Word: mobs
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Grimy Cicero, Ill. (pop. 67,000), which huddles close to Chicago's west boundary, has never had a reputation for being exclusive. During the roaring '20s, the Torrio-Capone mob roared through Cicero's streets in armored cars, ruled its wide-open gambling joints, honky-tonks and whorehouses. Cicero is also an industrial town, with tree-lined neighborhoods of workingmen's homes, and friendly corner taverns where jukeboxes play lively polkas and the talk at the bar is in many languages. Though its history is pockmarked with crime and violence, Cicero makes one proud boast...
Violence at Midnight. Around midnight the mob got bolder. A dozen or so young bloods rushed the cops at the doorway to the apartment house, pushed past them, smashed in the front door, clambered upstairs to the Clark apartment. Out the window, to the accompaniment of cheers from the crowd, went all of the Clarks' furniture, including a piano. Then the young vandals tore out door and window jambs, gouged holes in the walls, ripped out light fixtures, smashed radiators, a refrigerator and stove, bashed in the toilet bowl. For good measure they ripped up two apartments below...
...clock the mob was back and pressing against police lines, which blocked off the area around the apartment house for a full block. Mostly, they were young fellows in T-shirts and dungarees, but there were also housewives in cotton dresses, a father holding his child on his shoulder to give him a better view. The crowd was good-natured, as if going to a game, and the cops acted like ushers politely handling the overflow at a football stadium. But as darkness fell, some in the crowd got false courage from the night. They tossed firecrackers over police lines...
Shortly before 10 o'clock, the mob moved close enough to hit the apartment house with bricks and stones. The chant of "Go! Go! Go!", the firecrackers and the sound of breaking glass became a steady din. Then, just as the mob seemed to be getting out of hand, there was the sound of sirens down the street and a cry: "It's the Guard...
...news, he checks in at a cheap New York hotel; in the next 48 hours, he tries on a man-about-town role several sizes too large for him. Getting sickly drunk at a bar, he slithers away in a Walter Mitty mood, pretending: "Rocky's mob got me ... I kept putting my hand under my jacket, on my stomach and all, to keep the blood from dripping all over the place. I didn't want anybody to know I was even wounded . . . Boy, was I drunk...