Lords of the Levee: The Story of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink

In the early twentieth century, John Coughlin and Mike Kenna ruled Chicago’s First Ward, the lucrative lakefront territory and nerve center of the city. It encompassed City Hall and the Loop and the mansions of Michigan Avenue. More significantly, it was one of the most infamous havens for vice in the entire country, home to gambling palaces with marble floors and mahogany bars, to a mini-city of thugs and prostitutes and down-and-outers, to dives and saloons of every description and a few beyond description. In short, the First was a gold mine. In a city where money talked, it made boisterous Bathhouse John and the laconic Hinky Dink Kenna the most powerful men in town. This classic of Chicago-style journalism traces the careers of these two operators, one a former bathhouse rubman, the other once the Chicago Tribune’s loudest newsboy as they rose to the top of the city’s political world.