by Josh Levin
* * *
Eight days after he’d exchanged vows with Linda Taylor at city hall, Lamar Jones got a phone call. It was his new wife. She was in the Cook County jail.
“Remember what I told you to do if I got in trouble?” she asked. He remembered.
Taylor had prepared him for this day, though he hadn’t known it at the time. Shortly after they’d started going together, she’d brought him to meet a banker on Chicago’s Northwest Side. If anything ever happens to me, she’d said, you should go see this man right away.
Jones hadn’t thought much of the introduction—Taylor seemed to know a lot of men with money. But now, with his wife behind bars, Jones knew what he was supposed to do. He went to the bank, the man gave him a briefcase full of cash, and he used it to bail Taylor out.
* * *
Sherwin didn’t think arresting Linda Taylor would accomplish much of anything. Her criminal history report showed that bringing her into custody had never slowed her down. Besides, these welfare fraud charges were from out of state, and Sherwin wasn’t willing to cede this case to an outside agency. The cops in Michigan had caught Taylor two years before, but they’d let her wriggle free. If he gave up now, before he figured out who Linda Taylor really was, she would put on another wig, change her name, and slip away again.
The Area 2 burglary detective knew he wasn’t supposed to spend his time digging up dirt on a phony burglary victim. But Sherwin couldn’t bear to go back to his daily routine—the morning roll call, the half-dozen new burglary reports in his pigeonhole. This was a case he could crack open. He would find out everything Taylor had done, then put it all in a bundle and drop it on his lieutenant’s desk. When the higher-ups saw what he’d put together, how he’d gift wrapped a case they could take credit for solving, they were going to be overjoyed. He knew it.
Jerry Kush had never seen his partner so energized. The detectives worked in tandem to check out leads, taking hour-long detours from the cases piling up on the front seat of their Chevy. With Kush’s help, Sherwin learned whatever he could about a woman whose real name he still didn’t know.
Linda Taylor was at once impossible to follow and easy to track. She changed her identity constantly, kicking up a trail of new paperwork wherever she went. These documents—government intake forms, real estate records, marriage licenses—told an incoherent story, one populated by dozens of characters of Taylor’s own creation. When Sherwin found a name he hadn’t seen before, he added it to his working list. Eventually, it would grow to fifty-four aliases, a two-column stack that filled the length and width of a typewritten page.
The first arrest on her rap sheet came in the fall of 1944. She’d been booked in Washington State for prostitution, quarantined on suspicion that she had a venereal disease, and then released. The date of that arrest confused Sherwin. When he’d met her in 1974, Taylor appeared to be no older than her late thirties. Sherwin called the authorities in Washington, who sent along her mug shot. He saw enough—the pointed chin, the Cupid’s bow in the upper lip—to know he was looking at Linda Taylor. He also now had confirmation that she was closer to fifty years old than to forty.
Three decades after that 1944 prostitution arrest, Sherwin had gone to Taylor’s apartment and found welfare ID cards with the names Connie Walker and Linda Bennett. She’d signed those same names on a series of applications warehoused by the Illinois Department of Public Aid.
As Connie Walker, Taylor had told the Public Aid Department she’d been born on Christmas Day 1934. A single mother, she’d claimed she was incapacitated by heart disease and couldn’t work. The State of Illinois made sure Walker and her children didn’t go hungry. Starting in January 1973, the Illinois treasurer sent her $416.70 each month to provide for herself, her two daughters, and her five sons. By the following January, those monthly payments had increased to $464.
As Linda Bennett, she’d given her birthplace as Homestead, Dade County, misspelling the state “Flordia.” Born in 1940, she requested public assistance due to disability, and to meet the needs of her dependent children—this time, she listed four. On October 30, 1973, one week after Taylor signed the application, the state mailed her a check for $306. A day after that, the treasurer sent Linda Bennett $113.33. The money kept coming, every month. Three days after Sherwin arrested Linda Taylor at 8221 South Clyde Avenue, the Illinois treasury earmarked another $340 for Linda Bennett, 8221 South Clyde Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.
In April 1974, Taylor filled out a third request for assistance, giving her name as Sandra Brownlee. Her birthplace was Oakland, California, and her husband was “IN CANADA, DON’T KNOW WHERE.” Her stepfather had supported her seven sons and daughters, but now that he was dead the children were “HUNGRY. NO FOOD IN THE HOUSE OR CLOTHEN.” When asked to list her recent employers, she put down “NEVER WORK.” On the four-page application, she wrote “none” or “no” 154 times. She scrawled the words horizontally, vertically, diagonally, upside down, and backward. She had no income, no insurance, no property—none, none, none. Had she received any kind of public assistance in the previous two years? No. A Cook County caseworker looked over the application and couldn’t believe what she was reading. Only a rubber-stamping fool would’ve bought that Sandra Brownlee had seven children of preschool age or younger. This time, her request for public aid was denied.
Sherwin knew Taylor had committed welfare fraud in Michigan. He now had good evidence that she’d done the same thing in Illinois. He thought pinning those charges on Taylor would be easy. But when Sherwin and Kush shared what they’d found with the Department of Public Aid, the agency wasn’t interested—it didn’t do in-depth investigations. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office suggested they talk with the Illinois attorney general. The Illinois attorney general sent them to the U.S. attorney, who said this wasn’t something federal prosecutors pursued. Maybe they’d have better luck with the IRS, or the postal inspectors. The locals said the same thing as the people at the state agencies, who parroted the feds. It was a question of resources. It was out of their jurisdiction. It was somebody else’s problem.
It felt as though every bureaucrat in the United States was sending Sherwin the same message: Leave Linda Taylor alone.
* * *
Sherwin’s frustration with his bosses inspired him to flout departmental rules he’d never pondered breaking. His colleague Wally McWilliams didn’t need some crisis of conscience to challenge authority.
Sherwin and McWilliams had both started out as beat cops in the early 1960s, then earned promotions to detective. They worked in the same unit, Area 2 burglary, and they occasionally teamed up on investigations. McWilliams saw Sherwin as dependable, thorough, and unassuming. The feeling wasn’t mutual. Sherwin didn’t think that McWilliams was a bad guy, necessarily, but he did find Wally a little boorish—he always seemed to be scratching his crotch, and he’d scoot up two inches from your nose before launching into a conversation. Sherwin also thought McWilliams cared too much about his own image; he needed to play the conquering hero. He had a habit of butting in where he didn’t belong.
McWilliams considered himself a troublemaker. He loved Chicago—he’d been born on the South Side and never left—but he hated the people who ran the city. He couldn’t believe how easy it was for politicians to get away with graft, bribery, and outright theft. The whole system was corrupt. Everyone was out for himself.
The Chicago Police Department had its own problems. McWilliams chafed at how detectives got slotted into discrete divisions: burglary, assault, auto theft. If a burglary detective ran across a crime outside his assigned specialty, his superiors expected him to ignore it. McWilliams thought the department’s higher-ups were hypocrites. They claimed to value efficiency, but they did everything they could to discourage hardworking cops from working hard.
McWilliams hadn’t gone to Linda Taylor’s apartment to check out her supposed burglary. He hadn’t arrested her, and he didn’t do any of the work to untangle her life story.
But the more McWilliams heard about the Taylor case, the more he felt that he needed to get involved. Sherwin was a good cop, but he needed help to overcome a broken system. McWilliams could make sure justice was served. He knew the best investigative reporter in Chicago.
* * *
The day after Jack Sherwin arrested Linda Taylor for welfare fraud, the Chicago Tribune printed a front-page story alleging that four doctors had fleeced the Illinois Department of Public Aid. Those physicians, the Tribune’s George Bliss reported, received close to $100,000 per year for surgeries they didn’t perform and newborns they failed to deliver. In one case, a “doctor collected $50 for performing a circumcision on a newborn baby. A check of the records disclosed that the baby was a girl.”
Bliss blew out the story in a page one follow-up the next day, writing that doctors had pocketed as much as $750 for surgical procedures performed by unlicensed hospital personnel. He published another front-pager the day after that, with another killer anecdote: “A nurse at Bethany Brethren–Garfield Park Hospital had to deliver a newborn baby because the mother’s public aid doctor didn’t show up.”
Every reporter at the Tribune wanted a byline on page one, but Bliss felt worthless if he went a week without a story up front. A single front-page item made for an ordinary morning. Bliss really crowed when he scored three in one day—a “hat trick.” From August 24 to September 3, 1974, he placed eleven articles on page one of the newspaper’s final edition. No other writer managed more than two.
The Tribune, with characteristic immodesty, billed itself as “the world’s greatest newspaper.” Bliss was the greatest newspaper’s greatest reporter. He knew how every part of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago machine fit together—who got paid off, and who was doing the paying. When he caught a politician lying or stealing, he’d say slyly, “You know, I think he wants to be famous.”
Bliss made a lot of people famous. A mid-1970s book on investigative journalism estimated that his stories had sent more than one hundred people to prison. At age fifty-six, he’d contributed to several Pulitzer Prize–winning series, guided the Tribune’s award-hoarding Task Force investigative team, and been touted as a potential Cook County sheriff.
Stocky and muscular, Bliss maintained the build he’d developed forty years earlier as an amateur boxer. He dressed like a reporter from a bygone era, wearing baggy, off-the-rack suits and perching a fedora on top of his bald head. His typewriter, a Royal manual, sat on a rolling stand beside his desk. He knew how to mash the keys, but he was no great wordsmith. When a big page one piece appeared under his byline, somebody else had typically written it. A copyeditor once said that Bliss “should not have been allowed near a typewriter.”
Bliss’s skills as a reporter more than compensated for his deficits as a writer. He’d started out as a copyboy in the 1930s, ferrying drafts to editors, fetching coffee, and sweeping the floors at an afternoon newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst. He’d been with the Tribune since 1942, joining the paper just before he shipped off to the Pacific during World War II. As an up-and-comer on the police beat, he’d learned that news gathering was a competition, and that a successful reporter did whatever it took to win.
The key to racking up victories was cultivating relationships with the right people. Bliss didn’t just report on the police. He hung out with them at their favorite bars, played in their poker games, and attended their wakes. When the cops got together for the Chicago Patrolmen’s Association picnic, Bliss dropped by with his wife and children. For family vacations, he’d rent a house on a lake and share it with his policeman buddies.
In the 1940s and 1950s, police officers and journalists played on the same team. Many shared the bond of military service, and they lived in the same neighborhoods on the South Side. A bulky Irishman, Bliss could pass for a cop himself. He’d flash a badge, identifying himself as a coroner, state’s attorney, or police lieutenant when he needed to get places a reporter couldn’t. The real police didn’t seem to mind this sort of trickery—they understood the rules of the game. Cops spilled details on criminal suspects; reporters shared what they heard on the street. To make sure the information kept on coming, a writer might help a patrolman type up his reports, or look the other way when he saw an officer working security at a Mob-run cardroom.
Occasionally, Bliss used the power of the press to give his friends a little boost. One of the first times his name appeared in the paper—Bliss started at the Tribune years before reporters got regular bylines—was on April 22, 1951, atop a story headlined “Desk Sergeant: Busy Man Who Keeps Police Clicking.” In that piece, he praised John L. Sullivan of the Grand Crossing District, who “often is called the politest and most efficient policeman in Chicago.” Four days later, the young Tribune reporter snared a spot at the front of the procession honoring Douglas MacArthur upon the general’s return from Korea. The man who coordinated that procession was John L. Sullivan.
Bliss didn’t just churn out puff pieces. In an unbylined series published in 1950, he detailed abuses at Cook County’s juvenile home: allegations of a male employee bribing an underage female inmate for sex, of guards slapping and pulling the hair of their young charges, and of children being placed in solitary confinement. Bliss wrote those stories himself, crafting his copy on a portable typewriter he set up in his kitchen. He took pride in never putting in for overtime.
On June 20, 1959, his wife, Helen Jeanne Bliss—the mother of his five children—died giving birth to his sixth. Bliss’s colleagues and children thought he never really recovered from that loss. After his wife’s death, work became a compulsion. Bliss thought he needed to prove himself every day, so his editors wouldn’t fire him and leave his family destitute.
In 1961, after he’d been promoted to labor editor, Bliss discovered that city employees were forging their time sheets so they could get paid without going to work. He would build that one article into a series of more than eighty stories, documenting overwhelming corruption in the agency tasked with safeguarding the region’s drinking water. His exposé of the Metropolitan Sanitary District led to the elimination of 188 phony jobs, cuts the Tribune estimated would save taxpayers $1 million per year. The series earned Bliss his first Pulitzer, as well as a laudatory write-up in his own newspaper. That story, titled “George Bliss: Profile of a Top Reporter,” was accompanied by photos of the prizewinner; his second wife, Therese Bliss; and their ten children: the six from Bliss’s first marriage, three from Therese’s, and the couple’s infant son.
Powerful people knew Bliss’s newspaper was an institution they shouldn’t cross. In the early 1960s, the Tribune had the highest circulation of any non-tabloid newspaper in the United States, with more than eight hundred thousand readers during the week and 1.2 million on Sundays. Reporters like Bliss got their calls returned, and they got more respect than their rivals at the Daily News and Sun-Times. The Tribune earned its stature in Chicago thanks to its comprehensive coverage of local news. “Colonel” Robert McCormick, the former army man who led the paper from the 1910s until his death in 1955, popularized the term “Chicagoland” and tasked his reporters with blanketing the city, its suburbs, and neighboring states. This exhaustive approach to reportage wasn’t accompanied by a similarly expansive worldview. A hard-line, traditionalist Republican, McCormick used his paper to editorialize against the New Deal and the United States’ entry into World War II. The Colonel, who served as the newspaper’s owner, editor, and publisher, called the Tribune “the American Paper for Americans.” Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko later described it as “the voice of Midwestern Conservative Republican Isolationism and Inhumanity to the Downtrodden.”
The only politics George Bliss was passionate about were the ones that played out in the newsroom. Bliss wanted to dig up stories his editors wanted to print. He thought he’d found a great one in 1967, when he sussed out some possible corruption in the office of Illinois secretary of state Paul Powell. The paper’s leadership didn’t think that s
tory needed to be told. McCormick Place, the lakefront convention hall named for the Tribune’s late owner, had recently burned to the ground, and the newspaper needed Powell’s support to ensure that a bigger, better monument to the Colonel’s greatness would rise in its place. In 1968, a year after Bliss was told that Powell was off-limits, the reporter quit his job at the Tribune. Upon Powell’s death in 1970, the executor of the politician’s will found $750,000 in cash in the secretary of state’s closet, $150,000 of it packed into a Marshall Field shoebox—wealth accumulated by soliciting bribes from wannabe state contractors. Bliss had been right.
After he walked out on the Tribune, Bliss went to work for the Better Government Association, a nonprofit watchdog group that partnered with Chicago newspapers on big reporting projects. As the BGA’s chief investigator, Bliss engineered an exposé of private ambulance companies that refused to serve the poor. Bliss himself posed as a heart attack victim; when an ambulance crew arrived to find that he had just $2, the men stole his money and left Bliss propped up on the kitchen table. The resulting series, which ran in the Tribune, featured four front-page, hidden-camera photos of the “dying man.” Bliss played his part very well—the ambulance stories won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for local investigative reporting.
Although the Tribune got most of the glory from the BGA-conceived ambulance series, the paper’s reputation had suffered in Bliss’s absence. In December 1969, police officers detailed to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office shot and killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark during a raid of Hampton’s apartment. Within a few days of the killings, the city’s most influential black-owned publication, the Chicago Defender, ran an editorial headlined “Was It Murder?” State’s attorney Edward Hanrahan, meanwhile, gave the law-and-order-friendly Tribune an exclusive account of what he termed a “gun battle”—a confrontation that the Panthers had allegedly instigated by blasting away with a shotgun through the locked apartment door. That story was a lie. What Hanrahan had claimed were bullet holes in the door turned out to be nailheads. The state’s attorney was charged with obstruction of justice, though he was ultimately found not guilty. Hanrahan would, however, pay a price at the ballot box, falling to Republican prosecutor Bernard Carey in 1972, thanks in part to the Defender’s dictate that “not a single black vote should help Hanrahan’s reelection as Cook County’s State Attorney.”