Organized Crime in Chicago: Beyond the Mafia

5. The Forty-two Gang

5 the forty-two gang This chapter reviews the history of the Forty-two Gang and its significance for the continued development of organized crime in Chicago. The Fortytwo Gang was a group of teenage boys and young men who committed an endless series of crimes in Chicago’s Near West Side during the years between 1925 and 1934. Although they concentrated on auto theft, the Forty-two Gang engaged in nearly every other form of crime, from coin-box looting and smash-and-grab burglary to armed robbery and murder. During Prohibition the gang also furnished cars for their elders in the alcohol and bootleg rackets. They even robbed Mrs. William H. Thompson, the wife of the Chicago mayor. Promising members of the Forty-two Gang graduated into the various adult gangs in Chicago, including those led by Bugs Moran, Joseph “Red” Bolton, and Al Capone.1 The story of the Forty-two Gang is an important one. Other than Frederic Thrasher’s 1927 classic, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, and Herbert Asbury’s 1940 volume, The Gem of the Prairie, researchers have written little about the early history of gangs in Chicago. One of the reasons for this lack of information is the fact that gangs existed before the advent of social science. We have had gangs throughout the history of Chicago, but they did not become the focus of academic investigation until the 1920s and the establishment of the Chicago School of sociology.2 One of the fundamental problems in researching gangs is that the word gang has a number of different meanings. The outlaws of the Old West, the bank robbers of the Depression, and the bootleggers of Prohibition have all been referred to as gangs. Until the work of Frederic Thrasher, gangs were typically viewed as criminal groups: gangs in Chicago, such as the Quincy Street Gang, the Henry Street Gang, and the Gloriana Gang, engaged in robbery , burglary, and all manner of other crimes. However, it was Thrasher’s work and its sociological focus that changed this definition, forever linking the word gangs to successive generations of troubled immigrant youth. Thrasher focused primarily on adolescent youth in order to understand both the conditions and the stages of gang development. He was also concerned with the effects of the city on the immigrant community and the process by which young gang members were socialized into adult crime.3 Thrasher argued that adult gangs were formed in two ways: some criminal gangs were the direct continuation of teenage groups, which had drifted into crime;4 other adult gangs represented a coalescence of various elements in the gang community. Thrasher described these elements as criminal “residue ,” sorted and sifted from the gangs of adolescent youth. Studying the Forty-two Gang provides a unique opportunity to not only view the stages of development of a 1920s Chicago gang but to also examine the process by which young men were recruited into adult crime. Boys as young as thirteen joined the Forty-two Gang and remained in the gang into their early twenties, committing various criminal acts. The data for this chapter comes from a number of different sources, the most important of which are the unpublished Landesco papers found in the manuscript archives at the University of Chicago, and newspaper accounts of the day. John Landesco is best known for his study of organized crime in Chicago. In 1924, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago , he received a grant from the university’s Local Community Research Committee to study organized crime. The results of Landesco’s study were published as part 3 of the Illinois Crime Survey in 1929 and appropriately titled “Organized Crime in Chicago.”5 Although the report was not widely circulated, it received considerable attention when it was reprinted as a stand-alone volume in 1968. In fact, Landesco’s book is widely acclaimed to be the most important book ever written on the subject. Landesco also developed an interest in boys’ gangs, and after completing his research on organized crime, he began a study of the Near West Side Forty-two Gang. Although he intended to publish the results of his study in book form, the book was never completed. His investigation of the Fortytwo Gang was interrupted by his appointment to the Illinois Parole Board. The preliminary, typewritten draft of the manuscript, titled“The Forty-two Gang: A Study of a Neighborhood Criminal Group,” consists...