PicoZ

TIME

April 18, 1932 12:00 AM GMT-5

Onetime home port for Scarface Al Capone’s mob, Cicero, Ill. has become a U. S. household synonym for murder and vice. There fell Assistant State’s Attorney William McSwiggin under gangland bullets. Frank Capone, Al’s brother, died violently there. Musicomedienne Rosetta Duncan had her nose smashed there. Last week Cicero turned over a new political leaf.

In the election for village president, State Senator Richey Graham, son-in-law of Mayor Anton Joseph Cermak of Chicago, saw an opportunity to break the Republicans’ 16-year grip on Cicero. Mayor Cermak sent 230 policemen from Chicago to Cicero on election day to see that the voting took place without irregularities. Fifty Republican partisans were arrested the night before the balloting. Also arrested was Editor Lewis Cowen of the Cicero Tribune. He promptly sued the Chicago chief of detectives for $250,000.

Wrhen the votes were counted Cicero, with Scarface Al in jail, had gone Democratic. Elected as chief executive of the village (population: 66,602) was Joseph George Cerny, 36, strapping Wartime engineer, job printer, electrical worker. Most of Cicero’s home-loving Bohemians work in Western Electric Co.’s nearby Hawthorne plant.

In defeating his opponent, a plodding, slight little Bohemian named Joseph Z. Klenha, President-elect Cerny’s platform was: “Undesirables must go! Jail for the gangsters and payrolls for public employes!” Elected, he declared: “Most of the citizens are of foreign extraction. They are home-loving people and ask only for peace and good government. They’ll get it.” They will also still be able to get their beer at Cicero’s 175 dispensaries.

ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9ubXFhZn9wvM6loK2hk5a5brrOrZxmm5Wnu7p5xaipZpuZmLKzu44%3D