ILLINOIS: Whoopee Echo

To an apartment on Chicago’s towering Lake Shore Drive last fortnight went a doctor, two highway policemen and Chief Deputy Edward Scholler to carry a sick, 67-year-old man off to jail. Clutching at his sheets and shaking with palsy, Frank J. Link sobbed and wheedled: “I won’t go. I’ll never leave this bed. The idea of trying to move me on the coldest day of the year.” But he was bundled into an ambulance, taken to be fingerprinted at the Cook County jail, whisked off to the infirmary of Stateville penitentiary 35 miles away to begin a one-to-five year term which he did not expect to finish. Said Stateville’s Warden Joseph Ragen of his new prisoner: “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I guess he’s just worn out and old.”

Last month the U. S. Supreme Court finally ended Frank Link’s stubborn legal fight of five years and nine months to avoid paying the penalty for his part in one of the whoppingest frauds in the history of municipal corruption. In 1929 even callous Chicago was shocked by a sensational set of indictments returned against President Timothy J. Crowe, Frank J. Link and eight other trustees & officials of the Sanitary District, an autonomous corporate body which controls all Cook County’s canals, waterworks and sewage systems. Subsequently nol-prossed, in 1931 a new set of indictments was returned against nine of the officials. Prosecutor was First Assistant State’s Attorney John E. Northrup who charged that in 1927-28 out of funds collected by the District, the defendants had pillaged and grafted some $6,500,000. For two months their trial filled Chicago papers with stinking political sewage. Witnesses told how the District trustees had built a $1,000,000 bridle path in an isolated spot, paid for most of the materials twice or three times, padded their payrolls with numerous imaginary employes. Trustee Link’s druggist brother admitted that he had drawn $5,400 in pay checks without ever reporting for work. Dummy concerns were organized to sell the District pails at $100 a dozen.

To many a complacent Chicagoan, news it was that of all the defendants Republican Frank Link was the first to go to jail. Last week the District’s former superintendent of plants and structures, fat, bespectacled Democrat John T. Miller, who was a minor figure in the 1932 trial but who also carried his battle to the Supreme Court, philosophically surrendered to work off a six-month sentence in Chicago’s House of Correction. Three of the indicted officials were acquitted at the first trial, one was freed on appeal. Another, Timothy J. Connelly, escaped to California and was never brought to trial. Trustee John K. Lawier died during the trial, President Crowe died while he was appealing his conviction.

Chicago newspapers, prone to dismiss their city’s sorest financial scandal as an incident of the “Whoopee Era,” were signally silent last week about the official who was not included in the second set of indictments but whose Whoopee Era income taxes were among the District administration’s biggest—Chief Engineer Edward Joseph Kelly, who today is Chicago’s mayor and Democratic boss.