When Corruption was King

"When Corruption Was King: How I helped the mob rule Chicago, then brought the outfit down" is a memoir, written by Robert Cooley, the Chicago Outfit’s “Mechanic”—a fixer of court cases. During the 1970s and ’80s, Cooley has confessed to bribing judges, court clerks, and police to keep his Mob clients—hit men, bookmakers, racketeers, and political bosses— out of jail. Paid handsomely for his services, he lived fast and enjoyed the protection of the men he served.

He had enough money to blow on all the vices the Windy City could offer, and enough standing among mobsters to know he would never be caught. Yet, through the 1990s, Cooley became the star witness in a series of trials that took down the Chicago Outfit, arguably the most powerful organization in the history of American crime.

Plot introduction

The book tells the story of a Mob lawyer turned informant with a million-dollar contract on his head. Cooley states at one point that he has clanged back and forth between sin and sainthood like a church bell clapper. From his turbulent youth to his stint on Chicago’s police force, to law school, and then on to the inner sanctum of Chicago’s leading mobsters and corrupt political officials. With wild abandon he chased crooked acquittals for the likes of Pat Marcy, an Al Capone protégé, who had become the political boss of Chicago's First Ward and, to all intents and purposes, a trusted member and high ranking member of the Outfit.

He would also become a close associate of ruthless Mafia Capo and rising star Marco D’Amico as well as notorious enforcer Harry Aleman. He dined with the Outfit's bosses and shared a “last supper” with Tony Spilotro before his gangland execution. Cooley helped Marcy and the Outfit to control the courts, the cops, and the politicians. Then, in a shocking act of conscience, he walked into the office of the U.S. Organized Crime Strike Force and, without a pending conviction or a hit man on his tail, agreed to wear a wire on the same Mafia overlords who had made him a player.

Major themes

Cooley’s tapes and testimony would be at the center of nine landmark trials that together exposed and then broke the Mob’s unprecedented stranglehold on Chicago’s government and court system. With stunning detail and brutal honesty, Cooley tells the personal story behind the federal government’s most successful Mafia investigation.