Vintage Chicago Tribune: Jake Lingle lived well beyond the means of a Tribune reporter. After his slaying, it became clear how.

Jake Lingle walked toward the stairway to the Illinois Central Railroad station at Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue, on June 9, 1930.

A cigar bobbed in the Tribune reporter’s mouth, and he clutched a copy of the Racing Form that he bought at the adjoining newsstand.

The driver of a parked car honked and called out: “Don’t forget to play Hy Schneider in the third race’” “I’ve already got him!” replied Lingle, who was known for his love of playing the ponies.

But he didn’t make the 1:30 train to the Washington Park racetrack in suburban Homewood, and never got a chance to place that bet.

As Lingle crossed the underground passage to the station, someone stepped behind him and fired a single shot. It hit him in the head, and he fell over dead.

He was wearing a diamond-studded belt buckle, reportedly a gift from Al Capone.

A bystander chased Lingle’s killer, but was blocked by a priest who bumped him, allowing the killer to escape. “He was no priest,” said Lt. William Cusack of the detective bureau. “A priest would never do that. He would have gone to the side of the stricken person.”

Other witnesses told the cops that two men caught up with Lingle and tightly flanked him. Perhaps one said: “Just keep walking. Don’t look around.”

Splashed across the Tribune’s front page the next morning, was the headline: “OFFER $30,000 FOR ASSASSIN.”

But as details of Lingle’s life subsequently dribbled out, the narrative changed dramatically, leading to a quite different headline: “Tribune reporter was on the take, big time.”

Lingle was a “legman,” a reporter who phones the newspaper and dictates the scribbles in his notebook to a rewrite man. “Lingle had never mastered the art of writing,” explained his colleague John Boettiger, who later wrote a book on the case.

There were clues all along that there were other arts he had mastered. Lingle bragged about being chosen by rival hoodlums to set a fair-market price for illicit beer. He drove an expensive car and in any number of other ways lived well beyond the means of a reporter making $65 a week.

But those facts were overlooked amid the outpouring of anguish and anger that a hit man had violated a long-standing exemption of reporters from the bloodshed during mob wars on Chicago’s streets

Initially Lingle was considered a martyr. Rival Chicago papers supplemented the Tribune’s reward money. The Press Club of Birmingham Alabama pledged $100, and the reward eventually totaled $55,000. A friend of Lingle’s who moved on to the Los Angeles Times telegraphed the Tribune: “Wish to express my heartfelt sympathy to the boys on the loss of Jake.”

An immense crowd attended Lingle’s funeral at Our Lady of Sorrows Church and overflowed onto Jackson Boulevard. Like Lingle, a number of mourners were veterans.

“Squadrons of mounted police, of patrolmen afoot, of American Legion post members, in and out of uniform, detachments of naval reserves and blue jackets from the Great Lakes naval training station, and a company of Chicago firemen participated in the procession that escorted the funeral cortege the final mile to the church doors,” the Tribune reported.

The elected officials and police brass that filled the pews vowed to oust hoodlums from the city.

“I’ve given orders,” police Commissioner William Russell said, “to make this town so quiet that you will be able to hear a consumptive canary cough.”

Russell and Lingle were buddies. They played golf, traveled together and shared an investment brokerage account.

The Tribune started to realize it had a problem when a St. Louis reporter showed up and began writing stories about the shady dealings of Chicago reporters. The St. Louis Star published an article stating that Lingle had been posthumously dubbed “ ‘the unofficial chief of police of Chicago.’ ”

As Chicago newspapers followed the story, Col. Robert R. McCormick, the Tribune’s imperious publisher, proclaimed an all-out war to rehabilitate the paper’s reputation.

Boettiger led the Tribune’s defense. The Tribune reporter eventually joined the state’s attorney’s team investigating the slaying. How McCormick pulled off that trick wasn’t revealed by Boettiger in his otherwise informative memoir, “Jake Lingle: Or Chicago On The Spot.”

But Boettiger did report that Lingle’s financial records didn’t add up. On a reporter’s salary, it would have taken more than seven years to earn the $25,000 he deposited in his bank in 1929.

He cashed $15,000 in checks at racetracks that year. Movers-and-shakers, mobsters and ward heelers lent him big money

According to the state’s attorney’s report” “Ald. Berthold A. Cronson admits that on August 20, 1929, he loaned Lingle $5,000 and no part of it has been repaid. He states that the loan was a pure friendship proposition and was advanced upon the plea of Lingle that he wanted to use it in connection with his mother’s treatment in Sacred Heart sanitarium in Milwaukee.”

With the police commissioner and Capone as buddies, Lingle could have repaid those loans with favors: Promotions for cops; protection for speak-easies.

Lingle’s ledgers also offered suggestions as to why someone might want him dead: A fix paid for but not carried out; A rival mobster angered by favors shown Capone.

After several false starts, the manhunt for Lingle’s killer focused on Leo Vincent Brothers. A small-time hoodlum, he worked at the Green Mill Gardens, seating patrons and heading off bar fights. Eight witnesses put him in the tunnel to the Illinois Central station on the day of the killing.

“We’ve got a case now,” said prosecutor Charles Rathbun. “It’s seldom in a murder case that you have more than three witnesses.”

The Tribune hailed Brothers’ 1931 conviction “which for the first time in Chicago brought a gang killer to justice.”

But in an era of circulation wars, rival papers had their own preferred suspects. The Herald and Examiner — owned by McCormick’s rival William Randolph Hearst — claimed the Tribune had railroaded Brothers to divert attention from the Lingle scandal.

Edwin Johnson, a Daily News staffer, wrote a piece for the trade paper Editor and Publisher asserting: “the fact that not one witness testified he saw Brothers shoot Lingle presents at least a groundwork for the ugly rumors that have been circulating.”

For McCormick, such gossip was the final body blow of the Lingle affair. He considered keeping government honest a newspaper’s supreme obligation. His biographer reports that the unmasking of a dishonest employee rendered McCormick reclusive and suspicious,

“His office came to resemble the jail cell in which Leo Brothers served his sentence, but with one critical exception,” Richard Norton Smith wrote in “The Colonel.”

“When his time was up, Lingle’s convicted killer walked out of prison for good. McCormick remained incarcerated by his own wish for as long as he lived.”

Join our Chicagoland history Facebook group for more from Chicago’s past.

Sign up to receive the Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter at chicagotribune.com/newsletters for more photos and stories from the Tribune’s archives.

Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.