JOHN CORRY: Family Resemblances
Craughwell, Thomas J.
immoral things in his life, but he longed to be good," shewrites,addingthat"forallhisabusesofoffice,[he] accepted and believed in democracy"), and her accounts of the trends and factors that...
...Tyrrell and his colleagues seriously undermined Midwestern counterfeiting when they broke up a big criminalringin1875;butanunintendedconsequence ofthiswasthegrave-robberyplot.BenjaminBoyd,one of the men they put in jail, was highly regarded by other counterfeiters for the excellence of his engravings, and his absence put a dent in their earnings...
...Fearful of another grave-robbery attempt, its members secretly reburied Lincoln's coffin in the basement of the tomb...
...Genuine bills were called rhino, nails, putty, or spon-dulics...
...Instead we begin with his birth--1949 or the Year One, take your pick--in what O'Reilly the proud prole insists was working-class Levittown, Long Island, and what his enemies insist was a higher class suburb, and immediately find ourselves reading through a wrangle aboutzipcodesandpresentedwithaphotocopyofthe deedtothefamilyhousewithLevittownclearlyvisible on it...
...I bought second-hand leg pads, you know, leg pads that had been around since Gump Worsley's day...
...Washburn's great inspiration was to make the Secret Service truly secret...
...Serious miscreants do not enlist police informers to help them...
...And yes, the editor in chief of the magazine you nowholdinyourhandsisalsonamedTyrrell.PatrickD...
...agents weretoldtokeeptheirnames out of the papers and operate inthedark...
...presidents...
...Tyrrellwashisgreat-greatgrandfather,andanoldpictureinStealingLincoln'sBodysuggestsastrongfamily resemblance...
...I mean, it was absurd...
...But counterfeiters adjusted and thrived, and on theeveoftheCivilWarnearly4,000kindsofcounterfeit bills--or queer or coney--were in circulation...
...Aldermen "Hinky Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse John" Coughlin threw parties to which the owners of brothels, saloons, and gambling parlors hadtobuyblocksoftickets...
...The B O O K SI NR E V I E W 6 8 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R A P R I L 2 0 0 7The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly by Marvin Kitman (ST...
...I was so much better than what they had, you know, it was ridiculous...
...And in no time at all, the colonists began counterfeiting, too...
...When the English colonists in Rhode Island and the Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam agreed to adopt Indian wampumaslegaltender,theAlgonquinsbeganpassing off ersatz wampum to the colonists and keeping the good stuff for themselves...
...Family Resemblances ACTUALLY THE GRAVE ROBBERS were never up to the job, and their caper was doomed from the start...
...The Mouth of O'Reilly Past dominates these early rambling interviews, his unselective ego taking asmuchpleasureinbraggingaboutafightinthehallway as it does in bragging about demolishing a famous politician on TV...
...B O O K SI NR E V I E W A P R I L 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 6 7 JohnCorryisasenioreditorof TheAmericanSpectator...
...He went out for everything, always choosing, says Kitman, the position that would make him the center of attention: pitcher, quarterback, goalie...
...When one of the detectives accidentally discharged his revolver, however, the two would-be grave robbers fled on foot...
...The boast is thething;allboastsareequal...
...Indeed, America's 16th president did not find his final resting place until 1901, when his coffin was enclosed in a steel cage, lowered into a vault, and covered with cement...
...When they all showed upatLincoln'stomb,Tyrrellandotherdetectiveswere waiting...
...This book does not start getting good until Chapter Sixteen, but there was no one to advise me of this so I foolishlyreadthefirstfifteenchaptersfirstandhavetheCTScan results to prove it.I should have read the book backwards but I didn't and now I am paying for the author's compulsive fidelity to chronology at all costs...
...The same class-based picayune contention springsupoverhisschool:WasitaneliteCatholicacademyornot?Tohelpusgettothebottomofthiswehear allaboutthenuns,thepriests,thelibrary,thegrounds, the athletic field, scholarly priorities, and academic philosophy, all detailed in verbatim interviews of anyonewhoeversaworheardoftheplace...
...In 1869, Wood was succeeded as Secret Service chief by Hiram C. Whitely, and in 1874 honest Elmer Washburn, the former, and highly unpopular, police chief in Chicago, succeeded Whitely...
...What he should havedoneiswrittenitbackwards,kickingoffwiththe MouthofO'ReillyPresent,thengoneintoaflashback on the Mouth of O'Reilly Past, and last, summed up his predictions in a final chapter called the Mouth of O'Reilly Yet to Come...
...Counterfeiting, it seems, is as American as Mom's apple pie...
...The dodgy Wood, who wouldbecomethefirstchiefoftheSecretService,then hiredthreeassistants:aChicagojailbird,aNewJersey counterfeiter,andasuspectedfive-timemurderer...
...Then Boyd could get back to thelucrativebusinessofengraving...
...Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell (BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 234 PAGES, $24.95) Reviewed by John Corry WE ARE NOW AT THE PART of Stealing Lincoln's Body where susceptible readers may think they hear music: specifically, the evocative tinklingragtimeofScottJoplin's"TheEntertainer,"as orchestrated for the Paul Newman-Robert Redford movie The Sting...
...Washburn also wanted hisagentstoforgothecowboy tactics that Wood and, to a lesser extent, Whitely, had condoned...
...They were not very good at strategicplanning,either.BigJim,whostayedhomeon thenightinquestion,entrustedtheactualoperationto two pals, and they, in turn, enlisted not one, but two, police informers as assistants...
...They limped back to their old Chicagohangoutandimmediatelywerearrested...
...In 1682, William Penn complained that his "holy experiment" in Pennsylvania was failing...
...Washburn insisted onprofessionalstandards,and as Craughwell writes, Dublinborn Patrick D. Tyrrell, now a family man in Chicago, was justthekindofagenthewanted.Tyrrellwas"honest,respectable,incorruptible,"and hekeptwrittenrecords...
...Even so, courts tended to treat counterfeiters leniently, although on occasion real annoyance set in: In1720,onecounterfeiterwashangedinPhiladelphia, and in Newport, Rhode Island, another had his ears loppedoff...
...MARTIN'S PRESS, 318 PAGES, $25.95) Reviewed by Florence King Florence King's collections include The Florence King Reader,STET, Damnit!:TheMisanthrope'sCorner,1991 to2002,and,mostrecently,DejaReviews:FlorenceKing AllOverAgain...
...It seemed to be no more than a symbolic, patriotic-fraternal order, but it undertook a serious task...
...And everybody was like...
...Hungry Joe" Lewis conned Oscar Wilde...
...Chapter and Verve ISPEAK TO YOU FROM MY BED OF PAIN...
...But the aborted grave robbery had an aftermath...
...Thomas J. Craughwell has given us a richly detailed, highly entertaining, andbroadsliceofourhistory...
...immoral things in his life, but he longed to be good," shewrites,addingthat"forallhisabusesofoffice,[he] accepted and believed in democracy"), and her accounts of the trends and factors that made Nixon's trip possible, such as the growing tension in SinoSoviet relations after 1949 and Mao's grudging recognition of the catastrophes wrought by his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, are rendered brisklyandauthoritatively.NixonandMaoisabsorbing and enlightening, learned and lively, a detailed and comprehensive--yet highly readable--book that is sure to become the standard single-volume reference work on the American opening to China and its profound impact on modern geopolitics...
...Unconventional certainly, but also effective: Within a year Wood and his roughnecks had seized more than 200 counterfeiters and confiscated an enormous amount of queer...
...Author Craughwell gives us a collectionofconmen,bunkoartists,andcrookedpols,most of them Chicago Irish...
...Consequently one Big Jim Kennally devised an improbable plan...
...and then they were going for fieldgoals.Theholder,youknow,theguy,hetakesthe snap, intentionally turned the laces in to me because he didn't like me, didn't want me on the team...
...Andsoon;BigJimKennallyandhiscrew,though, were never in that league...
...He would get underlings to steal Lincoln's body from its tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and keep it in hiding until the governor of Illinois released Boyd from jail...
...Clearly something had to be done, and so Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase authorized WilliamWood,aherooftheMexican-AmericanWar,toput counterfeiters out of business...
...you know...
...This would have won O'Reilly's approval in view of his famous campaign to rescue Christmas, and put some space between the wheat and the chaff that we are asked to digest...
...But Stealing Lincoln's Body is asmuchaboutotherthings--theSecretService,counterfeiters, embalming practices, ethnic Chicago, even the Pullman Strike of 1894--as it is about bungling grave robbers and where they went wrong...
...half the coinage there was fake...
...For example, "Red Jimmy" FitzgeraldswindledCharlesFrancisAdams,adescendant of two U.S...
...When recalling his school days he boasts about sports...
...Boom...
...I remember the punter...
...I made the varsity hockey team," he sighs, but hisworking-classfamilyhadnomoneyforequipment so"Ihadmymothersewapadthatcoveredmyarm...
...By 1864, about half the bills in the North were fake...
...Some upstanding citizens in Springfield, appalled by the notion that Abraham Lincoln's burial site might once again be desecrated, formed the Lincoln Guard of Honor...
Vol. 40 • April 2007 • No. 3
