![]() “We’d go the cellar and there’d be Chinamen playing dominoes or whatever it was, he knew them by their first names. “He knew every rat hole down there,” Cartwright said. Years later, Levering Cartwright, a Tribune colleague, recalled being sent with Lingle on an assignment to Chinatown. Politicians, prosecutors, judges, cops, and athletes all offered confidences to the 38-year-old reporter, but his network stretched far beyond the well connected. He hobnobbed with Governor Louis Emmerson and collected tips on investments from Arthur Cutten, the millionaire Chicago trader. ![]() His best friend was William Russell, the chief of police, yet Lingle talked regularly with Al Capone and other gangsters, conversations that produced countless scoops for the Tribune. He operated at the center of a network of friends and associates that may stand unmatched for its depth and width in the history of the grown-up city. Jake Lingle, however, was no ordinary reporter. But at least one name made a curious fit with the rich and powerful: Alfred “Jake” Lingle, a $65-a-week police reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune. The banquet that night brought together the city’s leading citizens, a who’s who of Chicago’s financial and political elite. The corrupt and clownish mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson, swaggered around staging ludicrous stunts, when he was around at all. Gangsters virtually ran the town, raking in obscene sums when they weren’t gunning each other down on the street. The stock-market crash seven months before had punctured the economy. The city badly needed an occasion to cheer. On the Monday eight decades ago-June 9, 1930-when Chicago celebrated the opening of the new Board of Trade Building, the board’s officers planned a lavish dedication banquet at the Stevens Hotel, today’s Hilton Chicago. ![]() The principal players in the 80-year-old murder mystery ![]()
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