Jack's Nick Acropolis books Dancing on Graves, Westerfield's Chain and Highway Side are now available in paperback as well as eBooks (free for you Kindle Prime Members) and I'm damned happy to have him guest posting today in the CriMemoir series.
Blood in the Street
"Chicago's Toughest Cop"
By Jack Clark
In one of my earliest memories, I'm playing with
Bernie and Buzzie on their front porch when a policeman comes by and shoos us
into their house. Bernie and Buzzie were brothers who would soon move to the
suburbs, leaving me behind on the far West Side of Chicago. This is my only
memory of them. But that doesn’t mean you should trust it.
Later that day there was a shoot-out in the
alley that ran alongside the porch, the alley behind Madison Street. Two men were
killed by police.
Years later I was watching Arsenic and Old
Lace on late-night TV. I didn't remember seeing the movie before, but
apparently I had. There was the same cop who had chased us off the porch and,
look, he was still wearing that same gray suit.
Memory plays tricks, so I decided to find
out whether the shooting had ever happened. The only solid information I had
was the name Frank Pape. He was a well-known cop whose name I'd regularly come
across in the newspapers. Supposedly Pape had been involved.
Down at the library I found the story on the
front page of the September 24, 1954, Chicago American: "Police Kill 2
Ex-Convicts in Ambush on West Side." Two articles from other newspapers
filled in the details: "Lt. Pape Credo: Get 'Em Alive--or Dead" and
"Gunmen Walk Into 35-Hr. Police Trap."
"To a cop chasing criminals the most
important thing is not to let them get away," the American said. "That's
the philosophy of Lt. Frank Pape, head of the robbery detail--and he doesn't
let many escape.
"The two latest desperados who didn't
get away from Lt. Pape and his men were Chris Kanakes, 35, of 838 Vernon Park
Pl. and Spiros Demitralis, 34, of 3748 Clifton Av.
"They ran into a trap engineered by
Pape and were fatally cut down yesterday by gunfire as they resisted arrest
near an auto agency at 5817 W. Madison St."
For Pape, this was just another day's work.
He told reporters the two men were suspects in a series of robberies, including
holdups at two Rush Street nightspots and a Cicero Avenue business owned by
Cook County assessor John S. Clark.
Pape set the trap after learning that
Kanakes had taken his new car into Mars Oldsmobile for a 1,000-mile checkup.
The Tribune said, "Pape and 10 detectives dressed in old clothing and used
three trucks to conceal themselves at vantage points about the Mars garage.
Pape had a machine gun and the other officers carried revolvers and
shotguns."
When Kanakes and Demitralis walked into the
alley, five policemen approached them from behind. "Kanakes whirled, a .38
caliber revolver in his hand," the Sun-Times said. "He had time to
fire just one last wild shot in the requiem of his career with the gun.
Demitralis never even reached for the .32 pistol in his pocket.
"Both men ran about 20 steps before
bullets cut into them from three directions, a machinegun in the hands of Pape
leading the fire."
Demitralis was struck by 13 bullets while
Kanakes took 9. "They were the seventh and eighth fatalities in gun
battles in which Pape, 45, has participated since he joined the police
department 21 years ago," the Tribune said. "In addition, Pape has
been in 14 shootings in which robbers and hoodlums were wounded. He has never
been wounded."
After the shooting, Pape was in a thoughtful
mood, "his dinner appetite ruined and his evening's planned fun at a ball
game disrupted," according to the American. "Pape said: 'This was
more than a one-man job. It was wonderful the way everyone handled themselves,
especially the men for whom this was a new experience.'" The American
concluded, "Lt. Pape and his men saved the people of Illinois the cost of
two trials."
Pape died in 2000 at 91. Both the Tribune
and the Sun-Times called him "Chicago's toughest cop." According to
the Sun-Times obituary, Pape "sent 300 men to prison, five to the electric
chair and engaged in more than a dozen gun battles, surviving without a scratch
while sending nine suspects to their graves." Pape had never fired his gun
in the line of duty until his partner, Morris Friedman, was gunned down. After
that, he "carved for himself a reputation for fearlessness if not
ruthlessness, sometimes going after criminals with a Thompson submachine gun.
'My attitude was: If you shoot at me, I'm going to kill you if I can,' Pape
said years later. 'Of the nine people I shot, every one of them had a gun and
in every instance they had used it or were about to use it. I wouldn't take
them into custody and I don't give a damn who criticized me for it.'"
One of his critics was police superintendent
O.W. Wilson, the University of California criminology professor brought in to
clean up the department. Pape took a leave of absence to oversee security at
Arlington Park Racetrack and returned to the force in 1965.
When he retired in 1972, Pape was head of
Area 5 Traffic. "Pape's tenure with the department included the end of one
era in policing and the birth of another," the Tribune said. "He was
hired by a department when cops wore fedoras and natty suits and carried tommy
guns on raids. But in 1963, a jury forced him to pay an $8,000 judgement for
violating the civil rights of a murder suspect." In 1994 Pape said he'd
never become a cop today--"the methods had changed so much."
They don't make cops like Frank Pape
anymore. At least I don't think so. There's no way of knowing for sure.
Nowadays the police department refuses to release the names of officers
involved in shootings. For all we know there might be one or two cops with just
as many notches on their guns as Pape. We probably would have heard if they
were using machine guns.
Back in 1954 Pape and his men posed for
photos with their victims dead at their feet. Neighborhood children looked on. I
wasn’t yet five and wasn’t a witness to the shooting or the photo session that
followed. Neither was my brother Vince who was seven. But more than fifty-seven
years later he still remembers coming home from school that day, and the blood
running in the gutter in the alley behind Mars Oldsmobile. "They didn't
just shoot them," he recalls. "They cut them to pieces. Even after
they took the bodies away, there were still big chunks of flesh lying
there."
Keep up with Jack at his website, and if you visit Chicago, for heaven's sake tip your cabbie.
2 comments:
This is great. And I'm with Jed -- Nobody's Angel is one of the best.
I truly enjoyed NOBODY'S ANGEL and wish Jack was writing more.
RJR
Post a Comment