On August 8th, 1899, the Truro Daily News published a letter from Karl in Chicago:
“I arrived at Chicago on Saturday morning, and the scene was changed from “farmers” to “fakirs.” Chicago is alive with pickpockets and fakirs of every description. The city has the reputation of turning out in gross lots, the smoothest and sharpest fakirs in all America. Men, women and children are robbed every morning, noon and night and nothing is thought of it.
For instance, on Saturday evening, a Westerner was robbed of $7000 in cold cash; a Southerner was relieved of $5,500 in the same way, all the money they had in this world; and on that very same evening I was robbed of a brand new pair of suspenders for which I had paid exactly 13 cents, just one short hour before. There we were, the three of us, robbed and left “broke” in a strange town on a Saturday night.”
That Karl considered the loss of his 13 cent suspenders in the same league as someone robbed of thousands of dollars of cash is utterly endearing to me, but also speaks to the value of losing something when you don’t have much –– which was also the case for Karl.
Karl uses the word “fakir,” which would be akin to the word “crook,” and the crime that Karl described in 1899 was an aspect of Chicago’s reputation that persisted for some time. Between 1890 and 1920, local gangs existed in most large American cities. The gangs were linked to ethnic groups — Irish, Italian, Polish, etc., and the criminal activities were drugs, robbery and loansharking. The predominant gang at that time in Chicago was the “Black Hand” extortionist gang. Upon the gang learning that an individual or a merchant had money, threatening notes were sent with images of black hands or daggers, requiring substantial payments in return for not harming their loved ones.
Then, in the 1920’s the landscape of criminal activity in Chicago changed with the prohibition of alcohol. Ironically, prohibition intended to reduce crime and corruption by making the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol illegal. Instead, it initiated the bootlegging business. As it happened, the year Karl was visiting Chicago in 1899, Al Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York. At age 21 Capone moved to Chicago and went on to become the most notorious crime boss in American history.
Capone’s organized crime empire in Chicago included bootlegging, prostitution and gambling, and he was personally responsible for heinous acts of violence. Earning the nicknames: the Big Guy, Big Al, Snorky, Caponi, and Scarface, he was said to have amassed a personal fortune estimated at $100 million before being sent to prison in 1932.
Capone’s imprisonment coincided with the end of prohibition, and crime in Chicago abated. This trend continued due to the massive movement of men onto the battlefields to support the efforts of WWII. As men were generally the perpetrators of crime, the city had its lowest murder rates reported during this time. But when the men returned from war, the rates of crime once again increased.
This time, crime was influenced by access to drugs, first psychedelics of the ‘60s then crack cocaine of the ’80s. Gangs and turf wars again proliferated but this coincided with more capacity in the jails and improvements in the penal system allowing for quicker and longer sentencing. By the year 2000, there were fewer criminals on the street and less criminal activity in Chicago.
The legacy of Al Capone often perpetuates Chicago as a violent city. However, according to all current data reports from the FBI and local police — although there has been a surge of violence attributed to the pandemic — Chicago does not rank high as a violent city in comparison to other places in America.
Karl didn’t really expand on the circumstances of how he was relieved of his newly purchased suspenders — I presume as they were newly purchased they were taken by a local pickpocket. As for me, I walked the downtown streets of Chicago from sunrise to sunset and can attest to not feeling uncomfortable or at risk. However, as with any solo travel, I’m cautious and deliberate in the places that I go and the time of day when I’m exploring to mitigate the potential for being a target of crime. That being said, I also wasn’t carrying around a new pair of suspenders.