Released from Bad Behavior

By John Francis Callahan

Novel about a man who can't stay out of the mob because of his disposition. -- It's the kind of story that tracks reality. It begins in the semi-fictional corrupt city of South Chicago and moves to Florida with airplanes, drugs, money and a female gangster who likes guns a lot. ...Then to Silicon Valley with designer chemicals that make genius seem pedestrian. This is the sort of life that can only be lived in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387549887

Book preview

Released from Bad Behavior

Released from Bad Behavior

by John Francis Callahan

Copyright

Released from Bad Behavior

Copyright © 2018

John Francis Callahan

ISBN: 978-1-387-54988-7

published by

The Gestalt Legacy Project

All rights reserved.

For private use only.

Not to be reproduced for profitable use or distribution.

Do not publish or sell in any form, by itself or as part of another work.

Do not copy or publish any portion of this text

without express written permission from the author.

This is a creative work of the imagination.

All of the characters and events are fictional.

There is no correspondence with

any real place, organization

or person living or dead.

Released from Bad Behavior

Thomas William Dawson ran for municipal judge in 1938. The election was rigged. All elections were rigged in the City of South Chicago. This was the Democratic primary. The general election didn’t matter. The fix was in either way.

There was a problem. Old Judge DePaul wasn’t ready to step down. The time had come for him to be replaced, but he wouldn’t go. So young Thomas Dawson, two years out of Notre Dame Law School, was put up against him in the primary. That night, when the results came in, the story in the Calumet Times the next morning was that Judge DePaul jumped off the roof of the Hammond Hotel to his death. Actually, two thugs threw him off.

Funerals were a big political deal in South Chicago. Thomas William Dawson, the father of John Dawson, appeared at the DePaul funeral shortly before he was overwhelmingly elected City Judge of South Chicago.

John Dawson was born in 1951. His brother died long before his birth. Little Tommie Dawson had been his father’s favorite, the little man of the family. Tommie drowned by accident at the family lake house. Then Thomas joined the Army to serve as a military judge during World War II. When John Dawson was five years old he found a handgun in his father’s desk. It was a Colt .45 caliber automatic that the Judge carried back in his suitcase from war time in Europe. John Dawson’s frail hands were hardly strong enough to pick it up. He wanted it, but he was afraid of his father. Afraid he would be caught. So he put the gun back in his father’s desk. 

That all happened before this journey began. 

Chapter 1

This journey began a few months after John Dawson’s 18th birthday, when he set off to start college. His father, Judge Dawson as everybody called him, bought his son a brand new Bahama-blue 1969 Volkswagen Beetle to take away to college. A couple years before that John Dawson had learned how to drive in one of the family’s big American automobiles – an assortment of Buicks, Chevys and a Cadillac. This VW was a new experience, this little stick-shift rear-engine cult classic. It was a bit of an embarrassment for John, given the family’s penchant for flashy cars. But it was new, and he could call it his own.

John Dawson planned his adventure. This would be the first automobile trip he would take by himself. He would drive down to Florida where he would start a new life. Many times before he had ridden in the back seat of a Buick or the Cadillac, as his family set out for their winter retreat down south. So he knew the way. He planned to do it in two days, first leg probably to Atlanta, where he would check into a motel for the night, another first by himself. An adolescent romantic dream that would never happen the way he imagined, of a motel room all to himself, rattled through his head. Then there would be another day of driving down to Florida.

The night before he left on his adventure Judge Dawson took John to dinner, across the street at the South Chicago Elks Club Lodge. Judge Dawson was short and heavy set, shaped like a pear, with short hair almost shaved at the sides. He wore intentionally cheap and ill fitting suits, short sleeve white shirts with a clip-on bow tie. Over the entrance to the Elks Club was the club’s emblem, an Elk’s head, with the letters B. P. O. E. inscribed below. The abbreviated motto was Benevolent Paternal Order of Elks, but Judge Dawson muttered, as he did every time, Best People On Earth, with a crude laugh.

Like most places for the privileged in this dingy city, the grit of the street was replaced by luxury inside. A thick wood bar at one end of the wood lined dining room. They were shown to a prominent table. They ate roast beef, baked potatoes, and string beans. John Dawson drank a Coke, Judge Dawson had a beer, one of several that night.

I’ve seen you reading books, said Judge Dawson. You seem to be able to stick with it. You need to do that so you can get a decent job. Otherwise you’ll be just another working stiff.

John Dawson would remember this, later on, as the first compliment or words of encouragement coming from his father. The son couldn’t say anything back. He felt mute. He was afraid to challenge anything Judge Dawson said. He would imagine things he could say to his father. But then, when the time came, he couldn’t do it. So he sat in silence through dinner.

A couple of the Judge’s fellow Elks came up to the table, to ingratiate themselves. There was the South Chicago Chief of Police, Roger Dempsey. He was an ugly looking man, fat pock-marked face, wearing his police uniform.

Judge Dawson said, This is my son John. Have you met him? Of course he had. In fact, he had fixed a couple of the boy’s speeding tickets. But he pretended not to.

Dempsey shook the son’s hand. Happy to make your acquaintance, son. You should be proud to have such a great man as a father.

It was like that in this tough ugly place. A place Judge Dawson’s wife wanted her son out of. A place she didn’t want to be in. They led separate lives now, her and Judge Dawson. She was in the house on Hemlock Street. It was a big house in a part of the city reserved for the people in control, not the workers. It was box shaped, set back from the sidewalk on a tree lined street, with four huge bedrooms upstairs, an oak staircase leading down to the main floor with a foyer and living room, dining room, kitchen with an apartment for a cook, maid or helper. Then a huge finished basement with an entertainment room, and a separate living area, bedroom and bath reserved for the Judge’s boudoir and work. The big house had been a payoff from the mob to Judge Dawson. Supposedly he won it in a poker game at the Hammond Hotel. That was an easy way for the mob to pay somebody off. Let them win.

Thomas Dawson met his wife when he was in law school at Notre Dame in South Bend. Marion Dawson, then Marion McGinty, went to St. Mary’s College, the women’s college across the street, back when Notre Dame was male and the Nuns took care of educating a small flock of young women. South Bend was forty miles to the east, across the state line in Indiana, so Chicago Irish of different backgrounds tended to be estranged from their circumstances back home. All the Dawson boys, and there were three of them with Tom the oldest, went to school at Notre Dame. They formed a little tranche of tough boys from South Chicago passing through law school before heading back to run things. Marion McGinty was from an upscale Irish family in Rogers Park on the north side. Her father had worked his way up to become a vice president of Sears. She had been raised to know the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony. But the rough Dawson boys had their charm. The Nuns of St. Mary’s managed the courtship with young Tom Dawson, and the two were married in the chapel on the grounds of the Notre Dame campus. But the clash of cultures between the North Chicago lace curtain Irish and these rough lawyer boys from South Chicago was inevitable. Marion Dawson could not abide the life of South Chicago, despite her big house and the cars and all that money. The conflict on Hemlock Street finally boiled down to their son, John.

I want him out of here.

You mean my home ... my city?

I won’t have you make him into another Dawson.

And how’s that going to happen?

I’m not letting you send him to Notre Dame.

They were both alcoholics. That almost goes without saying given they were Irish. After Judge Dawson lost a primary election for Secretary of State in Illinois (his ambition had been in defiance of the Party and the mob) he and Marion had spent a week in the basement of the Hemlock Street house drinking a load of Champagne they bought for a celebration. Empty bottles piled up outside the back door. Probably the only thing that saved them was their capacity for argument, which eventually bubbled into the rest of the house. That’s when Judge Dawson got an apartment for himself across from the Elks Club. That’s how young John Dawson got sent down to Florida for college.

Judge Dawson had been hurt pretty bad when little Tommie died. So during the War, he decided to go off to be a judge in the Army, although he didn’t have to. As City Judge he didn’t have to enlist. He was doing an essential government function as they said back then. But the loss and the war made him give up any desire to add another generation to the South Chicago dynasty. Leave that to his bothers. And so he let Marion have her way. He would send off John from the South Chicago Elks Club to start another kind of life. Or not, as circumstances unfolded.

After that dinner in the Elks Club dining room, John left to go back to his father’s apartment, to turn-in for a good night’s sleep before his journey started. Judge Dawson stayed behind to get drunk with his fellow Elks. He had spoken casually with the waitress who served them, and John had a suspicion in his young male mind that his father had designs beyond a meal for the night.

The next morning John made a cup of instant coffee for himself and ate a bowl of cereal. He carried two suitcases down to the VW, put one under the hood trunk in front and one in the back seat. He went back upstairs to the apartment across from the Elks Club. Grabbed a few things. And without seeing his father (they had an understanding he was not to be disturbed) John Dawson left home for college in Florida.

John Dawson was a tallish and slender brown-haired youth with fine Irish features. For the road trip he wore a comfortable pair of brown cotton slacks with a belt, brown suede shoes, and a faded Madras shirt of indeterminate color. This was typical high school dress of the time, before his initiation into the standard costume of blue jeans, T-shirt, and sandals of the baby-boom generation. This is how John Dawson looked as he walked to his new VW, parked in the lot next to a three-story brick apartment building. South Chicago was strictly an industrial town. Behind the parking lot was an often-used pair of railroad tracks. John Dawson started the VW and carefully pulled out of the lot into traffic on South Chicago Avenue. The street was four-lane, mixed commercial, with drug stores, small department stores, automobile repair shops, a truck dealership, a few bars. John Dawson had to drive a couple of miles to get to the entrance to Interstate 65. He worked his way from stop light to stop light, shifting up and down through the gears, the way he had just learned.

John Dawson finally came to the entrance to I-65, the portal for his trip. He took the broad right turn south onto the freeway. Now he was heading away from Lake Michigan, first through what remained of industrial Chicago-land, then out into open Indiana farmland.  He turned on the AM radio, an option for the VW, and tuned in a popular Chicago station. A song from the Beatles album Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was playing, She’s Leaving Home. It had been released a year before and was still outrageously popular. ...A flash of anxiety shot through his body, and with it Dawson felt the predictable regret of leaving behind his familiar life for a different one, perhaps better, perhaps not.

Pensive now, he rolled down the flat Indiana farmland, along the Interstate highway for a couple of hours, a hundred miles or so from home. The bright blue morning changed gradually, first with a layer of flat clouds, then a build-up of cumulus, then dark thunder clouds. Late August rain was coming in from the west to water the farmland crops. Dawson would have to manage his first rainstorm driving the VW. He was unfamiliar with driving a rear-engined car. It wasn’t something that Americans were used to, with the stability of hundreds of pounds of American motor sitting on top of the front steering wheels. This German experience, with light steering and heavy behind, was a different kind of thing.

Curtains of rain poured down on the freeway ahead of John Dawson’s VW, dense even with the windshield wipers. It was difficult to see traffic in front. Normal speed was impossible to maintain. Dawson dropped his speed, although other cars shot past him on the left, throwing up sheets of water onto his windshield. A semi-trailer-truck came up behind Dawson and lingered for a while, then passed and pulled in front. Dawson tried to match its speed, using the truck as a guide. Then the truck’s stop lights flashed on, and Dawson hit his brakes, reacting by turning the steering wheel to the left to avoid the truck. It was a mistake. The rear wheels of the VW were hydroplaning and broke loose and the car started to snake around. Dawson slammed the brakes hard, which only made things worse. The rear end came all the way around and the VW started to spin.

There was no way to control what was happening anymore. Dawson was lucky that the VW didn’t roll over. And there was no traffic immediately behind him.  So he spun down the road making three complete turn-arounds, then veered off to the left of the roadway onto the medium. The VW came to rest headed against the flow of traffic, pointing north. A semi-truck flew past in the left lane, with its horn on, blaring loud, throwing a sheet of water onto the VW. John Dawson just sat in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, shivering a little. The engine still running. There was nothing to do. He thought how if he had stopped on the road, that semi, blowing its horn, would have plowed into him and killed him.

There was no way John Dawson was going to move for a while. So Dawson just sat there in the VW in the rain – turned around looking north from where he came. Looking back toward South Chicago, and reflecting on what brought him to this near calamity.

South Chicago would always keep coming back into John Dawson’s life, one way or another. The industrial towns and cities at the southern tip of Lake Michigan were the invention of an earlier technological revolution. Combined with the automotive centers around Detroit, they made up the equivalent of an earlier version of Silicon Valley from another century. They were financed by capitalists, populated by immigrants and regulated by organized crime.

South Chicago was an urban fabrication of the Lake Steel Corporation. That was what the town was for. Making steel to build the cars and build the buildings for the phenomenal growth of industrial America. Lake Steel was literally built out onto artificial land into Lake Michigan. Similar industrial developments shouldered the other huge plants. To the right was the massive refinery complex of Standard Oil, later Amoco in Whiting, Indiana. There was the venerable United States Steel plant in Gary. To the left were the railroad yards of the Illinois Central and Pullman, where rail cars and tracks were all fabricated from the steel made by Lake Steel. A little further north was the Chicago slaughter house complex, where cattle and pigs were butchered and shipped by rail out to a hungry nation. The railroads brought in coal from Ohio and Pennsylvania to make the coke to smelt the steel. The primeval forests of the Chippewa Indians in Michigan were cut down to build houses. All this movement, all this action, didn’t happen by accident.

South Chicago was founded, and then incorporated as a city in 1907. In a sense it was a planned community. But community wasn’t so much in the plan. The plan was a capitalist invention, a city for making steel. The Lake Steel Corporation was started in Chicago in the 1890s by the Black family. Philip Black, in particular, started making steel in a plant that occupied a couple of blocks on the south side. At first, iron was refined in open pits, then smelted into steel. In retrospect it was an amateur looking affair. Two long factory buildings for the refining and smelting. Horse drawn wagons pulling carriages full of ore into the plant. A work shed with a big brick chimney for making the coke that would fire up temperatures high enough to infuse carbon back into the refined iron to make the steel. Demand was so great. Lake Steel couldn’t make enough. The growing county was sucking up all the steel that could be produced. The geography was perfect, almost predestined. Lake Michigan and the interconnected Great Lakes bringing in the ore. Coal came in by rail from the coal mines to the east. Then the railroads built out toward the west as the capitalist project gobbled up the country. This attracted the United States Steel Corporation from Pennsylvania to set up shop in Gary. Competition was brutal.

The Black family had to have more production to compete, so they built a city to make steel, because Philip Black wanted more than just a business. He wanted a city specifically designed to make steel. But he needed capital. So he went to Manhattan and recruited a banker, William O’Reilly, a rich Irishman, to start a Bank. Seed money was needed for bribes to politicians in the Illinois legislature down-state in Springfield and Chicago councilmen. The vehicle was the South Chicago Improvement Company which morphed into a city. The wheels were greased, so to speak, and the City of South Chicago was formed initially as a 14 square mile rectangular patch of land bordering Lake Michigan to the north and the Indiana state line on the east. Once Black had a city, O’Reilly set up a bank, the First National Bank of South Chicago. It was a venture capitalist dream. With the bank and the city and the steel company in place, Black and O’Reilly raised capital from New York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin. Black devised a plan to dredge a small port at the southern tip of Lake Michigan and use the dredged spoils to make two square miles of fill land next to the port, jutting out into the lake, upon which he would build his new steel mill. And the money from O’Reilly’s bank made it happen.

Black needed an actual city. He needed to recruit workers and he needed housing and he needed roads and bridges. Everything. In 1910 he recruited another Irishman, Frank Dawson from Flint, Michigan, the home of the new Buick automobile plant. Frank was a civil engineer. He knew how to build concrete buildings, roads, bridges, sewers – the works. And these three venture capitals, in command of cutting edge technology at the beginning of a new century, created a whole city with a singular aim. To make steel and make money in the process. Lots of money. Black built a massive steel mill, O’Reilly built a bank that financed the building of the mill and the housing for the workers. Dawson built the city, the roads, the bridges and sewers.

The industrial project required social support. The steel needed hundreds of strong workers to do grueling work in the hot and dirty mills that made the steel. Poor immigrants were needed. First the Irish and Polacks – the racially discriminatory vernacular for Polish. Negros – the polite term used for African-Americans by Chicago racists – up from the cotton fields of the South. Finally a wave of poor Mexicans. The back-breaking job of making steel didn’t require a lot of cunning, it just took a lot of hard work and long hours. It never stopped. The fires were always burning. Shifts of men walked through the gates of Lake Steel 24/7, out into the long mill buildings built on the fill land dredged up from Lake Michigan. They were rough men with hard bodies and hard needs and hard passions. No weak force could make them behave. What Black and O’Reilly and Dawson needed was the mob to maintain order.

Politics was simple in South Chicago. The Democratic Party of Chicago organized elections for the new city government. Frank Dawson was elected mayor in 1914. The city government looked exactly like what it was, an extension of O’Reilly’s bank and Dawson’s construction company in service of Black’s steel corporation. The bank managed home construction for the workers. It made loans in order to maintain racial harmony. Polacks, in that prejudiced jargon, and Irish each had a separate neighborhood close to the Lake. African-Americans, subject to dominant Chicago racists, were kept separate further down from the plant gate. Frank Dawson designed the roads to efficiently flow workers into and out of the steel mill.

Mayor Dawson hired a retired Chicago police chief to help maintain order. But from the beginning, social order was actually in the hands of organized crime. The mill workers had certain desires. Whiskey was one of them. Prostitution another. But the real invention that made the whole social side of the City of South Chicago tick was gambling.

The great genius of Frank Dawson was to integrate organized crime into an industrial city, into the business and politics. When Frank was installed as mayor, Prohibition was already on the way. And when Prohibition became a fact of life the City of South Chicago was ready with a system of suppliers for the speaks and clubs, ready to keep servicing the needs of mill workers. Prostitution was an adjunct supported by a flow of single Eastern Europeans and single African-American women from South. But the real inspiration was gambling. South Chicago became a Mecca for gambling, initially drawing from the greater Chicago area, with regular limousine service from downtown Chicago. Eventually there was a nationwide pull. South Chicago ran an integrated illegal horse racing wire service. You could bet on a race from New York, Florida, or California in the Big House at 3366 Main Street in South Chicago. Outside, the Big House looked like an ordinary two story brick building.