'Whites Had Ghettos,Too'

The following story comes from a remarkable out-of-print 1971 book called "I, Pig" and is subtitled "or how the world's most famous cop, me, is fighting city hall." The book was transcribed by Paul Neimark from taped recordings of Jack Muller. I blogged some of Muller's thoughts on policing the Chicago conventions in 1952 and in 1968.

The following excerpt is the opening salvo in the book and helps explain events which shaped Muller's character:

For me, World War II began in 1928.
      In 1931, at eight-and-a-half years of age I was stopped on the way to Hebrew school by a gang of Dago toughs and ordered to suck their pricks if I wanted to make it to schul that day.
     In 1936 I had the toughest hood on the west side of Chicago tell me to get out of town within twenty-four hours or get dumped on a pile of ashes in the alley.
     In 1943 I stood frozen while a horde of Japanese dive bombers spewed bullets between my legs, felt my intestines go to dry ice when we were torpedoed and dozens of my buddies died just yards from where I was.
     But those times I knew how to fight. In fact, I learned goddam soon how to battle the world's dirt with the dirtiest fighting I ever saw.
     But in 1928 I was helpless.   
We lived on Douglass Boulevard then. I'd just started school. My oldest sister and I were playing in the tiny yard behind our apartment building. It was about an hour before dinner. My mother was in the house cooking and scrubbing. God, how she scrubbed those floors.

     Suddenly, an expensively dressed teen-age boy from the "other" side of the neighborhood came into our yard. The last couple of days I'd seen him looking at my sister--she was seven, a year and a half older than I was--when we walked home from school together.
    "There's something I want to show you," he said to her.
    "What?" My sister was so innocent.
    "Let's go to the basement," he said, taking my sister's hand and walking down the five stairs. After they got to the bottom and he'd turned the handle to the rickety basement door, I heard her scream.
     I ran down the basement stairs and peeked through the partly opened door. What I saw will be burned into my mind even after even if I fight fifty wars. My sister was naked. And this kid--he must've been seventeen or so--had one hand over her mouth and the other hand way up between her legs. Way up. His prick was out, big as life.
     I ran for my mother, screaming.
     "Ma!" I sobbed. "Some boy's in the basement! He's doing something bad to Sis!
      She had a soaking mop in her hand, and didn't even put it down, just ran past me out the back door. The kid must've heard my screams and was racing up the basement steps.
      My mother was a small woman, no bigger than five foot one or two, and she didn't weigh much. But when she got mad, Celia Muller was like two wildcats. I'd already gotten a bunch of beatings from her (and was going to get a helluva lot more), and I knew that when my mother wanted to punish the guilty, there was no way out on heaven or on earth.
      The rich kid tried to get by her. When he couldn't he went for the railing to escape. But she just started hitting him with the dripping mop, again and again, so fast that the thing looked like blur, until finally he was cowering on his knees back at the bottom of the basement steps.
    By this time some neighbors had gathered. The police were called. They came and took him away.
     The next week was horrible. My sister didn't stop shaking. She couldn't sleep until the end of the second day. Then, it was only out of exhaustion in my mother's arms, and time after time she'd jerk up five minutes later, sobbing hysterically. It was almost a month before my mother  could even send her to school.
     But eventually my sister learned to live with it as well as anyone can. Gradually our shock over what had happened to her turned to anger that some well-to-do pervert had been able to stroll down the block and fuck around with my sister.
     We didn't realize then just how well-to-do he was.
     We waited for the case to come to trial. We waited. And waited. But the case never came to court. Two days after this rich kid had molested my sister, I'd seen him walking down the street, big as life, staring at some other little girl. I saw him a lot of other times after that. Because he never went to jail, never came before a judge, probably never even had his grimy hands slapped.
     His father had put in a fix.
I hated what happened to my sister, but what I despised even worse was that this guy who did it had gotten away free as a bird. The next day, the next week, the next month he could do the same thing to some other seven-year-old child--maybe even my sister again--and never pay for it. And so could a lot of other guys just like him who lived around us in the melting pot--or was it a pisspot?--that was the west side of Chicago in the "golden twenties."