Wicked City Chicago: From Kenna to Capone - Softcover

Chicago has experienced more in the past 100 years than most cities do in 500. To tell this complicated, yet engrossing, story without overlooking important characters or events is nearly impossible--unless you are the authors of The Wicked City. This breezy narrative tells the story of Chicago between 1880 and 1930, including underworld mobsters, the origins of organized crime, and the men who laid down its foundations. An amalgam of amazing characters--from bootleggers of 1880 to influential gangsters like Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and Roger Touhy--are vividly bought to life, without ever being dramatized or romanticized. But gangsters wielding a Tommy gun weren't the only villains of the day. There were also megalomaniacal tycoons, such as "King Mike" Mcdonald--who was a proponent of the phrase, "There's a sucker born every minute," and who had the clout to manipulate professional athletes to throw their pride aside for the lure of the dirty dollar as witnessed by the shame of the 1919 Chicago "Black" Sox. Delving into the shadier side of Chicago, Johnson and Sautter plausibly separate fact from fiction and escape the trappings of sensationalism often associated with this period. Their book will fascinate anyone who has an interest in American cultural history. --Jeremy Storey

The Wicked City is an account of Chicago's vice, crime, capitalism, and corruption from Pierre the Mole, who sold whiskey to the Indians, through Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, who bootlegged a Great Lake's worth of booze during the Roaring Twenties. Chicago's drive for wealth and power in this fifty-year span are evoked through spirited accounts of the careers of its leading tycoons - such as Charles Yerkes, Marshall Field, George Pullman, and Big Bill Thompson - and its leading gangsters: the Terrible Gennas, Jim Colosino, Dion O'Banion, Diamond Joe Esposito, Johnny Torrio, and Al Capone. The Chicago portrayed here is raw, real, and vital; its raucousness, lawlessness, ebullience, and greed become almost poetic.