It was no coincidence that the development and institutionalization of the Chicago way happened to coincide with a steady influx of new immigrants. Germans, Poles, Slovaks, and Bohemians flocked to the city, but few ethnic groups were as insistent in making their presence felt as the Irish. Though the number of citizens claiming Hibernian roots in Chicago would never be as high as in New York, Boston, and some other East Coast cities, the nineteenth century Irish would become more influential in Chicago than anywhere else.
Most of the early Chicago Irish had first touched down in other U.S. cities—in New York, the initial port-of-call for many immigrants, or New Orleans, where a generation of famine immigrants suffered tropical heat and subhuman working conditions. In Chicago, there was opportunity, and, for anyone with a touch of larceny in his or her soul, there was something more. The city’s all-encompassing approach to urban development, which practically embraced gangsterism and the dictates of the Mob as part of the municipal charter, insured that vice lords and politically connected mobsters were among the town’s most renowned movers and shakers.
The greatest of them all was “King Mike” McDonald. In the pantheon of Chicago’s great civic innovators, Mike McDonald, gambling czar, political overlord, and the man who coined the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute,” is right up there with Marshall Field, Charles Pullman, and Cyrus McCormack, though you wouldn’t know it by driving around modern-day Chi-Town. Today, there are no statues or monuments honoring the accomplishments of King Mike and no edifices adorned with his name. Given the morally questionable nature of his reign and, as we shall see, the tawdry nature of his demise, the oversight is understandable. Nonetheless, if there were a Mount Rushmore for the founding fathers of the Irish American underworld, Mike McDonald’s mustachioed face would be right up there alongside Old Smoke Morrissey. For over forty years—from the beginnings of the Civil War to after the turn-of-the-century—no one played a more significant role in the day-to-day machinations of Chicago than Mike McDonald. He was the town’s Irish American godfather, a man whose early life and glory days were synonymous with the fabulous rise of Mud City.
See Mike
Michael Cassius McDonald was born in Niagara Falls, New York in 1839. As a boy, he apprenticed to be a bootmaker, but this trade held no enduring interest for the youngster whose Irish immigrant parents had encountered virulent anti-Catholic bigotry in the Northeast and been confined to an immigrant ghetto on the city’s west side. Young Mike yearned for something more; he yearned for the open road. As a teenager, he left home to take a position with the Michigan Central Railroad as a train butcher, a kid who sold magazines and confections to passengers commuting between cities. Around 1857, at the age of eighteen, McDonald’s job on the railroads took him to New Orleans, where he first experienced the glamour and excitement of the city’s gaming parlors and river steamboats; he saw the rich and influential sporting men in their natural habitat, and was inspired by the idea that the New Orleans model could be adapted to other cities—especially a fast growing, wide-open town like Chicago.
McDonald first visited Chicago sometime in 1855. At the time, the Gem of the Prairie was not much more than an idea waiting to take shape. The city had been built, inexplicably, in the middle of a mud flat, which necessitated raising portions of the downtown area on stilts above the sloshy earth, giving Chicago the first of many nicknames: Mud City.
The less-than-ideal geological conditions did not deter young Mike McDonald. He settled in the city around 1860, and, in less than a year, he had established himself as enough of an influential figure to cosponsor a petition calling on “all Irishmen” to join Corcoran’s Illinois Irish Brigade and fight on behalf of the Union in the Civil War. McDonald, of course, had no intentions of joining the brigade himself. Instead he organized his first major criminal scam, in which he colluded with army deserters who agreed to turn themselves in, reenlist, and split the commission that McDonald received for recruiting them to join.
But McDonald’s Civil War profiteering was small potatoes compared to the money he began to amass through his gambling interests. Dressed like an undertaker, always in black, with stark white shirts, a prominent sage-brush mustache, and a bowler derby hat, McDonald was a regular along a stretch of the First Ward known as Gambler’s Row. Although he never gambled himself, he financed a traveling faro bank, and, in 1867, he opened his first gambling establishment at 89 Dearborn Street. It wasn’t long before he got into trouble with the law. In 1869, he was accused of stealing thirty thousand dollars from an assistant cashier of the Chicago Dock Company, who had given him the money to finance his gambling operations. Unable to furnish bail, McDonald spent three months in jail before he was acquitted at trial. He returned to his gambling operation on Dearborn Street, although the expense of his criminal trial made it difficult for him to continue the necessary protection payments to the police. As a result, the place was raided two or three times a week, and McDonald was frequently arrested and fined.
The constant harassment by greedy cops with their hands outstretched engendered in Mike a resentment toward the men in blue that persisted until his dying day. Later in life, when he became politically powerful, he enjoyed nothing more than to put the squeeze on a cop. His dislike for policemen became so well-known that it even gave rise to a famous Chicago anecdote that was repeated for years in the city’s saloons and by local vaudevillians. With occasional variations, the story went like this: King Mike McDonald was in his club one afternoon when a community organizer came in and said “Mike, we’re raising money for a good cause, and we were looking to put your name down for two dollars.”
“What’s it for?” asked McDonald.
“Well,” answered the man, “sadly, we’re burying a policeman.”
“B’jaysus,” responded Mike. “In that case, here’s ten dollars. Bury five of ’em.”
McDonald’s antipathy toward the coppers became an ancillary motivator that drove him toward higher and higher levels of accomplishment. The fact that the Chicago of his day was perhaps America’s first truly wide-open big city—relatively free of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant bigotry so common in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and the southern states—contributed to his success. Sure, Chicago had its share of Protestant old wealth, and there were certainly pockets of anti-immigrant bigotry in city, county, and state government, but by and large, the Know-Nothing Movement never really flourished in Chicago as it did in and around the original thirteen colonies.1
First generation Irish Americans like Mike McDonald were typical of Chicago’s Irish population in that they weren’t immigrants at all, but native-born Americans. They were the children of a pioneering immigrant generation that had suffered through starvation, exile, discrimination, and squalor. That generation had managed to survive and pass along their enterprising nature and psychological scars to their offspring. Mike McDonald and his generation—restless, daring, and relatively unfettered by the constraints of the past—were the first to venture forth with a sense of entitlement. They were determined to make their mark within the bounds of popular norms and dictates of American capitalism—which, in the case of Chicago and many other booming towns and cities, allowed for considerable moral leeway.
McDonald’s first major venture came in 1873, with the opening of a gambling emporium unlike anything ever seen outside the riverboat parlors of New Orleans. A four-story building on the northwest corner of Clark and Monroe streets, King Mike’s place, which he owned with a consortium of silent partners and financial backers, went by the name the Store and included a saloon, a hotel, and a fine dining establishment. The second-floor gambling room was so extravagantly equipped with roulette wheels and faro tables that even McDonald’s partners expressed concern.
“It’s too much,” said one partner upon seeing the dozens of gaming tables being installed. “We’ll never get enough players to fill up the games.”
It was then that McDonald uttered the phrase for which he becam
e famous. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
The Store was a success almost from the start. To gain entrance, a gambler first had to knock on the door and be recognized by the elegant black doorman in a waistcoat and cummerbund who was trained to recognize all sporting men of note. If the gambler was not known to the doorman, he could gain entrance by using the name of one of the many ropers or bunco men who King Mike employed to hang out at the city’s train stations and finer hotels to steer newly arrived gamblers toward the Store.
Once inside, the prospective gambler was overwhelmed by the caliber of gaming establishment that presaged the grand casinos of Las Vegas by more than a hundred years. The room was furnished with the most expensive oak furniture and illuminated by gaslight chandeliers. Dealers and croupiers were formally dressed, as were the waiters. There was not a woman in sight, though McDonald’s wife, Mary Noonan McDonald, did run the establishment’s fourth-floor boarding house, which accommodated hard core sporting men who needed only an afternoon nap to revive themselves, replenish their bankrolls, and return to the tables.
Primary among the Store’s many games of chance were faro, poker, craps, and Chuck-a-Luck, a dice game of British origin where the dice are spun in a wire-mesh cage shaped like an hour glass. By far the most popular game of the era was faro, which had spawned a New York derivative called stuss. The exact origins of faro are unknown, but the game is believed to have first been played in France and brought to America by way of Louisiana in the eighteenth century. No other card or dice game—not even poker or craps—ever achieved faro’s level of influence; faro became the primary foundation for the elaborate gambling parlors throughout the United States, long before Atlantic City or Vegas centralized the country’s insatiable appetite for games of chance.
Faro was played at a gaming table, with a dealer who was variously called a mechanic or an artist. The dealer drew cards from a dealing box and laid them out on a folding board adorned with a suite of thirteen cards, usually spades, pasted or painted on a large square of enameled oilcloth. To the left of the dealer was a case keeper, a scoring device with beads affixed to metal rods that resembled a billiard counter. Once the cards had been dealt, the bank, or dealer, determined the size of the bet; he announced, before bets were placed, the amount for which he would play.
The rules of the game were complicated, and the various plays and betting methods shrouded in arcane terminology made faro an especially perilous game for a neophyte. Some believed that faro, when overseen by a square dealer, was the fairest banking game ever devised. Others felt there was no such thing as a square dealer, and that the game was no more or less fair than the average card game in which the odds are always tipped in the bank’s favor. In a seminal study of America’s nineteenth century gambling culture, author John Phillip Quinn quotes a gambler describing the perils of faro:
“Suppose a player wagers a dollar on the queen. If one of the three cards exposed happens to be a queen, he wins one dollar; if two are queens, he receives double the amount of his stake; if all three should prove to be queens, the dealer returns him his original stake augmented by three times the amount; if no queen is shown, the house gathers in the stake. It does not require a particularly erudite mathematician to discover that the odds at this game are enormously in favor of the bank.”2
The success of Mike McDonald’s faro game energized gambling operations in Chicago unlike anything ever seen before. The Store became the center of a sprawling empire in and around Gambler’s Row that included many dinner pail gambling houses, roaming crap games, and bunco operations designed to soak the low-level degenerate gamblers who feasted on the fringes of the gambling underworld. All of the gaming lords, whether their operations were large or small, paid a percentage to King Mike. If they did not, they were put out of business through political pressure, police raids, or unannounced visits from brawny Irishmen with thick brogues just off the boat from places like Cork, Kerry, and Tipperary.
McDonald’s connection to the city’s criminal element was comprehensive in nature. He cultivated a relationship with numerous killers and political sluggers3 through another entrepreneurial scheme that was nearly as remunerative as his gambling operation. For many decades in Chicago, if you were arrested and needed bail money to get out of jail, Mike McDonald was the man to see. Motivated perhaps by those three months he spent in jail without being able to post bail back in 1869, he devised a system that benefited everyone—especially himself.
The bail bondsman business was highly competitive, but McDonald kept an upper hand by employing numerous small-time lawyers to troll the sheriff’s office and criminal courts. At Mike’s behest, they offered to post bond for those charged with crimes on short notice and easy terms. Everyone was in on the scam, as police courts were little more than justice shops where the judge, the policeman, and the bondsman could receive a dollar a head for releasing an offender on a straw bail. Everyone came out ahead: The cops made money on the side while satisfying the reformers and the press that they were making arrests, the judge also got his cut, the criminal got out of jail, and bail bondsmen like Mike McDonald put every criminal in town in his debt as he amassed a small fortune through usurious loans and bounty payments—which, if an offender were to skip town, the bondsman, by law, was allowed to keep as pure profit.
By the mid-1880s, Mike McDonald was a millionaire many times over, but the true measure of his power and influence was only partially based on money. White-haired even in his youth and with a patrician manner that inspired confidence, McDonald was a friend and benefactor to Chicagoans at every level of society. He is credited with having handpicked and anointed the city’s mayor Carter Harrison, a beefy, boisterous Democrat who came to symbolize the spirit of Chicago during the 1880s, when the city doubled in size from five hundred thousand to over a million people and was never again referred to as the Mud Flats of the Prairie. In 1882, McDonald bought part ownership in the Globe newspaper with which he sought to influence elections and the passing of favorable municipal ordinances. He fleeced the city coffers through his ownership of various contracting firms that secured sweetheart deals with the city using a bevy of aldermen popularly known as Mike McDonald’s Democrats. He became copartner in a powerful bookmaking syndicate, which dominated gambling at the Illinois and Indiana race tracks, above all the Garfield Race Track in Chicago, which in one season alone took in $800,000. At the time, this was the largest profit ever taken at a single track.
Day after day, the newspapers excoriated King Mike. In a typical editorial, the Chicago Times wrote “Mike McDonald is an unscrupulous, disreputable, vicious gambler, a disgrace and menace to the city. He should be driven from the city and the race tracks closed forever.”
The negative press only added to the legend. Throughout the town, if you were looking for a job, a place to live, or small kernel of respect, there was only one way to get results:
See Mike.
Looking to nominate a stout lad for alderman and need the necessary backing of the ward bosses?
See Mike.
Looking to get your son, or husband, or cousin bailed out of jail and exert some influence on the judge presiding over the case?
See Mike.
Looking to pass a city ordinance that could provide jobs, money, and power for you and yours?
See Mike.
Mike McDonald’s power became so ubiquitous that, in 1885, one newspaper bemoaned the fact that these two words—See Mike—had quite possibly become the most common phrase in the entire municipal and criminal lexicon of Chicago.
The Man Behind the Man
During the years of his reign, Mike McDonald never held elective office. For decades, he remained the proverbial “man behind the man,” a stalwart and powerful figure in the long history of Irish political and criminal affairs. The Irish American underworld was based, at least in part, on a clan structure with roots going all the way back to various Celtic, Viking, and Angl
o-Norman invasions in Ireland. Long before the rural resistance societies of the nineteenth century, Ireland had developed a sociopolitical system that included elements of guerrilla warfare in which clan members could associate openly with one another without appearing to be plotting against the forces of occupation. The Irish figurehead, or political leader, was in many cases a diversionary figure while the real influence lay with the man responsible for putting the recognized community leaders into positions of power. Being the man behind the man had certain advantages, not the least of which was that, when the shit hit the fan so to speak, it was “the man,” not the man behind the man, who usually took the fall.
In some accounts of Mike McDonald’s subterranean career as the godfather of Chicago, it is suggested that he really longed for the kind of approval that comes from being voted into power. If so, those hopes were irrevocably derailed by a series of public and personal scandals that flushed King Mike out of the woodwork and exposed his back-door role in civic affairs.
The first incident erupted on November 23, 1878. During a police shakedown at the Store, a cop was shot down in the establishment’s upstairs boarding house by none other than McDonald’s wife, Mary. The killing was front page news in all the papers. McDonald’s influence, along with the efforts of an esteemed criminal defense attorney, was enough to bring about Mary’s arraignment before a judge who determined that she had killed the invader of her home in justifiable self-defense. Having dodged that bullet, McDonald moved his wife and their two children out of the Store and into a mansion he had built on Ashland Avenue, near the home of his friend Mayor Carter Harrison.
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