Friday, December 26, 2008

Being Bad, Being Very Bad . . . (Listen)

Well, it’s been a good year for really bad behavior. We’ve had a Midwestern governor who may have tried to sell a U.S. Senate seat, a Wall Street wizard Ponzi scheming with $50 billion of other people’s money, and a mortgage industry slapping a pretty label on garbage and selling it like it was gold . . . not to mention greedy investors signing on for deals they knew were too good to be true. All this bad behavior has sparked some reminiscing about the black sheep of our clan, Uncle Louie, our family’s one and only gangster.

Nobody living today knows why Uncle Louie went over to the dark side.  Sure, he grew up in a tough neighborhood with few opportunities, but so did his brother, my grandfather, who ran a coal delivery service. During the Depression, my grandfather worked two jobs when he could, and even then he lost the house, but Louis “Red” Smith, Uncle Louie, ended up in the history books as a notable Midwestern gangster. Grandpa said, “Your Uncle Louie was a very well-read man. For 25 years he was the librarian at Leavenworth.”

I can’t confirm the librarian part, but Uncle Louie did spend a big chunk of his life in federal prison after another member of the Egan’s Rats gang ratted out his colleagues to save his own skin – he said he was pretty sure that if he got into Louie’s car he would be killed. In the previous two years, the Rats were involved in gang warfare that left 23 people dead, and they also managed a $2.4 million heist – pretty good money in the 1920s. Uncle Louie never got crime out of his system – in his sixties he served a year for income tax evasion, just for good measure.

The family kept its distance from him most of the time.  When Louie’s working class mother died in the 1950s, the flowers filled two rooms at the funeral parlor, and the cards on the arrangements bore the names of gangsters featured in Congressional hearings on organized crime. These were guys with colorful nicknames like Greasy Thumb and Chippy and Buster, but she was just his mother.  When my high-school age father went outside for a smoke all the unfamiliar guys in suits standing there stopped talking.  Many of the city’s leading police officers attended the funeral in uniform, adding another twist to the mystery of corruption.

When they weren’t trying for big-money robberies and murdering their rivals, it seems Uncle Louie and his buddies sold insurance to small business owners. This was that special insurance that guaranteed that the gang wouldn’t come back at night and torch the place or break the owner’s legs. His brother, though, moved on to selling furnaces.  He married and raised a family, had successful children and much-beloved grandchildren, who used to scream with delight when he’d pull the last digit off his thumb, that old optical illusion. When he needed help around the yard as an old man, he overpaid his grandson who didn’t realize how small their pension was. He would throw a Frisbee high in the air for the grandkids who swarmed around him. I can’t learn much about bad behavior from those good memories, and his wicked brother Louie, who slashed and stole his way through life, died before I was born. Everyone agrees, though, that Louie used to take salt-water baths twice a day dressed in gray flannel underwear, a hopeless effort, my grandmother said, to cleanse his conscience. They’re both gone now, those two brothers who chose so differently, but the mystery of good and bad behavior lives on.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on December 26, 2008
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