Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,163

tore the city apart. “Thoughtful Negroes know this.”

In 1917, De Priest was snared by state’s attorney Maclay Hoyne, a crime buster conducting an Ahab-like pursuit of Thompson. Hoyne’s men raided City Hall, hauled off files, and sought a warrant to arrest the chief of police. A police captain testified that “vice conditions have flourished unchecked in the riotous cafes of the black belt” with “black men and white women, and white men and black women” indulging in “unspeakable orgies” between “midnight and dawn, drinking and dancing indecent dances.” Few were surprised. On the sidewalks of south State Street “midnight was like day,” the poet Langston Hughes wrote. “The street was full of workers and gamblers, prostitutes and pimps, church folks and sinners.” But Henry “Teenan” Jones, a black nightclub owner, was pressured into testifying and told how De Priest collected payoffs in return for delivering protection from the police.

De Priest arrived at the Criminal Courts Building in a limousine, escorted by notables from the South Side. Preachers, businessmen, and women’s clubs supported him, for the city’s black community, knowing the corruption that existed at all levels of Chicago society, wondered why their leader had been singled out. He too hired Darrow. In court, Darrow described De Priest as a little guy, being boxed around by the big men who ran things in Chicago. Yes, he got payments from Jones and others, but they were campaign contributions, De Priest told the jury. The allegations against him were the concoctions of his political enemies. He might have used his clout to intimidate a few street cops, but he had no pull at police headquarters. “Gambling is a horrible crime,” Darrow drawled. “Why doesn’t our industrious state’s attorney attack it in the women’s clubs, where they play bridge and whist for money and prizes?”

The jury took seven hours to acquit De Priest. In 1928, he was elected to Congress and became the first black man to serve in the House since Reconstruction.3

HOYNE WAS FURIOUS but persevered. And obtaining the indictment and resignation of his next target—Police Chief Charles Healey—was a notable accomplishment. The chief was charged with taking $1,000 a month in graft from the poolrooms, brothels, and saloons. The state had incriminating records seized from City Hall, and wiretap transcripts of Healey’s phone conversations. Among the prosecution witnesses was Tom Costello, the chief’s bagman, who agreed to testify in return for leniency. Healey had been on the take, said Costello, since 1898. They had manufactured evidence, sold protection, and auctioned off promotions to crooked cops. It looked like a rock-solid case.

Healey was a stand-up guy and refused to implicate Thompson. On the witness stand, he claimed to not remember things. “My client stated some things that were not correct,” Darrow was compelled to explain. “I deny that he lied.”

The defense was based on equal portions of cynicism and sentiment. Healey was no mastermind, Darrow told the jury, just a flawed cop who had tried to keep his head above the waters of corruption. The chief was frail and old, and had a modest home and a blind, devoted wife. He was a victim of the political rivalry between Hoyne and Thompson. Costello was the real schemer, framing Healey to save his own hide. Why, the chief’s miserable performance on the stand was proof, said Darrow, that Healey was not bright enough to organize a grafting ring.

“The state has told you he was a poor witness, and he was,” said Darrow. “Costello was a good witness; one of the cleverest.”

“I … confess that if I were mayor of this city, and knowing Healey as well as I know him now, I wouldn’t make him chief of police,” said Darrow. “It takes a clever man to be chief of police and keep out of jail—and this man is a child in the hands of Costello.”

The trial was a sensation, with the kinds of twists that lent defense attorneys “an aura of sulfur,” said lawyer Charles Erbstein, who worked with Darrow for the defense. There is no ready contemporary record that Darrow, as was said in the years after his death, would insert a thin piece of wire in a cigar to have jurors focus on the long, dangling accumulation of ash instead of the prosecution or its witnesses. But Erbstein accomplished much the same thing, with a broken watch that took endless noisy winding.

In the end, it was pathos that carried the day. “In poor man’s suit, baggy pants, floppy jacket, stringy tie,” Darrow