Sizing up the Outfit

This chapter considers the state of Jewish Chicagoan crime during the 1940s, when the Syndicate was occasionally known as the “Outfit.” This was a period when the relationship between organized crime and Chicago politics was reshaped for the rest of the twentieth century. It marked a détente in Chicago politics that eventually resulted in the change from the confederated system of organized crime to the more corporate structure. Here, a machine was assembled with deep enough roots in labor and ethnic coalitions that it did not need the day-to-day violence of previous gangsters. That meant politicians did not have to depend upon gangsters so directly, and it marked, for the most part, the end of the gangster/politician hybrid. Similarly, the Syndicate’s departure from that relationship allowed it to assume a lower profile, to become a quiet corporation supplanting the necessarily noisier confederation model. It meant a transformation from the world in which Zuckerman had thrived into the one that fostered Patrick.

Contemporary Chicago Politics

What was once a descriptor—Chicago as the last major American city government governed by a political machine—has become a trope, an all-purpose means of explaining public policy aims, achievements, and failures. The nearer-to-reality narrative that captures the essence of Chicago public policy trends in the last generation is neoliberalism. During the long tenure of Mayor Richard M. Daley Chicago’s demolition of high-rise public housing developments, public school restructuring, and long-term leasing of public assets both tracked broader neoliberal policy trends, and in some cases, represented the leading edge of such innovations. Nevertheless, many journalists and some scholars insist on interpreting Chicago politics and policy through the lens of personal corruption and partisan cronyism presumed to be the fundamental attributes of ward-based Democratic Party politics