[il-talk] FW: Who knew about these secrets and connections?

Wed Sep 13 23:47:20 UTC 2017

 Thank you for such a good reading excellent article
On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 6:23 PM Deborah Kent Stein via IL-Talk <
il-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:

>
> This article from Chicago Magazine may be of interest.
>
> Debbie
>
>
> Published Monday at 9:44 a.m.
>
> It’s been 48 years since the police came for Charlie Rizzo. But the
> 68-year-old glassmaker from Belmont Cragin can recall the moment as if it
> were yesterday. Twenty years old at the time, he was sitting on his bed in
> the two-flat he shared with his father, a mild-mannered divorcé who sold
> insurance from an office in front. Charlie’s dad had been blinded in a
> boyhood hunting accident—or so he’d told his son—and was a voracious reader
> of the classics of Western literature who wrote poems and essays in his
> spare time.
> Matt Rizzo with his son Charlie Matt Rizzo with his son Charlie, in 1957
> Photo: Courtesy of First Second Books
> Charlie was filled with shame as he listened to his bewildered father
> answering the officers’ questions. Charlie loved his dad and knew he’d let
> him down. Days earlier, he and two friends had robbed a pair of homes in
> the northern suburbs, making off with the loot in Charlie’s Buick Riviera.
> A neighbor had taken down the license plate number.
>
> Charlie’s dad persuaded the cops to let him have 10 minutes alone with his
> son. When his father came into the bedroom, he was in tears. It turned out
> that he had begged the cops for time not to scold his son, but to make a
> confession of his own.
>
> “There was never any hunting accident,” he said, explaining to Charlie
> that he’d withheld the truth about his blindness all these years to protect
> his son. The injury, he said, was the result of a robbery gone wrong. The
> man Charlie had known his whole life as gentle and learned and kind had
> been a criminal just like him.
>
> The story that eventually emerged from this startling revelation would
> become a lifelong fixation for Charlie. It’s a tale that spanned many
> decades, delved into the world of the Chicago Mafia, and led to the prison
> cell of one of the 20th century’s most infamous criminals, Nathan Leopold,
> who became the unlikeliest of mentors to Charlie’s father.
>
> That curious friendship is at the heart of a new graphic novel, The
> Hunting Accident (September 19, First Second Books), by David Carlson and
> Landis Blair. For Charlie Rizzo, the book represents the culmination of a
> tortuous quest for the truth, a journey that reveals how the sins of a son
> can be redeemed, in the fullness of time, by those of a father.
>
>
>
> Pages from 'The Hunting Accident'
>
>
> Charlie doesn’t remember precisely when he first heard the apocryphal
> story of the misfired buckshot that blinded his father, Matt Rizzo. In
> Carlson and Blair’s telling, the dad relates the anecdote to the son while
> they’re riding a city bus in a snowstorm in 1959, after meeting outside the
> Newberry Library.
>
> Charlie had no reason not to believe his dad. The tale fit with his image
> of the man: a victim of misfortune who’d scraped a life together as an
> insurance salesman and took his pleasure from books and writing, devouring
> Braille editions of Homer, Dante, Keats, and other literary greats.
>
> Charlie was 10 and had just moved into his father’s apartment at Diversey
> and Austin after the death of his mother. When Charlie was 3, she had
> whisked him to California after learning of his dad’s criminal past.
> Charlie had come to know his father only through rare court-ordered
> visitations, during which the two would stay in a motel, eat diner food,
> and go swimming together.
>
>
> The first apartment the father and son occupied was cramped—a shared
> double bed, a bathroom, a hot plate—but the close quarters created a
> comfortable intimacy. Over time, Charlie became his father’s keeper. He was
> careful to return cups and dishes to the exact spot where he’d found them.
> He planted flowers in a small plot behind the building so his father could
> enjoy their scent in summer. He chose hobbies that his dad could hear him
> practicing: tap dancing, cello. Outside of the apartment, he was his dad’s
> eyes. He helped him onto the electric trolley that plied Diversey Avenue in
> those days. He counted change to make sure store clerks weren’t cheating
> him. And he picked up Braille books at the local post office—dozens every
> month, each as heavy as a dumbbell—ordered from libraries in New York and
> London to satisfy his father’s literary appetite. Charlie would wheel them
> home on a handcart.
> At night, he fell asleep to the soft rasp of his dad’s fingers moving over
> the raised dots.
>
> Charlie was also his father’s secretary, helping him proofread his poems
> and literary essays and then submitting them to academic journals in the
> hope—slim at best for a writer without so much as a high school
> diploma—that they might one day be published.
>
> Secrets hovered around the edges of their lives, though. When Charlie
> asked about his parents’ divorce—about why his mother left Chicago so
> abruptly—his father would fall silent. When his dad asked Charlie about
> school, about what he did when he went out at night, the boy would fall
> silent too. Charlie didn’t reveal that he got teased by classmates for
> having a blind father and no mother. He didn’t tell his dad he was
> embarrassed when strangers would stare at them together on the street.
> He didn’t tell him that he and his friend Steve—an older guy with a
> beautiful girlfriend and a flashy car—had begun stealing food from the
> grocery store and smashing Halloween pumpkins on neighbors’ porches. And he
> certainly didn’t tell his dad about driving Steve and another friend around
> to rob North Shore houses in the Buick that Charlie had bought using his
> late mother’s Social Security money.
>
>
>
> Matt Rizzo’s 1935 booking papers
>
> The wall of secrecy finally began to crumble the morning the cops came for
> Charlie. As the officers waited in a vestibule near the back door, the
> facts of the horrible day his dad lost his sight spilled out. It was 1935,
> in the depths of the Great Depression. Matt Rizzo had dropped out of school
> several years before and had fallen in with the local Mafia.
> He and two buddies decided to hold up a liquor store in Portage Park.
> But the shopkeeper was armed, and as Rizzo was running to the car, a
> shotgun blast killed his friend. A second shot hit Rizzo in the head,
> rendering him blind. His other friend, the getaway driver, dumped Rizzo at
> the hospital, where he was arrested.
>
> “I never gave the police that third man’s name,” he told Charlie, his
> voice choked with emotion. “And I did four years in prison for it. I’m not
> gonna let you take the fall like I did. Tell me who you were working with.”
>
> Charlie was crying now, too. He was scared of his pal Steve, so he didn’t
> talk at first, but when his dad guessed that Steve was involved, Charlie
> caved and gave up the third boy’s name. The elder Rizzo told the police.
> Then his son was hauled off to jail.
>
> The next morning the cops told Charlie his dad had bailed him out. When he
> got home, his dad had the following words for him: “I’m going to help you
> out this one time, and never again.”
>
> And then Matt Rizzo picked up the phone to reach back across the gulf of
> years that separated him from his past, reconnecting with a world he
> thought he’d sworn off for good. He dialed a lawyer that his cousin, a
> Chicago cop, had told him about: Dean Wolfson, a fixer for the Mob who
> would himself end up in prison for bribery not too many years later.
> Wolfson agreed to take Charlie’s case and got the kid off with three
> years’ probation.
>
>
>
> “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” Charlie recalls asking his dad when it
> was all over.
>
> “You were already ashamed of me,” his dad responded. “I didn’t want to
> make it worse.”
>
> Charlie didn’t know what to say.
>
> Maybe it was a sense of duty to his father, maybe it was simply a case of
> being scared straight, but whatever the reason, Charlie never again had any
> major run-ins with the law. He went to college. He got married.
> He started a business not too far from where he’d grown up. When his dad
> began having heart problems in his early 70s, Charlie, who’d since gotten
> divorced, moved back in with him and took care of the elder Rizzo until his
> death a few years later, in 1987.
>
>
>
>
> In the months before Matt Rizzo’s death, his son made him a promise: to
> try and publish the writing that meant so much to him. Charlie couldn’t
> find a way to make that happen. But as the years passed, another idea took
> hold: to discover the full story of his father’s unusual life and tell it
> to the world.
>
> The details of the elder Rizzo’s time after prison were clear enough:
> The third accomplice in the botched holdup helped get Rizzo set up as a
> tavern owner. But the story of his time in Stateville was murkier.
> Charlie knew his dad had mastered Braille with the help of a benevolent
> fellow prisoner. But when he started interviewing family members about the
> prison years, yet another remarkable story came to light.
>
> Charlie eventually sat down with his cousin—the cop who put his dad in
> touch with Wolfson. The cousin refused to speak directly about Matt Rizzo’s
> time in prison, but when pressed, he handed Charlie a book. It was a copy
> of Life Plus 99 Years, the autobiography of Nathan Leopold, the
> perpetrator, along with Richard Loeb, of what was once called the crime of
> the century: the coolly calculated kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old
> Robert Franks in Chicago in 1924.
>
> “Flip through that book, and you can read about your dad,” the cousin told
> Charlie. He was incredulous at first, but sure enough, a couple hundred
> pages in, Leopold—an academic prodigy and polymath who’d been sequestered
> for his own protection after Loeb had been murdered in the prison
> showers—describes being moved into the prison hospital’s mental ward with a
> new inmate who was blind, uneducated, and suicidal. The two dejected men
> became friends.
>
> Paired with a blind person, Leopold, who was already fluent in at least
> five languages, took it upon himself to learn the Braille alphabet, which
> gave him the advantage of being able to continue reading after lights-out.
> Through the Stateville library, which Leopold had successfully lobbied the
> prison authorities to expand and improve, he ordered a primer in Braille
> and taught himself to read the raised dots.
> Along the way, with methodical patience, he taught Matt Rizzo to do the
> same, offering the young tough from the West Side what would become a path
> out of darkness: reading and writing.
>
>
>
> In Charlie’s imaginings—and in what would become the central narrative
> conceit of Carlson and Blair’s graphic novel—Leopold took on the role of
> Virgil and his father that of Dante, the former guiding the latter through
> hell and toward salvation. It was a radical notion: one of the country’s
> most infamous murderers helping a hopeless street thug turn his life around
> through the redeeming power of the written word.
>
> What’s more, the felicitous prison friendship had apparently worked both
> ways: When Carl Sandburg testified at the killer’s 1958 parole hearing—the
> famed poet was friends with Leopold’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow—he pointed to
> his having taught a blind man to read Braille.
> Leopold was subsequently ordered released after nearly 34 years behind
> bars.
>
> Carlson and Blair’s account of Matt Rizzo’s life ends where it begins:
> at the Newberry. A few of the final panels depict a grown Charlie Rizzo,
> thin and bald, carrying reams of his father’s writings up the front steps
> of the library.
>
> Though some of the scenes in the book are imagined, that one really
> happened. Today, thanks to Charlie’s perseverance, the Newberry houses most
> of Matt Rizzo’s surviving poems and essays, as well as his Braille stylus
> and even some old photos. One of those photos is included in the afterword
> of The Hunting Accident. Taken in 1957, it’s a faded and torn snapshot of
> Charlie as a young boy, in the embrace of his dad, who is smartly dressed
> in a suit and a fedora. It’s a beautiful day, and they’re both smiling.
>
>
>
>
> This article appears in the September 2017 issue of  Chicago magazine.
> Subscribe to Chicago magazine.
>
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