Old Time Enemies

The character type that learns by experience is the
exact opposite of the gambler as a type.
Walter Benjamin (fragment written in 1931 or 1932)


December 30, 1949. Mr. Julius Jones, aged 52, shot and killed his wife Grace, and wounded her companion John Fitzgerald as the two entered the Jones home at 6248 Harper Avenue, Chicago. The three had been out drinking. Jones left early, and asked Fitzgerald, a disabled WW1 veteran, to escort his wife home from the tavern in the freezing drizzle, offering him $1 for his trouble. Later on when he heard them coming in the door he became disoriented, grabbed his .32 caliber pistol and fired wildly, six shots in all. Jones was held without bail because it looked like murder and because it was not his first scrape.

I killed the best pal a man ever had. This would never have happened if I hadn't been drunk.

Jones, onetime hoodlum, told police he was "in a trance" and thought the two were old time enemies. Jones figured in the news years ago when he testified against three men accused in a bookie kidnapping.

Julius Augustus "Babe" Jones, who killed his wife Grace and injured his friend during the last days of the year 1949 might have done so in a drunken stupor, but he wasn't paranoid. In is terror of being pursued by "old time enemies" he was perfectly lucid. Jones turned state's evidence in the kidnapping case of James Hackett.

The word "bookie" is a demotion from Hackett's customary journalistic moniker "Blue Island gambler", or "Gambling Czar." Assistant State's Attorney Mal Coghlan announced that Jones would enter a guilty plea in exchange for a lenient sentence. That’s not how fellows like Jones were supposed to behave. They never ratted on a friend. They died game. The kidnappings had occurred on May 1, 1931 and May 27, 1933, and Jones had been looking over his shoulder ever since. In 1949 Governor Adlai Stevenson commuted the sentence of Frank Souder, the meanest, most ruthless of the kidnappers, from life in prison to 55 years. He ended up being paroled in 1954 as a reward for having participated in malaria experiments conducted at Stateville.

In 1950, even as the men he turned in were whittling away at their life sentences, Jones "the St. Charles squealer" was headed for the slammer after all. Three to seven years in prison for manslaughter.

It is uninhabited and when we visited it, from its stillness, loneliness, and quiet, we pronounced it a vast vegetable solitude. The ridge, when viewed from a distance, appears standing in an azure mist of vapor, hence the appellation, Blue Island.
from the Chicago Democrat, February 1834

By 1918, at the age of 44, Hackett was a businessman of sufficient stature to have been made a life member of the local Elks, Blue Island Lodge No 1331. There was once a plaque in a park commemorating his generosity to the community. My father looked for it once, and thinks it was removed or let to become overgrown as Hackett's style of patronage went out of style, and turned into something Blue Islanders were ashamed about.