Archives of the Chief Investigator Summer 2000

Homicide in Modern America

by

Chief Investigator, Wayne A. Johnson

     Known as the “Ultimate Crime” (Adorjan, 1989) Homicide holds a profound fascination over the American public. Much of this fascination is kindled by our news media and their dedication to reporting the event in detail. Homicide has found its way into the popular culture of American society as a captivating form of entertainment. However, the interest also transcends the hallowed halls of academia and has been studied with the zest and dedication of any phenomena of this significance.

     While many studies in this area are predominately quantitative in nature, carried out by social scientist, who tend to overwhelm us with statistical information that can be vast and downright confusing (Homicides in Chicago 1965-1995, Block & Block, 1995), over the era of modern policing (1960's-present) a more conventional approach has emerged. This approach has taken on a more medico/legal nature and deals deeply with the causative factors of homicide (Studying and Preventing Homicide, Smith and Zahn, 1998). While knowing who is killing whom and in what manner, it is as important to know why. Without this knowledge of the “WHY factor” American society is ill equipped to stifle this activity in the midst of becoming, by far, the most violent civilized society on the planet. Although, this causative research, rarely is part of any training curricula for homicide investigators.

     While reviewing such empirical data most of us come to a point where we find ourselves jaded by opinionated jargon and contradictory studies. What I see as an important omission in the process, is the absence of an experienced voice in the study of homicide. The voice is that of criminal justice, the professionals who investigate and  prosecute a phenomena only too familiar to our society. While rising to a status of icon in American Culture, my ongoing study hopes to memorialize, if in fact, those homicide professionals charged with this task, are adequately prepared to do so.

     While many researchers take a clinical approach, feeling that a phenomena that sees less than one tenth of one percent (24,456 murders in a total population of 257,908,000 in 1993), of a total population being victimized as acceptable, the human, economic and social costs preclude any acceptance whatsoever. What also has come to the fore is an absence of outrage, probably due to the fact that most homicides are confined to the lowest of socio-economic settings our country has to offer and relegated to the minority environs of America. This low priority of sorts is reflected even in the process of collecting homicide data.

     I have seen first hand this dichotomy while assigned to a Chicago Homicide Unit. As the case investigator of a specific homicide involving a middle class African American female who was brutally murdered in the rear stairwell of her building in a high crime area, I was re-assigned several days later along with three other investigators to the equally brutal murder of an young female white graduate student from an prominent Milwaukee family. This second crime occurred in an upscale gold coast neighborhood and received a great deal of media coverage because of the social status of who this victim was. This investigation was my only assignment for six months and I eventually made an arrest while the other case lay dormant. Fortunately upon refocusing my efforts on the original case, I was able to make an arrest and clear that case also. The chief of detectives at that time spoke out on the social ramifications of such investigations and how the media can effect resource allocation in homicide investigations. This official was sanctioned for his comments by the leadership of the department and the city.  

     While setting the stage for a scholarly treatise on homicide, I use the term Modern America as the contiguous United States from 1900 to the present. At the turn of the 20^th century America was emerging as the industrial giant it is today and homicide was just one of the growing pains that accompanied such maturation. Within this new world leader, many of the industrialized cities such as Chicago, grew to be some of the largest civilized cities in this country and the world.

     The studies that have previously portrayed homicide in this century found it necessary to divide this millennium into three parts, starting with the years 1900 to 1930. This era saw the need for governmental mandates in tracking homicide but, provided little in investigative theory.

     The next era from 1930 to 1960 saw the emergence of governmental mandates to track this phenomena by congressional order. Still the investigative process was remedial at best, and the ability to accurately classify homicides during this period was as suspect as the ability to solve them.

     It was during the current period of 1960 to the present that we witnessed the emergence of “Modern Policing” in America. Over this period of time, the field of homicide investigation developed to near professional status in some circles and has made great strides in technical evidence gathering procedures along with the psychological aspects of murder that may eventually lead us to actual prevention and a pro-active approach to the event, through what Tafoya-Brensinger-Johnson (1999) refer to as Criminal Investigative Behavior Analysis (CIBA), formerly known as Criminal Psychological Profiling. It is this period that spawned a presidential report in the 1960's recommending college education for the police, as a road to professionalization. Now, more that ever, we experience leaders in the field who boast advance terminal degrees and develop curricula fit for professional recognition.

     While modern policing has brought a great deal of credibility to the field of Criminal Justice, we still experience an omission in the area of research. Few agencies participate in research in various aspects of the field, especially homicide. What assumptions that are drawn from the data we collect are often not supported by empirical evidence outside of these quantitative assessments. And those that do exist are produced by academics that have little or no practical experience in the field.

     This, often politically inspired, process develops policy by a knee jerk reaction to short term trends and high profile cases. This tends to be costly in tax dollars and has little longevity in the social milieu where it is exercised. What we have become in the process, is a public service entity that markets perceptions while rarely providing a real product. Therefore we can not stand up to real public scrutiny and grow silent when even valid questions arise regarding effectiveness and accountability.

     What is needed is the ability to better understand homicide as a form of human behavior. This understanding is needed by the practitioners who investigate and prosecute. It allows them the foresight to not only investigate in the typical reactionary manner but, allows them the ability to forecast such aberrant behavior in those at risk of becoming killers before they actually do so. However, as some can see the science provided in Criminal Investigative Behaviors Analysis (CIBA), that can develop such skills only holds a very minor role in training curricula.  

     Organizational variables in homicide investigation are a grave concern throughout the country. In Chicago recent media investigations have been more than eager to uncover any short-comings or malfeasance in the investigative or prosecutorial conduct involving homicide cases. Nationally, there is no standard for the administration of homicide investigative units or the associated training. In Chicago, manpower concerns along with cost cutting efforts of the 1980's eliminated specific homicide units all together. Instead, investigators from robbery units and those in homicide units were combined into what is now referred to as Violent Crimes units. In close to twenty years since this reconfiguration has be in effect, clearance rates for homicide cases have continued to plummet.

     Other administrative obstacles to homicide investigations are politically generated for instance, when the majority of supervisors in violent crimes units charged with overseeing homicide investigations, possess no practical homicide experience themselves. Homicide detectives that are promoted to the rank of sergeant are forced to return to patrol units and never return to homicide investigative units unless they have the needed political sponsorship, most do not. This leads to a grievous underlying question, “are police consistently capable of effective homicide investigations?”

     Currently Uniformed Crime Reports have been designed to expound upon causative factors in Homicide which included: gang involvement, intimate partner associations, drugs and alcohol associations, African American-Latino groups as disproportionate participants in homicide, the current downward shift in the age of offenders and firearms as a means to committing homicides. This information is relevant in explaining the phenomena of homicide. I have to wonder if it goes far enough in a psychological perspective to help prepare the practitioners. Does it even hold a valid place in the preparatory curricula.

Data Collection

     Developing data on homicides, albeit a statistically rare event, is carried out in two national forums: by law enforcement, with its legal perspectives and definitions and by medical examiners, using medical evidence and definitions to draw their conclusions. These two offices determine independently whether a homicide by their perspective definition has occurred. The programs put in place lead national officials to claim that by 1985, over 99% of all deaths occurring in this country were reported properly (NCHS, 1985, p. 15).

Law Enforcement

     The law enforcement effort of gather homicide data, in any form, did not begin until the 1920s. It is now carried out through a national program called Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) that was assigned under a Congressional order in 1930 to the Attorney General of the United States, who in turn designated the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to serve as a national clearinghouse for crime data.

     In the early years the UCR program depended upon voluntary compliance by individual agencies which proved ineffective. State agencies with mandatory reporting requirements were then established. These state agencies (44 currently) now report to the UCR while the remaining independent law enforcement agencies are allowed to report directly to the UCR program. A yearly report on all such data is published by the FBI and titled “Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Reports”. This report contains no specific information on homicides, that information is contained only in the Supplementary Homicide Reports.

     Clearance rates of homicides refer to the closing of cases by solving them and arresting perpetrators, along with exceptional clearances that refer to the administrative closing of cases for a variety of reasons, often beyond the control of police departments. For example the conviction of a killer in another state who may face the death sentence, who by a decision of the local prosecutor’s office, will not be prosecuted locally for a homicide, even though overwhelming evidence may exist. This case can be exceptionally cleared and closed by the local police agency in what may be considered a cost cutting process.

     While it is not the purpose of my investigation to present statistical data regarding homicide in America, certain data is presented to merely highlight my concerns in Homicide Investigation Training (HIT). Keeping this in mind, no single statistic is more important than the fact that clearance rates have been declining steadily since 1960. In that year, 93% of homicides were cleared by arrest nationally, since then the clearance rate has steadily declined to 65% in 1995 (FBI, 1962, 1996) and is even lower in Cook Co. currently, which encompasses Chicago.

     An overwhelming question must be posed as: Are current homicide investigators properly trained to solve homicides? Are the changing trends in homicide, responsible for these dismal solve rates? Despite the advancement in forensic technologies i.e. DNA, fingerprint data bases, improved collection techniques, can more be done administratively and in the classroom to prepare investigators to take on the most grave responsibility in law enforcement? And finally, Are law enforcement agencies and their encompassing government entities committed to solve homicides at all costs?  

     Legal Responsibilities to protect the public and serve a constituency are paramount, but are we also responsible to prevent murders in a pro-active manner or simply respond after the fact and go through the motions of an investigation. Should the practitioners be required to perform with passion and exhibit outrage at our failures in this mission? Are we marketing a perception of safety, when we well know that no one is safe from random violence in the streets of America.

     It seems accurate tracking of this phenomena is a move in the right direction. This process however, has been a long time coming. The information we collect to track homicide has only been reliable in the latter half of this century. And this was only after congressional mandates. It seems like politicians would just as soon not talk about it. I feel that is part of the reason we are in the position we are (current clearance rates in Cook Co. are below 60%).

     How homicide is defined provides the functional dichotomy of the two data bases in dealing with Homicide. A brief legal definition is: the willful killing of another under illegal circumstances. While this legal definition is adverse to the definition used in the medical field we must consider that the UCR does not count Justifiable Homicide while NCHS (mortality data) does.

Mortality Data

     Much like the UCR the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) produces a yearly report titled Vital Statistics. This report is produced using information provided by coroners and Medical Examiners via standardized death certificates that go to the Vital Statistics Division of the NCHS. Unlike the struggles of the UCR with compliance throughout most of the century, the NCHS claims complete coverage since 1933 from 50 states, New York City and the District of Columbia report separately.

     However, as recently as 1979 Sherman and Langworthy contend that a widespread lack of awareness, support and compliance exists within coroners offices to supply full information necessary to properly coded causes of death. This appraisal along with a 1955 study of autopsies in Albany, New York by James, Patton and Heslin concluded that as many as 57% of homicide and suicide deaths were possibly mis-classified.

     Not surprising is the variance between this data and the UCR statistics that has existed for some time. This is partly due to the fact that mortality data includes justifiable homicides in their statistics while the UCR does not. It is also difficult to compare because the UCR reports are published in a timely fashion (yearly) while NCHS reports are commonly released 2 to 3 years after the reporting year.

     The fact that Coroners in many areas are not required to have medical training put the validity of their data at risk. Is some jurisdictions the only requirement for a person to hold the title of “Coroner” is to be at least 18yrs. old. That is only exasperated by a variance in the working definitions.  A brief medical definition of homicide is: all cases in which there is the intentional taking of another’s life.

     While validity has always been a question mark, the NCHS system was not fully national until the 1930's. However, some states maintained this data as early as 1900, and in Boston mortality data goes back to 1880.

     Cause of death determinations were also problematic in the early years do to limitations set forth by policy. Prior to 1968 death investigations could only be classified as accident or homicide. This left local coroners in a quandary when insufficient evidence existed to make that resolution. A change was put forth in 1968 that allowed for cases to be classified as undetermined and could allow for additional information to be gathered.

     A 1993 Rand report concluded that in juxtaposing the two programs, the differences between the cases in the data files are to a great degree the result of differences in the two programs’ purposes and procedures. Basically, the UCR measures crimes, of which death is one outcome. The Mortality System (NCHS) measures deaths, of which crime is one cause. (P. 112)        

Trends

     Changing trends in homicide over the course of the century can provide enforcement with the information they need to make adjustments in policing strategies. What we see by the following trends is a problem in the American culture that is endemic to large urban settings despite technological advances in the forensic sciences.

     Beginning at the turn of the century 6 people per every 100,000 were victims of homicide, which increased to 9.5 by the 1930s. However, such statistics are suspect before the congressional mandate to accurately store such data which became much more reliable after 1930. As America grew and its cities advanced, so did the phenomena of homicide, and by 1974, 10.2 people of every 100,000 were victims of homicide which increased to 10.7 by 1980. While these statistics seem staggering when we consider the human side of the issue, we have seen positive changes, as in 1985 when the statistics dipped to 8.3 people in 100,000 as victims of homicide. But this trend was not to last and returned back to 10.0 in 1990. Currently we are in such a dip and saw the rates dropping again to 7.4 in 1996. An overall view of the century shows the lowest rates in the 1950s and highest in last two decades.

     Sociologist find these trends most troublesome when relegated to the specific populations that are most affected. It has become very clear that the highest rates of homicide victimization are amongst black males in that 72 of every 100,000 die of homicide. Black females while noticeably less are still disproportionate for their gender with a range from 11 to 14.5 per 100,000 being victims of homicide, between the mid 1970's to the 1990's. Currently white males have increased to 11 per 100,000 being victims of homicide, while white females rose to 3 per 100,000.

     Victimization rates continue to climb for two age groups, 15 to 24 and 25 to 34. By 1989 the 15 to 24 age group surpassed the 25 to 34 age group. By 1993 the 15-24 age group was 23.5 per 100,000 as victims of homicide and by 1993 the 25-34 age group was 19.5 per 100,000. Equally disturbing in the spiral in patterns of juvenile killers from 8.3 per 100,000 in 1984 to 16.2 per 100,000 in 1993 and to 16.7 per 100,000 in 1994.

     The relationships between victim and offender have drastically changed during the last forty years. Prior to that time homicide was perceived as an intimate crime committed between people known to each other. During the period of 1900 to 1930's such information has been problematic because no national data base for homicides existed. The only information available was through specific studies on homicide that varied greatly by researcher, criteria and locale. These studies did produce information of note, to a modern society finally dealing with the over abundance of handguns. This consensus revealed that 71.5% of all homicides during that period were committed with guns. In retrospect, never was there any discourse at the time that would even suggest limiting the availability of the weapons that were part and partial to over two thirds of all homicides.  

     Other information regarding relationships between participants of homicide found that a large percentage of homicides were justifiable 18% (noncriminal), while almost an equal number were domestic at 18.2% and friends and acquaintances at 18.2%, while criminal transactions constituted only 16.6% of all homicides. Of the criminal homicides about 30% were related to control of bootlegging during prohibition (Boudouris, 1970). Lashly’s 1929 analysis of Chicago Homicides reflected similar results.

     During the period from the 1930's to 1960's several studies in northern and southern cities reported a growing number of homicides were domestic and love related. Furthermore, males killing males in combative situations continued to be a frequent form of homicide. Surprisingly, criminal transactions actually decreased to a very small percentage of all homicides.

     These same studies saw homicides amongst low income Blacks and Hispanics, many of which were laborers and domestics, emerge as the highest groups involved in Homicide in a Houston study (Bullock, 1955). This same study revealed that in 87% of the cases, the victim and offender were acquainted. A northern study during this same period found that only 4.5% of the homicides were cases where the victim and offender were unknown to each other. Wolfgang in his 1950 Philadelphia study found that the most dangerous place to be for potential victims was inside a home, over 50% of all homicides occurred there.

     During the period from the 1960's to 1990's certain types of homicides were the subject of in-depth studies to include: drug related, gang related, stranger robbery and spousal homicide.

     In 1961 the FBI began publishing, what was to become a new source of national homicide data, in what is now called the Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR). This report is an adjunct to the Uniform Crime Report produced by the FBI under congressional mandate since 1930. In this report homicides are classified in four general categories: family, acquaintance, stranger and unknown.

     In the early 1960's homicides that involved participants that knew each other (family and acquaintance) accounted for about 80% of all homicides. This made homicide an intimate crime that for all intents and purposes, made it relatively easy to investigate and solve as indicated by national solve rates of over 90%.

     By the late 1970's a change was seen in these previous patterns that involved a dramatic increase in unknown murders and strangers murders to represent almost 50% of all homicides by 1995. Could this change be accredited to a new breed of recreational killer traveling from state to state, leaving a trail of carnage in their midst?

     Throughout the 20^th Century homicide trends show the highest rates occurring during the last two decades. Is this change in the relationship between killer and victim solely responsible for current solve rates that have plummeted to below 60% locally? Are the training techniques for Homicide Detectives, that have held hard and fast for the last two decades, sufficient to the task of solving this new type of murder? Should we incorporate training theory, developed to address stranger homicides through profiling techniques, into every homicide training curricula available? These and other questions will be addressed in the following months at the Chicago Crime Commission.  

         

Homicide

     Murder is “the unlawful killing of another human being that is premeditated (planned) or that has malice aforethought: (Oran, 1985: 201). Special cases of non-rapacious killings include the double-murder and the triple-homicide. While highly uncommon occurrences, they are rarely the work of a serial offender. These crimes occur in a single location during one event. The killing of more than three individuals in one event and at a single site is described as mass murder; there are two types.

     The classic mass murderer kills four or more people in a single location and in one time frame. This could occur in a matter of minutes or over a period of several hours. This killer is generally mentally disordered; a person who acts out against bystanders who have nothing to do with the issues troubling the killer. A classic example happened on August 1, 1966, in the space of 90 minutes from the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin, sniper Charles Whitman indiscriminately shot and killed 16 and wounded 30 others who happened to be walking on the campus grounds below. Again on August 20, 1986 in an Edmund, OK. Post Office, Patrick Sherrill killed 15 and wounded 6 co-workers. It is from this incident that the term, “going Postal,” originated. But the most notorious mass murderer to date is Timothy McVeigh. He was convicted of killing 168 people April 19, 1995 in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The victims of this type of killer are people in the wrong place at the wrong time; there is no substantive nexus.

     A unique category of mass murder is “familicide.” Typically the killer, usually the father, takes the life of three or more family members and then commits or attempts suicide. In the United States, 15 – 50 such incidents are recorded annually. Psychiatrist Park Elliott Dietz uses the term “family annihilator” to describe the killer who has an over idealized sense of family values. That is, he kills because he is unable to distinguish between himself and his family or he is an angry, controlling person confronted with the realization that he is no longer able to hold his family together (Smith, 1995). Separated from his wife, on November 18, 1996 Johnny Satterwhite, shot and killed his son and 3 stepchildren before committing suicide in Laurens, SC. In a contentious child custody controversy in Shelbyville, TN, Daryl Holton shot to death his 3 children and his ex-wife’s daughter November 30, 1997. Embroiled in a bitter custodianship dispute, Sandi Nieves asphyxiated her four daughters and set ablaze their Santa Clarita, CA. home July 13, 1998; she survived (Mendoza, 1998).

     Spree killing is yet another subcategory of mass murder. The killings take place in two or more locations in a single event with no emotional cooling-off period between incidents. Perhaps the best known is David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. In a 13-month period (June, 1976 – August, 1977) in New York City, he shot 13 men and women at 8 different occasions; six of his victims died (Hickey, 1991). In a 15-month rampage (June, 1984 – August, 1985) the “Night Stalker,” Richard Ramirez, terrorized suburban Los Angeles. On March 17, 1985, he broke into an apartment killing a young woman. When her roommate returned, Ramirez shot her as well. The same night in an adjoining community, Ramirez dragged a young woman from her car and killed her. On June 27^th he slit the throat of a young woman. Five days later in a nearby community Ramirez bludgeoned to death a grandmother. Two weeks later in a third community Ramirez shot a man to death in his bed and tried to decapitate the man’s wife. The same night in a fourth community, the Night Stalker shot a man and raped his wife. Ramirez was convicted of 12 first-degree murders, one second-degree homicide, and 30 additional major crimes of rape and burglary (Cyriax, 1993). A recent spree killer was Andrew Cunanan.  In an 11-day odyssey that began April 29, 1997, at 4 different locales in three states, Cunanan killed four people. Aware that the authorities had linked him to the first two murders in Minnesota, the last two murders were committed while he was on the run. Having tortured his third victim, Cunanan exhibited the characteristics of both a spree killer and a serial killer (Tafoya, 1997). On July 15, 1997, sixty-seven days after the fourth killing, Cunanan murdered clothing designer Gianni Versace assassination style at point-blank range in front of his Miami Beach home. On July 23, 1997, Cunanan took his own life (Robinson and Vest, 1997).

     Serial killers take the lives of three or more people in separate events with an emotional cooling-off period between incidents. In this context, an emotional cooling-off means that the predator is not in a steady state of rage between killing events. The serial killer carefully selects and targets specific victims (Douglas and Olshaker, 1998; Ressler and Shachtman, 1998; Hazelwood and Burgess, 1995; Douglas, et al, 1992).

Phases of Predation

     Predation is a life style of exploitation and plunder. The predator lives to prey on others. Serial offenders are predators. They spend every waking moment thinking about feeding an insatiable emotional hunger. Between attacks, they relive their last conquest and fantasize about their next victim. The two most common are the serial killer and the serial rapist.

    Some of the most infamous serial killers were: John Wayne Gacy, Jeffery Dahmer, Larry Eyler and in Florida Bobbie Joe Long, a cousin of prolific serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas. It was Long who began his career as a serial rapist, searching local newspapers for victims via the want adds.

In considering the psychological aspects of homicide, I think those of us in the field of education and training, would be remiss if we did not incorporate these aspects into training modules for detectives faced with the most daunting task in all of Law Enforcement, HOMICIDE.  

Who are the real Nazis, anyway?

By

 Al Maurer

 - a quote from Al's article, Sep 17, 2017

Saul Alinsky writes that he learned his Rules for Radicals from Frank Nitti and his Chicago mob. He might as well have learned the same techniques from Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels.

Politics and City Life

By Novid Parsi

By Novid Parsi
ILLUSTRATION BY LANDIS BLAIR

PUBLISHED SEPT. 11, 2017

It’s been 48 years since the police came for Charlie Rizzo. But the 68-year-old glassmaker from Belmont Cragin can recall the moment as if it were yesterday. Twenty years old at the time, he was sitting on his bed in the two-flat he shared with his father, a mild-mannered divorcé who sold insurance from an office in front. Charlie’s dad had been blinded in a boyhood hunting accident—or so he’d told his son—and was a voracious reader of the classics of Western literature who wrote poems and essays in his spare time.

Matt Rizzo with his son Charlie, in 1957 PHOTO: COURTESY OF FIRST SECOND BOOKS

Charlie was filled with shame as he listened to his bewildered father answering the officers’ questions. Charlie loved his dad and knew he’d let him down. Days earlier, he and two friends had robbed a pair of homes in the northern suburbs, making off with the loot in Charlie’s Buick Riviera. A neighbor had taken down the license plate number.

Charlie’s dad persuaded the cops to let him have 10 minutes alone with his son. When his father came into the bedroom, he was in tears. It turned out that he had begged the cops for time not to scold his son, but to make a confession of his own.

“There was never any hunting accident,” he said, explaining to Charlie that he’d withheld the truth about his blindness all these years to protect his son. The injury, he said, was the result of a robbery gone wrong. The man Charlie had known his whole life as gentle and learned and kind had been a criminal just like him.

The story that eventually emerged from this startling revelation would become a lifelong fixation for Charlie. It’s a tale that spanned many decades, delved into the world of the Chicago Mafia, and led to the prison cell of one of the 20th century’s most infamous criminals, Nathan Leopold, who became the unlikeliest of mentors to Charlie’s father.

That curious friendship is at the heart of a new graphic novel, The Hunting Accident (September 19, First Second Books), by David Carlson and Landis Blair. For Charlie Rizzo, the book represents the culmination of a tortuous quest for the truth, a journey that reveals how the sins of a son can be redeemed, in the fullness of time, by those of a father.

Charlie doesn’t remember precisely when he first heard the apocryphal story of the misfired buckshot that blinded his father, Matt Rizzo. In Carlson and Blair’s telling, the dad relates the anecdote to the son while they’re riding a city bus in a snowstorm in 1959, after meeting outside the Newberry Library.

Charlie had no reason not to believe his dad. The tale fit with his image of the man: a victim of misfortune who’d scraped a life together as an insurance salesman and took his pleasure from books and writing, devouring Braille editions of Homer, Dante, Keats, and other literary greats.

Charlie was 10 and had just moved into his father’s apartment at Diversey and Austin after the death of his mother. When Charlie was 3, she had whisked him to California after learning of his dad’s criminal past. Charlie had come to know his father only through rare court-ordered visitations, during which the two would stay in a motel, eat diner food, and go swimming together.

The first apartment the father and son occupied was cramped—a shared double bed, a bathroom, a hot plate—but the close quarters created a comfortable intimacy. Over time, Charlie became his father’s keeper. He was careful to return cups and dishes to the exact spot where he’d found them. He planted flowers in a small plot behind the building so his father could enjoy their scent in summer. He chose hobbies that his dad could hear him practicing: tap dancing, cello. Outside of the apartment, he was his dad’s eyes. He helped him onto the electric trolley that plied Diversey Avenue in those days. He counted change to make sure store clerks weren’t cheating him. And he picked up Braille books at the local post office—dozens every month, each as heavy as a dumbbell—ordered from libraries in New York and London to satisfy his father’s literary appetite. Charlie would wheel them home on a handcart. At night, he fell asleep to the soft rasp of his dad’s fingers moving over the raised dots.

Charlie was also his father’s secretary, helping him proofread his poems and literary essays and then submitting them to academic journals in the hope—slim at best for a writer without so much as a high school diploma—that they might one day be published.

Secrets hovered around the edges of their lives, though. When Charlie asked about his parents’ divorce—about why his mother left Chicago so abruptly—his father would fall silent. When his dad asked Charlie about school, about what he did when he went out at night, the boy would fall silent too. Charlie didn’t reveal that he got teased by classmates for having a blind father and no mother. He didn’t tell his dad he was embarrassed when strangers would stare at them together on the street. He didn’t tell him that he and his friend Steve—an older guy with a beautiful girlfriend and a flashy car—had begun stealing food from the grocery store and smashing Halloween pumpkins on neighbors’ porches. And he certainly didn’t tell his dad about driving Steve and another friend around to rob North Shore houses in the Buick that Charlie had bought using his late mother’s Social Security money.

Matt Rizzo’s 1935 booking papers PHOTO: COURTESY OF FIRST SECOND BOOKS

The wall of secrecy finally began to crumble the morning the cops came for Charlie. As the officers waited in a vestibule near the back door, the facts of the horrible day his dad lost his sight spilled out. It was 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression. Matt Rizzo had dropped out of school several years before and had fallen in with the local Mafia. He and two buddies decided to hold up a liquor store in Portage Park. But the shopkeeper was armed, and as Rizzo was running to the car, a shotgun blast killed his friend. A second shot hit Rizzo in the head, rendering him blind. His other friend, the getaway driver, dumped Rizzo at the hospital, where he was arrested.

“I never gave the police that third man’s name,” he told Charlie, his voice choked with emotion. “And I did four years in prison for it. I’m not gonna let you take the fall like I did. Tell me who you were working with.”

Charlie was crying now, too. He was scared of his pal Steve, so he didn’t talk at first, but when his dad guessed that Steve was involved, Charlie caved and gave up the third boy’s name. The elder Rizzo told the police. Then his son was hauled off to jail.

The next morning the cops told Charlie his dad had bailed him out. When he got home, his dad had the following words for him: “I’m going to help you out this one time, and never again.”

And then Matt Rizzo picked up the phone to reach back across the gulf of years that separated him from his past, reconnecting with a world he thought he’d sworn off for good. He dialed a lawyer that his cousin, a Chicago cop, had told him about: Dean Wolfson, a fixer for the Mob who would himself end up in prison for bribery not too many years later. Wolfson agreed to take Charlie’s case and got the kid off with three years’ probation.

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” Charlie recalls asking his dad when it was all over.

“You were already ashamed of me,” his dad responded. “I didn’t want to make it worse.”

Charlie didn’t know what to say.

Maybe it was a sense of duty to his father, maybe it was simply a case of being scared straight, but whatever the reason, Charlie never again had any major run-ins with the law. He went to college. He got married. He started a business not too far from where he’d grown up. When his dad began having heart problems in his early 70s, Charlie, who’d since gotten divorced, moved back in with him and took care of the elder Rizzo until his death a few years later, in 1987.

In the months before Matt Rizzo’s death, his son made him a promise: to try and publish the writing that meant so much to him. Charlie couldn’t find a way to make that happen. But as the years passed, another idea took hold: to discover the full story of his father’s unusual life and tell it to the world.

The details of the elder Rizzo’s time after prison were clear enough: The third accomplice in the botched holdup helped get Rizzo set up as a tavern owner. But the story of his time in Stateville was murkier. Charlie knew his dad had mastered Braille with the help of a benevolent fellow prisoner. But when he started interviewing family members about the prison years, yet another remarkable story came to light.

Charlie eventually sat down with his cousin—the cop who put his dad in touch with Wolfson. The cousin refused to speak directly about Matt Rizzo’s time in prison, but when pressed, he handed Charlie a book. It was a copy of Life Plus 99 Years, the autobiography of Nathan Leopold, the perpetrator, along with Richard Loeb, of what was once called the crime of the century: the coolly calculated kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Robert Franks in Chicago in 1924.

“Flip through that book, and you can read about your dad,” the cousin told Charlie. He was incredulous at first, but sure enough, a couple hundred pages in, Leopold—an academic prodigy and polymath who’d been sequestered for his own protection after Loeb had been murdered in the prison showers—describes being moved into the prison hospital’s mental ward with a new inmate who was blind, uneducated, and suicidal. The two dejected men became friends.

Paired with a blind person, Leopold, who was already fluent in at least five languages, took it upon himself to learn the Braille alphabet, which gave him the advantage of being able to continue reading after lights-out. Through the Stateville library, which Leopold had successfully lobbied the prison authorities to expand and improve, he ordered a primer in Braille and taught himself to read the raised dots. Along the way, with methodical patience, he taught Matt Rizzo to do the same, offering the young tough from the West Side what would become a path out of darkness: reading and writing.

In Charlie’s imaginings—and in what would become the central narrative conceit of Carlson and Blair’s graphic novel—Leopold took on the role of Virgil and his father that of Dante, the former guiding the latter through hell and toward salvation. It was a radical notion: one of the country’s most infamous murderers helping a hopeless street thug turn his life around through the redeeming power of the written word.

What’s more, the felicitous prison friendship had apparently worked both ways: When Carl Sandburg testified at the killer’s 1958 parole hearing—the famed poet was friends with Leopold’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow—he pointed to his having taught a blind man to read Braille. Leopold was subsequently ordered released after nearly 34 years behind bars.

Carlson and Blair’s account of Matt Rizzo’s life ends where it begins: at the Newberry. A few of the final panels depict a grown Charlie Rizzo, thin and bald, carrying reams of his father’s writings up the front steps of the library.

Though some of the scenes in the book are imagined, that one really happened. Today, thanks to Charlie’s perseverance, the Newberry houses most of Matt Rizzo’s surviving poems and essays, as well as his Braille stylus and even some old photos. One of those photos is included in the afterword of The Hunting Accident. Taken in 1957, it’s a faded and torn snapshot of Charlie as a young boy, in the embrace of his dad, who is smartly dressed in a suit and a fedora. It’s a beautiful day, and they’re both smiling.

This article appears in the September 2017 issue of Chicago magazine. Subscribe to Chicago magazine.

Archives of the Chief Investigator Summer 1999

As the Chicago Crime Commission plans yet another Gambling Conference at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, The Chief Investigator presents the following article as reprinted with the Permission of the Northern Star, a college newspaper of Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, celebrating 100 years, 1899-1999. This article was written by Brian Schaumburg, Assistant Sports Editor.

Headline: Seminar puts bets on table

Byline: Fight against gambling starts with discussion

Date: January 26, 1999

Volume 99, Number 11

   The old cliche goes, “If you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.”

   By hosting an all-day conference on the subject, NIU is on the solution side of gambling issues, said Wayne Johnson, chief investigator of the Chicago Crime Commission.

   Johnson said by making people aware of the problem of gambling, NIU is helping fight it.

   “If you don’t teach (gambling), you should be fighting it,” said Tom Grey of the National Coalition Against Gambling Expansion.

   NIU took a step in fighting the problem with a seminar Monday, which helped educate and inform people of the effects of sports gambling.

   Numerous speakers were able to verbalize their messages.

   Kevin Pendergast, who was convicted in the 1995 Northwestern University point-shaving scandal, talked to the audience about his gambling addiction and what it did to his life.

   Pendergast will be going to prison in five days for his part in the NU scandal.

   However, Pendergast knows what he did and how his life has changed because of his gambling, is his own fault.

   “Life with and life without (gambling) are worlds apart,” Pendergast said. “There is not a gambling game that you can continually win at.”

   The Norte Dame graduate has been going around to college campuses for the last six months to talk to student athletes.

   The 27-year-old knows that he will be known more for his part in the NU scandal than for kicking the game-winning field goal in the 1994 Cotton Bowl.

   Pendergast was not the only seminar speaker to be convicted of sports gambling.

   Arthur Hicks, convicted in 1961 at Seton Hall, told the audience more about the consequences of gambling.

   “The people who bet big money on you will kill you,” Hicks said.

   The seminar even had a surprise guest.

   Bill Jahoda, a former mobster, talked to the audience.

   Jahoda was released from his life of crime in 1989, when he went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

   Jahoda has testified against his former associates and now takes a negative stance toward gambling by speaking at seminars.

   Although he’s in the witness protection program, Jahoda still talks about gambling and his former life.

   “If you’re dumb enough to gamble, be smart enough to know that the odds are against you,” Jahoda said. “It’s the athlete that doesn’t care about academics that cause the problems.”

   Pat Collins, one of the Assistant United States Attorneys, had a serious message for the student athletes.

   “It just takes one bet against your team,” Collins said. “It’s one bet that could change your life forever.”

   Collins told the people how a small gambling habit can start and grow into a big problem.

   “It could start with a simple question by a person on our floor,” he said. “Having someone ask who’s hurt, who’s not playing well, can start it.”

   Craig Henderson, an FBI special agent, let the audience know people who gamble suffer physically, emotionally and financially.

   A gambler who owes money may meet physical suffering in the form of an assault or even murder.

   Emotional suffering may come from the need to continue to gamble, said Henderson, who believes gambling is an addiction.

   The financial suffering happens to those who fall into bankruptcy from bets that do not pay off.

   Henderson told the crowd not to gamble, get involved in gambling to lie about gambling if approached by law enforcement.

   Ten people have been indicted in the Northwestern scandal, some for lying to law enforcement officials.   

You can now buy Al Capone’s first arrest record for $195K

By Tashar

July 12, 2017 | 8:53pm

Alphonse Gabriel Capone, aka Al Capone, became one of the most notorious gangsters during the Prohibition era as the boss of the Chicago Mafia, ultimately serving 6 ¹/₂ years for tax evasion.

One of the mob boss’ earliest criminal convictions was for carrying a concealed weapon in Philadelphia.

Gary Zimet of Moments in Time is now selling a piece of that criminal history. “It is a record of his first arrest for carrying a gun. He spent 8 months in jail for it.”

The item will be auctioned for $195,000 on MomentsInTime.com.

The year was 1929 and the official document lists Capone’s age as 30 at the time of his arrest. He received the maximum sentence of one year in prison for the crime. Also known by the nickname Scarface, Capone went on to become a highly ranked bootlegger and racketeer.

He died of a heart attack at the age of 48.

Presentation and Book signing; September 8th 2017

Yesterday on September 8^th 2017, I had the distinct pleasure to lecture at Sun City in Huntly Illinois. This group of approximately 80 residents were a wonderful audience and seemed to enjoy a presentation on my book: “A History of Violence”. A book signing followed.

The book is available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/History-Violence-Encyclopedia-Chicago-Murders-1st/dp/0615986935/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1504984025&sr=8-1&keywords=a+history+of+violence%2C+an+encyclopedia+of+1400+chicago+mob+murders

and at the Mob Museum: http://themobmuseum.org/

My next event will be at the Sycamore Public Library on November 1^st 2017, for more information contact them at: http://www.sycamorelibrary.org/

Followed by a January appearance at the Itasca Public Library in January of 2018: https://itascalibrary.org/

Enjoy the Book!

Flashback: Frank 'The Enforcer' Nitti: 1930s crime boss extorted millions in Hollywood

by Ron GrossmanContact Reporter

In Hollywood's golden age, the movie industry was a cash cow with an Achilles' heel. A strike could wreak havoc with shooting schedules and budgets, making studios vulnerable to unscrupulous labor bosses in the 1930s and '40s.

Apparently today's television industry is confronted by a similar problem. In July, a federal indictment charged John T. Coli Sr., a longtime Teamsters union official, with extorting "quarterly payments of $25,000 cash" from an unnamed company. Sources say it is Cinespace Chicago Film Studios, a West Side facility involved in the production of the television shows "Chicago Fire," "Chicago P.D." and "Chicago Med."

In 1943, Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti was similarly charged with extorting millions of dollars from Hollywood studios such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and 20th Century Fox. Nitti, the brains of the Chicago mob, realized that it needed new revenue sources after the repeal of Prohibition took the profitability out of bootlegging.

His eye had fallen upon the great pyramids of money involved in making and distributing motion pictures. The key to that treasure chest was Hollywood's unions, and Nitti was a labor boss whose philosophy was pragmatic rather than ideological.

An underling once informed a painters union official that Nitti's mobsters had gotten members a 10 percent raise. The total new money would be $50,000, and it would be delivered in cash.

"He told me, 'Now, if you're foolish, you'll give some of the money to your people,'" the union official recalled to congressional investigators. "'If you have any sense, you'll keep it yourself.'"

A 1943 Tribune article painted a vivid picture of Nitti's organizing techniques, quoting testimony to a Cook County grand jury given by George McLane, business agent of the bartenders union.

Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, center, shown with federal revenue agents after a 1930 arrest, was the brains of the Chicago mob. (Chicago Evening American)

In 1935, McLane was told that Nitti wanted to see him. So he went to a meeting at the Capri restaurant on the third floor at 123 N. Clark St. The place was crowded with mob bosses and their bodyguards.

Nitti informed McLane that a man he'd never met was now his assistant. Nitti touted the man's credentials — "He has no police record" — and explained his duties — "He'll 'adjust' any trouble on picket lines and see that all the places join the union."

Nitti was born in southern Italy and was brought to Brooklyn as a child. Eventually he came to Chicago, where he was a barber. His shop was a clearinghouse for those buying and selling stolen goods.

That brought him into contact with lowlife types ranging from petty thieves to mobsters. Al Capone took Nitti into his mob, and steadily promoted him. By the 1930s, the Tribune was identifying Nitti as the mob's "finance minister." He minded the store in 1929, when Capone pleaded guilty to a weapons charge in Philadelphia to take refuge behind bars from rival gangsters.

Some mob watchers say Nitti was only a bookkeeper and that others called the shots. Yet someone thought Nitti was important enough to put a hit on him in 1932. He survived, but Chicago being Chicago, Nitti was arrested and his assailants were given a medal.

They were police detectives who said they'd gone to Nitti's headquarters at 221 N. LaSalle St. under orders from the mayor to break up gangsters' meetings.

The Tribune's story reported: "Then, according to the story told by the policemen, Nitti drew a pistol from one of his pockets and fired a bullet striking (Detective Harry) Lang. Crying 'You shot me!' Lang raised his own pistol, which he held in his hand when he entered the room, and fired five times."

The cops also claimed that Nitti tried to swallow a piece of paper. Nitti was rushed to a hospital, and the paper was rushed to Northwestern University's crime laboratory.

"Perhaps, the police reasoned, it contains the names of men slated to die," the Tribune noted. When it didn't, the detectives' story began to unravel. At Nitti's trial, Lang's partner testified that it was the other way around: Lang shot Nitti, then wounded himself as a cover-up.

Nitti was acquitted and Lang was charged with perjury. On the eve of his trial, Lang was elected business agent of the Hebrew butchers union. He was convicted, but the verdict was overturned, and he wasn't retried.

By then, Capone was in prison for income tax evasion. So it fell to Nitti to put the mob on a more solid financial footing. He was hurting too.

"In 1935, Nitti took an inventory and found he was pouring his own money into a sieve," the Tribune reported in a 1948 story about testimony a Bureau of Internal Revenue (the precursor to the Internal Revenue Service) agent gave to a congressional committee investigating issues involving Capone's associates. Nitti had a substantial illicit income, but his wife, said the story, "was spending it almost as fast on dice, cards, roulette and horse racing."

Doubly motivated, Nitti brought skills honed in Chicago to California. After the extortion scheme was uncovered, the Tribune recounted a high-ranking union official's explanation of how it worked:

"Nitti paid the goons they brought in from other towns. They went to boxing gyms in Los Angeles and hired a lot of old pugs," the official told congressional investigators. "Now, these old pugs scared people because their ears are all rolled up."

When their lives and livelihoods are at stake, people pay up.

Nitti dispatched Willie Bioff, one of his underlings, to California. Bioff had created a shakedown operation of Chicago movie theater projectionists that Nitti muscled into.

When the Tinsel Town schemers were subsequently hauled into court, a witness testified that Bioff had demanded a $25,000 payment from film executive Harry Warner because "'the boys in Chicago' expected a Christmas present."

Another testified that Bioff told movie mogul Louis B. Mayer: "There is no room for both of us in this world, and I will be the one who is here."

Bioff, a kid from Halsted Street, went Hollywood. With his cut of the swag, he bought a ranch, lived in a mansion with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and built a distinguished collection of rare books. That caught the eye of Robert Montgomery, president of the Screen Actors Guild, who tipped off the IRS.

A federal grand jury was convened and Nitti and six other hoodlums were indicted. The others were convicted and sent to prison. Nitti was never brought to trial, yet he was being squeezed on the eve of the indictments.

Police in Riverside, Ill., saw a group of mobster bosses arrive at Nitti's spacious home in the southwest suburb. The bosses feared that Bioff had turned government witness. Since he was Nitti's man, Nitti had to deal with the problem.

"They demanded that Nitti shoot Bioff, even if he had to do it in a crowded courtroom," the chief investigator for the state's attorney said, according to the Tribune.

The next day — March 19, 1943 — Nitti's lawyer phoned to tell him of his indictment. Nitti put a gun in his pocket, said he was going for a walk and asked a favor of his wife.

"I want you to go to church this afternoon," Nitti told her, according to a Tribune report. "I want you to go to a novena at Our Lady of Sorrows."

Then he went to a railroad track about a mile away and fatally shot himself.

As feared, Bioff testified against the other mobsters. Then he moved to Phoenix. Under an assumed name, he palled around with Barry Goldwater until his past caught up with him. On Nov. 4, 1955, Bioff turned the key in his pickup truck and a bomb blew it to pieces.

Underneath the debris was a lifeless punk from Halsted Street with an acquired taste for old books with fine bindings.

rgrossman@chicagotribune.com

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