begun.

The 18

Amendment was the first amendment to the Constitution that limited

rather than protected individual freedom.

Prohibition’s controversial invasion of home

and leisure generated massive disregard for the law and, as a result, incredible

profitability for those who organized the production and sale of booze. Prohibition

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

triggered unprecedented corruption: Chicago’s elite received alcohol home delivery,

politicians voted for dry laws while wetting their palates with bootleg booze, judges had

access to the best Canadian imports, law enforcement salaries multiplied through bribes,

and federal Prohibition agents engaged in graft.

Short supply and high demand kept the

local bootleggers of Chicago busy. Four years into Prohibition, reporter Arthur Evans

wrote a three part series for the Chicago Tribune on the conditions in Chicago under

Prohibition; Evans and the unnamed politician he interviewed for the article accused

“alien” immigrants of supplying Chicago’s “Americans” with poisonous booze:

Homemade wine has no patrons for it is considered too tame, while beer is larded

as nothing more than a chaser. The call is for something with quick and fiery

action, something volcanic. … There are spots on the west side where at night

when the clouds are low, the streets reek with smells like a distillery in prewar

days. … Bootleggers with bottles in their pockets in black grips prowl the streets.

The hooch addict has no trouble in locating a source of supply. As fast as the

police hammer it down in one spot it rises in another. … The stuff goes at 25 or

50 cents a flask in the general run. … “And for the most part the moon is being

made and bootlegged by alien foreigners who are not citizens, but who are getting

rich poisoning Americans. There are some foreign districts in Chicago where half

the alien population seems to be moonshining and those who don’t make moon

are bootlegging the stuff.”

Evans and the anonymous politician’s accusations against Chicago immigrants and their

“fiery” booze focused on domestic production in tenements and Chicago slums,

perpetuating the anti-immigrant sentiment that pushed forward the 18

Amendment.

However, Chicago’s alcohol production and distribution was not limited to the domestic

sphere, and residents from all walks of life were cashing in on Prohibition profits.

Soda shops, pharmacies, and cigar stores became fronts for booze peddling.

Doctors’ prescriptions, diluted industrial-grade alcohol, and homemade batches of wine,

beer, and moonshine could not keep up with the dry nation’s thirst. Hundreds of gallons

of Canadian whiskey arrived in Chicago via the railroad.

Whatever the source, the

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

profits of pouring beer and liquor in Chicago were unprecedented. Harry Harris of

Chicago organized crime elaborated on the Prohibition cash flow:

Good whiskey was just like gold and it was nothing to get $120 for a case of

whiskey them days. … It was nothing to see a fellow with a couple of grand in his

pocket when before prohibition a five dollar bill would have been lots of money

to him.

As Harry Harris’s comments indicate, there was a scale to the production and

profits of Prohibition. On one side of the scale, anyone with access to an appliance store,

a screwdriver, and a set of pliers could build a profitable home still; any man with an

overcoat full of interior pockets could turn himself into a walking saloon; and any women

could sell individual shots from her moonshine jar hiding under her kitchen sink.

These

were substantial profits for these individuals and their families, but they were localized

profits generated within neighborhoods and from acquaintances. Although bootlegging

income could help a struggling family, especially during the Depression of 1929, average

families were not walking around with a “couple of grand” in their pockets like Harry

Harrison.

On the other side of the scale, Harry Harrison and other members of organized

crime took over local breweries, divided the city into distribution territories, robbed

federal facilities where confiscated alcohol was stored, and coordinated the international

smuggling of imported alcohol.

A family’s production of alcohol was no competition

for organized crime. Organized crime’s mass production, coordination, and distribution

ignored small batches of domestic product. However, domestic production and small-

scale distribution were one of the few ways women took advantage of the mass profits

generated by the 18

Amendment.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Women of Prohibition

Historians have consistently documented women’s domestic roles in brewing and

distilling throughout history, dispelling popular notions that brewing was only men’s

work. In medieval England, women brewed and sold the majority of all the beer

consumed, as it was domestic work denoted by the gendered term “brewster.”

During

US Reconstruction, the distillers of “mountain dew” in the southern Appalachian

Mountains were predominantly men, but in the rural mountain communities where

distilling was a family affair, some wives gave the tax collectors unreliable information

regarding the location of distilleries, warned the neighbors when government raiders were

approaching, or even fired shots at the raiders.

Occasionally, widows and daughters

inherited the equipment, skills, and knowledge to continue producing moonshine after the

men in their families had died.

Women were an important part of bootlegging and moonshining during

Prohibition across the US and especially in Chicago. Historical research on Prohibition in

the rural US found that women turned their kitchens into moneymaking machines with

home brewing and distilling.

Chicago cases suggest a similar economy for urban

women when residents complained in letters to Mayor Dever that Italian women were

selling barrels of wine and booze from their apartments.

Observers of Chicago

moonshine cases noted that even though few women were sent to Bridewell prison

compared to men, women’s cases were increasing.

The Illinois Humane Society

handled 221 moonshine cases in 1922 and nearly 12 percent of them were women

defendants, a figure that was up from the previous year.

However, for better or worse,

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and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Chicago women moonshiners operated in the domestic and family sphere in isolation

from organized crime.

There were two separate scales to Prohibition production and profits: the domestic

scale and organized crime’s scale. On the domestic scale, bootlegging and moonshining

were family affairs. According to the Chicago Tribune, “Little girls, daughters of

moonshiners whose dingy kitchens had been transformed into distilleries, delivered half

pints to customers of 35 cents.”

Children lied to the police officers about their fathers’

employment. For example, when policemen in plainclothes asked a 7-year-old Italian boy

what his father did for a living, he demonstrated some quick thinking: “[I] told them that

he worked on the railroad and I told that he didn’t make moonshine when they asked

me.” One of the officers offered the boy some candy, saying they were friends and

customers of his father’s and they were there to buy a few cans of alcohol. “I stuck to my

story … and when my dad came back and I told him about the incident, he was so tickled

with me and so pleased that he took me down, and he gave me a dollar.”

Converting the domestic sphere into a profit-generating enterprise meant having

and maintaining roofs over families’ heads. German families converted their homes into

beer flats where neighbors could spend the evening drinking beer and spending time with

the family for a small fee. The Mullers were one such family whose beer flat was an

important contributor to the family economy:

Their home was an old wooden shack. There were at least half dozen children

playing on the floor which was greasy and dirty. The family consisted of Mr. and

Mrs. [Muller] and about nine children some married who lived there with their

wives or husbands. On top of all this there were about seven fellows and girls who

lived with them and no one worked. Mrs. [Muller] was a tall slim woman who

loved to drink. The old man was a huge giant, he could hardly talk any English.

They were the typical German type. I looked over the place, the furniture was

scant. For a kitchen table they had an old wine barrel with a board over it. There

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

100

were not enough chairs and many had to sit on the floor. … The old man loved his

beer. He bathed in it. The home as a whole looked more like a stable.

Nevertheless we went here quite often as a pretty nice bunch of fellows hung

here. … The old lady [Muller] was rocking one of the kids to sleep on her lap and

in one hand she had a drinking glass filled to the brim with whiskey of which she

occasionally took a drink now and then. This family could live on whiskey. Even

the children drank it.

During Prohibition, family homes such as the Mullers became important social

institutions in Chicago neighborhoods. Men and women found these social connections in

these informal social spaces important for reasons beyond the alcohol and

companionship. Cigarette Mamie, for instance, was an Irish “short chubby woman with

coal black hair,” and she and her husband turned their home into an alehouse.

They

made good money selling beer and whiskey, but Cigarette Mamie was also a matriarch of

the neighborhood: “Mamie could fight like a man and God help the one she hit. All the

women in the neighborhood went to her in time of need or whenever any difficulty arose,

she would always help them. The people looked upon her as a sort of advisor.”

In many ways these informal beer flats and alehouses were not terribly different

than the informal brothels and disorderly flats scattered around the city, and homes could

function as both. Women continued to find criminal opportunities during Prohibition, but

their businesses and connections to organized crime only extended as far the walls of

their homes. Upon his release from prison, a young man returned to his mother’s brothel

where he knew he could also get a drink:

One of the girls my mother had staying with her came over and said, “Hello,

Baby. How are you?” I told her I was fine and asked her if I could buy a drink.

She said she did not know if Rose had any or not that she would go see. I knew

that mother always had it but she told the girls never to say she had whiskey until

she saw who wanted it. When my mother came in the front room to see if she

knew who wanted the drink she looked at me and started to say something. But

when she saw it was me tears stopped whatever she had in mind.

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101

Rose’s home functioning as a brothel provided housing and employment for herself and

the women who worked for her, as well as a place to land for family and friends. Alcohol

sales increased their profits. Brothels were illegal spaces and because of the trust required

between clients and workers, brothels became a safe place to ask for a drink. Rose

controlled the pouring of whiskey at her establishment, so that liquor violations were not

flagrant.

Illicit domestic work meant a home by day and a workplace by night without the

additional expense of renting commercial spaces. The informality and small scale of the

enterprise made for a quick cover in case of a raid. However, when the raids did come,

there were no resources or protection for escaping prosecution. Women’s domestic

moonshining and bootlegging operated outside a protection market, and the legal

consequences and sentences were severe.

Moonshine Mary, 34 years old, was an immigrant from Poland and a mother of

three young children. Her husband was chronically ill, so in 1923 she turned their small

cottage into a blind pig (slang for an illegal saloon). She sold drinks at 15 cents apiece

poured from her bottle of home-brewed moonshine. The Chicago Tribune reported on

Mary because she was charged with manslaughter for selling the moonshine that

poisoned a man. The report from the coroner’s chemist stated that the man died from

wood alcohol poisoning. Moonshine Mary received a one-year to life sentence in Joliet

state prison and was the first woman (though certainly not the last) in the state of Illinois

convicted of manslaughter for selling poisonous moonshine. Moonshine Mary’s

ridiculously long jail sentence speaks to her complete lack of legal resources.

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102

Considering the domestic scale of Prohibition production and profits, it is no

surprise that women turned moonshining and bootlegging into family or women’s work.

To examine women’s participation in the Prohibition economy, I identified 500 alcohol

related addresses in Chicago that included information on proprietors, co-proprietors,

operators, or managers from 1900 to 1933. Half of these addresses were from the first

decade, 1900 to 1909. Alcohol-related spaces included saloons, speakeasies, restaurants

serving alcohol illegally, and breweries, but also domestic spaces like blind pigs and beer

flats as well as domestic alcohol sales. Many of these addresses had no connection to

organized crime. The line graph in Figure 2 shows an overall increase in the percent of

addresses that involved women as proprietors, co-proprietors, operators, or managers

from 1900 to 1933.

Figure 2: Women’s percent of alcohol related addresses in Chicago, 1900-1933

The percent of women’s alcohol locations increased steadily across all decades

with the biggest increase occurring between the 1910s and 1920s, when Prohibition

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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103

began. In the first decade of the twentieth century women were only involved in 3 percent

of alcohol-related locations. Before Prohibition, these were establishments that violated

local liquor laws such as closing hours and unaccompanied women in saloons. Women’s

involvement in alcohol-related locations increased to 12 percent the decade before

Prohibition, 26 percent in the first 10 years of Prohibition, and 29 percent in the last 4

years of Prohibition. In summary, women found increasing opportunity in alcohol-related

crime: Prohibition was not an economy that excluded women. This research corrects the

misconception that Prohibition was a men’s economy, only affecting men’s drinking and

men’s violations of liquor laws.

Women were a rather substantial part of the small-scale domestic bootlegging and

moonshining in Chicago. Families like the Mullers and individuals like Cigarette Mamie

and Moonshine Mary are examples of criminal relationships that were localized

interactions between sellers and buyers. In many of these cases, women produced their

own alcohol; in other cases, it was not clear where women bought their product.

Moreover, these were not syndicated criminal relationships connected to the larger and

more powerful organized crime network of Chicago; rather, women were operating in

isolation and separate from organized crime. Women’s earnings, like Cigarette Mamie’s

several dollars a night or Moonshine Mary’s 15 cents a glass, were not competition for

the larger beer barons of Chicago. Women’s profits were so small that they were either

not noticed by organized crime or organized crime tolerated this tiny cut into its market.

Before Prohibition, the bulk of the criminal relationships in Chicago’s organized

crime network was the coordination and graft in the protection market. Locations in

organized crime territories provided entrée into the protection market when men and

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

104

women owners of illicit establishments connected to organized crime through payments.

During Prohibition, organized crime’s markets diversified beyond the protection market

to include large-scale bootlegging and eventually labor racketeering, racetracks, and

investments in legitimate businesses. Organized crime had moved outside of the Levee

districts, across Chicago, into the villages outside the city, and, occasionally, into

neighboring states. Organized crime and its restructured protection market largely

ignored women’s localized illicit establishments that produced and sold alcohol.

Organized crime still laid claim to the geographic space, but it did so without women

owners, even though women’s alcohol locations were increasing elsewhere in the city.

Locations no longer provided entrée to the organized crime network.

The Syndicate

Prohibition was an exogenous shock to the Chicago organized crime network, and

the organizational structures shifted dramatically over the 14 years of Prohibition. The

organized crime network grew to include three times more individuals and four times

more criminal relationships than before Prohibition. The restructuring of organized crime

resulted in a sparser and more centralized network, and the individuals in the powerful

core become even more powerful. Gone were the decentralized structure and ambiguous

leadership of organized crime’s protection market in Chicago’s Levee districts. However,

the Levees, the illicit entertainment economies, and some of the men from the pre-

Prohibition organized crime network imprinted the organizational restructuring during

Prohibition.

Among the ambiguous leadership of pre-Prohibition organized crime was Jim

Colosimo, who had been the most central individual in the organized crime network

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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105

before Prohibition because he had the highest number of criminal ties (n=43) in the

network. Most of his ties were to other members of Chicago’s underworld, but he

maintained a few close ties to local ward politicians. Jim’s famous Colosimo’s Café was

the property of his wife, Victoria Moresco. Notably, around 1917, Colosimo’s Café

began to feature cabaret singer Dale Winter.

Jim Colosimo, smitten with his new singer,

hired his Italian professional singer friends to train her in opera.

Eventually, Jim kicked

Victoria out of their house on Vernon Avenue, and invited Dale to move in with promises

of marrying her as soon as his divorce to Victoria was finalized.

Upon their divorce in

1920, Victoria Moresco left Chicago and ultimately left the organized crime network.

On May 11, 1920, only one week after returning from his honeymoon with Dale

Winter and only several months after Prohibition had gone into effect, Jim Colosimo was

murdered at his own café at 2126-2128 South Wabash Avenue. He was shot in the head

by a single bullet. The theories of the Colosimo murder varied widely to include a Black

Hand vendetta, political fight, labor union conflict, a jealous ex-wife, a jealous admirer of

his new wife, or Johnny Torrio—Colosimo and Moresco’s right-hand man—wanting

greater control of organized crime’s direction under Prohibition. Colosimo’s murder was

never solved.

The common narrative of organized crime was that with Colosimo gone, Johnny

Torrio was able to take over Colosimo’s empire. The Chicago Tribune reported this

narrative around 1925 when Torrio’s organized crime leadership was clear.

Historical

sources such as Herbert Asbury’s 1940 Gem of the Prairie and John Landesco’s 1929

Organized Crime in Chicago preserved the narrative of Torrio’s succession to Colosimo,

and the narrative persists in contemporary popular nonfiction.

The Colosimo-Torrio

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106

succession narrative is consistent with the organized crime networks. Colosimo was the

most central individual in the small and decentralized organized crime network before

Prohibition when Torrio was among the criminal elite. Colosimo’s death in the early

months of the 14-year Prohibition network left him with only 7 criminal ties within

organized crime compared to Torrio’s 68 criminal ties.

Torrio’s rise in organized crime began before Prohibition. Torrio took over

management of Colosimo’s brothels and expanded his own prostitution operations to the

Chicago suburb of Burnham around 1916, four years before Colosimo’s murder.

1920, Torrio was well-established around Chicago as one of the “vice kings” of the

prostitution syndicate, and he continued to run his resorts during Prohibition, raking in

even greater profits. The dramatic shift for Torrio during Prohibition was his relentless

pursuit of flowing beer and liquor into the city of Chicago and its neighboring villages.

By 1924, Chicago Tribune reporters wrote openly about Torrio’s leadership and control

of organized crime and organized crime’s geographic spread from the former 22

Street

Levee to the suburb of Cicero:

Torrio, before prohibition, was a south side red light personage. With Al Brown

as his aid, he kept many a disorderly house running, sometimes with police on

guard to see that no stray copper interfered. But prohibition made that a piker

game and Johnny went to beer running. From that to Cicero and overlordship of

everything. His lieutenants have moved from the 22

and Wabash neighborhood

to fine homes in Cicero, limousines, and complete power through control of

elections.

The “Al Brown” mentioned in the quotation was none other than Torrio’s aid and

protégé, Al Capone. Arriving in Chicago from New York around 1919 by invitation from

his mentor Torrio, Al Capone worked as a bodyguard for Jim Colosimo and a bouncer for

Colosimo’s brothels and cabaret.

Capone’s family, including his siblings, mother, and

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107

new wife and son, joined him in Chicago. Little did anyone know, Chicago had imported

a legend.

Capone’s earliest mentions in the Chicago Tribune appeared, under his

pseudonym Al Brown, in 1921 when he was arrested during a raid on suburban gambling

establishments.

He pled guilty and paid $150 in fines for running two gambling and

prostitution houses in the suburban village of Burnham.

Capone’s temper landed him

his next, and more famous, mention in the newspapers in 1922 when he was driving

while intoxicated and hit a taxicab requiring the hospitalization of the taxi driver.

Aggravating the situation, Capone flashed a sheriff’s badge and waved around a revolver

while threatening to shoot one of the witnesses to the accident. According to the Chicago

Tribune report:

Taken to the Central station, Caponi [Al Capone] threatened the arresting officer

with immediate discharge and promised his “pull” would make things unhealthy

for his prosecutors. ‘I’ll fix this thing so easy you won’t know how it’s done,’ he

is alleged to have boasted. He was locked up and later bailed out.

Over the next year or two, Al Capone was barely mentioned in Chicago press

except as the owner of the Four Deuces, the infamous bawdy house at 2222 South

Wabash Avenue, and as an assistant to Johnny Torrio.

Torrio appeared in the

newspapers with much more regularity in the early years of Prohibition regarding his

takeover of area breweries and collusion with famous brewers.

Meanwhile, Al Capone

was purchasing used delivery trucks for Torrio.

Police and media attention on Al

Capone as a more serious member of Torrio’s crew began around 1923 when Capone was

one of many suspects in the murders of several bootleggers.

Around this time, Torrio had also taken over the village of Cicero during a violent

election in April 1924. On election day, about 20 precinct workers were kidnapped, and

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108

Al Capone’s brother Salvatore (a.k.a. Frank) was killed during a shootout with police, but

Mayor Klenha won his re-election by 1,000 votes.

Reports in the Chicago Tribune

described interviews with horrified judges who recognized organized crime’s control of

Cicero:

Judge Jarecki declared from his own personal observation and from testimony

before him the election was the worst in many years. Kidnapping, slugging,

intimidation, illegal voting and general terrorism were the order of the day, he

declared, with the spoils of victory being control of the booze, gambling, and the

vice business of that city. [Ten] or more gunmen entered the polling place … and

chased 75 voters out of the place. The sluggers even searched the policemen

stationed there, the judges and clerks said. … [According to Judge Jarecki,]

“Practically all the dirty work was done by Chicago gangsters hired to go there

and swing the election. The beer runners were all interested in the election, I am

told, and Chicago’s best gunmen were there to kill or terrorize whatever voters

and workers were opposed to whichever candidates were friends of the

gunmen.”

That particular election day coined the phrase, “When you smell gunpowder, you’re in

Cicero.”

Chicago politics and law enforcement did not extend to the western suburb of

Cicero, permitting organized crime more physical space and new police offices ripe for

corruption. There were 161 saloons operating in the village of Cicero in 1924, all

supplied with Torrio’s booze.

For some unidentified reason, Torrio never permitted

brothels in Cicero; he only maintained brothels in the nearby villages of Stickney and

Burnham.

What had become very clear by 1924 was that Chicago organized crime finally

had a boss. Torrio had been among the most central individuals in the pre-Prohibition

organized crime network, but he was the only individual who became even more central

in the Prohibition organized crime network. What Chicago Tribune reporters and

Progressive Era activists had occasionally called the “vice trust” or the “vice syndicate”

had become Torrio’s Syndicate.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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109

Torrio organized distribution territories and ensured that buyers remained loyal.

As “overlord of the underworld,” Torrio charged $50 for a barrel of beer (about $700 in

2015 dollars), but his price included protection.

Although there are no estimates of how

many people worked for him, Torrio’s weekly payroll was estimated at $25,000

(approximately $348,000 a week in 2015 dollars).

If his payroll were divided equally

among his 68 criminal associates in the organized crime network, each associate would

have earned $19,000 a year or $264,000 in 2015 dollars. Torrio organized crime and

collected profits at levels that had been impossible in the Levee district protection market

before Prohibition. Five years into Prohibition, the Chicago Tribune attributed nearly all

of Chicago’s bootleg booze to Torrio:

It is a matter of common knowledge in the underworld that Torrio collects his

percentage on the sale of virtually every pint of illicit liquor sold in the city. It is

not necessary that he handle the liquor himself. The power of his organization of

thugs is so great that virtually every bootlegger who gets booze or beer into

Chicago does so by paying Torrio for not interfering with it. Torrio thus has a

position not unlike that of the medieval barons. He levies tribute on trade.

In this quotation, the Chicago Tribune ignored the family economy of domestic

moonshine and beer; however, if the Chicago Tribune writer was correct about “virtually

every pint” controlled by Torrio, Torrio was intentionally ignoring the domestic

production as he was clearly operating on a different scale.

Prohibition needed urban and suburban space to manufacture and store

intoxicating beverages. These had to be large spaces to accommodate all of the

equipment required for brewing and distilling, and they had to be discreet spaces as

brewing and distilling vented strong smells. The Sicilian Genna brothers, close associates

of Torrio and Capone, rented an entire row of empty houses along Miller Street where

they installed nice curtains and blinds to face the street and used the back of the houses to

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110

store “barrels of mash and yeast and stuff.”

Less discreetly, Torrio and his associates

just took control over multiple breweries in Chicago, including the Sieben Brewery at

1470 Larrabee Street, Hoffman Products Company at 2606 West Monroe Street, the Malt

Maid Brewery at 3901 Emerald Avenue, and the West Hammond Brewery—and these

were just Torrio’s breweries that were raided and made the papers.

As brewers across

the country boarded up their businesses or converted equipment to soda production,

Torrio ignored Prohibition and just took over the breweries. His boldness got him far for

a couple of years, but eventually his protection and immunity expired.

The so-called “gangster’s politician,” Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson

had three terms as Mayor of Chicago: 1915 to 1919, 1919 to 1923, and 1927 to 1931.

Mayor William Dever served during the 1923 to 1927 term, and this caused some

problems for organized crime. Mayor Thompson was in the organized crime network

before and during Prohibition. He only had one criminal tie to organized crime in the pre-

Prohibition network, but he had seven criminal ties to the Prohibition organized crime

network. Thompson accepted political campaign contributions from gangsters and gave

favors in return, such as ousting police chiefs and attempting to legalize dog track racing.

Mayor Dever was not a gangster’s politician, and Torrio could not influence

Mayor Dever like he had Mayor Thompson.

Mayor Dever highlighted his incorrigibility

as a contrast to Mayor Thompson’s corruption for Chicago reporters:

When I came into office I found appalling conditions here in our city. I had to

decide, once and for all, whether Chicago would be run by the legally elected

element, or by Torrio and a bunch of men from New York and Philadelphia who

had come here and taken over the moonshine business where the old saloon men

left off.”

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111

Mayor Dever’s comments specifically naming Torrio were in response to his

administration’s assistance to federal agents and prosecutors convicting Torrio.

In January 1925, two dramatic events affected Torrio’s Syndicate. First, Torrio

was found guilty of violating Prohibition based on evidence obtained during a raid on the

Sieben Brewery the year before. He received a nine-month sentence and a $5,000 fine.

Torrio was given several days before his sentence began to get his affairs in order, during

which the second dramatic event occurred. Torrio was shot five times after returning

home from a shopping trip with his wife.

Incredibly, Torrio survived the shooting.

While in his hospital bed, Torrio refused to identify his shooters to the police. Al Capone

was frequently at Torrio’s bedside standing guard in case of another attack, and Capone

also refused to tell police who shot Torrio.

As his recovery progressed, Torrio

transferred from his hospital bed to Waukegan jail in early February 1925.

Upon his

release later that year, Torrio briefly returned to Chicago before he and his wife moved

back to New York for retirement and years of tax trouble.

Torrio’s 1925 departure facilitated Capone’s ascent into leadership of the

Syndicate. Capone was loyal to Torrio and never forgave Mayor Dever and his

administration. Mayor Dever did not win re-election in 1927; he lost to Capone and

Torrio’s friend Mayor Thompson. President of the Chicago Crime Commission Frank

Loesch accused Al Capone of donating $260,000 in 1927 to Mayor Thompson’s election

fund to oust Mayor Dever.

Loesch might have inflated this number for his own political

purposes to establish the importance of his private crime fighting organization. If Loesch

was right, this approximately $3.5 million donation in 2015 dollars not only suggested

political corruption, it suggested incredible criminal financial success.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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112

Capone was not deterred by Torrio’s conviction and kept Syndicate breweries

operating. For example, in 1929, Prohibition agents discovered a fully operational

brewery at 2340 South Wabash in a 3-story brick building, which they presumed to be

Capone’s. There, agents found about $10,000 worth of brewing equipment, including 23

60-gallon fermenting tanks full of beer. Agents noted that they were not dealing with

some “fly-by-night bootleggers.”

Shortly after Prohibition agents took control of this

brewery, bootleggers returned and attempted to recover confiscated brewing equipment.

In another instance, a raid in 1930 uncovered that the Wabash Automotive Corporation,

an automobile accessory shop at 2108 South Wabash Avenue, was actually a front for a

large Capone Syndicate brewery. Agents seized 50,000 gallons of beer and 150,000

gallons of mash—the largest seizure at that time in Chicago.

These are just a few

examples of the scale of organized crime’s productions and profits under Capone.

Capone’s fame and notoriety quickly outpaced Torrio’s sensible temperament.

Much of Capone’s reputation could be attributed to his facial scar, his spending habits,

and his big, sometimes violent, personality. Chicago Tribune journalist Guy Murchie

wrote a three part series on Al Capone’s “Decade of Death” in which he alleged that

Capone instigated 33 murders during the Chicago Beer Wars.

Police Chief Michael

Hughes accused Capone of being a Mussolini sympathizer.

And if the verbal threats and

accusations were not enough, Capone was the target of several failed murder attempts.

Prosecutors and judges from Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami hit Capone with charges

of gun-toting, perjury, vagrancy, murder, public nuisance, Prohibition violations, and jury

fixing; however, it was the Internal Revenue Service that eventually brought Capone

down in 1931 for failing to pay income taxes on his illegally generated income. When

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

113

federal law enforcement finally found a charge that they could stick, they gave Capone

the longest federal sentence ever given at the time for tax evasion.

Al Capone was the center of the Prohibition organized crime network. He had 316

distinct criminal ties to 316 criminal associates in the network. Capone had five times

more criminal ties than the two individuals tied for second place: Johnny Torrio and

Syndicate accountant Jack Guzik, both of whom had 68 criminal ties. The Chicago

Tribune and the Chicago Crime Commission assumed and labeled Capone as the boss or

the kingpin of the Syndicate, but the day-to-day activities of organizing organized crime

were centralized among a small group of Capone’s closest associates, which included

Jack Guzik and Ralph Capone. Ralph Capone, Al’s elder brother, was not as central to

Prohibition organized crime as Jack Guzik, but he was the fourth most central person in

the organization with 57 criminal ties. Ralph’s nickname was “Bottles” because of his

role in organizing bootlegging for the Syndicate. The Internal Revenue Service was

aware of Al Capone’s closest associates, and it went after Jack Guzik and Ralph Capone

before Al. Jack and Ralph, as well as other members of the Syndicate, were separately

found guilty of tax evasion and served federal sentences.

The leadership center of organized crime was clear during Prohibition in a way

that was not before Prohibition. The men at the center of the Prohibition network had

been present in organized crime before Prohibition, and their pre-Prohibition activities

and connections set the stage for the restructured organization. Torrio, Al Capone, and

Guzik persisted in the organized crime network during both time periods. Only Ralph

Capone was in the leadership core during Prohibition but not in the pre-Prohibition

network. This is because Al Capone was the first in his family to arrive to Chicago

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

114

around 1919. Jim Colosimo, who died in May 1920, survived the beginning of organized

crime’s restructuring but not long enough to matter as a central player during Prohibition.

In a large, sparse, and centralized network, individuals in the powerful core become even

more powerful where they hoard networked resources and control their associates’ access

to the resources.

The Associates

Criminal associates in organized crime were the individuals connected to the

network through their various activities and relationships. Associates contributed to the

size of the network, and their direct and indirect ties to the men in the center concentrated

relational power within the core. Becoming an associate of organized crime required

previous relationships with bosses or other associates or opportunities to form

relationships with bosses or other associates.

Associates of organized crime and their profits made even the low-level positions

appealing to some on the outside. There was also the assumption that getting in with the

right people would provide legal protection in case of a raid or an encounter with the

police. One incarcerated juvenile in describing his outsider status, pointed to the financial

and legal benefits of being an associate for “the right mob”:

The reason I never went into bootlegging was because the right chance never

came. It doesn’t really pay unless you can get in with the right mob and I never

cared to get in with any half ass bootleggers. The right guys never offered me any

jobs and the few that I know I never asked. … I could have ran beer for several of

the smaller guys and made a few dollars, but these guys don’t furnish protection,

by that I mean if you get knocked over, you got to get yourself out and they want

you to use your own machine [car] or truck and I never cared to try Leavenworth

and then maybe a state stir for having a hot wagon too.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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115

This young man failed to know (or at least failed to ask) the right people to gain entrance

into what he perceived of as the relative safety of organized crime. Access to organized

crime was not available without the right relationships.

Harry Harris described himself as a con man with a history of thieving, gambling,

and conning in the Near North Side of Chicago.

His friends were thieves, safe-blowers,

racketeers, addicts, “queers,” and sex workers who found unregistered housing for $1 a

day among the dirty bug-ridden hotels and rooming houses of the neighborhood. Harry

had been running from the police in Wisconsin for some time, and when he returned to

Chicago, his old friend Dion O’Banion, a close associate of Johnny Torrio, got in touch

with him. Harry and Dion’s previous relationships in the neighborhood and Harry’s

criminal background provided a foundation of trust through which Dion brought Harry

into organized crime:

Dion was starting to organize a gang of booze hustlers and hijackers. I fell in with

this mob and the money I made I didn’t believe there was that much in the whole

word. Everyone in the gang had been just like myself out stealing anything they

could lay their hands on, and a hundred dollar bill they would kill for. Dion knew

that I didn’t believe in the heavy stuff, that is I didn’t believe in slugging a fellow

for nothing at all or killing anyone. When you were in a racket like the booze

racket it was slug and kill or be slugged and killed. I was the contact man and

handled the giving out of graft dough. I, therefore, didn’t have to go out on some

of the dirty work the mob done. Right from the start the gang made money and

Dion was known all over the city as the leader of the gang that controlled

everything from the little girl on the street to the handling of elections. Whoever

Dion was for at an election everyone on the North Side voted for whether they

wanted to or not. … Bootleg booze was being made and sold all over the city but

on the North Side soon as we found out someone who was handling booze of any

kind he was told to buy from us or else.

Dion and his crew pulled an armed robbery on a federal facility that stored confiscated

bonded whiskey. They each walked away from the robbery and the sale of their bounty

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116

with $2,000 in their pockets—approximately $28,000 in 2015 dollars for a night’s

work.

Harry Harris’s narration of his organized crime entrée and exploits was a unique

find in the archives. The Institute for Juvenile Research recorded his life history

sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, and the Chicago History Museum houses the transcripts

today. Harris’s close relationship with O’Banion provided the trusting foundation needed

to connect to organized crime. O’Banion was not scooping up speakeasy and brothel

businesses in the Near North Side neighborhood to pay into organized crime, he was

relying on previous relationships that developed into organized crime associations.

The process of previous relationships is difficult to map out in the organized

crime networks because the events preserved in the archives tend to not include the dates

when friendships formed or previous relationships began, with the exception of family

relationships. Retrospective accounts in the archives, however, do include some details

on previous friendships and prior associations that suggest that Harry Harris’s entrée into

organized crime through a previous friendship was not atypical. Al Capone and Ralph

Capone were brothers, Johnny Torrio knew Al Capone from the street gangs in Brooklyn,

the Guzik brothers knew Colosimo through the Levee—all of these pairs had connections

before or outside of the criminal activities and associations recorded in the organized

crime network. Connecting to organized crime required some type of access to the

leadership core or to their associates either through opportunities to form relationships or

previous relationships, but forming these relationships was easier for men than for

women.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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117

The Women of Organized Crime

The case of Betty Ann Schwartz is fascinating and complicated; her story was

archived twice in the Capone files at the Chicago Crime Commission.

In 1930, Florida

police arrested three men, Fred Eberhardt, Frank Ralls, and Henry Helsema, who were

suspects in a plot to assassinate Florida Governor Doyle Carlton. Police found one of the

suspects, Eberhardt, in a hotel room with 18-year-old Chicago native Betty Ann

Schwartz. She was taken in for questioning. Betty Ann Schwartz implicated Al Capone in

the plot to assassinate the Florida governor. Al Capone and his family had moved to

Miami Beach that year and had frequent appearances in local newspaper headlines.

During her questioning, Betty Ann Schwartz “intimated that she was affiliated with the

Capone gang in Chicago and Miami.”

According to the Chicago Tribune’s reporting of

the Florida event, “Repeatedly questioned regarding what information she may have in

connection with the reported plot, the Schwartz girl finally retorted: ‘I have lots of

information, but try and get it.’ Questioned further she became so enraged that she

attacked the jail matron. Officers, however, placed little credence in her statements.”

When investigators questioned Capone about the assassination plot, he denied his

involvement but was not surprised that he had been implicated. He was becoming more

and more familiar with his name being besmirched any time a scandal erupted in Illinois

or Florida. There was no mention as to whether he knew the three suspects, Fred

Eberhardt, Frank Ralls, and Henry Helsema, or Betty Ann Schwartz. A Chicago Tribune

reporter interviewed Schwartz’s mother, who lived in Chicago, about her daughter’s

involvement in the assassination attempt. Mrs. Schwartz doubted her daughter’s claims

and credibility:

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118

Pretty Betty Schwartz has run afoul of the law before in the course of her eighteen

years, her mother admitted yesterday…. But her claim to membership in the

Capone gang or knowledge of their activities is braggadocio intended to impress

the police, she added. Mrs. Schwartz explained that Betty, at sixteen, was

sentenced to the home for wayward girls at Geneva. Afterward she was

committed to an asylum in Wisconsin.

If there was more to Betty Ann’s story, it is no longer available to us. As to why an 18-

year-old blonde woman from Chicago, spending time with the publisher of the

Tallahassee State News, would want to implicate Al Capone and claim to be part of the

Capone gang would be pure speculation. Betty Ann Schwartz was, however, the only

woman who ever claimed membership in Capone’s Syndicate during Prohibition when

organized crime largely excluded women. What is fascinating about this case is that Betty

Anne Schwartz was the only mention in the historical record of a woman as a possible

made member in the Capone Syndicate, and both Capone and her mother disputed her

membership.

The majority of associates in the organized crime network were not made

members of the Syndicate. The labels of “gangster” and “made members” were not

terribly meaningful to organized crime as newspapers and investigatory commissions

generated the labels rather than them coming from the organization. Outside of the core

of the organized crime network were criminal associates contributing their various

criminal activities and relationships to the organizational structure. The associates of

organized crime made up the day-to-day grind of informal, illicit, temporary, and behind-

the-scenes work.

Drivers, brewers, bouncers, saloon wait staff, sex workers, and

couriers were foundational to organized crime activities. These positions resided at the

boundaries of the organized crime network and they included a small number of women.

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119

Prohibition Era women organized crime associates were small in number and

diverse in activities. This group of 38 women included a cabaret dancer, cabaret singer,

cigarette girl, a waitress, a beer runner from Waterloo, Iowa, brothel owners and

managers, a trafficker, and a few sex workers. In addition, there was a municipal clerk,

police investigator, as well as a union racketeer and Chicago’s first woman bomber.

Women made up only 4 percent of the organized crime network. The majority of women

associates (20 out of 38, or 53 percent) connected to organized crime through activities

with their criminally involved husbands and boyfriends. Some of the women (5 out of 38,

or 13 percent) connected to organized crime through other male relatives. Women’s roles

in Prohibition organized crime included silent wives, alibis, victims, entrappers, and

public enemies.

The trope of the silent mobster wife is assumed to know either nothing or

everything, but would never tell.

In truth, most wives never connected to Chicago

organized crime, or if they did, their activities went undetected by investigators. This was

the case with Mae Capone during Prohibition. Irish Catholic Mae Coughlin married Al

Capone around 1919, and shortly thereafter the newlyweds moved from New York to

Chicago. Mae’s involvement in organized crime was murky and likely very well-hidden.

She was arrested once with Al Capone in 1919 when Capone was a suspect in a murder,

but after that her connections to organized crime were financial, not criminal. The IRS

uncovered a trail of Western Union transactions documenting that Mae received money

from Chicago while in Miami, and the discovered a bank account in Mae’s name at West

Side Trust and Savings Bank.

The investigators believed that the transactions and

account were dirty organized crime money, but their allegations were never substantiated.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

120

Similarly, in 1928, the Capones purchased their 25-room Miami Beach estate in Mae’s

name, which the IRS also tried, and failed, to link organized crime profits.

Mae fought

the IRS for several years after Al’s incarceration, and made payments on Al’s unpaid

taxes.

Mae Capone’s role as the silent mobster wife meant that she never connected to

the Prohibition organized crime network through criminal relationships—at least not in

way that was detected.

For most women associates, their romantic connections and marriages were

undoubtedly their entrée into organized crime activities. Often these women’s

connections to organized crime were rather mundane events, such as being in the

company of husbands and boyfriends during raids and arrests, but other organized crime

women’s connections were more purposeful than guilt by association. For example,

Louise Rolfe was a beautiful model and cabaret singer. She was also the girlfriend of

Jack McGurn, a Chicago gunman and suspect in the Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929.

During their investigation of the massacre, police found McGurn at the Stevens Hotel

with Rolfe. She provided McGurn’s alibi, telling police officers and reporters that he

spent all of Valentine’s Day with her and that they never left their hotel room.

Following her questioning at the police department, she talked with reporters

outside of the police station. Reporters fawned over her fashion and looks. The Chicago

Tribune article following Rolfe’s interview showed a reporter convinced of Jack

McGurn’s alibi because McGurn would have never left such beautiful woman’s side on

Valentine’s Day:

She drew the folds of her swanky gray squirrel coat suavely about her hips, tossed

back astounding yellow curls from a face Egyptianlike in lines and synthetic

coloring, and gazed steadily at the group before her. … “Of course, Jack had

nothing to do with the massacre. … He was in bed—all night and until noon.” …

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121

She admitted that after St. Valentine’s Day neither she nor Jack left the room, but,

inferring that they had much to occupy them, “we read all the papers,” and “when

you’re with Jack you’re never bored.” … As she talked she smoked constantly,

lighting one cigaret from the tip of another. Her face was elaborately made up.

Her black dress of crepe over which hung long ropes of imitation pearls, hung

modishly beneath the draped fur coat. Dark eyes were heavily mascaraed and her

eyebrows were thinned down to the most extreme lines. On one curved ankle a

tiny gold bracelet made a line, “with my name on it, so they can’t lose me,” she

offered.

Louise’s testimony earned her the nickname “the Blonde Alibi.” Louise’s alibi

apparently worked; the state was forced to release Jack and other suspects when

prosecutors were “not ready to proceed with the trials.”

However, investigators and

prosecutors were hell-bent on hitting McGurn with something. Shortly after McGurn’s

release as a murder suspect, Assistant US District Attorney Daniel Anderson served the

couple with a warrant that alleged Jack had violated the Mann Act of 1910 when he

crossed state borders with Louise for immoral purposes and that Louise had conspired to

violate the Mann Act.

The white slave charge was based on consensual lovers’ romantic

vacations that crossed state lines. Even though Jack and Louise got married in May 1931

just before their case went to trial and after he finalized the divorce from his previous

wife, they lost the Mann Act case in Illinois federal court—a ruling later overturned by

the US Supreme Court.

Much like federal tax laws, the Mann Act gave federal

prosecutors loopholes to target gangsters when Prohibition cases failed to stick.

Some women were victimized through their romantic relationships to organized

crime men when violence of organized crime spilled into the home. Intimate partners

murdered the only two women who died from their connections to the organized crime

network. The cases of Rosemary Sanborn and Maybelle Exley were strikingly similar,

even though they occurred eight years apart. The criminal activities that linked these two

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122

women to organized crime were co-offenses that most women would not have engaged in

without their gangster boyfriends. Rosemary Sanborn was a cigarette girl from Chicago

and associated with gangster Robert Newberry, also a suspect in the 1929 Valentine’s

Day Massacre. The couple was wanted in Chicago for defrauding a wealthy man of

$25,000, but in 1932 their bodies were found in a New York apartment. Investigators

believed that Newberry murdered Sanborn before killing himself.

Maybelle Exley was a sex worker in Louisville, Kentucky when she met John

Duffy. Duffy trafficked booze and women and had ties to organized crime member Dion

O’Banion. Exley left the Louisville brothel with Duffy, and they worked together

peddling booze. In 1924, Exley was 21-years-old when Duffy drunkenly beat and

murdered her in their Chicago flat on Carmen Avenue. Police learned of Exley’s murder

when they found John Duffy’s corpse two days later dumped on a snow bank with three

bullets to the head; they traced his residence back to the apartment where they found

Exley. Duffy was last seen alive getting into a car near Capone’s Four Deuces on South

Wabash Avenue and was presumed to have been Chicago’s first instance of a gangster

being “taken for a ride,” wherein a victim is shot in a car and the body is dumped.

Maybelle’s murder was ruled a domestic violence case and John Duffy’s murder was

assumed to be gangland related though his was not solved.

The violence against

girlfriends and wives by organized-crime-involved intimate partners is a theme that has

received some attention in contemporary research on women and mafias. Renate

Siebert’s research on Italian mafias highlighted the contradiction between the domestic

sphere as a refuge from the violent public space mafia husbands created and the violence

that mafia husbands brought into the domestic sphere.

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123

Other research has shown the ways in which women and men use women’s

sexuality as a tool to complete particular crimes. For example, Jody Miller’s research on

the different ways men and women do gender in the completion of street robberies

included women flirting, convincing a mark that they want to have sex with him, getting

him in a vulnerable position, and then pulling the weapon to complete the robbery.

Men

also utilize women’s sexuality for the completion of a crime, as was the case in

Prohibition Chicago. Helen Delmar, 19-years-old, worked at the Knickerbocker night

club in New York when two Chicago organized crime men offered her $1,000 to help

them ensnare rival gangster, Jack Zuta. Allegedly, they wanted to kidnap Zuta to get a

$50,000 ransom from him. All Helen needed to do was bump into Zuta and introduce

herself, get Zuta interested in her, and take him somewhere. The men paid for Helen’s

trip to Chicago, and while she was waiting for additional instructions the police found

her. She never even started the entrapment of Zuta. The bizarre thing about the Helen

Delmar case was that police suppressed the incident, and it became public only when a

copy of her police confession was found among Jack Zuta’s personal effects following

his murder.

It is not clear how Zuta got the police report and what happened to Delmar

following her arrest.

Traditional patterns of gender and its relationship to victimization and sexuality

explain some of the cases of women associates in the organized crime network, but one

woman of the Dillinger gang, Pearl Elliot, defied these gendered patterns by not being

romantically involved with men of the Dillinger gang and shooting at police officers

during a getaway. Pearl Elliot and her Dillinger gang associate, Mary Kinder, were the

first two women in Chicago labeled as “public enemies.”

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

124

The public enemy label has its own history concurrent with Prohibition Era

organized crime. Chicago business elite founded the Chicago Crime Commission (CCC)

in 1919 by with the purpose of protecting the business community from the business of

crime, alleging that the Chicago Police Department was too corrupt to be up to the

task.

100

The CCC introduced the original public enemies list to Chicago in April 1930

with Al Capone listed as public enemy number 1.

101

The CCC’s goal with the public

enemy list was to drive the criminal element out of Chicago, or in the words of CCC

President Loesch, “to keep the light of publicity on Chicago’s most prominent and

notorious gangsters to the end that they may be under constant observation by law

enforcing authorities.”

102

By 1933, the CCC no longer controlled the distribution and

attention of public enemy lists, as police captains and Illinois states’ attorney’s offices

began compiling and releasing their own lists.

103

The CCC’s public enemies lists never

included women, but the state’s attorney’s list did.

Weeks after the end of Prohibition in December 1933, the states’ attorney’s office

released their public enemy list with bank robber and jail breaker John Dillinger as public

enemy number 1. Among the 21 public enemies on this 1933 list were two women—

public enemy numbers 8 and 9 of December 1933 were Pearl Elliott and Mary Kinder of

the Dillinger gang.

104

Less than a month before the end of Prohibition in November 1933,

Indiana state police and Chicago detectives set a trap for John Dillinger outside of a

doctor’s office following a tip they received regarding Dillinger’s doctor’s appointment.

Dillinger completed his appointment and got in his car when officers began firing at it.

Their gunfire had no effect because the car was armored. The armored car also had a

hidden person in the back of the car firing a machine gun in return. To assist with the

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

125

getaway, Pearl Elliott rolled down her window slightly to fire her pistol at police. The

police halted their pursuit of Dillinger because of the gunfire.

105

Pearl was described as a

friend of the Dillinger gang and not romantically involved with any of the men in the

gang.

Mary Kinder, the other woman on the public enemies list, was a sweetheart with

fellow gang member Harry Pierpont. Mary Kinder was indicted for harboring fugitives

and helping fugitives elude capture when members of the Dillinger gang escaped from

prison.

106

She and some of the other women of the Dillinger gang were in charge of

renting new apartments each week while in Chicago so that the gang could remain on the

move and in hiding.

107

Mary Kinder was caught and arrested with the Dillinger gang in

Tucson, Arizona, but it is unclear whatever happened to Pearl Elliott.

108

There was no

mention of her in the Chicago Tribune after she made the public enemies list.

These cases of the silent wife, the alibi, the murder victim, the entrapper, and the

public enemy, point to the variety of ways women associates became entangled in the

organized crime network. This variety in entrée was quite different than women

associates of organized crime before Prohibition, when 89 percent of women associates

were connected to organized crime through the sex work economy. During Prohibition,

this percentage dropped to a little more than a third. According to my calculations, 14 of

the 38 women in the organized crime network during Prohibition were connected through

organized crime’s brothels. These women were brothel owners, managers, hostesses, sex

workers, and traffickers.

Prostitution resorts generated even greater profits under Prohibition when illegal

booze complimented sex work and drove up the price of both. As James Bennett wrote

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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126

for the Chicago Tribune in 1929, “There had been money in liquor and girls before

prohibition. But there are fortunes in liquor and girls under prohibition.” Brothels and

cabarets developed a greater relevance because, when paired with good booze, these

spaces became the “social center for gangsters.”

109

In 1930, the prostitution fighting

Committee of Fifteen estimated that organized crime controlled 13 percent of all brothels

they had investigated.

110

Unnamed police sources alleged that Syndicate brothels

generated $100,000 a week in revenue (approximately $1.3 million a week in 2015

dollars), which did not include the additional thousands earned in booze sales in the

brothels.

111

There was nothing particularly special about Syndicate brothels except that they

all provided quality booze. Syndicate brothels certainly did not compare to the elite

brothels of the former Levee districts, which were costly to maintain. Nevertheless,

Torrio’s Harlem Inn in the village of Stickney could have up to 500 men waiting on a

Saturday night, “It is known as a $3 place, with the girls getting one-third of the three.

It’s a typical place—saloon in front, a back room full of women in virtually nothing, and

about 50 rooms upstairs. Blonde, brunette, short, tall, fat—all are there.”

112

Al Capone’s infamous Four Deuces at 2222 South Wabash Avenue was one of

Chicago’s bawdiest of houses and a headquarters space for the Syndicate.

113

The first

floor of the Four Deuces was a saloon, and in the back of the saloon was a corridor to a

stairway leading to the brothel on the second floor. Undercover Chicago Tribune

investigators in 1922 estimated 30 sex workers at the Four Deuces:

The “reception room” is a combination of two rooms in one, with a wide open

doorway in between. The place is brilliantly lighted, but otherwise harsh in

appearance. There is almost no furniture and the embellishment of the walls is nil.

Running practically entirely around the four walls are crude benches. Tribune

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127

investigators counted forty-three men—most of them young men—sitting on the

benches around the walls, and a dozen more stood or walked about. Four girls—

probably the least comely in the house—were among all these men; the remainder

of them were said to be “busy.” An obese, henna haired “madame” sat in a

rocking chair—one of the few pieces of furniture in the big room exhorting the

men in a shrill voice: “Come on, boys,” she piped again and again: “come on

boys; pick a girl.”

114

In this article the undercover Chicago Tribune investigators failed to name the “henna

haired madame” and the 30 sex workers. Had these women been identified, I could have

included them in the organized crime network as criminal associates involved in the day-

to-day labor at the margins of organized crime.

Either women were no longer managers or operators of the organized crime

brothels during Prohibition, or they were no longer under the investigative spotlight. Only

14 women involved in the sex economy had enough information in the archival sources

to reveal their organized crime relationships during Prohibition. For example, Emily

Marshall was protected by Johnny Torrio before Prohibition and during Prohibition was

protected by Jack Zuta. The Caldwell women, Audrey, Gladys, and Sara, were brothel

owners associated with their relative Mike Heitler of pre-Prohibition brothel fame. The

family men of brothels were brothers Jack and Harry Guzik. Harry ran a brothel with his

wife Alma, Harry purchased a brothel for his sister-in-law Rose to operate, and Jack’s

sister-in-law, Jeannette Keithly, was deeded the Harlem Inn brothel from one of Jack’s

associates. The group of organized crime women involved in the sex work economy also

included one black woman, Mary Brown, who worked as a brothel keeper for Abe

Weinstein at the Burr Oak Inn.

Outside of organized crime, however, was a growing prostitution economy that

did not leave women behind. The superintendent of the Illinois Vigilance Association

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128

estimated more than 2,000 brothels operating in Chicago in 1922.

115

However, the police

chief said that the list given to him by the superintendent included only 13 addresses.

116

identified 517 prostitution-related addresses inside and outside of organized crime from

1900 to 1933 that included information on proprietors, co-proprietors, operators, or

managers. Figure 3 plots the percent of address that included women for each decade. I

find that from the 1910s through 1933 women were associated with the management and

ownership of about half of the prostitution-related addresses. The decade when women

had the lowest percentage of addresses was 1900 to 1909—the period of the segregated

red-light districts in Chicago.

Figure 3: Women’s percent of prostitution related addresses in Chicago, 1900-1933

This increase in women’s percentage is consistent with Walter Reckless’s 1933

research on prostitution in Chicago that showed an increase in the number of prostitution

resorts and an increase in prostitution related arrests during Prohibition.

117

Reckless

described organized crime brothels as having poor working conditions, long hours, and

low pay compared to women’s independent brothels outside the central city.

118

Whereas

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s

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129

young men might have avoided bootlegging unless it was with a well-paid and protected

organized crime crew, women might have avoided working for or operating organized

crime brothels because of the poor working conditions.

During Prohibition, women’s entrée to organized crime was largely constrained

by romantic and familial relationships. These were trusting relationships that existed prior

to criminal activities in organized crime. Women owned, operated, or managed a

substantial portion of the sex work related locations in Chicago, but for the most part

these locations were not connected to the larger and more powerful organized crime

network of Chicago. Similar to women’s domestic distilling and brewing; women’s

brothels operated in isolation and separate from organized crime. The organized crime

brothels generating $100,000 a week had no mention of women as managers or operators.

Before Prohibition, locations in organized crime territories provided entrée into the

protection market when men and women owners of illicit establishments connected to

organized crime through payments. During Prohibition, organized crime’s markets

diversified beyond the protection market and reached geographically beyond the Levee

districts. Organized crime and its restructured protection market largely ignored women’s

localized brothels. Relations trumped locations in providing entrée to the organized crime

network, even when it came to prostitution under Prohibition.

The End of Prohibition

Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the second woman to serve as Assistant Attorney

General of the United States, handled federal Prohibition cases. She was often asked to

comment on women’s universal attitudes toward Prohibition, and she included her

perspective in her 1929 book, The Inside of Prohibition:

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130

The modern girl, whom makes no protest when her escort to dinner produces a

pocket flask and shares its contents with her, has no stake in prohibition

enforcement. But the moment that girl marries, she probably will, whether

consciously or not, become a supporter of prohibition, because she always will be

unwilling to share any part of her husband’s income with either a bootlegger or a

saloon-keeper operating legally. I am convinced that as far as the women of the

country are concerned, prohibition has come to stay.

119

Willebrandt’s Prohibition predictions were wrong, as the law had not come to stay.

Women’s political organizing was as responsible for the repeal of Prohibition as it

was for its introduction. Chaired by Pauline Morton Sabine of the Morton salt family, the

Women’s Organization for Prohibition Reform (WOPR) was a national organization and

a powerful group of women. Many WOPR members had originally supported Prohibition

but eventually recognized that the law had failed on all four of its major promises:

eradicating the saloon, ceasing drinking, reducing crime, and saving children from

alcohol.

120

WOPR gained political momentum by appealing to moral concerns,

Prohibition failures, as well as the classist implications of the Prohibition law, “If the

head of a corporation is free to drink intoxicants in his leisure hours, as and when he sees

fit, what right has he to determine what his employee shall do in his leisure hours for his

own enjoyment?”

121

Ione Nicoll, secretary for WOPR, wrote an article “Should Women

Vote Wet?” in 1930 for the literary magazine The North American Review:

A heavy responsibility rests today on American women. The time has come when

they must face conditions as they are and not as a few fanatics would have us

believe they are. ...Women have had suffrage for ten years; what more

magnificent opportunity will ever present itself for an intelligent, constructive and

patriotic use of this power?

122

More than 1.3 million racially and socioeconomically diverse members of WOPR defined

women’s first political issue since their suffrage.

123

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

131

During the 1932 presidential election, democratic candidate Franklin Delano

Roosevelt focused his campaign on the economy and recovery from the Great

Depression. However, the social issue of repealing Prohibition was dominating the

democratic political conversation, and Roosevelt had wavered as a moderate dry.

124

Roosevelt finally took an ardent stand against Prohibition minutes before the Democratic

National Convention in order to secure the party’s nomination.

125

In the end, Roosevelt

won by a landslide. Days after his inauguration, he called a special session of Congress to

legalize beer and wine as part of his New Deal strategy. On December 5, 1933, Utah

became the 36

and final state needed to ratify the 21

Amendment that repealed the 18

Amendment.

At 4:32 PM on December 5, 1933, Chicago Loop hotels and the old favorite bars

began serving alcohol legally for the first time in 14 years.

126

With talk of repeal, the

Palmer House built a new bar that the workmen did not finish until 4 PM. Hundreds of

men and women lined up outside the Palmer House anticipating the new bar’s opening.

By midnight, Palmer House officials estimated that “guests in the bar and the hotel dining

room had consumed 50 cases of bourbon and rye, 25 of Scotch, 50 of gin, 75 of wine,

including a sizable quantity of champagne, 10 of cordials, and 20 barrels of beer.”

127

Hotels and bars around Chicago happily reported similar booms in the evening’s

business. Within two weeks following repeal, more than 1,500 applications for liquor

licenses along with the accompanying $250 fees were filed with the city of Chicago.

128

Prohibition was over.

Some of the consequences of Prohibition and its repeal were for the better.

Alcohol quality went up and costs went down, although it was not as cheap as pre-

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

132

Prohibition alcohol.

129

Prohibition did actually cut down alcohol consumption in the

United States, and it took until the 1970s to return to pre-Prohibition levels of drinking.

130

Perhaps one of the most interesting unintended consequences of Prohibition was that

Prohibition made women regulars at public drinking spaces. On the night of repeal,

women lined up at the bars and ordered their own drinks, which was not considered

proper before Prohibition.

131

The new bar at the Palmer House was intended to be a

men’s oyster bar, but 30 percent of the patrons upon its opening were women.

132

Organized crime still had pending Prohibition cases upon repeal. One judge

resolved pending alcohol violation cases against organized crime individuals by charging

them a total of $500 in fines, even though these cases had cost the government $100,000

to prepare.

133

The IRS, however, continued attacking organized crime members and their

Prohibition profits for years to come.

134

Chicago organized crime was about to enter a

new era focusing on labor racketeering—an illicit economy also requiring relations not

locations that would continue to exclude women.

135

Conclusion

Prohibition was an exogenous shock to the organized crime network that not only

created a new type of crime (i.e., violating liquor laws), but also mobilized and

refashioned pre-existing criminal organizations. Whereas organized crime before

Prohibition revolved around the protection and exploitation of illicit entertainment

economies, organized crime during Prohibition added the product of intoxicating

beverages, which required space, transportation, distribution, and protection. The

Chicago organized crime network changed dramatically during Prohibition multiplying in

size, becoming more sparse and centralized, and spreading into territories outside of the

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133

Levee districts. Organized crime developed beyond its territorial focus of scooping up

illicit entertainment business of the Levee districts to include in its protection market.

During Prohibition, relationships became the main way to connect to an organization

growing in size and geographic reach. Clear criminalization of the alcohol market

required trusting relationships between criminal associates. One of the best ways to

establish trusting criminal relationships in organized crime was through prior

relationships.

The restructuring of organized crime mobilized men and excluded women.

Women made up only 4 percent of the Prohibition organized crime network even as

women’s proportion of alcohol and sex work activities and properties around Chicago

increased. Women could no longer connect to organized crime solely through the

location of their illicit businesses in organized crime territory; thus, relations trumped

locations as the means of connecting to organized crime, and women could not access the

relationships to organized crime like men.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

134

Notes

Andreas 2013; Fronc 2009:4-5.

Lerner 2007:13.

Ibid p. 174.

Griswold 1993.

Lerner 2007:174.

McCammon et al. 2001.

Flanagan 2002; Trout 1920.

Lerner 2007:13, 29-31, 96-97.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1919. “Council Acts on Licenses as Booze Dies.” July 1, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “J. Barleycorn Moves from Loop to Homes.” January

17, p. 1.

Ibid.

Lerner 2007:2.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Names Found on Vice Ring Books Are Kept Secret.”

April 8, p. 5.

Evans, Arthur. 1923. “Home Stillers Flood Chicago with Moonshine.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, November 24, p. 5.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “Mayor, Clyne, Decree Booze Cheaters’ Doom.”

November 5, p. 1.

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 50, 131 G 3,874. Folder 1. IJR Life History 9-1.

I have replaced all names from the Institute of Juvenile Research archival sources with

pseudonyms as required by the researcher confidentiality agreement. Direct quotations

from this material come from my typed notes and may contain transcription errors or

minor grammatical and spelling corrections.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

135

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1928. “His Overcoat Betrays Him as Walking Saloon.” May

11, p. 19; Evans, Arthur. 1923. “Home Stillers Flood Chicago with Moonshine.” Chicago

Daily Tribune, November 24, p. 5.

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 50, 131 G 3,874. Folder 1. IJR Life History 9-1.

Bennett 1996.

Miller 1991.

Ibid.

Murphy 1994.

Willrich 2003.

Sutherland, Sidney. 1925. “Dry Hootch Fills City Cells, Graham Asserts.” Chicago

Daily Tribune, December 30, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1922. “‘Hootch Cases’ Gain, Humane Society Finds.”

February 3, p. 17.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1923. “City’s Toughest District is Made Dry for Once.”

October 8, p. 2.

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 44, 131 F 3,867. Folder 8. IJR Life History 3-8.

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 44, 131 F 3,867. Folder 13. IJR Life History 3-13.

Ibid.

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 44, 131 F 3,867. Folder 2. IJR Life History 3-2.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “Woman Goes on Trial for Death by Poison Rum.”

March 12, p. 12; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Her Rum Fatal; Woman Begins ‘Year to

Life.’” February 5, p. 12.

This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not

been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

136

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1917. “Hobos Regaled at $50 Feast by Mary Garden.”

February 19, p. 13.

Collins, Charles. 1954. “Who Killed Big Jim Colosimo?” Chicago Daily Tribune,

February 7, pp. C19, 38.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “Divorced Wife’s Brother Tells of Family Rows.” May

12, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “Colosimo Slain; Seek Ex-Wife, Just Returned.” May

12, p. 1; Collins, Charles. 1954. “Who Killed Big Jim Colosimo?” Chicago Daily

Tribune, February 7, pp. C19, C38.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Torrio Is Shot; Police Hunt for O’Banion Men.”

January 25, p. 5.

Asbury 1940:317-322; Eig 2010; Landesco [1929] 1968:909; Russo 2001.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1916. “Burnham Fire No Mystery.” February 10, p. 13;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1916. “Gunmen Brought from New York, Levee Rumor.”

November 26, p. 6; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “‘Wop Tommy’ Now Sought as

Enright Killer.” February 6, p. 1.

Landesco [1929] 1968:909.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Quiz, Leads Way to Cicero Dives.”

November 20, pp. 1, 3.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Public Enemies Miscellaneous 2. June 1931;

Internal Revenue Service Archives. Letter. July 8, 1931. (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-

utl/file-1-letter-dated-07081931-in-re-alphonse-capone.pdf).

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1921.”Burr Oak Raided as Jury Votes 9 Gambling Bills.”

January 22, p. 13; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1921. “Crowe Raids Vice Spots on County’s

Edge.” January 21, p. 17.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1921. “Seven Gamblers Plead Guilty.” April 15, p. 7.

Eig 2010:16.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1922. “Caponi Waves Gun after Crash; Faces 3 Charges.”

August 31, p. 3.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

137

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Gang Like Pirates of Olden Days.”

November 11, p. 3.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “Beer King’s Twin Found; Puzzle Clear!” November

18, p. 1.

Chicago Crime Commission. Public Enemies Miscellaneous 2. June 1931; Manly,

Chesly. 1931. “Indict Capone; 5,000 Counts.” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 13, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1923. “Beer Gunmen Identified by Police Quiz.” September

21, pp. 1, 14.

Ibid.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “Killings and Terrorism in Cicero Probed.” April 3, p. 9.

Allsop 1961:61.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Quiz, Leads Way to Cicero Dives.”

November 20, pp. 1, 3; Landesco [1929] 1968:913.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Quiz, Leads Way to Cicero Dives.”

November 20, pp. 1, 3.

Ibid.

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015; Landesco [1929] 1968:910.

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015; Landesco [1929] 1968:912.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Torrio Is Shot; Police Hunt for O’Banion Men.”

January 25, p. 5.

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 46, 131 F 3,870. Folder 5. IJR Life History 5-5.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “17,000 Barrels of Real Beer Seized in Raid.” June 3, p.

4; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “Cops Land in Jail; Freed on Bail.” May 20, pp. 1, 6;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Beer Factory Locked by Court’s Order.”

October 7, p. 2; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Quiz, Leads Way to Cicero

Dives.” November 20, pp. 1, 3; Landesco [1929] 1968:910, 912.

Chicago Historical Society 2005.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

138

Landesco [1929] 1968:917.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Dever Slams Crime Bureau.” January 18, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Jail for Torrio, 4 of His Aids as Beer Stealers.” January

18, p. 5.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Torrio Is Shot; Police Hunt for O’Banion Men.”

January 25, p. 5.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Guard Torrio, Fearing Second Death Attack.” January

26, p. 4.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1925. “Waukegan Has Torrio Patient; Prisoner, Too.”

February 10, p. 2.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1931. “Torrio in Chicago; Quizzed by U.S. as Capone

Witness.” September 1, p. 4; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1937. “Torrio Indicted with Three

Aids as Tax Evaders.” September 5, p. 4; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1939. “Torrio, 4 Others

Indicted by U.S. for Tax Evasion.” February 7, p. 10.

Evans, Arthur. 1931. “Rise and Fall of Thompson’s Machine Told.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, April 9, p. 1.

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1929. “Drys Find 41,400 Gallons of Beer in Brewery Raid.”

June 2, p. 6.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1931. “Jury to Report on Capone Rum Inquiry Sept. 10.”

September 5, p. 3; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “$100,000 Beer Case Ends in $500 in

Fines.” December 9, p. 16.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Public Enemies File 21700. Public Enemies 4.

June 26, 1930; Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Public Enemies File 21700. Public

Enemies 5. May 1930- June 1930; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1930. “Giant Brewery of

Capone Gang Seized by U.S.” June 13, p. 5.

Murchie, Guy. 1936. “Capone’s Decade of Death.” Chicago Daily Tribune, February

9, p. D1.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. “Yarrow Drive Stirs Hughes.” Newspaper

clipping. December 7, 1929.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

139

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 48, 131 G 3,872. Folder 2. IJR Life History 7-2.

Harry Harris is a pseudonym due to my confidentiality agreement with the Chicago

History Museum. I was not able to code any of these relationships for the Database due to

this agreement.

Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile Research Life Histories Collection,

1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 50, 131 G 3,874. Folder 1. IJR Life History 9-1.

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015; Chicago History Museum. Institute for Juvenile

Research Life Histories Collection, 1910s-1940s (mainly 1929-1933). Box 50, 131 G

3,874. Folder 1. IJR Life History 9-1.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Capone File 1. August 1930; Chicago Crime

Commission Archives. Capone File 1. Capone Public Enemy Timeline.

Sarasota Herald. 1930. “Capone Man Absolves Editor.” August 28, pp. 1-2; Chicago

Daily Tribune. 1930. “Capone’s Name is Brought into Governor ‘Plot.’” August 19, p. 2.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1930. “Capone’s Name is Brought into Governor ‘Plot.’”

August 19, p. 2.

Ibid.

Haller 1990.

Siebert 1996, 2007.

Internal Revenue Service Archives. Letter. July 8, 1931. (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-

utl/file-1-letter-dated-07081931-in-re-alphonse-capone.pdf); National Archives Regional

Archives- Great Lakes. IRS non-record. Box 4. Witness Transcripts, Part I. June 16,

1931.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1936. “Capone’s Miami, Fla., Home Saved, U. S. Lien and

Taxes Are Paid.” November 8, p. 12; National Archives Regional Archives- Great Lakes.

IRS non-record. Box 4. Witness Transcripts, Part I. June 16, 1931.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1936. “Capone’s Miami, Fla., Home Saved, U. S. Lien and

Taxes Are Paid.” November 8, p. 12.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1929. “Captured Gangster’s Girl Friend Revealed a Divorcee

and Mother of 5-Year Old Child.” March 1, p. 5.

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140

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1929. “Jack McGurn and His Alibi Seized Under Mann Act.”

June 26, p. 13.

Ibid.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Folder Public Enemies. File 21700-8. 1931-

1933; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1931. “Gunner M’Gurn Weds Girl Who Gave Him Alibi.”

May 7, p. 5; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1931. “M’Gurn and Wife Sentenced in Mann Act

Case.” July 22, p. 9; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1932. “M’Gurn Mann Act Sentence Is Set

Aside.” November 8, p. 11.

Langum 2006.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Consolidation Folder. File Number 28562, 8-2-

32. Re. Sanborn, Rosemary, deceased.

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Consolidation Folder. File Number 6486:

Exley, Leah Belle, Duffy, Leah Exley; Northwestern History of Homicide Records.

Record Number 5981.

Siebert 1996, 2007.

Miller 1998.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1930. “Suppressed Police Record of Girl’s Story of Plot to

Kidnap Zuta Is Found in Box.” August 22, p. 2.

100

Ruth 1996.

101

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Folder Public Enemies. File 21700. April 23,

1930; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1930. “List 28 as ‘Public Enemies.’” April 24, p. 1.

102

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1930. “List 28 as ‘Public Enemies.’” April 24, p. 1.

103

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “39 Hoodlums on New ‘Public Enemy’ Roster.”

January 10, p. 1.

104

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “Dillinger Gang Named as Chief Public Enemies.”

December 29, p. 1.

105

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “City to Shut Up Gang Bars.” December 26, p. 1;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “Fight 16 Police; Elude Trap.” November 16, p. 1.

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141

106

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1934. “Arizona Rules Indiana Gets Dillingers; Tucson Wants

Gang Pending Rewards.” January 28, p. 3.

107

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “City to Shut Up Gang Bars.” December 26, p. 1.

108

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1934. “Arizona Rules Indiana Gets Dillingers; Tucson Wants

Gang Pending Rewards.” January 28, p. 3.

109

Reckless 1933:103, 137.

110

Chicago Crime Commission Archives. Folder on the Committee of Fifteen. File

Number 4525-4. Clement 2006 found the organized crime in New York City took over

the sex work economy during Prohibition and pushed women out of owernship and into

managerial positions.

111

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015; Chicago Daily Tribune. 1926. “Cicero’s Hiding

Apaches Wait Caponi Return.” July 4, p. 1.

112

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Quiz Leads Way to Cicero Dives.”

November 20, pp. 1, 3.

113

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1924. “O’Banion Gang Like Pirates of Olden Days.”

November 11, p. 3.

114

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1922. “Dr. Bundesen Denies Drive Condones Vice.” August

18, p. 1.

115

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1922. “Rev. Williamson Tires Vigilantes, Insist City Act.”

July 10, p. 7.

116

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1922. “Critics Called Rumor Peddlers by Fitzmorris.” July 22,

p. 5.

117

Reckless 1933:10, 21.

118

Reckless 1933:145. See also Clement’s 2006 discussion on the increasing corruption

among police officers during Prohibition in New York City generating greater violence

against and exploitation of sex workers.

119

Willebrandt 1929:278.

120

Lerner 2007:192; Nicoll 1930:561.

121

Nicoll 1930:565.

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142

122

Ibid.

123

Lerner 2007:195, 197.

124

Ibid pp. 295-305.

125

Ibid.

126

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “Liquor Flows Again; Chicago Gaily Responds.”

December 6, p. 1.

127

Ibid.

128

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “Allman Pushes Drive on Liquor Law Violators.”

December 15, p. 10.

129

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “14-Year Dry Era Ends Today.” December 5, p. 1.

130

Andreas 2013:235; McGirr 2012.

131

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “Liquor Flows Again; Chicago Gaily Responds.”

December 6, p. 1.

132

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “14-Year Dry Era Ends Today.” December 5, p. 1;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “Liquor Flows Again; Chicago Gaily Responds.”

December 6, p. 1.

133

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1933. “$100,000 Beer Case Ends in $500 in Fines.”

December 9, p. 16.

134

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1937. “Torrio Indicted with Three Aids as Tax Evaders.”

September 5, p. 4.

135

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1938. “Terror Killing Traced to Gang Rule of Strike.”

February 16, p. 1; Doherty, James. 1940. “Charge Gang Rule over 15 Unions in City.”

Chicago Daily Tribune, June 3, p. 1; Wendt, Lloyd. 1941. “The Men Who Prey on

Labor.” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 10, p. F2.

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143

CHAPTER 4

THE SHIFTING STRUCTURES OF ORGANIZED CRIME

Organized crime from 1900 to 1919 was a loose coordination between the

protection of illicit businesses and the corruption of police officers and politicians

centering on the shifting locations of Chicago’s sex work and gambling districts.

Organized crime was territorial and without clear leadership during this time. Corruption

and scale grew in 1920 with the introduction of Prohibition and organized crime’s

takeover of new criminal markets. Particular individuals, especially Johnny Torrio and Al

Capone, formed some semblance of a leadership structure and their influence spread

beyond the red-light districts, across the city, and into Chicago’s neighboring villages.

This historical context establishes broad organizational change around the role of

locations when organized crime was geographically concentrated versus geographically

spread, the increasing importance and influence of bosses, and the expansion and

diversification of markets. In this chapter, I shift from the broad organizational changes I

identified using historical methods to precise calculations of change in the organized

crime network.

Using social network analysis, I map the shifting structures of organized crime

networks. These structures include size, connectedness, centrality, and brokerage. While

historical methods speak to some of these changes, such as the rise of Johnny Torrio and

Al Capone, social network methods measure the rise and influence of particular

individuals and their significance to the overall network structure. After mapping out the

structures of organized crime during the two points in time, I then measure women and

men’s positions in the networks. I find that women were a substantial part of the network

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when organized crime was relatively small and decentralized and that women were

almost entirely excluded when organized crime was large, sparse, and centralized.

Contemporary scholars have attributed women’s low participation in crime to

gendered differences in licit and illicit economic power within market conditions,

criminal men’s homosocial preferences, crime as a way of doing gender in certain spatial,

cultural, and historical contexts, and gender bias in law enforcement practices.

possible takeaway from this criminological research could be that women have as

constrained of networks in crime as they have in business.

Another vein of research

focusing on women’s entrée and persistence in crime has increasingly paid attention to

women’s access to crime as largely limited to and influenced by familial and romantic

relationships.

The consistent finding of women committing crimes with their husbands

and boyfriends suggests that theories of relational inequality might be useful guides for

future research on the gender gap in crime.

When men are women’s gatekeepers to

crime, men’s opinions and decisions about values, skills, work ethic, trust, and

concealment can exclude women from crime and in turn create masculine or male-

dominated criminal groups or organizations.

Sociological and criminological research also shows that particular organizational

forms constrain women’s opportunities more than other organizational forms. Flat team-

based organizations provide better conditions for women’s careers than large, durable,

and hierarchical institutions.

Somewhat similarly and not at all surprising, women have

more job options in drug markets that are open and entrepreneurial than drug markets that

are closed and hierarchical.

There are other benefits to flat and decentralized criminal

organizations beyond women’s opportunities; decentralized criminal organizations

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privilege concealment over efficiency and coordination in the case of conspiracy

networks and smuggling networks.

It is worth exploring the potential overlap between

these organizational logics of gendered organizations and criminal organizations as a way

to understand the gender crime gap.

Organized crime in early 1900s Chicago was not a clearly defined organization,

bureaucracy, or hierarchy. Rather organized crime was a loose network of friendships and

favors, strong ties and weak ties, and trust and concealment. Organized crime networks

contain and distribute resources, such as access to influential gangsters, politicians, police

officers, and fixers, but, as is the case in most networks, access to those resources is

unequal. In the case of Chicago organized crime, a category of difference produced the

network: men formed criminal relationships with connected men, and women failed to

form criminal relationships with connected men or with connected women. However, the

differences between men and women were not explained solely by the categorical

attribute of gender. I next show in this chapter how the network facilitated increased

relationships between men and further marginalization of women. Focusing on positional

inequality within networks provides a theoretical and empirical interrogation of

difference often presumed to be categorical, but which I suspect is more typically

relational.

This chapter contains the empirical foundation of my finding that gender

inequality increased as the structure of the organized crime network changed. To these

ends, I map out the network of organized crime at two points in time. Time 1 is the pre-

Prohibition Era of 1900 to1919 and Time 2 is the Prohibition Era of 1920 to 1933. With

this network at two points in time, I calculate and compare (a) the organizational

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146

structure, (b) gender gaps in network position, and (c) gender gaps in structural

importance. I replicate the gender gap analysis for both time periods while treating

criminal elite men as a separate group. The criminal elite were the top 10 percent most

criminally connected actors in the organized crime network, and all were men. As I

demonstrate in the following pages, the exogenous shock of Prohibition caused the

structures of organized crime to grow in size and increase in centrality, and these shifting

structures excluded women. I argue that women’s decreasing presence in Chicago

organized crime was a case of dynamic inequality generation within an organizational

network, and I identify the processes of how organizational settings produce, reproduce,

and alter inequality. I conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the limitations and

robustness of this analysis and it implications for relational theories of inequality.

The analysis proceeds with the largest components described in Chapter 1 best

representing organized crime at two points in time: before and during Prohibition. I walk

the reader through a variety of descriptive statistics, comparisons, and examples to make

the case that before Prohibition women were an important part of organized crime, but

women’s positions got worse during Prohibition as the organization became larger,

sparser, and more centralized. To be clear, my analysis assumes that the organized crime

networks are as complete as possible. The descriptive analysis is appropriate because I

have uncovered the population of an organization and the relationships within the

organization, albeit admittedly with some missing data.

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Chicago Organized Crime Network, 1900-1919

The criminal relationships from 1900 to 1919 of protection payments, barely

legitimate businesses, corruption scandals, gambling and trafficking rings, raids, and

arrests produced an organized crime network containing 267 individuals and their 789

criminal ties. The structure of the organized crime network during this time was small,

sparse, decentralized, and locally clustered as detailed in Table 4.

Table 4: Structural properties of Chicago organized crime network, 1900-1919

n of individuals

267

n of criminal ties

789

density

0.022

degree centralization

0.140

betweenness centralization

0.398

Organized crime was sparse as only 2.2 percent of all possible ties were present as

measured by network density. Organized crime was also decentralized during this time

period. The degree centralization score was 0.14 for this network, which is a score that

ranges from 0 when ties are equally distributed across the individuals to 1 when all ties

concentrate on a single individual. The centralization of 0.14 shows a more equal

distribution of ties than concentration of ties. Even though organized crime was

decentralized, there were individuals brokering sections of the network to other sections

of the network. The betweenness centralization score of about 0.4 should be interpreted

on the same scale of 0 to 1 as degree centralization, which means that brokerage was near

the middle of the scale between equal distribution and total concentration of brokerage.

Together these measures indicate that the organizational structure of organized crime was

small, sparse, decentralized, and locally clustered.

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Figure 4 displays this organizational structure in graphic form. Figure 4 shows

that there was not a clearly identifiable center of the organized crime network; rather the

network was flat and contained several clusters connected by brokers. Some individuals

looked powerful in terms of their number of ties, but the powerful individuals were

spread around the network and not concentrated in the center. Social network plotting

algorithms are designed to place the most central points of the network in the middle of

the plot, which was not possible with this decentralized and clustered network.

Figure 4: Chicago organized crime network, 1900-1919 (n=267)

Criminal Network 1900-1919

police and politicians

criminal men

criminal women

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Each dot or node in Figure 4 represents an individual, and each line between them

represents their various criminal relationships. I assigned nodes one of three colors in

Figure 4: red indicates criminal women (n=47), blue indicates criminal men (n=168), and

yellow indicates criminal men who were also police and politicians (n=52). There were

no women police officers or politicians in this network, so women only have one color

assignment compared to the two colors for men. The distinction between the two groups

of men is a bit arbitrary in that the law enforcers and lawmakers indicated by yellow were

also law breakers just like the criminal men indicated by blue, but the law enforcers and

lawmakers positions in the underworld came with positions of power in the upper world

that the regular criminal men did not have. The presence of the yellow nodes, thus,

represents the access to legal resources and corruption available within this organized

crime network.

Women made up 18 percent of the nodes and resided on 19 percent of the ties in

this organized crime network. As a proportion of the Chicago population, 18 percent is

not such an impressive figure. In 1909, Chicago Police Chief Steward estimated women

owned and operated about 75 percent of the brothels in Chicago, and a police captain

estimated that women owned and operated about half of the brothels in his precinct.

According to my calculations of the sex work related addresses in the Capone Database,

28 percent of the addresses from 1900 to 1909 and 52 percent of the addresses from 1910

to 1919 had women involved as owners and/or managers. Given the importance of the

sex work economy to pre-Prohibition organized crime, women’s 18 percent of organized

crime seems low compared to the police estimates. However, organized crime was a

gendered organization with interests beyond just the brothels. Women were not involved

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in the gambling economies of organized crime, and women were not the corrupted police

officers and politicians, both of which made up substantial portions of the network.

During this same time period women made up only about 20 percent of the US labor

force.

As a point of comparison, this suggests that organized crime was only as gender

segregated as the formal labor force during this period.

Women did not look like men in the organized crime network. It is visually

apparent in Figure 4 that women were not connected to organized crime in the same way

that men were. Entire clusters in the network have zero women, women were missing

from the center of the network, and women did not appear to connect clusters of

individuals to other parts of the network. Even though women made up 18 percent of the

network, their positions were not randomly distributed throughout the network. Because

of the relational nature of these data, I can calculate dozens of statistics from this network

to compare women and men’s positions. It is through these statistics of network

properties where the nuance of gendered processes and interactions in the forming and

not forming of relationships come to light.

I focus on the gender proportions of nodes and ties within the network as well as

five network measures for which I compare means for men and women. Table 5 presents

the first set of these comparisons. The middle columns of Table 5 show the counts,

percentages, or means for men and women across the five network properties. Stars

indicate statistically significant differences between the means based on a two-tailed t-

test. The final column calculates the gender gap as a ratio of the mean for women divided

by the mean for men. A value of 1.0 in the gender gap column indicates that there was no

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151

gap between men and women for that measure. The closer the value is to 0, the greater

the gender gap.

Table 5: Organized crime network properties by gender, 1900-1919

Men

Women

Gender Gap

nodes (people)

220

0.214

(82.4%)

(17.6%)

edges (criminal ties)

763

148

0.194

(96.8%)

(18.8%)

men only dyads

641

(81.2%)

man and woman dyads

122

(15.5%)

woman only dyads

(3.3%)

degree (popularity)

6.382

3.702*

0.580

(7.354)

(2.321)

eigenvector centrality (popular friends)

0.0304

0.011*

0.362

(0.059)

(0.019)

geodesic distance (distance)

3.805

4.046*

0.940

(0.619)

(0.466)

normalized betweenness (brokering paths)

0.013

0.001*

0.069

(0.042)

(0.002)

(completely connected cluster)

4.300

3.468*

0.807

(3.075)

(2.135)

Notes: Standard deviations and percentages are in parentheses. Asterisks indicate statistically significant

differences between men and women’s means based on a two-tailed t-test. Gender gap ratios calculated as

the value for women divided by the value for men except for geodesic distance, which was reversed.

The top half of Table 5 includes the calculations of nodes and dyads. A node is an

individual (or in this case more specifically a criminal) positioned in the network. A dyad

is a pair of nodes connected by a relationship (also called an edge) and technically counts

each line in the network. The bottom half of Table 5 covers the five calculations of basic

foundational positions within networks, which I define briefly before discussing the

results.

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The five network measures included in Table 5 are node-level indices meaning

that the calculations come from each node’s position in the network. Degree is the

number of ties to each node and equals the number of people an individual is directly

connected to in the network. Degree can be thought of as measuring criminal popularity

or high criminal activity. Eigenvector centrality measures how connected individuals are

to the powerful individuals in the network. Even when individuals only have a few ties in

a network, those ties might be to the most popular person in the network producing a

higher eigenvector centrality score. Eigenvector centrality measures popular friends or

being connected to the criminally active. Geodesic distance is the shortest path between

two nodes when two nodes are within the same component. Small geodesic distances

indicate that individuals do not have far to travel to reach everyone else in the component

whereas a large geodesic distance indicates that individuals have far to travel. Distance is

the one measure considered here for which a high score indicates a less powerful and less

central position. Betweenness counts the number of geodesic paths on which an

individual sits, and a high betweenness score means that individuals are strategically

located between others in the network. A normalized betweenness score accounts for all

of the paths in a network. High betweenness scores identify the big brokers in the

network, as these are the individuals whom a large number of paths must go through to

connect to others. K-core is a measure that uses degree to identify dense pockets of

cohesion in a network often picking up the size of an individual’s largest totally

connected cluster. Given these definitions of network properties, I now turn to what the

results of these properties mean in the context of the organized crime network.

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Across every measure in Table 5, women were less structurally important than

men in the organized crime network. Women made up only 18 percent of the nodes and

resided on 19 percent of the ties. The means for women were lower than the means for

men for degree (popularity), eigenvector centrality (popular friends), betweenness

(brokering paths), and k-core (cluster size). The mean for women’s geodesic distance was

higher than the mean for men’s geodesic distance because women had overall longer

paths to traverse the network. Distance is the one measure in which a higher value

indicates a worse position. The differences between means for men and women were all

statistically significant.

Women formed criminal ties with other men in organized crime much more than

they formed criminal ties with women. Woman to woman dyads equaled only 3.3 percent

of ties in organized crime whereas woman to man dyads made up 15.5 percent of the

criminal ties. The reverse was true for men. Men formed criminal ties mostly with other

men (81.2 percent) and fewer of men’s ties were formed with women (the same 15.5

percent). Women’s connection to organized crime was almost entirely through their

connections to men. This finding of women’s offending through men is consistent with

contemporary research on women’s co-offending.

However, given the role of brothels

and the sex work economy to early 1900s organized crime, it is remarkable that so few

ties were between women. Gender as a category was very much influencing who was

connected to whom in organized crime and this gendered process produced relational

inequalities in the network.

On average, women were connected to fewer individuals than men, meaning

women were less popular in the network overall. Degree in social networks tends to

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follow a power law distribution of many individuals with low degree and few individuals

with high degree, and this was also true for the 1900 to 1919 organized crime network as

shown in the histogram in Figure 5. The range for degree in the organized crime network

was a minimum of 1 criminal tie to a maximum of 43 criminal ties. Jim Colosimo,

brothel and restaurant owner, collector, and organizer for the red-light districts, had the

highest degree in this network. On average men had 6.4 criminal ties compared to

women’s 3.7 criminal ties. Women were connected to about half as many people as men

in the organized crime network. The final column in Table 5 shows that the gender gap

for degree was 0.58, so if social ties were dollars, women were making about 58 cents to

men’s dollar.

Figure 5: Histogram of degree distribution in Chicago organized crime, 1900-1919

Women were not as connected as men to central individuals in this network. The

gender gap in eigenvector centrality (popular friends), showed men’s connections to

Degree Distribution of Largest Component, 1900-1919

Degree

Frequency

0 10 20 30 40

0 10 20 30 40 50

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central individuals were almost 3 times higher than women’s connections to central

individuals. A high eigenvector centrality score means that a person’s immediate

connections have a lot of ties and a low score means that a person’s immediate

connections have few ties. Women had less popular neighbors in the organized crime

network. Among the top 10 percent of eigenvectors scores, which included 27 people

from the 267 total, there was only one woman, Julia Van Bever. Around 1909, Julia Van

Bever and her husband, Maurice, trafficked women to Chicago’s red-light districts and

sold women to Jim Colosimo’s brothels. Julia Van Bever’s high eigenvector centrality

score picked up her connections to two powerful actors in the network: Jim Colosimo, the

most central actor in the network and her husband, Maurice, who was also prominently

positioned in organized crime. With the exception of Julia Van Bever, when women

formed ties in organized crime, their ties tended to be to less central men or to only a

single powerful man in the network. Men were much more likely to connect to multiple

powerful men in the network than women were.

Women had slightly further to travel to connect to others in the network than men.

In this rather small organized crime network, men on average could reach all other

individuals in the network in 3.8 steps whereas women required 4.0 steps on average.

This difference in means was small, but it was significant. Each person’s average

distance required calculating the mean of geodesic means because each individual has a

geodesic distance to every other person in the network. I calculated column means within

a distance matrix to then compare means of means for men and women. The gender gap

for the mean of geodesic distance means is the smallest gender gap calculated from the

organized crime network and should be interpreted as men’s distance was 94 percent of

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156

women’s distance, since this is the one gender ratio that I reversed. The difference in

distance is significant but not terribly substantial. The implication for the small gender

gap in distance is that women did not have much farther to travel than men to access

organized crime resources. If women had been located at the farthest margins of

organized crime and men had not been, then a larger gender gap in distance would have

occurred. But, as was the case, women were not located much farther from the center of

the network than men, and women had similar distances to travel to reach all the

resources in the network. Access to resources is not the same as controlling resources, but

access is important for the success of marginalized groups because only then can

marginalized groups borrow social capital from the dominant group.

Women failed to reside on paths between individuals compared to men in the

organized crime network. Overall, women tended not to have brokerage positions in the

network. On average, men resided on 14.5 times more paths than women. Betweenness

calculates the number of geodesic distances that travel through an individual node’s

position. Normalizing the betweenness scores takes into account the actual number of

paths within the network. A high betweenness score is a powerful network position

because paths connecting nodes within the network require going through certain

individuals. If the network were to disseminate information or provide access to legal and

political protection, individuals with high betweenness would control those flows. In fact,

many of the individuals with high betweenness scores were actual brokers or middlemen

who collected graft money from business owners and delivered cash to their bosses or

paid off judges or police officers.

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Betweenness also indicates a distinction between core and periphery. Individuals

in the core tend to have high betweenness scores because so many paths require going

through the center of the network whereas at the margins of the network the only paths

going through brokers are those directly in the local neighborhood. The normalized

betweenness score shows the largest gender gap ratio of all five network properties, 0.07.

If controlling paths were dollars, women were only making 7 cents to men’s brokering

path dollar.

Women’s clusters were smaller on average than men’s clusters. Women’s

connected clusters averaged 3.5 ties whereas men’s connected clusters averaged 4.3 ties.

Women tended to be connected in triads and men were connected in groups of four.

Though the k-core score is largely a function of degree, the gender gap ratio for mean k-

core was 0.81, which is one of the smaller gaps in this network. This means that women’s

local cluster size was not so different than men’s, but the importance of the local cluster

largely depended on who else resided in that cluster.

To summarize the differences across Table 5, women were a substantial

percentage of the organized crime network before Prohibition, similar in size to the

percentage of women in the formal labor force. However, women’s structural positions

were much less central and critical to the organized crime network than men’s. On

average women were connected to fewer individuals, they were not connected to

important individuals, they had marginally further to travel to connect to others in the

network, they did not reside on paths between individuals in the network, and their

clusters were smaller. In other words, women were less powerful and less important

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within the criminal organization. Women had access to networked resources, but they did

not control networked resources.

Another way to look at gender differences in the 1900 to 1919 organized crime

network is to examine some of the graph-level indices. These calculations come from the

network in its entirety. Graph-level indices include measures such as the number of

components, density of the network, network centralization, the number of triangles, and

transitivity (or connectedness). Some of these measures were introduced earlier in this

chapter to describe the small, sparse (density = 0.022), decentralized (degree

centralization = 0.14), and clustered structure of the organization. Intentionally, the 1900

to 1919 organized crime network contained only a single component with no isolates or

smaller unconnected segments. There were 1,310 triangles in this network, and the

transitivity for this network was 0.391. Transitivity measures the total number of closed

triangles over the number of all open and closed triangles and essentially measures the

adage “a friend of a friend is a friend.”

Because these measures focus on the entire

network rather than the nodes and create a single statistic for the entire network, parsing

out the gender differences requires a different set of techniques than comparing means

between men and women.

In order to examine the gender differences at the graph-level, I employed a set of

deletion techniques to generate additional networks for comparison. For this part of the

analysis, I created a network that dropped all 47 women and all of their edges, leaving

behind the network of only men and their edges. This resulting men-only network had a

different set of graph-level statistics that I could compare to the graph-level statistics of

the original network. Additionally, I randomly selected 47 men to delete from the original

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network to create a third network of men and women without the random 47 men and

their ties. The logic was to compare the structural changes across the networks when

entire groups were removed in order to identify how structurally important women were

to the overall network.

Figure 6 plots the change across six graph-level network measures. The red bars

indicate the change when deleting all 47 of the women from the network, and the blue

bars indicate that change when deleting the random 47 men from the network. I measured

all of the changes as percent change with the exception of components, which I left as a

count in order to bracket the maximum value in the y-axis.

Figure 6: Change in structural properties of the Chicago organized crime network after

deletion techniques, 1900-1919

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-45

-35

-25

-15

-5

nodes edges components density centralization triangles transitivity

Change

47 Women

47 Random Men

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The change in nodes for both deletions was -17.6 percent because this was the

fixed count of 47 to create a random group of men to compare to all 47 women. Moving

right from the first set of bars in Figure 6 shows the variation and gender differences in

the deletion techniques. Deleting women from the network removed 18.8 percent of the

edges, and deleting 47 random men from the network removed 34.9 percent of the edges.

Even though I fixed the number of nodes to 47, the gender difference in the percent

change of edges was about 15 percent.

One of the ways in which individuals can be structurally important to a network is

when they connect other individuals to the component. This is similar to the idea of

brokering paths discussed above as betweenness centrality. Removing brokers from a

network can break the network into multiple parts or components. The third set of bars in

Figure 6 shows the change in the number of components when I deleted the 47 nodes

from the original network. Removing all women from the network produced 2

components for a change of 1 plotted in the red bar and removing the random 47 men

produced 9 components for a change of 8 plotted in the blue bar. The second component

in the women-removed network was a single isolate whereas the 47 random men

removed network produced 1 component of 9, 1 triad, and 6 isolates in addition to what

was left of the largest component.

Removing all of the women from the original network actually improved the

overall network density by 18 percent. What this means is that women had so few ties in

the original network that removing the women actually increased the proportion of

present ties to possible ties. The original network had a density of 2.2 percent of ties

present, and after deleting the women, 2.6 percent of ties were present. This was not the

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161

case when deleting the random 47 men. The density of the network decreased by 4.7

percent when 47 random men and their ties were removed from the original network.

Included in the random 47 men, were some men with many ties creating dense areas of

the network.

The network also became more centralized when deleting the women. The degree

centralization score increased by 19 percent. Degree centralization also increased when

removing the random men, but not so drastically. Removing the random men increased

degree centralization by 6 percent. The interpretation of this increase is that the ties that

remained in the organized crime network were more concentrated on fewer powerful

individuals rather than spread out across individuals. There was more equity in the

distribution of ties with the women in the network because in total women did not have as

many ties as men.

At the overall network level, counts of triangles and scores of transitivity reveal

the connectedness of the network. Deleting women from the network decreased the

number of triangles by 17 percent but increased the transitivity score by 7 percent. This

pattern shows why it is important to consider both measures. Even though women do

matter in the overall count of triangles, removing the women increased the tendency for

the pattern of closed triangles overall. Women tended to not close the triangles with their

friends’ friends. The random group of 47 men had a very substantial impact of the

number of triangles, and deleting them decreased the number of triangles by 52 percent.

However, transitivity only decreased by 4 percent without these triangles. The 47 random

men contained and closed many triangles and were well connected in the network.

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To summarize these deletion techniques, women were structurally important to

the organized crime network but not as structurally important as 47 randomly selected

men. Removing each group altered the network, but men’s effects were much more

dramatic than women’s effects. I measured a gender gap of structural importance as the

absolute difference between the women and random men’s percent change, which ranged

from a minimum of 11 percent difference in transitivity to a 35 percent difference in

triangles. In two cases, removing the women improved the connectivity of network in

terms of density and transitivity, and removing women increased the centralization of the

network. Because women were not powerful actors in the network, their presence in the

network interfered with the concentration of resources. Mathematically, this is not

terribly interesting as a larger number of individuals changes the concentration.

Substantively, it suggests that women did not add much to organized crime in terms of

relational resources rather women had to borrow relational resources from men.

These two analytic methods, the calculations of gender gaps based on network

position and deletion comparisons, are unique to the study of criminal networks and

gender and crime. The logic comes from an organizational perspective that views social

networks as containing and distributing resources and assumes that individuals want to be

connected to those resources. The organizational structure of organized crime from 1900

to 1919 was small, sparse, decentralized, and clustered. My analysis shows that women

did have access to the resources of the organization, but they did not control the

resources. Women were marginal actors who were able to participate and hang on to a

lucrative and dynamic economy through their connections to slightly less marginal men

or through a single tie to a powerfully connected man. The structure of the network was

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163

not dependent on the women as women tended to contribute individuals rather than

robust relationships within organized crime. Women’s participation and position in

organized crime changed dramatically when organized crime responded and reacted to

Prohibition.

Chicago Organized Crime Network, 1920-1933

The exogenous shock of Prohibition dramatically shifted organized crime from a

loose syndication around the urban illicit entertainment economies to a large centralized

organization with diverse financial interests. In addition to large-scale brewing, distilling,

storing, and distributing of booze, organized crime’s earning portfolios diversified across

licit and illicit economies to include dog racetracks, dry cleaning establishments, political

campaigns, and union racketeering. Organized crime swelled in size, strength, profits,

and influence. Growth was explosive, and those in positions of power became more

powerful. During Prohibition, the organized crime network grew to include three times

more people and four times more relationships: 937 individuals and 3,250 ties between

them. Table 6 presents the shifts in network structure from pre-Prohibition organized

crime to Prohibition organized crime by listing several properties of the overall networks

and calculating the percent change from the first time period to the second time period.

Organized crime became even sparser as only 0.7 percent of the total possible ties

were present during Prohibition—a 68 percent decrease from before Prohibition. With

decreasing density also came increasing centralization. Degree centralization for

Prohibition organized crime was 0.33, which was an increase of 136 percent the

centralization before Prohibition. Brokerage became more concentrated during

Prohibition with a 78 percent increase in betweenness centralization. Whereas before

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Prohibition, the structure of organized crime was relatively small and decentralized, these

measures indicate that the organizational structure of organized crime during Prohibition

was large, sparse, and centralized.

Table 6: Structural properties of Chicago organized crime networks compared, 1900-

1919 and 1920-1933

Time 1

1900-1919

Time 2

1920-1933

Percent

Change

n of individuals

267

937

+250.9%

n of criminal ties

789

3,250

+311.9%

density

0.022

0.007

-68.20%

degree centralization

0.14

0.331

+136.4%

betweenness centralization

0.398

0.707

+77.60%

The organizational restructuring of growth, decreased density, and increased

centralization and brokerage is apparent in Figure 7. Similar to Figure 4, each node in

Figure 7 represents an individual and each line between them represents a criminal

relationship during Prohibition. I assigned nodes the same three colors for this figure: red

indicates criminal women (n=37), blue indicates criminal men (n=825), and yellow

indicates criminal men who were also state actors such as attorneys, police officers, and

politicians (n=74). I added one more color assignment to Figure 7 for the one green node

to indicate the one criminal woman who was a state actor. Shirley Kub worked as a

female investigator for the police commissioner and was also part of organized crime.

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Figure 7: Chicago organized crime network, 1920-1933 (n=937)

Before Prohibition, 18 percent of the organized crime network was women and 19

percent of the relationships included women, but during Prohibition women made up

only 4 percent of the individuals in the organized crime network and resided on only 4

percent of the relationships. Even in raw numbers there were more women and more

dyads that included women before Prohibition than during Prohibition. Similar to the pre-

Prohibition network, women’s criminal ties included group arrests, owning and operating

brothels, and trafficking women, but there were fewer of these relationships than before.

Women also entered the Prohibition network as moles in murder plots or members of

bootlegging or bombing crews. There was much more diversity in the types of criminal

Criminal Network 1920-1933

police and politicians men

police woman

criminal men

criminal women

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relationships women had during Prohibition. Table 7 presents the same descriptive

statistics shown in Table 5 that compare men and women’s network position.

Table 7: Organized crime network properties by gender, 1920-1933

Men

Women

Gender Gap

nodes (people)

899

0.042

(95.9%)

(4.1%)

edges (criminal ties)

3243

116

0.036

(99.8%)

(3.6%)

men only dyads

3134

(96.4%)

man and woman dyads

109

(3.4%)

woman only dyads

(0.2%)

degree (popularity)

7.093

3.237*

0.456

(12.952)

(2.823)

eigenvector centrality (popular friends)

0.016

0.003*

0.188

(0.029)

(0.006)

geodesic distance (distance)

3.684

4.270*

0.863

(0.847)

(0.928)

normalized betweenness (brokering paths)

0.003

0.0002*

0.067

(0.025)

(0.001)

k-core (completely connected cluster)

4.859

3.105*

0.639

(4.341)

(2.826)

Notes: Standard deviations and percentages are in parentheses. Asterisks indicate statistically significant

differences between men and women’s means based on a two-tailed t-test. Gender gap ratios calculated as

the value for women divided by the value for men except for distance, which was reversed.

The gap between women only dyads and men and women dyads was even more

pronounced during Prohibition than before Prohibition. There were only 7 relationships

between two women in this entire organized crime network of 3,250 criminal ties. Men

only dyads were 500 times greater than women only dyads. Women to women dyads

made up only 0.2 percent of ties in the network, and dyads connecting one woman and

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one man made up 3.6 percent of the criminal ties. Woman to woman dyads decreased by

73 percent during Prohibition. Similar to the pre-Prohibition network, women’s

connection to organized crime was almost entirely through their connection to men even

though men’s ties were predominantly to other men. Men were the gatekeepers of

organized crime relationships, and they tended to form relationships with other men

rather than women.

Most of the variation in dyads was due to the sheer number of men in this network

compared to women. The gender gaps for the proportion of nodes (0.04) and the

proportion of relationships (0.04) were some of the largest gaps across all my

calculations. There were 25 times more men than women in the organized crime network

during Prohibition, and men resided on 25 times more relationships than the women.

These large gender gaps persisted during Prohibition across all five of the network

structural properties. Women were connected to fewer individuals, they were not

connected to important individuals, they had farther to travel to connect to others in the

network, they did not reside on paths between individuals in the network, and their

clusters were smaller. Indeed, these calculations are due to the small proportion of

women in this network, but small proportions do not always equal inferior network

positions.

During Prohibition, women on average had 3.24 ties compared to men’s 7 ties,

which was a gender gap of 0.46. While women’s mean degree decreased by 13 percent

from Time 1 to Time 2, men’s mean degree increased by 11 percent. The skew in the

degree distribution, shown in Figure 8, was much greater during Prohibition in large part

due to the very different sizes of the networks and the increased importance of particular

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individuals within the network during the process of centralization and growth. The

degree distribution continued to follow a power law, the minimum degree was 1, and the

maximum degree was 316. Recall that before Prohibition the degree scores ranged from 1

to 43, so the maximum degree increased by 635 percent over time.

Figure 8: Histogram of degree distribution in Chicago organized crime, 1920-1933

Note: The x-axis in Figure 8 was truncated at 70 to display clearly the distribution on the left. This

truncation drops only Al Capone’s extreme degree of 316.

Al Capone had the highest degree score of 316 criminal ties during Prohibition.

Compare Al Capone to Kathryn Perkins who had the highest degree score for women

with her 13 criminal ties. The historical record on Kathryn Perkins is very thin, and all I

know is that she was a member of a group of booze runners bootlegging between

Chicago and Iowa. Kathryn Perkins had ties to all the other 13 booze runners in this

Degree Distribution of Largest Component, 1920-1933

Truncated to remove Al Capone's degree of 316.

Degree

Frequency

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

0 50 100 150 200

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group, and her highest degree score was a result of the rather large size of the group.

Compared to Al Capone’s 316 criminal ties, Kathryn Perkins’s degree score as the most

criminally connected woman is quite unimpressive. Whereas Al Capone’s maximum

degree included criminal ties spread across the diverse activities and investments of

organized crime, Kathryn Perkin’s maximum criminal degree was localized within a

single enterprise or event.

Women were not connected to central individuals in the Prohibition network as

shown by the gender gap in eigenvector centrality in which men’s connections to central

individuals was 5.3 times higher than women’s connections to central individuals.

Women experienced a decrease of 73 percent in mean eigenvector centrality from Time 1

to Time 2. Men also experienced a decrease in mean eigenvector centrality from Time 1

to Time 2 of 47 percent. Much of this change can be explained by the differences in the

sizes and densities of the two organized crime networks, but the gender gap in popular

neighbors suggests that this change was categorically unequal.

The woman with the highest eigenvector centrality score during Prohibition was

Alma Guzik, who was connected to more central and powerful individuals than any other

women. However, even with her highest eigenvector centrality score among women,

Alma Guzik was not among the top 10 percent of eigenvector centrality scores in this

network. Alma was married to Harry Guzik and together they operated brothels for

Torrio and Capone’s Syndicate. The couple had ties to both Al Capone and Johnny

Torrio, the top two crime bosses in the Prohibition network. Additionally, Harry Guzik

was the brother of Jake Guzik, who was one of Al Capone’s top lieutenants. Likely Alma

would not have been connected to central people in this network without her husband’s

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connections, and all of Alma’s criminal ties during Prohibition were entirely within the

sex work economy.

Distance continued to be the smallest gender gap, though during Prohibition the

gap was larger than it had been before Prohibition. Men’s distance was 86 percent of

women’s distance during Prohibition. Women’s distance increased slightly to 4.27 paths

to reach everyone else in the network on average compared to men’s distance of 3.68

paths. Men’s average distance decreased slightly from Time 1 to Time 2. Considering

that the network grew during Prohibition to include three times more people and four

times more ties, it is noteworthy that women’s average distance slightly increased while

men’s average distance slightly decreased. A network with the majority of individuals

only a step or two away from a centralized core would explain this change, which was

exactly what changed in the large, sparse, and centralized Prohibition organization. The

implication of the small gender gap in distance before Prohibition was that women did

not have much farther to travel to access organized crime resources than men, but during

Prohibition women had even less access to resources.

The gender gap for betweenness (0.07) continues to be one of the largest gaps in

network properties. Women were not in brokerage positions connecting individuals to

other parts of the network like men were. Women’s brokering paths positions were 93

percent lower than men’s. In other words, the shortest paths connecting individuals across

the network were through men rather than women. There were many more paths to

broker during Prohibition because of the size of the network; however, normalizing the

betweenness score by controlling for the total number of paths, showed dramatic

decreases in brokerage for both men and women. Women’s brokerage positions

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decreased by 78 percent from Time 1 to Time 2, and men’s brokerage positions

decreased by 77 percent from Time 1 to Time 2. These similarities in the percent

decreases in betweenness suggest a categorical similarity rather than difference, but the

distribution of maximum and minimum betweenness scores varied much more by gender.

Betweenness is sensitive to the number of individuals on the periphery of the

networks who have a single tie. These individuals have a betweenness score of zero

because they do not reside on any paths connecting others. Before Prohibition, 63 percent

of men and 79 percent of women had a betweenness score of zero, and during Prohibition

64 percent of men and 87 percent of women had a betweenness score of zero. Whereas

the percent of men with a betweenness score of zero remained about the same across the

two networks, women with a betweenness score of zero increased by 10 percent.

Additionally, the distribution for the maximum betweenness score changed

dramatically over the two time periods for both men and women: the value of the

maximum betweenness increased by 74 percent for men but decreased by 56 percent for

women. A decreasing maximum and increasing minimum explains women’s 78 percent

decrease in betweenness from Time 1 to Time 2. However, these same mechanisms do

not explain men’s 77 percent decrease in betweenness. Men’s maximum betweenness

increased and the percent with the minimum betweenness of zero remained similar. The

remaining plausible explanation for men is once again the story of network centralization

and density. Men continued to be the brokers in organized crime, but as organized

crime’s core became more centralized and the network overall became more sparse, paths

became shorter and required fewer brokers. Powerful men became more powerful.

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The final network position in Table 7 is the k-core measure for cluster size.

Women’s cluster size got slightly smaller during Prohibition and men’s cluster size got

slightly larger. Women’s cluster size was about 64 percent of men’s cluster size. Though

the difference between men and women’s cluster size is statistically different, it is

awkward to divide individuals up into decimals. Substantively women remained in

maximum groups of 3 during Prohibition as they had before Prohibition. Men, however,

had a cluster size of about 4 before Prohibition and this increased to almost 5 during

Prohibition, suggesting an increase in the coordination required for particular crimes, the

size of groups caught in organized crime activities, and also substantial overlap in the

powerful core of the network.

Moving from the node-level indices to the graph-level indices requires employing

the deletion techniques introduced with the 1900 to 1919 network. This part of the

analysis required me to delete the 38 women and all of their ties from the 1920 to 1933

network, and, for a comparison, delete a set of 38 random men and all of their ties from

the 1920 to 1933 network. Figure 9 presents the structural changes from these deletions

across the graph-level indices for the Prohibition networks.

Deleting women from the Prohibition organized crime network had very little

consequence on the overall network structure. I fixed the y-axis in Figure 9 to match the

y-axis of change used for the first time period in Figure 6. Doing so reveals that the

change was much less dramatic in Time 2 than in Time 1. The lower percent of women

deleted from the Time 2 network explains the smaller effects. Whereas in Time 1, I

deleted 18 percent of the nodes from the comparison networks, in Time 2 I deleted only 4

percent of the nodes. Deleting women and their ties produced a men-only remaining

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network that had 3.6 percent fewer edges, 1 additional component that was an isolate, a

4.1 percent increase in density, a 3.3 percent increase in centralization, 3.4 percent fewer

triangles, and a 1.3 percent decrease in transitivity. Unlike Time 1, removing women

from the Time 2 network did not increase the network transitivity, but like Time 1 it did

increase the network density and centralization.

Figure 9: Change in structural properties of Chicago organized crime network after

deletion techniques, 1920-1933

The network without 38 random men and their ties had 8.6 percent fewer edges, 9

more components, a 1.4 percent decrease in density, a 0.3 percent increase in

centralization, 17.3 percent fewer triangles, and an 8 percent decrease in transitivity. The

two properties for which deleting 38 random men had little to no effect on, density and

centralization, were properties that increased when deleting the 38 women. The gender

-55

-45

-35

-25

-15

-5

nodes edges components density centralization triangles transitivity

Change

38 Women

38 Random Men

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gap measured as the absolute difference between the percent change ranged from a 3

percent difference in centralization to a 14 percent difference in triangles. This range was

much smaller than the range from Time 1, so the gender gap for structural importance to

the overall network actually decreased over time but only because there were so few

nodes deleted from the networks in the second time period. Even a small matched sized

group of 38 random men contributed more to the Prohibition organized crime structure

than all of the women as a group. The takeaway from the deletion technique is that

women were less structurally important to the organized crime network during

Prohibition than before Prohibition. The Prohibition organized crime network would have

looked about the same without all of the women.

Increasing Inequality

Women’s structural positions in organized crime got worse across every single

measure during Prohibition. Figure 10 compares the gender gaps (the final column in

Table 5) from before Prohibition when the organization was small, decentralized, and

clustered to the gender gaps (the final column in Table 7) during Prohibition when the

organization was large, sparse, and centralized. The blue bars plot the gender gap from

before Prohibition and the black bars plot the gender gap from Prohibition. Across every

single measure the black bars were shorter than the blue bars. The black bars were closer

to zero and farther from one in every instance indicating an increase in the gender gap.

Increasing gender gaps were especially dramatic for the number of nodes, the number of

ties, and popular friends (eigenvector centrality). The gender gap for brokering paths

(betweenness) was the one of the biggest gaps before Prohibition and showed the

smallest change, but the gender gap did get worse during Prohibition by 0.01.

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175

Figure 10: Bar chart comparing the gender gaps, 1900-1919 and 1920-1933

The substantial and persistent gender gap in brokering paths warrants additional

comment. Betweenness scores dropped for both men and women from the pre-

Prohibition network to the Prohibition network because the network grew in size while

becoming more sparse and centralized. There were more paths, and those paths

concentrated through a smaller group of powerful brokering individuals. This was

structurally a story of centralization. Powerful people became more powerful and central,

and people on the margins became more marginalized. The examples of the top men

brokers compared to the top women brokers reveal a sharp gendered contrast in this

network position.

The distribution of betweenness scores became more dramatic between the two

networks. Before Prohibition, Mike Heitler, was the biggest broker in the network;

14,367 paths or 41 percent of all the paths in the network went through Mike. Mike’s

betweenness score was consistent with his biography in organized crime. He was a boss

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

people ties popular

popular

friends

distance paths clusters

Gender Gap Ratio

1900-1919

1920-1933

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176

and property owner in the red-light districts, tribute payments were made to him, and he

had political connections. Illicit business owners wanting legal and political protection

had to go through Mike. But, Mike Heitler was not the most popular criminal before

Prohibition in terms of criminal ties. Heitler had 35 criminal ties in the pre-Prohibition

network, but there were three people in the organized crime network with more criminal

ties than him: brothel king Jim Colosimo (degree of 43), gambling king Mont Tennes

(degree of 42), and collector and informant Louis Frank (degree of 39). Compare Mike

Heitler to Al Capone during Prohibition. Unlike Mike Heitler, Al Capone had the highest

degree in the network (316 criminal ties) and the highest betweenness score. Al Capone

was on 310,348 paths meaning 71 percent of all paths in the network passed through Al.

The normalized betweenness scores show that during Prohibition the biggest broker in

the network resided on nearly 2 times as many paths as the biggest broker before

Prohibition.

In stark contrast, women were just not brokers in organized crime. Women did

not collect tribute or graft payments. When women were connected to central figures,

their associates were also connected to those same central figures. Another way of

thinking about brokerage is through the visualization of open triangles. One of the nodes

in an open triangle connects the other two nodes indirectly, which is a brokerage position.

A closed triangle, however, has no broker because the two associates are connected to the

same person. This was the case for brothel owner Alma Guzik and her husband, Harry.

They were criminal associates, and everyone whom Alma was connected to Harry was

also connected to including bosses Al Capone and Johnny Torrio, so Alma never

brokered paths for Harry. The reverse was not true. Harry was connected to at least a

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177

dozen additional associates whom Alma had no connection to, and in these cases Harry

brokered the indirect relationships between Alma and his other associates.

Jennie “Diamond” Kirch had the highest brokerage score of all the women before

Prohibition. She resided on 331 paths or 0.9 percent of all paths in the organized crime

network. Compared to Mike Heitler, her brokerage position was unimpressive, and, in

fact, it was her tie to Mike Heitler through which she brokered several women’s paths.

Jennie ran one of Mike Heitler’s brothels at 9 Carpenter Street. She was arrested in 1911

with a group of five other women and two men at a train station en route to Pittsburgh.

The group was accused of violating the Mann Act, or the White Slavery Act, of 1910 that

prohibited crossing state lines with women for immoral purposes. Joseph Heitler, Mike

Heitler’s brother, was one of the men in this co-arrest. Together Joseph and Jennie

indirectly connected their co-arrestees to Mike Heitler, but they competed for this

brokerage position to Mike Heitler statistically splitting the betweenness score. Joseph,

however, had a much higher overall brokerage score than Jennie because he had many

additional associates beyond the 1911 co-arrest that Jennie did not. Nevertheless, Jennie

“Diamond” Kirch was doing better as a broker than Emily Marshall, who was the top

broker for women during Prohibition.

Emily “the Immune” Marshall resided on 1,868 paths, which was only 0.4 percent

of the paths in the total organized crime network during Prohibition. During Prohibition,

Emily Marshall ran a brothel at 18 North Curtis Street, which eventually came under the

control of Jack Zuta’s syndicate.

A raid on Emily’s brothel in 1920 and resulting co-

arrest revealed the names of two of the sex workers at her brothel, Ethel Rosenheim and

Peggy O’Malley.

As sex workers these two women had no other criminal ties in

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178

organized crime except to Emily Marshall, who indirectly connected them to Jack Zuta,

who then connected them to the rest of the organized crime network. The similarities

between Jennie “Diamond” Kirsch and Emily “the Immune” Marshall were that they both

were heads of their brothels, both brothels were protected by organized crime, and they

both brokered other women to the organized crime network through their

managerial/owner positions. However, Jennie’s brokerage score was more than two times

higher than Emily’s score when controlling for the number of the total paths. Brokers

control the flow of resources in social networks. In organized crime men were brokers,

and women were brokered.

Prohibition changed the structure of organized crime in a way that generated more

gender inequality. The structures shifted from a small decentralized network of clusters to

a large, sparse, and centralized organization. The first organizational structure was decent

for women’s criminal opportunities. Women were a substantial and structurally important

part of organized crime before Prohibition. Women did not add much in terms of

relational resources to the organized crime network, but they could access networked

resources through men. The organizational structure during Prohibition limited

opportunities for women. Women were not structurally important to the network during

Prohibition because they were too small of a group with too few relationships in

proportion to the large network. Failure to connect in the first place meant failure to

increase social capital from within the organization.

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179

The Criminal Elite

Women did not look like men in organized crime; however, average men did not

look like certain men in organized crime either. As there is within most formal and

informal organizations, there was an elite group of men within organized crime who were

categorically distinct from all others in the network. Elites require special analytic

attention when making comparisons because they drive the bulk of the difference. For

example, calculating gendered wage differences in a firm will show dramatic gender gaps

if all of the CEOs are men. Given general processes of inequality in organizations, it is

worth thinking about the elite as a separate analytic category. The goal of an elite

sensitivity analysis is to truncate the variance within the groups to increase the chance of

identifying similarity rather than just difference.

The clearest mark of criminal elite within the organized crime networks was

around the number of criminal ties certain individuals had compared to the majority. Al

Capone alone had 316 criminal relationships during Prohibition. Women did not look like

Al Capone in terms of position within the organization but neither did the majority of

men. The criminal elite resided in the right tail of the power law distributions of criminal

ties shown in Figures 5 and 8. I analyzed the criminal elite in these networks as the

individuals near the top 10 percent of criminal ties. These were the most popular and

well-connected individuals in the organizations, and they happened to all be men.

I identified 25 criminal elite men in Time 1 of the 267 nodes and 86 criminal elite

men in Time 2 of the 937 nodes based on criminal degree in each network. Elites were

not exactly 10 percent of the total nodes because degree scores are whole numbers, and I

did not want to slice up a group in which all members had the same degree score. I chose

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180

the bin closest to 10 percent that would not require me to divide up individuals with the

same degree. Technically, this was the top 9.4 percent for Time 1 and the top 9.2 percent

for Time 2. As a group, elite men had a minimum degree of 13 and a maximum degree of

43 in Time 1 and a minimum degree of 17 and a maximum degree of 316 in Time 2.

Given this distinction, the result was three categories for comparison: elite men, non-elite

men, and women. Sensitivity to elites showed that non-elite men had a degree more

similar to women than to elite men during both time periods as shown in Table 8.

Table 8: Degree for elite men, non-elite men, and women in Chicago organized crime,

1900-1919 and 1920-1933

1900-1919

1920-1933

Elite

Men

Non-elite

Men

Women

Elite

Men

Non-elite

Men

Women

mean degree

23.32

4.21

3.702

29.209

4.754

3.237

(standard deviation)

(9.017)

(3.046)

(2.321)

(32.742)

(4.004)

(2.823)

maximum degree

316

minimum degree

Employing this new category of elites, I replicated the entire gender inequality

analysis. Figure 11 presents the elite gaps between criminal elite men and non-elite men

from pre-Prohibition and Prohibition. The closer the bar is to 1 the smaller the elite gap,

and the closer the bar is to 0 the greater the elite gap. The blue bars for Time 1 compare

25 criminal elite men to 195 non-elite men. The black bars for Time 2 compare 86

criminal elite men to 813 non-elite men.

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Figure 11: Bar chart comparing the elite gaps between elite and non-elite men, 1900-1919

and 1920-1933

All of the differences between means for criminal elite men and non-elite men

were statistically significant using two-tailed t-tests. Even though criminal elite men

made up only about 10 percent of the nodes, they resided on almost as many criminal ties

as non-elite men. Criminal elite men had 80 percent of non-elite men’s ties before

Prohibition and 73 percent of non-elite men’s ties during Prohibition. The criminal non-

elite had about 20 percent of the elite’s popularity and 10 percent of the elite’s popular

friends. Criminal elite and non-elite had similar distances within the network. Before

Prohibition the non-elite actually had a shorter average distance than the elite and this

flipped during Prohibition. The largest elite gap was in the brokering of paths or

betweenness measure. Non-elite men only had 5 percent of the betweenness score of elite

men in Time 1 and Time 2, or in other words elite men were on 20 times more paths than

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

people ties popular

popular

friends

distance paths clusters

Elite Gap Ratio

1900-1919

1920-1933

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182

non-elite men. Elite men were on average in connected clusters of 10 in Time 1 and

connected clusters of 13 in Time 2, whereas non-elite men were in connected clusters of

4 in both time periods. This produced the final elite gap in Figure 11 showing a gap of 65

to 70 percent for cluster size.

None of the elite gaps in the bar chart was terribly surprising given that I defined

the elite by their unique and powerful structural position. I expected large elite gaps in

order to control for the variance within the group of men. Considering these large elite

gaps, it is possible that women’s absence from the elite criminal group was driving the

gender gaps in organized crime. To test the sensitivity of the gender gaps presented

earlier in this chapter, Figure 12 compares women to only non-elite men.

Figure 12: Bar chart comparing the gender gaps between non-elite men and women,

1900-1919 and 1920-1933

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

people ties popular popular

friends

distance paths clusters

Gender Gap Ratio

1900-1919

1920-1933

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183

In Figure 12, some of the bars are striped rather than solid, and all of the striped

bars are equal to 1. These striped bars indicate no statistically significant differences

between non-elite men and women’s means and, thus, no gender gap. The majority of

these striped bars, however, are blue showing more gender parity before Prohibition than

during Prohibition.

Before Prohibition, non-elite men had four times more individuals and

relationships than women in organized crime, but there was no significant difference in

means across 4 of the 5 structural properties. Non-elite men and women had structural

equality in the Time 1 organized crime network in terms of popularity, popular friends,

distance, and clusters. The brokering paths or betweenness measure, however, maintained

a persistent and substantial gender gap even when removing elite men from the

comparison group. Non-elite men were on 4 times as many paths as women, and elite

men were on 92 times (gender gap not shown) more paths than women.

The structural parity between women and non-elite men nearly eroded during

Prohibition. A wider gulf occurred between women and non-elite men suggesting that

non-elite men connected to the organized crime network of Prohibition in ways that

women could not. There were 20 times more non-elite men than women who resided on

20 times more ties than women during Prohibition. During Prohibition, only 1 of the 5

structural properties did not have a gender gap. Women and non-elite men’s connected

cluster size was statistically similar during Prohibition—between 3 and 4 people in the

connected group.

The significant gender gaps during Prohibition were not as extreme as the gender

gaps from the analysis presented earlier in this chapter that included the criminal elite

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184

men, but the gaps did persist. Women’s average degree or popularity score was 68

percent of non-elite men’s degree score and only 30 percent of non-elite men’s popular

friends score. The distance measure continued to be a small gender gap, women’s

average distance was only 13 percent longer than men’s average distance in terms of

number of steps required to reach everyone in the network. Once again, the betweenness

measure, indicating brokering paths, was the largest gap in structural position. Non-elite

men were on 5 times more paths than women, and elite men were on 100 times more

paths than women (gap not shown).

Another way non-elite men improved their position in comparison to women

during Prohibition had to do with who was forming ties with whom. Recall that in the

first time period, women resided on about 19 percent of ties and only 3 percent of all ties

were between women. About half of women’s remaining ties were to criminal elite men

(63 ties, 8 percent of the total) and the other half were to the non-elite men (59 ties, 7

percent of the total). A slight majority of women’s ties before Prohibition were to the

criminal elite men, mostly the elite men of the Levee districts. During Prohibition,

women had fewer ties overall, residing on only 4 percent of the total ties in the network.

Only 7 ties were between two women, accounting for 0.2 percent of the total. Women

had 26 ties (1 percent of the total) to criminal elite men and 83 ties (3 percent of the total)

to non-elite men during Prohibition. During Prohibition, then, the majority of women’s

ties were to non-elite men whereas before Prohibition a slight majority of women’s ties

were to criminally elite men. During Prohibition, women were connected to Al Capone’s

bootleggers and distributors, rather than Capone himself or his inner circle.

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To summarize the analysis controlling for the elite, before Prohibition 89 percent

of the men in the organized crime network were similar in power and importance as 100

percent of the women with the exception of brokering paths. Women were situated in the

organized crime network similarly to the majority of their male counterparts. Sensitivity

to the skew produced by the criminal elites within the network revealed a moment and a

location of greater gender equality within the organization, at least during the first time

period. However, Prohibition generated gender inequality in organized crime networks

beyond the elite. The black bars in Figure 12 show that even regular non-elite men were

mobilized and connected to organized crime in ways that women were not. Structurally,

non-elite men secured better positions than women in the centralized network during

Prohibition. In periods of centralization, a single tie to a member of the criminal elite

becomes more valuable than periods of decentralization. Women were categorically

excluded almost entirely from that single valuable tie.

In the deletion technique employed earlier in this chapter that removed women

from the networks and a comparable group of random men, the random groups of men

did include criminal elite men. Of the 47 random men deleted from the 1900 to 1919

network, 6 were elite (13 percent), and of the 38 random men deleted from the 1920 to

1933 network, 4 were elite (11 percent). At the graph-level, the criminal elite were

certainly driving much of the gender difference in structural change. Using a random

number generator, I identified two comparably sized groups of random non-elite men,

and I replicated the deletion analysis across the graph-level indices. Figures 13 and 14

replicate the analysis of the earlier deletion technique and add black bars to show the

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change when removing 47 random non-elite men from the 1900 to 1919 network and 38

random non-elite men from the 1920 to 1933 network.

Figure 13: Change in structural properties of the Chicago organized crime network after

deletion techniques, 1900-1919

Figure 14: Change in structural properties of the Chicago organized crime network after

deletion techniques, 1920-1933

-55

-45

-35

-25

-15

-5

nodes edges components density centralization triangles transitivity

Change

47 Women

47 Random Men

47 Random Non-Elite Men

-55

-45

-35

-25

-15

-5

nodes edges components density centralization triangles transitivity

Change

38 Women

38 Random Men

38 Random Non-Elite Men

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Not surprisingly, deleting a random sample of non-elite men and their ties did not

have as dramatic of effects on the network as deleting a random sample of men that

included the criminal elite, but the effects were more dramatic than deleting all of the

women. Over all of the measures and across both time periods, the change indicated by

the black bars was between the red and the blue bars. The one exception was deleting

non-elite random men from the first network, which had almost no effect on degree

centralization whereas deleting the random men did. What is notable in these results is

that deleting the non-elite sample followed the same axis pattern in terms of percent

increase or percent decrease as the women’s sample rather than the random men

including the elite’s sample. For example, removing women and random non-elite men

increased the density and transitivity of the first network when random men including the

elite decreased these measures. This was also the case for density in the second network.

In other words, in terms of overall impact on the networks, deleting the random sample of

only non-elite men had a similar effect on the overall network structure in both time

periods as deleting the women, but the size of the effect varied. These deletion technique

results imply once again that non-elite men looked more like women than they did

criminally elite men. Removing a small group of non-elite men from the Prohibition

network had the almost the same minimal effect on the overall network as removing all

of the women.

Sensitivity to the criminal elites revealed instances of gender equality in the

decentralized clustered organization but not in the larger centralized organization. Even

though as a proportion there were substantially fewer women than non-elite men in

organized crime before Prohibition, women and non-elite men were equally situated

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within the resource-laden structure with the exception of brokering paths. In large

centralized organizations, a single tie to an elite is increasingly more important. Non-elite

men were able to form ties to the criminal elite and secure their network position in ways

that women were not.

Discussion

One alternative explanation to my finding of the shifting structures of organized

crime excluding women could be that the finding is an artifact of my timeline, and I fail

to account for other events that excluded women from organized crime. A way to test the

robustness of my finding and to counter this alternative explanation would be to shorten

the time span around the exogenous shock of Prohibition. For example, Emily Owens’

research on violence and Prohibition uses a shifting five years before and five years after

Prohibition laws were passed to account for the state and local variation when alcohol

became illegal as some states banned alcohol as early as 1914.

My analysis does not

include state variation, but there were other shifts occurring within Chicago during my

specified timeline that affected women in organized crime, especially the formal closing

of the red-light districts. Shortening the timeline to the five years before and the five

years after Prohibition, could possibly demonstrate how much of a shock Prohibition was

to the structure of organized crime.

There is one serious limitation in my data that renders a shorter timeline analysis

ineffective. The majority of criminal ties in the Capone Database capture events

contained within the historical record. Criminal events are seldom the beginning or the

end of criminal relationships. An arrest in 1917 does not imply that two individuals began

their criminal relationship on that day in 1917, but rather it implies that on a certain day

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in 1917 the two individuals had a relationship for some period of time that lead them to

the co-arrest. Additionally, a brewery raid in 1924 does not mean the end of a criminal

relationship. Folks paid fines, took care of some paperwork and some snitches, and

returned to business as usual. The distribution of events is not the same as a distribution

of relationships. The recording and archiving of aggressive police and federal

investigations, intensive moments of Chicago Tribune reporting, and ambitious

investigator notes all bias the distribution of events. Broadly, I bring these events together

as organized crime networks. Specifically, Figure 15 shows the distribution of the percent

of criminal ties per year that aggregated into the larger organized crime networks.

The height of each bar in Figure 15 shows a percentage of organized crime. I

calculated each percent as the number of criminal ties per year by the total number of ties

in the organized crime network during that time period, which were 267 for the first time

period and 937 for the second time period. The orange section of each bar indicates the

percent of organized crime ties that included women during that year. I could not identify

an exact year for the dyads in the “Other Time 1” and “Other Time 2” bars, but I was able

to situate these dyads in the broader time periods. The same two people could have had a

criminal tie in multiple years, but the organized crime network aggregated the ties per

year.

Figure 15 shows a long period of sparse data from 1900 to 1906 and short bursts

of data making up the majority of the networks in 1909, 1930, 1931, and “Other Time 2.”

The burst in 1930 actually captures nearly 91 percent of the total of organized crime ties,

10 years after Prohibition began. To return to my larger point, these relationships did not

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190

begin and end in 1930; rather 1930 was a big year in the archival records when many of

the tax fraud cases began.

Figure 15: Percent of organized crime dyads per year, 1900-1933

These peaks and valleys in the data make robustness checks to the timeline

difficult to test and solid conclusions about exogenous shocks difficult to reach. Based on

Figure 15, one could argue that the closing of the red-light districts pushed women out of

organized crime, and the Prohibition was not a shock but a more gradual transition

leading to 1930. To the contrary, I argue that that would be too simplistic of a reading of

these data. The weight of my evidence of Prohibition as the exogenous shock radically

1900

1901

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

1911

1912

1913

1914

1915

1916

1917

1918

1919

Other T1

1920

1921

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

Other T2

Percent

Year

% Dyads of Total Organized Crime Network

% Organized Crime Dyads with Women

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restructuring organized crime comes from the historical narrative more than the

distribution of dyads. Relationships begin and endure beyond events, and a record of

events is only a proxy for the dynamics of relationships. The stricter the time boundaries

on evaluating static events, the more likely we are to miss the organizational structure

resting on the evolution of dynamic relationships. Without more precise data about the

beginning and ending of relationships, broad temporal strokes are needed to represent the

actual distribution of relationships.

Conclusion

Chicago organized crime at the turn of the twentieth century revolved around the

illicit entertainment economies of sex work and gambling and their legal protection and

political corruption. Above and beyond the women sex workers and gamblers, was a

loosely connected network of men and women, police officers and politicians, husbands

and wives, and graft collectors and bosses, whose criminal relationships made up the

small, decentralized, clustered structure of pre-Prohibition organized crime. Organized

crime was similar to the formal labor market with women making up almost 20 percent

of the total. Although women made up a rather substantial portion of the organized crime

network from 1900 to 1919, their structural position and importance were unequal to

men’s overall. However, sensitivity to the role of criminal elites on the network showed

that women and non-elite men were roughly equivalent in structural positions before

Prohibition. Women and non-elite men accessed but did not control networked resources.

The 1920 federal prohibition on the manufacturing, selling, and transporting of

intoxicating beverages was an exogenous shock to the organized crime network. During

Prohibition, organized crime swelled in size, strength, profits, and influence. The network

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included three times more people, four times more criminal relationships, became less

dense, and more centralized. Gender inequality got worse during Prohibition across every

single measure within the organized crime network. Non-elite men and women diverged

in positions when non-elite men formed ties with the criminal elite, and women did not.

The exogenous shock of Prohibition caused the structures of organized crime to grow in

size and increase in centrality, and these shifting structures excluded women. If gender

inequality of the early 1900s Chicago organized crime world were to fit neatly into a two-

by-two table, it would look something like Table 9 below.

Table 9: Gender inequality in two organizational structures

Decentralized

Clustered

Organization

Large Centralized

Organization

Men

82%

96%

Women

18%

This was a case of dynamic gender inequality within an organization. The

centralization and opportunity-hoarding of organized crime during Prohibition excluded

women from profitable markets and networked resources. As organizations change and

adapt to exogenous shocks so too do categorical inequalities within the organizations

because particular organizational forms produce greater gender inequality than others.

Distinct from traditional organizational and criminological studies, however, is that

categorical inequality is perpetuated through relationships. Relationships form unequally

upon entering the organization, and once within the organization relationships continue to

form and dissolve unequally. Who connects to the elite and who does not, is one such

example.

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193

In Chicago organized crime, a category of difference produced the network: men

formed criminal relationships with connected men, and women struggled to form

criminal relationships with connected men or with connected women. But the differences

between men and women were not explained solely by the categorical attribute of gender.

The network facilitated increased relationships between men and further marginalization

of women when men’s triangles closed, when men controlled brokerage, and when men

connected to more centrally powerful men. These are some of the internal processes of

social networks that in general generate greater inequality.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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194

Notes

Brunson and Miller 2006; Daly 1989; Feeley and Little 1991; Jacobs and Miller 1998;

Jones 2010; Maher 1997; Miller 2002; Pizzini-Gambetta 2014; Steffensmeier 1983.

Burt 1998; Lin 2001; McDonald 2011.

Becker and McCorkel 2011; Leverentz 2006; McCarthy and Casey 2008; Mullins and

Wright 2003; Schwartz, Conover-Williams, and Clemons 2015; Zhang, Chin, and Miller

2007.

See Pizzini-Gambetta 2014.

Kalev 2009; Smith-Doerr 2004.

Adler 1985; Maher 1997.

Baker and Faulkner 1993; Zhang 2014.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Steward’s Order Throttles Levee.” October 11, p. 1;

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1909. “Vice Loses Pomp in Levee Penance.” October 12, p. 1.

Bianchi and Spain 1986:141; Branch 2011:158.

Becker and McCorkel 2011; Schwartz, Conover-Williams, and Clemons 2015.

Wasserman and Faust 1994:150.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1911. “Federal Vicenet Entangles Eight.” November 8, p. 7.

Hewitt, Oscar. 1931. “Figures Reveal Big Increase in White Slavery.” Chicago Daily

Tribune, February 1, p. 22.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1920. “Court Rebukes Schoemaker for ‘Third Degree.’”

August 29, p. 6.

Owens 2014.

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195

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

Organizations, whether formal, informal, licit, or illicit, unequally distribute

relationships and resources. Organizational inequality is dynamic and can worsen when

exogenous shocks force restructuring and redistribution. Combining social network

analysis and historical research methods to examine the case of organized crime in

Chicago, I uncovered a group of women who made up 18 percent of the organized crime

network from 1900 to 1919 but only 4 percent of the network from 1920 to 1933. I

examined how the structure of Chicago’s organized crime network shifted to increase

gender inequality.

This dissertation posed three research questions: (1) What was the structure of

Chicago organized crime before Prohibition, and how did women fit into the structure?

(2) How did the shock of Prohibition change the structure of organized crime in Chicago,

and how did women fit into the revised structure? (3) Why did gender inequality increase

so dramatically in organized crime?

To the first research question, I found that from 1900 to 1919 the structure of the

Chicago organized crime network was small, sparse, and decentralized. The bulk of the

relationships in the network coordinated the protection of illegitimate gambling,

prostitution, and alcohol establishments alongside the corruption of law enforcement and

local political offices. The protection market was territorial gathering and exploiting

properties in the red-light districts where Chicago’s vices condensed. I argued that this

organizational structure was better for women. Women were 18 percent of the organized

crime network when they could connect to organized crime based on the geographic

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196

location of their illicit businesses. I documented gender gaps in network positions

between men and women, but when I compared women to only other men outside the

organized crime core, whom I called the criminal non-elite, the gender gap nearly

disappeared. This result pointed to an important analytic insight of comparing elites to

non-elites when the elites were exclusively men. All women in pre-Prohibition organized

crime were structurally similar to the majority of their men counterparts.

To the second research question, I found that Prohibition was an exogenous shock

that dramatically restructured the organized crime network. Organized crime shifted from

a territorial protection market to a product-based market of intoxicating beverages.

Bootleg booze required production, storage, transportation, distribution, sales, and

protection. From 1920 through 1933, the Chicago organized crime network multiplied in

size, centralized around a leadership core, and spread its geographical reach across the

city, into the neighboring villages, and to some neighboring states. I argued that this

organizational structure excluded women. Women were only 4 percent of the organized

crime network when women had to connect to organized crime through relationships with

male family members or romantic partners and had more diverse roles in organized

crime. The gender gap between men and women increased across every single structural

position in the organized crime network, and removing women from the network had

minimal effects on the overall network structure. Women were no longer structurally

similar to criminal non-elite men. Non-elite men formed ties to elite men in the

centralized structure that women did not.

The third research question asked why gender inequality increased so

dramatically in organized crime. I argued that gender inequality got worse when relations

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197

trumped locations as entrée to organized crime. The first organizational structure and its

territorial focus provided increased organized crime connections for women when

entrepreneurial women could access the protection market through the locations of their

brothels. Organized crime scooped up the local addresses to increase its protection

market and did not discriminate against women owning illicit businesses, especially

brothel businesses. The second organizational structure of the larger, more centralized,

and less territorial network constrained women’s organized crime connections when

access was obtained through prior trusting relationships to organized crime leaders or

their associates. Women could not form these relationships like men, and women of

organized crime became increasingly dependent on their relationships to their male

relatives and romantic associates to include them in organized crime activities. The

gatekeepers of organized crime largely discriminated against women.

Organized crime’s exclusion of women occurred when the larger sex work and

booze economies of Chicago increasingly included women. Women’s proportion of

ownership or management of illicit establishments in booze and prostitution were

increasing around Chicago from 1900 to 1933. Women turned moonshining and

bootlegging into family or women’s work. Women involved in the ownership or

management of alcohol and sex work establishments operated on a smaller scale during

Prohibition and in isolation from organized crime. Organized crime had gotten too big

and the market too spread out for small-scale entrepreneurial women in the domestic

sphere to be included. When the raids came, women had no resources or protection for

escaping prosecution, and the legal consequences and sentences were severe.

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198

Limitations

This research faced the same challenges and limitations that arise in all social

network analysis studies dealing with crime data and dark networks. Dark networks refer

to networks that are hidden and cannot be seen by researchers and sometimes the

members of the networks themselves. Networks are not dark because they are criminal;

they are dark when they are clandestine and members prefer to conceal their identities

and their activities. The main challenge in the analysis of dark networks is incomplete

data. Incomplete data on Chicago historical organized crime networks for the Capone

Database occurred two ways: (a) when investigators and reporters did not record and

archive events and relationships because the events and relationships were either

unremarkable or hidden, and (b) when investigators and reported recorded and archived

events incorrectly, either intentionally because of lying and cover-ups or unintentionally

because they did not know the full story.

The main consequence for analyses using dark criminal networks is that some

data on nodes and relationships are likely missing and sections of the network are

underestimated. I coded thousands of publicly known relationships, but these were

relationships notable enough to be documented and preserved in newspaper articles and

archival documents. Undocumented and unremarkable relationships and remarkable

relationships that escaped documentation are missing from the Capone Database. This

means that the missing nodes and ties are not random—an issue that is generally the case

in criminology of dark networks.

It is worth recognizing the implication that non-random missing individuals and

relationships have on my analysis because I assume women and women’s relationships

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199

are some of the most likely to be missing. Decades of feminist criminology have

unpacked the various ways in which gender assumptions minimize women’s crime,

which contribute to the lack of documentation in the organized crime archives.

Intersections of gender, race, and class mask women’s criminal activities when law

enforcement and criminally involved men perceive women’s criminal contributions as

inconsequential.

Women also employ gender as a strategy to avoid criminal consequence

appealing to law enforcement and judges paternalistic assumptions.

When women are

involved in criminal activities they tend to be in support roles and receive lower profits

from the crime.

In the case of the Chicago organized crime network, individuals, and

especially women, involved in the day-to-day grind at the margins of organized crime

were the most likely to escape documentation.

The Chicago Tribune reporter never named the “henna-haired madam” working at

the Four Deuces in 1922.

I never found one mention in the archives of a sex worker’s

name connected to a Torrio or Capone brothel during Prohibition. I found no mention in

the archives of waitresses or barmaids connected to organized crime even though urban

workingwomen formed the class of waitresses in all the major Chicago restaurants where

they performed similar labor required in speakeasies and parlors.

Meridel Le Sueur’s

novel, The Girl, detailed this gendered behind-the-scenes work of Midwest speakeasies

where young women found jobs and formed romantic relationships with men

bootleggers.

Chicago Tribune reporters, Chicago Crime Commission investigators, and

federal Prohibition and IRS agents had a special interest in uncovering and prosecuting a

particular version of organized crime that went after a few high-profile men and largely

ignored the associates at the margins.

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200

I assume that this gap in the historical record underestimates the organized crime

networks especially at the margins where women tended to reside. I am similarly

convinced, however, that marginal men, such as bartenders, drivers, plumbers, are also

likely to be underestimated in the networks. As long as men at the margins were just as

likely to be missing from the archives as women, then missing data on the associates at

the margins would not have consequence on the overall results of my gender gap

analysis.

I am less convinced of a different side of women’s missing information in the

archives, which is wives’ involvement in organized crime. The case of Mae Capone

especially makes me question the gaps in the historical record and their implications for

my analysis. Reporters and investigators documented gangsters’ wives as notable

individuals and occasionally documented their financial connections to organized crime,

but there were so few cases of wives connected to Prohibition organized crime that I

suspect other influences on women’s missing information in the archives.

Perhaps the trope of the silent wife, who either knows everything or nothing but

will never say, clouded journalists and investigators’ accounts.

Perhaps law

enforcement, investigators, and journalists’ gender bias assumed that women were

innocent, less capable of crimes, or inconsequential as criminals. Perhaps husbands

involved in high-risk organized crime activities went to greater lengths to protect their

home and families from investigation. All three of these explanations would be

fascinating pieces to this historical case, but I lack the sources to name one with more

certainty just as I lack the sources for a more detailed investigation of the organized

crime wives.

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201

It is clear to me that the organized crime focus of the archives pushed my analysis

toward an organizational change framework. During moments of this project I tried to

imagine the costs and the benefits of the organized crime lens on my research because at

times I felt like I had found competing stories of women in Prohibition Era Chicago. On

one hand, I found hundreds of cases of women and men operating and managing

prostitution and booze establishments during the Prohibition boom. On the other hand,

seldom did these cases overlap with the larger organized crime sources and story. In my

searches for women in Prohibition Era organized crime, I found women bootlegging and

running brothels during Prohibition with no clear connection to organized crime. I was

not expecting this level of disconnect when I began this research as I had identified a

small group of women connected to organized crime. In the end, while I am enthusiastic

about the organizational change story and its contributions to the study of gender

inequality especially in criminal markets, I feel that I do not do justice to the history of

Prohibition Era women outside of organized crime. This is a direction for future, related

research.

The Capone Database is just one possible iteration of a social world during a

particular historical moment. Data on offenders often feels partial and flawed, and I

would argue that this is even truer for historical offenders. Political scientist Peter

Andreas and author of Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, advises:

[I]t is better to tell the story with admittedly imperfect and incomplete data than to

simply throw up one’s hands and pretend that the world of smuggling doesn’t

exist because it cannot be precisely measured. After all, that would be the

equivalent of a drunkard looking for his keys under the lightpost because it is the

only place he can see.

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202

I agree with Andreas. It is better to pursue the analysis while acknowledging the

limitations of incomplete data than to leave dominant narratives unchallenged.

Contributions

There is no shortage of popular non-fiction books on Prohibition Era Chicago

organized crime. Al Capone’s grandniece, Deirdre Capone, published her account in

2011 and has since been a guest of honor at the Chicago History Museum’s Prohibition

Era themed events.

On February 14, 2009, I took The Untouchables bus tour of Chicago

during which I won a prize for correctly answering a trivia question. My prize was a free

copy of a book written by my tour guide and gangster enthusiast Don “Al Dente”

Fielding.

Mario Gomes, a self-proclaimed “Capone-aholic,” hosts a website called “My

Al Capone Museum” with various photos of artifacts from his collection and summaries

of people and places connected to Al Capone.

Even in this rather saturated genre, non-

fiction writers continue to recast the story with new attention to previously neglected

actors and angles, such as Jonathan Eig’s correction that US Attorney George E.Q.

Johnson took down Al Capone rather than Eliot Ness.

These popular non-fiction books are fun and focus on the sensational events and

infamous celebrities from Chicago organized crime. I accessed these books to generate

exhaustive lists of high-profile gangsters and potential archival sources. The public

fascination with the Chicago gangster era by “Capone-aholics” and other enthusiasts has

encouraged institutions, such as the IRS, to digitize their Capone related documents and

make them publicly available. In my sociological study of Chicago organized crime, I did

not uncover some hidden gem of the Capone era, nor was that my goal. Rather the goal of

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203

this project was to use Chicago organized crime as a case to explore relational and

organizational theories of gender and crime.

Social networks are abstractions—images of dots and lines that can be reduced to

a table of statistical properties. Yet, the birds-eye perspective illuminates networks

beyond the local and reveals patterns that might have otherwise been hidden, hidden even

to the members of the networks themselves.

Organized crime associates are no longer

hidden in boxes and folders full of crumbling pages when information on their

relationships to others can be organized in a networked way. Social network analysis

provided me with a means to organize historical data and the tools to analyze the data

statistically. Most importantly, from the Capone Database of 3,321 individuals and

15,861 relationships I could filter out the noise within some of the archival sources to

reveal the structure of organized crime at two points in time. Not every organized crime

individual mentioned in the archives was connected to organized crime, but when the

connection to organized crime was not clear in the source it became clear in the

extraction of the networks.

The organized crime network from the Capone Database challenges theories of

organized crime as familial or ethnic hierarchies or Chicago organized crime as an ethnic

feud between the Irish and the Italians. The networks reveal changes in the structure of

organized crime that have not been previously analyzed or discussed in non-fiction and

historical accounts. These changes include the move from a decentralized network to a

more centralized network, the move for a rather sparse network to an even sparser

network, the change in territorial focus, and the rising importance of leaders. Social

network tools permit these precise calculations and comparisons over time.

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204

My calculation of gender gaps and elite gaps in structural positions are an

important addition to social network and organization research. They require

acknowledging the relevance of categories in forming relationships. Following research

on gender gaps in wages in the formal workplace, I utilized the only statistics available to

measure gender gaps in organized crime: location in the network. These are not gaps of

dollars and cents, but they are gaps in access to networked resources in the abstract.

Recognizing the elites within an organization, or those most in control of networked

resources, revealed moments when the elite gap explained away most of the gender gap

and moments when the gender gap was robust even when controlling for elites. Without

social network analysis, I could not calculate the gender and elite gaps in these

organizations. This unique method of calculating inequality in network position is

applicable to future network studies of formal, informal, licit, and illicit organizations.

Social network analysis requires a level of abstraction that limits explanation

beyond the processes of the network. Interpreting the social network results through

historical narrative methods contextualizes the networks and brings the power of

temporal ordering and causality back to the analysis. It was only by zooming in on small

sections of the work and investigating the historical detail of women’s ties to organized

crime where I was able to discover the importance of location and location based ties for

women in the first time period and their near absence in the second time period.

Identifying the various processes behind women’s criminal ties to organized crime

required historical methods. The narratives are often not flattering, but they reconstruct a

historical moment to correct misconceptions about women’s locations in history and

render women, even criminal women, visible and relevant.

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205

Implications & Future Directions

This research speaks most directly to the gender and crime literature but is also

relevant to research on gender and organizations. The motivation of a relational

inequality framework is the potential to explain categorical differences (e.g., race, age,

gender, socioeconomic status, neighborhood) as products and consequences of various

configurations of relationships. Criminology lacks a coherent and cogent theory to

explain how a group that makes up 51 percent of the population (i.e., women) makes up

only 25 percent of all arrests and 7 percent of the prison population. The gender

socialization theories of the 1980s and 1990s are not enough to understand these dramatic

gender and crime gaps. Legal scholars Malcolm Feeley and Deborah Little’s research on

the shifting gender gap in crime over 226 years in Britain showed that it was not until the

1800s that the gender gap began increasing to its present rates, arguing that the gender

gap in crime is a product of historical and cultural shifts around the ideals of

womanhood.

My analysis of a criminal organization over 34 years cannot speak to

broader cultural shifts around gender norms, but it does contribute evidence to the

importance of studying shifts. Gender inequality is dynamic and influence by shifting

organizational structures.

Feely and Little’s research on the changing gender gap in crime convinces me that

incorporating criminal relationships into criminological analysis in an important direction

for theory. If the gender gap in crime is rooted in women’s unequal access to criminal

relationships, then the theory is not about some categorical difference between men and

women: it is about production and consequence of relational inequality. Moving to the

roots of unequal relationships is a shift in the theoretical conversation. Future research on

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206

drug and sex work markets over time would contribute to this theoretical shift in the

gender and crime gap. Studies on smaller co-offending groups should consider the

benefits of mapping out the dynamics of relational gender inequality in the face of

exogenous shocks such as arrests, residential mobility, market shifts, new competition, or

influxes of weapons.

I argue along with other criminologists and sociologists that crime and criminals

need to be studied relationally.

Offending and incarceration are not distributed evenly

and randomly across the population, and we need social network analysis tools to study

the interdependent non-random aspect of social life. Relational approaches illuminate the

group nature of offenders, map out configurations of relationships within opportunity

structures, and measure inequalities that occur through criminal relationships.

Unfortunately, relational data on offenders are rare. Scholars have successfully

transformed police department records and official court records into relational co-arrest

and co-offending databases, but the formation, duration, and alteration of relationships is

usually beyond the scope of institutional records.

Relational data can be difficult to

collect, but they are where we are most likely to understand criminal entrance, process,

and persistence.

The logic and theory of relational inequality that guided this research has broader

applications to other moral crusades as well. The legalization of marijuana in some states

has opened previously criminalized markets, and might show a reverse of gender

inequality. Anecdotal evidence of women’s roles in recently legalized marijuana sales,

especially in the market of baking marijuana infused treats, introduces a new gendered

dimension to the market that may be more accessible to women than during marijuana

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207

prohibition. A relational inequality framework could be used to study women’s access to

the marijuana market during criminalization and after legalization.

Another example of a moral crusade that would benefit from a relational

inequality framework is abortion restriction in the US As some states increasingly restrict

access to abortions, women needing access to abortionists will likely require connections

through men to gain the necessary information and contacts. Nancy Howell Lee’s

research shows that this was certainly the case before the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973

when contacts in the flow of information on abortionists were 2.5 men for every 1

woman.

Organizations, whether formal, informal, licit, or illicit, unequally distribute

relationships and the resources contained within those relationships. Organizational

inequality is dynamic and can worsen when exogenous shocks force restructuring and

redistribution. As was the case with Chicago organized crime, at times these shifting

structures leave women behind.

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been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s)

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208

Notes

Sageman 2004; Xu and Chen 2008.

Brunson and Miller 2006; Feeley and Little 1991; Klein 1973.

Daly 1989; Jacobs and Miller 1998.

Steffensmeier, Schwartz, and Roche 2013.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1922. “Dr. Bundesen Denies Drive Condones Vice.” August

18, p. 1.

Donovan 1920.

Le Sueur [1978] 2006.

Siebert 1996.

Andreas 2013:xii.

Capone 2011; Chicago History Museum 2012.

Fielding 2008.

Gomes, Mario. My Al Capone Museum. Retrieved June 23, 2015

(http://www.myalcaponemuseum.com).

Eig 2010.

Kadushin 2005:149.

Feeley and Little 1991.

Kreager et al. forthcoming; Morselli 2014; Papachristos 2011.

Malm, Bichler, and Van De Walle 2010; Morselli 2009; Papachristos, Hureau, and

Braga 2013.

Lee 1969:71.

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209

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