Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (14 page)

Primary among the Store’s many games of chance were faro, poker, craps, and Chuck-a-Luck, a dice game of British origin where the dice are spun in a wire-mesh cage shaped like an hour glass. By far the most popular game of the era was faro, which had spawned a New York derivative called stuss. The exact origins of faro are unknown, but the game is believed to have first been played in France and brought to America by way of Louisiana in the eighteenth century. No other card or dice game—not even poker or craps—ever achieved faro’s level of influence; faro became the primary foundation for the elaborate gambling parlors throughout the United States, long before Atlantic City or Vegas centralized the country’s insatiable appetite for games of chance.

Faro was played at a gaming table, with a dealer who was variously called a mechanic or an artist. The dealer drew cards from a dealing box and laid them out on a folding board adorned with a suite of thirteen cards, usually spades, pasted or painted on a large square of enameled oilcloth. To the left of the dealer was a case keeper, a scoring device with beads affixed to metal rods that resembled a billiard counter. Once the cards had been dealt, the bank, or dealer, determined the size of the bet; he announced, before bets were placed, the amount for which he would play.

The rules of the game were complicated, and the various plays and betting methods shrouded in arcane terminology made faro an especially perilous game for a neophyte. Some believed that faro, when overseen by a square dealer, was the fairest banking game ever devised. Others felt there was no such thing as a square dealer, and that the game was no more or less fair than the average card game in which the odds are always tipped in the bank’s favor. In a seminal study of America’s nineteenth century gambling culture, author John Phillip Quinn quotes a gambler describing the perils of faro:

“Suppose a player wagers a dollar on the queen. If one of the three cards exposed happens to be a queen, he wins one dollar; if two are queens, he receives double the amount of his stake; if all three should prove to be queens, the dealer returns him his original stake augmented by three times the amount; if no queen is shown, the house gathers in the stake. It does not require a particularly erudite mathematician to discover that the odds at this game are enormously in favor of the bank.”
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The success of Mike McDonald’s faro game energized gambling operations in Chicago unlike anything ever seen before. The Store became the center of a sprawling empire in and around Gambler’s Row that included many dinner pail gambling houses, roaming crap games, and bunco operations designed to soak the low-level degenerate gamblers who feasted on the fringes of the gambling underworld. All of the gaming lords, whether their operations were large or small, paid a percentage to King Mike. If they did not, they were put out of business through political pressure, police raids, or unannounced visits from brawny Irishmen with thick brogues just off the boat from places like Cork, Kerry, and Tipperary.

McDonald’s connection to the city’s criminal element was comprehensive in nature. He cultivated a relationship with numerous killers and political sluggers
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through another entrepreneurial scheme that was nearly as remunerative as his gambling operation. For many decades in Chicago, if you were arrested and needed bail money to get out of jail, Mike McDonald was the man to see. Motivated perhaps by those three months he spent in jail without being able to post bail back in 1869, he devised a system that benefited everyone—especially himself.

The bail bondsman business was highly competitive, but McDonald kept an upper hand by employing numerous small-time lawyers to troll the sheriff’s office and criminal courts. At Mike’s behest, they offered to post bond for those charged with crimes on short notice and easy terms. Everyone was in on the scam, as police courts were little more than justice shops where the judge, the policeman, and the bondsman could receive a dollar a head for releasing an offender on a straw bail. Everyone came out ahead: The cops made money on the side while satisfying the reformers and the press that they were making arrests, the judge also got his cut, the criminal got out of jail, and bail bondsmen like Mike McDonald put every criminal in town in his debt as he amassed a small fortune through usurious loans and bounty payments—which, if an offender were to skip town, the bondsman, by law, was allowed to keep as pure profit.

By the mid-1880s, Mike McDonald was a millionaire many times over, but the true measure of his power and influence was only partially based on money. White-haired even in his youth and with a patrician manner that inspired confidence, McDonald was a friend and benefactor to Chicagoans at every level of society. He is credited with having handpicked and anointed the city’s mayor Carter Harrison, a beefy, boisterous Democrat who came to symbolize the spirit of Chicago during the 1880s, when the city doubled in size from five hundred thousand to over a million people and was never again referred to as the Mud Flats of the Prairie. In 1882, McDonald bought part ownership in the
Globe
newspaper with which he sought to influence elections and the passing of favorable municipal ordinances. He fleeced the city coffers through his ownership of various contracting firms that secured sweetheart deals with the city using a bevy of aldermen popularly known as Mike McDonald’s Democrats. He became copartner in a powerful bookmaking syndicate, which dominated gambling at the Illinois and Indiana race tracks, above all the Garfield Race Track in Chicago, which in one season alone took in $800,000. At the time, this was the largest profit ever taken at a single track.

Day after day, the newspapers excoriated King Mike. In a typical editorial, the
Chicago Times
wrote “Mike McDonald is an unscrupulous, disreputable, vicious gambler, a disgrace and menace to the city. He should be driven from the city and the race tracks closed forever.”

The negative press only added to the legend. Throughout the town, if you were looking for a job, a place to live, or small kernel of respect, there was only one way to get results:

See Mike.

Looking to nominate a stout lad for alderman and need the necessary backing of the ward bosses?

See Mike.

Looking to get your son, or husband, or cousin bailed out of jail and exert some influence on the judge presiding over the case?

See Mike.

Looking to pass a city ordinance that could provide jobs, money, and power for you and yours?

See Mike.

Mike McDonald’s power became so ubiquitous that, in 1885, one newspaper bemoaned the fact that these two words—
See Mike
—had quite possibly become the most common phrase in the entire municipal and criminal lexicon of Chicago.

The Man Behind the Man

During the years of his reign, Mike McDonald never held elective office. For decades, he remained the proverbial “man behind the man,” a stalwart and powerful figure in the long history of Irish political and criminal affairs. The Irish American underworld was based, at least in part, on a clan structure with roots going all the way back to various Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Norman invasions in Ireland. Long before the rural resistance societies of the nineteenth century, Ireland had developed a sociopolitical system that included elements of guerrilla warfare in which clan members could associate openly with one another without appearing to be plotting against the forces of occupation. The Irish figurehead, or political leader, was in many cases a diversionary figure while the real influence lay with the man responsible for putting the recognized community leaders into positions of power. Being the man behind the man had certain advantages, not the least of which was that, when the shit hit the fan so to speak, it was “the man,” not the man behind the man, who usually took the fall.

In some accounts of Mike McDonald’s subterranean career as the godfather of Chicago, it is suggested that he really longed for the kind of approval that comes from being voted into power. If so, those hopes were irrevocably derailed by a series of public and personal scandals that flushed King Mike out of the woodwork and exposed his back-door role in civic affairs.

The first incident erupted on November 23, 1878. During a police shakedown at the Store, a cop was shot down in the establishment’s upstairs boarding house by none other than McDonald’s wife, Mary. The killing was front page news in all the papers. McDonald’s influence, along with the efforts of an esteemed criminal defense attorney, was enough to bring about Mary’s arraignment before a judge who determined that she had killed the invader of her home in justifiable self-defense. Having dodged that bullet, McDonald moved his wife and their two children out of the Store and into a mansion he had built on Ashland Avenue, near the home of his friend Mayor Carter Harrison.

Within months of this move, Mrs. McDonald made news again by eloping with a noted minstrel singer who had come to Chicago as part of a famous singing troupe; the two lovers fled the city together. Much to the entertainment of the local press, Mike McDonald set out after the pair, with daily newspaper reports informing Chicago’s citizens of his progress. McDonald finally traced his wife and her lover to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. He was waiting in front of the hotel one afternoon when Mary and the singer returned from a carriage ride in the country. He stopped the horses, but before he could do anything else, his wife jumped from the carriage, threw her arms around her husband, and declared, “Don’t shoot, Mike, for God’s sake! It’s all my fault! Take me back, for the love of God.”

King Mike ushered his wife to the railroad station, and they took a train back to Chicago.

He reinstalled his wife in the house on Ashland Avenue, and their life seemed to return to normal. Mike had forgiven his wife, but he did not forget. He became a remote husband and was gone from the house on business most of time. No longer employed by the Store and with little to occupy her mind, Mary turned to religion. She had a magnificent marble alter built in her home, and she recruited her own private priest to say mass and administer the sacred rights. The priest, Reverend Joseph Moysant, assistant rector of the Church of Notre Dame, provided extra-papal ministrations as well. One day, Mike McDonald came home to find a note from his wife explaining that she and the priest had become lovers. They had run away to Europe together. In a fit of rage, McDonald smashed the alter to pieces.

In the weeks that followed, he renounced Catholicism and officially divorced his wife to whom he vowed never to speak again. Mrs. McDonald and Father Moysant lived together in Paris for a few years, but the repentant priest eventually returned to his flock; Mary returned to Chicago and opened a boarding house.

Meanwhile, McDonald became embroiled in an even bigger problem—a municipal scandal that left him with the title King of the Boodlers.

Today, the word “boodler” is an anachronism, an appellation long ago relegated to the dustbin of history. But for a time boodling seemed to be the dominant criminal activity in America—at least according to the newspapers of the day. McDonald had certainly been a practitioner of the art, which involved fleecing municipal government through judicious bribes, the creation of fraudulent shell companies that were the beneficiaries of fraudulent contracts, and the billing of government agencies for services never rendered.

The scandal of 1887 involved the sort of boodling scheme McDonald and his trust, or syndicate, had pulled off to one degree or another many times before. This time it involved a lucrative city contract to renovate the Cook County Courthouse. Through a longtime city official named William J. McGarigle, the McDonald group bribed the Board of County Commissioners to extend the renovation contract to the American Stone & Brick Preserving Company, a front for McDonald. When the job was completed in December 1886, McDonald presented a bill for $128,250. With limited money in the treasury, the Board of County Commissioners paid McDonald in warrants, sixty-seven thousand of which he had cashed into dollars when a newspaper investigation began to unravel the scam. Among other things, it was revealed that the expensive secret preserving fluid that McDonald’s company had insisted on using to paint the exterior of the court house was nothing more than a mixture of chalk and water.

The scandal forced William McGarigle, a former police superintendent, to flee the country to avoid prosecution; numerous other aldermen and government co-conspirators wound up with jail sentences. McDonald was dragged through the mud in the press but was never charged with a crime. He even got to keep the $67,000 paid to him by the Board of County Commissioners.

For King Mike, it was a hollow victory. The scandal created a bad stink with the public that tainted the entire McDonald machine. The fallout was enough to prohibit Carter Harrison—known to the McDonald syndicate as Our Carter—from running for a fourth two-year term as mayor. McDonald himself went into retreat; he sold the Store and, for a time, disappeared from the scene.

All of that changed five years later when it was announced that the World’s Columbian Exposition was coming to town.

The thought that the city of Chicago would be showcased on an international scale was enough to throw the city’s overseers into a tizzy. They felt that preparing the city for such an event required the efforts and presence of the best the city had to offer—whether or not the participants had been tainted by scandal. In the months leading up to the opening of the World’s Fair, the venerable Carter Harrison was carried along in the rush of enthusiasm and re-elected as mayor after a three–term absence. The manager of his re-election campaign was Mike McDonald.

The World’s Fair was an unprecedented six-month long extravaganza in the city of Chicago. Participants from all over the world flocked to the White City, an area inside the downtown Loop district where buildings had been constructed, white tents put up, and bright lights strewn around giving the town a saintly glow. The frequent sound of French and other European dialects gave the city an international flavor that more than rivaled eastern metropolises like Philadelphia and New York. City officials became darlings of the international media and, for the first time, figures of national prominence. There was even talk that presiding over the World’s Fair might be just the event to launch Our Carter as a serious presidential contender.