Indiana: The Abandoned County

In Chicago these days, the visiting businessman has plenty of time for business. By edict of Police Superintendent Orlando Wilson, the once racy North Side is as dead as Gomorrah. Calumet City, thanks to another crusading police chief, has only darkened flesh parlors to show for its long career as Chicago’s sin suburb. Even Al Capone’s Cicero has quieted down. No matter. If he insists on drinking life to the lees, the conventioneer can still find paradise enow an hour away in Gary or East Chicago, across the state line in Indiana’s gamy, grimy Lake County.

In traditionally red-lit, back-of-the-barroom pads along Gary’s Washington Street—at Gus’s Lounge, the Club Little Island and the Central Cafe—the girls charge $20 to $100 and work in shifts to avoid occupational fatigue. Outside, Negro boys, few older than ten, lead the way to Adams and Jefferson Streets, just around the corner, where their sisters stand in the doorways or sit by the windows—waving, winking, blowing kisses and tapping on the windows at potential Johns. At the sleazier local hotels, the guests all seem to be named “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

The Outfit. If the rakehell wants a drink after the legal 1:30 a.m. closing time, he need only walk over to the Variety Lounge on Broadway and knock on the door marked “Family Entrance.” There, at 3:30 on a recent morning, a two-man band was in full swing, and 50 people kept two bartenders in constant motion. Gambling? In East Chicago, there are poker games almost any night upstairs over the Nu-Oriental Restaurant, and poker, pinball and betting on the horses at Forsythe Billiards. For a full Baedeker tour of the county’s delights, the visiting fireman can stop in Hammond (some gambling and prostitution), Whiting (gambling), or Griffith, where the favorite form of recreation is “Lucky 7s” and “Triple 50s,” in which the player puts a quarter or half-dollar into a jar, receives a numbered slip, then waits hopefully for his jackpot.

A hard-boiled area of steel mills and oil refineries with an abrasive ethnic mix, northern Lake County has not only been invaded by thrill seekers from shuttered Chicago; the crime syndicate, known locally as “the Outfit,” has also found a cozy haven there. So cozy, in fact, says a local minister, that today Gary, with a population of only 178,000, has “every problem, vice and crime known to man.”

Do-Nothing Millions. The fundamental problem is political. The county has been solidly Democratic since 1932, and its politicians have made corruption a way of life. An amenable Gary mayor can figure on an extracurricular income during his four-year term of $3,000,000 to $6,000,000—all for doing nothing. The only real mistake that a local official can make is to fail to report his graft on his income-tax return.

Elected as a reform county prosecutor in 1952, Metro Holovachka was later convicted of tax evasion. Former Gary Mayor George Chacharis was also caught on a tax-evasion charge in 1962 for failure to report $226,686 in kickbacks from contractors doing business with the city. Both could have learned from Chacharis’ more astute predecessor. Mayor Peter Mandich, a U.S. attorney told a federal court, “received large amounts of graft payments, but the evidence does not show that he failed to report the payments as income on tax returns.” Mandich went free.

The Established Pattern. The current mayor, A. Martin Katz, who ran as the reform candidate in 1963, pleads that “you can’t change established patterns of ten, twelve, 30 or 40 years overnight.” Gary’s police make little effort to do so. Two Democratic Governors since 1961 have been just as reluctant to tamper with the powerful county machine that has guaranteed them the margin of victory against stiff Republican opposition.

The Northwest Indiana Crime Commission, a private organization, has sporadically attempted to clean up the county, but has been hampered by a low budget and the obvious indifference of local and state officialdom. Commission Director Elmer C. Jacobsen, 49, a hard-bitten veteran of 16 years in the FBI, riled Governor Roger Branigin this month when he publicly protested the relicensing of Gary’s Boulevard Tap, which he called a “notorious B-girl joint,” and complained about a “wave of outlawry unmatched in the memory of living men.” Though that may have been overstating the case, Jacobsen is hardly exaggerating when he says that the county has been “abandoned” by the Governor. “No reformer,” adds the crime commissioner, “is going anywhere around here—especially me.”