The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Then I tried adding 1910.

  Up came an inside page from The Rock Island (Illinois) Argus from August 29, 1910:

  NEW HEAD OF GRAND LODGE

  Today’s session opened this morning at 10 o’clock. . . . The business of the meeting was the election of officers of the grand lodge. . . . The contest for office was warmly fought by the various delegations present, and much time was occupied in the balloting. S. Willner of St. Louis was elected first supreme vice commander and John Martin Kantor of Chicago was elected second supreme vice commander.

  God. “Supreme vice commander.” Mack would have hooted about that.

  The lodge in question was the Order of Knights of Joseph, a supposedly nonprofit organization of the early twentieth century whose goal was to sell insurance, and cemetery plots, to immigrants.

  All three of these items—insurance and cemetery plots and “warmly fought” elections—would appear as a recurring theme in John’s crooked career. Insurance, I already knew about. The other items would soon snap into place like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

  First of all, politics. The lodge election was a warm-up, a light workout.

  —

  By 1915, John was making appearances in far more consequential political news. I found a reference to him in a 1930 book on Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson—perhaps the most corrupt mayor of any city in American history—recounting the election of 1915, when Thompson first grabbed the city’s top job by bringing down his opponent Robert Sweitzer. The book’s author, John Bright, describes how Thompson drummed up support with the help of rabble-rousing ward heelers, who would say whatever was necessary to scare up votes—scare being the key word.

  “Among these the most sedulous was John Kantor,” Bright wrote, “a man possessing the fetching and imposing appearance of the popular orator, and plenty of enthusiasm for Bill’s cause. Announcing theatrically (in the proper locality) that he was of the Jewish faith and hence stood for racial equality, he would assail Sweitzer for his injection of the religious element into the campaign. Bearded Hebrews, grubbing for a living in the Maxwell Street markets, with the Cossack’s lash still stinging upon their backs, were not difficult to persuade to vote for William Hale Thompson, Zionist and Friend of the Jew.”

  Even as he was pandering to his fellow Jews’ fear of discrimination, John was fanning racial hatred in other venues. News accounts reported that John turned heads and votes when he charged that, as county clerk, Sweitzer had granted a marriage license to the African American boxing champ Jack Johnson and his white fiancée, a deed that John cast in the most manipulative possible terms. Sweitzer, he charged, “permitted the black man to marry the white woman, and tore to pieces the heart of [the fiancée’s] little mother.”

  “Kantor labored so zealously and effectively,” Bright wrote, “that he was rewarded both politically and socially by Thompson, becoming a close friend of Bill and his wife for the years following.”

  One news story described John as “the tall, curly-headed” personal associate of the mayor who made more pro-Thompson speeches “than any other spellbinder in the organization.”

  In those years, Thompson became open allies with Al Capone—who made huge cash contributions to the campaign—Bugs Moran, and other gangsters as they executed a virtual mob takeover of the city. Two portraits had places of honor on Thompson’s office wall: Abe Lincoln and Al Capone. Thompson maintained that the FBI G-men were a bigger threat to Chicago than the gangsters. During elections, explosions had a way of going off outside precincts favorable to his opponents. In his final campaign in 1928, sixty-two bombings took place leading up to the primaries and at least two politicians were killed.

  Late in my research, looking through my mother’s papers, I came across a remarkable photograph—a tintype actually, with an image imposed ghostlike on the mirrored surface. I found it in a manila envelope along with a sixty-year-old letter addressed to my grandfather, care of The Saturday Evening Post. It was from the office of the State of Illinois Auditors of Public Accounts, signed by a man named Leslie P. Volz, who had read a story Mack had written for the magazine. “Someone told me,” he wrote, “that you are the son of an old friend of mine, John M. Kantor, who was one of the top orators in the successful campaign of William Hale Thompson for Mayor in 1915. He contributed greatly to Thompson’s election by the force of his arguments. . . .”

  The photograph, he said, was taken at a ceremony celebrating the collection of more than one hundred thousand signatures from voters pledging to vote for Big Bill. Dead in the center of a crowd of maybe a hundred people on a flag-draped grandstand is Big Bill himself, standing tall, belly bulging against his white vest and coat, a small American flag flying from a stick in his right hand. The scene behind him on the crowded platform—police wearing those old-fashioned Keystone Kops–like star badges, women in flowered hats, potted ferns, and flowery wreaths—looks astonishingly similar to the famous cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Just to Big Bill’s right, one man stands out, second only to the mayor. He’s wearing a bespoke suit and holding a white hat to his heart, his large heavy-lidded eyes fastened intently on something just offstage, the amazing profusion of wavy, center-parted hair tumbling over his forehead, and a big cigar clamped in mid-sneer in the left side of his mouth. John Kantor.

  His reward for services rendered went beyond lavish dinners and hunting trips with the mayor—he began to show up in news stories as a city “real estate expert.” Less than five months after the election, The Chicago Tribune ran a story accusing him of offering to bribe the Board of Education to pay a vastly inflated price for a piece of property in exchange for a cut of the profit. The story quoted a board member speaking about John Kantor:

  “He has a beautiful voice. He could gather a group of pedestrians around him at the corner of the city hall, and after using up a few minutes in oratory he would have those fellows shelling out for the first installment of payments on the ‘hall.’”

  Apparently, John weathered the bribe allegation, and he wouldn’t have to work so hard for his commissions in the future. The Chicago Tribune would eventually expose the long-term scam in which Thompson and his cohorts cheated Chicago out of $2.25 million—more than $50 million in 2015 dollars—by charging fake expert fees on city real estate projects.

  In early 1917, just months before John would send train tickets to Effie and the children, a Chicago Tribune story began: “It became known in the city hall yesterday that John Kantor, a ‘real estate expert’ . . . politician, and a close follower of Mayor Thompson, will provide the windup for the . . . graft inquiry before the grand jury. To his astonishment and that of his friends, Kantor was served with a grand jury subpoena to appear. . . . He will be the last witness before the state asks the Jury to vote approximately fifteen indictments late today.”

  In a 1954 memoir, Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of The Chicago Tribune, said that phony real estate expert cronies of Thompson got $1,500 a day for work that had always paid no more than $50 a day. One of Thompson’s “close personal friends” netted $600,000—the 2015 equivalent of $14 million—over two years’ time. Much of that money was kicked back to the Thompson organization, but there would be plenty left for the personal enrichment of “close friends.”

  McCormick didn’t say that particular friend was named John Kantor, but it may well have been.

  —

  Mack never knew about the ongoing real estate expert graft scandal—which exploded just months before his visit and would linger for years, ending without any convictions—but now that he was thirteen, he could make his own judgments about his father. This visit, he was less impressed and more wary, especially since John seemed intent on treating Mack more like another bauble to show off than a loved son.

  It was a particularly vulnerable time for him to begin with. Not long before they’d left Webster City, Mack had found him
self living a nightmare. Among the group of paperboys delivering the morning news around Webster City, the most socially awkward was an innocent, lonely child named Charley Morean—Mack and the others called him “Chink” for the odd slant to his eyes. They all sneered when Charley put a naive classified ad in the paper that said: “WANTED. Boys to join a boys’ club. Inquire of Charles Morean.”

  The next time Mack ran into him, he said scornfully, “Well, how’s the wonderful boys’ club doing?”

  Charley got a hurt, bewildered look on his face, missing the sarcasm. “They didn’t come,” he said. “I waited and waited, but nobody came at all. I had the wienies all bought, and everything.”

  “If a stone cornice had fallen from the roof of the building above,” Mack wrote in I Love You, Irene, “I could not have felt more crushed.”

  To make up for his thoughtless cruelty to Charley, Mack began insisting that he be included in his group of friends. They did in fact become close friends, and were in the Boy Scouts together. On a July morning in 1917, Mack and another friend bicycled out to Charley’s farm to fetch him, then they all went into the nearby woods to hunt butterfly specimens (“an enormous black butterfly drifted above horsemint weeds like a runaway handkerchief of velvet”). They ate lunch on the bank of a river, then went swimming in a quiet stretch of water.

  The three sunned on rocks in the middle of the river, then began to swim back: “When my hands began to touch bottom I stood up in shallow water. . . . Chink was still out in the middle of the river, and he was making dreadful sounds. He skirmished and flapped, his hands were splashing aimlessly, his mouth seemed pulled half below the surface . . . [and he was making] a croaking and gobbling noise, as if he cried in a foreign language.”

  Mack thought “any boy ought to know better than to pretend that he was having trouble. . . . I heard my own short laughter rise and die, and Herbert’s laugh did the same. Suddenly we knew that this was truth.”

  Mack was closer and got there first. He tried to approach Charley from behind, as instructed by the Boy Scout handbook, “but he whirled around as I reached him, and his eyes were nearly shut, and his face looked like the face of an utter stranger. . . . A great claw seized me above the left knee. It clamped as the arm of an octopus must clamp. . . . Under we went, and down, and down, deep, deep. Silver lights came bursting inside my skull.”

  He kicked free from his friend’s panicked grip and lunged for a floating piece of wood to use as a life preserver, but Charley sank and disappeared.

  The boys ran for help. They had to run a long way. When they finally roused some adults to search the river, all they could hope for was to discover a boy’s dead body.

  Mack couldn’t look away when they found him. “I never saw anyone look so thoroughly soaked. It was as if that long-ribbed body could hold nothing but water within it . . . like a little girl’s doll lost in a garden pool.”

  It was barely two weeks later that Mack found himself in Chicago, following his father’s towering stride (his father loomed a full foot above him, a five-foot-two late bloomer at thirteen). Once again it was to a hotel, but this time to luncheon with a table full of his father’s cronies.

  They had barely settled at the table when John said, “Son, tell these gentlemen about the drowning of Charley Morean.”

  “Again silver lights would burst in my brain, and my tongue would seal against the roof of my mouth. Dully I’d gasp, ‘I . . . just don’t . . . want to . . .’

  “Dad flashed a look of contempt from his handsome brown eyes. Then settling himself in his chair, he turned to the others, beginning the tale to suit himself. ‘Boys my son had a very, very dear friend, out in the rustic village where he lives. Charley Morean was his dearest friend. . . .

  “‘One day a few weeks ago, the children went swimming in the old swimming hole. . . . My son attempted to go to the aid of his chum, but Mack had not been properly instructed. . . .

  “‘Son, show these gentlemen the lesson which I have taught you. Show them what you will do the next time you encounter a drowning person.’”

  Quaking with suppressed rage, humiliated beyond comprehension, Mack forced himself to demonstrate what his father had pedantically insisted was the proper response to a panicked swimmer: a firm punch in the face. He clenched his fingers, lifted his fist. . . .

  In that moment, Mack wrote, he thought his father the cruelest man who ever lived.

  —

  Effie, Mack, and Virginia returned to Webster City with nothing to show for their visit but the memory of too-rich meals crowded with John’s loud companions, and for Mack, the still-searing humiliation. But it wasn’t over. The next summer, a telegram arrived from John to Virginia:

  “You and Mack are to take the noon train to Chicago on next Monday and Daddy will meet you. I am very lonely for my darlings and shall take this opportunity to express the great affection for my children and try to make up for unhappy years which have passed. Give your mother my love. Tell her my sins have been sins of omission and not sins of commission. Kiss your wonderful grandmother for me. . . . All my love to my dearest daughter and son.”

  Mack had learned not to trust his father’s promises—of affection or support—but John’s proposition was difficult to turn down. John offered to put all three of them—Effie, now an underemployed thirty-nine-year-old single mother; Mack, fourteen; and Virginia, seventeen—in a one-bedroom apartment on Sheridan Road, near the lake. This time it wasn’t an effort at marital reconciliation. John was married again, but separated and living with yet another “very dear friend.” Effie and Virginia shared the bedroom and Mack slept in a converted sunroom. John provided Effie with a small allowance and paid the rent on the apartment from the proceeds of what appeared to be a legit job, and an impressive one at that: chief fiscal agent for the Consumers Packing Company—a food processing and shipping concern. Mack enrolled in a large-city high school, a severe culture shock, but having a father, one who was around and not the subject of snide remarks and gossip, served as compensation. Despite his bitter experience, Mack allowed himself to believe.

  For the first few months, John visited often, though not to spend the night. He chatted, played games, told elaborate ghost stories in his magnificent bass voice. He talked about his hunting trips with Mayor Thompson and other influential friends. Effie kept his favorite snack, boiled potatoes and sour cream, ready in the small icebox for when he’d stop by. Effie later said of those visits that John seemed like the boy she first knew in college, the charming young man she thought she had married.

  Then the ferocious Chicago winter descended. The sunroom turned dark and gloomy. John’s visits dried up, the potatoes turned rancid, and the rent checks disappeared.

  When Effie prodded John, he’d curse the incompetence of the postal service, his office staff, the landlord, swear he’d dispatched the check and would get to the bottom of the delay.

  The landlord remained remarkably patient—deferential perhaps to Mr. Kantor and his political connections—but when the weeks built one upon another and still no check appeared, he became insistent. Mack was dispatched to the Loop on the El train, to the Otis Building and the grand offices of the Consumers Packing Company.

  He’d made the trip before to discover his father behind a big desk, puffing cigar smoke and assurances. This time would be different.

  As Mack told the story in the unpublished manuscript pages of In Russet Mantle Clad, when he arrived at the offices a riot was in progress: cameras flashed and newsmen pressed toward the uniformed police guarding the inner sanctum of his father’s office. Mack pushed through until he got to the open door. A strange man with a badge, wearing a cheap suit John Kantor wouldn’t be caught red-handed in, sat in his father’s chair.

  Mack said who he was looking for, and the man said, “Well, kid, you came to the wrong place,” and directed him to the U.S. Marshal’s office in the federal buil
ding.

  “No need to hurry,” the man smirked. “I guess he’s going to be there quite a while. He’s been arrested for fraud.”

  —

  The Consumers Packing Company scandal is an obscure piece of twentieth-century history now recorded only in the scratchy microfilm images of newspaper pages. But in 1917 and 1918, it was huge news, a shocking revelation that fraudulent stock sales could destroy the lives and savings of ordinary people literally sold a bill of goods by grifters disguised as corporate suits.

  By recruiting janitors and office clerks and other ordinary folks to peddle shares of Consumers Packing Company stock to their friends and neighbors in a kind of pyramid scheme, in less than a year the company had managed to sell more than $800,000 (equivalent to $13 million today) worth of stock, which was actually worthless. The photographs of full warehouses, loaded trucks, rolling train cars, and impressive ledger sheets shown to prospective buyers were fictional. One front-page story featured a waitress who lost her life savings of $631 by investing it in the fraudulent shares, persuaded by photographs of facilities actually owned by other companies and false assurances that the stock was backed by the government.

  At the center of it all, the man identified in the news stories as the stock sales manager was John M. Kantor. He was the one who had recruited the little people to do his bidding, guaranteeing them that the shares would produce dividends of 16 percent a year, lies they passed along to the marks, who handed over their Liberty Bonds and the paltry contents of their bank accounts.

  After he was arrested that day when Mack went to look for the missing rent check, John Kantor was held in the county lockup on $30,000 bond, which was eventually paid by three men identified in the newspaper as “saloon keepers.”

  The case was tried by Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the man who two years later would be recruited to restore the tarnished image of professional baseball after the Chicago “Black Sox” scandal. Eventually, some of the officers of the fake company were sentenced to seven years in Leavenworth, and others were fined from $1,000 to $10,000.