Dan Gilbert was a big shot, the
kind of guy whose name rated boldface type in gossip columns throughout most of
his 80 years. His 1970 funeral was a who's who of Chicago's establishment.
Mayor Richard J. Daley and Col. Jake Arvey, the local Democratic Partychief,
attended the services at Holy Name Cathedral. So, too, did a flock of business
and union heavies.
It was a pretty good send-off for
"the world's richest cop," as he was called by headline writers. The
implication was that he didn't earn the title on a patrolman's salary or even a
captain's salary, a rank he attained in a scant nine years on the job. Gilbert
attributed his financial success to Lady Luck.
"You see in the press today
that I'm a big bad gambler," Gilbert said, according to the Tribune's
account of a 1950 political rally. "They say that I bet on football games
and elections. Yes I do. And I'll bet on this election too — that I'll be the
next state's attorney." Unfortunately, he was running for Cook County
sheriff.
He had been even more forthcoming
about his finances in an appearance a few weeks earlier before a U.S. Senate
committee in Chicago to investigate organized crime. As a courtesy to the
Chicago Machine, committee Chairman Estes Kefauver, a Democratic senator with
presidential ambitions, heard Gilbert's testimony behind closed doors.
"Tubbo," as Gilbert was known to friends and foes, said he was worth
$360,000. At the time, he was making $9,000 a year as chief investigator for
the Cook County state's attorney. Gilbert attributed the difference between the
two amounts to commodities trading and gambling.
Mathematicians and wiseguys say
the odds are against a gambler ending up ahead of the game, but Gilbert did
make big money in commodities. In 1947, the Tribune reported that Gilbert's
name was on a Department of Agriculture list of 100 elected officials
"gambling in the wheat market ... when inside knowledge of administration
market moves would have enabled a speculator in wheat to reap enormous
profits."
Whatever its source, his fortune
enabled Gilbert to live on Lake Shore Drive, a world apart from the Valley, the
hardscrabble Near West Side neighborhood of his youth. The Valley was a place
where police work, crime or union office seemed the best routes out of poverty.
Gilbert chose all three. At 23, he was elected secretary-treasurer of a
Teamsterslocal, giving him a foothold in union politics that he wasn't about to
surrender upon becoming a cop in 1918.
Looking back at his career,
George Bliss, the Trib's ace investigative reporter, noted that by 1938,
Gilbert controlled seven Teamsters locals. "Union leaders took their
problems directly to Gilbert and he was said to have dictated the men he wanted
as officers of the locals," Bliss wrote in 1954.
Gilbert had no compunctions about
mixing his police authority and union activities. When a 1934 strike of waiters
and bartenders closed down the French Casino, which the Tribune observed
"featured girls from the Folies Bergeres, in Paris," Gilbert ordered
union officials to settle with the club, pronto. "The state's attorney is
opposed to unjustified strikes," Gilbert told them, "and as far as I
can see, there is no justification for this one." The club's owner
controlled the Music Corporation of America, a powerful booking agent of
nightclub acts.
The following year, Gilbert forbade
a breakaway Teamsters faction to meet, sending cops to block access to the Hod
Carriers' Hall, as the Tribune reported. When the insurgents gathered instead
at the Bricklayers' Hall, Gilbert waited until the meeting was over, then
arrested their leaders.
When John "Jake the
Barber" Factor, mobster and half brother of Max Factor, disappeared in
1933, Gilbert had some minor hoodlums rounded up. Saying he suspected they knew
something but couldn't prove it, he ordered them to leave town and pointed to
an officer. "This man will bring you in feet first if you stay
around," Gilbert said, according to the Tribune's account. "You may
beat the law, but you can't beat bullets."
When Factor reappeared, just as
mysteriously as he disappeared, he said he'd been kidnapped by Roger Touhy,
another mobster; Touhy served 25 years before his conviction was overturned by
a judge who denounced Gilbert's role in the affair. Finding that Touhy had been
railroaded, Judge John Barnes ruled the jury had heard "perjured testimony,
which Chief Investigator Gilbert procured and knew to be perjured."
Gilbert was already retired at
that point. For decades, he'd been the Teflon cop. He was summoned before grand
juries that declined to indict him. Tantalizing clues surfaced but led nowhere.
In 1941, the Tribune reported the discovery of mafia financial records in the
oven of an apartment formerly occupied by mob boss Jake Guzik. On a page that
recorded payoffs for protection was the entry "Tub ... $4,000."
Gilbert denied it referred to him, because his friends called him
"Tubbo," never "Tub." In 1963, a loose-leaf notebook was
found in a desk in the state's attorney's office. Inside were tidbits — names
of girlfriends, mob associates, hangouts — of Capone-era hoodlums like
"George 'Tony the Wop' Basso," "Thomas (Rubber Nose)
Conley" and "'Two Gun' Ike Katsovitch."
"I never saw that book in my
life," Gilbert told the Tribune.
By that time, Tubbo's luck was
gone. When he ran for sheriff in 1950, he was tripped up by an enterprising
reporter. Posing as a newly hired Senate staffer, Sun-Times reporter Ray
Brennan conned the sealed transcripts of Gilbert's appearance before the
Kefauver committee out of its transcription service. Publication of Gilbert's
testimony sank his first, and only, run for public office. After losing by a
landslide, he retired as a cop and spent his remaining years shuttling between
the West Coast and Chicago, minding his real estate investments and securities
portfolio.
Perhaps the proper eulogy for
Gilbert, indeed for the whole shabby era, was something Cook County State's
Attorney Thomas Courtney reportedly observed in 1936, when Gilbert was accused
of conspiring to fix milk prices. Editorial writers and civic-minded citizens
were demanding Gilbert be fired, but Courtney declined to do so, saying:
"If many people feel that
politics has entered into this, then I won't disagree with that
conclusion."
rgrossman@tribpub.com