Murder of city official unsolved after 56 years
Shooting of 24th Ward’s first black alderman was big news in 1963
Initially Ella Lewis wasn’t overly worried when she woke up in the middle of the night to find her husband wasn’t home, two days after being re-elected alderman of Chicago’s 24th Ward.
She told a Tribune reporter that “his shoes, which he always left outside the door of his bedroom, were not in the usual place.”
Still, she knew that Ben Lewis delighted in the sociable side of politics: pressing the flesh, making the rounds.
The 24th Ward’s first black alderman liked being known as the “Big Cat” and the “Duke of Dixieland.” And why shouldn’t he enjoy his West Side celebrity? Along the way, Lewis had some slim pickings. He had to borrow money to buy a suit for his first swearing-in. That was four years before Ella Lewis got up on the morning of Feb. 28, 1963, and began calling people who might know where Ben was.
Then she got a call from the police asking her to come to the 24th Ward Democratic Organization’s headquarters at 3604-06 W. Roosevelt Road. A janitor had found Lewis’ body on the floor. He’d been handcuffed, and there were three bullet holes in the base of his skull. His fingers were gripping a filtered cigarette, its ash trailed along the floor.
Even for a city known for mobstyle killings, Lewis’ murder was big news in Chicago and beyond. Noting he’d won re-election by a decisive 12,189 votes to his challenger’s 888 votes, Time magazine wrote: “It almost seemed as though Ben Lewis had not an enemy in the world. But he did.”
Yet though the cops quickly identified myriad suspects, Lewis’ murder remains unsolved to this very day.
Ald. Benjamin Adamowski, the Republican candidate for mayor in 1963, thought the Democratic machine didn’t want the crime solved. Running against Mayor Richard J. Daley, Adamowski offered a City Council resolution calling for an investigation. When it was tabled, he asked why during a radio interview.
“Is it because they want to hide the fact that the policy racket has been operating wide open in the 24th Ward?” Adamowski charged. Policy was an illegal predecessor of the Illinois Lottery.
A stung Daley ordered the state’s attorney’s chief investigator to the probe. The investigation quickly determined one thing: Lewis wasn’t killed during a robbery.
He was found wearing a diamond ring and gold watch. There was cash in his pockets, and his wallet hadn’t been taken.
Lewis drove a luxury car and took golfing trips to Mexico. He’d bet big money on a single stroke, the Tribune reported. His lifestyle dwarfed an alderman’s $8,000 salary.
An autopsy found 27 milligrams of alcohol in his stomach. That was the equivalent of one or two shots of whiskey, which was a puzzler for a man who was described as a teetotaler. The Tribune reported: “Police have been unable to find any person who had seen him take a drink, even in celebration of election victories.”
The time of death suggested that Lewis and his murderer could have had a final conversation. Perhaps there was some kind of failed negotiations. As the Tribune put it: “Lewis may have shared his first and last drink with his killer.”
His wife told a Tribune reporter that her husband was extremely nervous just weeks before his murder. “When the doorbell rang, he insisted on answering it,” Ella Lewis said, recalling him warning: “You better hope that nothing happens to me!”
Looking for who might have made Ben Lewis jumpy, the police triaged the candidates into distinct lists: politicians, gangsters, girlfriends, and disgruntled customers of his insurance and real estate agencies.
“He led a cataloged life,” Lt. John Killackey of the homicide detail explained to a Tribune reporter.
The 24th Ward had long been a vote-rich fiefdom of Jewish politicians. President Franklin D. Roosevelt saluted it as “the greatest Democratic ward in the nation.”
But after World War II, blacks moved into the West Side — Lewis among them — even as Jews continued to dominate the ward organization and the patronage jobs that went with it.
Lewis was the ward’s first black precinct captain. In 1961 when he became committeeman while also serving as alderman, 37 of the 58 precinct captains were still whites who no longer lived in the neighborhood. The same was true of Erwin “Izzy” Horowitz, the ward’s longtime power broker.
Lewis was replacing white patronage job-holders with blacks, which ruffled lots of feathers. Other blacks thought he was moving too slowly. Detectives asked the ward organization for a list of fired patronage workers and payrollers like “court bailiffs, or deputy sheriffs who would have access to firearms and handcuffs.”
It was widely assumed that policy and other gambling operations in the 24th Ward were dependent on an alliance of hoodlums with cops and politicians on the take.
Accordingly, as the Tribune reported: “Police said they wish to question Lenny Patrick, gambling boss of the 24th, 49th, and 50th wards; Charles (Chuck) English, a juke box racketeer who controls portions of gambling in the 24th and neighboring 28th wards; and English’s brother Sam, a 270-pound labor racketeer.”
Then the cops took the investigation down the syndicate’s chain of command to Tommy “Shakey Tom” Anderson and Jimmy “Kid Riviera” Williams. They were allegedly the black deputies of Patrick, English and other white gambling bosses.
Lewis made advances on Anderson’s wife, and Williams, a 325-pound former boxer, had threatened to kill the alderman presumably on Anderson’s behalf, according to Eugene Belton, a cop close to Lewis.
Belton appointed himself a peacemaker and met Lewis and Williams at a West Side restaurant. “We had hard rolls and coffee,” Belton recalled to the investigators. “I told both of them: ’You are grown men, there’s no sense in you two arguing over a woman.’”
Lewis was indeed a womanizer, as one investigator later recalled. “That guy had a broad for every night of the week,” said Frank Flanagan, who headed the homicide detail in 1963.
Six women admitted to having affairs with Lewis, who paid their rent, bought them clothes and gave them money. Figuring his wife couldn’t have liked that, the cops brought Ella Lewis in for questioning.
She said Ben Lewis “shut me out of his life,” the Tribune reported. Asked if she knew of any business transactions that could have led to his murder, she replied: “No.”
The cops, however, had no trouble identifying several. There were complaints that Lewis was slow to pay off insurance claims. Premiums he’d collected didn’t appear on his ledger books. He had stiffed property owners of rents his management firm collected from tenants.
“There is no doubt that Lewis’ back was against the wall financially,” a police official told the Tribune.
One by one, lie detector tests were administered to potential suspects: the janitor who found Lewis’ body; the janitor’s helper; customers with a beef about his business practices; rebel precinct captains; political rivals; fired patronage workers; disappointed job-seekers; policy-wheel operators; mobsters; the gangster’s wife he’d supposedly made a pass at; his girlfriends; his ex-wife; and his wife.
The polygraph operators said all were telling the truth when asked if they had anything to do with Lewis’ murder or knew who the killer was.
On the first anniversary of the crime, a Tribune headline proclaimed: “Alderman’s Murder Is Still Mystery.”
Ever since, it’s remained an intriguing jigsaw puzzle — its missing pieces hidden amid the brownstones, two-flats, tenements and rubble-filled vacant lots where Lewis’ political career began and ended.
It’s like Lewis said when asked his position on a touchy issue: “I stand right at Kedzie and Roosevelt in my ward.”