Illinois

Illinois history exceeds the capacity of the Sears Catalog for categorization and the World’s Fair for spectacle. And no matter what the self-appointed tour guide at the local diner might say, the heritage of the land of Lincoln doesn’t end with Capone’s demise. Like the Chicago Loop, the Prairie State’s past seems to defy straightforward chronology—Cahokia offered a version of urban sprawl more than a thousand years before the first Windy City skyscraper. From Park Forest to Cave-in-Rock, scan our shelf of Illinois history books with the unflagging enthusiasm of a Wrigley Field hot dog vendor. [View all Illinois books]
10 products
Gangsters and Organized Crime in Jewish Chicago
Gangsters and Organized Crime in Jewish Chicago
$21.99
The Boys in Chicago Heights: The Forgotten Crew of the Chicago Outfit
The Boys in Chicago Heights: The Forgotten Crew of the Chicago Outfit
$21.99
Chicago's First Crime King
Chicago's First Crime King
$21.99 $11.00 Save 50%
The Chicago Cub Shot For Love
The Chicago Cub Shot For Love
$21.99
Cover image for St. Louis Gambling Kingpins, isbn: 9781467156226
St. Louis Gambling Kingpins
$24.99
Godfathers of Chicago's Chinatown
Godfathers of Chicago's Chinatown
$23.99
Silas Jayne:
Silas Jayne:
$21.99
The Ruthless Northlake Bank Robbers: A 1967 Shooting Spree that Stunned the Region
The Ruthless Northlake Bank Robbers: A 1967 Shooting Spree that Stunned the Region
$21.99
Touhy vs. Capone
Touhy vs. Capone
$21.99
The 1926 Orland Park Murder Mystery
The 1926 Orland Park Murder Mystery
$23.99

Gangsters and Organized Crime in Jewish Chicago

9781626191938

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Al Capone. The Untouchables. The Valentine's Day massacre. You may think you know everything about the Roaring Twenties in the Windy City, but in the early twentieth century, the harsh environment of the Maxwell Street ghetto produced a proliferation of Jewish gangsters involved in everything from labor racketeering to white slavery. Their illegal activity offended their own community's value system and sparked rifts between Reform and Orthodox Jews. It also ignited tensions between city officials and Jewish leaders, indelibly marked the gentile population's perception of Chicago's Jews and shaped the city's West Side for years to come.
Gangsters and Organized Crime in Jewish Chicago

The Boys in Chicago Heights: The Forgotten Crew of the Chicago Outfit

9781609497330

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Chicago Heights was long the seat of one of the major street crews of the Chicago Outfit, but its importance has often been overlooked and misunderstood.


The crew's origins predate Prohibition, when Chicago Heights was a developing manufacturing center with a large Italian immigrant population. Its earliest bosses struggled for control until a violent gang war left the crew solidified under the auspices of Al Capone. For the remainder of the twentieth century, the boys from Chicago Heights generated large streams of revenue for the Outfit through its vast gambling enterprises, union infiltration and stolen auto rackets. For the first time, the history of the Chicago Heights street crew is traced from its inception through its last known boss.

The Boys in Chicago Heights: The Forgotten Crew of the Chicago Outfit

Chicago's First Crime King

9781467140553

$21.99 $11.00 Save 50%
Michael Cassius McDonald arrived in Chicago as a teenage scam artist who quickly sketched a blueprint for running the city through its criminal underworld. Chicago's original mob boss, he procured presidential pardons, stuffed mayoral ballot boxes and operated the town's plushest gambling parlor. But he was also a philanthropist who befriended Clarence Darrow, employed Theodore Dreiser, promoted the World's Fair and funded the Lake Street L. His scandalous private life mirrored the tumult of his career, with more than one marriage mired in a love triangle and a murder trial. Kelly Pucci charts the rise of Chicago's first kingpin.
Chicago's First Crime King

The Chicago Cub Shot For Love

9781467148481

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In the summer of 1932, with the Cubs in the thick of the pennant race, Billy Jurges broke off his relationship with Violet Popovich to focus on baseball. The famously beautiful showgirl took it poorly, marching into his hotel room with a revolver in her purse. Both were wounded in the ensuing struggle, but Jurges refused to press charges. Even without their star shortstop, Chicago made it to the World Series, only to be on the wrong end of Babe Ruth's legendary Called Shot. Using hundreds of original sources, Jack Bales profiles the lives of the ill-fated couple and traces the ripple effects of the shooting on the Cubs' tumultuous season.
The Chicago Cub Shot For Love

St. Louis Gambling Kingpins

9781467156226

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A history of betting on the East Side.

Making it as a professional gambler in the first part of the twentieth century was a long shot, but wagering on the wide open scene of East St. Louis could help even the odds. Folks who were feeling lucky enough might grab a copy of Louis Cella's racing form, or get the inside scoop from turf men like Barney Schreiber. Students of the art of bookmaking had plentiful mentors in local legends like Adam "Mulepole" Fritz. But even then, a hot streak could attract the attention of a representative of the Chicago Outfit such as Frank "Buster" Wortman. The nephew of Vic and Jim Doyle, who built the Ringside Casino into the Midwest's largest casino, author James Doyle connects the dice rolls of bygone St. Louis Kingpins to high stakes players in New York and New Orleans.

Cover image for St. Louis Gambling Kingpins, isbn: 9781467156226

Godfathers of Chicago's Chinatown

9781467153942

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Discover the untold story of the Windy City's Ghost Shadows. Even in a town notorious for gangsters like Al Capone, much of Chicago's lawless lore has remained uncharted. Chicago's Chinatown, in particular, was home to a vast criminal enterprise, strictly bound by old country rituals, rules and traditions. Few know of Moy Dong Chew, aka "Opium Dong," one of Chinatown's original godfathers, much less Frank Moy, his fedora-wearing predecessor. While incidents like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre dominated newspaper headlines, the Tong Wars were being waged in the shadows. Author Harrison Fillmore relates the long and sordid history of Chinatown's underbelly from the early 1880s to the late 1980s when a Federal Indictment essentially ended organized crime's grip on their good citizens
Godfathers of Chicago's Chinatown

Silas Jayne:

9781596299689

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His name might not have the same notoriety that belonged to Al Capone or John Wayne Gacy, but Silas Jayne's life carved a similarly brutal arc through the Windy City's history. Even the mob was reluctant to compete with a man who burned his own horses alive for insurance money and ordered the assassination of his own brother in the same unhesitating fashion that he reportedly axed a flock of geese when he was six. Protected by bribery and intimidation, Jayne preyed on the innocence of the girls who took riding lessons in his stables and remained perversely untouched in the background of infamous Chicago crimes like the Schuessler-Peterson murders and the disappearance of candy heiress Helen Brach.
Silas Jayne:

The Ruthless Northlake Bank Robbers: A 1967 Shooting Spree that Stunned the Region

9781467119382

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Automatic gunfire hammered police arriving at Northlake Bank in response to a silent alarm on the morning of October 27, 1967. The shootout killed two officers and injured two others. One of the robbers lay wounded as the other two fled in a getaway car. The ensuing manhunt tore across state lines and thrust the quiet Illinois community into a national debate over rehabilitated prisoners--two of the men were fresh out of jail for bank robbery. Local author Edgar Gamboa Navar traces this violent midwestern crime saga from the initial grocery store holdup in Ohio before the bank job to the capture of the murderous gang in Indiana, as well as the conviction and imprisonment.
The Ruthless Northlake Bank Robbers: A 1967 Shooting Spree that Stunned the Region

Touhy vs. Capone

9781625858931

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When beat cop Don Herion and his partner responded to shots fired on December 16, 1959, they didn't know that they had heard the final, fatal salvo in one of the most contorted conflicts in the history of organized crime. A canny bootlegger, Roger Touhy had survived a gang war with Al Capone, false imprisonment for a faked kidnapping, a prison break and recapture. His story dragged in all the notorious men of his day: Frank Nitti, John "Jake the Barber" Factor, Mayor Cermak, Melvin Purvis, J. Edgar Hoover, Baby Face Nelson, Dan "Tubbo" Gilbert, FDR and JFK. As Touhy's life was ending on his sister's front porch, Herion's quest to unravel the tangle of events that led to his assassination had just begun.
Touhy vs. Capone

The 1926 Orland Park Murder Mystery

9781467139915

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On the morning of April 14, 1926, the Inland Steel payroll delivery was hijacked in Indiana Harbor. Later that afternoon, Will County deputy sheriff and Mokena resident Walter Fisher died in a hail of gunfire just outside Orland Park. That night, the bullet-riddled body of Santo Calabrese turned up on a Broadview road. The exact sequence of events remains uncertain, but a jury was able to trace enough of the day's violent trajectory to send Daniel Hesly on the path to Alcatraz. Matthew Galik leaps into a drama of high-speed pursuit and mistaken identity that shocked the jaded sensibilities of Prohibition-era Chicago and plunged the town of Mokena into mourning.

The 1926 Orland Park Murder Mystery