Crooked politicians, gangsters, madams, and cops on the take: To Serve and Collect tells the story of Chicago during its formative years through the history of its legendary police department.

To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal, 1855-1960

History

Lindberg, Richard C.

Americas

Southern Illinois University Press

The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology)

The Gambler King of Clark Street tells the story of a larger-than-life figure who fused Chicago’s criminal underworld with the city’s political and commercial spheres to create an urban machine built on graft, bribery, and intimidation. Lindberg vividly paints the life of the Democratic kingmaker against the wider backdrop of nineteenth-century Chicago crime and politics. McDonald has long been cited in the published work of city historians, members of academia, and the press as the principal architect of a unified criminal enterprise that reached into the corridors of power in Chicago, Cook County, the state of Illinois, and ultimately the Oval Office. The Gambler King of Clark Street is both a major addition to Chicago’s historical literature and a revealing biography of a powerful and troubled man. Illinois State Historical Society Scholarly Award, Certificate of Excellence, 2009 Society of Midland Authors Biography Award, 2009

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

In October 1955, three Chicago boys were found murdered, their bodies naked and dumped in a ditch in Robinson Woods on the city’s Northwest Side. A community and a nation were shocked. In a time when such crimes against children were rare, the public was transfixed as local television stations aired stark footage of the first hours of the investigation. Life and Newsweek magazines published exclusive stories the following week. When Kenneth Hansen was convicted and sentenced for the murders, the case was considered solved—until questions were raised about Hansen’s presumed guilt.Shattered Sense of Innocence: The 1955 Murders of Three Chicago Children tells the gripping story of the three murdered boys—thirteen-year-old John Schuessler, his eleven-year-old brother, Anton, and thirteen-year-old Bobby Peterson—and the quest to find and bring to justice their killer. Authors Richard C. Lindberg and Gloria Jean Sykes recount the bungled 1955 police investigation, the failures of multiple law enforcement agencies, and the subsequent convictions of Kenneth Hansen, in 1995 and 2002, and present new information concerning two suspects overlooked by police for five decades. The authors deftly examine all sides of this tragic story, drawing on exclusive interviews with law enforcement agents, with horse trainers affiliated with the so-called horse mafia, and with the man convicted of the murders, Kenneth Hansen. This intensely intimate account offers a rare glimpse into one community and examines how these atrocious crimes altered public perceptions nationwide. Shattered Sense of Innocence, which is also a story of political controversy, a determined federal agent’s quest for justice, and a community’s loss of innocence, includes fifty illustrations.

Shattered Sense of Innocence: The 1955 Murders of Three Chicago Children (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology)

Sykes, Gloria Jean

<div>Hidden gems from Chicago's past Tales of Forgotten Chicago contains twenty-one fascinating, little-known stories about a great city and its people. Richard C. Lindberg has dug deeply to reveal lost historical events and hidden gems from Chicago's past. &nbsp; Spanning the Civil War through the 1960s, the volume showcases forgotten crimes, punishments, and consequences: poisoned soup that nearly killed three hundred leading citizens, politicians, and business and religious leaders; a woman in showbiz and her street-thug husband whose checkered lives inspired a 1955 James Cagney movie; and the first police woman in Chicago, hired as a result of the senseless killing of a young factory girl in a racially tinged case of the 1880s. Also included are tales of industry and invention, such as America's first automobile race, the haunting of a wealthy Gilded Age manufacturer's mansion, and the identity of the telephone's rightful inventor. Chapters on the history of early city landmarks spotlight the fight to save Lakefront Park and how "Lucky" Charlie Weeghman's north side baseball park became Wrigley Field. Other chapters explore civic, cultural, and political happenings: the great Railroad Fairs of 1948 and 1949; Richard J. Daley's revival of the St. Patrick's Day parade; political disrupter Lar "America First" Daly; and the founding of the Special Olympics in Chicago by Anne Burke and others. Finally, some are just wonderful tales, such asa&nbsp; touching story about the sinking of Chicago's beloved Christmas tree ship. Engrossing and imaginative, this collection opens new windows into the past of the Windy City. <div>&nbsp;</div> </div>

Tales of Forgotten Chicago

Gangland Chicago: Criminality and Lawlessness in the Windy City

This engrossing tale of gangs and organized criminality begins in the frontier saloons situated in the marshy flats of Chicago, the future world class city of Mid-continent. Gangland Chicago recounts the era of parlor gambling, commercialized vice districts continuing through the bloody Prohibition bootlegging wars; failed reform movements; the rise of post-World War II juvenile criminal gangs and the saga of the Blackstone Rangers in a chaotic, racially divided city. , Gang violence and street crime is endemic in contemporary Chicago. There is much more to the saga of crime, politics, and armed violence than Al Capone and John Dillinger. Gangland Chicago explores the changing patterns of criminal behavior, politics, gangs, youth crime and the failures of reform in its historic totality. Richard Lindberg takes the reader on a journey through decades of a troubled past to delve deep into the evolution of street gangs and organized violence endemic in Chicago. Small ethnic gangs organized in ethnic slum districts of the city expanded into the well-known organized crime syndicates of Chicago’s history. Gangland Chicago is full of stories of unchecked violence, lawlessness, and mayhem. Unlike other standard true crime accounts focused exclusively on the Prohibition era, this historical look-back probes the obscure and forgotten dark corners of city crime history. Lindberg details how both “organized” and “dis-organized” street gangs have paralyzed city neighborhoods and transformed the crimes of the Windy City from street thuggery and common ruffians protected and nurtured by politicians into a protected class is gripping.  Gangland Chicago is a revealing look at the Chicago underworld of yesterday and today. This comprehensive volume is sure to entertain and inform any reader interested in the evolution of organized crime and gangs in America’s most representative city of the American Heartland.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chicago in the 1920s: Clark Street was the city’s last Swedetown, a narrow corridor of weather-beaten storefronts, coal yards, and taverns running along the north side of the city and the locus of Swedish community life in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. It represented a way station for a generation of working-class immigrants escaping the hardships of the old country for the promise of a brighter new day in a halfway house of sorts, perched between the old and new lands. For Richard C. Lindberg, whose Swedish immigrant parents and grandparents settled there, it was also the staging ground for an intensely personal, multigenerational, coming-of-age drama based on the struggles of two disparate families—their dreams and their depravities, their victories and their failures.
Whiskey Breakfast is Lindberg’s captivating tale of life as a first-generation baby-boomer Swedish American, caught between the customs of a land he had never been to and the desire to conform and fit into a troubled existence, tragically scarred by alcoholism, divorce, and peer abuse. But it is also a powerful and intimate portrait of his immigrant ancestors, and especially of his father, Oscar—a contractor and master builder who helped develop Chicago’s post–World War II suburbs. A paradoxical man, known to some as a socialist, an anarchist, and a serious drinker, Oscar would carry with him to the grave a sixty-two-year-old family secret, a secret that for Lindberg lies at the very heart of the great Swedish unrest that drove his father and countless other men and women out of Sweden and onward to America.
Masterfully blending autobiography with immigrant history, Whiskey Breakfast surrounds Lindberg’s family story with Swedish cultural history and politics, as well as remarkable Chicago history and how Clark Street and Swedetown became, and in many ways remain, a center of Swedish immigrants’ social and cultural life. Far from a eulogy for an idealized past, Lindberg has crafted a moving and sobering memoir of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with his father and himself, his immigrant heritage, and his native home.

Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life

Univ. of Minnesota Press

" Stealing First in a Two-Team Town is a unique and moving account of the Chicago White Sox from the earliest days of the teams's founding in 1900 by the enigmatic Charles Comiskey through the triumphant 1990s. A great read for White Sox fans and baseball lovers alike.

Stealing First in a Two-Team Town: The White Sox from Comiskey to Reinsdorf

Sports & Outdoors

Baseball

Sagamore Pub Llc

A book as expansive as the Windy City itself provides all the essential information for the diehard White Sox fan.

Total White Sox: The Definitive Encyclopedia of the World Champion Franchise

Triumph Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lindberg, Richard C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lindberg, Richard C.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lindberg, Richard C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal, 1855-1960

The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology)

Shattered Sense of Innocence: The 1955 Murders of Three Chicago Children (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology)

The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago's Democratic Machine (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology)

Tales of Forgotten Chicago

Gangland Chicago: Criminality and Lawlessness in the Windy City

Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life

Stealing First in a Two-Team Town: The White Sox from Comiskey to Reinsdorf

Gangland Chicago: Criminality and Lawlessness in the Windy City

Total White Sox: The Definitive Encyclopedia of the World Champion Franchise