Cops and / or Robbers

When shrimpy Dick Morrison, bush-league burglar, was dressed out of Chicago's House of Correction in the fall of 1957 after serving four months on a petty larceny conviction, he hung up his flashlight, he says, and pretty much set about trying to be a good boy. He found honest work with an oil company by day and a pizzeria by night and settled down to thoughts of marriage and meeting pay ments for the new furniture in his North Side apartment.

Then Morrison fell in with a bad crowd. He accepted a commission to steal a set of golf clubs, and soon he was the advance man for a surprisingly successful bunch of burglars. The others eagerly planned the thefts, posted lookouts and lugged out the lion's share of the loot. It worked remarkably well, and it should have. Morrison's accomplices were ten Chicago cops.

A Long Song. One day last August, Morrison was picked up for burglary, and the cops who locked him up were not in his tidy plan of loot and split. Faced with a stiff sentence, he decided to sing. Last week the good Chicago cops were rounding up the bad ones ; all over town charges of police crime bubbled up. In the burgeoning scandal, 17 policemen were arrested on criminal charges, and upwards of 130 (of a police force of 11,200) were haled into special offices in Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel to take lie-detector tests. The total cop-hauled loot was estimated at more than $100,000.

In a detailed 77-page statement to Republican State's Attorney Benjamin Adamowski, Burglar Morrison told of a year spent stealing with the cops of the Summerdale District. Morrison filched antifreeze for his colleagues in the winter, outboard motors in the spring, television sets as the World Series rolled around. Generally, Morrison kept what cash he could find, and the stolen merchandise went to the cops, who arranged to have it hauled away. "They wouldn't let me get by over a week," he complained in his statement, "without asking me to give them a night of my services. As time went on, things started getting out of hand."

Shoes & a Boot. One night, Morrison recalls, the objective was a shoe store. "Since the 40th District [the cops' own] was guarding it, it was very easy for all the boys to help themselves . . . We all started loading tons of these shoes. We filled up 30 or 40 big cartons with shoes. We were filling the squad car up and the trunk with shoes, all different sizes, for all their relatives and themselves. They're all wearing these shoes--it says Crawford Shoes on them. Everybody got four or five pair in their home. The rest of them were all given away to everybody else. There was $13,000 or $14,000 worth of shoes that we took this particular night. We took every one left in the place."

Another night, sighting a North Shore patrol sergeant on his night rounds, five uniformed police lay on the floor of a food store, pistols drawn. The sergeant rattled the next door and moved on.

As the story of the scandals hit the headlines, Democratic Mayor Richard Daley wobbled under a shower of political brickbats. State's Attorney Adamowski, one of Cook County's few elected Republican officers, crowed over a rising number of arrests: "How can something like this be possible? The brazenness is incredible." Republican Governor William G. Stratton, a third-term hopeful, lashed at the mayor: "Either clean up the mess or drastic measures are going to be taken." Then, with a political cut at the state's top Democratic boss, he advised Daley to resign as Cook County Democratic chairman.

For himself, Daley cried "cheap politics," nonetheless took his first drastic measure at week's end. Police Commissioner Timothy O'Connor, a 32-year veteran who proved a better cop than a chief, was relieved of his $22,500 commissioner's job and busted back to the rank of captain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.